A Brief History of Omnichannel Marketing

In less than five years, one marketing strategy has evolved from an unfamiliar concept, to a trendy buzzword, to a crucial component for successful marketing. Omnichannel marketing is one of the fastest-growing concepts for retailers and consumers alike.

Omnichannel is about continuing a consumer’s shopping experience across multiple platforms. Retailers must integrate every available channel to create a seamless shopping experience for customers. Omnichannel aims to encourage evaluation and interaction between a customer and the retailer.

The concept of omnichannel was first introduced to the marketing world in 2010. The term was devised to describe a shopping experience that extends beyond multi-channel retailing. An ideal omnichannel shopping experience would be accessible to customers on all platforms, from traditional brick-and-mortars to the digital world of text message, emails, and online shopping.

In September 2010, a report from IDC Retail Insights predicted a strong reliance on omnichannel for successful marketers in years to come. According to the report, retailers utilizing multichannel strategies in 2010 saw a 15-35% increase in average transaction size, along with a 5-10% increase in loyalty customers’ profitability. IDC cited the growing ecommerce market as the key reason retailers needed to implement omnichannel strategies.

Despite its introduction nearly 5 years ago, omnichannel didn’t receive much attention until a few years later. In 2013, “omnichannel” became a buzzword for marketers and consumers alike.

A 2013 article in Huffington Post attributed the rise of omnichannel to the increase of smartphones. Shoppers with smartphones are showrooming, or using their mobile devices to research competitive pricing while in a store and purchasing a cheaper option later on a laptop or tablet. As Smartphone sales continue to completely overshadow traditional cell phone sales, showrooming continues to increase, promoting more retailers to implement omnichannel practices.

This past year, the concept has further evolved. Omnichannel has morphed from a “buzzword” into a necessity for retailers that want to stay competitive.

In early 2014, Marketing Land called omnichannel a “must” for brands and retailers. Citing a report by MIT, they argued that omnichannel consumers are the “central force shaping the future of e-commerce and brick-and-mortar stores alike.”

Similar to the IDC and Huffington Post, Marketing Land attributes the rise of omnichannel marketing to the digital age. The MIT report found that $12 billion retail sales were made on Smartphones, and $1.1 trillion store sales were influenced by the web. These findings show that consumers are using multiple platforms to enhance their shopping experiences.

Several articles by Forbes also indicate that omnichannel is more than a fad or trendy phrase. The publication has recently called omnichannel, “More than a digital transformation buzzword,” and have dubbed it the “future of digital commerce.”

Retailers are also proving that omnichannel marketing is imperative for survival in the competitive free market. A look at J.C. Penney’s marketing strategy from 2011-2014 is a prime example of omnichannel’s impact on sales.

Originally hoping to keep online sales strategies separate from in-store sales strategies in 2011, J.C. Penney experienced a massive 32% decline in sales. In 2013, the company evaluated their business strategy, recognizing that separating online from in-store sales was detrimental to their success. Upon implementing an omnichannel strategy merging the two platforms, J.C. Penney saw a 6% increase in e-commerce sales in 2013 and a 26% increase in the beginning of 2014.

Omnichannel marketing is likely to remain relevant in years to come. A Forrester Research report predicts mobile commerce to grow 33% annually for the next three years, fueled by thee rise of Smartphone sales and usage. The report also expects an 89% increase in retailers that integrate mobile technology in-store. As omnichannel has become essential for retailers, it is imperative to understand the concept and its implications. In doing so, businesses will be able to reach their full potential and achieve success in today’s competitive marketing world.

5 Effective Ways To Hyper-Personalize Communications

hyper personalized communicationsEvery Customer Deserves Personalized Attention

One of the top priorities of any marketer is to capture, build and retain customers. Effectively engaging customers to keep any services and products in the forefront of their mind is a difficult task. It requires advanced marketing personalization with turbo charged hyper-personalized content, products and information.  No two customers are the same. For that reason, it’s important to hyper-personalize communications with content that is tailored to each individual.

As a marketer, you need to deliver meaningful, useful, and effective content that will address your customer’s needs in real time. That’s no easy feat. There’s a tremendous amount of competition out there. Millions of emails are sent out everyday to millions of customers. People are busy with very little time to spare. With several hundred emails lurking in a recipient’s inbox, you’ve got to stand out in order to be noticed and considered. A generic or “slightly personalized” marketing campaign wont’ cut it. Sally isn’t going to open your email just because it addresses her by name followed by a catchy slogan.

