What lessons did retailers and brands learn from the pandemic? One clear lesson is that a well-thought-out digital commerce strategy is essential because consumers have higher expectations for their online experiences than ever before.

After shoppers were forced online, they quickly grew to appreciate the convenience and autonomy of eCommerce. How drastic was the post-pandemic shift toward digital commerce? McKinsey & Company reported 10 years of normal eCommerce growth in just the first quarter of 2020. 

Using Marketing Automation to Fuel eCommerce Growth

Forward-thinking retailers quickly adjusted to the new normal and poured resources into improving their eCommerce customer experiences, including ramping up marketing automation programs. According to a 2021 Dun & Bradstreet survey, 64% of Retail CMOs had adopted marketing automation, a higher percentage than most other industries.

Listrak has been helping companies succeed online for over 20 years, and our Growth Xcelerator Platform (GXP) can help your brand engage new customers and grow eCommerce revenue like never before.

What is GXP?

GXP is a platform designed to create appealing online experiences for modern customers in today’s digital commerce environment. 

The pandemic isn’t the only recent change marketers have been forced to confront. There have been a whole host of new developments — including new online privacy rules, reduced data visibility, and limitations on social — that require an adjusted approach.

The demand for new, innovative ways to connect with online customers is growing, and the needs and expectations of those customers are evolving. So your marketing automation technology must evolve with them. 

That’s why we created our Growth Xcelerator Platform. In today’s fast-paced, omnichannel shopping environment, it’s not just about achieving a sale on a particular customer interaction. It’s also about how the customer feels throughout their entire journey with your brand.

With GXP, you truly connect with new customers in an engaging and impactful way. You identify the point shoppers are at on their customer journey, present them with personalized and engaging content and offers, and convert them at higher rates to grow eCommerce revenue like never before. 

How does GXP help you accomplish this? This full-service solution works with your current Email Service Provider (ESP) to turbocharge your list growth, onsite conversions, and triggered revenue — all with performance guarantees. 

“We have benefited immensely from our partnership with Listrak over the years, and GXP has been the latest solution in driving such quick and impressive results.”
-Gail Buffington, VP of Marketing and Analytics, Soft Surroundings

GXP focuses on improving critical eCommerce components to fuel growth, including:

• Identity Resolution
• Onsite Acquisition
• Onsite Conversions
• Triggered Messages

How can improvements in these areas boost your online revenue? Let’s take a look…

Identity Resolution

In an online environment that is seeing third-party cookies phased out, it’s no longer simple to acquire customer data. For a long time, marketers have leaned on third-party cookies to find out key details about customers, like what sections of a website they view or what products they click on. This data gives brands crucial information about their customers’ interests and behaviors.

But as platforms like Apple and Google remove cookies (or make it easier for users to opt-out of data sharing), a marketer’s job gets more difficult. 97% of all visitors to retailers’ websites are anonymous, so marketers must be more creative in acquiring data. 

The Importance of an Identity Graph

Fortunately, the right technology makes that possible. GXP’s identity resolution technology leverages the largest commercially available identity graph to identify previously anonymous individuals using authenticated sessions. At a time when the customer journey typically includes interactions across multiple devices (phone, home laptop, work computer, tablet) and channels, it’s essential to link online behavior to an individual shopper, rather than a particular device.

In practice, this means that a subscribed customer who visited your site, searched for a product, and browsed a category (but didn’t make a selection) — on their work computer — doesn’t need to start from scratch when they get home a visit your site from their tablet. The identity graph enables them to pick up on their shopping journey right where they left off, without signing back into their account.

Removing Friction from the Customer Journey

This subtle shift in the customer journey can have a substantial impact on their experience. By taking away the need to start each shopping session from square one, brands can remove a lot of the friction that keeps customers from completing a purchase. It’s frustrating to conduct the same search again, remember the products you’ve already viewed, read descriptions again, and so on. Many times, a customer will simply quit or move on to another site. Because GXP can identify individual shoppers and seamlessly track their progress, it creates natural momentum toward a purchase. 

Also, since GXP is a fully integrated platform, all of your channels seamlessly orchestrate together. So instead of trying to integrate multiple third-party platforms together, all of your channels work in harmony and all your data is in one central location. This eliminates data silos and helps each facet of your marketing approach have a greater chance for success. 

