By David le Douarin, Advalo
The rise of marketing overpressure practices has proven destructive for both profit margin and brand image and negatively affects the relationship of trust between retailers and customers. It thus has given rise to some consumer dislike for emails and, inevitably has led email click-through and open rates and customer contact ability to plummet.
A few years ago, 30% to 40% of emails sent by retailers to targeted individuals were opened. Today for the most successful retailers, opening rates hardly reach 15% or 20%. These findings reveal the urgency for retailers to limit mass marketing which is a pollutant and intrusive, and is not adapted to the real needs of consumers. Brands must change their CRM marketing efforts and the way they speak to each consumer. The greatest challenge lies in understanding — when they should, what they should and how they should talk to each customer.
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Bring Performance Back With Adapted CRM Marketing Efforts
If one studies retailers who succeed in properly taking advantage of their CRM data and thus increase traffic and turnover in their stores, we see that they have worked on three axes: the volume of contactable customers, the responsiveness of these customers and optimization of conversion rate, whether online or in-store. We can then define CRM impact as the sum of these three variables: Volume Of Contactable Customers + Reactivation Of Contacted Customers + Activated Customers Conversion = CRM impact
These brands have successfully provided concrete and operational answers to these 3 challenges:
1. Provide an answer to the drop in contact ability
By being able to establish a link between a unique CRM identifier and browsing cookies, brand marketing teams are able to find their customers on digital channels in order to open new points of contact with them. They can talk to them wherever they are and where their buying decision is being made. Marketers will be able to circumvent the barrier of email opt-in and low contact ability on social networks or search engines and push timely individualized messages to each customer on Facebook, Instagram or Google. Brands can thus contact an average of 4X more individuals than they would have with a simple email campaign, increasing their ability to speak and message reach.
2. Provide a response to the decline in responsiveness
One way marketers should respond to the decline in email campaign responsiveness is to identify the various pretexts for the desired message they want to convey and whom they want to convey it to. These pretexts can be of a different nature and have only one purpose: encourage the individual to click and go to the web site to consider and prepare their purchase. Indeed, we can take advantage of “hot data” related to real-time consumer navigation: through offline and online data reconciliation, we know who the user is, who is browsing the site, their purchase
history, what they are searching for in the exact moment and so a pertinent message with the relevant product recommendations are sent.
On the other hand, we also can take advantage of “cold data” related to the customer’s lifecycle and the history of their relationship with the brand. For example, a new customer, who has just bought a product for the first time, offers many speaking and exchange opportunities. I can speak about the brand’s history, or give them advice on the use or maintenance of the product they have just bought.
Based on a detailed analysis of its CRM database, the marketer will be able to identify several audiences (very good customers, occasional customers, churners, etc.), to which they will address in a differentiated way, an individualized message, aligned with the profile of each consumer. Finally, we can also identify exogenous pretexts, related to the consumers’ context and environment. The weather is the simplest example: if I know it will be 40°C in Nice, France next weekend, it’s time to implement the tank top collection to customers living in the Nice region.
Whether it’s the weather or various events in the vicinity, marketing actions must be registered as soon as possible, in the current context of the consumer that we want to activate in order to introduce a relevant discourse that takes into account the offer proposed to them.
3. An answer to lower conversion rate
The last link in CRM impact, conversion is undoubtedly the most crucial since it carries the final value. Here again, individualized marketing and personalization allow marketers to optimize the conversion rate of their campaigns by offering each of their customers the most relevant offers and products closest to the needs they express — complementary products or similar. Product customization takes advantage of all the data available to retailers, who can, through artificial intelligence and models, predict the past or current behavior of the customer, what they are precisely interested in today and what could interest them tomorrow.
In conclusion, in order to understand the impact of CRM actions, it is obvious that it is necessary first to better understand the new purchasing paths of customers, have a perfect knowledge of customers through RFM (recency, frequency and monetary) segmentation, assessment matrices, and ROPO (research online, purchase offline) for example.
These CRM analyses will enrich the relationship with the consumer: we are entering the age of individualized marketing which is taking its full meaning in the context of CRM data, pretexts for desired messages, context and environment.
David Le Douarin is the Co-Founder of predictive marketing platform Advalo. Advalo’s predictive Marketing Platform leverages artificial intelligence to detect intent-rich moments throughout the consumer journey. Advalo enables marketers to develop an individualized relationship with each customer, targeting key moments.
