Mr. Finch, a young entrepreneur in New York City, decides to sell beauty products online. First thing he does is sign up for an e-commerce shopping cart software called BigCommerce. He hires a designer to get his shop looking slick. He uploads a few products, images, descriptions and in less than a week he’s ready to start selling his wonderfully organic chemical-free beauty products.

He hires a ghost writer and a social media marketing agency to help him drive traffic and spread the word through online channels. WordWatch is helping him automatically manage his Adwords campaigns for better ROI. He also sets up a referral program using Buzz Referrals and Curebit so his customers can tell their friends about his e-commerce store. To measure social media ROI, he adds AddShoppers‘ social analytics platform. For a few landing pages, he sets up Visual Website Optimizer to make sure the message, imagery, and offer are the most effective ones.

He does not want to think much about which products to remove and which ones to add, so he installs Yotpo and Grapevine Reviews to understand how much people like each one of his products. These also helps his site visitors view ratings and make better product purchase decisions.

With so many orders and customers, now he has a customer management problem. First, he sets up TeamSupport for a powerful yet simple way to support his customers. To manage the relationship, Mr. Finch automates marketing using Mineful. With it, he can trigger emails offers based on purchase history, detect when there are changes in purchase patterns and request post-purchase feedback to ensure everything is running smoothly. With Mineful’s shopping cart analytics, he can also see sales and purchase trends and receive alerts when something needs his attention. For those shoppers that visited the site, but abandoned the shopping cart, he resolves to the Abandon Cart plug-in to automatically remind them of their abandoned cart.

Suddenly, shipping is becoming a bit of work so he decides to implement Ordoro to manage inventory and packaging labels across sites. Aftership informs his customers where their shipment is through email and SMS so he doesn’t have to answer questions to customers as to where their shipments are.

Tax season is approaching after a successful year, but thanks to a the Peachtree plug-in, all he does is export his data and send it to his accountant.

Mr. Finch’s e-commerce store is growing fast and thanks to all the affordable technology available to him, he can spend most of his time sipping Piña Coladas in the sunny beaches of Puerto Rico.

BigCommerce customers can drive repeat purchases and better target shoppers with the newest BigCommerce app, Mineful. Mineful uses analytics and email triggers to bring users back to your online store using smart, data-driven and respectful campaigns. Mineful expands email, analytics and marketing functionalities not previously available to BigCommerce stores.

Mass marketing is dead. Event-driven and data-driven marketing not only provide greater results but it is a more respectful way to market to shoppers. Technology nowadays can help a company control the frequency, content, and offers that a shopper receives based on their historical behavior. Unfortunately, that technology is only available to bigger organizations. “Mineful’s goal is to level the marketing playing field with the likes of Target” says Jaime Brugueras, Ph.D. CEO of Mineful.

Using Mineful’s powerful and analytical email trigger app to segment and target more efficiently, BigCommerce clients can get more repeat sales from their current customers. Email someone too often or with irrelevant offer and they’ll quickly unsubscribe. By timing campaigns intelligently and using each shopper’s past behavior, one can create a system that markets your product automatically. It is a like a sales force working for you 24/7.

The integration seamlessly sends customer, product, and sales data into Mineful. The software then quickly displays a retail customer dashboard with metrics and trends regarding purchase behavior. Users then can configure rules to start triggering emails. Finally, Mineful makes it very easy to vary content, A|B test, and measure all the interaction to optimize each marketing campaign.

For more information visit Mineful’s product page or visit BigCommerce.com.

Our friends at Software Advice have put together an article on their marketing automation software website that’s a must read. The article is titled Marketing Analytics vs. Website Analytics and it was written by Hubspot’s product manager Meghan Keaney. Mainly the article touches on how these two data sources are better used when put together. Their discussion focuses on measuring the ROI of your marketing initiatives in order to answer questions like:

• Are my readers becoming customers?
• How many people clicked on an email marketing campaign and bought something?
• Which results in more leads, social media, PPC, or organic search?
• What’s the ROI on each of my ad campaigns

It is a very interesting and must-read for every one in e-commerce. Check it out here.

