Advance Email Marketing

Complete Guide
to Marketing Automation
.
for Ecommerce

Table of contents
Introduction 3
Email list building 4
Step 1. Focus on quality traffic – define your target audience 5
Step 2. Improve your SEO 9
Step 3. Create high converting web forms and landing pages 16
Step 4. Drive traffic to your landing pages using paid ads 25
Email list segmentation 28
Demographics 29
Behavioral data 31
Experiment with segments 37
5 must-have campaigns 38
Onboarding 39
Post-purchase 43
Win-back campaigns 48
Short-term win-back campaigns 49
Long-term win-back campaigns 54
Summary 60

3 www.GetResponse.com
1
INTRODUCTION
Marketing automation plays a big part in how well your email campaigns perform. Our latest
benchmarks report showed that compared to traditional newsletters, automated emails have:
• Double the average open rate – 45.70% compared to 22.83%.
• Three times the average click-through rate (CTR) – 10.75% compared
to 3.48%.
This guide aims to help you make the
most of marketing automation, and get
better results for your ecommerce
business. Discover how to use
automation tools to build and segment
a powerful ecommerce contact list. And
see examples of essential campaigns,
including:
• Onboarding
• Post-purchase
• Win-back
• Re-engagement
• Customer success
To bring you the best insights, we
collaborated with industry experts
from Omniconvert, Shoplo, Shopify,
and GetResponse.
We hope this guide serves as a helpful
resource and inspires your marketing
automation strategy.

Complete Guide to Marketing Automation for Ecommerce 4
2
EMAIL LIST
BUILDING
HOW TO BUILD A POWERFUL ECOMMERCE
EMAIL LIST
2EMAIL LIST BUILDING: HOW TO BUILD A POWERFUL ECOMMERCE
EMAIL LIST
The single email marketing KPI in ecommerce is pretty simple – return on investment.
You look at the cost and revenue and can easily determine email marketing ROI (according to
the Global Industry Benchmarks email marketing provides highest ROI among the online
marketing channels). If you want to achieve long-term success with email marketing, you’ll
need a robust, continuously growing email list. Not sure how to grow one? In this chapter,
we’ll guide you through the most effective ways you can apply to your business.
If you want to achieve
long-term success with email
marketing, you’ll need a robust,
continuously growing email list.

STEP 1. FOCUS ON QUALITY TRAFFIC – DEFINE YOUR TARGET
AUDIENCE
To get the most of your email marketing efforts you need to start with your target audience –
people who are most likely interested in your product or service. To run relevant online
marketing communication, drill down into your data and identify customers who generate the
most revenue. Research who they are, what they are trying to accomplish, what drives their
behavior, and analyze their buying behavior and buying decisions.
Such information is not only the backbone of a great email marketing program – it's crucial
for your overall marketing success. Use it to create customer personas, that – if done – right
will help you match content to customers’ needs. I second the Buyer Persona Institute that
marketing plans should start with the buyer’s needs – not yours. That’s why a thorough
customer research should be the foundation of all marketing.
So how important is it to build a buyer persona for your ecommerce business?
Here’s what ecommerce experts have to say.
Ioana Lupec – Project Manager at Omniconvert
HOW IMPORTANT IS IT TO DEFINE YOUR IDEAL CUSTOMER AND BUILD
BUYER PERSONAS?
It is very important for ecommerce websites to analyze how they are spending their
budget and energy and to whom they are communicating.
Doing so, companies can understand if their efforts are paying off.
Sending the same message with a discount offer to all users or doing a
general PPC campaign will most certainly not have a positive ROI.

Imagine that 1% of your customers generate 30% more revenue than your average
customer. In this case it sounds reasonable to target that group with a personalized
campaign. Also, when you dig deeper into data you might start asking yourself what’s
the point of marketing your product to users that are not going to come and buy again
from your website?
To understand who your ideal customer is, segment your audience.
Know who are the customers that buy frequently, that have a high monetary value and
that have recently bought from your ecommerce website.
You can easily do so by using RFM Analysis.
Based on this segmentation, you can find out specific buying patterns. For
example, you can discover that the segment that has a high monetary value and
buys frequently comes from city X and was acquired through the Y campaign.
This segmentation will not only help you to know your customer, but will help you optimize
the customer acquisition cost because you will be able to market your products efficiently.
It is important to discover the impact each customer segment has in your business.
Doing so, you will be able to personalize the whole customer journey with the right
message, at the right time at every touch point: email, ads, social media, and your
website.
If you know the customer’s buying habits and how valuable they are, you can
most certainly deliver them relevant messages based on the previous activity
and interaction with your website. This is the way to become one of the players
in the ecommerce industry because the followers are the ones obsessed with
traffic acquisition and the top players acknowledge the importance of retention
rate, lifetime value and cohort analysis.

