Secrets of Retention: Keeping Seasonal and New Buyers Hooked All Year

Hello and welcome to today's webinar on the Secrets of Retention: Keeping Seasonal and New Buyers Hooked All Year. Why are we doing this webinar today? Why this title and why the content? I think everyone who's listening in today probably puts a great deal and time of energy into acquiring new customers during basically shopper seasons and the busy holiday season. Some of you probably put in these efforts all year. And so with Black Friday and Christmas and all these holidays just right behind us, we still got to keep our eye, keep asking ourselves the question, how do you then actually make sure that those newly acquired customers from those holiday season, for example, don't become those one and done shoppers after that initial purchase you converted them to? How do you convert them into repeat buyers and maximum their lifetime value? These are the questions that we're going to go, that we're going to answer you today. And so I'm Lucas Bergstroem, VP of ISV partnerships at Emarsys and I'm super excited to also have Sophie with me, who is managing the strategic partnerships team at Criteo. And so a lot and a little bit more detail here. The couple of things that you're going to learn today. Right. So if we're talking about retention, we must put the customer centricity in the center of it. And so you will learn why customer centricity is essential for fostering loyalty and driving business outcomes. We will then have Sophie, who is going to also share a couple of insights about last year's shopper season and some unique insights about the holiday and seasonal shoppers and how consumers behave and what brands can actually learn from it. We'll also have tips and tricks around how to deliver a seamless shopper experience but we will also take a look at the Criteo and Emarsys integration, how brands have been utilizing it and ultimately the value they gain from it. Last but not least, we will combine that with a couple of actionable use cases and the case study towards the end. We also have a great offer for you, the 60 days free trial, if you're really interested, and trying out the integration yourself. But we'll also share a couple more details about that towards the end. So first things first, let's talk about retention and customer centricity. As we always said, if you really want to win the retention game, customer centricity is key. But why do we and how do we know that? We basically commissioned a study together with Forrester Consulting where, them and we together, basically surveyed more than 600 manager level and C-level employees from different, companies across industries like retail, consumer products and others. And so during that survey, we asked them on how they actually determined how they use omnichannel strategies to effectively deepen customer relationships to drive the business growth for their specific brands. And there were three major learnings. First of all, within that survey, we've identified a very specific category of brands. Those that were then labeled at the end of the study, customer obsessed companies, which basically meant that those participants said they are truly putting the customer at the center of their brand's leadership, the overall strategy, and across all their customer and other operations within the brand. And then we also were able to identify that within that category of brands that were declared as customer obsessed companies, 54% of those actually saw better customer loyalty and improved retention rates. And also 52% of the same category of companies have also seen an improved customer interaction. And so ultimately, the key takeaway here is that if you want to increase retention or improve those engagement rates with your customers, customer centricity is key. It's sometimes one of those things that's easier said than done, because we also know that it comes with challenges. So even if you're in the mindset of okay, let's put the customer first. There are a couple of challenges that we identified. Three of those major challenges we've summarized here. First off starting with identity and address ability. I mean, slowly but surely cookie data is moving away and so with these also ever evolving privacy regulations, it's just going to be more difficult to identify customers and then therefore also target the right customers. And so if your brand wants to do better, you basically — you and your business — you need to organize customer data from multiple different touchpoints and sources and then collect all of that and aggregated to understand and predict the customer behavior, to act on those data touchpoints accordingly. The second challenge then, is where are those fragmented journeys? Ultimately, your consumers have more access and more flexibility to where they purchase your products. Could be the classical like e-commerce shop, could be a classical retail business, your physical retail stores. But then some of you might have wholesale distribution partners and their platforms. Some of you might have marketplace options. And so ultimately the consumers have more choices, which then leaves you as a business to needing the right marketing technology and its capabilities that can then rely on automating some of these processes and capturing and aggregating some of these touchpoints, and potentially also machine learning algorithms, to truly power the customer experience across all these different touchpoints and channels. That's but not the least, customer loyalty and the costs that are connected to it. Acquisition costs are outpacing customer lifetime value specifically sometimes because they're rising during these holiday seasons. And so businesses are also the need to ensure that every single touchpoint not only feels personalized to build customer loyalty, but it is also done in the most cost effective way possible. You want that positive ROI and you want to improve your return on that spend. But at this point, now talking about some of the acquisition costs. Let's dive deeper into understanding new holiday and seasonal shoppers. What they are buying, journeys