Your Evaluation Guide to Digital Marketing Platforms
This guide will help you in your evaluation process by highlighting 10 key questions you must ask every marketing vendor. For each question, we have identified the risk of not having the feature/function and the must-haves you should be looking for in a platform. The guide is designed for companies that:• have outgrown their current marketing cloud• want to scale their cross-channel marketing efforts• don’t find value in their current marketing automation tool• need to consolidate point solutions (e.g. ESP, mobile, DMP, CDP)• want an all-in-one platform• aspire to build 360-degree customer views This article was first published by MAPP. Permission to use has been granted by the publisher.
5 Skills Marketers Will Need to Succeed
The marketing landscape is shifting rapidly and marketers will need new skills in order to compete. Customer trust in marketing – whether B2B or B2C – is eroding. A new generation of highly effective AI-driven ad blockers and spam detection engines are making it much harder to reach customers. Customer expectations around their experience are growing. In the age where highly personalized, massively convenient buying experiences have become the norm in our personal lives, the typical email marketing experience is jarring. Marketing skills that emerged over the last decade became more technocratic and execution-oriented based on general, abstract assumptions about customers and their preferences. Investing in learning particularly broadcast platforms–marketing automation, CRM marketing, LeadGen/DemandGen–was built on the assumption that if you built a big enough top of funnel, you could (eventually, somehow) rely on trickle-down effects to a bottom line. And yet: when you look around to the implosion of…
Don’t Lose Track of Your Customers! CDPs Create Unified Customer Profiles
What’s a unified customer profile, and why should you care? It’s a question many CMOs and other marketing professionals wrestle with, even if they’ve never heard the term. That’s because customers today use so many different channels to interact with the brands they buy, that getting a grip on what’s driving sales is often maddening without a technology assist. At each critical point of the buyer’s journey, customers can choose their channels. And if the information on those channels isn’t carefully tracked and associated with a single unified profile for each customer, the result is often multiple identities for the same customer, a failure to “connect the dots,” and potentially lots of lost sales. What’s at Stake? How a Unified Customer Profiles Works For example, a customer might open an email, click through to the website, load up a digital cart, then decide to try items on in-store. Later, they…
4 Ways Data Management Can Improve Your Customer Engagement
We’ve established the importance of using a Data Management Platform (DMP) for your brand – What is a DMP? How do you implement it? But how do you ensure that the data you’re collecting is being used to provide your customer with the most effective and positive buyer journey? Data management is at the root of improving your brand’s customer loyalty and engagement. For a brand to be successful in Digital Marketing it’s essential to move away from siloed data disciplines. So, let’s walk through the below points to further discover how you can use data management to stand out from your competitors and deliver a better customer experience. 1. Multichannel Marketing For most digital marketing professionals, the ability to deliver the right personalized content cross-device and cross-channel is the most favored segment of the process. Mapp’s Customer Engagement Platform allows you to build value-add to customer engagements across all your digital channels via…
Improve Holiday Email Subject Lines to Boost Open Rates
Are your holiday emails not achieving the open rates you hoped for? Here’s a suggestion, adjust your subject lines: thirty-five percent of recipients use them to decide whether to open an email or not. We get it. Changing your strategy during the middle of the holiday season isn’t ideal. But subject lines with emojis and excessive capitalization don’t work instead, try a clear line of text telling your customers what they need to know. Here are some more ways to use subject lines to improve your holiday email open rates: 1. Say it all in the subject line Your shoppers have been frenetically spending since the week before Black Friday, and at the stage, a lot of their shopping is done, and the inboxes are packed. Combat email exhaustion by telling them what they need to know. Shutterfly: Just 3 days: get 50% off + NEW Disney Frozen Stockings KSL…
5 Steps to Smarter Segmentation
When you’re looking to maximize customer interactions, and engage in truly meaningful conversations, the devil is in the detail. So, it pays to get smart about segmentation. Here are a few ideas on how to segment your audience to create effective, customer-centric email marketing campaigns. In digital marketing, no two customers are exactly the same. Which is why, when it comes to personalizing the message, we need to move beyond making general assumptions about buying decisions. This is a fairly obvious statement, but you only need to open your inbox to see how few organizations actually tailor engagements or personalize their content. Adding the correct name and salutation at the top of the email doesn’t count! By carefully targeting your offer or message to different segments, you’ll see an instant uptick in campaign response rates. Because, the more relevant you are to each customer, the more motivated they’ll be to…
2 Simple Ways to Increase Email Subscriber Engagement
Over the last few years, the concept of subscriber engagement and behavior has become an important talking point for marketers and, more specifically, for email marketers. Reach is the main reason why marketers choose the email marketing channel to advertise their product or services. Compared to all other channels, email marketing remains the most cost-effective way of reaching a larger number of people in a short time. The email channel has been used and abused in many ways. In order to protect their customers, Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and subscribers themselves have become more fastidious with whom they allow into their inbox and which brands they want to deal with. If trust has not been established, it becomes a lot harder for a brand to get their emails not only into the inbox of their subscribers but also read by them. This behavior of engagement or non-engagement towards a brand defines whether…
Five Benefits to Using Mapp’s Whiteboard to Orchestrate your Cross-Channel Marketing
Your customers engage with your brand differently at different times of day and across different devices. Effective digital campaigns employ multiple channels to increase the likeliness of engagement, but that adds complexity to every marketing organization. Mapp Digital simplifies cross-channel marketing by enabling marketers to build and manage email, social, web, and email marketing campaigns from one single platform. With Mapp’s newly enhanced Whiteboard, marketers can design, schedule, and automate cross-channel campaigns for their unique customer journeys. Marketing across multiple digital channels is more important than ever in today’s digital landscape. Here is why: • 89% of customers are retained through omni-channel customer engagement strategies-compared to 33% with no cross-channel strategies (invesp) • 30% higher lifetime customer values are attributed to consumers shopping across multiple channels (IDC) • 23x higher rates of customer satisfaction are experience by companies with omni-channel strategies (Aberdeen) Seems easy enough, right? The reality is most…
