Customers expect a seamless, personalized retail experience and a hassle-free shopping journey, which is a tough task for retailers when customer needs and preferences are so individual. As a retailer, how do you know your customers and make them feel seen, heard, and loved? How do you use what you know about them to create personalized shopping experiences (online and instore), that make them love you back and keep buying?

The answers lie in your customer data and how effectively you use it.

The value of customer data

You might already be collecting data about customers and their purchasing decisions, preferences, behaviors, demographics, and experiences. Perhaps you’re tracking website visits and clicks, analyzing social media interactions, monitoring customer reviews, or recording purchase history. Your email campaigns and the way customers respond to them are a virtual treasure trove of information about the styles, promotions, language, or content that make customers come back to your stores (or your website) to browse and buy.

But if that data is fragmented, inaccurate, incomplete, or siloed across channels and systems, it won’t be of much value. A Customer Data and Experience Platform (CDXP) can help reveal the secrets, enabling you to improve customer engagement and drive sales.

How to identify your best customers

You’ve probably heard of the Pareto principle, otherwise known as the 80:20 rule. At Lexer, we often see brands surprised to learn their top 20% of customers drive 70-80% of sales. Focusing on customer loyalty is incredibly important for the long-term success of your brand.

If you’re unable to get a complete and clear picture of who your customers are, you might be spreading yourself thin wooing all your shoppers, when you could be really delighting the most lucrative ones. You may end up spending valuable time, money and resources trying to attract and keep low-value shoppers and miss opportunities to show your ‘big spenders’ some love.

By thinking beyond the demographics of your overall customer base and, instead, optimizing your marketing efforts to focus on only acquiring customers like the top 20%, you can not only reduce acquisition costs, but also gain more valuable customers with longer-term potential for your business.

Here are 4 key steps to help customer acquisition using data analytics.

1. Identify your hero products for customer acquisition.

Some products are better than others for attracting new, long-term customers. By identifying the products that your customers most frequently purchase first, you can gain a better understanding of what attracts your ideal first-time buyers.

2. Select your highest value customer audiences for each hero product.

Now you know the product categories that most commonly acquire high-value customers. You also know that a small number of customers make up a large amount of your revenue. The next step is to analyze the customers who’ve purchased your targeted acquisition products and build lookalike audiences around their profiles. First, build a segmented list of all purchasers of a target category. Then, layer on additional variables to improve the audience’s quality and value.

3. Build high-value lookalike audiences from your high-value customer segments.

Building multiple lookalike audiences at increasing sizes (e.g. 1%, 1-2% and 2-5%) can provide valuable insight into the size of your addressable market and how efficiently you can acquire market share.

4. Target each high-value lookalike audience with ad creative for the product they were built around.

Keep each audience in separate ad sets so you can evaluate each one’s relative performance. Be sure to experiment with different placements and ad units by creating a separate ad set for each variant and audience combination in the campaign. Including multiple ads under each ad set can also provide you with valuable insights.

Closing the gap between data and customer experiences

When fashion retailer THE ICONIC needed a better understanding of its customers, the company turned to Lexer and its partnership with Amazon Redshift. Connecting CRM and ecommerce data from Amazon Redshift to Lexer’s CDXP enabled continuous real-time updates to millions of customer identities in the platform. This data, further enriched with valuable demographic information, quickly generated meaningful and usable customer insights for the retailer.

THE ICONIC’s then Chief Marketing Officer, Alexander Meyer, said the partnership has been a win for customer satisfaction and understanding. “Our customers are at the heart of everything we do and having a more holistic understanding on how, why and when they are shopping with us enables us to not only better serve their needs but increase our customer satisfaction as a whole.”

Similarly, TGV Cinemas, the cinema destination of choice in Malaysia, desired a CDXP solution that utilized enriched, segmented customer insights while enabling the team to quickly and accurately make decisions for furthering their goals, based on their high-volume, fast-paced business model.

