Ask yourself the following:

• Is your technology up to scratch?
• Do you have the right strategy in place?
• Are you utilizing the right data to optimize both?

Technology, strategy, and data are the holy trinity of customer loyalty. Nail these elements, and you’ll be well on your way to transforming customers into lifelong brand advocates.

Choosing your tech-stack can be difficult, so let’s try to make this as easy as possible. There are several platforms and ‘add-ons’ out there; but if you can’t store the right data you need to power your revenue-generating campaigns, your results will suffer.

So, what data do you need?

1. RFM modelling

Combining RFM and persona modelling will help you deliver relevant campaigns that improve performance. The key is understanding your customers – both potential and existing – without being too creepy in the process. For those customers who have already started shopping with your brand, you’ve an armoury of historical data at your fingertips – so use it!

Recency – the time since a customer’s last purchase

Why: Use this information to target customers at the right time. If they’ve purchased with you in the last week, maybe don’t send them that 30% discount you’re launching. Likewise, if they’ve not placed an order in the last six months, tempt them to buy with a win-back offer.

Frequency – how many times a customer has placed an order

Why: This data helps you co-ordinate your campaigns. If your customer is a frequent low-spender, you could recommend products (with a similar price tag) regularly. However, if your customer is an infrequent high-spender (let’s say they make a big order twice a year), lessen the frequency of your campaigns and catch them at the right time.

Monetary – the monetary value of customer purchases

Why: This data helps you identify your low spenders from your VIPs. You can segment based on average order value (AOV) or lifetime value. Enrol high-spenders onto a loyalty program that rewards and incentivizes their custom, and tempt customers with a low AOV to up their spend. Want to know how you to adopt RFM in your marketing? Check out this blog.

2. Make the decision easier for customers

Ultimately, you want to make the customer’s choice easier to make. The psychology of ecommerce teaches us that excess choice can overload the consumer. Think about an overcrowded inbox. How will you stand out from the crowd?

In today’s fast-paced world, markets are maturing quickly and becoming more saturated. Time-poor consumers will find it increasingly difficult to reach a decision on the product they need, the price they’re willing to pay, and the retailer to buy from.

This uncertainty doesn’t bode well for marketers or consumers. Retailers should let data drive their decision-making – because consumers will, sooner or later, respond to campaigns that complement their behaviors and indulge their interests.

3. Apply a holistic approach to data

Aside from purchase history, remember to continue using basic data like name, age, and location. All of this information increases the relevancy of your marketing messages.

What’s more, preferences can go a long way. Sure, behavioral data is a sure-fire way to drive product recommendations that will resonate with customers. But you can’t ignore the explicit information that a customer has handed over to you. If they say they like diffusers, sell them your best scents! If they prefer not to be contacted by email, suggest SMS as an alternative.

Once you have all of this data in one place, you’ll be able to paint a clearer picture of your customer. You can use your customer insight to create various personas and target lookalikes.

Example:

• Name: James
• Age: 27
• Location: Edinburgh
• Preferences: blazers, jeans, t-shirts and vests, trousers, shirts
• Last purchase date: 04/03/19
• Purchases in last six months: 3
• AOV: £95 • Lifetime value: £2,072
• Marketing preference: email

4. Make customers feel at home

We know that driving timely, relevant messages will engage, convert, and retain customers at scale. Above all, they’ll make a lasting impression. But it all starts with the first meeting: a well formulated welcome series should breathe life into the customer relationship. It should set the scene and apply a standard for your wider marketing automation programs.

Welcome-program musts:

• Set the tone of the relationship
• Define they key benefits of signing up
• Showcase your USPs – what are you about?
• Ask customers who they are – what do they like?
• Offer an incentive to spur the first purchase

The best way to tailor future campaigns is to leverage both explicit and implicit data. This maximizes the relevancy of your message.

Example:

During the welcome program, a customer fills in your preference center. They tick the boxes against any products they’re interested in – namely, vegan snack bars.

