Setting Up Custom Deal Stages in HubSpot to Fit Your Unique B2B e-commerce Process

When it comes to managing a B2B eCommerce business, precision is everything. From order management to customer engagement, having accurate data at your fingertips can make or break your ability to scale effectively through personalization. That’s where HubSpot’s custom deal stages come into play. For businesses using Shopify as their storefront, aligning these deal stages with Shopify store statuses is not just a best practice—it’s essential for maintaining clarity and accuracy across your sales process.

Black Friday and Cyber Monday (BFCM) are often thought of as consumer-centric events, but B2B eCommerce companies have a massive opportunity to capitalize on this peak shopping season. With buyers in every sector gearing up to make end-of-year purchases, automating email marketing for B2B can keep potential buyers engaged, drive sales, and enhance loyalty. Here’s how to effectively leverage automation to make this BFCM season one of your best yet.

Black Friday and Cyber Monday (BFCM) are no longer just for retail giants and consumer brands. In 2024, the buzz of these shopping holidays is increasingly making waves in the B2B eCommerce world. As purchasing behaviors evolve, B2B buyers expect the same convenience, personalization, and incentives that B2C consumers enjoy.

Discounts and promotions are powerful tools for driving sales in eCommerce, but they’re also a double-edged sword. While they can attract new customers and boost conversions, overusing them risks eroding your profit margins and training customers to expect constant discounts. The key is to strike the right balance, using promotions strategically to drive value rather than devaluing your brand.

Following the whirlwind of Black Friday and Cyber Monday (BFCM), your responsibilities as a B2B eCommerce marketer are far from complete—cue sequel. Our previous blog, BFCM Email Marketing Automation for B2B eCommerce, focused on maintaining buyer engagement with precision. Now, it is crucial to concentrate on retention strategies. These strategies can convert one-time BFCM buyers into loyal customers, thereby enhancing their lifetime value. Here is how to implement these strategies effectively and sustain the momentum of BFCM. Get E-commerce insights and updates in your inbox.

Whether you’re pushing software, industrial supplies, or tech solutions, these five tactics will help you engage B2B buyers in a way that sticks and makes them want to click.

Attribution modeling in marketing plays a pivotal role in understanding where sales come from, which channels perform best, and how to optimize efforts for future growth. When ecommerce businesses use various shopping cart data synced with HubSpot through Unific

Uncover the secrets of revenue attribution reports and learn how to leverage them to boost your e-commerce sales.

Revolutionize the way ecommerce merchants approach customer segmentation by implementing automated processes based on real-time data analysis.

In this blog post, we will explore how personalized content can significantly impact conversion rates for abandoned carts through actionable strategies.

Sarah Barad - Paper Plotter Guys Abandoned carts recovery rates are hard and harder to increase with more and more people getting used to offers and finding an equivalent of 'window shopping' through abandoned carts. With over $4 trillion worth of merchandise abandoned, the estimation of the revenue merchants are keeping on the table is only getting bigger.

Our partnership with HubSpot has been long and fruitful as our systems works together to help e-commerce merchants achieve their business goals through different Hubs and features. As we know HS is a robust system made up of module like Hubs, each with different features that provide different benefits to merchants. Get E-commerce insights and updates in your inbox.

In the ever-evolving landscape of e-commerce marketing, the shift from traditional batch-and-blast emails to triggered emails is proving to be a game-changer. While the prevalence of batch-and-blast emails persists, it is increasingly common knowledge that triggered emails outperform them significantly.

In the ever-evolving landscape of marketing, and specifically in e-commerce, the focus on acquiring new users has traditionally taken precedence. A poll shared on LinkedIn revealed that 49% of marketing leaders prioritize acquisition, while 30% focus on monetization and 21% on retention. However, the dynamics of customer purchase behaviours have shifted, particularly due to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent economic uncertainties. This has forced industries to approach a re-evaluation of growth strategies, with preserving revenue from existing customers becoming a critical element in the net revenue equation.

Get E-commerce insights and updates in your inbox. Expectations for Purchases in a Post-Pandemic World Amidst the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic and the surge of the digital revolution, the importance of personalization has soared to unprecedented levels. An astonishing three-quarters of consumers have transitioned their loyalty to new stores, products, or buying methods during the pandemic, highlighting the ever-changing nature of consumer behavior.

In a world where digital innovation knows no bounds, the contours of business-to-business (B2B) interactions within the e-commerce realm are rapidly shifting. Once solely an arena dominated by consumer transactions, the online commerce landscape is now witnessing a profound metamorphosis. This evolution is driven by a pressing need to cater to the distinct nuances and requisites of B2B enterprises. From personalized procurement journeys to streamlined integration with sprawling supply chains, B2B e-commerce is undergoing a revolution that is reshaping the very essence of modern business dynamics.

