Facebook Deals could be revolutionary, although the idea is an old one. In fact, it's more or less exactly what the Tom Cruise film Minority Report imagined - proximity recognition. In the film, our hero's eyes get scanned and every poster he passes makes him an offer he can't refuse. Facebook Deals is slightly more elective that that, and I believe there's a huge opportunity for brands who already do eCRM well.
When you log into Facebook on your mobile, and "check in" to your current location, the account shows you a list of local places, some of which will have offers. For exmple, you can check in to your local high street and see an offer from the local Starbucks offering you a free muffin if you buy a big coffee. Simple and neat.
Redeeming the offer by clicking on it (and showing the cashier) automatically updates your status with an ad to say you've done so. As a marketer you get someone who self-identifies as a customer telling likeminded friends about your brand.
One of the issues that marketers will have to grapple with is that of acceptability: will our customer’s friends feel irritated by the fact that what’s effectively an ad (“I’ve just checked into Starbucks for a free muffin”) appears in their friend feed? This will require testing to get to the bottom of it, but given the trend towards privacy-agnosticism I suspect it will turn out to be a non-problem.
In the immediate future, combining Facebook Deals with newly-possible Social CRM attribution techniques (see www.scrm.co.uk) you will be able to track customers in your email marketing database through to purchase and back, which means you can assign influence scores to specific segments. In turn this means you can target specific location-based offers based on what you already know about your customers. It's potentially hugely powerful. Handled with sensitivity and intelligence, it will be game changing.
Friday, 25 March 2011
Friday, 18 March 2011
Social media value attribution
Everybody’s talking about how social media is the new big thing. Yesterday it was the next big thing. According to Facebook, the next big thing is, well, unknown so who knows what tomorrow will bring. So we have a marketing world set alight by the potential of social media, queuing up to use it, setting up plans to get into social media. But there’s no real rationale. It’s being done because it looks like it is important. People live there, so our world has changed. But as for value - well, who knows? KPIs all seem to surround the number of fans and Likes, sentiment (no matter how vague this is) and hope. Accountability - attribution - is the elephant in the room.
I’ve grown up with digital. In 1994 I set up a digital agency, building communities around websites for brands like Snickers and Hewlett-Packard. We added channels as we went along - search engines, ads, interactive television and mobile. Around ten years ago we had become part of the world’s fourth biggest advertising network, and the digital world looked full of colour, sexy as hell, with big brands piling in to spend money on visitors, eyeballs and sales. Having sold out, we next built an agency around something brand new in the world of digital marketing: accountability. We wanted to prove that digital could have tangible, measurable and commercial value. So we got into eCRM big time.
Working with brands like Virgin, NSPCC and News International we started creating digitally-delivered campaigns built around individual customers. What we learned about them and from them we used to better engage them. We used insights derived from demography and behaviour to inform targeting strategies that delivered relevant content when it was most likely to work. We used segmentation principles originated by the direct mail companies and facilitated by the cheapest of media, email, to improve response rates and sales revenues. We used Recency, Frequency and Value to benchmark customer segments, applied campaigns bespoked to each segment’s needs, and measured the changes. We gave marketers what they wanted: proof that what they were doing produced specific financial returns.
Today this is what we do, still. Sure, the channels have changed. We now use mobile, SMS and email, but we also use websites. What was once called personalisation has been adapted; for McCain Foods we extended the eCRM strategy from email onto its site, so that visitors see content based on which segment they belong to and where they are in a planned nudge-based customer journey. We track individuals through their entire web experience, bringing behavioural data back into the eCRM programme so we can attribute the contribution their experience makes towards changes in their value. Taking an example, we know that by increasing engagement through the programme, one specific segment has increased its average purchase frequency by 3% a year - leading to an increase in sales of around £1million.
This level of attribution means a client can justify spending part of its valuable marketing budget on this eCRM activity. If the incremental revenue a programme generates, and in particular the incremental margin it generates, is greater than the cost of generating it, then it’s a no-brainer. Likewise, one would think that if you could prove that the incremental margin was less than the cost of generating it, you’d close down the programme very quickly indeed.
