Identifying Your Item Follower Messaging

Now that you've adopted the scientific method as the best possible way to improve your messaging it's time to set up your experiments. 

You likely already have content for the majority of stages, so let's first identify what we can use, and how to map that to Cortex. 

Item Follower Messaging

You may be asking yourself, "WTH is an item follower message!?", don't worry it's very straightforward! You can think of this as an inverse relationship for users that "like" an item, except in this case the item "likes" the user. The items then "follow" the customer or prospect along his/her lifetime. At ReSci our team of Data Scientist's have built out prediction models that accurately identify items that users will like based on their browsing behavior, and past purchases. There are four specific instances in which an Item Follower will be useful:

1. When the item comes back in stock
2. When an item is new
3. When an item drops in price
4. When it's time to replenish an item

The best part about utilizing these stages is that you can create one template and easily utilize it across each stage. 

As you can see below Truth Nutraceuticals utilized consistent branding across all three stages and they update content to be consistent with new branding efforts. By utilizing dynamic content the templates can be the same across each stage, and the products will be relevant for the user receiving the message.

Other Strategies For Follower Stages

New Arrivals

Many businesses like to tightly control and brand their new product launches. In this case it's extremely important to utilize the New Arrivals stage strategically, so it doesn't overshadow your full product launch. One easy and effective way of utilizing this stage is to target it to high value customers. This does three things:

1. Gets your most valued customers a chance to buy from you quickly
2. Makes your most valued customers feel special, and valued
3. Allows you to quickly understand what the expected sales might be
   1. If your high value users jump on it, it'll likely be a top seller

The setup for this is quite simple. Utilize a template that has the proper structure as shown above. Follow this article to apply the High Customer Lifetime Value segment to the template. Cortex will specifically target only your High Value customers with the products that are new in your feed.

Item Back In Stock

In some cases businesses like to blast a message out to a specific list of users who showed interest in a product by signing up on a wait list. If this is the case for your business, you can utilize this as an opportunity to try to engage people who have never bought an item from your business. Normally, if an item is coming back in stock it is a popular product and one that may interest first time buyers. Set up a dynamic template for users who have 0 purchases. This will allow you to directly target users who have yet to purchase with you, with items that are of high interest to your customer base. With this strategy you can convert users who have yet to purchase, and still do your blast out to the waitlist.

Price Drop

Not in to devaluing your brand by announcing every Price Drop that your items go through? Utilizing segmentation in this stage can help alleviate that fear. Since this stage is all about announcing some savings, utilize our "Discount Only Purchasers" segment. This will help you target your price conscious users and ensure that you don't devalue your brand to anyone who is happy paying full price.

Replenishment

Do your products have a long lifetime? Don't need to be replaced or replenished on a regular interval? Why not use this stage for a different purpose? With this stage you get to decide when it sends. Since each email is based specifically on the item that a user purchased, we know that the user has, received, used and enjoyed the product. This is a great stage to encourage user generated content (UGC) by way of reviews, surveys, or even social media posts. Get creative with this stage and see big returns through your UGC content strategies and social media channels. Social acceptance and proof is one of the most powerful psychological strategies in a marketer's toolbox, and should be used whenever possible.