How do you effectively deliver hyper-personalize communications for your customers?

1.  Connect the Customer Dots – Imagine you’re asked to make a sandwich for Sally. The only information you have is she prefers white bread and doesn’t like mayo. Based on that, you make her a turkey and cheese sandwich on wheat with mustard and hope for the best. She’s not impressed. Why? The sandwich was plain, bland and lacked her personal preferences. The same holds true when you’re trying to hyper-personalize communications. Without big data under your belt, you’re going in blind. You need data from crucial sources like CRM, website, email, transactions, browsing history, 3rd parties, etc to create relevant content for each individual customer. Once you have those valuable dots to connect, you’re able to leverage every piece of data. This time around, you make Sally a roasted turkey sandwich on lightly toasted ciabatta bread with honey mustard, tomato, avocado, lettuce, bacon, extra pickle and a sprinkle of salt and pepper. Now…you have her attention.

2.  Create 360 Degree Customer Profiles – Once you’ve connected the customer dots, you’re able create rich customer profiles that is worlds beyond a profile established from traditional data. This can mean the different between “Sally likes to buy shoes” and “Sally likes to buy shoes preferably in the spring and summer months. She gravitates more towards trendy styles and adores heels. Her mission is to purchase designer brands without paying the designer price.” You can use this portion of her 360 degree customer profile to send her products and offers that are useful, caters to her buying preferences and communicate offers and products that would further enhance her buying options through your company.

3.  Pay Attention to Real Time Behaviors – Want deeper insights to the lives of your customers? With Nectar’s data processing tools, you can gather information about what your customers are sharing, liking and what their interests are. It’s taking the process a step further and listening to what your customer is doing through the use of algorithms. Is your customer taking a step out of the box? Are they spending additional time in other categories? Is your customer making purchases that veers away from their typical habits? This is all vital information that will update and combine with existing social data. This in turn gives you the ability to connect more dots and convert this data into valuable insights. The result? Turbo charged hyper-personalized communications. You know that Sally likes shoes, but lately, she’s showing an interest in vintage decor pieces. She’s liking items in that category and recently make several purchases. She’s in the market for both small and big ticket items. Why? Sally is renovating her home.

4.  Address the Customer’s Needs – Utilizing real time behaviors opens the door of opportunity. Based on Sally’s decision to renovate her home, you can create a slew of products and offers that will address her needs at this time. Based on her browsing and purchase history, you’ve determined she is partial to vintage styles and the color blue. Sally’s purchases have been sale or clearance items and so far, she’s worked on the livingroom and dining room. With all of this big data, it’s time to send out a few marketing campaigns with tailored products and offers. These offers can be a mix of items for the 2 rooms she’s currently working on and a few for other rooms in the house because eventually she’ll be in the market for those as well.

5.  Execute Immediately After a Trigger – Life happens and changes are always taking place whether sudden or those that are planned out. These changes produce triggers. Some of these triggers may include a birth announcement, save the date, engagement, new job, relocating to another city, booking a 2 week vacation to an exotic island overseas, birthdays, and other milestones. Amid these triggers are opportunities to cultivate products and offers based on a customer’s immediate needs. A customer’s birthday might trigger sending a personalized Happy Birthday message with an exclusive coupon to their most frequented store. An engagement annoucement is a trigger to send an email with products and offers that are tailored specifically to that moment…like save the date cards or wedding invitations.

Nectar’s products allows your brand to hyper-personalize communications with the right offers and products in real time that’ll drive revenue.

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Marketing Personalization Then & Now

marketing evolutionLet’s Take A Trip Back In Time…

When you sit back and look at the technology today versus 15 or 20 years ago, the first thing that probably comes to mind is, “Times have changed.”  When you think about it, the advances in technology over the years is quite phenomenal.  The same holds true for marketing personalization, one-to-one marketing and hyper-personalized customer communications. At one time, acquiring customers, boosting revenue, growing a customer base and retaining customers required a much different and often tedious process.

Some of you may remember these “old school” methods.

1. The 3 Foot Rule – Although it was somewhat awkward, this method entailed sparking up a conversation about your business opportunity or product with anyone within a 3 foot radius.

2.  Prospecting Strangers – This is sometimes referred to as cold market recruiting and it involves a strategy of approaching strangers, creating curiosity, getting people’s interest and implementing a path to present your idea, opportunity and product. Talking with potential customers was also a way to gather information for a customer profile.