And yet, social media defies this superbly clean logic. Because you cannot cast attribution, because you can’t tell whether it’s a positive or negative ROI, the hope that it’s the next big thing and it will be worth it seems to justify investment in it. Where’s the return? I read a statistic the other day that some Facebook campaign had generated an ROI of 4:1 (actually, they said “400%!!”). I’d love to know what that means... at a guess, this company isn’t making 25% margin, and unless it’s making 25% plus, that “ROI” is actually a loss.
So this is where we found ourselves, running fantastic, highly auditable campaigns, leveraging customer data for all its worth, using email, mobile and the web, when this groundswell of social media marketing buzz started preoccupying marketing minds. So Underwired has developed a tool that allows us to make some connections. It allows us to create specific calls to action to customer segments, and watch precisely what they do in response.
By creating this tool we’ve finally addressed the elephant in the room. We’ve added the ability to score individuals according to what social actions they take in response to our engagement programmes. It means we can add an advocacy dimension to our demographic, behavioural and motivation-based segmentation, and this means we can identify people who have value to us as recruiters and word-spreaders. We can even attribute new customers to an individual’s referrals, which gives us real power to tap into social behaviour and account for the results. This is the new big thing.
I’ve grown up with digital. In 1994 I set up a digital agency, building communities around websites for brands like Snickers and Hewlett-Packard. We added channels as we went along - search engines, ads, interactive television and mobile. Around ten years ago we had become part of the world’s fourth biggest advertising network, and the digital world looked full of colour, sexy as hell, with big brands piling in to spend money on visitors, eyeballs and sales. Having sold out, we next built an agency around something brand new in the world of digital marketing: accountability. We wanted to prove that digital could have tangible, measurable and commercial value. So we got into eCRM big time.
Working with brands like Virgin, NSPCC and News International we started creating digitally-delivered campaigns built around individual customers. What we learned about them and from them we used to better engage them. We used insights derived from demography and behaviour to inform targeting strategies that delivered relevant content when it was most likely to work. We used segmentation principles originated by the direct mail companies and facilitated by the cheapest of media, email, to improve response rates and sales revenues. We used Recency, Frequency and Value to benchmark customer segments, applied campaigns bespoked to each segment’s needs, and measured the changes. We gave marketers what they wanted: proof that what they were doing produced specific financial returns.
Today this is what we do, still. Sure, the channels have changed. We now use mobile, SMS and email, but we also use websites. What was once called personalisation has been adapted; for McCain Foods we extended the eCRM strategy from email onto its site, so that visitors see content based on which segment they belong to and where they are in a planned nudge-based customer journey. We track individuals through their entire web experience, bringing behavioural data back into the eCRM programme so we can attribute the contribution their experience makes towards changes in their value. Taking an example, we know that by increasing engagement through the programme, one specific segment has increased its average purchase frequency by 3% a year - leading to an increase in sales of around £1million.
This level of attribution means a client can justify spending part of its valuable marketing budget on this eCRM activity. If the incremental revenue a programme generates, and in particular the incremental margin it generates, is greater than the cost of generating it, then it’s a no-brainer. Likewise, one would think that if you could prove that the incremental margin was less than the cost of generating it, you’d close down the programme very quickly indeed.
And yet, social media defies this superbly clean logic. Because you cannot cast attribution, because you can’t tell whether it’s a positive or negative ROI, the hope that it’s the next big thing and it will be worth it seems to justify investment in it. Where’s the return? I read a statistic the other day that some Facebook campaign had generated an ROI of 4:1 (actually, they said “400%!!”). I’d love to know what that means... at a guess, this company isn’t making 25% margin, and unless it’s making 25% plus, that “ROI” is actually a loss.
So this is where we found ourselves, running fantastic, highly auditable campaigns, leveraging customer data for all its worth, using email, mobile and the web, when this groundswell of social media marketing buzz started preoccupying marketing minds. So Underwired has developed a tool that allows us to make some connections. It allows us to create specific calls to action to customer segments, and watch precisely what they do in response.
