In today’s digital era, user experience (UX) has become a critical factor in the success of websites, particularly in the consumer packaged goods (CPG) industry. A well-designed website can significantly impact user engagement, brand perception, and ultimately, drive business growth.
In this blog, we will explore the importance of user experience in CPG website design and provide actionable insights for designers and CPG company managers.
Understanding the CPG Industry:
The consumer packaged goods industry encompasses a wide range of products, from food and beverages to personal care items, household goods, and more.
As competition intensifies in this industry, establishing a strong online presence through an effective website has become essential.
By offering a seamless user experience, CPG companies can effectively engage their target audience, showcase their products, and drive conversions.
Let’s explore a notable example where a CPG company revamped its website to align with user expectations and achieved significant business growth as a result.
Procter & Gamble (P&G), a renowned CPG company, revamped its website to align with user expectations. By conducting thorough market research and analyzing customer behavior, they identified the need for a more intuitive and user-friendly interface.
The website redesign included improved navigation, enhanced product descriptions, and personalized content recommendations, resulting in a significant increase in website traffic and higher user engagement.
To create a successful CPG website, adopting a user-centric design approach is crucial.
This involves understanding the needs, preferences, and behaviors of the target audience through user research and data analysis.
By placing users at the center of the design process, CPG companies can create intuitive and engaging experiences.
Method, a sustainable cleaning products brand, adopted a user-centric design approach when redesigning their website. They conducted user testing sessions to gather insights into user preferences and pain points.
As a result, they implemented a simplified checkout process, improved product search functionality, and incorporated user-generated reviews and ratings. These changes led to higher customer satisfaction, increased conversions, and improved brand loyalty.
Simplified and Intuitive Navigation:
Clear and intuitive navigation is vital for CPG websites, given the vast array of products and information they offer. Users should be able to find what they’re looking for quickly and easily.
Coca-Cola, a global leader in the beverage industry, redesigned their website to enhance user experience. They implemented a simplified navigation structure, categorizing products based on consumer preferences and occasions. This enabled users to find their desired beverages quickly and easily, reducing bounce rates and increasing time spent on the website.
Responsive and Mobile-Friendly Design:
With the proliferation of smartphones and tablets, optimizing CPG websites for mobile devices has become imperative.
Responsive design ensures that the website adapts seamlessly to different screen sizes and resolutions, providing an optimal viewing experience.
Mobile-friendly design not only enhances user experience but also improves search engine rankings, as search engines prioritize mobile-friendly websites.
This can lead to a significant increase in mobile traffic, improved search visibility, and higher user engagement.
Coca-Cola, a global leader in the beverage industry, redesigned their website to enhance user experience. They implemented a simplified navigation structure, categorizing products based on consumer preferences and occasions.
This enabled users to find their desired beverages quickly and easily, reducing bounce rates and increasing time spent on the website.
Visual Appeal and Branding:
Visual appeal is a powerful tool for capturing user attention and reinforcing brand identity. CPG websites should reflect the brand’s personality and values through consistent visual elements such as color schemes, typography, and imagery.
To illustrate this, consider a well-known CPG brand that effectively integrated visual storytelling into their website.
By utilizing compelling lifestyle imagery and videos, they not only enhanced the overall user experience but also resonated with their target audience, leading to increased brand loyalty and customer retention.
L’Oréal, a leading beauty and personal care brand, integrated visual storytelling into their website design. They incorporated high-quality imagery and videos showcasing their products being used in real-life situations.
This visually appealing approach not only captivated users but also reinforced the brand’s identity, resulting in increased brand loyalty and customer retention.
Streamlined Product Information:
Effective communication of product information is crucial in the CPG industry. Users seek concise yet comprehensive details to make informed purchase decisions.
CPG websites can streamline product information by providing clear product descriptions, high-quality images, and user-generated content such as reviews and ratings.
Personalization with Performance:
Personalization and customization have become increasingly important in delivering a tailored user experience.
By leveraging user data and employing intelligent algorithms, CPG websites can provide personalized recommendations, customized content, and targeted promotions.
But handling multiple sources of data and trying to get insights from them at the same time takes around weeks to months.
To make sure that Business users and analysts do not waste time to get to the required data points, Explorazor comes into place.
Users can effortlessly connect multiple datasets and analyze them with our “Google – like” search interface.
Within a single query, you can drill down to the root cause of issues and identify hidden opportunities across multiple datasets.
Refer to our Use case on how Explorazor helped businesses such as Danone and more to empower a data driven culture.
User experience plays a vital role in the success of CPG websites.
