E-Marketing:  Reach your audience

Your business has a wide assortment of products and there is a great deal of interest in what you have to offer.  Sales are excellent and there is some buzz about your company.  But don’t think you can relax now!  The market moves fast and you want to be able to reach your customers and keep them interested.

WCEM offers many ways to do just that.

In this blog I will describe several ways to reach your customers and keep them wanting more.  Let’s begin with discounts.  Everyone loves a good bargain!

Campaigns

Keep your discounts fresh by updating them often.  You can create campaigns and offer a discount either on a single product, a category of products or even on every item you have in the store.  All you need to do is go to the discounts section of the campaign and assign the right discount conditions.  In the example illustrated below, we’re offering 30% off the price assigned to products of a specific category, such as televisions, and it is a personalized offer targeted to a specific market segment due to having a target group assigned in the campaign determination condition.  In addition, those customers would have to pay no shipping fees.

     Illustration 1: Campaign discounts.

You’d rather have your customers hunt for bargains?  All you need to do is create a public campaign, assign it a coupon code and let an affiliate marketing firm distribute it to a larger network of customers via various social networking sites.

     Illustration 2: Assigning a coupon code to a campaign.

These coupons can be entered in multiple places in the web shop and provide the rewarding feeling of seeing a price get slashed, only to reveal a lower one right below.  You can customize the shop to accept multiple promotions or restrict them to one per customer.

One caveat is that the web shop must be setup with dynamic or mixed pricing to work with campaigns.  You can learn more about these options in the “Pricing Engines” blog.  This is applicable only to the catalog and the java basket.  In the case of the backend cart and checkout, the campaigns will work automatically.

Newsletters and Customer profiles

Email marketing is a complex topic; there is a whole science behind it.  How do you ensure that your mail is not just skipped over and how do you keep the customer interested in what you have to say?  WCEM offers some features to help your business to be heard.  Customers can subscribe to newsletters from the web shop directly and to ensure that they do not start receiving emails by mistake we offer three types of subscription methods:

• Simple Opt-In
• Confirmed Opt-In
• Double Opt-In

Simple Opt-In is the most straightforward method.  As soon as the customer subscribes, newsletters will start being sent to the email address specified in the user information.  However, if your business wishes to send a confirmation email about the subscription, the confirmed opt-in option can be chosen.  If you absolutely want no customer complaints about spam, double opt-in is the best choice.  In this case, once the customer subscribes, an email is sent out to which a reply is expected for a second confirmation before the newsletters start being sent. 

But how do you ensure that the right information is sent to the right people?  For this, customer profiles can be used, allowing you to define a set of marketing attributes that will help you know your customers.  You wouldn’t want to send offers about meat products to a vegetarian customer.  An attribute set can be assigned to a web shop and the values chosen by the user will be saved in the business partner’s marketing attributes.

Target groups can then be created from these attributes which in turn can be assigned to campaigns and many other marketing objects.

     Illustration 3: Segmenting BPs based on their interest.

Now you’ll be able to send offers and general information to the market segments of your choice.

Loyalty

For the customers who aren’t bargain seekers, but still like to get some extra value for their purchase, WCEM offers loyalty management.  Customers can enroll in a loyalty program, manage their accounts and use their rewards to receive discounts when shopping online.  The settings to enable loyalty within your shop are quite simple.  There are only two mandatory settings: the loyalty ID and the point type you wish to use.

     Illustration 4: Loyalty management settings in WCB.

The first step for a customer to enjoy all the benefits associated with your loyalty program is to become a member.  A good approach is offering some incentive such as setting up a campaign giving out bonus points upon registration, which of course can be sent to select customers only.  The same result can be achieved by setting up a BRF+ rule which gets triggered upon registration.

The WCEM catalog has the ability to display bonus points on products which can be earned on purchase, and this information is displayed to all customers visiting the site.  You can use this type of promotion strategy to shift focus to higher margin products or assist with inventory control.  To assign bonus points to products, you have to assign a loyalty settype and maintain the “EARN” scenario.

     Illustration 5: Maintaining bonus points for products

Finally we come to redemption, or the way customers can use the points they have accumulated.  Points can be used as currency during the checkout step by entering the amount desired in the payment section.  Mixed payment is supported where the customer can enter points in conjunction with a monetary sum. If you require tighter control over the breakage point, you can set up rules to generate point consuming vouchers when a certain amount of points has been accrued.  This strategy along with an expiration policy can help you predict your velocity of earning more precisely.

Advanced Product Recommendations

In WCEM 2.0, we’ve enhanced the capabilities of our recommendation engine to take into account the wisdom of the crowd.  You can now mine data from BW to predict which recommendation will be more effective when displayed as cross-selling or Top N proposals.

Flexible analysis models from BW can build the recommendations and export them to CRM as cross-selling rules which can be personalized by the assignment of a target group.  

     Illustration 6: Steps to send mined recommendation to CRM.

Of course, these steps can be scheduled as jobs to run every so often to keep the information current.  By displaying more relevant and dynamically updated products to the customer you can expect to see an increase in sales.

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