By creating this tool we’ve finally addressed the elephant in the room. We’ve added the ability to score individuals according to what social actions they take in response to our engagement programmes. It means we can add an advocacy dimension to our demographic, behavioural and motivation-based segmentation, and this means we can identify people who have value to us as recruiters and word-spreaders. We can even attribute new customers to an individual’s referrals, which gives us real power to tap into social behaviour and account for the results. This is the new big thing.
Wednesday, 9 March 2011
Making social media pay
There’s an apparent conflict between the pragmatic and the desirable. Marketers necessarily want to be able to justify every penny they spend on marketing - especially in a recession - so there's a strong emphasis on the accountable. And then there's social media.
Everyone’s talking about the importance of social media, including channels like Facebook, Twitter, Quora and LinkedIn. The buzz has been incredible. Clearly when movies are being made about the kids who got the movement going, making billions in just six years, that buzz becomes tantalising for brands. And of course nobody wants to play catch-up, no-one wants to be the one who gets the dregs of the success that a new and revenue-generating marketing channel brings with it. Arriving just before everyone else leaves the party is low risk but delivers a very low return.
So how can you reconcile the two things, this requirement for measurable return on marketing investment, and the need to catch the wave?
This is the thinking that led Underwired, already the UK’s leading eCRM specialist agency, to try and bridge the gap between CRM, which is utterly auditable, and social media, which isn’t. To go back to the party metaphor, eCRM is like the bit where you know exactly who you’re inviting to the party and why. Social is the bit after you’ve taken their coat and they’ve entered the room. Once they are in there, all you can do is measure the noise levels (and in fact that's what Buzz Tracking or Sentiment Analysis tools do).
The new Social CRM tool that Underwired has developed actually bridges the gap. It allows you to track an individual into, say, a Facebook environment (with standard functions including Like, Share, Comment, Upload content, watch a video) and see exactly what they do. You can tell if, responding to a call to action in an email campaign, John visits your page, Likes it, comments on it, only watched half the video but sitll shares it with his facebook friends. You can then append that data back to your database, which means that you can create sub-segments of people who respond in a certain way when presented with specific calls to action, offers, promotions or choices.
From a marketing perspective it provides you with a way to further segment your customers. You can assign advocacy scores (even types of advocacy) and use that to inform future campaigns just targeting people who share your content with their friends - real fan marketing. But more importantly, it gives you the means to extend attribution into social channels. And if you can identify precisely which routes your sales came from, without having a big grey area where you’ve temporarily lost control of your customer, it means you can improve your marketing at every single step of the customer journey. Finally, it means you can assign a real value to social media - though of course while it means you can dive in with confidence, you do still of course have to dive in.
Everyone’s talking about the importance of social media, including channels like Facebook, Twitter, Quora and LinkedIn. The buzz has been incredible. Clearly when movies are being made about the kids who got the movement going, making billions in just six years, that buzz becomes tantalising for brands. And of course nobody wants to play catch-up, no-one wants to be the one who gets the dregs of the success that a new and revenue-generating marketing channel brings with it. Arriving just before everyone else leaves the party is low risk but delivers a very low return.
So how can you reconcile the two things, this requirement for measurable return on marketing investment, and the need to catch the wave?
This is the thinking that led Underwired, already the UK’s leading eCRM specialist agency, to try and bridge the gap between CRM, which is utterly auditable, and social media, which isn’t. To go back to the party metaphor, eCRM is like the bit where you know exactly who you’re inviting to the party and why. Social is the bit after you’ve taken their coat and they’ve entered the room. Once they are in there, all you can do is measure the noise levels (and in fact that's what Buzz Tracking or Sentiment Analysis tools do).