“We have been with another ID resolution platform, and nothing compares to GXP. GXP not only helps our business grow, but they are an extension of our team.”
-David Chalom, CFO, Cookie’s Kids

Listrak customer Cookie’s Kids experienced a significant bump in multiple metrics after converting from a different ID resolution platform. They saw a 64% increase in identity recognition of users with purchase intent and a 74% increase in conversion rate. 

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Online Acquisition 

In addition to identifying your customers and users, you also need to have a strong online acquisition strategy to achieve eCommerce success. By acquiring data on your customers, you can enrich their experiences by personalizing content and offers to their individual preferences and known behaviors. 

But as we mentioned, customer data acquisition is tougher without third-party cookies. So what type of customer data should modern brands focus on?

Pursue Zero- and First-Party Data

Smart retailers and brands are exploring ways to boost their acquisition of zero-and first-party data. The problem? Zero-party data (which is intentionally shared by the customer) and first-party data (which you collect directly from customers’ actions, behaviors, or interactions) have always been more difficult to access than data from third-party cookies. To solve this problem, marketers must be more intentional in their data acquisition pursuit.

First off, you need to be creative in developing new methods to ask your customers for their data. The beauty of acquiring customer data is that most shoppers want to give it to you if they will get something out of it in return (such as a better customer experience). A recent survey even showed that 71% of customers would be willing to share their data if it means getting personalized recommendations from brands.

Innovative Acquisition Tools

GXP simplifies zero-party data collection by automating acquisition through solutions like responsive pop-ups that capture both your customer’s email and mobile number. Listrak has seen these two-step pop-ups create 15% more orders, 30% more customer lifetime value, and 10% higher average order value than with email alone. 

And GXP also makes it easy to include methods like persistent sticky buttons or banners. As opposed to pop-ups, which users can close or click out of, these sticky features constantly remind your customers of the value you’re offering.

“GXP has been incredible in turning up our acquisition efforts.”
-Beth Coffey, VP, Sales and Marketing, Woodcraft

With GXP, the acquisition of zero- and first-party data works hand in hand with integrated identity resolution to help you identify more of your audience and significantly increase new customers across owned channels. 

What are owned channels? 

Owned channels are the channels that retailers and brands have direct control over. If you rely on buying ads on different social media platforms and marketplaces, you’re putting all of your marketing power in the hands of third parties. And if an ad isn’t compliant (or even if it’s mistakenly judged as non-compliant), the platform could remove the ad – or worse – your entire account. 

While there is often a review process to get your account back in good standing, you still lose valuable time (and revenue) while your ads are down. 

Listrak client Soft Surroundings saw a 679% increase in average daily opt-ins with GXP.

By focusing on owned channels, you gain a level of certainty in an ever-changing marketplace. These channels include your website, email, and mobile marketing — and they’re not subject to the whims of another company. You control them, and the more data you acquire for these channels, the more resilient your business will be.

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Online Conversions

Building on the first two components is another crucial aspect of eCommerce, online conversions. This is where your brand actually starts realizing the benefits of the strong foundation laid by ID resolution and online acquisition. Higher conversions lead to increased revenue and profitability.

Whether through content on your owned channels, affiliates, influencers, or ads — retailers spend an large amount of their budget driving traffic to their sites. Unfortunately, an enormous amount of that budget is wasted when visitors leave without making a purchase. 

But when all of your channels are working together in a unified platform —sharing data and pulling in the same direction — your brand can make great improvements in conversion rate in short order.

GXP Boosts Conversions

Listrak’s GXP is highly effective in boosting the percentage of first-time purchasers measured against the control. The platform uses a myriad of tools to optimize the entire customer journey, including 

• Intent algorithms
• Pull marketing tactics
• Dynamic coupon codes
• Differential treatments by traffic source
• Campaign suppression features
• And much more…

These tools combine to provide a greater return on acquisition spend (ROAS).

What does this mean for your business? Your marketing dollars can go further because you have more information about what your customers want. 

When you know who your customers are (identity graph) and know their behaviors and preferences (zero- and first-party data), you can better personalize campaigns and create compelling offers that convert.

