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In the previous article, we observed that Lean Marketing requires intelligent, highly efficient small steps instead of great marketing plans. In this article, we will show you 5 practical ways to make such steps so you can find your ideal customers among the existing ones and build true Customer Intimacy with them.

 

Enhancing the elements of a lean strategy

 

As we also pointed out in a previous article, certain elements of Lean Marketing strategy require actions to support, and the modern Customer Engagement Platform (CEP) seems more than capable of accomplishing this task.

In fact, leveraging the CEP to promote Lean Marketing practices leads to effects that surpass the requirements in a few key areas, turn personalization into hyper-personalization, and transform personas into real-life, high-resolution pictures of your actual customers!

 

Buyer Personas – ideal or real?

 

Shopify’s definition of the buyer persona is as follows: “A buyer persona is a fictionalized characterization of your best customer(s) based on information about them and how they use your product or service. These descriptions mirror your various market segments, with names to match the type of buyer.

You might have Stylish Sally and Practical Polly and Discount Daphne as personas in your clothing business, for example, all representing different categories of buyers with similar backgrounds and habits. In this case, Sally might be primarily concerned with looking snazzy at any cost, while Polly is focused on finding more functional, long-lasting outfits, and Daphne really only buys when you have a great sale, but is great for clearing out last season’s merchandise.”

Most companies, not only eCommerce platforms, use more than one persona; they usually establish 1–5. These personas define the patterns of various customers’ behaviors and enable companies to carry out strategies that fit these patterns.

Personas offer pictures of the ideal customer, and contemporary eCommerce, equipped with a CEP, that makes use of 360°customer profiles has plenty of data to derive detailed and comprehensive patterns to establish a persona. Buyer Personas are hidden in your data; they are your actual customers.

 

Hyper Segmentation Center goes beyond traditional segmentation with real-time high propensity & churning customers identification and one click availability across all execution channels

 

Better than personalization

 

The first steps on a lean way require actions identical to those used in classic marketing activities. It is necessary to segment the market and define the target group for your product. Traditionally, eCommerce segments customers according to psychographic, behavioral, social, budget, and geographic characteristics. This results in the creation of segments.

According to Investopedia, “The term market segment refers to people who are grouped together for marketing purposes. Market segments are part of a larger market, often lumping individuals together based on one or more similar characteristics. Corporations and their marketing teams use various criteria to develop a target market for their products and services. Marketing professionals approach each segment differently, but only after they fully understand the needs, lifestyles, demographics, and personality of the target consumer.”

Hyper-segmentation goes much further than this. According to Capgemini, hyper-segmentation is the “advanced and real-time customization of offerings, content, and customer experiences on an individual level.” It is not about creating just a few segments capacious enough to contain relatively large groups of people so everyone can fit somewhere. Hyper-segmentation means creating as many segments as possible, sometimes only for a moment or even only for a single customer, to deliver an extremely personalized experience. 

 

Conditional content is a personalization option that allows you to create different variants of one message. Each variant can be freely personalized by dragging the appropriate widgets into its field. 

 

5 examples of personas and the hyper-personalization of their experience

 

A new shopper

 

Target group: A new customer has just created an account and bought first, single product: a car lamp cleaner. The customer did not decide to subscribe to the newsletter.

Your sources of data:

Behavioral dataSegmentation rules

A reason to create such a persona:This is the perfect opportunity to get to know new customers better and to start creating a bond to ultimately reach the ideal Customer Intimacy level. 

What actions can be undertaken?Using the Customer Preference Center, you can collect information about the car/cars brand and model/models. You may ask detailed questions about car equipment and materials, as well as in what circumstances or weather conditions they are most frequently used. By inviting such customers to subscribe to the newsletter, you can begin the process of a lead nurturing or educating new customers about care processes, such as maintaining car seats based on their materials or cleaning wooden finish. Knowing the kind of car, its purpose, and the details of its utilization (for example, luxury cars are sometimes only driven occasionally, family daily car, and some own a car fleet of trucks), you can easily recommend whole sets of products at the right time of year.

