Womply Engage is an automated marketing solution for small businesses. It’s a new tool from Womply, a software company that partners with payment processors to offer merchants business tools, many of which are reliant on the credit card data stream.
Merchants have long struggled with multiple facets of their business, and marketing is no exception. Merchants are short on time, and many simply don’t have the skills of a Google engineer, meaning their capabilities of A/B testing and optimizing business processes are lacking to say the least.
Womply Engage looks to make some of that a little easier,
Womply Engage applies the enterprise concepts of customer relationship management (CRM) and marketing automation to a small business context, with minimal effort required. Every time a customer transacts with a business, Womply Engage builds or updates a customer profile, creating a comprehensive customer directory automatically. From there, the platform finds that customer’s email address without any work required by the business and then automatically sends timely, targeted emails to encourage repeat visits.
But before merchants start buying yet another tool they don’t understand, we think it imperative to fully explain how Engage works, and where some shortfalls might lie.
First, Womply is only able to pull customer information if that customer pays with some sort of card. Cash and check transactions – which can be 40% or more of the transactions in a small business – will not generate any customer data. It’s important that merchants understand the top of the funnel is not ALL their customers. Merchants should ask what percent of their customers are expected to be captured.
Second, Womply is using a technique called reserve append to match a customer’s name, truncated card number (last 4 digits), and ZIP code of the transaction to find the customer’s email address. We won’t get into too much detail but this has been a gray area since the Federal Trade Commission passed laws against certain types of appending in the early 2000’s. The gist of it is that customers now need to opt-in to marketing efforts, whereas previously marketing departments were acquiring precise contact information (name, phone, address, etc.) for every one of their customers based on their 16-digit card numbers.
Today the process of appending is not as accurate. Whereas you would previously expect to receive a 100% match rate – because each 16-digit card number is unique – now the rates are much lower. We would guess that of the information Womply is passing back to its appending service provider only 40% of the records are coming back with email addresses – some of them not correct, mind you. Most all the reverse append providers have the same data (it’s a giant horse-trading industry) so the below append match rates are considered normal. Merchants should ask what Womply’s reverse email append rates are.
Third, just because you have someone’s email address doesn’t mean that A) they will opt-in to continue receiving your marketing, and B) that your email is even delivered. You’ve probably noticed how important emails end up in your spam folder, sometimes sitting there for months before they caught your eye. The same thing can happen to any number of emails from marketing firms. Companies like Sendgrid work to ensure marketing email services aren’t blocked by internet service providers (ISPs) who might otherwise flag all your email activity as spam. Merchants should ask what percent of their Engage emails will actually be delivered.
Fourth, there are very strict rules around CAN-SPAM marketing programs. Womply is a large enough company that they have probably done their diligence, but don’t trust any random marketing provider who offers to blast out emails: each separate email in violation of the CAN-SPAM Act is subject to penalties of up to $40,654. Enforcement is another matter, but the number is large enough to make you pay attention. Merchants should ask what Womply is doing to protect them from CAN-SPAM violations.
Fifth, how much control do merchants have over the “automated” messaging? Is Womply determining what content to put into each message? The time at which to send it? How frequently to send it? Merchants should ask how much control they have in messaging their customers.
Sixth, what does Engage cost? Not in the sense that there’s undoubtedly a flat monthly fee for the software, but what does it cost in terms of the promotions being generated? For instance, is Engage automatically deciding to give customers a message that offers buy one, get one free or something similar? These sort of discounts must be accounted for in the true cost of the tool. Groupon proved they could attract plenty of the wrong kinds of customers with a deep enough discount. Merchants should ask what the real cost of Engage is.
Seventh, how is ROI measured? Measuring if someone opens an email is much different than determining if they showed up to your store. The best way to measure in-store redemption is with a redemption code that must be claimed on-site. Lacking this you are left with a number of methodologies like sales lift, phone tracking, and a few other techniques. Merchants should ask how Engage tracks ROI.
Of course a pretty glaring problem specific to Womply is that they only see the payments data, not the POS data. This is a mathematical issue for smaller merchants considering a very material number of their customers don’t use a card for payment. It’s also severely limiting because Engage can’t possibly know what the customer ordered and use this information to recommend a more actionable piece of marketing with higher redemption rates.
If you’re thinking Womply is on the right track you’d be correct: Engage is definitely a solution in the right direction for the industry. But by no fault of their own, Womply is faced with some limitations.
The good news?
There will eventually be a tool similar to Engage, built on POS data that provides higher levels of measurement, conversion, and automation. It will most likely come from your POS providers with seamless integration and amazing functionality. In fact we wrote about that inevitability here, with the below being an excerpt:
Our take is that this marketing inevitability is a partnership of advertising networks (think Google and Facebook) tied into the POS, where all transactional data (not just card swipes) can be measured and reported upon. We fully expect prescriptive marketing (also called programmatic marketing) to take hold; that is, machine learning is used to process data across tens of thousands of merchants and billions of data points from Google, Facebook and other sources to choose the right promotions for the right people at the right time. The output would be something that looks like this, generated directly within the POS user interface:
‘Over the next 14 days we recommend running this campaign. We will automatically adjust messaging and pricing for your customers and report on the success of the campaign. We estimate spending $2,000 will yield $7,481 in new revenue over the next 30 days. Click here to run it.’
Womply is definitely blazing a trail in the right direction but merchants also need to be aware of what they’re buying; it’s okay to be skeptical. Now we’ll wait and see if the POS industry can follow-up with a winning solution that has the right answers to all a merchant’s questions.
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