Home Depot is the largest home improvement chain globally, with over 2,200 retail stores. It’s a top Fortune 500 company focused on helping customers to build and improve their homes. To stay competitive, leaders on the marketing team decided to step up and implement more tailored communications.
Because Home Depot has numerous physical stores, an online store, and so much inventory, creating a personal experience for customers was going to be a challenge. Yet despite these odds, Home Depot found a way to shift to an omnichannel marketing approach, both in-store and online.
Find out how Home Depot marketers used their knowledge and experience, along with Emarsys, to create personalized experiences for every customer.
How to Get Buy-In from the C-Suite
One of the most challenging aspects of acquiring new marketing technology for improving a brand is getting buy-in from the C-suite. Sometimes the best way to get the budget required to enhance a brand is by simply explaining to company leaders how the tech aligns with the brand’s strategy.
“This is a very, very important tip for anyone trying to put together their online business strategy: when you go with your management team, your top management team, and try to explain things […] based on technology topics, or whatever, that they aren’t very familiar with, you’re going to struggle with it. But if you put that under what they know, having the analogy of your core business strategy, I think that’s something that will resonate in their brains, and you’ll get a lot of buy-in with that.”
Personalization
The more you know about your customer, the better. First-party data collected from customers within various touchpoints along their journey (both online and offline) is unique to each brand. Compared with second- or third-party data, this type of information provides greater depth and rich info about customers, which you can use for personalized omnichannel experiences that form lasting customer relationships.
By identifying shopping behavior, product affinity, and many fascinating insights, you can more easily tailor an individual shopper’s experience to suit them best 一 which results in higher conversion rates on products recommended based on these insights.
The right 1:1 personalization enables your brand to stand out from competitors and encourage customer loyalty.
“So, we’ve been using this to deliver a personalized product offering[s] in different channels. So with the help of the suite, the help of Emarsys, we can put this personalization out there on our emails, on our website, on Facebook, and Google 一 with the CRM ads feature. So that’s how we’ve been approaching [personalization] for the last, probably, two to three years. So let me give you one example.[…] Using the Smart Insight solution from Emarsys, we put together an automated/segmented campaign within the platform that considers complexity. […] Customer website behavior, the product category they’re interested in, and whatever other key data or attributes you need to put in there, in order to trigger automated workflows that are relevant to a specific segment or customer. So that’s complex, but when you have a tool like Emarsys, you have a lot of the job, that complex job, it’s to program it and put it into the platform. That needs brain power behind planning and all that; it’s not automated. […] But once you have the strategy, go to the platform, and configure it there, and let it go. That’s the easy part. So that’s how we are using the offline data together with the online data, and we are now able to provide, for example, different email campaigns to different segments of customers. But it is just one effort from the team that is doing one campaign. We change a little bit of the parts of the communication based on what the algorithms are learning about that specific customer.”
Loyalty
The goal of every retail marketer is the same: deliver exceptional experiences so your customers keep returning to your brand.
In an oversaturated e-commerce market, loyalty is vital for better business outcomes and can be incentivized through personalized experiences that keep customers coming back. Here’s an interesting fact: loyal customers spend 67% more on products and services vs new buyers.
“So the only way customers demonstrate loyalty is by incrementing their frequency, their ticket with you, or whatever. So without data, personalization efforts, or automation, it is almost impossible to provide them [a] relevant and a great customer experience when they are shopping with you. Or when they go to your website to look for whatever information they need and then go to a store. Doesn’t matter where they buy, just [that] they buy from you, right?”
Automation and More Time
As a marketer, the more time you can save on tasks, the more time you’ll have to actually work on your strategy and keep up with the ever-changing market. By leveraging marketing automation, you can not only improve customer retention and increase your brand’s bottom line, but also save your team a heaping amount of time.
“The work, it’s almost done, and the tool, it’s automating. So then […] the productivity of the team starts ramping now, exponentially. Why? Because they can be focused on analyzing the profitability of each of the campaigns. They can do more maintenance to those campaigns, focus on seasonal events, pushing a little bit, some of the messages inside the automated workflow. So, it is a matter of not only how you can save some time [for] your actual team, but how you can do more things with the same thing. So, that’s an exponential thing, a long time, when you start working with automation. And at the end of the day, I mean, this is a game of growing the lifetime value of your customers, right? In all channels.”
Final Thoughts
It’s imperative that your brand focuses on engaging with your audiences across multiple channels to ensure their loyalty. Doing so will increase your buyers’ satisfaction and encourage them to become loyal customers.
Managing your customers’ experiences across multiple channels can be difficult. The best way to ensure consistency across channels is to identify your audience and design accordingly. Fortunately, your brand can overcome these challenges and deliver great results with the right omnichannel customer engagement platform.
“Provide your customers timesaving capabilities, a better customer service experience, a self-service experience if possible. And on the other side, help your sales force to better serve their customers so they can have a better selling experience.”
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