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The most used triggered email message stream generally surrounds abandoned shopping carts or website signups where you give your email but do not complete a profile. If you are not using triggered messages around abandoned shopping carts and signups, you should begin to do so (see a good article on how to get going form MarketingSherpa), the emails are effective and can help you address a customer’s (or potential customer) real issue in abandoning their purchase. The problem in my mind is that the very nature of these being triggered messages pulls the real personalization and chance to connect with the consumer out of the equation. These messages generally consist of a generic message indicating that you are receiving the message because you did not complete an action on the site sending you the email. If that action was a purchase, the site might use some dynamic information about what was in your shopping cart and if above a certain dollar threshold trigger a message that offers free shipping if you complete the purchase. Sites often will offer you other ways to get in touch with them including their social media profiles and will wrap with some generic information about how you are a valued customer (maybe even telling you when you first became a customer). For sites that need to scale to large volumes of abandoned carts or signups there is perhaps no other way, however for the businesses where each purchase still matters tremendously and where you are just building your customer base I think you can do better.
If someone takes the time to come to your website and is on the verge of purchase (or sign-up) only to abandon that action you need to do two things. First you should have software that helps you evaluate when people abandon, on what step, on what page etc. Second, you should try to lend a helping hand and get them to complete their purchase. It is this second piece that I think small businesses can do better and create both a triggered email stream but also a social media reach out campaign. There is ample evidence that you want to get the email about the abandoned purchase/signup and offering to help to the customer immediately after they leave your site with the purchase unmade, and then again within 24 hours, beyond that is up to you. It is the time in-between the initial email you send and the one 23 hours later that I think as a small company you can and should be nimble enough to out maneuver your competitors by using social media to not only reach out directly to these customers but to do so in a much more personal way than the mail merge personalized triggered emails. So what can you do in those hours?
First build a list of all the consumers who abandoned during the last 24 hours (if you need to, prioritize by potential purchase size) and determine who you and your team will reach out to. The number of people will depend on the value of the purchase they abandoned and your own cost/benefit of time spent on the next steps, but if you want to grow your business as one that thinks customer service first and is socially adept then I recommend this for at least a few of the top abandoned purchases.
If you are not already using a CRM system and specifically one that allows you to import social media profiles that’s your first stop but for the sake of this article let’s assume you are using CRM and can integrate data from social networks on your customers and prospects.
My first piece of advice is to begin asking your customers for their social media profiles as part of the checkout process, if they are willing to give you their email addresses the probably will not hesitate to save you the trouble of finding them on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn. Just make the appropriate choice for your business – I recommend LinkedIn & Twitter for B2B and Twitter for B2C, they’ll find you on Facebook, it’s creepy to ask for friendship as a company. This one little change will save you having to take the next step of finding the consumer on the social network appropriate for you.
When a potential customer or site user abandons their cart/signup but gives you their email address (and any other details that are relevant) you have enough to use a service like Rapportive, Xobni, Gist to try to connect that email address and data to social media profiles across a variety of networks. None of these services gets it perfect, but if the email address you have (for the customer) is the one they use on social sites your chance of a match is high.
Once you have the potential consumer’s social media profile it is time to mine it for any information that you can find about the particular purchase they were about to make with you. Did they ask about your product on Twitter? Have they written on the wall on your Facebook page? Asked for recommendations on your products via LinkedIn? Depending on your market you might find exactly how they researched the product and may be able to leverage that information to supply them with anything you think is missing that would make their decision easier. Even more telling, you might just find out exactly why they abandoned their purchase at your site. Did they Tweet about your exhorbinant shipping costs? Great! A perfect opportunity to connect with them in a transparent way and either explain the need for the cost or find a way to lower the cost (be wary about what you make policy in an open forum) and help them become a customer.
You would be shocked at the number of reasons people abandon purchases. Last night I did so because the hockey game went into overtime and you know who could have known that? Anyone company who was looking for why I abandoned my purchase in the late evening because I Tweeted I had to sign off the computer because hockey was getting too intense. Now if the company I was purchasing from wanted to really let me know they cared about winning my business and that I was not just an order number they could easily have keyed off my Tweet and sent me something cleaver and invited me back to the site post game. So what that I was only buying $75 worth golf balls (don’t ask about my short game)? I am obviously a customer who purchases online regularly and as the purchase was my first with the site I could easily have been swayed to complete it by a coupon or really even a personal touch. If the company wanted to blow my mind they would include something related to hockey (even a Go Canucks Go on the invoice would suffice) when they shipped to me.
Gary Vanerchuck calls this the “Thank You Economy” and has his own amazing example of how he used social to reward a loyal wine buyer with Chicago Bears gear rather than a traditional thank you. While Gary did his giving post-purchase, there is no reason you cannot use the same strategy on a smaller scale pre-purchase for those who have recently abandoned a cart.
It may seem like what I am suggesting is daunting when you read it, but these are people who want to buy from you, they’ve already proven that. All you need to do is show them that you’re willing to go the extra mile to make them feel like they are purchasing from a friend and not just a company that seems to send them coupons each time leave a shopping cart mid -purchase.
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