E-Mail Marketing & Shopping In-Store. 2 Things That Are Awful and How I Would Fix Them
The next time you go out with your friends, ask them what they think about email advertising and going to the mall to shop in store. I bet you will get a ton of “wow, those are just terrible” and for the most reserved types, maybe a “well, there are some good things to them, but….” Find me a person that does cartwheels over these things and lunch is on me. Yes, I am good for it.
Recently, I have had the opportunity to engage with a few firms that are entirely dependent on one or both of these things and they continue to swear by them. During these conversations, questions came up such as “how do we get more people into our store before Amazon puts us out of business?” or “how do we get better performance from our emails to offset declining sales?” A natural and rapid response is ‘email sucks’ and ‘retail brick and mortar is dead.’ However, the facts suggest otherwise.
People use email. People want to go into the store. This is across all age groups — and especially Millennials. I’ll spare you the boredom of statistics & research, but if you want them, send me a message and I’ll gladly share. Yet, despite people preferring email for marketing outreach to all other forms of digital communications and people’s innate social desire to get out of the house and get to the store, the walls are crumbling. For the record, I was tremendously surprised by the findings. I actually enjoy getting out to the stores and seeing things in person and making a day out of it with my family. I was grateful to learn that I was not wandering off the cliffs of insanity and part of a dying breed of consumers.
I started to think and really pay attention to email marketing and what was going on in the stores and here is what I would do.
The EMail Solution — Please Have a Genuine Conversation with Me
People do not dislike emails. They dislike emails that they do not want to see or are not relevant to them. Many merchants have been spending mega bucks trying to increase the number of messages that actually get to the consumer’s inbox. I learned that in the USA, 3 or 4 out of 10 emails sent just end up in the spam quarantine or junk mail folder. The upside for merchants to tackle that problem can be easily measured. Say for every 100 emails sent out, a merchant gets 10 desired action (10% conversion). In reality, only 70 of those 100 are making it to the inbox. Spending a few bucks to increase deliverability to 100% (not sure that is ever possible) would now mean the merchant would theoretically see 14% conversion (since 100 are now being seen rather than 70). That is a pretty significant increase. Problem solved, right?
Well, perhaps not. Emails going into spam filters and junk mail folders are often the results of algorithms and other technology mail servers and broad-based consumer providers like GMAIL use to help their customers. Servers will tweak these formulas and if your email does not meet the criteria, bang, the email never gets seen. But, what if, rather than trying to trick the algorithms to sneak an email passed the goalie, we focused on getting people what they wanted?
For example, I received an email from an auto supply store about a special on batteries. Why would they randomly think I need a battery? Especially when I go into the store and spend a good hour lingering around the car cleaning supply aisle and reading the label on every new Armor All product? For the batteries, they do not even know what kind of car I have or when I last replaced the battery. If they did, they surely would not have sent me that email — with the WRONG battery. A specialty foods retailer that sends absolutely beautiful emails — I can’t stop buying pickles from them. Yet, I get a seemingly daily email about hot dogs or popcorn. Can I tell you how much popcorn I have bought from them? You guessed it — zero. Can you please just tell me you got a new type of pickle in? I may not even ask for a discount — I’ll just want to buy it now. End result in a perfect world, I get an offer based on something I actually have purchased before and am interested in and MAYBE, I whitelist the sender. Kiss algorithms goodbye — goalie pulled — now just send me the stuff I want and run up the score with me.
The good news is, thanks to digital and the very features these email programs have built in, this personalized interaction can be done. Segment customers — perhaps even down to a 1-on-1 level. Yes, it’s a lot of hard work. Marketing automation and AI aren’t quite there yet to do everything for every customer, so merchants, get your hands dirty. Develop more creative, more segments, maybe even pick out high-indexing customers and write an actual 1-on-1 email to them with a special offer or relevant product.
Retail — Please Treat Me Like a Real Friend
Going to the store is fun and has been since the inception of human history. We do not like to just sit in our homes. If we did, we never would have made it across the Bering Strait into the Americas. Today, if all we wanted to do was sit on our homes and have machines do everything for us, then ticket sales for NFL games would be plummeting and not skyrocketing. So, since we are social creatures and do not enjoy being exclusively chained to our homes, why are retailer profits fading? It’s easy to blame the big bad Internet, but again, research suggests otherwise.
People want to go into the store. They begin research online with the intent of going to see the product face-to-face or to ask questions. Yet, at some point, the experience falls short. Sure, it’s a drive and takes a few minutes out of your day, but that’s never stopped anyone from doing it before. Even today, people are willing to endure longer commutes for jobs and to drive further to try new things. I suppose if you are a $300 an hour billing machine and are 24/7 in motion, then stopping that to go to a store makes no sense. In that case, time is really money.
You know what makes retail terrible? Walking into a store and immediately being accosted by a salesperson. Or strolling through the mall to have a salesperson force a brochure or skin care sample into your hands. Enough of that discomfort, and everyone is out. No fun is worth that annoyance, so instead, stay home and buy online. I was in Target the other day and to conserve labor costs, they had only 2 cashiers working the registers. Each line had 6 people waiting. Bad news and I am talking about it here which even if one person reads this article, that bad customer experience is going to reach you.
We know many consumers research online. We know many consumers want to go into a store. Rather than treating every customer the same, treat your customers like friends. If you are an electronics retailer, allow people to browse the catalog and maybe loosely schedule an appointment with a representative or salesperson. When the customer arrives, that salesperson can be waiting for them to greet them and already be prepared with the items you were looking at. Imagine as a customer meeting your host as you entered? That would be worth a smile. If a customer declined wanting any assistance in the store, then do not approach them. Keep an eye out or maybe send a friendly email or push notification that you have a personal salesperson and he will leave you be unless you call.
Technology also makes this customer utopia a reality. Building user-first features into web sites, leveraging mobile tracking & iBeacons on mobile apps and timely, relevant messages based on the things the user needs and wants.
We love email. We love going to the store. We just don’t like those things when it stresses us out. Let’s fix it!