If you’re interested in retention rate optimization, you’ll find plenty of inspiration in this
article from Omniconvert.
Equipped with valuable data, create a marketing strategy aimed at your ideal customers. It’s a
good idea to design a framework that will help you plan actions along the customer journey,
e.g., marketing funnel or a loyalty loop.

The RACE Digital Marketing Planning Framework developed by Smart Insights
STEP 2. IMPROVE YOUR SEO
Once you’ve built solid buyer personas, it’s time to create a solid conversion plan.
The first stage in any given online marketing methodology is awareness or reach, where you
focus on attracting your target audience (ideal customers) to your website (or physical
location). This is where you focus on traffic – the number of visitors and visits on your
website.
A huge part of your website traffic comes from organic search results – people using search
engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo to find particular products. That’s why we consulted two
ecommerce experts on driving organic traffic with SEO.
Phil Forbes, Content Writer and Marketer at Shoplo
HOW DO YOU DRIVE ORGANIC TRAFFIC WITH SEO?
SEO is kinda like the weather. Everyone knows what it is, but you can never really predict it
perfectly, or control it.
But it’s not too hard to make it work for you. With regards to your ecommerce conversion
rate optimization, SEO is powerful, but complex.
Take a look at your product. What problems does it solve? Who would buy it?
Now don’t go cramming words into your title, just like a dodgy Craigslist listing.
Bad SEO is easy. Effective SEO isn’t.

Let’s say, your minimalist jewellery is a good idea for a sweet 16 birthday present.
Mention that it’s a ‘great idea for a sweet 16 birthday present’ in a H2 heading of
your product description. Then mention similar phrases throughout the description.
• Sweet 16 birthday idea • Idea for 16th birthday
• Gift for 16-year-old girl
Mix and match and put these phrases in different areas of your product page. The
heading, image ALT tags, meta descriptions.
One of the best, and most underused ways to leverage SEO for ecommerce is to
manage a blog. Sure, you’ve heard this a thousand times. But how many blogs that
accompany ecommerce blogs dedicate most of their content to selling the products.
I’ll answer it for you: too many.
The point of operating a blog alongside your ecommerce store is not to sell the
product. It’s to build:
• a rapport,
• a relationship,
• and an appeal between the brand and the buyer.
In the process, you leverage SEO by making your blogs rank for keywords that
your customer searches for.
A quality ecommerce blog creates content that solves problems that their idea customer
has – whether it’s related to the product or not.

The Long Hairs are a couple of guys that make hair ties and other accessories for
men with long hair. Their blog is full of tips and tricks for living with long hair, as well
as education and entertainment for guys with long hair.
The keyword ‘wash men’s long hair’ sees the Long Hairs blog about washing long hair
rank in the top position. The brand gets seen by organic traffic. Their products get
seen. Because of the trust created by quality content, there are sales.
Bear in mind that SEO is just one solution to increasing your ecommerce
conversions. To learn other ways, check out this article on “25 Clever Ways to
Optimize Your Ecommerce Conversions”.
If you want to know how SEO can improve your list building process, here’s a
crash course to email list building through SEO.
Radu Vrabie, Online Marketing Consultant at Omniconvert WHAT’S
MOST IMPORTANT WHEN IT COMES TO SEO?
Ecommerce websites need to have a dedicated approach to search engine optimization
because of the particularities these types of website have.
First of all, the main issue to handle while doing SEO for an ecommerce business is
reducing duplicate content to an absolute minimum.
Duplicate content is very frequent in this industry because sites usually list multiple
product pages with the same or very similar descriptions. Considering that an
average store has hundreds or thousands of products, this can easily lead to
problems in terms of organic rankings.

Or even worse, some ecommerce websites publish the product description they
got from the supplier, thus making sure that they become virtually invisible in
Google:
So one of the most important steps is to hire dedicated personnel (either in-house
or outsourced) that is tasked with creating unique product descriptions for each
product page. If you also manage to create descriptions of at least 3-500 words,
then you’re already in front of most of your organic competition.
Speaking of duplicate content, make sure that your ecommerce platform doesn’t
generate indexable pages with the same content by adding search strings at the
end of category URLs.
Example:
• /product-category
• /product-category?color-filter • /product-category?size-filter • /product-
category?price-filter
• etc.

This is a very common problem that ecommerce stores should be aware of
because most of the platforms or themes used to build stores are not
optimized by-default and will generate these types of duplicate pages out of
the gate.
Another approach that yields good results in terms of organic traffic is to treat your
main category pages as classic landing pages. This means improving their usability,
adding elements that increase trust, and also creating a solid piece of content
(ideally 1000+ words), placed right under the product listings (not above them,
because it will hurt user experience of the website).
Since the main category pages are very close to the website root level
(e.g. homepage.com/category1) they also have more SEO authority than product pages
which are a layer down (homepage.com/category1/product). So by turning your main
categories into real power-pages you’ll make the most of your homepage authority.

Image source
Yet another SEO strategy for ecommerce stores is to create their own product images instead of
using those sent by the supplier. This way they’ll be the only ones with these images indexed in
google, instead of having to outrank several other competitors in search results. And for an extra
boost, the image name and ALT tags should be relevant for the product as well!
Another aspect ecommerce stores should pay attention to is link building, which is
one of the most important parts of SEO. Even if you've built one of the greatest
stores and optimized it perfectly, without links it will most likely not rank, especially
for competitive keywords.
There’s much to be said on the subject of link building, but I can at least mention some
opportunities ecommerce stores have:

• Links from suppliers. Contact your suppliers and ask them to link to your
website from their presentation sites.
• Product reviews. Check on your customers and see if you can find any that
have personal blogs. Or even reach out to blogs yourselves and offer a product
for free in exchange for a review.
• Third party websites. Add your ecommerce store to trustworthy aggregators
such as product comparison sites, but avoid the smaller/shadier ones.
• PR. Send out a press release to publications in your target location when you
first launch or for any special event you might have.
• Attend conferences and tradeshows. Ecommerce conferences and tradeshows
will sometimes showcase a list of participants that also include links back to
their websites. Hint: speakers almost always get mentioned!
• Donate. Depending on the type of products you sell, you can create donations
to various NGOs. This will most likely get featured on their websites/blogs but
there’s also a chance that other websites will mention it as well.
STEP 3. CREATE HIGH-CONVERTING WEB FORMS
AND LANDING PAGES
OK, now that you know how to optimize your online business for search results, you’re ready
to start building your list.
The first step is to ask people who visit your website and are interested in your
product or service to subscribe to your newsletter and receive regular updates from
your brand.

To do that, you need a solid web form. Basically, web forms allow people to sign up, but
great web forms grab attention and incentivize subscription – and that’s exactly what
you need if you want to grow your ecommerce email list like a pro!
Place web forms on your home page, product pages, blog, and during registration in your
ecommerce store. The more opportunities for a signup the better.
Use multiple different forms depending on the situation:
• Download box to engage content lovers
• Exit pop-up to minimize bounces and maximize ROI
• Scroll form to keep your blog visitors engaged
• Fixed bar to stay at the top of the reader’s browser
Test, analyze, and optimize their performance. When you set out to grow your list with high
quality traffic, you’ll be able to see which forms result in the highest conversion and optimize
for further growth.
Whatever web form you choose, it needs to meet certain criteria. A great web form needs
to be visible (if not eye-catching), it needs at least one form field (email address) and a
clear call to action. If you want to personalize your email marketing communication from
the start, you can use more form fields (e.g., name, city, sex).
Make sure you ask subscribers only for relevant information. Ask for date of birth only if you
are going to use this information in further communication, e.g. by sending a personalized
birthday offer.
If you decide to use more form fields, it’s a good idea to write a few words explaining the reason
behind it. This helps visitors set the expectations. I’d recommend a short d

escription of your email marketing campaigns, especially if you send valuable content that
addresses customer pain points.
Now, let’s run through a few examples of great web forms:
A lightbox pop-upfromConverse.Three form fields allow you
to collect valuable subscriber data.

