The customer journey to purchase is increasingly convoluted. Potential customers view product information on many channels and even devices before they actually become a customer. The traditional “sale campaign” email, while still effective, is not the only way ecommerce Magento store owners should be communicating with their potential customers. Fortunately there are a number of marketing automation plugins and services for Magento and other ecommerce carts that allow for personalized segmentation, social media monitoring, targeted SMS ads, retargeted search and social ads and reporting to identify tactics that are working or need to be improved. Our clients with Magento shopping carts have asked us to evaluate Magento marketing automation software and make recommendations within their budgets. This post looks at a few Magento specific solutions that won’t break the bank, but will deliver positive returns.
Evaluation of SalesManaGo, Canopy Labs and SpringBot
We were looking for the best e-commerce Marketing Automation extensions for Magento in order to get better with personalized emails, retargeting ads and social media integration. Fortunately every ecommerce database that has been selling products online for a few years has a load of data that can be used for automating the marketing messages and touch points necessary for the customer journey to end in purchase. An ecommerce database like Magento stores customer names, phones, emails, gender, mailing addresses, birthdates and purchase history. Additionally most ecommerce databases also have information about abandoned shopping carts, when coupons were used, when chat was used, internal searches, wish lists, and the typical time of purchases. Marketing automation software allows ecommerce website owners to make better use of this data in order to improve customer relationships, user experience, and ultimately increase revenue.
The top email marketing automation solutions include HubSpot, Marketo, Hootsuite, Pardot and Silverpop, but they can be expensive and many of them do not emphasize increasing revenue because they also were designed for the B to B market. For this reason we took a look at SalesManaGo, Canopy Labs and SpringBot marketing automation solutions since they specifically focus on Magento e-commerce stores. We are currently in the evaluation process and will publish a follow up blog post with our final selection. The following criteria are what we used to evaluate these ecommerce marketing automation solutions.
Using eMail Marketing Automation in Ecommerce
Our customer’s stores currently use an abandoned cart email triggered by the Magento cart when a prior customer (who’s email we already have in our database) puts something in the cart and removes it or leaves the cart page. Our email goes something along the lines of “hi Joe, we noticed you did not complete your purchase of products x, y and z. If you checkout in the next 10 minutes, we will provide you with a 5 or 10% discount coupon code because you have been a customer in the past, and we value our customers. Take advantage quickly because this coupon will expire in 10 minutes.”
We want to improve our customer’s abandoned cart emails, using Magento marketing automation email software that will allow us to customize the email we send “Joe” so that it displays not only the products he currently left in the cart, but also his shopping history so that he can easily re-order a prior purchase.
About 65 percent of our client’s customers put products into the shopping cart and abandon the cart before checkout is complete. This percentage is actually a little lower than average online store abandon carts. The abandon cart revenue opportunity for this particular client is still only about 5% of all the abandon cart emails we send out, so we know we can do a better job in this area with additional marketing automation software that can personalize the email even further.
- As we have blogged about in the past, there are many opportunities to email customers without appearing intrusive, and generate revenue that would otherwise be unrealized. Some of these email opportunities that can be enhanced with marketing automation segmentation and personalization include:
- Use customer purchase history to add personalized product suggestions to the purchase confirmation email – these emails have a 70% or higher open rate, and are often not optimized by online stores
- Request for a product review or survey sometime after the delivery date
- Tell customers about a social media promotion they can enter
- Send inspirational uses of a product or product tutorials with ideas on related products after that product is purchased
- Sales or new products to a segmented audience who bought similar products in the past
- VIP or rewards points emails to segmented customers
- Reminder anniversary of a gift purchase with suggested products
- Emails with incentives to reconnect with customers who have not purchased in a certain time period. This is also called RFM, which stands for Recency, Frequency and Monetary data base segmentation. It is based on user activity, and is very effective for database segmentation and email automation.
Event Triggered Magento Marketing Automation
We are also looking for something that will allow for event-triggered Magento marketing automation based on channel and customer action. For instance, we want to optimize the customer journeys to improve conversions. To do this we will need to be able to look at every marketing channel and see how it influences the customer’s decisions and lead to a purchase. Currently we use Google Analytics and other tracking software to report these behaviors, but we want marketing automation software that will make recommendations for channels and devices based on customer actions. For instance we would like product recommendations to be personalized, have the ability to automatically generate an SMS message that may initiate a phone call if the customer opts into it, creation of personalized landing pages or graphic blocks on pages the past customer is currently visiting. We also want to be able to cross sell, upsell, have an exit coupon popup, and a number of other possibilities.
Social Media and Retargetting Campaigns
Another criteria for our Magento marketing automation software is the ability to re-engage visitors who view a product but do not purchase it by showing them a display ad on other websites and social media even if they switch from desktop to a mobile device. We are looking for the ability to set events that trigger automated messages, integration with Facebook Messenger, automation of Facebook posts after a product purchase, automated posts and Tweets and Ads.
The software should have reports that show average order value, order totals and total revenue as well as segment and campaign statistics.
Our next post will provide insight into our evaluation of these Magento marketing automation systems. Perhaps our process will also provide you with criteria for improving your Magento customer service and revenue.
Reporting
The software should have reports that show average order value, order totals and total revenue as well as segment and campaign statistics.
Summary
Our spreadsheet for comparison of Magento marketing automation will look at price, support, and features such as audience segmentation, personalization, social media integration, custom landing pages, mobile and SMS, retargeting Adwords, personalized upselling or cross selling, progressive personalized pop-ups and dynamic recommendations on the website.
Our next post will provide insight into our evaluation of these Magento marketing automation systems. Perhaps our process will also provide you with criteria for improving your Magento customer service and revenue.