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Smoke Your eCommerce Marketing Goals

Smoke Your eCommerce Marketing Goals: Gain Control with Mastering Multi-Channel Strategies Beyond Traditional Email and SMS

Relying solely on traditional email and SMS campaigns won't cut it anymore if we want to leave a lasting impression. With customer acquisition costs rising, digital marketers have an exciting opportunity to develop deeper, more meaningful customer relationships while encouraging repeat purchases for sustained growth. By embracing a multi-channel strategy, brands can tap into the incredible potential of lifestyle marketing, aligning products and services with the values and aspirations of their target audience. 

Whether diving into food marketing or exploring beauty advertising, the keys to success lie in automation and personalization, thoughtfully crafted to resonate with the unique preferences of different audience segments. With the expert support of an eCommerce marketing agency, you can elevate your customer interactions, integrating innovative UX design services and forming strategic partnerships with Shopify Plus. This approach will boost your brand’s visibility and enhance profitability in today’s competitive marketplace. Embrace these strategies with enthusiasm and watch your brand thrive!

Unlocking Multi-Channel Potential

Unlocking the power of multi-channel marketing is crucial for long-term success. By expanding beyond conventional email and SMS methods, brands can embrace various channels, allowing for better and more efficient customer engagement. This section explores how a holistic approach can significantly elevate your marketing strategy by harmoniously integrating owned and paid channels. Such integration creates a seamless customer experience, boosts brand loyalty, and enhances overall customer satisfaction. Let's embark on this exciting journey together and watch your marketing vision flourish!

Beyond Email and SMS

Email and SMS have long been the bedrock of eCommerce marketing initiatives. However, as platforms evolve and consumer preferences shift, moving beyond these foundational channels is crucial and a sign of forward-thinking and innovation. Relying solely on these traditional methods can constrict a business's ability to expand its reach and may not meet the expectations of modern customers. Broadening beyond these channels allows brands to meet customers where they are, engaging with them on platforms they frequent more regularly, ensuring relevance and engagement.

Social media marketing emerges as a potent avenue in this expanded landscape. Platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and the burgeoning TikTok allow brands to connect with customers in interactive and visually compelling ways. By integrating social media strategies with traditional email campaigns, brands can amplify their message reach and create a more resonant brand presence.

Influencer partnerships are another strategic cornerstone. Collaborating with influencers with authentic connections within your niche can significantly enhance credibility and capture attention in an oversaturated marketplace.

  • Explore and delve deeply into new engagement channels, ensuring they align with your brand ethos.
  • Strategically integrate social media marketing into your existing communication plans.
  • Establish and nurture partnerships with relevant influencers who align with your brand values.
Benefits of a Holistic Approach

A holistic marketing approach weaves together a tapestry of channels, ensuring a seamless and unified customer experience. This strategy is crucial in maintaining consistent messaging, fostering brand recognition, enhancing reliability, and nurturing deeper customer trust.

Consistency remains imperative. By maintaining a consistent and cohesive brand voice across all platforms, brands ensure that their customers receive a uniform message, effectively increasing the likelihood of customer engagement and loyalty.

Customer journey mapping is a strategic tool that identifies key customer interaction points and optimizes them to improve the overall customer experience. By achieving a granular understanding of the customer journey, brands can tailor messages to meet specific needs at each stage, maximizing impact.

  • Ensure that brand messaging remains consistent across all channels and touchpoints.
  • Utilize advanced customer journey mapping to gain deep insights into customer interactions.
  • Continuously optimize key touchpoints to enhance customer satisfaction and experience.
Integrating Owned and Paid Channels

Strategically merging owned and paid channels offers unparalleled flexibility and an expanded reach in your marketing efforts. Owned channels, such as your website and carefully curated email list, are cost-effective and communicate directly with valued customers.

Paid channels—like hyper-targeted Google Ads or carefully curated sponsored social posts—don’t just broaden your reach; they put your brand directly in front of the exact audiences who matter most, when and where it counts. When these are effectively integrated with owned channels, brands can ensure a broader audience is reached, engendering more engagement.

