If you’re in e-commerce, you understand digital tools.

Whether it’s Shopify, Facebook ads or (literally) hundreds of other tools and platforms — you’re pretty up to date.

You may even have one (or more) tools on your site to cover things like email marketing, support and live chat.

Where Gist Comes into Play

Gist is an all-in-one platform for marketing, sales and support processes within an online shop (like yours).

Essentially, it’s like having the power of 8 tools (more to come soon) for the price of one.

Like I said, you probably use at least one of the tools we provide. And this article is a plan to improve and automate a lot of the processes you currently use in your shop.

The Gist

The Gist

• One: Setup live chat and a chat prompt on key pages to start conversations with potential buyers.
• Two: Create the email marketing funnel using either broadcasts, drip campaigns and/or behavioral emails.
• Three: Create events to supercharge your automations and get a real look at how your customers interact with your site and emails.
• Four: Use our Workflows tool to visualize exactly how you want your buyers to move down your funnel.

1 First, Setup Live Chat and Create a Prompt

Live chat is a tool that spans marketing, sales and support.

Gist’s Chat can be used for all three (along with all of our other tools) in one dashboard. If you’ve installed the script on your site, the live chat is likely already there.

There are a number of ways you can augment it in the “Messenger” settings in the settings tab. These visual changes are great to match the chat with your branding.

Other than aesthetics, you can generate more conversations by using chat prompts.

Imagine you’re a brick-and-mortar retailer. A customer walks in. It’d be weird not to greet them, right?

So, what if someone “walk” onto one of your best-selling product pages? You going to leave them hanging?

Enter chat prompts. Prompts are greetings that “pop-up” when criteria you set are met (like, if a person is on the page for 10 seconds). I’ve written a detailed guide for creating a chat prompt. It’s a great start, if you’re looking for one.

But for e-commerce shops, it can go deeper.

Showing specific prompts on specific pages, to sell your highest-priced goods. Right then and there.

Depending on your audience, you may use Facebook. It may be for advertising and even communicating with your customers.

For this, Gist integrates with Facebook Messenger!

The Gist: Your visitors will always have questions about products. We give you the ability to be everywhere, even across thousands of individual pages to answer right away and make the sale.

2 Next, Start Talking to Your Customers with Email Marketing

Emails are great for several things. Ensuring customer satisfaction, driving traffic to new products and (of course) generating revenue.

In your Gist trial, you can send 3 types of emails:

• Broadcasts: One-off emails for things like flash sales and site maintenance

• Drip Campaigns: Nurturing emails sent to new customers, potential customers and just about anyone else on your list.
• Behavioral Emails: These are emails that can be triggered by certain events and are great tools for personalization.

Email + E-Commerce are a great match for delivering receipts and other types of online shopping automations. For these, you’ll really like the next two features we’re covering.

The Gist: Announce sales, show off hot new items and keep your buyers coming back for more with our email marketing. Schedule broadcasts and see how every subject line and button performs to maximize your effort.

3 Setup the Right Events to See How Your Customers Shop

This feature is simple to explain, but incredibly powerful.

Our custom event-tracking tool allows you to create events based on pages viewed or buttons clicked (amongst other filters).

These events can then be intricately used in the next tool in our guide.

The Gist: Find out your most visited products, see who’s close to buying and find out where your traffic is coming from by creating events for every widget, button and page on your site. Then, set up automations, emails and chat prompts to boost sales.

4 Finally, Automate the Process Using Workflows

One of the newest and most exciting additions to the Gist platform is our Visual Workflow builder.

In e-commerce, automations are a total necessity. And being able to see how customers are flowing through the funnel has become standard.

Essentially, you can segment and send the right messaging to your list at the right time.

• Nurture a lead until they become a customer and pull them from the nurturing funnel into the onboarding funnel.
• With our Stripe integration, you can automatically send new customers into a workflow.
• Segment your users based on their visiting and purchasing behavior.
• There are literally too many possibilities to list.

The Gist: Use email for more than broadcasts and automate tasks your customers now expect. Automatically send receipts, abandoned cart offers while segmenting your audience and increasing revenue.

There’s Even More to Gist

In this article, I’ve only what should be needed to see quick success with Gist.

There are a number of tools that can be implemented over time which will get you even more usefulness from the platform.

• Meeting Scheduler: Use Gist Meetings to book calls with suppliers, promotion partners or even your customers.
• Chatbots: Use our easy bot-creator to answer common questions on your best-selling items to see a boost in conversions.
• Knowledge Base: Answer common customer questions with a detailed article and alleviate the support burden.

Now it’s up to you. I hope you use this article to get Gist setup on your site and start using it to its fullest potential.

Happy Hunting.