Despite their recent rash of injuries, I’m feeling cautiously optimistic about my beloved San Antonio Spurs as the NBA playoffs approach. The team’s defense has risen to No. 3 in the league, and Tim Duncan is playing at his highest level in years.
In fact, the team’s stellar 58-24 record, second best in the Western conference, has been nearly enough to wash away the memory of last season’s two lowlights: the Spurs’ devastating loss to the Oklahoma City Thunder in the Western Conference finals, and the day I received my March 16, 2012 Sports Illustrated (SI) in the mail and saw Jabari Parker staring back at me (below left) rather than Duncan:
Now, I have nothing against Parker, who seems like a perfectly pleasant young man (aside from signing with Duke rather than my alma mater, Wake Forest). But prior to receiving the issue, I had read on Spurs message boards that Duncan would be fronting Sports Illustrated’s cover for the first time in five years, so the switch felt as deflating as a Kevin Durant three-pointer. How in the name of Manu Ginobili had this happened?
I was a victim of broad segmentation.
They’d sent the Jabari Parker cover to certain parts of the country, and the Tim Duncan cover to others. Based on my geographical location (Georgia), the magazine assumed I wouldn’t be interested in the Duncan cover.
Big mistake.
Of course, Sports Illustrated (whose customer service department quickly rectified the situation by sending a replacement issue) is far from alone in this regard. Many companies employ various sorts of broad segmentation based on geography, gender, income and other demographics in an effort to deliver more engaging content than a generic mass mailing would. But with consumers having more access than ever to exactly the types of content they want, this type of broad segmentation is in many cases no longer enough.
Fortunately, today’s advances in marketing technology make it easier than ever to deliver highly individualized content. Here are three ways SI might have dug deeper in its content distribution efforts – and how you might apply the lessons to your digital marketing initiatives:
1) Ask about preferences. I’m sure there are many other subscribers out there whose sports team affiliations don’t match their geographies. A simple message directing me to a preference center where I could update my favorite teams and sports could have helped ensure that I received the Duncan cover.
The marketing takeaway: Every person is different. Create a preference center that enables contacts to tell you what they’re interested in, and invite them to visit it in your welcome email. And don’t let those preferences rot on the vine — periodically invite contacts to revisit it during your relationship.
2) Capture targeted behaviors. Not only is Sports Illustrated my go-to source for offline sports reading, but SI.com is typically the first website I visit for my daily sports fix. Since I check the Spurs recap and box score for just about every game, SI could have used a little behavioral Web tracking to increase its understanding of my favorite teams.
The marketing takeaway: How your customers and prospects interact with you speaks volumes about their interests. Capture these actions and use them to deliver more relevant content, either by inserting behavior-driven dynamic content in your messages or by routing contacts down certain messaging tracks driven by their actions (or both).
3) Embrace scoring. SI also could have set up scoring rules so that, for example, each time I visited the Spurs page on its site, 10 points were added to my “Spurs” score. Reaching a score of 100, for instance, might then trigger its marketing platform to add me to a special Spurs content track, or prompt a triggered email asking if I’d like to visit a preference center and select “Spurs” as my favorite NBA team.
The marketing takeaway: Scoring is about more than driving leads. As Silverpop’s Bryan Brown outlined in a recent post, it can also be used to power loyalty programs, identify subscribers who are in danger of going inactive, help you run fun “gaming” promotions, and much more.
So, what steps are you taking to connect with customers at a more 1:1 level? Segmentation definitely has its place in the marketing toolbox, but if broad segmentation is as personalized as you get, it may be time to incorporate more individualized, behavior-driven content into your messaging stream.
As for the NBA playoffs, I’ll be pulling hard for a Spurs trip to the Finals. And if Duncan happens to make the cover of Sports Illustrated again, here’s hoping I get luckier this time around.
Related Resources:
1) Blog: “Why You Shouldn’t Do What Apple Does (Just This Once)”
2) Video: “The New Preference Center”
3) White Paper: “7 Digital Marketing Strategies Made Better Through an Integrated Platform”
Your email marketing program is like an old kitchen. Both need a top-to-bottom renovation after years of use, but just the thought of doing a major overhaul can be overwhelming. What do you fix first? Where’s the money coming from, and how can you get all your daily work done while you’re rebuilding?