In fact, GXP gives brands an average guaranteed ROAS of 20-40X. The platform increases first-time conversions and turns anonymous visitors into loyal customers. After they deployed GXP, Listrak client Sol de Janeiro saw a ROAS of 102X and experienced a 26% increase in onsite conversions of first-time purchasers.

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Triggered Messages

The importance of new customer acquisition in eCommerce can’t be overstated. To grow your business, you must regularly convert visitors into buyers. However, research shows it’s much easier to sell to someone already familiar with your brand. 

Triggered messages are an essential part of any marketing automation strategy, especially your email and SMS marketing. These messages are “triggered” by a particular action a subscriber takes while interacting with your brand. And they are also the most effective messages you can send.

In fact, nearly 40% of email revenue comes from triggers, such as browse abandonment, cart abandonment, product recommendation, and post-purchase emails. 

The problem with most trigger campaigns is that they are deficient in both quantity and quality. Many marketing teams (who don’t have the bandwidth to frequently monitor trigger campaign metrics) will approve a couple of abandonment campaigns with their ESP or SMS, but won’t actively work to improve conversions.

Managed Service for Trigger Messages

A “set it and forget it” strategy will result in your brand leaving significant revenue on the table. But with GXP, our team will work with you to identify key gaps in your trigger campaign strategy. It’s difficult to find and hire a qualified email or SMS strategist, and with GXP, you don’t have to take on that task. Because managed service is a component of GXP, we can handle everything for you. 

We’ll work with you to develop goals, inform you of all the triggered messages you could be deploying, and set everything up. But we won’t stop there. Once the automated trigger messages are established, we’ll test and optimize these messages to increase conversions and revenue.

As a by-product of our integrated platform, you can personalize messages based on acquired customer data. For instance, you can identify a user across any platform or device, leverage zero- and first-party data to evaluate their behaviors and preferences, and then (once they perform an action) send a timely, personalized message that gives them precisely the offer they want, right when they want it. We can also individualize triggers based on the specific channel, so the message seamlessly continues the interaction your customer is already having with your brand.

GXP helps you take your behaviorally triggered campaigns to another level by identifying more traffic, increasing the volume of triggered messages, and enhancing highly relevant and personalized cross-channel campaigns to drive considerably more incremental revenue.

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Perks of GXP Marketing Automation

At Listrak, we’ve designed GXP to be an all-in-one, integrated solution that meets all of your marketing automation needs. When these four eCommerce components — identity resolution, online acquisition, online conversion, and triggered messages — are working in unison, it makes every aspect of a marketer’s job easier. 

We’ve achieved fantastic results with our GXP customers, and marketers particularly love a couple of perks they get with the platform:

• Guaranteed ROAS – While other platforms overcharge for underperforming programs, we work directly with clients on an ongoing growth strategy to ensure guaranteed results are delivered. Because we know the effectiveness of the combined set of GXP tools, we contractually guarantee a 20-40X ROAS. So your team doesn’t need to worry about getting substandard returns on your ad investment, and you can focus on attaining success with your holistic marketing strategy.
• White-Glove, Turnkey Service – We know how busy marketing teams are. Coordinating your online marketing mix, aligning campaigns, and monitoring results can take you out of big-picture thinking. And that doesn’t even include executing offline strategies like in-store promotions and trade shows. The Listrak GXP team handles all of your marketing automation — from setup, strategy, design, and implementation to optimization, analysis, and reporting … saving you precious time and resources. Focus your marketing efforts on your other initiatives while Listrak’s team of strategists grows your revenue.

GXP Elevates Your Marketing Automation Results

GXP is more than just an identity resolution program, ESP, or SMS provider. It’s a fully integrated, all-in-one marketing automation solution. With this platform, you don’t need to coordinate multiple vendors and platforms that often don’t talk to each other. 

The solution aligns the entire customer journey, so users engage faster, convert better, and retain brand loyalty. If you’re looking for increased marketing metrics across the board, GXP delivers. You get guaranteed ROAS results, skyrocketed subscriptions, and increased conversion rates.

Get a guaranteed estimate – and start driving revenue.