Customer Service: Why Messaging Apps are #1
Consumers today are fully saturated with different brand and service options – and this means that most businesses are constantly looking for a way to improve their connection with their target groups, become more innovative with customer communication, and keep their customers as loyal as possible. Recently, analysts and media, from Gartner to Forbes, have suggested that messaging app customer service is the channel that can deliver the best results. Overview: Messaging App Customer Service Quick facts Background information Why should businesses want to offer customer service on messaging apps? A few quick facts: 79% of customers are more loyal to brands that are easy to contact 70% of consumers choose “message us” buttons over “call us” buttons Customers around the world overwhelmingly say they trust businesses more when they can message them Our Customer Service: The Rise of Messaging Apps series will delve deeper into the possibilities that messaging app customer service offers. In three installments,…
How To Display Your Logo In Web Mail Accounts
Your logo is your main visual identifier. Oftentimes people will only get a glimpse of your brand if they open your email and see it at the top of the message. A much more effective way for email contacts to identify your brand is by showing your logo up front, even before they open the email. You want to make that first visual impression count! But how? A growing number of ISPs are, therefore, exploring the marketing opportunities of displaying brand logos directly in webmail clients (e.g. Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo Mail), indicating them as « trusted » and « official » brands. What are the benefits? Increasing brand visibility and recognition by putting your brand in front of customers Enhancing the user experience, as users will see your logo and be able to trust that the email is from you Increasing email engagement due to these trusted communications Motivating adoption of authentication by other companies Avoiding fraudulent…
Data-Driven Marketing. Making Analytics Data Actionable
Remember Pareto? Eighty percent of your sales come from twenty percent of your customers. You’re in business largely because of a fraction of your customer base: your best customers. But who are they? And what to tell them when and where? The foundation for making these decisions is customer segmentation. Not all visitors have purchased identical amounts. Some have ordered more recently, some have ordered more often, some have ordered more, period. Consequently, not all visitors should be contacted with the same effort and expense. And the methodology for figuring out which ones to contact is RFM: Recency, Frequency and Monetary value. RFM methodology in a nutshellRFM uses primarily sales data to segment a pool of visitors/customers based on their purchasing behaviour. The resulting customer segments are neatly ordered from most valuable to least valuable. This makes it straightforward to identify best customers. The logic behind RFM is quite simple: Customers…
WILL EMAIL BECOME INTERACTIVE SOON?
Gmail recently announced the introduction of its AMP (“Accelerated Mobile Pages”) within email. This will not only enable content to load faster, but also add dynamic elements within email, so that e.g. for travel booking, mail receivers do not open a separate website anymore but can do the actions directly within the email. But what does that mean for Marketers?Do all Marketers need to develop AMP content now? Not yet. AMP is in “developer mode” for testing now, the official release should be by end of the year. It will be interesting to see, whether other providers plan to support AMP as well to make it a general success. Critical voices from the industryToday, there’s some critical voices towards AMP from the industry (e.g. Devin Coldewey on TechCrunch). Email itself has always be simple and static – when you receive a mail today and open it in 10 years, it should…
The Value of Loyalty for Telecoms Brands
The Loyalty Challenge Customer retention is a challenge for all industries, but churn rates are particularly high in the telecommunications industry, averaging between 10 and 67% annually. For example, it is estimated that 75% of the 17 to 20 million subscribers signing up with a new wireless carrier every year are coming from another wireless provider. Loyalty is extremely difficult for telecommunications brands to attain, especially due to the lack of differentiation in the product and service offerings. We spoke with Chris Sullivan, who has experience managing telecommunications clients at Lenati, a marketing and sales strategy consulting firm, about why this is the case and he told us, “In recent years, there’s been a massive shift in the telecommunications industry. With T-Mobile’s “Uncarrier” moves, it removed long term contracts that led to dependable, recurring income for the major providers (amongst other changes.)” Successful loyalty programs provide telecommunications brands with the ability to differentiate from…
The Five Trends Shaping Customer Experience Today
Are you keeping track on what’s happening in the world of customer experience? Our guide to the five CX trends that matter will ensure you stay ahead of the curve.The benefits of a robust customer experience (CX) strategy are clear. By understanding how your customers interact with your brand you can positively impact your bottom line. Customer mapping is a crucial, yet relatively new, component of the CX conundrum. Here we look at the five emerging trends set to dictate how the experience and mapping agendas will alter over the coming years. 1) The Machines are Learning –According to Gartner, Artificial Intelligence (AI) will power 95% of customer interactions by 2025. This startling statistic – inspired by brands looking to reduce costs and increase productivity – makes clear the impending shift towards machines making decisions on behalf of brands. Bots, intelligent virtual assistants (IVAs) and Internet of Things (IoT)-enabled devices are…
Who Does Email Really WELL . . . and What Do They Have in COMMON?
