Multi-dimensional segments for improved customer nurturing
Aug 17, 2017
Email is intrinsic to user lifecycle marketing—a strong email strategy begins with the anticipation of the user journey, mapping out all potential points of friction and recognizing opportunities to connect with customers. Even though user-nurturing will be a unique process for every organization the following phases of the user experience are highly prominent across the spectrum and important to consider:
- Discovery phase - Maybe it was an advertisement, social media post, or SEO but some glorious moment brought users to your site. If the initial impression and value proposition of your brand is compelling enough then users will gladly hand over their email addresses, thus initiating a relationship.
- Potential building - During this phase it’s essential that you educate new audience members about your brand’s most unique and outstanding qualities, nurturing them into making their first purchase, initiating a subscription, or starting a trial.
- Momentum building - From the moment a user begins interacting with your website, products, and services it’s time to give them the star treatment. Outstanding product development coupled with regular delivery of meaningful content to each individual is the only track to long-term success.
- Loyalty development - Brand evangelists are the lifeblood of any business. Through avid nurturing and consistent listening, your product development and customer services can stand the test of time.
- Wavering interest - Disenchantment can happen over time (faulty perception of demand, weak branding, slipping product quality, strong competition in the market) or quite suddenly (advertising disaster, bad consumer experiences and reviews, damning social media or PR). While there is an email campaign for almost anything under the sun, one should definitely try to maintain relationships rather than be forced to salvage them.
As data accumulates around each user the opportunity to continuously personalize the user experience grows, giving you a competitive edge in advancing the adoption of your brand and reducing churn.
The Looker vantage point
Real-time data equals real-time content for real-time segment building. Looker allows marketers to build complex, live segments to quickly and easily study their audiences. Sendwithus gives marketers the freedom to manage templates and multi-dimensional segments to achieve a targeted reach. With the combination of both a data platform and an email management platform, anyone on your marketing team can become ‘the master’ of creating customer-centric experiences. Instead of sending generalized campaigns to broadly defined segments, you can ‘dig deep’ and design customized content based on any customer activity you are able to track.
Specializing content for advanced segments
Multi-dimensional segments can be built out by considering various aspects (i.e. position of user in the sales pipeline, various user activities, user demographics) all at the same time. Here are some content specialization and segmentation tips for popular types of campaigns, each one corresponding to the phases that we discussed earlier...let’s say it’s for a popular e-commerce site (like Etsy):
Welcome email
When a person first registers with a website they will usually receive the traditional ‘triggered verification email’:
But the second part of the welcome series can be highly specialized, for example you can consider how people behaved upon completing the registration process. For users who register but remain less active you could infer that they might benefit from a friendly ‘how-to’ / ‘cool features’ themed email to bring them more on board. On the other hand, if a user was moderately active in their first visit you can specialize the email to outline advanced ‘Etsy profile-building prompts’ to optimize their experience (example below).
And if a user was highly active (i.e. shopped for items, favorited items, viewed multiple pages and/or followed other users), you can provide them with a highly personalized welcome experience that introduces them to more of what the love with the addition of customized tips and tricks.
Promotional email
At the intersection of a user’s data (i.e. their location, their search histories, their general interests, and the pricing range they generally participate in) is their ‘dream digest’. Create campaigns that pull the ‘best of the best’ for them to experience while mixing in a few surprises to keep it unpredictably interesting.
Newsletter
Unlike a digest email (which promotes favourited, saved, searched, or abandon cart items) a proper newsletter should provide long-form creative content like videos or blogs, mixed with updates to services or a special themed product features. All of this should inspire current users to continue to use the site, make purchases, and look forward to enjoying the free personalized content curated for them (i.e. email content as an extension of the service).
Win-back email
The win-back email should charismatically address whatever it was that may have caused everything to go off track, plus offer incentives! It would be a great time to offer store credit for survey answers, perhaps even feature some exciting news about product or service updates. Gaining a better understanding of what’s missing from the user experience can help you address pain points at scale. Looker dives into retention analysis and the data that drives it in great depth, along with resources to help model your data.
Ideally the content you feature in an email should impress the people you are trying to reach. However today people search for ‘value at a glance’, meaning you’ve got to wow them almost immediately. To avoid becoming ‘white noise’ in the inbox you will have to diversify content and consider querying finer segments for higher engagement.
See Looker and Sendwithus in action!
Visit the solutions page to learn how the sendwithus email optimization platform can help your marketing team create better email experiences. For a trial of sendwithus, simply sign up here.
