Are You Gearing Up To Meet Email Marketing Trends?

mediapost.com


Email marketing is constantly evolving. Staying on top of the transformation is vital, but knowing what's coming is just the first step.  You also need to know which new skills, perspectives, infrastructure and management backing you'll need if you want to thrive in this new environment.

Below are nine drivers of change and trends you must anticipate and prepare for if you want to remain competitive -- and to keep email a valuable and viable channel.

1. The "customer journey." It's the big marketing buzzword this year, but for good reason. Knowing your customer journey drives many decisions: e.g., is email or another channel best for responding to customer behavior?

To get that 360-degree view, you must map the journey in collaboration with all of the departments in your company that your customer will encounter.

2. Omnichannel environment. Mapping the customer journey can show you when your customers are most likely to move from one channel to another, leaving data trails that you can collect and share with your social, mobile, offline and other teams.

You need systems and processes to collect and analyze this data, but you also must build relationships with these other teams to share data and help everyone create more valuable and timely messaging.

3. Real-time marketing. It's not just another buzzword. Today's customers expect you to communicate, respond and deliver value in real or near real time. It won't happen if you still batch and transmit data manually every 24 hours or longer.

You need APIs and integrations that make all your systems -- ecommerce, CRM, call center/customer service, etc. -- talk to each other, transmitting data as close to real time as possible.

4. Marketing automation. Broadcast email campaigns will always have a role in email marketing, but automated marketing programs can break through inbox clutter by talking to your customers as individuals, based on their behavior and stage in the customer journey.

5. IT: Not the enemy. Marketing has become deeply technology-driven, involving IT in almost every project in some form. On your own team, you'll need left-brain employees with the technology and analytic skills to visualize and develop these data-driven programs.

6. Tracking behavior. Marketers will focus on their customers' behavior at the most important touch points. Having the right technology and tracking systems in place to capture customer behavior and bring it together in real or near-real time will be critical.

7. Going mobile. Email readership on mobile devices has passed 50% for most brands, and mobile browsing has exploded, with mobile traffic surpassing desktop traffic on Thanksgiving 2014.

Taking friction out of the buying experience is key to mobile success. Are you prepared to add one-click payment systems, a mobile website, or streamlined account registration -- or to use deep links within your email that open the relevant content within your mobile app?

8. Content is key. Content marketing is more than another buzz phrase but has become a critical means for breaking through the clutter and keeping email subscribers engaged with your brand.

Most brands actually have plenty of content to leverage but lack the mindset and processes to identify, capture and incorporate it from across the organization into email marketing programs.

9. Email gets off the island. Your department name says "email," but you're in a position to become the hub of your company's marketing communications efforts.

Use your vast data storehouse and your team's unique skill set and customer-focused mindset to own channels beyond email, such as SMS and mobile app push notifications.  

Ecommerce trying the ‘App’ropriate move

businessinsider.in

Competition in the eCommerce space is getting hotter and hotter. E-tailers are trying their best to outdo the competition by offering discounts, organising flash sales, launching contests and more. However, another bigger trend that we are observing in the eCommerce industry is: 'the app' move.

E-tailers are encouraging consumers to shop using their apps these days by offering extra discounts, freebies and more such things. Does this ring a bell? If you are an eCommerce shopper, then it defintely will. But did you ever think, why are eCommerce players making this move?

Coz mobile data is on rise
We feel that eCommerce players are making this move considering consumers' Internet consumption patterns. A recent study by Indian mobile network points out that 75% of Indians own a mobile device as against 15% getting access to broadband Internet. In addition, there are also studies, which reveal that an Indian user spends an average 200 minutes a day on smartphones and user base for the same is expected to grow to 205 million by this year. And what else could be a better way to tap this consumer base other than 'app'.

e-tailers to kill their desktop sites?
The way eCommerce players are going aggressive about apps, saying that their desktop sites would have an untimely death would be wrong—but the scene could change in the near future. The first visible signs for this are the stats which suggest that online fashion companies like Myntra have 80% of traffic and 60% of sales coming from its mobile app.

