Marketing Archives - Page 8 of 8 - Omnichannel Personalization SaaS Solution

09 Oct
2013

Why Trigger Marketing Matters

As 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.

07 Oct
2013

How Amazon Uses Marketing Personalization

Amazon…You’re Doing It Right

Amazon excels in the area of marketing personalization. They’ve mastered the art of creating a hyper personalized shopping experience for their customers saving them both time and money. With the data to back it up, they’ve created 360 degree customer profiles. This allows Amazon to connect the customer dots and divide their customers into discerning groups to prevent generic mass emailing. Personalized marketing emails are created based on segmented data that includes social data, website activity, browsing history, areas of interest, past purchase history, etc.

How can Amazon attribute marketing personalization to their success?

1. Paying attention to big data. Think about a moment when you’ve had to purchase a gift for someone. Naturally, you put some thought into this. During that thought process, you gather up relevant information about this person. Who is this person? What do they like? What do they enjoy doing? What are their interests? With that 360 degree view, you’re able to come up with a few gift ideas suitable for that one person. The same concept applies to marketing personalization and how Amazon uses that to target customers. They integrate social data, customer purchases, browsing history, customer lifecycles, and rich customer profiles to create hyper-personalized communications. Within these communications are offers, products and content that targets each individual customer’s needs and interests.

2. Hyper-Personalized communications at just the right time. Once this information is gathered, Amazon uses it to disperse real time communications to their customers that is personable, friendly, and addresses their needs. Let’s say Jill W. got a new puppy 2 weeks ago. Amazon determined this through gathering social information, traditional personaization data, and browsing history. By combining all of this information via marketing personalization, Amazon sends Jill an email with a variety of offers and products that she may need like puppy pads, puppy food, dog beds and pet toys. When Jill purchases a couple of these items, another real time email is sent suggesting other items that may interest her based on recent purchases.

3. Recognizing the little extras drive big results. Through marketing personalization and big data, Amazon targets their customers by throwing in a few of those “little extras.” A few days before the first of the month, Amazon sent Jill and email with a slew of October deals and coupons for puppy supplies. Another little extra is the email they sent Jill letting her know Criminal Minds: Season 8 was now available for purchase. Over the past couple of years she had purchased seasons 1-7. Amazon has also determined that Jill is a bargain shopper and will send her emails with deep discounts on products based on her browsing and purchase history. These little extras make a big different and can boost your revenue and sales.

Can your company acquire the same marketing personalization as Amazon? The answer is yes! With Nectar Software Products, you can increase revenue and customer engagement by connecting customer dots and creating a thorough 360 degree customer profiles. Unlock marketing personalization and big data’s full potential by connecting customer data, gaining social insights, hyper-personalizing communications and increasing social media ROI. You can this this quickly and cost-effectively.

Check out Nectar Solutions to find out how!

01 Oct
2013

5 Don’ts for Marketing Personalization

Scattered within the do’s of Marketing Personalization are some don’ts…

Whether you’re the owner of a small business or a lucrative company, there’s a need to get personal with your customers. Personalization is rendered when information is gathered through various social streams, email, mobile, CRM, transactions, etc. This melting pot creates a 360 customer profile so you can deliver personalized, up to date and accurate relevant content to your customers.

There’s an abundance of “how to’s” in the world of marketing personalization. You’ll find tips and advice on just about everything from the varying levels of personalization & segmentation to the challenges of improving relevancy through data. What about the don’ts? Are there practices you should avoid when diving into marketing personalization?

Yes.

1. Don’t get too personal unless you’ve got the data to back it up. Getting to know someone personally takes time. The same holds true with your customers. You’re not going to establish a 360 profile in 15 minutes. Collecting valuable data is crucial when incorporating personalization into your marketing strategy. When there’s not enough data to back it up, you risk delivering information, featured deals, products of interest, promotional offers, etc that are vague and generic.