By adopting a user-centric design approach, simplifying navigation, embracing responsive and mobile-friendly design, creating visually appealing branding, streamlining product information, personalizing user experiences, and optimizing website performance, CPG companies can elevate their online presence and drive business growth.
Taking inspiration from the examples discussed, designers and CPG company managers can apply these insights to enhance their own websites and effectively connect with their target audience. Remember, a well-crafted user experience is the key to success in the competitive landscape of the CPG industry.
As a decision maker in the Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) industry, you’re no doubt aware of the importance of staying ahead of the curve.
With consumers increasingly demanding more personalized and convenient products, and competition from both established brands and up-and-coming disruptors, it can be challenging to keep up. This is where Category Management comes in.
In this blog post, we’ll explore what Category Management is, its benefits, key elements, steps to implementing a successful strategy, and challenges CPG companies may face in doing so.
What is Category Management?
At its core, Category Management is a strategic approach to managing product categories. It involves analyzing and understanding customer needs, assessing the competition and market trends, and developing and executing a plan that maximizes the value of a particular category to the business.
The goal is to increase sales, profit margins, and market share by offering the right products to the right customers at the right time, all while minimizing costs and improving operational efficiency.
Why is Category Management Important in the CPG Industry?
Category Management is particularly important, where margins can be tight and competition is fierce. By adopting a Category Management approach, CPG companies can:
Gain a better understanding of their customers and what they want, which allows them to tailor their product offerings and marketing strategies accordingly.
Increase the effectiveness of their promotions and pricing strategies, leading to increased sales and revenue.
Optimize their product mix and inventory levels, reducing waste and lowering costs.
Identify new growth opportunities by analyzing market trends and identifying unmet customer needs.
Benefits of Category Management
Some of the key benefits of Category Management include:
Increased Sales and Profitability
By analyzing consumer needs and buying behavior, Category Management can help CPG companies create more effective product assortments, promotions, and pricing strategies. This, in turn, can lead to increased sales and profitability.
For example, consider a CPG company that sells laundry detergent.
By using Category Management techniques to analyze customer needs, the company may discover that customers in certain regions prefer products with natural ingredients. By offering a natural detergent option in those regions, the company can increase sales to that particular customer segment.
Improved Operational Efficiency
Category Management can help CPG companies optimize their product mix and inventory levels, reducing waste and improving operational efficiency.
By focusing on the most profitable products and minimizing slow-moving or unprofitable items, companies can reduce costs and improve their bottom line.
Better Understanding of Market Trends and Competition
By analyzing market trends and assessing the competition, Category Management can help CPG companies identify new growth opportunities and stay ahead of the curve. This can include identifying emerging product categories or analyzing consumer behavior to identify new target markets.
In the next section, we’ll take a closer look at the key elements of a successful Category Management strategy.
Understanding the customer and their needs
One of the key elements of Category Management is understanding the needs and preferences of your target customers. This includes identifying the products and services that your customers are looking for, as well as the features and benefits that they value most.
By understanding your customers’ needs, you can create more targeted and effective Category Management strategies that address those needs and differentiate your products from your competitors’.
Assessing the competition and market trends
Another important element of Category Management is assessing the competitive landscape and market trends.
This involves monitoring the performance of your competitors, understanding their strategies, and identifying the strengths and weaknesses of their products and services. You should also stay up-to-date on the latest market trends and changes in consumer behavior that could impact your Category Management strategies.
Developing and executing a Category Management plan
Once you have a solid understanding of your customers and competition, you can develop and execute a Category Management plan.
This plan should outline your Category Management goals and objectives, the strategies you will use to achieve those goals, and the tactics you will use to implement those strategies.
It should also include a detailed timeline and budget, as well as metrics for measuring the success of your Category Management efforts.
Steps/Guide to Implement a Category Management Strategy
Conducting a Category Assessment:
Before you can develop a Category Management strategy, you need to conduct a thorough Category Assessment. This involves analyzing the performance of your products and services, identifying any gaps in your product portfolio, and determining the key drivers of customer behavior in your category.
Defining Category Roles and Strategies:
Based on your Category Assessment, you can define the roles and strategies for each of your product categories.
This involves determining which products should be prioritized, how to position those products to maximize sales, and which promotional tactics to use to drive customer engagement.
Implementing Category Tactics:
Once you have defined your Category Roles and Strategies, you can implement specific tactics to achieve your goals.
This may include launching new products, optimizing pricing and promotions, and investing in marketing and advertising campaigns.
