Why Trigger Marketing Matters

trigger marektingAs They Say…Timing Is Everything

As a marketer, you’re probably thinking about how to acquire, grow and retain customers.  That’s a lot to do! There’s a lot to process as well as consider with marketing personalization. You’ll often hear important key terms mentioned including customer engagement, 360 degree customer profile, big data, CRM, ROI, segmentation, hyper-personalization and one-to-one marketing. These are all necessary components to create successful marketing personalization so your company can deliver the most relevant content in real time.

Amid these components is trigger marketing. In a nutshell, trigger marketing is the engine that hums continuously. There’s a constant stream of messages being deployed to to your customers based on behaviors, browsing history, purchases, interests, etc. Delivering a successful trigger marketing campaign entails combining these pieces of big data, identifying an event in a customer’s life that warrants a need and communicating during these pre-planned points in time.

Having the right road map can make it easier to achieve success and the desired outcome. As part of the email marketing campaigns, triggered email marketing is at the core of helping to drive engagement and revenue.

Delivering a successful campaign is your ultimate goal.  To achieve that, there are 3 key elements to remember…

Find the appropriate trigger – The content within these marketing campaigns should be based on your customers immediate needs.

Cultivate the right offer – Triggers have to be followed up with relevant products & offers.

Timely Execution – Presentation should occur immediately after an appropriated trigger.

As a business owner, you want your campaign to drive both traffic and revenue. There’s always a concern of frequency, value and appearance with trigger marketing. And, the big question lingers…”Do people mind followup emails?” The answer is yes. Keep in mind, though, it’s all about presentation, timing and tone.

Here are some tips to keep in mind for what your customers are looking for…

1.  Acknowledge me. I just signed up to receive emails from your company.  A welcome or thank you email is a considerate means of acknowledging my interest and introducing your company, products, offers, etc.

2. Entice me a little. The operative word is little. There’s a fine line between enticing me and conning me. Why should I become and remain a loyal customer? Based on my personal information, how can your company suit my needs more efficiently and cost effectively then company A or B?

3. Where’s my receipt?  I made a purchase and I’d like to have a transactional email for my records. I’d like to double check to see if my order is accurate and things processed correctly with my bank.

4. Spark my interest. I recently ordered a new bedding set, a few bathroom accessories and some end tables. It’s safe to assume I’m updating my home. I’d be interested in additional products you offer based on my purchases. Window treatments? Kitchen accessories? Area rugs? Go ahead, inspire me.

5. Nudge me a smidgen to try something new.  I’ve worn Crocs flip flops for as far back as I can remember. It’s my brand of choice, however, there’s a chance I order a pair year after year out of habit. Expand my horizons. Is there a flip flop that’s similar made by SKECHERS or Nike? Show me. I might just consider stepping out of the box.

6. I like special treats on my birthday. A gift basket filled with gourmet treats showing up at my door compliments of your company isn’t feasible, I know. However, how about a special offer, discount coupon or, at the very least, a Happy Birthday greeting?

7. Get me excited. Is there an upcoming event that you know I’ll be head over heels about? Let me know about it. As the event nears, send me a reminder or two because I’m busy and I may have forgotten to make note of it.

8. Offer a token of appreciation for my business.  I’ve been a loyal customer for quite some time. Whether it’s a personal note or a 20% off coupon on my next purchase, it’s nice to know my loyalty is appreciated. I’m making the choice to do business with you. Without loyal customers…well, you get where I’m going with this?

9. I’m not a fan of creepy. Offer discretion when analyzing my browsing and purchase history. Any mention in your emails of the amount of time I spent browsing products to diminish the appearance of stretchmarks will be duly noted. This will not work in your favor in more ways than one.

10. Touch base with me. I’m busy. Often times weeks go by with very little time to spare. I may not have had time to browse, shop & make a purchase. I may have even left a product or two in my cart.  Send me an email. Remind me there’s a product in my cart and, if you really want to earn brownie points, offer me a coupon towards my purchase. Score!

As mentioned, with trigger marketing, it’s all about timing, relevancy, tone and presentation. Remember, your customers are real people. Address them as such, respect their time, send offers that fit their needs and time it just right. Capture the attention of your customer by establishing the appropriate trigger. Materialize the immediate needs with applicable products, offers, and information.  With automation and the right set of tools, these triggered events can be both automated and intelligent. Once these fundamentals are in place, you’re ready to execute.

