Dating Apps Have Changed How Wayfair Sees Its Customers

Marketing is all about understanding the customer. We’ve heard it countless times before, and the same tenet rings true for Greg Kim, Wayfair’s senior director of product management and customer retention.Kim sat down with members of the digital team from the International Fund for Animal Welfare for a lunch-and-learn session, set up as part of a day-long custom event organized by BostInno. The topic was content marketing. The session took place at Wayfair's headquarters in a conference room that, appropriately, overlooks shoppers walking through the Prudential Mall in Boston.Wayfair is an e-commerce company selling furniture and home goods. Founded in 2002, it went public in 2014 and grew 71 percent last year, to $2.25 billion in revenue. IFAW is a global nonprofit with a mission to rescue and protect animals. Their goals are very different, but both organizations use content to accomplish them. IFAW uses images and information related to animal welfare to rally people to their cause and keep them involved. Wayfair uses everything from product images to articles about design to sell more furniture. More: What We Learned from Visits to 3 Boston StartupsBoth Wayfair and IFAW rely on email to engage with people. At Wayfair, Kim and his team set up the systems that determine what email to send when, and to whom. They spend hours on end interviewing small samples of people representative of the customer base at Wayfair. It’s quality over quantity when it comes to understanding the various customer profiles of the online furniture buyer.But most importantly, they understand that customer profiles change, frequently. "We used to think that everybody, once you were a certain type of person, you'd always be that person forever," he said. "It makes marketing that much easier if it's true."Several members of the IFAW team chuckled at that. "Unfortunately, it's not true," Kim said. "You've defined a customer in a certain way, they stay that way," he said. "That's not true." "How many parameters do you use ?”, asked one IFAW team member. There's really only one parameter, Kim explained: user activity--email opens, clicks and purchases, for example. What customers do helps Wayfair figure out what they're looking for. For example, a move into a new house necessitates certain purchases and a kind of committed hunting for the right item. Once settled, customers often come looking for smaller household items, or they’re browsing, not looking to buy anything at all. Kim compares the stages of that process to dating apps or relationship approaches. Unlike some companies' rigid customer personas, Wayfair imagines its customers more fluidly, as users of three kinds of dating apps, which most people are familiar with. The three segments--or dating apps--are as follows.Match.comThese people are the serious buyers--the new homeowners and other hunters for the perfect piece of furniture. Like folks who sign up for Match.com, they aren’t looking for casual interactions. They want to get married. The “Match.com” Wayfair customers know what they want, are ready to commit and are actively looking to make that purchase. Emails for the big buyers cut straight to the chase, providing information helpful to that person who is on a mission to buy a rug. And they don't stop with one email."We are very persistent," Kim said--which is necessary to rise above the rest of the marketing noise. "It's a very persistent landscape."But not every email is a hard sell. Once the purchase is made, Wayfair follows up with additional information to maintain the relationship. If the customer buys a rug, for example, a follow-up could include tips for maintaining and cleaning the rug. Because these are major purchases, people are only going to be making them once, and you need to keep them engaged beyond that. That engagement isn't always a selling opportunity.TinderMost Tinder users aren’t out searching to get married, and Wayfair “Tinder users” (or “window shoppers”) aren’t going to be on the hunt for big, essential items. Wayfair’s outreach to them is for smaller things, less serious items that aren’t fundamental to a household. They’re not as expensive--perhaps kitchen utensils or baking products. And like an actual window shopper, these customers aren’t going out of their way to make a purchase. They might see something they like while browsing their phone on their morning commute, for example."Even in this world of Tinder there's very casual Tinder folks and very serious Tinder folks," Kim says.In other words, even among Wayfair's window shoppers, commitment levels vary. The Wayfair email outreach acknowledges that. For example, for the casual browser, emails list items by themselves, without prices. The more focused browser gets a curated list of items, accompanied by price details. Here's a slide showing an email a casual shopper might get on the left, vs. what a more motivated buyer is likely to see on thhe right. Coffee ChatAn informal meetup over coffee isn’t intended to be super serious or overbearing. But it’s fun and engaging, and people are able to establish an initial connection. Wayfair approaches these casual customers knowing that they’re not likely to buy--at least not yet. The content in these emails includes design tips, “Shoppers’ Top Picks" or recipes (which conveniently use kitchenware available at Wayfair).The BuzzFeed-like lists are fun to read and also intended to get people to click into the email and visit the site. They also can provide information--like the post-purchase email on product care, or a welcome email after a user first signs up for the site. While this type of email is fun and non-intrusive toward the customer, Kim emphasizes that you shouldn’t get complacent with it. There is still a time when the customer needs to see the "buy" button.“Initially, we kept losing because we tried to apply the coffee chat model to everyone,” he explains. Coffee chats are fun, but you can only do so many before you should find out if you’re getting more serious.A slide below shows a Welcome Email, a situation where Wayfair's "coffee chat" approach is always appropriate.  Conclusion: Understand Customers By What They Do, Not Who You Think They AreWith thousands of products available, Wayfair faces a complex set of decisions as to which pieces of content to show its customers, and when. Add to that its layer of customer personas and the task Kim's team faces is daunting. To inform these decisions, Wayfair primarily relies on user action within the email and on the site. The parameters are pretty simple. “If you’re about to buy something, we want to show you what to buy,” says Kim.Customer relationships are much like interpersonal relationships in real life. Get to know someone, and perhaps commit further in the relationship. By approaching customer retention and email marketing like a human being, you’re far more likely to reach those humans on the other side.