3.  Paper Ads – At one time, paper ads (ie magazines, newspapers, catalogs, etc) were heavily relied on for marketing campaigns as this method was the only way to reach thousands of potential customers.

4. Trade Shows – This gave business owners the opportunity to display products, introduce upcoming products, sell in mass quantities, acquire new customers and distribute paper ads in the form of fliers. Hundreds, if not thousands, of people flock to trade shows every year to “get the scoop,” take advantage of special offers, and see what’s coming in the year ahead.

5. Mass Mailers – Hands down, this had to be one of the most grueling tasks. The process of mass mailing was a complex strategy that was extremely time consuming. You had to collate a target audience, print out hundreds of fliers, address envelopes, seal and send. Then, wait. Unfortunately, this approach didn’t deliver results that were immediately visible.

6.  Door to Door – At one time, going door to door to introduce and sell a product was a sole means of getting the word out there about your product and would drive immediate results. You had the product in hand, a sales pitch and, if warranted, a demonstration. When all was said and done, you knew if you had a new customer or not.

7.  Word of Mouth – Regardless of the advancements in technology or marketing personalization, word of mouth will never phase out or lose it’s impact.  This is by far one of the most important elements in a business. Positive word of mouth is the modus operandi engine behind reaching and obtaining success.

Granted, most of these techniques have been modified and advancements made however, there is one thing that hasn’t…the need for marketing personalization.

Although some of these are still used and hold a great deal of importance, the marketing personalization road map has changed drastically.  The process has been intricately modified to cover every detail and behavior to substantiate big data. A great deal of time and work that has gone into developing solutions to connect customer data for marketing personalization, trigger marketing, personalized communications and data integration.

Old School has transpired into the here and now…

1.  One-to-One Marketing – Individualizing every bit of data and leveraging social data to establish and create one-to-one marketing messages across all digital channels. This technology allows the market to engage with a customer in ways they never could before.

2. Connecting Customer Data – Facilitating data integration based on browsing & purchase history, web & mobile click tracking, email, CRM, demographics, social, etc.

3. Creating a 360 Degree Customer Profile – In the process of connecting customer dots, and customer lifecycle management, a complete customer profile can be obtained so your company can deliver relevant content to each and every customer in real time.

4. Generating Hyper-Personalized Content – Your 360 degree customer profiles, along with segmenting your data, will determine the most accurate route to deploy content, products and information based on immediate customer needs.

5. Trigger Marketing – Executing a successful and profitable campaign is possible by honing in on triggers, identifying events and communicating in real time during these pre-planned points in time.

6. The Small Details – These details aren’t so small and play a big part in the road map to success. Listening to what your customer is doing and using adaptive algorithms gives you the ability to observe, test and optimize, key in on insight generation, evaluate and optimize your hyper-personalized content. This in turn will fine tune accuracy, value and appearance of marketing campaigns.

Modern technology has come a long way and it’s a far cry from hitting the pavement and go about your company or solely relying on paper ads to spread the word.  Old school methods are still applied today and the importance of these shouldn’t be ignored. One feeds off the other and the end result is a strong and loyal customer base with a steady stream of new customers.

 

 

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How Amazon Uses Marketing Personalization

Amazon…You’re Doing It Right

amazon shopping

Amazon excels in the area of marketing personalization.  They’ve mastered the art of creating a hyper personalized shopping experience for their customers saving them both time and money. With the data to back it up, they’ve created 360 degree customer profiles. This allows Amazon to connect the customer dots and divide their customers into discerning groups to prevent generic mass emailing. Personalized marketing emails are created based on segmented data that includes social data, website activity, browsing history, areas of interest, past purchase history, etc.

How can Amazon attribute marketing personalization to their success?

1.  Paying attention to big data.  Think about a moment when you’ve had to purchase a gift for someone. Naturally, you put some thought into this. During that thought process, you gather up relevant information about this person. Who is this person? What do they like? What do they enjoy doing? What are their interests?  With that 360 degree view, you’re able to come up with a few gift ideas suitable for that one person.  The same concept applies to marketing personalization and how Amazon uses that to target customers. They integrate social data, customer purchases, browsing history, customer lifecycles, and rich customer profiles to create hyper-personalized communications. Within these communications are offers, products and content that targets each individual customer’s needs and interests.