One of the biggest frustrations I hear when meeting with marketers is that they lack the time, money and personnel to achieve what they really want with their email programs. To complicate matters further, additional challenges have emerged:
1. More channels: The minute you think you’ve finally figured out how to leverage Facebook in your marketing mix, Pinterest, Instagram and Vine pop up. All these channels give us great opportunities to reach out and engage with customers, prospects, stakeholders and the world at large.
But the down side is that you need more and more content to fill those channels. Who’s producing that content? Marketers. And, since most companies still treat marketing like an expense instead of a revenue-generator, you must create more and more content using the same budget and people.
2. More devices: “Mobile” is the watchword, but it’s much more involved than making sure your message looks good and functions properly on every device from a basic cellphone to the biggest desktop computer.
Marketers also have to think about context – what’s happening in the environment around the reader – and understanding which devices drive which kinds of actions. Do they read on their smartphones but convert from their desktops? Which kinds of content engage best on which devices?
3. More data: “Big Data” is flooding into your systems and department, but the problem is the “big” part. You have access to more data than you can act on. You need to turn “big data” into small, actionable data. But, in the meantime, many marketing teams are simply ignoring or not acting on this data because they lack the expertise, systems or programs to take advantage of it.
It’s easy to sit around and complain about not getting budget and buy-in from management for your projects. I know — I’ve been there, done that, too, in my 30 years in and around marketing. Today’s marketers have two advantages that we didn’t have all those years ago:
1. Marketing technology and automation
Marketing automation can ultimately help you be more efficient by moving more of your program to messages that are triggered in real time based on customer behavior and events.
Yes, you have to spend time on the front end to create new content, integrate email with CRM and third-party systems and set business rules. However, once everything is locked and loaded, these automated messages are going out while you are lying on the beach or working on your golf swing.
2. Measurability
Department-store legend John Wanamaker should be living in our times instead of the 1800s. He’s the guy who said, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.”
One of the greatest advantages of digital marketing is that nearly everything we do can be measured now. We can see who’s visiting our websites, opening and acting on our emails, and sharing or converting from our social media messages. And, we know whether they’re engaging with us from their phones, tablets or computers and which operating system they’re using.
You can use this knowledge to shift spend and focus on a dime. Your priority becomes continuously reallocating your marketing resources based on these shifting numbers.
Ready? Go!
So, yes, you have a lot of challenges to overcome if you want to get the resources and management backing you need to make your email marketing program the significant driver of company success that you know it can be.
But now it’s time to saddle up and ride out to meet these challenges. Create a new way of thinking among your email teams and reset the process for getting things done.
1. Seek Knowledge and Inspiration
- Get out of the office: A change of scenery can help you see things in new ways. Move your workspace to a coffee shop for a few hours or go for a walk on a regular basis. Take your marketing team to an offsite planning retreat. Go out into the field and spend time in your customers’ shoes.
- Put “thinking time” on your calendar: As marketers, we typically race from meeting to meeting, deadline to deadline and campaign to campaign, leaving little time for strategic planning. LinkedIn’s CEO recently wrote about booking time on your own calendar for “thinking time.” Do it now.
- Read to get inspired: Go beyond your core focus. I read Harvard Business Review articles, political books, online discussions about sustainability topics and the like. Then, I think about applying these ideas to marketing.
- Stay on top of emerging techniques: Become a sponge. Attend Webinars and user conferences. Seek out local and regional events and online communities. Read case studies. Subscribe to competitor emails as well as those from companies outside your industry.
2. Build Relationships and Get Buy-In
- Benchmark against the best: My motto has become “Average is the new bottom.” Too many marketers use the wrong metrics or compare themselves to the average. Measure your performance against the top performers and the metrics you need to achieve your business goals. Then use these benchmarks to help drive change. (Download Silverpop’s “2013 Email Marketing Metrics Benchmark Study.)
- Collaborate with other teams: I continue to be amazed that many email marketing teams are unaware of initiatives and technologies in other departments or marketing teams in their company. Schedule regular meetings or lunches with staff from other departments to uncover joint opportunities and shared resources.
- Get top-level buy-in: Management support is the No. 1 differentiator between top marketing teams and average performers. What matters to management? Results such as conversions, closed deals, higher revenue or reduced costs. Think like your boss, and choose the right metrics.
3. Just Do It
- Find your company’s fulcrum: Maybe you need to convert more “freemium” customers into paid; reduce print and postage costs; or turn one-time buyers into brand advocates. Identify your company’s biggest unexplored revenue opportunity and then figure out how to move the needle. (Read more on focusing on the fulcrum.)
