personalization Archives - Page 6 of 9 - Omnichannel Personalization SaaS Solution

22 Jan
2015

Overcoming Stress with Marketing Personalization

Marketing has never been easy, and 2015 is no exception. This year, marketers in every industry will face several new challenges and stressors. However, today’s marketers should banish all anxiety and confidently embrace these challenges head on with a marketing personalization strategy.

We have determined three common stressors for today’s marketers, which can all be solved by implementing marketing personalization techniques.

Adjusting to big shifts in target audience

For decades, the largest generation has been the baby boomers. Boomers have held the most purchasing power and have been primary targets in marketing campaigns. However, as Millennials begin to outnumber the boomers, there will be a shift in purchasing power. This shift might be stressful, as marketers will be forced to change marketing strategies to remain relevant to Millennials.

However, marketing personalization is the key to pleasing this new purchasing power. Personalization is one of the most important elements that Millennials want when being marketed to.

A Forbes article explains, “Millennials today are looking for relevancy…they want to develop relationships with brands that deliver a personalized, customized experience.”

While the shift in purchasing power might be unnerving for businesses, marketing personalization is exactly what businesses should implement to gain favor with Millennials.

Keeping up with technological advances

When it comes to making sales, marketing and technology go hand-in-hand. Over the past century, marketing has evolved with technology from simple print ads to broadcast and radio, broadcast and radio to the Internet, and Internet to mobile and social media. With several changes in a short span of time, marketers may be stressed about using the latest marketing technology to attract customers.

Embracing marketing personalization is the key to a successful transition into the newest development in marketing technology.

The newest development in marketing technology is the marketing cloud. Marketing clouds will connect engagement channels and create an omnichannel experience for customers.

An article from Forbes lists several ways that businesses can be the winners when using the marketing cloud. Personalization appears several different times, through recommendations like “map the end-to-end decision journey for each persona,” and “build and manage personalized experiences and campaigns across key touch points seamlessly.”

As businesses introduce the cloud into their marketing strategy, implementing marketing personalization will make this technological adjustment easier and more effective.

Meeting goals

Marketers stressing about meeting their businesses’ goals may be at an advantage when considering personalization strategies.

In 2014, a CMO report found that the top four marketing priorities for 2014 were customer acquisition, personalized experiences, customer engagement, and loyalty. With the implementation of a personalized marketing approach, successfully meeting these priorities should be easy.

Implementing marketing personalization obviously meets the personalized experience priority. However, personalization also plays a strong role in meeting the remaining three goals.

With the average human attention span approximately 8 seconds, companies have a small window of time to attract consumers. A personalized, tailored message can quickly grab a consumer’s attention – and keep it. Companies can also improve customer engagement by presenting relevant, personalized merchandise based off their past purchases and demographics. After continuously presenting relevant products to buyers, companies can expect brand loyalty to increase, as “most consumers (60 percent) expect businesses to know their preferences and understand their needs,” according to a CMS Wire article.

So if your business or marketing team is feeling stressed, ask whether you are using marketing personalization to its fullest extent.

If you feel like you could use a little marketing personalization help, learn how to get started and check out personalization strategy from the experts.

21 Jan
2015

A 3 Step Guide to Starting Omnichannel Marketing

Omnichannel is a relatively new concept for today’s marketers. Despite its relatively new tenure in the marketing world, the idea of omnichannel has made a strong impact on businesses and consumers alike, and it doesn’t look like omnichannel is going away anytime soon. In a time where consumers constantly accessible through dozens of marketing platforms, marketers must embrace omnichannel now. Consider these three steps when starting omnichannel marketing, if you haven’t already.

Step one: Find Your DMP

With an omnichannel approach, a data management platform is a must-have for retailers. A data management platform (DMP) collects, manages, processes, analyzes, organizes and activates data. There are plenty of DMPs available to marketers, so choosing the right platform is imperative to your omnichannel success.

There are a few important qualities you may want to consider when choosing your DMP. Businesses should consider how the platform integrates 1^st and 3^rd party data, how the platform can be utilized, the platform’s cross-channel management abilities, and how easy the platform is to use.

Finding the right DMP can help businesses create a much more comprehensive, 360-degree profile of their customers, a key foundation for marketing personalization.

Step two: Develop Content

The key to a seamless, omnichannel experience lies within the content of the marketing messages that customers receive. Although consumers are receiving messages on different platforms, the messages must be unified and consistent with one another. All messages directed to customers must reflect products and ideas of the overarching marketing campaign.

