Much in demand among online merchants today is the functionality to provide their customers with the ability to subscribe in order to receive notifications when an out-of-stock product is back in stock. 
 
The CloudCart system requires setup while the product is out of stock and relevant messages will be sent to your customers when it becomes available.


In this section:

Setting status

1. Go to your admin panel, from the Products > Product statuses menu, go to the Product statuses page 


By default, there are two statuses - In and out-of-stock.

You have two options to create the possibility for your customers to subscribe for a product that is out of stock. 

1. The first option is to change the behavior of the Out of stock status

2. The second option is to add a completely new status


We recommend you to use the first option and change the behavior of the Out of stock status.


To change the behavior of the Out of stock status, click on it and select 'Show as subscribe for quantity' from the drop-down menu. When you choose this action on the product page, a button will show that allows your users to subscribe to this particular product.  


It would also be nice to change the status's name, e.g. 'Notify me, when available. This will be the button's name when you come across a product that is not in stock. 

This is what a similar product looks like on the storefront: 

 

Creating segments

1. Go to the Marketing > Campaigns > Segments section and create a new segment by pressing the Add segment button. 

2. Click on Add condition and select 'Subscribed for product availability from the drop-down menu.

This is quite enough to segment a customer list by this criterion. Still, if you want to, you have the opportunity to divide your customers into more specific groups by product, category and vendor. 

It is not recommended to use the options for more detailed segmentation by product, category and manufacturer, as this may result in some customers not receiving the notifications they have subscribed to. You may have put their product in category A and it is in category B.


3. Once you are done, hit Save and wait a while.  


Segmentation does not take place in real time and it may take time to generate the list.


Creating an automated campaign

1. Go to Marketing > Campaigns > Automated, and create a new campaign from the Create campaign button. Enter a title and be sure to enable the option Repeat the campaign for customers that got into it more than once so that your users can enter this campaign again and again.


If this option is turned off, a user who has once entered the campaign will not go into it in the future. That is why ensure that is turned on so you can communicate with your users over time. 

2. Then select the segment in section 2 from the drop-down menu in the middle: 



3. The mandatory information to fill in is the campaign actions in section 3, where a communication channel must be selected:



We recommend you to use Viber and Web Push notification because they are very fast, have a significant open rate and users are used to using them for such type of communicaten while email is mostly an official type of communication.


4. The CloudCart Suite allows you to use 2 or more actions - so we can first select email as a communication channel, let the action implement immediately and create the following template:

The email address, name, subject and text are easy to fill in. The important thing is that we want the product that triggered the campaign to be present in the email: this product is a variable called triggered products, and you can select it from the menu on the right. 

5. When you are done, hit the Save button to save the template and Save step.  

6. You can go on with the second step - to select Viber, SMS or even set up a condition to see if an email has been read, clicked and then send another Viber message after a few days.

Creating a condition looks like this:

 

If the condition is met (e.g. The link was clicked), remove the subscriber from the campaign because this means that the customer is aware that the product is online again. Otherwise, continue with the next step. 

7. Press the Save condition button.  

8. The next step will be a Viber message reminding you that the specific product is online again. 

Here's a sample Viber message you can use for this purpose: note that the {triggered_products:1} variable is included again.

 9. Save the condition, save the step, and your campaign is ready.


This campaign is built for users subscribed to receive notifications about a specific message. If they constantly subscribe to different products, this campaign will run for them because you have enabled the option 'Repeat the campaign for customers that got into it more than once'. 


The first communication channel is email, and we check if the link is opened or not. If it is opened, we will remove the subscriber from this campaign, if it is not opened, in one day, we will send a reminder on Viber. 


10. You can add tags 

11. You can specify the purpose of the campaign

12. Once you are done with the settings of your campaign, click on the Start button, otherwise, if you click on the Save button only, the campaign will be saved as a draft and will not be enabled.



Note that once the campaign is launched, you will not be able to make any changes to it. So before you launch it, make sure you have everything set up the way you want it.


When someone subscribes to be notified when a product is back in stock, the email they will receive when the product is back in stock will look like this: 

"Expected products" section

Go to the "Products > Expected products" section

In this section are the products for which the customers have signed up to receive a notification when available. If the total quantity of a product is more than 0, the "Create campaign" button is displayed and leads to the creation of a new campaign, and if the quantity is 0, the button only indicates how many customers have signed up to receive a notification when a product is available and directs to a filter in the "Subscribers" section, which shows these subscribers. 

In the CloudCart Marketing Suite dashboard, the Marketing section displays expected products, sorted in descending order based on how many customers have signed up to be notified about them.

This is all you need to do to give your customers the option to subscribe to receive notifications when a product is available again.