- Don’t boil the ocean: Sure, a real-time triggered, three-message cart-abandonment remarketing program with personalized recommendations would be awesome, but it could take six months to launch. Start capturing revenue sooner with a simpler but well-executed program. Then, after launch, work on continual optimization.
- Rethink processes: Once you’ve reached this point, you’re likely going to have to make several changes to your approach to truly take your program to another level. You might find that you need different skills on your team; a shift from manual, last-minute campaigns to multi-step automated programs; or new technology vendors and agencies.
If your email marketing program is on autopilot, you’re probably seeing declining results or, at minimum, leaving significant revenue on the table. Follow the steps and ideas in this post, and you’ll take your program to another level.
Please share your challenges – and solutions – for getting your program out of a rut.
Related Resources:
1) Ebook: “Almost Everything You Wanted to Know About Email Marketing”
2) Blog: “Using Integrations to Make Your Emails More Dynamic”
3) Video: “Moving from One-Off Email Campaigns to Behavior-Driven Series or Tracks”
By John Watton ( @jwatton), April 17, 2013
I’m a big fan of Apple. I first used its products in 1989 (an Apple Macintosh SE) and never looked back. I got my first iPod in 2003, and since then I’ve probably purchased every Apple “form factor.”
I now own, on behalf of me and my family, 13 (!) Apple devices: MacBook Air, MacPro, Apple TV (two), iPod Touch, iPod Classic, iPod Shuffle v1, iPod Shuffle v2, iPod Shuffle v3, iPhone 4, iPhone 5, iPad2 and iPad Mini. It’s fair to say I’m a fan.
But Apple doesn’t know that. In fact, it probably doesn’t care. In another world I would be a Platinum customer — loved, cherished and nurtured. But not in Apple’s. Despite controlling my entire (fabulous) experience and having insight into everything I’m doing, it appears to know nothing about me.
Never is that more obvious than in the communications I receive for Apple. On a regular basis I get “Buy an iPad for your loved one for Valentine’s Day” or “It’s Mother’s Day. Buy an iPad for your Mum” emails.
No recognition of any loyalty. No offer or discount. In fact, these promotional messages don’t even convey a new idea — I get the same email every holiday/seasonal event saying much the same thing, the same as everyone else, with no personalization or targeting. I even get “Back to College” emails (my kids are 7 and 9).
It’s the total opposite of what most marketers are trying to do. That’s because a one-size-fits-all approach may work for Apple, but it’s a road to disaster for the rest of us.
Tailoring communications based on behaviors has been proven to increase conversions and maximize retention rates. In Apple’s case, there’s should be plenty of data to choose from: who I am (I’ve been registered on iTunes for nearly 10 years), what products I’ve owned (I register them all AND I buy everything in Apple stores), what apps I download, what music I like (I have all my 13,253 songs in iCloud), which emails I’ve opened, what I’ve clicked on and what Web pages I’ve browsed.
You likely have a similar wealth of information on your customers. This demographic plus behavioral information is a goldmine for all of us that don’t have the brand equity of Apple. How about using dynamic content in emails that reflects what the individual browsed on your site? Or delivering a customized Web experience based on what messages the visitor opened? Or scoring interactions to help determine whether consumers are in active buying mode, so you can then send offers at the right time, tailored to their profile?
This is the world of behavioral marketing, and it’s the end of “spray and pray” marketing. Brands that ignore the actions of their customers do so at their peril. So for once, don’t try and emulate Apple.
Related Resources:
1) Blog: “Make Your Marketing More ‘Bobular’!”
2) White Paper: “7 Digital Marketing Strategies Made Better Through an Integrated Marketing Platform”
3) Blog: “Behavioral Email Done Right: Big Ups to Foursquare and Sephora”
What determines the success (or failure) of marketing automation? The technological features of a platform are critical, no doubt, but success has a lot more to do with your people and processes than you might think.
Here are four simple questions that will help you evaluate your practices and readiness for marketing automation, and ultimately pave the way for success.
1) Are you prepared to automate?
At the end of the day, marketing automation solutions are only tools. Purchasing and implementing an automation solution — even the best one available — will only provide value if other parts fall into in place.
Obviously, not all pieces of the puzzle need to be perfect, but before you can automate, you need to know a few key bits of information, including “your product’s value proposition, your customer buying cycle, what constitutes a sales-ready lead, and how you want to communicate the status of leads to your sales team.”
