Key Speakers: Mr. Armando Roggio (Contributing Editor, Practical Ecommerce)

Klaviyo which is a marketing automation platform was the main sponsor to this webinar.

Premise

Email continues to be observed as amongst the most effective ways of executing digital marketing. It can be personalized based on the segment or sent on mass basis if such requirements arise. There are five aspects that must be studied before initiative email marketing. They are as follows:

·    Shopping loyalty

·    Marketing interaction

·    Website and buying behaviour

·    Social contest activity

·    Life changing purchase behaviour

Thorough research on these aspects is a must for any marketer. This write-up will now explore those five points in greater detail.

Shopping Loyalty

Varying levels of shopping loyalty exist in the market. Shoppers may be categorized under the following heads:

·    VIP Customers

·    Frequent Customers

·    Recent Customers

·    Binge Customers

·    Missing Customers

·    Subscribers who are not Customers

As the name suggests, VIP customers are those who are loyal customers and even act as brand advocates, referring the product to several others. As per marketing research published on a white paper by Adobe, it emerges that only eight percent of visitors to any particular website or store in North America generate a whopping forty one percent of its total revenue. This is in stark contrast to the rest of the ninety two percent of the visitors who are only responsible for the remaining fifty nine percent. Thus it is obvious that no efforts must lag in retaining loyal customers and to make brand advocates out of them. In Europe the gap is even more as loyal customers account for seven times more shopping volume than the others.

Frequent customers as a category are just one notch below and can soon be upgraded to the VIP category. Recent customers have only lately been brought in to the fold. Binge customers, as the name suggests do most of their shopping at any particular times of the year, such as festivals, holidays or special personal occasions.

There exist those who subscribe to brand content but have not yet made any purchase. On the other hand, there are missing customers who have not shown any interest in the brand. It is these last two categories that can best be converted through mass marketing means.

A typical email marketing flow may be described in the illustration below:

At the initial phase, a complete blast of emails is made to an entire database. Then profiles are extracted that are best suited to the product. Lookalike profiles are segmented together based on common tastes, requirements and interests. Then the buying behaviour of group is noted. All this data is collated together to conduct a business analytics operations. Once the numbers are out, the system can be worked to provide predictive analytics which will help in predicting market and customer moves. This will allow the marketer to stay ahead of the competition.

Marketing Interaction

It has been studied that there is on average a forty percent increase in the average open rates once positive marketing interaction is carried out. It triples the average revenue per campaign. In fact there is nearly a fifteen percent rise in revenues with this method being applied than on un-segmented groups.

Website and Buying Behaviour

At this stage, data is collated from the website to study browsing and purchase behaviour of the customer base. The business intelligence then gauged, helps the marketers in optimizing their strategies. Echo Club for example has been able to pinpoint the exact time and day of the week with the highest email open rates. The best time with maximum actual conversions is also recorded.

Certain buyers spend a substantial part of their visit time on a certain page, so ads pertaining to those products must be beamed across to them. Even a seemingly trivial piece of data such as shopping cart abandonment rates tells a certain story. If at a particular time of the year, any shopper tends to use a lot of shipping, that person can at an earlier point be sent free shipping or subscription offers as hook points.

Social Contest Activity

As the name suggests, this phase is about using social media to engage audiences. Games and contests can be run to keep the customer base hooked as well as to provide them with useful information. The number of entrants, entries, likes, shares, invites and visits must all be tracked here. Social media can open up a window into people’s lives as people freely share content.

Life changing Purchase Behaviour

There are certain points in life which make a sudden change in buying behaviors. This could include examples such as going higher education, marriage, pregnancy, having children, change in job, transfer to new location or even country, retirement or death of close relatives. The marketers need to be sensitive enough to foresee what could be these circumstances and how best the brand can provide solutions during this time of flux.

US retail giant Target for example used Big Data to predict times when customers would buy certain products. Specifically they were able to predict pregnancy among women. Post pregnancy or post child-birth, families tended to buy baby-care products, thus such products’ ads would be extremely relevant to them. They were able to predict pregnancies due to sophisticated algorithms but also a perceptive nature on customer behaviour.

Similarly, another company which deals with pet food was able to insert relevant advertisements related to animal growth. Families that had puppies, were sent advertisements on dog food and requirements that dogs get when they get older. Real animal faces encouraged greater connect between the marketer and the final consumer.

At the end of the webinar, the speaker advised all viewers to taka demo of Klaviyo’s software. A senior representative from Klaviyo took five minutes to introduce his product and how it is useful for people working in this line.

Forum:   http://www.practicalecommerce.com/