If you’re in retail marketing, and you’re not already using data to target and personalize your marketing campaigns, it’s time to start.
Most retailers are blessed with the availability of lots of data – customer registration info, POS data, online order history. This wealth of data may seem overwhelming when initiating a data-driven marketing approach, but with the right level of care and feeding, it can make up for it in results.
The trick is to start with the low-hanging fruit – those campaigns that are easiest to implement and which also can lead to great response.
Here are three such campaigns that may be the best place for you to start or expand your data-driven marketing programs:
1. Welcome Message
Who doesn’t like to feel warmly welcomed as a new customer? Use your data to identify new customers and send a welcome message shortly after the first interaction. Typically your welcome message would contain an offer – a savings offer or welcome gift of some type. Messages would be triggered by a new customer record in the database and a first interaction date falling within a given time range. An email followed by a direct mail postcard reiterating the offer would be a good approach here.
2. Lost Customer Winback
Reaching out to customers who have not purchased in a year, or whatever time range you specify, serves a two-fold purpose. You have the opportunity to reactivate past customers, AND you can identify non-responsive contacts to clean up your list and save expense on unnecessary mailing in the future. If you have both email and mailing addresses for these customers, consider a 3 + 1 approach: email them 3 times and mail them once. Be sure that before each drop you suppress anyone who already reactivated. Your data will tell you this! Your very first lost customer campaign could be relatively large, but for subsequent months or quarters, you can automate the campaign to reach out to each new batch of inactive customers on a programmed schedule.
3. Loyalty Program
Of the three campaigns we cover here, this campaign may require the most upfront investment of strategy and planning. However, establishing an ongoing loyalty program can be just the ticket to keeping customers engaged and raising your customer lifetime value. Typically you will want to use your loyalty program to identify and recognize your best customers. The sense of exclusivity it can create goes a long way to keep customers happy. This could be as simple as segmentation to mail special offers to your top tier of customers or a full blown loyalty program tied to customer purchase history. Because you want to generate a sense of exclusivity in your loyalty program, in addition to periodic emails, consider higher end direct mail pieces (from a production standpoint – heavy stock, special finishes for example) or higher value offers in your direct mail.
You don’t have to figure this all out on your own. Reach out to experienced partners for help to decipher your data and program your campaigns. Start with a free database marketing consultation with us to kick off your retail data-driven marketing programs.
