When we first started, Better Coupon Box app was attracting a lot of new customers (thank God and thank you, it still does) and quickly gained its no.1 position as the most popular app in Shopify AppStore. However, the bigger we grew, the harder we found to reach out to each individual and make sure they were having the best experiences with our apps, or more importantly, to turn them into paying customers as any other businesses.
I guess there were times you experienced the same.
Therefore, we decided to communicate with each customer personally, and found it’s not only effective, but also extremely cost-saving. We reached 16% conversion rate right after the first month using this technique.
But how can we communicate with each of ~15,000 customers that we’re serving?
The key to our success is by applying automation emails to customer development process, so we can speak ourselves without manual efforts. Sounds impossible? Let me show you how and how you can apply to your own store as well.
The 3 biggest wins from testing hundreds of automated emails
During 4-5 months, we tested hundreds of different emails, some with only very minor tweaks such as: subjects, bodies, links, calls to action and more… We ended up with 3 key types of emails that had the biggest impact on customer growth and engagement, which you can surely make use of the same principles to your store.
1. “Welcome to the party” emails
With offline businesses, it’s easy to have you or a staff there to say “Hi” and smile to each customer walking in, talking with them to make sure they can find what they need. However, it turns into a difficult task to online stores because there could be a huge gap between what you’re telling your customers, and what they want – or need – to hear. The only way to find out the truth is surprisingly simple: communicate.
You could never know what customers think, what they might need, or where they get stuck if you don’t reach out. Therefore, we interact with our customers as soon as possible by “welcome emails”, like this:
Some people under-estimate the power of welcome emails and say that it doesn’t matter. However, in Beeketing’s case, 90% of our support tickets are replies from customers from these emails, which proves its amazing effect.
The tips here is to make your customers feel that you personally care about their experience. For example, starting each email by addressing your customer by name doesn’t just make you sound more respectful or polite; it actually makes the customer happy to hear it:
In the beginning, we used the system email to communicate with customers and rarely did we receive a response. However, when we change the “From” email to CEO’s or CMO’s and make a personal conversation with customers’ names in emails, the response rate jumped up to 40%.
Well, you know, we could have lost that 40% of customers if we didn’t actively start the conversation otherwise. If you haven’t contacted any of your new customers yet, do it now before it’s too late. Here’s a template for your advantage:
Takeaway:
Start talking with visitors as soon as you can, ideally when they first show their interest on your store, such as: make their first purchase, sign up for an account or newsletter,… It’s like welcoming guests to your party and turn strangers into friends.
2. Apply behavior-driven emails to engage slipping-away customers
Online visitors are usually treated as “traffic”, while each one is a real person with different needs and interests.
“Your customers all behave differently, why treat them all the same?”
Most of our customers use the app effectively right after installing, however, there are always a big number of customers getting stuck somewhere. It could lead to “app abandonment” if we couldn’t solve that “bottleneck”. So, we built a simple system that would alert us when a customer would spend too much time on a particular task, and we reach out to each of them:
Such emails help you understand your customers and identify any unique needs that they might have. The same technique can be applied to recover all the abandoned carts on your store, which one of our customers used to share: “I could be a millionaire if I had all the money from abandoned carts”.
Especially if the emails come from you, rather than from a general business email, it would perform better across the board. We learned that when customers know that they have a direct line to the store owner, they feel more connected, and less likely to quit if they hit a snag.
If you don’t reach out to your customers, there’s a huge chance that you’re leaving money on the table.
Takeaway:
By tracking customers’ behaviors, you’ll know where they’re stuck and offer help at the right time. Not every customer quits or abandons cart because they dislike your product, there could be something in the way, but you’ll never know unless you reach out to them.
3. Cross-sell in emails is powerful
Open rates, click-through rates, engagement (replies), conversion from cross-selling one app to another app,…we tracked the results of all emails closely and here’s how our dashboard looks:
According to our reports, on average, 14% of Better Coupon Box customers will use another app from Beeketing. It’s not impressively high, we’re still working on it. But hey, we could have lost that 14% of “new” customers if we didn’t show we do provide other sales-driving apps that match their needs.
The same applies to your store. Buyers will never know what you’ve got if they don’t know, so get ready to recommend other relevant products that compliment their existing purchase, or some items that you think they might like.
Takeaway:
Set your goals clearly and never be afraid to fail. It is suggested that you test every marketing ideas you could think of to find the best way. Some ideas might sound crazy, but it could be your most revenue-driven source. Who knows if you don’t try?
MailBot for you (and only you)
You might wonder how you can apply the same to your business, as you don’t have a team of in-house engineers to build the engine or marketers to write the emails? Especially when you’re also having thousands of customers to take care of?
It’s as easy as switching on your computer, sitting back, relaxing and letting the software do all the work for you while you watch the sales coming in in dashboard. Sounds crazy? It may sound difficult for store owners with a small team (like you and me), but it is achievable.
Marketing automation was once the preserve of only the most financially successful businesses. Technology needed to create the systems required heavy investment and was built ‘in-house’. Regularly the cost of building the software outweighed the cost-savings.
That’s why we built Mailbot to help you automate the whole process at a very suitable cost. This app will automate your sales process by analyzing customers’ behaviors to send follow-up emails based on their actions and interests, from the very first point when they step on your store until…forever.
We’ve A/B tested, optimized hundreds of emails to come up with this flow for your online store:
- Happy Email: welcome new customers to your store
- Sales Nurturing: nurture visitors who are interested in some products to convert them into paying customers
- Collection cross-sell: recommend and cross-sell the most suitable products based on customers’ behaviors
- Sales Return: bring back slipping-away customers for your store
- New Arrivals: weekly updates of new arrivals
- Reward Coupon: motivate royal customers to spend more with a reward coupon
- Promote products that can be bought again: depending on the cycle a product can be bought again, email customers to remind that motivate them to re-purchase
Each customer behaves differently, so our app reacts differently to each customer as well. All emails are tested thoroughly with subjects, bodies, timing, call-to-action,…to make sure everything works smoothly to turn every single visitor on your store into revenue.
Or if you want to customize, we’ve gathered top suggestions from our marketing experts for you here, so you can make the most money with MailBot app.
Give it a try for 15 days free if you want to earn more with the least efforts.
Don’t waste your 4 or 5 months like us 😉
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