During RAU Expo 2024, Sergey Doroshenko , Retention Team Lead Maudau, spoke about how the company successfully uses retention marketing tools. RAU selected the main points of the speech.
The guest journey from discovery, loyalty, churn and return
Retention marketing is not only mailings, repeat purchases and loyalty programs, it is a complex process that requires asking a philosophical question: what is the meaning of retention marketing? Its causal essence is the establishment of long-term relationships.
And in Maudau it is compared to a love relationship. After all, the life time of a love relationship and the life time of a relationship with a Maudau visitor are the same. Naturally, everything starts with the acquaintance stage. Conventionally, a person searches for something in a search engine, sees Maudau, and then decides whether to go in or not. If he does go in (or the acquaintance is successful), the first purchase occurs, then the second and repeated, after that – loyalty, churn and return.
How to touch at the first stage – acquaintance
When a customer searches for something and visits a certain website, it is not known what they are doing: just looking at prices, reading the product description or they are really here to buy. The main goal at this stage is to collect contacts. I will share a New Year's case. We had a widget on the site and any new guest who came to us could enter their e-mail address and choose a 10% discount, a 150 UAH discount or free delivery. As a result, 3% interacted with the widget, 40% – new contacts, 25% made an order with a promo code, 7% – a share of advertising costs on the income from the campaign.
We repeated this idea for Valentine's Day: on the Maudau website, a person saw a widget and could swipe the discounts they wanted to choose. Here, too, we had good results: 2% interaction with the widget, 25% — new users, 25% — made an order with a promo code, and 8% — the share of advertising costs relative to campaign revenue.
I gave an example of just two cases, but in fact we have a lot of them. We produce them with Promodo. And in 2023 we received more than 100,000 new users, about 40% of contacts make their first purchase and less than 12% is the share of advertising costs.
What needs to be done to make the second purchase happen
Once a person has made their first purchase, the probability that they will make a second is 27%, a third is 49%, and the next is 62%.
However, what should you do to make the second purchase happen? Show care at the moment when a person makes their first purchase. I will tell you about two cases:
The first one is a special letter for new customers: all our new customers receive a beautifully designed letter to see what we have on the site;
The second is special transactional emails for new customers: when a new guest places an order, they don’t just receive a standard text: your order has been accepted. We have a whole story: “We have accepted your first order and are very happy that you are with us. Sailors have a tradition: when you cross the equator for the first time, you must swim in the sea, we have something similar too – we want to immerse you in the sea of our love and care” (further in the photo).
And for each transactional message we have our own hooks on which we hook our buyer.
What to do when a client runs away
Of course, we analyze the first purchase, divide it by the check amount, apply product recommendations based on the first purchase, and after that, guests receive e-mail triggers with a specific offer for the next purchase.
There are also cases when clients "run away". That is, the visitor came, but did not make a purchase: looked at the products or simply added something to the cart. We catch up with them with product recommendations from eSputnik and e-mail triggers with an offer to complete the purchase.
At this stage, it is important to: prioritize the first order, give additional emotions, analyze new customers and invite them to make a repeat purchase.
What to do after the third purchase
We do not segment by RFM, because it is simply knowledge of when the buyer bought, for what amount of the check and how often they did it. RFM gives general statistics, however, if we want the guest to come back, we need to guess the favorite category and products and offer them.
It is important not to be pushy in mailings, so we schedule them when it is convenient for the buyer, not the category manager. Now we have fewer mailings, but the Click Rate has become 6-7%, which shows the guest's interest in a particular mailing.
Therefore, it is important to segment by category preferences, plan mailings depending on the buyer's needs, create personalized offers for those who go and analyze each mailing separately. And if the mailing does not work, return to the category managers and talk about it.
What to do at the loyalty stage or if a guest leaves
At this stage, guests do not need to be surprised, they need to be retained. So we continue to calculate the metrics – Retention Rate, Loyalty Customer Rate, Loyalty Retention Rate, Repeat Purchase Rate.
You shouldn't think that at this stage you are completely loved. So don't forget to provide promo codes, apologize for screw-ups.
If you look at all our tests on working with customer churn, then people who have already left you have long been loyal to another company. And if you attract a lot of resources, only 10% will make a repeat purchase upon return.
And briefly about the Maudau philosophy:
