3 Lead Nurturing Tactics for E-commerce Retailers

08 Mar 2023 in

Gary Vassart

3 Lead Nurturing Tactics for E-commerce Retailers

Salesforce Marketing Cloud is a powerful tool for e-commerce retailers to nurture leads and convert them into loyal customers. Lead nurturing is a process that involves building relationships with potential customers by providing them with relevant and useful information that addresses their needs and concerns. In this article, we will discuss three effective lead nurturing email marketing tactics for e-commerce retailers.

Abandoned Cart

Abandoned cart email flows are designed to win back potential customers who have left items in their shopping cart without completing the purchase. This flow typically includes an email that remind the customer of the items they recently left behind and encourage them to complete the purchase. For example, the first email could be a reminder email that includes images of the abandoned products and a call-to-action button that takes them back to the checkout page. If the recipient has any vouchers still available to use then these can be displayed inside the abandoned cart email as a personalisation. These vouchers could still be active from an active welcome or birthday flow. To add more urgency, you can add reminders to this email by highlighting the product with high demand, low stock or that just received a price reduction.

Abandoned Browse

An abandoned browse journey is an email marketing flow that targets potential customers who visit your website, browse products, but leave without making a purchase. The goal of this journey is to re-engage with these leads and remind them of the products they were interested in. The journey typically includes a series of emails that highlight the products the recipient viewed and provides them with additional information and incentives to complete the purchase. For example, the first email could be a reminder email that includes images of the viewed products and a call-to-action button that takes them back to the product page. The second email could offer a discount code or free shipping to incentivise the purchase. The third email could highlight the services or unique selling points of purchasing that product through the vendor. Usually these services are not top of mind during the purchase decision phase. For example, if there is a free extended warranty or installation, it might just help close the sale!

Abandoned Search

An abandoned search journey targets potential customers who have interacted with your website's search function, but for some reason failed to complete their purchase. Additionally, customers who have browsed multiple products within the same category or spent time consuming specific content on your website can also be targeted using this strategy. The goal of the abandoned search journey is to help businesses win back lost customers who have already shown interest in their products or services. By providing them with a personalised experience and making it easy for them to continue their journey on your website, businesses can increase their chances of converting them into loyal customers.

How To Add Urgency To Your Abandoned Cart Journey

29 Nov 2022 in

Marketing Automation

Gary Vassart

Being in the salesforce marketing cloud & automation world for over 7 years means I have had the opportunity to work with a lot of marketeers and how they view and develop journeys to be built in Salesforce. Below is one of my favourites when it comes to the Abandoned Cart Journey. One of the most common journeys you’ll find amongst organisations with a focus on ecommerce.

Abandoned Cart Journey

Abandoned cart emails are usually sent a few hours after the user has left the online store and an email containing the products has been sent. Conversion rate tends to be around 10% or higher and that leaves us with another 90% of users that have displayed some concrete interest in buying a product. Rather than sending an Abandoned Cart Reminder email, why not try the ones below. You could always send a reminder email if one of the below scenarios is not applicable.

Abandoned Cart - Low Stock Reminder

Once a product becomes low on stock, we usually see an indication of this on the online store of retailers. This is to add urgency on the user to add it to their cart as soon as possible but why not use this same indicator as a trigger for an Abandoned Cart Reminder email, one where communicate that the products in the cart, left behind by the user, might not be available anymore moving forward so be quick!

Abandoned Cart - Price Drop Reminder

The same applies for the prices of the products in the cart. If there is a drop due to a special promotion or someone had an Abandoned Cart prior to a day like Black Friday and now there is a price drop, wouldn’t you want to communicate this to your hottest leads? To those that already showed an intent of purchase?

Abandoned Cart - Reminder

As mentioned before, if the previous 2 scenarios are not applicable, I would still recommend sending a reminder email of the Abandoned Cart. Some are not ready not to purchase but the intent is there so why not go for it.

Contact Deletion - How to clean up your contacts in Salesforce Marketing Cloud

13 Nov 2022 in

Marketing Automation

Gary Vassart

It’s the time of the year again.

The end of the year is usually a time when marketers and CRM specialists are working hard and long hours to prepare for many promotional days such as Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Christmas, New Year’s Sales and so on. All of this work reaches a peak in the months leading up to these holidays but it’s also the time of the year when we get requests to clean up Salesforce Marketing Cloud's contact count !

Below we’ll discuss our approach to defining a contact deletion plan that works for your organisation.

Define the quantities

I’m sure you’re thinking, why do I have twice as many contacts in Salesforce Marketing Cloud compared to my database? Usually these are due to legacy setups, small configurations or mistakes that were made that have accumulated over time to have exploded your contact count. The good news is that there is a solution.

Step 1 would be to run a report in Salesforce Marketing Cloud named “Contact Count”. This report will give you an overview of the contacts residing in the different modules from Salesforce Marketing Cloud as well as those generated via API calls.

Step 2 is to define what you are expecting to see. How many transactional emails do you send a year? How many contacts are you expecting to have? How many data sources do you have and from how many sources? Are there duplicates? Were these factored in from the start?

Once both sides of the equation have been defined, we can enter into the world of data & maths to find the difference between what we have and what we expect.

Find the difference

Here comes the heavy lifting. What happens next is an investigation. We need to go deeper and find those redundant contacts and this investigation should happen within each separate studio of Salesforce Marketing Cloud (Mobile, Push, Email, etc). Once you’ve done this, you’ll see you will have a larger number of contacts to be deleted than you foresaw but bare in mind that a single contact can exist across different channels and thus only count as 1. How do we find these redundant contacts? By simply cross referencing the system data we have from Marketing Cloud with the contacts we have in our data model(s).

