Anon-to-Known
The central premise of an eCommerce brand’s Identity Gap solution is to leverage Email 2.0 as a means of establishing an interactive hotline with customers. The initial step mirrors conventional tactics: offering rewards and incentives to coax anonymous shoppers into opting in, whether through a pop-up on a website or app, or a QR code in-store. However, this is no small feat, as shoppers are well aware that once they share their personal information, they’ll be inundated with brand emails. Brands therefore need to recalibrate their approach. Three strategies can prove beneficial in this regard as part of the Anon-to-Known solution.
Firstly, introducing “Atomic Rewards” as a universal brand currency to power gamification. Rather than offering a simple discount tied to a specific brand, these rewards manifest as points that can be accumulated and used for diverse purposes. For instance, Mu (the currency for Atomic Rewards) could be utilised to subscribe to GK quizzes, gain access to personalised content, or participate in sweepstakes. The key selling point is that Mu is a rewards currency that can be used for a wide array of non-monetary activities in the customer-brand relationship. [See Atomic Rewards: The Solution to Attention Recession, Loyalty 2.0: How Brands can Tokenise Customer Attention and Data, and Muniverse: A Brand New World.]
Secondly, the distribution of “Microns” (micro-newsletters; also called Ems) is a powerful way to provide valuable content. These succinct, information-rich emails enrich customers’ lives. They stand in stark contrast to the promotional emails customers have become accustomed to receiving. As explained in Microns and Brands: Made for Each Other, microns have the power to transform fleeting moments of interest into sustained relationships: “We all go through the moments where we find something interesting – an article we have read, a product we have searched for, a podcast we heard, a movie reco we saw, an interesting person we came across. These fleeting moments come – and go. Now imagine, if some of these moments can lead to (with our permission) a series of microns which serve as reminders over the next few hours or days.”
Thirdly, these emails are built on AMP, making them interactive and bringing an app-like interface into the inbox. This negates the need for clicking through to a landing page and enables actions to be performed directly within the email. Everything from progressive profiling to NPS ratings, from search to chat, from carts to checkout, from ratings to referrals – the email inbox becomes the destination. [See AMP’s Magic: Coming Soon to Your Email Inbox, The Coming of Inbox Commerce, and Email Shops can Transform eCommerce.]
These three transformative strategies lay the groundwork for Email 2.0. The value they offer is what entices anonymous shoppers, both online and offline, to identify themselves to the brand. By fusing high-value content with micro-incentives aimed at influencing user behaviour, and combining that with email shops and engaging footers, Email 2.0 emerges as the new super app, offering salvation for brands grappling with the “Identity Gap” friction. Consider this as the email-powered Know Your Customer (eKYC) process. This seamless transition from anonymity to recognition is facilitated by Email 2.0, with Mu-incentivised and AMP-powered microns piquing the interest of unknown shoppers, encouraging them to share their personal identity to engage with brands in a win-win relationship.
