5 Tips for a Better and More Profitable Year
The first weeks and months of a new year is the most popular time for individuals and companies alike to look back on the past year and see what might need some changes. For many retailers, it's an ideal time to refocus on driving new customer growth and bolstering customer lifetime value across all digital channels. It's also a good time to leave bad habits behind and adopt newer, smarter strategies.
Here are five resolutions retailers can make for a better and more profitable new year (trust me, your customers will appreciate it!):
1. Go mobile. Yeah, I know this was the resolution you kept five years ago, but it may be time for a mobile refresh. A comprehensive mobile strategy is needed to embrace a more complete understanding of the "mobile experience." During the 2012 holiday season, we saw more than 80 percent email open rates and nearly 90 percent of social interaction happening on mobile devices, with several of our top, "trendy" retailers. These numbers showcase how important it is for retailers to move beyond just having a mobile site to understanding their customer's mobile experience.
2. Differentiate social from email. Humanize your brand with your social media channels. Remember, social media offers an outlet for a unique kind of conversation with your followers — one that happens in real time. Respond and interact with your followers to build loyalty.
3. Get on board with omnichannel. Omnichannel is extremely valuable for retailers. By understanding your customers’ channel engagement across online, catalog, brick-and-mortar and mobile, retailers can mitigate channel and brand-level attrition risk. The task of uniting this information can seem daunting, but there are a slew of new vendors solving this problem cost effectively.
4. Acknowledge the uniqueness of your visitors. Retailers, you love your website visitors, don't you? Of course you do! You work hard to find, convert and keep customers, so why does your website treat a new visitor the same as a high-value returning customer hitting your mobile website? The technology is now readily available to recognize visitors uniquely and to send messages to them based on their current and future value to your brand. This goes beyond your website to include messaging in email, your mobile site, in-app and display. Message and promotion continuity, where have you been all our lives?
5. Love your email subscriber. We know it's cheap and easy, but retailers have the opportunity to stop pummeling their subscribers with nonrelevant email. While your CPM may mean you can afford to continue "batch and blast" email marketing, the hidden cost is subscriber fatigue, higher compliant rates and plummeting conversion. There are multiple examples of targeted email sends to lists less than one-fifth of the size of your standard marketing send producing as much revenue as an email blast sent to your entire list. By sending extremely relevant messages, you're driving extreme revenue.
This could be the year you engineer more value from every visitor by simply understanding and honoring who they are and their value to your brand. Get to know them a little more than you did in 2012. Show them a little more love by respecting their inbox and increasing relevance. Give them consistency in your digital touches across your marketing and messaging channel. Understand who they are across your brand, the channels you sell through and the ways your customers choose to engage with you. They'll thank you for your efforts in both sales and loyalty.
Angel Morales is the co-founder of Smarter Remarketer, a provider of a SaaS email marketing automation and analysis suite. Angel can be reached at Angel@SmarterHQ.com.