How to mess up worst practices to ensure your triggered email communications
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Remarketing email is a really hot topic right now: high conversion rates mean that the campaign ROI’s are often spectacular, reaching up to 50 percent in some cases.
In the current market environment, shoppers are more cautious leading to a rise in shopping cart abandonment rates. For the marketer, when every cent is under scrutiny, remarketing email looks highly attractive.
But just because an email is triggered by an event, such as a shopping cart abandonment, or other form of website abandonment, doesn’t automatically make it relevant to your customer.
In fact it is very easy to slip over the line, into the realm of one-to-one spam.
Follow these five ‘worst practice’ techniques to drive up your unsubscribe rates, and infuriate your customers. Don’t worry, you’re not alone, most email remarketing campaigns today exhibit one or all of these characteristics, so you’ll be in good company.
1. Timing
To ensure that your email is truly irrelevant, make sure that you have a delay between the visitor’s behavior that triggers the event, and your remarketing email. The longer the delay the better, since it makes it much more likely that your visitor will have moved on to something else.
To really hack them off, email them a special offer just after they have purchased at the full price. The secret to this technique is making sure that your communications are out of step with the customer dialog, so you need to lengthen the time elapsed between the event and your abandonment email. Real time triggered emails obviously don’t meet these requirements since they are guaranteed to stay in step.
2. Context
Start your email something like this:
“Dear Customer, we are not actually sure who you are, or why you visited our site, but we think you should buy from us anyway.”
This is the other way ensure your remarketing email is out of step, is to remove anything that might personalize the communication to the event that caused the abandonment. Yes – you can drive up your unsubscribes and annoyance by being vague.
Don’t refer to the abandonment event itself, when it was, on which site, and what was involved, like the contents of the shopping cart. All those details will only engage the customer, and clearly therefore not ‘worst practice.’
3. Tone
While we’re on the subject, you need to ask for the order. Every rookie sales guy straight out of Selling 101 knows you have to ask. Here’s your chance to communicate directly with the customer that has just abandoned their shopping cart. They abandoned – they owe you that order.
Go on – don’t be a lemon, just be bold and ask for the order directly. There’s no point in beating around the bush, get to the point, and push hard. We’re not trying to build a relationship here after all. Only the brash, direct, and money grabbing approach will make the grade when you’re striving for maximum customer irritation.
4. Avoid finish up links
It’s so tempting to make it easy to pick up where the customer left off when they abandoned by providing them finish up links or alternate products. Don’t fall into this trap – if you email is to be ignored, you need to put every possible barrier in the way. Make them search all over again, and reassemble the shopping cart, or complete the three pages of the form again. They deserve it – it’s just punishment for abandoning in the first place……
5. Unbranded
One of the best ways to stay irrelevant, is to make sure that your abandonment remarketing email is unbranded. Leave out the fancy logo’s, and you make it just that little bit harder for your customer to remember that they abandoned; to figure out what you’re selling, and to ‘connect’ with you.
Everyone reading this tongue-in-cheek commentary of worst practices will have experienced being on the receiving end of one or more of these techniques. They are all too common. In fact, I’ve been startled to have some of these worst practices presented to me as best practices by leading vendors in the space. If you’d like to understand the 6 techniques that will make customers love remarketing emails, then check out my earlier (serious this time) blog. Or to find out more about how it should be done, visit www.seewhy.com
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