Only two days after our previous integration partner, today we are excited to announce the release of our seamless integration with Volusion to provide customer analytics and email automation to all Volusion users.

Mineful helps online retailers increase customer retention by using purchase history to drive highly targeted emails. The integration is quick and only takes a few minutes to set up. Once set up, your shopping cart data is downloaded every day and your reports and email automation rules updated automatically.

Key Benefits of Email Automation for Volusion

Increased Revenue – When you combine e-commerce, customer, and email response data you send more targeted emails and offers that lead to higher conversions rates and engagement.

Cost Efficiency – Get access to powerful analytics and email automation platform for the price of other more simplistic email marketing tools.

KEY FEATURES

Shopping cart integration – Seamlessly use data in your shopping cart to drive email marketing campaigns.

Customer analytics & reporting – Quick access to metrics trended over time. Metrics include: average number of purchases, revenue per customer, customer lifetime value, and many more.

A|B Testing – Easily create variations of email message to understand which offers, subject lines, and images work best for each type of campaign and customer segment.

Segmentation – Target buyers and personalize content based on preferences, behaviors and purchase-related data.

Automation – Create rules to trigger email messages and Mineful does the rest.

Email campaign metrics – Track emails sent, click through rates, and conversion rates for each of your email templates.

We are pleased to announce the release of our latest shopping cart analytics and email automation platform, Mineful for Magento and Magento Go.

Mineful helps online retailers increase customer retention and repeat sales by using buyer behaviors, preferences, and purchase history to drive highly targeted emails. The integration is seamless and only takes a few minutes to set up. Once set up, your shopping cart data is downloaded every day and your reports and email automation rules updated automatically.

Key Benefits of Email Automation for Magento

Increased Revenue – When you combine e-commerce, customer, and email response data you send more targeted emails and offers that lead to higher conversions rates and engagement.

Cost Efficiency – Get access to powerful analytics and email automation platform for the price of other more simplistic email marketing tools.

Time Savings – Automate email marketing campaigns based on recency, frequency, purchase pattern changes and even feedback. This allows you to send targeted offers at the right time without pushing any buttons. Purchase and customer metrics are trended over time and updated automatically so there is no need to clean, tabulate, and report on the data.

KEY FEATURES

Shopping cart integration – Seamlessly use data in your shopping cart to drive email marketing campaigns.

Shopping cart reporting & analytics – Quickly after your integration, you’ll have access to metrics trended over time. Metrics include: average number of purchases, revenue per customer, customer lifetime value, and many more.

A|B Testing – Easily create variations of email message to understand which offers, subject lines, and images work best for each type of campaign and customer segment.

Segmentation – Target buyers and personalize content based on preferences, behaviors and purchase-related data.

Automation – Create rules to trigger email messages and Mineful does the rest.

Email campaign metrics – Track emails sent, click through rates, and conversion rates for each of your email templates.

Data is an asset to any business. Many times, getting the information you need becomes a cost because of the difficulties of exporting, cleansing, analyzing and presenting the information. That’s why we’ve created a new introduction page into our portal. After you integrate your shopping cart, quickly you’ll access a few purchase and email campaign metrics updated in real-time, making it easy for e-commerce businesses to stay on top of e-commerce shopping cart metrics.

Shopping cart and email campaign metrics

Every time you log into Mineful, now you will have access to high-level customer, purchase and email campaign metrics. The tool also provides a more detailed e-commerce dashboard, but in this post I will only talk about the metrics on our “home” page.

Customer Segments

The first thing that catches my attention is a pie chart that segments your customers into three: New, Engaged, and Inactive. Every e-commerce business cycle is different which is why we’ve designed this segmentation process dynamically. The definitions are:

New customers – Those customers that were first entered into the system within your data’s average purchase frequency. So if your average purchase frequency is 60 days, new customers are those that made their first purchase in the last 60 days.

Inactive customers – We look, as in new customers, at the average purchase frequency from all your customers. If a customer is on the bottom 20th percentile in terms of average frequency, then they are considered inactive.

Engaged customers – Basically the rest, those that are neither New or Inactive.