Imagine being a salesperson, juggling multiple priorities. You're rushing to pick up your daughter from school for her dentist appointment when a prospect calls. They need a quote, and your commission depends on sealing the deal. The catch? You only have time to enter the data into one system but your company needs it to be in both Shopify and HubSpot.

E-commerce merchants are hyped up and busy getting ready all throughout fall for one of the biggest events of the year: Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

Abandoned carts are a huge problem for online retailers. In fact, it is estimated that around $4 trillion worth of merchandise will be abandoned in shopping carts this year alone. Even with those numbers we have decided to run a couple case studies and this are some of our findings: Over 50% of carts for returning customers were recovered without a discount which meant more ROI on each order. Recoveries were seen up to fifth email, especially when it mentioned the coupon only had 24 hours left. From 0% recovery to over 14% in 2 months meant well over $10.000 that would have otherwise been lost. Segmentation is key for optimization as recovery for returning customers is easier, faster and can yield more ROI. Dynamic Coupon and Dynamic segments tools were used to achieve this, making this campaign sustainable as it pays for itself and scalable as it still yields ROI.

E-commerce merchants face a lot of challenges that are like those any other merchant face, but some can be as unique as their value proposition and must be addressed in unique ways as well. Automating your sales process is one of them, even though it might seem like a usual problem, e-commerce merchants must deal with some of the following obstacles regarding customers: Attracting qualified customers is harder within an enlarged social media universe Social ad prices rising all over the world Customer saturated with information and ads Competing with many other brands that could have more resources Having less than a 3 second window to grab someone’s attention Getting people’s email once they come in

As e-commerce continues to ripple the globe, we see it becoming more and more its own science, with unique needs in every aspect. An online store is so much more than just ‘an online store’ nowadays and it deserves to be treated as such. It is above all, a business, and one that has unique goals that can only be achieved with the right tools.

Abandoned carts are a huge problem for online retailers. In fact, it is estimated that around $4 trillion worth of merchandise will be abandoned in shopping carts this year alone.

Out with the old, in with the new is the basic sentiment behind spring cleaning. A time to go over your closet and remove old clothes making room for new trends, new items, a new style if that is what you desire. As the world evolves so do concept like this. For us, spring cleaning means freeing up space of that which no longer serves who we want to be in the future. When we think about it, we are not who we were one year ago so it is the perfect moment to reanalyze the situation and ask yourself, is what I have what I really need?

If you want your ecommerce business to be successful, you need to focus on retention.

Mapping your customers lifecycle is key to your marketing efforts, after all, your ultimate goal is to move them through each stage of your journey. Ultimately, that is the definition of Customer Cultivation, which is what we are all about! Are they leads? Let's get to become buyers. Are they first time buyers? Le's get them to become Champions.

With BFCM right around the corner have you checked all of your boxes to make sure your sales strategy is ready for your customer's eyes? We have created an easy checklist for this weekend.

The E-commerce wave is still on the rise since it is a fairly new concept, definitely older than COVID-19 (too soon?) but definitely young enough that we are still trying to navigate this new waters. However, one the most important things about it is that data and insights are more easily found and accessed since the very fact that everything happens online (the store, the purchase, the follow up) makes it so. So we set out on a data journey this summer... We took the summer when people began going out after months and quarantine, after a 2020 that is still blurry, after so many things happened, and decided to take a look at some key insights amongst several of the merchants we work alongside of. Over 20 e-commerce merchants and their customer buying behavior data were analyzed. What type of insights did we find? Keep scrolling...

As the fall season begins to approach and we feel summer drifting away we can see how the light behind people’s eyes is different. Where us, as e-commerce merchants, use to see daylong picnics and beach vacations we know see the jolliest season of the year coming close. The first Christmas after COVID-19 is bound to be a memorable one! With so many unknowns it is sure to be full of surprises, new behaviors and our personal favorite (nerd alert): DATA INSIGHTS!! (Sorry not sorry)

We all know e-commerce is here to stay and still, Summer 2021 is going to be completely unique for this type of businesses. One thing we can all see coming is people going out again to enjoy the sun, the beach and every outdoor activity we can imagine, including shopping. With more people leaving their homes, specially on the weekends, sales are bound to be shared between the online and the offline world. But fear not, we have devised some cool strategies to turn down that heat wave.

How many of us have resorted to sending the same winback campaign with the same discount coupon to all of our customers? Most merchants fall into this trap. Given the data that’s available, merchants usually view retention as a single metric - customers are either active or lost. Retention Spectrum is a better, more accurate way to analyze and act upon customers that are starting to drift away from you, and in turn provides a better chance of retaining your customers over the long-term.

Throughout 2020, we were busy working closely with merchants of all shapes and sizes to uncover the hidden opportunities and risks within their data. With feedback and input from some of our customers, we have developed the first version of what we're calling the Buying Behavior Analysis.

Here's some ideas you can implement this week to target coupon code emails to your "churn risk" customers who just Abandoned Cart so you can win them back.