The TGV team implemented Lexer, met a three-month live deadline and accomplished key business goals:
● Customer data was housed in one simple, accessible interface for all teams, helping remove the IT bottleneck. Data was enriched with relevant attributes about customers, including days between cinema visits, preferred cinema location, and the language of the last film seen.
● There was increased transparency regarding customer motivations to join member programs and sequential experiences, helping drive visitation for various segments.
● Personalized and automated marketing campaigns were executed within 30 minutes, down from 2-4 days.
● Business strategies enabled by KPIs were built around accessible data points and quality insights, rather than assumptions.

The importance of a single customer view

A single customer view—or unified, cleansed, and standardized customer profiles—are created by aggregating multiple sources of data and reorganizing that data to paint a comprehensive picture of each individual customer within a CDXP. In other words, it acts as a “single source of truth” for all the customer information to which your business has access to, including:

● Demographic information
● Purchase history in all offline and online channels
● Customer service interactions
● Web and mobile browsing activities
● Email engagement

Unlike traditional, channel-focused data management systems, a CDXP reorganizes data to support a customer-centric business model, provides every team with the ability to self-serve customer insights based on that data, and improves the quality of existing data as well as data collection methods for the future.

This information is sourced from direct integrations with ecommerce systems, point-of-sale systems, email marketing and marketing automation platforms, like Dotdigital or other retail systems, and through batch file uploads and flexible APIs.

For example, when leading Australian men’s footwear brand, Aquila needed to determine how paid social ads were impacting in-store purchases, they enlisted the help of Lexer and digital performance agency, DataSauce. By utilizing their enriched single customer view from Lexer’s CDXP and a Facebook Offline Conversions API, Aquila was able to see exactly how and which online social ads were driving purchasing decisions in stores. Armed with these insights the Aquila team was able to confidently double down on their social media marketing strategy.

Final thoughts

At Lexer we believe great brands are built on great customer experiences. It’s important for retailers to be able to utilize customer data and work with technologies that help ensure it is available to every team across the organization. Not only will this help inform customer insight and engagement but will also drive incremental sales. Lexer is the leading CDXP for retail tech stacks and a strategic Dotdigital partner. Reach out to see how Lexer can help you utilize your customer data effectively across your organization.

In 2020, Chinese ecommerce giants Alibaba and JD.com racked up around $115 billion in sales across their platforms during Singles’ Day, both setting new records. With 250,000 brands of which 31,000 were from overseas and 5 million online retailers participating with 16 million products on offer, holiday shoppers had a lot to choose from last year!

With its growing popularity, Singles’ Day is increasingly gaining attention from global brands, making it one of the most anticipated sale days. So how do you leverage the event to acquire new customers and drive sales? Here are a few essential tips to help you grab the customer’s attention as well as maximize your revenue this Singles’ Day.

Segmentation and personalization

We all know relevancy and personalization drive customer loyalty. Modern shoppers want to feel special and look out for tailored experiences. Segmentation allows you to deliver targeted messages to specific audience groups.  Cross-tracking and using insights from your transaction data flow across your retail channels, allows you to build granular segments to deliver relevant and personalized email marketing throughout.

Customer modeling tools such as Recency, Frequency, Monetary (RFM), and lead scoring will be invaluable during this period and can help you group your audience based on their spending behavior and how they interact with your brand. eRFM and lead scoring also consider online engagement. Email opens and high-intent page hits, provide insights into who’s engaging with your brand. You can then enroll them into relevant automation programs and devise tailored campaigns catering to customer sentiments to drive future purchases.

For example, Caruso’s Natural Health utilized its RFM segments to push its Singles’ Day campaign to specific personas, giving early access discounts to their loyal customers. The brand saw a 72% increase in conversion rates from the RFM segmented audiences, which accounted for 25% of the total revenue generated from the email campaigns.

Creating eye-catching emails

The success of your email campaign is underpinned by great design. Because when design is poor or shoddy, engagement rates go down – and that’s not good for business, especially around key sales days.

