By Joanna Track, Founder at Good Eggs & Co, Sweetspot.ca and eLUXE

How do you establish and grow durable relationships with your customers? Over the last few years, many brands — especially in the hyper-competitive world of e-commerce — have sought to answer this question through free, value-added content. This has been effective, but such methods are limited by the extent to which brands know their audience. Fortunately for marketers, new technologies are now emerging that enable one to know their audience on a much more personal and actionable level than was previously possible.

The key to building any relationship is knowing the person with whom you’re interacting. This is obvious when you’re interacting with a person in person, as a person. But things get trickier when you’re a company speaking to thousands or millions of people through mediums like blogs, advertising, social media and the like. Still, brands must try.

Through useful, inspiring and informative content, brands attract and retain valuable repeat customers. For example, fashion retailers offer glossy look books and styling tips, which many people find compelling. But when everybody is offering high-calibre content, the pressure to distinguish your brand is intense. Yet there’s only so far that good graphic design, well-shot photography and witty copy can go.

Great creative is fundamental to great content. But it’s only part of the equation. For better results, you need to know who your audience is and what they want so that you can deliver it to them. Ironically, though brands now have access to huge amounts of data via social media, website traffic and transaction history, they’re still too often left with a rather fuzzy impression of who their customers are and what they want.

Let’s consider the example of a person who clicked on scarves on your website. Content that focuses on fall fashion will likely be relevant to this person, but probably not much more relevant than the content everybody else is offering them. If you have a more holistic idea of who they are as a person that goes beyond ‘scarf-clicker’, you’ll be in a much better position to create content that attracts and retains their attention.

What else do people who clicked on scarves like aside from fall fashion? Presumably, something! If you know what that something is, you can create the kind of content and offers that stand out in their inbox or Facebook feed. If you can consistently do this, you’ll win the attention of your audience. When you consistently win the attention of your audience, you achieve retention. With better retention, you’ll have more repeat business and earn higher lifetime value from each customer.

New developments in the world of predictive analytics and personalization are enabling brands to finally get a handle on their data so that they can go beyond fuzzy impressions and answer real questions about their customers such as, “What do scarf-clickers like aside from fall fashion?”. This works. An Experian study found that personalized emails generate six times the transaction rate of non-personalized emails, for instance.

At Good Eggs & Co, we’re always looking for tools that can help our clients connect with their customers better in order to build sales and retention. By utilizing the personalization tools offered by Coherent Path, for example, we’ve already seen significant lift for one of our clients. A win win for us and our clients!

About Joanna Track
Joanna is the co-founder of Good Eggs & Co, a consultancy dedicated to helping brands hatch new ideas to build their businesses. She is best known for her prior entrepreneurial pursuits, Sweetspot.ca and eLUXE, two of Canada’s most well known online destinations for women.

Joanna has over 20 years experience in marketing, business strategy, branding and advertising. After earning a BA in Mathematics at the University of Western Ontario and an MBA in Finance at Schulich School of Business, she has become one of the most well-known and respected digital entrepreneurs in Canada.

About Good Eggs & Co
To launch a successful project, whether it’s a new brand or an e-commerce site, you need the highest quality ingredients.
We are the good eggs that help your business succeed.
We have over 40 years experience combined–across business management, marketing, digital media, e-commerce and creative services. Our standards are high (just ask our husbands), and our passion is to build brands with great purpose.

At Good Eggs & Co., we help you by selecting and managing the best talent for your particular project. We have an amazing team of dedicated freelancers, partners and vendors ready to get to work (you could say they’re the best eggs in the coop).

Visit: http://goodeggsandco.com