Personalization Archives - Page 10 of 13 - Omnichannel Personalization SaaS Solution

19 Aug
2014

4 Steps to Implementing Marketing Personalization at Your Company

If you are at all interested in implementing marketing personalization at your company, follow this quick 4 step guide.

1. Determine whether or not you really need it right now.

How do you know when you’re ready to start personalizing your messages? First, decide what state your company may be in. Are you a growing consumer facing business that has reached a plateau in revenue and is looking for a new marketing/growth strategy? Or maybe you’re in a slow moving industry and you want to jump ahead of your competitors. Perhaps there are more pressing issues that must be solved first, such as branding or strategy.

What most consumer facing companies have realized is that customers are almost expecting some kind of personalization during their digital experience. Recent studies have shown that 71% of consumers would be more likely to purchase from a brand if a company’s emails were tailored to their customers’ likes and preferences (source).

Marketing personalization could be your answer.

2. Do your research

At this point, you’re still in the preliminary stages of determining whether or not personalization is a right fit for your company. It’s important to find out what you’re really looking for in a marketing personalization suite. Do you need a powerful e-mail, customer relationship management, and personalization tool? Or do you have an email deployment platform already and are looking to supplement your email service provider with marketing personalization?

If you’re still new to the world of personalization, we cover the basics of marketing personalization in our mass customization article. Additionally, here are some quick data stats on digital marketing to kick start your research.

3. Build a Business Case

Convince your boss you will need personalization by building a business case. Your business case must have buy-in from the CMO and the CFO. Make this happen by demonstrating the power of personalization as not only a customer experience management capability, but also a strategic investment to grow profitability by increasing revenue and decreasing costs with a strong ROI.

In building your business case, you can use metrics such as open rate, click through rate, and shopping cart basket items to portray a potential increase using personalization. Really think through how personalization can be beneficial for your organization. If you’re an apparel retailer who is constantly seeing shopping card abandonment, you may want to consider implementing card abandonment emails along with personalization such as “Based on your shopping cart items, we recommend:”

nectarOM founder and CEO Amrit Kirpalani explains how hyperpersonalizing will garner gratitude from not only your CFO but your customers as well in this Direct Marketing News article.

4. Choose a vendor

Personalization is relatively new in the digital marketing space, which means the companies that offer the technology are relatively young as well. Many companies will claim to have some degree of omni-channel personalization, but it’s very difficult to really evaluate a product without being extremely diligent in your research and taking a deep dive into each solution. It is very common for companies to offer pilots and short test periods before implementation, so take your time before signing the dotted line.

20 Feb
2014

Flappy Bird: The Truth Behind Addicting Games and Ad Spending

Let’s face it: the majority of us have played Flappy Bird at least once.

It was such a simple yet so frustratingly difficult that it became extremely addicting. In fact, it was so addictive that creator Dong Nguyen yanked the game out of the app store for good, according to a Forbes Interview. Nguyen has also stated the game has caused him undue stress, which we can attribute to the numerous death threats and personal attacks. Nguyen tweeted in response to the game “I can call ‘Flappy Bird’ a success of mine. But it also ruined my simple life. So now I hate it”
The truly spectacular part of this whole ordeal is that even though the app was said to have been generating $50,000 in revenue a day from mobile ads alone, Nguyen decided to take if off the market anyway.
We have learned 3 things from the yanking of the game:

(1) Creating an immensely popular game app can have adverse reactions on the developer’s sanity

(2) Some game developers do have souls and aren’t just in this for the money.

(3) Mobile ad spending was outrageously high on this game.

Flappy Bird has been available in the App Store since May of 2013. It was not overly popular until January of this year when it became the most downloaded app in the store for that month with over 50 million downloads. Advertisers saw the potential in the amount of “eyeballs” in this free app and coordinated with Nguyen to insert and sponsor ads into the game for millions to see. Nguyen admitted that he was making around $50,000 per day in ad revenue alone.

There are two key insights marketers can glean from looking at an ultra-successful game like Flappy Birds:

(1) Mobile ad spending is increasing and should be an area marketers should invest in. In fact, Gartner estimates that mobile ad spending will reach $18 billion in 2014, a 37% increase from 2013’s $13.1 billion mobile ad spend.

(2) Free games are one of the best platforms for mobile ads because they gain users rapidly due to the lack of barriers in downloading the game and the repetitive nature of playing the game. Advertising spend on mobile games will increase to $894 million in 2015, up from $87 in 2010. That’s ten times the amount spent in 2010.

