New Year, New Emails, No More Excuses

With email continuing to be one of the top-performing online marketing channels, I guess it shouldn’t be a surprise that my inbox is overrun with bland, generic emails. Why change what seems to be working? But change is inevitable. If you don’t believe me, just look at what evolving consumer expectations have done to many legacy retailers.

First, a look at some numbers. The Relevancy Group reports that U.S. marketing executives attribute 23% of total revenue in Q2 2017 to email, a 21% year-over-year increase. But other research suggests consumers expect more. A Flagship Research report from 2016 showed that 62% of consumers expect website browsing behavior to be used to personalize emails, and 76% expect the same with purchase history. Relevance matters to consumers, especially when it comes to marketing emails.

Traditional promotional emails can still deliver revenue, but relevant, personalized emails can deliver much more. I know, you don’t have a lot of resources at your disposal. I know, it’s only you running the show. And yes, I know you already have a welcome series (well, really, I hope you do). But I also know an excuse when I hear one.

The fact is, while some strategies require larger resources or investments, many do not – and those that don’t can pay huge dividends. Make 2018 excuse-free. Roll up your sleeves and improve your email program. Here are three ways to get started.

Step 1: Reassess Your Welcome Series

If a 60-year-old man and an 18-year-old woman sign up to receive your emails, will they receive the same welcome series? If the answer is yes, you need to make adjustments. Consumers expect relevance. Sending the same message to both subscribers is not that.

There are a couple of ways to do this. Look at what page, or category, the sign-up came from, and deliver specific messaging based on the acquisition source. If they signed up from the maternity category, customize their messaging to match. If they signed up on the men’s swim trunks page, do the same. Apply this strategy not only to the first message, but the entire series as well. Tracking the source is easy to do with a simple piece of source code, a field identifier or by using a unique sign-up form. The best part is that you can implement this tracking before any messages are even created, which gives you valuable segmentation information on your subscribers before new welcome messages start sending.

In lieu of this tactic, or in addition to it, determine the welcome series based on the actual clicks inside of your welcome email. If a subscriber receives a generic welcome message and clicks on the maternity navigation bar link, the next message should be maternity-focused. The same goes for other clicks. This allows subscribers to control their own onboarding experience. One company that tried this saw increases in every email metric for the customized message versus the generic one. The personalized message generated 140% more revenue than the generic version, while making up only 3% of the volume of sends.

In both instances, setting up the automation and tracking the data are extremely easy to do. And messages can be created and implemented one at a time. Gradually implementing new messages will require fewer resources for execution because it’s not an all-at-once strategy. As a bonus, think about all of the segmentation data you’ll capture with this click behavior while implementing your plan.

Step 2: Personalize Your Cart Recovery Strategy

Should a customer abandoning $800 worth of products receive the same message as the customer who abandoned one $50 item? Their obstacles to conversion and motivations for purchase are likely very different. Yet, in most cases, each gets the same message.

Why not customize the message to overcome potential hurdles? You have a lot of cart data readily available that can help you make these messages more relevant. For products themselves, look at things like cart total, SKUs, product category, margin of products, sale price, what gender would likely use it and/or sale end date. Consider the actual shopper by looking at their purchase history, such as recency of last purchase, lifetime AOV or total number of orders.

Such data can help you determine how to overcome conversion obstacles and what types of messages to communicate to the would-be buyer, including when to send them, how many to send, and what types of incentives to offer, if any. Addressing the shoppers’ needs – for example, communicating about installation and haul-away services for specific cart SKUs – can be a great way to address the individual shopper. Personalizing messages in a meaningful way, while protecting margins, lets both customers and retailers win.

Step 3: Think About What They Want

While relevant lifecycle messages can drive significant revenue, so too can your promotional messages. Crafting 50 segments to use in daily promotional emails isn’t realistic for most retailers, but you don’t have to settle for generic batch-and-blast messaging either. Inserting intuitive product recommendations into your emails is an excellent way to make emails more relevant.

