Drive repeat purchasers with a personalized re-engagement Journey

These days, customer retention strategies have gained equal importance, if not greater, to acquisition strategies. In fact, our latest State of Personalization report found that more consumers are ready to commit to a relationship with brands than ever before — 60% of consumers stated they would become repeat buyers after a personalized shopping experience in 2021, compared to 40% in 2017.

With Journeys, Segment users can now build multi-step lifecycle campaigns to build deeper customer relationships with the right message, at the right time, in the right place.

This recipe provides a step-by-step guide to building a “starter” re-engagement campaign with Journeys, a feature within Twilio Engage (formerly known as Personas). While this campaign can apply to any industry, we’ll be using e-commerce traits and behaviors. At a high level, this journey optimizes ad spend based on lifetime customer value and designs personalized messaging based on a customer’s preferred categories. 

Step 1: Check your instrumentation requirements

To support this Journey, you’ll want to have all of the communications channels you’d like to leverage connected to Segment Personas (read more about compatible destinations here). To start, you’ll want to make sure your email and advertising channels are connected. To uplevel your communications, connect a push or SMS mobile notification application.

In order to tailor your communications, you’ll also want to make sure you’re collecting the right customer events and traits to orchestrate effectively. Read more about instrumenting standardized data collection in our Spec Overview documentation.

1. Event: `Order Completed` 

2. Event: `Page Viewed` Event (or other engagement event)

3. Trait: Customer LTV

   1. Use any quantitative metric that measures customer value. Some customers pull in RFM data from their data warehouse using SQL Traits, or you can use Computed Traits to aggregate your customer’s order values (in the case of retail) or time on site.

4. Trait: Favorite Category 

   1. Feel free to use any trait that provides a customer’s preference that you can personalize off of. This could be their most frequently viewed category, last viewed category, or most purchased category. It’s yours to decide!

Once you have all the information ready to work with, we can get started building a journey.

Step 2: Create a Journey and define entry criteria

Here, we’ll use Segment’s visual builder to design a cross-channel journey based on the events and traits gathered above.

1. From the Segment app, navigate to Personas, select your Space, and click the Journeys tab to Create a Journey.

2. Define your entry criteria:

   1. Name: `About to Sleep - One-Time Purchasers`

   2. Conditions: Order Completed Exactly 1 Time AND Order Completed Exactly 0 times within 180 days

Step 3: Optimize marketing spend based on lifetime value

Once you’ve started your entry criteria, we can segment the group by customer value to optimize our marketing spend.

1. Add a True/False Split based on customers’ LTV:

   1. Add “True/False Split”

   2. True: High LTV and False: Low LTV

   3. Conditions: Computed Trait OR SQL Trait of `Customer LTV` greater than `500` (you can use any number you want, based on your unique business rules

2. For High LTV, we’ll want to message these customers on our owned and paid channels.

   1. Add “Send to Destination” step

   2. Connect your email, support, advertising, and other paid & owned channels

3. For Low LTV, we’ll want to conserve ad spend and simply message customers on our owned channels.

   1. Add “Send to Destination” step

   2. Connect your email, support, and other owned channels

Step 4: Re-engage based on real-time interactions

Next, we’ll want to see if a user engages after a week of initial communication, but still has not purchased. This engagement signals that a user has a higher propensity to buy than someone who has not engaged.

1. Add Delay: 7 days (or more, depending on your business rules)

2. Add Condition

   1. `Page Viewed` at least 1 time within 7 days

   2. AND users who did not `Order Completed` at least 1 time within 7 days

Step 5: Design personalization based on customer preferences

For those who have engaged, let’s design more personalized communications based on their profile traits. This is where you’ll want to use whatever profile trait that provides a starting point from which to personalize. In this example, we’ll work with a Computed Trait: Most Frequent Product Type Purchased.

1. Add a Multi-branch Split with 3 branches

   1. First branch conditions: `Most Frequent Product Type Purchased` equals `shoes`

   2. Second branch conditions:`Most Frequent Product Type Purchased` equals `tops`

   3. Third branch conditions:`Most Frequent Product Type Purchased` equals `pants`

2. For each of these branches, add Send to destinations

   1. Connect your email, advertising, and other channels

Wrapping up

This is just one simple Journey that you can build on top of Segment’s powerful customer data platform. 

From this point, you can come up with endless possibilities. By leveraging intelligent insights based on your first-party customer data, you can deliver the best actions for your customers, and deepen your customer relationship along the way. To see more “starter” Journeys, download our Journeys 101 guide here.

For our Personas Advanced customers, log in to your workspace to start creating Journeys now. New to Segment and want to learn more about Journeys? Request a demo today.