  • Thoroughly identify your key owned channels and optimize them for maximum impact.
  • Select paid channels that aptly complement your overarching strategy and brand message.
  • Develop a cohesive and unified messaging strategy that resonates across both owned and paid platforms.
From Flow Fixes to Full-Funnel Wins

At UN/COMMON, our work lives at the intersection of creative thinking and measurable impact—and nowhere is that more evident than in our partnerships with Rails Clothing, Botany Farms, and Garden Cup. Each of these D2C brands came to us with unique challenges: Rails needed to modernize their owned channel strategy to keep pace with a high-end, omnichannel customer; Botany Farms was ready to scale but lacked the segmentation and sophistication to maximize their flows; and Garden Cup, a fast-growing startup in the health food space, needed lifecycle marketing that matched the energy of their brand and mission.

For Rails, we brought their email program up to par with the premium experience they deliver in-store and online. Our team reworked the campaign strategy, designed new high-performing automations, and implemented segmentation strategies tailored to their luxury buyer. With Botany Farms, a leader in the alt-cannabinoid space, we went deep on lifecycle marketing. Our work unlocked revenue hiding in plain sight by overhauling existing flows, building targeted replenishment journeys, and refining post-purchase messaging that educates and converts. And for Garden Cup, we created an owned channel strategy that increased retention and reflected the brand’s fresh, vibrant personality—turning transactional messages into engaging moments.

Across all three brands, our Klaviyo expertise was a key performance driver. We’re proud to rank in the top 0.2% of Klaviyo partners worldwide with Master Elite status—an accolade earned through results, not just credentials. That means we bring a rare level of strategy, creativity, and rigor to every email and SMS touchpoint.

Driving Retention Through Email Innovation

With a core focus on improving email marketing creative and implementing an A/B testing strategy, UN/COMMON's email marketing specialists partnered with Rails Clothing to lead the way in elevating their retention program.

👚 71% Increase in Emails Delivered

👚 436% Quarterly Growth in Unique Flow Clicks

👚 92% Increase in YoY Q4 Owned Revenue

Implementing a granular A/B testing strategy was the second core priority of Rails Clothing. UN/COMMON identified the key strategic elements of campaign and email flow designs that should be tested, along with digging into tests for campaign send times. These tests yielded statistical significance to where Rails Clothing saw a heavy uptick in performance across the board in their email program.

👀 See Rails Lifecycle Marketing Emails 👀

Elevated Email Strategy and Revamped Email Design Leads to Epic 420 Sale Success

Botany Farms entered into a fruitful partnership with the UN/COMMON Lifecycle Marketing team just as they needed to sprint on strategy and production ahead of their annual 420 Sale. Leveraging our health and wellness marketing expertise, UN/COMMON launched into action, driving value through strategic segmentation, data-driven approaches, and a highly elevated email design transformation.

🌿 62% Increase in MoM Conversion Rate

🌿 48% Increase in YoY Campaign Revenue

🌿 9% Increase in Unique Click Rate

Their 420 sale witnessed unprecedented success, marked by substantial revenue increases, heightened engagement levels, and notable conversion rate enhancements.

👀 See Botany Farms Lifecycle Marketing Emails 👀

Gardencup image
Lifecycle Marketing Mastery

The collaboration between Gardencup and UN/COMMON led to a significant enhancement in lifecycle marketing. By focusing on customer retention, the strategy incorporated advanced email and SMS campaigns tailored to engage users at every journey stage. This approach involved crafting a comprehensive customer journey roadmap, identifying gaps, and implementing optimized communication flows.

🥗 26% Increase in Email Marketing Flow Click-through Rates

🥗 31% Increase in Email Marketing Campaign Click Through Rates

The improved lifecycle marketing retained existing customers and transformed one-time buyers into loyal brand advocates by employing a detailed segmentation strategy. By prioritizing data, UN/COMMON created a better customer experience and employed smart marketing strategies that stand out in today’s D2C competitive market.

👀 See Gardencup Lifecycle Marketing Emails 👀

Strategies for Customer Engagement

To genuinely connect with customers, brands should embrace innovative strategies beyond traditional marketing. This might involve launching engaging social media campaigns, personalizing product suggestions, or sharing exclusive content. By thoughtfully developing loyalty programs, effective win-back efforts, and vibrant VIP communities, brands can enrich customer relationships and boost retention, fostering a positive and lasting bond with their audience.

Building Loyalty Programs

Loyalty programs are essential for boosting customer retention, encouraging repeat purchases, and fostering enduring brand loyalty. They provide a structured method to reward customers for continued business and support.

Tiered loyalty systems have shown remarkable effectiveness. These systems reward customers based on spending, allowing them to earn points or rewards that increase in value as they ascend tiers. This strategy promotes higher spending and long-term customer retention, incentivizing customers to reach higher tiers for more enticing rewards.

