But how do you do it? Think about post ‘crazy period’ marketing. High levels of traffic mean high levels of abandonment, and these are the people to target. We’ve outlined four actions you can take to ensure you use the post sales window effectively and keep your buyers interested in to the New Year.

1. Segment your data

Group the people who have clicked on your emails or have browsed your site, but haven’t yet made a purchase. From this group you can create a ‘one last chance’ offer a few days after to tempt them back to your site. A personalized subject line that reminds them of the interactions they made with your brand is a good way to capture your audience.

2. Cart abandonment

Take advantage of that ‘missed opportunity’ feeling. Run Black Friday-branded special abandonment emails. Can you offer an incentive if you don’t normally? This could be a good way to claw back any sales you lost on the big day. What’s more, you could include related product recommendations if the product they were after has now sold out.

3. Browse abandonment

If you know someone was spending lots of time looking around the site by duration or number of pages viewed, follow up with an email. Use the data to send product recommendations reminding them of what they looked at, particularly if it was a specific range. Some people may not be after anything specific, so could be browsing for gifts. Why not put together an email pulling in your top-selling products for some inspiration?

4. Christmas

Black Friday is a time when consumers are looking to bag deals for festive gifts. So it makes sense to use the data you’ve collected from your site and emails for the remainder of the holiday period. Try creating an advent calendar campaign to build excitement. Our Creative Services team can help you get this set up.

CRM is a major part of this bigger picture. B2B companies are increasing their technology spend and we’ll soon see more CRM systems combined with flexible ecommerce platforms. Indeed, Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics and OroCRM are proving to be popular CRM options to combine with platforms such as Magento.

But with all of this extra insight powering a marketing automation platform such as Dotdigital, what does it mean for marketing teams?

1) The ability to see, and do more

B2B marketers are provided with wholesale insight into customers and customer service and a further way to bring in offline order information – making a much deeper level of understanding that many B2B businesses have not previously been able to tap into online accessible. Using this can be business changing with recent Econsultancy research showing that “by migrating B2B customers online, companies have seen a 44% increase in average order value and 38% of the B2B executives agreed that customers have spent more.”

2) Better personalization capabilities

Personalization brings different challenges in the B2B world. B2B sales are more complex with clients having their own individual pricing schema or customer group, existing product knowledge and an awareness of the market and what’s already available.

In order to achieve personalized communications, data becomes more important than ever. Additional B2B data that may sit in your CRM could turn sales focused messages into the individual, educational and persuasive messages required. Browse behavior data for instance is as important as past product or category data for personalization.

3) Making contact at the right time

B2B buyers often adhere to repetitive buying cycles and the buying process can be very long.  Combining past purchase data with clients CRM data helps marketers send emails at the right time for the client on their purchase journey.

Plus, with multiple channels in the process, marketing communications need to reflect the client’s recent activity. Sending a generic ‘120 days after purchase’ email won’t cut it. Behavioral information from email interaction fed back into CRM gives the ‘single view perspective’ which allows for further relevant communications over the phone.

B2B buyers are likely to move themselves through the buying process and have a different way of finding products. Product codes or part numbers will be used and the search functionality is much more important. It’s also likely that catalogs are used or samples requested. This is all data collected within the CRM as opposed to the ecommerce platform but with synced systems, your communication can take these buyer requests into consideration.

The Dotdigital functionality spans both B2C and B2B worlds. We have deep integrations with Magento’s ecommerce platform, Salesforce CRM and Microsoft Dynamics CRM. For marketers, this means getting your data from ecommerce and CRM platforms into Dotdigital is a seamless task. Using the resulting single customer view will ensure your data goes further, empowering you to achieve much more from your marketing.

To discuss your integration requirements, feel free to get in touch.

After all the blood, sweat and tears you put into coaxing potential customers to your site, designing and optimizing your landing pages, perfecting prices and meticulously mapping your customer’s journey, it would be a travesty to lose them at the final hurdle, wouldn’t it?

Why do users abandon carts?

There are numerous reasons as to why someone might choose to jump ship just before making a payment. They might be hopping across to one of your competitors (who has always been and will always be just a click away) because they liked the look/feel/price of their offering a little more than yours.

Alternatively, you might have done something to put them off; is your p&p a little on the steep side? Is your checkout process too clunky?

Failing that, consider the fact that many abandoned carts aren’t actually abandoned after all, as you can see from the screenshot below, according to Statistia there are 14 main reasons as to why shoppers abandon their carts.

