#CNX14 - Predicting Success: Achieving ROI from Personalized Content Across the Customer Journey
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Join us to learn how one major retailer observes customer behavior across the journey to infer preferences—and applies the data to provide personalized experiences. This includes predictive content on the web and in email, as well as journeys triggered by site behavior, such as abandoned carts or abandoned browse. In just the first month of implementation, this retailer achieved a 200% ROI from personalized content on the web and delivered recommendations in millions of marketing emails per week.
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#CNX14 - Predicting Success: Achieving ROI from Personalized Content Across the Customer Journey
- 1. Track: Customer Journey Showcase #CNX14 #CNX14 Predicting Success: Achieving ROI from Personalized Content across the Customer Journey Sears Canada: Amanda Pereira, Manager Strategic Email and Affiliate Marketing Salesforce ExactTarget Marketing Cloud: Matt Coffman, Director, Product Management
- 2. Track: Customer Journey Showcase #CNX14 1 2 3 The customer journey has changed. More communication channels, more customer options, more interactions. Huge amounts of data are available, but are often siloed or difficult to use To connect with consumers, you need meaningful messages at key moments Today’s Challenges
- 3. Track: Customer Journey Showcase #CNX14 What is the Customer Journey?
- 4. Track: Customer Journey Showcase #CNX14 Explosion of Channels + Data
- 5. Track: Customer Journey Showcase #CNX14 Harvard Business Review webinar, McKinsey & Co, September 2013
- 6. Track: Customer Journey Showcase #CNX14
- 7. Track: Customer Journey Showcase #CNX14 Sears Customer Persona
- 8. Track: Customer Journey Showcase #CNX14 Stacie’s Customer Journey
- 9. Track: Customer Journey Showcase #CNX14 Stacie’s Customer Journey
- 10. Track: Customer Journey Showcase #CNX14 Predictive Content for the Journey
- 11. Track: Customer Journey Showcase #CNX14 Price Trigger 2.8x the open rate 4.3x the click rate
- 12. Track: Customer Journey Showcase #CNX14 Abandoned Cart Trigger 2.7x the open rate 5.8x the click rate
- 13. Track: Customer Journey Showcase #CNX14 Biggest Challenges for Sears Canada • Incomplete picture of journey and preferences • One-to-many communications • Stale data = Missed opportunities
- 14. Track: Customer Journey Showcase #CNX14 Challenge 1: An Incomplete Picture • Subscription preferences change (or are never set) • Disparate data prevents full customer profiles
- 15. Track: Customer Journey Showcase #CNX14 Takeaway 1: Combine Holistic View + Real-Time Access
- 16. Track: Customer Journey Showcase #CNX14 Challenge 2: One-to-Many Communications • Extreme customer diversity • Many, varied products and services • Manual customization is unmanageable • Constant balance of relevancy vs. scalability
- 17. Track: Customer Journey Showcase #CNX14 Takeaway 2: Observe Behavior + Act in Real-Time • Predictive, Automated customization across channels • Content grows more relevant with each click • Profile built from multiple data inputs • Phenomenal ROI
- 18. Track: Customer Journey Showcase #CNX14 Challenge 3: Missed Opportunities from Stale Data • Limited methods to segment lists • Manual segmentation based on general assumptions • Customers often receive irrelevant campaigns
- 19. Track: Customer Journey Showcase #CNX14 Takeaway 3: Right Content + Key Moments • Browsing behavior refines campaigns • Engaging content isn’t always enough • Identify key moments in the customer journey Cart abandonment 2.7x open rate / 5.8x click rate Browse abandonment 2.7x open rate / 4.3x click rate Price (drop alert) trigger 2.8x open rate / 4.3x click rate
- 20. Track: Customer Journey Showcase #CNX14 In U.S., $83 billion lost to poor customer experiences each year The State of Marketing, IBM, 2013
- 21. Track: Customer Journey Showcase #CNX14 Single View of the Customer • Identify your customer wherever they interact • Get to know your customer through the data
- 22. Track: Customer Journey Showcase #CNX14 Data Driven Content • Develop content from your cross-channel view of each customer • Give individuals what they want, they will respond
- 23. Track: Customer Journey Showcase #CNX14 Be in the Moment Connect during the moments that matter • Identify those critical moments • Listen and act in real-time
- 24. Track: Customer Journey Showcase #CNX14 1 2 3 Evaluate your data practices – how you collect it, from where, etc. and find partners who can help you fill the gaps. Collect and organize your data to make it useful and productive. Use insights and take action, at the right time, to be relevant to each individual customer. Next Steps
- 25. Track: Customer Journey Showcase #CNX14 Questions?