Developing consistent messaging can be a stumbling block for some businesses. When faced with the dilemma of message uniformity and also personalizing content, marketers often decide to just “batch and blast” generic campaigns across the board. However, with carefully planned strategy and new technology, businesses can combine uniformity and 1:1 personalized marketing with much less effort and spend compared with several years ago.

DMPS and automation platforms can help pull in data from customers so that the right bits of content can be used in messaging, whether it be product offers, copy and language, or design.

Erik Schulze, VP at Yes Lifecycle Marketing, expects that personalization will only become more of a necessity in the next years. In a MediaPost article regarding email marketing personalization, Schulze said, “As the number of emails go up, the engagement with those emails goes down…it’s much more important to have a more personalized discussion or address personal needs.”

And email is just one of the channels marketers should be personalizing…

Step three: Consider all Channels

There are a variety of other channels that retailers should be taking advantage of for optimal coverage.

As the millennial generation becomes the primary target for retailers, companies must adjust their omnichannel strategies accordingly. Raised in an era that incorporates technology into everything, milennials are naturally tech-savvy. Their familiarity with technology will likely influence marketing strategies. Almost three-fourths of today’s consumers believe digital technologies will transform the way businesses use their channels to interact with customers.

Therefore, marketers should be able to access these customers through more, nontraditional channels. This opens more doors for businesses willing to market through social media, apps or SMS. Businesses that are unwilling to embrace new technologies will be left behind.

Despite the increase of technology in today’s marketing, marketers should not forget about old, traditional marketing channels.

Brick-and-mortars, the most traditional channel for marketing, are still important to customers. Brick-and-mortar account for over $4 trillion in sales: a majority of the retail market. Providing an enjoyable in-store experience is still vital for success in the marketing world.

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If you’re still looking for more ways to get started with omnichannel, check out some of our favorite omnichannel campaigns.
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29 Dec
2014

The Top 5 Personalized Marketing Efforts

In a market that places increasingly more importance on creating a customer-centric experience, today’s top marketers must utilize personalized, 1:1 marketing strategies to drive sales and stay competitive with other companies. However, some personalized marketing efforts are more effective than others. While we have talked about some great omnichannel marketing winners, we’ll be focusing on personalized marketing winners. We’ve determined five brands that offer some of the best personalized marketing campaigns.

Amazon

Amazon incorporates personalization into marketing automation emails, as well as on their website. Last September, I experienced Amazon’s marketing personalization first-hand, when I received three emails from the company within the week following a purchase of textbooks.

The first email I received was an order confirmation email. The email confirmed that my payment had gone through, that my order had been made, and – most importantly – included a thank you for shopping with Amazon. The second email I received confirmed that my order had been shipped and, once again, thanked me for my purchase. The final email I received was signed from TextbooksTexas, but was sent through Amazon. I received confirmation that my order had been delivered, a request for review, and yet another thank you.

While each of these emails contain different content, they all thank the customer for making a purchase. Incorporating a simple “thank you” can turn a standard confirmation email into an intimate shopping experience, making the customer feel appreciated. Showing gratitude makes the customer feel valued, which increases the likelihood for loyalty and future purchases.

In addition to emails, Amazon also implements personalized marketing when customers visit their sites. A widget at the bottom of their home page lists recently viewed and recommended items for past customers, based on previous purchases. Because my past purchases had been textbooks for journalism and human rights classes, my widget was filled of different books of the same nature.

Anthropologie

Anthropologie has one of the best personalized marketing strategies for their customers’ birthdays. The retailer sends several emails to consumers over the course of their birthday month. At the beginning of the month, Anthropologie sends an email inviting the birthday guy or gal to a birthday soiree at the nearest store, complete with appetizers, personal styling, and discounts. Anthro also sends multiple emails throughout the month with special codes for discounts to birthday customers.

People like to celebrate their birthdays with family, friends, and loved ones. As Anthropologie sends customers birthday celebration emails, the retailer nonchalantly categorizes itself into the same category as those friends and loved ones. This simple personalization technique gives Anthropologie another dimension: a company that wants to maintain a close relationship – not just another sale.

Hostelworld.com

Hostelworld.com is the world’s number one hostel booking website – an accomplishment that can be explained by their personalized marketing strategy.

