Build the List: The Right Way to Acquire Subscribers

Until someone signs up for your emails, you are limited in what kinds of marketing messages you can send them. And while you can use 20% of a transactional email to recommend a product or suggest a site visit, it isn’t the same as having a subscriber.

Why? Because linking the subscriber to their purchases gives you a wealth of personalization options from the very simple – a birthday email with an offer – to the more sophisticated – a reminder to replace running shoes based on their weekly mileage.

While you can encourage people to sign up at checkout or through a transactional email, those options won’t capture people visiting your site without buying. For this, you need to consider using a pop-up.

Initially, pop-ups had a bit of a sketchy reputation. They were deployed with all the subtlety of a used car salesmen. Frank Vigliarolo, director of advertising at ABC Carpet & Home, received a tremendous amount of pushback when he suggested a pop-up sign-up to encourage visitors to subscribe. “We can’t have a pop-up, it’s a luxury brand,’’ Vigliarolo recalls being told. But using a pop-up manager gives you control of the look, feel, timing and placement of a pop-up. And they can really bring in the subscribers: In two years, ABC grew its email list from 22,000 to 100,000.

Features to look for in a pop-up management tool:

• Ease of Use: Visually edit to create (or change) a pop-up in minutes, with a library to let you manage and store multiple versions.
• A/B Testing: Test several versions to determine which performs better.
• Mobile Compatibility: Deploy two versions of the pop-up at once – one for mobile and one for desktop.
• Integration With Coupon Managers: Pair with a coupon manager to display unique coupon codes.
• Preference Capture: Add fields to the pop-up form to capture data beyond the email address to better inform and personalize future mailings.

The Moret Group, which owns brands like Danskin and 2(X)ist, started using our pop-up manager and immediately saw dividends better than that of the static pop-up created by a developer. “Now we can add a coupon, create versions specifically for people shopping on mobile devices and change the message seasonally. It’s as easy as uploading the image to the site,” says Michael Harary, ecommerce marketing manager. The result in the first month: 700 new subscribers, compared to just 250 in the previous eight months with the old pop-up.

Manage Coupons: Offer a Promotion to Your Subscribers – Not the Entire Internet

A promotion often plays a role in a customer’s decision to sign up for, and continue receiving, emails. But what happens when the promotions you save for your subscribers find their way to websites like RetailMeNot? Not much reason for customers to continue to subscribe. Canadian retailer Silver Jeans faced this dilemma.

Ecommerce Manager Mike Girardin adopted our coupon management app because he “was sick and tired of the exclusive coupon codes ending up on coupon sites.” It was a problem on several fronts. Birthday emails weren’t that special anymore when the featured coupon could be found on other sites and reused throughout the year. And the incentive to sign up for Silver Jeans’ emails wasn’t strong either when the welcome message coupon was easy to find elsewhere. The unique coupon codes generated by the coupon management app have eliminated that headache. The app has also made it easier for Silver Jeans to distribute gift card codes as bonuses for high-volume shoppers during special promotions.

We can import a bunch of gift card codes as coupon codes and then send them to anyone who’s bought to a certain level,” Girardin said. “We look at our stats, ‘OK, here’s everyone who’s spent over $200 on the site,’ and then send the email out to them. It allows for a lot more automation.

If your email provider and ecommerce platform are linked by an extension or connector, the users who click on coupon emails can have them automatically deposited into their shopping carts – making for a seamless experience that adds value to subscribers.

Another critical reason to employ coupon management: Coupon leakage causes problems for brands that walk the delicate line of balancing their relationship with retailers who carry their products while maintaining their own ecommerce site.

Features to look for in a coupon management tool:

• Image-Based Approach: Use image tags to avoid the setup and timing concerns of having to move coupon data into your email marketing system.
• Visual Editor: Define the style and content of your image with an easy-to-use editor, including support for both text and barcodes.
• Unique Coupon Codes: Distribute coupons that are unique to each user and campaign to minimize risk of coupon abuse.
• Real-Time Rendering: Provide the flexibility to modify content and manage coupons after your message has been sent.
• Coupon Redemption: Track and report on valuable metrics, such as redemption rate, average redemption time and revenue and discount per coupon.
• SMS/MMS options: Include coupons in your SMS/MMS messages.
• Expiration Dates: Whether a set date or rolling time period, the ability to add expiration dates creates a sense of urgency.

