E-commerce companies have enjoyed double-digit growth in recent years. In 2020 alone e-commerce market penetration experienced the equivalent of 10 years’ growth in just 3 months.
This rapid growth means greater competition for online retailers as more shops begin selling online to the same audiences. And these pressures are lifting customer acquisition costs (CAC) to new heights: Retailers saw cost per click rise by over 40% in a short period of time, from $0.71 to $1.00 in four months.
In light of explosive growth and rising acquisition costs, e-commerce retailers can improve ROI and boost revenue by focusing their efforts on driving loyalty and creating new upsell opportunities within their existing customer base. Harnessing context-rich and real-time insights from customers’ email data can help e-commerce companies build more engaging experiences to maximize gross merchandise value (GMV).
2020 saw a significant rise in cost per click
Data from customer emails can equip e-commerce businesses with the information needed to maximize repurchases and upsells. Communications data offers context-rich insight into buying behavior. Emails contain valuable data such as shipping and order details, tracking numbers, email headers, and contact information. Tapping into this information can help your business build more engaging purchasing experiences for current customers to drive repurchases and keep acquisition costs low.
To unlock this insight, you’ll need email or inbox parsers that extract unstructured data and turn it into information that’s categorized and structured. You can then use parsed email data to enhance your end-to-end customer experience.
Normally, customers have access to their order information in one platform and their shipping information in another. By consolidating this information and making it available in your application through universal package visibility, you can keep customers engaged while surfacing relevant offers.
After a purchase, customers will keep coming back to your platform to check their order status and track their package. You can use this as an opportunity to surface relevant, personalized offers and promotions that will drive repurchases and upsells. Driving repurchases will give you a substantially higher ROI than spending money on acquiring new customers through digital campaigns.
Furthermore, research has found the fear of package theft causes 48% of customers to avoid purchasing expensive items online. Despite this, 66% of customers prefer their packages to be delivered at home. Universal package visibility helps reduce the risk of theft, making more customers feel comfortable purchasing higher-priced goods through your platform.
Offering customers a more personalized experience has been found to increase revenue and brand loyalty. Inbox parsers can unlock context-rich, real-time data that give you insight into your customers’ purchasing behaviors and preferences.
Research found that 78% of customers are likely to ignore any offers you present unless they feel like the attention they’re receiving is personal. By using customer email data to power hyper-personalized recommendations, you can surface highly relevant offers throughout the purchasing funnel to drive engagement, repurchases, and revenue.
This recurring revenue helps to increase customer lifetime value (CLV). Optimizing your average customers’ LTV means that the initial customer acquisition costs are likely to yield a higher return on investment for your company. This way, you don’t need to acquire new customers as frequently.
Personalization can be applied at different steps and in different ways throughout the customer journey:
Pre-Purchase
Purchase
A global, Fortune 1000 FinTech company knew it needed to reduce friction in its post-purchase experience by offering more personalized offers, but it couldn’t tap into data from its customers’ inboxes. The company tried to build its own inbox parser, but, six months and a sizeable amount of money and resources later, the project failed.
The firm then chose the Nylas Email API and Inbox Parsers to unlock its customers’ email data and power universal package visibility in its application. The result was a massive 600% repurchase conversation rate increase. In the end, Nylas’ parsing solution was found to be five times as efficient as the company’s unsuccessful in-house solution.
Email parsing software offers direct and real-time insight into your customers’ behaviors. Data from industry reports and third-party research, on the other hand, gives you data that might not be relevant to your customers and that’s likely to be a few months, if not years, old. By extracting your customer email data and loading it into your analytics stack, you’re able to generate and share actionable insights that’ll help you maximize your company’s gross merchandise value (GMV). This includes:
With the impending removal of third-party cookies, it’ll be even harder for organizations to get their hands on the data needed to design and run effective digital marketing campaigns. Going forward, customer communications data obtained by inbox parsers will prove to be vital in e-commerce acquisition strategy.
Leveraging communications data from emails can empower you to create a frictionless customer journey to maximize repurchases, retention, and GMV. This will be vital going forward as e-commerce becomes increasingly competitive and acquisition costs continue to rise. For a more in-depth look, check out our ebook Improving the End-to-End Purchase Experience to Maximize Gross Merchandise Value.
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