After one stays in a hostel booked through Hostelworld, he or she receives an email requesting a review about their stay. If, after a few days, the traveler still has not reviewed their stay, Hostelworld sends out a friendly reminder email. In big bold letters at the top of the email, Hostelworld tells the user, “We value your opinion.” Hostelworld also sends an email to its users six months following their last use of the site. This email is a reminder to travelers that Hostelworld is still around, and highly values their business.

In both of these emails, Hostelworld emphasizes the high value they place on each of their users. And, when a customer feels valued, they are likely to become repeat users.

Spotify

Similar to Amazon, Spotify incorporates personalized marketing through emails and their actual site in order to generate and maintain subscriptions.

Spotify sends out several emails each month with recommendations for music to the subscriber. These recommendations are based off of music that the user has previously listened to on Spotify. In addition, users have the option to discover new music recommended by Spotify on the Spotify platform. These recommendations, again, are based off of music the listener has listened to in the past.

ASOS

The retailer is another company that has utilized personalization through marketing automated emails to drive sales. Interested in bringing back past customers who have not visited their online store in a while, the company sends out an email with a special promo code for discounts on items on the site. Asos also sends out abandoned shopping cart emails to customers who have left the site without purchasing items they placed in their cart. As online studies show that 60% of online shoppers return to the site to make purchases after receiving an abandoned shopping cart email, Asos’s marketing automation techniques are a strategic implementation.

In both types of emails, the importance Asos places on keeping tabs on past customers is very clear. Forbes explains the importance of customer retention through statistics, like Gartner Group’s findings that 80% of a company’s future revenue will come from 20% of existing customers.

Wrapping it up

From using personalization to celebrate birthdays, to keeping customers engaged, companies utilize various 1:1 marketing techniques to generate sales. And, as data usage and omni-channel develop further, we can’t wait to see what personalized marketing campaigns await in 2015!

04 Dec
2014

Top Three Fears About Marketing Personalization

A recent survey of online shoppers shows that consumers are more open to marketing personalization strategies than ever before. 79% of U.S. consumers expect personalization from brands, and over 50% expect e-commerce sites to remember past purchases. With these expectations and demands from the public, why hasn’t every company utilizing personalized marketing?

We’ve found that unwillingness to incorporate personalization comes down to one factor: Fear.

Fear of change
As marketing personalization is a relatively new concept, companies that are doing well without utilizing this marketing strategy may not want to make changes.

An article by Forbes explains why companies hesitate when making big changes.

Old habits act as a resistant towards change. These habits can be powerful and hard to break, pulling us away from new, alternative ideas. The brain is also responsible for resistance to change. One’s prefrontal cortex must work harder when experimenting with new ideas. With this in mind, companies may be reluctant toward embracing the new concept of personalization.

However, while embracing change may be difficult, doing so is imperative for a company that hopes to stay successful. Those who fail to utilize new approaches risk becoming outdated by competitors who conform to the fresh marketing tactics the public wants.

Fear of turning off customers
Personalized marketing is designed to give customers a 1:1 experience with products that are relevant and tailor-made for each individual. So why would some customers be turned off by this approach?

The creepiness factor.

Consider this blunder Target made a couple years ago. The company sent coupons for baby items to a teenage girl. Using the girl’s Guest ID number, name and historical buying data, Target had determined the girl was pregnant…however, the baby item coupons arrived in the mail before the girl had told her father. As chaos ensued, Target was met with skepticism. Critics called the company’s personalization practices “creepy” and “eerie.”

Situations like this give personalized marketing bad stigma. However, if the right precautions are taken, personalized marketing will not turn away customers.

Consider this: When a consumer is aware that their information is being tracked, they may be more comfortable sharing their data. Target had come across as invasive because neither the girl nor her family was aware that Target had been tracking her purchases and personal information.

Contrast this situation with a strategy employed by Nordstrom. Nordstrom uses marketing personalization by showing products similar to ones a customer has previously viewed. Because Nordstrom is so open about their use of personalization and data tracking, people are not fazed by it.

Nordstrom's take on marketing personalization — Nordstrom’s take on marketing personalization

Rewards in exchange for information can help customers feel at ease with the creepiness factor. Reward customers for sharing their email information with special offers each month exclusively through email. Similarly, asking a customer for his or her date of birth can go from creepy to personal with the promise of a birthday card and special gift delivered during their special month.

While personalized marketing can admittedly come across as creepy, companies aware of the boundary between personal and invasive should not fear the concept of a personalized marketing campaign.

Fear of the payoff
If your company is spending money on personalizing an experience, will it pay off in the future? Or is your company wasting time, money and other resources on something that could end up costing more than its worth?

