Data Dive: How to Personalize Email & Navigation for Maximum Impact

Segmentation data is an essential element of delivering relevant email messages, but deciding which pieces of information to use can present challenges. And how do you personalize emails when you have too little information, such as with new email subscribers?

For email marketers, finding opportunities to collect background on your customer can deliver a more personalized email experience. While this information exists for every retailer — whether they sell apparel, footwear, jewelry, or insects — marketers often overlook customer background data widely available to them.

Stop ignoring the information in front of you and start segmenting your email subscribers by focusing on some behavior-based alternatives.

Collecting Background at Sign-up

There are some surprisingly simple ways to collect useful, usable information from new subscribers at the onset. Look no further than the email subscription process. Asking for a single piece of data on the actual sign-up form, such as gender or product size, provides an immediate segmentation opportunity.

Here’s how. Imagine you are an apparel retailer selling clothing for both men and women. Capturing their gender allows you to send a welcome email tailored to that specific gender. You can personalize with different hero images, navigation links, secondary content and product recommendations.

If your company sells both B2B and B2C, consider asking which group the subscriber falls into. Options like this exist for most retailers — you just need to decide which piece of information makes the most sense for your brand.

You can also capture the product category the user signs up from. For example, if a subscriber is viewing engagement rings on your site and then decides to sign up for your emails, knowing this information can help you tailor your welcome messages for this subscriber while providing a different set of messages to shoppers browsing watches.

Beyond the Simple Navigation Bar

Your email navigation bar holds a lot of value for collecting segmentation data, because clicking on navigation links tells you a lot about customers’ immediate interests. But capturing and using segmenting data is about more than just customizing navigation bars, it is about making all emails more relevant.

When an email subscriber clicks on any link inside of an email, their behavior tells a story. Your job is to help them navigate it. Here are some effective ways to provide them a more personalized storyboard.

Using Non-Traditional Navigation Bars

Traditionally, navigation bars contain links to a brand’s primary product categories — but they don’t have to. Consider what other types of links inside of your emails might be useful for customizing messaging.

For example, knowing a customer’s shoe size might be helpful for a footwear retailer. Instead of including links to your primary categories, you could instead link by shoe size. Then, you could segment subscribers by the size they indicated when clicking on a particular link. This would allow the marketer to use dynamic content in future emails, such as using a more traditional navigation bar with size-filtered links.

In this scenario, subscribers who click on the size 6 link in the navigation bar are placed into the size 6 segment. In future emails, the navigation bar has more traditional links, such as links to dress and casual shoes. However, when the subscriber clicks on the dress shoes link it would direct them to the dress shoes landing page, but with the products already filtered to size 6.

This is just one example of using navigation bars for the sole purpose of gathering customer background. Whether it’s shoe size, dress size, or type of pet, think of ways your brand can apply this same segmentation and email strategy.

Lifecycle Messages

Automated lifecycle messages outperform promotional messages because they’re based on customer action, like an email sign-up. And when customers sign up for your email program, they often plan to make a purchase soon, from either you or someone else.

Using some of the data already mentioned, you could send the subscriber a more relevant welcome message. But instead of sending a generic message two, three and four, you could use click-behavior inside of the emails themselves to customize subsequent messages.

Let’s use the apparel retailer from the earlier example. They capture gender at sign-up and send a gender-specific welcome message. But, instead of sending a generic second message in the welcome series, they could use click behavior from the welcome message to determine the next message.

For those who click the “jeans” link in the welcome message, they would receive a jeans-focused email that helps them select the right style and fit; it could even showcase some customer favorites. For those who click on swimwear, they would receive messaging around the hot new styles for the season and swim accessories like cover-ups.

And that manage preference message so many retailers send during the welcome series? It’s likely no longer needed now that you’ve collected some of this very same information.

This type of click-based messaging can apply to a variety of lifecycle messages, such as birthday, lapsed-purchase, browse recovery, and post-purchase messages.

Promotional Emails

Using this information in everyday promotional messages is also manageable. Even though the main content of the email may be generic (e.g. 30% sitewide sale), you can cater secondary content in each email to the individual based on these same data points.

For those in category-specific segments, like swimwear (either from sign-up, click, browse, or purchase), you can show swimwear banners or product recommendations. For those in particular size, gender, or customer categories, you can them content most appropriate for them.

