The Holiday Season is a big time of year in the ecommerce calendar. Deloitte has projected that ecommerce sales will total between $278 billion and $284 billion between November and January. Don’t let the opportunity to capitalize on this slip through your fingers. Let’s take a look at some Holiday Season ecommerce best practices and how R! can help optimize your ecommerce business heading into the holiday season.
The holiday gift buying rush is now in full swing with many racking their brains about what to get for friends and family and trying to avoid having to do any last minute shopping the night before.
This is the perfect opportunity to set up multi-touch campaigns for curated holiday gift ideas.
Ensure that you set up your Retention.com email flows to reflect the kind of offerings you have. If you’re giving certain discounts or promotions for certain holidays, if there’s a site wide sale, make sure that the flows you have in your Retention.com account mirror these new deals and you’re not giving the same old discounts you have for other points in the year.
As the holiday approaches, there's a surge in urgency among shoppers to complete their purchases before shipping deadlines. Using Retention.com’s cart abandonment feature can help in segmenting customers who've abandoned carts close to critical shipping deadlines. This allows for targeted reminders through email campaigns, emphasizing the urgency and offering shipping incentives to prompt customers to finalize their purchases.
Retention.com's features enable businesses to time their communication effectively, reminding customers of looming deadlines and driving them back to complete their purchases, especially during crucial periods like the last days before shipping cut-offs.
At a certain point it’s likely too late for your customers to buy anything and have it arrive before Christmas Day but that doesn’t mean you can’t still make sales. Some customers might have abandoned their carts due to uncertainties or indecisiveness about gifts arriving on time. Retention.com can help identify these potential customers and enable you to target them with reminders about the availability of gift cards or vouchers. These reminders can serve as an alternative solution for last-minute shoppers or those unsure about specific gifts.
After Christmas, there's a window for post-holiday sales that you’ll surely want to capitalize on. Retention.com can assist in segmenting customers who abandoned carts before or during the holiday period. This segmentation will allow you to craft personalized email flows offering post-Christmas discounts or exclusive offers, encouraging customers to return and make purchases.
As we brace for the holiday season, utilizing Retention.com throughout the holiday season enables businesses to identify, and re-engage potential customers who have abandoned their carts at various stages, even if they haven't filled out a form on your eCommerce site. This approach helps in maximizing sales opportunities during the critical holiday period by strategically re-engaging with customers and offering tailored incentives or reminders to complete their purchases.
As businesses navigate the dynamic landscape of the digital age, crafting successful growth strategies has become essential. Leveraging cutting-edge tools like AI-driven chatGPT has elevated customer satisfaction, while innovative platforms such as ActiveCampaign and Retention.com have emerged as powerful contenders in marketing automation and customer engagement respectively. This article delves into the power of combining ActiveCampaign and Retention.com for your business growth.
Retention.com Integration with ActiveCampaign
In the era of technological progress, the quest for growth demands a multifaceted approach. ActiveCampaign's prowess in integrating third-party tools into its modules streamlines email marketing campaigns and workflow automations. One such tool is Retention.com, an entity offering exceptional marketing solutions for enhanced audience connection. By harnessing Retention.com, businesses gain the ability to track website visitors and shoppers, even without form submissions, expanding the potential buyer base.
But before delving into the integration's mechanics, it's crucial to explore fundamental practices that foster growth through the Retention.com- ActiveCampaign integration:
Refers to the practice of maintaining a single, centralized database or list that includes all audience segments or groups. This centralized approach simplifies the process of managing and organizing contacts, eliminating redundancy and ensuring that all interactions with individuals are consistent and well-coordinated. Both ActiveCampaign and Retention.com offer a centralized contact management system where you can maintain a master list of all your contacts, regardless of their segment.
It involves gathering specific and essential information about your audience. It emphasizes using dynamic fields, which are placeholders for data that can change over time, to capture information that might not change frequently but is crucial for personalization and targeting. This information can include details such as purchase history, preferences, interests, and more. ActiveCampaign provides the capability to capture dynamic fields that hold vital but less frequently changing data about your contacts. You can also create custom fields to store information such as birth dates, preferences, or subscription dates.