The DMA (UK) has just launched its 2019 Consumer Email Tracker report. This is a “must read” for every email marketer. Over 2,000 consumers were asked 28 questions around the marketing emails they receive. Their responses contain some excellent observations on the state of email – as seen through recipients’ eyes: 59 percent prefer email communications over any other channel. 40 percent now sign-up in-store as part of getting an e-receipt. The average email subscriber has five addresses and gets 57 emails per week. Only 14 percent considered more than half the emails they receive to be ‘useful’ 33 percent still ‘often’ question how brands got their email address! Perhaps the best observation of all was in response to the question: “Which brands/shops/sites do you think do email well?” – eight of the top-10 are Return Path customers (“obviously” you may say!). In terms of what they do well, common themes included: relevant offer, keeps me informed, uses clear presentation, and emails are interesting. Which is…
What to Consider When Setting Up Automated Nurture Programs
You’ve done it. You created an amazing marketing campaign, and you’ve got thousands of new contacts stacked up in your marketing automation suite. Great! What’s next? How can you move these contacts down the funnel, get them to know more about your company and offering and eventually convert them to customers? What you need is a lead nurturing program. A sequence of well-crafted experiences and messages, delivered via relevant marketing channels in a perfect timing, each one complementing the others and together, playing in harmony in order to push the contact into falling in love with your brand. The benefit of such a program is that you set it up once and can optimize on the fly while it is running. This saves time and money and you can actually focus on creating appealing content, the thing marketers like to and should do. There is also less room for human error…
Three Mistakes Programs Make Using Bonus Points (And, How To Fix Them)
Bonus Points: Three Common Program Mistakes Loyalty strategists know that bonus point opportunities can be a great way to drive traffic, lift frequency, improve basket size, or celebrate key relationship-building milestones. As Brierley + Partners evaluates loyalty programs or consults with prospective clients, we see loyalty programs tend to make one of three common mistakes in their eagerness to deliver value for their Members and ‘move the needle’ on sales for their companies. The three mistakes or misuses of bonus point events are: Misaligned Goals to Structure, Messaging Missed Opportunities, and Overuse. So, let’s break down each of these mistakes and talk about remedies. Misaligned Goals To Structure The first misstep Brierley sees most often with loyalty programs is the misalignment of goals to how the bonus offer is ‘structured.’ Let me give you an example: Company X decided to run a 2X Points Bonus for Members during a traditionally…
6 Easy Steps to Email Marketing Success
Studies show email remains one of the most powerful and cost-effective tools in the digital marketers’ arsenal – especially when it comes to permission-based promotional messages and personal communications. Here are our key recommendations to maximize the impact of your email campaigns, increase open rates and boost customer engagement. With so many consumers using social media these days, it’s tempting to assume the humble email has lost its marketing impact. Not so, according to the data. Research shows that email marketing consistently generates the highest ROI for marketers and remains a core tactic for delivering revenue back to the business. Marketing trends come and go, but email’s still here. Personal, transactional and timely, email marketing campaigns consistently outperform other digital channels when it comes to generating higher-than-average open and click-through rates. Why? Compared to social media, email has by far the biggest reach – there are three times more email accounts than…
When Is the Best Time to Send Your Brand Emails?
When is the best time to send emails? This question has been around as long as email marketing itself. If you do a quick search, you’ll find tons of different studies pointing to a variety of answers, leaving retailers just as confused as before. The common result: Brands are flooding consumer inboxes with emails at seemingly random times throughout the day. This oversaturation, especially when combined with a lack of relevant content, can quickly lead customers to unsubscribe or let unread promotions sink to the bottom of their inbox – never to be opened. Let’s explore some of the nuances of the “best” email send times, debunk a few common myths and review why you should be looking beyond the email open. The Best Time of Day Identifying the best time to send depends greatly on the products you sell and the makeup of your audience. For example, millennials and…
Big Loyalty Data: Harnessing Your Greatest Marketing Asset
Loyalty technology is developing at an ever accelerating pace. The rise of smartphones, cloud computing and big data have compounded to create exciting opportunities for loyalty programs. No surprise then that a flock of loyalty startups have surfaced, each with their own unique spin on rewards, incentives and loyalty schemes. While most focus on small business, the impact higher up the food chain is taking hold, transforming the way larger enterprises approach loyalty. Chief among the impacts of this transformation is recognition of the value tied up in loyalty data. Unlocking actionable insights from loyalty data has become a primary goal of any new program launch or program overhaul. While increasing shopping frequency – the “share of wallet” – is still a prevalent goal, the focus on using loyalty data to drive business and marketing decisions is stronger than ever. Recent launches of OneCard credit card, AirPoints credit cards and…
Mobile Engagement Marketing 101: When to Send SMS, Push Notifications and In-APP Messages
People are consumed by their mobile devices today with mobile usage continuing to grow. The question for marketers is what is the best mobile engagement marketing channel in order to reach out to customers for each specific purpose? When is it beneficial to use SMS, push notifications or in-app messaging? Each of the three above has its pros and cons, as well as one channel can be suitable in a specific use case or with a specific product, while for other use cases or products another channel may be a better fit. The Pros and Cons of Each Mobile Channel and Relevant Use CasesSMS: Yes, SMS still matters in the age of smartphones! SMS provides an easy and immediate way of sending messages to customers directly into their personal message application. But if done incorrectly, you run the risk of your subscribers opting out of your messages all together. –…
Are Your Emails Ending Up on BLACKLISTS or WHITELISTS?
Reaching your target audience can be a hard task in a world ruled by automated email marketing campaigns. To overcome this, two concepts directly impact your deliverability: whitelists and blacklists. Knowing and understanding the meaning of these terms allows a sender to enjoy the benefits of whitelists and avoid the disadvantages of blacklists. Blacklists Marketers are always strategizing about how they can drive more revenue through email marketing by reengage people who haven’t purchased or interacted with the brand in a while. And for good reason: Consumers who purchase products through email spend 138% more than those that don’t receive email offers. While marketers are aware of the staggering numbers, it’s easy to neglect email best practices and, as a result, end up on a blacklist. An email blacklist is composed of emails, URLs, domains and IP addresses classified as poor because they are associated with spamming senders. A blacklist is commonly used by mail…