Go Get Started

With a good marketing platform, this information is at every marketer’s fingertips and can easily be used by even the most time-strapped email marketer. If done well, you should expect these more relevant messages to increase conversions.

How to Start Segmenting Your Emails

I receive hundreds of marketing emails each day, and I immediately notice how much, or little, segmentation is in a company’s email strategy. Consumers increasingly expect more relevant emails from retailers, but too few actually take the time to segment their emails — even just a little.

From my experience, the reasons for the lack of segmentation usually center on time and resources — too few people handling email and not enough time to execute the strategy. With only two people in the email department, it isn’t realistic to consistently send seven varieties of messages each time.

But that doesn’t mean a company can’t segment their emails. They just need to start in a manageable way and grow from there.

You have to start somewhere

Companies need to understand the obstacles that prevent them from achieving a consistent segmenting strategy. Is it the lack of time needed to segment, lack of data, or the marketing tool’s ability to segment? Maybe it’s not knowing where to start.

Should someone start with segmenting lifecycle messages or promotional messages? While there are a lot of ways to segment lifecycle messages, I find most companies struggle most with segmenting the day-to-day promotional messages.

But they don’t have to. Here are three simple segments any retailer, regardless of the resources available, can use to begin their email segmentation strategy.

Isolate your recent purchasers

Create a segment of those who recently purchased from you, say within the last five days, and withhold them from promotional sends. This can be a great first step in creating a better customer experience.

Rather than asking someone who just purchased from you (especially if it is their first purchase) to immediately buy more, you provide them a few days break from the promotional email onslaught. This gives them time to be excited about their purchase while not treating them like you do the person who has never purchased from you.

Pro tip: To keep these people engaged, and potentially purchase again, create dedicated post-purchase messaging for your recent purchasers. These messages can improve the overall customer and brand experience and generate significant revenue.

Isolate your non-openers and non-purchasers.

Create a segment of contacts who have both not opened an email in a given time (e.g. six months) and have also never purchased, as this behavior indicates a lack of interest in your brand or products. Begin to withhold this segment from some promotional sends.

This can be a permanent suppression until you have a non-opener re-engagement campaign automated, or simply a reduction in cadence (two emails per week instead of five). Doing so can provide a variety of benefits, including:

• Better reporting: When you send emails to non-openers your email open rates are being artificially dragged down and you’re not getting a true measure of how they perform. This is especially important if you are doing subject line testing. While one subject line may look to be outperforming another, having a large number of non-openers in one group may make it appear as if one is performing worse than it is.

• Deliverability: Sending to consistent non-openers can have a negative impact when it comes to inbox deliverability. ISPs like Gmail look at these engagement rates as a factor in determining whether your email makes it to the inbox or spam folder. Be smart about who you’re sending emails to.

• Acquisition source: Try to identify a common theme in acquisition source for these contacts. Did the majority come in from a sweepstakes or from a social promotion? Being able to identify an acquisition source that has a higher-than-average non-response rate can help you prepare a targeted strategy for this set of subscribers moving forward.

Pro tip: Create a never-purchased series for new email subscribers who haven’t made their first purchase. For example, you could automate a series of messages around the four-week mark for new subscribers if they have not made a purchase reinforcing your competitive differentiators, and maybe even offer a steeper discount to entice the first purchase.

Find your customers

Create a segment of your customers. This could be all of your customers, only repeat purchasers, those who have spent over a certain dollar amount, or some other criteria that makes sense for your organization.

You may want to include some factor of recency to this segment. For instance, if a contact has purchased five times from you but has not purchased in the past two years, should they be included? In most cases, probably not. But again, this would be company specific.

When sending emails to these contacts make them feel appreciated. Here are a couple of ways:

• Thank them: Create a small banner at the top of each email recognizing them as a customer and thanking them. This could easily be appended at the top of each email using dynamic content or easily inserted into a duplicate message.

• Offer exclusivity: If you have an upcoming sale, consider giving this segment early access and let them know they are receiving this early access. This can make them feel appreciated and also provides a sense of urgency to make a purchase. You can also run specific sales just for your past customers, such as a flash sale. Again, let them know the sale is just for them.

Pro tip: Consider touting these email-only offers as part of your enticement for joining, or staying a part of, your email program. This can give subscribers a reason to not only remain subscribed but also continue opening your emails — which we know can help inbox placement.

