It's the worlds largest marketplace and 80% of its marketing it relevant to each individual customer, it claims.
This is no easy feat for eBay, however Harvey Sanchez head of marketing - CRM at eBay Australia and New Zealand, told AdNews it's because of its commitment to “test, test and test” again the collateral that leaves its doors and arrives into a user's inbox.
“The user activates that relevancy, their activity is going to create messaging and communications to expose certain assets that are relevant. That's what we're trying to do and that's where the magic happens,” Sanchez said.
The other 20% of messaging is brand messaging, but Sanchez explains that all messaging needs to be relevant especially in the digital landscape because a rival website, or even just another distraction, is just a click away.
“We all have a responsibility to keep messaging as relevant as possible, because customers are incredibly savvy, they can go places very quickly.
“Any online business is a click away. Customers can simply just click away, but if you're in your local Westfield, it's less likely that they decide to go to another shopping centre. But on the internet it's a click away. So we have to be even more careful about customer treatment and relevancy and offers,” Sanchez said.
Another key element of eBay's CRM strategy is its commitment to test its collateral, by polling its customer online and also in person.
“It's good to fail because we learn, it is the only way that you're going to learn is by trial and error,” he said.
“Every company is guilty of this. You can stand on your laurels and say that works, that’s been working for years', but we haven't really tested it any further than that.
“How do you know you can't get any more incrementality by doing a test on that? Or optimising it? One of the things we embarked on was to sit down with our customers and ask 'did you actually like that e-mail? Is that icon in the right place?' When you start to collect that information you start to see that your idea of it isn't the same and suddenly you start to see incrementality,” he said.
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