TL;DR:

• Launch onsite campaigns at the right time to meet customer needs. For example, start a campaign when customers look at a sizing guide. 
• Avoid using chat campaigns without a goal. Invite dialogue while addressing specific customer concerns.
• Educational campaigns help customers make better choices. When done at the right time, they can increase sales by 31%.
• Offering premium options on entry-level product pages can help engage customers and drive upgrades.

Without strategic planning, campaigns become nothing more than annoying pop-ups. But done right, onsite campaigns can energize customers to checkout and click the ‘order’ button.

At CX Connect 2024, TUSHY’s Senior Director of Customer Experience, Ren Fuller-Wasserman, and Connor O'Malley from Gorgias shared how vital timing was in creating successful Gorgias Convert campaigns.

You can also watch the full Why Education Matters for Conversions panel discussion below: 

‎How campaign timing impacts customer engagement

Launching a message too early or too late can end in two ways: engaging a potential customer or losing them entirely. Timed perfectly to align with your target audience, you have a better chance of converting them. 

Essentially, you want to be in the right place at the right time.

Connor O’Malley, a Gorgias customer success manager who helps brands optimize their Convert campaigns, said that it’s effective to solve a pre-sales friction point at the right time. “If we're going to have a campaign on the website and we want people to actually read it and feel compelled to engage with it, timing is everything.”

So, how do you resolve presale friction points with campaigns, all while getting the timing right? There are a few ways:

• Engage new customers with educational campaigns.
• Address customer concerns by initiating chat campaigns.
• Upsell to the appropriate customers based on customer behavior.
• Analyze your ticket history and metrics.

Now, let’s look at how you can launch these campaigns effectively:

1. Capture new customers with educational campaigns on product pages

Customers navigating your store might need help determining which option to choose or how your product works.

Don’t let them leave with unanswered questions. 

Instead, offer them exactly what they need while they view a product, like a video tutorial, compatibility guide, or even an invitation to chat with one of your agents.

It’s about giving them the clarity they need to:

• Learn about your product
• Increase brand awareness
• Motivate them to explore the rest of your offerings

“The engagement rate on our education campaigns was much higher than any other campaigns we've seen, even upsell or exit intent campaigns,” Ren said. More impressively, their educational campaigns led to a conversion rate of 31%.

2. Answer customer concerns with chat campaigns

Brands miss the mark when they only use onsite campaigns as a bridge to their live chat channel. 

You might even be one of them with one of these conversational campaigns on your website right now:

• “Let us know if you have any questions!”
• “Need help? Talk to an agent now!” 

While there’s nothing wrong with using campaigns to get one-on-one time with shoppers, it casts too wide a net to truly capture customers’ attention. 

“We were just asking, "Let us know if you have any questions. Here's the chat," and that’s not really compelling people to ask their questions, even if they did have some,” Connor said.

The fix? Use customer concerns to guide your chat campaigns and bake them right into your campaign messaging. 

Here are pages that could benefit from chat campaigns: 

• Compatibility/quiz page: Accelerate decision-making and alleviate concerns by activating a campaign on pages where customers are exploring product compatibility, taking a quiz, or checking sizing guides.
• Product comparison page: Trigger a chat campaign when customers are comparing similar products to help them understand differences and guide them toward the best choice.
• Checkout page hesitation: Engage customers who linger at checkout with a chat offering to clarify any last-minute concerns, such as shipping details or return policies, to help push them over the finish line.

💡 Pro Tip: Offer real-time support during peak traffic hours to catch customers when they’re most available.

“People fall in love with TUSHY through these real-time conversations. We talk to everyone like our best friend, and that is what drives people to consider making this life switch.”

—Ren Fuller-Wasserman, Senior Director of Customer Experience at TUSHY

3. Upsell items on entry-level product pages

Upselling to new customers can be effortless if you present your higher-ticket items as better options, as Ren does.

TUSHY has multiple bidet models, ranging from a basic model called Classic to one with a temperature-controlled seat. Ren uses their entry-level bidet product page to launch an upsell campaign aiming to educate and upsell simultaneously. 

“We want customers to have the insertion at the right moment. They’re on our Classic page. Great, did you know you could get hot water? We pop the campaign up for our Spa 3.0.”

4. Find the perfect timing by analyzing your metrics

We’ve given you general recommendations on when to deploy your onsite campaigns, but your campaigns should go beyond these general campaigns. 

The best information for finding your perfect timing? Your tickets. 

Tickets are a record of customer sentiment — your cheat sheet to find out what customers want to know and their exact concerns.

“If you can look at your analytics, you can target what the average site traffic spend is on a particular page. That’s the sweet spot you want to shoot for,” Connor said.

On Convert, you can tailor campaigns to display only when customers meet certain conditions. Some conditions you can customize are current URL, time spent on a page, products in cart, number of visits, total spent, and more.

💡 Pro Tip: Analyze traffic for each of your webpages and think about the reasons behind the metrics. Why are website visitors spending more time on one product page than another? Why do visitors drop off after viewing certain pages? Understanding these patterns allows you to alter your campaigns to address specific concerns.

Get your timing right with Gorgias Convert

Effective campaigns depend on delivering the right message at the right time. Focusing on presale friction points, carefully timing your outreach, engaging in valuable conversations, and providing educational and upselling content when it’s most relevant can help you reach your conversion goals.

Ready to see how Gorgias Convert optimizes your campaign timing? Book a demo today and flip customer interactions into brand advocacy.

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Black Friday is the strongest revenue-generating day of the year for retailers, with $9.8 billion in sales reported in 2023, according to a report by Adobe. For online merchants, the revenue potential is even sweeter, with the online shopping period extended into Cyber Monday.

But, it takes a coordinated effort by customer support, sales, and marketing to encourage a shopper to click “checkout.” Without a solid ecommerce strategy, many online retailers will miss out on the Black Friday - Cyber Monday rush. 

Whether you’re looking to optimize your existing strategy or starting from scratch, we’ve got you covered. This guide will help you make the most out of your BFCM ecommerce strategy with a clear list of steps (in chronological order) to help you prepare.

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What is Black Friday - Cyber Monday? 

Black Friday - Cyber Monday — also referred to as BFCM — are two back-to-back sales days that bring in a ton of revenue for both in-store and ecommerce retailers in the US. The Black Friday - Cyber Monday shopping window also kick-starts holiday shopping from Thanksgiving day through the new year. 

Why you need to prepare for BFCM now

BFCM isn’t just about one big day of revenue generation. It’s a crucial period for online retailers to capture new customers and convince them to keep shopping through the end of the year and beyond. 

In-person BFCM experiences are out, and ecommerce is in 

Shopper sentiment is shifting away from physical experiences. Online transactions are up by 13% year-over-year, according to research from Criteo. So, you probably won’t see consumers camping out in front of physical stores on Black Friday, but those same shoppers still want to find an excellent ecommerce deal. 

Consumers are eager to spend despite concerns about inflation 

After BFCM in 2023, research from Nielsen found the desire for a good deal caused 57% of shoppers to stay on budget and 18% of shoppers to spend more than they planned in the year prior.

Brand familiarity matters

Shoppers, Gen Z in particular, are more likely to make a purchase with a brand they’re familiar with. So, ensure your marketing tactics are firing well before BFCM will help folks get to know you before the holiday sales season starts.

Get proactive rather than reactive

When you make a plan early, you give your business more time to craft a great marketing campaign. Plus, you give your team time to figure out how to manage customer service on Black Friday for these high-traffic days. 

Considering Black Friday - Cyber Monday is the busiest ecommerce sales event of the year, prepare as early as possible to get a leg-up and stay on top of Black Friday trends. 

