E-commerce Management: How to Engage or Re-engage Customers to Drive C

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In the fourth article in the E-commerce Management series, we will talk about Engagement, that is, what tactics your online store should apply to promote customer involvement, increase the volume of interactions with your customer base, and improve relationships with the ultimate goal of conversion.
It is worth remembering that for engagement to work, the acquisition stage must be carried out with quality, since it is only possible to communicate with the customer if they provide their contact information (email, phone, etc.) or through tracking scripts (Facebook Pixel and Google Remarketing Tag).

Going back a little…

Before we talk about all the engagement tactics, we need to go back one step and ensure that in the Acquisition phase we have created several lists:

Email Marketing List
WhatsApp Broadcast List
Browser Notification List
Push Notification List
Retargeting List
Custom Audience on Facebook Ads

The audience available in each of your lists will determine the revenue generated by engagement initiatives. A list with 1,000 emails generates less results than a list of 100,000 emails. A segmented list can result in higher open rates, CTR, and conversion. Lists ready, let's get to work!

Next Purchase Engagement

In next purchase engagement, we will work to promote the next purchase, whether it is the first or the twentieth of a user. To do this, it is necessary to understand the customer's moment in the sales funnel and present the content most aligned with their goals at that moment. Here are some tactics for Next Purchase Engagement:

Welcome Flow: a sequence of messages that can be by email, through another channel, or through several channels simultaneously. The goal of this flow is to educate a new customer about the company, products, solutions, social media, ask questions, and analyze interactions to segment the user according to their opening and click behavior.
Post-purchase Flow: customers are more likely to open emails right after a purchase, therefore it is the time to take advantage of the high open rates to engage your customer. Offer complements, or even explain how to handle, combine, and use the purchased product.
Drip Campaign: drip campaigns aim to keep the customer involved with your brand. They are not highly segmented, nor do they have incredible offers, nor do they have high open rates. But they serve so that your customer receives content from your brand frequently.
Tiered Offer Flow: to understand which sales arguments make the most sense to each of your customers, build a sequence of messages with a different offer in each message and with increasingly aggressive discounts. This will allow you to understand which stimuli work best for each user (percentage discount, fixed discount, shipping upgrade, free shipping, second item with discount, etc.), but it should be done with customers who have already purchased and should be interrupted after a purchase.
What else you can do:
- 30-day post-purchase funnel (+ recent)
- Recurring customer funnel (+ frequent)
- Top customer funnel (+ spent value)
- Refer and earn funnel

Avoid putting product prices in the content of automated funnels or flows unless your marketing system does so dynamically. At some point, the price may change, the stock may run out, and your content will become obsolete, therefore always opt for marketing automation tools that integrate with your e-commerce and build the emails dynamically with the products available in your store (see example).

Modern marketing systems allow you to insert dynamic content into marketing messages according to customer data or according to the probability of purchasing a specific product.

Contextual Engagement

Contextual engagement uses a “trigger”, an event or an action to be triggered. When triggered, it fires one or several marketing messages. This means that there is always a context for these messages, which in turn we use to deliver more relevant content. Let's go to the examples:

Recommendation
Personalization
Retargeting
Upsell
Overlays
Broadcasts
Entry offers

Recovery Engagement

Recovery engagement aims to recover potential revenue from inactive customers. They may be inactive for several reasons:

Inactivity in email due to irrelevant content
Disinterest in the brand and its communication
End of the customer's life cycle with the product or the company
Negative purchase experience
Unsubscribed from receiving marketing communication

Regardless of the reason, it is the duty of the e-commerce manager to re-engage recovery customers, because it is much cheaper and easier to bring revenue from old customers, no matter how inactive they are, than from new customers. Old customers already know the brand and its value proposition, therefore the effort of persuasion is much smaller. Below are some approaches you can apply:

Recovery funnel for those who haven't purchased in X time
Recovery funnel for those who haven't visited the e-commerce in X time
Recovery funnel for those who haven't opened emails in X time

Tip: use multi-channel funnels, because it is possible that your customer is still interested in your product or brand, but the channel you are trying to contact is not their preferred channel. Opt for other channels, such as: