#170. Boost Your Holiday Sales: Mastering the Bounce Back Flow | Podcast

Vira: 0:41

Hi everyone, and welcome back to Email Einstein, the podcast by Flowium. I’m your host, Vira Sadlak, and I’m happy to bring you back to the magical world of ecommerce email marketing. You guys, I know that you have been crazy busy with preparation for Black Friday, Cyber Monday. Well, at least you should be because it’s only like, what, a month away? It’s crazy to think that it’s like so close. But also, I know that we’ve been crazy busy with like preparing all these little like flows and automations for all of our clients. It’s been, it’s been crazy week, um, to say the least. But today I want to actually share one short but very actionable strategy with you. It’s like literally one email long, 2 emails long max, that you will be able to implement and generate that like extra revenue during the holiday season. So today we will be talking about what happened for customers who have placed an order and how to retain those holiday shoppers with post-purchase bounce-back flow. Something that a lot of brands don’t realize, you guys, is that actually the LTV, the lifetime value of holiday shoppers is very different from like lifetime value of those like non-holiday shoppers. And it turned out that LTV you can expect to generate from customers acquired the holiday season is significantly lower than non-holiday. And this is made probably even more frustrating with the knowledge that the margins for your like holiday shoppers is further crunched thanks to the discounts that you’re offering during the holiday seasons, right? That’s why, like, considering the acquisition cost and the cost of your discount codes, your low margins, it’s like extra important to basically bring those people back after they have placed their first order. And the good news is a well-executed bounce-back strategy will help you to drive those people back to your website and to make them purchase even more from you. So what is a bounce-back? Well, this bounce-back craziness It was invented probably by brick-and-mortar stores. I remember when we were like shopping in malls as teenagers and Gap was like notorious for their bounce-back purchases. Every time you go to a store like, again, Gap, when you like purchase something, they would give you this little card at the checkout saying like, if you come back within the next X days, within the next 30 days, we’re going to give you $10 off your next order. And you know what? It worked every freaking time because when I was like comparing whether I should go to Old Navy or whether I should go to Gap, I would always choose Gap because I had that like little incentive, right? And basically the bounce-back flow is like the, the same thing but for your online store. So customer acquisition is high. We kind of like agreed on that, especially during the holiday season. So if you automate that process of like repurchasing, definitely, definitely do that. So what is the bounce-back offer sequence? Let’s— I’m gonna give you an example of bounce-back offer sequence. Basically, this is a sequence of email or emails that should be sent to everybody who buys during the Black Friday Cyber Monday period. I’m saying like everybody, but depending again on your like goals and on your margins, you can target like certain group of people people with this offer. Say you can only send this offer to people who are your one-time buyers and they are not your return customers. Or you can only target people who have spent certain amount of money. Or you can create different offers for different people. And that’s something that I will be doing with my clients anyways. So basically, after your customer purchases a product during your Black Friday Cyber Monday promo period, say your Black Friday Cyber Monday offer was 20% off sitewide discount. The post-purchase email that the customer will receive, since they will be added to a bounce-back automation, it will deliver to them another personalized deal. The discount code on that deal can be even higher than what they previously used. So here is sort of like the sequence that I’m using for one of my clients. So this client of mine, they sell cosmetic products and say they have a group of hair products and they have a group of like different serums and like mascaras and stuff like that. So for customers who during that holiday season will purchase the product from like mascara/serums collection, we will promote them the products from hair collection and vice versa. And then we’ll have a third group of products that will go to people, third group of promotions that will go to people who haven’t purchased like neither of those products or who purchase both. So the idea here is that you will basically give a limited time offer that is even higher than your holiday discount. And the text of the email can be Hey Mr. or Mrs. Klein, thank you for buying XYZ products during this holiday season and using our 20% off discount. We currently run another secret promotion with a higher discount code for those who have already purchased the product. Get 30% off towards another purchase at our store for the next 48 hours. Now, there are a few things happening here. First of all, you are telling them what just happened and thanking them for their purchase. Amazing. You don’t want your customer to feel neglected after they have placed