The following article outlines steps to sell more, but for some expert guidance, get in touch!
As you may have heard, we recently had the pleasure of speaking alongside MailChimp at Imagine Commerce, the annual Magento conference in Las Vegas. MailChimp chose us as their partner in this endeavor so we could show how a real agency is using MailChimp to help clients engage with customers and sell more through their online store.
The three main topics of discussion were automation, personalization and optimization. Three marketing buzzwords, but three very real and usable strategies to help sell more with MailChimp’s awesome tools.
We’re guessing most of you weren’t there to attend our session, so here’s a recap of what we chatted about, and some quick ways to sell more with Magento and MailChimp.
Step 1: Connect Your Store
MailChimp is great platform to send newsletters, but it does so, so much more when you connect your Magento store and have all of your data flowing into MailChimp. Thanks to the very brilliant folks at eBizMarts, you can hook your Magento store up with your MailChimp account using the MageMonkey Magento extension.
Once your store is hooked up, your store’s data and customer purchase behavior will begin seamlessly flowing into your MailChimp list, allowing you to harness the awesome power of automation, personalization and optimization.
Step 2: Automation
Ah, marketing buzzwords. But what is automation? Automation is the reason we do business on the internet. You have an online store so you can take orders 24/7/365, and so you don’t need a clerk to receive orders, take payments, make change, and print out receipts. So what if you could take that concept and apply it to email, so someone doesn’t have to design and send every marketing email that goes out the door?
Enter MailChimp Automation. We’re talking about sending email to your customers while you sleep. Email that will be targeted, contextual and help drive sales.
Setting up Automation with MailChimp is simple, but coming up with what to automate can sometimes be hard. Here are a few types of automated emails that we help clients send:
- Abandoned carts
- Welcome series
- Up-sells and cross-sells
- Reorder reminders on consumable products
- Customer win-backs
- Rating and review reminders
Each of these emails has its own trigger that begins the automation workflow and customers then receive the right email at the right time to help them complete their purchase, reorder, or remain active customers.
Step 3: Personalization
Which would you rather read? An email from a store, addressed to your first name with information about a product you recently purchased or an email about what’s new in said store? We like the former too. Personalization with MailChimp allows you to send contextually relevant content, rather than mass-messaging your entire list.
MailChimp uses merge fields to insert personalized data into emails rather than sending the exact same message to everyone. From small personalization touches like inserting a customer’s name to deeper segmentation based on location, purchase behavior and more, adding personalization to your emails creates more incentive to open, click, engage and convert.
Take a real-world example of purchase behavior. You recently purchased tickets to a jazz concert at a music venue. The following week you receive an email from the venue with all of their upcoming concerts. The assumption here is that you purchased tickets to one concert, so you must be interested in all concerts. Wrong. The better, personalized way to do this would have been to set up and email to send information about all of the upcoming jazz concerts. Now that’s effective personalization.
Step 4: Optimization
So now you’re sending automated, personalized emails, but how do you continue to optimize your email activity? Optimization is all about the next email, taking everything you have learned and making better choices to improve open rates, clicks and conversions. Beyond the extremely useful reports that MailChimp spins up after each campaign, MailChimp also provides exceptionally useful tools for making smarter choices when it comes to your email.
A/B Testing, or the more data-licious Multivariate Testing with MailChimp allows you to set up multiple variations of a single email and send the best combination to your subscribers. Rather than coming up with a hypothesis for how to improve your email and manually testing the variants yourself, MailChimp can automate that process over the course of the same campaign send, choose which version is best based on a variety of metrics, and send the winning combo to the remainder of your list. Easy money!
Take email content as an example, specifically pictures in your campaign. Your thought is that an email containing pictures of clothes on a model, rather than a mannequin, will encourage more clicks. You set up an A/B testing campaign as such. Of your list of 100,000 subscribers, the first 5,000 are going to receive the campaign with mannequin pictures, and the next 5,000 are going to receive the campaign with model pictures. The final 90,000 people are going to receive the version that gets the most clicks out of the initial test… Automatically!
You can (and SHOULD!) create A/B tests for things like:
- Subject line
- Email Content
- Send time
- From Name
Final Thoughts
It was a thrill to speak alongside MailChimp at Imagine 2016, but the subject of our talk was a handful of quick, real, usable strategies that you can implement today to start selling more. Automate. Personalize. Optimize. Rinse and repeat.
If you’re curious about how you can sell even more with Magento using MailChimp, drop us a line!