Alyssa Jarrett is Sr. Content Marketing Manager at Iterable, where she specializes in creating data-driven content to educate growth marketers on how to develop world-class, omni-channel campaigns. Connect with her on Twitter and LinkedIn.
Modern growth marketing is all about attracting and retaining more engaged customers by building immersive, personalized experiences across all channels, including direct mail, email, web, mobile and social.
Today’s marketing leaders are moving toward a highly integrated omni-channel approach to drive true relevance with their audience. In fact, brands that use omni-channel marketing techniques achieve customer retention rates 91 percent higher than those that don’t, and omni-channel shoppers have a lifetime value that’s 30 percent higher than customers who only use one channel.
But top enterprises aren’t struggling with adding channels to their marketing strategy, but rather with aligning teams and coordinating their efforts. When the average marketing stack consists of 12 siloed technologies, it’s no wonder why most brands aren’t able to deliver seamless customer experiences.
If your organization wants to achieve true omni-channel relevance, here are the three key factors you should seek in a growth marketing platform:
3 Key Factors To Seek in a Growth Marketing Platform
- Unified engagement. Avoid inconsistent, fragmented messaging by leveraging technology that enables you to build and send campaigns at scale across all online and offline channels.
- Data-activated campaigns. Modern MarTech uses flexible data models and universal webhooks to retrieve data from any first- and third-party source, which can then be harnessed to trigger personalized messaging in real time.
- Marketer-friendly functionality. No one should need an army of developers or custom scripting skills to get a campaign up and running. Intuitive workflow capabilities support immediate out-of-the-box usability without engineering support.
One piece of mail or one email is obviously not enough to sway most customers, so the best campaigns are part of a larger omni-channel strategy.
Inkit + Iterable Integration is Available Now
Today with our integration combining Inkit’s modern direct mail software with Iterable’s growth marketing platform, you can develop and deploy campaigns across all these available channels:
- Direct mail
- Email (transactional and promotional)
- SMS
- Rich mobile push
- Web push
- In-app notifications
- Facebook and Instagram Custom Audiences
With Inkit and Iterable, you can supplement direct mail with email offers, trigger social media retargeting ads, and coordinate mobile messages to stay top-of-mind with your subscribers along each step of their buying journey—from welcome to re-engagement.
Marketers can utilize an omni-channel approach at each customer stage, including:
Welcome and Onboarding
Less than half of leading retailers send a multi-touch welcome email series, and only a tiny fraction incorporate other channels in their campaigns. When a new customer signs up, make a good first impression by mailing a welcome postcard and sending a robust series of digital messages to excite them about their membership and familiarize them with your products or services.
Build out your welcome and onboarding campaigns by including FAQ resources, encouraging new users to follow your brand on social media, and invite them to visit their nearest store—if applicable—with geo-targeted personalization.
Recommendations for Warmer Welcomes
- Keep the good vibes going with a multi-touch welcome series across channels
- Trigger unique welcome campaigns off different user actions (e.g. post-purchase, newsletter signup, contest entry)
- Get sophisticated with segmentation by personalizing based on demographic, behavioral, and real-time event data
Re-Engagement
A steady stream of promotional messages keeps customers engaged and primed for their next purchase. Although email and mobile messages are better suited for real-time interactions, direct mail pieces are great opportunities to inform your audience of new inventory or seasonal offers.
Direct mail is also useful to encourage a response. For example, in your shopping cart abandonment campaign, you can trigger an email within an hour of cart abandonment, then follow up with a postcard in the next several days if the customer hasn’t completed checkout.
Web push notifications are especially powerful to incorporate into your re-engagement campaigns, since this channel is deployed through the subscriber’s browser. Now your customers don’t even need to check their inbox, mailbox or app to stay connected with your brand.
Recommendations to Keep Them Returning
- Grab customers’ attention with dynamic content, like fun animations, GIFs, scratch-offs, live polling and more
- Personalize promotions based on past and real-time behavior to achieve higher engagement rates
- A/B test often—not just the content within a message but also which channel better performs to deliver that message
Re-Activation
By using modern growth marketing technology, you’re already equipped to detect signs of customer disengagement, but churn happens to the best of us—especially those at subscription-based businesses. Surprisingly, only 13 percent of the top 100 subscription retailers send re-engagement campaigns: it’s astonishing how little brands are doing to win back subscribers.
Don’t simply blast your lapsed customers with no targeted attempt to incentivize them to return. Use all the channels at your disposal to send highly personalized messages to win them back before it’s too late.
Recommendations for Winning Them Back
- Offer the sweetest deal you can, whether it’s 20% off, a bonus item of their choice or even a whole month of service for free
- Keep it casual with lighthearted, no-pressure messaging and focus on maintaining a positive relationship
- Don’t stop tracking lapsed customers so you can be prepared to reach out again when their interest resumes
With an omni-channel approach that focuses on building highly relevant, behavioral-based messaging, you can build a program that more effectively meets your customers’ needs and treats them each like the unique individuals they are.
Growth marketing platforms like Iterable and Inkit provide the technology that makes that program easy to implement and increasingly more efficient.
Want to learn more about achieving omni-channel relevance at scale with Inkit and Iterable? Request a demo of our newest integration.