Related reading: Why proactive customer service is essential for growing your business

Pre-Black Friday preparation: What to do before the holiday

Preparing for Black Friday — and building a strong ecommerce strategy — goes well beyond ironing out a limited-time deal. 

Tactics like updating key policies, building out customer self-service options, and marketing early will help you be successful.

1. Update key policies on your website before BFCM 

Displaying clear-cut and easy-to-find policies on your website makes a huge difference to the customer experience. It sets the customer up for success and cultivates a positive sentiment with your brand. 

To prepare for the best Black Friday-Cyber Monday possible, we recommend updating these key policies (and your Help Center) with BFCM-related information. 

✅ Tip: A tool like Gorgias’s AI Agent learns from your policies to know how to respond to certain topics and escalate tickets. And we know that more automated tickets leads to a lighter workload for your agents. It makes a compelling case for keeping your policies up-to-date.

“The anxiety for customers during BFCM is real,” says Lauren Reams, Customer Experience Manager at VESSEL. “This year, we are planning on leveraging AI Agent to help us get ahead of the most common questions. AI Agent has been so seamless, so we’re confident that it will help us handle the busy season without needing to bring in additional agents.”

Returns and exchanges

BCFM is a popular time for consumers to buy holiday gifts, which means you could see an influx in returns or exchanges. 

✅ Tips: Use return management apps like Loop Returns to provide customers with a self-service return portal to process their returns. Take that idea one step further by using AI Agent Actions to send your Loop Returns link or return shipping status automatically.

Integrate Loop Returns with Gorgias and enable customers to initiate their own returns.

Shipping and fulfillment 

Customers expect purchases, especially if they’re buying gifts for upcoming holidays, to arrive on time and quickly (you’re competing with fast shipping speeds from retail giants like Amazon).

If those gifts don’t arrive in time, you’re going to face a lot of angry customers. 

✅ Tip: Use your shipping and fulfillment policy to be crystal clear about when you ship orders, how long orders typically arrive, and how customers can look up their order status. AI Agent can perform Shopify Actions, such as editing the order's shipping address. Having this automated means agents do not have to do manual work.

Lost packages 

All those Black Friday - Cyber Monday sales equal a ton of packages in transit. You can expect a few to go missing. 

When that happens, your customers need to know what happens next. 

Make sure you’re clear with your team and customers upfront if you are willing to cover damages (either with refunds or credits). This will help your agents handle the process quickly and consistently. Plus, it gives your customers the peace of mind that accidents won’t put them out.

✅ Tip: Include a policy about damaged items in your FAQs so your customers know what to expect in case anything goes wrong with their order. 

Related reading: FAQ Page Template & Tips (+ Free Shopify FAQ Generator)

Automate self-service options

If you’re on Gorgias, Automate includes Flows, Order Management, and Article Recommendations. These different automations can help you deflect up to 30% of tickets, freeing your agents up for higher-value conversations. 

Set up Flows to automatically answer common customer questions specific to Black Friday - Cyber Monday related to: 

• Shipping policy: Will my items arrive by the holidays? 
• Get a gift recommendation: Can you help me find a gift for a friend? 
• Return policy: Can I return a gifted item? 
• BFCM discounts: Do you offer any holiday discounts? 

Related reading: Offer more self-serve options with Flows: 10 use cases & best practices

2. Reduce strain on your customer service team 

It turns out that many customer support inquiries your team receives are repetitive. 

“If you force agents to respond to every question manually — no matter how small — you're only limiting the time they can spend on tickets that actually need human attention,” says Gorgias Director of Support, Bri Christiano.

That’s why we built Automate at Gorgias: It deflects your most repetitive tickets — up to 30% of your overall ticket volume — so you can focus on the tickets that grow your business.

Tech product retailer Nomad leaned into Gorgias’s automation to support customer service interactions. Not only did the online retailer gain a streamlined way to manage customer feedback, they also reduced response time by 70%. 

Customer story: How Nomad uses automation to reduce their response time and resolution time by over 70%

3. Build a marketing campaign to tap into social commerce

Social commerce is on the rise among consumers worldwide. 

Deloitte estimates about one-third of shoppers in the US made a purchase through a social media app in 2021. That number is estimated to be even higher for those who were influenced to buy a product after seeing it on social media. 

You don’t necessarily have to sell directly through Instagram, but you can leverage your social channels to generate brand awareness. 

The need for social-focused customer support is exactly why online retailer MNML turned to Gorgias. The company found that their shoppers turned more and more to social media for answers to their shopping-related questions. 

Ultimately, the company leveled up their customer support on social media to connect with potential buyers. 

Get started with these ideas:

Partner with influencers to generate brand awareness

Don’t partner with influencers for the sake of it. Instead, think about it like building a relationship with someone who fits your brand ideals and can cross-sell your products to their audience. 

To do this, focus less on influencers with millions of followers on Instagram and TikTok. Instead, look for micro-influencers (or creators with less than 100,000 followers) with audiences that match your brand personas.

Create content that focuses on your store’s Black Friday deals

Once you’ve figured out the Black Friday sales your store will offer, you must ensure people know about them. 

Craft content for your social media channels that highlight your deals. Since social media primarily focuses on visuals, start by collecting photos, videos, or illustrations of your products. Then, draft copy for captions, think through the best hashtags, and hand over creative briefs to your design team to build any assets you might need. 

Put a little money behind your most successful organic social media posts

The weeks or months leading up to BFCM are prime time to talk about your brand’s Black Friday promotions. Use social media analytics to see which published posts are performing best across your channels. 

Turn those high-performing posts into ads on social media by boosting them with a little money. Even with a small budget, you can use social ads to grab even more eyeballs — and potentially bring more people to your website. 

A few other ideas to consider: 

• Prompt your customers to sign up for an SMS reminder or push notification on their smartphones or mobile devices. 
• Give early sale access to email subscribers, incentivizing customers to build a deeper relationship with your brand.
• Pin the sale date and deal information at the top of your social media profiles, especially Instagram.

How to maximize revenue during BFCM in 2 steps

Imagine Black Friday - Cyber Monday is here. Even better, imagine you’ve got a ton of website traffic full of eager browsers. You need a plan to keep those browsers engaged.

One major step you can take to boost your conversion rate and potential revenue is to increase communication touchpoints and focus on recovering abandoned carts.

1. Increase customer touchpoints to keep shoppers engaged   

Throughout any customer’s journey, there are many opportunities to interact with your brand. One moment might be finding out about your BFCM sale on social media, signing up for emails to get early access, or browsing the best deals before heading to checkout. 

The more you interact with customers along the way, the more you can keep them engaged — and personalized interactions increase your chances of converting a first-time shopper into a repeat customer. 

Gorgias’s Convert is a CRO tool that easily personalizes interactions at multiple points throughout a customer journey. Convert offers several ways to increase touchpoints and boost overall engagement: 

• AI-powered cross-sell campaigns to offer product recommendations.
• Up-sell campaigns to showcase higher-priced items.
• Share timely discounts, free shipping, or valuable product insights. 
• Offer 1:1 support with a smooth hand-off to Gorgias Live Chat.
• Leverage Shopify browsing data to offer product recommendations.
• Set up onsite campaigns without any coding.

Another way to build in more touch points is to use automated chat campaigns that pop up and engage with your customers at crucial moments. Chat widgets are a small addition to any homepage, landing page, or product page that immediately lets customers know where to go for help. 

2. Reduce abandoned carts 

Cart abandonment is a major source of lost retail sales for any ecommerce business, considering about 70% of online carts are abandoned. 

You can easily target customers who have opted into an email list or receive SMS messages from your brand. Design emails or text messages designed to trigger if a cart is abandoned.

Include copy that builds a sense of urgency to drive customers back to their shopping carts to “buy now” before the deal is over. 

There’s even a chance to use re-engagement to increase your average order value by upselling once that customer returns to your site.  

