In absence of a centralized view into customer data, interactive marketers struggle to execute effective cross-channel programs, fueled by real-time, action customer data and insights. Customers increasingly push for and expect a seamless experience from all interaction points. Connecting each channel into a holistic experience for the shopper is key to driving conversions and not leaving money on the table.

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10 Ways Retailers Are

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Retailers now have more than just product pricing in their
bargaining arsenals. Consider how you might be leaving
money on the table:
Are you narrowing your shopping experience
to a single channel?
It’s no surprise that customers today interact through various channels. They browse on a tablet and then later
buy on a laptop. They read emails on their phones and redeem offers in-store. You may view each one of these
channels as its own separate entity, but customers don’t. According to recent research real-time customer
insight and engagement across channels is the key to success. Savvy retailers should strive for a centralized
view of their consumers. In absence of a centralized view into customer data, interactive marketers struggle to
execute effective cross-channel programs, fueled by real-time, action customer data and insights. Customers
increasingly push for and expect a seamless experience from all interaction points. Connecting each channel
into a holistic experience for the shopper is key to driving conversions and not leaving money on the table.
These best practices are not only good for you, they’re great for
your customers.
These strategies significantly improve the customer experience.
Shoppers show their approval and encouragement of these
practices by converting into customers.
Tips:
Utilize a single marketing platform that allows you to gather data about your customers from all
channels and use that data to drive personal, one-to-one interactions across email, mobile, social,
in-store, and on the web.
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Let’s face it: gaining
and retaining customers
can often feel like a
high stakes match.
What’s the right
balance between what
you’ll give in the way
of offers or discounts
and what you’ll gain in
customer loyalty?
You Your Customers

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Are you letting your
shoppers leave their
carts abandoned?
According to the Internet Retailer article Cart Abandonment E-Mails
Gain More Attention From E-Retailersi
, 71% of shoppers are
abandoning carts and only 19% of the top 1,000 online retailers
are sending abandoned cart email messages to bring the customer
back. Have you created your customer abandonment strategy
yet? Abandoned cart programs are an “easy win” to recapture lost
revenue.
Are you sending non-
targeted or blast emails?
Sending the same offer to your entire database is yesterday’s
news. In fact, this kind of blast email could actually be hurting
your sales efforts. A recent study by eMarketer revealed that 56%
of U.S. email users unsubscribed from email lists because the
content was no longer relevant.
To ensure you don’t succumb to this same fate, collect
demographic and behavioral data from your site, email programs,
and CRM systems, and then use that data to target messages to
the audience that’s most likely to convert. For example, a hardware
retailer could send a marketing email highlighting snow blowers to
customers in the Northeast when a snow storm is predicted. Or
an apparel retailer might send a special offer to customers who
viewed, but did not purchase, a certain style of jeans in the last
30 days. Emails that are behaviorally targeted preform 20 times
better in terms of conversion than general blast messages to your
entire customer base.iii
Tips:
Recent studiesii
indicate that triggering a message
within 24 hours of a shopper abandoning a cart can
recapture 10% to 30% of revenue left in the cart.
Tagging your site so that these messages send
automatically during the window of opportunity your
customers are shopping AND incorporating their
onsite behavior will dramatically increase ROI. You
might ask, “What’s the window of opportunity?” The
window of opportunity is different for every retailer.
Some retailers should trigger an email 24 hours
after a cart is abandoned, for some it should be as
soon as one to three hours. Based on your unique
business goals, the ExactTarget team will work with
you to determine how soon an abandon cart email
should be triggered to ensure it’s landing in your
shopper’s inbox during the crucial buying period.
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Tips:
Make sure to implement a customer preference
center where customers can choose what
communication topics most interest them, which
allows you to personalize future communication on a
one-to-one level. For added sophistication, implement
an engine that can further segment your audience
based on site behavior, demographic information,
geography, and email behavior.
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Are you still manually merchandising
your cross-sells and up-sells?
Recommending products to your online shoppers consistently delivers increased
conversion rates and increased average order values. However, if you are manually
merchandising these recommendations, there is another part of the ROI equation you
should consider: the cost of these man-hours to do it. Manually merchandising your
website can quickly become expensive, and makes you less agile when responding to
shifting customer trends and preferences.
