Case Study – How to Convert Non-Shoppers in your Email list into Shoppers?

When you market your brand online, you start acquiring customer emails. This email list can be a few dozens of subscribers, to a few hundred or even a few thousands. Many of these subscribers are customers who placed an order but the vast majority are the interested shoppers who gave their email to receive updates but never placed an order. Let’s call them the skeptical shoppers. 

Many brands don’t know what to do with this dormant list of skeptical shoppers. You can’t just remove them from your email list because they were once interested in buying, and you’re hoping that they will buy one day.  But the truth is that it won’t happen automatically. Every brand has to proactively come up with creative marketing campaigns to convert the non-shoppers in shoppers. 

In this case study, we’re sharing one of such campaign ideas we used to convert inactive, non-shoppers in our client’s email list into shoppers using a simple survey email and automation. 

Overview:

This is actually a live case study of the email marketing work we did for a Fashion technology brand that sells health bands to help their customers track their body health, movements and sleep. We’re happy to share our learnings and the overall strategy with the ILFR blog readers. 

Problem:
The brand had more than 45,000 subscribers in their email list and they wanted to convert the inactive, non-buyers from the email list into paying customers. 

Tool:
We used ActiveCampaign to create an automation flow. You can create this Automation for your brand using other solutions such as: Drip, Iterable, etc.

Solution:
We used Active Campaign to set-up automated funnels to engage with the non-buyers in the email list of 45,000 email subscribers. 

Strategy:

Step 1:
We first sent a promotional email in which we asked the subscriber the reason why they didn’t place the first order. Nothing fancy – we kept the email basic. We asked a simple question: Why have you not placed an order yet, and we gave them 4 options to choose from. Each option was a purchase objection that linked to a thank you page on their online store. We sent the survey email to the non-buying segment of the email list, and customers clicked on the link which best represented their reason not to buy, and thus adding them to an automated workflow of emails. 

The first survey email sent out to non-purchasing subscribers in the email list

Step 2:
We set-up an automation sequence using tags in ActiveCampaign to fire more emails with information to overcome the customer’s objection and gently push into placing their first order. For example, if a customer clicked on the first option, that the product is too expensive, they would receive:

• An email explaining why it’s the best investment they can make
• Another email stating success stories of customers using health trackers
• And finally, if they still didn’t buy they receive 3rd and final email with a 20% discount coupon.

Here is how the login in Active Campaign workflow looked like:

Results:

The campaign within the first week converted more than 15% of the non-shoppers into shoppers by helping them overcome their objections and offering them the motivation to buy. 

As we said, this is just one campaign example of how you can engage with the inactive shoppers in your email list. You can take it to the next level by clubbing the emails with timely SMS messages, push notifications and re-targeting ads on social media and generate a better conversion rate.