INC Magazine: E-Commerce Marketing Mistakes: Why Discounts Alone Don’t Drive Loyalty
The world of e-commerce is filled with promotions, sales, and discount codes—the types of offers that traditionally entice shoppers to keep coming back. But for many brands, that’s as far as the strategy goes. When the next week comes around, they recycle the same promotions again. And again. And even again. When sales dip, they simply increase the promo frequency. Before long, jaded customers stop buying their products, even when it’s on sale. It’s a recipe for ensuring that merchandise ends up being sold for much less than its worth.
The reality is that these types of promotions are destined to create customer fatigue, particularly if the content and messaging behind these offers are not interesting. Too often, ecommerce brands forget that there needs to be a clear value exchange, even when it comes to something as simple as reading a brand email. The philosophy works a lot like sustainable gardening: you can only realistically expect to pull out in relation to how much you put in.
This is obviously much harder than it sounds. The places customers communicate are more disparate and siloed than ever. An email inbox may be ideal for one customer, but a message in WhatsApp is preferred by another. What’s relevant and interesting across these communities, demographics and platforms changes on a daily basis. It’s a lot to keep up with.
The good news is that current technology allows DTC brands to meet each customer where they are. Through a combination of first and zero-party data and a solid CRM, retailers can create and serve content as close to each user’s interests as possible, showing a clear value and surprising level of relevance. Marketing messaging can be personalized to an insane degree, referencing shoppers’ likes and dislikes, their stylistic preferences and more. The brands that do this well—segmenting their audiences by their engagement, buyer type, buyer frequency, and interests—have content that feels less like a typical sales pitch and more like a personal message in their inbox.
Here are a few worth following:
Taco Bell
Believe it or not, Taco Bell is one of the biggest brands pushing the envelope in customer relationship management—in part because of its dynamic content and the testing discipline it has baked into its email templates. It also excels at in-app messaging, which is often a bigger engagement driver for its overall sales.
For example, instead of just pushing products, Taco Bell uses emails and in-app messaging with dynamic content that leverages past behavior to recommend products or categories that each individual user is likely to repurchase. What’s more, its templates are personalized with unique subject lines, tone, call-to-actions and send times. This is dynamic content at its best with content that is uniquely valuable to the individual.
Ritual
This subscription-based supplement company does an incredible job helping shoppers find the right product, suggesting new products and keeping them informed of when their next order will arrive. Take its approach to managing a customer’s life stage transition. If a customer has been subscribed to the prenatal vitamin for a specific duration, Ritual’s CRM triggers a sequence introducing postnatal support at the exact right time. This isn’t just a sales pitch; it’s a helpful nudge that feels like a healthcare provider checking in, proving they understand each customer’s biological journey.
Homes.com
This online real estate giant, alongside its contemporaries like Zillow and Redfin, are known for creating personalized inbox messages on steroids. Whether a customer is watching homes or just browsing, it offers suggestions and keep people informed based on browsing and saved history. At times, these platforms can be incredibly nuanced when analyzing the seemingly intangible attributes of the homes a user views. As a result, its suggestions feel less like a database query and more like a human realtor curated a list for them.
West Elm
It balances a cadence of seasonal releases with personalized emails based on browsing/suggested product history. If a customer buys a specific Mid-Century Bed Frame, West Elm doesn’t just send random furniture emails. It flows up with a “Style your Space” email featuring the exact matching nightstands and bedding that coordinate with that specific purchase. It feels like a helpful interior design tip rather than a cold cross-sell.
Following its example, any brand can let implicit and explicit signals from each online shopper guide its content. By leveraging the right tools, brands can not only better appreciate the unique qualities that drive every customer decision, but better serve those customers with messaging that honors their preferences, needs and connections to the brands they support.