 I'm here to introduce Lea Macaliz, who's been developing WordPress plugins for Recommerce in her past and now works at Good Addy. She's going to talk about nurturing your customers. So, a big applause for Lea. Hi, everyone. It's my first FortCam. So, it's really exciting to be here, a little bit nerve-wracking. So, I'm sorry if I'm becoming very red. It's just I don't breathe enough when I speak, so it will be a fun. Okay. So, I am here to talk about nurturing your customers and your leads. So, as I said briefly, I work for Good Addy. We work specifically on Recommerce. So, I'm not as familiar with WordPress. I'm really eager to hear any advice on WordPress, but I've worked for Recommerce for quite a bit of time now, and it's really a privilege to help merchants get more revenue and really grow their stores. That's what we do every day, which is really awesome. All right. So, today, what I'm going to talk to you about a little bit is, first, why you should nurture your customers and your leads and how that applies to a little bit more than e-commerce only. And then we'll go into three strategies to do that. So, the first one being product reviews, the second one being card abandonments, and the third being points and rewards. All right. So, let's jump into it. So, why should you nurture your customers and what should you nurture your leads? What should you care? So, even if you're not in e-commerce, you know what nurturing means. It really means engaging, really bringing, helping the person bring forward to the next step. It's really sort of touch points, right? So, for e-commerce specifically, nurturing leads and customers helps you get more sales. Obviously, as an e-commerce shop, that's what your goal is, is to get more revenue, bigger profits, right? So, to be able to turn a visitor on your store all the way into a brand advocate, which is where you're gonna make the most money, there are several steps, right? So, everyone starts as a visitor. Approximately 96% of people that visit your sites are not ready to buy today. So, that's really not good, right? Like most people that come to your site, they're not gonna make a purchase. And to bring someone from a visitor to a customer, it takes approximately 10 lead nurturing steps, which is a lot, right? And it can be different things. It can be like looking at your site. It can be engaging on social media, over email. It's really a bunch of different things. And then what we wanna do is to take someone from being just a customer to being a repeat customer, right? They come back for more purchases. And only approximately 20% of people will do that. So, that's just not a lot. But then to get to a brand advocate, that's really the goal, because they are worth so much more than their first purchase value, right? Approximately 10 times more. So, if someone spent 100 bucks the first time they came, if they become a loyal customer, if they become like a repeat customer, they can bring you all the way up to 1,000, which is really, really exciting. So, first strategy. So, I'm gonna cover three. There are many other ones. I'm sure there are some people that will cover others today. So, it will be great. There are a lot of e-commerce talks today, which is super exciting. So, I'm gonna go into product reviews. And we're gonna discuss a little bit how that helps someone make a purchase. So, everyone knows what a product review is, right? It's when you leave an opinion about a product that you've purchased, right? So, they really are the voice of the customers. They really are what sort of is the social proof that your products and services are worth buying. What you wanna do is you wanna enable them as soon as possible. Obviously, there are some built in for e-commerce, which is great. And the three key benefits of product reviews is really, as I just mentioned, social proof. But the two other ones are a little bit less obvious. The first one is that they allow you to build your brand. So, if you get a product review on your site and you respond to it, that is really a great opportunity for you to establish your brand voice, to establish a good relationship with your customers, and really take it to the next step. And they're also really good for SEO because they add a lot of relevant content to your pages. And so, obviously, that's great for ranking. So, approximately 92, that those are studies so the numbers can vary obviously across localizations and whatever, but an American study found that approximately 92% of visitors will hesitate to buy if there's no reviews. Again, that's a very high number. And so, that's really showing you that you wanna get reviews as soon as possible. So, I'm gonna go into starter tips and then we'll go into more like pro tips. So, as I mentioned, they're built in into WooCommerce so you don't even have to purchase anything additional. It's really great. However, as a bonus, if you want to automate the way you ask for reviews, you may wanna look into an email marketing tool, right? So, there are many out there, Clavio, Omnisand, many other ones actually. And so, you wanna look into that because that really allows you to just sit back and relax and have the sort of the platform send emails for you. One common question is how soon after the purchase should I ask for a review? So, that depends on what you're selling. If you're selling consumables, you may wanna ask one or two days after the purchase because people will probably eat your food, right? But if you're selling ski gear, you may wanna ask after the winter, right? Not in the middle of summer. So, it just really depends on what you're selling. In terms of the content, that's gonna be a bit of a repeat phrase for me that you're gonna hear today, but