If you’re a marketer who thinks email marketing is dead, then you’re probably unemployed. Far from being last century’s news, email marketing is undergoing a renaissance of sorts. Personalization driven by machine learning and personalization AI systems is what’s making email marketing more relevant and effective than ever. Savvy marketers have been using behavioral data to trigger emails for years, using triggers like abandoned carts or searches to remarket to lost customers. But behavioral triggers barely scratched the surface of what is possible when using behavioral data to trigger emails. Merchandising triggers are all the rage right now, so in this article, we’ll find out what they are and how you can use them to grow email-attributed revenue.
#Triggered
For the sake of clarity, let’s start off by getting to know our triggers. Behavioral triggers are exactly what they sound like. When a customer or user carries out a particular action on the site or app, that behavior triggers an email. These behaviors might be something like abandoning a cart before purchase, extensively browsing a particular category, or returning to the same product several times. A behavioral email trigger system is easy to set up and, compared to “cold-call” or newsletter-style emails, are much more relevant and personalized. This also means they are significantly less annoying and intrusive. These days, email firing by behavioral triggers is a basic aspect of chopping personalization.
Merchandising triggers, however, are generally based on internal changes to stock or pricing that may be relevant to a certain customer, based on their online interactions with your site. In other words, a merchandising trigger is not directly activated by a customer’s activity on your site. Instead, it is activated by a change to your store, products or pricing, that might be relevant or interesting to a specific customer, based on their past activity on your site.
It doesn’t take a grand master of email marketing to see that merchandising triggers allow you to directly notify potential customers of changes or improvements that might convert them from casual browsers into paying customers. It opens up a host of possibilities for your store to communicate with customers more often, without compromising relevance and personalization of your emails.
So Why are Merchandising Triggers So Cool?
Some marketers may react to merchandising trigger excitement with a resounding “meh”. After all, it’s just another type of trigger right? Not even close. Behavioral triggers allow us to attempt to reignite the intent to purchase that the customer had when he abandoned his cart, or browsed our specials page. Merchandising triggers, however, attempt to create a new and powerful intent to purchase. It’s like being able to use your website product recommendation engine in an email.
Imagine a customer browsing pet apparel, just to see what kinds of practical and hilarious outfits might be available for his beloved pooch. He’s impressed by your range of dog costumes and tuxedos, but he isn’t motivated enough to actually pull out his credit card at that point. A few days later, your store runs a special on all your most humiliating dog apparel. That same customer receives a personalized email, letting him know that you’re offering 20% off those same products he was browsing earlier. Perhaps he wasn’t willing to commit when he was casually browsing, but if he can get 20% off, heck, why not. That’s the magic of merchandising triggers in action.
Because merchandising triggers are not dependent on the customer taking certain actions on your site, their associated emails are sent more often, without becoming spammy or irrelevant. These email can be used to accelerate the purchasing process, rekindle interest in a product or category or promote product discovery.
Tech Requirements
It goes without saying that more complex systems and technological infrastructure are required to make merchandising triggers work, as compared to behavioral triggers. Effective behavioral triggers can be set up using something as simple as a Wordpress plugin, but merchandising triggers are the result of the combination of various types of data, including customer identity, product catalog and onsite behavioral data.
Furthermore, unlike behavioral triggers, the quality and relevance of emails based on merchandising triggers improve proportionally with the range and quality of data that drives them. In other words, the more user preference and behavioral data that you can feed into the system, the more relevant and effective emails the system will be able to send. If your goal is to maximize email-attributed revenue, then the number of data points you can bring to bear in creating merchandising triggers can have a direct effect on your bottom line.
This might sound scary and expensive, but most online retailers looking into this kind of functionality will already have some form of product recommendation AI. So it’s just a matter of applying the data you are already collecting for e-commerce recommendations, and applying it to an email remarketing system.
What’s more, the rise of third-party machine learning and AI solution providers has made these technologies more accessible than ever, even to SMEs. Liftigniter can help you turn the customer data you are already collecting into an email marketing system with massive revenue-generating potential.