App: The next 'in-thing' in eCommerce 

As per analysts, the day isn't far when 80-90% orders would start coming through app, the daily has reported.
In Tier-II/ Tier-III cities, penetration of Internet is much less and people still rely on brick and mortar stores. In those areas, accessing to eCommerce through mobile is easier and convenient.

A regular buyer through apps of various eCommerce companies, Sweta told BI, "It's all about on the go! Since I've a fascination for shoes the entire stretch I travel in Delhi metro, I would browse shoes across all online stores. Whichever suits my pocket and choice, I just buy it instantly. Moreover, the mobile screen being smaller than web, the designing is more crisp and convenient."

No wonder, to cheer up more buyers through mobile, eCommerce companies like Amazon and Flipkart are offering extra discounts to buyers ordering through apps. Amazon's 'Appiness' offer last year had increased its traffic through app by 4 times and more.

Mausam Bhatt, senior director, marketing (mobile and digital marketing) of Flipkart had said "Over the past year we have been seeing that there is an increase in growth coming from our mobile app. A majority of this growth is coming from outside of metro cities. So, we are taking this opportunity to connect with our consumers better and grow the user base for our mobile app by having a shopping festival exclusively there."

10 Must-See Digital Marketing Stats From the Past Week

adweek.com

Here are the 10 most intriguing stats from the digital marketing space in the last week, including fascinating Instagram numbers and research about where brand dollars are going.

1. Companies will allocate 11.7 percent of their marketing budgets for analytics by 2018, up from 6.4 percent currently, according to Duke University's survey of 288 chief marketing officers.

2. The same Duke study found that mobile advertising currently takes up 3.2 percent of marketing budgets but will almost triple to 9 percent in the next three years.

3. Using video with great effect, Nike has skyrocketed its Instagram following from 4 million to 12 million in the last 10 months.

4. And there will probably be more brands like Nike honing their Instagram skills very soon. Cowen & Co. analysts predict that the Facebook-owned mobile app will generate $5.8 billion in revenue in 2020, up from $700 million this year, Mashable reported.

5. Want to know why Facebook's getting into shopping-based product ads? According to Q4 2014 research from Adobe Digital Index, 20 percent of clicks on Google search linksfor retailers were on its Shopping Ads. Indeed, follow the money, Facebook.

6. From August through November last year, personal finances app Acorns leaned heavily on Twitter's Promoted Tweet ads to generate downloads In the first 90 days, the brand told Adweek that one in five of its downloads came from Twitter. What's more, the company paid less than $4 per app install, which it claims is significantly lower than the $8 to $10 that financial companies typically pay to acquire users.

7. A study by the Association of National Advertisers found that 58 percent of marketers had purchased native advertising in the past year.

8. The white-collar class is an increasingly digital shopping set. Martini Media researched Americans with at least $250,000 in annual household income and found that 83 percent bought luxury goods online in the past 12 months, according to MediaPost.

9. People constantly delete their mobile apps. But Ibotta, a shopping-driven player, seems to have solved the viewer-retention dilemma by giving people cash. The Denver company said that more than half of its 2 million monthly users opened the app an impressive 25 times in January.

10. A 6,000-participant survey by MindBodyGreen found that 83 percent of millennials would be open to recommendations from a brand on how to be more mindful or culturally aware, compared to 74 percent of Baby Boomers. The research is from the online publisher's new internal consultancy for brands called MBGEnhance. More surprisingly, MBGEnhance learned that 84 percent of the smartphone-loving Gen Y respondents sometimes felt overwhelmed by social media.

Bonus stat: Ford's "Speed Dating" digital film has been viewed 10.6 million times on YouTube alone since Feb. 6, and it was the No. 1 brand spot on the video site last week. You can watch the three-and-a-half-minute clip below.

Will Apple Pay Be The Next Great Marketing Channel?

forbes.com

Most people assume the whole point of ApplePay, Google Wallet and other mobile wallets is to pay for stuff with your smartphone.

And sure, you can. It even works pretty well. But most people still can’t figure out why they’d use a smartphone to pay rather than just swipe their credit or debit card.

