Is your eCommerce brand building dead-end relationships with your customers?
If your team is relying on siloed marketing solutions within your tech stack, you might be — and your customers can tell the difference.
Building a brand is hard enough, and when your marketing solutions don’t speak to each other, your customer experiences become even more disconnected, making it difficult to build a loyal, engaged community.
If you’re currently relying on siloed marketing tools, here are 5 questions you may be asking (and the answers that can help you solve them).
1. How do I engage my customers based on their past shopping behavior?
If your tools are siloed, it can be difficult to ensure you’re creating consistent segments across your marketing channels.
To create connections at every touchpoint, build data-driven segments that can be leveraged across your channels, including email and SMS, to ensure you create and send effective, targeted messaging based on your customers’ past shopping behavior.
For example, build segments of your highest spenders, your customers who purchase every 30 days, your loyalty program subscribers, or your customers who only shop during the holiday season, or during a sale. Knowing how certain customers prefer to shop can help you tailor your messaging on every channel accordingly.
2. How do I provide the best customer experiences for my most loyal shoppers?
Synergies, synergies, synergies. Disconnected tools result in disconnected customer experiences, and the best way to engage your highest-value VIP customers is to ensure their data is accessible across your solutions so you can build synergies.
Need an example? Integrate your loyalty program data and your customer service helpdesk software, like Gorgias, to provide exclusive, top-tier level support for VIP members, or direct mail perks after a support call. Show your loyal shoppers that they are top-of-mind for your brand at all times.
3. How do I predict which of my customers are most likely to refer friends?
While loyalty data can help you create better segmentation, that data on its own can’t provide insight into your buyers’ sentiment about your brand. However, you can learn sentiment from your customers’ reviews and ratings, making it essential for your brand to leverage integrated, holistic data across these solutions.
In practice, this looks like segmentation informed by rich, multi-solution data. Try segmenting VIP tier shoppers who have left more than one positive product review and target them with emails encouraging them to refer their friends, or targeting customers with high average sentiment scores on their reviews but haven’t yet made a referral.
Additionally, you can double down on shoppers who have made successful referrals by rewarding them with exclusive perks for being an ambassador, like early access to sales.
When your tools are working together with integrated data, your messaging becomes that much more effective, and your highest spenders can also become your most valuable in the long run.
4. How do I leverage data from my offline and in-store channels?
Consumer buyer journeys are no longer linear. Your customers are shopping across channels, both online and in store, all the time, and they’re hitting multiple touchpoints prior to making a purchase decision. If your brand can’t consolidate and analyze shopper behavior data from every channel, including your brick-and-mortar stores, it will be impossible to gain deep insights that can provide a full picture of how a customer shops.
As consumers return to shopping in stores, it will be essential to leverage point-of-sale (POS) integrations to understand key buying habits. Are there particular products your customers prefer to buy in store vs. online? Are your shoppers redeeming certain discounts online vs. in store?
Our tip? Leverage customer-led redemption options, like QR codes in your POS integration, or receipt scanning. These omnichannel strategies increase conversion by letting your customers control over how they engage with your loyalty program in store, and they provide rewards instantly.
5. How do I drive shoppers to convert on recommended products?
Half the battle is understanding your customers’ purchasing behavior to provide accurate suggestions, and the other half is driving shoppers to actually purchase the products you’ve recommended. In order to extend lifetime value, your cross-sell strategy has to be informed by both past purchasing data and engagement data.
What does this mean? You have to dive into the data across your channels to understand which is the highest-converting channel for your shoppers. From there, not only can you recommend the right products to the right shoppers, but you can recommend them via the channel they’re most likely to purchase from.
So, if your shoppers are converting more frequently via SMS than email, you can confidently launch timely SMS cross-sell campaigns that engage your customers where they prefer to purchase.
Start building customer relationships that last
With so many brands to choose from, products to buy, and channels to purchase from, it’s the shopping experience that ultimately has the staying power to build lifetime value.
With an integrated eCommerce marketing platform, like Yotpo, your brand can power an integrated, well-informed, and tailored buyer journey that ushers every customer down the path to purchase and retains them for the long run.
To learn more about how you can build better customer relationships with Yotpo, request a demo.