I've worked with many ecommerce clients who want to roll out the red carpet for their Best Customers, and when they Abandon a cart is probably the best opportunity to step in and help them out.

Rather than replacing 50% or more of your ecommerce customers every year (at least half simply never buy again!), this article will take less than an hour of setup and help you retarget high-potential new customers to increase your repeat purchase rate.

If your repeat purchase rate is under 40% (which is normal in Ecommerce), that means you're continually forced to replace 60% of your customers! Every single year!

Visualize your New Customer segments in HubSpot so you can automatically or manually follow up with them at the right time to close a 2nd sale. With at least 50% of Ecommerce customers never making a 2nd purchase, this is a critical area for business visibility and action.

Building a list of Ecommerce leads who aren't yet ready to buy but would still like to get things from you is critical for increasing that 1% sales conversion rate on site visitors. HubSpot's built-in popup tool is powerful enough to win over visitors to a purchase with a great offer.

Using less than an hour of time, this article will help you find the gaps in your marketing strategy and see which sources are best or worst at converting customers.

Using less than an hour of report building, this article will help you understand the power of calculating "lag-time" in your HubSpot Ecommerce data to chose the best possible followup dates for your new customers.

Here's some some key Ecommerce data points that you can use to build 5 different HubSpot Ecommerce reports that help identify high-opportunity customers.

As we’re entering the most important time of the year for Ecommerce, there is a cornucopia of great advice out there for online retail. I’ve assembled the top 5 most important strategies that you STILL have time to execute on in HubSpot this holiday season, tailored to 2020's unique needs.

Email marketing still accounts for over 15% of all ecommerce sales, but how are you using the other 85% of channel sales opportunities to help new customers? This is how you can adopt a comprehensive strategy to help serve New Customers across HubSpot Email, Chatbost, Service, Site, Ads, and Sales.

Shopify is NOT a CRM tool with deal pipelines nor sales email automation, so here are 3 problems your sales team will have using Shopify Draft Orders and what you can do about it to close more sales.

We've worked exclusively in ecommerce digital marketing in HubSpot's ecosystem for 5 years, since 2015. Since we're no longer selling HubSpot Agency retainer services, I'm sharing the key lessons I'd learned to help you wow Ecommerce brands as a HubSpot Agency (with fewer time-wasting surprises).

HubSpot might not like this post, but I think it’s an important option to lay out. Brands with a B2B or consumer sales team will have a better long-term fit on HubSpot. But if a 1-year Marketing Hub contract is too big a jump right now, how could you use both Klaviyo for email marketing AND HubSpot for sales?

There are certain segments of abandoned carts where you can offer discounts with the fewest tradeoffs (TL;DR, non-customer leads), so here’s 3 major coupon strategies to align your overall marketing goals.

Since April, Shopify’s revenues have nearly doubled as Covid-19 pushes brands to find their way online. Launching on Shopify or WooCommerce needs to be easy because brands simultaneously have to learn ecommerce marketing tools (like HubSpot or Klaviyo) to serve prospects/customers that are no longer in-person.

I’ve had the good fortune of working with some ecommerce clients who get hundreds of Abandoned Carts per day, which provides a lot of split-testing and segmentation opportunities for an Abandoned Cart email campaign in HubSpot.

This guide will help you set up a simple two-segment Abandoned Cart campaign in HubSpot as quickly as possible, even if you’re using the Shopify/HubSpot native integration. After all, sales in the ecommerce industry represent only 30-40% of all shopping carts, leaving 60-70% of shopping carts abandoned and not recovered.

Unific is honored to be named a Top 30 HubSpot App based on the quantity and quality of reviews of our Unific App in the HubSpot Marketplace!

Today, almost every online business has a need for integrations, and the industry has answered! There are now a large number of integration platforms such as Zapier, Workato, IFTTT (If This Then That). It is easier than ever to connect two or even more things together and play Double Dutch!

Prospects coming from competing integrations have been trained to expect data to sync on a schedule. We built Unific to be near-real-time without relying on a sync schedule. (By near-real-time we mean the sync might take between 1 second to 3 minutes after events happen in the Magento store.)

This guide will help you to know if the paid HubSpot Ads Add-On will help your ecommerce business today, or if you want to hold off for later developments down the road and use what’s included in your plan for the Ads tool without the paid upgrade.

I was answering a client’s question about Unific’s Magento 2 to HubSpot integration this morning and realized that we could do a better job of explaining how the integration works and why it works that way. While moving data from one platform to another may seem like a very simple problem to solve in this day and age, there’s a lot more to it!

Setting up an automated browse abandonment campaign in HubSpot can effectively augment your retargeting or conversion strategies for your Magento 2 store. In this article we'll look at the mechanics of setting up a very basic workflow to automate sending these emails.

First, congratulations on investing in the growth of your ecommerce business! If you are reading this, you have likely either recently purchased HubSpot, are testing HubSpot's free tools while considering purchasing HubSpot or are doing research on how HubSpot can support you Magento 2 hosted online storefront.