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The Future: Big Opportunities in Big Data

marketingBig Opportunities in Big Data Abound.  You Just Need to Know HOW to Look (4th in a Series)

 

I recently spoke with several high level marketing executives about the near-ubiquitous topic, BIG DATA. The executives included Paul Golden, ex-CMO of Samsung Mobile, Barry Judge (ex-CMO of Best Buy, current CMO of LivingSocial, and Brad Todd, (Principal at The Richards Group). In this fourth installment, we will share these executives’ thoughts about the way big data can further revolutionize the future of marketing.  They see big opportunities in Big Data.  The best is yet to come!

When we posed the question to our marketing executives about the future of big data in the marketing realm, they were excited about the possibilities and big opportunities in big data’s future.

Paul Golden would like to see big data used to truly personalize the customer experience.  Paul recalled a men’s retailer whose sales people would write your information, preferences and measurements on index cards (similar to today’s “preference centers”). They would use this information to follow up with their customers whenever an item arrived in-store that might fit a customer’s needs.  In this age of big data, this type of information is available for so many customers—retailers could be delivering personalization at its best.  Why don’t they create big opportunities with big data they have?  With SO MUCH data, many executives just aren’t quite sure what to do with all that data, much less how to turn it into value for their brand and customers.  Too much leads to not enough.

Creating a truly omnichannel experience, merging all big data from physical and digital channels would be the holy grail, according to Barry Judge.  If you could combine store purchase data with online transactions and click behavior, plus email, mobile and social, throw in CRM and loyalty data, you’re well on your way to creating big opportunities in big data.  The key is integrating all that big data into something that allows you to speak to each of your customers as an individual, regardless of where she interacts with your brand.

Brad Todd would like to see retailers, like grocery stores, who have been capturing data for decades, turn that knowledge into a one-to-one customer experience.  It would be great, for instance, if the grocer “knew” that you shop weekly for strawberries but didn’t buy any this week; they could offer a real-time discount for you to pick up some strawberries during this shopping trip as well.  Another one of the big opportunities in big data.

Today tools exist to make one-to-one personalization—hyper-personalization—a reality.  The tough part is corralling all that big data and applying robust analytics to arrive at hyper-personalized communications for each customer.  Want to learn how to overcome the tough part?

And please feel free to leave any comments or questions below.

Big Data Analytics: The Key to Unlocking Business Potential

Using Big Data to Drive RevenuePositive Results From the Smart Use of Big Data Analytics (3rd in a Series)

I recently spoke with several high level marketing executives about the near-ubiquitous topic, BIG DATA. The executives included Paul Golden, ex-CMO of Samsung Mobile, Barry Judge (ex-CMO of Best Buy, current CMO of LivingSocial, and Brad Todd, (Principal at The Richards Group). In this third installment, we review some of the results these executives experienced.  Big data analytics was the key in making the information they had actionable to drive customer value.

Brad Todd has helped clients use their data in very sophisticated ways, by applying rigorous big data analytics.  A home improvement retailer, for instance, has used information from their customers’ do-it-yourself projects to engage in helpful conversations with their customers. This type of engagement not only makes the customer feel valued, but very often leads to follow-on projects and increased customer loyalty.  For instance, if a customer has planned a deck using online tools, the retailer can follow up with them at predicted intervals with suggestions and relevant offers to improve the likelihood of purchase.

The Richards Group also helps their clients integrate their marketing data and then apply big data analytics, with the objective of personalizing customer communications.  They have seen improvements of 20% on average when website, email and remarketing channels are personalized to customers.  The results are even greater—about 25% if cross-channel personalization occurs.

At Samsung Mobile, Paul Golden used longitudinal brand preference data to prioritize markets for their marketing efforts.  He and his team tailored brand messages and tactics for eight key markets to improve brand preference versus a key competitor.  The result was a swing from a relative score of -6 to +2 in overall brand preference, despite only focusing on eight key markets.  Big data analytics allowed Samsung Mobile to cost-effectively determine which markets would swing the entire country’s brand preference score in their favor.

While CMO of Best Buy, Barry Judge and his team applied big data analytics to vast amounts of customer information to zero in on their highest value customers.  They then tailored all their marketing to best serve those customers and increase their engagement.  Knowing their customers and what their shopping habits allowed Best Buy to offer the most relevant products and offers to promote via email and direct mail.  By focusing on their most loyal customers, they grew their loyalty even more and increased their share of wallet with these customers.

Big data can be a big deal in driving results for brands if used to improve customer interactions.  Set objectives, determine what data is needed to achieve those objectives, compile and analyze the data, then translate it into something valuable for your customers.

Want to learn more about how to use big data analytics to improve business results? Click here.

And please feel free to leave any comments or questions below.

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How Marketing Executives Use Big Data: All Types of Data Sets At the Right Time

Data Management Platform

I recently spoke with several high level marketing executives about the near-ubiquitous topic, BIG DATA. The executives included Paul Golden, ex-CMO of Samsung Mobile, Barry Judge (ex-CMO of Best Buy, current CMO of LivingSocial, and Brad Todd, (Principal at The Richards Group). Each of the executives with whom we spoke had used all types of data sets in different ways.  Depending on the need of the business, they called on different types of data sets to achieve their purpose.  Given their focus on marketing, the types of data sets tended to be tied to customers.

As a principal at The Richards Group since its inception, Brad Todd has seen a lot of changes in how advertising clients have used data. He recalls the proliferation of data from the introduction and use of loyalty cards at grocery stores. Although grocers captured vast amounts of information about their customers—what they bought, how often they purchased, how they paid—very little of that data was used to improve the customer relationship.  The data was primarily used for managing inventory and shelf space.  Arguably, having fully-stocked shelves does help the customer experience, but the primary use of the data was to improve the bottom line.  Today, grocers and their CPG partners have begun to combine many types of data sets for more targeted marketing.

While CMO of Best Buy, Barry Judge and his team used different types of data sets–purchase history, clickstream analysis, email interactions, demographics and psychographics–to identify and deliver relevant product offerings to their customers.  However, integrating newer analytics tools into legacy systems posed roadblocks.  And incorporating data from the physical store, in order to have a truly holistic picture of each customer, was very difficult.

At Barry’s current company, Living Social, the relative newness of the company and the lack of a physical channel makes it easier to combine data.  They have used customer information to prioritize offers according to each customer’s purchase history and click behavior, thus making the customer experience much more relevant.

Paul Golden, while he was CMO at Samsung Mobile, used big data to improve the brand preference score for Samsung’s mobile phones.  Applying analytics to their big data allowed Paul and his team to identify key markets and determine the most relevant messages for those key markets.

Once you get past the hype and noise, big data can be very useful.  The important thing is to clearly define your objectives and use the data to meet those objectives.

Want to learn more about how to connect different types of data sets? Click here.

And please feel free to leave any comments or questions below.

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Clickstream Analysis: Understanding Your Customers Online

Why You Need Clickstream Data. And How You Should Use It

Clickstream Analysis: Understanding your Customers Online
Clickstream Analysis: Understanding your Customers Online

Almost everyone in online retail knows about clickstream tracking.  Many companies utilize click tracking on their sites.  However much of it is either not utilized or under-utilized as a tool to improve the customer shopping experience.  When clickstream data is analyzed, it is typically to understand usage patterns or the types of customers visiting the site.  Recently, e-retailers have begun using clickstream data to serve up improved content choices to its visitors–think of the “You May Also Like” or “Customers Who Viewed _____ also Viewed_____” widgets found on many websites today.

All these current uses are beneficial to the company and its customers.  The usage patterns can help inform a better path design to improve the customer experience.  The new content widgets provide improved relevancy to the customer, also improving their shopping experience.

However, clickstream tracking can deliver even more value when combined with other customer data, including their transactions, email interactions, mobile and social information, CRM data and so on.  When you combine click data with other data you have about your customer, you go from delivering potentially relevant content to delivering hyper-personalized communications. When you use hyper-personalized messages–what they want, when they want it, where they want it–to communicate with your customers, they are more engaged, more loyal and give you more of their business.

So why don’t brands use their click tracking data in this manner?  Below are a few reasons:

  1. Many brands use companies whose clickstream tracking is just too complicated to make real-time decisions.
  2. Even when they have easy access to their clickstream data, companies are not sure how to combine that data with other customer data.
  3. Using clickstream data as outlined above is just another “to-do” in a long list of “to-dos” marketers and IT departments have.

Do you use clickstream data?  Have you found what works and what doesn’t? Please let us know in the comments below.

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The Opportunities of BIG DATA: What Do You Think?

What Do You Think When You Hear the Term Big Data?
What Do You Think When You Hear the Term Big Data?

 

Opportunities of Big Data Lie beyond the Hyperbole (1st in a Series)

I recently spoke with several high level marketing executives about the near-ubiquitous topic, BIG DATA. The executives included Paul Golden, ex-CMO of Samsung Mobile, Barry Judge (ex-CMO of Best Buy, current CMO of LivingSocial, and Brad Todd, (Principal at The Richards Group). Generally, I wanted to get their points of view on the opportunities of big data.

I also wanted to get a better understanding of their thinking about:
1) how they perceive big data
2) how their companies use it
3) what kind of results they’ve experienced when leveraging that data, and
4) future opportunities of big data.

But first, before I got into the meat of the discussion, I asked each of them the same question: What do you think when you hear the term BIG DATA?

