Retail and e-commerce marketers have a lot to keep tabs on. Not only are their brands releasing new items on a seasonal basis, but consumers are also shifting their spending habits. Add to that, marketers want to personalize their messaging for every individual.
That last bit is the most important piece of the puzzle for retail and e-commerce marketers. Consumers want a more personalized experience and with COVID-19 completely altering the way consumers can shop, the “trusted brand” takes precedence over the available brand.
Now that we’re 6+ months into the pandemic altering our reality—and little sign of it ending soon—it’s as good a time as any for marketers to take a moment and assess. What’s working? Where are our strengths? What crucial user profile data are we missing to get that much closer to our audience at the individual level?
Such an audit can be overwhelming, but the impact is invaluable. Where do you even begin?
Here, that’s where.
In our latest guide, “From Drab to Glam: A How-To Guide for Giving Your Retail Marketing a Red Carpet-Worthy Makeover,” we provide the following perks:
- A deep-dive into common marketing trends we’ve seen in the retail industry
- A framework for assessing your level of cross-channel personalization
- Actionable steps you can take to set yourself up for success against all challenges and changes.
A Look at Our Models
For any good makeover, you need a model—a canvas of sorts upon which to create something beautiful. In preparation for our guide, we acted as engaged new users for 15 leading retailers and beauty brands to see how they would incorporate our actions and behavior into their marketing messaging.
We signed up and opted in. We favorited items. We browsed a ton. We even abandoned some carts. Anything and everything you can do without actually buying an item, we did over the course of three weeks this summer.
In order to make a more seamless, like-to-like comparison between brands, we focused largely on the beauty and cosmetics industry. This way, we could identify trends that extend into the larger retail and e-commerce market and provide more pointed recommendations that can help all marketers, regardless of vertical.
The Elements of a Good Marketing Makeover
Our models identified. The messaging collected. We set to work.
Like with any type of makeover, there’s a natural order you must follow to make sure everything is layered just right for the perfect look.
We started, like one would logically expect, at the beginning—the welcome campaign—and continued through the average customer lifecycle onto promotions and cart abandonment campaigns.
For each of these campaigns, you will find the trends across all of our lovely models, a few pitfalls to avoid, and at the end, a piece-by-piece framework for how to build out your ideal version of each campaign.
Everyone loves a good sneak peek, so here’s just a glimpse at some of the takeaways you’ll find inside:
- Build Trust: People love brands they can trust. Showing off your company values and what you stand for in the welcome campaign kicks off the relationship between you and the user on the right foot. Even better if you’re able to harness those values to identify what’s important to users and use them to inform preferences for future campaigns.
- A Seamless Experience: A common trend in modern retail promotions is to design emails to mimic the online shopping experience. Take this one step further with new features like AMP for Email to allow users to purchase items directly from the email. No further clicks required.
- Don’t Take Our Word For It: A brilliant way to drive conversions in cart abandonment campaigns: using data feeds to pull third-party reviews of products to confirm the value of a product. Capitalize on the data you have at hand by building a tech stack that gives you a holistic view of user behavior and the tangential data to give yourself a leg up.
You might be thinking, “Bah, our marketing is fine, we don’t need a makeover.” You may very well be ready for your red carpet moment.
But, the operative word there, really, is “fine.” We want to help you turn that into “fierce” so download the guide and maybe—just maybe—you’ll find that spark, that shine, that aha! idea that takes you from drab to glam.