The Future of Programmatic Advertising
Since its inception, programmatic advertising has allowed brands to reach prospective customers in real time. The ad buying experience is now faster, cheaper and simpler for companies that run digital advertising campaigns. Given that programmatic uses algorithms to better position an ad, it saves time and money for advertisers and enables better campaign optimization. The innovations around the field of programmatic encompass mechanisms that aim to improve targeting and instantly notify advertisers on the needs of their customers. Programmatic advertising is expanding way beyond online banners, to encompass new digital channels such as interactive TV networks and wearables. Let’s dissect in depth the concept of programmatic, where it holds value for marketers and what its future is. What is programmatic? On a publisher’s website, there are pages on which ad slots are available. The inventory of all these available ad slots can be sent out to ad exchanges and put up for auction. The…
Mapp’s Customer Data Platform (CDP) simplifies cross-channel marketing
Marketers around the world are struggling to leverage all their customer data. They know they need to be data savvy, but in reality, the Martech landscape is complex. The emerging solution to this problem are CDPs – customer data platforms. Just this Monday, we saw Salesforce invest $800M in CDP company, Datorama, to enhance their cross-channel marketing offering. Why are CDPs the solution? Let me explain my vision of a Customer Data Platform and how it plays a role in cutting-edge marketing organizations. Martech acronyms are confusing, but CDP shouldn’t be Marketers are drowning in perplexing Martech acronyms: the DMPs, ESPs, DSPs, SMSs, and trying to execute marketing across all these channels. And each channel is generating an abundant amount of customer data, adding to the overwhelming goal of creating data-driven campaigns. Thanks to the emergence of Customer Data Platforms (CDP), customer data is easy to work with and easy…
Publisher Spotlight: Mapp On Lead Generation for Advertisers
Mapp is one of our publisher partners who supply an integrated data management platform with the intent of helping brands stand out to reach their potential. Alongside their many services, they offer lead generation which can add value to advertisers who may have lost data due to GDPR compliance. We recently got the chance to catch up with Will Eke and Pat Guidi at Mapp to find out more about more about their services and how they can help drive new customers for brands. Can you tell us a bit more about Mapp? Mapp is a unique independently owned technology company where Adtech and Martech combine to allow our clients to orchestrate customer engagement over e-mail, social, mobile and web marketing with one simple dashboard. We are headquartered in San Diego and have offices in a further 30+ countries around the world. Our simple modular cloud stack allows clients to…
What does Deliverability mean?
Deliverability supporting clients with the core function of their email business: Delivering email to the client’s inboxes. This task sounds simple on the first view but contains several challenges. Deliverability can also be seen as interface, or translator between the different players in the email business. You need to understand all participating parties, goals and challenges to be able to navigate your mails through the jungle of the world wide web and finally hit the customers inbox. On client side, Deliverability is supporting the whole customers lifecycle: Starting from Vetting prospects and supporting pre-sales calls, Deliverability does the IP Onboarding, Warmup and supports clients in production with inbox-support. On technical side, Deliverability needs to understand ISPs (Internet Service providers). Delivering email simply means following the rules of the ISP. Those are usually checked with different metrics and summarized in a “reputation” value. Blacklists usually check list-management practices. This information is…
What is the ultimate digital retail experience?
Adding value at every stage of the customer journey with personalized and orchestrated engagement. It is the age of the customer. In this fast-paced, competitive, dynamic digital world, customers are bombarded with between 3000-5000 messages daily, via numerous channels. New digital technologies and channels have multiplied and will continue to do so – email, social media, web banners, direct mail, SMS, mobile apps, and even in store, customers are using a multitude of different devices to research, review and ultimately purchase goods and services. All these touch points present an opportunity and a challenge for retailers to add value with personalized engagement both online and in store and progressively shift the customer from someone who is agnostic to someone who becomes passionate about your brand. Shopping is no longer about simply going into a shop. It’s all about engagement, of ine and online. Evidently, the need for cut through is…
Why experience matters in the digital world?
Embrace the age of smarter shopping The impact of digital technology on commerce is powerful and fast moving. Today’s shopper is 100% connected digitally 100% of the time. The proliferation in mobile devices means that customers can browse and buy whenever and wherever. With technology now being inseparable from everything consumers do and attention spans diminishing, this presents a new battleground for brands where they are being constantly challenged to innovate, cut through the clutter and keep up with this rapidly changing evolution. A recent report from Internet Retailing calculates that more than £150bn ($187bn) of retail sales are now in uenced by digital and that retailers whose services don’t meet customers’ expectations could lose more than £12bn ($15bn) a year.3 And according to new research by Kibo 4, six in ten shoppers are ready to stop using retailers that are unable to cater for their digital expectations, such as…
The 4 simple steps to implementing the ultimate digital experience
Step 1: Define your objectives The starting point is to agree your overall objectives and identify what would really transform your customer’s lives and bring your brand experience to life. Do you want deploy an ultimate digital experience to increase sales and return on investment (ROI)? Improve customer satisfaction and loyalty? Boost conversion rates? Improve order accuracy? Look at what your competitors are doing but don’t follow their journey, create your own path. And push your existing agencies and technology suppliers to help challenge this and bring them on your journey. Step 2: Prioritize the quick and easy wins Once you have established your objectives, you need to prioritize and determine the most essential solutions and which ones are quick and easy to deploy. It could be confronting the realities of your legacy technology. It could be better use of customer data collected across all touch points turning them into…