Today’s customers are changing, and so should your outlook on how you address their needs.
If you want to see significant impacts on your bottom line, recommendations should be personalized based on each customer’s up-to-the-minute shopping activity and purchases.
The Power of Identity
Ninety-nine percent of your website visitors don’t buy anything, nor do they leave behind Personally Identifiable Information (PII). So, if you can’t identify them, you’re missing a tremendous opportunity to engage them when it matters — serving the kind of relevant messaging that drives revenue.
This, in turn, relies on your ability to reach customers across many channels and to identify them each time they interact with your brand. Once you can do that, your data on individual interests and preferences can be captured and transformed into consumer insights, which is how you personalize your interactions and form thriving customer relationships.
Let’s dive into two key ways to increase your email database and furthermore leverage your customer data to create emails that consumers will not only click but will also take further action on:
Intelligent Data-based Lightboxes
One of the simplest ways to grow your email lists is by implementing data-based lightboxes. What does this mean? Even if you aren’t familiar with the term, at some point, you’ve definitely encountered lightboxes. These are website overlays that encourage visitors to sign up, subscribe, etc.
The way to make lightboxes most impactful is to leverage data to make these dynamic per user. You want to show that you understand if they’re a new user, returning after a certain amount of time, or maybe they’re just a loyal repeat customer. Either way, make the messaging applicable to the customer’s stage in the journey and show that you care by offering incentives.
From initiating new relationships to re-engaging customers who are less active, triggered lightbox services send highly segmented, highly personalized messages to new and existing customers as they shop.
Note: Avoid serving lightboxes from Google to people entering your site because Google doesn’t like intrusive popups.
Triggered Emails
Abandoned-cart emails are the most common triggered email type and the most straightforward. When a shopper puts something in the cart and leaves without purchasing—which happens about 70% of the time on retail websites—persuading the shopper to complete the sale often doesn’t take much. Abandoned-cart reminders sent over the subsequent few hours typically result in 10-25% of abandoners making a purchase.
How can such emails affect the bottom line? If, over the course of a day, on a retail website, 1,000 carts are started and 700 are abandoned, only 300 result in a sale. If an email is triggered to those 700 abandoners, and 10% (70) follow through with an average order value of $100, that’s an additional $7,000 in revenue per day. Multiply that by 365 days in a year, and that’s an additional $2.5 million in annual revenue.
Other types of triggered emails (such as abandon browse, low inventory, back in stock, etc.) offer multiple additional opportunities to increase revenue —and again, identification rate makes all the difference because it directly affects revenue. Once you optimize your identification rate for abandoned carts, that same high identification rate will optimize your other email triggers: Abandoned browse, abandoned search, and abandoned category work similarly to abandoned cart notifications.
To make your triggered email even more relevant and personal, or to personalize otherwise generic bulk email, include dynamic product recommendations unique to each recipient.
As you can see, the more website visitors you can identify (and re-engage), the more revenue you will generate. Retailers must identify customers each time customers visit their website in order to build a cohesive understanding of each customer’s wants and needs.
With each re-engagement method, focus on your brand name recognizability: Become familiar to your customers with each interaction. Add your logo, and keep your color palette, recognizable faces, and tone.
Takeaways:
- With 99% of website visitors not making purchases or leaving behind personally identifiable information, identifying visitors presents a major opportunity for engagement and revenue generation.
- Successful engagement relies on reaching customers across various channels and recognizing them during each interaction, which enables the collection of data on their interests and preferences.
- This data can be transformed into consumer insights for personalizing interactions and building strong customer relationships.
- The ability to identify more website visitors directly correlates with higher revenue. Retailers must strive to recognize customers upon each website visit to develop a comprehensive understanding of their wants and needs, which is essential for effective personalization and engagement.
- Personalization is crucial: Tailoring recommendations based on individual customer activity and purchases can significantly impact the bottom line.
Image: Envato Elements