- 26. Track: Customer Journey Showcase #CNX14 • 1:1 journeys across channels and devices • Premium experiences throughout the marketing lifecycle • 360-degree view of your customer • When it comes to your customers, every moment matters
- 27. Track: Customer Journey Showcase #CNX14
- 28. Track: Customer Journey Showcase #CNX14 Take the after-session survey! Take the Survey in the Connections 2014 Mobile App Join the $50 Starbucks Gift Card Conversation! $500 •#CNX1 4 • Best Buy Gift Card #CNX14
Editor's Notes
- The marketer today, many of you sitting out there, deal with a bevy of challenges in crafting and executing your marketing strategy and programs. Today, we’ll explore several that relate to the journey that your customer is on with your brand and the experiences that they expect to have. The first challenge is simply that, The customer journey has changed. There are more communication channels, more customer options, and more interactions to be managed and accounted for. This creates the second challenge which has been eloquently termed – Big Data. How do we ensure we are collecting all of this data in an organized fashion to make it useful? Finally, it’s about connecting with customers in the key moments that matter with messages the matter to them.
- So let’s first make sure we define what exactly we mean by ‘Customer Journey’ Your customer is constantly on a journey – a with your brand. That journey spans from the first time they hear about your offering, step foot in your store or browse your website to the point in time when they decide to make a purchase or download your content and then beyond with customer service and future transactions. It’s a journey that also spans messaging channels as customers interact with your brand in the way that they choose. Your customer’s journey will be unique to your own brand and in most cases unique to each individual customer, so to define it, you must understand the way your customer thinks about their experience with your brand, not just how you want them to interact. It’s a study of each interaction and meaningful moment in the customer lifecycle and how you will communicate and engage with customers in each of those moments.
- How the Customer Journey is changing today But defining that customer journey is easier said than done today. Gone are the days of the limited communication channels and hyper-personal interactions. We live in a world where technology is driving an unprecedented connectedness for consumers as they shop or browse on mobile devices nearly as much as walking into a store or fire up their PC. And it’s not just mobile devices, there is increasingly an app or way to communicate through any product – think about how the automobile has become more than just a transportation vehicle today where customers access media and are served alerts about everything from car performance to song preferences. The customer journey has exploded with ways for the customer to interact and it has put them more in control of their experience than ever. Not only that, but all of this is at their fingertips meaning their expectations have shifted. They want real-time value and feedback from the brands they trust and expect you to know who they are, their history and when they are interacting with you, regardless of where they are.
- Why is it more important than ever to be optimizing it? With this increased customer engagement this also means that we have access to infinitely more customer data, which is great. That means more opportunities to build and nurture existing relationships and create new ones. And it is more critical than ever interact and engage customers in ways that meet and exceed their expectations. Brands who actively manage their customer journeys - <reference stats on slide> To do that, it is critical that we optimize the customer journey and view the data, not in the disjointed way that so often exists, but through a consolidated lens, because that is the way the customer sees it. Transition - Eric says: Sears Canada is a great example of a company who is tuning into its customers and the journey they are on with their brand. I’d like to introduce Amanda Pereira, Manager Strategic Email and Affiliate Marketing, who will share more about how Sears.ca understands its customers, the challenges they faced in getting there and how leveraging Predictive Intelligence and the ExactTarget Marketing Cloud has led to key successes.
