When it comes to making effective eCommerce CRM campaigns, triggered campaigns (e.g., abandoned cart, browse abandonment, add-to-wish list, etc.) typically get the highest engagement and conversion levels of all messages sent.
That said, there are a few small but important tweaks that can greatly increase your SMS and push notification campaign engagement and effectiveness.
Here’s how to do it:
1. Identify the most impactful triggers for your messages and campaigns:
When setting up triggered campaigns, most eCommerce CRM teams tend to focus on the same small group of events: purchases, abandoned carts, add-to-wish list, etc., but from our experience, these events typically aren’t the most impactful ones.
To find the events that are truly the most impactful, we first run a propensity model to determine which events have the biggest influence on key outcomes.
For example, here’s a propensity chart of an eCommerce app’s top 20 and bottom 20 events influencing retention and churn:
- The far left column for each table shows the event name
- The columns to the right show a user’s maturity in the app (first day, first week, etc.)
- The percentages in the boxes show if a user does that particular event, what the odds are that they will still be using the app after a month.
If the percentage is high (dark blue box), a user doing the event has a high likelihood of still being on the app in a month. This event is a high indicator of user retention.
If the percentage is low (Dark red), a user doing the event has a high likelihood of not being on the app in a month. This event is a high indicator of churn.
Note: There are some events we can’t influence through messaging (e.g., notice that new users enjoy playing a game, but more mature users don’t tend to get as much value out of games), but this would be a great example of a simple product improvement (e.g. making this game only for new users) that could greatly improve user retention.
When we’re deciding what campaign to write, we want to focus on driving engagement towards events that generally correlate with retention and driving focus away from the events that tend to lead to churn.
Taking a look at the data, we can see several important patterns emerge. Perhaps one of the most impactful patterns is that a user who uses a gift card for their first purchase is an incredibly high churn risk (using a gift card has a more negligible impact on more mature users):
If you place an order with a gift card on your first day, there’s only a 27% chance that you’re ever coming back to the app.
Conversely, a user checking their loyalty savings is the highest indicator of retention for most users:
Therefore, we’re going to focus on building messages that capture users who have checked out with a gift card and try to get them connected into a loyalty program as quickly as possible.
2. Build your triggers:
The first thing we’re going to do is open Aampe and navigate to the trigger menu. (Note: if you haven’t imported your events into Aampe, it’s a very simple process via API. You can learn more about it here.)
By default, Aampe imports ALL of your events, so you don’t have to pick and choose which events you can use:
Now that we have our events selected, I’m going to set up a trigger for users who have made a gift card purchase but aren’t yet in the loyalty program (or at least haven’t been checking their loyalty balance):
3. Write your messages (adding your triggers):
First, we’ll go into the Aampe message editor (I picked a push notification, but we could also compose an SMS message, WhatsApp message, in-app notification, or a banner).
We’ll give it a title and attach our “Gift Card to Loyalty Program” trigger:
(Note: If I wanted, I could restrict this message to a particular audience, but this message could be applicable to all users.)
Here’s the message I wrote to help coax gift card users to sign into the loyalty program:
Note that I added multiple alternates to the base message (on the lower right) that appeal to different personas and motivations (e.g., “Our loyalty members get the first glimpse at the latest fall fashions” for buyers who resonate with “exclusivity” while “Get personalized recommendations with our loyalty program!” appeals to shoppers who want a more personalized experience).
I also added multiple different incentives to the message, including "200 bonus points," "150 bonus points," "100 bonus points," and "free shipping":
Here’s a preview of what the different message combinations look like (you can also add images and deep links to each message variant if you’d like):
(With Aampe, it’s easy to write thousands of messages in minutes. Here’s a quick video overview that shows how to do it.)
4. Hit “Start Sending,” and your messages are live!
…but where do I schedule my send times and journeys?
If you looked closely, you may have noticed that I didn’t set any specific send times or build any user journeys.
That’s another key advantage of Aampe — you dodge the dreaded orchestration problem.
Orchestration: A leading cause of user churn
CleverTap recently found that 28% of users uninstall apps because they report getting “too many ads and notifications,” and the cause of this is typically orchestration.
Take the use case we discussed: Making your first purchase with a gift card —
Users who have just made their first purchase with a gift card are also likely to qualify for a new user onboarding user journey and a post-purchase user journey…not to mention any abandoned cart, add-to-wishlist, or browse abandonment campaigns.
This means by using traditional user journeys and timing sequences, our user could potentially be getting SMS messages or push notifications from three or more different campaigns at the same (or very similar) time, which again is a major cause of user churn:
Also, we can’t discount the importance of sending messages at the *right* time. Messaging timing is often more complex than we give it credit, and we’ve actually found that message timing can even have a bigger impact on engagement than the actual content of the message.
Therefore, when you write campaigns in Aampe, our AI takes care of the message timing, sending the right message to each user at the time they’re most likely to engage while respecting individual user message limit preferences.
*Note: As part of Aampe’s message orchestration process, we also determine on which channel each user would like to receive their messages (So, you can load in messages on various channels — SMS, Push, WhatsApp, In-App, etc. — and we’ll ensure each user gets the best message at the best time on their most preferred channel.)
Of course, if you prefer, you can choose not to use Aampe’s message AI message scheduling and just send specific messages at specific times:
So, how do you increase the effectiveness of your triggered CRM campaigns?
Here are the steps:
- Make sure you’re focused on the right events and actions with the highest propensity to lead to your desired actions (retention, conversion, etc.).
- Write messages that effectively appeal to each individual user’s desires and motivations.
- Use Aampe’s AI to orchestrate your messages, ensuring each user gets the most applicable message for them individually and that they don’t get bombarded with multiple messages from multiple campaigns.
Want to see how it looks in action?
It's easier than you think:
If you have any questions or would like to see your most impactful events, please drop us a note at hello@aampe.com.