How to retain new customers you get during BFCM

Repeat customers are valuable — like, really valuable. 

According to Gorgias research, returning customers make up about 21% of a brand’s customer base but generate 44% of that same brand’s revenue. 

Your brand should re-engage with anyone who shops on your website during the BFCM rush. Those same people could become returning customers who give your shop a revenue boost during the rest of the holiday season. 

1. Offer a discount for next time 

The perfect moment to re-engage a customer starts at checkout. When someone makes a purchase through your online store, offer them an immediate discount that goes toward their next purchase. 

At CX Connect LA 2024, Ron Shah, CEO of Obvi, shared his brand’s strategy for offering discounts to generate revenue. Ron knew implementing AI to support Obvi’s two-person customer support team was necessary to help the brand grow without eliminating the need for his human agents. 

“The time saved by AI handled a lot of the redundant work our agents were doing, which meant we could turn them into part-time sales agents. We also gave them a code to help them prevent a refund from happening or upsell somebody. It created a completely new shift in their mindset. They realized, ‘Oh wow, you're not just taking something away from me (with AI) — you're actually elevating my opportunity.’”

✅ Tip: You can increase the touchpoints to re-engage with an existing customer by building a reminder email that triggers one week after their initial transaction. That way, you not only stay at the top of their inbox, you also stay top of mind. 

2. Invite customers to join a loyalty program 

Loyalty programs are a tried-and-true method to build engaged, returning customers.

In a recent survey, Yotpo found that over half of surveyed consumers agreed a loyalty program would encourage them to purchase more from a brand. 

If you already offer a loyalty program, make sure new customers know about how to get the VIP experience with your store. Build awareness touchpoints into your loyalty program marketing strategy. You can also prompt buyers to become loyal customers after they make their first purchase.

3. Continue to improve your customer experience strategy 

A successful, positive, and repeatable customer experience doesn’t end after midnight on Cyber Monday. It’s a road rather than a destination. 

Consumer habits are always changing, and your support teams must be prepared to handle customer requests.

One way to anticipate your customer’s pain points is to look at customer feedback. 

Reviews and social media activity is a great place to start. You might also consider putting a more formal customer sentiment strategy in place, with a CSAT survey to collect direct feedback from customers.  

This feedback helps your team prioritize what needs to improve so you’re not left reaching in the dark.

Give your ecommerce strategy a boost this holiday shopping season

The name of the game this Black Friday - Cyber Monday isn’t just to get a ton of online sales; it’s to set up your ecommerce site for a successful holiday shopping season. 

Success could look like: 

• A reduction in BFCM returns or exchanges 
• Having the perfect amount of inventory 
• Seeing higher-than-average sustained engagement on your social channels 

If you want to move the meter, focus on a strong Black Friday marketing strategy that starts now.

Gorgias is designed with ecommerce merchants in mind. Find out how Gorgias’s time-saving automations and convenient platform can help you create successful customer experiences.

Claim your demo today, or sign up to try Gorgias.

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Customer expectations continue to rise — around 82% of service pros say customers expect their requests to be resolved in less than three hours. Given the pressure to meet these climbing demands, more brands are turning to automation and AI. 

It’s not only about providing a fast, helpful, and efficient customer experience. Brands must also stay ahead of the competition and adopt the latest tech for long-term success. 

Luckily, brands like Shinesty are adopting tech like AI and automation to meet consumer demands. It’s worth it — since adopting automated CX in 2023, Shinesty’s resolution time has decreased by 50%, and their overall satisfaction rate is up.

In a recent workshop, Molly Wallace Kerrigan, the Marketing and CX Director at Shinesty, shared her team’s strategies for setting up automation, maintaining brand voice, and optimizing customer experience (CX).

You can also hear Molly share these insights herself by watching the workshop here:

How Shinesty automates more than half of their CX tasks

Before using Gorgias Automate, Shinesty hired about 20 seasonal employees, including CX agents, to help with the peak holiday season. In 2023, they only hired two, bringing their total to five agents. It was clear that Automate saved them money.

“When Automate came along, it changed everything... We only hired two agents, raising our team from three to five. That was our biggest game changer with Gorgias.”

Molly shared their impressive journey to automating 54% of their CX tasks — a feat transforming their customer service operations, especially during high-demand periods like the holiday season. Most importantly, they achieved this without losing their brand’s personality. 

Here’s how they did it:

Focus on key areas

First, Shinesty identified the most common customer inquiries that could be automated. They prioritized high-volume tasks such as WISMO (where is my order?), subscription cancellations, and account management. Automating these repetitive inquiries reduced the pressure on their human support agents.

Rebuild and clean up

Before rolling out automation, Shinesty cleaned up its helpdesk. The team re-evaluated existing workflows, removed outdated processes, and ensured their helpdesk was ready for automation. Laying the groundwork helped the team transition to automation more efficiently. 

Optimize self-service

A key part of Shinesty’s strategy was empowering customers to find answers on their own. Molly emphasized the importance of creating simple, humorous help articles that resonate with their brand. Regular audits of these resources meant customers could self-serve more easily, reducing the need for human intervention.

Lean into AI recommendations

AI-powered article recommendations help Shinesty identify ways to improve their use of automation. For example, AI suggested updating some existing help articles based on common customer questions, helping Shinesty address gaps proactively.

Gradual scale-up

Instead of overhauling everything at once, Shinesty rolled out automation gradually. The team focused on key areas and then expanded. Eventually, they automated 54% of their CX tasks without overwhelming their team or compromising service quality. 

Reinvest time into human agents

Automation doesn’t mean eliminating human agents. Instead of getting bogged down in repetitive tasks, their small team of agents now has the chance to focus on more valuable tasks and specialize. 

“With a smaller team, we could develop our agents more, giving them opportunities to specialize in different areas. Our satisfaction rate has increased, and our resolution time has decreased by 50%.”

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Why you should embrace AI and stay ahead of the competition 

Molly strongly encourages businesses not to hesitate when it comes to adopting AI tools. “Don't be afraid. Just do it. AI is here to stay, and it's not going anywhere,” she emphasized. 

Integrating AI into your CX strategy allows you to keep up with customer demands and position your brand ahead of the competition.

📚 Related reading: The hidden power and ROI of automated customer support

Take the leap with AI for a competitive edge

Molly’s advice is clear: AI is a game-changer for businesses looking to stay ahead. The tools are intuitive, easy to implement, and designed to enhance your team’s capabilities rather than replace them.

Gorgias’s AI Agent comes with pre-built templates that make it even easier to get started. These templates provide a solid foundation, allowing you to quickly set up automated responses and workflows that align with your brand’s tone and style. Molly pointed out, “The templates were a great starting point, and the guidance part was simple.”

By adopting AI, you can automate routine tasks and ensure consistent and empathetic customer interactions. Your team will also have more time to focus on more complex and valuable activities.

As Molly noted, AI allows your team “to develop beyond mindless tasks” and offers “empathetic responses without turning on the customer,” which can significantly improve customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Read more: How Shinesty automates 50%+ of tickets to offer great CX with a team of 5

Prepare for the future with upcoming AI enhancements

Looking ahead, Gorgias is rolling out exciting new features for the AI Agent that will level up CX automation. One of the most anticipated upgrades is the ability to perform actions like canceling orders or changing addresses automatically — tasks that currently require human intervention. 

Another upcoming feature is automated QA, which will enhance the quality assurance process by removing subjectivity and ensuring more consistent results.

Want to see how many routine tasks you could automate? Book a demo to see Gorgias’s AI Agent in action.

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With so many distractions across platforms, it’s getting trickier to hold shoppers’ attention — even on your own website. You’re lucky to get even a couple of seconds of their time. But don't worry, we've got the perfect bait for your brand.