Knowing what you hope to achieve with your platform and how you’ll measure ROI will help you assess your readiness for behavioral marketing automation.
2) How effectively are your marketing and sales groups aligned?
SiriusDecisions estimates that prospects only connect with sales when they’ve made it through 60 percent to 70 percent of their buying cycle. This means that both your demand generation and sales teams must clearly understand buyer paths leading to engagement and be fully synchronized around common definitions of an MQL, SAL, and so on. Together, they can act fast to take advantage of those critical moments when buyers are finally ready to connect.
Educating your sales reps to properly use marketing automation data in the sales process is critical for marketing automation success. When reps are aware of a prospect’s past behavior, they can engage in the most effective ways to close a sale.
For example, a rep who doesn’t fully understand a prospect’s engagement path might contact that person and only say, “I see you’ve been all over our website. What are you interested in?” A more insightful rep, on the other hand, will use the prospect’s path information in a much more advantageous way by saying, “I see you’ve been engaging in content around automation software. It looks like you’re trying to figure out how automation might help your business. I would be happy to spend some time with you talking about how our tool could benefit your organization.”
The latter interaction clearly communicates a higher level of confidence and customer service, bettering the rep’s chances of closing the sale.
3) Can you generate enough content?
Marketing automation is a beast that feeds on content, functioning best when it has enough content to lead customers through the sales funnel. Companies that don’t have a “content factory” are sometimes hesitant to move forward with marketing automation, but they shouldn’t be, because there are many ways to repurpose existing content to nourish the system: A white paper can be turned into a series of blog posts; speaking engagement presentations can be uploaded to Slideshare and then shared using social media; Q&As from Webinars can be transformed into blog posts; and more.
If you don’t think you have sufficient internal resources to produce the content you need, consider outsourcing as a cost-effective alternative. You’ll be among 52 percent of marketers who did so in 2013.
4) Do you have the bandwidth for ongoing improvements?
Successful companies continually invest in improving their marketing automation — tweaking and optimizing campaigns to get the best results. Your marketing automation solution will provide insight into prospect behavior and automate lead nurturing, but there’s a manual component. Before you can achieve bottom-line results, be ready to invest in ongoing optimizations, process fine-tuning and content repackaging.
With the right elements in place, marketing automation can help you drive big-time revenue — taking into account that it could take a few months of building programs and tweaking before you see results. Business consulting and technology company TekStream, for example, saw a 200 percent pipeline increase, 105 percent lead conversion boost and 75 percent revenue jump after deploying a new automation strategy.
In the process of adopting marketing automation, it’s natural to quickly jump into a meticulous evaluation of technological platforms. But before doing that, take a close look at your people, processes and interactions. Doing so will affect your marketing automation success much more than you might think.
Related Resources:
1) Marketing Automation Ebook: “Best Practices for Marketing Excellence and Operational Efficiency”
2) Tip Sheet: “10 Ways to Make the Case for Marketing Automation”
3) Blog: “Use Marketing Automation to Get Your Email Program Organized”
If you’re like most marketers these days, you’ve launched a new redesign of your website, set up your Facebook page and started scheduling your Tweets. You’ve also installed a Web tracking system to see how many visits you receive to your site. The goal is always to make those numbers go up because more visitors equal more sales, right?
Well, not exactly. Even if your number of website visitors continues to increase, this will not always correlate to sales. Prospective customers visiting your website must be presented with a solution compatible and consistent with their company’s objectives.
Without the right prospect analytics, marketers resemble the fisherman who spends all day with a baited line amongst schools of fish, yet fails to catch any of them. Although he knows where to locate and coexist with schools of fish, his bait is not right to yield any bites.
With the latest Web tracking software, companies can see who is looking at their site, what pages they are visiting, and how often without those people filling out a form. Visitor Insight from Silverpop, for example, allows you to see what type of “bait” your customers are most interested in consuming even if they don’t opt in and subscribe.
Once you’ve gathered your most promising prospects, use these tips to turn anonymous visitors into a warm lead:
1) Spotlight your product offerings to a target industry. Build dynamic content rules into your website so different content is served up for different industry visitors. For example, let’s say that a food service company sees that an organic restaurant chain is spending time on its website. When someone from that chain returns to the website, the marketing platform recognizes this and serves up a custom piece of content via the dynamic slot on the website – perhaps a video or PDF download spotlighting the benefits of the food service company’s organic food line. By serving up such industry-specific content, lead generation and nurturing are enhanced.