These reasons can (and do) include website crashes, timeouts and declined payments. These customers didn’t bail on you because they didn’t like you or your product; it was merely circumstance. It’s your job to reengage them and get them back.

Despite these reported high average abandoned cart rates, our latest research found that when it comes to re-engagement, some practices that we’d believed to be standard just weren’t. At the bottom of this post you’ll be able to download our latest findings and report in its entirety, but to give you a taster, you may be surprised to read that our headline finding was that ‘80% of retailers didn’t send us a cart recovery email’ at all!

What’s more, the quality of the emails that are being sent (by major retailers I might add) is lagging, with brands merely ‘scratching the surface of potential’.

So, in an effort to help you to scratch beneath the surface, here are our top 3 tips for cart abandonment re-engagement email sends:

Don’t rely on your customer’s memory:

Don’t rely on your customer remembering that their transaction is sitting there waiting for them to complete. The chances are they won’t remember and if they do, they probably won’t care.

It’s your job to make them remember (and care), but you haven’t got time to wait around. For maximum impact, your very first cart abandonment email must arrive in a customer’s inbox within the first few hours following the abandoned transaction.

Then, as a general rule of thumb, configure your marketing automation software to send a second email a day or two after, and then a third around 3 days from the moment that your ‘could be ‘ customer first left you hanging.

The timing and frequency of these sends will ensure that these potential customers remember that they’ve got unfinished business with you, but how do you now make them care?

This comes down to the content that you choose to put in these triggered messages. Remember that a customer is shopping around for best deal, so give it to them! Show why you’re the best retailer to buy from, highlight any offers, USP’s or running discounts that might just tip them over the fence.

Get the tone right:

Your email needs to be single minded, with one clear purpose.

Abandoned cart emails are for reengaging potential customers with their recently abandoned purchases. Now is not the time (not the place) to harp on about following you on Facebook, to divulge your entire new collection/range/offering or to raise awareness about your Christmas opening times.

All you want this email to do is to get them back on your site to purchase, so keep your content focused to that objective.

Clearly display the abandoned item within the message. Include an image, a product description and/or pricing details if appropriate and then add a clear link that takes recipients directly back to the cart. Do not pass go, do not collect £200, do not take them around the hedges – just take them swiftly to the point of purchase.

Are incentives worth it?

Last year, Mike Austin, CEO of Triggered Messaging wrote a blog post for us on this very topic, you can read it here.

He said that ‘incentives such as free shipping, money off, etc. can definitely help conversions when people abandon their cart’ but despite that, he doesn’t recommend it. Intrigued as to why? Read on!

According to the research that Mike cited in the post, 18% of customers who were sent a cart abandoned email without an incentive converted and purchased.

And what about those that were sent an incentive? Well, 21% of them converted. While it’s not necessarily a stat to write a sing and dance about, the numbers do indicate a (small) positive correlation between incentives and conversions.

Mike recommends that his customers do NOT use incentives to encourage customers to return to an abandoned cart. Why on earth not? Mike says that generally speaking if you do the ‘maths, it works out that clients will make more gross profit by not offering an incentive than if they do’.

I bet you wouldn’t mind seeing some examples. We have chosen a few of our favorites and here they are:

Check out our showcase of campaigns designed to recover otherwise lost revenue, including everything you need to help you squeeze every drop of revenue potential, download our ‘Email Marketing Through The Purchase Journey – A Benchmark Report’ today.

Read more about abandoned basket strategy on our blog.

Despite this fact, growing businesses often spend so much of their efforts and money trying to acquire new customers that they often oversee a great (and often the best) source of growth: retaining their existing customer base.

Existing Customers: The Trump Card

• It’s 50% easier to sell to existing customers than to brand new prospects according Marketing Metrics
• Bain and Co recently reported that a 5% increase in customer retention can potentially increase a company’s profitability by up to 75%
• The Gartner Group predict that 80% of a company’s future income will come from a mere 20% of their existing customer base.

Sell Online?

The ecommerce platform that you use will store a wide array of valuable personal data about customers that have purchased from you previously.

Most ecommerce platforms, will allow marketers to view, download and sync the following data:

• Account creation date
• Total spend
• Average order value
• & purchase history

This data is crucial to understanding a customer database and allows marketers to perform marketing techniques like RFM analysis. If you’re not familiar with the acronym then me acquaint you:

RFM (recency, frequency, monetary) analysis is a technique that marketers have used (for some 60 years) to determine which customers are their strongest leads by examining

• Recency of purchases
• Frequency of purchases made
• Monetary value of individual customers

What Do These Numbers Mean?