Personalization is key within loyalty programs, offering a deeper level of engagement. Brands can achieve maximum impact and foster brand loyalty by tailoring rewards to individual customer preferences and behaviors.

  • Implement dynamic tiered loyalty systems to reward customer loyalty.
  • Personalize rewards to resonate with individual customer preferences and behaviors.
  • Create strategies that encourage repeat purchases through meaningful rewards.
Crafting Effective Win-Back Campaigns

Brands design win-back campaigns to reignite interest and re-engage lapsed customers. These campaigns tap into untapped potential by re-engaging past customers already familiar with your brand.

Personalized offers can be a compelling draw for customers to return. By analyzing past purchasing behavior diligently, brands can craft offers tailored to meet specific customer needs and preferences.

Email marketing is a vital channel for executing win-back campaigns, providing a direct line to communicate personalized and compelling messages to lapsed customers.

  • Conduct a thorough analysis of past purchasing behavior to inform campaign strategies.
  • Tailor personalized offers to entice and re-engage lapsed customers effectively.
  • Utilize targeted email marketing as the primary channel to reach out to lapsed customers with personalized offers.
Leveraging VIP Communities

VIP communities offer an invaluable space for your most loyal and dedicated customers. Within these communities, brands can foster deeper customer relationships and drive sustained engagement through exclusive content and tailored offers.

Exclusive events and granting early access to new products or special sales events cultivate a palpable sense of exclusivity. They deepen customer connections and fortify lasting brand loyalty.

Engaging these communities through platforms like Yotpo amplifies customer advocacy and extends your brand's reach.

  • Create and nurture exclusive VIP communities for your core and loyal customers.
  • Host exclusive events and provide unique offers to foster a deeper connection with your brand.
  • Leverage engagement platforms to build stronger connections and amplify customer advocacy.
Personalization and Automation Techniques

Embracing personalization alongside intelligent automation is essential for sharing meaningful and timely customer messages. By automating important touchpoints and utilizing data-driven insights, brands can effectively engage their audiences and achieve remarkable results more efficiently.

Data-Driven Insights for Personalization

Data-driven marketing is the cornerstone of effective personalization. By meticulously analyzing customer data, brands can tailor messages to fit individual customer preferences and behaviors, enhancing overall engagement.

Customer data platforms serve as a vital tool, integrating data from various sources to provide a comprehensive, unified view of the customer. This consolidation allows for more precise targeting and highly personalized messaging.

AI technologies can further augment personalization efforts by predicting customer needs and automating responses, refining the customer experience.

  • Leverage comprehensive customer data platforms for a unified view.
  • Integrate sophisticated AI technologies to enhance personalization efforts.
  • Adapt and tailor messages based on precise data insights to maximize impact.
Automating Key Customer Touchpoints

Automation in marketing not only streamlines processes but also ensures consistent communication with customers. Brands can maintain engagement by automating key touchpoints, ensuring customers receive pertinent messages without manual intervention.

Modest spenders like to engage with brands via SMS, judging by research from Klaviyo.  Among generations, 43% of millennials are likely to engage by SMS, versus 26% of Gen X and 21% of Gen Z.
- via MediaPost

Marketing automation platforms such as Klaviyo provide essential tools for automating email campaigns, social media posts, and more. These platforms ensure that customers receive timely, relevant, and personalized messages that resonate.

Triggered emails, such as timely cart abandonment reminders, have proven particularly effective in driving conversions and salvaging otherwise lost sales opportunities.

  • Employ advanced marketing automation tools for streamlined processes and consistent engagement.
  • Utilize triggered emails to reach customers with timely and relevant messages.
  • Maintain continual engagement with customers while minimizing manual effort.
Segmentation for Maximum Impact

Audience segmentation empowers brands to divide their audience into distinct groups, ensuring marketing efforts are strategically targeted and effective. This refined approach enhances both personalization and engagement across customer groups.

Behavioral segmentation focuses on analyzing customer behavior data, enabling brands to tailor messages based on actions such as purchase history or browsing habits, maximizing personalization efforts.

Demographic segmentation further refines targeting by grouping customers based on criteria such as age, gender, or geographic location, ensuring precision in messaging.

  • Implement precise audience segmentation to optimize your marketing efforts.
  • Focus on both behavioral and demographic data to refine targeting strategies.
  • Tailor messaging for each segment to achieve optimal engagement and impact.
Measuring Success and ROI

Understanding the success of your multi-channel marketing efforts is essential. By tracking key metrics for email and SMS, and setting benchmarks for eCommerce marketing, brands can gain valuable insights into performance and identify areas for improvement.

