How to find new customers and re-engage existing ones: Mastering email segmentation with Clerk

Finding new customers and re-engaging your existing ones are crucial steps in the growth and sustainability of any business.

In terms of attracting new customers, you need to understand market trends and the demands of your target audience. It's not just about drawing them in but offering value that converts initial interest into loyal patronage. To do so, it’s essential to identify the most effective channels for reaching potential customers, which may range from social media to traditional advertising.

But in this article, we’re primarily focusing on email marketing.

Re-engaging existing customers, on the other hand, particularly hinges on analyzing and enhancing their behavior with your brand. That is, how they interact with and think of your brand. Your current customer base is where the majority of your sales will come from, yet many companies tend to neglect these in favor of finding new sales.

In fact, most businesses gain 5-20% of their revenue from new customers but between 60-70% from existing customers. Thus, it’s pretty clear that focusing on retention and growing revenue from your existing customer base is important for any business. 

To keep them coming back, you need to explore and understand what drives their engagement, from the effectiveness of your communication to the personalization of your offers. By doing so, you can shift your focus to really retaining these customers to ensure higher conversion rates and an increased bottom line.

Key Takeaways:

• Attracting new customers requires understanding their needs and the best channels to reach them.
• Your current customer base makes up almost 70% of your current revenue as opposed to new sales.
• Re-engagement is shaped by evaluating, adjusting, and responding to your customer behaviors.
• Personalization and effective communication are key to solidifying customer loyalty. 

Why is customer behavior so important?

Traditionally, email marketers have tended to rely on demographic data such as age, gender, and location to segment their email lists and then target their marketing. However, this approach often results in generic emails that fail to engage recipients. People are complex, and their behaviors offer deeper insights into their preferences and interests.

Understanding customer behavior is crucial for your business as it provides invaluable insights into your customers’ preferences, their shopping habits, and their decision-making processes. By analyzing this data, you can then make informed decisions on how to effectively attract new customers and re-engage with existing ones.

Clerk's Audience tool leverages the power of customer behavior in your webshop, analyzing factors like the timing between purchases, the frequency of purchases, order value, and basket size. This dynamic segmentation is not based on who your customers are but on what they do. We will go into this a bit further down, but first let’s take a look at why customer behavior can guide your business strategies.

Customer behavior is crucial for success: 4 key examples

1. Create effective targeted marketing towards your existing customers:

• Knowledge of customer behavior allows you to effectively tailor your marketing efforts. For example, identifying trends through social media feedback or even dashboard analysis from your website can directly influence your marketing strategies, ensuring that you are reaching out to your existing customers with the right message at the right time.
• This is why having a system, such as Clerk’s Audience tool, is perfect for you to identify which products each segment of your customers are interested in, so you can start messaging those interested in protein power or those interested in baby shoes, with the correct communication to ensure conversions.

2. Improve the overall customer experience:

• By understanding your customers' expectations and preferences, you can then design experiences that specifically meet their needs.
• Be they campaigns, discounts, or simply implementing customer feedback, this is critical for enhancing customer satisfaction and loyalty.

3. Further your product development:

• Insights into your customers’ behavioral patterns will also be paramount for informing your product development. You can create or update products that align with our customers' evolving needs, thereby staying competitive and relevant. This also means you can determine which elements of your products your customers are not interested in.

4. Inform your strategic decision making:

• Customer behavior helps you make strategic business decisions in terms of operations and service offerings. For instance, knowing which touchpoints are most effective for engaging customers guides you in optimizing those channels for better interaction.

You need to recognize that customer behavior is not static. Many outside influences can impact this behavior. The last few years tells us this immensely with instances like high inflation, the Pandemic and large-scale global events all having an impact and can radically change customer priorities and preferences. Therefore, it’s imperative to stay aware of these changes and adapt business practices accordingly.

Clerk's metrics: How do they work?

Before we delve into the specifics of Audience and email marketing, it's essential to grasp Clerk's capacities and the way we segment and analyze customer data that allow our customers to pinpoint opportunities for growth and re-engage their customer base effectively.