2. Don’t be creepy about it. Suggesting products to your customers based on their browsing and shopping history has a world of benefits. A 360 view of your customer goes a long way however, you don’t want to cross the “getting too personal” line. For example, your data tells you that Mrs. Jones is expecting and she has recently browsed baby items and made several purchases. Recommending additional items in a “based on your previous purchases, may we suggest” tone is perfectly acceptable. Sending a quip mentioning the amount of time Mrs. Jones spent browsing nursing bras and commenting on her baby bump “selfie” profile picture…creepy.

3. Don’t suffer from mediocrity. On average, about 70% of marketing emails lack personalization on a multitude of levels. Names are misspelled, the content is inconsequential, and the offers hold very little, if any, interest to your customer. If you’re going to embark on marketing personalization, do it right. Make an impact. You’ve got the data so leverage it. Give your customers a reason to open and read the email. Let them know you’re paying attention to them.

4. Don’t drag it out. If your customer base is online shoppers looking to score a great deal, grab their attention with the subject line. Once you have their attention, get to the point. You’ll lure your customers with personalized sales, deals and coupons. Add a few time sensitive “80% off today only” highlights. Don’t dilute the relevancy with bloat and useless fillers. More than likely, your customers care very little about ribbed cuffs and double stitching. Their eyes are feasting on the 80% off discount.

5. Don’t lose sight of important details. You can have the most up to date personalized data on each and every customer however, it’s often the small details that can make or break the deployment and customer response. Avoid these mishaps by safeguarding your form fields, running reports to ensure your data isn’t blighted with errors and checking to see if defaults are set accurately.

19 Sep
2013

Big Data Analytics: The Key to Unlocking Business Potential

Positive 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.

04 Sep
2013

Market Segmentation versus Personalization: Which Marketing Strategy is Best for Your Business?

I often hear people using segmentation and personalization interchangeably. And it’s no wonder–the goals of both are similar: speak to your customer in a relevant way to increase their engagement with your brand. Every business wants to have more engaged customers. So we slice and dice our customer base to try to understand how best to communicate with them.

Market segmentation was THE big thing until a few years ago. Take all your customers and try to figure out similarities that would enable you to group them into segments, then communicate with those segments. So you’d have High-end Heather and Coupon Clara and Value Victoria, segments that would receive similar communications, targeting their demonstrated habits. High-end Heather would get direct mail filled with expensive brands, while Coupon Clara got emails touting the best coupons of the week. Of course, segmentation was better than the mass marketing of old, but what if you had one million Value Victorias? Victoria could be a young stay-at-home mom or be a grandmother or be a college student, or even be a Victor! Segmentation will likely engage your customer more, but will not differentiate you from your competitors.

With the advent of all things digital and the realization that we now know more than we ever did (or thought we wanted to) about our customers, we now see personalization at the customer level. Of course, even today, personalization can seem to be an over-used, and sometimes misused, word, but essentially, it means speaking to your customers as individuals, not as segments. Rather than speaking to a few large segments of customers, you can speak one-to-one to each of your customers. Because we can access and control so much customer data, we now know that a customer in the Value Victoria segment is graduating from college and will likely need professional attire and perhaps starter furniture. And message accordingly.

So which marketing strategy is best for your business? If you have very few products and a homogeneous set of customers, segmentation will likely suit your needs. An extreme example would be a personal jet dealer/broker. They likely sell to rich individuals and businesses. Very limited product line and two types of customers–>Very easy segmentation. However, few businesses have the luxury of having very few products and very similar customers. Most companies have a large number of SKUs and a heterogeneous set of customers; for them, personalization is the way to best engage customers. With recent technology improvements, cost is no longer a factor in choosing between the two, so personalization no longer has to be a dream deferred.

28 Aug
2013

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

Is 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.

