39: Email Automation & Shopping Cart Abandonment for eCommerce

Media Captain Digital Marketing Podcast

In episode 39, Stefanie and Jason discuss the importance of capturing email addresses and why it's critical for eCommerce companies. Below is an outline that we used for our Podcast on email automation and shopping cart abandonment for eCommerce.
Important Resources referenced in podcast:

• Klaviyo
• MailChimp
• Constant Contact
• Sumo Email Capture
• Email Marketing ROI Stats

Importance of Collecting Email Addresses:

• Being able to capture email addresses on eCommerce site (or any site) is very important
• With eCommerce, you’re often paying money to get people to your site (Google Ads, Facebook ads, etc). So, you want to get their email so that even if they don’t convert you can try to convert them later.
• We used SUMO for the past 5 years which is awesome, but recently switched when we switched our email marketing company, since they also had a solution for this.

Starting Out:

• Have been using MailChimp for DW since we launched in 2016
• Strategy has always been to send a limited amount of emails (around 2 per month).
• When we started out, Stef would spend hours putting together emails but we quickly realized that we got the best results when keeping them simple.
• So, we started sending out about 2 emails per month with a 20% off sale and the results were amazing.
• We were lucky that we were able to send out sales, as these did extremely well for us. Any other content that we tried (blogs, etc), didn’t yield great results.

Money Left on the Table:

• As we continued growing, we realized that there was a lot of money left on the table from customers that we weren’t capturing, but we never found a great solution to do what we wanted to do.
• We tried several different plugins for shopping cart abandonment, purchase reminder emails, but none of them functioned properly or looked good.
• Recently we switched to Klaviyo, which is much more advanced than something like MailChimp.

Our Automations:

• Shopping Cart Abandonment
• Browse Abandonment → When someone is looking at a product on your site but they never actually make it to the checkout page, can email them about the product they were looking at
• Anniversary emails → gift for 1 year anniversary with DW
• Birthday emails → Send gift card on customer birthdays
• Loyalty Program emails → Letting people know they have points they can use so they make purchases
• Replenishment Reminders → If someone hasn’t shopped in 3 months, remind them they may be running out of their products
• Subscription Automations → If someone has shopped for an item multiple times but never signed up for a subscription, you can suggest they sign up