With Lee Jorgenson, Client Success Director at Marigold Engage+.
In this podcast, Lee Jorgenson takes that soft “J” of his and talks to Julian (hard “J”) and Kayla about his vast experience working with many of the world’s largest retail brands. The three of them discuss how digital marketers, working in this sector, can use this moment to further embrace technologies that will help to monitor, grow, and shape their consumer audiences online.
Highlights include:
We hit the hard stuff right away by discussing what are some of the general rules or metrics that digital marketers working for retail brands should be using to monitor their consumers.
00:48 to 05:06
Lee suggests that we first take a few steps back and assume that many retailers don’t currently have a good handle on their audience. Take digital stock — a quick checklist:
— Acquisition: Are you analyzing your email acquisition sources? Do you have ways to determine where valuable email acquisition is coming from?
— Audience Segmentation: Once someone is acquired are you segmenting them and creating truly personalized communications across a range of channels?
— Frequency Cohorts: Something that has been around in the industry for a long time but are retailers considering when – and how often – a consumer in their database might want to hear from them?
— RFM Modeling & Market Research: Are you monitoring trends to increase lifetime value and prevent attrition?
— Machine Learning: This may well be the golden goose but make sure the above points have been addressed first.
If you’re starting out, get your dashboards and insights sorted so you can make data-driven decisions.
The key tool retailers should be looking towards is the Customer Data Platform (CDP). These can help to process data in real-time, make sense of it, and turn it into something actionable.
05:28 to 07:25
Lee discusses the key metrics that retailers should be looking at and acting on. Numbers that relate to transaction records including;
Average order value / Basket size / Frequency to purchase / Seasonality / Basket Analysis.
What would really be powerful is if this information could be matched with a richer set of personal profiles and demographic data.
08:05 to 13:13
Marigold Grow can help here of course.
Lee considers why it is so important that retail brands in particular look to add different and more interactive ways to communicate with their consumers. Retailers must add some diversity and now is the perfect time to consider options. What kind of communications can digital marketers come up with here, beyond product pushes, “% Off” coupons, and constant selling? There’s an opportunity to pay more attention to the individual consumer, embrace interactive Experiences that encourage involvement and have psychographic data points shared.
Brands that are doing this have seen success with quizzes, polls, contests etc. Building relationships and entertaining online is more important than ever.
14:00 to 19:48
With digital Experiences still in mind where should effort be spent implementing these. To drive acquisition, engagement, reengagement, retention, consumer research etc? We now consider the importance of turning unknown online visitors to know and using Experiences to complement efforts on retail brands’ large existing social following. Create unique interactive Experiences that can be deployed at scale.
21:17 to 24:27
Lee discusses the best ways he’s seen retail brands communicate with the customers via email, SMS, and push. He then shares with us how retailers should be messaging to different channels based on the data they have access to — Machine Learning would really help here! Have you considered Send Time Optimization for your channels too?
24:47 to close
We close by discussing the importance for retailers to further embrace more sophisticated loyalty programs, programs that look beyond earn and burn mechanics which erode margins. Look to find other ways to drive emotional loyalty. Fleet Feet are leading the way here.
Check out the resources listed in this episode below.
