How To Use Email Personalization To Increase Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)

3 ways to use personalized emails to get customers to buy more from you

Customer lifetime value (CLV) is a metric closely related to the profitability of a business.

It’s a measurement of customer loyalty and how well you’re catering to their needs so that they buy from you again and again.

Why’s that important?

The cost of acquiring a customer is much higher than that of retaining one. In addition, loyal customers are more likely to tell others about your products and services, thereby increasing your sales through word-of-mouth marketing.

It pays to invest in cultivating customer loyalty, which will help increase the amount they spend on your products or services over time.

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Thanks to its cost-effectiveness, personalized email marketing remains one of the best ways to cultivate customer loyalty.

Email marketing has a median ROI of 122%, which is over 4 times higher than other marketing formats. Meanwhile, the average order value from personalized emails is 5% higher and conversion rates are 6% higher, compared to those that aren’t personalized.

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So how do you use email personalization to increase customer lifetime value and encourage recurring purchases?

1. Optimize customer segments by CLV

You can segment your email list by profitability, such as not-profitable (20%), profitable (60%), and very-profitable customers (20%). This way, you can send personalized emails with the most relevant content and offers to increase purchases from each segment.

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For example, you can move customers in the “not-profitable” segment into the “profitable” segment with a special offer or cultivate relationships with your “profitable” or “very-profitable” groups so they’d stick around and buy more.

The goal is to move as many customers as possible into the “very profitable” category and increase the average CLV.

2. Reward customers for their loyalty

Offering rewards via personalized emails is a great way to add value to the relationships that customers have with your business and increase their CLV.

A research has shown that customers who make one purchase have a 27% chance of coming back. Meanwhile, second-time customers have a 54% chance of returning for a third purchase.

There are many ways to show your appreciation to your existing customers, by adding special discount codes, offering a free gift with purchase, sending an exclusive invite to an event, or giving them early access to a sale.

3. Upsell and cross-sell relevant products

Customers have very little tolerance for marketing messages that aren’t relevant to them. In a survey conducted by Accenture, 44% of consumers indicated that they’re frustrated when companies fail to deliver relevant, personalized shopping experiences and 41% of consumers have switched brands because of that.

By offering highly personalized product recommendations via email to existing customers based on their preferences and purchase histories, you can upsell and cross-sell items to entice them to buy more from you and increase their CLV.

For example, JustFab leverages interest and behavioral data to encourage repeat purchases through personalized email campaigns. These highly targeted recommendations increased email revenue by 39% and cut customer churn by 46%.

The foundation of effective email personalization

In order to personalize your emails effectively to increase customer lifetime value, you need a comprehensive customer database and the ability to organize the information for your email campaigns.

A robust data management platform (DMP) provides the solid foundation for processing all your customer information in a centralized location so you can extract actionable insights to increase your customer lifetime value.

3 Compelling Reasons To Use Personalization In Healthcare Marketing

How personalization technologies are helping medical practices improve patient acquisition and retention.

The healthcare industry has become increasingly decentralized and consumer-centric, thanks to shifting patient expectations and insurance policies.

As people are taking a more active role in managing their health and wellbeing, they want their healthcare providers to do more than just making a diagnosis and writing a prescription.

Today’s savvy patients are used to receiving highly personalized services from businesses and they expect the same from their healthcare providers.

Here’s why personalization is the future of healthcare marketing:

1. Deliver a holistic patient experience

Healthcare isn’t a one-off transaction with a single seller. Patient experiences often involve interactions with multiple providers and facilities over time, as well as support for personal and emotional issues.

A personalization strategy, driven by a customer data management platform, allows healthcare providers to access all the patient data at a single location. They can gain a comprehensive understanding of each patient’s history and deliver a holistic experience that includes customized recommendations most relevant to each patient.

Not to mention, personalized interactions will help you build long-term and trusting relationships with your patients and improve the quality of care.

2. Improve patient acquisition and retention

Personalization technologies can help you acquire and retain more patients by delivering the right message in the right place at the right time to the right audience.