Gorgias Convert is specially designed to capture shoppers at the right time with the right messaging. This onsite conversion strategy tool launches subtle yet compelling campaigns, allowing ecommerce brands to engage customers like never before.

In this article, we'll dive into how you can refine your messaging to increase conversion rate, boost order value (AOV), reduce bounce rates with clever exit intent triggers, and educate customers through engaging quizzes and informative content. 

Get ready to craft campaign messaging that truly connects and drives customers to buy.

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The top 6 ways to create captivating & compelling campaigns

Different goals call for different campaigns. Here are the top six methods to create compelling campaigns that resonate with your customers.

Why should you care?

Compelling campaigns matter if you want to drive engagement and conversions. If your message doesn’t resonate with shoppers, they’ll exit without taking action. 

Customize your content to your shopper's specific needs — it can make all the difference in capturing attention and winning over a new customer.

1. Put a face to your stories

Relatability is the magnet that pulls shoppers closer to considering your product. It’s why brands highly incentivize social proof like customer reviews and influencer endorsements. 

Combine stories with social proof through relatable customer story campaigns or behind-the-scenes campaigns. When your customers see someone who genuinely enjoys your product, it nudges them one step closer to the checkout.

How STYLEST did it

Innovative swimwear brand STYLEST gives customers a VIP shopping touch with a campaign that shows their co-founder Chrissy talking about the benefits of their bras. For shoppers unaware of the brand, a firsthand account from the creator leads to a deeper connection to the brand’s mission and products. 

STYLEST created a total of eight campaigns made for different scenarios and customers. At its peak, their campaigns drove 18% of the brand’s total revenue — a remarkable achievement since pop-ups typically influence only 2-5% of revenue.

2. Incorporate visuals

Plain text campaigns can be easy to gloss over. Instead, add visuals to your campaigns, like images, infographics, emojis, or videos, to easily break up text and capture attention.

However, make sure not to overload visuals or text with information. For instance, if you’re making a video tutorial, keep it short and on message. Meandering can cost you engagement.

How Kreyol Essence did it

Haircare brand Kreyol Essence’s welcome campaign is simple but eye-catching: a greeting with a sparkle emoji. Friendly language is a fantastic way to invite shoppers to connect with your support team and find what they’re looking for.

Kreyol Essence created welcome campaigns, product recommendation campaigns, and promo campaigns to lower the barrier to entry for new customers. In three months, they reached an incredible average conversion rate of 11.47% — 8% more than the industry benchmark.

3. Offer personalized product recommendations

According to 1,100+ survey responses, customers want personalized experiences. With product recommendation campaigns, you can deliver just that. Feature a selection of products to upsell and cross-sell in targeted campaigns, then choose which kinds of shoppers receive them.

Three effective scenarios to use product recommendations:

• For visitors viewing a specific product or collection: Suggest product bundles or add-on products that align with what they’re already browsing to increase purchase likelihood. For example, if someone is viewing a shampoo product page, a campaign can suggest a conditioner to go with it.
• For first-time visitors: Showcase best-sellers or trending products to new visitors, helping them discover items they might like.
• During seasonal sales: Feature related products in your holiday or special sale campaigns, promoting bundles or discounted add-ons to boost overall sales.

How LSKD did it

Australia-based sportswear brand LSKD puts eyes on their three newest products by appearing to shoppers with empty carts. This condensed list of recommendations makes buying easier for customers who don’t know where to start.

4. Provide incentives that are unique to the shopper

Give shoppers a reason to stay longer. Exit intent campaigns can be the last-ditch effort to retain customers who are about to leave. Make sure these campaigns are enticing, down to the selling point and message.

Here are the four essential elements to getting your campaign messaging right:

• Offer value: Provide an irresistible offer, such as a discount code or free gift, to persuade customers to stay. Convert enables users to select a generic discount code or a personalized, unique discount code, which can be more enticing and drive higher clickthrough rates (CTR).
• Highlight the benefits: Highlight what customers will gain shopping with you, like free shipping, discounts, or exclusive gifts on top of their order.
• Personalize the message: Customers like to feel seen. Use customer profiles (i.e., subscriber vs. not) or reference items they've viewed to make the offer more relevant.
• Keep it concise: Use clear, direct language and a strong call to action.

How Impact Dog Crates did it

Premium dog crate retailer Impact Dog Crates anticipates uncertain customers by allowing one free exchange per order. They show off this perk to browsing customers in just a couple of sentences — simple and effective.

5. Educate customers with fun, engaging material

Businesses win 28.9% more new customers when they implement customer education programs, according to Intellum. 

For browsing shoppers, you don’t need a formal program, just a quick educational campaign that appears while they look through your products. Empowering shoppers with information about product knowledge can lead to better buying decisions and, in turn, decrease return rates.

Educational campaign ideas:

• Interactive quiz campaign: Do you have a product line for specific needs and customers? Point customers to your sizing guide or product matching quiz for a personalized shopping experience that helps them find exactly what they need.
• Informative blog campaign: Share educational advice through a campaign and link out to a relevant blog post.
• Product tutorial campaign: Do customers often struggle with using your product? Demonstrate how to use your products by including a short video tutorial in the campaign.
• Product comparison campaign: Provide a side-by-side comparison of your products to help customers choose the best option.

How TUSHY did it

TUSHY, a leading bidet brand, recognized that many customers were concerned about bidet installation, leading to a spike in support tickets and abandoned carts. Their solution is an educational video campaign that proactively guides customers through installation. 

The campaign contributed to 25% of their revenue and a 37% drop in bounce rate. Most importantly, it cleared away installation anxieties and repetitive support inquiries and provided customers with a more confident buying experience.

6. Offer VIP support by having real-time conversations

Use conversational campaigns to show customers you're there to make shopping easier. Plus, personalized advice helps hesitant buyers make decisions.

Actionable Tips:

• Offer human support: Ensure seamless integration with human agents for more complex questions and personalized assistance.
• Leverage AI Agent: If your support agents can’t handle the conversation due to business hours, leverage Gorgias’s conversational AI tool, AI Agent, to handle pre-sales questions.

How Glamnetic did it

Accessory brand Glamnetic lets customers know they can call for help anytime, just by using Chat. Quick access to a customer support agent is a simple way to alleviate customer concerns.

Glamnetic’s strategic use of Convert campaigns drove an 18.39% on-ticket conversion rate for their top exit intent campaign and up to 49% more sales for new product promotions. They even saw a 12% increase in average order value. 

💡 Pro Tip: Unsure which message will resonate most with your audience? Use A/B testing to experiment with different messages, designs, or calls to action to see which version drives the best results. This data-driven approach takes the guesswork out of your content strategy so you can generate strong interest.

Get their attention with Gorgias Convert

Ready to take your campaigns to the next level? Gorgias Convert offers powerful tools to engage customers at the right moment with personalized, compelling messaging. 

If you’re looking to boost conversions, reduce bounce rates, or offer VIP support, Convert makes it easy to create campaigns that truly speak to your audience. Start capturing attention and driving results today with Gorgias Convert. Book a demo now.

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Strategies for handling difficult customers can sometimes feel like vague, generalized advice. If you’re dealing with these types of customer interactions daily, you need specifics.

At CX Connect 2024 in LA, four leaders in the ecommerce and customer experience space shared their tips for managing demanding customers with empathy, strategy, and a dash of creativity.

In this panel recap, learn how leaders at Princess Polly, Obvi, Glamnetic, and Jaxxon navigate complex customer interactions while maintaining high levels of customer satisfaction.

Watch the full panel discussion:

‎Start from a place of empathy

Customer experience agents: The baseline is empathy, says Alexandria Collis, Senior Director of Operations at fashion brand Princess Polly. Having a reset point — empathy and understanding — can be valuable for agents to remember, especially in the middle of heated exchanges.