With each of these examples, the segments are not only easy to create but the strategy is also easy to execute consistently, even for those with fewer resources. Even if the segmentation strategy consists more of not sending emails to specific groups than creating new messages, that’s not a bad thing. Many times, an email not sent is better than an irrelevant email.

Email segmentation is important, and you need to start somewhere. Don’t be overwhelmed. Starting in a manageable way will help you feel more comfortable doing it and can help identify roadblocks to further advancing your segmentation efforts.

Removing these roadblocks will help your email team become more efficient, which will ultimately help you drive even more revenue from your email program.

After all, isn’t that the goal?

Keys to Creating a Gen Z-Friendly Email Marketing Strategy

The eldest Gen Z, the generational cohort following millennials, will turn 22 this year. Like all generational cohorts, they have attributes unique from those before them, but Gen Z does have a first: They’re true digital-natives. They have never known a world without the internet, smartphones, social media and Amazon.

This means they instinctively know how to use their phones to find information, search for products, interact with others, and check their email. In fact, 83% expect to increase or maintain their email usage over the next five years.

If Gen Z makes up part of your target audience, you need to know how to effectively market to them on all channels, including email.

Mobile Matters

Sixty-one percent of Gen Z use smartphones five or more hours each day, and 35% use them between 1-4 hours a day. So being mobile-first is a must! This could mean a lot of different things, but to keep it simple, avoid creating a need to side-scroll and pinch-and-zoom messages, and create clear calls-to-action (CTA).

Your messages should not only be mobile-friendly, but also visually appealing. With the top social channels for Gen Z being image-first, your emails should follow suit. Expecting subscribers to read paragraphs of text is a surefire way to get your emails deleted, or maybe worse, ignored.

Social Media and Social Proof

Social Media: Gen Z trusts social media, so if they can’t find you on social media, they are going to be less trusting of you.

According to CivicScience, when it comes to media influence, 53% of Gen Z say comments on social media, compared to internet or TV ads, have the most influence on a purchase.

Finding ways to incorporate social media into your emails can help build trust and engagement. Here are a few ways to incorporate social into your email marketing:

Ask them to share. Instead of sending an email asking subscribers to follow your brand, ask them to share their photos of your product using a designated hashtag.

This will allow you to showcase your customers, build user generated content (UGC), increase engagement, and expand your reach. You can include a secondary or tertiary section in each email that constantly promotes content sharing.

Showcase most “liked” products in posts. Look no further than your social sites for the most liked images or videos. If your pale-green sweater has more likes than other social posts, highlight the sweater post, along with the like-count, inside your emails.

Your consumers are telling you what they like. Listen to them.

Use influencers in your emails. Gen Z likes influencers. In fact, 46% of them follow 10+ influencers on social media. Create an influencer-themed email that showcases specific influencer picks, or complete sets like an outfit.

Then look for other areas where you can repurpose some of this content. This can include a “complete the look” post-purchase message for those who purchased a featured item, or secondary content highlighting an influencer’s “pick of the week.”

Social Proof: Obtaining UGC is one thing — using it is another. Using UGC in your marketing can provide social proof for consumers and can have a powerful influence on sales.

Consider this: 30% of Gen Z say a real customer, as opposed to an influencer, athlete, or celebrity, is more likely to persuade them to try a new brand.

Consider these tactics to enhance social proof:

Use UGC. If you are collecting selfies or product images, be sure to use that content in your emails. If you are asking for, and collecting, consumer photos, you can utilize that content within other emails on the same topic. For example, a clothing retailer asking for selfies can use the images with sweaters for sweater-related emails.

Use customer reviews. Sixty-seven-percent of Gen Z read three or more reviews before making a first purchase. Use this to your advantage by including reviews in your emails.

You can create stand-alone emails featuring top-rated products and even include a review quote along with each product. For secondary content, consider including a UGC photo alongside the review, and feature the photo and quote below the main content of the email. Again, the possibilities are virtually limit-less.

Employee recommendations. Finally, use your own employees. Similar to a top-rated email, but instead showcasing your employees’ top picks. This will give you an opportunity to put a personal face to your brand and give your emails a more personal feel. After all, who knows your products better than your own staff?

