Joy UgiGood news! According to a recent MarketingSherpa study, 61 percent of people say they like getting promotional emails once a week, and what’s more, some subscribers want it on a more frequent basis.
Retailers have a tremendous opportunity to take advantage of this goodwill. Subscribers know a generic e-blast when they see one, so marketers must take their campaigns up a notch in 2015.
The best place to begin is understanding your relationship with a customer – that just getting them to buy something isn’t the end of the road. Marketing is tied to a customer throughout his or her journey with the brand, from the first touch to inspiring them to come back again and again.
There are a few concepts that when implemented well can make a difference in your retail email marketing this year.
Grow your email list
Anyone who knows the value of email marketing understands the directly related tie-in to growing their email database. Getting more email addresses directly relates to driving ROI.
In 2015, implement a strategic website popup to boost the volume of interested buyers on your email list. A targeted, successful popup won’t see the gains you want it to with any old message. It has to use the right incentives in return for a visitor offering up his or her email: coupons, gifts-with-purchase, and sweepstakes.
And don’t forget the most important part: targeting. Having an incentivized exit-intent offer active on your cart page, for example, reduces cart abandonment rates and increases sales conversions, all while adding to your email database.
Use your customer data
Are you ready to make 2015 the year you make the best use of the data about your customers in your email marketing?
By connecting your CRM with your email marketing, you can create granular segmentation rules based on customer purchase data that allow you to send the right message to the right person at the right time.
- Post-purchase thank you series to create loyalty and returning customers.
- Reward your best customers to turn best customers into brand evangelists.
- Product recommendations create a relationship where your customers value your opinion.
- Win back churning customers.
With access to purchase data comes the ability to start sending personalized, relevant, and timely emails to your current customers.
Get up close and personal
The industry has been talking about personalization for awhile now, and we all know it works. But the gap between what email marketers say and do is significant in this area. The secret to 1:1 behavioral personalization at scale is algorithms. Powerful algorithms.
It starts with measuring a customer’s on-site and in-app behavior. The algorithms combine semantic analysis, trending content, effective recommendations and business rules to produce human communication at machine scale.
What an email marketer gets is customer experiences that are personalized with content based on an infinitely complex and ever-evolving picture of each individual.
Drive engagement with real-time content
Leveraging someone’s context at the moment of open can provide immediate revenue and efficiency gains. Enter, real-time content.
- Use a countdown timer to see a 15 – 70 percent increase in click-through rate.
- Insert local offers or maps for stores in that subscriber’s area.
- Dynamically insert live web content and personalized deadlines.
- Update pricing, inventory and specific user information in real time.
The primary benefits of real-time content? Your emails will stay relevant in consumers’ inbox’s longer to boost response rates, and you’ll optimize campaign ROI so you can squeeze more profits out of your programs.
Complete the lifecycle
The overarching theme of taking your retail email marketing up a notch is to cover every stop on the customer lifecycle with your brand: bringing on new subscribers, converting them to customers, and growing and retaining them.
More details about each of these concepts is published in the eBook Top 5 Retail Campaigns for 2015, a collaborative resource between industry experts Windsor Circle, Boomtrain, Justuno, LiveClicker, and WhatCounts.
Making a commitment to send better email this year will allow you to increase subscribers, boost engagement, and maximize sales. Testing and refining the process will help you far exceed your goals.
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