Editorial
The Gist
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Highlight customer value. Year-in-review campaigns show customers how their engagement adds value and strengthens their loyalty and brand connection.
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Tailor for all. Customize campaigns to engage new, lapsed and power users with personalized or aggregate data that resonates.
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Increase future loyalty. Effective customer engagement campaigns increase brand affinity, reduce churn and enhance campaign responses long-term.
As we approach the new year, some brands will be sending year-in-review campaigns — and perhaps you should be, too. These typically include detailed information about how people engaged with your brand over the year, with a focus on how they got value from that customer engagement.
This is the most popular with service- and entertainment-oriented brands, but they are a possibility for many other brands with regular interactions. And while year-in-review campaigns are the most popular in the email channel, brands can also promote these in SMS, push and other channels by hosting the campaign online.
Because these campaigns involve a lot of personalization, they’re more complicated to produce than the typical campaign. Their high level of personalization also prompts a number of questions and concerns. Let’s look at the biggest ones.
Customer Engagement Metrics to Highlight
The goal of these campaigns is to equate customer engagement and product-usage with value for customers. That can take many forms, depending on your business. Here are some examples of metrics you can share with customers:
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TV streaming service: Number of episodes watched, number of movies watched, hours of programming watched and most-watched genre.
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Music streaming service: Number of songs streamed, number of different songs streamed, hours of music streamed, favorite music genres and favorite artists.
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Video game platform: Number of games played, hours spent playing games, most-played games and number of achievements unlocked.
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Travel services: Number of trips taken, miles traveled and favorite destinations.
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Financial services: Money saved, interest/appreciation earned, balance changes and spending breakdown.
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Fitness-tracking or health-tracking app: Weight loss, performance improvements and faithfulness to the plan.
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Business app: Overall usage, feature usage, time/money savings, sales generated and return on investment.
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Charities and philanthropic efforts: Number of people helped and money or amount of product donated because of consumer’s engagement.
In all cases, you could also break down activity by month, as well as highlight loyalty points earned and burned. For nostalgia, you could also compare stats year over year — although that could introduce some new challenges.
Engaging Customers with Limited Data
Every brand has new customers who just haven’t had time to engage much yet. And every brand has lapsed customers who haven’t engaged much or at all in the past year for a variety of reasons. For these subscribers with little to no customer engagement, summarizing their usage doesn’t create a great impression, so it’s best not to send them a personalized year-in-review campaign.
Instead, consider sending those subscribers a year-in-review campaign that looks at companywide usage information. For example, an airline could highlight the total number of flights and miles flown for their entire fleet over the year, along with top destinations by month or any number of other breakdowns that might be insightful. It could also state how many destinations it flies to and how many car rental, hotel and other partners it has, plus the activity of its customers with those partners.
An organization-wide summary of activity is particularly effective for philanthropic efforts, since individuals are likely to contribute relatively little overall. In cases like this, you might skip the individual-level customer data completely.
Another alternative is to showcase the activity of your average user. For example, a coupon-clipping service could highlight the savings their typical user racked up over the year. For a new or lapsed user, illustrating what they’re missing out on could be very motivating.
Related Article: The Hidden Dangers of Over-Personalization in Marketing
Tailoring Campaigns for Power Users
At the other end of the spectrum are your highest users and best customers. For these folks, you may also want to do something slightly different. Learning that you’re an outlier can be amazing for some people and heartbreaking for others, depending on what you’re sharing stats about.
Here’s a real-world example: Several years ago, a major airline’s year-in-review email indicated prominently how customers compared to others, including who was in the top 1% of their travelers. Some of those top 1% turned to social media to express their utter despair at spending so much time away from their families on business travel. Some even vowed to quit their jobs. It was surely not the reaction the airline was hoping to generate.
Because of that risk, you might consider putting caps or limits on what you show. For instance, sticking with our airline example, instead of saying a customer is among your top 1% of travelers, say they’re in the top 10%. It’s still accurate, but gives them more company. Similarly, you might say they took “more than 25 trips,” instead of the 64 they actually took.
Should We Highlight Things They’re Not Doing?
Chances are that you have plenty of customers that aren’t taking advantage of all that your company has to offer. Highlighting that could nudge them to reconsider. Ask yourself these questions:
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Is a customer not using a product feature that many of your other customers do or that is a new feature?
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Is a customer taking advantage of your offerings in some categories but not others?
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Has a customer not submitted any reviews?
Moreover, is there a way to turn some of these zeros into something more compelling and positive? For example, if someone isn’t a customer loyalty program member, how many points did they miss out on, and how many of those points can they get if they sign up now?
That said, go easy on this angle, as it could become a turnoff or feel salesy. After all, year-in-review campaigns are mostly a celebration of customer engagement with your brand.
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Measuring Year-in-Review Success
While it’s possible for year-in-review campaigns to spur customer engagement and even lead to conversions, that’s not the most natural goal for them. That’s because these are primarily branding and loyalty campaigns. These should make customers feel good about your brand and their involvement in its success.
Therefore, besides some potential evangelism and social sharing, the biggest impact from your year-in-review campaigns should come from higher responses on your future campaigns, as well as lower customer churn. To confirm, compare the behaviors of customers who receive this campaign to those who have not opted in and do not receive your promotional campaigns. If done well, you should see a positive difference in their behavior.
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