HubSpot’s free CRM provides an abundance of value for ecommerce companies. Whether you're B2C, B2B, or a mixture of both, integrating your shopping cart to HubSpot enables you to unlock value across the customer lifecycle within marketing, sales, and service.

This year we've focused on helping ecommerce merchants grow sales is by adopting a data-driven methodology. With the holidays representing the busiest (and most lucrative!) time of the year, being data-driven can be a game changer! Many of our clients are using their customer and order data to strategize and plan how they'll make this a successful holiday season. Are you considering the following questions to help formulate your data-driven strategy?

Many ecommerce brands know their data is critical – they prioritize collecting and storing it, and perhaps even use some of it – but aren’t able to be strategic about leveraging it to grow their business. And large amounts of data (as much as 60-73%, by Forrester’s estimate) simply sit dormant, locked in systems that don’t talk to other systems.

If you are starting an ecommerce business, you need a strategy for turning your visitors into paying customers. In the marketing world, this is known as a conversion. You’re converting your visitors from latent prospects into customers, and your conversion rate is how many visitors you convert into paying customers.

What are WooCommerce and HubSpot? WooCommerce is an eCommerce plugin for WordPress sites – essentially, it allows you to transform your WordPress website into an online store. In fact, it's behind 37% of all eCommerce sites! The WooCommerce plugin is robust and can sometimes be difficult to master; but once you crest the peak of the learning curve, WooCommerce becomes an invaluable ecommerce tool.

I've been working on integrating shopping carts and marketing platforms for what feels like a very long time. Maybe it was all the late, late nights when we were building the first version of our legacy app Revenue Conduit ... but the reality is, it's only been 6 years! However, what was an application born out of scarcity and necessity has now become an integral part to how many merchants operate.

The History of Coupons in Retail and eCommerce 1887 marked the beginning of the use of coupons; Coca-Cola co-owner Asa Candler realized that utilizing coupons to increase brand exposure would boost sales and benefit his business. Since then, the popularity of coupons has risen steadily. The early 1900s offered shoppers coupons on dry goods like cereal; but their heyday came with the storm of the Great Depression.

Marketers put a lot of time and effort into perfecting their digital newsletters and promotional emails. They see that these types of emails can generate leads, sales, and conversions, so they focus on making them perfect. But recent data trends prove consumers are becoming conditioned to filter these messages in their inboxes, which means marketers must continue to look for additional opportunities to generate more sales. Conversely, the majority of consumers agree that purchase confirmation emails are the most valuable items in their inbox, and they are opened at a much higher rate. These emails are a great way to capture your customers' attention and get them to engage more with your brand. Read on to learn about how you can use this fact to your advantage to generate more sales with purchase confirmation emails.

I often hear from retailers that they struggle to find the time for effective ecommerce marketing when most of their energy and resources are dedicated to operations and customer support. For these businesses, my first question is "have you invested in a marketing automation platform?"

It is always fun when you can combine two technologies in a new and innovative way. Check out the video below to see how you can combine a HubSpot chat bot with Unific's Dynamic Coupon Code Generator to generate single-use, expiring codes via a chat.

At Unific, we’re always listening to feedback from our customers and partners. This is how we prioritize what new products to build, and what features to add or improve on. In fact, many of our larger merchants are beginning to drive our product development.We’re always looking for new ways to help your business thrive, so when many of you come to us asking for a similar feature, it goes right to the top of our priority list.

In the new frontier of Digital Marketing, the ability to automate complex sales chains can mean the difference between a tremendous boost to your business, and a mild success. HubSpot not only lets you automate large portions of your sales channels, but has a level of customer data and insight that is unprecedented, allowing you to create automated campaigns with a level of specificity that was previously unheard of.

With Unific, you can now connect as many shopping carts as you want to a one HubSpot portal. This video shows you how!

HubSpot’s CRM is the foundation of the platform, the place where the Marketing Hub, Sales Hub, and Service Hub converge. It’s a massive data hub where every interaction you have with a customer is filtered and cataloged—and more importantly, it’s where Unific can help you extract the most value out of your data.

"The folks at Unific integrate HubSpot with Shopify, Magento, BigCommerce and WooCommerce. It's not just about synchronizing your data between your ecommerce platform and HubSpot, although that’s definitely a start. You’re able to map your fields between your ecommerce platform into HubSpot, you’re able to have order history, review how your data has been synced, and then you’re able to use that data in workflows and segments to pull people back in and deliver the right message to the right person at the right time and have workflows and smart lists to pull people back in at the right time. This combination between HubSpot and ecommerce platforms with the help of Unific is actually amazing. With Unific, integrating these things is really just the beginning. On top of this they have things like coupon code generation, which you can then use for personalized promotions and some awesome technology for RFM analysis, recency, frequent monetary to be able to optimize ecommerce marketing to different customer segments " - Scott Brinker, VP of Platform - HubSpot

In this episode of eCommerce in the Trenches, JD meets with John and Courtney Brown, the power couple behind online fast fashion store Cents of Style. Courtney discusses the years long struggle to become successful and the twists and turns they went through to becoming a multi-million dollar business. They also dive into how to maintain your brand vision and image while scaling and how various types of marketing can impact your strategy.