Cross-selling Progressive profilingLead nurturingWebsite personalizationHyper-personalized recommendations in SMS/email/Web Push

 

Dynamic Segments are advanced tools allowing you to create and update in the real-time, the groups of contacts, meeting has given set of criteria including CRM data, behavioral and transactional data, at the given moment.

 

High-value shopper

 

Target group: Woman, living in a large city like London who spend at least 400 Euros regularly in your shop. 

Your sources of data:

Declarative data Dynamic segments (transactional data)

A reason to create such a persona:Targeting groups with a high probability of making valuable purchases is the essential purpose of hyper-segmentation and creating buyer personas. Gender recognition provides an additional opportunity to promote gender-specific products. 

What actions can be undertaken?Using Customer Preference Center and transactional data, you can broaden your knowledge about this valuable customer’s needs and preferences. Inviting customer to subscribe to the newsletter allows her to stay informed about how other products are related to the ones they have already purchased. This will provide lead nurturing and lay the foundation for cross-selling. Considerable average cart values and encouraging the customer to take advantage of the Wishlist in their Personal Shopping Inbox could provide useful information not only for recommendations but also for upselling. Actions you can engage in using relevant data are as follows:

Cross-sellingUpsellingProgressive profiling (needs and desires)Lead nurturingWebsite personalizationHyper-personalized recommendations in SMS/email/Web Push 

 

 

Shopper you are losing

 

Target group: Customer who have made purchases irregularly with mediocre cart values from the House and Garden category. Now, the frequency of purchases has begun to drop. They don’t browse through the offers and instead use the search bar.

Your sources of data:

RFMSegmentation rulesBehavioral data

 

Our shopper is in the casual category

 

There are 75 contacts in his segment

 

By monetary, he is medium

 

Medium segment contains 100 users RFM Marketing Automation is a perfect solution for eCommerce and will help you to successfully implement the customer value approach.

 

A reason to create such a persona:People who make purchases irregularly and for average amounts can still be your loyal customers—a garden is something that requires care for years. This segment includes people who do not bother to browse the entirety of the product selection anymore because they know about your offers and have gotten used to seeing certain products, which will be clear from their carts. Since they type the names of the products, these particular ones, or some of them, may not be in stock anymore. Such customers may feel this is where they part ways with the shop.

What actions can be undertaken?An obligatory win-back campaign should be supported by data gathered via the Customer Preference Center. It is important to get to know what the customer’s garden looks like, what plants grow there, and what the small architecture is. Another thing to know is the reason for certain product preferences. Knowing this, you can really hyper-personalize a new, even better set of offers for your loyal customer—after establishing a preferred channel of communication, since this particular person does not like to browse. Additionally, lead nurturing via newsletters can provide the customer with useful information on how to care for the garden using the latest products that are possibly better than those not in stock anymore. 

Win-back campaignsInactivity alertsProgressive profiling (garden and products)Lead nurturingHyper-personalized recommendations in SMS/email/Web Push 

 

Shopper who suddenly vanished

 

Target group: Logged-in customer highly active on the website, browses offers, has subscribed to the newsletter, and is a regular reader. However, they have never bought anything online. Instead, they have made regular purchases of medium-to-high value at the stationery shop. The purchases suddenly ended 3 months ago, but the customer remains active on the website and opens newsletters.

Your sources of data:

Declarative dataSegmentation rulesBehavioral dataRFM

A reason to create such a persona:If someone suddenly stopped making purchases in your stationary shop but apparently did not lose interest in your offers, this may mean that such a person simply moved! Your network probably does not have a stationary shop in this new area. The customer is apparently attached to your shop and probably treats you like an authority figure in this area, given that they read your newsletters. You are also probably a benchmark for the competition since the customer still browses your offers, though this activity begins to fade. Loyal, attached customers who do not buy items online but have no problem with online communication probably simply do not trust online shopping. Alternatively, they simply prefer to see the products in person and communicate with any available salespeople who then offer further information about the product. This indicates that such a person does not believe that online shopping will provide her with enough care and consulting from the shop’s side. It is worth proving her otherwise.

