Even if it’s just saying Hi [NAME], at the beginning of all your email marketing, you should at least be aware of and using a bit of personalization when marketing your ecommerce store. Personalized marketing can be hugely successful – just look at Coca Cola’s Share A Coke. By adding names to their iconic bottles, they increased sales by 2.5% after a decade long decline.
Of course there are now countless innovative ways beyond just adding a name to your emails, but most of them come at a cost that not all of us can afford.
If like me, you’re working to a tight budget, then you’re in luck! I’m going to show you how with less than $10 and three tools you can personalize your marketing.
First of all, before we even get started on tools, one of the quintessential things you need to do is to create customer segments. By having a better understanding of the different customer groups you have, you’ll know exactly how to personalize your messages.
There are several ways to segment your customer base, and the one you choose will depend on your objective.
If your store is targeting a global audience, it’s certainly worth segmenting geographically. I’m not only looking at this from a language perspective, but also culturally.
Different countries have very different cultures, right down from the holidays the celebrate to the way they approach shopping. One example – Mother’s Day is celebrated in several countries across the world, but not on the same day.
Looking at customer behaviour is an essential segment. Some simple segments would be new customers, those who have purchased within the last month, frequent purchasers and those who have not purchased in the last 3 months.
Customers might shift between the different segments, but creating simple segments like this can help you craft promotions and messages that are more likely to result in conversions.
Finally you can also segment your customers based on the actual products they buy. Are there products that you could upsell to them based on their latest purchase?
Using these customer segments you’re now ready to start building your cheap yet effective arsenal of personalization tools.
Neatly – FREE
Now that you have your customer segments identified, you can start finding your customer data to create your email list. (Note: presently this feature is only available for users with Magento stores, but we’re working hard to bring it to all our other ecommerce integrations!)
Simply head to your Magento Dashboard, then click Features > Customer Search.
Simply click show results and voila, I have my list!
If you already have Mailchimp set up and connected to neatly, you’ll be able to now export these emails into a specific list on Mailchimp.
Mailchimp – Free or $10/month
If you’re on Mailchimp’s free forever plan, your list is all set up and all you need to do is create your campaign and you’re done!
If you’re already paying for your account because of the number of subscribers, you already have access to Mailchimp’s Automation tool.
This feature allows you to create drip campaigns and automated emails, and we’ll be using it to create lifecycle emails; email campaigns that nurture customers through the funnel and also help to retain loyal customers.
They’re largely influenced by those behavioural customer segments we mentioned earlier, with new customers receiving welcome emails to kickstart the funnel, and customers that are slipping away receiving an exclusive offer to encourage them to return.
According to Ometria, these are some of the campaigns that you should be including:
- Welcome Series (e.g. Thanks for signing up!)
- Cart / Browse Abandonment (e.g. Did you forget something?)
- Post – purchase (e.g. Woohoo, your order’s on its way)
- VIP recognition (your most loyal customers deserve to be recognized! Create a club only they can join or give them a tasty offer they can’t refuse)
- Reactivation (e.g. We’ve Missed You)
To set up your automation flow, choose the list that we’ve already added the email addresses into and then create your flow of emails. For our VIP segment, we’ll start by offering them an exclusive 10% off their next order, and sending an email 3 days later encouraging them to refer their friends for an extra 10% off!
While you’re there: Humanize your emails! When you sign off your emails, don’t sign it as coming from ‘the team’. Using a name, and possibly even a photo if you can, is a simple way to improve personalisation in just a couple of minutes.
Personalization isn’t just about making content personal to the customer, it’s also about making your brand feel personal and human; something that people feel they can trust and reach out to.
Bespoke – FREE
In emails, it’s relatively straightforward to add in a merge tag with the subscriber’s information in to personalize the content.
When it comes to your landing pages though, it’s a bit more complicated, unless you’re willing to spend the big bucks on some software.
Which is why I was super excited to discover the Bespoke tool. It’s completely free, which is one big tick, and second, it’s a pretty simple set up.
This tool, once installed on your site, allows you to edit a specific piece of text, simply by changing the end of the URL. You can see it working on the bespoke home page here: http://getbespoke.co/?dynamic=Your%20mom%21 (Sorry for the dated Your Mom joke…)
As the guys from Kudu themselves noted, there are countless ways you can utilise this, from PPC landing pages matching the keyword, to email marketing campaigns, to logged in users and so on. It’s just a case of experimenting and finding out what works for you.
For us, we’ll use it on the landing page we send VIPs to when they claim their 10% off to give them a warm welcome.
So there you have it, now you’ve got no excuse to not being experimenting with some more innovative personalisation techniques.
Of course there are many other techniques you could try; including remarketing, related products and so on, so do let us know below if you’ve come across any other cheap and effective tricks!