2.  Hyper-Personalized communications at just the right time.  Once this information is gathered, Amazon uses it to disperse real time communications to their customers that is personable, friendly, and addresses their needs.  Let’s say Jill W. got a new puppy 2 weeks ago.  Amazon determined this through gathering social information, traditional personaization data, and browsing history.  By combining all of this information via marketing personalization, Amazon sends Jill an email with a variety of offers and products that she may need like puppy pads, puppy food, dog beds and pet toys. When Jill purchases a couple of these items, another real time email is sent suggesting other items that may interest her based on recent purchases.

3. Recognizing the little extras drive big results. Through marketing personalization and big data, Amazon targets their customers by throwing in a few of those “little extras.” A few days before the first of the month, Amazon sent Jill and email with a slew of October deals and coupons for puppy supplies. Another little extra is the email they sent Jill letting her know Criminal Minds: Season 8 was now available for purchase.  Over the past couple of years she had purchased seasons 1-7.  Amazon has also determined that Jill is a bargain shopper and will send her emails with deep discounts on products based on her browsing and purchase history. These little extras make a big different and can boost your revenue and sales.

Can your company acquire the same marketing personalization as Amazon?  The answer is yes!  With Nectar Software Products, you can increase revenue and customer engagement by connecting customer dots and creating a thorough 360 degree customer profiles.  Unlock marketing personalization and big data’s full potential by connecting customer data, gaining social insights, hyper-personalizing communications and increasing social media ROI. You can this this quickly and cost-effectively.

Check out Nectar Solutions to find out how!

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5 Don’ts for Marketing Personalization

Scattered within the do’s of Marketing Personalization are some don’ts…

 

marketing personalizationWhether you’re the owner of a small business or a lucrative company, there’s a need to get personal with your customers.    Personalization is rendered when information is gathered through various social streams, email, mobile, CRM, transactions, etc. This melting pot creates a 360 customer profile so you can deliver personalized, up to date and accurate relevant content to your customers.

There’s an abundance of “how to’s” in the world of marketing personalization. You’ll find tips and advice on just about everything from the varying levels of personalization & segmentation to the challenges of improving relevancy through data.  What about the don’ts? Are there practices you should avoid when diving into marketing personalization?

 

Yes.

1.  Don’t get too personal unless you’ve got the data to back it up.  Getting to know someone personally takes time.  The same holds true with your customers. You’re not going to establish a 360 profile in 15 minutes.  Collecting valuable data is crucial when incorporating personalization into your marketing strategy.  When there’s not enough data to back it up, you risk delivering information, featured deals, products of interest, promotional offers, etc that are vague and generic.

2.  Don’t be creepy about it.  Suggesting products to your customers based on their browsing and shopping history has a world of benefits. A 360 view of your customer goes a long way however, you don’t want to cross the “getting too personal” line.  For example, your data tells you that Mrs. Jones is expecting and she has recently browsed baby items and made several purchases.  Recommending additional items in a “based on your previous purchases, may we suggest” tone is perfectly acceptable. Sending a quip mentioning the amount of time Mrs. Jones spent browsing nursing bras and commenting on her baby bump “selfie” profile picture…creepy.

3.  Don’t suffer from mediocrity.  On average, about 70% of marketing emails lack personalization on a multitude of levels. Names are misspelled, the content is inconsequential, and the offers hold very little, if any, interest to your customer. If you’re going to embark on marketing personalization, do it right. Make an impact. You’ve got the data so leverage it.  Give your customers a reason to open and read the email. Let them know you’re paying attention to them.

4.  Don’t drag it out. If your customer base is online shoppers looking to score a great deal, grab their attention with the subject line.  Once you have their attention, get to the point. You’ll lure your customers with personalized sales, deals and coupons. Add a few time sensitive “80% off today only” highlights. Don’t dilute the relevancy with bloat and useless fillers. More than likely, your customers care very little about ribbed cuffs and double stitching. Their eyes are feasting on the 80% off discount.

5.  Don’t lose sight of important details.  You can have the most up to date personalized data on each and every customer however, it’s often the small details that can make or break the deployment and customer response.  Avoid these mishaps by safeguarding your form fields, running reports to ensure your data isn’t blighted with errors and checking to see if defaults are set accurately.

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Market Segmentation versus Personalization: Which Marketing Strategy is Best for Your Business?

Market Segmentation or Personalization?
Market Segmentation or Personalization?

I often hear people using segmentation and personalization interchangeably.  And it’s no wonder–the goals of both are similar: speak to your customer in a relevant way to increase their engagement with your brand.  Every business wants to have more engaged customers.  So we slice and dice our customer base to try to understand how best to communicate with them.