- Eric asks: Amanda, can you start by helping us understand the Sears Canada story? For those unfamiliar with Sears, it is a large, established Canadian department store with almost 200 stores and over 1,400 pickup locations. Over 90% of Canadians live within a 10-minute drive of a Sears Pickup Location. This makes it an optimal ecommerce environment, serving a wide-variety of customers. We are also a general merchandiser. A quick glance at our website will show everything from a $3,000 diamond ring to a $20 shirt to a 12’ greenhouse. Sears truly serves Canadians from all across the country in urban, suburban and rural environments. Even within specific categories, Sears’ products reflect this diversity. Dining room furniture on the site includes modern condo-sized pieces to large, durable sets for bigger families in houses. Transition: So who is the Sears customer? There are many answers to this question but let’s consider the typical Sears consumer.
- Stacie is a mother who handles the shopping for her family and has two school-aged children. She is a suburban mother who cares about quality and value in her purchases but does not have the time to shop around at many stores and trusts Sears to provide her the best selection for her needs. As a busy mother she relies on conveniences such as promotional emails to give her the best deals on the products and brands she’s looking for. Transition - Eric says: That is really great background. When you think about this typical customer, how does she interact? What does the customer journey look like? Amanda - The customer at Sears Canada can be really complex and multifaceted, as it is becoming for many companies, so it’s important that we track and manage across all touchpoints. If we take a journey for example, it may look like this:
- Stacie begins by shopping at a Sears department store at her local mall. At this point, Sears Canada doesn’t know anything about Stacie or her preferences as her profile remains anonymous. But whether in-store or online, we are implementing strategies to identify her and begin better understanding her needs and wants which is key to delivering more relevant messages and an overall better Sears Canada experience. It doesn’t take long before Stacie notices a sign for a $10 coupon when you sign up for email. Using her smartphone she texts her email address to the number on the poster. Within 1 minute our system has confirmed that she is a new customer and she is emailed a welcome email with her coupon, which is redeemable from her mobile phone.
- The welcome email also prompts her to visit the preference centre to customize the categories she would like to hear about and set other parameters such as region and gender. Based on the her registration and the preference information she has provided, we can already see a more robust profile beginning to be built and stored within the ExactTarget Marketing Cloud that we can begin to use to target more relevant content and messages to Stacie through solutions like Predictive Intelligence.
- The next day she receives her first promotional email on family fashions. After clicking through the email she browses several different products. She is particularly interested in a boy’s jacket that is regularly priced at $50. It is important to note that utilizing the Predictive Intelligence web tracking capabilities we are able to follow her browsing behavior all across the website, not just the initial landing page. That’s been very powerful, allowing us to build a view of Stacie – and every other customer – across channels and take into consideration each interaction and data point when deciding what to recommend next.
- The next day the $50 jacket Stacie was browsing goes on sale. In cases such as these Sears leverages predictive intelligence to trigger a Price Drop email, which notifies the customers that their item is now on sale and also includes additional recommendations based on browsing history and Stacie’s profile. We’ve seen that when compared to just historical promotional blast emails, the behaviorally targeted Price Trigger email delivers excellent returns on engagement – 2.8x the normal open rate and 4.3x the click rate. So it is the case with Stacie. She adds her item to cart but before completing her purchase she shops around the other competitors to do a final comparison.
- In this case Predictive Intelligence will recognize an unfinished cart and automatically trigger an Abandon cart email through ExactTarget Email in order to reengage this user and prompt them to complete their transaction. Not only are we able to include the specific item left in the cart, but we can also take the opportunity to encourage relevant product cross-sells by leveraging the Predictive Intelligence suite. We are also aware that the journey doesn’t simply end after Stacie would purchase the jacket, so Sears is also extending the customer journey with a post-purchase email offering complimentary items such as gloves and a scarf for Stacie’s jacket. Transition Eric says: So for Sears Canada, the journey started in-store, but quickly moved to the digital experience incorporating channels like Mobile, Web and Email. In the example you just shared, it sounds like Sears Canada has already taken steps to optimize the customer experience. Eric asks: For the benefit of the marketers representing brands large and small in the audience today, could you go back to and walk us through your evaluation of the challenges/opportunities you faced with the customer journey and what priorities you identified?
