Welcome back!

The air is getting warmer, and the days are getting longer… it’s almost summer!

At Beyond 9to5, we love the summertime, but we also know it’s not for everyone. Some people hate the humidity, the sweat, the bugs - and that’s okay!

Everyone’s got unique preferences and not just when it comes to their favorite season.

When it comes to your customers, everyone’s got their own opinion too, so we figured we’d spend this month talking about how to best meet everyone’s unique preferences. In one broad term, we’ll be focusing on customer relationship management.

As always, you can find this week’s marketing strategy just past News and Tools.

Let’s dive in! 🔥

News

Tools + Productivity

Strategy

According to Salesforce research, 66% of consumers expect companies to understand their unique needs and expectations, and 52% expect all offers to be personalized.

Consumers want to feel like you actually know what they want, and in the age of big data, finding out what they want has never been easier.

The problem is, consumers also don’t want you to know too much. If you use information about your customers that they don’t realize you have, or without getting a clear picture of their wants and needs, the odds are good your efforts will backfire and you will alienate them.

If done well, personalization is a fantastic feedback loop: you make a personalized ad, your customer is more likely to engage with it, by engaging with the ad they offer insights into their identity (location, preferences, demographic, etc), ultimately making it easier to personalize their next email.

How to Collect Data
There are many ways to collect data, and the strategies differ depending on what kind of data you hope to collect.

One of the most useful methods for tracking data is by leveraging UTM parameters. UTM stands for Urchin Tracking Module.

Urchin was originally a web analytics software, developed by Urchin Software Corporation and designed to track the behavior of unique website visitors. Google bought it in 2005 and the acquisition led to the creation of Google Analytics, which became the most popular web data analytics tool across the internet.

These days, the UTM tagging is an analytics tool used by marketers to track the impact of their online marketing efforts. For instance, UTM tags allow you to discover which channels bring the most sales conversions to your website.

It’s made up of tags, which you add to the end of a link, to track and analyze the given page’s traffic sources.

If you still don’t quite know what we’re talking about, try clicking on any link in this newsletter. If you then go up to the URL in the searchbar, you will likely see the phrase “UTM” a few times.

The hosting platform we use, Beehiiv, offers this tagging tool to help us see which source our readers are coming from (inbox vs. website) and which article or campaign the link was in.

In the above example, provided by Hootsuite, you can see that the UTM tags attached to different links allow the marketing company to tell where their clicks are coming from, LinkedIn, Instagram, or other sources.

Other ways to get insights on consumer preferences is through A/B testing, which is the practice of sending out two different versions of a campaign and seeing which performs better.

Additionally, a less sophisticated way to extract data but reliable nonetheless, is by just asking your customers what they like or who they are. Surveys are always your friend, and if you add an incentive like discounts or special offers, they are sure to see greater engagement.

How to Use Data
Once you have useful data on your customers, it all comes down to how you use it.

To begin with, you can use the data to segment your marketing campaigns.

Aside from starting an email with “Hey [name],” you can actually break your audience into different buckets based on their unique preferences.

Imagine a clothing company, take H&M for example. Let’s pretend the fast fashion giant just rolled out a new line of children’s clothing.

It wouldn’t make sense for them to email everyone on their mailing list about it. Instead, they’d want to target their marketing to middle-aged women, who are the most likely to have young children.

By using the data they have on their customers to segment their marketing campaigns, they can be more efficient with their efforts and not bother the customers who are unlikely to purchase particular products.

Similarly, Dutch airline KLM segments their customer base by behavioral tendencies. For example, the frequent flyers get automatically subscribed to loyalty reward campaigns.

By offering rewards to their most loyal customers, KLM increases the likelihood that their most lucrative customers will keep coming back.

By the Numbers

1. Segmented email campaigns drive 30% more opens and 50% more click-throughs than unsegmented ones.

2. The most effective strategy for email marketing campaigns is subscriber segmentation (78%).

3. Marketers who segment email lists increase email marketing revenue by 760%.

4. 4 out of 5 marketers personalize subscriber profile data and 64% use customer segments.

Source: Sender

Looking Ahead
To leave you with one piece of advice: start collecting data! Big Data gets a bad rap for using personal information irresponsibly, but if your customers are willing to share their preferences with you to help them shop better, then by all means, use it! Leveraging tools like UTM tagging to segment your audiences and personalize their advertising experience will make your marketing campaigns more effective and more capital efficient.

Next week we’ll be diving into the customer journey, from that first marketing email to the moment they click “purchase.” Be on the lookout for us in your inbox in seven days!

For a sneak peak into the rest of the month, check below:

Advertising 101
Week 1: Personalization (This Week)
Week 2: Customer Journey
Week 3: Engagement
Week 4: Feedback

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