Personalized segmentation involves categorizing your contacts into distinct groups based on their behaviors, preferences, interests, or interactions with your business. This categorization can be achieved using tags, labels, or other classification methods. By segmenting your audience, you can create more personalized and targeted communication campaigns. For instance, you might send tailored emails to specific segments, addressing their unique needs or offering products/services that align with their interests. This level of personalization increases customer satisfaction, loyalty, and engagement. Using tags in ActiveCampaign, you can segment your contacts based on their behaviors, interactions, and preferences.
Tailored engagement refers to crafting interactions and communications that are specifically designed for each segment or individual. Instead of using a one-size-fits-all approach, tailored engagement involves creating content, messages, and offers that resonate with the preferences and needs of each audience segment. This approach increases the effectiveness of your campaigns, as recipients are more likely to respond positively to content that feels relevant and valuable to them. ActiveCampaign's automation capabilities empower you to create personalized customer journeys. You can design automation workflows that trigger based on specific actions or conditions.
Fostering customer loyalty involves building strong, lasting relationships with your customers. Personalized communication and engagement strategies contribute to this by making customers feel valued and understood. When customers perceive that a business is catering to their preferences and needs, they are more likely to remain loyal and continue engaging with the brand over time. Additionally, effective engagement strategies contribute to customer retention efforts by keeping customers interested and connected, reducing the likelihood of them churning to competitors. This is when Renention.com-ActiveCampaign integration can come in handy by creating personalized campaigns from the data obtained by Retention.com.
To illustrate the power of integrating ActiveCampaign and Retention.com for your business growth strategies, let's envision a practical scenario where your objective is to connect with potential customers who have interacted with your sneaker store's online platform.
Step 1.
The initial step assumes the successful linkage of your Retention.com account with the ActiveCampaign dashboard. Through this integration, a seamless mechanism is established, allowing the synchronization of contacts from your Retention.com account to your ActiveCampaign platform. These contacts can then be systematically assigned to specific lists and designated with appropriate tags. What sets this integration apart is its capability to not only monitor Retention.com contacts but also to populate valuable fields with details like their location or the email domain they utilize, such as Gmail or a corporate email service.
Step 2.
Once these new contacts are successfully monitored, the subsequent step involves designing an automation sequence tailored to their preferences. This sequence is strategically crafted to send them personalized emails, extending an invitation to explore products and suggesting complementary items of interest.
Constructing this automation sequence mirrors the familiar process of crafting other automated campaigns; however, in this instance, we leverage the capabilities of Retention.com's designated tags and a unique field that specifies the specific webpage the visitor engaged with before departing the site.
The holistic outcome of this integration is your newfound ability to engage with previously elusive contacts who exhibited latent interest in your sneaker e-commerce platform. This integration serves as a bridge, enabling you to not only track and manage contacts from diverse origins but also to cultivate meaningful interactions with individuals who demonstrate subtle engagement with your brand.
Cultivating Revenue Growth through Integration
Connecting both ActiveCampaign and Retention.com it's a strategic investment. The integration empowers businesses to reach beyond the obvious, connecting with previously anonymous website visitors and nurturing growth. By embracing these tools, businesses can effectively tap into latent opportunities, boost engagement, and drive revenue.
Now that you understand how Retention.com can significantly assist you in growing your business, we invite you to DigitalME’s exclusive 10% deal and enjoy exclusive perks like 24/7 premium support, free assets, and the guidance of one of the biggest ActiveCampaign affiliates worldwide.
In today's digital landscape, our online activities span a multitude of platforms and devices, from web browsing and social media to messaging and smartphones. We're immersed in a world of diverse apps catering to our every need, from e-commerce and work conversations to personal interactions and digital payments. The Internet of Things further adds to this data explosion. With nearly 5 billion internet users worldwide generating an astonishing 2.5 quintillion bytes of data daily, the landscape was already rapidly evolving before 2020. However, the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated this transformation, forcing even the most traditional users to embrace the online world out of necessity.
So, what does this data surge and digital transition mean for brands? Quite simply, everything! The concepts of hyper-personalization and omni-channel experiences in marketing have been gaining momentum for some time. Yet, today's consumers, increasingly conscious of privacy due to high-profile data breaches, demand seamless user experiences. This presents an opportunity for marketers to reassess their approach to personalization, and this is where identity resolution comes into play.
Identity resolution is, essentially, the art and science of securely identifying an individual customer across various data sources, channels, and devices. It relies on a deterministic or probabilistic identifier to consolidate a person's data, attributes, and interactions from disparate sources. Without identity resolution, customer data remains trapped in isolated silos, rendering it ineffective in the new digital landscape. Implementing a comprehensive customer data strategy entails developing an identity resolution component that can merge these silos into a cohesive, accurate dataset.