For example, you can send highly-targeted content to patients with specific conditions and reminders for checkups or vaccinations. This will help you stay top of mind, build trust, increase patient engagement, and get more patients to return to your practice for continuous care.


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When supported by a robust customer data management solution that provides a single customer view, your team can access each patient’s history and preferences in real time to improve efficiency and quality of care while reducing errors and frustrations.

For instance, by seeing all of a patient’s conditions and treatments in one place, you can help them better navigate their health insurance coverage. As you add value by personalizing patient interactions, you’ll also improve patient retention.

3. Increase patient satisfaction and word-of-mouth referrals

Personalization technologies help a medical team care for the patients more compassionately by developing personal relationships with them.

Such technologies also streamline the patient experience, making it more convenient and less time-consuming to visit a medical practice.

Patients will have more positive interactions with your practice, be more motivated to continue their care, and follow through with their treatments. This will lead to better outcomes and higher patient satisfaction.

Last but not least, most people still look for personal recommendations while choosing a healthcare provider. When you offer a highly personalized experience that improves treatment results and patient satisfaction, you’re more likely to get word-of-mouth referrals, which is often the best way to market your service.

Cleanse Your Data: Personalization in the New Year

Welcome to 2018. Personalization rules the world and nearly every business you can nav to on Google Maps has a method of harvesting customer data. Of course, these days it takes more than just downloading some basic CRM (customer relationship management) software onto your POS system to differentiate yourself. Since nearly every company has some method of pulling customer data, analytics alone aren’t effective until that data is cleansed, streamlined and put to work by personalizing your company’s customer experience in measurable ways. Maybe that’s why most of the conversation about data this year is focused more on cleansing your existing customer data than on blindly accumulating info just to stash it away in siloes.

While it may be tempting to take the “more is more” approach when it comes to accumulating customer information, data security is a hot-button issue right now, so it’s important to get your technology up to code. Especially in light of the new GDPR regulations which will require companies doing business within EU countries to revamp their data security measures by May of ’18. In addition to the soon-to-be-implemented GDPR regulations, most companies straight up don’t have time to waste on CRM systems that are lagging due to useless data hoarding.

With this said, here are actionable tips on how you can cleanse your company’s data systems to implement safer and more effective personalization strategies in the new year.

Build a Master Data Strategy

A master data strategy, or MDM, is essential to making sure that the right people in your organization can access the data they need at the right time. Building a MDM also helps ensure that your information is safe from piracy, and the data presented to each individual at your company is whittled down to suit their specific needs. This helps prevent shrinkage, while empowering both you and your employees to make better decisions for your business in a fraction of the time.

CMO by Adobe suggests 5 steps to building an effective MDM: 1) Establish data governance policies (or set of procedures by which to implement your data strategy), 2) identify an owner (someone responsible for the data and how it’s dispensed), 3) define the data (choose universal terms and data conventions to use across your organization) 4) map it out (identify who will be using the data and how), and 5) start small and scale (be patient – it is a process to implement a change of this magnitude).

Assess Relevance with Regular Reviews  

Of course, before you implement a MDM within your organization, you’ll need to determine which data remains pertinent to your company’s needs… and what you can do without. Conducting a regular data review and eliminating unnecessary and/or dated customer information can help to increase your business’s connection speeds, as well as help your employees better locate and utilize relevant information. According to Campaign Live, two-thirds of organizations do not regularly review their data, which means that 75 percent of marketing data within the UK will be rendered obsolete once GDPR restrictions go into effect in May ’18.

It’s essential to conduct reviews regularly for your data to remain relevant, usable, and compliant with all of the evolving privacy laws pertaining to countries where your company does business. Set an internal precedent for, at minimum, an annual data review across all branches of your organization to empower your employees to easily access the information they need.

Use a Single Data Management Platform

So, what do you do with data once it’s cleansed and processed? It’s time to put that data to work to help you gain a better understanding of each customers and tailor your marketing campaigns to suit their specific needs. This sounds more complex than it is, since the right data management platform (DMP) will do most of the work for you. In fact, Nectarom’s DMP creates a centralized channel for all of your data across platforms, while also providing you with a 360-degree profile of each unique customer. In other words, it simplifies your marketing efforts by segmenting customer information and automatically updating customer profiles based on both their recent activity and their phase in the customer lifecycle.

