New Layout Design

Hey there!

We are pleased to announce: Gather has an updated layout to help improve the admin experience.

The following images will assist you in finding your various account sections:

Campaign Navigation

Navigate between the various sections of your campaigns using the annotated items in the sidebar.  This allows more room for the editors (including the recently added drag-and-drop email editor).

Campaign Selection

Switch between your campaigns and add new campaigns from the drop down menu in the top bar.

Account Settings

Access your account settings, help, notifications and other account links from the right hand side of the top bar.

Campaign Editor

In the Editor section under either: 'Your Website' (for referral campaigns) or 'Website Sidebar' (for Opt-in campaigns), the various subsections (like 'Design' and 'Preferences') can be selected from a navigation menu on the left hand side.

With that, if you have any queries, please reach out at: hello at gathercustomers.com, we're happy to help!

Gather Team

Brand Loyalty NFT's for your Shopify Store, and how they can Take Loyalty Programs to the Next Level

Image by Milad Fakurian

Recently we have been paying attention to the evolving landscape of web3, and how web3 in the context of loyalty programs and customer referral programs.

With a growing number of household brands, like Singapore Airlines, exploring blockchain based loyalty points as part of their marketing strategy, this emerging technology is increasingly becoming ripe for mass adoption.

Quick Primer on Web3

Web3 is a term given to a set of new capabilities on the web that make it possible for customers to buy and own digital assets. This is only possible with blockchain technology, or decentralised ledger technology.

A function of blockchain is to verify that a customer owns a certain asset. This is done with consensus, or agreement, between many parties in a decentralised way. It is a decentralised ledger of ownership that is verified by the community, in a reliable way, where incentives are aligned.

This is revolutionary because it means that digital value on the internet can be owned and exchanged.

The following are examples of what digital value could provide:

• Digital art

• Access rights to certain online functionality (i.e. software)

• Access to exclusive products

• Access to discounted pricing

• Access rights to a professional community

NFT’s and Loyalty Programs

An example of how NFT’s could be used with customer referrals on your Shopify Store, is as follows:

• Customers are given an NFT, which doubles up as essentially their loyalty account with you.

• When a customer performs loyalty actions, like referring their friends, they are rewarded with points that are attached to that NFT.

• They can choose to redeem those points, save them; or they could gift those points to their friends where their friends can redeem them at your Shopify store. The ability to do so requires rather advanced smart contract capabilities behind the scenes. There is ongoing research in this area to verify that this can currently be done, and whether it preserve a good user experience.

• You can incorporate reward tiers and you can delight your customers with surprise rewards, drops, birthday gifts and so on.

How is this any different from any loyalty program?

The key difference here, is an NFT facilitates a medium of exchange.

As the technology advances your customers can easily gift or sell their NFT’s, or some of the contents of their NFT’s, to others.

As with loyalty points, the contents of the NFT’s are only redeemable for products at your store (or a network of complementary stores).

This means, that with your customers having the ability to sell or gift the contents of their Brand Loyalty NFT, they can bring you new customers (who can redeem NFT contents in your store), hence expanding the reach of your brand.

This is especially beneficial for customers who hold a substantial amount of loyalty points where they have no immediate plans to redeem them. Instead of sitting on them, they have the ability to make these rewards redeemable for other customers who may have more of an immediate need for your products (i.e. the loyalty points would facilitate a new acquisition channel).

This has the potential to make your advertising budget go further, and can provide an attractive customer acquisition ROI.

Over to you: Are Brand Loyalty NFT’s something you have considered for your Shopify store?

New Refer a Friend Experience and CloudSponge Integration - Product Updates

We’ve been working hard at Gather, and the fruits of our labour are starting to come out, here they are:

The New Embedded Refer a Friend Experience

Up until now, Gather’s interfaces for referrals were all served on the Gather domain. That meant when an advocate sent an invitation, they did so on dedicated page Gather’s domain.

Even though you could brand those pages so that it suited your brand (with things like branded banners), we wanted to go further and provide the whole referral experience on your site.

So we went to work for months and planned to release a brand new referral experience over two phases.

Phase 1 (available now to select customers)

When you ask your advocate to refer a friend, you can now simply forward them to your site (we provide you with a special link to do so). When they land on your site, a side widget opens where they can enrol on the referral program and invite their friends.

The refer a friend floating button and the referral invitation side bar widget

Phase 2 (available soon)

When your advocate invites a friend and their friend clicks to join or receive their coupon, they will click on a link to your site, where the widget will open and your advocate’s friend can accept the invitation or claim a reward.

This side widget will form the basis for many more on-site interactions in the future. So we designed and built it from scratch using the latest technologies and the design principles. I hope you’re excited as much as we are!

I want to send special thank you to our brilliant Dom for all his hard work with this!

CloudSponge Integration

We have been working super hard with CloudSponge, to integrate Gather with the CloudSponge Contact Picker.

Contacts importing makes it super easy for your advocates to select many of their friends to invite, without having to remember their email address. It puts your advocates’ invitations on steroids!

The CloudSponge integration is currently available on the referral invitation interface that is hosted on the Gather domain, and will be available on the embeddable widget soon.

These are the two main changes we have been working on. However, since the last update, there’s been a few new features we have released, including:

• Advocates can invite their friends on Whatsapp, Twitter and Linkedin.

