building a multi step informational e-mail follow up campaign for a $250 product (8)
building a multi step informational e-mail follow up campaign for a $250 product
OK, I am working on reviving a product that did great before, but now is contributing way too little to the bottom line.
There's potential here, that neither I, nor others are using.
I thought it would be interesting as a follow along. Hope you all agree ;-)
Product:
250$ market price, which all my competitors can buy at the same price as I can. So there's no way to compete profitably at price only. (Opportunity cost are too high to go that route).
Product is a gateway product of a premium brand, so I am reselling. So no edge for me here either.
Product is fairly technical, but does not require technical assistance perse.
Sales Background
Sold the most of these for 2 years straight, until there was a model change. Hard to figure out what happend, but we went from 20K per month in sales to 1 to 2 k.
Too may variables at play - misunderstanding in the market about models, price fluctuations, lack of stock available form manufacturer etc.
Lost interest in the product due to other opportunities.
There is a lot of potential for add-on sales, as is proven by our proactive customers, who figure out what else there is. On site sales are one offs for the main product, with close to zero percent of related products sold.
Hypothesis
Through a sequence of informational mails that follow up on the purchase of the main product, not only will customers be happier with their product, they will also buy more related products.
The plan
- map out up the sequence, step by step
- create auto responder triggered by the purchase of the main product
- sales history analysis to create a list of customers who have bought the main product and can retro actively be added to the sequence (slightly adjusted)
- set up adwords and shopping campaign to maximise sales volume
- use data to establish customer value and lower main product sales price
Will follow up on this at least once a week with updates.
Looking forward to this 
Very interested to see how you progress, I'll be watching!
Andrew
Ok, so the first steps have been taken:
- Called my account manager to see what they can do in terms of promotional support / pricing. Got an Ok for a price reduction for a specific item, which is good.
Stock levels are OK too, so no foreseeable problems there.
This step is important, as there are model changes regularly and I don't want to run into any fulfillment issues.
- On the auto responder side, I have been testing out the following options:
1. Mailchimp
2. Klaviyo
3. Follow up email Magento extention already in use on the site ($199 here: https://ecommerce.aheadworks.com/mag...-up-email.html)
Decided to go with mailchimp ( have a paid account there already which you need for this, but not the pro $199 subsciption)
Why?
Klaviyo did not pull in the data from the site correctly and I don't want to spend the time getting it sorted out.
The follow up extention would work well, but does not give me the granular analytics data that Mailchimp does.
- Had a freelancer make a database which allows me to pull out everyone that did buy X, but not Y. This allows me to get in touch with customers who bought the product before and would not be automatically put in the queue. (If you ever need an very good and inexpensive excel guy, let me know and I'll get you in touch)
So next steps are to write the copy for each follow up mail, get that into mailchimp with images, links, timing etc
Approach sounds nice, but execution is everything...
@johnaff Get your point.
So here's an update.
Got an update from the account manager about a model change for one of the add on products. So I needed to change the sequence. Not a big deal, but an annoyance still.
Even more so because the expected price support for promotions will not happen after all.
Wasn't enough margin left at the price bracket we're in.
So far, 2 of the 10 or so mails have been written.
They're fairly long, so if will be interesting to see how well they will do.
More writing planned for next week.
cool. you could also always swipe emails from the list of another product, and use them as templates to rewrite. i always have found that quickest
@johnaff - good idea, but can't use it here - this series will become the template ;-)
Here's another update:
- Have 4 mails written out and have a few topics more added to the list
- Decided to start setting up the sequence in Mailchimp, so I can test these first 4 and add more as I finish them.
The process in Mailchimp is very easy BTW. Triggers are easy to set up and you can just drop products in your mail template.
These products come straight from the ecommerce platform, so the product info and prices are always up to date.
Will be finishing the first part of the sequence in the next few days and should be able to start sharing some results
Home > Paid Traffic Sources > eCommerce