The Delicate Line Between Creepy and Thoughtful in Ecommerce Marketing

The world of ecommerce has changed marketing quite a bit. With ever improving technologies and seemingly endless customer data, marketers can be extremely specific and intentional. Truly personalized marketing is now possible at scale.

This is an incredible tool. It gives marketers the ability to intelligently use data to hit potential customers with exactly the right message at exactly the right time to push people down the conversion path.

The downside of this is that we have the potential to be extremely creepy. With the data and technology available to us, we can really overstep our bounds and damage our relationship with our customers, rather than strengthen it.

What tools are available to us now?

Data Integration

For a long time now, we have been able to track almost every behavior on a website. But getting this data to talk to your various marketing platforms was next to impossible. Recently, data integration between your marketing platforms and ecommerce platform have become more readily available.

Our favorite combo is Shopify Plus with Klaviyo’s email marketing platform. The data integration is seamless, so you can not only see the performance of your email campaigns in terms of dollars and cents in real time, but you can dynamically use data in your emails. Whether creating targeted segments for personalized marketing or using customer variables in the body of your emails, the Klaviyo and Shopify Plus combo makes it easy to dynamically send messages to your audience to build your relationship with them.

Automations

Automations, such as email sequences and marketing funnels, make the integration of marketing and ecommerce data even more powerful. Sequences can be automatically triggered and will dynamically update based on customer behavior on your site. This is a great way to scale your personalized marketing.

How do we walk the line in personalized marketing?

Personalized marketing is becoming easier to accomplish. But just how personal should you get?

There is no hard and fast rule here, and it largely depends on your audience. The younger generations are much more accustomed to personalized marketing and therefore less likely to get creeped out.

Use common sense and treat your relationship with your customers as you would any other normal relationship. If you just met someone, you shouldn’t email them every day with personal messages calling out what products they’ve viewed on your site or the exact date and time of their last visit.

Utilize the data you have for targeting. By all means, include products customers have added to cart or viewed several times on your site in retargeting ads or abandoned cart emails. But don’t call out every product they viewed or follow them all over the internet. Give your customer space and respect their boundaries. Aim to be helpful, reminding them of products they have expressed interest in to bring them back to your site, but don’t be overbearing or annoying.

Need help with your personalized marketing strategy? Get in touch with us.

About Metacake: Metacake is an award-winning design, technology and marketing firm that is focused on creating successful customer-experiences. Learn more at metacake.com