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.
I’ve personally analyzed sales data for over 150+ of our customers over the last 7 years and - with the exception of probably 3 businesses - I never see a repeat conversion rate that's above 50%. (Incidentally I’ve seen that the repeat conversion rate in the Fashion & Apparel and Consumables sector is consistently lower, around 25-40%)
This means that no matter the work done to close that first sale, the larger battle is closing the second order. For many of our merchants, even a slight change from a 48% repeat purchase rate to a 48.5% repeat purchase rate can add a huge spike to their monthly order revenue.
You can create raving fans just from your entire end-to-end new customer onboarding process that will move the needle on your repeat purchase rate. Welcoming New Customers is one of the many critical areas of focus in an overall Ecommerce Customer Segmentation strategy.
This article is about using the channels at your disposal in HubSpot to create meaningful and helpful interactions that delight your new customers:
A customer’s first order with your business is an extension of their trust, and fortunately you have a huge opportunity to fulfill that trust during this first 30-60 days of their purchase to help them feel welcomed and at home with your brand.
From their standpoint after first ordering, they still have to wait for your product to show up at your door, have positive interactions with every touch point from your brand, have a great experience with your product along with how it helps them accomplish their intended goals.
Remember that NOT communicating with your new customer isn’t a neutral experience. It’s subconsciously a negative one, even if your competitors are also similarly doing nothing in terms of new customer followup.
Let’s go for that “wow” factor through hyper-personalized automation and followup with new customers.
We provide a $250 Ecommerce Marketing System with email and workflow templates that include New Customer Welcoming but I'm going to give a short version of the strategy principles and setup of this campaign series.
Regardless of email platform, there are two major campaign phases to a New Customer Welcome email strategy:
Above is a templated example of a first email. Remember that they're still waiting for their order to arrive in the mail at this point, and you may wan to send the 2nd email around day 7 after their order would have arrived at their door.
Here's some example items you might want to share through the 2-email content to build trust, education, and create an emotional connection with your brand:
Covering 2nd sale incentive offers isn't the point of this article, I'm more concerned with using these channels to make sure the customer is wowed with their first purchase.
But simply put I'd send email 3-4 after the time they should have organically made a 2nd purchase (but didn't) and put a fixed coupon in place with a product grid of top-selling products they could look at and consider. I'd also highly recommend sending a product/purchase review email to get feedback on their experience before sending those next purchase emails, so 5 emails in total. (I'll cover this topic further in another article)
A reminder, don't forget to associate each email with a "New Customer" HubSpot Campaign for performance and revenue tracking.
You'll want to trigger the HubSpot Workflow off a Smart List, which I'd recommend calling "New Customers | 1. Welcome & Educate - #ADD to Emails/Audiences/Site Promos", or something like that.
Using Unific's default Contact Properties, here's some example criteria of how I'd set up the Smart List criteria:
Why use a Smart List vs just raw criteria in the Workflow Trigger?
It can make it easier to monitor who currently qualifies in that "New Customer" range, and more importantly it allows this list to serve as triggers for the other 4 channel types below.
When implemented right, a Chat Bot functions like a personal search function that can pop up on any page of your website. It’s no substitute escalating an issue to a customer service person, but research from Drift has shown that 37% of people will use a customer service bot to get quick answers in an emergency.
You want to set up a Chat Bot that’s specifically set up to answer a brand new customer’s most relevant questions. A brand new customer likely won’t be asking about your latest deals because they just bought, so don’t prioritize pre-sales questions in your bot logic and make sure it’s launched with common post-sale questions, first.
The new customer may be concerned about everything from order arrival to product education to discussing the need for returns.
Even if they can’t get the problem fully solved through the bot, being able to end the chat with them knowing a customer service rep will have all of the needed context when they arrive is a huge trust-builder.
Here’s an article of the top 6 questions customers are asking Ecommerce chat bots and some of the highlights I saw that would pertain to the first 30-60 days after a new customer buys:
That article is from 2019 and I’m sure these responses will evolve over time. Talk to your support team who are aware of your new customer’s trust-extending world to see what questions get commonly asked. You might find common product-specific concerns like:
You may notice that a lot of these common topics can (and should) also be covered in the New Customer Email series. It may seem like you’re repeating yourself, but you’re really not. You want to offer a consistent set of messaging and help no matter where the customer prefers to interact.