their first order. You don’t want them to feel any purchasing remorse. And that’s definitely something that happens within that 24 hours of purchasing. The second thing that is happening, you are making this offer exclusively to them and not to the public, right? So they kind of feel special. They feel like they are being treated nicely. And third, you are receiving like a greater financial incentive as well, and so are they. This flow is great for different reasons, but also if you have some like slow inventory that you want to move around, this is a great way to like upsell those products. If you have some exclusive products that you want to sell, this is also an excellent product. And I know a lot of brands are doing this like holiday-themed products, so definitely push your holiday bundles if you have ones, um, or stuff like that. For one of my clients who is selling different supplements, we have this product called Wellness Bundle, and we will actually be promoting this Wellness Bundle in the post-purchase sequence because that Wellness Bundle consists of like different supplements that are like, uh, pretty much they are universally, uh, good for everyone. So like everyone needs vitamin C, vitamin D, and stuff like that. So how we sort of like frame this entire thing, we were saying like, this is the bundle that you can give as a gift to someone, or you can split it and just give it as stocking stuffers. You can be creative, you can put that little holiday magic on your email, but that’s a very, very good way to bring back those customers. A good bounce-back offer ideally is when you are offering only one product. I would, guys, I would stay away honestly from giving that sitewide discount again because first of all, you don’t want to give a higher sidewide discount to someone who just purchased, right? Your customer service representatives would be overwhelmed if you’ve done that. So don’t do that. But also, there is this such thing called paradox choice. So people are more likely to buy when presented with a simple yes or no decision. So you can send them an email saying like, hey, here’s the mascara with like 60% off, buy it or leave it. And don’t make your customer think. You don’t want to give them like gazillion of options to choose from because they will pick Neither. I know I’m like this. Every time I go to like a Whole Foods or something, I get overwhelmed with a number of like jams to purchase from or like to choose from. But every time I go to Costco, I like, I go out and like get my favorite strawberry jam or whatever. And I’m happy because I were given like only 2 options. Same thing here. So only one product. 2, make sure that item is always, always in stock. Remember that this bounce back flow, it will be automated. Remember that your bounce back offer has to deliver a discount code to something that is always in stock. The last thing you want to do is annoy your customers by offering something that is unavailable, right? Or something that is going out of stock. Third, consider a different product category than the product being purchased. For example, if someone purchased a pair of jeans, maybe you can upsell them a t-shirt to make a full look or something. This is just an idea, but just consider introducing your customers to a different group of products and consider educating them on those products as well. And also free gifts. Number 4, free gifts with purchase or buy one, get one offers also work amazing here. I’ve also seen simple, you might also like this product or that product as bounce backs that feature no monetary incentives at all. So you can go this route as well. But it’s always nice to get that like extra discount code, especially around the holidays, right? So yeah, here you have it, a very simple bounce back strategy. I’m sure you guys, you will be able to bring that extra revenue to your store just like by implementing this super simple, very straightforward strategy. So yeah, here you have it. Let me know what you think. Let me know if you have any questions about it. I know that like last year, those bounce back offers emails, they had crazy conversion for us. Honestly, like some of those emails, they had like 4% conversion. Conversion. And I say crazy conversion because this is basically like the offer that is being delivered right after you purchase something. So this is just some extra revenue that we wouldn’t have made otherwise. But by setting up that like little automation that consists of like few emails, we were able to do that. So how cool is this, right? Thank you so much. That’s basically like the strategy that I wanted to share with you today. Thank you for listening. Let me know what you think. Let me know if you plan to implement this strategy and if have any questions about it. And by the way, for those of you who might have questions, we have this amazing WhatsApp channel that is like— we just like literally just launched it. So join our WhatsApp challenge— challenge— join our WhatsApp channel if you have any questions to me or to our amazing Flowium team. We are hanging out there all the time, so we’d be happy to answer all of your questions. And if you have any guest suggestions or if you have any like any topics that you want us to discuss on the, on the podcast, let us know in that WhatsApp channel as well. Thank you so much, and we’ll talk to you next Tuesday.