How can you be sure you’ll reach your desired return on investment?

Based on these statistics, we are confident that personalized marketing will generate positive results for companies. Personalization makes customers feel special, generates a higher response rate, strengthens loyalty, and increases customer lifetime value. Personalized emails in particular are able to generate 18 times more revenue, compared to generalized emails. 78% of CMOs believe that custom content is the future of marketing.

With so many positive effects from personalization, it’s difficult to imagine an unsatisfactory ROI after implementation. These stats should qualm any uneasiness about payoffs a company may have.

Key Takeaways:
While changing adding a personalization aspect to marketing campaigns may seem like a big leap of faith, doing so is more of a help than hinderance to companies. However, if used correctly, personalization gives your company the edge it needs to stay competitive, retain customers, and increase ROI. Need a few tips for getting started with personalizing your marketing strategies? We have determined four steps to implementing marketing personalization.

01 Oct
2014

4 Marketing Personalization Mistakes to Avoid

We’ve posted quite a few articles on marketing personalization best practices and ways to increase value with personalization, but what we haven’t touched on are things to avoid when it comes to building momentum with marketing personalization and automation.

Here are four marketing personalization mistakes you absolutely have to avoid like the plague if you want a smooth ride(relatively) on your path to personalization.

1. Infringing on customer privacy and not protecting customer data

Don’t be manipulative when it comes to gather information from customers

All it takes is one screw up for a huge PR disaster and plenty of lost potential and current customers. Just don’t do it.

This applies to email opt ins on retailer websites, to mobile app permissions, to social log ins on websites. Be clear, respect your customers by letting them know exactly what you will be using information for, and you’ll earn their respect.

Since one of the first steps of true hyper-personalization is building an integrated data management system that can bring in multiple external and internal data sets, the inherent risk is quite clear. With all your data in one location, there must be significant care in protecting the customer gold harvested because one data breach can mean multiple streams of data are vulnerable.

Be honest with your customers about what you are taking from them, and once you have their trust, protect what you have. It’s that simple.

2. Relying on one set of data

To build a 360 degree view of your customers, you need to draw insights from various data sources. While one data source may constitute a large majority of your data analysis into your personalization platform, the more diversified your data collection points are, the more accurate your predictive analytics will be.

For instance, a big box retailer with may point to POS data and their eCommerce data as their main data feeds into a marketing personalization tool, but forgetting to integrate social media data for crucial life event data would be simply be a waste. There will be sources of data that will be more relevant than others, but finding out where to piece in and weigh each data channel is too important to ignore.

3. Neglecting testing

Testing is a pain. Multivariate testing can get very messy with hyper-segmentation, but always remember to test while executing. The closer you get to hyper-personalization, the more marketers will be tempted to skip various parts of the testing process.

Don’t fall into that trap. Just because the testing process will become more complicated doesn’t mean you should take your foot off the testing pedal. It will become even more important to your personalization journey that all your data sources, creative pieces, and messages are carefully tested to optimize your personalization efforts. Remember that a marketing personalization tool is exactly that…a tool that needs constant recalibration to make the high, consistent returns that you expect.

4. Thinking you’ve reached true hyper-personalization

Thinking that hyper-personalization is a place where you will someday reach and lay claim to is unreasonable and dangerous to long-term marketing personalization efforts.

Algorithms can be update and tweaked, new sources of data can be added, execution points can be refined and tested.

Knowing your customer 100% and predicting their needs exactly won’t happen without having Jedi mind reading powers, but you can always keep moving in the right direction.

Nobody said personalization was easy, which is why very few have figured out the right path towards marketing personalization. With these tips in mind, you’ll save yourself a lot of time and money while consistently moving and accelerating in the right direction.

19 Sep
2014

What is Marketing Personalization?

At nectarOM, we mention the phrase marketing personalization quite a bit. In fact, we mention it so frequently we have decided to write a blog post about it just to make sure you’re completely clear on what it is.

The short definition is that marketing personalization is the process of sending targeted personalized messages to individuals based on consumer data acquired from various sources or channels.

In short, makes marketing much more relevant to your customer base by using existing customer data.

When we talk about implementing marketing personalization at a company, we assume that:

1) Your company already has a customer database. You may not be quite sure how to segment and target these individuals, but you have the list, which is the most important step. Marketing personalization does not assume that you want to acquire customers, rather, you want to be able to analyze your customer data more efficiently in order to send personalized messages.