The new Social CRM tool that Underwired has developed actually bridges the gap. It allows you to track an individual into, say, a Facebook environment (with standard functions including Like, Share, Comment, Upload content, watch a video) and see exactly what they do. You can tell if, responding to a call to action in an email campaign, John visits your page, Likes it, comments on it, only watched half the video but sitll shares it with his facebook friends. You can then append that data back to your database, which means that you can create sub-segments of people who respond in a certain way when presented with specific calls to action, offers, promotions or choices.
From a marketing perspective it provides you with a way to further segment your customers. You can assign advocacy scores (even types of advocacy) and use that to inform future campaigns just targeting people who share your content with their friends - real fan marketing. But more importantly, it gives you the means to extend attribution into social channels. And if you can identify precisely which routes your sales came from, without having a big grey area where you’ve temporarily lost control of your customer, it means you can improve your marketing at every single step of the customer journey. Finally, it means you can assign a real value to social media - though of course while it means you can dive in with confidence, you do still of course have to dive in.
Thursday, 10 February 2011
Monday, 7 February 2011
A groundbreaking Social CRM tool from Underwired
Until recently driving traffic to Facebook pages was the equivalent to old-style viral or word of mouth marketing, using it as a venue for people to engage with a brand. The evaluation of a campaign’s success was based on inference rather than end-to-end tracking – indicated by click-through rates, sentiment scores, mentions, ‘likes’ or Facebook transactions. However until now there has been no simple way of linking prompted Facebook activity to an individual customer’s record.
My company, Underwired, has just launched an sCRM tool which allows address-level tracking, the holy grail of social strategies. It closes the loop between the outbound customer journey and subsequent engagement, bringing relevant data back into the eCRM database. Underwired sCRM allows brands to employ social as part of a fully tracked eCRM programme that never loses sight of an engaged customer.
Underwired sCRM enables brands to capture social data, including an individual’s clicks on ‘like’ and ‘comment’ buttons, external links and video content (including how long they watch it for), photo upload, post and share with friends functions. For example, this means that customers who don’t spend much but have huge social influence can be identified and messaged appropriately, leveraging their real value. For the first time marketers can add an Advocacy dimension to their segmentation.
Making address-level tracking a reality solves an epic challenge for digital marketers, allowing them to pinpoint exactly who is doing what in their brand’s social channels and identify – and properly target – their most active brand advocates.
Social behavioural insight will be critical for marketers in 2011. By building Underwired sCRM into Underwired’s four week audit process, we can now include Facebook as an intrinsic part of a brand’s eCRM and email marketing campaigns. It means we can remove the final remaining blind spots in tracking ROI for online campaigns.
For further information, please visit www.scrm.co.uk
My company, Underwired, has just launched an sCRM tool which allows address-level tracking, the holy grail of social strategies. It closes the loop between the outbound customer journey and subsequent engagement, bringing relevant data back into the eCRM database. Underwired sCRM allows brands to employ social as part of a fully tracked eCRM programme that never loses sight of an engaged customer.
Underwired sCRM enables brands to capture social data, including an individual’s clicks on ‘like’ and ‘comment’ buttons, external links and video content (including how long they watch it for), photo upload, post and share with friends functions. For example, this means that customers who don’t spend much but have huge social influence can be identified and messaged appropriately, leveraging their real value. For the first time marketers can add an Advocacy dimension to their segmentation.
Making address-level tracking a reality solves an epic challenge for digital marketers, allowing them to pinpoint exactly who is doing what in their brand’s social channels and identify – and properly target – their most active brand advocates.
Social behavioural insight will be critical for marketers in 2011. By building Underwired sCRM into Underwired’s four week audit process, we can now include Facebook as an intrinsic part of a brand’s eCRM and email marketing campaigns. It means we can remove the final remaining blind spots in tracking ROI for online campaigns.
For further information, please visit www.scrm.co.uk
Friday, 3 December 2010
The nudge towards eCRM
ECRM is not a quick fix but requires sustained investment and patience, explains Felix Velarde, managing director at Underwired Amaze.
