The “Client Holiday Readiness Series” is a window into how Experian Marketing Services is helping clients succeed during the busy holiday season along with some helpful tips as clients prepare their campaigns. This series provides information on the products, support, and services we offer and how we are helping clients succeed during the crucial holiday period.
Effective customer communication is important any time of year, but is particularly pertinent to the holidays. During this time, the market is saturated with holiday communications and customers can be overwhelmed by the sharp increase in messaging. To break through the clutter, the Marketing Suite works to sustain and enhance your customer relationships by sending accurate, efficient and personalized messaging.
Using a comprehensive set of REST & XML based API’s, referred to as triggers, the Marketing Suite supports several different message structures and outreach methods to deliver useful communications to your customers that will increase customer retention. To optimize your comms strategy, we recommend the use of triggers that fall into two categories; transactional and promotional.
Transactional Triggers
Transactional or operational triggers provide customers with important information related to a purchase, oftentimes instantly. These API’s support messaging related to ecommerce transactions, order confirmations and shipping status, to name a few. Let’s look at an example:
While commuting to work, Dana is browsing through a retail website on her mobile device and luckily finds the last gift on her wish list. After quickly selecting the item and checking out, she enters her billing information before arriving at the office and clicks ‘Confirm Purchase.’ Within seconds she receives an email notification confirming the purchase as well as a link to track the shipping status. Without the use of the right Trigger system, her confirmation could have been delayed or even sent with incorrect information, instead of instantly assuring that her gift is on its way.
Promotional Triggers
Promotional triggers usually involve messages with a deeper level of personalization. These help to grab the attention of a likely customer, who has been identified based on actions they have taken, such as abandoning an online cart or visiting a site and browsing through product categories. Generally these triggered emails are sent 24 hours after an event takes place, but given the quick product turnover during the holidays, we recommend clients shorten the time between events and email sends. Shortening the time between action and email send to 6 or 12 hours can greatly increase the likelihood of grabbing customer attention. Let’s look at an example:
In this scenario, after choosing her gift online, Dana is unexpectedly interrupted by a fellow commuter before she can complete the checkout process. Dana closes her phone and unfortunately forgets about her intended-purchase. Later in that day, she receives a push notification, directly to her phone, reminding her of the product still waiting in her online cart. Since she is no longer distracted, she signs onto the website and completes her purchase. In this case, her reminder to purchase was triggered by adding a product to her cart and failing to complete checkout.
These are just a few of the many email triggers available through the Marketing Suite, all of which are proven powerful marketing tools. They enable ecommerce brands to continue successful relationships with valued customers and even grow sales among likely purchasers. To learn more about how you can use triggers and other EMS technologies to optimize your customer communications during the holidays, please Contact Us.