Society is at a place of hyperconsumption, digital saturation and increased competition due to globalization. Given this fact, customer retention efforts in 2018 have to be more personalized and strategic than ever before in order to meet the new type of customer who is always hungry and connected to the next best product, even before it hits the market.
You need a system that will work for you, rather than the other way around. Smoove offers marketing automation tools in a easy to use, cohesive tool that will make your retention efforts seamless and easily measurable, and all with just a few clicks.
List Management Made Easy
Customer retention relies on providing an ever increasing personalized customer experience. Beyond knowing your customers and having the data to segment your audience, you need to send them the right message at the right time. This is where RFM analysis comes in – recency, frequency and monetary data that helps you classify and gauge your customer’s level of loyalty. What does this mean for email marketing and list creation?
With smoove, you can create customer lists with one click, and then even merge contacts. For example, say you have a group of customers who have not purchased in one month and you want to send them a special and timely incentive to bring them back in, with a subject line like “We Want You Back!”
Once they open or engage with the email, they’ve gone from unengaged to engaged. You can then break up that list based on their interaction, and now move the engaged list to join the rest of your customers that you regularly talk to with frequent purchase history. That means that the next time they receive an email, it’s geared towards an active customer, rather than written as a win-back email.
Additionally, automation features allow for you to add customers to lists based on simple rules that you can set up beforehand. For example, lists can be automatically generated based on a customers purchase amount, checkout history such as cart abandonment, engagement with emails and lots more. This means you can now target customers with the precision of a laser, to maximise your retention efforts.
A/B Testing for Best Results
As a retention manager, you know better than anyone that nothing is set in stone and there is not always one right answer in your marketing efforts. You should always be looking for new and unusual ways to delight your customers.
That’s why A/B testing in email campaigns is a useful tool to try your ideas and measure, in real time, their success. With smoove, you can A/B test your emails based on subject lines, variable personalization, or even the layout and design with easy to use and easy to implement templates based on your industry.
Additionally, you can create templates and clone campaigns to save more time for your future communication efforts.
Maximise your Success with Automation
When you set up automated campaigns, results are necessary to ensure your setup is working as intended. Smoove takes this to another level with real time metrics for every trigger, condition, and action. Using smoove’s easy-to-read dashboard, you can track open rates and engagement throughout the entire process.
For example, if you send a specific list an email with a promo code, you can see how many people clicked through on the code just by clicking on that part of the process. You can even see exactly which customers clicked. With automated triggers, the system will have already moved them to an engaged list, if you have designated that rule.
The drag and drop features combined with dynamic triggers all work around a customers’ actions. This means that you can perfect your best retention strategies with less effort.
Go Even Further: Smart Blocks and Triggers
Every platform and landing page uses a call to action to drive a user to take a specific action and lead them down the sales funnel. However, with smoove, we go one step further by giving you the option to create a multifunctional trigger by using the Smart Link embedded in any call to action button.
What this means is that when a user takes an action by clicking on a button on your landing page, you can set up rules for what happens next. Options include the ability to replace certain data related to a contact, add the user to a defined list (in order to better target them in your next series of communication), and more. For example, if you have a call-to-action that is to redeem an offer, if a person clicks on the button “redeem offer,” smoove can move them into a “Send Offer” list and an automated email with a promotion will be sent their way.
While most call-to-action buttons end in the user’s hands and puts the onus on them to get to the next step, smoove’s Smart Links create journeys from the get-go and allow the business to take the next action to continue retaining and communicating with each interested customer.
Additionally, you can use the Click to Call (CTC) feature to create a phone number for direct response actions. That means when you can enter any phone number to generate a response and the user simply clicks a button and the phone call is placed. In the same way, you can even integrate your call-to-action with Waze and allow the user to click on the Waze button and immediately navigate them to your physical location to redeem an offer or stop in to shop.
Target Your Customer, Collect the Data You Need
Let’s take it back to our beginning point. Digital saturation and cognitive overload is a real issue in today’s connected world, and that means that attention spans are even shorter than before. If a form is too long or has irrelevant data fields for the customer, they will be more likely to click exit before they hit submit. That means that you just lost the opportunity to collect more data and better target your customer with personalization. In an effort to combat this, smoove offers the option to create form blocks that are logical and rule-based with if/then statements.
For example, a certain form will only show up if a user fits certain criteria and has filled out other information on a landing page beforehand, so that the form actually makes sense for them to be seeing. This kind of personalized approach allows a user to feel like your business actually knows who they are and what they are looking for. At the same time, it allows you to smartly collect more data and further segment your lists based on more targeted information.
Merge SMS and Email Campaigns
Most people read SMS messages within 3 seconds of receiving them, and they therefore, have a higher open rate than email marketing. For this reason, it makes sense to communicate with your customers via both channels.
With smoove, you can use easy-to-build mobile-specific landing pages, embed the Smart Links to create customer journeys, and sync these journeys with automated SMS and email marketing follow-up messages. You also have the option to create an automated trigger once someone takes an action on your page. Additionally, you can add a countdown clock to add urgency to your message so that you prompt a user to take advantage of a deal in a specific time period.
A good use of this would be if you create a landing page with a win-back email with a promotion to bring back a lapsed customer. Then, they click on the email and get taken to a landing page where they have to redeem the offer, but they have a countdown and some additional fields to fill out. Once they fill out the customized fields, you can set a trigger (Smart Link) that automatically moves them to a new list where they will get a follow up email for the action they just took. In this way, you keep communication lines open to retain this customer for longer, with less effort. You are also contacting them via email and SMS messaging, and can easily deduce which channel drives more engagement per user.
E-Commerce Specific Triggers
If you’re part of an e-commerce business, you know that an abandoned cart is your worst nightmare. In the fourth quarter of 2017, on average across industries, 77% of customers abandoned a purchase after adding the item to their cart. This means that the majority of people who shop online get to the final step before commitment, and no transaction takes place. There goes retention.
If your customer falls into this category, smoove’s automated abandon cart email will be sent reminding them that they left something behind. This feature simply integrates with Woo-Commerce, Magento and Shopify. Automation makes it possible to set rules in advance so that your retention strategy can work, even if you’re not working.
But, what about the customers who actually purchased, and you’re just looking to keep them coming back for more? Smoove has a function for that, as well. The purchase history trigger allows you to set rules as to monetary values or rules based on purchase frequency that will allow you to automatically send messages to your customers. Imagine being a customer who just spent X amount of dollars with a business and then you receive a message with personalized content acknowledging this fact. That amount of personalization can easily set you apart from your competition.
Wrap It All Up
There’s a lot of automation tools out there that allow you to send email campaigns, measure metrics in real time, and automate SMS text messaging. However, there aren’t many that use “smart marketing” to make it as easy as smoove does. Enhanced with distinctive personalization functionalities, smoove neatly wraps all of its tools together in a robust, mobile responsive, and user-friendly platform.
The ability to highly personalize your content, put the action steps in your business’ hands rather than on the customer, and collect data in a streamlined fashion means that you can communicate with customers and strategize retention efforts based exactly on their needs, their time, and in their desired communication channel.
We’ve just opened the door for you to go above and beyond your competition in your efforts. What are you waiting for?
