How Targeted Email Marketing Can Supercharge Your Brand’s Online Conversions
(*This post originally appeared here on Monk blog for WebEngage.)
Why is Email so popular? Well, it’s cheap and very easy to manage. A recent study found that 72% of respondents chose Email as their preferred form of correspondence with their customers.
The trouble is, emails that are not targeted fail to catch the user’s attention. Going ahead in 2018, hyper-personalization is going to be one of the biggest agendas for CMO’s, Marketers and Entrepreneurs alike.
What Is Targeted Email Marketing
It is the practice of sending customized email campaigns to a selected group of users in order to incite an intended response. Using both personal and behavioural data, brands can create highly accurate user profiles and understand their search intent and preferences. By creating segments of users, one is able to drive up contextual relevance of the messaging significantly. Couple this personal and behavioural personalization tokens, and you have all the ingredients of a highly engaging, targeted email campaign that facilitates one-to-one communication even at scale.
Using WebEngage’s Journey feature, you can craft highly complex multi-channel life-cycle campaigns for users. With a simple drag-and-drop interface, you can create elaborate workflows to intelligently boost your customer retention efforts with smart triggers and personalized, contextual communication.
In the examples listed below, several brands have used the Journey feature to create Targeted Email Campaigns with great success.
1. Abandonment Based Campaigns
→ Surfing Abandonment Email
Problem Statement:
OTA user searches for flights/hotels but didn’t complete the transaction within the same session.
Solution:
This is every OTA’s single biggest issue because most holiday bookings involve intense research and price comparisons with competitors. Based on reports, the search abandonment rate of OTA’s is 81.6 percent. Here is how India-based OTA GoIbibo solved this problem effectively.
Segment - Registered users abandoning the site without making a purchase.
Trigger - User searches for flight and doesn’t make a purchase for 30 minutes.
Personalisation Token - user_location, journey_date, wallet_balance, fare
Industry - OTA
User Lifecycle Stage - Middle of the Funnel
They targeted users who searched for flights but didn’t go ahead with the final purchase. GoIbibo sent them a hyper-personalized email by sourcing values like wallet balance, flight search activity, real-time flight pricing for the date range the user searched for, etc.. The resultant email was contextually very relevant, and it helped them increase conversions by 11%.
→ Search Abandonment Email
Problem Statement:
User lands on the web app page or mobile app screen, views a product page, then leaves without buying.
Solution:
The average conversion rate of an E-Commerce site is 1.5 percent. To improve upon this metric, online lingerie brand Zivame came up with a novel strategy. They urged users to buy the same product that they were previously viewing via an automated journey, maintaining high contextual relevance with the user.
Here is a detailed breakdown of the use-case highlighted above that led to the user getting this email:
Segment - Users who viewed a product page and didn’t complete the purchase within the next 60 minutes.
Trigger - Users entering this dynamic segment
Personalisation Token - Name, Product Name, Color, Price, Currency etc.
Industry - E-Commerce
User Lifecycle Stage - Top of the Funnel
With a combination of targeted emails, web push and onsite notifications, Zivame ramped up their conversions by 20 percent.
→ Cart Abandonment Email
Problem Statement:
Targeting users who are reachable on email, else push the same message across other reachable channel(s)
Solution:
This is probably the most pressing issue that plagues online businesses. Cart abandonment rate for online retail was pegged at 77.3 percent in 2017 alone. There are several reasons accredited to this phenomenon, but here’s how hyperlocal services startup Housejoy remedied cart abandonment.
Segment - Users filled up the lead form, but didn’t purchase the service.
Trigger - Not Completed the Booking within 15 minutes of completing the first step (Lead Form Filled).
Personalisation Token - Name, Service Page
Industry - Hyperlocal
User Lifecycle Stage - Middle of the Funnel
Housejoy managed to increase repeat purchases by 10 percent with an intelligent targeted email campaign. This email was sent to users who filled up the intent form but failed to transact online. This email was deftly hyper-personalized. Apart from the inclusion of the user’s name in the subject line, the included CTA took the user back to the same page that they were browsing at the time of abandonment.
2. RFM based Emails
→ Re-activation Email For Reducing Recency
Problem Statement:
Improving frequency of repeat purchases from existing customers, boosting customer retention.
Solution:
Fintech brand Slicepay addressed this issue with a targeted email campaign to a segment of users who had transacted in the past, but didn’t transact on their platform in the last 30 days.
Segment - Users who have signed up for the service, applied for credit limit but haven’t transacted.
Trigger - User hasn’t interacted on the platform for over 30 days.
Personalisation Token - Name, Time since last engagement, Credit_Amount.
Industry - Fintech
User Lifecycle Stage - Middle of the Funnel
The email urged users to spend their credit that was lying unutilized. The impressive bit is the point of personalization, which is the custom credit amount unique to each user’s account. It let the user know the exact amount of unused credit, and this led to a 58 percent increase in conversions for SlicePay.
→ RFM based Emails for Increasing Frequency of Interaction
Problem Statement: Increasing frequency of interactions to drive more conversions.
To explain this, let us look at Israel based eSports brand Zengaming. They created a cross-channel engagement workflow with one goal in mind: make their users visit the ‘cases’ page. Now, a case comprises of in-game rewards and upgrades that can help you get a leg up on the competition and inflict some serious damage.
As soon as a user registers, Zengaming sends a web notification to them inviting them to check out new cases at their marketplace section. This is sent in real-time, i.e. when the user is active on the website.
What if the user ignores this message? Here’s the contingency plan. They send off this email to them once the user goes offline from their website.
Segment - Users who have signed up and logged on to their dashboard.
Trigger - Users entering the dynamic segment defined above
Personalisation Token - Name, Game played
Industry - ESports/Online Gaming
User Lifecycle Stage - Bottom of the Funnel
This worked out well for them as they were able to enhance their D1 retention rate by 26 percent.
3. Time-based Targeted Campaigns
→ Reactivation Email
Problem Statement: Getting previously interested, now-dormant users to transact with your brand
A reactivation campaign can help you get your inactive users become transacting customers. Edtech brand Testbook created one such campaign, where they fired off an email to users who registered, but didn’t show any activity for 15 days.
Similarly, Edutech platform Testbook urges their users to renew their subscription post expiry to continue using their services uninterrupted.
Segment - User who signed up for a free trial but remained inactive for 8 days.
Trigger - User enters the above segment.
Personalisation Token - Name, test_Name, last_test_page, Price.
Industry - EdTech
User Lifecycle Stage - Middle of the Funnel
On the back of a multi-channel strategy that included emails, Testbook managed to reactivate 15 percent of dormant users.
→ Event-Based Reminder Email
Problem Statement:
Increasing repeat purchases from users after a fixed time progression to increase CLV.
Solution:
This can be explained perfectly with Amazon’s email.
Segment - Users whose product warranty period is close to getting expired.
Trigger - User crosses 365 days since purchase (for specific categories).
Personalisation Token - Name, Product Name, Color, Time elapsed since purchase.
Industry - E-Commerce
User Lifecycle Stage - Bottom of the Funnel
Exactly 1 year after purchase, Amazon sends such an email to their users asking them to give feedback and/or sell their phone off via their platform. One would be fully capable of giving a capable review after 1 year of usage, and also might be interested to upgrade their device with the latest handset.
MarTech has witnessed the growth of platforms that can capture user data and understand their purchase behaviour based on varying stimuli. Marketing Automation platforms such as WebEngage can help you create highly accurate user profiles by combining user attributes and behavioural data. By understanding search intent and purchase behaviour accurately, you can create highly contextual multi-channel campaigns on the fly, and engage intelligently with your users.
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