Inbound marketing creates opportunities for companies to connect with prospects and customers in a meaningful way. It's typically used by lead-generation sites, and most marketers don't understand how it could possibly apply to e-commerce as well. After all, they're trying to sell products on their sites, not just generate leads. The truth is, inbound marketing is a perfect fit for e-commerce and applying the core inbound methodologies can have a dramatic impact on a company's sales and revenue.

We tend to talk a lot about broad-market businesses, but one of the things eCommerce allows is for niche products to thrive just as much.

One of the biggest hurdles eCommerce businesses have to jump over is having a plethora of one-time buyers making up the majority of their revenue. While this is great for short-term growth, in the long run many businesses struggle with converting these buyers into more valuable customers. That's where the 80/20 rule comes into play.

You've started to see more sales through your e-commerce business, and now you want to continue to succeed. If you don't know where to start, it’s difficult to know how to grow your e-commerce business. You have to capitalize on what you're doing well order to keep growing.

With a recent update to the Shopify API, we are now able to provide you with even more value through our Dynamic Coupon Codes. On Wednesday, November 8th, our CEO and Co-Founder, Dan, hosted a webinar explaining the new features and how you can quickly and easily implement them. You can watch the full recording here!

With a recent update to the Shopify API, we are now able to provide you with even more value through our Dynamic Coupon Codes. On Wednesday, November 8th, our CEO and Co-Founder, Dan, hosted a webinar explaining the new features and how you can quickly and easily implement them. You can watch the full recording here!

Our podcast, eCommerce in the Trenches is now live!

Recovering abandoned cart shoppers is vital to the success of any e-commerce store, every retailer should have campaigns in place. Recently, we shared best practices for abandoned cart recovery emails, but now it's time to see these strategies in action. We analyze 3 of the best cart abandonment email campaigns from online retailers and discuss what we can learn from each. We'll look at what other online retailers can learn from each example email.

Why Retarget Abandoned Cart Shoppers 71% of customers place an item in their shopping cart but end up leaving before completing the checkout process. On average, retargeting ads are 76% more likely to be clicked on than a regular display ad.

It's inevitable; shoppers will abandon their shopping cart before completing checkout. Every e-commerce store will fight a growing abandoned cart rate, the best businesses effectively leverage tools for abandoned cart recovery and increase revenue in the short and long term.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) encompasses many tactics, but the main idea is that you're helping Google and other search engines understand your eCommerce brand and what products you sell. SEO increases your visibility by improving the likelihood search engines will list your site in relevant search results when potential customers are looking for products. In this post, I'll focus on one major part of your SEO strategy: keyword research for eCommerce stores.

Email subject lines are the first chance to grab the customer's attention after shopping cart abandonment. If retailers want to stand out in a shopper's inbox, they need an attention grabbing subject line; in fact, 35% of email recipients open email based on the subject line alone. Considering abandoned cart campaigns are the final opportunity to recover a customer's order, retailers need to use their best email subject lines.

69.23% - that's the average cart abandonment rate as of January 2017.

A Salesperson's Standpoint: This is the first in a series of posts from Unific's Account Executive, Grant Rieger! He'll talk about e-commerce marketing from a salesperson's point-of-view.

So, you've decided to implement a campaign of abandoned cart emails. Great decision! Because as sure as the sun will rise tomorrow, customers will desert shopping carts. In fact, eCommerce sites face an average shopping cart abandonment rate of 69.23%.

It's no surprise that product reviews increase the likelihood of a shopper making a purchase. What may surprise you is the degree to which product reviews can impact a retailer's business. Take a look at these stats about consumers and product reviews:

Once you've installed the Unific app, it will take you to your Order Confirmations page. Here is where you manage your different order confirmation email campaigns.

Every customer is different, but their purchases often help businesses identify groups or common characteristics among customers. It's precisely these identifiers that allow companies to use custom email segmentation for more targeted marketing messages. It starts by understanding what action(s) a customer can make, then how what that means for your business. Understanding these actions can help you decide how you'd like to segment your customers for targeted marketing messages.

Today is Get To Know Your Customer Day for Q3. While it may not be the oldest, most legitimate holiday of all time - it can be a valuable opportunity for your business' eCommerce marketing. For two reasons:

Congratulations, you made a sale! Your customer received an order confirmation, which they loved. Guess what? You've only just begun. Your customer wants to be informed, and up to date, so you should be ready to send a few more emails. Hopefully, you've included something in your order confirmation email that lets your customer know how many and what kind of emails to expect from your business. In this post, we'll dive into the different types, and the importance, of post transaction emails.

