For eCommerce retailers, a key way to stay ahead of the competition and ensure success is through the use of differentiation and personalization. The idea behind this is simple: site visitors want to give their business to companies that solve their problems or provide them exactly what they are looking for, and they want their interactions with that company to be unique - nobody wants to feel like they are just another face in the crowd. One way that online retailers can achieve this is through effective segmentation and, specifically, through the use of smart CTAs as part of their inbound marketing strategy.
The Basics
Smart CTAs are calls-to-actions that are customized for each viewer based on specific information such as:
- The contact’s stage in the buyer’s journey
- Their personal contact properties
- What device they are viewing the retailer’s site from.
They can be used across the board - in emails, landing pages, or on website pages themselves - as effective, targeted eCommerce marketing tools. The main benefit? As part of a larger contextual marketing effort, they’re a quick and hands-off way to segment content and give site visitors marketing material that is relevant and interesting to them. This, in turn, often increases click-through rates by 100% or more. Also, though they can seem complicated to create, they are rather straightforward if an eCommerce retailer is working on a robust and supportive CRM - once they are properly set up, they do the work themselves.
SEE ALSO: Better Marketing: Understanding the Inbound Commerce Methodology
Smart CTAs in Action
EYEMAGINE used smart CTAs as a part of larger marketing campaigns with the clients Mr. Beer and Personal Wine. Looking first at Mr. Beer, the smart CTA appeared in an email, showing a unique call-to-action to customers based on their personal beer flavor preferences. If a customer indicated that they preferred stouts, for example, they would see the stout version in their inbox, while another customer who preferred ales would see different content. Overall, this campaign was extremely successful, contributing to a 25% increase in Mr. Beer’s site traffic over the previous year and a 3.04% increase in revenue.
For Personal Wine, we created a call-to-action for their blogs that showed differently to blog visitors based on their lifecycle stage. If they were a new visitor, for example, they’d see the offer on the left inviting them to take 15% off their first purchase. If they had already made a purchase in the past, the offer on the right invited them to visit the shop and create a custom wine bottle. Both of these CTAs indicate scarcity and create a sense of urgency, utilizing effective language to further entice viewers to click through and redeem.
Both of the Personal Wine CTAs performed well, with the new customer version having a click-through rate of 3.31% and the version for returning customers having an even higher rate of 5.31%. Why? This, again, has to do with personalization and giving the customers content that they want to see. While this kind of segmentation takes more initial attention and effort, it is ultimately one of the most effective, targeted marketing strategies out there, one that - when done correctly - leads to increases in traffic, conversions and lifetime value of customers.