2) Promote segmented solutions. Perhaps a company is spending time looking at a specific area or product offering on your site. This could be the result of an issue or problem within their operations. For example, let’s say a beverage company is frequently looking at a bottling company’s “durable” line. The beverage company might be looking for a solution to its reputation for unreliable packaging. Advanced Web tracking software, such as Visitor Insight, would allow the bottling company to see this specific activity and follow up with a sales call where the sales executive asks the prospective customer, “Have you heard about our disposable and surprisingly durable bottles?”
3) Celebrate diversity. Perhaps your site is receiving visitors from companies of all different sizes. Try segmenting your site so that you can effectively cater to all potential customers. For example, a sand company sees high activity from a school system, a local construction company, and the state government. In order to effectively convert visitors into leads, create easy-to-navigate “paths” of content on your site that describes how your business works with each type of customer.
4) Gauge your next move. Suppose a certain visitor has spent multiple days researching, reading case studies, and even watching your product demo videos. You don’t understand why they haven’t contacted you — or better yet, bought anything! Use the analytics about which pages they have visited and how often to see how you may enhance their experience by delivering richer content. Based on what pages they have visited – and how often – put your best bait forward and serve up a Webinar invite, white paper download or product demo on your website to help move them through the funnel.
Conclusion: Just like the man surrounded by fish but no bites, your business can have millions of website visitors per day, but you won’t generate leads if your marketing and sales content do not match your customers’ needs. Instead, you’ll be left with high traffic, no action and confused C-levels execs. Web tracking software allows you to see who your visitors are and what they are spending time looking at. You can use these analytics to organize your site, customize content or efficiently contact these “anonymous” visitors to turn them into leads.
With Visitor Insight from Silverpop, you’re able to track outside activity on your company’s website. This app for Engage allows you to see which companies are viewing your site, which pages they’re spending their time on, what they’re clicking on and where they’re located. For more information, visit Silverpop’s web-tracking solutions page for Visitor Insight.
Related Resources:
1) Blog: “Behavioral Marketing: What It Is and Why It’s So Exciting”
2) Video: “Personalizing the Web Experience”
3) Blog: “The Marketer’s Genome Project: Identity Starts with Anonymity”
By Bryan Brown ( @getvision), April 10, 2013
It’s hard to believe that only a decade ago, the process of renting a movie involved heading over the nearest Blockbuster to browse the “New Releases” section to see if anything caught your eye.
The hundreds of titles flooding the walls could be overwhelming, and of course the system of organization (alphabetization) had nothing to do with your individual preferences for dramas versus comedies, Will Ferrell versus Charlie Chaplin, or Schwarzenegger action pics versus ‘60s French films. With nothing to help you cut through the clutter, it could be tough to find a movie selection that matched your preferences.
Compare that to the modern-day movie “rental” experience, where a site such as Netflix provides customized recommendations based on your personal viewing history and movie ratings. In other words, the experience gets better the more you engage. Rent Lincoln and rate it five stars, for example, and you might find recommendations for less-well-known historical epics such as Downfall, Che and Kundun. Talk about enhancing the customer experience.
 The days of browsing aimlessly through the "New Releases" aisle have been replaced by Netflix and its customized recommendations based on your personal viewing history and movie ratings. Changing Customers, Shifting Expectations
Unfortunately, this type of individualized experience is more the exception than the norm. As new marketing channels and mediums have arisen in recent years, many marketers have reacted by taking the same ‘ol approach to these channels, sending more and more generic “push” messages out.
The customer or prospect at the end of all this noise has become overwhelmed and begun tuning out brands because they physically can’t process all the generic marketing and advertising messages that are showing up in their social feeds, email inboxes, mobile apps, etc.
The result is a lackluster customer experience, coming at exactly the same time that Web-savvy buyers have come to expect more. How can marketers adjust?
The answer lies in helping people cut through the clutter around them rather than adding to it. That’s what’s cool about the Netflix experience – they’re filtering out the noise for you and making the experience more relevant to you as an individual.
Many marketers I know want to be more personal, but either don’t know how to get there or feel like they don’t have the resources to make it happen. But as I discuss at my Digital Marketing University sessions, an amazing customer experience is within your reach — you just need to focus on what I call “the three T’s”:
TACTICS: Marketing to the individual
As your customers are interacting with you through your website, emails, social media sites, mobile apps, brick-and-mortar locations and more, they want this behavior to be recognized and reflected in the ways you communicate with them.
