Dear Mr. Paul Ray, Head of Brand & Marketing at N Brown Group,
I’m writing to you because on January 6th, 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 CRM analysis on your brand 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 original analysis of N Brown Group.
Your brand got 81% in the initial analysis and ranked 7 out of the 34 leading brands we analyzed. Now, 46 brands into our project – your brand has fallen to 9th place. Still a very good spot, but what does seems to be the one case for improvement here is Realtime Personalization.
Let’s dig deeper.
What’s Improved (but still not enough)
Realtime Personalization – Previous Score 3/10 – 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 sneakers to our cart, we were presented with similar item suggestions as shown below.
Last time when adding items to our cart, we also received similar item suggestions, but the products were irrelevant to what we were looking for.
In the original analysis, we wrote:
“When adding children’s sneakers to our shopping cart, we were presented with item suggestions – but they were totally off… weird!” The items included leggings and other trousers.
This time the items were relevant to our search, Kudos to that! Also, cross-sell and upsell marketing principles were used. That’s a step in the right direction.
When going back to the HP after adding the sneakers to our cart – our experience wasn’t tailored or personalized to suit our product and/or category of interest, though.
Directing customers to homepages filled with personalized product choices and recommendations that are based on what they browse is a must-have for any customer-centric brand.
By adding personalized recommendations to your site, you can increase the likelihood of a customer returning to your site and reduce the unsubscribe rate.
In addition, 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…
And so, overall, we’d say that N Brown Group’s overall score is still pretty much unchanged.
The two additional points would move you up from 9th to 7th place – not by much. Still, this is considered to be an excellent score out of the 46 brands we analyzed to date. Why not excel at the personalization part too and make it that much closer to perfect?!
To learn more about how N Brown Group 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.