Recover the Cart: Don’t Lose Revenue to Abandoned Carts

Do shoppers abandon items in carts or use them as temporary storage? It doesn’t really matter. What those carts represent is lost revenue. If you can automate the sending of an email after a shopper leaves something in a cart, you can quickly, easily and economically bring in revenue. A solid cart recovery tool can return more than 50 times the investment.

Fashion brand Vince Camuto saw cart recovery become a nice slice of its overall email-generated revenue. “In just four months of use, [cart recovery] drove 5% of email-generated revenue,’’ says Eve Loughran, ecommerce marketing manager. “We expect that to double, perhaps even triple.’’

Not all cart recovery tools are created equal, as Unique Vintage, a multichannel retailer of retro-inspired clothing discovered. It had a cart recovery program with a commerce marketing provider that felt restrictive. By moving to our more flexible solution that gives the marketer control over the number and timing of messages, Unique Vintage cart recovery messages are now producing a revenue rate of $2.05 per email with a conversion rate of nearly 20%.

Features to look for in a cart recovery tool:

• Fast, Accurate Data Capture: Identify abandoned carts in near real time to respond with a cart recovery message at the point you deem appropriate.
• Automated Cart Recovery Messages: Use a drag-and-drop automation canvas to trigger a personalized message or message series.
• Personalized, Dynamic Content: Dynamically insert detailed order and cart information into email and SMS messages.
• Cart Recovery Analytics: Track detailed cart activity, including abandonment rates, recovery percentages and recoverable revenue.

Capture Browse Behavior: Reach Customers Higher in the Sales Funnel

Many savvy commerce marketers have been exploring the browse behavior of customers to craft messages that will encourage purchases. But until recently, it was a process that often happened outside of the email platform – involving additional integrations, expense, time and the import and export of data. Increasingly, this option is available within the platform with the rich functionality of third-party browse tools.

“That matters,” says Derrick Riley, digital marketing manager, ecommerce US for Fox Racing. “While we can analyze browsing results separately, being able to leverage the data within our marketing platform really makes it useful.”

Cart recovery messages worked so well for Sewing Machines Plus that Web Marketing Manager Kyle Hoogervorst wanted to layer in triggered emails based on a customer’s browsing behavior. The goal was a 10x return on the investment in browse technology within a year. Within two months, the company was 80% of the way there.

Hoogervorst set up three types of triggered messages, all with a 10% coupon. The first is related to products. If a customer looks at three to five products during a visit with at least two views of each product, they receive an email with images and information about the products they viewed. “The conversion rate on this email is 6.8% with a return of $23.69 for every email sent,” Hoogervorst says.

Features to look for in a browse tool:

• Easy Setup: Quickly pull product catalog and product ID or SKU data from your website.
• Configurable Rules: Control how often customers receive these personalized messages. Exclude recent purchasers and those currently in other workflows (such as a welcome series). Regulate how many and which products to highlight, so you can, for instance, showcase the highest margin or highest priced products of those viewed.
• Behavior Collection: Capture and store product page views for all customers and tie that behavior to a known contact. Or save the browse activity so it can later be matched to a known contact.
• Centralized Reporting: Measure the effectiveness of the entire program and then drill into specifics. Uncover the most popular products and traffic trends.

Deploy a Crystal Ball: Recommend Products Without A Lot of Extra Work

Recommendation engines have been readily available, but not necessarily in ways that integrate easily or effectively within an email marketing platform. For instance, an engine that churns out recommendations that must then be manually adjusted to factor in out-of-stock items is going to deliver minimal ROI.

Offering recommendations, though, is incredibly valuable to making emails deliver revenue. Doing it in an automated way has delivered for Bruce Cabral, director of ecommerce for the multi-channel marketer behind the brands Adam & Eve, Better Sex and the Sinclair Institute. Results in two months of using the solution: A 13% lift in click-through rates over emails without recommendations and a corresponding 33% increase in revenue. An automated recommendation engine is a great option for companies with large product catalogs.

“It provides choices,’’ Cabral says. “Do I want to feature items that are on sale or non-sale items? I can add products from different categories or multiple items from one category. I can get very granular in what I pick to show in the message.’’