Introducing, Unific! The exciting future of our company, Revenue Conduit.

It's become an industry standard to send segmented promotional email messages for better returns on marketing efforts. There are dozens of tools that allow businesses to send custom marketing messages to a targeted audience, increasing the likelihood of recipients engaging and converting from the email.

Congrats! You just made a sale; now your customer is about to receive an email to confirm their purchase. It's highly likely they open this email, I mean, at least a 60% chance that they'll open the email one or more times. So, why not use this opportunity to learn more about your customer to better market to them in the future?

The excitement of buying something is rarely accompanied by a thrilling confirmation document. I mean, really, when was the last time you were pumped to be handed a receipt or to open an email with a 12-digit confirmation number? Answer: never.

Any smart businessperson knows marketing isn't measured in impressions, clicks, or opens but in revenue returned. At the end of the day, what resources did we use and how much revenue was driven as a result? In the world of marketing through bulk and transactional emails, revenue per email (RPE) is widely used to measure campaign success. It's a simple formula that shows how effective email messages are at converting and driving revenue.

The Value Of Order Confirmation Emails With the retail industry averaging open rates of 12.74% and click-through-rates (CTR) of 7.10%, marketers can't afford to undervalue any opportunity to gain their customer's attention. We've talked about transactional emails as a missed marketing opportunity, but here we'll focus on order confirmation emails and why their high open and engagement rates make them so valuable.

Measuring Confirmation Email KPIs & Setting Benchmarks Like anything else, performance data and KPIs are contextual. The chart above uses data that represents a wide collection of e-commerce stores but these numbers vary by industry. For example, most order confirmation email open rates fall anywhere from 60% to 70% depending on the industry. So how can you gauge your business' performance? For non-transactional emails, use resources like Constant Contact's Knowledge Base for an estimate to your industry's average email performance.

Hint: There is none.

Customer segmentation adds a level of personalization that is easy to apply in mass. By creating saved searches in Infusionsoft you can appeal to groups of customers through targeted messaging in your marketing emails.

Customer segmentation adds a level of personalization that is easy to apply in mass. By creating smart lists in HubSpot you can appeal to groups of customers through targeted messaging in your marketing emails.

It is often believed that customers do not scroll all the way to the bottom of pages on ecommerce home pages and heat maps show this to be true. So it is assumed that customers don’t look at the footer and many companies worry less about the footer than they should. In actuality, the footer is very important. Not only does is act as the end of the container that holds informational and product content, it is essential for navigation. Additionally, the footer is the perfect place for social links and email capture.

These days, we all shop online, and we all know that the most important and sometimes frustrating part of the shopping experience is finding exactly what we are looking for. Most of us rely on the site navigation to be the most organized and efficient way of purchasing the item we are looking for, but many sites fall short and end up losing potential revenue. There are five areas of the navigation that are the most important for consumers and businesses alike.

There are several applications, platforms and integrations that allow you, as a retailer, to market to your target audiences by segmenting them based on purchase history, browsing behavior, or demographics. Once you have identified your various target audiences, segmentation is an easy way to appeal to them on a personal level in such a way that encourages a purchase. Marketers have been using this method for years and have seen great success.

We often see designers and marketers focus their efforts on newsletters and sales blasts rather than transactional emails. This is often due to limitations within their shopping carts, and sometimes due to a lack of time. As we have discussed, transactional emails are a missed opportunity and it all begins with the order confirmation. To maximize the available opportunity, here are some tips and tricks to ensure you are sending out the best possible order confirmation.

Businesses often focus their email marketing efforts on campaigns like newsletters and sales-blasts, leaving little-to-no time for design and segmentation efforts relating to transactional emails. We've said it before and we'll say it again, transactional emails are a missed opportunity! It all starts where lazy marketers think it ends: order confirmations. Order confirmation emails are hugely important because 60% or more of your customers will open the emails, so let's be sure to get them right.

Now that we've spent some time thinking about transactional emails, you may be thinking to yourself, “is there really a missed opportunity here?” Or, maybe you are thinking that most order confirmation emails look pretty good. Well, I hate to be a Debbie Downer but in this post, we're going to look at real examples of confirmation emails and point out where they can make improvements.

As consumers, we are all familiar with the emails that are sent to us following a purchase online. Typically you will first receive an email confirming your order with the items listed, as well as the tax, shipping a total you paid. These emails usually see open rates of 60-70%, astronomically high in comparison to their marketing email counterparts. We know that transactional emails are being underutilized. Today, we explore the various types of transactional emails being sent.

As a business owner or marketer, you have to find inventive and creative ways to attract consumers and convert them into loyal customers. Every customer is a one-time buyer at some point, and even the most established brands can struggle to take customers to the next level. One of the most popular forms of marketing is through email, brands communicate with consumers through campaigns like newsletter updates and sales blast announcements. Most brands are sending every kind of marketing email imaginable, but so many fail to utilize a type of email that receives over 100% open rate: transactional emails.

