Your Lifecycle Messaging Plan 01/21/11

Through an understanding of each step of the customer journey from offer discovery through to purchase and post-consumption activity, we can design a lifecycle messaging plan to optimise lead conversion and retention.

Performing a cohort analysis, you can identify high-value segments and also glean insights from which you can design reengagement assets.  Through a robust testing framework, you can identify what combination of design, content and timing works best. This post presents a framework for your organisation’s lifecycle messaging plan.

The Effectiveness of Trigger and Behavioural Email Marketing

A lifecycle messaging plan requires an integrated approach across all of your digital touch-points:  Website, email, mobile, social and banners. As such, it requires working collaboratively with your retail, loyalty, rewards, and retention marketing teams to identify and implement new campaigns and programs via these 1:1 channels

Building a Lifecycle Messaging Plan begins with a cohort analysis that involves mining your database to understand optimal relevance and timing windows.  properly segment customers to deliver personalised and well-timed messaging. Examples of the value you gain includes:

Boost Conversion

• After a customer makes a purchase, how long should I wait before emailing them an incentive to make another purchase?
• After an order ship’s how long should I wait before emailing the customer to ask them to review their purchase?

Boost Retention

If a customer does not make a second purchase within 7 weeks of their original purchase, then there is an 80% chance that they will never buy from you again.  Knowing this, you can deliver re-engagement emails to the customer in the lead-up to this threshold with increasingly stronger incentives to make another purchase.

Remarketing: Emails

As part of your lifecycle messaging plan, it is important to include automated trigger emails.  For example, when someone adds an item to their shopping cart, but then abandons it before making payment, you have an opportunity to contact them to encourage them to complete the purchase and try to understand what happened.  This means offering time-sensitive, quantity-limited special offers.  One vendor suggests that you can recover 40% of abandoned online hotel bookings.  In another case, Alaska Airlines achieved these results with their remarketing

• Open rate was 81.5%, more than twice the already high average of 36%, while CTR topped 29.6%, three times better than the 8% average.
• The campaign converted at 12.3%, four times better than the 2.5% average.

Incentives aside, even just asking them if there was a problem with the website can be the tipping factor. This is also a great source of qualitative feedback. Remember that completion of the first purchase is just the start of your relationship. For example, after a flight, it would be great to know how the customer enjoyed the flight.  I know some airlines hand out surveys in-flight, but email offers a more efficient pathway that I think also gives you more honest feedback.

Remarketing: Banner Ads

In case you don’t have an email address, you can use remarketing over the Google Content Network to show ads to people who have previously visited your website and capture incremental conversions.

Calculating Lifetime Customer Value

LTV = Expected Life X ARPU X Gross Margin

Implementing Your Lifecycle Messaging Programme

• Take an integrated approach across all of your digital channels.  There is a need to work  collaboratively with your retail, loyalty, rewards, and retention marketing teams to identify, advocate, gain buy-in and implement new campaigns and programs.
• Map your customer journey from discovery through to checkout and then use a cohort analysis to properly understand it and identify opportunities to deliver relevant, well-designed and well-timed messages to your customers to ensure they become lifetime customers.  Performable may come in handy.
• Ensure that the vendor meets your needs.  You may find that the best solution is one that you develop in-house, but if you don’t have the software engineers available, then you might find that the basic list segmentation and scheduling features offered by iContact are sufficient, but then again, the remarketing system offered by Cheetahmail may be your cup of tea  There’s always Mailchimp that is also easily integrated into a plethora of third party applications, one of which may give you the added functionality that you need. Also consider RevenueExpect which integrates with some of the popular shopping carts.  Redeye looks like a pretty powerful and comprehensive solution.

Questions to Include in Your /Remarketing/Behavioural Messaging Vendor Selection Checklist