There are still some companies that haven’t understood the significance of eCRM (Electronic Customer Relationship Marketing). Yes, eCRM, that marketing nirvana, which comes with investment barriers that might make it impossible to buy. How could you turn down something that’s going to take a year to get right, that may cost a quarter of a million pounds but that might make you millions in new revenues?
It feels like an impossible proposition. It’s so difficult for brands to buy that many of them don’t. Those big innovators with money to burn can afford to experiment and reap the rewards, but most brands just can’t see it. Most brands have to focus on their immediate tactical requirements (sell, sell, sell!), and perhaps try social because they’ve heard they can do it for ten grand.
Most brands can’t afford to do eCRM, no matter how big the rewards, and how much it differentiates them from the rest of the market. Or can they?
Let’s go back a few years to when the first major eCRM campaigns started. In 2003 Underwired Amaze proposed to Virgin Holidays taking over an existing email newsletter campaign and building something more sophisticated.
The campaign became segmented, largely by behaviour to start with. What Customer Type 1’s preferred destination, time of year of booking, or decision making time was likely to be, informed when they’d get a special offer on a certain Florida hotel. Quite quickly the second dimension demographics came into play as well. Sending an offer for a free flight for your second child to parents of two made a big impact. The first segmented email sent generated £3million in direct holiday bookings. Virgin Holidays had taken a leap of faith and invested in a campaign that cost around £30k and justified a programme with an ROI of 100:1.
But once the initial surprise had worn off and customers got used to it, there was a long period of lots of detailed activity, lots of creative work going on, but not - it seemed - much return. It changed though, reached a critical mass after about a year, and finally the smiles started reappearing on the client’s faces. And stayed as the programme’s ROI three years later was still averaging 26:1. Fantastic.
The Virgin engagement went exactly like every other eCRM project. It started with a big bang that makes everyone very happy, and settles down. After a few months the quick wins have worn off and it starts looking like nothing is happening at all. After a long, long year though, the eCRM programme starts paying for itself again. But there’s this big, long, frustrating period of doldrums, where the project owner gets disillusioned and it all looks like very hard work for no return, and it’s this that I want to come back to. Why? Because actually it’s this period when the principles that really drive eCRM are hardest at work.
The first principle is segmentation, and if you will indulge me while I teach granny to suck eggs for minute it will set the scene for the second. Segmentation is based on a simple idea, that if you send a specific call to action (an offer, for the sake of this example) that is relevant to the right person at the right time, it’s more likely to be acted on than if you send it to the wrong person or at the wrong time. Let’s take an example. You have three hundred people, 100 are golfers, 100 football fans and 100 cricket fans. You have three offers to go see the Ryder Cup, the FA Cup and the Ashes, in an email, one after the other with a paragraph each. You send the email to everyone. 100 football fans will see the golf offer first, and a third of them will bin the email. The golf players will see golf first and be happy. The cricketers, well two thirds will bin the email before seeing the third, cricket, offer. Your maximum response rate will be 200 - because only 200 of the 300 recipients will have read the offer that appeals to them. Simple. Segmentation says, send one email with one offer to each group (yes, the right offer!), and your maximum response rate is 300 out of 300, a fifty percent improvement.
The second principle is the principle of the nudge. eCRM isn’t an advertising medium, it doesn’t work by bombarding people with messages until they buy - in fact, if you send too many emails it’s obvious what will happen: after the initial hit of increased response people stop reading, after a while they add you to their junk filter, and you never know because after too many emails they can’t even be bothered to unsubscribe.
The job of eCRM is to create relationships. So while the segmentation principle is important, it must be balanced against the need to create a relationship. What we want to do is change people’s behaviour subtly over time. Small calls to action, little asks, are what is required. I want every customer to spend a tiny little bit more every time. I want them to increase their purchase frequency by 2% over six months. I want a 0.1 percentage point increase in average transaction value. Why so little?
