Whatever product you’re selling, having access to first-party data will considerably improve your sales, given that you use this data correctly. In previous articles, we’ve touched on how vital sourcing accurate customer information is. Despite being a hefty task, there are many ways business owners can manage to collect authentic first-party data.
Many retail businesses are facing less foot traffic and a significant decrease in sales, and often the reason lies in choosing the wrong channels of communication with their clientele. Marketers are now exploring more creative channels for interaction with their potential and existing customers. While the contents don’t change significantly, there are many new mediums to explore.
Mobile marketing is on the rise
The typical internet user is desensitized to paid ads. Moreover, nearly half of the respondents in a study conducted by Harris Interactive, stated that they ignore banner ads altogether, especially when they aren’t presented to them at a comfortable time. Furthermore, it seems that for the average user, ignoring banners has become somewhat of a cognitive instinct.
Mobile marketing, on the other hand, is a valuable medium that users tend to take seriously — SMS messages have a staggering 98% open rate, compared to less than 20% of open rate for emails in the retail industry, depending on the industry.
The versatility of text messaging
By personally collecting phone numbers and email addresses from their customers, businesses can meaningfully interact with them via text messaging or email marketing.
SMS
There are many short message types that are currently popular among retail marketers. Distributing them is beneficial to both businesses and their recipients.
The latter enjoy quick and valuable information about products that interest them, whereas the former can collect even more first-party data about their customers’ preferences while getting their message across. Here are the most common message types distributed by retail marketers:
- Special offers, holiday discounts, last-minute offers
- Text alerts for sales events.
- Mobile coupons
- SMS gift cards
- Delivery confirmation
While sending your customers promotions and special offers is a wildly successful means of communication, it’s by far not everything that text message marketing has in store. Retail marketers have seen a 3000% ROI on SMS campaigns. Test your company’s potential sms results using our ROI Calculator.
Short codes
Short codes have been a popular means of interaction between businesses and their customers for quite a while. Just like SMS messaging, short codes are impressively efficient. Retail marketers can use first-party data that has been collected at the POS to interact with customers, but also to collect other data from their requests and interactions with the consumers.
It’s safe to say that business-to-customer communication shouldn’t be lasered in on a single channel. By diversifying their approach, retail marketers will be able to experience the benefits of each channel and also provide their customers with the possibility to choose their preferred means of communication.
iMessage
An Apple-exclusive — iMessage provides marketers with all the benefits of text messaging, along with impressive extended functionalities like link preview and integrated images. This provides for a much more engaging and interactive layout medium, compared to just plain text messages.
The significant change came in 2016, when users were finally able to open links to images in iMessage directly, instead of having to be redirected to Safari, in order to open the image, which is obviously a very disruptive process.
Furthermore, Apple’s native messaging app can also play multimedia messages too. So in case you’re feeling adventurous, you can integrate videos and audio messages into your iMessage strategy as well.
Facebook messaging
The reason Facebook Messenger provides businesses with impressive results is that it makes commerce more personal. Furthermore, it’s an excellent vessel for providing your clientele with interactive messages as well. Due to the more engaging nature of these exchanges, Messenger offers an open rate that is almost 250% greater than an average email, and a 620% higher click rate.
Similar to short codes, Messenger is a fantastic medium for collecting data from your customers/audience.
Here are just a few ways you can optimize the communication with your customers via Messenger, while being able to collect supplementary first-party data from these interactions. You can:
- Replace feedback and poll forms with Messenger bots.
- Distribute invitations to live events or in-store promotions.
- Deliver blog content via chat.
- Re-engage customers with relevant ads.
- Ensure impeccable customer support.
Email marketing
Despite being a fairly old medium, email still appears to be among the most popular channels for marketers to reach out to their clients. Despite not being able to boast about stellar open rates, the email does provide a good ROI. Some marketers report a 44:1 return-on-investment ratio on their email marketing campaigns.
The wrap-up
First-party data, when used correctly, will provide businesses with massive benefits. Besides the obvious, but highly important increase in sales, marketers apply first-party data to collect even more customer information from interacting with them, thus engaging customers even more.
Accumulating more detailed and intricate information about your clients’ preferences will let you tailor more personalized and highly attractive ads, meaningful B2C interactions, along with valuable promotions and offers.