With the death of Flappy Bird, it has become apparent that a popular game such as Flappy Bird can play a strategic role in a marketing plan. Marketers should be aware of the trends in ad spending and recognize that mobile ad spending can no longer be ignored.

17 Feb
2014

3 Marketing Trends of 2014

Marketing is just like any other tradition here in the United States: as time progresses it begins to change and adapt to new trends that emerge. In 2014, the marketing world has had a lot of new developments thanks to the innovations such as mobile apps, social media, big data breakthroughs, and other discoveries. As a result, there has been a noticeable shift in how marketers create their strategies to promote products and services. Today, we will discuss 3 of these new marketing trends that have emerged in 2014.

1. Don’t Just Personalize, Hyper-Personalize In 2013, personalization was the name of the marketing game. How was this accomplished exactly? By tracking spending habits and recording clicks while signed in to their website. Then the companies would take that information and use it to send personalized offers via email, text or through the website. Hyperpersonalization takes this one step further. By integrating various existing data sets such as personal information and social media data, companies are able to know more about their customers than just their spending data. For example, utilizing information from Susan’s Facebook page, a company might be able to learn that Susan is expecting a baby in a few months and to send her offers for baby clothes. Hyperpersonalization is like knowing what the customer wants before they actually want it

2. Measure Social Media ROI Accurately Measuring ROI from social media in the past has been anything but exact. Every company that has invested in social media has had a different method of measuring the effectiveness of their social media efforts with varied results. In the past, companies measured their social media success by how much revenue it directly generated for them. While this may work for other marketing avenues, it may not necessarily work for social media. In 2014, measuring social media ROI has evolved from looking at revenue generated to the buzz that is created from the efforts put in. Creating buzz around a company will increase a company’s audience and engagement by increasing word of mouth; hence the word “viral”. Understanding how to optimize content to go viral is key in the success of social media implementation.

3. Real Time Geographic Marketing Geographic marketing is not a new innovation. It has been around since the early days albeit in a more primitive fashion; for example, a large billboard perched above a building has an arrow which points down, indicating it is a restaurant to stop at while driving. Over the past few years email has been the primary source of geographic marketing by sending offers to customers within certain distances from companies. In 2014 this will be taken one step further. With the rise in mobile device usage, real-time geographic marketing will be employed by sending SMS messages or emails to customers’ mobile devices when they are certain distance from a company. So if I am in a mall looking for a gift, I might get an SMS on my phone alerting me that a clothing store in the same mall has a sale. That is the power and convenience or geographic marketing.

Marketing will always have a place in any business strategy because it is the most basic form of communicating with potential customers. The best way to look at is summed up in the expression: “The players haven’t changed, but the game has.” By staying on top of the newest developments one can expect to enjoy the benefits of being top of mind.

27 Jan
2014

3 Ways to Improve Mobile Personalization

Mobile Personalization is one of the hottest new trends in marketing in 2014. Mobile purchases make up about 20% of all eCommerce transactions and mobile sales are projected to increase from $139 Billion to $400 Billion in the next couple years alone. It is apparent that mobile presence is growing rapidly, but the real question is “What is the best way to improve mobile presence and interaction?”

1. Push for increase in opt-ins: The first way to improve mobile presence is to push for an increase in opt-ins. Opt-ins range from customers signing up via mobile devices with their personal information, allowing push notifications to their phone, and cross-promoting mobile offers through their desktop site. By offering these opt-ins a company is able to gain more personal insight into customers that agree to this and personalize their mobile experience by including their name, deals and offers based on their geographic location, and more relevant product selection based on their previous transaction history. In short, having these opted-in customers allows a company to associate more personally with the customer and create an opportunity for them to evolve from being a simple customer to an evangelist for your brand.

2. Cross-channel Promotions: The second way to improve mobile presence is cross-channel promotions over mobile. Within the mobile realm there are multiple ways to reach customers: SMS texts, Apps, social media, passbook, and mobile website. There are various ways to get involved in this avenue of marketing and it can include text campaigns where potential customers can text a preset number for offers and rewards and thereby entering their phone numbers into a
database for a company. Another method is to have an app developed for a brand. This has the most flexibility as the app doesn’t have to serve any particular purpose other than collecting data. It could be a game, a coupon generator, or any other form of entertainment. As long as it gets downloaded then it is fulfilling its purpose and creating more personal contact with customers.

