Hey,

First of all, I wanted to reach out and send my best wishes to you and your loved ones. These are crazy and difficult times straight out of a sci-fi movie.

Similarly to me, you are probably working from home thinking about your customers and how you can help them. Maybe you are even thinking about how to tweak your offering to account for these difficult times. Hopefully this magazine helps you with answering some of these questions.

These are times where your customers expect you to understand them, show empathy and lean on your long-term relationship. Based on our experience working with hundreds of CRM teams around the globe, here are three tips on how you can do this:

Personalize to help – research shows customers react positively when they believe a message is intended to provide help, but negatively when a message is intended to prove how well you know them. Help personalization includes content that reassures customers, teaches them something new, or directs them to where they can find helpful products and information.
Anticipate customer needs – Lean into your customer data to anticipate your customer needs. For example, if you have products that customers purchase regularly, identify customers who bought these and reach out with a replenishment email at an earlier time than usual. They will appreciate you noticing them and making the extra effort.
Don’t take advantage– As simple as it may seem, this is not the time to send pushy offers. Prioritizing long-term relationship building over short-term profit gains can help put your brand in a better position when things return to normal. Be considerate of your customers and offer value over a sale. Delay non-critical promotions you had planned and replace them with relationship-building ones. These can be updated regarding new forms of purchasing products or tips on how to be financially responsible in these times.

This is also the time to double down on your retention efforts while considering lowering acquisition ones. Many of our users have begun shifting budgets away from paid and into owned channels in order to control costs. You have probably thought about it yourself.

I’m providing some more detail and tips below, but if you want to have a 1-on-1 talk, I’m only a reply away.

Cheers,

Shai Frank, VP of Product

Identify and act on interaction opportunities

Now more than ever it is time to let your customers know you are thinking of them. Think about moments in time when your customers come into contact with you and are ready to welcome them.

For example, replace your promotional website pop-up message with one that welcomes returning visitors with a warm message or trade out that weekly email with a personal conversational note.

Help customers find their preferred products

Use Optimove’s customer explorer to identify customers with specific behaviors that might now be interrupted. For example, communicate to in-store purchasers which of their preferred products can also be bought online. You can use Optimove’ssegmentation layers to find customers with certain preferences or habits.

As mentioned above, this is also a great opportunity to be proactive regarding replenishment offers. UsePurchase History or Game History to identify and reach out to buyers of specific products based on each one’s respective buying frequency. If you don’t have a common timeframe, this video includes some tips on how to identify when a customer is due to come back soon.

Focus on long-term relationships

Optimove isn’t called a “relationship marketing hub” for nothing. Use this time to focus on building trust with your customers, even if this sacrifices some short-term revenues. For example, pause promotional campaigns and replace them with content campaigns that include tips on how to better use or take care of your products.

Adapt your marketing mix – but do it smartly

One final tip. Many companies around the world are cutting their marketing costs by replacing paid channels such as advertising and doubling down on owned channels such as email and mobile push.

However, you shouldn’t overdo your own channels. For example, companies indiscriminately sending emails to all their database have begun to find their emails in “quarantine” blockers, not even showing up in Spam or Junk folders.

To avoid this, review your automated templates to make sure they are consistent with the current situation and stop any that aren’t necessary, and also segment customers further to ensure only those who have a real reason or need to receive each message do so.

If you are increasing your email send, our email experts have combined a list of does and don’ts in last week’s blog.

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