Evaluating and Adjusting Category Performance:
Finally, it is important to regularly evaluate the performance of your Category Management strategy and make adjustments as needed.
This may involve analyzing sales data, conducting customer surveys, and monitoring market trends to ensure that your strategy remains relevant and effective.
Challenges of Category Management
While Category Management can offer significant benefits to CPG companies, there are also a number of challenges that must be addressed. Some common obstacles that companies face when implementing Category Management strategies include:
Data management challenges: With the increasing volume and complexity of data available to CPG companies, it can be difficult to effectively manage and analyze that data to inform Category Management strategies.
Siloed organizational structures:
Category Management requires collaboration and coordination across multiple departments and functions within a company. However, siloed organizational structures can make it difficult to achieve that collaboration and coordination.
Lack of resources:
Implementing effective Category Management strategies requires significant resources, including time, money, and personnel. Smaller CPG companies may struggle to allocate those resources effectively.
Resistance to change:
Finally, some employees may be resistant to changes in Category Management strategies, particularly if they have been successful with existing strategies in the past.
To overcome these challenges, CPG companies should focus on building a strong data management infrastructure, fostering a culture of collaboration and innovation, and investing in the resources and training needed to implement effective Category Management strategies.
Explorazor is a data exploration tool that helps CPG companies optimize their categories by providing real-time data-driven insights. Here’s how:
Combining all datasets: We combine all datasets, including Nielsen, Kantar, Primary Sales, Secondary Sales, Media, and more, into one harmonized dataset into a single source of truth, eliminating the need to run around data custodians or extract pivots from multiple excel files.
AI engine: An AI engine, trained on data of Fortune 500 CPG companies, sends alerts and suggests action items. This helps brand managers make informed decisions based on real-time data.
Natural language processing: Once brand managers look at the performance, they can ask Explorazor questions in simple language, without troubling the insights team. This makes data-driven insights accessible to everyone in the organization.
Drill down: Losing market share? Brand managers can drill down across dimensions to figure out if the problem is in distribution or trade promotion and what exactly is the problem. This helps them identify the root cause of issues and take corrective action.
In conclusion, Category Management is a data-driven process that involves managing product categories to increase sales and profits.
By using data-driven insights, CPG companies can optimize their categories and gain a competitive advantage.
Explorazor’s data exploration tool is designed to help brand managers achieve this goal by providing real-time data-driven insights. With Explorazor, CPG companies can optimize their categories, improve customer satisfaction, and increase sales and profits.
In today’s digital age, social media has become a powerful tool for businesses to connect with their target audience.
With the rise of social media influencers, influencer marketing has become an essential part of marketing strategies in the CPG (Consumer Packaged Goods) industry.
In this blog post, we will explore the benefits of influencer marketing in the CPG industry, successful influencer marketing campaigns, key strategies for influencer marketing, as well as challenges and risks associated with this type of marketing.
What is influencer marketing?
Influencers have a large following on social media platforms and can help brands reach a wider audience.
By partnering with influencers who have a similar target audience, CPG companies can tap into their followers and gain new customers.
According to a survey by Influencer Marketing Hub, 63% of consumers trust influencer recommendations more than brand advertisements.
This shows that influencers have a strong influence on consumer purchasing decisions.
By partnering with the right influencers, CPG companies can improve their brand reputation and credibility among consumers.
In addition, influencer marketing has higher engagement rates compared to other marketing strategies. Influencers have built a loyal following of engaged fans who trust their recommendations.
This means that sponsored content from influencers is more likely to be seen and engaged with by their followers, resulting in higher engagement rates for the brand.
Successful Influencer Marketing Campaigns in the CPG Industry
There are many successful influencer marketing campaigns in the CPG industry that have helped brands reach a wider audience and increase sales.
One example is the partnership between beauty brand Glossier and beauty influencer Emily Weiss.
Weiss founded Glossier and used her social media presence to promote the brand. Today, Glossier has a loyal following and has become a household name in the beauty industry.
Another example is the partnership between food brand HelloFresh and food blogger Damn Delicious.
HelloFresh partnered with Damn Delicious to create sponsored content featuring their meal kits.
This helped HelloFresh reach a wider audience and increase sales, while also providing Damn Delicious with a new source of income.
Finally, wellness brand Nike partnered with fitness influencer Kayla Itsines to promote their workout gear.
Kayla created sponsored content featuring Nike products and shared it with her followers. This helped Nike reach a new audience and improve their brand reputation among fitness enthusiasts.
How to implement a successful influencer marketing strategy?
To implement a successful influencer marketing campaign in the CPG industry, it is important to follow best practices.
