On average, less than 3% of visitors make a purchase the first time they visit a website. If you run Facebook ads but are not setting up the correct email automations, then you are definitely leaving money on the table and unnecessarily increasing your cost per acquisition (CPA).
Here are four automated emails you must be sending out as an e-commerce business that uses Facebook ads.
1. Abandon cart
Let’s start with low-hanging fruit.
Depending on your industry, abandon cart rates online are around 60%-80%. This means that for every 100 people that add items to their cart, as many as 80 will not complete their order.
When running thousands of dollars in ads per day, having this email automation set up is going to be huge.
When using an email service like Klaviyo, you send triggered emails to anyone who adds items to their cart but does not check out. The email will serve as a reminder.
Online food delivery business Paleo Robbie sends an email to anyone who adds items to their cart but does not complete their order within two hours. The email shows the items left in the cart with a direct call to action to the checkout.
Most people visit websites on mobile devices, so a Facebook notification, WhatsApp message, a call, or a real-life event may have distracted them from completing their order.
A cart abandonment email can be sent to current customers and new prospects to increase revenue and lower your CPA on Facebook.
2. Welcome series
A welcome series is a number of emails that someone receives as soon as they sign up to your website (regardless of if they place an order or not).
One of the major reasons for a new prospect not to order from your store is lack of trust and information. A welcome series helps educate prospects to what your business is about, its values, its mission, and even first-time offers and promotions.
Here’s a welcome email from Beard Brand which informs the subscriber what they should expect in the future from them:
Rapha take another approach by offering 50% off a new size jersey and information about the services they offer:
There are many ways you can control the message of your welcome email. If you’re asking visitors to give you their email address for a voucher, then it will be wise to showcase your best products.
If you have a strong brand and history, then lead with that in your welcome email.
3. Upsell
Depending on the email service you use, there are a number of ways you can upsell to your customers.
Here’s a great example from Target who combine their cart abandonment email with an upsell email:
Dollar Shave Club send their upsell email after a customer places their order, giving them time to add extra items to their order with just a few simple clicks.
Our email provider of choice is Klaviyo, which allows you to create cross-sells and upsells at various stages of the customer journey automatically.
4. Win back series
It doesn’t matter how great your product or services are, customers will eventually stop shopping at your store.
Maybe they found a better deal, or maybe life got in the way and they totally forgot about you.
A win-back email series is sent to customers who have not bought from you within a specific period of time. The objective of this email is to get them to re-order or to find out why they left.
A good win-back series will include an offer to entice customers back and a survey or some sort of form to gain feedback on why they left.
Blue Apron provides inactive customers $40 off their next order if ordered within 24 hours:
Netflix asks their customers to take a survey so they can gather more feedback on their service:
The timing of your win-back series is critical to success.
To get the right timing, find out what your average order frequency (AOF) is and set it to send when customers are a week outside of your AOF and have still yet to place an order. I’ll sometimes see businesses leave it as late as six months to a year when they have a short AOF window. This is too far away and the inactive customer will likely have found someone else or totally forgotten about your business.
How many of these do you have right now?
All four emails can be automated and sent out when a customer triggers a certain action. They can help you convert prospects into customers, educate your audience, increase their lifetime spend, and can work alongside Facebook ads.
How is your email marketing?