A fixedbarfromMany Morningswitha discountas an incentive.
Design a great landing page
A landing page is a simple website, with a single purpose. It is designed with a specific call to
action in mind. Landing pages are great for a dedicated online marketing campaign, specific
product launch, or a sweepstake. Landing pages have much bigger conversion rates, as visitors
don’t get distracted by too much information and are more likely to follow a clear call to action.
For the sake of this article, let’s agree that the CTA is email list subscription (e.g., subscribe, sign
up, join).
In order to build your ecommerce email list, you need a landing page with an opt-in form,
optimized for conversion. When designing your landing page, think of the following elements:

1. Value proposition
What do you offer in exchange for my email address? What’s in it for the subscriber? Is it worth
to share personal data with your business? Make sure that your landing page answers these
questions and that visitors know that it’s worth it.
Create an attention-grabbing headline followed by an informative subheadline. There
are no strict rules as far as the length of copy is concerned, so feel free to experiment
and A/B test different versions.
You could also list benefits of subscribing to your list.
A fragment of the Remarkable Content webinar landing page from Andrew & Pete.

2. Clear call to action
You should start designing your landing page with defining a clear CTA. It is certainly the most
important element of a landing page.
Let’s take a look at a few great call-to-action examples:
A clear CTA from care/of.
A product photo with a CTA.

3. Incentive
Think of something your target audience perceives as valuable and is likely to exchange it for
data (e.g. discount/free shipping). If you are not sure which incentive to use, run A/B tests and
see what’s improving conversion best.
A lightbox pop-up from mindbodygreen with a health shopping guide as an incentive.
4. Social proof
Ask your customers for opinions, turn them into simple, short-form recommendations and use
them as social proof that your deliver on your promises. According to Nielsen, 68% of
respondents trust consumer opinions posted online, so it is potentially a huge conversion
factor.

Anotherfragmentof the Remarkable Contentwebinarlandingpage fromAndrew &Pete.
5. Mobile-friendly design
It turns out that 31.65% of emails are opened on mobile devices. That’s why it is absolutely
necessary to use responsive templates that look great on every device. You can prepare a
great looking landing page with a web form and use it during trade shows, events or near the
point of sale in your physical locations. Actually, if you also run a traditional brick-and-mortar
business, you should search for opportunities to convert offline to online. It might be a great
source of traffic.
Shanelle Mullin, Content & Growth at Shopify
WHAT’S MOST IMPORTANT WHEN IT COMES TO EMAIL SUBSCRIPTION
LANDING PAGES?
There are two things that make or break a lead gen form:
1. The value proposition.

2. Friction.
In ecommerce, transactions are paramount, right? If you’re not thinking about lead
gen forms as transactions, you’re making a mistake. The visitor might not be giving
you money, but they’re giving you something else that’s valuable: their email. What
are you giving them in return? The answer to that question is your value
proposition. If it’s not strong enough, they won’t part with their email address, the
same way they won’t part with their money if the product’s value proposition isn’t
strong enough.
You also want to eliminate as much friction as humanly possible. I encourage you to do
your own qualitative and quantitative research to uncover the friction that exists on
your unique site, but some common sources of friction for lead gen forms are:
1. Asking for the opt-in before the visitor is ready in the name of keeping the form above
the fold.
2. Error messages that don’t show until after the form is submitted.
3. Unclear submit button copy that doesn’t set expectations.
4. Requiring phone numbers, addresses, etc. be entered a specific way.
STEP 4. DRIVE TRAFFIC TO YOUR LANDING PAGES USING PAID ADS
When you have your landing page up and running, you can use social media to reach an
audience representing your ideal customers.
In search for valuable insights, I turned to Piotr Sobczyk, PPC specialist at GetResponse with the
following question:
How do you drive traffic to your landing page using social media?

If you want to gain more clicks and reach to your landing page, you have two options:
• organic traffic from interesting posts/content
• and the second one – paid traffic.
Let’s look at the second option. In my opinion, the best way to get cheap, but also
valuable traffic, is to use… your existing customers! Before starting a paid
campaign, I recommend studying your audience using:
a) Facebook Audience Insights – upload your email list (or set your custom
audience from Facebook Pixel) and check who your customers are – their
demographics, what they like, and what social profiles they follow. This will help you
narrow down your campaign targeting.
b) Google Analytics – do the same as with Facebook. Check your visitors’ age,
gender, location, interests, and other characteristics.
After some research, we know much more on how to target our customers and
who they actually are. We can save money and target our prospects. But don’t
forget to use your knowledge about your customers once more.
Choose your social media network and:
• exclude your customers from the campaign – there’s no point in
offering them something they already have
• create a similar/lookalike audience – it’s a really cheap way to get
customers who are similar to your existing customers according to
the algorithm

Facebook Lookalike Audience Creator
• create a campaign (e.g. with interests/topics), but remember to
exclude your existing customers and the lookalike audience.

