Multi-offer campaigns and targeting are not mutually exclusive

People only buy products and services that solve a specific need AND that they are actually able to purchase. This need could be something that makes their lives easier or better or it could be something that simply makes a person feel good. Either way, there is a perceived value.

For marketers, finding customers who are able to and want to buy a specific offer is difficult. Luckily, with the power of AI, CRM marketers can actually identify those who are most likely to purchase EVEN if the customer themselves aren’t aware they want to buy just yet. That’s the power of audience building powered by deep learning. Deep learning that’s able to identify untapped demand within your CRM database.

But what about campaigns that contain more than one offer?

Multi-offer campaigns are especially difficult to target

Audience building for multi-offer campaigns can be especially difficult for CRM marketers. You may have an offer or a set of offers you need to promote. Targeting those campaigns to the same audience can be difficult because you need to find audiences that would be interested in all or most of the included offers.

Marketing pressures to promote specific offers due to product and revenue goals make this even more challenging as that means marketers don’t have complete control over what they want to promote.

Maybe a marketer has to promote an offer to reach a revenue goal, maybe there is excess merchandise to push, maybe the product is high margin, or maybe the category manager needs a campaign to go out this week. This can lead to what we call skyscraper emails which include many offers in the same campaign.

This means that customers are going to have to scroll down to see the offers lower within the campaign. Those are unlikely to get much attention and it’s not a great experience for the customer!

From a targeting perspective, this tends to lend itself to batch and blast. After all, with so many things to be promoted in the same campaign, how can you find the right audiences for all of them?

Well, that’s where once again the power of AI powered by deep learning comes into play.

Multi-offer campaigns present a big opportunity for marketers

When marketers need to promote many offers due to commercial pressures, this can lead to many campaigns being created and sent out at a high frequency. This approach is time consuming from a planning and strategy perspective…not to mention the lift required from the creative team to execute.

More campaigns per customer means a higher chance of fatigue. That leads directly to an increase in opt-outs and unsubscribe rates. Not a great experience for your customers! Multi-offer campaigns allow marketers to send more things using fewer campaigns to do so.

Multi-offer campaigns, when targeted correctly, can actually increase engagement with customers. There is more opportunity to get offers in front of people that they want to and are able to purchase. That delights customers and leads to a greater chance that they will convert and buy one or more off the promoted products within the campaign.

There are also opportunities for marketers to create really compelling, themed campaigns. Could be for the holidays, could be for the big game, beach ware for the summer, or summer travel. The list goes on and on…but the opportunity is there.

Ultimately, multi-offer campaigns provide a big opportunity for marketers to increase the revenue per campaign sent…an important metric for CRM!

What can marketers do to make the most out of their multi-offer campaigns?

Well if you have a set of offers you need to promote, you simply can’t target them effectively right? Well, that’s not at all true when you have the power of deep learning at your fingertips. You can in fact send targeted campaigns even if you have multiple offers you need to promote. The key is to finding those that have similar buying audiences.

Additionally, there are opportunities to unlock additional revenue streams. Wouldn’t it make your head of marketing or company stakeholders excited if you were able to come to them with new campaign opportunities that could unlock previously untapped revenue?

Promote niche products

Maybe there are products that have niche audiences that are simply not worth the effort to create specific campaigns for. These offers are great candidates to include with other larger offers within the same communication. After all, there are customers who are able to and want to buy these even if you can’t find them through traditional targeting and segmentation strategies.

Avoid skyscraper emails and create targeted multi-offer campaigns

With so many offers to promote, multi-offer campaigns are a great solution to be able to increase pipeline. When these campaigns are also targeted marketers can ensure that the audiences receiving these campaigns are relevant to the included offers. It is possible to target multi-offer campaigns and only include those relevant to specific audiences.

The broadly targeted skyscraper email can indeed be a thing of the past.

This brings me back to the challenge around commercial pressures. When CRM marketers are able to identify offers that have the most overlap of potential buyers, they can build campaigns with more things without harming the relevancy of their campaigns. This is a powerful tool to help marketers deliver on all of the commercial pressures to promote without harming the customer experience!

All this sounds great! So, how can you effectively target multi-offer campaigns?

The best, and potentially only solution, is through using deep learning powered AI to identify customers most likely to buy a certain product. For every offer in your catalog there are customers who are able to and want to buy. AI can identify the tiny signals that can significantly predict buying intent.

Most traditional methods of targeted use explicit behaviors such as a website visit or a past purchase; however, 1) that isn’t always accurate and 2) it leaves tons of unidentified demand on the table as there will be customers left out of segments based on trigger-based targeting that would have converted.

Once you are able to identify demand for a set of offers, you can also identify the demand overlap. Let’s say you are promoting a summer beach campaign. Deep learning could help you identify offers with the highest overlap of high-propensity buyers. Maybe a pair of sandals and a sundress have a high overlap…these are two offers that should be included in the same multi-offer campaign!

It can also help you decide which offers to exclude or potentially promote in a separate communication targeted to a different audience. Maybe a pair of sunglasses you were thinking of including actually has a relatively low overlap of potential buyers…this might be best included in a one off campaign or in another multi-offer campaign with offers that have a high overlap of high-propensity buyers with the sunglasses offering.

All of this can be accomplished using only your 1st-party data. You don’t’ need to purchase expensive data sets or rely on data that might not be privacy complaint. You can use all the data you currently have at your fingertips; Email addresses, zip codes, demographics, web behavior, transaction data, and more can tell you all you need to know.

If you’ve identified current demand for every offer in your product catalog and have the ability to refresh demand in near real time, you can ensure that the campaigns you are building are targeted to the most relevant customers.

Whether or not you need to execute a multi-offer campaign because of a high volume of campaign requests due to business pressures or you have a seasonal campaign to run or you simply want to find new revenue opportunities, through using deep learning you can target the right customers…even when several offers are included.