So while broadcast emails will always be a part of the marketing mix, delivering highly personalized and individualized messaging requires a shift in how you approach your digital marketing program. The goal is to use what we call behavioral marketing automation to use individuals’ actions to deliver immensely relevant, real-time campaigns of one.
So let’s say someone just came to your culinary website and watched a video on grilling fish. You might follow up via email with one of your most popular fish marinade recipes (as rated by your customers), a link to your ebook on the different types of fish for grilling, and pictures of your three top-selling fish-grilling tools.
What about the next time that customer visits your website or Facebook page? Instead of showing them the same content you would display for a vegetarian or a red meat lover, you could ask them their favorite fish, and then serve up related content.
TECHNOLOGY: Marketing systems become individually aware
For many businesses, their current marketing tech isn’t ready for communicating at an individual level. Siloed systems, list-based databases and aggregate analytics aren’t up to the challenges of marketing to segments of one.
A common problem is that many companies today depend on an email-centric marketing database, yet modern buyers expect a relationship beyond email. A better option in the multichannel world is to employ a unified marketing database that’s integrated across channels and devices – Web, social, SMS, CRM, apps, check-ins, etc. – and enables you to capture these behaviors in one place.
Then, you can use these behaviors to drive automated interactions, across channels. The action of watching a certain video on your site might trigger an email to that individual. Or a text message. Or a print mailing. Or a call from your sales center.
TOUCH: Individual customer and campaign interactions
Marketing departments today need to be centered around the customer experience. What does that mean in terms of customer touches? Your goal should be a more nuanced approach than simply blasting out content to every person in your database, then rewarding the lucky few that click through to your site with a Web experience that has nothing to do with who that individual is, where they came from or how they’ve interacted with you before.
Has a contact opened or clicked on an email? Browsed deep within your website or abandoned a shopping cart? Made a purchase or watched a video on your site? Commented on your blog or tweeted your content? Try building new business rules that reflect these touches.
And look to get more automated, programming communication steps into your marketing that zig and zag depending on how a person has interacted with your company. By adding just a few business criteria that shape the content you serve up to contacts based on their behaviors, preferences and demographics, you can quickly wind up with dozens, even hundreds, of unique messaging paths.
This move from mass marketing and broad segmentation to marketing to the individual is what IBM CEO Ginni Rometty was talking about when she recently told Forbes, “What you will see with rapid data and social sharing is the death of the average and the era of you.”
In the era of “you,” marketing to the “average” through broad segmentation based on geographies, age groups and gender won’t be enough. Instead, make your goal to deliver hyper-individualized content to every person in your database, and watch the experience of your customers and prospects soar.
Related Resources:
1) Blog: “Behavioral Email Done Right: Big Ups to Foursquare and Sephora”
2) Video: “Personalizing the Web Experience For Every Customer Through a CMS Integration”
3) Blog: “Make Your Marketing More ‘Bobular’! Treating Every Person Like a Valued Customer”
Most marketers know that loyal customers are key to their success, but they still tend to get caught up in filling the top of the funnel instead of enticing repeat buyers to come back for more. A recent study from Silverpop partner Windsor Circle, a retention automation platform, revealed that 55 percent of ecommerce revenue was from 31 percent of customers who were repeat buyers, so this is obviously an audience that marketers should be nurturing to build long-lasting relationships.
I recently co-presented a webinar on this topic titled “10 Most Effective Retention marketing Strategies for Digital Marketers” with Windsor Circle and our joint client, evo. In this Webinar, we discussed 10 real-life examples of brands using marketing technology to keep their loyal customers coming back and how to re-engage those who might have fallen off the radar. Here are a few of my favorite takeaways:
Leverage each customer’s behavioral data to drive personalized, targeted messages.
Your customers’ inboxes are constantly flooded with marketing messages, and it’s easy for them to hit a quick “delete.” Sometimes marketers get caught in a “batch and blast” mentality and forget to incorporate their buyers’ needs and wants into their messaging. By “listening” to a buyer’s behavior and using this data to send uniquely relevant content to that person, you’ll increase the likelihood that he or she will come back to make a purchase.
You don’t have to boil the ocean to see the benefits of this approach. Start by leveraging information you already have, like purchase anniversaries or the geographic area where a buyer lives, to send them meaningful messages. evo, for example, sends emails with winter gear specials to geographic regions that have just had a snowfall.
Also, consider surprising or rewarding your customers – a little “thanks” for making a purchase or sharing a piece of content or rewarding your most loyal buyers with something exclusive can go a long way.