Excluding visitors and customers
That short process can save you money on paid social ads and drive valuable
traffic to your landing page!

3
EMAIL LIST
SEGMENTATION
HOW TO SEGMENT YOUR ECOMMERCE EMAIL LIST
Building an audience is just the first step towards growing your ecommerce business. What you
also need to learn is how to engage and interact with your customers, so that they’ll be more
likely to convert and stick with you for longer.
From this chapter you’ll learn about the importance of customer segmentation and how it
can help you drive more revenue.
One of the simplest and most
neglected email marketing tactics
is segmentation. Just use it and
you’ll be ahead of 47% of email
marketers who send the same
message to everyone.

DEMOGRAPHICS
Using demographic data to categorize your audience is probably one of the easiest
segmentation methods you can find. But, believe it or not, many online stores still don’t use it,
even though a lot of this data is right in front of them, stored in their CRM.
Demographic data refers to socio-economic customer information such as:
• Gender
• Location
• Age
• Income
• Education
• Other (e.g. children)
You can use demographics to create meaningful email list segments and provide your
contacts with personalized content that addresses their needs and preferences.
Valuable content translates into higher engagement and business results.
Now think for a moment.
If you were selling running shoes, wouldn’t it make sense to send different content to women
and men? Or if you knew that your customers had children, wouldn’t it be great to include – just
for them – information about your new back-to-school campaign?
Doing so is super easy, too.

If you use GetResponse, all you have to do is add that information to your customer profiles and
save it as a custom field. Then you can create a custom filter that uses your custom field as a
condition.
GetResponse dashboard
Pro tip: You can ask website visitors for demographic information at signup. Think of the
data you would like to use from the very beginning and create an appropriate signup form.

A signuppopuponconverse.com, askingforanemail address,date of birth,andgender.
BEHAVIORAL DATA
You can also divide your email list into segments based on your customers’ activity. In other
words, everything your customers either have or haven’t done – whether it’s in your online
store or online marketing communication.
Let’s take a look at the most popular segments you could use when selling online.
Subscribers with no purchase
I guess we could assume that this segment consists of people in the consideration or
evaluation stage of the customer journey. Your business objective here is clear – drive them
towards the purchase.

A fragmentof a newslettersentbyLushintroducingnew products
through benefits (and possible segments)
Remember that at this stage what you offer is content. Create lots of different types of
content and use it to discover your audience’s needs and preferences.

First-time buyers
How would you like to welcome your first-time customers? Think of the information they need
and the way you’d like them to feel after they’ve made their first purchase. The right
combination of valuable information and positive emotions is your holy grail.
Don’t forget about educational or onboarding campaigns explaining the features of the
product or service they’ve bought. Customers who use products to its full potential are
usually the most satisfied with it.
Pro tip: You can use the date of the first purchase as a special event and create a
marketing automation workflow sending an anniversary email with a discount or a
special offer.

A marketing automation workflow triggered with the special event condition.
Top customers (high average order value, high frequency)
I’m sure you have a definition of your top customer. Their average order value is high, they buy
from your frequently (e.g., more than once a month), and their customer lifetime value (CLV) is
above average. Whatever it is, it’s worth creating such a segment.
And here’s why.
Top customers are most probably satisfied customers – they’ve bought from you, and they’ve
been coming back for more. Recognize them and appreciate their loyalty. You can target
them with exclusive offers, and ask them for feedback. Also, ask them to become your brand
advocates and recommend your store to others (offer them something in return as an
incentive.)

If they’re high-spenders, you might want to target them with exclusive offers with a
higher profit margin.
Recent buyers (made a purchase within the last 30 days)
Target your recent buyers with upselling campaigns offering complimentary or additional
products or services to the things they’ve bought.
Recent buyers are also a great source of feedback that helps improve the customer
experience. Ask them to review the products they’ve bought and monitor their level of
satisfaction with the service you provide. Ask if there are any areas of the customer journey
you should improve and do everything you can to enhance the customer experience.
Repeat buyers
Monitor repeat buyers and figure out why they come back. How often do they buy?
Is there any particular incentive that influences their decision?
Find patterns among repeat customers and create even more specific segments. You can dig
deeper into the purchase data – use purchase frequency and decency to create such
segments, e.g.:
• VIP customers
• lapsing VIPs
• regular customers
• lapsed customers
• win-back customers