3. Geographic data: The final way to improve mobile presence is to tap into geographic data. This can be done very simply just by having a feature in an app or website that utilizes the phone’s location services to determine
where a customer is and if there are any promotions that would benefit them at their current location. One way to

capitalize on location information is to send geographically defined text messages or emails to customers based on where they are. If a customer in a shopping mall, for example, and then receive a text from a store offering a sale a clear call to action is created and it is more likely to be followed up with because of the proximity to the store.

As mobile presence increases and customers are more focused on their devices than ever before, marketers too must focus more on these devices. The ability to capture customer data and create a more engaged experience for them is available but it’s a matter of acting on it and creating the avenues to acquire this data in the first place. Once the mobile presence is improved, the results will be noticeable and by connecting with customers it can be expected that lifetime value and loyalty of those customers will be increased dramatically.

23 Jan
2014

Achieving Conversion with Website Personalization

Delivering a hyper-personalized email marketing campaign isn’t the only avenue to delivering relevant content and offers to each and every customer. Website personalization gives customers access to a personalized onsite experience.

What’s the difference between a personalized and non-personalized website?

Non-Personalized – The content presented is the same for all customers and lacks personalization. Finding desired products and content relies on search and navigation. The customer must first select an item before it’s presented to them.

Personalized – The content presented is controlled, targeted and based on your big data. When a customer clicks through, targeted products and offers will be displayed based on their browsing history, purchases made, website behavior, lifestyle, etc.

As a marketer you want every customer to experience something personal and relevant. In doing so, you need to act on big data insights to segment and deliver personalized experiences in real time. This, in turn, drives higher conversions and revenue.

How can you turn non-personalized into personalized?

Personalized Greeting – When a customer clicks through, have a personalized greeting such as, “Welcome back, Mrs. Jones.”

Personalized Options – This includes the option to view account information, edit and update profile, add a profile picture and once click features that pulls in targeted information.

Visible Browsing History – Let’s say Mrs. Jones was shopping for workout apparel and had viewed a dozen items. Before making a purchase she was interrupted and had to step away for a few hours. When she returns and clicks through, a visible browsing history would pull in the items she’s previously viewed. This prevents Mrs. Jones from having to re-search the items.

Personalized Content – When a customer clicks through, it’s important to have a hyper-personalized landing page based on preferences, browsing & purchase history, profile etc. Mrs. Jones has browsed and purchased workout apparel and home office solutions. The landing page, or a portion of the content, should address her needs and preferences.

20 Jan
2014

The 3 Biggest Complaints of 2013 Holiday Shopping

When you think of the holidays you think of delicious food, time with family and friends, receiving presents, and if you’re lucky, a White Christmas. When talking about giving presents, however, the Christmas mall rush is not something to be reckoned with. Within the past few years, the advent of digital shopping has drastically changed the Christmas gift-buying experience. Arguably, 2013 was the year of the digital shopper; just as an indication, total e-commerce grew 24% to $4.6 billion on Cyber Monday, Black Friday, and Thanksgiving (Business Insider, Link) Customers are shopping online more than ever, shopping for deals and buying presents all from the comfort and convenience from their own home.

With such a dramatic increase in online shopping, it’s no wonder that the limits of delivery infrastructure were tested. The overwhelming amount of individuals shopping online combined with weather issues across the United States actually triggered an overload on the parts of carriers such as UPS and FedEx. This has inadvertently resulted in customer complaints over the holiday season.

Top Three Consumer Complaints

Failed promise of timely delivery: The biggest complaint of 2013 on the customer side is the failed promise of a timely delivery and it ironically stems from digital shopping becoming “too easy” and “too time-efficient.” That is to say as more and more customers shop for items on their phones instead of going to the physical stores, the retailers are put in a bind because they become forced to extend their shut-off day for shipping and will rely solely on the postal service to deliver the items on time even if Christmas day is just two days away. Stella Service, an online service that measures customer service and satisfaction, stated that 8 out of 25 prominent retailers failed to deliver on time before Christmas day, even though the orders were before the cut off day. By not meeting the delivery time, retails are losing customer loyalty and profit in the long-run.

Item out of stock after placing order: After talking with several of our colleagues, friends, and family, we noticed another negative trend. One apparel retailer did not synchronize their stock inventory with their website, failing to keep up with inventory count. As a result, a coworker of mine had placed an order for a shirt and paid for it only to receive an email a few days later saying the item was out of stock. Obviously by having these issues you will not only lose sales but valuable customers as well. This retailer did take steps to mitigate this issue however. They called my coworker and personally spoke with her about the problem and gave her a gift certificate. While the retailer did a good job of handling this problem, all of it could have been avoided in the first place if they had kept their inventory up to date.