Shopping Cart Metrics

These charts represent purchase metrics in trailing yearly periods. So if today is March 1, 2012 Current period is 3/1/2011 to 3/1/2012 and Previous period is 3/1/2010 to 2/28/2011.

Revenue per Customer – This chart displays the average revenue per customers in the last 365 days (Current) and 365 days before that (Previous).
Average # of purchases – This chart displays the average number of transactions in the last 365 days (Current) and 365 days before that (Previous).

Email Campaigns Metrics

Three metrics are displayed regarding the emails sent through Mineful.

Emails Sent – The total number of emails sent through the system.
Click Through – The number of unique emails that were clicked on one or more links in your e-mail expressed as a percentage of total emails sent.
Conversion Rate – The number of unique individuals who purchased after a click through expressed as a percentage of emails sent.

I’m curious to find out what other high-level metrics would you, as a e-commerce business owner or manager, like to access or find most beneficial. Please list some of them on the comments section.

Trigger-based email campaigns can help an online retailer increase clickthrough rates and sales. It also saves significant time since rules are set to automatically trigger emails based on events a customer takes with the brand.

There are various types of triggers, some more successful than others. In this post, we explain a few best practices to follow when an online retailer decides it is time to implement trigger email marketing campaigns.

What is trigger-based email marketing?

A triggered email is a message sent based on an event or purchase behavior done by a customer. Trigger based emails are used to deliver targeted content at the right time, rather than sending the same offers and messages to all clients. It has been shown that triggered emails are twice as more successful than regular emails based on ROI and clickthrough rates.

Types of Triggered Emails

Not too long ago we wrote a few examples of rules-based triggers and last year Practical Commerce published a nice post giving 6 examples of triggered emails. Essentially you have five categories of automatic emails. We have also expanded this list a bit more on this popular post of Rules that Matter Most in Customer Retention.

The simple/automatic emails – These include your welcome emails, purchase confirmation, and shipping updates. A clear event happens like a purchase or a sign up and your system quickly sends out the email.

Abandon shopping cart emails – A customer adds a few items to the cart but never purchases them. Simple and efficient technique. A few things to consider when implementing this type of solution is first to understand what is driving abandonment. Solve the problem, if there is one, rather than using this as a solution to fix it. If you will send an offer after shopping cart abandonment, make sure the customer has not purchased the items already. Finally, customers will catch on if you send them offers after abandonment and will greatly reduce your margins.

Order reminder emails – Order reminder emails is another powerful tool for retailers with replenishable products. If you are selling health/beauty, food/drug, apparel, office supplies or anything that needs reordering every x amount of time, remind your clients it is time to buy more. In our experience, it is one of the most successful tools for a marketer. Simply put, it sends an email with a product offer at the time when the shopper is “running out” of your product. It will depend on your product so find out on average how often each product is bought by customers and start your campaign a few weeks before and continue it a few weeks after (stop after purchase).

Customer attrition emails – When you have a customer that has not bought in a long time or suddenly has changed their buying pattern, these emails are intended to re-engage them with your brand. The first sign of churn is simple to find out since you can find out which customers haven’t bought in x number of months. The second type is a bit trickier because it involves pattern. Say a customer purchases once every quarter and it is almost the end of the quarter and they haven’t come to your site. You can remind them with good content and offers. For those customers you want to resuscitate, you need emails that take this unengaged segment and engages them again with your brand. They don’t have to be strong offers, it could just be a few useful emails to ‘get their feet’ wet again with your company.

Internet behavior emails – These are trigger emails after a shopper browses your site. When a logged in shopper browses your site and searches for products you don’t want to automatically send them an email. Give them time, make them feel that it is a coincidence that they’ve recently been on your site. Remind them about you and give them something useful, not an offer, something they can take home and remember you as the provider. They’ll know where to go after that.

Best Practices with Trigger Emails

To be successful at trigger based emails the number one rule is to set frequency limits. A recent study showed that the number one reason customers opt out is the frequency that the emails were being sent. Don’t spam them, send them relevant emails at the right time.