You’ve already captured basic information, like their date of birth, during the email sign-up process. Later, the customer starts engaging with you on email. As a smart marketer, you track their web behavior to keep on top of what they’re interested in.

Leading up to their birthday, you send them a special offer to redeem online – a standard practice. To enhance the relevancy of the message, you pull in hyper-relevant product recommendations, based on either the previous browse or preferences. These might be superfood smoothies or protein vegan boxes. Delighted with their birthday treat and the products on offer, the customer places an order. They might not go on to remember what you did or said, but they’ll always remember how you made them feel.

5. Strive towards customer loyalty

The customer-driven experience exemplified in the above example is what every marketer should be aiming for . It sets the foundation for customer loyalty.

Providing such an experience requires an optimal flow of data, the right technology, and an informed strategy. Consider the following customer lifecycle programs when re-platforming:

• Welcome
• Nurture
• Birthday
• Post-purchase
• Cross-/upsell
• Loyalty/VIP
• Win-back/re-engagement

Ask yourself: do you have the data all in one place to make these triggered campaigns work?

Are you thinking of migrating ecommerce platforms? Check out our integrations here.

In 2018, Paperchase celebrated its fifty-year anniversary with a fun and engaging scratch-card promotion. The aim of the occasion was to capture valuable data and acquire more customers.

Email address continues to be a key data asset for Paperchase. To incentivize customers to exchange this and other details like first name, nearest store, and transaction ID, an instant reward was offered. The prizes ranged from £5 off your next online order to 50% off in store.

Acquire, engage, reward

The colorful scratch cards were distributed at points of sale. Once customers scratched to uncover their prize, they were directed to an odicci micro-site, hosted within Paperchase’s Magento ecommerce environment. Here, they could redeem their prize by entering both their code and personal data: first name, email address, nearest store, and transaction ID.

The data-capture form had omnichannel capabilities; Paperchase could reach customers wherever they were and connect engagements across all touchpoints. Gating the content was another great tactic to incentivize customers to unlock their prize. The landing page could be conveniently published anywhere across web, ecommerce, and social media pages.

Once data had been captured, it would then flow from odicci into Dotdigital, merging or updating any existing contact records with new, valuable information. Profiles were enriched with demographic data, multichannel behaviors, interests, and order histories. Then, in Dotdigital, Paperchase could harness this insight to deliver even more targeted and engaging campaigns.

Rewarding engagement is a conversion-driver

The campaign was hugely successful, generating over 5,000 opt-ins (20%). odicci technology provided Paperchase with granular reporting to gauge the campaign’s performance. This included hourly reporting on impressions and the devices used; over 50% were on mobile.

What were the success factors of the anniversary campaign?

• Data set – tight focus on asking the right amount of relevant data.
• Staff – working closely with stores to ensure the program’s success.
• Trigger – including prizes that would be valued by customers.
• Footfall – evaluate the expected footfall to implement the right program.

The success of interactive content hinges on several things: giving customers control; making it personal; rewarding instantaneously; storytelling; and creating omnichannel experiences. Safe to say, Paperchase successfully made a buzz about their 50^th birthday and adopted a creative approach in celebrating with customers.

ODICCI

ODICCI’s interactive marketing platform enables users to create unique experiences to drive customer loyalty. Users can create, test and measure experiences with zero development skills required. The insights generated from experiences can be used to better target customers.

Dotdigital

Dotdigital empowers marketers to harvest and connect customer insights, deliver meaningful engagements across all channels, and unlock ROI.

odicci and Dotdigital work together to help clients engage their customers and drive loyalty.

Pride drag bingo!

Amie Lane, Head of Partner Marketing

• Stonewall estimates over 80% of hate crimes and hate incidents against LGBTQIA+ people go unreported.
• Many same-sex partners are afraid to show affection, to even hold each other’s hands in public, fearing some sort of attack.
• LGBTQIA+ youth are four times more likely to attempt suicide than their heterosexual peers – predominantly from some form of bullying.
• LGBTQIA+ students are three times as likely as non-LGBTQIA+ students to say that they do not feel safe at school.
• Studies have shown that 90% of LGBTQIA+ students have been harassed or assaulted during the past year.