So what could spur more use of mobile wallets? If a newreport from Forrester is any indication, what consumers want more than anything else in Apple Pay or Google Wallet is to store loyalty program points and rewards, coupons, and other special offers. They can do that today in Google Wallet and in Apple’s Passbook, but it requires people to know they can do it and proactively add loyalty accounts to their phone.

That’s why a company that once made money from marketing on pagers–remember them?–today is announcing a way for marketers to run ads for deals and offers that can be saved to Apple’s Passbook and Google Wallet. Chicago-based mobile marketing company Vibes is introducing what it calls WalletAds. Marketers can run the ads like banners, but if you tap them, the offer or other branded content gets saved to the wallet. Then, the marketer can choose to send a reminder when you’re within, say, 100 yards of a store, popping it up on your lockscreen. “There’s a huge marketing opportunity in wallets,” says Vibes CEO Jack Philbin.

Vibes, which counts the likes of Sears, Home Depot HD +0.04% and Gap GPS -1.71%among its clients, says the point is to offer marketers, whose apps often are ignored or deleted after awhile, a more permanent presence on people’s smartphones. “You’re getting a presence in Apple Passbook or Google Wallet that doesn’t go away,” says Philbin. He says that data from more than 400 mobile wallet campaigns Vibes has helped run using its existing Wallet Manager service that sends offers via email, text messages and other means, shows that 90% of the content doesn’t get deleted. That provides the opportunity to stay in contact with the consumer and collect data that could be useful for targeting new offers.

Could all this ultimately prove annoying, though? After all, there are always marketers who can’t stop themselves from overdoing it. Walgreen's , for instance, keeps reminding me it’s nearby the cafe where I fuel up every morning, requiring me to swipe away the notification every time.

Philbin thinks it will be a long time before that happens, if only because marketers will take awhile to figure out how best to use the ads. (After all, it’s no insult to say that Vibes is no Facebook or Google, and even their new ad formats take months to catch on.) “We’re a long way from bombardment,” Philbin says, and even when we get there, beacons and better targeting can ensure that people don’t get turned off.

Forrester thinks Starbucks’ app provides an early example of how mobile wallets can become much more than very thick credit cards. Paying at a Starbucks using the app is almost the least appealing part of the app, which allows its loyalty program members to store and use rewards and offers. “In the next three to five years, we expect mobile wallets to take off significantly, becoming a new marketing channel where marketers will mix their offline and online marketing efforts,” Thomas Husson, author of the Forrester report, said in a recent blog post. “Instead of replacing merchants’ own integrated apps, mobile wallets will complement them and offer more reach to engage beyond apps and loyal brand aficionados.”

Tips For Developers To Successfully Market Android Apps On Google Play

androidheadlines.com

If you’re already a developer or you are thinking about publishing your first app to Google Play for the Android platform, making sure you market your application will be key if you want to ensure your best chance that the app will succeed. Marketing isn’t all there is to it of course, as creating a compelling app that people will like and want to engage with consistently is where you’ll want to start, but marketing is an important piece of the equation so people know that your app is out there and that it’s worth their time to give it a shot.

Stepping back a bit to the actual app building, it’s going to be that much more difficult to build a great app if you have no idea who your target market is going to be. So, doing some research and figuring out who your app is going to attempt to grab the attention of is probably one of the first things you may want to consider. Take into account what your targeted demographic is into and factor in that in this day and age people want things as fast as they can get them when it comes to content consumption through apps. As you continue researching to figure out how to make your app the best it can possibly be, you’ll gather a collective of important data that can give you a great launchpad for publishing a really polished end result.

Monetizing your Android app is another factor you’re going to want to decide on. They are many ways to monetize an application and in most cases almost every single app will have some form of a monetization in place so that as a developer, money can be made from the hard work. Depending on who your app is for, and possibly considering the monetization trends of the current time when you publish, you may find that a free, ad-supported app is best. Of course charging a few bucks for your app may be a better way to go since many users don’t particularly care for ads, and if you’re application is extremely captivating then more users are likely going to be willing to pay for it up front.