How often do you go shopping, find something you like, get in line, hand the cashier what you'd like to purchase, then turn around and leave? If you're anything like me, almost never. So why do over 77% of online shopping carts get abandoned? More importantly, how do we get those customers to come back and complete their purchase? Strategic, automated abandonment email series - that's how.

Revenue Conduit subscribers on our Growth plan and above (and on any cart but Shopify) can now dynamically create coupon codes that include custom words and merge fields!

Watch the recording of our 80/20 for Online Retailers webinar with JD Crouse of Bolder Bands. JD shares lessons on how to grow your online store through the use of 80/20 analysis and RFM segmentation.

We had an excellent webinar with our friends over at Justuno. Watch the video below to learn why Justuno is one of the best popups for online retailers and how a popup is just the first step in growing your online store, automatically. Interested in giving Justuno a try? You should be. Click here to sign up now!

I have some exciting announcements - after doubling the size of our development team and adding a full-time Quality Assurance Tester, we have been pounding out new features like never before! Today I have four new features to tell you about. By the way, in all cases, these features were requested by you, our subscribers. Thank you for the feedback and your continued help in making Revenue Conduit the best it can be. Now on to the details...

It is getting harder and harder for small online retailers to compete. In a world dominated by Amazon, if you are competing on price, you’re in a race to the bottom and Amazon will win. There must be something that sets you apart. Something that Amazon cannot replicate - a unique selling proposition (USP). Your USP must be unmistakable. Woven into your online store and communicated via every touch point with your prospects and customers. One of your first areas of focus should be your method of turning an anonymous visitor into a lead, a lead into a known prospect and a known prospect into your customer. You can do this through an automated New Welcome Series. If you go to 10 small online retailer websites, I can almost guarantee that 70% of them will have nothing more than a hard-to-find “sign up for our newsletter” form. The other 30% will have a popup form. Of the 30% with the popup form, two out of three will have just a single welcome email. That leaves one company out of ten with a multi-step Welcome Series. With traffic being harder and harder to come by, you better be doing a better job at capturing leads on your website. It’s a low-hanging fruit.

When we put marketing automation in place for a small online retailer that has done little more than send out email newsletters in the past, the results can often-times be staggering. We started working with one particular client a few months ago. The project started with getting all of her historical data (customers, orders and products) out of her shopping cart and into Infusionsoft. In Part 2, I’ll explain how we then conducted an 80/20 analysis and put a reengagement campaign in place. For now, I’ll focus on our popup lead generation campaign. Our approach is to always go after the low-hanging fruit first. We want to put campaigns in place that will to bring cash into the company as quickly as possible. At the very least, we want the initial campaigns to pay for our implementation services, Infusionsoft and the Revenue Conduit integration between the shopping cart and Infusionsoft. Even more so, we want the initial campaigns to provide a quick ROI. For most small online retailers, there’s enough low-hanging fruit to bring in enough cash to move the needle and be meaningful. Popups - love ‘em or hate ‘em, but they actually work.

Do you remember that email I sent you a bit more than a week ago? The one asking for your help - for your vote? Well, all I can say is thank you! Among 41 apps that were submitted, Revenue Conduit was named the #1 Kick Apps Champion in the Infusionsoft 2014 Battle of the Apps competition. Winning is a huge honor. It’s validation for why we exist - to help you, the small business online retailer, connect your online store to your marketing so you can market like the Amazons of the world on a small business budget with some semblance of a work-life balance. It is hard to find words to describe ICON14, the annual Infusionsoft conference. More than 3,000 small business entrepreneurs descended upon the Phoenix Convention Center. The energy was intense. It was exhilarating, contagious and ultimately exhausting. On the flight home, with adrenaline and exhaustion fighting the final fight, my fellow co-founder Parag and I reflected on where we are now and on how this all began... A few years back, my wife and I were running an online store selling jewelry. We were using Magento for our store and Mailchimp for our marketing. We wanted to automatically market to our prospects and our customers based on where they came from, what they were interested in and how engaged they were. We wanted our online store to be deeply connected to our marketing. Mailchimp was not cutting it. Infusionsoft showed up in a google search and my uncle also happened to be using it. So, we signed up, went through the Kickstart program and partnered with long-time friend and colleague, Parag, to build the first version of Revenue Conduit simply to scratch our own itch.

Automating lifecycle marketing takes time. It takes effort. You will never be done because it’s a journey and there will always be room for improvement. Dramatic improvement at first and then incremental improvements over time. To fully automate your lifecycle marketing, you have to create lead magnets, and write content for emails, landing pages and thank you pages. You have to write emails that will welcome your new customers and start building a relationship with them. You will need to write content that reengages your customers when they stop buying. And you will need to write other emails for countless other lifecycle marketing opportunities. The promise of lifecycle marketing is that you can deliver the right message to the right person at the right time, automatically. And guess what? You just don’t know what will work until you try and test.

