Mood
According to a report by the sales and marketing automation platform SharpSpring, around 25 to 50 percent of a brand’s customers become inactive every year.
While customer loss is part of the process, the cost of acquiring new customers has increased nearly 50 percent over the past five years, according to Hubspot.
Statistics like this show the importance of an effective reintegration strategy. Whether through texts, emails or surveys, the goal is always the same: to rekindle the brand-to-consumer flame (and keep it burning).
Built In Chicago connects with Cami Bartel, Content Marketing Manager at Vibes, and Jack Seney, Marketing Director at Arrive, for a quick look at the strategies their teams are executing. They shared strategies that they had succeeded with and what they had learned throughout the process.
Cami Bartel
Content Marketing Manager
Software company Vibes enables marketers and e-commerce professionals to acquire, engage, serve, and connect with consumers through a variety of mobile channels. When designing reintegration campaigns, content marketing manager Cami Bartel said she relies heavily on personal and targeted incentives to truly spark consumer interests.
What reintegration strategy has your team had great success with?
SMS-SMS is by far the best opportunity to get involved again. Email is great for longer, rich visual content. Given that most of us are connected to our phones, texting intimacy lends itself to quick attention capture and accurate, timely messaging. The availability and opening rates of SMS are also impressive: The opening rate is 98 percent within the first 90 seconds after delivery.
A Vibes customer recently used automated text messaging to target consumers who needed an incentive to buy again. Based on the recent engagement, the customer sent out two subsegments of rewards: a 25 percent discount offer for non-engaged consumers and a 10 percent discount offer for consumers who have recently purchased. The average click-through rate of the campaign was over 6 percent over the course of a year and the sales of the brand increased gradually.
A targeted strategy will result in higher engagement, a higher likelihood of re-engagement, and ultimately, increased revenue over time. “
What’s a best practice for you?Have you found this really helpful when designing reintegration emails?
Personal and targeted incentives are best for designing reintegration campaigns. Package deals are convenient. However, they are only used by the most loyal subscribers. In order to recruit other subscribers, you need a personal and targeted strategy to keep them interested. Brands should look at usage, last engagement dates, and activity, as well as shopper behavior. For example, a consumer is only allowed to shop in autumn and spring.
A targeted strategy will result in higher engagement, a higher likelihood of re-engagement, and ultimately, increased revenue over time.
What reintegration strategy did you find unsuccessful and what did you learn from this experience?
When we see areas of improvement for our clients’ campaigns, these are usually tied to sending out package deals without any segmentation (i.e. all recipients get exactly the same message). Without careful segmentation to deliver a personalized experience, these campaigns will often hit or miss and have less of an impact on ROI.
Working with leading brands like Ralph Lauren, Dollar General, and Dick’s Sporting Goods, we found that world class mobile engagement uses strategic and intelligent targeting to increase ROI that makes mobile marketing such a powerful addition to a program. Consumers want personalized offers based on their interests, behaviors and shopping goals. Brands that can meet this demand will see the rewards.
Jack Seney
Head of Marketing
Arrive is a transportation technology company that connects drivers to a network of parking lots. With people driving less as a result of the pandemic, Marketing Director Jack Seney said they have been refocusing their marketing strategy on one that is more focused on content that helps customers get the most out of their services when they have parking needs.
What reintegration strategy has your team had great success with?
In May, we launched a campaign for key workers to support those who answered the call every day to keep people safe and healthy. The program offered key workers in major US cities a 10 to 50 percent discount on parking at locations near medical centers. Communication with our customers continued via email and the program enabled key employees to find and book parking spaces through our website and / or app.
A lot has been invested in the organization and communication of this initiative. We have worked with our park operator partners to curate selected locations and prices. Then we teamed up with Waze to display the curated inventory on their app so that it could be accessed by key employees through ParkWhiz and Waze. We had an immediate adoption and saw an average of about 20 percent increase in key workforce bookings per week during the initiative.
What’A best practice for youHave you found this really helpful when designing reintegration emails?
Parking messages during a global pandemic is a challenge. We had to scrap our content calendar and focus on being agile and adapting quickly. Prior to COVID-19, our email communications focused on parking use cases that our customers would find valuable. As offices closed, sports leagues paused, orders stayed in place, and our daily lives changed, we turned away from use case messaging and focused on content that helped our customers best use our products and services can use if they have parking needs.
Our new messages highlighted our touchless parking options like Tap Pay Park and the ability to find, book and pay for parking spaces with your phone. This linchpin has been effective for our customers who have relied on this news to make driving and parking a safe transportation option. Practice has forced us to adapt our e-mail content quickly to our constantly changing customer needs.
What reintegration strategy did you find unsuccessful and what did you learn from this experience?
At the beginning of the first resurgence of orders that stay in place, we tried to incentivize our audience offers and discounts. But because of the fork that was occurring in our audience – people with a mobility use case and people without – we had to readjust in no time. We found that promoting incentives to our entire audience did not become more important as a large proportion of people no longer needed a parking space.
The pandemic has forced us to nimble our email content to meet the ever-changing needs of consumers. “
Over time, we’ve learned a lot from campaigns that fell short. They have helped make our email communications more personal in terms of use cases and have added value that is important when our users need parking.