What You’ll Learn in This Podcast:
- How to craft the perfect mix of retention marketing channels, including email, SMS, push notifications, and direct mail.
- The importance of prioritizing click rates over open rates to drive meaningful traffic and conversions.
- Tips for split testing subject lines and optimizing email performance.
- Proven strategies for structuring simple, high-impact offers that boost holiday sales.
- How to reduce inbox noise and engage customers effectively through high-intent channels.
- Personalization tactics to retain and convert high-value customers with direct mail.
In this episode…
Dives into actionable retention marketing strategies tailored for the holiday season, highlighting the perfect channel mix of email, SMS, push notifications, and direct mail to maximize engagement and conversions. Josh emphasizes prioritizing click rates over open rates as the true success metric, as they directly measure traffic-driven results. He also underscores the importance of simplifying offers, reducing friction in discount redemptions, and strategically using channels to cut through inbox noise. Packed with practical insights, this podcast is a must-listen for e-commerce brands looking to enhance their retention game this holiday season.
Resources mentioned in this episode
Episode Transcript
Retention Marketing Channels: What’s the Winning Formula?
Arvind (00:00):
Josh, you mentioned about retention marketing. Now that’s a big umbrella, right? It has multiple channels under it. What is the perfect marketing channel mix that you recommend for this holiday season?
Josh (00:11):
First of all, I would deploy all channels at my disposal. That includes email, SMS, push, direct mail. I like to think of SMS as push as high punch, high intent, high conversion channels, but used sparingly because it’s so annoying when you overdo it. With emails. You can go a little bit more aggressive, but its effectiveness is also much lower. I would start with SMS as a first touch point. If you have a significant enough SMS list, that’s where I would start because that captures a lot of attention right away. Following that up with emails and then following up reminders and retargeting with SMS and push. At the same time, for the long tail high value customers that have yet to purchase, I like to throw in some direct mail, so that’s generally speaking how I like to think about it.
Clicks Are King: The Metric That Really Matters
Josh (00:58):
In any of these retention channels, the number one metric that matters the most isn’t revenue. It’s not revenue per recipient. It’s not conversion rates, it’s clicks. That’s all that matters. The hard work that can be done with these channels effectively is how much they’re able to drive traffic onto your site. Conversions and revenue is driven by your landing page. A leading indicator to clicks on emails and SMSs would be opens. There are a couple of layers to that. What percentage of your customers are actually reading through your entire email? Or more simply, you could just look at the number of people that actually open your emails, and that’s just plain old open rates, and in that situation, you’re optimizing for a better subject line and you can run split tests to optimize for that as well.
Should brands focus on open rates as their North Star metric?
Arvind (01:46):
Brands over index on open rate. Should brands focus on open rates as their North Star metric, help us bust that myth.
Josh (01:53):
Open rate should not be your North Star metric. In emails, it should be click rates. Ultimately opens are fairly convoluted, and this metrics diluted with bought opens like Apple Mail users, and it doesn’t always correlate to a higher intent down the funnel. Open rates tell you how amazing your subject lines are and how much resonates, but it doesn’t tell you anything about how much traffic it’s actually sending to your site, which is the ultimate purpose of your email channel, and that’s something that only click rates can do. So your North Star metric for emails should be click rates. And click rates would tell you the effectiveness of your email programme as a whole and how much traffic it’s actually sending to your site.
Simplifying Offers: The Art of Frictionless Shopping
Arvind (02:37):
Holiday season’s all about offers. Brands want to hook the attention of the end users. So if you were to suggest pointers on how brands can structure their offers for delivering maximum impact, what would that look like?
Josh (02:48):
Number one, keep it simple. One, offer per audience. Don’t go overboard with the number of discount codes and offers that you want to offer your customers. The less friction there is, the easier it is for your customers to say yes. The second thing that brands need to pay attention to is reducing friction in applying discount codes. It sounds simple and dumb, but you’d be surprised at how many brands overlook this. Don’t make your customers do any work except for putting in their credit card detail. The third thing that I strongly recommend is when it comes to reducing friction and standing out with your offers, where those offers take place and where these notifications come up also matter a lot. So less noise equals more attention, and that’s one way of on how you can stand out from the crowd and your inboxes because you’re not living in your inboxes anymore.