In particular, Alexandria points out that significant life events can be tricky because customers expect a high level of service. These milestones are often sentimental, coming with more emotional investment from the customer’s end than your run of the mill WISMO requests.

Alexandria on empathetic customer experiences:

For example, if a customer receives a damaged graduation dress, Alexandria understands it would be best to replace their item as soon as possible. “Figuring out how to integrate empathetic responses into understanding the actual customer is so important,” Alexandria emphasizes. 

Bearing in mind the circumstances and emotions around a customer’s issue, mainly when the stakes are high, is the key to finding a sound resolution.

Don’t fight until you have to fight

Ronak Shah, CEO and co-founder of collagen supplement brand Obvi, advocates for a measured approach when dealing with difficult customers. His philosophy is simple: choose your battles wisely. Obvi’s CX team aims to avoid unnecessary conflict, especially when it comes to returns.

"We don’t make people ship the product back. Instead, we say, 'Hey, you can keep the product. We’ll give you the refund,'" Ron explains. This method defuses potential tension and turns a refund into the potential for better customer lifetime value.

Ron on returns:

Ron acknowledges that not all businesses have the budget to approach returns in this way, so they add a bonus: customers can receive a $10 discount if they share the product with a family member or friend.

However, there’s a limit. "When you have abuse, that’s where you have to fight," Ron adds. His team draws the line when repeat offenders try to exploit the system, ensuring fairness for all customers.

Trust your agents, give them autonomy

Kevin Gould, co-founder of beauty brand Glamnetic, believes in empowering his customer experience team with the freedom to make decisions. He understands that micromanaging can lead to inefficiencies, so he trusts his agents to delight customers in their own ways. 

"We try to be very lenient. We give our CX team lots of autonomy to operate because you need to give [them] a lot of leeway, or else everything just gets escalated up to the head of customer experience,” Kevin says. His approach ensures that issues are resolved quickly and effectively.

Kevin on trusting his support team:

For example, Glamnetic often resolves lost package issues by sending out new products or adding an extra "just because" item. They don’t view these as unnecessary expenses. Rather, they’re a way to build trust and improve overall customer satisfaction.

This strategy has paid off, especially in situations where offering a little extra can turn a negative experience into a positive one. Kevin’s trust in his team has proven to be a key component of Glamnetic’s customer service success.

Ask, ‘What did we do wrong?’

When facing unhappy customers, it’s easy to get defensive. But instead of pushing back, Jaxxon’s Director of Customer Experience, Caela Castillo, suggests a different approach: self-reflection. Her advice to the team is to always ask customers, “What did we do wrong?”

“There are customers who aren’t going to be happy with anything,” Caela says. “I try to ask, was there something we could have done that would have made this a better experience?” This basic question shifts the focus from blame to understanding, helping to diffuse tension.

In one case, a customer complained to Jaxxon’s support team because they missed a key detail on the website. Rather than dismissing the complaint, Caela’s team asked how they could make the information more visible. Listening may be a minor solve, but it shows customers that their input matters, which can often guide the interaction toward a peaceful outcome.

Caela on defusing angry customers by asking the right questions:

Turn their frown upside down with AI Agent

Every business faces the challenge of dealing with tough customers, but the strategies shared by these industry leaders offer clear paths for handling those thorny situations. Leading with empathy, picking your battles, trusting your team to make decisions, and reflecting on what could have been done better all lead to stronger customer relationships.

It’s time to level up your customer experience strategy. Explore how Gorgias’s AI Agent can help your team deliver exceptional service. Book a demo today to see the difference it can make to your support.

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According to our recent survey, 69.2% of respondents already use AI and automation in their roles, with support leaders and agents being the highest adopters.

However, in order to be successful, AI needs a robust knowledge base to learn from. The more knowledge and context, the smarter AI will be.

Below, find the tips you need to set up a great customer knowledge base in order to use AI most effectively.

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The role knowledge bases play for AI

Aside from acting as a self service resource for customers, knowledge bases now serve a dual purpose — they also act as a data source that provides AI with the training it needs to accurately answer questions from your customers. 

That’s the case for Gorgias’s AI Agent, an autonomous AI team member who can resolve customer inquiries without the involvement of humans. While teams also provide the AI with Guidance during the setup process, your knowledge base is the primary source for AI Agent to be onboarded, have a consistent source of truth, and provided faster and complete resolutions.

‎Helps your AI get up and running quickly 

The more information you provide your AI with, the faster it will be able to deliver accurate responses — and the sooner your customer support team can move onto more important things than answering another WISMO request.

Building a quality knowledge base is essentially the first onboarding step for using AI in your customer service operations. It’s the main data source for AI, sort of like a handbook or manual. The more thorough the Help Center is, the less agents will have to tweak and guide AI at the start.

Provides a consistent source of answers

The more up-to-date and accurate your knowledge base is, the more accurate your AI’s responses to your customers will be. Errors or inconsistencies in knowledge bases can lead to flawed AI behavior. 

The benefit of that is that AI will consistently intake any new information you add as long as your Help Center articles are updated. For example, brands who have new or different policies won't have to worry about setting aside time for AI to digest the new info –– it will automatically pull them from the Help Center.

📚Further reading: How your CX Team will evolve with AI

Allows it to better provide full resolutions 

An AI customer support rep can resolve tickets 99.4% faster than human agents –– and that’s full resolutions, not just first responses! But those full resolutions will only be as helpful as your knowledge base is.

Benefits of a high-quality knowledge base

• More accurate responses
• Improved learning and adaptation
• Increased trust and usability
• Effective self-service resource

More accurate responses 

Quality data improves AI accuracy and efficiency. For CX, that quality data comes from a robust knowledge base. 

For example, clothing brand Psycho Bunny was able to successfully implement AI Agent in part because of their thorough knowledge base. 

They have articles that cover: Shipping & Delivery, Order Status, Returns & Exchanges, Buy Online Pick Up in Store, products & FAQs, and Payment & Billing. 

“AI Agent helps immensely with data reporting and reducing human error, because it tags tickets accurately and follows processes consistently,” says Mary Mundy, Technical Support Specialist at Psycho Bunny.

Improved learning and adaptation

Knowledge bases also enable AI systems to learn and adapt over time, especially if they’re consistently edited and updated to reflect new or changing policies or product information.

Adaptability is crucial for a high-performing CX team, and your AI tool needs to be able to rise to that challenge. That was the case for premium sport and travel accessory brand Vessel. 

“I was a little bit hesitant about using AI Agent initially,” says Lauren Reams, their Customer Experience Manager. 

“We knew that we were interested in more automation because we have had more customers reaching out, but weren’t sure that it would be able to meet their growing needs.

“It’s been incredible to see how adaptable AI Agent is, and how it can quickly pick up on the small things — for example, if something is a hot topic for us, you can see AI Agent start talking about it, and knowing when it’s something that needs to be handed off to our team.”

Now, Vessel boasts a 20% automation rate and a resolution time of just 1.06 minutes. 

Increased trust and usability

A reliable knowledge base fosters trust in AI systems. It’s a cycle: the better the information in your knowledge base is, the better your AI Agent can speak on your behalf.

For example, fine jewelry brand Baby Gold has built trust with customers through a more personalized AI experience. 

“What I like about AI Agent is that the responses are so different, and it makes it sound like it's an actual agent,” says Sindi Melgar, Baby Gold’s Customer Service Manager. 

“We've gotten feedback from customers who say, Michelle, has been helping me, Michelle did this for me, Michelle did that for me — so that's awesome. We provide personalized items, so we should provide a personalized experience and journey for our customers.” 

Effective self-service resource

Aside from being AI’s most knowledgeable sidekick, your Help Center is a prime self-service hub for customers. 