What actions can be undertaken?Encouraging such a customer to share more about her needs and preferences via the Customer Preference Center using a series of questions about her attitude toward online shopping could change her mind about your shop’s attitude toward online shoppers. By knowing her fears and sources of distrust, you can mitigate them. Establishing product preferences and sending hyper-personalized recommendations would prove that she is an important customer, regardless of whether she makes purchases online or in person. Encouraging her to download and use the app could open a new, exciting way of shopping for her, and personalizing the content of the website would make her feel at home.

Win-back campaignsInactivity alerts Progressive profiling (attitude toward online shopping)Hyper-personalized recommendations in SMS/email/Web Push Website personalizationMobile marketing Win-back campaigns

 

A Contact Card in CDP contains all the information you need to evaluate the contact and diagnose the possible reasons for disappearance both declarative …

 

… and behavioral

 

Wrapping up

 

In other words, we showed you few ways you can describe:

customers you can start building the relationship with, based on Customers Intimacycustomers especially worthy of nurturingloyal customers that you are losing for no particular reason, besides they needed your attention in a pivotal moment of your relationship.

These are probably the simplest, yet very promising groups of people. We showed you just four examples, but there are many personas you can construct to find them as real people in your own database – with no additional costs, just with little creativity, the lean way.

 

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The travel and tourism industry was hit worst by the COVID-19 pandemic. The sector is still in recovery mode, but the uncertainty of new variants is taking the wind out of its sails. Now, businesses in this industry are faced with the challenge of marketing to clients who are increasingly less confident about making plans…
The post Promoting Travel and Tourism with Email Marketing appeared first on Benchmark Email.