Although it may feel like it sometimes, creating an effective personalization strategy really isn’t rocket science. Put cleansing and streamlining your company’s data at the forefront of your omni-channel efforts for 2018, so that all of the branches of your organization can come together to operate at maximum efficiency!

3 Killer Abandoned Cart Strategies

Marketers have found that on average, 67.45% of online shopping carts are abandoned before customers check out. That’s a huge number of missed sales, and that’s why abandoned cart remarketing was developed.

Traditional abandoned cart platforms operate on a simple logic: Set a trigger when customers leave your website without finishing their purchase. Trigger an email with product info. Rinse, repeat ad nauseum. This basic trigger is pretty much a ground floor requirement for eCommerce websites, but most of them are highly limited in their logic and don’t don’t utilize data from CRMs or Customer Data Management Platforms. They’re missing out on valuable opportunities to reach customers with compelling reasons to revisit their abandoned carts.

Here are three ways you can reconnect your customers with their carts by tapping into your customer data sources:

1. Trigger messages on previously abandoned items that go on sale.

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Surveys report that the top 3 most common reasons for shoppers to abandon their cart are related to the price of their items. When you let your customers see an item that they’ve previously considered has gone on sale, it’s just another reason for them to reconsider their purchase.

Example: Trisha abandoned a pair of blue suede shoes 3 months ago, but now these shoes are on sale. We’ll send her a triggered message alerting Trisha that her shoes are on sale.

Requirements: customer purchase/abandon history integration, sales category for products for trigger

2. Product recommendations in abandoned cart emails

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Example: Jasmine purchased a grey backless dress and abandoned her cart before checking out. Our software will send her a triggered message with her abandoned item along with additional products that may interest her, just in case she’s decided that the dress didn’t match her needs.

Requirements: depends on the complexity of recommendations…simple recommendations can simply be built from product hierarchy modeling (grey dress is in same category as several other dresses), more complex variations will need software capable of predicting customer needs by combining lifecycle, purchase, lifestyle, clicks, etc

3. Trigger abandoned cart emails to users that are anonymous

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Example: Sarah has made an account before, but is browsing the website anonymously. She puts an item in the basket and abandons the cart. The system recognizes her unique ID and triggers an email.

Requirements: 1:1 digital tracking service required to attach unique id to known profiles, automation system to connect the dots, validate confidence, and fire message.

With a powerful enough system, you could probably pull off all 3 mentioned abandoned cart strategies for increased ROI. There’s still time for brands to utilize abandoned cart remarketing to the fullest, and newer, tested technology enables companies like NectarOM to build the capabilities needed for marketing personalization across the omnichannel frontier.

Importance of Location Data in Content Marketing

With the increasing integration of technology and data in sales, there has never been a better time to use location intelligence in marketing. Using location data is too easy and too beneficial to ignore. Location features help businesses stand out amongst competitors and are a staple for today’s leaders in marketing. As the concept grows, customers are beginning to expect it when using technology in their shopping experience.

Location intelligence is a must for companies that want to be successful. Read on to find out why.

It’s too easy

Working with all types of data is easy, and location data is no exception.

With a quality Data Management Platform, businesses can store, manage, organize and analyze their data in one entity. Because companies are utilizing DMPs more than ever, there is now an abundance of platforms in the marketplace ranging in price and features. With several types of platforms on the market, companies are able to choose the DMP that best suits their needs in terms of performance ability and price.

The right DMP makes data easy to use and understand. And finding the right DMP is too easy for companies not to utilize.

It’s an asset to businesses

When companies think “big data” there are certain metrics that come to mind. Typically, businesses look at what is being purchased or who is doing the purchasing.

Amazon Local customizes its deals based on customers' location
Amazon Local customizes its deals based on customers’ location

Location data is often underrated, but just as important.