Next step is to actually look into this data and see if we can find a logical explanation as to why these contacts were inserted in this particular fashion and below is a list of possible reasons as to why you might have more contacts in Salesforce Marketing Cloud than foreseen:

‌• Sending Transactional Emails with the wrong SubscriberKey
‌• Sending Journeys with the wrong SubscriberKey
‌• Sending Guided Sends Emails with the wrong SubscriberKey
‌• Incorrect Population
‌• Synchronising Contacts via Salesforce CRM while your legacy data model still exists
‌• Wrongly configured file imports (manual or via FTP)

At Transformative we investigate and try to allocate the redundant contacts to one of the above reasons and make adjustments to the cause. Fixing a journey or asking for a bugfix on an incoming API call. Something to note is also to see the impact when it comes to all the reporting data, will this be lost? Do we need to migrate this before we start the deletion process? Are you actually sending to these “invalid” contacts that use the wrong ID?

Start the process

Once most of these questions are answered, we can start using the GDPR deletion functionality of Salesforce Marketing Cloud to delete contacts. We tend to start with small batches of which we are certain that can be deleted. After that, we look at those that have not received any communication in the last 6 months and then the discussion changes. Do we need to make structural changes to Salesforce Marketing Cloud to fix the contact duplication issues before we delete the remaining contacts or do we delete first and fix later? This would depend on your level of urgency.

How to Leverage SFMC's Einstein Recommendations

13 Sep 2022 in

Marketing Automation

Gary Vassart

What Are Einstein Recommendations

Web & Email Einstein Recommendations have multiple benefits. Let’s look at some of them:

Einstein Recommendations Web – This feature improves your website by personalising your customer’s view by displaying products or content based on Salesforce’s Einstein algorithms which in turn looks at the wisdom of the crowd as well as relevancy based on attributes you associate with the catalogue.
Einstein Recommendations Email – This feature improves your emails by personalising your customer’s view by displaying products or content based on Salesforce’s Einstein algorithms and calculates the next best thing upon opening (not sending) the email.

How to Leverage Einstein Recommendations for Web

The greatest benefit of Einstein Web Recommendations is that they are based on First-Party cookies which means all incoming traffic on your website is being tracked. The cookies will therefore recognise returning visitors as well as provide recommendations based on their current & previous online behaviour. Below you will find the 5 best places as to where to install Einstein Recommendations for Web.

Home Page (Banner recommendation)

It’s important to personalise not only the products for sale on your website but also to tailor the look and feel of the website to your audience. If you provide insurance services, you might wish to display images that reflect your visitor’s age or family situation whilst if you sell sports gear for different sports, you might wish to display the main images concerning the most relevant sport more prominently on the home page.

Home Page (Product recommendation)

When a visitor has not returned as a customer, the visitor might still be in the consideration phase. It is important to remove as many hurdles as possible which includes allowing the visitor to find the products he or she viewed recently more easily. By presenting the recently viewed products on the homepage, the returning visitor will need less clicks to find the product and in turn reduces bounce rates and improves our chances of converting.

Category Page (Product Recommendation)

If you look at it from a UX perspective, most ecommerce websites are based on category pages. If you from the main page, you drill down to categories from which you drill down further to find the product you are looking for. So the category page is key and that’s why it is extremely important to frontload the products in each category based on recommendations tailored to each visitor! Imagine a google search but on the category page. Very important if colour or design is important to a visitor, that the visitor sees this immediately upon clicking a category.

Cart Page (Product Recommendation)

This one is especially interesting when there are a lot of accessories to a product. Think matching clothing based on a lookbook or batteries if you are selling electronics. It’s the final upsell before a sale happens and has a place in all check-outs.

Product Page (Product Recommendation)

When we first speak about adding recommendations to a client’s online store, we generally speak about this one. Not because it is the highest performing (see category page) but because it’s the classic. People who like this product also like this product and Amazon made it mainstream.

Usually when visitors have reached the product page, they found what they are looking for so adding product recommendations on the product page is more like adding a back-up. It’s there in case the visitor is still looking for something but can’t really find it. We tend to see lower CTR and conversions with this block.

How to Leverage Einstein Recommendations in Email

The greatest benefit of Einstein Email Recommendations is that they are based on the same First-Party cookies as the Web Recommendations are which means you have a wealth of data to use in Email. The great part about it is that people build their tracking on Einstein before they sign up to your mailing list but also as soon as they start clicking in emails, they’ll be adding to their tracking data. Below you will find the 3 best ways to use Einstein Recommendations for Email.

The Welcome Email

One of the key benefits of having Einstein running on your website is that it is collecting information about your visitors based on first party cookies. Once that visitor has signed up to your mailing list, then that subscriber is considered identified and we can apply Einstein Recommendations in Emails.

Imagine if the first email you ever send to a new subscriber is completely personalised? From the header to the content of the email, all tailored based on gender, preferences and budget? You’ll leave a strong impression. Not only does this improve conversions, but the look and feel of an email drastically improves based on each new subscriber.

Product Recommendations per Category

One of the obvious differences between an email and an online store is that emails have limited real estate when it comes to displaying products. If you wish to display 4 rows of 4 products in your email which tends to be the usual amount, you are only able to display 16 products. This while your online store probably contains over 300 products. Therefore it is incredibly important to use that real estate as efficiently as possible and you do this by making sure that the products displayed are personalised based on the recipient.

Recently Searched

The search bar is such an underutilised tool in marketing. Your customer is directly inputting what he or she is looking for and we don’t use this data enough for retargeting. Einstein isn’t a search engine but it could help your visitors in finding the products they need by providing recommendations based on the search term and matching those with what others have bought