Sure, it’s important to acquire customers, but retaining them is even more important!
But what do brands and retailers do when consumers “drop off the purchasing map” and show no signs of coming back?
The panel discussion, titled: Retaining and Reactivating Customers Across Multiple Touch Points,“ focused on just that.
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Here are a few key takeaways, as well as strategies the brands and retailers are implementing to re-engage customers across segments.
Sam Barnett, Struq: Extend customer relationship management across all touch points. one of the things we see is consumers don’t think in channel, so you have to think of how to create these consistent experience across all channels. Across display, social, video and mobile, showing an image of a standalone product, not on a model, actually increases conversions. There are common experiments brands and retailers can run to determine which tactic improves reactivation across channels. The challenge for marketers is creating a compelling and personalized experience across devices to increase likelihood consumers will buy again.
Elain Chang, TiBi: Because TiBi recently entered the e-Commerce space, the company has a "lean and mean team” focused on building the e-Commerce business as well as the overall brand. They look at the “first order of optimizations,” or low-hanging fruit. “When we look at re-engagement and re-marketing, we have customer data and an excel spread sheet. We don’t have a data house. We’re focused on the active bucket, then the win-back buckets, or customers who have completely lapsed. The we create an engagement strategy based on those buckets."
Craig Elbert, Bonobos: The triggered program was designed to create a personalized brand experience. For us, that means when someone joins the email list, we go through a welcome series about the brand. We see that has a significant lift versus just going into the standard email cadence. If you have a small team, abandoned cart emails aren’t hard to get off the ground. Bonobos handles returns, however, with a soft touch. They have their "customer service ninjas” walk through the reasons why the customer wants to return their product, and then see if and how they can rectify the situation. However, in terms of re-targeting, Bonobos isn’t “quite where we want to be” in developing and leveraging a CRM database.
Larry Promisel, Camuto Group: As a wholesale, Camuto Group has to leverage customer information across all brand partners. This data has helped them re-prioritize their marketing tactics and tailor offerings based on age segments. Deliver on service and with multiple marketing messages. Surprisingly, direct mail has been hugely successful for the brand, and is an effective way to “push through the noise” and better connect with customers.
Jason Weidner, eBay Enterprise: If repeat purchases don’t happen within 60 days of the initial purchase, consumers are likely dropped into the bucket. Look at the purchase path…when you look at the complete journey, it’s probably around 7 or 8 touches. We see social is about 50% of the time tied to the transaction, as well as contributes to higher order value and lifetime value.
What was most interesting to me, however, was the role of social advocates. According to Craig of Bonobos, social can both create and drive advocates. Larry of Camuto Group agrees: it’s about understanding customers and their expectations of social. For example, one consumer may go to Twitter to share a complaint or ask a question. Another person, however, may prefer to go to Facebook.
I think this is the key here. Identifying and understanding different customer segments, and meeting them on the channels they frequent and providing the offers and messages they crave.
Retailers, how are you keeping your customers coming back for more? Have you seen success with any specific re-targeting methods? Share in the comments below!
