Chart of the Day: Annual churn hits 23% in the high-tech industry
Email marketing is a vital channel for B2B marketers. Providing a high ROI when compared to other marketing channels. Which drives us, marketers, to spend many hours creating engaging content for our target personas. After all this effort when you're ready to hit the send, are you sure that your data is accurate?
A recent study by Salesforce found that the rate at which B2B marketers were able to grow their email lists looks relatively healthy. In the High Tech and Retail sectors, the growth is as high as 21%. On the face of it, most marketers would take a 21% growth rate each year.
Average Annual Growth by Vertical and Department
But this is only one side of the story. The report also looks at…
Chart of the Day: Don't forget your Lead Scoring
We all know about Email Marketing Automation, but what is Lead Scoring?
In the chart, we can see that Email Automation is the most popular at 65.50%, which is expected. The chart also shows how little people either know or use lead scoring, as it's only at 11.80%.
Lead scoring is an excellent way of ranking prospects using a scoring method. These scores will help sales teams to prioritise leads or which should be nurtured by marketing more.
In the beginning of the process, marketing and sales need to work together to decide on what their ideal prospect is and what we want them to do on your site. And then assign or detract points from the prospects score for doing those activities. For example:
Visited Pricing Page = 20 points
Visited Blog = 1 point
Visited Careers Page = -20 points
Each time a prospect visits one of these…
Chart of the day: Data, analytics, and insight are critical to business success. Insight and data are empowering growth.
Marketers understand the important of data and businesses understand how data drives growth.
The research by Mediasense, in association with Ipsos MORI and ISBA, asked respondents what factors they thought would be critical to business success in 2020. Almost 8 in 10 (78%) thought data, analytics, and insight were the most critical factor.
Content marketing was down compared with 2015 data whilst SEO was found to be one of the least critical factors, but scores for SEO were not as low as Pay per click and community management.
Source: Media2020 report
Sample: 250+ senior marketers
Recommended resource:
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Auto-play video and banner ads are seen to be least effective digital formats by global CMOs
What digital ad formats should you use to get the best ROI online? One way to answer the question is to flip it on its head, and ask, what are the least effective formats?
According to a survey of global CMOs, the worst ad formats are auto-play videos and standard banners. Standard banners are hardly surprising, as ad blockers and 'banner blindness' have taken their toll of the years. It's gotten so bad that on many sites the majority of banner ad clicks are actually accidental.
It's interesting that no CMOs thought that sponsored content was an ineffective technique, and very few thought pre-roll ads were ineffective. This shows that it isn't video ads that are ineffective, just video ads starting when the user hasn't opted in to watch anything.
…
Chart of the Day: The importance of having quality marketing data
Data is the not-so-secret weapon of each and every marketer across the land. Data-driven marketing takes the guesswork out of your daily decision making. Should you place more budget into Facebook Ads, more resource into email marketing or cancel your latest campaign early? It's hard to know unless you have accurate data at hand to inform your decision-making.
In a recent research report, Ascend2 asked marketing influencers "what are the most important objectives of a marketing data strategy?" Leading the way with 62% was improving marketing data quality. This result is encouraging because if you don't have accurate data you could be making worse decisions than if you had no data at all.
In a follow-up question, they asked "What are the most critical challenges to achieving marketing…
Chart of the Day: McKinsey Analysis rates machine learning marketing applications highly
I thought this was an interesting chart and article from McKinsey on 'What’s now and next in analytics, AI, and automation'.
McKinsey outline the range of opportunities for applying artificial intelligence in their article. They say:
'For companies, successful adoption of these evolving technologies will significantly enhance performance. Some of the gains will come from labor substitution, but automation also has the potential to enhance productivity, raise throughput, improve predictions, outcomes, accuracy, and optimization, as well expand the discovery of new solutions in massively complex areas such as synthetic biology and material science'.
At Smart Insights, we've been looking beyond the hype to look at specific practical applications for applying AI in marketing. Our recommendation is that the best marketing applications are in machine learning where predictive analytics is applied to learn from historic data to deliver more relevant personalization, both on site, using email…
Chart of the Day: Using more than 10 hashtags per Instagram post could be damaging your visibility
Hashtags are one of the best ways to get your posts seen on Instagram. They can help pull your social media posts into topic-specific feeds, which can reach audiences beyond your current followers.
Many businesses will often resort to using too many hashtags on one post in the hope of it getting more visibility. A recent study suggested that it is far more effective to keep your hashtag count to less than 10 hashtags per post. If you where to use relevant hashtags and keep the count below 10, it is suggested you could reach up to 25,000 engagements per post.
Be careful if you use too many or the same hashtags in all your captions, you might be putting yourself at visibility risk or a shadow ban. This is when Instagram…
Chart of the day: Over half of loyalty program users in North America don't know if the program offers a mobile app
There is a huge demand for mobile apps for loyalty programs, according to the large scale loyalty program study by Bond Brand Loyalty.
Loyalty program behaviours and wants
Over half (55%) enroll online, compared with just over 3 in 10 (32%) at the brands location. Almost 6 in 10 (57%) want apps from their loyalty programs but over half (52%) don't know if the program has an app.
There isn't enough personalisation
36% are very satisfied with their loyalty program, whilst just a quarter are happy with the level of personalisation.
Over 3 in 10 (33%) trust loyalty programs, however only a quarter (25%) are happy with the rewards.
In North America, the average number of programs customers have joined is 14, whilst it's around 6…
Chart of the Day: Many clients and agencies aren't using Martech tools for marketing attribution.
Attribution isn't very glamorous. But it's critical to evaluating ad spend, proving ROI and optimizing your marketing mix to get the most bang for your buck.
Because of this, marketers should be using the best technologies available to help them attribute marketing effectiveness as accurately as possible. But research by Adroll shows that shockingly almost half of agencies and close to half of clients are using spreadsheets and manual attribution processes, rather than using vendor technology or an independent third party.
This report also shows where marketers are using tech for attribution, it's overwhelmingly vendor technology. This tech can be useful, but as recent analytics errors at Facebook have shown, it can result in over-reporting. Third party attribution tools can provide a less biased picture, although these can't be used for certain platforms which are 'walled gardens' where the…
Chart of the day: 71% of luxury brands measure influencer success through web traffic
In recent years, using influencers to market products has become a core part of most brands marketing strategy. But now it has become a key strategy for some of the world's biggest luxury brands. The struggle for many luxury brands is being able to measure their return on investment, as it is hard to single its success down to just one influencer or product.
One study asked both luxury and non-luxury brands how they measure the success of a campaign where influencers have been used as part of the strategy.
62% of luxury brands said that revenue generation is an important measure of success, whereas only 44% of non-luxury brands place value on revenue. For luxury brands 79% measure the success of influencer collaborations through web traffic generated.
Although it is difficult to fully understand what impact influencers have, brands can measure many…
