ESCALE 002 Using Page Abandonment To Get More Sales - John McIntyre Reengager

As an established eCommerce store you already have a customer base, and are getting orders every single day. If you're not using effective email marketing to leverage those emails and that website activity, you're missing out on additional sales opportunities.

In this episode of eCommerceScale.com, we're speaking with John McIntyre from ReEngager.com. John is an expert in the email marketing space, and has a podcast with hundreds of thousands of listeners. He has coached hundreds of copyrighter's through his educational programs, and also provides a done for you email marketing service for online retailers. In today's episode, John shares how to use page abandonment to get people back to your store buying more product.

If you have any questions about this podcast episode, please feel free to contact us.

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What is Page Abandonment

If someone starts the checkout process on your website, you can use a cart abandonment email to automatically follow-up with them if they don't complete the checkout process.

Cart abandonment is a really common email marketing technique for eCommerce stores that you should already be using. Page abandonment is similar, but can be even more powerful for many stores. In short,

1. If somebody visits a product or category page on your website, but does not actually add that product to their cart or complete a purchase,
2. You can send an automatic follow-up email to them asking them why they didn't buy or addressing potential reasons that they didn't buy.
3. The end result is similar to a cart abandonment sequence, but this allows you to follow up with prospects even before they've started the checkout process.

How to Get Started with Page Abandonment

There are a few different steps to get started with page abandonment for your store.

Tracking Website Activity in Your Email Marketing Software

In order to send follow-up emails based on website activity, you need to be able to track this activity, and trigger events within your email marketing software. Klaviyo.com is a powerful email marketing software that you can use for this as well as a range of other advanced eCommerce email marketing campaigns. You could also use tools such as Activecampaign.com, or Getdrip.com.

If you're using an entry level email marketing platform like Mail Chimp or A-Weber, this might be possible to configure, but these tools are not built for advanced email marketing techniques like this. Consider using Klaviyo.com to get this campaign configured if you don't already have an advanced email marketing system built for eCommerce stores.

Trigger Email Campaigns Based on Page Views

Start with the highest trafficked page or category on your website. Eventually you can get to the point where you have automatic campaigns configured for many pages on your site, but at first you should start with the highest trafficked page.

1. Within Klaviyo.com, configure a rule to add people to the page abandonment campaign if they visit the product page, but do not add the product to their shopping cart or complete the checkout process.
2. This will work with prospects that you already have in your email marketing system.
3. There are a few different ways that you can get people's emails to add into this campaign if you don't have them yet.
4. You could configure an exit popup just for this product page that gives people an incentive to provide their email address if they visit this page, but click away without adding it to their shopping cart or completing the checkout process.
5. You could also configure advanced custom coding to track user activity on the website before someone gives you their email address, and then to connect this user activity to their email record when that email address is provided at a later time.

For now, focus on creating a simple campaign in Klaviyo.com to add people to the page abandonment campaign if they view a product page on your website, and you already have their email address in their system.

Create the Page Abandonment Emails

The actual emails that go out to prospects in the page abandonment campaign need to be carefully crafted. The main thing to address is why someone isn't buying the product.

Here are a few things to consider when trying to identify why someone isn't buying.

1. They might be confused about how the products work. In this case, you could create some emails explaining how to use the products, and how they help them accomplish the goal they're trying to achieve by purchasing.
2. They might be concerned about the product quality or how it compares with other products on the market. In this case, you could provide testimonials from customers, detailed information about how the product is constructed using the highest quality materials and manufacturing techniques, and also guarantees that you have about product quality.
3. Finally, the price might be too high, in which case you could consider offering a discount, or otherwise trying to justify why the price is high.

It's important to not jump directly to providing a discount. Don't assume that price is the only reason why people aren't buying a product.

1. The first page abandonment sequence you configure should start with one simple email. I
2. n that email ask people why they didn't buy. By launching this one email sequence with a high trafficked product page, you'll start to get replies from people about why they didn't buy.
3. Once you get enough replies to identify a few trends of why people don't buy, you can use that insight to create a full email sequence.

Apart from your understanding of the business, this is the easiest way to identify the real reasons why people aren't buying.

Measuring and Optimizing a Page Abandonment Campaign

Once you have your page abandonment email campaign in place, you should monitor and optimize it over time. The main metric to focus on, is not open rate or click through rates, but instead the dollar value per emails sent for this campaign compared to other emails you sent. Depending on your email marketing strategy, this campaign will usually be significantly higher than other campaigns such as, general promotional campaigns or other campaigns that are not as directly connected to a prospects direct interest in your product.

1. Test different messaging in your emails to better address why people aren't buying.
2. Consider changing the order and timing of the emails, and also the content that you use to address the reasons for not buying. For example, you could create a buyers guide to explain the complexities of different products, or tutorials on how to use certain products if needed.

How to Super-Charge Ecommerce Email Marketing

Having a page abandonment campaign is one part of an email marketing strategy for eCommerce stores. There's a wide range of other techniques you can use, and they all impact each other. Below are a few examples we'll cover on future episodes.

1. Weekly or monthly newsletter and promotion emails to bring people back to your website.
2. The page abandonment campaign we talked about today to follow up with prospects that viewed specific products, but didn't start the checkout process.
3. Shopping cart abandonment emails to follow up with prospects that started the checkout process, but didn't actually complete it.
4. New customer and repeat customer email sequences for customers that do complete purchases which can help them purchase even more in the future.
5. Re-engagement campaigns to warm up prospects that have stopped buying, so they come back and purchase more products.

Additional Ecommerce Email Marketing Resources

To learn more about how to use email marketing effectively in your business, visit John's eCommerce email marketing blog post at Shopify.com.

You could also see additional details about the ReEngager.com email marketing service here.

If you want to work directly with John on your email marketing, and are doing a minimum of one to two million dollars a year in revenue, reach out to John at ReEngager.com.

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