How to Optimize Your Marketing Technology Stack with Unified Customer Data
This whitepaper uncovers the challenges marketers face in today’s world of marketing technology, as well as the solutions. The challenge lies with deep-rooted data silos that cause fragmented data and, in turn, fragmented marketing. The solution can be found in breaking down those data silos, allowing for the free flow of data between marketing technology platforms and organizational departments. With this converged data infrastructure, the marketer will be able to create a 360-degree profile of their individual customers, providing the foundation for truly customer-centric marketing. Find out how data silos are impeding your business’ success Learn how to break through silos and converge data on a customer data platform (CDP) Discover how single customer profiles based on real-time data will enable customer-centric marketing This article was first published by MAPP. Permission to use has been granted by the publisher.
The New Role Of CDP In Data-Driven Marketing
How many is quintillion? Good news; we have a tremendous amount of data about consumer behavior. Targeting and reaching customers with the perfect message at the perfect time should be a breeze, right? Bad news; IBM estimates that 2.6 quintillion bytes of consumer data are being generated every single day. At any given moment, consumers are interacting with brands via multiple touch points across various data collection points, channels or silos. Due to the complete disarray of all the customer data, much is lost, making it is impossible to get a complete view of our customers. No data left behind With all of these potential touch points, it is more important than ever to reach our customers with a seamless and personalized message sent at the perfect time. Wouldn’t be great if we could use ALL the information from our website, 3rrd party sources, CRM, ad server, and offline marketing to communicate…
The 10-Step Checklist To Kickass Email Deliverability Results
The success of your email marketing campaign depends heavily on good deliverability. If your emails aren’t getting delivered, then email marketing is a massive waste of time and money. We loved eDataSource’s blog post about the ten “do-not’s” in email deliverabilty – so we created the list of “must-do’s” to ensure your email marketing gets kickass results. 1. Send your emails on a regular schedule to a consistent contact list. 2. Remove the hard bounces and “complainers” (people who marked your email as spam) from your list after each campaign – and delete them permanently. Inactive accounts stay inactive; complainers don’t want your mail. 3. Don’t use IP or domain hopping. The times of “burnt IPs” are over. Now ISPs want to identify you and assign a reputation reflecting your practices. Note: If you are having reputation issues, remove non-engagers from your list and email only the most active users until you get…
3 Ways to Capture Data without Annoying Your Website Visitors
Capturing data is crucial to any business. Whether someone is coming to your website via PPC, paid media, or organic ways, the name of the game is getting that person to identify themselves with a login or sign up. However, it’s astonishing to see how many brands, in all industries and countries, do not have a clear strategy in place to capture new leads on their website. The lack of creativity or proper use is no one’s fault per se, it is more than likely an inherent fear based on personally being interrupted over and over again on websites that has scared marketers out of using this tactic. So popups have a pretty bad reputation at this point. They come in many forms, from the instant hit, to the delayed capture to the targeted content. And users have accepted them, as long as they are easy to dismiss. These can…
Get Better Email Open Rates With Mapp’s “Best Send Out Time” Feature
When it comes to email, opens lead to clicks and clicks lead to conversions. This simple concept is key to making sure email stays the high ROI channel that it should be. While there are many different metrics, email opens still form the foundation of email marketing. We as marketers strive to optimize open rates through various methods, including subject lines, personalization, and device targeting. Even better would be if you were able to reach more people by sending communications when they are more likely to be checking their emails, therefore more likely to open them. Best Send Out Time is a feature in the Mapp Engage platform that allows you to automatically send out communications at the times customers or prospects are most engaged. The premise is simple but extremely effective: record, compute, and assign the correct time segment to a customer. Now let’s dive into a bit more detail, shall we? Record: Track…
5 Lessons to Unveil The Mystery Behind Viral Marketing
How many times have you asked yourself what is the Ultimate Question of Life, Universe and Everything? We have an answer but it doesn’t quite get close to uncovering the secrets behind the viral marketing universe. We know a vast amount of videos that exploded in the internet, for no obvious reason. It seems that the magic happens beyond our understanding. Wrong! Surely it bothers us all. What made that Mom’s with the Star War Mask live streaming video become the most popular thing on Facebook? Or is there a particular reason for a mannequin challenge to take teenagers, adults and even companies’ breaths away? There is no exact recipe for a viral marketing, but it makes sense to start digging deeper into the viral dna. Explore the 5 secrets to help enhance your customer engagement through viral marketing universe and beyond: 1. Catch the buzz wave Unless you live in a cave, you must have…
Increase the Conversion Rates of your Email Campaigns with the Correct A/B Testing
A/B testing isn’t just a buzz term that is going to go away with time. A/B testing is your train ticket into understanding your visitor’s behavior and a way to increase your conversion rates. Testing on digital channels is so easy. But still many marketers neglect this topic or deprioritize this topic due to their daily workload. For most businesses, their website conversion rates range from 1 to 3% and only 22% of companies are satisfied with their conversion. The stark truth is that most companies opt out of using A/B test experiments despite the positive results. It’s crazy if you think about, the fact that using the correct targeting and testing methods can increase your conversion rates of up to 300% and marketers just opt out?? Well let’s change that today. It is time to make some resolutions and bring the testing back to life. Using direct channels and getting quality traffic to the website…
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…
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 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…
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…
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…
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…
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.