2) You have data, but it’s scattered. You have data sitting in so many different places you have not the slightest clue on how to bring it all together to make recommendations. You have your standard customer data (name, email address), your customer transaction data, and your customer’s social data sitting in all these different places. Ideally, your marketing personalization is able to aggregate this data into one platform, like we do in our suite.

Personalization means that you are able to tailor targeted communications, whether it’s by email, text message, call center, or mobile app to your customers in a relevant way that will induce a higher probability of purchase.

So now you’re asking, so what? Who cares if my customers see relevant messages? I want to know what it does for my bottom line. Well I’ll give you an example. Let’s say you are an online hotel retailer and your customer is looking at multiple hotels in the New York City area. She has looked at several hotels in Manhattan but hasn’t actually made a booking yet. Based on click tracking information and searches, this online hotel retailer has configured trigger personalized emails to display NYC hotels in her price range to send a couple of days after she conducted her search. After seeing a great hotel deal in the email, she is inspired to make the booking.

The above is an example of how a potential could turn into a guaranteed revenue purchase. Just a simple email pushed the customer through the funnel from evaluation to purchase. Now imagine sending automated trigger emails to your entire consumer base. Below, we’ll do some quick math.

Assuming the following

Conversion rate: 1%
Customer base: 500,000
Customers who purchase: 500,000 * 1% = 5,000
Average Order Value: $300
Revenue: $300 * 5,000 = $1,500,000

That’s a huge chunk of change left on the table, and when your customer base is in the millions, it’s easy to see how marketing personalization can dramatically increase your bottom line.

So when someone asks you, “what is marketing personalization” you’ll be able to give them an answer with a short quantitative case study! Use your newfound understanding of marketing personalization to impress your friends and colleagues.

If you have any questions or comments, drop us a line below in the comments section.

03 Sep
2014

5 Tips for Improving E-mail Metrics Using Marketing Personalization

Email metrics are increasingly becoming an essential part of a company’s marketing plan. Marketers are constantly under pressure to excel at various key performance indicators. These 5 tips will give you a better understanding of how to start improving and measuring important email metrics using marketing personalization ad various other tactics.

1) To Increase Open Rate, Personalize the message

Personalizing email message content results in an average open rate of 13.2% versus 9.8% with no content personalization. It’s clear that personalizing the content in the message is instrumental in increasing open rates. Personalizing a message may include adding relevant items based on the individual’s past browsing behavior, cart additions, or more sophisticated omnichannel data analysis.

However, it’s interesting to note that personalizing both the subject line and content message results in a much lower open rate of 5.3%, according to the same study. Conducting your own study with your customer base may give you a better understanding of how your consumers react to different personalization tactics.

Fabletics.com works on a subscription model, where you receive an outfit every month for $49.95. If you don’t wish to purchase an outfit that month, you must login and opt out within the first 5 days of the month. Your first outfit is $25 which is a steal for an outfit compared to the price of other athletic brand names. When you first sign up you are prompted to create a Lifestyle Profile Quiz, which generates a personalized profile regarding your likes/dislikes, what kind of activities you are involved in, and the type of clothing you prefer. Consumers sign up for the website and get an email on the first of every month, exclaiming “Your Personalized Picks Have Arrived”. This model is an example of how personalization is integrated within both email and the website experience where personalized outfit picks are the largest selling point.

2) To Decrease Bounce Rate, Use Double Opt-in Signup

A company’s reputation is perhaps its most valuable asset, not just in the physical world, but in the digital world as well. It’s important to be well aware of your bounce rates because these numbers directly affect how an ISP sees the emails that are coming to your consumers’ inboxes.

A soft bounce means there is a temporary problem associated with the email address, such as an automatic vacation message responder or full mailbox message.

A hard bounce means there is a permanent reason why the email cannot be delivered because the email address is invalid or closed. Removing hard bounces is important in maintaining your reputation as a company because ISPs will use these bounce rates to place your emails in the “Spam” category.

Using double opt-in can combat increasing bounce rates. Double opt-in means that an email address is validated a second time through a confirmation email which will contain an activation link.

Additionally, letting members personalize their preferences on what types of emails they wish to receive and making the unsubscribe process simple will also ensure satisfactory bounce rates.

3) To Increase Open and Click Through Rates, Time of Day Matters

Some claim that deciding when to send your email is just as important as what goes in your email.

There is a wide variety of conflicting information regarding what time you should send your emails. Open rates typically peak at 8am and emails are more likely to be opened during normal business hours, specifically from 8am to 5pm.