Using product recommendations that take into account individual browsing and purchase history, email content, and even your select business rules can deliver powerful results. Think about your everyday promotional email sends. With a batch-and-blast strategy, each message is relevant to only a portion of the audience at any one time. With individual recommendations, some part of that message will be relevant at all times.

Include recommendations not only in your promotional messages but also in any triggered message, such as order and shipping confirmations, birthday messages, post-purchase messages, and even cart abandonment emails. You can even use recommendations as stand-alone email content. In addition to being relevant, these types of emails provide a nice change of pace from the standard promotional messages.

The best thing about using product recommendations is that they don’t require extra resources, so you can still focus on growing your email ROI. How does generating 33% more revenue from your emails sound? That’s what one company saw from emails sent with recommendations versus those without. People like personalization.

“Get Busy Living or Get Busy Dying”

This line is from one of my favorite movies, and it sums up email marketing perfectly. Being complacent with your email program in 2018 is not the key to success. In fact, it may be the ticket to gradual failure. With competition coming from every direction, consumers are quick to tune it out. Personalization can help you cut through the noise. Are your emails differentiating you from your competitors? Do they give consumers what they want? If not, 2018 is a perfect time to ditch the monotonous one-size-fits-all messaging and get personal.

This was originally published on Multichannel Merchant.

Email Expectations vs. Reality: Are You Letting Your Customers Down?

Consumer expectations versus reality. It is a complex topic for all retailers, but especially for those who sell online. Look at how Amazon has raised the bar on consumer expectations, such as with fast and free shipping. Consider how accessible mobile phones are, allowing consumers to find any product they are searching for, regardless of where they or the product is located. Social media, and its integration into the shopping experience, is providing a direct connection between brand and consumer.

The best way to meet consumer expectations is to develop a more robust personalization program, especially when it comes to email marketing. According to a 2016 Flagship Research survey, nearly 60% of consumers expect gender to be used to make email messages more relevant. More than 60% of consumers expect emails to be personalized based on interests they gave in their profile, their birthday, purchases they made online, and what they looked at on their website. While these figures are telling, what is even more daunting for retailers is that 40% of consumers expect offline purchases to be used to make email marketing more relevant. I repeat, offline purchases!

The good news is that many of the necessary data points are already being collected by retailers. When it comes to email marketing, retailers often ask for this data at signup or inside of messaging itself. Consumers who provide this information do so willingly, but expect something in return: relevance.

Perception is Reality

Retailers aren’t meeting that expectation. Instead, consumers find marketing emails consistently useful only 15% of the time, and at the same time, consistently find emails not useful nearly 60% of the time. This is a drastic difference between expectations and reality.

The primary reason for this gap is the prevalence of batch-and-blast messaging. Too often, retailers have limited internal resources that prevent them from sending deeply segmented emails to their subscribers. The result is generic messaging aimed at the masses rather than the individual. Whether a subscriber purchased yesterday, last month, or never, they get the same message.

Retailers can upend that habit by honing in on those data points that can make their email marketing more relevant. For instance, retailers can look at the source of the email subscriber. The person signing up from the maternity section of the website is likely much different than the one signing up from the men’s clothing section. The same holds true for those clicking inside emails. The person clicking on maternity links in a message should receive different messaging than the men looking at button-down shirts. After all, they have different needs from your store.

Sixty-two percent of consumers expect their website browsing data to be used to personalize the emails they receive. Give them what they expect by implementing a browse recovery strategy. These messages can be a significant revenue driver for any email program. While these messages are generally clothed as promotional messages (pun intended), they are immediately relevant to the recent online window shopper. 

What’s It All Worth?

At the end of the day, does this all really matter? The answer is yes! One retailer did just this and implemented a unique second welcome series message based only on a specific link click in the first message. This targeted message was sent to just 3% of the new subscribers, but generated a 140% lift in total message revenue, compared to the generic second welcome series message. This is the power of relevance!

Only 15% of consumers say that marketing emails are consistently relevant. Your competitors likely know this. Take the initiative to meet consumer expectations before they do.