One key strategy is to set clear goals for the campaign. This could be to increase brand awareness, improve engagement rates, or drive sales.
By setting clear goals, brands can measure the success of the campaign and adjust their strategy accordingly.
Another important strategy is to identify the right influencers for the campaign.
Brands should partner with influencers who have a similar target audience and share similar values. It is also important to look for influencers who have a high engagement rate and a loyal following.
Creating engaging content is crucial for a successful influencer marketing campaign. Brands should collaborate with influencers to produce content that resonates with their followers and showcases the brand in a positive light. Additionally, many websites are now using text-to-speech generated videos to reach a wider audience by adopting AI technology.
This could be through sponsored posts, videos, or social media takeovers.
Finally, measuring the success of the campaign is essential to ensure its effectiveness.
Brands should track metrics such as engagement rates, website traffic, and sales to determine the ROI of the campaign.
This information can be used to improve future campaigns and adjust the strategy accordingly.
Things which we need to keep in mind during Influencer Marketing
While influencer marketing has many benefits, there are also some challenges and risks associated with this type of marketing.
One challenge is the cost of partnering with influencers. Popular influencers often charge high fees for sponsored content, which can be a significant expense for brands.
Another challenge is ensuring that sponsored content is disclosed properly.
In the US, the FTC (Federal Trade Commission) requires influencers to disclose their partnerships with brands in their content.
Failure to disclose partnerships can result in fines and damage to the brand’s reputation.
There is also the risk of negative publicity if an influencer’s behavior or actions come under scrutiny. Brands need to ensure that the influencers they partner with have a clean reputation and align with the brand’s values and mission.
Finally, measuring the success of influencer marketing campaigns can be a challenge. While engagement rates and website traffic can be tracked, it can be difficult to determine the actual impact on sales and ROI.
As a data exploration tool, Explorazor helps brand managers harmonize their different datasets and ask important questions to uncover insights that can drive growth and improve their influencer marketing campaigns.
With Explorazor, brand managers can easily deep dive into their data and identify root causes of issues, making it easier to optimize campaigns and improve ROI.
To see how Explorazor can help you unlock valuable insights from your data, request a demo today.
As the world becomes increasingly digital, the consumer packaged goods (CPG) industry is faced with a critical question: how can companies adapt to the changing e-commerce landscape?
In the fiercely competitive world of consumer packaged goods (CPG), companies are constantly seeking new ways to boost sales and drive growth. With the advent of digital marketing, email marketing has emerged as a powerful tool for CPG companies to connect with their customers and drive sales.
We all know how important it is for businesses to stay ahead of the curve in marketing while remaining competitive.
In this blog post, we will explore the power of email marketing in the CPG industry, its benefits, and how it can help you increase your sales.
By the end of this post, you will have a clear understanding of why email marketing should be an integral part of your marketing strategy, and how you can use it effectively to connect with your target audience, drive sales, and achieve your business goals.
So, let’s dive in and discover the world of email marketing for CPG companies.
Understanding Your Audience
Email marketing has become an integral part of any successful marketing campaign. With an estimated 4.03 billion email users worldwide, email marketing has the potential to reach a vast audience.
Identifying the target audience for your email campaigns
However, to maximize the effectiveness of your email campaigns, it is important to understand your target audience. By creating buyer personas, you can gain insights into your audience’s pain points, interests, and preferences, allowing you to tailor your emails to their specific needs.
As a corporate employee of a CPG company, you understand the importance of identifying and understanding your target audience.
After all, your products are created with your customers in mind. It is essential to know who your target audience is and what they want. Creating buyer personas is a powerful way to achieve this.
Creating buyer personas to understand your audience’s pain points, interests, and preferences
Buyer personas are detailed profiles of your ideal customers. They are based on market research, customer data, and insights from your sales and customer service teams. Buyer personas include information such as demographic data, job titles, goals, challenges, pain points, preferred communication channels, and more.
By creating buyer personas, you can gain a deeper understanding of your audience’s needs and motivations, allowing you to create targeted and relevant email campaigns that resonate with your audience.
To create a buyer persona, start by gathering data from various sources, including market research, customer feedback, and your internal teams.
Look for patterns and commonalities in the data to identify key insights about your audience.
For example, you may find that your target audience is primarily made up of millennials who value sustainability and eco-friendliness.
Once you have gathered your data, it’s time to start building your buyer persona. Start by giving your persona a name and a job title.
This will help you to personalize your persona and make it more relatable. Next, include demographic information such as age, gender, income, and education level.
