Competition in e-commerce now outstrips the total growth of the market, making customers harder to find, easier to lose and more demanding about the shopping experience they expect.
This is coupled with chief marketing officers feeling the mounting pressure to make smarter marketing decisions which lead to tangible sales growth.
All this can make it hard to know how to take your e-mail strategy and e-commerce experience to the next level, while justifying the investment. But it doesn’t need to feel so difficult as there are opportunities to automate the delivery of a more personal customer experience through your website and e-mail marketing, which will improve your return on investment. And with the technology that exists today it’s far easier to take control and unlock extra revenue streams.
E-mail marketing solutions, such as PureCampaign, let you reach out to your database with one-off promotional communications, while also allowing you to create complete series of e-mails that nurture customer relationships over time. Welcome e-mails, promotional campaigns, regular newsletters, review requests and customer services messages can all be used to build a complete journey that expertly guides the customer from first visit to repeat purchase.
And you can increase relevancy of the message to each recipient by coupling your e-mail marketing solution with behavioural targeting technology, such as PureTargeting, which will zero in on specific customer segments and behaviours. This includes browsing and cart abandonment, lapsed custom and replenishment campaigns that retarget customers to prompt them to come back. Well thought-out campaigns such as these can be easily automated to increase your revenue and recapture sales that would have otherwise been lost.
If you’re looking at new ways to optimise your e-commerce experience, there are plenty of opportunities
And it’s easy to build on this by personalising e-mail and web content to increase your engagement and conversion rates, making it easier for customers to find and buy what they want. The same technology allows you to display personal suggestions and recommendations based on behaviours, previous purchases and customers’ interests in your e-mails and on your e-commerce site.
It’s all about creating a personal shopping experience, not just a way to shop online. Personalised landing, search and home pages can all be created and tailored to allow you to increase your conversion rates by increasing the relevancy of your message.
Marketers can present a catalogue of merchandise filtered by personal preferences with real-time crowdsourced recommendations, availability alerts, countdown timers and social media feeds to engage and convert. And as behavioural targeting technology, such as PureTargeting, can be automated, the content can be managed and triggered in an instant with little ongoing maintenance.
But if you really want to unleash growth it’s about looking to the future – prompting your customer to make their next move, consider an additional purchase or second guess what they want – before they know it themselves. And it’s only by bringing your data into one single customer view that you can spot behavioural patterns, customer trends and the opportunities to do this.
Single customer view technology, such as PureIntelligence, combines your customer data from multiple touchpoints to analyse quickly the trends and patterns in their behaviours to show you what they’re likely to do or be interested in next. By combining this insight with behavioural targeting technology you can grab these opportunities by sending out targeted e-mails to prompt the reaction you want based on the recommendations of the software.
So if you’re looking at new ways to optimise your e-commerce experience, there are plenty of opportunities. By using the right technology you will not only make your e-mail marketing and e-commerce site more relevant and engaging, but you will take control and unlock the growth of your entire e-commerce business.
