In this blog series, we’ve been following brands that strategically use email marketing to seamlessly personalize every step of the customer journey.

Marketers today know that customers expect tailored content and a flawless experience when interacting with brands online. Here are some examples of brands that have perfected the art of personalizing the purchase stage of the customer journey:

Room & Board

Room & Board may not be the largest furniture retailer in the country, but the brand has received accolades for the exceptional service it provides to customers and its consultative approach to selling. Knowing this is the company’s greatest strength at its brick-and-mortar stores, company leaders wanted to replicate that experience for online customers.

To do this successfully, the company needed to learn about each of its online users and make smart recommendations based on that person’s individual tastes and style.

The Room & Board digital customer journey starts, as many do, with an invitation for online users to become email subscribers. Once subscribed, the user is taken to a preference center to fill in his or her personal profile of information. This page asks questions such as, “What types of products are you interested in?” and “What types of information would you like to receive from Room & Board?” Marketing Cloud captures this information, along with information the company gathers from monitoring user activity and product interest. This enables Room & Board to get to know its individual customers over time without them ever setting foot inside a store.

The strategy of combining different channels — called coupling: in this case, email and web — to create a highly personalized digital experience has shown great success for Room & Board. By utilizing Predictive Intelligence, the company can recommend customized content for every email subscriber based on a customer’s purchase history and browsing behavior. It’s no surprise, then, that Room & Board has seen a 150% higher conversion rate from customers who engage in personalized content versus those who don’t.

This is not where the Room & Board experience stops. The company also uses email to deliver design ideas and advice to subscribers. Much of this content is user generated and includes testimonials from real customers. Room & Board collects this by inviting customers to share photos, ideas, and stories. As marketers, we know how valuable user-generated content is, and in Room & Board’s case, it is essential to keeping the customer at the center of the digital experience.

Safeway

The grocery industry is a highly competitive landscape. Safeway has given itself an advantage by capitalizing on a simple insight — that people don’t always buy the same products every time they go to the grocery store.

The Just for U® program puts customers in charge of their own experiences by enabling them to choose which special offers they want to receive. Safeway combines this additional information with tracked purchase data to form customer profiles. Safeway can then use Salesforce to automate the special offers it sends to individual customers.

Safeway’s marketing team uses the information they learn through Marketing Cloud to create individually tailored versions of deals for shoppers. By helping customers save money on the products they were likely to buy anyway, Safeway is driving its customers to become more loyal shoppers.

Using a mix of traditional and digital channels to drive email registration in the program, marketers at Safeway can deliver personalized offers via web and email, much like Room & Board. The company has found that the program produces a 224% higher click-through rate and a 330% higher click-to-open rate than the industry average.

The key to personalization is insight. Safeway is distancing itself from competitors and driving impressive repeat purchase rates simply by gathering insights and using them to improve the customer experience.

Much of the success of these campaigns can be attributed to the service-first approach of both brands’ online experiences. “Our goal is to present the customer with content that is relevant, not invasive,” said Kimberly Ruthenbeck, Director of Web Customer Experience at Room & Board. Smart brands use email and other digital platforms to inform, not only to sell. The right strategy can help you do both.

Check out the rest of the video series from Joel Book, Senior Director of Digital Marketing Insight at Salesforce.