They should be able to locate policies like shipping and returns and answers to product FAQs. If you want to go the extra mile like Baby Gold does, create a portal where shoppers can start a return, track or cancel an order, or report an issue. 

Best practices for developing a quality knowledge base

• Include your most important policies 
• Identify your FAQs
• Leverage pre-existing templates 
• Keep it consistent with your brand’s voice and tone
• Establish a regular cadence for maintenance 

Include your most important policies

This might go without saying, but customers won’t know your policies if you don’t clearly list them on your website. A policy section helps set expectations upfront and builds trust. 

Some common policies to include are: 

• Shipping times and costs
• Returns and exchanges 
• Defective or broken merchandise
• Support or in-store operating hours 
• Promotions 
• Warranty
• Order processing and fulfillment 

Identify your FAQs

🛑 Challenge: Identifying your frequently asked questions manually, especially if you have a ton of tickets that come in on the daily, a wide variety of questions, or topics that require super personalized responses. Yes, you can source your brand’s specific FAQs manually by speaking to your agents, but you might not cover everything. 

✅ Solution: Some frequently asked questions are pretty standard across ecommerce stores. Your shoppers will always need to know your shipping information, return and exchange policies, order cancellation windows, the status of their most recent order, and where they can reach out for 1:1 support. 

If you use a helpdesk, you’ll likely be able to see an aggregate of top questions. With Automate, it's easy —  customers' most asked questions are listed in your Overview dashboard with an option to automatically create a Help Center article for each, answer included.

📚Further reading: FAQ Pages: Examples, Benefits, and When to Add a Help Center

Leverage pre-existing templates 

🛑 Challenge: Scaling your knowledge base to answer all relevant questions can be a daunting task, especially at the beginning. 

✅ Solution: You don’t have to create your knowledge base from scratch! You can use an AI tool like ChatGPT to create it or, check out the 50 Help Center templates in this article to establish a solid foundation.

Keep it consistent with your brand’s voice and tone 

🛑 Challenge: If your knowledge base doesn’t accurately reflect how your brand engages with customers or how it shows up online, your AI won’t sound like you either.

✅ Solution: If your brand is all about personalization, for example, include that in a “Who we are” article in your Help Center like Baby Gold does. 

“Sometimes agents forget personal details to call out when communicating with our customers, like birthdays or weddings,” says Sindi Melgar, Baby Gold’s Customer Service Manager, “But I noticed on a few different occasions where the AI Agent is highlighting these things and is saying, congratulations on your wedding! Just the tone of voice that our AI Michelle is able to adopt is definitely on brand for us.”

Establish a regular cadence for maintenance

🛑 Challenge: Continuously updating the knowledge base to ensure it remains relevant can be time-consuming, especially the longer you wait to review it. 

✅ Solution: Because AI is such a huge time saver, your team should have more time available to edit and maintain your knowledge base, as well as coach any AI tools you use. For example, Psycho Bunny sees 26% of all tickets resolved by AI Agent. 

Schedule time each month or quarter, depending on how often your policies or products change to keep your knowledge base current and relevant. If your knowledge base has outdated information, your AI most certainly will, too. 

📚Further reading: The Gorgias AI Approach: Onboard, Automate, Observe, and Coach

How AI Agent can help

Gorgias’s AI Agent learns your policies and brand voice to autonomously handle support queries via email –– just like a human agent. 

Our customers have found that it often doesn't matter if an agent or AI responds to a customer so long as a resolution is reached quickly. 

That was the case for Ron Shah, CEO of health and wellness brand Obvi:  

“People just want to know things fast; they want things quickly. As long as they're getting accurate responses, most people don't care how.”

Within the first four weeks of its launch, AI Agent supported 300 brands, 60 of which reached a 20% automation rate. It was able to process 10,000 messages in one week. 

“These might look like modest numbers on a screen, but they’re translating to significant benefits for the people who monitor, manage, and innovate on ways to deliver exceptional customer experiences — and we feel grateful to be able to facilitate this shift,” says Gorgias CEO and Co-founder Romain Lapeyre.

Investing in and prioritizing high-quality knowledge bases will support both your CX team and your customers. Give your team time back, create better customer experiences, and get on the cutting edge of AI for customer support.

See AI Agent in action and book a demo.

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TL;DR:

• By automating straightforward customer requests, Gorgias Automate saved time and reduced response times by up to 69%.
• Health and wellness brand Obvi handled 27% of tickets with only two support agents within two weeks of using Automate.
• Menswear brand Psycho Bunny resolved tickets 99.4% faster than human agents by leveraging the conversational AI tool included in Automate, AI Agent.
• Luxury shoe and garment care retailer Kirby Allison boosted conversions by 23% and sales by 46% by implementing Flows.
• Automate helped businesses develop a robust help center, automating 30% of support volume within 30 days and improving customer self-service.

Guess what? Automating your customer support doesn’t mean you don't care about every customer interaction—it’s quite the opposite. 

Think about it… if someone wants to cancel an order, they simply want it done without any attempts at a personalized upsell. This type of response usually doesn’t require any additional flair.

Automation allows you to meet customers' needs promptly for straightforward requests. At the same time, it gives your team the bandwidth to invest more time and energy into solving intricate problems and building stronger customer relationships.

Many brands using Gorgias Automate features are saving both time and money, reducing response times, and even increasing sales generated directly from support.

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First, who benefits from Gorgias Automate?

As a solopreneur, it’s pretty self-explanatory. You’re busy with all aspects of your business, so automating what you can is going to help you prioritize and focus on more important things. 

But what about those who have customer support teams? This might sound counterintuitive, but Automate isn’t geared toward any specific type of brand. 

It benefits everyone at every stage of growth, whether you’re a single founder who wears many hats or lead a large CS team at an enterprise business.

Take Obvi—this mid-market health and wellness brand has a lean CX team of only two support agents. Although surprising, given their size and stage of growth, they’ve been able to automate the tedious and repetitive parts of CX.

For example, during BFCM 2023, Obvi’s CEO Ron Shah decided to use Gorgias Automate to boost CX efficiency even further while still providing excellent customer support.

“I told our team we were going to onboard Automate for BFCM, so a good portion of tickets would be handled automatically. There was a huge sigh of relief knowing that customers were going to be taken care of.”

—Ron Shah, CEO and Co-founder at Obvi

Obvi now handles 150+ tickets per day without adding any headcount, thanks to a 27% automation rate—which they achieved within two weeks of onboarding Automate. 

Even for enterprise brands with larger CX teams, Automate helps them deal with the huge influx of queries that don’t require a human response—things like, “Where’s my order?” or “Can you cancel my order?”

And it’s also more than the support teams who benefit. With more time given back to agents for strategic thinking, support teams can share helpful advice across the entire organization:

• For the product team: Report on which products are causing the most tickets to identify and address issues. When the product team can directly reference customer pain points, it becomes easier to improve product quality and reduce future support inquiries.
• For the marketing team: Analyze which campaigns may have been misleading by tracking customer complaints and dissatisfaction to improve future promotions. Customer insights can help refine messaging that resonates better with your audience.
• For the operations team: Identify big spikes in lost or delayed packages to streamline order fulfillment logistics and improve delivery processes.
• For the sales team: Provide insights on customer feedback related to pricing and product preferences to refine sales strategies.

This way, customer support becomes less about the speed of ticket resolution and more about providing high-quality customer service that returns the favor with higher CLTV. How? Let’s review a few stories from brands using Automate.

💡 Pro Tip: Deflect WISMO tickets and let customers track their order by activating Order Management in your Automate settings. Go to Automate > your store > Order Management and toggle Track Order on.

AI Agent resolves tickets 99.4% faster than human agents

Every brand eventually faces a common dilemma: how to scale efficiently while keeping customer experience high and costs low.

