GUEST COMMENT Fingers on buzzers – triggering the consumer to reconsider a missed opportunity

by Judd Marcello

The mobile arena continues to attract the attention of retailers and marketers alike. However, where it was on their agenda for years as a channel to watch for the future, the channel is really beginning to take off with an increasing number of businesses successfully monetising it. Inevitably in line with this investment of time and resource from retailers, mobile has become a very attractive place for consumers to window shop. Apps and beautifully rendered mobile sites are becoming standard practice from the major players, enabling consumers to more readily research their next purchase at a time that suits them.

It therefore hardly comes as a surprise that a new study, released this month by Interscope, found twenty-somethings switch between electronic devices and media platforms every two minutes. The rate of media consumption could be perceived as a problem for retailers – how do they make their message stand out from the many promotions they are exposed to on a day to day basis across a whole host of platforms? The reality is that a single marketing message is not going to prompt a response, with Comscore noting that click through rates have dropped from 7 per cent in 1996 to less than 0.1 per cent today. In a similar vein, brands know better than to bombard their customers with material – a recent YouGov survey found that 66 per cent of consumers unsubscribe from their messages, where they receive too much marketing.

So looking for a way to stay on the radar of consumers when they have added a product to a shopping cart and then gone absent without purchase becomes a difficult line to tread. Using email triggers is a very clever technique that shows a brand knows its customers, as messages will be dispatched based on real-time interactions where a number of different emails can be automatically sent out based on a number of different customer scenarios.

Triggers can be set to be activated before or after a particular event has taken place, for example to remind customers if they have left items in online shopping baskets or for recommending similar items after a purchase. To illustrate this in more detail, if one customer has bought a product, they may receive a thank you email with information on further deals. If another customer hasn’t, they could receive an email, offering a promotion prompting them to come back to again. This can all be done automatically, tailoring messages to consumers and taking caution not to irritate with too many irrelevant messages.

While retailers scramble to find a way to make mobile part of their engagement strategy, email continues to play a pivotal cross channel role to make sure sales opportunities are not lost. This isn’t to compete with other marketing mediums but to complement them, creating engaging messages for multichannel consumers that are targeted, personalised and operate on real-time and ensure that retailers and customers don’t miss out on great deals.

Judd Marcello is director of marketing and PR EMEA, e-Dialog