Chris Cano, Content Team Lead

Leah Phillp, Human Resources Assistant

Tanya Plaza, Head of Deliverability

Ryan Raymond, Online Marketing Executive

Anuska Jose, Technical Program Manager

Frank Brooks, Head of Marketing EMEA

Isabel Muñoz, Event Marketing Manager

Julia Neuhold, Product Marketing Manager

Tamara Bond, Delivery Operations Manager

Every brand now vies for their customer’s attention not with product or price, but a personalized experience. Consumer expectations have shot through the roof, their demands for tailored one-to-one experience now having shifted fully online. McKinsey claims the pandemic has transformed consumers’ lives, and that shoppers have “covered a decade in days” in the adoption of digital. Traditional offline shoppers have had to pivot to online shopping overnight – which has put pressure on brands to replicate that personal in-store experience digitally. Moving forward, businesses need to nail their messaging and customer experiences if they wish to compete in this new ‘home-demand’ economy.

Transactional vs. marketing

Post-purchase marketing covers everything from transactional updates like order confirmations and marketing promotions like upsell product recommendations. But, it’s important to remember that your customer perceives all your communications equally: it’s just marketing. With this in mind, it’s key to keep messages looking consistent, because a harmonious brand experience will drive your competitive edge. Customers will feel satisfied and value your brand more.

What’s more, the post-purchase experience sets the scene for a continued healthy relationship between brand and customer. Retention is a key business pillar for every brand, especially because it’s much more costly to acquire a customer than retain one. And yet, many marketers pour their focus into pipeline and acquisition – even though there’s a bounty of sales opportunities in their post-sale marketing that will convert faster. After all, your existing customers know you, have a relationship with you.

Ok, so what is post-purchase marketing?

Essentially, it’s the transactional and marketing messages you drip-feed customers after a completed purchase. Hand-holding customers is important in our digital age because of all the ambient noise. Once a shopper places an order online, they want reassurance that they completed the order successfully, plus an idea of when it’ll be delivered. They’ll likely want updates about when it’s dispatched too, in case they forget about it.

Psst! With Dotdigital for Adobe Commerce, powered by Magento, you can send transactional updates via SMS in app. Plus, using our Microsoft Dynamics 365 integration, you can trigger transactional emails from lists in CRM too. You don’t need to settle on plain transactional templates either; brand your post-sale emails so they reflect all your other marketing comms.

After a customer receives their order it’s customary to follow up with a ‘thank you’ and review, maybe including a little incentive. Asking customers about their experience and purchase helps you improve your online shopping capabilities and products.

The next stage is promotional and editorial content. Remember, customers who’ve bought with you once are likely to buy again. So, mix relevant product recommendations based on past purchases – like ‘also bought’ and ‘best next’ – with exciting editorial such as product help guides and inspirational articles.

For more insight into the kinds of post-purchase messages you can send, plus all the relevant product recommendations, download our post-purchase marketing guide here.

Post-purchase marketing automation programs

Post-purchase marketing is much more than just an order confirmation. Automation tools are a great way to plan out all of your customer lifecycle messages. Here are some effective aftersales programs you can consider:

Nurture program

Build engagement and loyalty over time, pre- and post-purchase. Deliver on your subscription promise with engaging and valuable content, including both promotional offers and top editorial picks.

Loyalty program

Once customers purchase, or the more they purchase, you can enroll them onto a loyalty program. Just set your criteria and start boosting the value of your customer’s overall experience, with perks exclusive to them.

VIP program

Reserve this premium program for your customers that spend big and frequently. Here, you’ll want to showcase your most exclusive content, invite-only events, and limited product ranges.

SMS: an effective post-sale marketing tool

SMS marketing, when used in conjunction with email marketing, can be a highly engaging way to connect with customers. The channel boasts unbeatable engagement rates, plus cuts through the white noise better than email. Your customers don’t even need an internet connection for you to reach them, either.