You can also use purchase history to figure out the categories your customers are
most interested in. Then send them an alert whenever you introduce new products to
the category.
Fragmentof a newsletterfromPenguinRandomHouse

Customers who bought X times
Why not? If someone has bought from you for the tenth time, it calls for a celebration. There
are a lot of ways in which your company can celebrate. For example, you can send an
appreciation email with a token for free shipping at the next purchase.
EXPERIMENT WITH SEGMENTS
Collect data along the customer journey and feel free to experiment with segmentation.
As you already know, browsing and purchase history offers a lot of valuable insights. Combined
with demographics and CRM, they’ll give you a massive amount of information about your
customers.
Here are a few options to get you inspired:
• Total number of orders
• Average number of products per order
• Total number of products ordered
• Most frequently purchased product
• Average amount spent per order
• Number of product reviews
The thing is to recognize your business goals and customer information needs at each step of
the loyalty loop and create segments that will prove meaningful in this context.

4
5 MUST-HAVE
CAMPAIGNS
HOW TO COMMUNICATE EFFECTIVELY
AS AN ECOMMERCE BUSINESS
Marketing automation allows you to run effective communication along the customer journey.
The following 5 must-have email marketing campaigns: onboarding, postpurchase, win-back, re-
engagement, and customer success represent the crucial stages in the ecommerce buyer’s
journey.
Use marketing automation
to send your emails at the right
time. This way your audience will
be more likely to act upon your
messages.

subscribers ONBOARDING
You can start an onboarding campaign right after subscription or purchase. Whether it’s the
initial consideration stage, when your might not yet exactly know what they’re looking for, or
the purchase stage, when they have just bought your product – create a marketing automation
workflow that makes them excited about your brand and products.
Here are a few types of emails you can use in your onboarding campaigns.
Thank you email
As a marketer you constantly ask your subscribers to do something for you. Sign up for a
newsletter, download an ebook, fill out a survey – does that sound familiar?
Now let’s imagine the same scenario in the offline world. If you kept asking someone to do
something for you, the least you could do is say thanks, if not return the favor. It’s simple.
The best thing is, it’s not so difficult to do it online either. All you have to do is to send an
automated email right after they perform an action. To make the message even sweeter, you
can also add a discount code, store credit, or free delivery – they’ll know it was all worth it!
Welcome emails
Let’s assume that you’re organizing a dinner party. What would you do if someone responded to
your invitation and arrived at your door? Most likely, you’d greet them and show them around.

Although your newsletter subscription may feel less like a party and more like a business
meeting, it doesn’t mean you should throw your good manners away. Thank them for
signing up, welcome them to the subscription, perhaps even let them know how
frequently they’ll be hearing from you, and what kind of topics you’ll be discussing.

Make them feel special and let them know how much the fact that they’ve decided to stay in
touch means to you. You can also follow what Course did in their welcome email and tell your
new users what they should do now, pointing them to the most important pages.
Meet the team
Sometimes you’ll want to really connect with your audience. Not on a business-tocustomer or
business-to-business level, but on a human-to-human level. Introducing your team and the
people behind your brand can help you with that.
A “meet the team” email can be a good way to start the conversation on the right foot. You can
use it when contacting your employees in your internal newsletter, or when trying to convince
your regular subscribers to support your cause.
Emails like this are great as they prove that there’s a human being that’s sitting behind the
brand. He or she is trying their best to deliver value to you, but may sometimes make an error
or need help from you. And it’s easier to ask for a favor if they know you in person. On the next
page you can see a good example of a welcome email that introduces the team behind the
company called Andrew and Pete.
Or if you think you can go slightly more crazy, just link to your Meet the Team Page, like
the one made by Wistia. *Hint* Make sure you click the Party time link at the bottom.

A welcome emailby Andrew andPete introducingthemselvesandlettingpeopleknow
what they’ll be talking about in future emails
Download the app and stay up to date
Whether you’re running an online store, a news website, or a SaaS platform, you will want your
customers to keep coming back for more. Is there a better way to do it than letting them know
“there's an app for that”?