Beyond these core functions, identity resolution also facilitates identifying households, their needs, and personas, in addition to individual consumers. Building lookalike audience segments opens the door to scaling marketing investments and unlocks numerous other data-driven use cases for enterprises.
The strategic importance of identity resolution lies in providing marketers and brands with anonymized master profiles of each consumer, enabling them to engage customers in meaningful moments. This, in turn, allows brands to deliver truly empathetic and memorable customer experiences that not only drive purchases but also foster long-term loyalty.
At the heart of identity resolution solutions are dynamic identity graphs—a continually evolving database of customer identities and touchpoints. This database acts as a single source of truth, connecting customer data from various sources for targeting, measurement, and insights.
A robust identity graph database ensures accuracy, reach, and privacy while effectively utilizing deterministic online and offline datasets to unify customer profiles and fill in gaps when new connections are established. With a future devoid of cookies on the horizon, marketers must adopt an identity-first approach to their customer data strategy. Without identity resolution, it becomes impossible to connect the dots across the customer journey, measure engagement, and deliver personalized, empathetic customer experiences.
Are you prepared to deliver personalized experiences?
At Retention.com, our identity graph has been integral to our technology from the outset. By incorporating customer intelligence into the marketing and measurement equation, we're empowering DTC marketers across the U.S. to personalize the experience and retain customers to achieve robust returns.
Customer retention is vital for brands looking to grow their e-commerce business and cultivate loyal followers. On both Amazon and your own website, implementing strategies to boost repeat purchases from existing customers can significantly impact your bottom line.
From personalized promotions to optimizing your product catalog, here are 7 proven strategies to improve customer retention on Amazon and your website:
On Amazon, tailor promotions for recent, high-spending, and repeat customers. On your website, extend loyalty discounts to your valued customers, ensuring consistency across platforms.
Offer "subscribe & save" coupons to entice customers into regular purchasing habits. The initial discount pays off through increased customer spending over time. This can work on Amazon and your website.
Utilize a Demand-Side Platform (DSP) for retargeting campaigns, especially for dormant customers. On Amazon, the levers on DSP allow for this granularity while also allowing for the exclusion of subscribe & save customers.
Some products lead customers to buy more products from your brand, others not so much. Identify gateway products that drive repeat sales by analyzing the LTV data of your catalog as a whole. From there, direct your marketing dollars to the SKUs that give you the most bang for the buck.
Leverage Amazon and social media posts to build brand followership. Heightened touch-points amplify customer engagement and strengthen brand loyalty. Amazon Posts is free-to-use, and its "Follow" feature builds a connection, ensuring more frequent interactions for sustained retention.
Combine customer engagement emails (Amazon) and past purchase history (website) for a potent re-engagement strategy. Hit them with the one-two punch, DSP retargeting & email combo for a sure way to drive that re-engagement.
Make sure the products you are selling are top quality. High-quality products meet and exceed customer expectations, fostering trust and loyalty, which are essential for long-term retention. When customers consistently receive value, they are more likely to remain loyal, make repeat purchases, and advocate for the brand, solidifying the link between product quality and sustained customer relationships.
By focusing on winning back loyal customers and incentivizing repeated purchases across platforms, you can maximize customer lifetime value while minimizing acquisition costs.
Consult with an agency like Envision Horizons to develop data-driven retention strategies tailored to your brand and products. As a leader in optimizing Amazon and e-commerce success, they're dedicated to elevating your brand's retention efforts. Request a free Amazon growth plan from experts at www.envisionhorizons.com.
Black Friday is the biggest shopping event of the year, and the time when your customers are likely to be most engaged.
Using Retention.com can help you to turn your anonymous Black Friday shoppers into revenue, drive more sales, improve your brand awareness, and set your business up for success.
We know BFCM can feel a little overwhelming, so we put together a one-stop-shop guide for holiday strategy planning. Check out our Ultimate BFCM 2023 Strategy Calendar, designed to help you make sure you capture every sale and every dollar this holiday season.
Learn more about how your business can leverage Retention.com for the Black Friday holiday season.
In the ever-evolving landscape of digital advertising, engaging customers and driving conversions depends on the strength of your ad creative. Compelling and personalized ad messaging is the key to capturing your target audience’s attention and fostering brand loyalty.