Select the best words to convey your message, communicating your intended ideas and concepts. The success of your emails also hinges on brand recognition – people need to identify who you are, and quickly. Ensure your logo is clearly visible above the fold, and don’t forget to use the friendly from name as a recognition prompt for subscribers.

Use your brand’s creative assets to style your emails, helping recipients recognize who you are. The language you use should indicate what the action is or the resource/information you’re linking to. With buttons, you can test which words or phrases work better.

Cath Kidston 11.11 Mega Sale email captures the attention of readers, engaging them with their content while enticing them with several offers – whether it is the 20%-30% discount, or the free gift wrap for $30 and over purchases, or the clever 1 for 1 deal on luggage and accessories. The well-designed email stays true to their brand and the images strike a good balance with white space.

Winning subject line

As key holiday shopping days inch closer, customer inboxes are flooded with deals, and the one that grabs attention wins instantly. The inbox is a noisy place at best times, but during shopping events like Singles’ Day, the sound is deafening. Cutting through the din of sale announcements and discount-driven messages is crucial, and a stand-out subject line puts your campaign in with the best chance of securing an open.

Use your subject line to shout about the value of your proposition – whether that be special holiday editions of content, access to interactive media, or time-limited offers. Make sure your subject line acknowledges where a customer is on their journey with your brand; this drives relevancy and fulfills the one-to-one communication experience. A fantastic example here from Pupsik’s 9.9 sales offer. It includes first name personalization, the sale day and discount offer, as well as specific brands that are on special:

Hi Aparna, 9.9 Sale – 20% off Baa Sheepz, Baby Bjorn, Skip Hop, Oxo, Ergo, Bravado

Segment customers by pathway actions, like date of signup or most recent purchase, and devise subject lines that speak directly to the customer’s experience. The other thing you might want to consider is adding an emoji to help your subject line stand out in customers’ inboxes. A great example here, from Cath Kidston:

 THE 11.11 MEGA SALE IS NOW ON! 

Remarketing and retargeting

To make the most of Singles’ Day, remarketing and retargeting are the best ways to reduce lost sales. As remarketing re-engages with customers through email marketing, retargeting attempts to recover sales through online and display ads. Both methods attempt to reach out to website visitors who have already shown an interest in products or services but then left the website without completing their purchase.

Thankfully, this allows marketers to persuade interested customers to make a purchase. By leveraging savvy trigger-based emails, as well as personalization, you can make sure you’re targeting browsers with correct info at the right time. If you have a good strategy, you will convert shoppers into customers.

Identify the most successful conversion method – email, socials ads, SMS, Messaging apps and accordingly create promotions prior to the Singles’ Day that taps into your customer’s sentiments, and they will love you.

Beyond just a single day…

Starting early September there are numerous online shopping events that offer a massive opportunity beyond Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Mark these important dates on your marketing sales calendar, but be sure to ascertain which of these dates will resonate with your brand and audience. For instance, in numerous countries, Remembrance Day/Veterans Day is observed on November 11 to recall the end of the First World War and to honor military veterans – keep that in mind as you schedule your Singles’ Day campaigns across various demographics. You don’t want to miss these key sales events but be sure not to spread yourself too thin.

• September 9: 9.9 Super Shopping Day
• October 10: 10.10 Perfect Sale
• October 31: Halloween
• November 11: 11.11 Singles’ Day
• December 12: 12.12 Sale
• December 26: Boxing Day

Singles’ Day is a great opportunity to get ahead of the competition by running your own promotions and I hope you’ve found these essential tips helpful, as you plan for the upcoming holiday season!

Setting up marketing automations

Adapting to a changing situation

A results-driven approach pays off

• Singles’ Day – Saturday, November 11, 2017
• Click Frenzy – Tuesday, November 14, 2017

Last year, Singles’ Day racked up almost US$18 billion in sales in 24 hours on  Alibaba, [2] while Click Frenzy day saw a 100% increase in emails sent from dotdigital compared to 2015.

