This is an all too familiar situation – you really needed to get something but just didn’t have the time to stop by a physical store for it? So you decide to clickety click your way to an e-commerce site such as Zalora or eBay. You browse through a few things and realise maybe you didn’t really need to shop for this product after all, so you exit.
But oddly enough… all the products you viewed earlier on start appearing on almost every page you go to after! And it doesn’t stop there. If you’re subscribed to that particular e-commerce site you visited, you receive an email a day or two later to check whether you’ve forgotten about the products you viewed and if you’re still interested in making that purchase.
No, these aren’t early signs of paranoia or a higher calling from the universe telling you to buy that Ray Ban. It’s a simple marketing trick known as retargeting and it’s a part of digital marketing – a solution designed to make the lives of businesses, whether they are B2C’s or B2B, a whole lot easier.
In a nutshell, digital marketing solutions help automate marketing and sales in order to generate more leads, close deals and get better results through marketing campaigns and various channels. Some examples of digital marketing solutions include Pardot, Adobe Marketing Cloud, and Salesforce Marketing Cloud.
By using marketing automation, e-commerce sites are able to personalize the way they communicate with their customers. It also helps them analyse customer behaviour and design better plans to reward their customers based on that insight.
While email blasts may work initially, as a company’s database and network grows, the need for personalised content based on specific demands will grow as well. This is where the genius of marketing automation kicks in. Marketing automation gives businesses the freedom and ease of sending out personalized and targeted campaigns and to make informed data-driven decisions based on their customer’s interaction.
Marketing automation allows businesses to track not only clicks on the website but also captures contact information each time a lead fills out a form and hits submit button. Marketers can also look up the key phrases used by a potential lead or customer which led them to the webpage. This information can be useful when it comes to creating content for targeted marketing campaigns. For example, companies such as eBags Inc. managed to turn 10% of their mobile shoppers into buyers via Adobe’s Experience Manager solution. Enclothed on the other hand used Salesforce Marketing Cloud to send targeted campaigns to prospects based on their browsing history. Dana Zingher, co-founder of Enclothed, said that using marketing automation has allowed them to tailor emails to reflect the age and style of their audience and also give the audience a taste of their personal touch before they’ve even signed up for their webform or newsletter. This has resulted in a 20% increase in the open rate of Enclothed’s campaigns.
Image source: Retargeter
By keeping track of a user’s browsing habits, businesses are able to bring back potential customers back to their website. This is a strategy as it specifically targeted at individuals who have already shown an interest in a product and therefore are more likely to convert and leave as a happy customer.
Besides, who wouldn’t miss out on a rather decent discount voucher that’s just sitting in your inbox, waiting to be used? At the end of the day, although it might be a little creepy, it’s just a business’s way of approaching you in a friendly way.
Lava is an authorised Salesforce Partner Reseller in Malaysia and has more than 10 years of cloud solutions, CRM implementation and consultation experience. We pride ourselves in not just being a CRM partner but in also understanding the needs of our customers and taking their business to the next level.
