Tag Archives: Customer State

Example: Messaging for the Apathetic

DataBase Marketing, Web Analytics

So I look at the mail yesterday and there’s a catalog from Bliss.  If you don’t know Bliss, they are an online / catalog / storefront multi-channel retailer.  The tagline on the book is “beauty by mail from new york’s hottest spa” – yes, no caps at all.  So you pretty much know this book is positioned for younger – or want to feel younger – gals.

The book had a wrap on the outside with a message for the Apathetic.  This is a great technique to use because you can do it “in-line” with the rest of the mailing, which saves a lot on postage.  The Engaged just get the catalog, the Apathetic get the catalog with this special wrap around and they all are processed inline and enter the mail stream together. 

It’s one of my favorite catalog tricks, check out the piece:

Bliss Catalog Wrap

Let’s do the copy thing:

You can see on the left spine the macro message of “we want you back” – again, no caps.  This is an acknowledgement of the state of the relationship – we’re not sure if you like us, but we still like you!  This is a classic Date message tactic, it sets the proper tone and pulls the customer into the conversation.

Then they just come out and say it:

We haven’t had an order from you in a while and – what can we say? – we miss you.  We feel lost without those 3 a.m. ‘beauty’ calls and the sweet, soft sound of your mouse clicks.

Yes, they’re great copywriters, but there’s a bigger point I think you should take away: you couldn’t possibly get away with copy like this if you had not set up the personality of Bliss in the first place.  They can speak like this because they have spoken like this to the customer in the past – all over the web site and throughout their catalogs and hopefully in customer service phone / e-mail.  Consistently.  Everywhere.  That’s a Brand in remote retailing, that’s how Brands are built.  Theatre of the Mind is the best weapon you have.  Copy.  Art.  Get it?  What about your web site?

This is probably the most common retail problem on the web today – web sites / businesses that completely lack any kind of personality.  Catalogs know how important this idea is in remote retailing and have been using it for a very long time.

So, in a totally shameless attempt to woo you, we’ll send you a Free full-sized bottle of our clog-dissolving cleansing milk (a $28 value) when you order $75 or more from this catalog or at blissworld.com.

The classic Dating offer, complete with a threshold ($75) as explained here.  They’re testing.  The importance of the words “full-sized bottle” you don’t know about but I do; about 4 weeks ago we received another “we want you back” effort that offered a trial size.  They’re essentially starting small with the offers and when we remain Apathetic, they up the offer. 

This approach drives down the cost of the average customer reactivation; the strategy is called The Discount Ladder.

(If that’s not a great excuse to arm yourself with our all-out flab attack kit (p. 49) or smooth yourself citrus with our lemon+sage set (p. 09), we don’t know what is.)

This is just very smart merchandising, it is persuasive because it directs you to a specific place rather than giving you a lot of choices – by the way, how many different offers do you make in a promotional e-mail?  The choice of products promoted here may have been customized (not sure of my wife’s buying history) or they may simply be very popular products with a high conversion rate to lapsed buyers on catalog covers.

I would bet the latter; that’s how I would play it because after all, she’s a lapsed buyer.  She’s stopped buying because she doesn’t want what she has bought before.  Do you make offers based on what customers have bought before?  Why is that?  Why not offer the products that convert people like the targets?

Unless you have specific evidence that “people who buy this also buy this” I’m pretty sure that outside of certain niches, you depress response by making “forced offers” to customers – especially lapsed ones – to buy a specific item or category just because they bought it in the past.  Think about it.  “Buy anything over $75” is a lot stronger offer than “Buy these specific things we are promoting”.

A lot to test there as well…

To take advantage of this special offer, just order something from us before March 1, 2008.  Our land of lotions and lip gloss just isn’t the same without you.  Bliss on, the entire bliss team

Par for the course here – a deadline and an “in personality” close.  Urgency and persuasion.  If you’re busy, you probably keep the book at least to check out p. 49 and p. 09…

P.S.  If you’ve been getting your Bliss fix somewhere other than our catalog or web site (it happens), don’t forget to keep up with our latest and greatest by signing up for Bliss beaut-e-mails at www.blissworld.com

Ah, the beaut-e of multi-channel done the right way.

They probably don’t have perfect visibility between the direct channel (web and catalog) and the retail channel (who does?) so they are acknowledging that, telling you it’s OK, and then offering you a service so you can “keep in touch” – the general theme of “we want you back”.  They don’t want you to feel bad if you find their retail distribution more convenient, and at the same time they’re trying to re-engage you electronically and generate value from this catalog drop even if you don’t buy. 

I guess the channel managers are team players.  By the way, this relationship started on the web site…and in my experience, you can extend the LifeCycle by switching customers to another channel.  But you don’t want to force it, you let it play out the way the customer wants it to.  Test and look to the behavior; they will tell you what is right on an individual or segment basis through their actions.

bliss-ful job on the catalog wrap gang!

P.S. Well, almost.  A search for “flab attack” (phrase from the promotional copy above) on the web site returns this result:

We’re sorry, but your search for flab attack returned no results.  Please try again with a different keyword, or double check the spelling. (You’re not alone – we only learned how to spell ‘fuchsia’ properly a week ago.)

Gotta love that personality thing though…

Questions on this?  What do you think of this promotion?

Messaging for the Apathetic

DataBase Marketing, Measuring Engagement, Web Analytics

Recall from the Messaging for Engagement post we generally have 3 states of customer in the database:

  • Engaged – highly positive on company, very willing to interact – Highest Potential Value
  • Apathetic – don’t really care one way or the other, will interact when prompted – Medium Potential Value
  • Detached – not really interested, don’t think they need product or service anymore – Lowest Potential Value

Combine this messaging approach with a classic behavioral analysis, (the longer it has been since someone purchased, clicked, opened, visited etc., the less likely they are to engage in that activity again) and you get different messaging for each group, what I call Kiss, Date, and Bribe. Click image to enlarge if you want…

Kiss Date Bribe

Please note “Months Since Last Contact” means the customer showing interest / taking action and contacting you in some way (purchase, click) not the fact that you have “contacted” them by blasting out e-mails. Behavioral analysis is about customer behavior, not yours.

We’ve already gone over an example of Kiss Messaging, so lets provide an example of Messaging for the Apathetic.

Recall the tactical background with Apathetics:

Apathetic – Date Messaging: We’re not real clear where we stand with you, so we’re going to be exploratory, test different ideas and see where the relationship stands.  Perhaps we can get you to be Engaged again? In terms of ROI, this group has the highest incremental potential. Example: this is where loyalty programs derive the most payback.

The most consistently successful (meaning profitable) messaging for this group generally looks at what their past behavior is and tries to drive it just a bit higher with a carrot / stick combo.

In commerce, if you were looking at a behavioral segment such as “No Purchase in 180 days” (month 6 on chart above), you find their average purchase price and then discount for purchasing over that average price threshold. So, for example, if a segment (or individual customer, if you can go that far) has an average purchase price of $80, you do a promotion like $10 off any Purchase over $100. This approach tends to preserve margin on the customer while driving new activity, thus setting up the customer to become re-Engaged on a longer-term basis.

Why re-Engaged? A new purchase moves them to the 1 month column in the chart above, so they have a much higher “natural” likelihood to purchase again. They are now Engaged again, and their messaging should change to Kiss, if you want to really leverage their state.

The values I have chosen above are not a “formula”, you have to test and optimize the thresholds and discounts for your business. For example, sometimes people don’t trade up to just over the threshold, they’ll respond to a $10 off purchase over $50 discount by generating an average purchase price of $125. Now you’re talking some severe latitude on your margins and you can try for incremental response with a higher discount or try to drive margin with a higher threshold.

The trick with Apathetics is this: unlike the Engaged, they probably need some incentive to act on.  But unlike the Detatched, they still have some Potential Value you would like to unlock – you don’t want to just all out bribe them because you’ll lose some of that Value.

After all, in an always-on sales environment like the web, some people are going to purchase anyway – without an incentive – no matter what segment they are in. For this 180 day case (chart above) a healthy portion of the 7% are “buy anyway” kind of folks. The more Recent the action, the more likely it is to repeat. That’s why you give ’em a threshold – to ensure you don’t give away more margin in discounts than you are making from the rest of the promotion.

Does this “threshold approach” depress response? Sure. But are you trying to drive response (gross demand) or profit? Those of you whose success is judged by ROAS don’t need to answer; profit doesn’t matter in your world. You’ve never used a control group.

If you were working on my business, I’d want you driving profit.

Messaging for Engagement

DataBase Marketing, Marketing / Tech Interface, Web Analytics

Or Behavioral Messaging, as we used to call it. 

Much has been written about Measuring Engagement, but once you measure it, then what do you do with this information?  Most folks know the idea driving the Engagement Movement is to make your messaging more Relevant, but how do you implement?  Perhaps you can find the triggers with a behavioral measurement, but then what do you say?

This is the part Marketing folks typically get wrong on the execution side.  They might have a nice behavioral segmentation, but then crush the value of that hard analytical work by sending a demographically-oriented message, often because that is really all they know how to do.  So as an analyst, how to you raise this issue or effect change?

Marketing messaging can be a complex topic, but there are some baseline ideas you can use.  Start here, then do what you do best – analyze the results, test, repeat.

You want to think of customers as being in different “states” or “stages” along an engagement continuum.  For example:

  • Engaged – highly positive on company, very willing to interact – Highest Potential Value
  • Apathetic – don’t really care one way or the other, will interact when prompted – Medium Potential Value
  • Detached – not really interested, don’t think they need product or service anymore – Lowest Potential Value

Please note that none of these states have anything to do with demographics – they are about emotions.  The messaging should relate to visitor / customer experience as expressed through behavior, not age and income.

These states are in flux and you can affect state by using the appropriate message based on the behavioral analysis.  Customers generally all start out being Engaged (which is why a New Customer Kit works so well), then drop down through the stages.  The rate of this drop generally depends on the product / service experience – the Customer LifeCycle.

Generically, this approach sets up what is known as “right message, to the right person, at the right time” or trigger-based messaging.  Just think about your own experience interacting with different companies; for each company, you could probably select the state you are in right now!

OK, so for each state there is an appropriate message approach:

Engaged – Kiss Messaging: We think you are the best.  Really.  We’d like to do something special for you – give you higher levels of service, create a special club for you, thank you profusely with free gifts.  Marketing Note: be creative, and avoid discounting to this group.  Save the discounts for the next two stages.

Apathetic – Date Messaging: We’re not real clear where we stand with you, so we’re going to be exploratory, test different ideas and see where the relationship stands.  Perhaps we can get you to be Engaged again?  In terms of ROI, this group has the highest incremental potential.  Example: this is where loyalty programs derive the most payback.

Detached – Bribe Messaging: You’re not really into this relationship, and we know that.  So we are simply going to make very strong offers to you and try to get you to respond.  A few of you might even become Engaged again.

Can you see how sending a generic message to all of these groups is sub-optimal?  Can you see how sending an Engaged message to the Detached group would probably generate a belly laugh as opposed to a response?  You’ve received this mis-messaged before stuff, right?  You basically hate the company for screwing you and then they send you a lovey-dovey Kiss message.  Makes you want to scream, you think, “Man, they are clueless!” and now you dislike the company even more.

Combine this messaging approach with a classic behavioral analysis, and you now have a strategy and tactic map.  For example, you know the longer it has been since someone purchased, clicked, opened, visited etc, the less likely they are to engage in that activity again.  Here’s the behavioral analysis with the messaging overlay:

Click image to enlarge…

Kiss Date Bribe

Please note “Months Since Last Contact” means the customer taking action and contacting you in some way (purchase, click) not the fact that you have tried to contact them! 

So does this make sense?  Those most likely to respond are messaged as Engaged – as is proper in terms of the relationship (left side of chart).  As they become less likely to respond, you should change the tone of your communication to fit the relationship up to a point, where quite frankly you should take a clue from the eMetrics Summit and not message them any more at all (right side of chart).

Example Campaign for the Engaged: At HSN, I came up with the idea of creating some kind of “Holiday Ornament” we could send to Engaged customers.  If the idea worked (meaning it generated incremental profit), we could do it as an annual thing; we could put the year on the ornament and create a “collectible” feel, which is the right idea for this audience.  No discount – just a “Thank You” message “for one of our best customers” and “Here’s a gift for you”.

These snowflake ornaments were about $1.20 in the mail (laser cut card stock) and generated about $5 in 90-day incremental profit per household with the Engaged, test versus control.  Why?  Good ‘ol Surprise and Delight, I would bet.

We had some test cells running to see how far we could take this, and as expected, the profitability dropped off dramatically based on how Engaged the customer was.  If the customer was even minimally dis-engaged – no purchase for over 120 days – there was very little effect. 

Interactivity cuts both ways; it’s great when customers are Engaged, but once the relationship starts to degrade, folks can move on very quickly emotionally.  That’s why it is so important to track this stuff – so you can predict when your audience is dis-engaging and do something about it.