Location data gives insight to consumer behavior based on a key demographic. When analyzed, this data shows geographic patterns and trends. Companies can use this information to segment their audience. These segments can then be targeted with personalized messages specifically designed to their wants and needs.

One company that utilizes the power of location data is Amazon. Through their Amazon Local feature, the company sends its consumers deals they may be interested in based on their location. For example, emails that I receive are based on my home address and contain offers just a few miles away from my house. All offers show how far away the brick-and-mortars are, which can be helpful for consumers who don’t want to make a far drive to use their deal.

It’s a customer favorite

If there’s anyone who values location data more than businesses, it’s their audience.

As businesses are beginning to include location data into their services, customers have become exposed to new interactive features that rely on location data.

One of the most loved features that uses location data includes a GPS element that shows shoppers where the nearest store location is. This feature is often available on apps or websites. Some companies have expounded on this ability by adding in-store pickup options for customers when they checkout online.

The ability to purchase online and pick up in-store is not universally used by all retailers – at least, not yet. A Forrester report says that 50% of consumers expect the option to buy online and pick up in-store. As companies gradually rely more on more on technology in marketing, this already large fraction will likely increase. Companies who have not implemented location services like this need to seriously consider doing so; otherwise, they risk being left behind with the technologically-impaired.

Walmart's blog shows its app, Shop My Store, which lets customers find items in the brick-and-mortar.
Walmart’s blog shows its app, Shop My Store, which lets customers find items in the brick-and-mortar.

Consumers also love retailers that incorporate item locators into their business strategy. Large stores like Walmart can often be overwhelming. However, by introducing an app that shows an item’s availability and aisle location, Walmart turns a headache-inducing shopping experience into a 5-minute spree. Employees have commented that the feature, in some cases, has actually saved sales by making the shopping experience easier and more convenient for the customer.

Services that incorporate location data work because customers love them. Features with location intelligence make shopping experiences more convenient. And, because an easy shopping experience correlates with a powerful shopping experience, customers prefer marketing that considers location data.

Hungry for more?

Love reading about the latest in the datasphere? Learn more about some of today’s top data trends, or check out some recent case studies from Forbes that inspired this post.

Marketing Personalization: A Long Term Investment

With 94% of marketers agreeing “personalization of the web experience is critical to current and future success,” we know that personalization is an investment that yields impressive results.

However, personalizing content can take more effort than producing generic, robotic marketing content. Getting to know a customer’s habits and preferences can take time, and analyzing customer behavior may require a few extra resources from the marketer’s toolbox. Nevertheless, personalization is an investment worth making, as a 1:1 shopping experience yields dramatic increases in ROI.

How is personalization a “long-term investment”?

Companies might need to wait several months before seeing a significant payoff in any type of long-term investment. The time it takes for personalization to pay off varies, based on the amount of interaction a shopper has with a company. For example, the pay off for a consumer that purchases purchases from a company a few times each year is longer than the payoff of a consumer who buys from that same company a few times each week. The brand will subsequently have more opportunity to gather data about the frequent purchaser based on his or her purchases and will be able to use the applicable personalization techniques over time to increase revenue on the customer. The more you know about your customer, the better the payoff.

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Why does personalization yield results?

Customers prefer personalization. Tailored content enhances a shopping experience and makes a customer feel special. 1:1 marketing improves loyalty, strengthens business-consumer relationships, generates leads, and attracts shoppers. This all leads to an increase in sales and ROI. With all of these potential benefits, marketers should be more than willing to invest a little effort into personalizing content for shoppers.

How do you get that payoff?

Investing in personalization is a three-step process. Marketers should practice the following steps for maximum ROI.

