Another round?
Refill flows are a great way to encourage repeat purchases and stop missing out on sales opportunities.
Overview
For those selling consumable goods, refill automation is a must-have and one of the easiest ways to boost revenue. Many retailers already have these set up in the form of email campaigns, but with the emergence of SMS Marketing–it may be time to change up channels.
Create replenishment flows using behavioral and purchase data to predict when customer segments will be almost out of product. Start by finding an overall average for repeat buyers and then start to narrow it down to each customer. As individuals begin to reveal their own patterns (~2-3 purchases), you can begin to target them based on a faster or slower than average consumption rate.
Pro Tip: You want to make sure these texts are timed just right, giving customers some time to buy and you to ship before their supply runs out.
SMS Marketing works well for this type of re-engagement since you can send highly-personalized (and relevant) messages, with direct links to re-purchase items, all on the device they spend the most time on!
Details
Let’s check out VitaWorld, a supplement company that wanted to focus on boosting their repeat purchase segment and help customers stay on track with their daily routine. They had been collecting emails for a while but wanted to start collecting phone numbers via SMS pop ups. VitaWorld wanted to start with a basic re-purchase flow for those who had only purchased a few times while customizing the time period for those who had bought from them repeatedly.
Setup
VitaWorld used a two-pronged campaign:
- First, they set up a welcome offer and an SMS Sign-Up promotion. If someone engaged with the form on the welcome offer, on their next visit, a promotion promoting SMS sign-up would fire.
- The SMS promotion will also fire after seeing the welcome offer and closing it or not engaged with it for the duration of the welcome offer. But wouldn’t fire in the same visit as the welcome offer.
- VitaWorld realized that some users might not realize the value of SMS messages until the time came when they needed it, so they developed a strategy to target those individuals as well.
- VitaWorld created a corner promotion that encouraged SMS sign-ups as a reminder to purchase products before the consumer ran out. They also created a mobile version using an SMS Text Message layer. This layer will open the user’s SMS app with a prefilled number or shortcode and text message, so the user just needs to hit send to register.
- Next, VitaWorld added rules to the promotions; they created a new Advanced Ruleset and added the following rules:
- First, they went to “User Engagement Rules” and chose ‘Have ever engaged SPECIFIC pop up.’ In the dropdowns, they chose ‘have not’ ever ‘engaged’ and chose their original SMS promotion to ensure that they were only targeting users who had not already signed up for SMS messages.
- NOTE: For mobile promotions, it is encouraged to choose ‘engages with SMS Click’ to ensure that the user has not engaged with an SMS CTA layer before.
- In “URL Based Rules,” they used ‘Current URL’ and selected ‘contains’ and the URL for their checkout page.
- Then VitaWorld went to “Technology Rules” and chose ‘Matching Element Hovered Over’ and entered the ‘jquery selector’ for their checkout button.
- Next, they clicked “Add Rule Set” and then added a rule from “Cart & Past Order Rules.” They chose ‘Item purchased before’ then in the drop-downs, they chose ‘Item SKU’ ‘is equal to’ and then added the SKU of one of their best selling vitamins.
- They added this same rule again and changed the ‘AND’ in between the rules to ‘OR.’ They continued to add this rule for their top 10 selling items.
- In the same rule set as the final rule, they added ‘Cart Totals THIS visit’ under the “Cart & Post Order Rules.” In the dropdowns, they chose ‘Amount’ ‘is greater than’ and set a threshold amount of $20.
- First, they went to “User Engagement Rules” and chose ‘Have ever engaged SPECIFIC pop up.’ In the dropdowns, they chose ‘have not’ ever ‘engaged’ and chose their original SMS promotion to ensure that they were only targeting users who had not already signed up for SMS messages.
- Together these set up a trigger rule set targeting users who have visited the site before and haven’t already signed up for SMS. These are visitors on the checkout page, and either has a popular item in their cart they’ve purchased before or are about to checkout with over $20 in their cart. The promotion is a corner promotion, so it won’t distract shoppers from checking out but alerts them for the opportunity to sign up for SMS reminders.