With so many retailers looking to benefit from these, it’s crucial that your marketing strategy is well-planned and fine-tuned ahead of time. Email deliver

s £30 for every £1 spent, making it the obvious choice for bringing in ROI from your holiday efforts.[3] Here are some tips for making the most of Click Frenzy and Singles’ Day 2017:

• Get noticed with a winning subject line

Your customer’s inbox is a noisy place at the best of times, but during retail holidays the sound is deafening. Cutting through the din of sale announcements and discount-driven messages is crucial, and a stand-out subject line puts your campaign in with the best chance of securing an open.

There are three key ingredients to whipping up a winning subject line, and the first is to ensure you’re promoting something of value. If you’re running a dedicated Click Frenzy or Singles’ Day email program, use your subject line to shout about the value of your proposition – whether that be special holiday editions of content, access to interactive media, or time-limited offers.

Make sure your subject line acknowledges where a customer is on their journey with your brand; this drives relevancy and fulfills the one-to-one communication experience. Segment customers by pathway actions, like date of signup or most recent purchase, and devise subject lines that speak directly to the customer’s experience.

Finally, with 54 percent of consumers now opening their emails on their phones, it’s crucial that your subject lines (and emails for that matter) are designed with mobile in mind.[4] 20-30 characters provides a general rule of thumb for subject line length, but thorough testing is always recommended.

• Warm customers over time

Getting deals on beloved brands is truly exciting for your customers, so make sure you leverage this in your warm-up strategy. Tantalize customers with teaser campaigns that hint at what’s to come in the run up to the big day; make sure that you fully utilize all your channels to build the hype. Think too about incorporating rich media like video to provide customers with valuable and engaging content they won’t get elsewhere.

This 2016 Christmas shopping campaign from Australian fashion footwear brand, Spend-Less Shoes, uses an advent structure to nurture recipients to conversion. Each campaign is bolstered with an Instagram competition that adds value to the proposition and gives customers even more ways to connect and celebrate.

• Close sales like a pro

Nurturing customers and building loyalty is all very well, but to smash sales targets for the holidays you need to rack up customer conversions. The relevance of your email marketing strategy will be the deciding factor in the revenue race this year, so bake it into your strategy early and become the anticipated highlight of the inbox. The data your ESP collects on your contact list provides the key to highly relevant email marketing. You can easily personalize your emails and landing pages with all kinds of information you already hold on your customers, from gender to geographical location. Make use of dynamic content blocks to automatically display pertinent product images based on each customer’s web behavior, and include images, titles and descriptions of previously purchased products to prompt reviews that’ll help other customers convert.

• Rescue lapsed sales

In a similar way to the stateside stretching of Black Friday to incorporate the days pre- and post- Friday, the boundaries of Click Frenzy and Singles’ Day are ever-blurring, giving you extra time to drive wayward customers to complete last-minute purchases.

Follow up with customers who showed buying intent; you might want to extend your offer for a limited period, or offer new incentives like free delivery or extra loyalty points. Your abandoned cart strategy could provide the perfect vehicle for this rescue mission. Here are three ways to deck your program out for the big event:

• Pull in a live countdown timer to maximize on customers’ fear of missing out (FOMO).
• Include dynamic content from your ecommerce store, like product images and stock availability.
• Bring some relevant user-generated content (UGC) into the mix to boost brand trust.

Still got a list of lapsed conversions after the holidays? Send a personalized feedback email asking for details on why customers didn’t feel like they were able to purchase, and collect valuable data to further refine your strategy.

The more customers you have in your database, the more opportunity you’ve got to bag serious revenue. Check out our free resource: 6 ways to grow your list this season.

[1] http://www.bbc.com/capital/story/20170616-the-worlds-biggest-online-shopping-day

[2] CNBC, Alibaba’s Singles Day is Amazon’s Prime Day — on steroids., 2017.

[3] UK DMA, Consumer email tracker report 2016.

[4] Litmus, 2017 State of email.