- Transition – Amanda Sure. At Sears Canada there were a lot of options to consider, but I’ll give you three today that we believed to be critical to enhancing our brand experience, all of which that majority of you have or will face Incomplete picture of the customer journey and preferences; One to Many Communications Missed opportunities due to stale data
- For Sears Canada it started with data first and more specifically the gaps in existing customer data – let me explain what I mean by giving you some examples. Let’s consider the Stacie and her experience beginning her online journey. Initially she may have visited the email preference centre and set a preference for kids and home décor emails because she is always looking for clothing for her growing children and is currently renovating her home. However, if we look ahead to year 2 in her relationship with Sears she may have completed renovating her home and is no longer interested in these products and may become disengaged with these particular emails. So we do find that customers set a preference for emails during the start of their Sears relationship or they may never set a preference. We also had no way of knowing how customers interacted with sears.ca once they clicked through the email. For example, they may have clicked on a furniture email but ended up browsing or transacting on a completely different category, such as baby clothing. Because we were only able to track their initial click, we couldn’t create an accurate customer profile. Our User Experience team did have data on website browsing and our finance team had purchase data but it was difficult and time consuming to try and match all of this data together
- ETMC’s Predictive Intelligence was able to accomplish several things right away for us: Predictive Intelligence helps us to identify a customer in one channel and string that data together with data gathered on the same customer elsewhere in their journey, storing it in a common profile within ETMC. It’s what you saw illustrated during the customer journey as each click on the Web or piece of information entered in the preference center updated the same profile. The combination of this holistic view of the customer and the real-time availability to drive marketing decisions is what allows us to deliver a more relevant brand experience and message to each individual customer. …This really leads me to the next area of opportunity we focused on – beefing up our marketing messages on the Web and in Email.
- As I mentioned in my introduction, Sears is a large merchandiser with a wide range of customer demographics. Prior to our work with Predictive Intelligence we were often challenged by how to effectively target email to maximize the customer experience. Like many other email marketers, we often had one email creative available to send to our entire database. Any segmentation required multiple emails to be prepared. This was a manual, time-consuming process that we knew could not be sustained in the long term. Partnering with Predictive Intelligence allowed us to create a customized program in a more automated way. We faced the same challenge on the Web side of the house and creating unique experiences to provide differentiation and value to each visitor versus treating them all as one group.
- Leveraging Predictive Intelligence, we are able to observe and act upon customer behavior in real-time That allows our web experience to take on new life, where content changes and grows increasingly more relevant with each click. You can see from this Sears.ca screenshot that PI is recommending additional vacuums for the customer. Instead of a static experience where the customer may only view their chosen product and decide not to transact, they are presented with 4 additional vacuums in order to see a larger selection without having to leave the page, return to an assortment, and view several more items separately. It’s a simple yet impactful way to give each customer their own unique experience in a multi-channel environment and we’ve already seen phenomenal returns on this investment. It was clear right away that customers were eager for a more personalized shopping experience and responded positively to the convenience of predictive intelligence. On my team specifically, Something we were really excited about was being able to highlight products and content – predictively and automatically – within emails. Previously our merchandisers would curate this, our compliance department had to confirm pricing and inventory and the day of deployment I had to manually check to ensure the item was the correct price & had not sold out overnight. This was a particular problem during week long sales or holiday time when items may sell out before a customer had a chance to open the email. Not only was this an inefficient use of time, but it still didn’t ensure the content was truly personalized. I still had to select a small number of items with the hope they would appeal to a broad audience. Adding Predictive Content and personalized recommendations from ETMC to all of our marketing emails allowed us to reduce time to send and deliver product centric emails that were customer focused, timely and relevant.The result: 7% of total marketing email program revenues can be directly attributed to this content
- Faced with scarce resources, it was hard to use the data as effectively as we would have liked. When building segmented lists for email sends we had limited methods of list creation. For example, we often created segmented lists based on previous email opens or clicks. However, this led to some customers receiving irrelevant campaigns to them or content about products or services they had already purchased.
