Many businesses utilise mailer advertising; In fact based on statistics from Adoric, 87% of marketers have email marketing as part of their e-commerce strategy. However many businesses simply focus on only sending out weekly mailers, usually focusing on discounted or new product launches for B2C and company updates for B2B. Although these campaign types are great, they are only touching the surface of what is available in most mailer platforms to keep their customers engaged.
Why Use Abandoned Checkout Mailers?
In B2C it is also common practice to send out abandoned checkout mailers – our e-commerce partner, BigCommerce, conducted a study on the success of abandoned checkout mailers and found these types of mailers had a 41.18% open rate, compared to 21% for standard weekly mailers.
Customers who already had the intent to buy, sometimes just need that friendly nudge to get them over the line to complete their purchase. An abandoned checkout mailer can do this for you, all automated and left to its own devices.
So, What is the Difference Between Weekly Mailers and Mailer Journeys?
Mailer Journeys use API calls to trigger when someone has completed an action on your website, or in fact not completed an action. Signing up to your newsletter, or not adding anything to their basket in a certain period of time are just two examples of actions and non-actions which can trigger a journey.
Using mailers to target “almost” customers is a great way to get customers reengaged in your brand. The majority of mailer platforms now enable you to not only send one mailer, but drop those users into a series of mailers with a time delay between them to handle customer interaction automatically.
How to Create a Mailer Journey?
A general rule to follow in B2C is to have one mailer journey when someone signs up to your newsletter. Having a pop up when a user first visits the site helps get the number of subscribers up quickly and easily. Including a discount for their next order helps with the number of sign-ups as let’s face it, who doesn’t like a cheeky discount on a product they’ve been eyeing up!
After this, in a mailer journey you can set up a delay of around 5 to 7 days then have a series of mailers to follow. Mailers which work best are ones introducing your brand, the process behind making your products (without giving too much away, as you need to keep a few things secret!), top products which are available all year round and have no seasonality, focus products…the world is your oyster!
For B2B it could be more service focused, an in depth mailer about each of your services, meet the team behind the company and a bit about you as a company.
Why Is It Important to Send Mailers to People Who Haven’t Interacted With My Brand?
You may think if a customer hasn’t been active for 3 to 6 months that they aren’t worth putting a focus on, but sometimes customers just need that little nudge to reconsider buying from your brand.
Setting up a trigger in your mailer platform to send an email if someone hasn’t purchased from you in a period of time, gives a sense of care. They may have not purchased for a while, but showing that you care about them with a personalised email stating they are missed and a discount code to get them back, usually has a great response.
This can then trigger a new mailer trail, based on your top products to get your key lines back in front of your potential customers.
Are there any other types of mailers I may be missing out on?
Depending on your mailer platform, there are endless opportunities to re-engage customers. One of our favourites at Agency51 is cross sell campaigns. There are a number of different ways to utilise cross sell campaigns. You start by triggering an API when someone buys a particular product. Next, decide if the mailer you send should be grouped by product types, (for example, if a customer buys one of these 10 products, they get this particular campaign promoting this product).
If you use a product recommender platform on your site, you can pull this information through to the mailer with HTML. Or, if you can have a granular approach, looking at each individual product and have a specific mailer for each of the products. If you sell mugs, why not send a cross sell campaign a week later of your beautiful matching coasters?
Another type of mailer which works great for products which require repeat purchases is a reminder mailer to reorder. We all know that sometimes life gets in the way, you have all intentions to repurchase but often forget to! Setting up an API when someone purchases a product, adding a delay of the period just before a customer will need to repurchase, then triggering a mailer gives your customers that reminder to purchase as well as an easy way to purchase too!
A great example is supplements – if you sell your supplements in 30 days’ supply sizes, sending an email 25 days after your customer purchases gives them that helpful reminder they need to get some more ordered before they run out.
This doesn’t just work for products with a set date, conducting some research on the average cycle where a customer would repurchase enables you to utilise this information for your repeat purchase mailers, catching customers who may need that gentle nudge to purchase again.
Do you think your business could utilise mailers a little better and want a helping hand? Get in touch with us to find out how we can help.
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