The beauty of text messages is that they’re highly contextual, so using them as part of a wider marketing program helps drive relevancy and engagement. You could, for instance, incorporate SMS into your aftersales program for transactional updates or loyalty series for product drops. Likewise, SMS can complement your product recommendations push in email too.

When it’s all said and done, SMS is easy for marketers, novel for customers, and a smart way to communicate post-sale. And with Dotdigital, sending your transactional and broadcast SMS is simple via API.

For more info on the golden opportunity of SMS, download this guide.

It’s time to take post-purchase marketing seriously

If you’re a marketer that doesn’t have control over transactional campaigns, it’s time to take ownership now and consolidate all post-sale messages under one roof. Keep your email design branded, your SMS and email messages coordinated, and your content super-relevant. This will help make the post-marketing experience more holistic and personalized, delighting customers at scale.

Want to find out more about post-purchase marketing? Check out our guide to all things aftersales here.

Make it fun

Make it factual

Make it filmic

Make it shareable

Make it useful

Email marketing is one of the most widely used forms of communicating targeted messages to the target audiences of any business. That’s hardly surprising when its ROI is 4200%. The beauty of email is that it allows any business to scale its messaging, broadcasting its brand to the masses so to attract people in the market for its products and services. Marketers can personalize content and segment contacts based on everything from demographics to preferences and website behavior. This data-driven approach makes messages more relevant.

As a marketer, it’s your job to showcase your brand – and your email marketing template is the best way of doing that in the inbox. What’s more, keeping it simple but on brand means that recipients can engage with your messaging more easily – recognizing who you are and what you want, quickly. It’s important for your templates to be dynamic and flexible, helping you adjust your strategy as the goalposts move.

10 tips for email template success

In this blog, we’re going to look at 10 mistakes to avoid by using email best practice when building your email templates, as part of an effective marketing strategy.

1. Be on brand: but less is more

Email’s place in marketing is to turn interested subscribers into serious prospective customers. Initial success often depends on the way email design looks and feels, plus other delivery metrics (you’ve got to get the email in the inbox in the first place!). When building your email template, experiment with your brand’s color palate, but remember: less is more. You don’t want to detract from the overall message. The key here is the placing of your copy and call to action. Make sure the content can breathe within your design!

2. Get the length right

We’ve all read countless articles about optimum email length. Well, there’s isn’t one. What’s right for one brand won’t be right for another. So, my best recommendation is this: provide quality and not quantity. Say what you need to say in as few words as possible. Providing less information doesn’t mean being unclear; there’s more impact articulating your message concisely, because it prompts subscribers to engage faster. People don’t have time to read blocks of paragraphed text – so brevity is key. Don’t forget you can use images to convey what you want to say, too.

3. Tone of voice is everything

Talk like a human and not a business. This is the best piece of marketing advice out there. Similar to the above point, you don’t want to inundate your readers with heavy complex jargon – talk to them as you would a friend. Be authentic in your style of writing, keeping language simple and on brand. Don’t be abstract, or too academic – no one has time for BS. A message of twenty-four words with a compelling CTA gets customers to your site faster than long, uninterrupted sentences lacking proper punctuation. Once subscribers reach your site, they can add comments, interact, or even buy something. Huzzah!

4. Include testimonials, please

We live in a world where social proof is everywhere and everything. I don’t know about you, but whenever I visit a new city I only go to restaurants that have been highly reviewed. The same goes with shopping online; I instinctively head to the reviews section to read other people’s experiences, which all have an impact on my decision to buy. Because at the end of the day, we trust other humans because they’re essentially the same as us. So, next time someone questions including testimonials in your email campaign, kindly remind them about that time you obsessively read reviews for three hours before hitting ‘buy now’.

5. Test your subject lines for goodness’ sake

If testing isn’t already ingrained in your marketing strategy then please download this testing worksheet and fill it out immediately. The success of your campaigns hinges on the subject line; because if the text doesn’t resonate with the recipient then they’re not going to open the email. And after all that work on the data, copy, and creative – you don’t want that! A/B test to see which version is more popular with your audience. For more tips on writing subject lines that generate email opens, check out our killer infographic.

