Multichannel Magic

High quality customer care is the best marketing tool that exists. The companies that put service first find acquiring and keeping customers easier and more cost effective. Marketing makeovers should begin with the fundamentals of providing value and delivering on the promise. Most people know this intuitively but moving from knowledge to execution is challenging in a world of interdepartmental conflicts and corporate politics.

Youtility, the New York Times Bestseller by Jay Baer is one of the best business books I’ve seen on the dynamics between service and marketing. It is filled with examples of companies using helping people to drive sales and growth. Any marketer with doubts about how care generates revenue would be wise to read this book. The information will change the way you think about marketing forever. Here are five takeaways:

1. Instead of trying to be amazing, focus on being useful. This is a breath of fresh air after all of the hype about how being remarkable is required to be successful. Being useful is easier to do and has a longer positive effect.
2. Greatness is a process that requires perseverance and time. Jay says, “By making helpful marketing a never-ending part of your company’s cultural DNA, you enable greatness to emerge whenever and however it can.”
3. Your customer expectations are defined by global experiences instead of select industries. To be competitive, you need to know what your customers expect and be willing to offer it even if your company is the first in your industry to do so.
4. Apps are replacing brand in determining corporate value. As mobile activity increases, tools to access services and products provide introductions to prospects and keep customers engaged.
5. The number of sources required for a buying decision almost doubled from 2010 to 2011. If people are searching for information to help them buy, shouldn’t your company provide it?

The book is an easy read and contains statistical information to support the key points. Reading it will inspire ideas on how you can improve your company’s future.

We’re giving away a copy of Youtility to a lucky person. Click the button below to enter for your chance to win.

Click Here to Enter!

This post is an excerpt from 31 Ways to Supercharge Your Email Marketing.

Executives often ask me how they can eliminate cart abandonment. They receive reports that show thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars left sitting in online carts. The reports mislead them into thinking that if they stopped people from abandoning carts they would make more money.

It’s easy to eliminate cart abandonment. Create a carting process so demanding that only the most committed customers will complete it and the problem will go away. A better approach is to focus on capturing abandoned carts instead of eliminating them.

People abandon carts for a variety of reasons. The three that matter most to ecommerce companies are:

1. Distractions – Life happens and when it does carts are abandoned. People intend to come back to it when things settle down but the best intentions can be forgotten.
2. Wishful Thinking – People put items in carts that they would like to have but don’t have the resources to purchase at this time. The cart becomes a working wish list. Offering an option to keep a running wish list reduces the abandoned cart rate and provides an opportunity to convert wishers into buyers.
3. Pricing – Your shoppers want to know that they are getting the best price possible. They populate carts and then shop around for better pricing or coupons. Abandoned cart programs that rely on discounts to capture sales have trained people to place items in the cart and wait for the coupon. Don’t fall into this trap because most people who abandon carts for this reason fully intend to buy at any price.

Best practices for capturing abandoned carts begin with getting the email address. Try to get it as early as possible in the buying process without requiring people to create accounts. Forcing account creation increases cart abandonment. According to Forrester, 14% of shoppers report abandoning carts because there isn’t an option to checkout as a guest.

Start remarketing within 24 hours of the abandonment. A study by SeeWhy Research of 65,000 shopping carts sampled from a broad cross of ecommerce sites found that 54% of the shoppers who are going to buy do it within the first 24 hours. An additional 10% buy within 48 hours.

Remarketing is a multiple level process. Like everything else in the marketing world, testing is the best way to find the optimal solution for your company. I recommend starting with a three email campaign that focuses on customer care with a sense of urgency. The data acquired from the test can then be used to expand your cart capture program.
 
Offering assistance in the first email helps foster trust while reminding recipients that they still have items in their cart. The following email from sharmusic.com leads with an offer to help and quickly follows with a sense of urgency. Noting that product availability cannot be guaranteed if the cart isn’t completed encourages people to act now.

The email makes it easy to contact them by providing an 800 number or the option to reply to the email. One downside is that there are two different telephone numbers provided. Be sure to double-check your emails to insure that the number you want people to call is the only one presented.

Alloy’s simple reminder has a sense of urgency too but it doesn’t have the same emotional pull as the one from sharmusic.com. “Your shopping bag will expire in a few days” isn’t as effective as telling people that someone else may get the items they want.

Emphasize why the customer should buy from your company in the second email. If customers are price shopping, they need to know the benefits of ordering from you to make an intelligent purchase decision. Boot Barn includes a highlighted sidebar to insure people don’t miss it:

The third email is a final notice. Reiterate special benefits to ordering now like free shipping or fast delivery and provide another opportunity to contact customer service if there are questions.
When used wisely, offering discounts can help capture carts. Reducing prices should be a last resort, not a first offer. If discounting is part of your strategy randomly generate the offers so people don’t receive them every time. This keeps people from being trained to wait for the best deal. 

This post is an excerpt from 31 Ways to Supercharge Your Email Marketing.

Yahoo is running a fire sale on dormant email addresses. All of the addresses in their dead pool have been released for people to claim. An individual can request up to five addresses between July 15, 2013 and August 7, 2013. The people who receive rights will have 48 hours to activate the accounts beginning August 15, 2013. Giving people the opportunity to claim the names they really want is a great idea for users. It is a challenge for email marketers.

Spam reports triggers spaminators more often than any other delivery no no. A campaign generating as few as one spam report for every thousand emails sent can get the account temporarily blocked. Continued spam reports will inevitably generate a permanent block completely destroying your email marketing program. Dead pool addresses that are in your email database will go to new people who did not opt in to your program. Pressing the spam button is the easiest route for them to stop the messages. This will hurt your business. Taking action now keeps the Yahoo changes from affecting your company. To minimize your risk:

• Segment Yahoo addresses that have not responded to your messages in twelve months or more. Send them a personalized email asking for confirmation that they still want to receive emails from your company.
• Monitor bounces closely because Yahoo is currently bouncing messages to the dead pool addresses. All Yahoo addresses that are bounced need to be moved to the “do not mail” list.
• Before the August 15 deadline, send a second email to people who did not respond to your first confirmation request.
• Move all Yahoo addresses that did not respond to the confirmation requests to the “do not mail” list in your marketing database.
• Flag all Yahoo addresses that did not respond to the confirmation requests as “do not mail” in your order management system. If you do not have the option to flag them, consider removing the addresses. Spam reports can be generated by transactional emails too.
• Ask customer service representatives to verify existing customer email addresses to insure that you have the most current ones on file when speaking to customers.

5 Reasons Every Company Needs Email Marketing

1. Acquisition: Customers acquired with email marketing are loyal and responsive. Use every channel to acquire email addresses so you can connect on a 1-to-1 basis.
2. Retention: Email is the best channel for speaking directly to your customers because it is personal and economical. Use it to inform, promote, and show that you value their business.
3. Sales: Email customers want to know about your company and products. Include informational messages along with promotions to encourage sales.
4. Service: Emails allow your company to economically send personal messages to customers. Anticipate needs to simplify buying decisions and share the information via email.
5. Integration: Encouraging people to share information about your company across channels is easy with email. Make the process simple and your marketing reach will grow exponentially.

Getting the most out of your email marketing is easy when you have a guide. 31 Ways to Supercharge Your Email Marketing is filled with tips and tactics to make your marketing strategy deliver more results with less effort. Learn what to do and how others are doing it.