Engaging consumers through email Marketing
- Kristy Sherman
Some interesting statistics
More than 80% of U.S. retail sales will still happen within the four walls of a store (McKinsey & Company)
44% of email recipients made at least one purchase last year based on a promotional email. (Convince and Convert)
80% of email subscribers are added at the Point of Sale (Paradise Pen)
Digital interactions influence 50% of in-store sales (Deloitte Digital)
91% of consumers have gone into a store based on an online experience. (Dimensional Research)
These are amazing stats and show the importance of building and use your customer mailing lists. Here is a step by step process of how to import your existing lists, some tips about growing your lists and how to activate and launch an email campaign.
Importing your existing customer list
Lets begin by gathering all your various customer lists you have and put them in an excel file, ideally you will want to have the following fields:
- Customer Number (if one exists)
- Customers First Name
- Customers Last Name (If your list has the first and last name in one field, you can use follow these instructions from Microsoft)
- Email address.
- Source of List (this can be used to group each list so you can later track it)
- Linked Account 1 (to link the activity to another account spouse/family member/duplicate)
- Linked Account 2 (to link the activity to another account spouse/family member/duplicate)
- City (to run activity reports by Location)
Once you list has been gathered you are now ready to organize and import the list using the Advanced User Import. You may review your list and say its not large enough or perfect enough, don't let that dissuade you from doing your first campaign (Remember the statistics above 44% of email recipients make at least one purchase based on a promotional email).
Building a list
So what's the best way to build a list? Ask at the point of sale
This method is particularly effective when combined with incentives like discounts and offers. Activate CRM Builder to start prompting your cashiers to ask customers if they would like to be added to your list to receive special offers; Paradise Pen Co. actually collect 80% of their customer emails in-store. Combine this with incentives using gift cards or loyalty and start not only building your list, but also tracking SKU level and transactional data about your customers. Remember to set up static and frequency groups to get even more insight on your customer habits, do they respond to discounts or certain product mixes? When you create these special offers use the club pricing feature to automatically have eligible customer groups automatically receive that offer once they are linked to a transaction.
Offers and discounts are not the only motivation for consumers to get added to a mailing list, many retailers use early access to new products as an incentive to successfully build their list. As you get to know more about your customers, you can tailor campaigns specifically based on their shopping habits or even by using the New For You capability on the TabPOS. For those using the recommendation item prompt, these recommendations also get more targeted the more you know about the customer.
Activating Mailchimp and Launching a Campaign
You can begin by activating mailchimp under the Integrations tab in the Configuration Menu when signed in as the system administrator. If you do not see it, please contact us via chat or by sending an email to support@retailcloud.com to have it activated for you.