6. Don’t overdo the imagery

Peppering your email template with too many images runs the risk of several things:

• It can detract from your overall message
• Imagery can block the call to action and delay engagement
• With images not turned on in email clients by default, emails with a full-length image (which look awesome) won’t show, robbing the message of any relevancy and context
• Too much imagery can increase the size of emails, which might become more susceptible to spam

Like all things in life, everything in moderation.

7. Make the unsubscribe link visible

Every email legally must include an unsubscribe link. There’s nothing more annoying for a frustrated subscriber than scrolling an email in search of that link. Unsubscribing should be effortless and it’s important to welcome feedback so you can improve on your content and email campaigns. Rather than including the link at the very bottom, consider placing it at the top. While you don’t want people to unsubscribe right away, people will tend to scroll first – so the unsubscribe link will only be visible for a short time before people start engaging with your first-rate content!

8. Preheader text is handy, so use it

The almighty preheader, albeit often neglected, is a useful bit of text that you can use to describe the contents of your email campaign. There are two reasons why you should populate it:

• The copy supports what you said in the subject line (it’s a great way to add extra info)
• If you don’t use it, it can auto-populate with random code from the first few lines of your email (which is can look ugly, making your super-duper email campaigns look unprofessional)

9. View-in-browser links are there for a reason

Any marketer knows that no amount of planning and testing can prepare for what will actually happen after you hit the send button. Whatever that may be, including a view-in-browser link is a simple way for recipients to view the contents of your email in a browser. Images might not show or, heaven forbid, there could be a horrific design glitch. Don’t let these possibilities detract from the subscriber’s overall email experience – prompt them with a link to where they can view the email in all its glory.

10. Okay, there isn’t a 10

But instead – and rather more excitingly – I’m recommending these two bits of content to help you improve your email marketing templates (the latter is the first part of a series of three).

• Designing the perfect email campaign:

• The marketer’s guide to copywriting:

Winning email templates

All in all, email is your vehicle to marketing your products, services, and events. And at the heart of that strategy is your email template: how you structure copy and imagery, letting the data and message come alive. Following these simple tips (or rather, avoiding the all-too-easy mistakes) means your campaigns have the best chance of engaging your audiences and converting prospects into buying customers.

So, the question on everyone’s lips: what are the components that can and should be tested in an email marketing campaign?

Here are the key ones to consider:

1. Email subject line

It’s an obvious one to start with – and possibly one of the most important elements of an email marketing campaign. Ultimately, whether or not your recipient opens your email rests on the language, context, and relevancy of the subject line. Remember, people’s inboxes might be full to the brim – so standing out is key. We’ve spoken previously about how to write the best email subject line, but the only way to really be sure what will work best is to test! Plus, don’t forget the preheader text which you can also test. This handy bit of extra info supports the subject line in convincing readers to open the email.

2. Call to action

The call to action is the component of an email that propels the recipient towards a conversion point, usually via a click-through. But which call to action works best for your recipients? Test different options to see if they impact results differently.

Here are a couple to consider:

• Language variations: ‘download now’ or ‘get yours here’
• Button variations: circular, square, or plain text?
• Color variations: pink, green, or blue?

3. Images

The issue of whether or not to include images in your email marketing campaign is one that divides opinion in the industry. If recipients are likely to have images turned off as standard then there’s an argument for using images sparingly in your messages. However, if lots of your recipients have added you to their safe-senders list, then you could get better results by increasing the number of images in your message. The only way to know for sure is to test. And don’t forget to segment your database depending on what you find out! In any case, it’s always best to populate the alt text with information related to the image – giving readers some context should images not automatically appear.

