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Autopilot Selling – functionality and costs
Promotions and campaigns FAQ section:
  1. Promotions and campaigns – overview
  2. Advanced promo engine (paid service)
  3. How to create a promotion
  4. How to create coupon codes
  5. Kick-starter – functionality and costs
  6. Autopilot Selling – functionality and costs
  7. Is there a special URL for promotions?
  8. Why loyal clients are important
Autopilot Selling – functionality and costs

How Autopilot Selling works | Types of campaigns | Costs and monitoring

What is Autopilot Selling?

Autopilot Selling is a service that helps you drive sales and customer loyalty by sending automated messages via e-mail and SMS. It comes with a set of pre-built campaigns that target your clients, based on their purchasing history.

How does it work?

Once you activate the Autopilot service, you can customize and enable your campaigns. As long as Autopilot is active, it segments your clients based on their last order date and total number of orders. That’s how it knows who your most recent clients are, who ordered most often, and who is slipping away.

Every day, Autopilot watches over the client segments and delivers the appropriate messages:

1. It sends the “Encourage second order” campaign 7 days after a client placed the first order.

2. It sends the “Cart abandonment” campaign after 1-2 hours when an order has been started and not completed.

3. It monitors the clients’ last order date and starts the “Re-engagement” campaign when the client starts slipping away.

Where can you find the service?

You can find Autopilot Selling in admin, under the Kick-Starter section. 

Autopilot campaigns available 

There are 3 Autopilot campaigns available now:

1. Encourage second order

The key to building customer loyalty is turning your one-time buyers into repeat clients, as fast as you can. 

  • Recipients: Clients that have recently placed their first online order
  • Message type: e-mail and/or SMS
  • Timing: 7 days after the first order is placed

If you click on “SMS,” things look a bit different, but the message is the same:

2. Re-engage clients

Getting new clients and fostering loyalty is hard work. It’s far less expensive to identify those that are slipping away and send them targeted offers to order again.

  • Recipients: Clients that did not order in a while*
  • Message type: series of e-mails and/or SMS
  • Timing: The campaign starts as soon as the client is identified as slipping away. The campaign stops as soon as the client orders again.

*The order frequency of your regular clients varies throughout the year due to seasonality or other events (like the pandemic we’re facing now). That’s why we use the segmentation technique to identify the “clients at risk”. We look at all your clients that placed orders within the past 6 months. From this list, those 60% that have ordered the least recently are the ones targeted by this campaign.

 

3. Cart abandonment

Recover some of the lost sales by reminding your clients to come back and complete their unfinished orders. 

  • Recipients: Clients that started an order and didn’t finalize it
  • Message type: e-mail and/or SMS
  • Timing: 1-2 hours after starting an order

Please note that when we send these campaigns, we don’t always use both e-mail and SMS. We might send only one or another, depending on the clients’ response (orders generated and unsubscribe rate).

How much can you customize the campaigns?

The messages you see when you click “Enable” on any of the campaigns have been taken from the promotions that you offer to your clients.

However, these are just suggestions, so you have full control over the promotions and the text that you use in these campaigns.

Keep in mind that, for good user experience, it’s important that the messages in these campaigns be aligned with what the user sees in the ordering widget. That’s why the images and the headlines that you use in your promotions are automatically applied to the e-mails as well.

While you can customize most of the content of these messages, what you cannot change is the template. That is designed for selling, in close relation with the campaign logic that was chosen. Basically, some things need to “stay put” in order for the platform to execute the Autopilot logic correctly.

The only campaign where you cannot edit anything because it doesn’t include a promotion is the “cart abandonment” one. For “encourage second order” and “re-engage clients,” if you click on the edit button of the messages, you are taken to a screen where you can edit the headline and description of your promo, which will change it in the campaign as well.

If your aim is to focus on your brand and you need to get more creative, these campaigns might not be for you and you may want to consider using a 3rd party mailing system (e.g. MailChimp, Constant Contact, SendGrid, etc).

How much does Autopilot cost?

We charge a 10% conversion fee on the total value of each order that was placed as a result of the Autopilot program, regardless if you will accept, reject, or miss the order. The orders that you generate organically, or as a result of other marketing efforts are not subject to such a 10% commission charge.

So, what does “as a result of the Autopilot program” mean? It means:

  • orders placed directly after clicking on the buy link of an Autopilot message or
  • orders placed within a 24h window after clicking on the buy link of an Autopilot message (no matter from which link).

How can I check if I am being charged correctly?

You are only being charged for the particular orders generated by the Autopilot, not by all orders a client will place in the future or has placed in the past. You can always export the list of your orders and see which order was generated by the Autopilot, when, who was that client and if you want you can return on the order list and even pivot on the order ID to see what’s in that order. Like this: