As marketers, we are always looking for more opportunities to enrich our audiences’ lives. Though with larger KPI goals and increased noise, it can be difficult to maintain growth, especially amidst growing economic uncertainty. When re-evaluating your marketing strategy going into 2023, one of the most important things you can do is ensure your current systems and processes enable you to pivot quickly. This way, you can better meet your prospects with messaging that resonates at the right place and time.

Innovative Solutions That Strengthened Organizations’ Marketing Foundations 

We actively have conversations with our clients on how new technologies and process improvements can better equip them to take advantage of current trends, understand their customer’s needs, and pivot at scale. What we’ve continued to discover in 2022 is that many companies know it's important to provide a consistent, personalized customer experience, but many still struggle to incorporate the right elements of channel, content, and timing to execute a successful personalization strategy.  

Let’s explore some of the ways we’ve helped our clients establish processes that enable them to better meet their customers’ needs. 

Establishing a Single Source for Capturing First- and Zero-Party Data 

One of the major challenges marketers face is gaining a complete picture of their audience. It's important to consider that your audiences’ wants, desires, and behaviors can dramatically affect their buying habits and how they interact with your brand. Capturing these characteristics can be difficult, but not impossible.  

Implementing a Customer Data Platform (CDP) can empower your team to unify customer insights, so you can provide a consistent experience across all channels. Lev was among the first wave of partners to achieve accreditation for Salesforce’s CDP, so we are well-versed on the benefits and best practices. We’ve helped clients with CDP exploration and implementation to meet their unique business goals.  

One such client is a national shoe retailer, who was looking to improve their martech stack to enable a higher level of personalization and customer engagement. With decades of customer data scattered across disparate platforms, they reached out to us to help them create a single view of their customers that is timely, visually intuitive, and actionable.  

We worked alongside them early on in discovery to integrate several 3rd party platforms with Salesforce CDP. Their CDP was also tied to their Marketing Cloud instance, allowing them to personalize journeys and communications based on every customer touchpoint and fields collected over the years.  

By adopting CDP, this retailer experienced a:  

• 150%+ in digital revenue growth  
• 90% decrease in manual chat interventions  
  

Improving Deliverability to Break Through the Noise 

It’s important to consider performing IP warming, especially if you are just starting to build out a more robust email strategy.  

IP warming involves gradually increasing email volume sent by a new IP address to build your reputation with your ISP. This is a critical process because it helps ensure your email communications are making it to your subscribers’ inboxes.  

Another Lev client, a consumer goods company, wanted to build a comprehensive email marketing program, but when they began executing their strategy, they were disappointed in the low engagement and deliverability rates they received in part of the initial send. They didn’t want their hard work to go down the drain, so they reached out to us to help remedy the issue.  

The Lev team worked closely with them to implement an IP warming process. Throughout the engagement, we shared many deliverability tips, recommending a total list cleanse, sending to only their most engaged audiences, and placing their most compelling content into campaigns. Also, we helped put in place a deliverability report, making it easier to check for any errors during campaign sends.  

With that deliverability reporting in place, they were able to pivot as needed, empowering them to kick off their biggest and most successful email promotion ever. As a result, this company’s communications consistently have open and click-to-open rates above the industry average. 

Implementing Segmentation That Allows for Further Personalization  

While IP warming can ensure your emails make it to their inbox, it’s critical to utilize your customer data to further personalize your audience’s experiences. For your major customer segments, you should consider creating journeys that deliver dynamic content throughout their entire engagement with you and your brand.  

These segments may look different depending on your goals. Perhaps you’ve been tasked to:

• Increase sales in a particular segment  
• Decrease time to purchase  
• Improve retention

It may be tempting to blast customer segments with more communications to accomplish these goals, but it could lead to your customers being annoyed and could result in larger churn rates. It pays to be intentional.  

One of our clients, a national fashion retailer, found themselves in that tough position. With increasing sales goals, their marketing team started sending more than three emails a day to millions. As time went on, they noticed they had a declining positive sender reputation and subscriber churn increased.  

To get to the root cause, Lev worked with the team to test a subscriber segmentation strategy. The team found out that only 15% of their sender audience contributed over 70% of their total revenue. Even a smaller cohort contributed to most of the churn. This meant that a small group churning was impacting their chance to reach their most engaged 15% as their decreasing sender reputation increased the risk of their emails being categorized as spam.  

Lev and the team implemented a new strategy to send more impactful content to segments that were more likely to unsubscribe if they receive too many emails. This way, the retailer could provide more relevant communications with the right volume depending on the segments’ needs and expectations.  

With the new segmentation strategy in place, the fashion retailer was able to reach their revenue goals while sending 60% fewer emails. As a result, they:  

• Improved their customer experience 
• Reduced overall subscriber churn  
• Increased their sender reputation, which ensured their emails were making it to their subscribers’ inboxes  
  

Strengthen Your Marketing Foundation with a Trusted Partner 

By having a single source for customer data, utilizing that data to build relevant and dynamic communications, and improving deliverability, you can be better equipped to overcome any marketing challenge that comes your way.

Contact us to ensure your marketing systems and procedures enable you to pivot when necessary, so you can better meet your audiences’ needs and accomplish your goals throughout 2023.