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How Email Parsing Software Builds a Stickier E-Commerce CX

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Learn how to create more engaging customer experiences across your purchasing flywheel by using email inbox parsing software to extract context-rich data.

How Email Parsing Software Builds a Stickier E-Commerce CX

Despite the ever-growing number of communication channels at our disposal, one remains the dominant platform for e-commerce businesses—email. From order confirmation, shipment tracking, and general business communication, your customer’s inbox is where most, if not all, of your customer communication occurs.

Email contains valuable and real-time data that, if harnessed, can provide deep customer insights that help e-commerce businesses enhance their customer’s purchasing experience. The best way to tap into this data is with high-quality inbox parsers.

In this article, you’ll learn how you can use email parsing software to extract context-rich insight that will help you build better, stickier customer experiences. A more engaging CX will help you improve customer retention and loyalty, increase engagement and conversion, and accelerate your gross merchandise value (GMV) growth rate.

Extracts Context-Rich Customer Data

The good news is that email inboxes are treasure troves of information. A customer’s email contains important data and insight into their buying behavior. This data is more context-rich, real-time, and direct than data extracted from web analytics and third-party research. Insights from such sources are passive and don’t necessarily reflect the intent of your customers. Data found in analyst reports is, at best, already a few months old and tends to reflect broader themes in the marketplace.

A customer’s inbox contains highly valuable data such as shipping and order details, tracking numbers, email headers, and contact information. Tapping into this information can help your business build more engaging purchasing experiences that will help drive repurchases and keep acquisition costs low.

The bad news is that email data is unstructured, meaning it is very difficult to extract value from. And it can be especially challenging to stand up the custom integrations you need to flow this data into your product, your analytics stack, and elsewhere. To be able to handle these challenges, you need email parsing software.

An email or inbox parser is software that can extract unstructured email data and turn it into categorized and structured data. You can then use parsed email data to enhance your end-to-end customer experience.

Enhancing the customer experience across the purchasing flywheel

Utilizing parsed email data allows you to provide a more engaging experience throughout the purchasing flywheel. It’s useful in every stage of your customer journey, starting from pre-purchase all the way to your customer’s support experiences.

  • Pre-purchase: Using data from previous purchases, you can ensure your pricing stays competitive and share personalized recommendations. You can offer seamless price matching or even rebates on older purchases.
  • Purchase: Email data on purchase preferences and order history allows you to create personalized add-on recommendations as the customer is completing their purchase
  • Post-purchase: Typically, your customer’s order information (such as order number and merchant name) and shipping information (such as tracking numbers and links) are siloed, creating a poor user experience. Email parsers allow you to consolidate order and shipping information to surface shipping updates and other order information in a single place. Universal Package Visibility empowers customers to view, track, and manage every step of their order through one application.
  • Customer care: Customer email data lets you offer a more streamlined support experience. Resolve disputes more efficiently and fairly, provide seamless returns or refund tracking, and analyze customer sentiment. By providing a more personalized support experience, you can reduce the number of calls and complaints for support agents to deal with, boosting their productivity.

By providing highly engaging experiences, e-commerce platforms are well-positioned to maximize customer retention, brand loyalty, engagement, and conversion. These companies can harness customer data to implement business processes that accelerate GMV growth rate while keeping customer acquisition costs low.

Identifying the Consumer and Business Benefit

To integrate communications data into your flywheel, you need access to your customers’ inboxes. And the best way to secure customer buy-in is by building features that make their lives much easier. Before implementing inbox parsing technology, consider the benefits you can offer to your customers: 

Identifying the consumer and business benefits

Reduces Friction in Your Customers’ Journey

For a flywheel to function correctly, it requires movement. In the case of your purchasing flywheel, this means smooth movement throughout all stages, from acquisition to retention and engagement. To ensure this, you need to identify any friction throughout the journey and address it. Email data offers insight into these pain points and helps you take the best courses of action.

Here are some indicators of friction in your customer journey to look out for and how email data can help reduce them:

  • High cart abandonment rates – Providing a better purchasing experience by using email data to surface personalized recommendations and add-ons during the purchase phase.
  • Disjointed order and shipping data – Providing universal package visibility to reduce the time customers spend searching their inboxes for tracking numbers, merchant names, or to view the status of their order. Research has found the fear of package theft causes 48% of customers to avoid purchasing expensive items online. Despite this, 66% of customers prefer their packages to be delivered at home. Universal package visibility helps reduce the risk of theft, making more customers feel comfortable purchasing higher-priced goods through your platform.
  • Customer service issues – Get a clearer idea of friction points with your post-sales service by analyzing customer sentiment.

Take Control of Your Customer Email Data Using Nylas Inbox Parsers

Inbox parsers are the best solution for extracting customer email data. However, finding the right parsing tool provider can be tricky since parsing quality can vary significantly from one platform to another.

Building your parsers in-house is a costly endeavor. And to get the most out of your in-house built inbox parser, you’ll need to train them with high volumes of real, representative email data. You’ll need to train your parsers using the following processes:

  • Data generation using a high volume of real, representative invoice transactions
  • Data labeling to annotate emails and train the parser on what to look for
  • Parsing, or extracting, email data based on the logic from both the generation and labeling steps
  • Anomaly detection to ensure consistent accuracy, monitor the health of your parser, detect baseline deviations, and identify significant trends

Additionally, customer purchase data quickly becomes outdated, which means it requires constant updating. As your data set grows, you’ll need to handle monitoring, quality assurance, and updating existing algorithms within your software.

The Nylas Neural API offers inbox parsing solutions that allow you to build a data-driven e-commerce powerhouse. Our parsers rely on economies of scale to process massive quantities of representative data and ensure a high level of precision without the exorbitant costs of building your own solution.

  • Leverage AI with customer profiles, allowing you to display relevant content, products, and services.
  • Get access to real-time data to learn how customers respond to products. This data gives you insight into your business strengths and weaknesses, which will help you drive up retention and prevent customer churn.
  • Parse emails to obtain real-time purchase data to help you build personalization models and understand consumer behavior and trends.

Download the Ebook: Improving the End-to-End Purchase Experience to Maximize Gross Merchandise Value

Leveraging communications data from emails can empower you to create a frictionless customer journey to maximize repurchases, retention, and gross merchandise value. For a more in-depth look, read our full ebook, Improving the End-to-End Purchase Experience to Maximize Gross Merchandise Value.

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