Learning from handling customer Retention
In times today when the customer inbox is inundated with innumerable mails, PN, sms. It’s challenging to come up with communication strategy that is able to break the clutter. In this post, Here are few of learnings while handling the strategy & execution of these campaigns in travel industry and fashion industry. Though customer engagement would vary a lot from industry to industry and hard to crack as It’s like by the time you have figured out the key to lock, someone (read google) changes the lock. Yes the rules get updated very frequently and what might be working a month back won’t be working today
Domain & IP reputation — Should there be separate pipes for transactional and promotional emails. Same logic holds true for sms strategy else be ready to be firefighting customer complaints. Being consistent
Best time to send PN — We experimented all the times of day and realized sweet spot for PN is 10–11 AM, 1:30PM-2:30PM, 9–10PM. Experiments at early time of the day before 9 and during evening were a complete failure
Choosing external vendor — Next question comes is whether you should go with established vendors like sendgrid, Mailchimp, Sparkpost or go with marketing automation players in between. Established players charge heavily for their expertise.
SMS — The most expensive channel and probably the most difficult to justify in terms of ROI. Just realized ss partners are tracing sms clicks at user level as making it easy to track
Open Rate — overall open rate is roughly ~2x of what you get in first 2 hours of launch of campaigns. Timing is of paramount importance. Depending on your audience geography, avoid holidays, evening time. We found morning slot ~10 am giving best results
1st email — 1st email has be very personal and about expectation. Make sure no external links are used, even in the footer. It’s about setting customer expectation and is going to decide his future engagement based on his initial few interaction with the mails.
Image vs GIF vs Text — Text is boring while image is spammy while GIF is heavy in size? Right answer mix of these. While GIF and Image certainly has better click rates, open rates might take a hit depending on real estate consumed by GIF/image. Also many inbox like aoutlook strips of the image so ake sure alt text is there. Sweet spot was image+text format.
Triggered Mails — Which route should triggered mails be part of — transaction of promotional. Triggered will have 2–3x chances of open rate. 1 strategy is going with promotional route as it helps consistent volume of emails. Consistency in frequency of sending mail is 1 of major factors in Domai reputation
Domain or sub Domain — Should you use a domain or sub domain while sending email? The question to be asked is how updated is the subscriber list? Are the emails verified? Was anytime list contaminated with bought lists possible spam traps? How many hard bounces are happening?
If above hygiene are taken care of, best to go with Domain. Else to keep it immune to promotional experiments, go with sub domain or a new domain
Metrics to measure — If attribution is happening on the basis of clicks, it might give a misconstrued picture. Apart from Push/Inapp notification, all other channels have little gestation period and also serves the purpose of getting into consideration set of users while making a decision. Sms & email click rates are generally very low. Measure it by running control/test only with sms and see the effectiveness when no other channel was used. Send a comms only on email and it would have direct correlation with impact. Measure effectiveness of these campaign with engagement and let leads, revenues from these campaign be the secondary metrics.
