Bombarding customers with irrelevant marketing messages is costing retailers conversions and customer loyalty, new research warns.
A study of 1,000 UK shoppers by marketing tech firm BounceX found that customers want relevant, timely email communications from retailers. Almost two fifths (37 percent) of respondents said they would be more likely to make a purchase if they received a personalised notification about a product they have already looked at online, while over a quarter (28 percent) find onsite overlays helpful, as long as they are personal and enhance their user experience.
Both of these statistics demonstrate the impact of showing the right message to the right shopper at the right time in order to increase conversions, BounceX has suggested.
Robert Massa, General Manager of BounceX EMEA, said: “The need to know your customers and provide personalised marketing messages of value is becoming vitally important for brands and retailers. By enabling retailers’ to recognise site visitors on a unique basis, they have greater clarity of where each individual customer is on their individual buying journey which allows them to trigger relevant emails or overlays to deliver the online personalisation that customers now both demand and expect.”
With 269 billion emails received globally each day in 2017, and the number expected to rise to 320 billion by 2021, being able to identify and understand a shopper’s digital buying behaviour, across channels and devices, in order to serve them the most relevant message at the right time and frequency, will be an increasingly critical capability.
Meanwhile, 70 percent of consumers feel they receive too many marketing emails from brands, with a third (34 percent) regretting giving their email address to a brand. Over half (57 percent) of shoppers say that receiving too frequent marketing messages would cause them to unsubscribe from a retailer’s database entirely, meaning in their efforts to engage their customers, retailers could in fact be turning away the very audiences they are trying to influence. In fact, a third (32 percent) of shoppers would be more likely to make a purchase if a retailer did not bombard them with marketing messages.
“As the research shows, timing is everything and knowing when not to communicate with your customer can be just as important as knowing when to communicate with them,” added Robert.