Punchmark is always discussing ways to take our clients to the next level. A lot of our conversations involve goal-based digital marketing strategies. For our jewelry retailers who have their digital marketing running in full swing though, the next step is marketing automation. Marketing automation allows a small business to act as if they have a larger marketing team by automating some of the key communication points based on customer interactions.
Imagine if your jewelry store was able to place a score on interactions customers make, and have a different communication plan based on those different interactions. What if, when a customer adds an item to your website's wishlist, they receive an email with follow up information. Taking it even further, if that item had a retail price of over $2,500, place the customer in a queue to be called personally rather than emailed.
How it's done
There are a few marketing automation tools that are widely used by jewelry stores, followed by a few more obscure ones that perform very specific tasks. The ones we at Punchmark see the most are Hubspot, Klaviyo, Pardot, and Marketo. Each of these has their own benefits, but they all perform the basic tasks needed to automate your marketing.
Workflows
Workflows allow you to capture interactions that customers make, and perform automated tasks based on those actions. You could create a workflow that targets a user buying an engagement ring, or a user subscribing to your newsletter, and then send a sequence of emails to that user in an attempt to get them into the store.
Events
Events are customer actions -- from the purchase or newsletter subscription mentioned above, to more specific events like reading a blog post, or performing a search on your site. You create workflows based on these events, and then perform a task based on them.
Tasks
Tasks are where the real work is done. Workflows catch events and call upon tasks to perform the next step. A task can be sending an email to the customer, creating an email sequence timed over the next few months, updating a customer profile record, nudging an employee to reach out to someone, or even calling an API.
Email Sequences
One of the most powerful tasks is the creation of an email sequence. Email sequences are sets of emails that lead a customer toward a particular action via a few different approaches over time. Email sequences are best defined by example and here are a few:
When a customer makes a purchase for the first time online, an appropriate email sequence would be a "Thank You" email, a "Special Offer Coupon" email, then an email engaging them to sign up for your store credit card. These emails can be spanned out over a two month period so they're not too frequent for the user.
When a big engagement ring purchase is made, it's often looked at as the conclusion of a campaign. Instead it can be the start of a great relationship and future buying opportunities. An example email sequence could be: "Thank you! Come in to get your free cleaning". Then after 6 months: "You're due for a prong check." And finally, after 12 months, "Your warranty is expiring. Let's talk." The goal would be to remind the customer of the relationship they have with the store, and to get them in the store!
Events can even include a customer reading a blog post on your jewelry store's website, if that customer is recognized by the marketing automation software. Let's say a customer reads an engagement ring buying guide on the website's blog. The email sequence could be: "More about how to buy an engagement ring", "Engagement Ring Specials", and finally, "Let's Set Up an Appointment". The workflow from content read to email sequence has amazing results for turning customers in the research phase to customers in the buying phase -- this is one of the most profitable parts of the buying funnel.
Benefits of Marketing Automation
Marketing Automation comes with a cost in both dollars and hours of setup. For a jewelry store who is looking to get every drop of opportunity out of their marketing however, there are a lot of reasons to carry out the setup of automation.
The first benefit to marketing automation is constant touch points with customers. The jewelry industry is unique in that keeping constant communication with your customers reminds them of their relationship with you. Communications with your customers can spur up some questions they've had on the back of their mind but haven't had an opportunity to ask, or a gift idea for an upcoming event.
The second benefit is what we call, "not dropping the ball". Marketing automation allows you to keep track of all opportunities, and send communications where appropriate. Most small businesses don't have enough sales people that they can dedicate enough time to emailing their customers after every interaction with the website or within the store. This is how marketing automation allows you to optimize your marketing to the fullest.
The third benefit is the obvious, and is the reason behind all of this: increased sales. All of these added customer communications need to result in more sales for this to make sense, and in every case we've seen, they do!
As stated above, the coolest benefit is the fact that your store can perform like a heavy-hitting marketing team. It can typically all be done for the cost of less than half of one person's entry-level salary.
What's The Next Step?
Punchmark strives to make it easy for our jewelry stores to set up marketing automation. We have already performed successful integrations with Hubspot, Klaviyo, and SalesForce/Pardot for clients, and with the new functionality in V6, it's even easier to integrate new ones. For someone looking to get started, we recommend having a free consultation with one of our customer success team members to see if marketing automation is something you're ready for.