This was no different for Psycho Bunny, the vibrant menswear brand known for its edgy twist on classic styles and its iconic skull-and-crossbones rabbit logo. As the company grew, so did the challenge of maintaining top-notch customer support without skyrocketing overhead costs.

"As we continue to grow this multi-million dollar company, the most important thing is maintaining or improving our current KPIs and CSAT, but without raising our customer support overhead. And being able to maintain this for the next 5–10 years."

—Tosha Moyer, Senior Customer Experience Manager at Psycho Bunny

Recognizing the need for innovation, the team turned to AI for a solution, specifically through Gorgias. Quickly after setup, the team began trialing AI Agent and named it Lisa.

Gorgias’s conversational AI tool, AI Agent, is an extension of your team. Just like a new support agent, AI Agent can:

• Learn all your support processes and policies
• Answer tickets in your brand’s tone of voice
• Perform Actions in Shopify and other tools for full resolutions
• Escalate tickets it cannot confidently answer

For Psycho Bunny, AI Agent quickly became a vital member of the team, resolving 26% of customer tickets with lightning speed—99.4% faster than human agents. 

By handling repetitive questions like order status and returns, Lisa freed up human agents to tackle more complex and high-value customer interactions.

One of the standout features of AI Agent is its ability to respond with empathy and personalization, reflecting the specific information customers provide. 

"We love the empathy in AI Agent’s responses," said Mary Mundy, Technical Support Specialist at Psycho Bunny. "Replacing a generic automated reply with a response that identifies the issues and has empathy, while communicating the key information the customer needs, is awesome."

The impact was immediate and impressive. Lisa answered queries 10 times faster than the team average, typically resolving tickets in under 2 minutes compared to the 4+ hours it took human agents.

Within the first two months, AI Agent shot to the top of Psycho Bunny’s customer support leaderboard for first response and resolution times, all while generating higher CSAT scores (4.67) than the team average (4.6). 

💡 Pro Tip: Give your AI Agent some personality to match how your human agents speak. Go to Automate > your store > AI Agent > Configuration tab, and in the Tone of Voice dropdown menu, choose from Friendly, Professional, Sophisticated, or Custom tones.

Kirby Allison generated 46% more sales from answering pre-sales questions

Kirby Allison, the luxury shoe and garment care retailer, has been a staple for well-dressed customers since 2011. However, their growing success came with a hefty challenge: an overwhelming influx of customer support inquiries.

With just two dedicated team members handling a surge of repetitive questions and manual processes, Kirby Allison’s customer support team was stretched thin. 

The pressure was on Addison Debter, Head of Customer Service, who not only managed customer queries but also juggled inventory management, product information updates, and website development.

"We were inundated with simple, repetitive questions: 'Where is my order?' 'What kind of shoe polish do I need?' We had to keep repeating similar answers to similar questions. And we were doing the exchanges and returns manually, one by one. We were losing so much time. We couldn't follow up with customers as quickly as we wanted," Addison shared. 

The team wanted a better way to handle these tickets, so they switched from Zendesk to Gorgias, specifically for the automation features.

"Our favorite features are definitely Flows and Article Recommendations," Addison said. "They drive so much automation for us. Shoppers get answers to their questions by themselves: what's the right size hanger, where is my order, what shoe polish would you recommend, etc."

Flows allow you to display up to six commonly asked questions directly in your chat widget. If a customer clicks on one of those questions, they’re redirected to articles from your knowledge base where they get the answer quickly. It’s an entirely self-serve experience.

Auto responses have also been impactful for this team. These work by using Rules to automatically reply to emails and messages based on the context of the customer's message.

The results? Within just two months, Kirby Allison saw a 23% increase in conversions and a staggering 46% boost in sales from support. 

Automating responses to pre-sales questions freed up the team to engage in conversations that led to sales, improving both revenue and efficiency.

💡 Not sure which FAQs to include in your Chat? Check out our list of 50+ FAQ templates here.

Boost holiday efficiency with 69% faster resolution times

The holidays are always difficult for support teams. The stakes are high, and so is the influx of support tickets.

Thankfully, customers can get the answers and guidance they need faster and more easily via self-serve order management, Flows, and AI-driven Article Recommendations.

Shinesty, the brand that’s all about making the world take itself less seriously, started out selling wacky vintage suits. Nowadays, they’re best known for their men’s underwear range, including the signature Ball Hammocks, which promise booty bliss and scrotal serenity. 

Shinesty also offers a subscription service, delivering a fresh pair of underwear each month with exclusive prints and discounts.

As with many ecommerce brands, Shinesty’s peak sales period spans from Black Friday through Christmas. The year-round customer support team of three builds up to 20 agents during the holidays to handle this surge.

For the 2023 holiday season, Molly Kerrigan, Senior Director of Retention, aimed to boost efficiency through automation. The goal? Help the CX team work smarter, not harder, and maintain their stellar customer satisfaction without increasing headcount.

“We get a lot of praise from our customers, and they talk highly of our CX team after 1:1 interactions. We can’t lose that as we scale,” Molly emphasized.

The team was swamped with repetitive questions about order status, discounts, and account management—all important queries but ones that don’t necessarily build customer relationships. Self-service solutions seemed like the answer, but previous tools struggled with Shinesty’s subscription model complexities

“Other tools required a high level of customization to handle the subscription element. But Gorgias Automate has been straightforward,” said Molly. 

After seeing the impact early, Molly and her team doubled down on optimizing their use of Automate, specifically for

• One-step Flows offer customers instant answers to common questions. When customers ask questions in Chat, Automate checks Shinesty’s Help Center for relevant articles and shares them, often resolving the query without agent interaction. 
• Multi-step Flows guide shoppers through a more interactive experience for picking the right undies, managing their subscriptions, and applying discounts.
• Self-serve order tracking and management have become extremely popular. Customers can get instant updates on their orders and report issues through the Help Center or Chat.

These automations are accessible via Chat, the Help Center, or the Contact Form, giving customers fast answers without needing to speak to an agent.

📚 Read more: Offer more self-serve options with flows: 10 use cases & best practices

Shinesty’s Flows are so effective that many have an automation rate of over 90%, meaning they resolve customer inquiries 90% of the time without human intervention. 

Automate helped Shinesty significantly save on recruitment, training, and overtime costs. Shinesty’s first response time has dropped by 65% and resolution time by 69%. This has resulted in the fastest resolution times Shinesty has ever seen, with the smallest CX team they’ve ever had—just five agents for the 2023 peak season, compared to 20 in 2021 and 12 in 2022.

Why you need a knowledge base for automation

Today, shoppers expect a high-quality shopping experience, and we know that they love having the power to solve problems on their own, on their schedule. In fact, 84% say a company's customer experience is as important as its products and services.

While we’ve seen how Automate can help you meet those expectations, a core component to making all of the flows work effectively is a customer knowledge base. This is crucial for any effective customer support automation strategy. Why? 

A few reasons:

• Customers get the answers they need quickly and easily, leading to a better overall experience.
• By deflecting common queries to the knowledge base, your support team can focus on more complex issues, improving efficiency.
• Providing detailed product information helps customers make informed purchase decisions, leading to higher conversion rates.
• Educated customers are less likely to make returns, saving your business time and money.

A knowledge base is an interactive portal that connects your customers to both sales and customer service. That means making it easy for them to find answers before making a purchase and helping them troubleshoot any possible issues afterward.

Here’s a helpful example from BrüMate 

This brand’s Help Center shines with its customer-focused design. 

At the top of the page, it addresses common questions like returns policy and product compatibility, allowing customers to find answers quickly without scrolling. To enhance the shopping experience, BrüMate offers an interactive quiz that guides customers to the perfect product, saving them the hassle of extensive research. 

