Technology now sits at the core of every Brand’s marketing activities.
Point solutions prevail for those brands that are still finding their way in the digital world (Microsite Software, Search Marketing Software, Marketing Communication Software etc).
As the level of sophistication grows, however, marketers find it increasingly difficult to hold all the moving parts together. At this stage, marketers are faced with 3 options:
1. Work longer hours
2. Grow the team
3. Find a smarter way of working
Work smarter, not harder – Coordinate your efforts!
If your marketing sophistication is in the ascendancy and you’re wondering when you’ll find time to sleep in your efforts to stay on top of the complexity that this generates, you need a platform that pulls it all together (Marketing Professional Software).
If you can link your Capture, Engage and Convert activities in one place, you can not only streamline your processes (Marketing Workflow), you will also surface the crucial Marketing ROI that CFOs now rightly demand to justify budgets. Clear collaboration with Sales (B2B & B2C) and open visibility of Marketing's contribution to the bottom line shouldn't be aspirational - they are pre-requisites.
If your day revolves around making things happen at the last minute, juggling all the moving pieces and shouting as you go, there'll never be time to think.
Know where you are, how you got there, what’s working (and what isn’t) and – crucially – ensure you have enough time to apply your marketing genius to the rapidly changing environment.
Marketing platforms like Aprimo Marketing Studio enable Marketers to shine.
The key to achieving your desired conversion rate is relevancy -- pure and simple. It's more than using your microsite software to support specific campaigns. It's about testing and delivering personalized emails with relevant content that drives customers to a personalized and relevant experience on your microsite.
A few words stand out in the above paragraph that merit additional attention.
Personalize - This means many things to many people. It can be as simple as embedding the customer's name in the email message. A recent study by Aberdeen found that personalizing an email with a name increased conversion rates by 200-300% over non-personalized emails.
Relevant - The message/offer needs to resonate with the customer. Relevancy can be driven by events, prior purchases, and/or through segmentations.
- Events - A customer that downloads a whitepaper or article about a product or service could be ripe for a follow-up email or call. A dramatic increase in bank account balance could signal a call-to-action from a bank about investment options. A very personalized email could be triggered to drive customers to personalized microsites with a relevant message that speaks to the customer's need or interest. Lead nurturing applications can play a key role in supporting your marketing efforts related to customer events.
- Prior purchases - Simple cross/up-sell campaigns can be driven by product purchases. For instance, a customer that purchases a water filter could receive an email that drives them to a microsite that attempts to enroll them in scheduled deliveries (recurring sales!) of replacement filters. Data mining can also use information about prior purchases (RFM type data) to predict the likelihood of a customer's interest in other products or services. Then we simply communicate to customers about the products they are most likely to purchase (based on a statistical probability to respond). We won't always be right, but more times than not, this type of personalized communication will increase conversions and improve our campaign results.
- Segmentations - There are many ways to create segmentations. One is based on industry, product and customer knowledge that is accumulated over time. For instance, "I've worked in this industry for 10 years and know that females, aged 21-25 are the best targets for my product." Another interesting segmentation approach that improves campaign results is customer clustering. Clustering is a data mining technique that creates customer segments where everyone in one segment is similar to each other based on customer attributes (e.g., gender, age, prior purchases, geographic location, income class, etc.). While everyone in a given segment are similar to one another, each segment in general is quite different from any other. Once we profile each segment, it is easy to develop a personalized message that goes beyond first name. The actual copy/text of the email can be personalized to be perceived as even more relevant. If just using first name for personalization leads to a 2-3 X conversion improvement versus mass email, just imagine what affect personalized copy will have. Let's look at an example.
A large print newspaper in the northeast was experiencing declining subscribers like many of it's counterparts nationally. The newspaper appended Census data (number of residents, race, ethnicity, age, income, home value, average commute time and many other variables) at the zip+4 level to all of it's subscribers. It then used clustering to create five different clusters of customers based on the Census data. Their idea was to profile each group and develop editorial zones based on these segments. Each editorial zone would receive it's own unique newspaper content based on assumed interests as derived from the cluster profiles. One cluster was comprised of the highest proportion of customers with high home values, 4-year degrees and the lowest proportion of people with blue-collar jobs. This cluster also enjoyed the highest penetration in terms of current subscribers. You can see how the content this group would be interested in would differ from the cluster with lower education and income. By personalizing the newspaper content, the newspaper reduced the rate of subscriber loss from all segments/zones.
This information was also used to promote customizable online versions of the newspaper as well. Subscribers now opt-in/out to various content. As such, they are directly professing their interests in a topic or issue. This information is even more powerful from a marketing perspective than what we "deduce" via analytics, and can drive a circular process where we get to know the customer better and better over time. This increases customer loyalty and ROMI.
Many organizations have even taken this idea farther from a Social Marketing perspective. Customers can form their own clusters by opting in/out of particular forums or discussions. Creating customer segments based on the forums or discussion groups to which they belong is valuable low hanging fruit. Some leading edge companies are also applying Text Mining to customer posts to take proactive steps for customer loyalty/retention, cross-sell and acquisition efforts. More to come on Social Marketing and Text Mining in future posts.
Test - Testing is a best practice that cannot be ignored by Online Marketers. It's often referred to as A/B or Champion/Challenger testing. The notion is to create two or more versions of your message. Perhaps version A uses a
dark blue call to action that is italicized, and version B uses
rich green that is bolded instead of italicized. The simplified notion here is to split your targets into two groups or segments. Segment A gets version A, and segment B gets version B. We'd then look at open rates and click-thru's to see if one version outperformed another. We can then use the format of the winning version in future email campaigns. We can also utilize A/B testing on microsite pages as well. Testing can cover various combinations of: font size, font color, subject line text, images, etc. Testing is truly where the art of marketing meets the science of marketing square on to dramatically improve your campaign performance. I will develop a post dedicated solely to the subject of Testing in the near future.
Keep an eye out!
There is soooo much that can be written on the many marketing topics I've covered at various levels in this post.
Please write to share some of your valuable insights today and help others become marketing heros!
Project DefinitionThe goal of this post is to provide some insight into how the following interactive splash page was built to market our
Aprimo Marketing Studio Microsite (sorry non-techical people, but this may bore you to death):
Purpose of Marketing Studio Splash PageThe Marketing Studio animation was meant to excite people's interest in our temporary Marketing Studio microsite, which provided plenty of information about our new microsite software. The software includes modules such as Search Engine Management, Commercial Email, Microsites & Landing Pages, Web Analytics, etc. It contains everything a marketing department needs to run web campaigns.
The splash page included animation of a box turning from white to green, opening, and letting our icons, which represent our solution modules, out of the box. Then, text pops up mentioning that we can't wait to show you our solutions. Finally, you would fill out a form, and we would contact you with the password to view our
Aprimo Marketing Studio microsite.
Technologies Used- Blender 3D (blender.org) - create Box Animation: Output Targa
- Adobe After Effects - import TARGA & animate icons; output FLV
- Adobe Flash - used to embed FLV and actionscript was used for the lights in the background
ChallengeThe biggest challenge for me, in this case, was learning free 3D software that was brand new to me. Due to the fact that I had never used Blender, it took couple days to build the 3D box animation. The interface is nothing like Autodesk 3D studio Max or Maya, and don't get me started on the materials and shading.
While this was a challenge, the direction I received from our marketing management pointed to 3D animation, so I took initiative to learn enough about the software to create a simple animation. Though the software is the opposite of intuitive, Blender can be used as an excellent marketing tool for sharp, 3D animation with transparency.
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