Highlight Causes

Gen Z expects brands to be more involved in social causes, with 69% being more likely to buy from a company that contributes to such causes. As a retail strategy, you commonly see this displayed with a one-for-one model, where a company donates to a social cause with every purchase. Take Oracle Bronto customer TOMS, which built a business on this model of giving.

TOMS’ End Gun Violence Together Campaign included a stand-alone email asking subscribers to complete a simple form, which generated postcards sent to their local representatives asking for universal background checks.

Once completing the form, the confirmation email asked people to share their cause with others on social media. The campaign went viral and resulted in owner Blake Mycoskie appearing on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon, creating even more brand exposure.

Look for other ways your company can show that it does good – and means it. By navigating to the TOMS website, and others with similar models, you can see dedicated sections showcasing the good that comes from each purchase. This content can be an email goldmine when it comes to Gen Z.

Using this content inside an email can be done a variety of ways. If you have figures or stories showcasing the tangible good being done, include this as stand-alone or secondary content in messages.

For stand-alone content, a welcome and post-purchase series makes the most sense. For secondary content, a section can be added to other lifecycle messaging, such as birthday messages, or in day-to-day promotional messages.

These sections provide constant reinforcement of the value of making a purchase and can be a great tool for building an emotional connection with Gen Z customers.

Tying It All Together

Finding ways to use and combine these elements can make your email marketing more effective for this unique, and still maturing, generation.

Make no mistake, even though they are young, they possess a lot of spending power, both direct and indirect. At the end of the day, whether it is Gen Z, millennials, or Gen X, basic marketing principles still apply – make it easy for the consumer to engage and purchase, and they’ll love you for it.

Want to Win Back Lapsed Purchasers? Focus on Customer Experience

Lapsed-purchaser campaigns, also known as win-back campaigns, are a staple in many retailers’ email marketing programs. These automated emails are sent to past purchasers who have not repurchased in a certain period of time, and the strategy typically consists of several incentivized messages that often increase in value from one email to the next.

Time and time again, I see retailers consider these messages a high priority. And for whatever reason, they’re almost always deemed a much higher priority than implementing post-purchase messages.

There’s a fundamental flaw with this approach: Retailers assume loyalty comes with every purchase. But they shouldn’t. A one-time purchaser is not a customer, and a repeat customer is not necessarily loyal. These assumptions result in retailers waiting for customers to lapse before engaging them. By then, that customer may be lost for good.

Before focusing on how to win back lapsed purchasers, retailers should step into the shoes of their customers and evaluate their purchase experiences. This helps retailers become more proactive in identifying areas which may cause customers to stray. Retailers can then work to transform these deficiencies into value-adds that make customers want to return to their brand.

Three ways to become a more proactive retailer

1. Create Personal Customer Experiences

Customers are most engaged with brands at the time of purchase, but they often receive promotional emails the day after they make a purchase. Promotional messaging at this stage holds little, if any, value for them. Not only will this not help create loyalty, but it may be enough to persuade them to ignore your emails moving forward.

What you may find is that promotional emails sent the day after a purchase have a 60% open rate – along with a 1% click rate and zero conversions. The open rate is indicative of the customer’s temporary high engagement with your brand. But because they just purchased, the click and conversion metrics are significantly low because the message holds little-to-no value for them. They may now assume any future messages will also not be valuable and may choose to ignore your subsequent emails.

Think about how you can create effective post-purchase messaging to improve the customer experience. This messaging will help nurture the customer and provide a more personal customer experience.

2. Customer First Service & Policies

Lacking customer service and customer-friendly policies can cause shoppers to stray from your brand. This could come in the form of friendly and helpful store associates or customer service reps, customer-first return policies, satisfaction guarantees, or otherwise.

An example of this is when I was once gifted an electronics product. One day, the display screen went gray. It clearly wasn’t fixable. Although this happened beyond the one-year warranty period, I contacted the company to see if there were any last-ditch troubleshooting steps I could take. The customer service rep politely walked me through their procedures and confirmed the unit was a goner. Unprovoked, they told me to email my address to them and they’d send a replacement unit. I did not ask, nor did I expect it.

I was floored by their level of service, and I have since purchased more of their items as gifts and recommended their products to others. I won’t even consider looking at another company for products like this in the future.

3. Get the Most out of a Purchase

Buying something is great but getting the most out of it is just as important. Being proactively helpful can have a significant impact on customer satisfaction. Proactively showcasing how a customer can care for a product (e.g. washing instructions), or better use the product (e.g. how-to instructions) will likely result in higher customer satisfaction with their purchase experience, the product, and your brand.