In a chatbot tool like HubSpot, you can have questions like these pull up related series of Knowledge Base articles for a customer to click on, and you can offer the links to these exact same FAQ’s in your email onboarding.
Customers are busy, they might not look at one channel like email. Or they might look at it but then forget because they have a lot going on and the question becomes relevant again once the product is actually in their hand.
As a word of caution: Do NOT try to pretend that your chatbot is a real person, but rather call it your “Support Bot”, or something like that.
Consumers are familiar enough with Siri and Alexa to know that there are certain ways they have to phrase things with computers to get results, and this will also create a grace for them in the interaction.
You don’t want customers feeling they’ve got the rug pulled from under them when they thought they were talking to a person, or have the chat devolve into all-caps complaints like, “DO YOU SPEAK ENGLISH?!”.
That does not add plus-points to the new customer’s experience, so call it a “Support Bot” from the onset.
And I wouldn’t worry about these for your Version 1 (or even version 3), but here’s a fun bonus article of small talk questions you can program into your bot logic that will help to give your chatbot an on-brand personality for your company.
Here’s a knowledge base article on how to set up a HubSpot chat bot in detail, as well as a great video tutorial of how to built a HubSpot chatbot. (FYI, they now call them "chatflows")
The important part though is the New Customer targeting part of the bot, which is what’s most important to this article.
After setting up your Chatflow logic, go into the "Target" section of the menu
Obviously, this depends on the site visitor being properly cookied so that HubSpot knows it's that particular customer, so if they're returning to the site from another computer or phone where they haven't interacted with the HubSpot UTK, this won't work. But for a large portion of customers who do have the tracking enabled, this is how they will get that specific chat help!
Also, in the main Chatflows menu make sure to put this "New Customer Welcome" chatbot as the top priority item in the list!
Here’s where we get into the real-people component of chat and support so that your team can prioritize these brand new customers!
A note about prioritized support: The complaint among many is that this creates a “tiered class” of customers that cares about new business and just kind of leaves all existing customers to fend for themselves as though they’re not important.
At most, if your team aims for a 2-day resolution time with new customers then existing customers should max out at 3-4 days. Having a back log of tickets because someone isn’t “new” and you "already have their business” is not a customer-first mindset and I’m completely NOT saying that.
What I am saying though is that new customers are in this delicate phase where you still actually haven’t earned their trust, yet. They’ve trusted you enough to make that first purchase, but because of the great things that Amazon has done for the ecommerce industry they're relying on an amazing experience or convenient return if everything doesn't go according to plan.
For a brand new customer, their tolerance for issues is still very fragile if there are other similar options in your market space and you need to be sensitive of that.
If you're on HubSpot's Service Hub for managing your support, it's easy to prioritize Tickets generated from New Customers.
Here's some other advice to implement for helping your Support team prioritize new customers:
Creating dynamic content on your site that changes based on where they came from, purchases they've made, or past form submissions and pages visits is one of the most powerful strategies available to digital marketers
HubSpot doesn't enable you to change your product and category pages, but there are some key ways you can implement dynamic site content using HubSpot tools, especially if you've implemented an Inbound methodology for attracting leads.
“Spending ad money on my existing customers? That’s insane. They already bought from me, why would I spend more ad money on them?”
Remember that at least 50% of your customers will only purchase once. They are not loyal or bonded to your business, yet.
If sent at the right time and to the right group of customers, retargeting your existing New Customer list can be a great way to keep your brand top of mind.
This is where some napkin math will have to come into play. Need to do some analysis of what your typical customer lifetime is worth, and how much of your best customers are shouldering the burden of your not so great customers.
I can cover the targeting of higher-potential customers in another post, but some basic ideas of retargeting content include:
HubSpot allows you to create Ad Audience lists inside of HubSpot using Smart Lists, so you'd use that "New Customers | 1. Welcome & Educate - #ADD to Emails/Audiences/Site Promos" list we established earlier to send to Google or Facebook.
Note that a list needs at least 20 contacts in order to create an audience list, but to get the most out of your ad spending (since the match rate won't be a perfect 100%) it's recommended that you use a list with at least 1,000 members.
