Here’s how the eCommerce conversion stats have shaken out this year:
The average eCommerce conversion rate was just 1.71% as of July, 2019.
43.8% of website visitors viewed a product page.
14.5% of visitors added an item to their cart.
Now, you’re probably thinking that browse abandonment emails and abandoned cart emails address these issues, and that’s the best you can do.
Abandonment emails are the gold standard for reaching customers who didn’t convert. However, there’s another way to connect with the 98.29% of customers who haven’t made a purchase yet: price drop emails.
Website and checkout optimization address most of the reasons people opt out of a purchase. But, even with a perfectly optimized customer experience, price is still a massive purchase influencer. That’s why discounts work.
A price drop email is an email sent to customers who viewed a product, or added it to their cart, but didn’t buy. Price drop emails send when the price of a viewed item drops below a certain threshold. These emails tell customers that the product price has been reduced, and help remove financial barriers to making a purchase.
Price drop emails might seem extraneous, because browse abandonment and abandoned cart emails often include discounts to address price issues. But, you should still send price drop emails. Here’s why, and how to do it.
Price drop email benefits
First, price drop emails supplement your other email campaigns. If you setup your price drop email campaigns properly, they won’t be redundant. Your price drop emails simply give you an additional opportunity to contact customers who’ve expressed interest in your products.
Price drop emails also give you more opportunities to collect email addresses. Create an exit intent popup that triggers only on product pages and asks customers if they’d like to sign up to receive price drop alerts. Again, if you set this up properly, it won’t be redundant with your other popups.
Lastly, price drop emails are a great way to access a high-interest audience for sales and clearing out old stock.
Customers who visited product pages or added items to their cart have demonstrated high purchase intent. They’re your most profitable customer segment. Price drop emails give you one more way to entice them with lower prices.
So, price drop emails are a valuable tool. And, they can be entirely automated. It’s a low-effort way to generate sales lift.
How to automate your price drop emails
Automating your price drop emails requires the right email tools. You need to track behavioral data and trigger emails when the right conditions are met. So, there’s some software involved.
Here’s how it works:
- Track browsing behavior, wish lists, and abandoned carts on your website. If you’re already sending browse abandonment and cart abandonment emails (you should be), you’re already tracking the behaviors you need for price drop emails.
- Create customer segments based on these buying behaviors. Again, you’ll already have the segmentation in place if you’re sending other triggered emails.
- Implement a solution to track price changes in your product catalog. The tracking doesn’t need to be sophisticated. It just needs to send a price alert when price changes meet a predefined threshold (i.e. when a price drops 10% or more).
- Establish a price drop threshold for triggering price drop emails.
- When a price drops enough to trigger a price drop email, create an audience of customers who have expressed interest in that product. Typically, this audience will be people who have viewed or added the item to their cart without making a purchase within the last 30 days.
- Setup your email software to automatically send a price drop email to this audience when the price drop conditions are met.
Setting up triggered price drop emails is virtually impossible if your email software doesn’t integrate with your price monitoring system.
If your email software doesn’t offer an integration for your price tracker, you may want to consider switching your email software. It will make your email marketing much easier, more profitable, and enable you to send triggered price drop emails.
How to create the best price drop emails
Price drop emails are straightforward, and they should be simple. So, the best practices list is fairly short:
- Create and use email templates for your price drop emails. Without a price drop email template, you can’t automate the email creation and sending.
- Include specific product images, the original price, and the new, lower price. It reminds people of what they were interested in and shows them how much they’re saving if they buy it right away.
- Avoid sending price drop email alerts to customers who are already receiving a browse or cart abandonment series. Your other abandonment emails might include a discount, anyway. And, you don’t want to overcontact customers.
- Fortunately, it’s fairly rare that a price drop email will trigger a customer is in another abandonment email workflow. But, it’s best to put this rule in place to minimize unsubscribes.
- Use scarcity and urgency. If the price will only be reduced for a limited time, say so in your price drop email. If the price is reduced because it’s a clearance item, point out that the stock is low. These are reliable conversion increasing techniques. So, take the opportunity to use them.
That’s it. The emails themselves are easy to create. The main hurdle with price drop emails is getting the email trigger right. Clearing this hurdle is mostly a matter of using the right software.
You need a system that monitors the prices in your catalog in real-time. And, you need email software that integrates with this system to track buying behavior, build audiences, create emails, and send them based on data from your price tracker.
That’s how Rejoiner works. Our software integrates with any eCommerce platform. Then, Rejoiner pulls price data from your catalog, dynamically inserts images and prices into prebuilt email templates, and automatically sends triggered emails to the appropriate audiences. Rejoiner automates your entire price drop email campaign, and maximizes the profits from your discounted inventory.
Bottom line: if you’re not sending price drop emails, you’re missing out on easy sales and revenue. Add price drop emails to your email program and watch your email marketing ROI grow.
What to do now
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