and behaviors might look like, and when and how to best engage them in order to start the relationship off on the right foot. So over to you, Sophie, to some of the seasonal shopper insights. Thank you Lucas. Hi again everyone. I'm Sophie, Strategic Partnerships Manager at Criteo. I'm thrilled to be here today to share some of the latest trends about seasonal shoppers and how Criteo and Emarsys utilize these insights to drive engagement for customers. Let's dive in. Whether it's new holiday shoppers or seasonal shoppers you pick up throughout the year, these new buyers all have the potential to be turned into repeat customers who come back to your brand time and time again. Your ability to retain them comes down to how you engage them initially, and how you continue to nurture them throughout their journey with your brand. So let's talk about what we learned from past holiday seasons to help us better understand today's holiday and seasonal shoppers. Learning number one. Be patient and persistent to maximize longer purchase paths. The longest holiday path to purchase is about 45 days. And the path to purchase for $500 plus items is 48% longer than for items less than $100. Therefore, you need to plan for touch points throughout the longer holiday season to ensure all journeys are facilitated. These paths to purchase insights show us that holiday shoppers are starting early, taking their time, and comparison shopping to make the best of their budgets. So what can you do to win more sales? You need to show up early, show up often, and show the best offers. Learning number two promotions and early deals attracts new buyers. Customers love snapping up great deals. Brands that offer attractive deals and promotions well before a holiday season are more likely to win new buyers. This is also true for broader shopping season such as spring break and back to school. For example, when we ask customers what makes you consider a new online store during Black Friday? The top three answers are great deals, early deals, and exclusive promotions on products that cannot be discounted elsewhere. Learning number three. Holiday acquisition efforts pay off with additional purchases down the road. After purchasing for the first time during Black Friday, 30% of customers purchase at least one more item again in the following five months. And do not forget, these customers you acquire during the holiday shopping season can be nurtured throughout the year to become your repeating and loyal customers. So with the past holiday learnings in mind. Now let's think ahead to 2024 and see what these learnings mean for you and how do you plan? Here are our recommendations. First and foremost, planning for holiday and season shopping starts early. We know that customers have already started thinking about and buying gifts way in advance, and some holiday shopping journey can take 40 plus days. Second, make sure that your holiday budget takes into consideration when and how much CPCs will rise. Consider starting earlier, when CPCs and competition are less intense, and to make sure that you are budgeting for the early acquisition efforts. Third, lean into those early deals and promotions, since we know that customers stayed. That's what makes them consider a new online store and since we know that these customers, at least a third of them, will return to make a purchase again. So with this understanding of seasonal holiday shoppers and the strategy of when and how to engage them, let's explore some of the best practices and use cases to keep these buyers hooked all year long. Lucas, back to you. Thank you so much, Sophie. And so we talked about the importance of customer centricity right at the beginning of this before, we've now learned about some of the more underlaying strategies. And then in a moment we'll actually go into the Emarsys platform and explore the Emarsys and Criteo integration in a little bit more details that help marketers deliver a more seamless shopping experience. But before we actually do that, I wanted to take a quick moment to review of what we do at the Emarsys at a more general term. Again in order to deliver seamless experiences to your customers, we already identified some of the unique capabilities that the right solution would need in order to cater for your brand's needs and challenges sometimes. Once ready your data together from variety of different touchpoints, allowing you to keep the customer at the center of everything you do, and the brand specifically in how they engage with the consumer. And so ultimately the Emarsys platform is built on the backbone of email over 22 years ago. But email was only the beginning truly for us, right? And so since then, we've created homegrown capabilities to give you a unified view, truly of your customers and to deliver best in class omnichannel experience at scale to meet the growing needs of your consumers. We know that this is what every customer is demanding of brands today for giving you their coveted first party data. And so ultimately, the entire platform strategically is built to give you, at a brand level, the strategies and tactics to keep up with your growing business. Marketing automation, ultimately to power your omnichannel campaigns, to reach your customers at those touchpoints of their choice. Everything filled with personalization coming from our personalization engine that is capable of delivering real time, data driven customer engagements at scale. And the true beauty of it is it's disconnected first from a decoupled from all of the channels. So every single setup process you do in terms of leveraging some of the data, you only have to set up once, and then you can truly recreate and reuse all these personalization data across all those different channels. It comes in also with a cross channel execution across channels like SMS, mobile native app engagement, digital ads, these integrations to platforms like Criteo, web and even direct mail. And so we're tried to continuously, also innovate and create more channels over time, which also leads to us being a leader and the faster way for cross-channel campaign management for mobile