Let your fans know that they can access all their favorite information and products even when
they’re commuting and killing time on their smartphone. If you can’t offer them an app, just
make sure your website is mobile-optimized and that your audience knows that their
experience will be just as great on a mobile device.
This type of email fits in well with an onboarding series, when your new users are just starting
to get familiar with your offer. On top of that, it’s also worth reminding those who haven’t
used the app just yet, every once in a while. After all, you want them to interact with your
brand as much as possible.
POST-PURCHASE
Post-purchase emails will help you reach various goals – you can increase sales, educate
customers on how to use your products or services, or ask them for feedback helping improve
the products and customer service.
Here are a few popular types of post-purchase messages you can implement to increase
performance.
Cross-selling
Marketers always want more. They want their customers to buy more often, put more products
in their carts, and spend more when they’re placing their order. It’s not surprising, though, since
we’re all striving for a higher ROI.

Nike promoting its app for customers to access all their favorite brand information on the go
One of the tactics you can implement in your post-purchase communication in order to increase
the average order value is cross-selling – offering customers complimentary products to the
ones they’ve purchased. Here’s a simple example of a marketing automation workflow in this
scenario.

You can create a workflow that starts with a purchase. Customers receive a tag based on the
product they’ve bought and receive a thank you message and confirmation that they’ve made
the right choice.
But you don’t stop here. After 30 minutes you can send another email with
recommended products your customers can add to their order and have it
delivered in one go (optimizing shipping costs).
Possible post-purchase cross-selling marketing automation workflow
Upselling
Another successful tactic that can help you deliver higher results is called upselling. It’s most
often done through the use of additional elements appearing on the landing page, but it can
also be used in your emails. All you have to do is send them at the right time.

Upselling emails are popular among accommodation sites such as Booking.com or Airbnb. Their
aim is to convince subscribers to spend more on their service. They can do so e.g. by getting the
customers to stay longer at a given hotel or book a more expensive room. This way their
commission is bigger, and the users get a chance to have a slightly longer vacation.
Thanks for trying us out
Let’s consider you’re running an online course that offers a free trial allowing people to give it a
go without any obligations. During the course, you’ll probably be sending a few messages, trying
to convince them to upgrade their account. But what happens to those whose subscription runs
out before they make up their mind?
The most obvious answer is that you reach out to them. Present them with a final offer (e.g.
with an additional 10% discount, if they make a decision within the next 24 hours) or ask them
to answer a few questions about the product — what went well, what went wrong, what they’d
like more.
You’ll see that those last-resort offers will not only add value and teach you about your
customers, but also generate additional profits you won’t want to ignore.

Bigcommerce email askingtheiruserstoleave anopinionabout
why they didn’t upgrade their free trial
Join the community
There’s nothing better than a loving, devoted, and loyal customer. A real brand advocate. But
those don’t grow on trees, I’m afraid. You need to find them yourself.

To get your customers hooked on your product, you’ll want them to spend as much time as
possible being exposed to your brand. You’ll want to reach them through all the possible
means and channels.
Increasing the number of consumer touch points is a solid approach that can make your
marketing campaigns more effective. One way to do this is to invite your subscribers to not only
visit your site, but also join you on other platforms — e.g. Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, or
Instagram.
Invite them not only to buy more products, but also to become part of your community. Who
knows, maybe they’ll be as loyal as these Harley Davidson fans, from my personal all-time
favorite ad.
WIN-BACK CAMPAIGNS
Our job as online marketers is to build relationships with our target audience and be there
whenever they are ready to buy. But sometimes, our customers lose interest and become
less engaged with our brand. As a professional, you’ll have to step in and re-engage them.
I’m going to divide win-back campaigns into two categories: short-term – designed for a quick
win, and long-term – designed to reach a major business objective.
SHORT-TERM WIN-BACK CAMPAIGNS
To run effective win-back campaigns, we need to understand the reasons for the lack of
engagement. Let’s go through some of the most common reasons why our customers might
lapse, and try to come up with possible solutions.

Abandoned cart
Possible reasons:
Two-thirds of online shoppers fall short of completing their online purchases.
There are a few reasons for that, but probably the most common one is very simple – they’re
not ready to buy when they add products to the cart. They’re researching, choosing products
they like and adding them to the cart to:
a) easily get back to them when they’re ready to buy
b) check the total cost
There are also other reasons why people are abandoning their shopping carts.
Possible solution:
Remind cart abandoners about the products they’ve chosen. It’s a good idea to plan a
marketing automation workflow with several emails addressing different possible objections.
Take a look at the following email cycle from American Giant, where the company changes
the header of the email every time.

The first email in the cycle says that the chosen product is still available (addressing the
fear of loss).

