Saima Alibhai, practice manager – professional services at Bronto Software explores three ways to engage customers and increase revenue
Are you taking advantage of the most effective tactics for reaching your customers? As you start planning for 2017, look at how you can make your commerce marketing programmes more successful.
Email is one of the most effective ways to reach your target audience and can enhance the entire customer lifecycle: From convincing a shopper to buy to maintaining the conversation after the first purchase and identifying opportunities to encourage customers to buy again. So it’s no surprise that the Direct Marketing Association found that ROI from email rose from £24.93 in 2014 to £38 in 2015.
But a ‘spray and pray’ approach to email misses a lot of opportunities. To succeed, you need ways to engage customers to drive higher conversion rates. Three email tactics – segmentation, welcome series and cart recovery – do just that. Let’s take a look in more detail.
Segmentation
Messages tailored to each customer convert at higher rates. Segmenting your database allows you to deliver the most relevant content and use every touch point as an opportunity to offer additional value. A brand that’s using segmentation successfully is womenswear brand Closet London. By leveraging customer information such as preferences and purchase history in emails, the retailer becomes, in effect, a personal stylist. For example, shoppers who have bought bodycon style dresses will receive emails suggesting similar types of clothing. The success speaks for itself: The conversion rate of those tailored emails is 50 times higher than Closet’s average marketing message.
Welcome Series
Roll out the welcome mat! A welcome series is a very focused message series that introduces shoppers to your product offering, tells them why they should care about your business, and hopefully inspires them to make their first purchase. A great example is Swedish sports apparel brand Björn Borg. The retailer sends a three-part email series to welcome new subscribers, convey the brand’s “active and attractive” messaging and make them part of the Björn Borg tribe. The click rate is 232% higher, conversion is up 21% and revenue is 217% higher than their standard marketing email.
Cart Recovery
Abandoned baskets can be a source of frustration for commerce marketers, but they’re also full of potential. Shoppers who have gone to the trouble of selecting items and putting them in their basket are just a step away from buying. London-based footwear brand Hudson Shoes is generating significant revenue by bringing shoppers back to the products they left in their basket. These highly-effective messages generate 22% of Hudson’s total annual revenue from email with engagement 2x higher and conversion rates 4x higher than their newsletter.
The revenue opportunities continue to grow as technology becomes more sophisticated. When it comes to measuring the success of your marketing programmes, the most valuable benchmarks are your own trends over time. No one knows your business like you do. But it’s also nice to see where opportunities lie. So if you are not yet using these three tactics, consider moving them to the top of your list of options to test in 2017. You will be in a better position to increase sales and encourage customers to return.
About Bronto Software
Bronto Software, a NetSuite (NYSE: N) company, provides a cloud-based commerce marketing automation platform to mid-market and enterprise organisations worldwide, with a client roster of leading brands, including Vivienne Westwood, notonthehighstreet.com, Björn Borg, Joseph Joseph and Oak Furniture Land.
