In this guest post, Ometria – the customer marketing platform for retailers – takes a look at the challenges that many merchants face along the customer journey and suggest some ways you can combat them.
Customer retention marketing is, simply put, all about creating experiences that make shoppers keep coming back to you. And the marketing experience they have with you is everything. It decides whether they see your brand as “getting” them completely and worthy of engaging with, or irrelevant and ignorable. A poorly executed retention strategy is the difference between the two.
With so many methods for delighting your customers, whether using insight to tailor personalised campaigns or consistently rewarding them for their loyalty, there are equally as many pitfalls in the quest to keep them happy.
Alongside every experience that accelerates them along the customer journey, just around the corner – and usually feeding off a lack of insight – is a shortage of resources and actionable knowledge. A large problem that could be impacting your customers and sending them running in the opposite direction.
So, how do we go about avoiding these hurdles? Let’s take a trip along your customer journey…
72% of consumers are frustrated with you sending too many emails and, in turn, are only opening between one and five emails a day. Frightening stats and even scarier facts to take in, considering you want their attention.
But, they feel pestered. Constantly throwing emails your customers’ way, in the hope that at least one of them feels relevant and sticks, is the wrong approach – but that hasn’t stopped it being a popular one among marketers.
It can also be caused by a lack of joined-up cross-channel strategy. We’ll cover that in more depth later, but when retailers take a siloed approach to different marketing channels that don’t consider the overall number of messages a customer is receiving, there’s a very real risk that you could be bombarding customers with messages from all angles.
So, how do you work to fix this issue?
A unified cross-channel approach to marketing. This means using tech with the power to understand each customer’s behaviour and preferences, and orchestrate all the messages you want to send your customers – whether SMS, email, direct mail or across social media – from one place. With everything being sent from a centralised place, you are able to not only time and prioritise the messages appropriately so they don’t overwhelm your customers, but you will be able to control the messages you send to ensure consistency.
This is a hydra of a problem and one of the biggest to try and get around. Simply put, customers don’t feel understood by brands, and this usually reflects in what they are sent and whether they respond to it. In fact, 67% of customers are frustrated with emails that don’t contain products and content that is interesting to them.
“Irrelevant content” sounds like a broad stroke but it can be boiled down to not having a distinct view of your customer. Or, in essence, not being able to reflect what you know about them in the messages you send them, leaving messages that make little sense to them and feel generic.
A lack of knowledge about their customers usually leaves marketers resorting to “batch-and-blast” methods and bewildered customers wondering why they’re receiving offers on golf clubs when they’ve never touched a putt.
This leads to common mistakes like:
Sending irrelevant content is a symptom of two problems: not having enough insight and or not having actionable insight.
You don’t have a joined-up picture of each shopper usually because the data that you hold on each individual is siloed across multiple solutions (your ecommerce platform, ESP, etc.). This limits your ability personalise without a hefty amount of manual work (usually in spreadsheets) trying to tie together different customer data sources.
While having reams of data is a great foundation, if you can’t make sense of it in actionable customer insight, all your work collecting that data is meaningless.
This means that you won’t be able to create real-life personalised experience for your customers beyond knowing what you should be doing and can’t. Marketers are often held back by a lack of real-time insight, meaning a reliance on agencies or an in-house team to provide insights. The second issue is associated with workflow. Greater personalisation means more templates and content creation, and having an inefficient setup that doesn’t do the heavy lifting can put marketers off personalising at all.
Sending highly personalised messages will set you apart from the crowd, and with actionable insight as your starting point, you can continually mould your messaging to suit your variety of customers. Your workflow also becomes less of a headache as your chosen solution will save you hours of manual work and potentially having to input data specifics yourself, which is not only pretty boring but as with most tedious tasks, leaves you prone to human error.
An example of an advanced campaign may be using:
Online fashion retailer Maniere de Voir, along with our latest innovation stream Ometria Labs, wanted to move away from a batch-and-blast approach of marketing and tailor its newsletters so that each individual felt like they were being sent an email specifically for them. Using AI-powered predictive segmentation the brand was able to see an uplift of 40% to their newsletter revenue. Using this experimental tool, Maniere de Voir sent emails to its customers that were tailored based on insight such as browsing history, the relationship between similar products and customers that purchased them and buying cycles of products.
