Over the past few years, we’ve witnessed unprecedented growth in the e-commerce sector. In 2020 alone, consumer spending online grew by nearly 44%, representing 21% of all retail spending, with further growth being seen in Q1 of 2021.
Helping to bolster this growth, Shopify has grown exponentially, and it’s presented an incredible opportunity for e-commerce brands to build a better customer experience. At Iterable, we know how crucial it is to provide a hyper-personalized experience for customers, and the necessity to ensure customer communications are aligned. Incorporating Shopify data into Iterable ensures alignment and provides a way to provide the personalized e-commerce experience you’re striving for and your customers expect.
While we’ve had an integration with Shopify since 2019, we’re excited to announce that Iterable has taken another step to support our customers within this evolving space by launching our new app within the Shopify App Store Ecosystem. This important step strengthens our longstanding relationship with Shopify while giving customers access to a powerful partnership to take their businesses to the next level.
Why It’s Important to Build Up Your Tech Stack
The importance of bolstering your tech stack is two-fold. The first involves a shift that’s been taking place for a while now, and refers to what industry experts call the “Now Economy,” consumers’ attention spans are shortening and their expectations of brands are growing. Businesses are expected to cater to their customers’ needs at a moment’s notice—wherever they are, whenever they want. It’s not enough to set up your online store and wait for the transactions to roll in. This evolution has shifted how people live, shop, and communicate:
- Traditional news outlets and social media deliver breaking news 24/7
- A ride to the airport is just a quick Uber or Lyft request away
- Meal delivery services like DoorDash can send a freshly-cooked dinner right to your door
- Streaming platforms like Spotify and Netflix offer millions of songs and movies at the touch of a button
The second industry shift is more recent, or at least in its dramatic nature, which is an aggressive shift to e-commerce spending. As noted earlier, in 2020 alone, consumer spending online grew by nearly 44%, representing 21% of all retail spending, with further growth being seen in Q1 of 2021. We don’t foresee this slowing down anytime soon, and instead expect this growth to aggressively continue which is going to put further pressure on your tech stack.
To create recurring revenue for your brand, you need a sophisticated marketing platform like Iterable that can segment your audiences, personalize your communications, and act on behavioral data to maximize engagement and revenue.
And, to ensure our customers’ success within this evolving retail climate, we feel it is integral to work towards solidifying strategic partnerships with world class providers such as Shopify.
How Does Shopify + Iterable Power Your E-commerce?
Iterable’s robust, native app with Shopify allows you to:
- Power marketing and transactional e-commerce messaging across channels including email, push, SMS, and in-app
- Access full historical purchase data for improved segmentation and better/more precise targeting
- Personalize your messages with Shopify customer, order, and product data
By harnessing behavioral data stored in Shopify, marketers can build targeted and hyper-personalized campaigns in Iterable like:
Welcome Series
Set up a welcome flow in Iterable that automatically starts when a new customer creates an account, signs up for a newsletter, or shares a product with a friend. Activating newly-acquired users is one of the highest ROI activities you can focus on with Iterable.
Iterable customers can set up a workflow that listens for an account creation event from their Shopify powered website. Once received, the Iterable workflow will automatically message the user (on their channel of choice) welcoming them to the platform and encouraging them to complete important actions like finishing their profile, adding their credit card, and selecting their specific interests, which ultimately convert a newly-acquired user to an activated user.
Re-Engagement Campaigns
Many online merchants have a portion of their user base that has gone dormant. Iterable makes it easy for customers to segment their user base into audiences based on profile and event data, then identify segments with opportunities to restart the conversation and automatically re-engage with them in a meaningful way. It’s often much more cost-effective to re-engage existing users than acquiring new ones.
There are two common re-engagement campaigns: browse abandonment and cart abandonment. Both look at customer data to incentivize a re-engagement based on what the user has browsed or left in their cart. And both campaigns can be cross-channel to incorporate mobile behavior as well.
In the screenshot below, you can see an example of how an Iterable customer using Shopify would leverage our Workflow Studio to automatically re-engage a customer that abandons an item in their shopping cart. The flow begins with Iterable receiving a cart abandonment event from Shopify. Iterable then confirms a purchase has not been made by querying internal Iterable data.
Iterable then segments the user’s engagement path based on their existing subscription status, eventually driving the user to return to the shopping cart and ultimately complete their purchase.
An abandon cart campaign is crucial to maintaining engagement.
Here’s a quick rundown of this workflow in action:
- We’re triggering this workflow on a customer adding something to their cart, at which point we put them into a 30 minute delay.
- After 30 minutes, we want to see whether or not they went ahead and ordered.
- If they didn’t, we then split on whether or not they’re an Active Subscription (currently have a subscription with our company).
- If they are, we trigger them into another workflow to Active Subscription Hardware Upsell (in this example, an upsell to drive a hardware purchase)
◦ If they aren’t, then they continue on our workflow and receive an abandoned cart email with our Send Time Optimization within 24 hours
- If they are, we trigger them into another workflow to Active Subscription Hardware Upsell (in this example, an upsell to drive a hardware purchase)
- After that email sends, we add them to a one-day delay
- Once the delay’s over, we filter again to see if they made a purchase.
- If they did, then they exit the flow as we’ve successfully driven a purchase!
- If they didn’t, then we perform an A/B test, sending half the customers an SMS and the other half a second email.
This example is only the start! You could continue this Workflow in so many ways, including checking for mobile app usage and perhaps trying in-app and push notifications within your workflow.
Check it Out!
As brands look to strengthen their online presence, we couldn’t be more excited to support this growth by continuing to strengthen our relationship with partners such as Shopify.
Make sure to check out our new app and to learn more about how brands are leveraging Iterable + Shopify to develop better customer experiences, sign up for a custom demo today.
