Email Marketing & Personalization

Customers are constantly bombarded with daily marketing emails from numerous brands, so how do you stand out? Research demonstrates that personalizing emails and texts results in higher open and click-through rates than standard email blast techniques.

Personalized marketing leverages customer data—such as demographics, lifecycle stage, and purchase history—to improve your marketing performance and brand interactions.

Why Personalized Marketing?

One of the key indicators of small business success is the ability to connect with its customer base via marketing messages, providing the right message at the right time to forge better relationships.

 “Personalized marketing gives customers a sense of identity. They cease to be one of the masses, and instead become an individual with unique wants and needs. Consumers tune out mass marketing because they are bombarded by it everywhere. A personalized message that is relevant is much more likely to attract their attention and to seem more credible.~Susan Solovic, American entrepreneur

In a study completed by Experian, personalized emails deliver 6XS higher transaction rates than non-personalized emails. Most companies collect customer data upon customer sign-up but fail to utilize that information to personalize email and text communications. If you’re running a loyalty program, you’re already gathering valuable customer data through signups—so why not leverage it to enhance your customer outreach?

Automated and Personalized Promotions 

Delivering the right message and promotion at the right time is paramount in increasing customer lifetime value.  Customers want promotions and communications relevant to their purchase history and customer journey. With simple data analysis, you can pinpoint critical milestones to reward and communicate with your customers accordingly.

Rather than focusing on obtaining new customers, upselling existing customers is an excellent way to lower your customer acquisition cost. 

Post-transaction emails are a great opportunity to suggest related products. Would they be interested in a product within the same brand? Is there another product that pairs well with the item they just purchased? These suggestions can often be powerful enough to increase revenue without even offering a promotion or coupon. Who knows, maybe you’re even saving the customer some time by offering an item they would need to purchase anyway. A paddle with their kayak? A cheese platter with their red wine? A sleeping bag with their tent?

Customer Macros 

Incorporate your customers’ first and last names into your email and text communications. It could be as simple as using their first or last name in the greeting instead of “dear customer”. Get yourself out of the introductory phase and one step closer to a personal relationship.

You can also use customer macros to let your customers know where they are in their shopping rewards. Are they close to their next rewards? Do they have rewards just sitting in their account waiting for use?

bLoyal believes customer macros are a crucial first step in adding a personal touch to customer communications and has worked to make it as easy as possible for you to use.

Incentivize Customers to Complete Their Demographic Profile

Not everyone readily volunteers information so make it worth their time. A birthday program is a great way to incentivize and reward your customer for signing up with their information. You can let them know during or after their first purchase that signing up for your loyalty program will result in special rewards for their birthday or birth month. The more customers you have signed up with their information the better you can understand their spending and customize your customer outreach.

Use Data Tools to Analyze Consumer’s Behavior and Preferences

Enhance your customer understanding by using data tools that analyze your consumer’s behavior and preferences. Segment your customers to determine spending trends between demographics and purchase history. What customers are more likely to buy which products?

Analyze engagement with your customers by looking at the open/click-through rates of email or text communications. How many times was a promotion used?

You will need to continue to refine your approach as you see how the customer base reacts. Promotions and offers get stale over time and it is important to remain relevant. Tracking the engagement on your marketing strategy will enable you to determine when it is time to change course.

Single Customer Record

To fully utilize personalized communications, you must have your customer records in one place. When a customer purchases online, the purchase data should be stored in the same customer profile as their in-store purchases. All information related to that individual customer needs to be stored together in an easily accessible single customer record so you can accurately segment your customers based on both demographics and purchase history.

With bLoyal centralizing all your customer data, you can seamlessly personalize every customer interaction.

Upgrading to an omnichannel loyalty program unlocks the ability to analyze spending trends based on different demographics. The seamless customer record can also provide a better understanding of how each channel compares to the next.

How Can bLoyal Help?

bLoyal makes accessing your data and automating marketing and promotions around key milestones simple. With minimal effort, you can streamline the process to maximize customer lifetime value and save time.