use. And then you also have that component of predictive analytics to help you make smart decisions, every single day. And so all of this is developed on top of an integrated loyalty platform as well, that's weaved into everything that we do at Emarsys around customer data and customer centricity. And this is how to drive long lasting, loyal customers for life and supporting your brands to do so. And so one step further then. Customer loyalty starts with data, even though it's ultimately already said that there's much more data you need to aggregated from multiple different touchpoints. Because without data, you won't be able to understand your customers on a deeper level. And so that's part of how the integration also Criteo ultimately works, right? Because we're unifying all these different data touchpoints around product, web behavior, online, offline or marketplace sales, customer data that they've chosen to actually share on a brand level, for example, different contact information. We then take that data aggregated, analyze it, have those predictive data on top of it in terms of predicted spend, the affinity to a certain channel, perhaps, and then we can leverage all this information to truly execute across all the different channels, but make sure that the personalization and the engagement across all these execution layers is truly customer centric, because it utilizes all the customer data that were aggregated for one specific individual. And so within that digital ads offering, there also lies the integration between Emarsys and Criteo to then also help brands that use us, mutually to make better decisions when it comes to their return on ad spend and these different things. And so ultimately, the Emarsys and Critieo Connector, allows brands to really connect first party and commerce data and insights to deliver a more personalized omnichannel purchase journey. And I've also prepared one specific use case so we can look at it together. And so ultimately, here, inside the Emarsys platform, you can either choose of, I think 65 plus pre-built different marketing use cases that really help you to also increase your efficiency when it comes to creating these different omnichannel journeys. I've chosen one where we're looking at how to actually convert these first time buyers and make them repeat buyers. So ultimately, sticking with the example coming from the busy holiday season, it's probably spending a lot of money into acquiring new customers. You finally got them to the first purchase, and now you want to retain them as consumers and get them to purchase for a second, third and many more times. And so ultimately, this program here is already looking at that specific audience. We have even using some additional insights coming from our predictive analytics, and we can identify the ones that are having the the highest likelihood to actually make a purchase within the next 30 days, which could be also coupled with our predictive insights around channel affinity. And then we can engage with them utilizing their personalized, touchpoints across channels, for example, like email here. Or once we can identify them on the brand website, we can also share more personalized engagement with them on site. But also our Criteo node allows us at this point to then also make sure we can share these audiences in real time with a Criteo platform, so we can optimize that targeting across many other platforms that Sophie is going to walk us through later on during the webinar as well. And so ultimately here, then the chance to also expand across many more channels, but still make sure we're targeting the right audiences at the right time. It's a personalized approach. Plus, the brand can make sure this way that they're optimizing their return on ad spend while also making sure across along this journey that we're double checking whether or not specific consumers have already converted or not. Again, for a second or third time. And then we can actually use the same audience exchange with Criteo to also remove individuals from certain audiences so we stay relevant no matter what the action or engagement from a consumer will be at the end of the day. Yeah. Over to you, Sophie, to walk us through what's then happening on the criteo side of things once we've done the audience exchange. Thanks for that overview, Lucas. Now that we've learned more about Emarsys, let me take a moment to dig into how Criteo supports these use cases and what's happening on our end. Clients around the world believe in us and the outcomes we deliver for them. But not every client uses our commerce media platform the same way. So let's take a look at who they are and what their focus is. On the demand side, we serve over 1600 brands and agencies, including the likes of L'Oreal, P&G, and we partner with all the big six agencies or HoCo's to align with the largest trends shaping digital advertising. Large brands and HoCo's are looking to adapt their media strategy and scale their commerce media approach by capitalizing on the intersection of brands and shopper moments on the open internet. We also partner with over 20,000 direct to consumer and performance marketers, including performance agencies. These include the likes of Raymore and Flanagan Innovative Group. Their primary objective is to maintain and scale sales pipelines through performance media. On the media monetization side, we partner with close to 200 plus retailers today. These include traditional retailers such as Best Buy and Walmart in Canada and Mexico. These retailers are looking for the right tech partner to maximize retail, media and data revenues from their unique media inventory and first party data while growing their customer relationships. It also goes beyond traditional retailers, with the retail media model being replicated in adjacent verticals with Deliveroo, for example. Online marketplaces are also looking to offer advertising on their e-commerce platforms and partnering with Credo to light up that opportunity. Lastly, we partner with 75% of the top 100 ComScore publishers, and we're offering new ways for publishers to get the best monetization