Wrong Item: The final complaint was delivery of an incorrect item. Another friend of mine had ordered a pair of boots from a seller through Amazon prior to his hiking trip. They arrived in a timely manner but had one slight issue: they were a completely different pair of boots. Obviously my friend did not let this go and since he needed the pair in the next few days before he left he had to wrestle with returning them and then waiting for a new pair to be delivered. He ended up getting the correct pair of boots in time but the fact that the first pair was the wrong one was a huge pain for him and he had to jump over a ton of hurdles just to get the right pair. The moral here is for companies to perform quality control on anything they ship out because messing up orders like that can hurt their image and brand loyalty.

While 2013 still saw an increase in traffic and sales across the board last year one thing is becoming apparent: the tried and true old methods are becoming obsolete in this technology-driven consumer society. If retailers want to maximize their sales in this coming 2014 holiday season they will have to go back to basics and adopt the “underpromise and overdeliver” mantra in their delivery, pricing, and customer experience areas.

14 Jan
2014

How to Utilize Lifecycle Marketing

Lifecycle Marketing can Deliver the Right Message at the Right Time!

You, as a marketer, are aware of the thousands of e-mails that companies send out according to the various seasons of the year. As the winter months near, there are a slew of promotions for winter apparel, home heating and everything related to the holiday season. Come spring, consumers’ inboxes bloat with offers for patio furniture, grills and air conditioners. These companies are targeting groups of products to coincide with seasons and holidays.
Lifecycle marketing is similar. Not only are you using big data as a means to strategize delivering the right message, product and offer at just the right time, it’s also recognizing the stage in which the customer is with the brand or lifecycle of the product itself. If a customer is an avid runner and purchases a pair of sneakers, more than likely, they’ll need a new pair 6-12 months down the road. It’s knowing that when a customer purchases a mobile phone, they’ll probably be looking to upgrade and exchange towards the end of the second year.

One of the “don’ts” in marketing personalization is treating everyone the same despite interests and lifecycle changes. That would be like trying to sell an air conditioning unit three days before a major blizzard is about to hit. It’s not happening.

Placing the right products and offers on the table at the right time increases your chance of customer loyalty and increasing your revenue. There’s a narrow margin of “make it or break it.” If a customer purchases a new mobile phone you wouldn’t try to sell them a new one several months down the road. What do customers purchase for their phones throughout that timespan? If you guessed accessories, you’re right.

A lifecycle can range anywhere from somewhat long term to short term. Jill and Bob announced they’re having a baby and the due date is months away. This widens the margin for email marketing and allows you to send various products and offers relevant to the stages of pregnancy, preparation and beyond. On the other hand, if John is showing interest in asking Jane for her hand in marriage, the margin is narrow. Got a great deal on engagement rings? Well, now is the time to send it. NectarOM’s suite automates the content based on the customer and product lifecycle so you know what products and offers to bring forth at just the right time.

You can request a demo through our website to see how Nectar’s products can best serve your needs.

19 Dec
2013

The Power of Trigger Marketing

Trigger a Call to Action through Personalization!

As the old saying goes, timing is everything. Trigger or Event-Based Marketing is the pulse behind a successful campaign because it hones in on actions your customer takes today. The result is highly targeted, hyper-personalized communications that delivers immediate results.

A trigger is the opportunity to talk to someone. As a marketer, you’re reacting based on this trigger by cultivating an offer or message and presenting it in a timely manner. Within that process, it’s important to keep frequency, value and presentation in mind.

What defines a trigger and takes it to that pivotal step of reacting? It can range from a welcome or thank you email when a new customer makes a purchase or acknowledging a customer’s absence. Other common triggers include checkout abandonment, customer loyalty, seasonal, lifecycles, special events, and sales triggers.

Strategizing how you approach these triggers, cultivating an offer, and presenting it is no easy task. You’ve noticed Patty has left several items in her cart. There’s dozens of reasons why this could have happened. How you approach this is crucial. You want to be personal and helpful, however, you don’t want to cross the line of being overwhelming and “creepy.” For example, an e-mail will be pushed out to Patty a week after her cart has been abandoned with something along the lines of “We noticed you left several items in your cart and would like to offer you a 20% off coupon to use towards this purchase.”

As a marketer, recognizing the changing habits of consumers’ online shopping habits is important for staying ahead of the competition. Trigger marketing is a fantastic way to gain additional per customer revenue with little effort using SaaS software such as NectarOM’s suite.