  1. Collect customer data: Data is the backbone for a personalized marketing campaign. Companies can collect customer data with a Data Management Platform (DMP), and make adjustments to marketing strategies based on what customer data tells them. Companies can retrieve data by offering exclusive customer membership accounts, promising an exchange of personal information like name, address, and birthday, for special offers and discounts. Companies can also collect data from customers’ past searches or purchases in-store or online. After compiling this information, marketers can then…
  2. Analyze customer data: Customer data analysis shows whether a marketing strategy is working or failing. By evaluating specific metrics, marketers can figure out their customers’ preferences. Each interaction between a consumer and a business contributes to their 360-degree customer profile. The more interactions a consumer has with a business, the more complete their customer profile will be. Complete profiles allow businesses to adjust their marketing strategies and provide relevant content for customers. With a customer profile, marketers can proceed to…
  3. Create content based off of analysis and customer profiles: Once a company figures out which marketing messages their customers prefer, marketers can begin drafting personalized, relevant content. This tailored content may include products similar to past purchases, or special offers based on birthdays or location. Data analysis is reflected in every aspect of customer content – from a personalized subject line of an automated email to a list of recommended products on a website.

The collection, analysis and content development process should be a never-ending cycle. If companies slack on collecting customer data, marketers could miss important changes in customer preferences. This could lead to an inaccurate data analysis. Mistakes in data analysis – or neglecting to analyze data at all – can taint marketing content. And failure to adjust marketing messages can lead to a drop in sales, as nearly 75% of consumers dislike irrelevant content. Interested in learning a little more about marketing personalization? Check out some of personalization basics here.

Four Reasons Why Bad Data Management Hurts

For many businesses, data is a great addition to a marketer’s toolbox. Equipped with data, businesses can collect, store, analyze and interpret their customers’ information. This helps marketers develop the best sales messages and strategies for each individual customer.

However, if used incorrectly, data can be more of a hindrance than an asset for a company’s performance. Bad data management hurts businesses that base their marketing strategies off of data. Bad data management can include disorganized, underdeveloped, or irrelevant data. These problems are responsible for time wasted, unsuccessful marketing, and a weak ROI.

Time Concerns

When data is not managed well, retrieving relevant customer data can be a time-consuming pain. Businesses using data to drive sales may find themselves spending hours sifting through data.

This puts businesses at a disadvantage against competitors with good data management. By the time a business finds meaningful information with poorly managed data, its competitor that properly manages data will have already developed a marketing strategy that has generated dozens of sales.

Reporting and Forecasting Limitations

Data disorganization can also affect a business’s ability to report conclusions from the data. Data analysis may be construed with flawed, incomplete or inaccurate data. This tainted analysis can ruin marketing strategies.

Predicting customer behavior is impossible without an accurate customer data analysis. In a worst-case scenario, a poor analysis may actually prevent a business from developing any marketing strategy. A bad analysis does not give businesses the necessary material to create an accurate forecast for consumer preferences. This accurate forecast is key in marketing effectively.

Unable to market effectively

The ability to personalize marketing is extremely important to the successful modern-day marketer. Marketing personalization is the premier tool for marketers because it can be used in a variety of ways. Personalization reduces stress for businesses, brings back the disconnected customer, and improves email metrics. Personalization is no longer a choice for businesses, as marketers say it is the most important capability to marketing in the future.

When data clouds a business’s ability to personalize marketing, sales are sure to suffer. Businesses currently personalizing web experiences see a 19% increase in sales on average, according to Econsultancy. The reason for sales increase? Customers like  the custom, tailored messages they receive from businesses. If unable to offer personalization, businesses will lose customers to their competitors providing a tailored, 1:1 marketing approach.

The snowball effect

Bad data management is one of those problems that are susceptible to the snowball effect. If not fixed quickly, poor data management can grow into a larger problem and, eventually, spiral out of control.

Unorganized data management system is much easier to fix in its early stages of development. For example, a data management system that catches a problem early on should not require much effort to make a quick fix. In contrast, businesses that have ignored a necessary data cleanup for years would need to take several steps back to fix problems. In a worst-case scenario, the business might need to create a new customer database from scratch.

If you’re curious or concerned about the state of your data management, take a close look your material. Reexamine any data already collected, and extract any dirty data from the data pool. Review your data management platform and ensure that it is reliable, working as an effective, helpful tool. Reevaluate any good data you have, and use that to create tailored messages for your consumers. Lastly, remind your marketers and data analysts the importance of good data, and encourage proper data management practices across your company.