you wanna personalize the email as much as possible. You wanna make sure you use the customer name and you wanna make sure you use the products that they bought, right? Obviously, to remind them what they're gonna leave the review about. Another thing that's gonna come back again is you wanna have a single CTA, right? You don't wanna confuse them. You wanna have a single call to action and say, like, DC's where you should leave the review. And then the last thing is that a lot of people don't necessarily think about it, is that you wanna explain why the review is important to you. And so, that may be either because, like, okay, I'm a small business, a review can make a big difference for me, this just be great, or it could be like, oh, I'm looking to provide better services for you, so I would love to hear from you on how I can improve. And there are a lot of studies that show that if you ask and you give a reason for the favor, people are more willing to help you out. So, those are, you know, the starter tips. And again, as I said, like another stat that really shows you that reviews are so important as a sort of a lead, nurturing step, is that they can lead to an 18% increase in sales. And that's huge, you know, it's like, if you have a zero review, and then you get one review, and that's an 18% increase in your sales, that makes a big difference. So, some pro tips for the reviews. Obviously, it's probably everyone's nightmare to get a negative review. But what you wanna do to help avoid that a little bit is you wanna surface help. So, again, I mentioned you want a single CTA for the review. You want a single button in your email that says, here is how you leave a review. But you also wanna make sure that they know how to reach out to you for help. So, that could be like a post-crypt or something, but that says like, hey, if you run into an issue with a product, please let me know. That really helps alleviate the negative reviews. So, that's the first tip. The second is even though it hurts, even though it's really not fun, you wanna show the negative reviews on your site. And the reason is because we all know about fake reviews. If you go to a site and there's a thousand five-star review and then zero other reviews, it's probably bought is probably fake. Unless you're really, really lucky. But showing the negative reviews really helps build trust with the people that wanna buy from you. And then I mentioned that a little bit already, but you wanna respond to reviews. And that really helps you develop deeper relationships with your customers. That really helps you build the brand, being known for customer service, which is super important. So that's another pro tip that obviously can take a lot of time, but it's worth it. And then the last tip is a little bit controversial. So don't necessarily follow it depending on how you feel about it, but there are some businesses that offer a small incentive for leaving a review. You wanna be careful with that because obviously you don't wanna say, give me a good review and then I'll give you 50% off. That's illegal in some countries that obviously is not good to do, but there are some ways to position things like, small incentive like free shipping or 5% off or loyalty points which we'll cover later. But again, don't ever specify that it needs to be a good review, right? It obviously needs to be the truth. Okay, so those were really the tips for the product reviews. Those are tends to be a little bit more helpful in the, I guess the top of the funnel, right? Like when people are visitors, when people they haven't bought from you or they haven't bought from you frequently, that's where that lead nurturing step is more useful than if someone has already bought like a ton from you, they don't necessarily need reviews. So continuing down our funnel a little bit, we're gonna talk a little bit about cart abandonment, which is a topic that's really near and dear to my heart because I worked on the cart abandonment platform with Skyverge, the company I was at before we got acquired by GoDaddy. And it's fantastic, it helps a lot. It really grows your revenue. It's a fantastic way to get more money but also help customers finish their purchase journey. So I'm sure everyone is familiar with cart abandonment recovery but essentially what happens is when you browse a site, you add something to your cart and you just don't complete the checkout. I'm sure everyone has done that at least a few times. I'm definitely guilty of that. I think it's just because you browse on your phone and then you, I don't know, someone interrupts you or whatever and you don't ever finish. So you can see the stat approximately 70% of carts are abandoned, which is huge. It's really frustrating for stores to see people adding things to their carts and just never actually making the final purchase. So the cart recovery campaign is one of the tools that really helps you recover that revenue, get that revenue that you would have lost otherwise. So obviously the benefits include that but also it allows you to again create a positive and personalized touch point with a potential customer. The other thing that's also great is it's the same as product reviews. If you use an email marketing platform, you can set it up once and then never think about it again, which obviously is the dream of every entrepreneur is you make money in your sleep. It would be awesome. So it's a great way to actually just make money while you do nothing. So with the company I was at with Skyverge, we saw over a few thousand clients and several millions in revenue, we saw that people recovered on average 15 to 20% of carts, which again is huge. If you have 70% of your carts that are abandoned