– Retention strategies in email agencies are often ineffective and not worth the investment.
– The majority of sales occur within a short time frame after signing up for email, and only certain circumstances can prompt non-purchasers to buy.
– Conversion rates and customer journey optimization are crucial for success, and agencies should focus on improving these areas rather than relying solely on ads and emails.Optimize the customer journey through ongoing customer research and data collection to improve website and product experience, ultimately increasing conversion rates and sales.So, email agencies became email/sms agencies, and now they have become retention agencies? I’ll save you some time and a lot of money. The incremental gains you’ll make through some crazy “retention” strategy can be trumped by data-driven customer journey changes. This is why you see everyone saying that retention has to have qualitative data collection and RFM and CLV (shoot me now). RFM, CLV, ROAS, any other KPI or acronym people are trying to sell you on does not matter unless you can directly tie it to the customer journey and improve your website and product experience. FULL STOP. This isn’t retention; this is customer research. There’s a very big difference. The majority of “retention” strategies are complete bullshit. If you actually look at the data, you’ll find that some things are pretty much consistent across all accounts. 75% of sales come within 12 hours of signing up for email. Collectively, we see 90% of sales happening in a maximum of 11.5 days after signing up. Those who purchased previously and had a good experience are likely to buy again when reminded that your brand exists according to need. Those who signed up but didn’t purchase are only likely to purchase under two circumstances: a large sale or a new product offering or variant of an existing product. That’s it, seriously. I know the last one is acquisition, but most agencies would be better off figuring out how to get their subscription to conversion rate up because what we see more often than not is that it’s usually less than 20%. If you can’t convert those people who have high intent and are signing up, you don’t have a chance at any sort of retention. With 75% of all sales happening within 12 hours of signing up at the high end, you’re really fighting for just a fraction of sales that you can influence through email/sms. This is why I would never pay an email agency based on performance. There is very little impact on a brand’s revenue. With our test brand and a good customer journey focus, 95% of all sales happen within 5 days. Our subscription to conversion rate through customer journey optimization just hit 40% on two of our forms. It’s not about your ads, it’s not about your emails, it’s about your customer journey. There aren’t going to be ad agencies that don’t do landing pages, product pages, and data collection in the future, same as there aren’t going to be retention agencies that aren’t doing data collection and optimizing the customer journey through ongoing customer research. The reason why few see it is few people actually have the data to understand these things. #ecommerce #data #strategyhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/jivanco