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Jeremy Swift is the cofounder and CEO of Cordial, an advanced cross-channel marketing platform that helps brands connect with customers in a hyper-personalized way across email, text, mobile apps, and more. Cordial’s technology is unique in that it collects all the data that a marketer has on its customers, unifies it in its platform, and helps them use those data in imaginative ways to create “emotionally intelligent marketing.” I had the pleasure of sitting down with Jeremy to find out about how the company is helping brands create more meaningful connections with their customers.
Gary Drenik: You guys have an impressive roster of clients— Revolve, 1-800 Contacts, Backcountry, and Eddie Bauer. Why are these well-established brands turning to your platform to connect with their customers?
Jeremy Swift: We have found that many brands have —over time or due to the limitations of some legacy providers — had to bring on more and more tools that collect and analyze consumer data for specific marketing purposes. The problem is that these tools are disjointed and disconnected, resulting in a profoundly segmented view of their marketing, business, and customer data and, as a result, preventing them from creating breakthrough customer experiences. Forward-thinking marketing teams are increasingly consolidating solutions and reevaluating their tech stacks to move faster and win in an outsized way. Consumer demands are changing too rapidly for marketers to settle for legacy tools that can’t keep up in terms of speed and precision.
Cordial makes it extremely easy for companies to automatically unify data and use it for better marketing. We not only have the capability to collect and store data, but we also allow clients to organize and use their data wherever it lives within their technology stack.
Our platform is built with the data connected to marketing execution, so marketers can build more powerful campaigns in new ways. From creating custom audiences to unique predictive models, marketers can easily build directly on the Cordial platform for more customized engagement using data on their brand, their customers, and their products.
Drenik: Revolve raised a projected annual revenue of $11.7 million from Cordial’s triggered campaigns. Tell me about the strategy behind this success. What can retail marketers learn from Revolve’s success?
Swift: When Revolve came to Cordial, they knew that segmented emails to targeted audiences were higher performing, but their former email service provider wasn’t able to execute in the way they needed. With Cordial, Revolve created advanced segmentation to support revenue goals and set up trigger-based email campaigns using accessible, real-time data.
The Revolve team initially launched 19 highly personalized trigger campaigns using real-time signals ranging from behaviors like cart and browse abandonment, to events such as birthdays and anniversaries to product availability data. Fast forward to today: Revolve has been a client for nearly five years and has over 200 active triggers and automations on Cordial that generate more than 50% of their email revenue. They have also seen incredible value in orchestrating communications across email and text messaging, becoming leaders in the cross-channel space in a way that brands can aspire toward.
Revolve is just one of the Cordial clients who understand the power of email with apparel buyers. In fact, according to a recent Prosper Insights & Analytics survey, when asked about influence on apparel purchases, email marketing was the second most influential source—ahead of social media and influencers. Clearly, other retailers can learn a lot from Revolve’s success focusing on email as a core part of the buying experience.
Prosper – Media Influence For Apparel/Clothing
Drenik: Email engagement plays a critical role in establishing and maintaining relationships with consumers. What are some of the top email personalization tactics that businesses should be using to their advantage? What tactics have been deployed where you’ve seen your clients achieve the most success?
Swift: Engagement starts with showing your customers that you really understand them, which is why we are seeing a rise in creative uses of first-party data. Every brand that wants to compete and have a loyal customer base must take an approach that prioritizes innovative personalization and uses data and models to predict product interest and add specific value in the moment for each customer.
This holiday season in particular, we are also seeing clients experience success by using real-time supply chain data in their messaging strategy. Triggers such as back-in-stock alerts and limited inventory alerts are key right now, re-engaging customers with much-needed information. We have also found that businesses using these types of triggered communications see a roughly 43% higher order value.
Drenik: With personalization becoming more of a trend in the marketing space across the board, why are so many marketers seemingly still stuck using a “one size fits all” approach, and how can they overcome any obstacles in order to create truly 1:1 email marketing campaigns?
Swift: Many marketers struggle to get personalization right for two main reasons: First, many businesses are limited by a fractured data approach. To truly engage in a meaningful 1:1 way, marketers need the ability to use all the business and customer data available to them to make a personal connection.
Second, many marketing platforms and legacy email service providers aren’t equipping marketers with the technology they need to truly create personalized experiences. Many platforms haven’t kept pace with what’s possible, providing only cookie-cutter models or solutions. Alternately, other platforms are so complex that marketers can’t fully take advantage of the personalization capabilities available to them because they are too difficult to use.
Cordial takes a different approach. We have an incredibly advanced platform that lets marketers build complex campaigns and predictive models, but we prioritize simplicity for marketers with an easy-to-use user interface and a full-service team dedicated to our clients’ success. We want to ensure marketers have access to the most advanced marketing technology and personalization capabilities available today as well as experts alongside them to help create and execute incredible marketing campaigns—without spending eons of time learning complex systems.
Drenik: Email marketing has been around for years. Why is email marketing so important to brand’s today? Is it relevant in comparison to channels like social media, influencer marketing, text messaging, and other channels — especially those that may carry more weight with younger consumers etc.?
Swift: Email is still the highest ROI channel and poised to grow in importance for two reasons: First, as other digital channels become more constrained, zero- and first-party data used in email is ever more important to delivering on rising customer expectations of personalization. And email is continuing to evolve as new modeling, machine learning, and predictive intelligence capabilities are incorporated into the email experience.
Ultimately though, email is still important because it is an invaluable part of a cross-channel experience. Consumers, especially younger generations, expect all the channels they use to work together and be tailored to their needs. That recent Prosper Insights & Analytics survey also showed that more than half of Gen-Z and Millennials use their phones to receive text messages with special offers.
Prosper – Smartphone Activities – Receiving Text Messages
Brands who approach email, SMS, and mobile app messaging as part of a seamless engagement strategy and prioritize great customer experience across those channels are the ones who will win.
Drenik: Thanks Jeremy, for your insights on Cordial, and into all the incredible innovation going on in the world of data and cross-channel marketing.