Make Your CRM Team Much Faster

Retention Marketing, or CRM, is a key tool in your marketing toolbox that gets existing customers to buy more. A sophisticated CRM organization focuses on highly personalized, event-based, triggered campaigns; those have a few characteristics: 

• Personalized messaging. Depending on what you know about the customer, send them different stuff. A simple example: if we know you’ve logged onto our website from your iPhone, let’s email you encouraging an app install. If you’ve been using your desktop, hold off on that message.

• Personalized offers. If the customer is a student, send them a student discount. If they’re always ordering the same stuff, give them a discount for trying something new. 

• Personalized cadence. If a customer hasn’t engaged with your brand for a while, don’t send them daily emails. Instead, aim to re-engage them with the “best shot we got” less frequently. 

• Personalized channel selection. Should you send this via email or SMS to this customer? Using a measure of the relevance of the message and strength of the relationship are key to determining the right route. 

These, of course, are a contrast to “batch and blast” campaigns of the not-so-distant past when marketers would pull lists of tens of thousands of customers and email all of them with the same templated message. In that world, adding the customers’ names to the subject line passes for personalization. We now all know that this kind of “personalization lip service” is unhelpful for business outcomes. 

To achieve the level of sophistication described above, you’ll typically see a large company maintain a dedicated marketing technology team. That is, a bunch of engineers working closely with marketers to build these highly personalized messages as custom code. Each will be custom-built - and thus, expensive to both create and maintain. This was the setup we had at eBay in 2014. This was the team that I led at eBay, and if I had a chance to do this again, I would do this differently. 

A more modern approach that facilitates faster iteration (and headcount savings!) is to enable retention marketers to function independently by investing engineering effort upfront. That is, to do three things: 

• Expose APIs from your web store that your CRM system can hit. Ex: an API your marketers can hit during campaign execution to issue new coupons. A key aspect of the design is to provide marketers with the most flexibility in terms of configuration. In the “Coupon API” example, the amount of the coupon, targeting capabilities, and expiration dates are some of the parameters that you’d want marketers to be able to experiment with - as opposed to hard-coding them. 

• Maintain up-to-date customer records in your CRM system by using events that are routed from your app to your CRM system. Ex: an event that fires from your app once a key product feature has been used by a customer. 

If you do the above, and buy modern customer engagement software (ex. Braze, Iterable, Klaviyo), your marketers will be able to experiment with sophisticated, event-based, highly personalized campaigns independently - without much recurring involvement from engineering. 

Moreover, if your business is running on top of Shopify, Klaviyo offers a strong out-of-the-box integration that reduces initial engineering investment considerably. 

Here are examples of some of the most personalized, highly effective CRM triggers that can be built with limited engineering involvement using this approach: 

• In a restaurant delivery business, if a customer ordered from a specific restaurant a few times before, and that restaurant is now running a sale, telling this customer about it - perhaps even aggressively, via SMS - will be an ultra-relevant, beloved communication. 

• In a health-focused business, telling the customer how far they’ve come towards hitting their health goals by using your product is quite effective. Inspired by Spotify Wrapped, this ultra-personalized campaign makes inertia work for you.

• In a subscription product that has features crucial to retention, encouraging that feature usage via coupons is very effective. For example, at eBay, buyers who sold even just one item retain dramatically better. Thus, issuing a coupon at the right moment to an eBay buyer to list their first item for sale is quite effective. 

The “marketer enablement” approach produces handsome paybacks in the form of an independent CRM experimentation workstream. This is key to its higher velocity - and thus, to its ability to produce significant business outcomes.