But how can you create ad campaigns that truly resonate with customers? Look to a powerful source of customer insights: first-party data. Let’s explore what makes first-party data your best tool in the fight for customer attention — and how to leverage it to create more effective ads.
First-party data is information a company can collect from their own sources. Examples include data gleaned from website and app visits, past purchases, and social media interactions. First-party data is valuable because it provides insights about real customers who are interacting with your brand.
We’ve already touched on some of the advantages of using first-party data to shape your ad campaigns, but here are some of the key benefits, summarized:
Begin by defining the key insights you need from your first-party data to support your campaign goals. For example, if your objective is to increase customer retention, find first-party data that helps you understand customers' past purchase behaviors, preferences, and interests to create personalized, retention-focused ad creative.
Outline the data collection methods, tools, and technologies you’ll use to gather the information you need about your audience. For a well-rounded view of your customers, integrate data from various sources, including website interactions, email subscriptions, and purchase history.
Today’s consumers don’t just value transparency — they demand it. Let customers know about your data collection methods, ask for consent to use their data, and make it clear that you’re using it to deliver better ad experiences and personalized content.
Create different versions of your ads to reach different segments of your audience. Continuously optimize your ad creative by using A/B testing, monitoring ad performance, and iterating according to your findings.
Conclusion
Harnessing data is the key to producing more captivating ad creative and executing more effective ad campaigns. If you’re pivoting away from third-party data and want to invest in an effective first-party approach, check out Retention.com’s powerful solution for reaching more customers with customized messaging.
We're excited to announce that we have made a significant breakthrough in one of our leading products, Reclaim. Reclaim is now opt-in only!
This advancement has brought about three major achievements:
We are thrilled to introduce these advancements and believe they will greatly benefit our customers and their businesses.
Our ultimate objective is to ensure that all our products align with Klaviyo AUP standards by the end of 2024. Thanks to the remarkable advancement of "server-side tracking," we successfully achieved Klaviyo AUP compliance for Reclaim, while simultaneously enhancing the overall value provided to our customers across the system.
No! We have already made the necessary changes for you. Just sit back and enjoy the product enhancements we have put in place to make a great product even greater.
The positive impact these new updates are already making waves for our clients, system wide, we're seeing an increase of 11% more revenue with 47% fewer sends for Add-to-Cart (ATC) flows, and 14% more revenue with 69% fewer sends for Abandoned Product flows!
If you're an eCommerce store, and you haven't started using Reclaim yet, what are you waiting for! To get started, please reach out to your Customer Success Rep or write us back and we will get in touch with you right away.
Nothing stirs fear in the hearts of eCommerce marketing teams quite like a new Apple privacy announcement. And their most recent edicts concerning link-tracking changes in iOS17 are no exception.
The privacy landscape is constantly changing, and we’re all evolving in stride. Let’s walk through some of these changes, whether or not they’ll affect you, and what Retention.com is doing to stay ahead of them.
According to Apple’s recent announcement, Link Tracking Protection is likely to be enabled by default in Apple’s Mail app, Messages, and Safari's Private Browsing mode.
As with most new iOS changes, we expect that this will roll out in September or early October when the new iOS is usually released to general consumers. Fortunately, it often takes a couple of months for wide adoption of the new iOS.
Link Tracking Protection aims to strip certain query parameters from URLs in Apple Mail, Safari Private Browsing Mode, and Messages.
What are query parameters? They can include:
First things first, this will not impact your regular social utm codes (utm_source, utm_medium, etc). Nor will it strip Impact Radius or Klaviyo query params, or even custom utm parameters.
This is good news.
So, what will be affected?: The parameters added by Google and Facebook: fbclid and gclid.
This will hurt Google Analytics’ ability to track your Google Ads, Meta’s ability to track Facebook Ads, and Facebook’s Conversion API.
Yikes? Actually, not so scary. Remember, Link Tracking Protection is only happening in Apple Mail, Messages, and Safari Private Browsing mode. Most shoppers do not use Safari Private Browsing mode, the only place where Google Search Ads should be affected. And most Facebook shoppers shop directly through the Facebook Native App.
In short, we expect that this won’t really affect most of your tracking.
Then comes Apple Mail, which has around a 50% market penetration rate. This is where you’re likely to lose Google and Facebook attribution parameters (gclid and fbclid). Your other parameters should still work.