Retailers with brick-and-mortar locations should think about how they can connect online and in-store purchases. Using email to drive purchasers in-store can be a great way to add to the customer experience. For instance, if you sell eyewear, you may want to send emails reminding the purchaser of free in-store lens cleaning and adjustments. Your physical store surely offers something of value for the customer, such as free returns, in-store stylists, upgrade trade-ins or otherwise. Identify what those are and start connecting the online-offline customer experience.

I recently spoke to a seasonal goods retailer who sells high-end, made-to-last Christmas trees. Their customer service department constantly received a high volume of calls from recent customers asking how to properly fluff their trees. They took these inquiries and turned them into a dedicated post-purchase email message sent to new tree purchasers. This resulted in a decrease in customer service inquiries, higher email engagement, and increased customer satisfaction.

Never Lose Sight of the Customer

Retailers should never assume customer loyalty. They should focus on all aspects of the customer journey, especially within an email program. Lapsed-purchase messaging has its place in email marketing programs and can be an effective tactic, but it is not a stand-alone strategy.

Retailers should automate messaging that nurtures the consumer at each stage, from welcome messages and cart abandonment to lapsed-purchase messaging, to provide a more personalized brand experience.

These positive purchase experiences are some of the things that can keep customers loyal, not deep discounts and batch-and-blast messaging.

What’s Your Email Discounting Strategy?

Marketers have come to rely on discounts to spur purchases on, but poor coupon management eats into margins and trains customers to wait or shop around. According to eMarketer, 57% of mobile smartphone users will use a mobile coupon, and 53% of tablet users will regularly use mobile coupons to make purchases. Retailers beware! There is a fine line between discounts being used as a promotional tool and as a crutch.

Smart marketers care about brand perception and know site-wide discounts needlessly risk long-term profitability for short-term revenue gains. Personalizing the experience for every customer will help your promotions stand out, drive conversions, and boost your bottom line.

Instead of continuing to offer your consumers promotions for the sake of promotions, your focus should be on understanding the impact of your discounting strategy. Until you do a deep discount analysis of your incentives, you’ll never be able to fully determine how much money you are needlessly giving away. Retailers need to start focusing on their discounts and put together a plan to track and test incentives and redemptions.

Segment, Test, and Track

To determine how your discounts are working across your customers, begin segmenting your consumers. Create segments made up of non-purchasers, one-time purchasers, and repeat-purchasers. You can also do this with a variety of other variables and combinations, such as by customer AOV, time since last purchase, and gender to name a few.

When sending emails, send your current promotional messages to these segments. Measuring the performance of these discounts will help you get a better view of the conversion effectiveness. Even if you are not testing different incentives, knowing how your current customers are redeeming coupons can provide insight into what to test later. The same principles apply to any social ads you may run.

Knowing how your coupons are being applied across different segments gives you general baselines to measure against. Once you feel confident in how these different segments are responding, it’s time to begin testing incentives.

Create multiple incentives and test into each of these segments. You may find out that 10% off performs better than 15% off, or that 15% off performs better than 20%. Maybe you will find out a small discount with a higher minimum spend threshold performs the best. Whatever the case, you’ll get a clearer view of how your customers respond which will help protect margins.

Moving in the Right Direction

Knowing you don’t need to give away the bank to acquire sales can impact many parts of your marketing strategy, such as website email or SMS acquisition, paid search, social ads, and (of course) email marketing strategy. For emails, discounting smarter in not only your day-to-day promotional messages but your automated messages can have a meaningful impact.

For example, if you know X incentive can acquire and convert new email subscribers at a higher rate, your email acquisition strategy can be adjusted to meet this. If you discover that men are more likely to purchase with slightly deeper discounts while women are focused more on style and respond better to shipping speed, the welcome message discount can be adjusted based on the corresponding product pages where the new subscriber was acquired from.

Discounting smarter from the onset can help set expectations for your consumers. This will allow you to discount less, or not at all, in day-to-day emails and other automated messages like post purchase or cart abandonment messages. This will allow your brand to home in on what separates it from competitors, like customer service and other brand values.