And here were their responses, in no particular order:  cliche, digital, lots of customers/lots of interactions, complicated, limited actionability, hyperbole, blanket term.  If one were to look at this list, one might draw the conclusion that BIG DATA has a BAD RAP.

But when we began to speak about the promise of big data, these same executives were much more positive and even excited about the opportunities of big data–the potential customer value it could deliver.  The goal of big data is understandable and very desirable, but the steps to get to there are difficult to envision. Especially with all the hype today about big data, which often is just that–hype, a certain amount of cynicism has crept into the C-suite.

But today, you CAN turn all that big data into actionable information to deliver value to your customers by hyper-personalizing their experiences. From connecting all your data dots, to generating the most relevant customer messages, to omnichannel marketing communications, Nectar has the comprehensive marketing suite that can take you from A to Z, quickly and easily. Want to learn more about the opportunities of big data?

Stay tuned to the rest of our series as we find out what these executives think about actual use of big data in business.

Please feel free to leave a comment or ask a question in the section below.

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5 Tips for Building an Omni-Channel Customer Profile

Creating an Omni-Channel Customer Profile can be Easy, if you Start with the End in Mind

omni channel customer profileWith all the clutter of marketing messages, customers are demanding relevance. At the same time, marketing teams are struggling with some of the basic foundational components because of all the disparate sources of data available both internally and externally { there I stayed away from saying big data } …The ability to communicate with your customers in an individual manner is becoming table stakes in both online and offline marketing, what we at Nectar Online Media like to call Hyper-Personalization. Whether you use the term 360-degree customer profile or omni-channel customer profile, the goal of creating a unified picture of your customer’s data is foundational for accurate customer analytics and also hyper-personalizing your interactions with your customers.

In this post, we thought we’d provide some of our tips for how to build an omni-channel customer profile. If you start with the end in mind (i.e., your marketing or business objective), it will be a lot easier.

 

# 1 Know Your Goal — It sounds simple and we’ve heard the same tip for many other areas, both in business and personal life. As it relates to customer analytics and hyper-personalization, the goal is based on how you want to use the customer data and, therefore, impacts the data sets you really need vs ideally want to have. By selecting the right data sets for building your omni-channel customer profile, your internal business partners and external providers can be much more focused (and efficient).

For example, Nectar works with an online ecommerce retailer, hipcycle.com, to help personalize their digital communications { if you’ve not checked out Hipcycle before, I strongly encourage you — you won’t be disappointed }.

Based on understanding Hipcycle’s marketing business objectives, we were able to hone in on the right data sets to integrate. These data sets were primarily based on transaction, crm, and behavior on hipcycle.com. While data sets like social media and household data provide an interesting lens, these data sets were not going to add incremental benefit & results that outweighed the effort.

 

# 2 Marketing & IT Need to Collaborate — While the marketing team can help define business objectives and outcomes based on using the omni-channel customer profile, the marketer’s technology counterparts are pivotal in articulating in identifying road blocks ahead of time and developing the right data streams.

If the marketing group is defining the customer analytics and hyper-personalization needs, involve the technology teams early on in the process to be better informed on constraints, timelines, and the ‘art of the possible.’

 

# 3 Choose the Right Technology — Different technologies are appropriate for different business objectives. If you are aiming to build an omni-channel customer profile, our experience has found a traditional SQL (row & records) environment is not optimal. Why? In a nutshell, because of all the different data sources and likely millions of records, there is a fair amount of processing a system needs to do before you can see the results (analysis, reports, recommendations, etc.) that you are looking.

At Nectar Online, we’ve found a noSQL environment is much better suited for storing data records for the purpose of utilizing that 360-degree view of the customer. The primary benefit is that data is stored in an array … so at the instance when data needs to be processed for an individual customer, information is ready.

 

# 4 Relevant Refreshes — An important component to evaluate is the frequency of your omni-channel customer profile refreshes. Depending on your goal { see how knowing your objective comes back in }, a different refresh or re-scoring frequency may be needed potentially at a data set level.

For example, if you are using social data to identify key life events of your individual customers, a weekly refresh might be sufficient. However, if your goal is to create a trigger event based on an abandoned cart, having this behavior refreshed in real-time is important.

 

# 5 Test & Learn — In the same way that a customer’s behaviors, habits, and interactions change over time, so do requirements on how you are using the customer profile data. By having a specific testing and learning plan identified prior to embarking on building your initial omni-channel views, the marketing and technology teams can better determine what elements are important for consideration.

In addition, as the customer profiles continue to be refreshed, you will be able to identify additional revenue and engagement driving opportunities. The testing and learning plan establishes the right set of performance indicators for what you are looking to accomplish.