The Help Center also includes easily accessible links for package tracking and returning to the main site, with a chat bubble for immediate assistance. When the customer service team is offline, customers can still access helpful articles.

💡 Did you know? You can teach AI Agent information from specific URLs! Simply go to Automate > AI Agent > Configuration > Knowledge > Public URL sources.

“We’ve started pushing people towards resources that are in our Help Center. We're trying to help our customers self-solve.”

—Colin Waters, leading at The Feed & former Associate Director of Customer Experience at BrüMate

Automate 30% of support volume in 30 days

By integrating Automate into your customer support strategy, you can significantly reduce your team's workload. Gorgias Automate is proven to be able to handle 30% of inquiries autonomously within just 30 days. 

Curious about how Automate can benefit your business? Book a demo to learn about the advantages of Gorgias Automate and AI Agent and see firsthand how they can transform your customer support operations.

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While new customer acquisition is always going to be the most important driver of business growth, it’s important to keep existing customers coming back for more. Good customer retention helps brand reputation—which is itself important for new business growth—while making your overall marketing program more efficient. 

Paid social media advertising is one of the most powerful customer retention tools that brands have at their disposal. In this blog, we’ll break down: 

• Why social retention is essential 
• How to build social retention audiences 
• Ways to craft effective retention campaigns 
• How to validate retention success 
• What to avoid when targeting retention audiences 

Let’s get started. 

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The importance of social media in customer retention 

Put simply, if you don’t use social media to stay top-of-mind for your existing customers, your competitors will. Competitor conquesting is a very real part of paid social strategy, and competing brands will always try to woo your existing audience, often with an appealing deal or offer. Retention strategies, in part, are a way to defend your brand from those encroachments. 

On top of that, customers often need a reminder. Even if they love your brand and products, they aren’t going to be thinking about them all the time, so it’s on you to do a little of the lifting for them. It’s important to pop out every now and then to show them what new items you have in stock, or to encourage their next purchase with a great sales offer. 

Lastly, every person’s preferred communication style is different. Not all customers read emails or marketing texts, but social usage is pretty ubiquitous: More than 7 out of 10 American adults use at least one social media platform, with Facebook (68%) and Instagram (47%) being the most popular. That makes paid social a good way to ensure your customers remain aware of your latest and greatest offerings when they’re passively browsing their preferred social apps. 

How much of your budget should go to retention?

Generally speaking, prospecting should always get the majority of your paid social marketing budget. At ADM, we encourage no less than 60%, and often more depending on a brand’s business model. That means retention campaigns should always represent a minority of your budget. 

This is for a number of reasons: One, most businesses can’t survive without constantly restocking their pipeline of new customers. And since it’s much harder to convince an unfamiliar user to make a purchase if they haven’t heard of your brand or enjoyed your products yet, new customers will typically require more touchpoints to produce a conversion—which means more budget. 

Retention campaigns, on the other hand, often work more efficiently. If you’re properly nurturing existing customers by offering perks like exclusive deals and early access to sales, they will keep purchasing. So deciding how big of a majority share your prospecting efforts get compared to retention shouldn’t be solely based on the volume of purchases you can get from each bucket: The cost of driving a purchase from each segment is a deciding factor as well. 

Targeting retention audiences

The march towards a cookieless future has made traditional remarketing less effective on social media. Custom audiences are still useful on Meta and other social platforms, however, which means retention campaigns should rely on first-party data. Your CRM lists, which use first-party data willingly provided by your customers, will be your most important resource—though Pixel-based past purchaser audiences can also be useful for speaking to existing customers who may have purchased more recently. 

The rise of AI-powered campaign types, like Meta’s Advantage+ campaigns, have also changed how marketers approach these audiences. These campaigns use algorithmic insights to deploy different ad creative based on inferences about the user and its own learnings about how different creative performs for different purposes. That makes it possible to utilize “blended” targeting—running prospecting, remarketing, and retention audiences all under the same campaign, provided you have appropriate ad creative options for each audience type in the campaign. 

The most important part of this “new era” is staying on top of the spend allocated to these segments. A strong retention audience can help lift ROAS, but brands still need to monitor where spend is going within those campaigns to ensure it isn’t all gravitating to one customer type. Putting spend caps on a retention audience, or using an existing customer percentage cap in Advantage+, can be good ways to regain some control over your audiences.

Tips for retaining customers on social media

There is no one-size-fits-all strategy for making sure customers come back for more, but there are some best practices to follow to set your retention efforts up for maximum success. Here’s what ADM recommends: 

Upsells/Next step products:

Create targeted ads featuring “next step” products in the customer journey. For example, a running apparel brand might advertise running shoes specifically to existing customers, as these items typically have a higher price point and require more research compared to items like tights or a running bra. 

First looks/early access to new products or releases: 

Utilize custom lists to incentivize first-time purchasers to make a subsequent purchase with a small discount. Offer VIP early access to sales for existing customers with steeper discounts, making them feel valued and encouraging repeat business. 

Special deals for existing customers only:

Target existing customers with exclusive deals on their favorite products in new colors or offer early access to new releases related to previously purchased items. This approach can enhance customer loyalty by making them feel special and appreciated. 

Creative messaging specific to retention audiences:

If it’s a retention ad, users should get the impression you’re inviting them back to buy again. That’s why it’s important to differentiate retention messaging from prospecting, with ideas like: 

• Back In Stock: “We made more of your favorite, get it before it sells out again.” 
• You Asked, We Listened: “You asked for this polo in green, we made it.” 
• Most Requested Feature: “The feature/upsell you’ve all been asking for is now here.” 

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Validating success

Because retention campaigns typically use first-party data, there’s often less guesswork involved when it comes to your results. The user is verifiably tied to the action they undertake, so marketers feel confident that they are accurately reaching existing customers they intend to. 

In order to validate success, it’s best to look at the return on ad spend (ROAS) you’re getting from your retention audiences relative to your prospecting efforts. Since existing customers already have brand affinity, they should be expected to purchase more while requiring a shorter journey from impression to purchase.

That means your retention audience ROAS targets should be as much as double those of prospecting. For example, if a comfortable ROAS for one of our client’s prospecting audiences was 1.5, we would consider targeting a retention ROAS goal closer to 2.5 or 3. 

Customer retention mistakes to avoid 

The only thing as valuable as knowing what to do is knowing what not to do. Here are some of the common customer retention mistakes we have seen around the industry: 

Running Generic Ads: Creating generic ads is the easiest way to lose with any segment. If your messaging isn’t tailored to your audience, it will always fall flat. This is especially true with retention audiences who already loyal customers don’t want to be spoken to like they’re brand new. 

Letting Ads Go Stale: An ad might work great the first time someone sees it. It might still make an impact the fifth or tenth time. But if your same existing customers are receiving the same message repeatedly—and not converting—then fatigue can have a negative impact on performance. Make sure you’re updating retention ads frequently enough that users don’t get annoyed by or immune to your message. 

Inappropriate Spend Split: As mentioned in the budgeting section, the wrong spend split and not tailoring goals to each audience can also be major hindrances to retention performance. It’s important to make sure you’re not neglecting your existing customers by putting too little budget towards them, but since existing customers are finite and new customers aren’t, it’s possible to reach oversaturation and diminishing returns if you put too much budget into those campaigns. 

Bad or Outdated Customer Data: Healthy, accurate customer data is key to ensuring you are reaching the right audiences. Using outdated customer lists for targeting can be a big mistake. When using CRM segments for retention campaigns, make sure you are updating those segments frequently (or using a third-party integration like Klaviyo) to ensure segments update automatically. 

Retaining customers is an art 

As we’ve laid out here, a lot goes into running effective customer retention campaigns on your paid social media. If you’re looking for an expert performance marketing agency that can assist in all facets of your online growth, reach out to our team at Accelerated Digital Media to set up an audit.