4 Marketing Personalization Mistakes to Avoid

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We’ve posted quite a few articles on marketing personalization best practices and ways to increase value with personalization, but what we haven’t touched on are things to avoid when it comes to building momentum with marketing personalization and automation.

Here are four marketing personalization mistakes you absolutely have to avoid like the plague if you want a smooth ride(relatively) on your path to personalization.

1. Infringing on customer privacy and not protecting customer data

Don’t be manipulative when it comes to gather information from customers

All it takes is one screw up for a huge PR disaster and plenty of lost potential and current customers. Just don’t do it.

This applies to email opt ins on retailer websites, to mobile app permissions, to social log ins on websites. Be clear, respect your customers by letting them know exactly what you will be using information for, and you’ll earn their respect.

Since one of the first steps of true hyper-personalization is building an integrated data management system that can bring in multiple external and internal data sets, the inherent risk is quite clear. With all your data in one location, there must be significant care in protecting the customer gold harvested because one data breach can mean multiple streams of data are vulnerable.

Be honest with your customers about what you are taking from them, and once you have their trust, protect what you have. It’s that simple.

2. Relying on one set of data

To build a 360 degree view of your customers, you need to draw insights from various data sources. While one data source may constitute a large majority of your data analysis into your personalization platform, the more diversified your data collection points are, the more accurate your predictive analytics will be.

For instance, a big box retailer with may point to POS data and their eCommerce data as their main data feeds into a marketing personalization tool, but forgetting to integrate social media data for crucial life event data would be simply be a waste. There will be sources of data that will be more relevant than others, but finding out where to piece in and weigh each data channel is too important to ignore.

3. Neglecting testing

Testing is a pain. Multivariate testing can get very messy with hyper-segmentation, but always remember to test while executing. The closer you get to hyper-personalization, the more marketers will be tempted to skip various parts of the testing process.

Don’t fall into that trap. Just because the testing process will become more complicated doesn’t mean you should take your foot off the testing pedal. It will become even more important to your personalization journey that all your data sources, creative pieces, and messages are carefully tested to optimize your personalization efforts. Remember that a marketing personalization tool is exactly that…a tool that needs constant recalibration to make the high, consistent returns that you expect.

4. Thinking you’ve reached true hyper-personalization

Thinking that hyper-personalization is a place where you will someday reach and lay claim to is unreasonable and dangerous to long-term marketing personalization efforts.

Algorithms can be update and tweaked, new sources of data can be added, execution points can be refined and tested.

Knowing your customer 100% and predicting their needs exactly won’t happen without having Jedi mind reading powers, but you can always keep moving in the right direction.

Nobody said personalization was easy, which is why very few have figured out the right path towards marketing personalization. With these tips in mind, you’ll save yourself a lot of time and money while consistently moving and accelerating in the right direction.

Nectar: The Easiest One-to-One Marketing Suite. Period.

Easiest one-to-one marketing suiteIs Nectar really the “easiest one-to-one marketing suite”?  Yes! We have developed an integrated SaaS suite that makes the marketer’s job easy as pie.

And how have we done it?  Our comprehensive software suite allows marketers to take disparate big data about thousands (or millions++) of customers and create individual 360-degree profiles in real time, then determine the BEST marketing message for each of those customers and get it to them, regardless of the device or channel they use.  No technical expertise required!

Do you have lots of data in different places that you know has value, but you just can’t seem to get all the dots connected? nectarConnect will do that for you. We are your quick and easy Data Management Platform.

Do you have communications that you’re trying to personalize for your customers but just can’t make it relevant enough for them?  Have you tried customer segmentation but aren’t getting the results you expected? nectarEssence will apply our proprietary algorithms to your data and generate one-to-one marketing messages for each of your customers IN MINUTES!

Do you struggle to get relevant messages to your customers across all the touchpoints you have?  nectarEngage will distribute your one-to-one marketing messages to each of your customers, no matter how many you have, in real time, across email, mobile, website, and social.  Really!

Listen to our Founder & CEO, Amrit Kirpalani, talk about Nectar: //www.youtube.com/watch?v=hMCPhluRuTg.

 

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