Then, delve deeper into your persona’s goals, challenges, and pain points. What are they trying to achieve? What obstacles are they facing? What are their biggest frustrations? This information will help you to understand what motivates your audience and how you can help them overcome their challenges.
Finally, consider your persona’s preferred communication channels and content preferences. Do they prefer email, social media, or direct mail? What types of content do they find most valuable?
This information will help you to create email campaigns that your audience will actually want to receive and engage with.
How to Build an effective Email List
In today’s digital age, email marketing remains one of the most effective ways for CPG companies to reach and engage with their target audience. Not only is it cost-effective, but it also provides a direct line of communication between your brand and your customers.
Importance of building an email list
However, to reap the benefits of email marketing, you need to have a quality email list. We will now discuss the importance of building an email list, best practices for building a quality email list, and ways to encourage sign-ups.
You understand that building an email list is essential to the success of your email marketing campaigns. Your email list is a valuable asset that allows you to communicate with your customers, build relationships, and drive sales.
A high-quality email list is made up of subscribers who have opted-in to receive your emails, are interested in your products or services, and are engaged with your brand.
But how do you build a quality email list? It’s not just about collecting as many email addresses as possible.
Instead, it’s about building a list of subscribers who are genuinely interested in your brand and are likely to engage with your emails. To achieve this, you need to follow best practices for building a quality email list.
Best ways to build a quality email list
First and foremost, you should always obtain permission from your subscribers before adding them to your email list. This means using opt-in forms and clearly communicating what they will be receiving from you.
Additionally, you should never purchase email lists or add email addresses without explicit consent. This not only violates anti-spam laws but also leads to low engagement rates and high unsubscribe rates.
Another best practice for building a quality email list is to segment your list based on your subscribers’ interests and behavior.
By doing so, you can create targeted email campaigns that are more likely to resonate with your audience. For example, you may want to segment your list based on purchase history, location, or engagement level.
Ways to encourage sign-ups
Encouraging sign-ups is also an essential part of building a quality email list. One way to do this is to offer something of value in exchange for their email address.
This could be a discount code, a free e-book, or access to exclusive content. You can also include opt-in forms on your website, social media profiles, and in-store signage.
Social media is another effective way to encourage sign-ups. By promoting your email list on your social media profiles, you can reach a wider audience and drive sign-ups. You can also use paid social media advertising to reach even more people.
By following best practices for building a quality email list, such as obtaining permission, segmenting your list, and encouraging sign-ups, you can create targeted and relevant email campaigns that resonate with your audience.
So, take the time to build a high-quality email list for your CPG company. It’s an investment that will pay off in the long run.
How to Craft an Effective Email
Now that you have built a quality email list, it’s time to craft effective emails that will engage your subscribers and drive results for your CPG company. The components of an effective email include a strong subject line, engaging and relevant content, a clear call-to-action, and personalization.
In this section, we will discuss tips for creating attention-grabbing subject lines, writing engaging and relevant content, and personalization techniques to make your emails more appealing to your audience.
As a brand manager, director, CXO, or VP of a CPG company, you know that your subscribers’ inboxes are inundated with countless emails every day.
So, how to make your email stand out and get opened?
The first step is to craft an attention-grabbing subject line. A strong subject line should be concise, descriptive, and compelling. It should entice your subscribers to open your email and find out more.
One way to create attention-grabbing subject lines is to use personalization.
Tips for creating attention-grabbing subject lines
This involves incorporating your subscriber’s name, location, or previous purchases into the subject line. Personalization can also extend to the content of your email, making it more relevant to your subscriber’s interests and behavior.
Once you have captured your subscribers’ attention with an attention-grabbing subject line, it’s time to focus on the content of your email. Your email content should be engaging, informative, and relevant to your subscribers. It should provide value to your subscribers and inspire them to take action, whether it’s making a purchase or visiting your website.
Writing engaging and relevant content
One way to create engaging and relevant content is to segment your email list based on your subscribers’ interests and behavior. By doing so, you can create targeted email campaigns that speak directly to your audience’s needs and preferences. For example, if you have subscribers who have purchased your products in the past, you can send them emails about new products or special promotions.
Another way to create engaging content is to use visual elements such as images or videos.
Visual content can help break up long blocks of text and make your email more visually appealing. It can also help convey your message more effectively
How personalization plays an important role in content creation for email marketing
Finally, personalization is key to making your emails more appealing to your audience. Personalization can take many forms, from using your subscriber’s name in the subject line to providing personalized product recommendations based on their previous purchases.
Personalization can help your subscribers feel valued and connected to your brand, which can lead to increased engagement and loyalty.