4. Email from address

The ‘from’ address is another element that can have a big effect on open rates. Is it better to use your business name as the from address or does an individual, maybe your MD, work better? A known contact can be particularly successful for B2B companies, for example, because it’s especially relevant to the recipient. For higher education institutions or learning organizations, perhaps a team name would be more appropriate. Test a few different possibilities and see what gets the best results for your email marketing campaigns.

5. Email marketing personalization

Personalization is an aspect of email marketing that has, to an extent, been overused in recent times. Sometimes its effectiveness is muted and, at worst, can look spammy. Try using different forms of personalization to see whether it works for your recipients. Don’t just change the odd word or piece of copy, change elements of the creative as well. Or better yet, test out your messages and content on different segment types, identifying what works well for whom.

Psst!

If you’re an ecommerce brand, Dotdigital’s RFM personas make it easy for you to target the right customer group – based on the recency, frequency, and monetary values of their total purchases. Our automation tool can help you test which RFM group fits better with your message, through split-testing and then sending the email marketing campaign to the group that engages more. Just set your engagement criteria, whether it’s an open, conversion, or purchase. And while our affinity score tool helps you judge which product recommendations are more suited to your individual customers, you can always test whether your recipients in general respond better to personalized recommendations or bestsellers, for instance.

6. Landing page

What happens when your recipients click through? Do they then convert or does your landing page put them off? Try alternative pages for different segments, versus a standalone generic page, and see whether this has an effect. It’s equally important to test your content and creative on the same landing page to see what combination works best.

7. Time of sending

The day and/or time of sending can have a big effect on open rates and conversions. B2B emails generally work better during business hours, whereas high street stores may want to send an email on a Friday to tempt buyers to visit their store the following day. When it comes to ecommerce brands, we all know what has turned usual trends upside down this year. With lots of people working from home, a timely lunchtime or evening email could secure a sale any day of the week.

For those of you who have been using email marketing for some time, you can always look back at your previous campaigns and see if certain sending days or times had a better result. You’ve probably already done some of your testing!

Every company’s audience or recipients will have different preferences or behaviors, so testing and segmentation really is the only way to find out what will work best for your business.

Discover more email marketing tips in our fundamentals of testing worksheet.

The awards

• Clearly defined marketing problem
• Creativity and imagination
• Innovative solution with demonstrable results

The winners

Best crisis-communication campaign

“Cute execution of email and clearly resonates with the brand.” “Clear campaign objectives – execution considerations in terms of online event comfort and clear audience segmentation for relevance.” “Great success metrics.” JUDGES’ COMMENTS

Best use of data

“Clear objective and approach. Use of RFM as well as product data to add maximum value to the content…” “Shows a customer-first approach to the data planning which no doubt supported the reactivation rates you saw.” JUDGES’ COMMENTS

Most advanced automation

“A very well thought through campaign and event. You had a stream for each type of customer which is great. And the use of SMS to maintain engagement was a great addition to the overall campaign. Well done on such a good job!” JUDGES’ COMMENTS

Favorite omnichannel campaign

“Nice, clear, well thought out creative, not to mention a good use of personalization across multiple channels to deliver the message.” JUDGES’ COMMENTS

Outstanding email creative

“Great idea, great copy, and clearly know their target market well.” JUDGES’ COMMENTS

Leading B2B campaign

“A great strategically focused multichannel campaign, where email has been instrumental in driving results.” JUDGES’ COMMENTS

Leading B2C Campaign

“Email is very clean in look and feel, very easy to absorb the key info and makes great use of the wealth of images available.” “Fantastic creative that works well across all devices – with the added bonus of generating unexpected revenue. Good insight of performance across a range of measures.” JUDGES’ COMMENTS

Most impressive ecommerce campaign

“Wonderful to see the leap of faith into automation has paid off! Especially for an industry that hasn’t understood its value in far too long! Nice work!” “Great to see the power of automation when messaging and promotions are tested. Great work.” JUDGES’ COMMENTS

Inspiring not-for-profit campaign

“Achieved strong results – particularly given the world was changing quickly and it was hard to get attention. Good work.” JUDGES’ COMMENTS

