Cassie Lancelloti-Young of HighTable & Michael Hershfield, VP of Strategic Partnerships at SailThru present this webinar as the second in the inSparq Social Commerce Accelerator Series. Focusing on engaging with customers through web & email conversations, Cassie and Michael highlight best practices in email marketing.

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Sailthru provides next generation technology that significantly increases customer engagement and loyalty by focusing on the individual – across platforms.

Customer Insights & Analytics. Collect interest and behavioral profiles at the individual level.  SailThru helps you analyze data including engagement, geolocation, devices used, pages read, product and topic interests, or purchases made.

Cross-Platform Personalization. 100% behaviorally targeted email and onsite recommendations. SailThru matches your content with each user’s unique interests, and can send real-time messages specifically tailored to them in seconds.

Automation. You create the content; SailThru’s system does the rest.  It selects the right offer based on each user’s interests, provides fresh content to users, decides in what order to send the messages, and more.

Is Email Dead?

A lot of people in the industry claim email is dead. Not true, its the original social channel.

Companies group email analytics in three different buckets:

1. Monitoring what is going on in email ecosystem with open rates, click through rates etc.

2. What does site behavior look like? How does that differ based on what registration source you came from?

3. What is revenue or engagement level from different sources?

SailThru allows you to merge data from all these buckets. The important thing to realize in today’s ecosystem is that you are no longer competing with your competitors for attention, you are competing with everyone because its mindshare battle. Email marketing has changed a lot even in the past five years – a lot more emails are being sent today. Often times, potential customers are only communicating with your brand via subject line and you can’t diminish that.

Merging site behavior, email behavior, revenue propensity etc you can target people in the right places.

Case Study: Savored

Savored is a restaurant reservation website very similar to OpenTable but focused on a discount space.  Savored tagged the various restaurants they had by cuisine, NYC neighborhood and price point. Both tagged on website and by email. The tags could track what offer someone was both likely to click on in a email blast and what they were most likely to view once they reached the website (was it the same?) and whether that was what that customer ended up buying.

This allowed Savored to understand what makes the most sense to feed similar content on an automatic basis.  They could also identify ‘inspirational diners’ which were those who were clicking on the more expensive restaurants but ended up buying a restaurant deal at a lower price point. Savored decided to offer them free reservations to restaurants they have looked at a couple times but didn’t make a commitment to buy in order to encourage that purchase.

Filter Bubble Problem -> a lot of people are skeptical to these algorithms and automated content saying that if you only show people what is recommended to them you may be missing out on content that may be compelling to everyone. With SailThru you can customize your templates to manually enter offers and have the rest of the email tabulated with the most relevant content.

Gilt Groupe has 2,000 segments for their millions of users which is a very old technology. Instead, using what your customers have read, where they shop, what they actually click on reveals unique stories that are constantly changing in order to customize content. SailThru pulls through all these channels and they see amazing results because in the end its about relevancy – getting the right content to the right people and the right time.

SailThru customers commonly see:

8x extension in their customer lifetime value

3-5x increase in open & click rates

200% increase in pageviews

12.3% increase in revenue per user.

SailThru gives you ability to import many different variables (revenue, page views, indications etc) from your database within the platform. Not only did Savored look at revenue per thousand emails deployed sent but also page view per thousand emails. If they didn’t get someone to buy someone were they at least driving people deep into their website to see offers?

Opportunity for trigger emails in the SailThru platform was really ket for Savored. Through automated workflows, if customers completed a certain behavior in the first 10 or 30 days they would be introduced into a different optimization flow. Savored saw a 600% lift in the number of people who became active in the first seven days on site.

Savored make sure they tracked when users had joined. Many marketers see strong open rates within a customer’s first month or two and tend to diminish over time. Within Savored they were about to automatically re-engage to make sure that doesn’t happen.

Cohort Synergy

Email has a key relationship between social channels and using the right insight, analytics and tools allows you to tie in your infrastructure. As you engage your fans on Facebook and Twitter, make sure you continue to rengage those fans through the email front as well. When doing Cohort analysis, make sure you tag where you gained those fans in order to allocate your advertising budget to be more effective.

Share the relationship across channels. Every customers has their own preference to engage with a brans, whether it be via email or through other social channels. If a customer doesn’t respond well to email, they may just be following the brand more often on Facebook, and its important to know that you haven’t lost that customer’s attention.

The half life of a…

•Tweet    2.8 hrs

•Facebook  3.2 hrs

•Email  3.4 hrs

Engaging your users within the first couple days is crucial, because thats when you will most likely get a sale out of that customer. There is a very strong relationship between a customer and a brand in the beginning, but if you do it smartly you can engage your customers for an infinite amount of time.