and yield out of their media. Now that we know who Criteo's clients are, let's dive into what Criteo does, and let's take a step back first. As there have been several marketing trends that have transformed businesses and how they are addressing their consumers. First there was search, where Google is a dominant player. They successfully became advertising giants, by targeting people actively searching for specific products and services. Then came the rise of social, which was led by Facebook, now Meta. We saw businesses build social teams, adjusting marketing strategies around how they engage with customers with likes, follows and subscribes. Then the latest trend comes via marketplace, where the dominant player is Amazon. But when you look at the global spend, Amazon represents only a small amount because they only see transactions that happen inside their marketplace walls. This is where commerce media comes into play. Where Criteo is the intersection of open commerce. We see 900 billion plus in e-commerce annual sales. By comparison, that is three times what Amazon sees. This allows us to find commerce audiences across the open internet. The most valuable audience is two brands. Think about it like this. Today, the average consumer spends 66% of their online time on the open internet — outside of Google, Meta, and other platforms like Amazon — and they turn to the open internet. And while brands see the benefits of advertising on Amazon, search, and social platforms, we believe they need to advertise everywhere consumers are and drive consumers into digital stores where products are actually stocked. This requires a streamlined platform that has reach and access to multiple retailer networks. With the Commerce Media Platform, Criteo is the obvious choice to complement Amazon. So to put it shortly, Criteo is Amazon advertising for the rest of the internet. Lucas has mentioned earlier that it is increasingly hard to get customer centricity right, but when done right, getting those one time buyers to make a second purchase can make a huge impact on your bottom line. It increases the likelihood of another purchase by 95%. Criteo makes it easy for you to reconnect with your customers so you can stay top of mind and make them come back time and time again. Criteo clients can connect their first party data using integrations of their choices, including API, server to server, one tag, direct upload to Criteo's platform or via platforms like Emarsys. Criteo's commerce data helps you find your existing customers online and enrich with our understanding of how and what they buy across the open internet. Together, the strong customer data and Criteo's AI then reaches each customer with real time decisioning and predicts show products and services consumers are most likely to be interested in increasing engagement, conversions and revenue at scale. That enriched data and real time decisioning, then empowers Criteo's dynamic creative optimizer that chooses design elements and products to create the right ad. The ad can be shown in different formats including video, rich media, and dynamic ads that tells the story at the right time. Clients can also adapt their messaging strategy to feature lifestyle images, videos, products, promotions and call to actions that guide customers through product discovery and repeat purchases. Critical clients can also rotate sequence ads across different times of the day or week, or let the AI engine optimize for you. One great example of a brand that has maximized engagement through Emarsys and Criteo, is OrthoFeet. When you integrate Criteo and Emarsys, Criteo benefits from the enhanced data that Emarsys has to offer so that your digital advertising on the open internet is more targeted and relevant. This really helps you to achieve that golden target. The right message to the right people at the right time. On the other side of the intuition with Emarsys, the Criteo audience node allows you to manage your Criteo audience directly from Emarsys automations, adding and removing contacts and creating entire audiences from scratch. Criteo becomes the incremental channel that you can use alongside email, web, and SMS. With that, I believe Lucas can introduce more about the 60 day free trial on the next slide? Awesome. Thank you so much, Sophie. And hopefully you were able to actually answer a couple of these questions we raised at the beginning of this webinar and gave you here also specifically to the end, a couple of, real kind of like use cases and tips and tricks and how to improve your retention for your brands. And so we've talked about basically, right, like how Emarsys and Criteo can help you to do exactly that, ultimately delivering more seamless 1 to 1 customer experiences that increases retention. And, that's ultimately the goal of this webinar today. We're going to go a step further now and offering you the opportunity to actually try this all out yourself for free. And so Emarsys and Criteo are offering a free trial for 60 days right now, using the Criteo audience node inside the Emarsys platform, which then allows you to create and populate these new criteo audiences like just mentioned from Sophie within the master's platform to support you and your brand, deliver seamless shopper experiences at the end of the day. And so if you are interested in that trial and you want to redeem this offer, you can actually contact us directly. If you're already an Emarsys customer, you can always contact your Emarsys client success manager to then activate the 60 day trial. And so if you're still curious and you want to learn more about how Emarsys and Criteo will work together, we also have a free demo you can watch on the website. I believe the link is also then available in the resource section that comes with the webinar. And so at this point, I hope you all got something out of this webinar when it comes to retention specifically now coming probably out of a very busy holiday season. And so thank you all for joining. Thank you, Sophie, for running this webinar with me today. Thank you. Everyone out there have a great rest of your day. Thank you. Bye bye.