Having this data and being able to perform various analyses on the facts and figures is all very well and good, but it’s what you do with the information then that really counts…..

What if you could integrate this data seamlessly with your ESP (email service provider) so that you can harness it to power your online marketing campaigns?

Great news, you can!

If you use an eccomerce platform that can be integrated with your email service provider (like the dotMailer/Magento integration) then you’ll be able to effortlessly segment your data based on customers purchase history and previous behaviour. For example, you might decide to segment your data based on customers who purchased a certain product or by customers who currently have items left within their basket but are yet to complete a purchase and send them a promotion or offer relevant to their activity.

Top Tip: The most important thing for ensuring that this data helps to power the best marketing campaigns is to ensure that your database is up to the minute in terms of accuracy.

Whilst direct marketers might be forgiven for being slower to adapt to change, because of the speed of online marketing, people expect the messages they see and the communications they receive to be current and updated frequently.

Leverage The Data:

This customer data can be used to target sends and drip campaigns to automate your follow-up, this helps marketers to engage with their purchasers with relevant and timely content, offers and calls to action in an effort to push them to purchase more/again.

Your ecommerce provider will be able to provide you with a whole host of analytical insights on who your customers are and their purchase patterns to date, so what can you do with these insights?

Post Purchase:

Post purchase email triggers are a great tool to harness because they offer customers who have already purchased from you an opportunity to stay engaged with you beyond the transaction.

Marketers can use emails like this as an opportunity to:

• Ask customers to take part in a satisfaction survey
• Request reviews
• Up sell products
• Offer loyalty rewards
• Cross sell products related to the original purchase
• Encourage customers to follow and/or like social media profiles

Post purchase trigger emails aren’t just sent as a matter of courtesy, statistics have also shown that they can have a huge impact on future purchase decisions too. eConsultancy recently reported that Loyalty programs and rewards were the most popular factor (39%) in persuading customers to make repeat purchases, followed by strong after sales support (20%) and personalised offers after purchase (14%).

I’d love to hear about retention strategies that you’ve tried, let me know in the comments below or on Twitter to @dotmailer

The average business person receives over 100 emails a day, I’m pretty sure that some days I receive a lot more. If you’re marketing message is one of them, you’re potentially competing with 99 other emails for the recipients attention. So how do you make sure your email gets noticed and read? With a winning subject line, that’s how.

The content marketing advice portal Copyblogger recently reported that on average, 8 out of 10 people will read headline copy, but only 2 out of 10 will read the rest of your marketing message. I also read a post on the ‘convince and convert’ blog that stated that 35% of email recipients open email based on the subject line alone.

So, it appears that the case for spending time on crafting your subject lines is pretty strong, but what does a top subject line actually look like?

When mentally crafting your next subject line whilst reading the below tips you should resist the temptation to make your subject lines overly witty. Simple, direct subject lines will deliver far better open rates.

Even the cleverest wordsmith armed with puns and metaphors galore can be beaten by simple, straight to the point copy.

So, leaving ambiguity at the door, what are some other routes to subject line success?

Get To The Point: Try keeping your subject line below 50 characters, this works out to be roughly 5-6 words. Convey your message in as few words as possible, if you can say it in 3 words, don’t use 5.

Refrain From Free: If your email subject line is constantly using words like ‘free’, ‘limited’ and ‘important’ it won’t be long before recipients start ignoring your messages. Be frugal with these sorts of words, by all means use them; just don’t overuse them.

Call To Action: Using a clear call to action will provide more impetus to engage with your message. If the message inside is asking the reader to ‘book’, ‘reply’ or ‘enter’ then tell them in the subject field.

Mobile Matters: In a previous post we talked about the fact that consumers are opening emails from retailers on their smartphones and tablets at a much higher rate than ever before, remember this when crafting your subject line. While most email clients might display 50-60 characters, some mobile devices will show the reader considerably less.

Know Your Audience: Think about what will interest them and craft your subject line around that by perhaps referencing a holiday, an event or a relevant news piece.

Test: Test your subject lines. We’ve previously talked about split testing your emails to achieve optimum success; this is certainly a component of your email campaign that should be split tested.  Send the same message with slightly varying email subjects in order to determine what your readers like and don’t like, what works and what doesn’t work.

Integrate social and email marketing, amplify your reach:

Are you exploiting social media to amplify your email marketing ROI?
Our practical guide can lead you step-by-step through every key action point to consider when planning and managing social email marketing campaigns.