As back to school campaigns begin in full swing, the pressure is on retailers to engage with customers in more meaningful and personalised ways. And considering there’s been an 86% increase in U.K. consumers who want suggested products and services based on their preferences in return for their loyalty, according to Cheetah Digital’s 2022 Consumer Trends Index, learning more about them is time well spent.
Start by understanding your customer
The days of retailers blasting one single, generic message to their entire database are, hopefully, a thing of the past.
The most forward-thinking retail marketers are ‘progressively profiling’ customers’ interests, preferences, motivations and desires. They know it’s a perpetual process and, like learning and homework, progressive profiling never stops — it simply evolves. Technology like AI and machine learning has made it now even easier to determine who gets the next message and when.
Progressive profiling allows marketers to ask the next best question to expand their knowledge of an individual. New data provides reasons to reach out with a more relevant message or offer — how many children is he purchasing for? What are the children’s ages? What do they study? and so on.
The secret of back-to-school email campaigns: think ‘passing notes’ at scale
To truly deliver better back-to-school email marketing and have emails that actually get noticed in noisy inboxes takes treating every recipient like an individual. That means, messaging that goes beyond a first name or lumping consumers into generic buyer personas. Getting your email opened, read, clicked and converted starts with building more meaningful relationships with consumers.
Email has consistently reigned supreme as U.K. consumers’ preferred channel for receiving offers, content, incentives and rewards from brands. In fact, according to Cheetah Digital’s report, when it comes to driving sales, email beats paid social and display advertising by up to 128% in the U.K. This is largely due to email’s hyper-personalisation capabilities.
Engage across every channel
According to Cheetah Digital’s report, there’s been a near 60% increase in U.K. consumers who feel frustrated with a brand whose personalisation initiatives fail to recognise their unique desires and needs. This year, getting a personalised omnichannel experience right is the path to increased revenue in customer retention in a saturated back-to-school market.
Customers interact with an average of six digital touchpoints when engaging with a retail brand, oftentimes unpredictably, says Cheetah Digital’s report. Each of these experiences, whether it’s content on social media, landing on a website, offers from SMS or email or payment through wallet, etc. must be integrated to deliver a truly consistent experience. This is vital for letting your customer seamlessly move from one experience to another.
Take this all-too-familiar customer experience for instance. A customer purchases new school shoes, which is a necessity purchase rather than desire. It’s not uncommon for this customer to be hounded with display ads, emails and personalised website content for kids’ school shoes for the next month even though she has no desire to purchase another pair anytime soon.
Ultimately, a true omnichannel experience is about putting the customer at the heart of your strategy, where all channels and touchpoints revolve around them — not merely the product.
Real-time wins
Real-time marketing allows marketers to capture real-time consumer interactions to deliver contextual and personalised experiences. Marketing in real-time helps to extend cross-channel orchestration, armed with capabilities to listen and react to user signals on web, online store or mobile app. With these insights, marketers can then decide on the next best action and trigger actions in real-time as part of their overall marketing strategy. Some key actions marketers can take are personalising the customer experience, supporting online actions via messaging and ensuring the right incentives are in place for each user.
Getting ‘schooled’ in true personalisation
According to Cheetah Digital’s 2022 Consumer Trends Index, there’s been a near 60% increase in U.K. consumers who feel frustrated with a brand whose personalisation initiatives fail to recognise their unique desires and needs. The report further reveals UK consumers are rewarding brands that make personalisation a priority with more than half saying they will trade personal and preference data to feel part of a brand’s community. Even more, they leave consumers feeling annoyed.
The opportunity to ‘wow’ customers with truly personalised, back-to-school content and products that fit their distinct needs starts with data. However, initiatives that only purport to be personalisation are commonly limited to remedial efforts like retargeting ads, knowing your customer’s first name or employing a curation algorithm. It’s these techniques that have led to personalisation efforts that yield less-than-impressive results. They fail to prove ROI and leave consumers feeling apathetic about the personalisation they receive.
True personalisation is at the core of relationship marketing. It’s about delivering value and relevancy while creating meaningful experiences to individuals based on their own preferences and data.
Download Cheetah’s back-to-school white paper
