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Brought to you by CleverTap.
Customers want personalized experiences. With almost every new startup proclaiming it’s the “Netflix of X” and more established brands rushing to meet ever-changing demands, the onus is on companies to provide interactions that are highly personalized. In fact, McKinsey reports consumers don’t just want hyper-personalization, they demand it.
Forrester says 77% of consumers have chosen, recommended, or paid more for a product or service that provides a personalized experience. And, 76% of customers get frustrated when they don’t receive personalized notifications.
This means that there’s a tremendous opportunity facing marketers right now. If they can hyper-personalize the customer experience — actually serve up what customers want to receive, in real-time — then they have a better chance to retain these customers for life.
But, what exact steps can marketers take to build out a hyper-personalized growth strategy?
A Framework For Success: Fit For The Future of Retail
Over here at CleverTap, since we’re a mobile marketing and retention platform, we set our data scientists to the task of establishing benchmark metrics for ecommerce. They analyzed over 140 million devices, used by more than 121 million unique users, alongside data from exclusive interviews and workshops with 100+ customers across multiple markets.
The result is a downloadable report — Fit for the Future of Retail — that takes a holistic view of consumer behavior and the strategies that have succeeded across the entire customer lifecycle. This report lays out the most effective campaigns leading to growth and customer retention for ecommerce companies.
In essence, every ecommerce brand has four main business objectives:
- Increase new user retention
- Increase user engagement
- Increase order transactions
- Reduce user churn
The report then delves into six to nine tactics under each of those four objectives, as well as the metrics to measure your success. This effectively provides 30 campaigns that any marketing team can mix-and-match, depending on their KPIs and bandwidth.
Below is a snapshot of the report, showcasing one tactic for each of the main objectives, their representative metrics, and why each of these strategies leads to growth.
Highlights From the Report
Increase New User Retention By Getting Them to Register
Here’s the situation: you’ve got a ton of anonymous users and they’re churning out the door. How do you stop the leaky bucket of user acquisition? Simple: get their names.
The data shows that one of the most solid ways to keep new users from churning is simply to get them to register. Build a campaign that entices users to fill out their profiles so you can use their data to customize offers, discounts, and updates. Use “number of registrations” or “number of successful sign ups” as your success metric.
The more insights you have into your customers, the better your chances to individualize your campaigns and interact across other channels. After all, you can’t hyper-personalize their experience if you don’t even have their names.
Increase Customer Engagement By Using Psychographic Interests
You’ve got users on your app, but aren’t exactly sure what they want to buy next? If you gotten them to register successfully, then you should have insight into their psychographics — their beliefs, lifestyles, and interests — and can use these to predict what they want to see.
This is where segmentation by interest or preferred categories comes into play. Group your audience into interest-based categories and send push notifications or email campaigns that contain the appropriate offers. Track the right metrics too, like product views and especially category views, to ensure you’re sending the right offers to the right people.
Increase Order Transactions By Building a Loyalty Program
If you want your users to start spending more on your platform, then one-off discounts can only go so far. For a long-term solution, you’ve got to create your own loyalty program.
Research shows that 75% of consumers favor companies that offer loyalty programs. What’s more, these programs can attract new customers in addition to encouraging repeat business. Think of the success of the loyalty programs of Starbucks, Sephora, or even Macy’s, where over 70% of their transactions in 2021 were tied to their Star Rewards program.
To execute this campaign, begin by fleshing out your own loyalty program. Then, include it in every new member journey. Move on to building theme-based loyalty experiences that factor into your program. And make sure to keep track of the increase in membership rate.
Reduce User Churn By Analyzing the Purchase Funnel
If your users are dropping off before they actually hit the BUY button, then that’s a roadblock that you’ve got to fix. It simply means you’ve got to look at your purchase funnel and pinpoint where your customers are leaving. Is it a price issue? Is it a stocking issue? Perhaps not enough choices? Figure out the problem, and use cohorts to measure the retention rate on days 1, 3, and 5 after a new user installs the app.
Summary
There are many ways an ecommerce brand can improve customer retention. But, if you want data-driven insight into what has worked for other mobile companies and apps, based on the actual user actions of over 121 million users on 140 million devices, then check out the Fit for the Future of Retail framework with its rundown of 30 tried-and-tested tactics.
Learn more from CleverTap at MGS22 Las Vegas.