Automation is key for maximizing conversions throughout a customer’s lifecycle.
Whether it’s through email, social or the Web, marketers need to give buyers what they want, when they want it. Automation, though not traditionally associated with retail marketing or content humanization, is an excellent way for businesses to drive more personalized experiences and give your brand the edge when it comes to standing out from the rest of the pack.
Welcome series are probably the most basic automated program to set up, and a great place to start. A friendly “hello” after signing up for your email program or a nice “thank you” after a first purchase gives consumers a positive impression of your brand. It also puts a human touch on your marketing messages, setting them apart from generic inbox clutter.
To go above and beyond, consider expanding your single welcome email into a multi-message format, with each email warming the new subscriber to a different value proposition or call to action based on his or her point of entry, interests or what the new contact needs to do to become an experienced user of your product or service.
Give your customers the content that matters to them.
Delivering content based on past purchases is another way to deliver a more personalized experience. For example, if a customer has purchased a set of plates, send them follow-up content with the matching bowls and a how-to video on caring for their new tableware.
Implementing Web tracking is another smart way to capture data you can use to enhance the customer experience. You can these use this information to automatically send relevant content to customers who have been browsing a particular section of your website, for example. Providing content, advice and tools about which specific product or solution is right for them builds credibility and keeps your brand fresh in your customers’ minds, making them more likely to come back for a purchase.
The key to personalization is actively “listening” to your customers’ needs and wants and then acting on those things. A great way to get to know a customer better is to entice them to provide product reviews. It’s a win-win for both of you – once they’ve made a purchase, use automation technology to trigger an email requesting a review. They are able to provide feedback in the form of a review that can help convert future customers. Further, these customers often make additional purchases once they are back on your site posting or reviewing their live review.
Or, offer fun contests or gifts. evo, for example, recently held a “Vote for your favorite snowboard” promotion. To the consumer, this is a fun way to engage with one of their favorite stores. For you as a marketer, it’s another behavioral data point for you to act on.
Related Resources:
1) Blog Post: Windsor Circle on 3 Holiday Marketing Tips to Boost Revenue
2) Blog Post: Browse Abandonment Emails: How You Can Use Them to Bring Browsers Back to Buy
3) White Paper: 7 Digital Marketing Strategies Made Better through an Integrated Marketing Platform
As we exit Q1 and enter Q2, we’re all still focused on delivering against new, aggressive quotas with a bunch of new business. But what about the business that comes from those who are already your customers? They’re part of making your sales goals, too, so it’s critical that they don’t feel like just another number.
The fact is, today’s winning enterprise orbits around cultivating successful client relationships across many channels and multiple touch points for the long term. Yes, many companies solve for this challenge with dedicated customer service and success teams. But why take yourself out of the equation when you were part of the initial customer-creation chemistry?
In this blog, I’ll share key ways that marketing and sales teams can nurture and expand post-sales relationships with behavioral marketing automation — and gain the same revenue-producing personalization that they employed when first chasing a sale.
1. Continue using the data you have. Just because the sale is over doesn’t mean your marketing department should stop tracking online behavior. You sell more than one product or service, don’t you? Pay attention to how your customers behave — clicking an email, visiting your new product page, requesting a demo. You’ll gain visibility into possible next purchases and can customize your automated offers accordingly across multiple touch points at exactly the right time. Of course, collecting and responding to this information depends on having a robust marketing automation tool.
You should also monitor online behavior to spot opportunities to recommend products or services that your customers might not know they need. For example, if a customer keeps visiting a page about analytics, she might need help creating custom reports. Does she know you offer that service? There’s a lot of money to be had in existing account expansion via upsell and cross-sell, so don’t miss that opportunity.
2. Check in on your customer. By experience, we all know that the beginning of a relationship often dictates its longevity and quality. This principle is no different in business. Honor it by sending automated emails at regular intervals after you sign new clients. Check in, and provide relevant content at critical times — from the first thank-you note you send after their initial purchase, to offers to review products online.
For B2B customers, consider sending content that addresses current behaviors. In the case of the customer looking at analytics, you might fire off a step-by-step guide for creating those custom reports. On the consumer side, consider celebrating important anniversaries or recent searches on your site with discount offers. In future emails, you can recommend complementary products or add-ons.