Features to look for in a recommendation tool:

• Simple, Fast Configuration: The ability to quickly import an existing Google Merchant product feed or any other product feed. Look for prebuilt templates.
• Seamless Message Integration: Automation that uses product tag syntax to insert placeholders in messages for the product field you wish to display. It should be able to identify the recommendation for each placeholder. The tool should do the rest.
• Different Ways to Offer Recommendations: The ability to define rules on any combination of product fields and set priorities to determine which products to display to a segmented list of subscribers. It should allow you to sort on top-rated products above a specified profit margin or new arrivals sorted by price.

Augment Email: Add SMS to Your Messaging Toolkit

Creating automated SMS/MMS campaigns that are triggered and filtered by customer behaviors provides another option for communicating in a personalized and segmented way. Doing it on one platform makes for a unified and consistent user experience.

Greats is using SMS/MMS to augment its email marketing program. “When was the last time you didn’t open a text message?’’ asks Chris Berry, email marketing manager for Greats, an online-only fashion sneaker brand. Text campaigns resonate better with Millennials and those shoppers who are most engaged with the brand. Greats’ once-a-week texts highlight new releases and restocks on popular products.

“SMS isn’t going to overtake email anytime soon. It’s only for people who are very, very engaged with your brand,” Berry says. Adding, “If you want to get an SMS from us, you really want to hear from us.’’

Greats says the SMS list is 3x more valuable than individual emails, with a text message delivering 10x more traffic to the site over mass emails.

Features to look for in an SMS/MMS tool:

• Brand Building Features: The ability to create unified, consistent email, mobile and social campaigns.
• Personalization Options: Pulling in dynamic content, including past-purchase information, is key to sending personalized messages.
• Transaction Message Alternatives: Text is increasingly the preferred channel for shipping and confirmation information.

Make it Seamless: The Importance of Connectors

Whether you call it a connector or an extension, the ability to easily transfer data from your ecommerce platform to your email platform (and back) is important to developing a more sophisticated approach to email marketing. If porting data is clunky or time-consuming, it makes it more difficult to take advantage of dynamic content and create visually rich emails chock-full of product information.

Plenty of integration companies will provide custom options, but it’s better if your toolbox includes ready-made and carefully vetted connectors with major ecommerce platforms, such as Magento, NetSuite, Demandware, Kibo and Shopify.

Connections can help in a myriad of ways. Discount codes can be deposited directly into the customer’s shopping cart, for instance, and transactional messages can become more valuable.

When World Kitchen began using a connector between its ecommerce platform and email provider, it was able to send confirmation and shipping messages with a look and feel that matched the company’s branding. The company’s order confirmation message has an impressive open rate of 69.7%.

Boot Barn added a connector that made it instantly easier to market with transactional messages. It contributed to a 34% lift in email-generated revenue.

"We now have a baseline and can continue looking at our transactional messaging to find out what we can tweak, what info we can add to increase that click rate or to get that repeat buyer,” says Lisa Mann, ecommerce marketing manager for Boot Barn.

What to look for in connectors:

• Contact and Subscriber Import: Map customer information collected in the contact field and through website sign-ups to the email platform for the best segmentation.
• Order Import: Import past-purchase information, including full order history, for more targeted and personalized marketing campaigns.
• Connections to Specific Tools: Order, subscriber and contact information needs to flow freely into added services, such as abandoned cart, coupon management, browse and recommendation engines.
• Product Catalog Sync: Automatically sync your entire product catalog from ecommerce platform to email service platform to easily insert any content into your messages.

Assemble Your Toolbox

There are multiple tools available to enhance your email marketing program. When selecting tools, ask yourself these questions:

• What kind of return on investment can I expect? Look for solutions that come with documented ROI from named customers.
• How easy is the tool to deploy? If the tool or solution requires IT expertise to deploy (and maintain), do I have the resources in my budget? Does it require coding skills, or does it visually coach a user through setup?
• What kind of customer support does the tool’s provider offer? Is it free? Is it 24/7 phone support or an email ticketing system that promises a response in 3 to 5 days? Can more extensive support be purchased by the hour?
• How well does the tool integrate with my platforms? Connectors between ecommerce and email platforms are critical. Look for well-documented and vetted products.

Exploring options to enhance your email marketing program is necessary, but shouldn’t be fraught with stress over the complications of using a tool once it’s purchased. There are sophisticated, easy-to-use ways to gain subscribers, grow revenue and manage your messaging.