Flow Series: From in-store to online purchases (1/3)

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Turn your shoppers into multi-channel customers

The new season’s begun, and it couldn’t get off to a better start! The in-store staff have collected the phone numbers and email addresses from almost everyone that has bought something, while every online customer has been encouraged to download the new app. Why?

Business ManBecause now it’s time to move up a gear and take advantage of the enormous potential that a multi-channel communications strategy offers you. A study by Contactlab experts in collaboration with Exane BNP Paribas, highlighted the importance of digital customers to a company’s total profits. Customers that can be reached digitally, spend a lot, even in-store… producing 27% of the store revenue and 73% when it comes to e-commerce.

The study further highlights the importance of harmonizing the activities of various sales and contact channels, in order to integrate offers and deliver successful marketing campaigns.

This is the first in a series of three articles, which explore the subject in further detail. In particular, we’ll show how easy it is to use Flow to create automated, precisely targeted, yet still individually tailored communication activities, which are intended to increase customer enthusiasm for the brand, generate contact opportunities and support sales.

Ready? Then let’s get started…

From buying in-store to the first online purchase: Let’s follow Angela…

Sales AssociateWhen she bought something from the latest range in-store, Angela registered her phone number and email details for marketing purposes. As a reward, she can now receive a 5% discount off her next online purchase, if she subscribes to your e-commerce newsletter. By attracting in-store customers to subscribe in this way, you can, for example:

  • Create integrated profiles of your previously offline clients, follow them and know them better.
  • Improve the quality of your customer base and monitor the behavior of more customers.
  • Give them access to an easy way to become cross-channel clients, with enormous advantages for you both!

But where do you start? Let’s do it with Flow – the marketing automation module of the Contactlab Marketing Cloud.
When Angela concludes a purchase in-store, she joins the automaton in Flow and begins the journey that you have designed and built for her.

Let’s go through the steps…

Angela completes the purchase in-store and because of this, she was automatically added to the journey. Now the first thing to do, is to wait and see if she follows your sales associate’s request and completes the online subscription. You decide to wait half a day, then check if Angela has actually subscribed.

 

Option a: Angela hasn’t subscribed?

Send an SMS to remind her of the chance to receive the discount. Thanks to the Marketing Cloud, you can easily overcome SMS length limitations by using concatenated SMS.

If she continues to ignore your reminders, end the activity for now. Maybe she prefers to remain a ‘retail’ client and has no interest in the offers on your e-commerce site. Maybe you can try again later.

If, on the other hand, she subscribes to your newsletter following your SMS, you can welcome her by sending an email with a discount coupon off her next online purchase. Thanks to the new Email Designer HTML editor, it is easier than ever to create the right template and design the content just for her.

 

Option b: Angela subscribed to your newsletter after buying something in-store?

Don’t wait any longer. Send her the welcome email with the discount code immediately.

 

But the Angela’s journey with your brand does not end here.
If she has received the coupon, let’s watch her next actions.

  1. It could be that everything goes according to plan and Angela uses the discount for her first online purchase. If so, the goal is achieved. You can say hello for now and close your journey.
  2. Or perhaps you discover that Angela actually bought on your site without using the coupon. If that’s the case, you could send an additional email to remind her that the coupon is still there, and the expiry date.
  3. But you also have to consider another option. Angela doesn’t buy, and consequently, she doesn’t take advantage of the coupon. In this case, you could decide to make one last attempt, and send her a new email reminding her of the 5% discount off the first online purchase. Afterwards, close this first flow.

 

And just how does Flow help you with Angela?

Here they are, Angela’s potential journeys, thanks to the Marketing Cloud platform.

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And now?

Everything could just end here, but a new digital relationship has just been born, and you can’t ignore it. Perhaps not all your in-store shoppers have started the journey yet, but those who have made their first online purchase, are well on the way to becoming multi-channel customers!

And in the next article, we’ll see how the newly built automation can continue with Flow to keep Angela and all the others even more ENGAGED!

 

 

Flow Series: Coupon

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Flow series: Survey

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Flow series: Abandoned Cart

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