If you don't have 1000 members in your new customer list though, just use what you've got and see how it goes.
I will also note that you'll want to use a separate, new list for 2nd purchase retargeting that lines up more with the times where customers SHOULD have made a 2nd purchase but aren't. You don't want to be spending ad money on people who are still focused on using their 1st purchase, nor do you want to spend on people who might have bought again, anyway, because of your followup from other low-cost channels.
I'd recommend setting up a Smart List with a title like "New Customers | 2. Nurture 2nd Order - #ADD to Emails/Audiences/Site Promos" and using some criteria such as these (the exact days depends on an analysis of your customers' typical repurchase timelines):
We're coming on the time of year that creates the biggest revenue and new customer gains for retailers. Implementing this work across all of these channels so that it can be part of your holiday strategy is a great way to make sure you can be helpful to the influx of new customers you'll get.
An important note about applying this to holidays: Be careful, specifically about your Ad Retargeting strategy for New Customers during the holiday shopping season, and possibly delay that component until the end of the year. Increasingly customers are having holiday surprises ruined by seeing evidence of their purchases and browsing follow them around Google, Facebook, and elsewhere. Take that at your own risk, since the average consumer may not be aware of how retargeting works and may not take the necessary steps to preserve the surprise.
Consumers are bombarded with contact from all forms of various companies across all channels they interact with. Your goal with using multiple channels is not necessarily the volume of content but rather the consistency of message and experience across mediums, along with knowing how your customers PREFER to be contacted.
Different channels have different strengths. Though I'm not covering it here, this is a great writeup of the advantages of SMS marketing as a channel.
Some customer bases are really responsive to SMS or Facebook Ads or Messenger. Some customers don’t use Facebook and hate getting bothered in a text instant message fashion.
As the basis of a Persona analysis, look at your list of top 1-5% of customers, talk with some of them. Ask how they prefer communication. Figure out the 20% of communication channels that will lead to 80% of your results and prioritize those channels first.
If you want to do a cool Facebook retargeting campaign but your ideal, best customers don’t use Facebook and prefer they come to you on support chat/emails, then deprioritize the Facebook component and focus your chat/support system around helping new customers.
I've commonly seen that email marketing also be overdone, with 9+ long email series that aren't tied to any specific product purchase where the content could be consolidated to much fewer emails. (I've also commonly seen these brands simultaneously sending out weekly sales promotion emails to new customers who just bought from them: my strong suggestion is to filter all new customers out of regular Newsletter lists for their first 30-45 days of onboarding so that all content is focused around them getting the most out of their first purchase.)
For a first purchase, 4-5 follow up emails should be more than enough to be helpful, friendly, available, and top-of-mind during that customer's onboarding. Any other outbound mediums you choose (ad retargeting, phone calls, direct mail, SMS, etc) should not try to copy-paste the same content across every medium but figure out a seamless way for them to work together.
Create a cohesive brand message that still works if a customer sees all, none, or some of your communication by putting yourself in their shoes:
This is hard work to do well, and part of the reason that multi-channel campaigns are rarely tackled.
But because repeat purchase rates are less than 50%, welcoming new customers is the best possible lifecycle stage to utilize multiple channels to be helpful to your new buyers.
The goal of this article was to help implement a New Customer welcoming strategy that will apply perfectly to the majority of your customer base, regardless of what they purchase.
Obviously though there will likely be key-indicators within your customer data of new customer types you need to pay special attention to, and using Unific's Contact Properties you can create other segments for more targeted welcoming.
Whenever you explore this though, make sure to apply the 80/20 principle. What are the 20% of new customer types that lead to 80% of long term revenues or create the most issues that require special attention?
This will take some analysis and understanding of your data but here's the two most common segment types I've seen over the years:
Frankly, these are harder to implement but I’d be amiss to not talk about them:
Taking a wholistic, multi-channel approach to New Customer Welcoming gives your business the best possible chance of growing repeat orders. Doing so will also create good word of mouth for future new buyers to build that flywheel of happy customers that creates momentum for your overall growth.
If you prioritize the channels that are most important to your customers as you tackle this critical lifecycle stage, you can make a measurable impact on your company's growth for the future.
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