Why the marriage of technology, data, and creativity allows brands to foreground the consumer experience and drive greater sales results
More than most marketing strategies, direct marketing remains largely stigmatized. Mention it to most outside of the discipline, and truckloads of snail mail overfilling people's mailboxes come to mind. But direct mail and direct marketing are not the same thing.
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Direct marketing is about driving business results. No matter the platform, any time brands communicate with a potential consumer — such as using an augmented reality platform targeted at Millennials to drive insurance purchases — they are actually using direct-response marketing. Today, the convergence of data, technology, and creativity are opening new direct-response avenues that, while highly successful, are still largely untapped by many brands.
After years of being the…
Chart of the day: How can latency be applied to other sectors to understand engagement and to design lifecycle communications?
I don't see latency talked or written about much, so I was interested to see this new research from Monetate that shows average latency between purchases. So, what is latency in marketing? I think latency is best defined in the context of the customer lifecycle, that is:
"Latency is the average time it takes between different lifecycle events for different groups or cohorts of customers".
In this research, to measure engagement, Monetate looked at how frequently customers began a new session within a set time period, specifically the number of sessions and the number of days it took for a customer to complete a purchase.
For first-time customers, the baseline latency from the first visit is an average of 25 days and 3.5 sessions to complete a purchase. Here is the latency for repeat…
67% of companies that don't hit their multi-year Black Friday average will fail to hit their multi-year rest of the holiday season average
The days are getting shorter and all of the decorations are out. You know what that means. Pumpkin and maple flavored everything and your massive holiday season to-do list just became more urgent. The NRF 2017 Holiday Playbook reports that more than half of holiday shoppers start researching potential purchases in October or earlier.
With the holiday shopping season fast approaching, there is no time to waste. eMarketer expects digital commerce to climb 15.8%, even while total retail growth will slow this holiday season. Make sure your eCommerce engine is firing on all cylinders because there is a lot at stake.
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The three C's of customer social rewards: Community, Comparison, and Charity.
It’s been said that the greatest gifts are those shared with others. I’ll share a memory with you. In third grade, my classmates had a communal pet. Herman was more than a hermit crab — he was an icon, a mascot, a symbol of our community. One week, as a reward for helping a classmate, I was bestowed the honor of taking Herman home for the weekend. The sense of duty I felt to my classmates was my first palpable sense of social responsibility, and it was, itself, the true reward for my behavior.
Science tells us there is something to this concept of social rewards. Fundamentally, we are wired to connect with others. We are always attuned to our social context. In which group do I belong? What are my peers doing? Am I keeping up with the Joneses? Am I…
What to measure when conducting customer surveys
The customer has to be at the heart of your strategy. That's so elemental it hardly merits saying. But how do you accurately build up a picture of your customers desires, wants, and needs?
Customer surveys offer a valuable way of connecting with your customers and understanding them better. But, often it's extremely hard to get your customers' attention for periods long enough to get detailed results. After all, we're all busy. Let's face it, how many emails asking you to give your feedback have you ignored in the past week? More than the number of surveys you've answered in all likelihood.
If you need tips on how to get more from your customer surveys, this infographic from appuri offers four ways you can improve them. Also, see our new Quick Win for members on Customer Satisfaction Surveys and measuring NPS for more detailed recommendations on best practices for…
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: 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…
Use NPS follow-up insight to convert Detractors and Passives
The ability to quickly gauge your enterprise’s overall health with a single NPS score is useful to let you know whether you need to make any changes. However, a lone NPS score is not enough to tell you what changes you need to make.
The Net Promoter Score has become a popular customer loyalty metric, but you need more than a simple measure of the likelihood of receiving customer recommendations to help you identify organizational problems in enough detail to chart a course for corporate success.
That’s why the metric’s proponents are now recommending you ‘close the loop’ with follow-up questions that get to the root of your customers’ neutrality or lack of satisfaction.
‘Close the loop’ with a NPS-integrated solution
Enterprises looking to transform their Net Promoter Scores into actionable insight should be considering…
The 7 elements you need for superior retention automation
It costs a lot to acquire a new customer, but most clients will make a single purchase and leave. A repeating purchase, on the other hand, costs far less than acquiring a new customer, estimated at between 4 and 7 times less actually.
Retention automation has a simple, well-known theory that deals with this issue. Retention automation aims to get better ROI by turning one-time buyers into repeat customers and keeping them, rather than focusing on acquiring additional new customers.
Retention automation can be done with the basic understanding that customers are different, then analyzing them as groups, connecting them to automated campaigns designed to move them in the right direction.
There are plenty of examples that demonstrate programs and multichannel campaigns addressing customer retention according to the customer’s current lifecycle situation and their importance to the business. Surprisingly, although the theory is so…
How acknowledging your customers’ emotions helps Improve your customer experience and business performance
Every business would like to uncover the secret of the best customer experience. Customers have always run the business--no customers, no business--but this saying has never been more true than in the digital era. Brands that appeal to customers are those with added value, great features and an easy, frictionless experience--and we’re not talking about reduced prices here.
Here’s how most companies try to improve their customer experience: through surveys or market research, they find out what customers want or need and try to fulfill that need.
Sure, it’s important to understand what customers want and know how they want to be served, and to use this information to guide your strategy. That’s a basic business principle. The problem is that many companies have forgotten the basics--they forgot that emotions actually drive customer choices.
Customer experience is pivotal
There has been a…