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The origin story of my business will be familiar to so many entrepreneurs: I was tired of my full-time job and had an idea I just couldn’t let go of. At the time, I was working for a design firm and was frustrated that everything we were selling was so expensive. I had a vision for luxury-quality home goods at a more accessible price point, and the spark of Inglenook Marketplace was born.I set up a website and started filling it with products, shipping handmade candles from my apartment in Brooklyn and drop shipping a curated selection of goods that I bought wholesale from other brands. I reached a point where I wanted to move on from my current job because they weren’t paying me enough—but I wasn’t ready to go all in on my business, so I interviewed for a new full-time role. My brand started growing on the side, and I was getting more and more orders every week that I would fulfill on nights and weekends. Once again, I left my current day job because of lack of growth opportunities, but started another one for fear of losing the stability of a salary. Meanwhile, my vision for my business was getting bigger and bigger, and I got my first storefront in a small town in upstate New York, only opening it on the weekends and commuting during the week to my full-time job in the city. Finally, nearly five years after starting my company on the side, I opted to stop working for other people and give my business my all in 2019. And I’m so glad I did. Today, we’re doing better than ever, with a new storefront in a bigger town, a thriving e-commerce and white label wholesale business, and a brand that’s so beloved that we were recently voted the best candle maker in the Hudson Valley. In some ways, I think this time spent slowly developing my business on the side was instrumental to today’s success. But I also often wish I had believed in my idea and taken the leap sooner. Here are a few of the ways building my business on the side helped me—and some of the ways I held myself back along the way.How Building My Business On the Side Helped Me SucceedI Got Revenue to a Stable PointThe biggest benefit of building my business on the side was getting my finances to a more stable place. When I first started Inglenook Marketplace, my life (and bank account) looked very different. I was living in Brooklyn where the cost of living was extremely high, and I was relatively young in my career so didn’t have any savings to rely on. If I had gone full-time from the start, I would have either needed my business to start making meaningful money immediately (which is challenging for any business that needs to grow a customer base, but especially for one with as much overhead as a product-based business), had to compromise my vision to make more sooner, or been stressed about finances all the time and probably given up on my dream quickly.In just a few years of growing my business on the side, all of this changed dramatically. I had moved to a smaller (cheaper) town in upstate New York and was shuffling as much of my salary into savings as possible so I’d have a nest egg to lean on in the event of financial surprises. During that time, the company also had time to grow organically to the point where I had enough sales each week for the business to pay for itself, giving me space to spend my energy building my brand instead of stressing about scraping by.I Gained the Customers to Reinforce My VisionIf money was the biggest indicator my business was ready for my full attention, the customers were my biggest motivator to make it happen. If I hadn’t gotten the response I did when I opened my storefront, I may still be working a full-time job to this day. Instead, hearing customers walk in and say the store smelled amazing validated that I was making a good product. Comments like “this is the cutest place I’ve ever seen” made me feel like I was bringing joy to peoples’ lives. And the repeat customers made it clear that I was filling a need in this small town where there were hardly any other stores.Obviously, having customers who love what you do is an important aspect of a financially stable business. But, more than that, the positive reinforcement kept me going when things got tough. Not everything about running a business is fun, but even when I’m packing orders or filing my taxes, don’t mind because I know who I’m doing it for. When COVID hit and most stores had to close their doors, I pivoted our stock to provide essential goods, both so the business could survive but also so I could be there for these customers I cared so much about. If I had gone full-time on my business with no existing customers, I don’t know what would have carried me through the ups and downs.I Had Time to Refine the Product and Customer ExperienceDeveloping my business slowly on the side also helped me fine tune the product and customer experience so I could feel confident people would keep coming back. Sure, I could have refined the customer experience even if I had immediately gone full-time on my business. But doing so takes time, and I had time on my side thanks to my salaried jobs.I could try things, see what the response was, and tweak my approach until I got it right without feeling too stressed about perfecting things quickly. I could start to develop relationships with my customers and get insights into what they want. I took classes and spent time researching all the business know-how I needed to get things up and running. I even gained a lot of knowledge from my full-time jobs: Working for design firms taught me so much about branding and marketing that I carried back to my business.By the time I went all in, I really knew my customer and what they wanted, had streamlined processes in place, and was consistently sourcing and creating beautiful, great quality products.Why I Wish I Had Gone All-In SoonerUltimately, all of these things were true well before I took the leap and left my full-time job. Even when I was interviewing for my last position, I had dedicated customers who loved my product, and I was bringing in enough from my business to support itself and me. At that point, fear and lack of confidence in myself were the only barriers keeping me from investing fully in my business. There was the fear of leaving a stable salary behind; I had a hard time believing I could truly support myself with my company, even though the numbers said otherwise. There was the fear in believing in my own vision, even though so many customers had reinforced it. And there was the lack of belief that I could build a thriving business, even though I had achieved so much success already.So I took another full-time job, which was hard on me and hard on the business. Juggling my day job and my ever-growing business caused me to miss customer calls and prevented me from getting orders out on time. Those are customers who will probably never come back because they had such a weird experience in the beginning. It was also frustrating to have such limited hours at my brick-and-mortar store, reducing the chances new customers had to discover the shop. But more than any of that, my heart was in my business, and it was emotionally taxing to deal with frustrations at my day job.I wish I had been more pragmatic about calculating what the business needed to be making to cover my needs (with a little wiggle room), and quitting my job as soon as I hit that threshold. Instead, I had to wait until I grew my own confidence.A few things helped me flip the script there. One was that I started dating my partner, who was my biggest fan. I’ve never had anyone support me like he does. Finding just one person to believe in you that much can really mean the whole world.Around that time, my father also passed away at a relatively young age, and it ignited something in me. I thought about how much of their lives my parents spent being unhappy working for other people, and how I was currently stuck in the same pattern. Meanwhile, I kept facing roadblocks when I tried to advance or share my ideas in my full-time role. Finally, one day I woke up and thought, “I’m not doing this anymore. No one is going to control my future and tell me that I can’t be something more, and put a cap on my career.” And I decided to start believing in myself.And from that day forward, I’ve been all in.Finally, one day I woke up and thought, “I’m not doing this anymore. No one is going to control my future and tell me that I can’t be something more, and put a cap on my career.” And I decided to start believing in myself. – Heatherlyn Nelson, Founder of Inglenook Marketplace

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