Ultimately, understanding what your audience responds to allows you to apply these practices across your online marketing channels. By reducing the reliance on heavy discounts to drive sales, you’ll be able to provide consumers with what they have come to expect (discounts) while focusing on the actual value and benefits your company has to offer.

Deep discounting kills margins. It is not a sustainable business strategy. It’s time to start discounting smarter, not deeper.

Creating a Post-Purchase Email Strategy with Simple, Smart Segmentation

Let’s talk about 2019 email marketing planning. When you sit down with your marketing director and they you how to increase email revenue by five-plus percent, increase your repeat customer rate, and slow customer churn; what’s your answer going to be? It can’t be to just, “send more email.”

To achieve sustainable success means you will have to create and optimize different aspects of your email marketing program. If you’re looking for a good place to start, might I suggest focusing on a post-purchase message strategy?

When it comes to post-purchase email marketing, it is a severely underutilized yet powerful tactic. A strategic, well-thought-out series will impact your day-to-day promotional email strategy and lifecycle messages, and it can do all three things your marketing director asked of you above.

Here’s why.

A Little Context

The model of the customer journey that resembles a straight line from consumer to purchase, with some marketing tactics dotting the line between the bookends, no longer exists. Today’s consumers have more choice than ever. They shop on a variety of different channels, oftentimes during the same purchase. They are always connected, meaning they’re exposed to more influences and distractions, and they expect more personalization from marketers.

Today’s customer journey model looks more like something produced with the old-fashioned Spirograph toy, with lines that zig, zag, intersect, and circle back multiple times over. It’s a mess. And here’s where it gets even more complicated: when a consumer makes a purchase, they are simply recycled back into this complex and crazy customer journey.

How are companies expected to secure repeat customers, much less create loyalty and advocacy?

Here’s an everyday example. Have you ever made an online purchase only to receive one, two, or even three promotional emails the following day? Yep, me too. Let me translate this interaction. “Thanks for your money. We don’t know who you are, and we don’t care if, or what, you bought from us. We just want you to buy some more stuff, today.”

Does this scenario help create loyalty? Does it help create advocacy? Does it make the customer feel valued? Does it provide any reason whatsoever to immediately think of your brand the next time they decide to buy?

The first step to go about treating customers as people and not commodities is to understand how your customers are actually interacting with your emails. Only until you understand this can you strategically design an effective post-purchase messaging strategy.

Here are some ways to begin the process of creating a strategy that cultivates a stronger brand-customer relationship.

Segment Your Customers for Everyday Sends

One of the commonly-cited challenges of creating post-purchase messaging is time and resources. This is often the same reason retailers don’t segment their daily promotional emails.

Segmenting and setting up automation aren’t hard to execute. Creating the excess email creative can be. So, before you jump head-first into creating post-purchase messages, start by using easy-to-execute segmentation alongside your daily emails. This can help determine how your emails are impacting your customers and will lay the foundation for your post-purchase campaign.

To begin, create segments of your current email subscribers to determine what portion of your list has made zero, one, two, and three purchases; and how many have purchased within the past 12 months (I am using three purchases and 12 months as examples — this will change based on your products sold). Doing this will give you a better idea of the makeup of your overall email list.

Next, create segments for purchasers based on last order date. For the first month after purchase, you can break these contacts down in one-week increments. For example, one segment would be for contacts who purchased within the past seven days, one for 8-14 days, and so on. Month two and three can live independently as an entire month. Group month 4-12 together and finish off with 12+ months. Repeat this for each group of total number of purchases, stopping at a number that makes sense for your business.

Turning Buyers Into Repeat Buyers

Now that you’re equipped with some purchase-related segments, send your promotional emails as you normally would. But instead, send to these segments. Now you will be able to see how these messages performed with each customer group. What do you notice? You might find that recent purchasers have a 60% open rate within the first week after purchase.

While that might sound good, if they don’t click or convert you wasted an opportunity to engage them. You may find these contacts are unsubscribing at much higher rates, likely because they are being asked to buy again and are receiving irrelevant messages.

Looking at this data can inform the decisions as to how to construct your post-purchase messaging. If you know customers are engaging, but not purchasing, within the first 10 days post-purchase, this signals the time period you can engage them with meaningful messages, such as with “thank you” and product care messages. How does this behavior shift for first-time, repeat buyers, and won-back customers? What messages would matter to each of these customers at these moments?

