Jennifer Jacobs is Customer Marketing Manager at Freesat, where she’s helped build brand loyalty through personalisation and behaviour-based marketing automation. She tells us about the role of customer insight in tailoring the user experience
How can brands use behaviour-based marketing automation to build loyalty?
An automated campaign gives brands the opportunity to target the right people at the right time with the right message. You can start to build loyalty from a welcome email all the way through to a re-engagement series, while retailers are able to own the customer buying experience by automating emails such as cart abandonment. Replenishment emails are also a great way of securing customers’ next purchase by contacting them when their product is due to run out. Win back automations such as an email to those who have just visited your website after a three month hiatus offer a great opportunity to start rebuilding loyalty.
What sort of customer insight do you make use of at Freesat?
At Freesat the five main insights we try to capture as part of our welcome series are whether they are a Freesat customer, the product that they own, the TV picks they’d be interested in hearing about, what kind of emails they’d like to receive and how they heard about Freesat. We send quarterly surveys to our database to gain further insights to support marketing and product development. We also use Silverpop to find out what device a user has opened our emails on.
How does that insight inform the customer experience you offer?
These insights allow us to tailor and personalise the emails that we send and execute our acquisition, upsell and retention strategies, depending on the user’s needs. If the recipient is not a customer then we attempt to find out their current provider so that we can ensure our message is tailored correctly. If a customer has expressed an interest in, for example, children’s TV we can then target them with a selection of kids’ telly highlights, which resulted in an open rate of over 50 per cent. Knowing what device a customer is using allows us to send targeted emails with the option to download the Freesat App for iOS or Android.
Is there any brand you’d point to whose personalised approach to marketing you particularly admire?
Airbnb are a brand I particularly admire, as I don’t find their emails intrusive – simply helpful. They focus their emails around your personal customer journey. Airbnb track your website behaviour and what settings you have selected, such as dates and type of property, to send you a personalised email full of suitable properties. Before leaving for your trip Airbnb send you a personalised checklist of things to do in the area as well as all the details of your host – it’s like having your own PA. Once you return they check-in to make sure that everything went ok and to leave feedback for your host.
What are some of the risks or mistakes brands can make when attempting to adopt a more personalised or ‘human’ approach to digital marketing?
There is a fine line between being personalised and coming across as creepy. To find the right balance you need to first consider what channel you are using. How will your customer feel about receiving a text message from you. Is this too intrusive? Browser retargeting is often an approach that can make people uncomfortable that Big Brother is watching. Just because I’m searching for a Frozen doll for my niece’s birthday doesn’t mean I want to receive dozens of emails about children’s toys. Finally, when using personalised data within an email consider what your default is, nobody wants to receive an email that says ‘Dear Recipient’.