Best partner in APAC

High number of opportunities that have converted in the Asia-Pacific region and commitment to showcasing customers the value of dotdigital.” JUDGES’ COMMENTS

Best use of dotdigital in APAC

“Slick use of marketing automation to drive impressive sales leads for local businesses. Nice use of personalization across integrated channels – awesome stuff!” “A comprehensive entry. They made use of pretty much all the platform has to offer – including retargeting via Facebook and Google when email isn’t as effective.” JUDGES’ COMMENTS

Best partner in Americas

“A broad collaboration of high-value opportunities where both dotdigital and Kadro have driven wins in the Americas region. Both partners work hand in hand to deliver the best customer service resulting in a satisfied and loyal mutual customer base.” SUPPORTING COMMENTS

Best use of dotdigital in Americas

“Curating an aftersales program based on overall fragrance experience is as customer-centric as it gets.” “Great use of order data to deliver useful information in the way of personal care, which demonstrates both value for the customer and brand expertise. Including relevant product recommendations post-purchase also drove positive engagement rates. Well done.” JUDGES’ COMMENTS

Best partner in EMEA

“Great number of net new clients in a short period of time. Ultimately, ISM eCompany was able to tailor an email proposition that its customers couldn’t refused. Great expertise of Dutch ecommerce and Magento is an added bonus. Awesome work.” SUPPORTING COMMENTS

Best partner in UK & Ireland

“Referred mutual client wins and a seamless collaboration make dotdigital and Tryzens a winning team. Both partners work together to provide value solutions for brands all over the world, helping them grow their business further.” SUPPORTING COMMENTS

Best use of dotdigital in EMEA

“Inspiring content and imagery which reinforce the tagline message of the campaign. Excellent execution along with social targeted messages for those who engaged with email or on site, but hadn’t yet converted. Smart communication across multiple touch-points – great work!” SUPPORTING COMMENTS

Rising star

“All round great marketer, love how she’s proved focusing on content drives revenue.” “Very impressive.” “Demonstration of an incredibly resilient and creative email marketer – an inspiration.” JUDGES’ COMMENTS

Marketing team of the year

“Incredible revenue figures from focusing on customer loyalty specifically.” “Smart use of automation programs across multiple channels driving significant customer value – which is reflected in the highly positive performance metrics. Overall, the best use of the platform in terms of value output and returns.” JUDGES’ COMMENTS

Find out who your ‘customers’ are, what they look like, and how they make their buying decisions. Then you can easily tailor your products, service, sales methods, and email marketing messages to hit home every time.

Online surveys make sense

Surveys and landing pages are both an efficient and cost effective way of collecting customer data.

Forms in particular enable you to engage with a large percentage of your database at low cost.

What are the benefits? 

Online surveys can be made quick and easy for your recipients to complete, encouraging mass response.

Survey tools – such as Dotdigital’s pages and forms – allow the data you capture to be automatically matched and appended to your existing database records.

Key considerations

Customer touch points

Your first step is to map key touch points where your customers come into contact with your organization online. These include, your transactional and marketing emails, and website visits including browsing and purchasing, plus log-in pages, blogs, and other customer forums. And don’t forget other channels like SMS and live chat, too.

Each of these touch points is a potential opportunity for you to invite your customers and prospects to take part in your online survey. That may be an email sign-up, preference center, or demo request.

Top Tip – If necessary, create new, key touch points for collecting data.

For example, set up an auto-response ‘thank you’ email following sign-up to your newsletter or registration, and include a link to your survey.

Maximize your response rates

It can be important to incentivize respondents to complete your survey.

Incentives will ensure you getter a higher response rate and a more meaningful sample.

These can range from business incentives to personal incentives, and from competition entry to prize draw, through to discount vouchers, free gifts, or special privileges. However, this can be expensive, and sometimes just the offer of sharing your results with participants can be incentive enough.

It all depends on the online survey and your requirements. You might, for example, offer 10% off a customer’s first purchase in exchange for their email address. Or, the mere promise of sending more relevant communications in future might well be enough for subscribers to complete your preference center.

