Overview

• The use case is that I’m looking for a calf and foot massager and Bed Bath & Beyond is the few places that sell those machine
• In the period of between Black Friday and Boxing Day (Canadian version of Black Friday), I am looking to get deep discount on these machines; however, there was none during the Black Friday, Cyber Monday and including Boxing Day periods
• Then, I saw this newsletter signup from the company which offers 20% discount if you sign up for anything; then I realized that I can use this one-time discount to the foot and calf massager
• That is how this Marketing Automation Journey begins:
  1. I went to the website and added the product I want into the Shopping Cart and after idling (since I’m waiting for the discount code), I received the Abandoned Cart Journey
  2. In parallel, I initiated the 20% Discount Welcome Email and they work along together
  3. It is also a great example of Omni-channel sales process where I start the shopping from online/digital channel and end up making the purchase in-store with all the promises from the digital side

Welcome Email Journey with Discount Code

It starts when the user signs up for the newsletter.

One of the drivers to increase revenue is to acquire customers. One of the best ways to acquire digital customer is to provide discounts in exchange of their permission to market them digitally.

In my case, I was looking for deals and I already had in mind what I was looking for so the extra discount is the incentive to push me from the consideration stage to purchase.

My purchase experience fits nicely into the basic 4 Ps of Marketing (Positioning, Product, Price and Promotion).

In summary, the Bed Bath and Beyond positioning is unique from the massage products because they tend to carry products and brands that are not available that easily even at Amazon. From Product, I was looking for Calf and Foot massager since I do a lot of weight lifting with my legs, it is nice to have one of those machines (I bought one already to my mom).  From promotion perspective, I passed the Awareness and Consideration stage. Finally, I only needed a nudge to fulfill the purchase stage with an extra discount.

Then, the user immediately receives a Thank you email for the sign up with the discount promise.

After 24 hours, the user receives the promised discount code.

Then the user needs to click the email (for tracking and code generation purposes).

And the customer (myself) can see the unique discount code that I can use within 2 days.

That's a very interesting experience since I can use the code for both online and offline. Also, it also shows that they have some way to enforce the discount code in the POS (Point of Sales) system - which can be a challenge if the POS system does not get integrated with the Discount and the Marketing Automation systems.

Abandoned Cart Journey

Everything starts from the home page.

It shows the message about the sign-up with 20% discount on your first purchased item.In general, the website makes it very clear the value proposition of what is offering beyond the product selection.

Since I know what kind of product and brand I was looking for, I search the product brand and I found in the first result the product I’d like to purchase.

To make the experience faster, it has the “Add to Cart” button so I just clicked it immediately without having to go to the Product Page and have extra clicks, that decreases the attrition from digital perspective.

I added the product immediately from the search page.

Then, after 24 hours, I receive the abandoned cart email showing the product that I added on the cart and also other related products.

Conclusion

• At the end, current retail companies are levering Marketing Automation to capture customers coming from online channels and also sealing the purchasing via in-store
• Customers are shopping cross-channel and the companies that can tackle that opportunity and offer them a digitally friendly experience can definitely drive up revenue
• The experience from the customer perspective may seem smooth, but it requires a lot of behind the scene work such as IT, Marketing, Sales, Merchandising, Designers, etc. It requires a cross-functional team to put these kind of experience into play

Happy Holidays!!! Sign up for more emails like this.

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