In this article, we'll present the second session from our Onboarding series. It will walk you through the following stages:
Growing your contact list — setting-up signup forms, collecting your customers' opt-ins from the checkout, etc.
Contact Profile page — the information that can be added to your customers' profile and how you can use it.
Segments — our best practices and recommendations.
Keeping your list healthy — improving your deliverability with smart segmenting.
You can start from the video or look through the instructions provided below.
1. Growing your contact list
When building your marketing strategies, you should shift the focus onto collecting your customers' opt-in rather than just receiving their data. For example, when placing the order in your store, the customer provides information about themself and gives you an understanding of the products they prefer. Still, if they didn't agree to receive your marketing, you won't have any means to reach your customer with promotional messages and build strong, long-lasting relationships.
Therefore, from the very first day with Omnisend, you should focus on new subscribers' acquisition. After the initial synchronization, there will be a few ways to collect your customers opt-ins, you can:
acquire subscribers at the check-out page
💡 For Shopify, apart from collecting opt-ins to the Email channel at check-out, you can also collect those for the SMS channel. Find instructions in the article on SMS opt-ins collection.
Signup forms
Once you've transferred your contacts, we would also encourage you to start using all options available, to collect as many contacts as possible. You can enable the pop-up form that shows up after your customer spends some time in the store, and you can also add a signup box on the side of the page. In this case, the customer that didn't subscribe to the pop-up will be able to re-open the signup box at any time. You can also use the Landing Page signup form to collect your customer's signups on your social media or enable the interactive Wheel of Fortune form.
2. Contact Profile
All of the contacts that have ever visited your store and left their email address or phone number will end up in the 'All contacts' list. Each of your contacts will have a dedicated page on Omnisend with some unified information about them:
personal details;
subscription status for each channel;
a list of the tags assigned to the customer and a list of the Segments each customer belongs to;
web-tracking data, displayed under the Activity, Orders, and Products tabs.
Channel subscription status
Your contacts can have different statuses for each channel:
green or subscribed — means that they gave you permission to send promotions to them;
yellow or non-subscribed — means that they left their credentials in your store but never agreed to receive your marketing;
unsubscribed or red — means that your customers opted-out from your marketing.
Customer Tags
Tags are labels that you create to organize and manage your audience. You can add a tag:
manually;
via the contact import;
using Omnisend signup forms;
via automation workflows.
By tagging, you can categorize your contacts based on the data you have about them, then create segments and target your communication to a specific contact group.
Web-tracking
In each of the contact profiles you will find three different tabs:
Activity
Products
Orders
In these tabs, you'll see information about your customers' activity, the orders they've placed, and the products they've purchased. Since we will be able to start tracking the data only after the integration is complete, you won't see historical data in the Customers' profiles. For example, if your contact made orders prior to the integration, those will not be displayed here.
But no need to worry! We will still pull the information about all past orders for the segments you create and will trigger automation workflows based on the data synced from your store.
3. Segments
Segmentation allows you to communicate with specific groups more precisely while choosing a particular group of recipients. It can make your newsletters, automation messages, and online ads drive a lot more engagement, opens, and reads that would result in much better sales.
Now you can filter your contacts here in the Audience tab based on their:
Channel subscription;
Shopping behavior;
Email campaign activity,
SMS campaign activity;
Profile data.
Instead of sending your promotions to All contacts, we recommend targeting those by group. You can create a segment with one or more rules. You can also add a filter to any of your rules for more specification, e.g., select not those who have made 1 order, but those who have made 1 order containing the defined product.
4. Keeping your list healthy
There are a number of aspects that can influence your deliverability. We've already discussed some of them in the First Session, but in this session, we want to bring a few more aspects to your attention.
Collect your subscribers organically — via your store's check-out or signup forms;
Send quality content to your subscribers;
Target your communication. Don't send your emails to all contacts at once.
Warm-up.
Clean your contact list regularly.
Key takeaways
Grow your list with organic subscriber collection. Use Omnisend signup forms or your store's check-out to drive more subscribers.
Get to know your contacts profile, use tags to determine what your contacts usually purchase. This will help you send promotions to targeted groups.
Send your communication to segments rather than All contacts list. This will drive a lot more engagement, opens, and reads that would result in much better sales.
Take regular care of your Contacts list. Clean up regularly and unsubscribe inactive contacts at least twice a year.
FAQ
How do you prevent segments from overlapping? Even if the customer belongs to different segments and you choose to send the Campaign to all of them, only one message will be sent.
Does Omnisend automatically clean hard and soft bounces? Yes, we automatically unsubscribe hard bounces and soft-bounces that were rejected 8 times in 12 hours. However, exceeding the limit of 4% for bounces can lead to your account suspension. Therefore, before uploading your list to Omnisend, make sure to clean them with cleaning services, such as Mailgun and Neverbounce.
