As CDP adoption has increased, a common complaint has emerged. CDPs are a lot of work to implement, and their use cases aren’t clear and obvious enough for marketers to get practical value from them quickly. Forrester reports that CDP users tend to do “more legwork than expected” to get their CDP set up and generating value. It’s enough of a problem that a whole new category of consultants has emerged, with companies like Actable specializing in helping brands use their CDP.
In our experience, marketing teams in fashion e-commerce especially tend to be very meticulous about defining clear strategies and tactics to drive performance. So while CDPs are versatile, a technology with purportedly boundless possibilities is not automatically helpful if it’s not clear where to start. Our client onboarding process includes guided segment creation and campaign experimentation. But with our latest release, we hope to see our clients getting off the ground even faster and with more autonomy.
Start With What Works
Starting in September 2020, Velocidi clients will have access to a group of pre-defined audience segments created from RFM (recency, frequency, monetary value) percentiles, predictive attributes, and customer behavior. They will include segments of most loyal customers, customers at risk of churning, high spending customers, and more.
Having default segments in the Velocidi CDP gets us closer to becoming a fully automated revenue-booster for our clients. The segments address a range of specific marketing objectives, covering every stage of the customer lifecycle. Whether your goal is to increase reach, improve conversions, or reduce churn, there will be an audience segment of your website visitors ready to activate.
The default segments align with innovative best practices in e-commerce marketing. The advantage you get from these segments is that they are made from your first-party data and Velocidi’s built-in machine-learning. So these segments are a trustworthy representation of your actual customers.
Default segments are cloneable so that you can create customized versions of them. The original segments will be maintained and improved by the Velocidi product team to ensure they are continuing to deliver the best possible results. That means you don’t have to worry about your segments having an expiration date on their usefulness. They’ll stay up-to-date, and in-step with your current customer activity.
The First Wave
The initial list of default segments focuses on improving campaign performance with hyper-effective audience targeting. Future additions to this list will go further into personalization and product recommendations to include default segments for clothing and shoe sizes, price ranges, and automatic brand and category clustering for effective cross-selling. (Read more about the manual version of this here.)
For Prospecting – Lookalike Seeds
These audiences help you expand your customer base by modeling lookalike audiences on platforms like Google and Facebook after your best current customers
Active Potential Converters – A machine-learning audience of your recent website visitors who look like they are in a buying journey but have not converted. Use this audience as a lookalike seed to catch new customers who are currently shopping, not those who are already done shopping. Get higher conversion rates, more sales, higher ROAS, and gain increased market share.
MVP Customers – An RFM audience of your current customers who are high spenders, recent buyers, and frequent purchasers – all at the same time. Finding more of these people will increase your average customer lifetime value.
High Spenders – An RFM audience of your current customers who have spent the most. Use this audience as a lookalike seed to get a higher average order value (AOV).
For Retargeting
A conversion rate optimization mainstay. Even if retargeting is a small part of your budget, it significantly impacts your conversion rates.
Active Potential Converters – A machine-learning audience of your recent website visitors who look like they are actively shopping and have some potential to convert. Focus your retargeting on this audience to increase conversions and ROAS.
For Email
Velocidi audiences are generally channel-agnostic. You can integrate them with any marketing platform, including email. But some audiences, like this one, only apply to email.
High email engagement – A machine-learning audience predicting which customers are most likely to engage with emails in the near future. Use this audience to improve email engagement rates and keep your sender rating healthy.
For Retention and Reducing Churn
These two both use the Timely Re-engagement feature. They take into account product-specific buying cycles and global customer behavior to determine the best time to re-engage previous converters. Customers who buy shoes have different buying cycles than customers who buy t-shirts. Velocidi does this calculation automatically, so you don’t have to.
Next predicted purchase within two weeks – An audience of previously converted customers who are predicted to make their next purchase in two weeks, but have not yet shown behavior indicating that they are in a buying journey. Use this audience to get in front of customers right before they start shopping, so you’re their first choice.
Purchase Overdue – An audience of customers whose predicted purchase date has come and gone. Use this audience to send exclusive offers and win customers back.
For Reactivation
Even when it feels like a last-ditch effort, retaining current customers is drastically cheaper than acquiring new ones, especially with acquisition costs rising.
Churned customers – An RFM audience segment of your customers with the lowest Recency scores. Use this segment to send offers and win back churned customers.
If you’ve made it to the bottom of this post, hopefully we’ve managed to stir up some excitement or interest around this impending new release. Thanks for reading, and we look forward to rolling this out with you next month!
