There are a lot of ways to communicate with your customers, but the key element is communicating with them in the right way. Mass marketing will reach your database, but it’s not likely to engage them or convince them to make a purchase. Instead, if you have data that tells you something about your customers (e.g., female, 55 years old, who just purchased a road bike), you can use it to market in a much more familiar and friendly way.
Ascent360’s CEO Scott Buelter recently sat down for a roundtable with NBDA President Heather Mason and Kristin Sundin Brandt, Co-Owner of Steve the Bike Guy, to discuss how bike shops and other specialty retailers can use their data for more impactful marketing.
General traffic versus meaningful traffic
The landscape for getting customers in the door has changed quite a bit, especially since the pandemic. During that time, retailers introduced a plethora of new ways for customers to interact and behave, such as allowing appointments, online sales, and other ways that didn’t require them to come into the store. For this reason, retailers have had to redefine “the door” and prioritize things like website traffic and email marketing.
But what is the difference between traffic and meaningful traffic? If you hosted a celebrity at your bike shop, it would likely bring people in, but would it incentivize them to buy a bike? To that same effect, sending emails about a brand-new road bike to your avid mountain biking customers will get some eyes on it, but it will be completely irrelevant to those customers and won’t likely result in sales (or customer loyalty).
This is why it’s important to get extremely specific and talk to each person like they’re a person (this likely seems obvious but it’s more uncommon than you may think.) You can even customize your sign-up forms to include questions such as “are you in the market for road, mountain, or commuter bikes?” to get a better understanding of their interests. Your most recent customers are your most likely next customer, so to achieve meaningful traffic, you need to get to know them. Many retailers fail to focus on their existing customers assuming that they will return, but the reality is that nobody is thinking about your store as much as you are, so staying in front of existing customers is critical.
Campaign examples
Once you’ve gotten to know your customers, you want to focus on segmenting them into groups that will get the most value out of your follow-up. While there are hundreds of ways you could niche these segments, start with the primary campaign segments as you mature into your database. This includes:
- Post purchase – This is a very intentional campaign designed to bring people back to your store or website, such as a 30-day bike tune-up, a reminder to check your brakes, promoting any accessories they might be missing, etc. The post-purchase timeline is important, because 51% of repeat purchases occur within 60 days.
- Lapsed customers – Do you have a ton of customers in your database who haven’t purchased anything from your store in over a year (or more)? Lapsed customer campaigns are the perfect opportunity to bring your brand back to the forefront of their minds.
- Life events – If you know your customers’ birthdays, when they bought their last bike, etc. you can use that data to engage with them. This also includes things like holidays, current events, and more.
- Abandon browse/abandon cart – This is one of the least used campaigns but the most powerful as the success metrics are incredibly high. With these campaigns you can use web tracking pixels on your site to help determine who was viewing a product but never completed the purchase.
As you segment your customers, it’s important to consider how your categories are set up. For example, do you care more about which customers purchased a particular brand of bike, or are you more interested in what type of bikes they are (mountain, road, etc.)? As you get more into the groove of creating valuable segments, you can continue to niche down and make your segments even more specific.
Segmentation increases email conversion rates by up to 33% in customer lifetime value, according to multiple studies (2022)
Creating relevant content
It’s easy to send a one-off sales or event message, but what are the best practices for creating content that isn’t related to a sale? Essentially, the content needs to add value to the relationship and be worth the customer’s time to read it. People enjoy content that makes them feel connected to the shop and how it runs, how to care for their bikes, information about new trails in the area, what organizations they can support, when to service their shocks … and the list goes on.
This type of content positions you as a knowledge expert and valuable resource as a retailer, and from there, the bike and equipment purchases fall into place.
Using the right tool to measure your success
Having a tool that gives you a report on the results of your segmented campaigns is a critical step in the process of data driven marketing. On the surface, it will show you who opened your emails, how many times an email was opened, which links were clicked, how many unsubscribes there were, etc.
Digging a little deeper you can evaluate whether you are selling any product as a result of your campaigns and attribute revenue to each. You can also see which campaigns are generating inquiries that move customers through the funnel.
At Ascent360, our marketing automation platform helps you organize and enrich your customer data, create valuable segments based on what you know about your customers, and build high-impact, automated campaigns that can be set to run automatically based on customer behavior. Plus, our reporting functionality shows you everything you need to know about how your campaigns are under- or over-performing so you can adjust as needed.
Ready to see what’s possible when you put your customer data to work for you?