All of the above steps are great details to keep in mind but you can’t market your app correctly without a strong marketing plan to work off of. You may already have some great ideas on how to market your application, but it can’t hurt to give Google’s tips a look and see if some of them if not all of them can be worked in the plan you may already have in mind. Google suggests your marketing plan be set up in a structural format, as this will make it easier to follow, breaking things down into four separate categories of awareness, trial, purchase, and repeat. The last one may or may not be self explanatory, you want repeat users, and to foster this type of user base, you’ll want to provide updates as the landscape of apps will change over time and you should want yours to adapt along with the changes. Other things like loyalty programs to give something back to the users, notifications, and social integration are all ways to help with the repeat part of the process. To start though, people need to know your app exists, and this is why the awareness step is first.

You can make people aware of your app in a number of ways including PR, social media, mobile ads and video, and search, and of course you can always advertise it via the web, TV, and ATL. Once people know about your app getting it into their hands is an essential course to take. Starting things of with a trial or beta for free would be a great possible solution as you’ll want to grab user feedback. A trial of your app(if you’re planning on utilizing a pay model at launch)is a great way for users to become acquainted with it, and after you get some user feedback you can figure out if anything within needs to be tweaked or fixed. Once you feel your app is ready for the public and if you decide to publish it as a paid application, you’ll want to include details like bulk sales or discounts, something like special launch sale pricing. If you’re planning on publishing your app for free, upselling to a premium version with added features can be a great way to monetize the app, and also gives users a way to forego ads, which you could include in a free version. This would lead you back to the last step in your structural marketing plan which we talked about above, the repeat step. While this set of tips isn’t going to guarantee you app success, it’s a good set of guidelines to follow in attempting to execute your plan an seeing your app all the way through to completion, and finally getting it published.

Are Mobile App-Install Ads the End-All to Social Marketing? Advertisers eye Pinterest and Twitter

adweek.com

Will app installs work for Pinterest?

Mobile app-install ads have been fundamental to Facebook and Twitter's rise as mobile advertising players over the past two years, and now Pinterest wants in on the action.

Last week, Pinterest teamed up with Apple to roll out App Pins—a feature that lets users save and share apps to boards. For example, someone looking for a recipe on Pinterest may see a meal-planning app pop up in search results. Clicking on the posts then lets a user download the app straight from Pinterest.

With 75 percent of the social network's traffic coming from mobile, the new tool seems like a natural fit for Pinterest marketers. But Pinterest may also be too late to capitalize on the tactic since Facebook and Twitter are already bolstering their revenues with app-install ads.

"They're definitely a little behind, but there is still a massive opportunity for them to integrate an app-install format," said Guillaume Lelait, general manager at mobile marketing agency Fetch. "Pinterest is different in that users are already coming to the platform with a discovery and purchasing mindset."

As part of the partnership, social media-averse Apple has also set up an account with a few boards of themed apps.

App Pins are the latest attempt from Pinterest to make it easier for users to find things they're interested in. In 2013, the company started packing more text into pins. And last year, Pinterest started testing Promoted Pins—ads that are bought based on keywords.

The San Francisco company told The New York Times it doesn't plan to make money off App Pins. But app install ads have been a boon for Facebook and Twitter, and it's hard to imagine that Pinterest isn't interested in tapping into the lucrative opportunity. Mobile accounted for 69 percent (or $2.5 billion) of Facebook's revenue during the fourth quarter, while smartphone and tablet ads generated 85 percent of Twitter's third-quarter ad money.

Lelait also noted Pinterest has a bevy of targeting options for marketers to home in on specific interests. "Pinterest is a platform that is based on customization and curation. People's Pinterest feeds are filled with content that they have personally chosen to follow, so the app-install cards will need to be highly relevant to the content they search for and pin to avoid feeling spammy and intrusive on users' feeds."

Targeted tweets
While Pinterest doesn't plan to use its new tool for advertising, a new case study from financial savings app Acorns shows that app-install ads pay off.

Acorns launched in August as an app that saves spare change on credit and debit card purchases. Users first link a credit card number to the app, which then rounds up the amount of a transaction to the next dollar. The extra money is then saved away to use later.

The financial startup used mobile app install ads on Facebook, Twitter and mobile ad networks to drive downloads of the app.