Key Metrics for Email/SMS

Tracking the right key performance indicators (KPIs) for email and SMS campaigns unveils insights into their effectiveness. Critical metrics include open, click-through, and conversion rates, which help guide strategic decisions.

Open rates indicate the percentage of recipients who open your emails, reflecting the effectiveness of your subject lines and sending frequency.

Click-through rates measure engagement, indicating how many recipients interact with your offered content, shedding light on the relevance of your messaging.

  • Consistently monitor open and click-through rates to inform strategic refinements.
  • Analyze conversion rates to derive insights into customer behavior and campaign effectiveness.
  • Adjust strategies accordingly, leveraging insights gleaned from KPI analyses.
Benchmarks for eCommerce Marketing

Establishing concrete benchmarks in eCommerce marketing allows brands to measure performance against prevailing industry standards realistically. This practice affords a more accurate assessment of strategies and identifies areas requiring enhancement.

Industry reports often provide valuable average KPIs, such as conversion rates or customer acquisition costs. You can highlight strengths and pinpoint weaknesses by comparing these benchmarks with your metrics.

Consulting resources like Shopify's blog can offer critical benchmarking insights, providing a roadmap for advancement.

  • Establish relevant industry benchmarks to track and measure your performance effectively.
  • Compare your metrics against industry averages to identify growth opportunities.
  • Continuously assess and identify areas that would benefit from improvement.
Improving Open and Click Rates

Improving both open and click rates involves meticulously optimizing various elements within your email and SMS campaigns. Every detail contributes to engagement levels, from crafting compelling subject lines to thoughtful call-to-action (CTA) placement.

A/B testing empowers brands to experiment with different elements to determine what resonates most strongly with their audience. Testing can encompass various areas, including subject lines, email layouts, or CTA wording.

Optimizing send times remains a key factor and enhancing open rates by ensuring messages are received when recipients are most inclined to engage, maximizing effectiveness.

  • Conduct rigorous A/B testing for optimization insights across campaign elements.
  • Optimize both subject lines and CTAs to enhance recipient engagement.
  • Strategically adjust send times to maximize engagement and open rates.
The Future of Multi-Channel eCommerce

Emerging trends and groundbreaking innovations are dynamically shaping the future of multi-channel eCommerce. From the rise of lifestyle marketing to cutting-edge UX design services, brands must remain alert and adaptable to stay ahead of the curve and maintain a competitive edge.

Emerging Trends in Lifestyle Marketing

Lifestyle marketing prioritizes the alignment of brand values with customer lifestyles. This trend is gaining traction, as discerning customers increasingly seek brands that resonate with their values and preferences.

Content marketing is indispensable, with brands dedicated to creating content that resonates directly with their audience's values, interests, and needs.

Sustainability and ethical practices also occupy central positions in customers' decision-making processes, ultimately affecting their purchasing behaviors.

  • Strategically align brand values with the lifestyles and preferences of your customer base.
  • Focus intensively on content marketing to engage with your audience personally.
  • Emphasize sustainability and ethical considerations to appeal to contemporary consumer preferences.
Innovations in UX Design Services

Innovative UX design services are pivotal in crafting seamless and gratifying customer experiences. As the sphere of eCommerce continues to evolve, brands must emphasize usability and accessibility across their digital platforms.

User-centered design principles focus intently on creating intuitive, engaging interfaces and exceptional user experience.

Mobile-first design is becoming increasingly crucial, with a growing number of customers opting to shop via mobile devices, necessitating an adaptable and responsive design approach.

  • Prioritize user-centered design principles in the creation of digital interfaces.
  • Focus on delivering mobile-first experiences to accommodate evolving customer habits.
  • Ensure all platforms are accessible and offer superior usability to all users.
Partnering with an eCommerce Marketing Agency

Partnering with a specialized eCommerce marketing agency offers brands unparalleled expertise and guidance in navigating the complex landscape of multi-channel marketing.

Agencies provide access to specialized knowledge and abundant resources, assisting brands in optimizing their marketing strategies and effectively achieving their business goals.

🤝🏽 Team up with UN/COMMON and unlock the door to innovative, state-of-the-art tools to supercharge your marketing efforts! Elevate your strategies and achieve remarkable outcomes like never before!

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