Customer expectations, particularly in the retail industry, are constantly changing. Marketers have had to reconsider every strategy they used to establish customer relationships and drive brand or product value to increases revenue during the last two years. Those who do not prioritize adapting and expanding their marketing strategies across all channels risk falling behind.
Recently, there has been a significant shift in the marketing industry; all centred on what data is accessible for retailers and marketers to use in their programs. Apple’s iOS15 upgrade and Google’s decision to eliminate third-party cookies from Chrome by 2022 demonstrate the importance of data privacy. While third-party data is becoming obsolete, businesses can take advantage of a multitude of zero- and first-party data to construct effective email marketing campaigns.
What does this suggest for brands looking to rethink their marketing strategy in order to reach out to customers in a meaningful way? The answer is personalization, which means that retailers should use technology, data, and savvy thinking to deliver relevant information to their existing and prospective customers.
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Leverage technology to capture data
Marketing teams don’t have time to go through millions of data points to uncover what’s important and make effective recommendation for each customer who visits their website or uses their mobile app. This is where automation technology comes in: it allows marketers to go through data and tailor digital content for each customer, removing the time-consuming task of managing multiple audiences across platforms and updating custom segments when customers move between groups.
They can then start optimizing the content each consumer receives – when it arrives, how personalized it is, and even where it appears in the email — all with the goal of increasing conversions while also improving the end-to-end customer experience. Marketers can use these features to shift away from unproductive batch-and-blast email campaigns that cause email fatigue.
Marketers can automate content sections such as brick-and-mortar store location data, product recommendations, loyalty program engagement data, and more by taking a modular approach to email builds and powering each portion of an email by an API or other appropriate data source. The days of coding emails from top to bottom as single newsletters are long gone. Marketers who are on top of their game use a modular approach that connects to data sources to develop content as near to deployment time as possible.
Omni-channel experiences are key
Consumers have rethought their brick-and-mortar buying patterns since 2020, therefore now is the moment for retailers to push their personalization efforts into mobile messages. Consumers developed a preference for flexibility throughout the pandemic, which marketers had to adapt to. Customers are more accustomed to shopping online and making purchases on whatever device is most convenient at the moment.
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The omnichannel experience is a useful tool for retailers who want to reintroduce new or existing customers to the purchasing process. Marketing personalization is essential to persuade the majority of customers who abandon their carts to return to the checkout page or app and complete their transaction.
With newer, more tech-savvy generations more likely to boost online and mobile purchasing even when the world returns to normal, the need of developing solid omnichannel strategies grows every year.
Consider the customer who is visiting the brand website and abandons an item. According to the traditional email marketing strategy, brands need to send a “Cart Abandon” drip journey. But why stop there? If brands know the customer has the app installed, why not send them a rich-push notification with the item they abandoned and other relevant information like a nearby store that has it in stock, the number of units left, or even the number of consumers who have viewed the item in the last 24 hours as an evidence of social proof?
The future ahead
Success depends on the simple fact that marketers need to build a space where customers can express themselves and feel heard. This can be done by personalizing data using zero- and first-party data based on real online interactions between consumers and their preferred retailers. Creating 1:1 messaging across every channel can help retailers raise awareness and deepen relationships, but the only way to do so at scale is with an integrated techstack that is purpose-built to be data-driven and agile.
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