By understanding the components of an effective email, such as attention-grabbing subject lines, engaging and relevant content, clear call-to-actions, and personalization, you can create email campaigns that resonate with your audience and drive results for your CPG company.
So, take the time to craft effective emails that provide value to your subscribers and inspire them to take action. It’s an investment that will pay off in the long run.
Steps to Measure your Email Campaign Performance
We have now understood how the usage of both captivating subject lines and pers email marketing can be a powerful tool for reaching your audience and driving results.
However, to get the most out of your email campaigns, it’s important to track their performance and make data-driven decisions.
Key metrics to track in email marketing
We will now discuss key metrics to track in email marketing, tools for tracking email campaign performance, and strategies for improving email campaign performance.
One of the most important aspects of email marketing is tracking key metrics to evaluate the effectiveness of your campaigns.
These metrics include open rates, click-through rates, conversion rates, unsubscribe rates, and bounce rates.
Open rates measure the percentage of subscribers who opened your email, while click-through rates measure the percentage of subscribers who clicked on a link in your email.
Conversion rates measure the percentage of subscribers who completed a desired action, such as making a purchase or filling out a form.
Unsubscribe rates measure the percentage of subscribers who opted out of receiving future emails, while bounce rates measure the percentage of emails that were undeliverable.
Best Tools for tracking email marketing campaign performance
To track these metrics, you can use email marketing tools such as Mailchimp, Constant Contact, or Campaign Monitor.
These tools provide analytics dashboards that allow you to track your email campaign performance in real-time.
They also allow you to segment your email list, A/B test your campaigns, and automate your email marketing efforts.
Different ways through which we can improve the email campaign performance
To improve your email campaign performance, there are several strategies you can implement.
One strategy is to optimize your email content for mobile devices. With more and more people accessing their emails on their mobile devices, it’s essential to ensure that your email content is easy to read and navigate on small screens.
Another strategy is to use A/B testing to test different variations of your email campaigns. A/B testing involves creating two versions of your email campaign and sending them to different segments of your email list.
By comparing the performance of the two versions, you can determine which one is more effective and optimize your future campaigns accordingly.
As discussed above, Personalization is also key to improving email campaign performance.
By using your subscriber’s name, location, or previous purchases in your email campaigns, you can make them more relevant and engaging to your audience.
Personalization can also extend to the timing and frequency of your email campaigns, ensuring that your subscribers receive your messages at the right time and at the right frequency.
By tracking key metrics, using email marketing tools, and implementing strategies such as optimizing for mobile devices, A/B testing, and personalization, you can create email campaigns that resonate with your audience and drive results for your CPG company.
So, take the time to track your email campaign performance and make data-driven decisions that will help you achieve your marketing goals.
Email Marketing Examples:
Email marketing has proven to be an effective tool for increasing sales and building brand loyalty. Many CPG companies have embraced email marketing as a key component of their overall marketing strategy, with impressive results
Examples of CPG companies that have successfully used email marketing to increase sales
For instance, Starbucks – In celebration of their 40th anniversary launched a personalized email campaign that used customer data to generate unique and personalized messages for each recipient.
The campaign resulted in a 10% increase in sales as per a report by Campaign Monitor.
Another example is Coca-Cola. They launched a holiday-themed email campaign that featured a virtual Santa Claus who delivered personalized messages to customers.
The campaign generated a 20% increase in open rates and a 73% increase in click-through rates.
Nestle launched an email campaign that featured personalized recipe suggestions based on customers’ dietary preferences and product purchases.
The campaign resulted in a 15% increase in sales.
Procter & Gamble launched an email campaign to promote their Tide PODS product line. The campaign used bold, eye-catching visuals and a simple, clear message to generate a 40% increase in click-through rates.
One of the key strategies that CPG companies use to maximize the effectiveness of their email campaigns is to create compelling content that resonates with their target audience.
For example, Johnson & Johnson’s BabyCenter creates email campaigns that provide valuable information to expectant and new parents.
Their emails contain tips on child-rearing, product recommendations, and other useful content that helps build trust and loyalty among their subscribers.
Similarly, Nestlé Purina’s email campaigns focus on pet care and provide valuable content that pet owners can use to improve the health and wellbeing of their pets. By providing valuable content that their subscribers find useful, these CPG companies are able to build strong relationships with their customers and increase the likelihood of repeat business.
How does Explorazor a Data Exploration Tool help Marketing Teams to get the Required insights?
