If your business does any type of eCommerce, you most likely rely heavily on email campaigns to stimulate purchases. Though we’ve seen that higher sales generally always follow an email, or the purchase of a specific item often occurs after individual email targeting, regular marketing apps like Marketo, MailChimp, ConstantContact, or AWeber don’t have the right information to tell you exactly how much revenue was generated from a specific email campaign.
With this workhack, you can help your Marketing and eCommerce apps communicate with one another, allowing you a 360 degree view of the exact impact your campaigns are having and which campaigns generate more revenue.
Get This WorkHack
What You Need
To apply this workhack to your business, you need a powerful connector like Workato to allow your Shopify and Marketo accounts to send information to one another. Workato calls its integrations “recipes,” which are robust connections between your apps that don’t require coding or an IT staff. If you don’t have a Workato account you can create a free Community account.
How It Works
After you create or sign into your account, you can activate a Shopify to Marketo recipe with one click. This recipe automatically updates a lead in Marketo with data from Shopify. The trigger is a purchase in Shopify which will cause Workato to complete the action of adding the purchase information from Shopify in Marketo.
Workato is flexible, which means you can install the existing Shopify to Marketo recipe described above or you can easily customize it to fit your specific parameters like the American Kennel Club did in the next section below.
What It Means For Your Business
While traditional marketing apps can show you how an email performed by clicks or opens, adding the information from your eCommerce app means that you can now see exactly how much money came in from a particular campaign. Plus, knowing exactly what each lead purchased also allows for you to implement highly targeted email strategies, and avoid advertising something that they’ve already bought or that isn’t relevant to them. Goodbye errors, hello revenue analysis!
Workhack In Action: The AKC Case study
To demonstrate the full power of connecting your eCommerce and marketing apps, we’ll explore how and why The American Kennel Club (AKC), a registry of purebred dog pedigrees involved with most major dog shows in the U.S., uses this workhack.
The Challenge
If you are a dog breeder or want to certify a dog’s pedigree, the AKC offers Pedigree, Breeder, and Competitor reports that you can purchase online. They use Shopify to track the purchase history of their leads and customers while Marketo stores the data from their email marketing campaigns. In order to generate numbers for a campaign by revenue, they need a way for Marketo to access the purchase history in Shopify.
The Solution
The AKC uses Workato to integrate Shopify and Marketo with a recipe that updates Marketo every time a purchase is logged in Shopify. The recipe will look to match the information of the purchaser from Shopify in Marketo and if there isn’t a profile in Marketo, Workato will create a new lead and update it with Shopify’s order information.
The Benefits
A standard marketing app only provides data on opens, clicks, and unsubscribes for any given campaign, but now the AKC can see who, how, and what was bought. The ability to evaluate the success of a campaign based on the revenue driven from the email gives the AKC a completely new way to evaluate their email marketing strategy and become more effective.
“Workato’s Shopify to Marketo integration makes it possible to measure the full impact of our marketing campaigns without a CRM system. That’s a huge step forward…and Workato made the configuration easy for our team.”
– Elihn Glass, Senior Manager of E-commerce, American Kennel Club
This integration also reduces errors for the AKC that are not only time consuming to fix, but most likely would have annoyed their customers. For example, it’s a customer satisfaction drag and revenue suck if the customer keeps getting emails for a product they already purchased, but now the AKC can automatically unsubscribe someone who purchased a specific item from an email campaign. They can also drive smarter campaigns in Marketo now that the purchase history has been transferred from Shopify to Marketo thus making upsell/cross-sell targeting possible.
Enjoy A Full View Of Your Marketing Campaigns
With real time, up-to-date information about leads, customers, sales and payments being transferred from one app to another, they can work together to drive much better results. Sales information from Shopify can help marketing apps like Marketo, Mailchimp and RegOnline send more targeted and relevant information to your leads. It can also automatically process and add up the total revenue coming in from each campaign – an incredibly valuable insight for your business.
Not using Marketo or Shopify?
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