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These days, it’s not uncommon to wake up every morning with anywhere from 15-25 unread marketing emails to your personal email account. Sprinkle in a couple of SMS alerts, a few branded push notifications, and another 10 promotional emails throughout the day, and voila – that’s the life of a modern consumer. But rather than receiving the interesting, thoughtful, or relevant messages you expected upon sign-up, marketing’s era of re-engagement has become a never-ending barrage of generic messages from brands hoping that something—anything—sticks.
To discover how we ended up in this messaging apocalypse—and whether we might come out on the other side—Ernie Santeralli, Content Marketing Manager at Dynamic Yield, spoke with Nadav Yair, the brand’s Senior Product Manager.
With 8+ years leading UI/UX and product lifecycle projects in eCommerce environments, he has a unique perspective on the past, present, and future of re-engagement.
In what follows, Nadav offers his thoughts on how marketers can incorporate emerging technologies into their strategies and achieve far more engagement—without burning out their audiences.
Q: Audience re-engagement isn’t a new idea. The old saying goes “your best new customers are your old customers,” after all. But how has this concept changed in the last five years? What recent advancements are transforming the game?
A: Some key changes and advancements include:
Five years ago, these factors either didn’t exist or weren’t as developed as they are today. These ideas have contributed to today’s consumer behavior, where most are ready to chase the latest trend rather than demonstrate brand loyalty, or switch from purchasing items outright to subscription models. Together all of these facets have led to businesses seeking more effective, personalized, and integrated re-engagement strategies.
Q: With all of these advancements working to a brand’s advantage, then what’s the biggest challenge they face today with re-engagement?
A: Most businesses struggle with capturing and maintaining audience attention in a saturated digital landscape marked by content fatigue, ad blockers, and privacy concerns. To overcome this, businesses must continuously test and adapt their engagement strategies to deliver content that matters to each customer, like tailored product recommendations or a limited-time offer on a recently viewed product – not just what matters to the business.
Q: If that’s the key, and businesses have access to such advanced tracking, triggering, and reporting mechanisms, then why is over-communication still such a persistent problem?
A: Today, users are more involved with brands than ever. We spend our days looking at an ever-growing list of messaging platforms on our phones, computers, and tablets, and when we’re not looking at screens, we’re dodging dynamic advertising on everything from billboards to benches. Users end up being bombarded with marketing messages from all directions.
Recent research from Litmus indicates that over-communication has a direct, negative impact on two of the top three monitored email KPIs among marketers: open and unsubscribe rates. In fact, overcommunication causes 50% of consumers to miss or ignore communications by phone, email, SMS, and social media, and one in four respondents switched brands or didn’t renew a subscription because they received too many emails or SMS messages.
Ultimately, this problem persists because many brands lack a channel prioritization strategy that tailors the right message to the right user on the right channel. Unfortunately, many brands in today’s landscape still prioritize quantity over quality. They’d rather send tens of daily messages to everyone and no one. But when communicating with users who might be overwhelmed with marketing messages, less is more.
Q: How important is personalization for effective re-engagement? Are businesses focusing on it enough?
A: Focusing on a message’s content rather than its scale can help the message become more efficient.
Today’s consumers expect content and messaging that’s tailored to them. They receive customized content and recommendations in places like their Amazon account homepage or Spotify Discover Weekly playlists and expect this personalized experience on all channels. To be effective, re-engagement campaigns must be personalized, or they won’t capture the recipient’s attention.
Fortunately, the personalization technology for email and messaging finally allows brands to accomplish the following in a structured, streamlined and scalable way:
Q: The modern marketer has access to countless communication channels – and if we’re not active on every social media platform, sending emails, triggering push notifications, and renting billboards, we feel like we’re missing out on potential results. How would you advise teams strategically to find the right balance?
A: Marketing teams must have the proper data and insights to make the right decisions. For example, when strategizing a single campaign, you need to decide:
“Which messaging use cases should we focus on?”
“Which channel should we utilize?”
“Which recommendation strategy is the best fit for this message?”
The best way to approach the above is to:
You need a technical solution that lets you not only test different content variations against one another but also different channels or combinations of channels within the same campaign to determine the best strategy for each use case and audience.
Q: What should teams keep in mind when developing a prioritization strategy and testing these content variations and channel combinations?
A: You should start by looking at which communication methods your audience segments prefer, and then ask if the channel is the most effective for delivering the messaging for a particular use-case.
For example, some common use cases naturally fit with specific characteristics of certain messaging channels.
To further optimize your strategy, consider the following questions as well:
For maximum efficiency, teams should always test performance to understand what’s working and be able to pinpoint and tweak the campaigns that are no longer performing.
The bottom line: As strategies differ between brands, the best approach is to test channels and strategies across audiences and use cases. This will help to determine the best channel prioritization strategy for each campaign.
Cutting through the noise of generic marketing and re-engaging consumers has never been more challenging. But new technological advances—from personalization and data analytics to omni-channel marketing to automation—have empowered marketers to focus on the content of their messaging, rather than scale. Tapping into these new tools will lead to far better engagement from audiences who, now more than ever, need a reprieve from boring, irrelevant messaging.
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