but you can recover 20% of those, it's a lot of money that you would otherwise just have lost. So again, start the tips and then we're going to pros. In this case, there is nothing built in into WooCommerce. You have to use an e-commerce email management tool. There are plugins, there are third parties, there are lots of solutions, so you may want to look into what works best for you in terms of pricing and what they support, but you have to go with a third party. In terms of setup, what we've seen work best is a three part campaign, meaning that you're going to send three emails. The first one being an hour after, the second being 24 hours after, and then the third being 48 hours after. The reasoning is when you're a customer that adds something to your cart, again, you might be in the middle of something. So if you are ready at home to make the purchase, an hour is going to be enough to remind you, but if you were out and about shopping downtown or doing something, 24 hours might be more effective for you. So the reason we have those three emails is really to help touch the customers at every point in their journey. As I mentioned, content is a little bit repetitive because I think that's just best practice for any communication is you want to personalize as much as you can, customer names and the content of their car is super important. Those email marketing platforms support that from the get go, so you don't have to do anything fancy, and you want to always include a single CTA. We've seen folks include several buttons, it just confuses people, so you want to include a single one, and again, the great thing about that is that it will regenerate the cart. So if people click on the example right now which says resume checkout, it will regenerate the cart and it's ready for them to make the purchase. So that's great, and usually it's built into those platforms. So with GILTS, that was the email marketing platform for Skyverge, what we saw is that of the carts that were recovered, the majority came from the first email. However, another further 40% came from the second and third. So again, it doesn't add up to 100%, I'm sure you can do math, the rest were from the fourth and fifth email, but again, that was so little that we don't recommend using that. But you can see that having a second or third email is really effective, it really brings a lot more than just having one. So some pro tips, the first one is a little bit repetitive to product reviews. You wanna again ask for if they need help, right? And the reason is because I don't have the exact statistics, but one of the top, I think, five or 10 reasons people actually abandon their cart is they run into an issue during checkout. So if the first touch point that you do with them is, hey, how can we help? It really can help actually get them through the purchase, maybe their cart had a problem or any other possibility. The second one is actually offering an incentive. In this case, it's more accepted than for product reviews because you're not actually buying them for anything. However, what we really suggest is actually doing it at the third email, not the first one. And the reason is you don't wanna devalue your brand. You wanna make sure that your brand is still perceived as nice and sort of expensive, but you don't wanna give them a 50% discount an hour after they lost the checkout, right? So if you do it in the third email and you give like a relatively small incentive, like maybe 20% off or free shipping or whatever, that can really help them complete the checkout. And then one thing about copy is you may wanna play with urgency or limited stock or we're saving your item for a certain number of time or obviously don't lie too much, right? Like if you don't have limited stock, maybe don't say that, but it is important to play with the urgency a little bit so that they can complete their purchase more quickly. And the last thing I will say here is that as every single email marketing strategy, capturing emails as soon as possible in the journey and segmenting emails based on the attributes of a customer really helps, right? If someone is based in a certain country or if someone adds a certain product to their cart, maybe you wanna tell them a different message than someone that does something else. And obviously you wanna capture their email as early as possible, otherwise you can't send them the email. And so there are different ways to do that. It needs to be early in the checkout process. There are some tools, not all, but some tools that when you click on add to cart, they let you enter your email address. So it really depends on what the tool actually supports. So the last part is points and rewards. That really is a way to create loyalty and brand advocacy. So what you wanna do is you wanna turn people into loyal advocates, right? So to do that is there are different ways but setting up a loyalty program is really effective. There are some studies from McKinsey that show a lot of revenues. I will go into that in a sec. But really the benefits of loyalty programs is that they drive additional purchases. We all know that rewards really work as a psychological reinforcement. That's a very basic psychological principle but it really builds trust and mutual benefit because they give you something but you give them something back. So loyalty programs are really effective. As I mentioned, McKinsey funds that offer the people that redeem their points. So not everyone that participated of the program offer the people that redeem their points. You can make more money from them like up to 15 to 25% per year which again is really big. So some tips. There are a lot of extensions and plugins out there. Feel free to