You spoke. We listened and delivered. We’re pleased to announce that Revenue Conduit now supports customer group and newsletter syncing! Before explaining these new features, I would also like to announce that we’ll be hosting a webinar to demo these features and answer your questions about these new features or any other aspect of Revenue Conduit. Based on your feedback, we may make this webinar a monthly ritual, providing you with demos of features, ideas on how to fully leverage Revenue Conduit and Infusionsoft, and answer any questions you have. The webinar will be held on March 26th at 3pm CT. Click here to register! Now on to the new features...

I spent a few hours reviewing the 2014 Revenue Conduit Action Plan this weekend, taking a look at our goals and the initiatives we planned in order to reach them. Goals are powerful things. I have found that once you write a goal down, the universe immediately begins to conspire and help you reach it. You meet people. Opportunities present themselves. Strange things happen.

Remarketing to your prospects and customers has never been easier or more powerful. You should start by building remarketing segments using your homepage, landing pages, landing page thank you pages, category pages, individual product pages and post-purchase thank you page. But if you want to take it a step further, you can use data from your CRM to build even more targeted remarketing segments based on customer purchase behavior. Revenue Conduit makes it easy for you to segment your eCommerce customers based on the last time they bought, how many times they bought and how much they have spent with you over their lifetime as your customer. When Revenue Conduit syncs data from your shopping cart (Magento, Shopify, BigCommerce or Volusion) to Infusionsoft, we calculate a number of data points that are stored in Infusionsoft custom fields.

In Part 1, we talked about the results of a recent 80/20 Analysis we conducted for a Revenue Conduit customer. We found a number of customer segments that were all but invisible prior to the 80/20 analysis. One big revelation was that only 10% of their customers accounted for 50% of revenues. Another big revelation was that a full 85% of customers had only bought once. When conducting 80/20 analysis, we always look for "low-hanging fruit" campaigns - campaigns that offer a relatively easy and immediate source of revenue and profit. Campaigns that not only pay for your initial investment in Infusionsoft, Revenue Conduit and consulting but also provide an immediate ROI that can be further invested in even more profit-generating campaigns. The biggest "low-hanging fruit" campaign was to get a second purchase from the customers that had only bought once. Knowing that the customers that had only bought once also differed based on the data of their last purchase, we also decided to further segment them into three groups - customers that last bought more than six months ago, customers that last bought between four to six months ago and customers that last bought within the last four months.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again - running an online store is hard and getting harder. The cost of PPC is going up. Google can change their algorithm and you can lose half your traffic overnight (which actually happened to one of our clients recently). If your product can be sold on Amazon, chances are it’s already there and being sold for less money than you care to admit. To succeed in online retail as a small business, you need to stand on something other than price. You need a unique selling proposition. You need something that Amazon cannot do. Something that WOWS your customers during every interaction.

One of the best ways to grow your online store is by sending traffic to a landing page and capturing leads.

We're excited to announce that Revenue Conduit now integrates Shopify POS with Infusionsoft! This integration will be great if you have ever wanted to do Lifecycle Marketing with your in-store customers, and drive them to also purchase online. We'll have a more complete rundown of everything you can do shortly. For now, we wanted to give you a taste.

Love ‘em or hate ‘em -- popups work and they work well.

You never know what you will find when conducting 80/20 analysis for eCommerce. Hidden opportunities. Looming threats. Clues for campaigns that provide the right message at the right time to the right customer segment you didn’t even know existed. I’ll share with you the results of a recent 80/20 analysis for a Revenue Conduit customer. For confidentiality reasons, I’ll withhold the name of the actual company and generalize some data. Start with Getting the Data into Infusionsoft A recent signup for Revenue Conduit purchased our Historical Data Service to export all of his orders, products and customers from Magento and import them into Infusionsoft. Part of the service includes calculating data and populating a number of fields within Infusionsoft. We use the fields for RFM Segmentation (purchase recency, purchase frequency and monetary). The fields include:

It’s been about 9 months since the first online store signed up for Revenue Conduit. Since April, 2013, online stores from all over the world in one niche after the next have joined the Revenue Conduit family. With our growth well under way, and the knowledge we have gained through working with clients and subscribers, it is now time to share our experiences and open a dialogue with you. This is our first post on the Revenue Conduit blog. You can expect many more. Revenue Conduit started as a simple plugin built to scratch my own itch. Before Revenue Conduit was even an idea, my wife and I had an online jewelry store built on Magento. We were using Mailchimp for our marketing, and we were frustrated by the lack of integration between our shopping cart and our marketing. We had two data silos and no real way to make them talk with each other in any meaningful way. I went on a search to find something better and thankfully found Infusionsoft (it was love at first sight). I signed up, went through the Kickstart and my mind began racing with all the possibilities. I partnered with a long-time friend and collaborator, Parag Jagdale, and we built the first version of Revenue Conduit to connect my own store with my marketing (now being run through Infusionsoft).