Today’s episode is an expert panel discussion from the Commerce Accel Conference. The session was hosted by Kurt Elster, with an expert panel consisting of Gen Furakawa and Soma Toth.

The marketing landscape has made monumental shifts with the tightening of privacy and data sharing rules. Merchants can no longer bank on Facebook ads to grow their businesses. The concept of “Owned Media” is now front and center in all marketing strategies. This starts with building your own email list and collecting 1st party data. Most businesses are still coming to grips with the changes and trying to figure out what email capture tactics work best? And how best can the data we collect be leveraged?

In this episode, you’ll discover how to build a sizable and engaged audience that is primed up to purchase this Q4. You will get to hear about the best tactics to build and segment an audience. This is a great episode for operators and marketers alike.

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Here is a summary of some of the most important points made,

• • It usually takes 8-10 touch points to make your first sale
  • All your retargeting touch points don’t have to be paid
  • Customers are willing to share their personal data in exchange for a personalized experience
  • Using Quizzes is a great way to understand the motivations of a customer

Covered Topics:

On today’s episode, the expert panel discuss,

• Why is Q4 a retargeting event?
• Increasing Efficiency of Campaigns
• Segmentation 101
• Changing Offers across Segments
• Data-driven Approach to Segmentation
• 1st Party Data and Privacy
• Components a Successful Customer Funnel
• Growing Owned Audiences Organically

Timestamp:

• 14:20 – Why is Q4 a retargeting event?:
  • Soma:
    • It usually takes 8-10 touch points to make your first sale
    • If you start to introduce yourself in the middle of the BFCM rush, where every single customer is being bombarded with all the offers and they don’t know anything about your product, you’re already too late
    • Increasing ad budget just won’t work during at high peak BFCM, because CPMs are really high
    • Start that relationship and that introduction right now.
  • Gen:
    • If there is a heavy reliance on paid retargeting, the ROI on that is uncertain
    • Upcoming changes like access to third-party cookies and iOS 14/15 are going to make paid retargeting more unreliable
    • You have to build a holistic omni-channel experience using email, SMS, Facebook messenger.
    • All your touch points don’t have to be paid
    • Relevancy and personalization helps you cut through the noise
• 18:45 – Increasing Efficiency of Campaigns:
  • Gen:
    • Customers are willing to share their personal data in exchange for a personalized experience
    • People are going to be more likely to purchase if they see a personalized offer, more likely to have a higher order value, more likely to have repeat purchases
    • I think only 1 in 10 marketers are actually effectively putting forward a personalized experience
    • Personalization is really only as good as the data that you’re feeding it, like garbage in garbage out.
• 22:40 – Segmentation 101:
  • Soma:
    • You can segment your audience into two pieces and you can segment your audience on a subscriber basis as well.
    • Merchants often see value from creating engaged lists based on click open and on-site activities
    • One of the must-haves is a VIP list. This can be defined as based on total order value or number of orders that the customer made in the entire life cycle
    • When you start treating your VIP’s as your truly most important customers, and you provide them content, or discounts that you don’t give to others, they keep spending with you, they keep consuming your content and they keep purchasing your products.
    • Mostly use engagement and order of value based segments, and send campaigns, offers and content to them very effectively. It works much better than just blasting your entire list out.
• 26:50 – Changing Offers across Segments:
  • Soma:
    • Engaged lists usually receive non-promotional content, like education about your product, new arrivals because you can expect that there’s a much higher chance that they will purchase when you send the offer.
    • Many merchants and especially in SMS were sending messages to segments as messaging your entire list can be fairly expensive.
      You can increase the discount you send out to VIP customers, and you can handle them as priority customers since you can expect them to convert better.
• 29:00 – Data-driven Approach to Segmentation:
  • Gen:
    • 3 ways to Segment
    • Using Demographic data like age, gender, location
    • Using Behavioral data like past transactions or purchases, a website, behavior, abandoned cart
    • Using Psychographic data by looking at their interests, their goals or challenges.
    • People are looking for different things out of products. And if you’re able to capture what their intent is, then that can really do a lot in terms of your segmentation.
    • Using Quizzes is a great way to understand the motivations of a customer
• 34:40 – 1st Party Data and Privacy:
  • Gen:
    • Facebook can no longer track user behavior across different websites, which means that you don’t necessarily know like if they purchased
    • Without this data the algorithm is less reliable and so cost per acquisition is increasing
• 38:15 – Building a Successful Customer Funnel:
  • Soma:
    • It all starts with On-site experience
    • Default popup templates are not doing an effective job for most merchants
    • Aim for the 10% rule here. I want to capture at least 10% off the onsite traffic into email SMS, or messenger channels
    • If you start testing what your audience is receptive to, you will find surprises
    • Mystery Discounts work really, really well. They don’t show the discount they’re going to give to their customers. Instead, they’re finding out what the discount will be in the email
    • Welcome flows on email should consist of 5-8 different messages where you introduce yourself, your brand, and teach your customers about your products, your product lines
    • Also important to have browser and cart abandonment flows ready and live in your accounts
    • A Cart Abandonment flow is different from a checkout abandonment flow
    • Set up receipts, fulfillment and delivery notifications on both email and mobile channels like SMS and messenger
    • The post purchase process needs to include a Win back flow where you remind your customers that it’s time to purchase again.
• 46:00 – Growing Owned Audiences Organically:
  • Gen:
    • In addition to Mystery discounts, Quizzes are very effective too
      Quizzes have 2-3X opt-in rates as opposed to just an opt-in popup or you know, at the footer, join our club or join our newsletter

Takeaways:

• Welcome flows on email should consist of at least 5-8 different messages
• The post purchase process needs to include a Win back flow
• Default popup templates are not doing an effective job for most merchants
• Mystery Discounts work really well for email capture

Tweetable Quotes:

“If you start testing what your audience is receptive to, you will find many surprises.”

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