Your rules engine does not need to contain a thousand triggers. Set a few, ones you understand, and see which ones have the best results. Content is always king. I usually suggest my clients to have a set of emails that are not offer related but solely provide useful content to the readers. For example, if you are selling baby products, have a few trigger rules (after initial sign up) that sends them your best articles for say breastfeeding.

Finally, test, measure, and refine. Although there is much science here, creativity is key. Know which emails have highest clickthrough rates and which don’t. Find out which subject lines, content, and images have the most success. Use what works, dump what doesn’t, and continue creating.

Benefits of trigger based emails

Triggered emails will save you huge amounts of time. Once you have your most successful campaigns in place, you can set your rules and market to your customers without spending any time. Since you are targeting customers based on what and when they’ve purchased, your targeted emails will have significantly higher clickthrough rates. Higher clickthrough rates will give you higher sales. Now because these are existing customers, you are getting much more (hence increasing customer lifetime value) from each customer. This has a huge impact on your bottom line since acquiring a new customer costs 7x more than getting an extra purchase from an existing customer.

If you are interested in learning more about how Mineful can power your shopping cart with trigger email marketing campaign, contact our CEO at ceo(at)mineful.com.

Shopify is an e-commerce hosted platform that allows you to easily set up an online store. From custom templates to a secure and reliable online store, everything you need to run an online store is available on Shopify.

They recently made Fast Company’s 50 most innovative companies list in the retail category and are growing fast with more than 20,000 online stores today.

If you can’t find a functionality on the Shopify e-commerce platform, you will sure find it on the Shopify App Store. The app store provides an easy way for retailers to add functionality to their shopping cart to improve business and operations. You will find apps for shipping, marketing, customer service, inventory, reporting, social, and other business needs.

Now Shopify online retailers will be able to add Mineful as a Shopify app to send targeted emails based on customer behavior.

Timing is Everything
Consumers are bombarded with email offers. It is estimated that 15-20% of consumers opt out of email lists mainly due to email frequency. Retailers need to use email as way to engage consumers rather than a channel to send coupons. As any marketer knows, timing of the communication is key. Big retailers like Target understand this and use their own analytical tools to segment their customers and send the offers at the right time. Mineful provides smaller retailers with predictive analytics and segmentation tools that compare with those of the bigger companies.

Content is Still King
Once you know when is the best time to send an email campaign, content is what matters most. Most retailers do not have time to test whether subject line “30% off new t-shirts” or “free shipping on new t-shirts” is more successful. The difference can mean thousands of dollars. Varying the sentences, images, and products offered inside the email is a nightmare if not impossible for any retailer. Mineful allows you to easily create different variations of emails to A|B|C test all your communications.

Advanced Marketing Tools for the Small Retailer
Mineful is a powerful tool to segment customers and optimize your email marketing campaigns. It will sync your Shopify store data and help you leverage your own data to gain a competitive edge.

As with any Mineful account, it is free to try for 14-days. Once set up, Mineful goes on auto-pilot to trigger your campaigns and once it starts measuring responses, it adjusts to deliver the best message to each individual customer.

Quick Example of Email Segmentation
You’re sending an email 30-days after a purchase of a custom t-shirt. Which subject line is best?
A: “25% off your next order”
B: “Free shipping on custom t-shirts”

Mineful triggers these emails 30-days after every purchase of your custom t-shirt. By tracking which shoppers click on each email, our algorithm automatically adjusts to send the best email to each shopper based on their characteristics.

More Benefits for Online Retailers

• Measure, learn, and improve marketing efforts
• Repeat what works, dump what doesn’t; clear visibility of email marketing efforts
• No IT involvement needed; Mineful is in the cloud
• Easy to set up and use
• Analytical power to the small business
• Easily segment your customers based on purchase and customer information
• Mineful marketers and statisticians at your service

Mineful will continue to share best practices and training and educational materials with Shopify users of Mineful, to help them increase customer retention and repeat sales.

Analytics is a competitive advantage in online marketing. We are happy to partner with such an innovative company like Shopify and make Mineful available in the Shopify App Store.

While searching on the internet for a few facts and studies regarding customer retention, I found a list of studies with some interesting stats.

