With COVID-19 accelerating the shift to digital, consumers have turned to eCommerce for their shopping needs more than ever before.
This surge in digital behavior has raised the bar for customer experience, making personalized engagement a priority for brands.
According to Accenture, 91% of consumers prefer to shop with brands that provide relevant offers and recommendations. So, it comes as no surprise that 97% of marketers reported a rise in business outcomes thanks to their personalization efforts.
It is clear that personalization in customer experience is not just another buzz term going around but a trend that is here to stay. And businesses that don’t prioritize tailored experiences for their customers run the risk of getting left behind and outperformed by their competitors.
In this interview, we talk with Nick Dimitriou, head of growth at Moosend, an email marketing automation software and a Sitecore company, about the importance of personalization and the effective, organic ways brands can incorporate personalization in their email marketing campaigns.
At the same time, Nick also discusses segmentation and how businesses can win back lost sales and customers.
Who Is Nick Dimitriou
Nick Dimitriou is the head of growth at Moosend, a Sitecore company where he leads strategy, growth and innovation across all user acquisition channels from SEO to paid and social. He is a dedicated and goal-oriented strategist passionate about solving problems by leveraging business insights and unique methods.
Spotlight: Research suggests consumers demand personalized online experiences — 55% of them like to receive emails that include relevant offers. What are effective, organic ways businesses can incorporate personalization in their email marketing campaigns?
Nick Dimitriou: Since we are in the era of personalization, businesses need to show customers exactly what they need. To do so, they can leverage product recommendation engines such as Moosend’s to anticipate customers’ needs by recommending the right product based on their past activity.
Another simple tactic is to collect information about new customers during newsletter signup. A name, birth date, or location are essential details you can use to create more personalized experiences for them.
Lastly, when businesses have access to such information, they can use marketing automation to set up sequences triggered by specific actions, such as sending a campaign during a customer’s birthday.
What role does segmentation play in driving engagement and conversion and how do email automation tools help businesses with these efforts?
Sending email blasts is an outdated tactic that no longer drives results. On the contrary, the more relevant your content is, the more engagement you’ll see. To do so, you can create segments based on specific user behaviors and actions. For example, you can find customers who keep purchasing a product every month and add them to a VIP segment to provide them with exclusive offers.
Segmenting your audience based on different criteria, such as demographics, location, etc., will help you target your customer base more effectively, showing them the content that will engage and convert them.
Segmentation is one of Moosend’s many services. How can businesses leverage the tool to deliver personalized online experiences?
Segmentation is one of Moosend’s best features as it enables businesses to engage their audience with more relevant content.
Any business that wants to segment its audience can start with newsletter signup forms. By adding different form fields, like location, gender, interests, etc., you can collect valuable information about your new subscribers and then segment them based on it.
For instance, if you add a female/male option, you can group your customers based on their gender and then create and send two different campaigns to them with relevant offers and products.
If you want to take segmentation a step further, Moosend’s feature also allows you to group your subscribers based on their engagement with your emails. So, you can group your loyal, highly-engaged customers to give them various rewards and content tailored to their needs.
Moosend was recognized as one of the fastest-growing products that users are most likely to recommend in 2022. How does the tool stand out from its competition and why is it trusted by leading brands like Gucci and Sephora?
Moosend’s strongest points have been its ease of use, quality of support and variety of features all in one place. Scalability and affordability have also been our priority when implementing changes. Compared to other platforms, we have strived to make our tool faster and more modern, redesigning the UI for a better user experience, and adding more features to allow marketers to create everything they need without purchasing additional tools.
When it comes to our trusted customers like Sephora, the brand achieved a 240% increase in email open rates and 5% in sales after using Moosend. This is the result of careful planning and the adoption of a multi-channel strategy with email marketing at the top of the new agenda. What made Sephora choose us was the powerful, AI-driven, and eCommerce-oriented features that enabled the brand to deliver personalized experiences to its customers.
How can businesses win back customers who have stopped engaging with their emails and how does Moosend’s cart abandonment feature help increase conversions and recover potential sales?
Customer disengagement is one of the most common problems that businesses face. However, with the right tools and strategies, businesses can recover their lost revenue and even increase sales.
Using Moosend’s cart abandonment feature is pretty straightforward and it’ll take just a few minutes to set up. All you have to do is create custom automation through the visual workflow editor. You can choose the trigger, which in this case will be the customer abandoning their cart, and set a specific wait time to give your shopper time to complete the purchase.
After the wait time is over, your automation will find out whether your customer proceeded with the purchase. If not, it will send them an email with an incentive, such as a discount or free shipping, to get them back to their cart and finish the checkout process.
From a dedicated help section to blogs to video courses, Moosend offers plenty of free resources to its users. Why is help content important and what’s the strategy behind these efforts?
Help content enables users to find answers to common questions that come up about a service. These pieces of content are very easy to digest, often including steps, tips, and visuals to help users solve the problem at their own pace.
Our self-serviced users are usually lifelong customers who may need to refresh their memory about some of the features or learn new strategies, especially when it comes to new blog content and video courses where our content team strives to cover everything they may need to succeed in the long term.
Moosend integrates with various leading platforms such as WooCommerce, Magento and HubSpot. How do you decide which companies to partner with and what benefits do these integrations bring to both companies and clients?
Integrations are very important to us as they ensure that all systems cooperate to increase productivity. Thus, integrating with robust and popular platforms is a no-brainer to help our customers streamline their operations. Also, it allows us to tap into their audience and acquire more users because we play well with other software.
Furthermore, if we have a lot of customers requesting a particular integration with an app then we make sure we develop it to help them have a holistic view of their customers, data, and operations.
Moosend was acquired by Sitecore in May 2021. How does Moosend complement Sitecore’s offerings and how can businesses benefit from this successful partnership?
Sitecore saw Moosend's amazing potential to expand its product offering to include email marketing which is a universal need. With this in mind, Moosend is an intuitive, easy-to-use DIY platform that typically addresses the SMB market, whereas Sitecore is geared towards a more Enterprise-level clientele.
Hence, post-acquisition they took a lot of the legacy Moosend code to create a solid foundation for the more "enterprise-level" Sitecore Send - which is the more advanced, and robust email offering that Sitecore clients like Ernst & Young, Thule and Mitsubishi have come to expect.
There’s been a rising demand for event marketing, especially as the world recovers from the pandemic. What are some email marketing best practices businesses can follow when holding events?
Event marketing has surely seen a rise post-pandemic and this is due to the lack of forging new relationships with customers. Email marketing, now, can help event planners make their events more successful. Among others, creating and sending an email invitation will help you increase your registrations and even boost the visibility of your event through referrals.
Also, sending personalized invitations will be much more effective than a generic email. Including the recipient’s name, for instance, is a simple and effective way to do so. Another best practice is to set up an automated email sequence to nurture your audience before the event with specific pieces of content, as well as send reminders to keep your event on top of their mind. And to give your event campaign greater open rates, make sure to write a compelling subject line that will intrigue your audience and make them open it at first glance.
Thank you for your time, Nick Dimitriou. Best of luck to you and Moosend!
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