Let’s talk about what this really means. Losing fbclid and gclid parameters in emails received through Apple Mail (or through Messages/Safari Private Browsing) can cause some headaches for you, such as:
Wait, broken things?
Well, as mentioned above, this really only impacts gclid and fbclid attribution via Google Analytics, Facebook Conversion API, and Meta ad tracking, and only in this one channel. All your other attribution methods should still be fine.
Here’s a reminder of what’s not going away (at least not yet, as far as we can tell):
The result? This really won’t affect that much of your attribution.
Since we have time to adapt before the changes really take hold, let’s be pragmatic about it:
First, consider your channels - Remember that only some link tracking parameters will be affected in only some channels, and most people won’t be shopping through those channels.
Second, consider your attribution tracking - Are you wholly reliant on Google Analytics/Facebook to track your performance, and are you only using Google Ads? There’s no time like the present to consider alternative options.
Third, lean in to attribution methods that are not being affected. Make sure you’re exercising everything at your disposal to track the customer journey and maintain that valuable attribution.
Nope.
This change shouldn’t have a noticeable impact on our current product suite. Social advertising attribution tracking from an email click is a small pool to begin with – and when the specificity of in-private browsing is added, the pool gets even smaller.
Retention.com will still serve you up with plenty of net-new, high-intent customers that you otherwise would be losing, and you’ll still be able to market to them using your existing marketing automation tools with all of your regular attribution methods. No changes there.
While these announcements can seem scary, rest assured that our team of seasoned eCommerce and agency experts is staying way out ahead of the curve.
In the dynamic world of digital marketing, effective audience retargeting is a crucial strategy for businesses aiming to maximize their online advertising efforts. Retargeting allows brands to reconnect with users who have shown interest in their products or services, providing a higher probability of conversions. To accomplish this, leveraging both third-party and first-party data is essential. In this blog post, we will delve into the importance of combining these two data sources and explore how their synergy can amplify retargeting efforts, drive engagement, and boost overall marketing success.
Before delving into the benefits of combining third-party and first-party data, it's essential to grasp their distinct characteristics.
Third-party data refers to information collected by external entities unrelated to your brand. These sources can include data aggregators, publishers, and other companies that track user behavior across various platforms. Third-party data offers broad insights into consumer preferences, interests, and demographics, making it a valuable resource for targeting specific audience segments.
On the other hand, first-party data is generated directly from interactions between your brand and your customers. This data is typically collected through website analytics, customer relationship management (CRM) systems, email marketing platforms, and other owned channels. First-party data provides a deeper understanding of individual user behavior, preferences, and purchase history, allowing for highly personalized retargeting campaigns.
By combining third-party and first-party data, businesses can access a holistic view of their target audience. Third-party data adds depth to the understanding of customer segments by providing broader demographic and interest-based insights. Meanwhile, first-party data offers granular details about individual user behaviours, enabling brands to create highly personalized retargeting campaigns.
Integrating third-party and first-party data enables brands to refine their audience targeting strategies. Third-party data allows businesses to discover new potential customers and expand their reach, while first-party data enables precise targeting of existing customers and prospects who have already shown interest. By combining these two data sources, brands can create highly relevant and targeted ad campaigns that resonate with their audiences, increasing the chances of conversion.
The synergy between third-party and first-party data can significantly enhance campaign performance. Third-party data provides valuable insights that help identify high-value customer segments, while first-party data enables personalized messaging and tailored offers. By leveraging both data sources, businesses can optimize ad delivery, create compelling content, and improve campaign efficiency, resulting in higher engagement and conversion rates.
When third-party and first-party data are used in tandem, brands gain the ability to create customized customer journeys. By understanding customer preferences, interests, and behaviors from first-party data, businesses can identify touch-points where retargeting efforts can be most effective. Third-party data then enhances this personalization by providing additional context and insights into customer behavior outside of the brand's owned channels, enabling the delivery of relevant messages at the right time and on the right platform.
In the realm of audience retargeting, the combination of third-party and first-party data is a winning formula for success. By leveraging both data sources, businesses can create powerful, personalized campaigns that resonate with their target audience, enhance engagement, and drive conversions. The comprehensive insights obtained through third-party data, when combined with the granular details of first-party data, enable brands to optimize their retargeting efforts, deliver highly relevant messages, and build long-term customer relationships. In the ever-evolving landscape of digital marketing, harnessing the power of both third-party and first-party data.