People like to know that their opinion matters.

Telling your recipients how their feedback will influence, for example, the products or services you offer will help to increase your response rates.

Test which incentives work best with your audience (or ask them in a test survey!)

Top tip – if you are running a prize draw, be sure to stay on the right side of sales promotion law.

If in doubt, make sure you state that there is ‘no purchase necessary’ and link to a set of prize draw T&Cs.

Full Survey, mini surveys, and polls

Collecting customer data online doesn’t have to mean creating and distributing a multiple question survey.

You may find that your audience responds better to mini surveys of just two or three questions. They might even prefer a series single question surveys or polls, asked over a period of time, included for example in your monthly newsletter.

What’s more, with survey branching you can curate more relevant questions for respondents depending on how they answer – all within the same form.

Test which approach works best for your audience.

Online surveys: What do you want to know?

Generally for business customers, you should be asking about:

• the size of their businesses
• which sectors they’re in
• who makes the decision to buy your product or service

It might also be an idea to ask them about the kinds of business challenges they’re facing, so you know how to tailor your offering to them.

If you’re targeting individual consumers, you should be capturing their:

• gender
• age
• location
• lifestyle
• attitudes

And crucially, you’ll need to find out how they rate your products, your prices, your service, and your competitors.

To improve your email marketing metrics, your aim should be to collect customer data that is highly relevant to your business model and current objectives. What data will allow you to understand who, how, and why your customers purchase/engage in your sector?

It’s also an idea to ask for post-purchase feedback on the product and service, helping you improve your wider business offering in future.

Key areas to cover in your survey include:

• Customer profile – what do they look like (these are the ‘demographics’*)
• Attitudes and preferences – what do they like and dislike, what’s missing, what do they want more of
• Behaviors – influencers (where to place your advertising)
• Competitors – who are they and how do they rate them

Top tips for framing your questions

1. Keep your online survey focused – make sure it has a clear structure and is completable in less than 5 minutes, ideally

2. Use closed questions* to aid analysis and year-on-year trend comparison

3. Use open questions** sparingly, to collect deeper customer intelligence

4. Don’t ask what you do badly – better to ask recipients to rank attributes from 1-5 for satisfaction

5. In B2C surveys – ask for demographics at the end of the survey, to avoid scaring respondents off

6. Test your survey with a sample customer panel before you roll it out

Analyzing and taking action

• Rule 1: Make sure you use a survey tool that can automatically append the data you collect online to your existing email contacts.
• Rule 2: Use the data you have collected and your newly ‘enriched’ customer profiles to build answers to key questions that will help you achieve better metrics in your omnichannel marketing (encompassing sales too).

Look to find out:

• Where your best-sell and upsell opportunities may lie – what do your best customers look like? Once you know this you can find and target lookalikes
• What are the buttons to push for your different customer segments – know what makes them tick and you can personalize your emails and use dynamic content to send highly targeted messages and offers that drive up your response rates
• Your best competitive stance is – what do your customers see that makes you different/preferable to your competitors
• What your customers’ contact preferences are – how often do they want you to email them, with what content, and on what channels

Send them what they want, when they want it, how they want it – and your response rates will go up.

What’s next?

If you’re a Dotdigital customer, check out our range of content guides to further refine your marketing strategy.

If you’re not a Dotdigital customer, take a quick demo and get in touch with one of our representatives about how you could create awesome data capture forms with Dotdigital.

* Demographics for business contacts will include location, industry category, number of employees, turnover, job title, job function. Demographics for consumer contacts including location, gender, age, occupation, etc.

** A closed question will provide your contacts with a choice of answers from which they may choose one or multiple responses. Typically, closed questions in an online survey will feature radio buttons, drop downs, or tick boxes. An open question will invite your recipients to provide their own answer, using a free text field.

1. Start with design

2. Get the wording right

3. Placement is key

4. Be careful with quantity

5. Testing makes perfect

6. When all else fails – turn images off