Pay attention to the ripples. If you find repeat purchases are happening five months after purchase but your win-back campaign is sending at four months since last purchase, you should adjust that win-back strategy. Consider sending a message or two at two months for first time purchasers just to check in and ask if there is anything they need.

Is your win-back strategy effective for first-time customers or only for repeat customers? Maybe you’re trying to win back a customer you haven’t actually won. Use post-purchase messaging to help win them over and save the win-back for when they truly lapse.

What’s Your Answer?

Ultimately, the answer you are trying to uncover is what will make the customer feel better about your brand and their experience. It will likely come back to how often the customer buys to start with.

If your average customer makes a purchase 2.7 times per year, what’s going to drive the third purchase and beyond? If they haven’t reached the threshold of the “average” customer, you have not won them. They need to be nurtured, not “won back” with deep discounts.

Understanding how your day-to-day email marketing messages impact your customers is critical. Ask for help if needed. If you don’t have internal resources to draw upon, find an email partner, like Oracle Bronto, that offers execution or strategic professional services in-house.

A former client of mine once activated a three-message, non-incentivized post-purchase series designed to engage, help, and inform recent purchasers. These emails accounted for less than one percent of their yearly email sends yet drove nearly five percent of their yearly email revenue.

They got their five percent. How will you get yours?

How Much is Your Email Program Costing You?

We hear about how machine learning and artificial intelligence have reshaped email marketing but lurking inside these buzzwords is a hidden danger – not knowing whether these tools, among others, actually improve your email program.

Email marketers should understand their current KPIs and capabilities. Does their email marketing include batch-and-blast and segmented promotional emails? What about welcome series, post-purchase, and abandoned cart emails? What’s the revenue-per-email for each type of campaign? It’s hard to quantify results without these efforts.

Already executing these campaigns? Nice job. Now it’s time to focus on improving your email fundamentals and understanding the cost of not doing so.

Here are two examples of how improving the fundamentals of your email program can generate more revenue.

Welcome Messaging

Implementing a welcome series is an industry best practice. These messages introduce new subscribers to your brand, products and value props. But in most cases, every subscriber receives the same messages. Shouldn’t who they are and what they’re interested in determine the type of messages they receive?

Utilizing a single piece of data collected at signup (e.g. gender) and incorporating click behavior within the message allows for more personalized messaging experiences. For example, a woman who signed up to receive emails from a clothing retailer and then clicked on the maternity link within the welcome email would receive a gender-specific welcome message along with subsequent maternity-focused emails. As for her husband, if he filled out the same sign-up form but clicked on graphic tees within the welcome email, he would then receive subsequent gender and product-related messaging.

One Bronto client performed this type of click-based welcome messaging. Their targeted, click-based version represented only 3% of their email volume, yet drove 140% more revenue. There is a cost for not improving your email marketing fundamentals.

More Relevant Cart Abandonment

It’s estimated that the majority of consumers (87%) abandon their shopping carts. This is why an abandoned cart email strategy is so important for retailers. But much like batch-and-blast messages, they hope their messages relate to the masses rather than the individual.

Although these messages are extremely profitable, their fundamentals can be improved. The majority of abandoned carts are due to cost or availability of products elsewhere, according to eMarketer.

As a marketer, this matters to me. I want to know why they abandoned. Abandonment messaging that considers data points like cart total, specific products, category of products, or their purchase history allows me to create more relevant messages that entices website visitors to complete their purchase.

For example, if I know products in the cart are on sale and the sale ends in 24 hours, the abandoned cart messaging should have a sense of urgency. If the cart total is significant, messages highlighting satisfaction guarantees and return policies could help convert the consumer. If the product has other variables, such as installation and haul-away services, these details can be highlighted in the message.

One company wanted to improve their cart conversions by sending a fourth abandoned cart message. They found that the fourth message drove 15% of their yearly total abandoned cart revenue. By not improving the fundamentals this was money otherwise left on the table.

Improving the brand experience

Implementing and improving email fundamentals not only enhances the effectiveness of your email marketing program, but also provides your customers with a better overall brand experience. This can go a long way in building loyal customers.

As your email program becomes more advanced, you can add more robust strategies and technologies. When you do, you’ll have a better understanding of how your new tools are impacting your email marketing program.

If you’re not actively working to improve your email marketing fundamentals, then there’s a question you should ask yourself: how much is it costing your business?