What the big innovator brands realised a while ago is that little nudges add up. If I suggest you double your turnover in two years you’d think it impossible. Yet if I suggest you increase it by 3% this coming month you might feel it’s much more realistic. And what happens if you increase your turnover by 3% a month for the next two years? The laws of compound interest say you’ve doubled your turnover. That’s why eCRM is, really, so compelling. Yes there’s a quick win, and yes, there’s a long dull patch, but patience pays off.
There are still some companies that haven’t understood the significance of eCRM (Electronic Customer Relationship Marketing). Yes, eCRM, that marketing nirvana, which comes with investment barriers that might make it impossible to buy. How could you turn down something that’s going to take a year to get right, that may cost a quarter of a million pounds but that might make you millions in new revenues?
It feels like an impossible proposition. It’s so difficult for brands to buy that many of them don’t. Those big innovators with money to burn can afford to experiment and reap the rewards, but most brands just can’t see it. Most brands have to focus on their immediate tactical requirements (sell, sell, sell!), and perhaps try social because they’ve heard they can do it for ten grand.
Most brands can’t afford to do eCRM, no matter how big the rewards, and how much it differentiates them from the rest of the market. Or can they?
Let’s go back a few years to when the first major eCRM campaigns started. In 2003 Underwired Amaze proposed to Virgin Holidays taking over an existing email newsletter campaign and building something more sophisticated.
The campaign became segmented, largely by behaviour to start with. What Customer Type 1’s preferred destination, time of year of booking, or decision making time was likely to be, informed when they’d get a special offer on a certain Florida hotel. Quite quickly the second dimension demographics came into play as well. Sending an offer for a free flight for your second child to parents of two made a big impact. The first segmented email sent generated £3million in direct holiday bookings. Virgin Holidays had taken a leap of faith and invested in a campaign that cost around £30k and justified a programme with an ROI of 100:1.
But once the initial surprise had worn off and customers got used to it, there was a long period of lots of detailed activity, lots of creative work going on, but not - it seemed - much return. It changed though, reached a critical mass after about a year, and finally the smiles started reappearing on the client’s faces. And stayed as the programme’s ROI three years later was still averaging 26:1. Fantastic.
The Virgin engagement went exactly like every other eCRM project. It started with a big bang that makes everyone very happy, and settles down. After a few months the quick wins have worn off and it starts looking like nothing is happening at all. After a long, long year though, the eCRM programme starts paying for itself again. But there’s this big, long, frustrating period of doldrums, where the project owner gets disillusioned and it all looks like very hard work for no return, and it’s this that I want to come back to. Why? Because actually it’s this period when the principles that really drive eCRM are hardest at work.
The first principle is segmentation, and if you will indulge me while I teach granny to suck eggs for minute it will set the scene for the second. Segmentation is based on a simple idea, that if you send a specific call to action (an offer, for the sake of this example) that is relevant to the right person at the right time, it’s more likely to be acted on than if you send it to the wrong person or at the wrong time. Let’s take an example. You have three hundred people, 100 are golfers, 100 football fans and 100 cricket fans. You have three offers to go see the Ryder Cup, the FA Cup and the Ashes, in an email, one after the other with a paragraph each. You send the email to everyone. 100 football fans will see the golf offer first, and a third of them will bin the email. The golf players will see golf first and be happy. The cricketers, well two thirds will bin the email before seeing the third, cricket, offer. Your maximum response rate will be 200 - because only 200 of the 300 recipients will have read the offer that appeals to them. Simple. Segmentation says, send one email with one offer to each group (yes, the right offer!), and your maximum response rate is 300 out of 300, a fifty percent improvement.
The second principle is the principle of the nudge. eCRM isn’t an advertising medium, it doesn’t work by bombarding people with messages until they buy - in fact, if you send too many emails it’s obvious what will happen: after the initial hit of increased response people stop reading, after a while they add you to their junk filter, and you never know because after too many emails they can’t even be bothered to unsubscribe.
The job of eCRM is to create relationships. So while the segmentation principle is important, it must be balanced against the need to create a relationship. What we want to do is change people’s behaviour subtly over time. Small calls to action, little asks, are what is required. I want every customer to spend a tiny little bit more every time. I want them to increase their purchase frequency by 2% over six months. I want a 0.1 percentage point increase in average transaction value. Why so little?
