The Email Wars

So your campaign went out, they opened, they read, and they clicked. Battle one down. Fortunately for you you did a good job of presented the right offers to the right people and voila they were in market and bought. Kudos. Goal two complete. But what happens after that? Do you simply count them as another customer or as a savvy email marketer to do you take the next steps in the lifecycle? What is that you ask, I assume that you knew right?

Well you are only 1/4 of the way there in the right steps. I use Sorel as a good example (even there are some great things they can still add to the process that I will explain) of the steps that come next.

Immediately you should be sending out a Thanks for Your order/Order confirmation. Now as a best practice you really need to give people an immediate email showing them what they just did. Now in this example you can see things that I like, they present a clearly written thanks, they present your information and the order number back to you for easy reference, and (not shown) they display photos of the items you purchased. This last one I am always appreciative of as it give me a fast way to visually scan the order to make sure that I did not add anything wrong as well as shows me that their ecom system got my order right. Win right? Yes it is. But at this same point in time they have me as a captive customer and as this was my first order in the system they could have done one of the following.

1. Present me something to use to place another order with them. A unique discount code that I can use for another purchase with a time offer associated with it making me think about using it faster.

2. A way to give someone else I might know that could also be in market either a “friend” code to use, making me take the step to increase their customer base (say 10%) that I can pass on right then. I am a satisfied shopper right now and it is an ideal time to use me as a referral source.

3. Present to me other relative items (say to the right hand side of this email) that might be ones that are complimentary to these items OR things that others that have bought these items might use. A great way that you can do this even if you do not have a system in place is to look at a great and cost effective system called 4-tell to automatically feed this type of data into the email. It does not even need to be nestled into your ecom platform. I have seen in action lately and am impressed with it so far. Take a look.

So now there is going to be some time that goes by from the order confirmation to the actual shipping of this product. We all expect some downtime around now. Depending on how long it takes to pick and ship these products there may or may not be a marketing email touch here during this time.

But then comes the shipping confirmation. This is when we all get excited right? The main point of this confirmation is to project a date of arrival and to present the customer a tracking code that is easy to see in order to know when that door bell will ring. A little Pavlovian but we all salivate for them. Actually from past studies I have read this order shipped email often gets more opens than any other as we tend to keep it and use it until the order arrives. So what can you do here? Well it is another great place to position a cross or up sell around like items, future deals, or even promote something that does not exist in the main marketing messages for your site. Also here is a little trick If you can make sure to not the exact location of the offer image paths you can actually change those every few days to always have a current offer presented. Simply by replacing those images you can continue to present new offers while they wait for that order to be tracked and arrive.

So you are 3/4 to the goal now right? So what is next you might wonder? Isn’t our job done? Well the hard part is, but this is where you really have an opportunity to reach back out and find out the level of customer satisfaction with the experience or with the product. Why? Well knowing what is working and what is not is key to growing a strong ecommerce program and your relationship. A simple survey is one way to get them engaged. How did it go? Where things easy to find? Did you have any issues that came up that we could address better? Would you recommend us to someone else (Net promoter scoring)? But even better is to engage with feedback on the happiness with the product itself. We all know that people look for the recommendation of others and even seek them out when making a purchase. So would you rather have them search those out all over the web OR take advantage of placing this content back into your site and having the authority rest right next to the products? I would choose the latter based on a few reasons. Now the less I have to leave your site to make a decision and the more time I can stay with you then the higher the chance that I am going to make the purchase. Now if you decide to house these reviews you need to allow both good and bad to live here side by side. You need to throw on your tough skin and be ready for a fair amount of tough love. Hiding negative comments are a sure way to lose the trust of those that come to you.

In a recent test we did with an online retailer we tried showing professional reviews from a outdoor gear magazine in one email, while in the other we presented customer scoring and reviews. Which do you think did better? It was an interesting testament to the changes in online trust going on. The email with the customer scores and reviews outsold those of the old line journalistic source. Now this was only one test and should be repeated to make a true call on, but we found it to be a real driver to sales. Are you including testimonials or reviews in your ecom emails? Maybe you should test this.

The other reason I love reviews in the ecom site is that it creates more content. Content is king and from a search perspective I would love to have more juju on my side from a review and content perspective than on an aggregator site. Note that you will want to wait a few weeks to 30 days to follow up on this so that they have had adequate time to use the product and write an intelligent review.

In the end you need to understand that the campaign is not over when you drop your first touch email. It should be continued through the lifecycle allowing to you leverage this relationship to drive more sales, provide goodwill, and keep your engagement levels high. This way they next time they are in market they will consider you before your competition.