3. Make recommendations based on your typical customer lifecycle. Your customers think about the issues and challenges of their own specific companies every day. Broaden their industry perspective with a consultative approach. Share competitive information about what others in their region and industry are doing at similar stages in the customer lifecycle. For example, Silverpop customers may start with email and see great results within six months. Once they’ve mastered the basics they might be more ready to understand the additional ROI they could enjoy via social sign-in or more sophisticated automation.
Happy and successful customers remain customers for longer. They also expand their business with vendors like you. And let’s not forget the power of new business referrals. It’s in your best interest to take good care of your new business, especially after they become customers! Make sure behavioral marketing automation is a key pillar of your revenue strategy.
Related Resources:
1) Blog: “Leveraging Buyer Behavior and Automation – Keys to Retention Marketing Success”
2) Tip Sheet: “7 Tips for Creating an Effective Modern-Day Loyalty Program”
3) Webinar: “10 Most Effective Retention Marketing Strategies for Digital Marketers”
It’s been six weeks since catchers and pitchers reported to extended spring training (thanks to the World Baseball Classic). Thankfully, the countdown to baseball opening day 2013 is finally over! The season kicked off earlier this week, with our hometown Atlanta Braves winning their opener in style.
One of the best things about being a baseball fan today is how your experience at the ballpark has become truly interactive. You can sign up for email and text message notifications, download your favorite team’s mobile app, check in at the stadium, and follow teams on Facebook and Twitter.
Since baseball fans typically enjoy poring over statistics and debating who’s better than whom, we thought it would be fun to dive into the numbers and see how today’s teams and fans are using social media and other channels to connect with their favorite teams.
So, our team at Silverpop registered for clubs’ mailing lists, logged onto multiple social networks and monitored Foursquare check-in data. Then, we crunched the numbers and created this infographic so we could share the numbers with you. The results may not please Yankee haters, but we think baseball fans will enjoy it nonetheless. In the words of former MLB Commissioner Bart Giamatti, “There’s nothing bad that accrues from baseball.”
More Infographics:
1) “2012 College Football Opening Weekend Check-ins”
2) “Comparing Barack Obama and Mitt Romney’s Emails”
3) “How the Top Grammy® Nominees Communicate with Fans”
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By Eric Holmen ( @eholmen), April 5, 2013
As I mentioned in my last post, “The Marketer’s Genome Project: The Benefit,” collectively our customers are capturing billions of buyer behaviors and using them to create automated, multichannel interactions with their customers and prospects.
There is a fundamental component to this: the individual.
All of this data must be synthesized down to an individual; otherwise, who are you interacting with?
Not surprisingly, most customer-business relationships begin with some level of anonymity, typically in the form of a person visiting your website. While you don’t know who they are, you’re trying to learn as much as you can about them through Web forms and sign-ups and new customer special offers.
Even before they reveal their identities, these anonymous browsers may return to your website and click around, exhibiting valuable behaviors. Are they on an iPad, Samsung Galaxy smartphone or a desktop PC? What search terms brought them to you? Which products or services are they reading about? Are they sharing that? Far too many marketers ignore this data at their own peril and assume that the relationship hasn’t begun until they have captured their first piece of addressable data – often an email address.
Silverpop captures anonymous visitor data, and then we sit on it. It might be days or weeks or a month, but at some point, those interested buyers who have been all over your site will suddenly give you a piece of addressable data, and when that happens we match that up with their prior browsing behavior so that the very first interaction with them looks – to the buyer – to be clairvoyant. “How did they know this is exactly what I’m looking for?”
The importance of buyer identity starts with anonymity.
There are sites that don’t allow you to browse or experience the benefits of their content without registering. This can create a poor customer experience and increases the likelihood of people providing false data since they’re forcing these potential buyers to share information without having first established a relationship.
And while this might give them a larger database to email offers to, it boosts the chances that they will send spam since they know so little about the buyer. In these cases, the identity itself is no different than anonymity. An address doesn’t occupy a person; a person with all of their behaviors and details, however, can occupy an address.
It’s up to the marketer to persuade buyers to provide addressable information, and with tools from Silverpop and our partners, we make this easier. And when you have the unfair advantage of knowing what these previously anonymous buyers’ behaviors say about who they are, you can be as relevant as possible, starting with that critical first interaction.
Related Resources:
1) Blog: “The Marketer’s Genome Project: The Benefit”
2) Video: “Silverpop Web Tracking”
3) Blog: “Be Quiet and Start Listening: 3 Reasons to Start Having a Relationship Before You Have an Email Address”
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