The second email talks about lifetime warranty.
The third message isareminderincase the customeris still lookingforthe rightproduct.
To influence your customer’s decision, you can reinforce your value proposition with:

• social proof (review of a satisfied customer)
• free return policy • social responsibility
• etc.
Re-engagement
Possible reasons:
It’s natural that some contacts will become less active with time, some will no longer engage in
your communication, and some will even stop visiting your website. Some of the reasons could
be:
• change of interest
• change of needs
• change of email address
• purchase behavior (some people buy only during sales and clearances or on certain
occasions)
• etc.
Possible solution:
The key is to discover the reasons for the engagement drop. You need to know if a customer lost
interest in the content of your emails, or is no longer interested in your product or service and is
not your target audience anymore.

Use marketing automation features like scoring and tagging to track subscriber
activity and automatically segment your contact list. Then create separate marketing
automation workflows for each segment using different psychological triggers.
Useful tip: Figure out how much time must elapse before considering a subscriber inactive.
Remember that people go on vacation or my take a break and go offline for some time.
Let’s create a possible communication pattern for contacts who haven’t opened our email in a
period long enough to notice the lack of engagement. The following workflow consists of three
emails:
1. one where customers can adjust their content and frequency preferences,
2. one with a win-back offer and an incentive,
3. a goodbye email asking if they would like to remain on the list or be removed.
A re-engagement workflow based on a template available in GetResponse

LONG-TERM WIN-BACK CAMPAIGNS
One of the long-term business objectives is loyalty. Your goal is to make sure that customers are
satisfied with the overall experience and come back for more. Satisfied customers are also likely
to recommend your products and services to others, so they become your brand advocates and
a source of revenue. So how do you make sure your customers are satisfied? First of all, you
stay in touch.
Customer success Possible
threats:
Sometimes your customers are not using your product or service fully. As a result, after some
time they are no longer sure if your solution matches their needs. They may go back to the
evaluation stage and search for competitive solutions on the market.
Possible solution:
Keep in touch with your contacts. You need to know if your content satisfies their information
needs and if your product or service solves their problems. You can send out surveys and
monitor customer satisfaction along the customer journey. The goal is to make sure that your
customers know how to use your product to satisfy their needs.
The following workflow sends customers an email with a survey link. The survey aims to
determine the number of product features a customer is using.

Marketingautomationworkflowwithasurveylink
Based on the result, an appropriate tag is applied:
0-3 features = light
4-7 features = regular
8-10 features = heavy

Workflowpersonalizingcommunicationbasedontags
Based on the applied tag, you can run further personalized communication helping people
discover and use more features of the product.

A fragmentof a newsletterfromJimDunlopofferingtolearnmore abouta product.
Customer retention
The key to retention is relevance. Your contacts stay engaged as long as they find your content
interesting and valuable. The same goes for customers. They remain loyal to your brand as long
as your products satisfy their needs. Makes sense, right?
That’s why it’s crucial to collect meaningful information about customers and use it to
create valuable communication cycles. Use the power of marketing automation to identify
different types of customers, like:

• impulsive customers – who can make a buying decision in an instant (perhaps with the right
incentive)
• discount customers – who see value in your product but won’t pay the full price
• loyal customers – who visit your website and buy regularly
Segments based on purchase behavior will help you address the different needs of your
customers and maximize the email marketing ROI.
Provide an incentive
A/B test different incentives to find out what resonates with your customers. I’m not saying
that you should use an incentive in each campaign, but every now and then it might be a
good idea to offer an additional reason to buy.
There are a lot of additional triggers you can use:
• discounts (dollars/percentage)
• gifts
• free shipping
• etc.

A segment from EMU Australia newsletter pointing to incentives
The trick is to use them at the right moment to satisfy both the customer and your
business needs.
Plan your win-back campaigns carefully based on what your contacts perceive as
valuable. Make sure that both the content and the offer satisfy their needs and solve
their problems.
However, when you find out that someone is simply not interested, don’t hesitate to
remove their address from the contact list. Keeping your list clean is a must for effective
online marketing.

5
SUMMARY
Ecommerce is about sales and ROI. Using marketing automation will help you optimize your
online marketing communication and provide excellent customer service along the customer
journey.
In addition, each workflow that brings results is a ready business case for more email marketing
budget. Good luck with automating your online business!
CLICK HERE TO KNOW MORE ABOUT GETRESPONSE

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