Additionally, sending emails on either Tuesdays or Wednesdays are beneficial in increasing your open rates. Weekend email sends generally have lower open rates and click through rates as well, although this could vary for certain retailers, such as those who send out weekly sale emails every Sunday.

4) To Increase Open Rates, Keep Your Subject Line Relatively Short and Sweet

When crafting subject lines, keep in mind short and sweet is the way to go. Aim for a range of 4-16 character limits, as this range has shown to have higher open rates. Various studies suggest that subject lines with 4-15 characters have slightly higher open rates compared to emails with longer subject lines.

Since the goal of the subject line is to entice an open, it’s important to explain the benefit from the get-go by explicitly stating it in the subject line in order to grab the user’s attention.

Below are some examples of subject lines received in my personal inbox within the last two weeks that were enticing enough for me to open because they were either very applicable to me (just bought a Kindle PaperWhite and was therefore browsing books on Amazon) or piqued my interest because of the potential discount or promotion I could get (J. Crew lured me in with the $50 off promotion and Travel Zoo knew I would love travel sales from my city).

You There? Here’s $50…
J. Crew

Up to 85% Off More Than 1,000 Kindle Books | and more
Amazon

NEWSFLASH: Virgin America Launches 3-Day Sale from Dallas
TravelZoo

5) To Increase Click Through Rate, Include Multiple Calls of Action within Email

Have you heard of “above the fold”? Essentially, you have about 2 inches of space to really catch your customer’s eye before he/she decides to hit the back button and browse the other 100 promotional emails within the inbox over the weekend. Because this is valuable real estate, you will want to make it as appealing as possible by announcing what the benefit of the email is to the user. Your e-mail header, the header that contains your company logo, shouldn’t take up too much space because you will want to allow room for both the benefit and call of action.

I counted 24 different areas within the main area of the email below where one can click to go through to the website. The email offers plenty of opportunities for clicks which makes the experience very user friendly. If the consumer is not particularly interested in the clearance items, but has been wanting to get a new cross-over bag, she can click on the BAGS tab which is reflective of Francesca’s website.

The image above the fold is eye catching and it’s clear that the benefit of the email is buy one get one 50% off.

25 Aug
2014

Retailers, Maximize your Omnichannel Marketing for the Upcoming Holidays

Omnichannel marketing is key to growing revenue in an increasingly hostile holiday environment.

Because you’re reading this, I’m assuming 3 things about you:

Marketing across channels is essential for you this holiday season
Tracking and measuring performance across channels is important to you
Personalized omnichannel marketing is a priority

With those assumptions in mind, here are three quick ways to start preparing for a busy, cross channel holiday season.

Learn from last year’s performance

It’s almost a given that your CFO analyzed last year’s holiday performance like a hawk, and it’s now up to you to take another glance at how your marketing goals and metrics held up previously.

Here are several questions to get you started:

How accurate was reporting?

Were you able to track users from each of your digital assets?

Could you track email campaigns onto website?

Were the discount campaigns a direct result of your in-store sales increases?

Did personalized campaigns run across your channels?

Remember that your CMO may already have specific metrics, goals, strategy for this holiday season, so be sure to tailor your analysis to this year’s needs.

You can save lots of pain and suffering by learning from past performance, so get digging!

Audit your current capabilities

Take your current holiday strategy and objectively ask yourself if your current capabilities can rise to the occasion. If goals seem difficult to meet, start pinpointing weak points in your current processes, team, and tools. You can take your analysis of last year’s performance to build a diagnosis of your situation.

We’ll use an example from above:

Reporting was not accurate + Team has to create manual reports, leading to inconsistent cadence and content + Reporting was only able to pull from separate sources individually (email/website/in-store) + We do not have a current data integration platform for easy reporting

The problems may be many, but laying out all your marketing issues allows you to find the easiest solution to solve all the issues at hand. For instance, it’s easy to see that the clear solution to the reporting problem would be to invest in an automated data management system.

Look to success stories

Most companies are struggling when it comes to cross-channel marketing personalization, but there are a few gems that have managed to connect the customer experience and drive significant ROI as a result. Apple has managed to track omnichannel customer movement through clever use of digital tracking and in-store digital check out with Apple IDs. Easton Bell sports has connected social, mobile, online, and offline data to mine lifecycle, demographics, buying patterns, and other critical data points, creating 360 degree views of customers.

Photo credits go to Chris Ford and Andy

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.