In addition to compelling content and personalization, CPG companies also use data analytics to measure the effectiveness of their email campaigns and optimize their strategies accordingly.
For instance, PepsiCo uses A/B testing to determine which subject lines, images, and content are most effective in driving engagement and sales.
They also use analytics to track customer behavior and preferences, and then use this information to create more targeted and effective email campaigns.
Trusted by leading CPG & Pharma companies such as GSK, DANONE, Sanofi, Abbot, ALKEM and Olem, Explorazor helps combine all the datasets (Nielsen, Kantar, Primary Sales, Secondary Sales, Media, and more) into one harmonized dataset making it the single source of truth.
Once all the Datasets are added to Explorazor, rather than troubling the insights team, ask those questions to Explorazor in simple language and get the desired insights to your queries.
Take an Interactive Product Tour of Explorazor Today!
Driving brand commitment is a major goal for organizations. Gartner defines brand commitment as ‘the degree to which audiences prefer the brand to alternatives (brand preference), feel a personal connection to it (brand connection) and advocate on its behalf (brand advocacy)’. Thus brand preference, brand connection, and brand advocacy are all subsets of brand commitment.
Now, once solidified, brand commitment is more than just a regular revenue growth strategy. Brand commitment can drive customers to purchase your products at a premium. It drives customer loyalty and advocacy, where the customer promotes your brand on your behalf. Internally, employees already working with the brand seek to be retained, while human talent scouring for opportunities are attracted to your brand. Thus the need for creating brand preference and commitment is clear.
Creating A Strong Positioning
Now, there are 3 kinds of benefits that a brand can provide: functional, societal, and personal. An organization can choose to position itself using any one or more than one type of the 3 benefits, to initiate brand commitment. To drive preference, brands need to create strong positioning, which can be done by
Avoiding negative advocacy – this is done by branding through functional benefits
Communicating a personal benefit that a consumer can derive by being associated with your brand, and demonstrating simultaneously, how the fulfillment of that personal benefit leads to a ‘greater good’, i.e. societal benefit
Personal benefit is understood as a psychological need that a customer fulfills via brand association, while societal benefits range from ethical production, like zero or negative carbon emission, to any other sustainability initiative.
Positioning Through Personal Benefits, Or Using a Combination of Benefits?
Gartner estimates, from a 2022 research conducted among 1,999 consumers, employees, and B2B buyers, that while providing a personal benefit, like a sense of belonging or a sense of growth, is almost thrice as impactful as the other 2 types of benefits, the type of industry matters too. Positioning through personal benefits yielded the best rewards in the manufacturing, healthcare, and natural resources industries. Brand commitment in the technology industry is boosted through functional benefits, while the same connection works between retail and societal benefits.
Brands can use all the 3 benefits at once or combine personal and functional benefits for best results. The latter is because lack of functional benefits drives negative advocacy, so avoiding that, and inserting the impact of personal benefits for positive outcomes, is the best recipe.
Societal benefits combined with personal benefits as your brand positioning to drive brand commitment is also good, but excluding personal benefits to combine functional and societal benefits yields the least favorable results, comparatively speaking.
How Will You Position Your Brand?
Even if you miss out on customers actively advocating for your brand, or feeling a core connection with it, you can still focus on making your brand preferable over the others by choosing the right set of benefits as per your industry and other relevant factors. Just make sure that you include personal benefits in your brand messaging.
Organizations can use these 9 categories as frameworks to develop their own positioning through personal benefits:
A sense of belonging – Making customers feel like they are a part of a certain community
Life purpose – Making customers feel like they can achieve their ambitions through your brand
Growth – Self-explanatory; making customers feel like they can achieve personal development through your product/service
Self-consistency – Basically telling the customer ‘You live a certain life; adopt our product/service to be consistent with the way you live your life’
Autonomy – Helping the customer take charge of their life, or be independent
Competence – Related to autonomy; helping people feel competent, or experts, in something
Security – In other words, offering peace of mind
Esteem – Telling the customer ‘Associate with our product/service and feel confident’
Energy – Providing adventure, or entertainment, or the strength needed to go through life, as an offering
Regardless of How You Position It..
You will need all the intel on market, competition, forecasts, opportunities, threats, and a clear understanding of your own internal budgets, allocations, performance, etc. Right now, if you are doing it in Excel, we have a better proposal for you. Explorazor is refreshing the way users explore data by consolidating all datasets that an organization possesses and bringing it under a common Explorazor roof. There, they can extract data pivots instantly and conduct actual root-cause analysis on the consolidated data.