Promoted Tweets on Twitter ran from August to November 2014, targeting money-related keywords. The paid tweets generated a 3 percent engagement rate. "Basically we were able to find who was our audience and serve the ads directly to them," said Sami Khan, director of user acquisition at Acorns.

In the first 90 days that Acorns launched, one in five of the company's downloads came from Twitter.

The company paid less than $4 per app install, which it claims is significantly lower than the $8 to $10 that financial companies typically pay to acquire users.

The Acorns team also experimented with the ad's creative, changing up images on the fly. Khan said pictures that were simple and to the point performed well.

"Twitter ads for mobile app installs work better when they have pictures attached," Khan said. "So we needed to create images that related to our value proposition."

The Internet of Things from a Consumer Perspective

blogs.oracle.com

Ask an average person what they think about the Internet of Things, and you’ll likely get a confused look. For us who work in technology, the concept means a great deal, as it represents the latest frontier in the opportunity to leverage data and analytics to fuel better business performance.

I raise this distinction simply because to understand how to take advantage of new data sources from sensors and machines, it helps to consider what it all means to the now commonplace mobilized consumer. After all, consumers don’t care about the complexities of a well considered customer experience, but they do recognize a good experience when it happens (and of course bad experiences as well).

The stakes are as high as the hurdles for retailers, and really any business to consumer organization, with respect to the Internet of Things. The use cases in CPG manufacturing and distribution processes are very compelling, for example. From the machines which produce goods and generate data that helps predict and head off maintenance or failure issues, to the flow of tagged goods (via RFID) through the supply chain, and knowing with confidence their quantity and place relative to demand, there are many cases manufacturers are exploring.

Likewise, retailers have the opportunity to pick up where suppliers leave off, and know precisely inventory and shelf position for all merchandise, both in brick/mortar and online stores. With omni-channel shopping a condition retailers are struggling with, this capability is crucial to simply maintaining competitive parity.

The approaches and options to attacking these opportunities vary considerably depending on who you talk to in the technology, data and analytic market ecosystem. Deciding to pilot something new is one thing, but embedding this form of intelligence into a complex and often disconnected business is quite another paved with as much risk as upside potential.

Bringing it back to the consumer, executives need to look beyond the back office use cases and analytics to the impact this all has on their consumer. Mobile is becoming the ubiquitous interface between consumers and their environment, at any point along the path to purchase. New technology like iBeacons get a lot of press due to the ability to connect a consumer to a contextual interaction “on the go,” but there’s a slew of connected devices coming online as well.

Mobile devices are not just for texting, emailing, using apps, and browsing the web, but now serve as the connection point to the consumer Internet of Things – thermostats, household appliances, security systems, automobiles, watches, televisions, and even pantry and household products.

I think the stakes are huge for both retailers and their supplier partners, whether they approach the Internet of Things separately, or in collaboration. Regardless, what’s necessary is the ability to move quickly on the opportunity to connect the tracking of physical goods through the manufacturing, marketing and sales processes, to consumption by consumers. That’s a complex problem for which solutions now exist.

Gartner describes “business moments” as cross-industry collaboration scenarios that provide a differentiated consumer experience that benefits all parties – the consumer and the businesses working together to deliver the experience. Imagine a can of paint knowing it’s nearly empty and your car recognizing when you are going to the hardware store to buy another. Your furnace then becomes part of the conversation, and notifies you to pick up a new filter, while the businesses supporting this experience try to connect you with a location that has both items in stock. A mobile device today and in the foreseeable future is the one place to which all of these interactions point.

It is a somewhat lofty concept requiring a change of mindset for industries such as consumer packaged goods and retail that are often at odds, but makes sense against a backdrop of fickle consumer attention. The most successful business to consumer organizations will come to be defined by the extent to which they can transparently support such complex and differentiated experiences.

For both retailers and CPG manufacturers, the future is nearer than they think, and consumers will come to expect and prefer satisfying experiences unhindered by limits imposed by disconnected business processes. Imagining a mobilized consumer along the path to purchase is a good way to think about The Internet of Things.