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Whatever your role in marketing, chances are you’re in the same boat as everyone else.
Thanks to some current economic issues, we all need to get more done with fewer resources. Those constraints aren’t easy, but they are doable. Getting from Point A to Point B isn’t easy.
It usually means we need to zoom out and take a look at the current playbook and figure out where we need a bit of a refresh. In this blog, that’s exactly what we’re going to do. Here are some points we’ll cover:
- Why retention marketing is outdated
- How to give your strategy in upgrade and save
- What a unified platform does to make this all possible
How the Retention Marketing Playbook Usually Goes
According to Hubspot, retention marketing is “the activities a store uses to increase the likelihood of a customer purchasing again while focusing on increasing the profitability of each repeat purchase.”
What does that look like, though? If you chatted with a few of your eCommerce peers, most of them would have a roadmap that probably sounded something like this:
- They integrated their marketing automation software with their current eCommerce platform
- They put pop-ups on their site to collect emails and a good cell phone number
- They spend time sending emails blasts for sales messages
- They made sure to build out the normal automation email and SMS flows like Welcome, Abandoned Cart, and Post-Purchase messages
- They have systems in place that follow those up with additional email and/or SMS blasts around big sales and holidays
- As their emails and SMS marketing moves along, they’ve added some basic tags to create segments of their audience so they can personalize their future messages
That’s generally how it goes and then most brands simply rinse and repeat. Unfortunately, this doesn’t work like it used to.
For one thing, trying to “integrate” tech together makes things slow and clunky. And using an outdated playbook just means money is left on the table.
Today, our money doesn’t go as far as it used to (thanks to inflation). And with another economic downturn predicted, people are spending a little less, which means marketing budgets have less to spend AND need to get more done to capture sales.
If you want to do more with less, you need to upgrade your game plan.
//[inject:ad-unified-email-sms]
Give Your Retention Strategy an Upgrade with Contextual Data
Let’s start this part with an example. One way you’ll see what you can do with the old way of doing things. Later we’ll use the same example but cover what we can do with a bit of an upgrade.
So…
Let’s say you have 100,000 people you send your email and SMS campaign to.
Out of that campaign, 2%-4% click-through (2,000-4,000), and about 5% of those who clicked convert to sales (100-200 sales).
That means there are anywhere from 1,900 to 3,800 from that campaign who clicked but ultimately didn’t purchase anything.
If we did things the old-school way, we wouldn’t have set up any automated follow-up for those 1,900+ who didn’t convert. There was obviously interest, but the tools or the data at hand make it hard to know how to follow up best, so it isn’t done.
This is leaving money on the table.
But when you change up your strategy to incorporate contextual data points with automation, the game changes.
What is Contextual Data?
Great question.
Like the name sounds, contextual data is relevant facts and context around your contacts' interests.
It tracks their email/SMS opens and clicks when they visit a website, what they view, what they buy, and when the cart is abandoned.
Technically, you can access this data through your current tech stack. However, it’s probably missing a key component:
Behavioral Tagging.
Without this type of tagging, you could manually send an email or an SMS to the 1900+ people who buy from the example listed above. But it wouldn’t be a personalized or easily repeatable process.
With Behavioral Tagging, you can send that email or SMS but completely personalize and automate the whole thing. This increases the likelihood of conversion without taking up more time or money out of your marketing budget.
Retention Strategy 2.0: How to Build Automated Lifecycle Flows with Contextual Data
Using contextual data, you can do more with the audience you already have while making that experience cohesive between email and SMS. This means those flows will feel less clunky to those creating and receiving them – that’s a win-win for everyone.
Now, you can build Automated Lifecycle Flows inside Sendlane to help you utilize contextual data with behavioral tagging to highly customize and personalize each email or SMS sent to your customer.
And yes, that’s all done fully automated.
Hello, marketing dreamland!
Here’s an example of how all this comes together.
First, you’ll tag each link in your email and SMS messages with unique identifiers. When customers click those links, your Sendlane account tracks which one they clicked on.
Then, you can set up Lifecycle Flows that trigger based on those tags. Depending on what they click on, they are put into an automated flow to receive communications completely personalized to their interest.
For instance, if they click on Men’s Shoes in the email, then 3 hours later, the flow would send them an SMS for that sale by calling out men’s shoes.
This can be done vice versa, too, where the SMS is clicked, which puts them in an automated flow to receive a targeted email message later.
This creates a more targeted customer journey for each contact based on their interests rather than getting a generic message as the follow-up.
The touchpoints become seamless, the personalization is on point, and you gather more and more data to drill down future campaign success that’s hard to come by.
That’s the power you have when contextual data and behavioral tagging are brought together with automated lifecycle flows.
//[inject:ad-multi-automations]
Don’t Integrate. Unify and Watch Your Revenue Soar!
Integrating tools is the old way of doing things. Sticking to one tool with everything you need unifies all the data into one place.
A unified platform allows you to use contextual targeting for retargeting your highest-intent users:
The people actually clicking on your email and SMS.
You could do all this by trying to build a tech stack that does it, but you’d still be left with something clunky and expensive to keep running. Not to mention the delays in the data feed that happen through integrated platforms (*two thumbs down*).
However, with Sendlane, we’ve unified all the elements we’ve covered, and more so, all you have to worry about is generating revenue.