Market segmentation was THE big thing until a few years ago.  Take all your customers and try to figure out similarities that would enable you to group them into segments, then communicate with those segments. So you’d have High-end Heather and Coupon Clara and Value Victoria, segments that would receive similar communications, targeting their demonstrated habits. High-end Heather would get direct mail filled with expensive brands, while Coupon Clara got emails touting the best coupons of the week.  Of course, segmentation was better than the mass marketing of old, but what if you had one million Value Victorias?  Victoria could be a young stay-at-home mom or be a grandmother or be a college student, or even be a Victor!  Segmentation will likely engage your customer more, but will not differentiate you from your competitors.

With the advent of all things digital and the realization that we now know more than we ever did (or thought we wanted to) about our customers, we now see personalization at the customer level.  Of course, even today, personalization can seem to be an over-used, and sometimes misused, word, but essentially, it means speaking to your customers as individuals, not as segments.  Rather than speaking to a few large segments of customers, you can speak one-to-one to each of your customers.  Because we can access and control so much customer data, we now know that a customer in the Value Victoria segment is graduating from college and will likely need professional attire and perhaps starter furniture.  And message accordingly.

So which marketing strategy is best for your business? If you have very few products and a homogeneous set of customers, segmentation will likely suit your needs.  An extreme example would be a personal jet dealer/broker. They likely sell to rich individuals and businesses.  Very limited product line and two types of customers–>Very easy segmentation.  However, few businesses have the luxury of having very few products and very similar customers.  Most companies have a large number of SKUs and a heterogeneous set of customers; for them, personalization is the way to best engage customers.  With recent technology improvements, cost is no longer a factor in choosing between the two, so personalization no longer has to be a dream deferred.

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Mad Hyper-Personalization: The Evolution to 1:1 Marketing

Don Draper of Mad Men works on Madison Avenue
Don Draper of Mad Men works on Madison Avenue (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In honor of the Mad Men Season 6 premier this weekend, we’d like to take this moment to take a walk down Marketing Memory Lane, From mass marketing to demographic segmentation to customer segmentation to personalization. And now with Nectar, hyper-personalization.

Before the era now inextricably linked with Don Draper, all consumers received the same products, the same messages and the same ads, in the same medium(s). As Henry Ford once famously said, “Any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants so long as it is black.”

Then came those famous Ad Men (and yes, they were mostly men) of Madison Avenue. They realized that men and women actually hear, read and remember things differently.  So these Mad Men placed “male-oriented” products, like aftershave, in sports magazines or the sports section of the newspaper.  Products “for women” were advertised on TV during the middle of the day, thus the term “soap” opera, a tip of the hat to sponsor Procter & Gamble and their detergents.  This demographic segmentation became more and more specific as time passed, differentiating marketing for marrieds vs singles, high income vs low, urban vs suburban, black vs white, and so on.

As companies began to gather more and more data on their customers and computers became increasingly powerful, smart businesses realized there was an even better way to market.  Customers could be grouped into similar segments and marketed to according to their similarities.  After all, not all women are created equal.  Some of us like brand names. Some of us refuse to buy anything without a coupon.  And some of us try to shop as infrequently as possible–hard to believe, but we exist! The hypothesis was that If brands could speak to each segment in a way that resonated with that segment, customers would buy more. And they did! Segmentation not only improved customer loyalty, it also reduced the cost of doing business.

With the advent of the internet and the wealth of data it provides, targeting has become increasingly defined.  Savvy companies track not only customer purchases, but what customers are looking at when they are on the brand’s site.  Some even combine internal digital data with bricks & mortar data. All this data allows businesses to relate to their customers more effectively.  This 0ersonalization is the precursor to hyper-personalization.

But what if a brand could speak to a customer on an individual level, aka hyper-personalization? That’s what Nectar’s proprietary software allows brands to do!  By combining all digital data available (purchases, online and email click behavior, CRM data, mobile, and so on) with social information, companies can now market to their customers in a 1:1 manner, yet do it at scale.

Today, we may go to the office in blue jeans rather than dapper suits, we may no longer be able to smoke wherever we please, we may not be able to have the 3-martini lunch anymore, but we can speak to our customers in a way that’s much more relevant for them: hyper-personalization.  Now, please excuse me, so I can go spend an hour with Don Draper. Cheers!

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