Are you recommending products with “wisdom
of the crowd,” or “personas” type solutions?
For some retailers, the next step from manually merchandising is to use recommendations engines that rely
primarily on “wisdom of the crowds” or “personas” to make product recommendations. However, when customers
are shopping your site, every click made and every page browsed is giving you valuable insight into their wants,
needs, and preferences. Why stop at “wisdom of the crowds” when the data is there to make truly personalized
recommendations that are unique to each individual shopper?
Tips:
Just like with your emails, relevance is key to delivering product recommendations on your site.
Invest in an engine that captures a wide variety of data points about an individual such as click,
browsing purchase behavior, demographics, and social profile data. Use that information and
marry it with “wisdom of the crowds” data to deliver recommendations that are truly tailored to
the individual. Personalizing product recommendations, like those provided by iGoDigital, can
increase conversions site-wide by up to 10%.
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4 Tips:
Utilize an automated product
recommendations engine to deliver cross-
sells and up-sells on your site. Even better,
personalize those recommendations based
on a shoppers behavior and purchase
history to really move the needle.

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Are you generating “basic”
transactional emails out of
your eCommerce platform?
Transactional emails are often viewed as operationally necessary,
but not as a marketing tool. At some retail organizations this function
lives either in the IT department or is a generic email delivered from
the eCommerce platform or the cart solution. However, this valuable
touch point should not be overlooked as a way to provide product
suggestions and reengage the customer post-purchase.
Tips:
Take control of your transactional emails and
position them as customer engagement tools.
Inject product recommendations into purchase
and shipping confirmation emails. These
product recommendations turn transactional
emails into conversion tools, increasing click-
through rates by up to 35% and conversion
rates by up to 25%.iv
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Are you using your social
presence to drive email
engagement?
If your subscriber list has hit a plateau, you may be overlooking a captive
audience: your Facebook fans and Twitter followers. Research shows
that social consumers still want to receive email from brands— and, in
fact, these individuals might be your most engaged email subscribers.v
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Tips:
Even though email is the most preferred channel,
consumers still want communication from
social mediums. Retailers should use a simple
sign-up form to drive email opt-ins and collect
customer data on Facebook or Twitter. Build
branded Facebook fan pages with customized
content, including an email opt-in form. When fans
submit an email address, those individuals are
automatically added to your chosen subscriber
list. As always, make sure you are staying true to
permission and only including those subscribers,
fans and followers who have opted in to receiving
communication from your company.
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Have you fully leveraged
the mobile channel?
Ninety-nine percent of all mobile devices sold today are capable
of receiving SMS messages, as cited in a recent report from BI
Intelligence. Plus, according to Google mobile statistics, four out of 10
people leave a retailer without buying anything in the store—with that
mobile device in hand! Most retailers are overlooking mobile as a way
to reengage customers after they’ve left the store.
Tips:
Encourage people to join your email program via text message
by promoting SMS calls-to-action on location (whether in-store
or at an event). Entice participation by offering a discount or
other promotion.
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Are you overlooking the importance
of relevance in email deliverability?
Poor email deliverability can be a result of several factors, but—no matter the cause—it
will quickly jeopardize your email marketing programs. In fact, according to eMarketer,
78% of US email marketers say improving email deliverability is a significant challenge
to email marketing effectiveness. Are you blindly pressing the send button and hoping
it will reach your subscribers inbox? If you want to keep your position in the inbox,
you must not only maintain good ISP relationships, but also make sure you’re sending
relevant, engaging content to your subscribers.
Tips:
Before you hit the send button – make sure the
content you are sending to your subscribers is
RELEVANT. Create a worthwhile relationship with
your subscribers by sending them content that
relates to them. Driving subscribers to a preference
center or landing page where they can provide more
information about themselves (like how often they’d
like to be contacted or what type of communication
they’d like to receive) is a good start to creating
relevant communications. Additionally, you should
know your customers well enough to speak relevantly
to them based on their preferences and shopping
behavior stored in their customer profile.