Not knowing much about your customers also marries with the first of our problems – too many messages – but another element is the timing of the marketing you send.
Much like “irrelevant content”, this scaled foe leads to a lot of frustrated and confused customers:
This is just the start but it all highlights that a lack of customer context means that you resort to throwing-it-at-the-wall-and-hoping-it-sticks, which very often leads to customer-suddenly-disengaging-and-subscribing-marketer-now-with-head-in-hands-because-targets-not-met.
This may seem obvious, and in truth, it is a simple way to use the data customers provide to learn how to communicate with them. Not merely the method of communication they prefer, but where they are in the customer journey, their usual shopping habits (so a loyal in-store shopper isn’t bombarded with lapse campaigns), their browsing history and how frequently they spend with you.
Having a single customer view means you also take into account their offline activity. This creates a complete picture of your customers and in turn, means you can adapt your campaigns to the context of that specific shopper or use the platform to segment them into groups with similar behaviours.
Recognising where a customer is at in their journey with your brand – often called “customer lifecycle marketing” – is a great way of creating more relevant customer experiences. Common lifecycle-based campaigns include:
Using this data empowers you to create campaigns that resonate with the customer on the receiving end; you create personalised messages that – even if automated – really feel individually tailored. As the platform is made specific to the customer journey of retail marketers and not generic in its approach, you have your pain-points addressed to ensure the best results possible.
This looks like:
Customers want to feel like individuals when they shop with you, they want to feel that their experience matters and that you recognise them and their habits. Especially if they make shopping with you one of them. A great example of this is not making customers feel special or recognising their loyalty. 61% of them are frustrated with you for not doing so.
Every time they come back to spend with you over a competitor, they’re making a choice to place value in what you can provide for them – and they would like this to be recognised (something that many retailers forget to do). Your most loyal customers are driving the most revenue for your business, yet you’re treating them like everyone else. Ask yourself, would you come back if you were treated like this?
Often, new customers are welcomed and rewarded for subscribing to a newsletter or making a first purchase – keeping a consistent level of enthusiasm for your most loyal customers is a strong way to keep them happy. So, what do their current frustrations look like?
Nothing. No discounts or perks, no anniversary emails, no incentives for top spenders. Oh, and a lot of fed up customers.
Whether through special VIP recognition programs or throughout all of the marketing messages you send, it’s possible to offer your best shoppers a premium experience, without investing huge amounts of extra time and resources. There are ways to show your most loyal customers some love:
This problem is caused by having multiple solutions, all working to speak to your customers – but not each other. This might take the form of using different solutions for newsletters, automation (such as cart or browse abandonment), or other marketing channels such as push or SMS. As we know, communication is key. But if your stack is fractured, your messages will be too.
This means that your customers end up:
A platform with cross-channel capabilities will keep your marketing messages and brand image aligned. Customers who shop with you want to see that they are investing in something of value, a brand that understands them and works to provide messages that resonate. A lack of cohesion means that both strategically and aesthetically you will be misaligned. One of the most important strengths of having a channel agnostic approach to your marketing is remaining future proof, should the channel du jour change. This is key to the survival of your brand and engaging with customers how they want.
The barriers between keeping your customers and losing them are the same: your technology, data insight and execution. With a strong foundation in actionable data, you not only learn about your customers but you can continually work to create bespoke campaigns, even going so far as to preempt their needs. As a brand, you want to ensure the customer journey is one to remember for all the right reasons. You have to avoid these common mistakes so every online experience is worthy of your customer, their lifecycle stage and expectations of you as a brand. It may sound tough but with the right tool to hand, you can cement yourself among their firm favourites and be sure to see them return to you again and again.
About the author
Alegría is Senior Content Executive at Ometria, the customer platform helping retailers create marketing experiences their customers will love.
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