What the big innovator brands realised a while ago is that little nudges add up. If I suggest you double your turnover in two years you’d think it impossible. Yet if I suggest you increase it by 3% this coming month you might feel it’s much more realistic. And what happens if you increase your turnover by 3% a month for the next two years? The laws of compound interest say you’ve doubled your turnover. That’s why eCRM is, really, so compelling. Yes there’s a quick win, and yes, there’s a long dull patch, but patience pays off.
Monday, 15 November 2010
Javari’s wasted birthright
Disappointment is... when I buy something from an online store that’s got brilliant products and brilliant service, a fantastic website and a sign-up form that asks me loads of questions - but which then sends me generic emails I have no interest in whatsoever. I mean, I bought some Merrell trainers from this place, Javari, and now they bombard me with stuff about how kitten heels are the next big thing.
Javari is owned by Amazon, world leaders in relevant recoomendations. But Amazon has clearly kept Javari on a very tight budget. The email marketing programme is so, like, yesterday - I couldn’t believe it when such high regard generated by the shopping experience have been so let down by the customer retention programme.
So what should they be doing? Well, for a start, I’m a bloke, buying (what I hope are) cool walking shoes, and I looked at every single Merrell shoe on the site before making my choice. That must tell them something. At least it tells them to relegate the kitten heels to emails I get at weekends or to second place in the content in case I’m the sort who of man who buys shoes for his partner (either way). I wear the same size shoes as I always have, so that might inform tactical sales of remaindered stock and so on. Perhaps they should be sending me news of every new Merrell shoe they get in – Merrell does.
The days of blanket emails to Mr/Mrs AB Sample surely have gone the way of the door drop. Javari ticked all the boxes – indeed, I was looking forward to the emails when I opted in, wondering which agency was doing them. I am so, so disappointed. And that means that although by some miracle I might remember they were cheap and go back if I’m actively shopping, there won’t be any mid-cycle visits to their site, nor serendipitous nudge-driven sneaky sneaker purchases.
Yet we know from long experience that just by maintaining relevant contact using segmented emails, and observing how each segment responds, we can increase ROI by between 25% and 90% straight away and average purchase frequency by 7% in the first year. So why, Javari, why have you ignored your genetic birthright of great customer engagement, and prompted a critique like this? The first you’ve heard of it you say? That’s because you can’t: you’re not listening.
Javari is owned by Amazon, world leaders in relevant recoomendations. But Amazon has clearly kept Javari on a very tight budget. The email marketing programme is so, like, yesterday - I couldn’t believe it when such high regard generated by the shopping experience have been so let down by the customer retention programme.
So what should they be doing? Well, for a start, I’m a bloke, buying (what I hope are) cool walking shoes, and I looked at every single Merrell shoe on the site before making my choice. That must tell them something. At least it tells them to relegate the kitten heels to emails I get at weekends or to second place in the content in case I’m the sort who of man who buys shoes for his partner (either way). I wear the same size shoes as I always have, so that might inform tactical sales of remaindered stock and so on. Perhaps they should be sending me news of every new Merrell shoe they get in – Merrell does.
The days of blanket emails to Mr/Mrs AB Sample surely have gone the way of the door drop. Javari ticked all the boxes – indeed, I was looking forward to the emails when I opted in, wondering which agency was doing them. I am so, so disappointed. And that means that although by some miracle I might remember they were cheap and go back if I’m actively shopping, there won’t be any mid-cycle visits to their site, nor serendipitous nudge-driven sneaky sneaker purchases.
Yet we know from long experience that just by maintaining relevant contact using segmented emails, and observing how each segment responds, we can increase ROI by between 25% and 90% straight away and average purchase frequency by 7% in the first year. So why, Javari, why have you ignored your genetic birthright of great customer engagement, and prompted a critique like this? The first you’ve heard of it you say? That’s because you can’t: you’re not listening.
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