How to Personalize the Customer Experience Based on Segments
Cyber Monday 2016 was the biggest online shopping day in U.S. history, generating $3.45 billion in online sales, up 12% from 2015. This statistic shows how important it is for marketers to get their emails right the first time if they want to benefit during the season.
The following chart from IBM’s email marketing metrics benchmark found that during the holidays open rates are lower than the non-holiday season:
While this seems daunting, overall total open rates are higher for the period due to the multiple emails being sent out from companies. According to Hubspot, 78% of people expect retailers to include personalized offers and recommendations in their promotional emails, so it is important and helpful for ecommerce marketers to create segmented email lists that are targeted based on the customer.
There are a few ways to segment your email lists for the holiday marketing campaigns. You can segment your email list by:
- Holiday Buyers
- Active Buyers
- No-Purchase Subscribers
One of the most important ways to personalize email marketing to specific segments is to tailor the frequency of your emails based on your customers' past purchases.
Once your email segments are established, you should work on showing your appreciation to loyal, active customers with opportunities for early access to products or sales, special discounts, and new products.
Another target segment to be considered for customization are abandoned carts. By linking up your ecommerce store to an automated workflow, it is easy for marketers to follow up with customers and remind them what they left behind. This can be helpful during the holiday season when a consumer is debating what is in their cart.
Marketo offers a few helpful tips for sending abandoned cart emails, including sending out an email within a few hours of abandonment, another reminder 24 hours later, and a final email three days later. If an incentive is included in the final email it is more likely the customer will make a purchase.
In an article on Mailchimp with Authenticity 50’s CEO Jimmy MacDonald, he states that abandoned cart emails are an important part of his business, “Email marketing is an integral part of our business and abandoned cart emails are very important to us. We’ve recovered many carts via the built-in abandoned cart emails.”
To the left is an example of an abandoned cart email from Marketo that is considered a successful abandoned cart email. It shows the product the customer left as well as benefits to shopping with Nordstrom and using their services. Use these tips for your own forgotten cart emails and you can expect returns this holiday season.
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