• Now we send Mailchimp rich data about your advocates and their referred friends so that you can conduct some really nifty automations in your email marketing. Look out for a detailed blog pots on how to use this.

As always, if you would like to reach out to me, please do not hesitate to do so. If you have received this by email, simply reply to the email.

Iz

Founder, Gather

NEW FEATURE - Popup Session Timer

This is a mini announcement for a new feature we added to Gather!

By collaborating with one of our customers we learned that there is an additional indicator to a visitor's intent to exiting your site. This comes from simple statistical probability.

If you know how long, typically, a visitor spends on your site, before they exit the site, that is valuable information.

You can typically get this information from Google Analytics or similar analytics software.

Let us say a typical visitor spends 5 minutes on your site (which you would typically get from knowing the median website session).

Now if a visitor on your site approaches the 5 minute mark, statically they may be approaching the end of their visit on your site. Now if they are not in your cart pages, or if they have gone idol, you want to incentivize them with an offer or ask them to opt in to your list.

Why?

So that you do not loose them and deliver value to them, and have a direct channel to their inbox, to deliver value to them until they become ready to make the decision to purchase from you.

For that reason, we released the session based popup timer. 

Now you can define how many minutes before a visitor should browse your website, before they receive your promotional popup.

This timer is unlike the existing page timer, which tracks how long a visitor should stay on a single page before receiving the popup.

The session based timer tracks the time your visitor spends on your whole site.

To access this feature:

1. Head to your account area

2. Head to the Editor section

3. Under Show Modes, select "Show Popup after a customer spends a period of time on your whole website?", choose a time and save. 

Enjoy the new feature :)

Iz - Founder and Product Manager, Gather.

Improve Conversion Rates with Mailchimp and Gather

To celebrate Gather's new integration with Mailchimp, I'll run you through the essence of this integration and how it will help improve your conversion rates.

How Gather helps Improve Conversions

Gather isn't your average optin popup provider. With Gather's rules based system, you can target the popup to only present itself to certain customers based on their behaviour.

One of Gather's core values comes from giving you the ability to automatically place your prospect customers in a funnel, when you would otherwise lose them as they exit your site without taking a desired action.

This gives you the chance to convert those customers at a later opportunity, and hence improve your conversion funnel.

Imagine if you knew what those customers were interested in, what they were looking at, when they opted in?

Well that's already possible with Gather. Gather gives you the acquisition URL from which an opt-in came.

Now, with the Mailchimp integration, not only does Gather send your opt-in's name and email address to your Mailchimp list, it also sends Mailchimp  the acquisition URL (the page they were on when they signed up).

This gives you the opportunity to segment customers based on their interests. Which also means you get to send them highly targeted emails, aiding with conversion optimisation.

Connecting your Gather account to Mailchimp is as easy as 1, 2,3:

1. Tell Gather you wish to connect to Mailchimp, with a click of a button.

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2. Log into Mailchimp to authorize Gather

3. Select the Mailchimp list where Gather would push new email leads.

Here are a few examples to illustrate how this new functionality can benefit you:

Ecommerce Example - More Power to your Store

Cart abandonment is such an issue for many ecommerce merchants. This is when a customer adds an item to their cart, checks out, but leaves without making a payment.

By the time a customer checks out, they usually register with the store, adding their email address. With that, Mailchimp is then able to send the customer an automated reminder email.

However, until a customer adds their email address in the check out process, cart abandonment emails cannot be sent.

Gather can help with that.

When enabling the Exit Intent Mode, and adding a cart targeting rule  on Gather, when a visitor adds an item to the cart and for whatever reason they decide to exit the site, they can then be given the option to opt into your email list and can be offered a compelling discount code.

A significant number of visitors will opt-in at this point, where Gather gives them the discount code automatically. Gather then sends their email addresses to Mailchimp, including the page on which they were on when they signed up (the acquisition URL).

Mailchimp works with a number of ecommece software, like Shopify, to track customers by email and provide you with details as to if they have made a purchase, and how much they made in orders?

Ok, this is when you can get super smart:

You can then create a segment for a particular customer interest (based on the URL information sent by Gather to Mailchimp), and only for customers who have not made a purchase yet.

That way, you'll know which customers have not completed a purchase despite being given a coupon code.

You can then send an automated email with Mailchimp to remind them to use their code, and perhaps follow up with a series of emails with information about other products which are related to the product they were originally interested in.

Content Marketing Example - Better Email Open Rates

Combining Content marketing, opt-ins and email marketing is a powerful pattern for targeted customer acquisition.

As your content grows and you add more and more content categories, you may find that your email readership and open rates fall due to the wider set of interests you now cater for.

For example, an opt-in who is interested in cake baking, may not be interested in content related about farmers markets.

When Gather sends the URL Acquisition details to Mailchimp, you can start segmenting readers by their interest categories, based on the page they were on before opting-in.

As and when a particular segmented list reaches a certain number of subscribers, you can start tailor-sending emails specific to that segment based on their interested; which in turn helps with keeping the content sent to readers (or customers) targeted and relevant to them, increasing open-rates and clickthroughs.

These were just two of many wayswith which you can utilise the power of the Gather - Mailchimp integration.

Hope that helps.

Having read this, do you have any other ideas that come to mind? 

What other customer information would you like Gather to send to Mailchimp?

I would love your comments below.

Iz. Founder, Gather.