What is Back in Stock?
A Back in Stock campaign notifies shoppers when a previously out-of-stock product is back in stock. This campaign is particularly useful for eCommerce businesses where stock availability can change frequently.
Why Build a Back in Stock Automated Campaign?
Building a Back in Stock automated campaign is essential because it helps retailers retain customer interest and reduce the likelihood of lost revenue.
When products are out of stock, shoppers often look at other alternatives or abandon their purchase. An automated Back in Stock campaign allows businesses to re-engage new or existing shoppers on a large scale, which can save time, increase conversion rates, and encourage additional sales.
Reasons to Build an Automated Back-in-Stock Campaign:
- Increase Customer Retention: When a product is out of stock, a shopper may lose interest or look elsewhere. A back in stock campaign reminds shoppers about the product they are interested in, encouraging shoppers to return to purchase once the products are available again.
- Increase Revenue: When products are out of stock, it represents missed sales opportunities. An automated campaign aims to recover some of the lost revenue by directly targeting shoppers who viewed the product(s) when it was unavailable.
- Create Positive Experiences: Shoppers want to know when a product they love is back in stock. Create a sense of FOMO and urgency by notifying shoppers of products being back in stock.
What are the Benefits of Creating an Automated Back in Stock Campaign?
- Time Saving: Once the automated program is set up, these campaigns run on their own, reducing manual tasks.
- Higher Conversion Rates: Studies show that shoppers who receive back in stock alerts are more likely to purchase the item once it’s available.
- Additional Data for Shopper Profiles: This creates more of a customer profile on what products users are interested in and can help influence future marketing campaigns.
Back in Stock Logic
- When a shopper views a product, Salesfire creates a product profile and saves details like the product ID, viewed price, view time, and stock status. This is then used to identify the users who viewed a product before preparing to notify them.
- Once integrated, product catalogue imports are made daily to Salesfire. Salesfire will check if a product has moved from “out of stock” to “in stock”. If this condition is met, the campaign is triggered.
- Please note that the product page must be live and functional on site to ensure a shopper is enrolled into a Back in Stock campaign.
- Conditions can include: Has the user recently purchased the product? If they’ve bought within a specific time period (e.g. the last 30 days) these shoppers will be skipped.
- If all triggers and conditions are met, communications are sent to users about the product being back in stock. This is configured using the featured product element within the body of the email content. This dynamically pulls through the product that is back in stock when sending to the shopper.
- The time of the day condition will be set as default on the campaign to prevent the shopper from receiving communications during unsociable hours if a product they’re interested in comes back in stock.
- The Back in Stock campaign requires a user to have a ‘Marketing’ subscription.
- If the shopper buys a product, Salesfire will update the profile with the purchase date.
What are the Steps to Build an Effective Back in Stock Campaign?
Update inventory via catalogue import:
- Once integrated, product catalogue imports are made daily to Salesfire. Once complete, Salesfire will check if a product has moved from “out of stock” to “in stock”. If this condition is met, a campaign will be triggered.
Set trigger points
- Back in stock thresholds: Define the conditions that trigger your automated Back in Stock campaign E.g. the time of the day of the send or excluding certain shoppers by using the ‘Hasn’t Received Campaign/Hasn’t Received Campaign Type’
- Tracking: Ensure the tracking is set correctly for links that are pushed across channels such as SMS.
Create a multi-channel flow
- 75% of shoppers prefer to interact with companies across multiple channels vs one channel (Reference 1).
- Ensure that emails/SMS and LPS render well across all devices.
- Ensure that the messaging across all channels matches the brand’s tone of voice and is consistent. Optimise messaging for each platform.
Alongside setting up your Back in Stock campaign, we recommend reviewing your checkout process:
- Minimise the number of steps during the purchase process.
- Allow guest checkout and offer multiple payment options
- If a shopper saves their basket, direct them back to the checkout page with all their information pre-filled.
Use social proof and urgency messaging:
- Social proof examples could be testimonials, reviews, etc.
- You could create a sense of urgency to purchase the back in stock product before they sell out.
Monitor metrics:
- Consistently monitor metrics across channels.
- Track KPIs such as email open rates, click-through rates on email and SMS, conversion rates, unsubscribes etc.
- Regularly optimise automated campaigns based on metrics. We recommend only making one modification at a time to understand what has worked and what hasn’t worked.
References:
- Recover more revenue with a multi-channel abandoned cart campaign | nopCommerce