04 Apr
2013

Mad Hyper-Personalization: The Evolution to 1:1 Marketing

Don Draper of Mad Men works on Madison Avenue (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In honor of the Mad Men Season 6 premier this weekend, we’d like to take this moment to take a walk down Marketing Memory Lane, From mass marketing to demographic segmentation to customer segmentation to personalization. And now with Nectar, hyper-personalization.

Before the era now inextricably linked with Don Draper, all consumers received the same products, the same messages and the same ads, in the same medium(s). As Henry Ford once famously said, “Any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants so long as it is black.”

Then came those famous Ad Men (and yes, they were mostly men) of Madison Avenue. They realized that men and women actually hear, read and remember things differently. So these Mad Men placed “male-oriented” products, like aftershave, in sports magazines or the sports section of the newspaper. Products “for women” were advertised on TV during the middle of the day, thus the term “soap” opera, a tip of the hat to sponsor Procter & Gamble and their detergents. This demographic segmentation became more and more specific as time passed, differentiating marketing for marrieds vs singles, high income vs low, urban vs suburban, black vs white, and so on.

As companies began to gather more and more data on their customers and computers became increasingly powerful, smart businesses realized there was an even better way to market. Customers could be grouped into similar segments and marketed to according to their similarities. After all, not all women are created equal. Some of us like brand names. Some of us refuse to buy anything without a coupon. And some of us try to shop as infrequently as possible–hard to believe, but we exist! The hypothesis was that If brands could speak to each segment in a way that resonated with that segment, customers would buy more. And they did! Segmentation not only improved customer loyalty, it also reduced the cost of doing business.

With the advent of the internet and the wealth of data it provides, targeting has become increasingly defined. Savvy companies track not only customer purchases, but what customers are looking at when they are on the brand’s site. Some even combine internal digital data with bricks & mortar data. All this data allows businesses to relate to their customers more effectively. This 0ersonalization is the precursor to hyper-personalization.

But what if a brand could speak to a customer on an individual level, aka hyper-personalization? That’s what Nectar’s proprietary software allows brands to do! By combining all digital data available (purchases, online and email click behavior, CRM data, mobile, and so on) with social information, companies can now market to their customers in a 1:1 manner, yet do it at scale.

Today, we may go to the office in blue jeans rather than dapper suits, we may no longer be able to smoke wherever we please, we may not be able to have the 3-martini lunch anymore, but we can speak to our customers in a way that’s much more relevant for them: hyper-personalization. Now, please excuse me, so I can go spend an hour with Don Draper. Cheers!

14 Feb
2013

PR Mention: Advertising Your New Business Under $100

Yesterday we were thrilled to be included in the Toilet Paper Entrepreneur round-up for ways to advertise your business under $100, and we got so inspired by the great ideas that we thought we would share a few with you! The best tactics for advertising your new business are those that will get your company noticed without having to spend thousands of dollars. Starting a business is no easy task, but with the right marketing, you can get in front of your ideal clientele and make every expenditure worth your while. Our number one idea for marketing is quick, inexpensive social media contests. Here are a few examples that we have used on our sites:

Twitter Contest: Simply have your readers and/or members re-tweet a message or mention your @company on Twitter, counting each tweet as a contest entry. You can include any other criteria you want, but the point is to get your company’s name out there as much as possible. After a week or so, choose a winner at random and reward them with a gift card or small prize, remembering to mention and thank them on Twitter! We did this contest successfully on BuyerHive.

Pinterest Contest: Pinterest is a great social media marketing tool and a great way for information and/or products from your company to circulate. For zuuzs and zuuzStyle, we custom-made an image and had people re-pin it as wells as products from our Pinterest boards, simultaneously entering a contest and promoting our sites!

Exchanging Links: Another method for social media marketing is to exchange links with similar blogs/websites. You can both promote each other’s giveaways, contests, events, and products and develop some cross-over in each other’s audiences. This is a great (free) way to get the word out about your business, as well as form lucrative partnerships in the industry!

Want more great marketing tips? Follow us on Twitter!