These relate to understanding why customers churn and the monetary benefits of retention. I found others studies specific to e-commerce and how reviews, site performance, and customer service all affect sales and retention. Here are just a few customer retention studies, I’d be interested to know if you find others and post it on the comments below.

1. A 5% increase in customer retention can increase profits by 25% to 125% – Bain & Company

2. On average, a company loses between 10% – 30% of its customers every year – McKinsey

3. The probability of selling to an existing customer is 60 – 70%. The probability of selling to a new prospect is 5-20% – Marketing Metrics

4. A 2% increase in customer retention has the same effect as decreasing costs by 10% – Leading on the Edge of Chaos, Emmet Murphy & Mark Murphy

5. It costs 6 – 7 times more to acquire a new customer than retain an existing one – Bain & Company

6. Customer profitability tends to increase over the life of a retained customer – Leading on the Edge of Chaos, Emmet Murphy & Mark Murphy

7. A dissatisfied customer will tell between 9-1 5people about their experience. Around 13% of dissatisfied customers tell more than 20people – White House Office of Consumer Affairs

8. 68% of customers leave because they think that you do not care about them – Rockefeller Corporation

9. eCommerce spending for new customers is on average $24.50, compared to $52.50 for repeat customers – McKinsey

10. 63% of executives are seeing higher churn rates – CMO Council and Satmetrix

A retailer’s best asset are its own customers. Large retailers know this and apply scientific reasoning to convince shoppers to buy from them again. They understand that it is hard to change shoppers’ habits but with the right timing, product offer, and discount they can win shoppers’ loyalty.

Most online shoppers are used to searching for a product, compare prices, and purchase. Although many online retailers can replenish beauty, health, clothing, and office supplies, very few can convert the majority of their buyers to purchase more than once.

It is tough to convince a shopper to buy using email marketing. Consumers’ shopping habits and the way they check email is ingrained in them. The amount of email we receive daily is astonishing, very few get our attention. It is therefore very difficult for any marketer to change what someone is doing and convince them it is time to shop.

As many marketers know, timing is everything. There are some brief periods of time when routines fall apart and a creative and enticing offer for a much needed product can be very successful. Any successful customer retention program to entice customers back into the store needs to understand timing and when the consumer is most vulnerable to purchase your product.

Large retailers like Amazon, Target, and Walmart are known for their analytical advantage. They collect vasts amount of data for each consumer and have teams of analysts predicting when that ideal time comes when the consumer is ready for their next purchase. Linked to each consumer if not only demographic information like gender, age, marital status, and salary but also purchase information (what type of soap they use, how often they purchase) and interests (political, religious, reading habits, and hobbies).

Scientists and even corporations for many years have been studying habits. Many say that habits work in three phases. First there is a trigger that starts the habit (like “You have new mail”). Secondly, you go through your habit of checking email as you always do. Finally, you may find one message that builds curiosity and provides some kind of pleasure or reward. Data analysts at many corporations (including myself at one point) are paid to find patterns in shopping data and exploit it.

In my experience, at first it started simple. Find out which products are purchased in consecutive order, how long it takes to buy product B after product A is purchase and then provide a list of people who have bought product A so we can market them product B. Other things I worked on was studying coupon redemption by customer segments. If we found out that seniors responded well to this buy one get one free offer, then we looked for all zip codes with high percentage of seniors in them (we even found a nursing home that had its own zip code). By the end of my consulting career, we were predicting with 80% accuracy which customers were likely to disconnect a service and what promotions had the highest success by segment.

Many times retailers do not know what works and what doesn’t. The first figure out the who. Then they will send dozens of variations and understand what sticks and what fails. This process sometimes takes time and creativity to really understand what drives the shopper to click or respond. If you over do it, you will be annoying and disengage the consumer. But when done at the right time (“Aha a coupon for something I’m running out of”), the benefits go beyond that one click. Now that shopper is on your site or store and there you have other ways to entice that shopper to get other things they need.

The art of customer retention is in prediction. Prediction comes when you can send coupons or even content for things you want before you even know you want them. That’s the secret behind consumer habits: timing, prediction, and