This was originally published on Multichannel Merchant.

The Adventures of a Choose-Your-Own Welcome Series

I remember as a child reading “Choose Your Own Adventure” books, where the story and ending ultimately depended on the choices I made throughout the story. Why not be adventurous and take this same approach with your welcome series? After all, a welcome series is designed to introduce, engage and build consumer confidence with your brand. What better way to do that than by delivering content based on the actions and preferences of your newly acquired customers?

Consider the possibilities for a shoe retailer who could send welcome series messages with a loafer theme to contacts who showed an interest in loafers at a very early stage. Or a clothing company that can send maternity-specific messaging to those who click links for maternity products. The ability to make these messages as relevant as possible ultimately helps set your series up for even greater success.

To execute a “choose your own”-style welcome series, follow these four steps:

Step 1: Collect Subscriber Data

A successful welcome series requires reliable data. Think about how you can optimize your acquisition points to collect more relevant information. There are four primary places where you can collect new subscriber data:

1. Ask for it During Sign-up : Are you asking for preference data you can segment upon at sign-up? Your subscribers are more likely to provide you with information during those initial interactions when they are most engaged with your brand. If your sign-up process allows, you should attempt to collect gender, category of interest, or any other targeted information that pertains to your products.

2. Identify the Sign-up Location: Add a hidden field or list assignment based on the page the user is viewing when they choose to sign up. For example, if you’re a shoe retailer, your hidden field value could capture whether the contact used the form from the men’s page or the women’s page. You can take this a step further by having a more detailed field, such as men’s loafer, tennis shoes, etc. Read more on using this tactic here.

3. Capture Click Activity: The welcome message should be the most-read message in your email program. Use a contact’s click behavior within this message to determine which message they will receive next. Not only are they interested in your products (they just signed up), but their actions immediately tell you what they are focused on. The navigation bar makes the obvious choice here, as these are commonly your overarching links of importance.

4. Request Additional Preference Data via Dedicated Messaging: A manage preferences message is a common part of a welcome series. If you send it early in the series, you can use the data provided to dictate future messages.

Step 2: Create Your Segments

What information do you need in order to segment your list? Gender, product category, price point, something else, or all of the above? Your criteria for segmentation will be based on how you’ve been collecting your data up to this point, but that doesn’t mean you can’t update your plans and incorporate some of the strategies from step one going forward. For example, if you only collect email addresses at sign-up and have no other means of gathering info, identify contacts who clicked on particular links in the welcome message, and build new segments from there.

Note: Be mindful that a person may enter multiple segments, so creating a priority list will be important for you. For example, if someone clicks on both the women’s and maternity links in your welcome message, you need to determine which of these two segments takes precedence over the other. You may decide maternity has a more immediate need and send the maternity-focused series to this contact.

Step 3: Create a New Stream of Messages

Now that you know what specific audience you want to target, you can begin creating your new welcome series messages. You can customize the imagery, highlight specific value-adds, include secondary CTAs, and even feature specific product recommendations based on the segment. You may also have a better idea of crossover categories that would be most likely to convert. If you’re tight on resources, using product recommendations and related crossover categories within your existing emails may be easier to execute until new messages can be created.

Take this Everlast email, for example. I could easily use the three CTAs in the email to determine what the focus of the subsequent messages should be. I could even combine that with gender to really differentiate product types within the category.

Step 4: Analyze and Adapt

As with other automated messages, never set it and forget it. Be sure to analyze the performance of these messages to determine not only if they convert better in general, but also which segments and which messages in the series convert better. With this information, you can begin to apply a profitable segmentation strategy to your standard promotional messages as well. It could also be the first step in customizing a similar strategy for other series, such as those for post-purchase or lapsed purchase.

There you have it. Have fun experimenting with a more unique subscriber onboarding adventure, while really focusing on your overall segmentation strategy. So how will your story end? To try this strategy, return to Step 1. To try a more basic optimization strategy, click here. The choice is yours.