personalized content Archives

Here are three tips to retain your customers.

You already know that relevant, personalized messaging can make or break your digital marketing campaign. So as we think about cutting through the noise during the increasingly competitive holiday season — where brands fine-tuned their Cyber Monday promotions for months and worked to solve supply chain shortages — how can your company use personalized content to stand out and drive incremental revenue, both for the all-important holiday season and beyond?

While technology has enabled more personal, immersive experiences, consumers’ expectations remain higher than ever. Having a seamless e-commerce website experience is expected, and now is the time to go beyond offering transactional benefits — like low prices or free shipping offers — and instead focus on providing an enriching consumer journey, like with targeted messaging.

And there’s no time like the present if you’re looking to grow your brand’s holiday revenue. In fact, almost half of consumers start their holiday shopping by mid-November (before Black Friday and Cyber Monday), and 56% finish by mid/late December (Dec 11-31), according to the Facebook Holiday Discovery Moment Study by YouGov.

So, how do you make the most of it? Based on my experience managing digital marketing at companies like Nike, L’Oreal, and Meta (formerly Facebook), here are my three tips to increase brand loyalty and reconnect with ambivalent consumers to improve your online revenue.

1. Craft purpose-driven messaging

Think about how your customers’ priorities may have shifted this season and how your brand can meet their changing needs. Successful companies are re-evaluating how to stay relevant by crafting more purpose-driven messaging rather than creating purely transactional content. Your brand’s communication strategy should be an extension of its DNA and amplify what your company believes.

According to a Deloitte study, 25% of respondents said they stopped shopping with brands that appeared to be acting in their self-interest. My takeaway? Consumers will stay loyal to the companies that demonstrate authentic empathy, and relationships will last longer when your customers feel invested in your company’s success. When analysing your outreach strategy to your consumers, whether through social media or email, ensure that your messaging engages, inspires, or impacts others.

Consider the three phases of a consumer’s traditional path-to-purchase:

Discovery phase: How does your brand show up when your audience conducts research? When a consumer Googles you, do your brand’s philanthropic initiatives show up at the top of the search results page?
Consideration phase: How does your brand show up when a consumer engages with your content? Do your influencer/creator’s social media posts represent your brand’s values?
Conversion phase: How does your brand show up when a consumer ultimately shops on your website? What action do you want your consumer to take beyond making a one-time purchase?

Ensure that your purpose-driven messaging is woven throughout all of your brand’s “owned” channels.

For example, a recent blog post by Sheryl Sandberg, Meta’s (formerly Facebook’s) Chief Operating Officer, announced its #BuyBlack Friday Show. It features episodes led by television host Elaine Welteroth on their Facebook Shops tab — to highlight select Black-owned businesses that have continued to be the hardest hit by the pandemic, helping consumers learn about their business journeys and encouraging people to #BuyBlack for the holiday season.

2. Build an affinity-focused customer profile

Who are you talking to? Get to know your audience. Data is one of the most valuable resources that companies have. We know cookies are going away, which will make it more challenging for brands to collect and attribute third-party data. This makes it critical to continue gathering information directly from your consumers on your brand’s owned website, like a consumer’s first name, gender, and the last category shopped (foundational data points to build customer profiles to better market to them).

But, be sure to take it one step further and go beyond merely capturing transactional data points. Instead, use this as an opportunity to learn more about your consumer’s interests and affinities. For example:

Are they interested in researching or buying? If they’re undecided, would they prefer that you send them a sample to “try before they buy”?
Who are they buying for? Are they interested in purchasing the product for themselves, or are they buying gifts for a friend?
After they complete a purchase, would they like monthly stylist tips on how to “update their look?”
To continue the conversation, either after they browsed your website or purchased, would they prefer to get text messages or email communications from your brand?

Rather than making assumptions about vague customer personas, humanize the data capture experience. Get to know your audience by understanding their unique preferences, which will ultimately help you retain your consumers and reduce their churn rate.

3. Redefine customer retention

Marketers closely monitor traditional e-commerce metrics like conversion rate and bounce rate and often keep a careful watch on CRM (customer relationship management) analytics, like the monthly number of one-time purchases, repeat purchase rate (usually defined by 2+ purchases), and consumers’ average replenishment rate (how long it takes a consumer to re-purchase from your brand’s website).

While consumer demand for online buying hasn’t waned, according to McKinsey, as many as 30 to 40% of consumers continue to switch brands or retailers. I encourage marketers to take this opportunity to redefine brand loyalty and retention before their customers start shopping elsewhere.

We should go beyond merely defining retention as a customer making two or more purchases and instead try to understand consumer behaviour across all channels. This goes beyond “last-click attribution,” which tells us the last channel they clicked before purchasing from your website.

What if we assigned tiered “values” to consumers who engaged with the brand during the “consideration” phase of their path-to-purchase, rather than just monitoring shoppers during the “conversion” phase of their journey? In other words, a loyal customer should be defined by both shopping and engagement behaviours.

