Iterable's 3 tips to improve your LTV with promotional messaging

Promotions take up a sizable chunk of the customer journey. They’re an important nurture stream to incentivize further engagement. This likely isn’t news to you, but what often gets left behind is the ways in which promotional messaging can increase customer lifetime value (“LTV”) and retention. 

In an era where customers receive dozens of promotions every week, grabbing attention—no matter how fleeting—can make or break a customer relationship with your brand. That’s why it’s imperative marketers focus on a differentiated promotion experience that drives LTV. 

The good news is that this doesn’t require a massive overhaul of your marketing! With Talon.One and Iterable in your stack, the below strategies become easy to implement and scale upon to create relationships your customers want to keep. Here are three quick ways to improve your LTV with promotional messaging.

If you’re on time, you’re late. It’s a principle many have adopted, but when it comes to your promotions, being on time is all that matters in building a frictionless customer experience. 

With the endless stream of promotions being sent to your customers, timeliness is key to grabbing that attention and boosting LTV. Typically when we look at promotional timing, we’re thinking “end of summer” or your “last chance to save” email. You absolutely should still stay on time with these sorts of promotions, but these are expected, and it’s “on time” for your marketing, not necessarily the customer. 

There’s a different timeliness marketers can adopt that will give customers something a bit more personal. 

GoDaddy taps into its customer’s behavior to send discounts. Source: ReallyGoodEmails

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Look to your behavioral data, like GoDaddy did in this example, to send promotions that show customers you’re (1) paying attention and (2) taking their experience with your brand into account. A generic 30% discount coming at a time when they aren’t engaged feels impersonal, but a discount specifically triggered right on time after a user’s action makes it feel tailored to their experience. 

Speaking of things feeling impersonal, few things shorten LTV quicker than completely irrelevant recommendations. Cross-sells and upsells are an important part of the promotional process. However, personalization needs to be top of mind for these to hit home and sustain engagement with users. 

In this example from Fabletics sent to a colleague of mine, her name is front and center in the header and is followed by a series of recommendations based on her past year of browse and purchase behavior. 

{firstname} is a good start. Follow it up with personalized recommendations to take it up a notch. Source: Fabletics

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Be warned though, recommendations based solely on purchase behavior can lead you down a tricky path. Circumstances change and every once in a while, customers purchase gifts. Here, getting a complete view of the customer profile makes all the difference. 

To improve LTV and keep customers engaged, recommendations—more often than not—should be brought together based on key segmentation criteria and centralized, historical data. Iterable’s Catalog makes it easy to create personalized content experiences tailored to what your customers want by looking at all facets of the customer’s profile to make accurate recommendations. An easy way to make this messaging even more impactful, is to couple Iterable's ability to create personalized content experiences with Talon.One — allowing you to turn any behaviour or touchpoint into a reward hook. By combining Iterable and Talon.One's features for more detailed granularity, your promotions can be individualized to keep users engaged over and over. 

One best practice of welcome emails that is often disregarded once in the promotional stage of the lifecycle is the educational aspect of marketing. This doesn’t mean teaching of concepts, but relates more to showcasing the different benefits users can gain with your brand. 

In all likelihood, your users are not tapped into all of your different product and service lines within the first few weeks of signing up for your marketing communications. That’s why, no matter what stage of the lifecycle they’re in, you should be reminding them of the benefits that come with expanding their scope of engagement with your brand. 

Sometimes keeping it simple makes all the difference. Source: Charles Schwab

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Charles Schwab isn’t exactly at the forefront of everyone’s mind for modern marketing examples, but this recent email came as a pleasant surprise for its ability to simply, and effectively, alert users to potential benefits they might be losing out on. 

For a brand like Charles Schwab, the sheer number of products and services available makes it difficult to hone in on what is best for each user. The above example gives recipients the chance to quickly scan options and learn of new value from their relationship with the brand. If even just one of these 10 sparks financial inspiration, it’s a rousing success and further rounds out the customer profile with more data.

Not all promotions have to be about savings or coupons or sales. You undoubtedly have excellent products that solve customers’ problems and fill their needs, but you can also add value to their experience through other means. 

Too many promotions are batch and blast coupons or discounts. This strategy shortens LTV and inherently creates a barrier between customer and brand. It separates customer from brand in the experience, which is the exact opposite of what both sides want in this exchange. 

By incorporating the above three examples, you’ll be connecting with customers at a more personal level, building and nurturing a relationship that’s beneficial for all. 

To learn more about how to improve your LTV with promotional messaging through Talon.One and Iterable, click here. 

This is a guest post from Iterable, kindly contributed by Michael Huard, Senior Manager, Content Marketing.

Michael leads the Brand and Content teams at Iterable, building content across all mediums to help marketers connect with their customers at a personal level. Michael has experience creating written and video content for B2B and B2C brands like Apple, Disney, and LiveNation.