Users work faster on Explorazor, because they have ready access to all the data they need, pivot extraction is instant, and their laptops operate faster than before due to data being held in server as against the browser.
Explorazor users, typically Brand or Sales Managers, depend less on the Insights Team for their analysis and test out far more hypotheses than before.
Today we’ll be talking about branding’s impact on sales using some examples from the FMCG industry. The purpose of this article is to convey, in no uncertain terms, that companies need to pay attention to and hammer down their branding strategies right now. We’ll also be exploring how ease of data analysis can help make better branding and sales decisions – and a very simple and effective method of easing data analysis. Let’s begin:
Function of A Brand – Seth Godin
You might have heard of various definitions of ‘brand’, but one of the most complete definitions that I have come across is from Seth Godin. I quote “A brand is the set of expectations, memories, stories and relationships that, taken together, account for a consumer’s decision to choose one product or service over another.”
He further goes on to say “If the consumer (whether it’s a business, a buyer, a voter or a donor) doesn’t pay a premium, make a selection or spread the word, then no brand value exists for that customer”.
Why this quote is complete is because it outlines the benefits that companies get when they get their branding right –
The consumer pays a premium to get your brand, simply by virtue of it being your brand
The consumer at the very least chooses your brand over others, in the event of other factors, such as price, being the same
The consumer herself begins actively engaging in promoting your brand via word-of-mouth
The right branding should get you sales and free promotion, per Seth Godin.
To get the branding right, one has to focus on branding in the first place.
Using Branding For Sales – Recognition & Trust!
Now that the need for branding is established, let’s skim over the very first ingredients needed to get the branding underway. A foolproof method is to start off by building greater brand recognition and fostering brand trust.
Attention Grabber: Brand Recognition
The competition for grabbing the mental space of a consumer is always ON. Round-the-year branding, even though it may not seem to be the most impactful at times, readies the consumer for the moment-of-truth, when she is looking to make a purchase. Hardly a consumer knows the difference between Tide & Surf Excel, but almost every consumer buys on the basis of the perceived value they derive from the advertising campaigns of each brand.
In other words, if they give first mental recognition to your brand when opting for a solution to their need, they are more likely to prefer your brand to others.
The right branding can even trump core value offered to consumer!
Care & Nurture: Brand Trust
Brand trust is one of the biggest drivers of brand loyalty, repeat customer purchase decisions, and long-term customer satisfaction.
Case Study: HUL Star-Sellers
In around 1997, HUL wanted to set up distribution of basic necessities like oils, detergents, and soaps across all villages in India. Distribution was one thing; store acceptance was another. HUL identified local influencers in villages even with populations of less than 2000 people and used them as ‘faces’ of the brand to persuade retailers to stock their products and sell in the local markets.
The branding was unconventional, but it hit the mark because HUL used the concept of brand trust as its base.
You will find multiple other examples of HUL paying focused attention on creation of brand trust. Ventures like Project Shakti are another reason why HUL was able to not only create thousands of jobs and revenue for the company, but also forge a lasting impact on the masses that today holds HUL’s name synonymous with ‘trust’.
From Cadbury to Pepsi…
Cadbury noted that the term ‘Eclairs’ was a commonly used term for a type of candy, and retailers were dishing out other brands in the name of ‘Eclairs’ instead of Cadbury’s well-known Eclairs. It undertook a product realignment campaign and renamed the product to ‘Chocolairs’.
Pepsi keeps changing its logos to keep up with trends, spending millions of dollars each time.
Tropicana’s package rebranding in 2009 for reasons similar to Pepsi’s, failed drastically, resulting in 20% year-on-year sales degrowth. As marketing professor and Ph.D. holder Mark Ritson noted, and we quote Brandstruck, the new design “achieved something Tropicana’s competitors had failed to in 20 years – a degradation of its brand equity and an undermining of its status as market leader.”
There are hundreds of examples in the FMCG industry itself, of how brands spend time, effort, and money to brand and rebrand their well-established products.
Branding seems to be pretty important for all of these brands.
Is it for you?
An Important Sub-Component – Proper Data Analysis
Just like all the sub-components in a branding strategy pave the way for good branding, a company’s overall choices of people, processes and products combine to produce effective decisions that impact every facet of the company, including branding and sales.
While we’re sure your choices of people and processes are most apt, we do have a proposal to add Explorazor to your product portfolio.
Explorazor is a data exploration and analysis tool built to ease the daily tasks of Senior Managers in Brand & Sales Teams, who currently work on Excel. Explorazor does not replace Excel; we are interested in complementing Excel. You can also explore some ways Explorazor differs from Power BI.