For example, if a consumer searched for non-branded keywords in Google (“how to get glowing skin”), watched a how-to video, and then signed up for emails on your brand’s website, traditional marketers might disregard this research behaviour since they’re only in the “consideration” phase of their path-to-purchase. However, a more nuanced marketer might consider this an excellent opportunity to assign a tiered “value” to this type of consumer and develop relevant content with a targeted communication strategy — hopefully converting them to a purchaser and brand loyalist down the road.

By Melissa Stone

Sourced from Entrepreneur Europe

Reigniting the spark: What is connected re-engagement and why it is good for your business

Connected re-engagement steps into this picture to enable your brand to reignite interactions with lapsed customers. The core idea behind it is simple. Existing customers are already primed to be engaged with the brand—all a brand needs are the right ‘connected’ strategies.

Connected strategies are critical because modern-day customers are disposed to switch between different channels when interacting with a brand. A report by Social Media Today revealed that nearly three in four customers (72 per cent) prefer an omnichannel communication approach. Opting for connected re-engagement strategies—which comprise myriad methodologies and approaches—has proven advantages across multiple sectors. Recent market studies indicate that customers that interact across multiple channels spend 3-4 times more, on average, than their peers who interact across a single channel. Brands that opt for a strong omnichannel approach to customer engagement also register an average 9.5 per cent increase in their annual revenues.

In short, while your brand may grow in the absence of a connected communication strategy, your odds of long-term success are more favourable if you opt for one.

This invites the question: how do you build a strong and effective re-engagement campaign that is powered by connected communication? Here are the key aspects of any connected communication strategy, along with some examples of how brands across verticals have used different approaches to re-engage customers:

Identifying and segmenting inactive customers

Before you endeavour to target your inactive customers with re-engagement campaigns, you first need to identify your least engaged customers. In-depth data mining and analysis of consumers and their past behavioural patterns can help you to accomplish this goal by enabling you to categorize dormant customers into appropriate segments. You can create diverse segments depending on your business objectives and requirements.

For instance, one segment could include customers who have not made any purchase from your shop in the last half-year. Customers who have not visited the shop in the past three months can be grouped into yet another segment. More segments can be created to segregate customers into organized sub-clusters, such as users who have not interacted with your brand on any social media platform over the last three months or shared negative feedback on a product/service.

Identifying and understanding these segments is essential as they can then be targeted with highly personalized content and call-to-actions that are precision-tailored to speak to their stated and unstated needs. For instance, if a customer bucket includes people who now only prefer to passively engage with your brand (like over your social media pages through reactions on posts, videos, etc.), you can send them personalized emails along with appealing offers.

Targeting each segment with personalized content

Offers such as digital coupons and sales promotions (including providing free product samples or limited-time subscriptions) can remind your inactive customers what they have been missing out on. A popular OTT platform did something similar with a recentre-engagement campaign. It was different because people could sign up for free content streaming without filling in their credit/debit card details. By eliminating this barrier, the brand prevented the problem of customer drop-off before sign-up while significantly expanding its customer database and generating massive social media traction.

You can also up the ante of your offers (such as rewards and loyalty programmes) by making the interaction of customers with your (re-) engagement campaign intriguing. A popular digital payments app recently gamified the users’ engagement through a travel game. Users gained reward points upon each transaction, enabling them to advance to the next level. The excitement of moving ahead in the game, in turn, incentivised users to transact more frequently. The short-term and long-term rewards reaped under such gamified initiatives can also be a powerful motivation for customers to re-engage with a brand they’re already familiar with. This can, therefore, maximize the impact of your re-engagement strategy.

Focus on data to build a truly connected strategy

Once you have successfully re-engaged a segment of lapsed customers, the next step involves doing it at speed and scale across multiple channels. This is where data and analytics enter the picture. As mentioned above, the data that you have accrued from your past interactions comprise a valuable asset. You can leverage this wealth of information to optimise the effectiveness of your re-engagement strategy through data-mined insights.

Every successive campaign facilitates the capture of better quality of data that you can then leverage to create even better strategies. A robust technological infrastructure, such as those enabled by leading players in the connected communication space, can help you tap into the power of this virtuous cycle and optimise re-engagement. Having a data-driven omnichannel communication strategy also increases the number of points of interaction, thus ensuring that the customer engages with your campaigns across multiple channels.

Unless brands find a way of rigging the balance of probability, an uninformed chase of customers is not likely to yield the desired result, and chance is the one thing that brands cannot afford to take in this highly unpredictable post-pandemic business landscape. The only viable solution, then, is to create a well-thought-through and tech-augmented connected communication strategy. By keeping the aforementioned steps in mind, brands of all sizes can optimise their customer engagement and ensure that they achieve all the relevant objectives, with precision and at scale.

Feature Image Credit: Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

Managing Director-India, Infobi