17 Dec
2013

Randi Zuckerberg Dallas Digital Summit Keynote Part 2

Randi Zuckerberg Emerging Tech Trends Recap

We last left off in the middle of Randi Zuckerberg, CEO and founder of Zuckerberg Media, talking about what she believes are the emerging trends of technology. She spoke mainly of the internet empowering the “everyday man” to pursue their entrepreneurial spirit, she spoke of how tech giants and social media sites are becoming the popular news sources, and she mentioned how teens of this generation are the most influential and well-connected due to their prowess with social media and other similar tools. In this blog we will conclude with her other 5 trends so without further ado here are Randi Zuckerbergs 5 more trends of technology.

WOMEN IN TECHNOLOGY= Women have been pigeonholed in the technology world as being inferior to women. To counteract this there have been movements to increase women’s proficiency and activism in the technology world. Websites such as Girls Who Code have been created to promote the spread of knowledge among women and in fact the youngest mobile app developer is actually a 7 year old girl. Women are most definitely tech savvy and they just have to overcome the stigma against them.

GAMIFICATION FOR MOTIVATION= This refers to turning daily tasks into games in order to motivate ourselves to accomplish more. One such example is an app that acts as an alarm with access to your credit card information. Each time you hit the snooze button it automatically donates money to the charity of your choice. Running, one of the most popular exercise forms has evolved with motivational apps as well such as one that simulates zombie sounds in your headphones to motivate you to run farther and faster.

PASSION PROJECTS AS A SIDEJOB= This trend is the increasing likelihood of people with passions or hobbies to turn those into sidejobs that they can earn extra income and pursue their passions. Randi spoke highly of this trend as stimulating the entrepreneurial mindset into the “common working man.”

WE ARE ADDICTED TO OUR PHONES= More of a negative trend but a very real one we face. As we become more connected in the social media world, we tend to miss out and become disconnected from the real world. We ignore friends in our immediate company to text ones who aren’t there and our FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) has caused us to believe that we lead boring lives compared to the crazy stories we read on the internet.

DISCONNECT AND BE MORE MINDFUL OF TECHNOLOGY= Randi mentioned that it was great to be connected with people far away but in order to not lose sight of those around us we must put down our devices and reconnect with friends, family, and nature. Technology is evolving to connect the opposite sides of the world even faster but we can never disconnect with what is right in front of us.

Randi touched on some very poignant and deep issues in her talk. She is encouraging us all to disconnect and reconnect with the world around us and stop and smell the roses sometimes. I believe that we should embrace the technology around us and integrate it into our lives instead of being consumed by it.

17 Dec
2013

Randi Zuckerberg Dallas Digital Summit Keynote Part 1

Randi Zuckerberg Emerging Tech Trends Recap

While attending the Dallas Digital Summit these past few days we were fortunate enough to listen to Randi Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Zuckerberg Media and sister to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. Randi spoke on a very relevant topic that everyone faces today and that is the shifting trends of technology. She spoke of 10 trends and how they are changing around us every day. As a recap, here are 5 of Randi’s trends. The other 5 will be presented in next week’s blog:

BRANDED NEWSROOMS= This means that tech providers such as yahoo or large companies on twitter on facebook are now a more followed source of news than actual news stations. The rapidity that word travels on these social media sites far exceeds that of televisions and newspapers as we are now able to learn events as they occur almost real-time.

TEENS ARE THE HOLY GRAIL OF TECHNOLOGY= Randi explained this as the younger more tech-savvy generation is shaping the way information is dispersed, new things are learned and overall how the world is viewed. This always connected generation is able to effectively utilize all the information around us and break through clutter to discover new knowledge.

THE MAKER MOVEMENT= People purchasing products in the store, for example, see the inferiority in consumer goods and believe that they can create a higher-quality product. This is no new way of thinking, however, people have always been trying to build a better mouse trap but in today’s world the internet is giving these people the channels to actually distribute to consumers now.

THE RISE OF ENTREPLOYEES= This is the notion that within companies employees will see opportunities to create their own ideas and carve niches. Unfortunately, the everyday working man does not have the time nor capital to pursue their idea, but today, there are companies that will provide funds and time for their employees to create their own startups from within in exchange for equity.

LIFE-LOGGING= Life-logging is the idea of capturing your everyday life through pictures, diaries, social media, etc. So widespread has this “selfie” culture become that there are now apps reminding you to take daily “selfies” and there are even devices that you can purchase that will snap pictures of your day-to-day activities to record them for you.

For Randi’s next 5 emerging social trends stay tuned for our next blog!