To make the most of our Audience product, let’s look its key metrics:

• Products Interested In: Clerk can anticipate which customers are likely to purchase specific products, brands, or types of products based on their purchase history.
• Have Purchased: This metric helps you find customers who have already bought a particular product, brand, or category.
• Have Not Purchased: On the flip side, this metric helps you identify customers who have not yet made a purchase of a specific product, brand, or category.

With this information, you can them further segment via customer behavior. All of our products provide comprehensive Customer Analytics Dashboards that segment customer behavior into clear categories. Details include the number of active customers and customer base growth signified through detailed graphs.

By evaluating these segments, you can easily identify and create audiences, gain an overview, and derive insights per customer, all without using any cookies or personal customer details.

To further inform your customer understanding, our Audience Insights dashboard can be thoroughly analyzed and highlight metrics such as the lifetime value, average order amount and average basket size. With this data, you’ll be equipped to create targeted campaigns that resonate with each customer segment and drive engagement.

Clerk’s customer behavior categories:

Clerk's pre-defined Audience categories are based on customer behaviors.

Here are some key categories:

• VIP: The top 10% of purchasers based on basket size and order value. These customers are your most valuable.
• Frequent Buyer: Customers who purchase more frequently than the average customer.
• Loyal Customer: Customers who return regularly to your webshop, though not as often as Frequent Buyers.
• One Time Buyer: Customers who have made only one purchase.
• Just Ordered: Customers who recently placed an order, likely within a few days.
• Active: Customers who regularly return to the webshop, with the frequency based on the average customer's order patterns.
• Slipping Away: Customers who are purchasing less frequently than before, indicating a potential drop in engagement.
• Lost: Customers who haven't placed an order in a long time and are unlikely to return without reactivation efforts.

Related: Learn how to unlock the power of audience segmentation. 

Optimizing your email marketing with Clerk: 

Now, let's delve into how you can optimize your email marketing using Clerk's Audience product and email recommendations:

1. Syncing with your marketing platforms:

• Our Audience tool doesn't operate in isolation, it should be seamlessly integrated with your existing marketing platforms.
• Set up automatic synchronization with platforms like Google Ads, Facebook, and your existing email client to save time and avoid manual data transfers.

2. Leveraging product interests:

• Identify your top categories and brands, and create unique Audiences for each using the "Interested In" parameter.
• Clerk will help you find customers who are likely to buy these products, even if they haven't purchased them yet.

3. Embracing customer lifecycle segmentation:

• Segment customers based on their behavior.
• Target those who are slipping away with tailored marketing efforts to re-engage them.
• Allocate marketing budget to One Time Buyers, as they have the potential to become regular customers.
• Treat VIPs with special care and attention, as they are your most valuable customers.

4. Utilizing Audiences with Email Marketing:

• Sync your Audiences with your email client and set up recurring email flows for each segment.
• Customize your emails by showcasing products based on customer interests using Clerk's Keyword Recommendations.
• Reactivate Slipping Away and Lost customers with enticing incentives.

5. Enhancing Ad Campaigns:

• Make your advertising budget count by using the same interest-based Audiences for targeted campaigns on Google and Facebook.
• Sync your VIP customer list with Facebook to create Lookalike Audiences and acquire new customers with similar behavior.

6. Harnessing Customer Analytics:

• Identify which segments offer the most profit potential using Customer Analytics.
• Compare segments based on interest, and optimize your advertising spend to focus on the most lucrative segments.

Further reading: Eva Solo optimized the customer experience with personalized content and emails to see a 125% higher average order value.

Incorporating smarter email segmentation with Clerk:

You want to increase your bottom line, grow your business, and keep your customers happy. But with increased privacy regulations and ad-blockers, traditional methods of customer segmentation have become less effective. However, there's a smarter way to segment your audience, and it's the focus of our training webinar: "Segment smarter in your email marketing”. To learn more about this webinar, which is available in 3 languages (English, Danish, Italian), click the respective links below:

• Information in English
• Information in Danish
• Information in Italian 

Conclusion:

To summarize, Clerk's Audience and email marketing tools empower you to segment your audience based on their behavior rather than demographics. This approach allows you to deliver highly relevant marketing content while respecting privacy regulations. By understanding your customers' actions and preferences, you can save time and boost your bottom-line results. So, start segmenting smarter with Clerk!