I was sitting in a conference a couple of years back listening to the senior marketer from a leading British retailer talk about customer journeys. At the time, this was considered revolutionary thinking: he said the customer journey didn’t stop at the checkout (when he got the customer's credit card details) but went all the way up to the moment of delivery.

I wrote on my pad: "Yes, but what happens next?"

In my world of email marketing, that's just the start of the customer journey. Knowing what people have bought before becomes one to the three pillars of customer intelligence, alongside declared data and behavioural data. If you know who people are, what they look at and what they buy, you have the three starting points you need to predict - or triangulate - what they might choose to buy next … and directions for how you might influence that choice.

Kitbag is the leading UK seller of replica kits for football (or soccer) clubs and other sports teams. This is a massive business in the UK and internationally. The most dedicated supporters buy a new kit every season - and in multiple variations. "Home kit" and "Away kit" are the two most obvious variants. So sending an email campaign to someone who bought last season’s kit inviting pre-orders of the new season’s kit is an obvious winner. So is a message offering the Away kit to people who bought the Home kit.

United Direct Email

This is a significantly more profitable way to do business than going back to the beginning of the customer journey - i.e. relying on Google to sell you search traffic all over again. And, of course, you already have some key data that will make it easy to make that transaction happen: address details and clothing sizes, for example. Your customer is left with just a couple of clicks to make the purchase. The easier it is for them to buy, the more likely they are to do so - thanks to using past purchase data you can make this process like shelling peas.

I’ve seen huge success with a large number of retailers using this approach.

The British Museum shop saw click-through rates - and purchase rates - rise to more than four times their untargeted benchmark results by sending tailored email messages to customers based on previous buying behaviour. A recent mailing to "high order value" customers of the British Museum shop generated click-through rates that went through the roof.

British Museum Email

Of course, in doing this, you can also ensure you don’t email an offer for items that people have already bought online from you. For instance, if you had already bought the Warren Cup replica (above), your copy of this email would have featured a different product instead, thanks to the use of conditional or dynamic content.

This helped to make the content they sent so compelling and relevant that sales figures were stellar. Every metric from the email campaign was significantly higher than a broadcast email would be: open rate, click-through rate, conversion rate and average order value. In fact, despite the lower number of people such a targeted email naturally gets sent to, compared to a broadcast to the whole database, email marketing like this frequently generates more revenue than the full broadcast - and keeps the recipients more engaged for future messages.

That’s definitely time and effort well spent!