Dear Mr. Nick Wilcox, Head of CRM & Performance Marketing at The White Company,
I’m writing to you because on January 28th, 2021, we at PostFunnel – a publication dedicated to everything relationship marketing – analyzed your company’s basic relationship marketing tactics, according to our “7 commandments” for basic CRM practices for the kind of world we live in today.
In other words – we looked at it all through the lens of how brands should behave in a post-COVID-19 world to improve their chances of building meaningful customer relationships.
You can read more about the method at the bottom of this page.
Since we ran The White Company’s CRM analysis a few months back, we wanted to revisit it today to see what has changed – what has improved, stagnated, or gotten worse. After all, we all know these things are dynamic.
See the full original analysis of The White Company here.
Back then, your brand got a 66% score, and ranked 30 out of the 37 leading brands we analyzed. Now, 45 brands into our project – The White Company has fallen to 36th place!
What seems to be the case are two crucial CRM drawbacks: the lack of some basic Realtime Personalization and CRM promotional practices.
Let’s dig deeper.
What’s Improved
Master UX – 8/10 – Would go up to 9/10
Though your brand got a pretty good score the first time around, we felt the overall experience was a little cleaner this time around – and that thought the following “How did we do?” popup asking customers for feedback below is the cherry on top. Would be interesting to see how you implement that feedback.
What’s Improved – But Still Not Enough
Realtime Personalization – Previous Score 2/10 – Would go up to 5/10
Here’s how we checked your brand’s level of immediate/basic marketing personalization efforts –
When adding women’s sandals to our cart, we were presented with similar item suggestions as shown below:
Last time when adding items to our cart, we also received a similar item suggestion banner according to the products that we added.
Still, no cross sell or up sell marketing principles were used this time around – either.
Finally, last time we wrote, “When going back to the brand’s HP after adding the item to our cart – our experience wasn’t tailored or personalized to suit our product and/or category of interest.”
However, this time we were impressed to see that your brand has upped your personalization efforts with a new personalized recommendations widget in the homepage. After adding the sandals to our cart, we were presented with it a few scrolls down the HP.
Brands that adopt a truly personalized, customer-centric approach can attribute 33% of their revenue to CRM marketing.
To achieve deep, meaningful relationships with your customers – your CRM team needs the ability to discover valuable insights about your customers, segment them into granular micro-segments and deliver the appropriate message to each one, at-scale.
Wanna know how it’s done? Talk to us, we know a gal..
What’s Not Improved
Incentives and Perks – Previous Score 5/10 – Would go down to 3/10
The 60% off promotion we mentioned in the original analysis did not appear this time around.
Therefore, only the newsletter signup offer and sale section were presented to us.
Companies today must leverage promotions to entice new customers. In fact, 87% of new customers can be acquired through the use of a promotion when placing the first order. And, of course, it’s a super useful tactic to retain them. Additionally, not all promotions should be the same for every customer.
Each customer should be placed in various customer segments to suit their exact purchasing behavior, demographics, geo-locations, personal details, and so much more. By leveraging the customer data you have, you can generate the right insights that lead to more effective customer marketing.
And so, overall, we’d say that The White Company’s overall score is still pretty much unchanged.
The two additional points would move you up from 36th, but not by much – still very much in the bottom half of the 43 brands we examined so far.
To learn more about how The White Company can take full advantage of all the latest, cutting-edge realtime marketing personalization and customer segmentation practices, feel free to reach out to me at any time.
Cheers,
Amit Bivas, VP Marketing at Optimove
Email: amit_b@optimove.com
About the 7 Commandments for Basic CRM Tactics in A Post-Coronavirus World:
We have a saying here at PostFunnel: All marketing is relationship marketing. Why? Because every touchpoint with a potential customer impacts the kind of relationship they will have with a brand, if and when they become customers. Even branding has. It’s like what people hear about their upcoming blind-date can determine the actual meeting’s success.
In recent years, it meant that the ways brands support global, social, environmental, and even political causes have become increasingly critical to their relationships with customers.
Then, 2020 happened. With its global pandemic’s tragedy, economic downturn, and historical social and political turmoils – people turned their eyes to brands, almost as much as they have to governments. Expecting and judging brands by how they conduct themselves throughout such events was never more crucial to a company’s CRM success.
One after the other, the internet got flooded with articles advising marketing and CRM leaders on how to make sure their brand is suited for this new reality. So, we combed dozens of them – and came up with a list of 7 staples that appeared in most of those articles.
The seven most essential commandments a brand must follow these days to make sure they put themselves in the best position possible to develop long, meaningful relationships with their customers.
The 7 Commandments:
1) Transparency. Show the human side of your brand
2) Give incentives and perks (that make sense)
3) Be relevant (with your language, offering)
4) Be helpful (improve your communities’ lives)
5) Personalize in realtime (cause, duh)
6) Master UX (slow, clunky websites are no longer an option)
7) Leverage social media (don’t just treat it as a sales channel)
Yup, that’s all. Without being at least decent at all of these, your CRM efforts will struggle to achieve their full potential.
And, let’s be honest, it’s not too much to ask of a brand, right?
Yet, you’d be surprised how many well-known brands fall short too often when analyzed through these lenses.
Still, it makes some sense – these changes are happening fast, and not all brands can react and adapt quickly enough and on all fronts.
And we’re here to follow these reactions and adjustments as they happen.