Back to Basic Tips
Use a deliverability tool to find and fix rendering and deliverability issues before hitting send. Staying true to permissions will increase deliverability as well as
using a consistent “from” name of your company. It’s beneficial to double-check the subject line before hitting send to make sure it doesn’t include words that
might be considered spam, which gets your email a one-way ticket to your subscriber’s “junk” folder. Last but not least, make sure you’re sending only
to your most engaged subscribers to maintain high deliverability rates. Webmail providers like Yahoo! and Gmail know exactly which messages are
opened, viewed, clicked, or deleted without being read. This data is compiled to create an “engagement score” for you as a sender. Building
scores to denote reputable senders isn’t new, but ISPs are starting to rely on this engagement-based data more heavily than before
to determine what messages should be considered SPAM. Every email you send to an unengaged subscriber puts you closer
to falling into the bulk or SPAM folder.
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Are you lacking automation and
segmentation practices?
Tasks like data movement, segmentation, and routine messaging programs can become time-intensive
and costly. The right marketing automation tools make it possible for retailers to do more with less. By
leveraging automation functionality, it frees resources to focus on strategy that optimizes your interactive
marketing programs, directly resulting in increased revenues. Retailers are also asking how they can create
a one-to-one experience in their messages that combine prior customer data, email transaction history,
and purchase history and speaking to each and every client in a relevant way without using an email
blasting approach.
By investing in segmentation solutions you can ensure your subscribes are receiving the messages that are
targeted. According to a recent study from McKinsey Global Institute, targeted emails bases on customer
demographics alone produced a response rate up to 18 times grater than those that were not targeted.
Think of the possibilities if you leverage other behavioral data to further target your shopper communication.
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Tips:
If you’re sending welcome messages or cart abandonment emails, you’re on the right track. Here are some strategies to take your segmentation
to the next level. Think about incorporating site behavior into your segmentation strategy. By leveraging iGoDigital behavioral segmentation tool,
customers have seen as much as a 50% increase in click-rate and a 56% increase in orders per send.vi
Additionally, there are other intrinsic benefits
to segmenting your audience and sending your shoppers messages that are relevant, timely and personal. As a retailer, you can leverage behavioral
segmentation to push inventory, cross-sell/up-sell, geo-target marketing messages, send event based campaigns, send re-engagement offers, and
create social buzz. Think of the possibilities you could send outside of “traditional” message types.
Continue to maximize your ROI by leveraging automation. Automate your email lifecycle campaigns by using drip campaigns to help manage your
customer and prospect relationships at various stages of the customer lifecycle. For example, begin your drip campaign by sending a welcome
message. Welcome emails are highly anticipated, frequently opened, and (luckily for you) simple to automate inside the ExactTarget system. Don’t
forget to leverage preference centers, registration forms, and landing pages to collect incremental data that will improve automated segmentation.
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Consider the strategies and tips mentioned here to create a winning combination, where you
avoid leaving money on the table, and your customer receives an excellent user experience across
channels.
You might ask, “How do I put all
these strategies to use?”
ExactTarget + iGoDigital gives retail marketers the tools they need to create engaging customer
experiences across all channels. We call this holistic solution the Interactive Marketing Hub.™ It
allows retail marketers to focus on delivering relevant, real-time communications without juggling
multiple vendors and systems.
The Hub gives you UNITY: Integrate data from disparate sources—from CRM and social
media networks to point-of-sale information and web analytics—to gain a single, unified view
of each consumer.
The Hub gives you CONTROL: With access to real-time tracking and first-class, graphical
reporting, get immediate visibility and ultimate control over all of your marketing campaigns.
The Hub gives you SPEED: Ensure your communications are as relevant as they are timely.
Automate advanced, sequenced programs and deliver personalized cross-channel messages
from a single, intuitive console.
i
Source: Internet Retailer - http://www.internetretailer.com/2013/01/09/cart-abandonment-e-mails-gain-more-attention-e-retailer
ii
Source: SeeWhy - http://seewhy.com/blog/2012/10/10/97-shopping-cart-abandonment-rate-mobile-devices-concern-you
iii
Source: iGoDigital Customer Benchmarking Data
iv
Source: ExactTarget’s subscribers fans and followers Channel Preference Survey
v
Source: iGoDigital Customer Benchmarking Data
vi
Source: iGoDigital Customer Benchmarking Data
It’s time to stop leaving money on
the table. See how to get started
at www.exacttarget.com.