Every customer loved to be surprised by a special promotion now and then — especially when it offers a discount on an item they’d already been thinking about buying. Since promotional emails tend to generate higher CTRs than other types of content, it’s no surprise that many marketers turn to promotions when their sales are in need of a boost, or when they’re aiming to move inventory of a specific product.
But despite the likelihood of a boost in click-throughs, every promotion also represents a possible missed opportunity to sell the item at full price. This begs an obvious question:
How can you know when a promotion is necessary to close the sale — and when each customer is willing to buy without a markdown?
A promotion miscalculation can add up to surprising amounts of lost value. For example, if 30,000 of your subscribers purchase an item through an email offering a $5 discount, but 20,000 of those customers would’ve been willing to buy the same item at full price, you’ve actually sacrificed $100,000 in profit for a comparatively small uptick in gross sales.
The challenge, of course, is that there’s no way to know in advance which of your customers will buy at full price — at least, not until now.
Coherent Path’s intelligent email marketing automation software designs self-optimizing campaigns for every customer on your list — adapting in real time to serve up personalized mixes of product emails, editorial assets, and other content geared to connect with each customer’s tastes and aspirations.
These personalized campaigns build deeper brand loyalty than traditional segmented content — helping you capture more revenue by reducing email promotions.
Start with your customers’ goals, then work backward to find the ideal content mix.
Most email campaigns begin with a set of strategic objectives determined in advance. For example, your marketing team might be assigned to increase sales of spring wardrobe items, or to get last season’s overstocked inventory off the shelves. But while objectives like these may make perfect sense from your brand’s perspective, they’re not always aligned with your customers’ current interests.
When you take your brand’s sales goals as starting points for campaign planning, your customers are likely to feel bombarded by emails that fail to speak to their personal journeys. Their loyalty to your brand may take a nosedive, and many might hit the “unsubscribe” button, or simply mark your emails as spam. As a result, you’ll be forced to turn to promotional emails to recover sales — sacrificing revenue you could’ve captured if you’d started with your customers’ goals, and built personalized content mixes around those aspirations.
Although this isn’t a practical undertaking if you approach it manually (especially if your subscriber list numbers in the millions), it becomes very straightforward when you let an automated machine learning solution analyze your customer database. Let your customers’ actions drive the content mixes they receive, and you’ll find your subscribers are far more responsive to non-promotional messaging.
Set guardrail rules to keep each campaign aligned with your strategic objectives.
Even when you allow your customers to shape the content they receive, you’re still responsible for meeting the strategic goals you’ve been assigned to achieve. What’s more, you’ve got to make sure your automated campaigns avoid mistakes you know better than to make — such as sending emails featuring autumn apparel in emails sent out in the spring season.
Issues like these are easy to avoid, though, by setting guardrail rules in your personalization software. For example, you might tell the machine never to feature men’s and women’s jackets in the same email, or to make sure every email promoting camping gear also links to your guide on choosing the best tent. Rules like these help ensure that every personalized campaign stays aligned with your strategic objectives, and consistently works toward the targets you’re aiming for.
Deliver a balanced content diet that only serves up promotions when they’ll click.
Coherent Path’s software draws on your internal library of product promotions, guides, how-tos, and other content, to tailor unique content mixes around each subscriber’s behavior — building loyalty that doesn’t depend on discounts.
At the same time, our solution gives you total control over the parameters of every personalized campaign — from send dates to content mixes. That means you’re able to target every individual subscriber with the content most likely to connect with them at each moment — reducing reliance on email promotions without sacrificing overall sales. And best of all, Coherent Path’s individualized content diets help guide customers toward higher-value product categories over time — cultivating lifelong customer relationships that expand far beyond the boundaries of any single campaign.