choose whichever works for you. One of them is for example, WooCommerce Points and Rewards. But there are many of them. What you wanna do is you wanna make sure that you reward the customers for several actions, right? So not only for spending money but also for doing things like leaving a product review, it's full circle, sharing a photo, completing a profile or reaching a milestone like a birthday or a certain amount of money spent. One thing that's really important with content here is that it's very clear what they get and when. So if they get 100 points on their profile, what are they gonna get as a benefit? If they get 500 points, what are they gonna get? So that's very important to have this clarification either on your website or in an email. And so the last sort of slide before we wrap up with the key takeaways is really the pro tips, right? So you wanna get people excited about your program. So whenever they actually get points you may wanna explain to them, okay, like this is what you got, this is what you're gonna get in the future. Really try to hype it up. And one thing that is very important is to reward referrals because we know that people that are referred are way more likely to make a purchase than people that are not. So you can automatically reward referrals by points and whatever, using those points and reward programs. And then the last points that I'm gonna, that could be a whole talk, so it will be very quick, but you may wanna consider pairing it with memberships. So if you have membership set up on your site, members could get more points than non-members. It's sort of a virtual cycle to encourage memberships and to then encourage loyalty. So that could be something to consider. All right, so key takeaways, and then we'll go into questions. So as a visitor, you're not likely to purchase, so you wanna use product reviews. As a customer, let's get them actually finished completing their checkouts, so you wanna do cart recovery. To get a repeat customer, you wanna use loyalty programs because it really helps. And then to get, to a brand advocate, really reward referrals, really drive more sales through that. All right, so that's it for today. I think I am on time, but I really wanna thank you and yeah, I hope you learned something today. Thanks a lot, Claire. We got some time for questions. Thanks a lot for being on time, that was perfect. Do we have any questions? That was so clear. Yes, it was about marketing email laws about sending an email for recovering cart. You have to get the client approval. Yes. Yes, yes you do. The laws vary by countries, obviously, but with GDPR, yes, that's one that you need approval for. Yeah. In the states, if your clients are in the states, you don't necessarily need approval because it's considered as part of the sort of regular touch point with clients, but it's obviously preferred generally. For example, or if they're subscribers, you can also use their email, yeah. Hi, great talk. Everything you said basically was targeted to the people that already left an email on your website. How do you target those who did not by cookies, or I don't know, elaborate please? Yeah, no, that's a very good question. It's a very difficult answer as well. I think that's a big struggle for e-commerce in general. So there are different solutions. You could also do a pop-up, say something like, please leave your email and you get this type of things. For product reviews, typically you will have their email automatically because it's very rare to be able to purchase something without an email, but for card recovery, yes, that's the main one. There is no end, you cannot do card recovery in the email-automated way if you don't have an email. So one thing is, as I mentioned, is having a little box under the add to card button that lets them leave their email super early on. But yeah, for card recovery, there is no good way around that, sadly, sorry. All right, one last question. Yes, I'm not sure if it is a question or just a comment regarding the abandoned cards. I have seen two approaches sometimes, even consciously abandoning my card. I will get a price change either higher or lower. So have you seen that or are there any best practices? For example, like too many of us sometimes, especially looking for flights. Airlines, yeah. It's always more expensive. If you hesitate, in some other cases or portals, I have seen you get a discount if consciously you abandon the card a couple of times. Yeah, I think that's a very good point. The airline system is, unfortunately, they look at demand automatically, so that's an algorithm. So there's not a lot to do, like airlines is a particular industry. For the other ones, I have not met a client that automatically increases the price, if you like on purpose. Again, airline being the exception, but I think the vast majority of beginning merchants that use skyverge, that use GoDaddy and whatever, what we've seen is that they offer a small reduction in price at the start of the month. So if you wait 48 hours to complete your checkout, they offer a small thing, but it's not significant because they don't want to devalue their brand. So the answer to your question, I think, is the airlines industry, they work on demand. So obviously they are incentivized that if there's a lot of people looking at the same flights, they have the chance and the luck because it's a limited supply to actually increase the price. It's very uncommon for other industries to do that. And then the vast majority of industries don't change their prices. They may offer you the coupons through the car recovery. But I agree, airline sucks. Not fun. All right. Thanks a lot, Leah. Thanks. That was a great talk. Thank you. Thank you.