+  +  +  +  +

I’d love to hear from you and learn about your experience building omni-channel customer profiles. What other tips have you seen be helpful?

Drop us a note or share a comment below.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Nectar: The Easiest One-to-One Marketing Suite. Period.

Easiest one-to-one marketing suiteIs Nectar really the “easiest one-to-one marketing suite”?  Yes! We have developed an integrated SaaS suite that makes the marketer’s job easy as pie.

And how have we done it?  Our comprehensive software suite allows marketers to take disparate big data about thousands (or millions++) of customers and create individual 360-degree profiles in real time, then determine the BEST marketing message for each of those customers and get it to them, regardless of the device or channel they use.  No technical expertise required!

Do you have lots of data in different places that you know has value, but you just can’t seem to get all the dots connected? nectarConnect will do that for you. We are your quick and easy Data Management Platform.

Do you have communications that you’re trying to personalize for your customers but just can’t make it relevant enough for them?  Have you tried customer segmentation but aren’t getting the results you expected? nectarEssence will apply our proprietary algorithms to your data and generate one-to-one marketing messages for each of your customers IN MINUTES!

Do you struggle to get relevant messages to your customers across all the touchpoints you have?  nectarEngage will distribute your one-to-one marketing messages to each of your customers, no matter how many you have, in real time, across email, mobile, website, and social.  Really!

Listen to our Founder & CEO, Amrit Kirpalani, talk about Nectar: //www.youtube.com/watch?v=hMCPhluRuTg.

 

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SXSW: Vote for Us to be on a Panel and Learn More about Hyper-Personalization


Vote_My_Session

Asking for your vote for SXSW Interactive 2014

SXSW Interactive: It’s huge. It’s music. It’s technology. It’s THE place to be in March of any given year.  And we at Nectar are very excited (and also honored, maybe a bit nervous) to say that we made it through the first gateway to speak at SXSW Interactive in Austin next year.

With this opportunity, we have a chance to share our vision–to bring hyper-personalization to the B2C masses.  We would love your vote to help us accomplish this.  With this in mind, we ask you to please vote for our talk, “Hyper-Personalized Marketing: Easy as 1-2-3”: The steps for voting are:

1) Setup your account: https://auth.sxsw.com/users/sign_up

2) Log in: //panelpicker.sxsw.com/

3) Go to this page to vote for our submission: //panelpicker.sxsw.com/vote/21906. Click the thumbs up icon so it turns green.

4) And you’re done.  (Feel free to comment of course.)

Thank you!

Patricia Blair, Nectar Online Media

Using Big Data to Micro-Target: Integrating Big Data for 1:1 Marketing

personalization_social_media

One of the things I love about my job at Nectar is sharing with our customers how we deliver value to their business by enabling them to micro-target messages to their customers. Recently, while reading McKinsey Quarterly articles on big data, I saw a couple of statements from McKinsey directors that really resonated with me, because it addresses the core of Nectar’s value proposition.

1) From David Court: “…the key is to focus on the big decisions for which if you had better data, if you had better predictive ability, if you had a better ability to optimize, you’d make more money.”
2) From Tim McGuire: “Analytics will define the difference between the losers and winners going forward.”

I believe that if you make your customers happy, they will be loyal to you, and loyalty generally translates into greater revenue (and less cost) for your company. How do you make your customers happy? By knowing them. Know how they interact with you, know what they buy from you, know what they like about you, know who they are.  At an individual level.  Of course, this is easier said than done.  But with the right tools and data, it can be done.

When, where, what and how you communicate with your customer is one of those big decisions.  Using the data you already have from your customer and combining it with other big data–online behavior, social, CRM, mobile, etc.–enables you to predict what that customer would want to hear from you.  This predictive ability, in turn, allows you to optimize your relationship with that customer, which then helps you make more money.  (I use the singular “customer” because that’s what a robust Digital Management Platform enables you to do: communicate with each of your customers as an individual, yet do it at scale.)

Technology exists today to bring all of your available big data together to build a foundation from which to make your big decisions. A company like Nectar can help you bring all this data together to enable you to build 360 degree profiles of each of your customers.  But we don’t stop there; we then apply our proprietary algorithms to analyze your customer profiles to determine the most relevant communications to deliver to each customer–we call this hyper-personalization.  To complete the circle, we then help you distribute consistent hyper-personalized messages across every digital channel your customer uses.

We like our perch at the intersection of big data, analytics and hyper-personalization because when we bring each of these tools to bear for our customers, big decisions not only become easy but they also make you money.

Want to learn more?  Please email contact@nectarom.com for more information.

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