- As a brand, its critical to have relevant, engaging content, but that is lost on the customer if it is not also delivered in the right way and at the right time. Predictive Intelligence not only helps us ensure the right content is being served, but enables us to identify key moments in the customer journey where we need to be engaging with our customers to build that relationship. At Sears.ca we’ve been able to use browsing behavior to refine the campaigns that a target audience receives – For example, one of our key categories is major appliances, which includes stoves, fridges and more higher priced items. It is difficult to predict when a customer needs these items and because they are more expensive and not replaced frequently, timing for this type of marketing is key. Utilizing browsing behavior allows us to deliver this messaging at the optimal time. Additionally, Sears.ca is using PI to record key moments in the customer lifecycle and respond with timely, value adding campaigns. Three really important ones to our business have been: Cart Abandonment Browse Abandonment Price (drop alert) trigger In each case we rely on PI to recognize these actions in real-time so that we can optimize when we reengage and never miss a conversion opportunity It’s paid off Cart Abandonment - 2.7x the open rate/5.8x the click rate Browse Abandonment - 2.7x the open rate/4.3x the click rate Price (drop alert) trigger - 2.8x the open rate/4.3x the click rate Transition - Eric Says: Wow! Thanks for sharing Amanda. Sears Canada has really embraced a customer centric focus, living and breathing the data that you’re collecting and pursuing success by understanding and predicting the optimal customer experience. If it’s not evident enough from the Sears story about how important playing an active role in the customer journey is for your customer and the success of your business, consider this:
- Customers are in control of their journey and largely in control of the experiences they have with your brand. In order to engage and garner loyalty, it’s necessary to anticipate, meet and exceed their expectations. So what does Sears story and everything we’ve talked about today mean for you? What can you leave here with today to set you on the path of optimizing your customer experiences: Get to know your customer better This starts with cultivating a 360 view of each customer and synthesizing the data you are collecting across channels and each interaction they have with your brand. Sears Canada is connecting these disparate channels with the help of ETMC and Predictive Intelligence, building a profile of each customer as they interact in-store with mobile campaigns, in email with the content and recommendations they are serving and on the Web capturing each click. Remember, Customers expect you to know them regardless of what how or where they are interacting with your brand. The experience needs to reflect that – and it starts with data
- Develop Data Driven Content Once you’ve begun to see your customer from a common view, it’s about delivering value to them on a 1:1 scale through the content and messages they receive. In the spirit of data driven marketing, brands cannot be successful embracing antiquated marketing techniques that value efficiency over effectiveness. I think we could all agree that each one of us is different from the next in some way – that goes for our consumption habits as well. So it’s not that we don’t understand the need to deliver individual, personalized content and communication, but rather that there are roadblocks and costs associated with it. But as you saw with Sears Canada, by moving past simple batch and blast strategies and focusing on targeted messages including the most relevant content based on personal preferences, the returns and impact on the customer journey are worth it.
- Be in the moment Finally to connect with customers and optimize the customer journey, timing is key. On your own teams, begin to identify those times where engaging with the customer is the most critical – be it when they abandon a session or a change in your inventory prompts an alert – and create programs that add customer value. Sears recognized that they had massive opportunities to engage with interested customers who may be waiting for a price to drop or may just be stuck in the decision funnel. Leveraging Predictive Intelligence and by combining personalized content with campaigns that were delivered at the precise moments where a customer was listening has paid huge dividends.