How Francis Ford Coppola’s Rewards Program Connects Customers Across the Entire Brand Portfolio

Brands with multiple entities may find it challenging to connect their customers across their entire portfolio. The Francis Ford Coppola family of brands, which includes wineries, restaurants, resorts, and cafes made the investment in loyalty to unify its brands and reward customers for spending and engaging across all touchpoints.

Cat Rossi, Senior Director of Brand & Content Marketing at CrowdTwist, recently sat down with Rebecca Gilbert, Senior Brand Manager at Francis Ford Coppola, to discuss how Coppola is leveraging loyalty to create brand-authentic experiences that foster emotional loyalty. Here are the main takeaways:

Create one program that spans across all entities

With so many different business units, it’s valuable for Coppola to have a loyalty program that connects the brands across the entire portfolio. A Coppola consumer can interact with the brand in many different ways whether that be online, at a winery or restaurant, on social media, or in a grocery store. Before launching the loyalty program, Francis Ford Coppola had no way of capturing this customer behavior or rewarding their customers throughout their entire journey. 

Because members can earn points across all business units, the program encourages customers to explore more of Francis Ford Coppola’s offerings. Being able to interact and communicate with consumers across the entire profile allows the brand to build a deeper connection and drive emotional loyalty. 

Use receipt scan to reward members for all purchases

Since Francis Ford Coppola is sold through retail distributors like grocery stores and restaurants, the brand wanted to be able to capture purchase data and reward members for choosing their products. Previously, Coppola had no insight into the behaviors of the customers who made purchases in-store or at restaurants and had no way of communicating with them. 

Using receipt-scan technology, Francis Ford Coppola is able to reward customers for their purchases wherever they are made. They simply take a picture of the receipt and upload it into their loyalty profile in exchange for points. Including this perk in the Coppola Rewards program not only enhances the experience for members by making it easier for them to earn rewards, but it also gives Coppola an inside look into where their consumers are shopping and what else they are purchasing. Coppola can then use this information to help inform their decisions related to partnerships, promotions, and advertising to ensure that they’re maximizing customer reach and offering them compelling promotions.

Reward members for engagement activities

As part of their loyalty offering, Francis Ford Coppola rewards members for completing engagement activities, like reading blogs, taking surveys, and opening emails. This allows Coppola to keep consumers engaged with their program beyond purchases. It also serves as a valuable way to get first-hand information into what their consumers’ preferences are and how they like to interact with the brand. 

Francis Ford Coppola used Coppola Rewards to engage their members in brand-authentic experiences that are physically inaccessible for some customers due to geographic constraints. Reward members can earn points for completing engagement activities related to their Virtual Food & Wine Feast featuring recipes, entertaining advice, wine hacks, and culinary inspiration.

The feast was developed as a way to give consumers who did not live near Francis Ford Coppola’s winery in California a way to be involved in the action. Members are rewarded for participating in the feast and taking surveys about their experiences throughout. Campaigns like this provide Coppola with insight into how they can improve their rewards, how they can make the campaign even better next year, and the types of content that resonate best with their consumers so that they can better engage them, and drive brand advocacy and emotional loyalty.

Create unforgettable experiences

Francis Ford Coppola is a unique winery, and they aim to ensure that the experiences they offer to customers are just as unique. The rewards always tie back to the Family Coppola values, traditions, and passions and they center on creating unforgettable experiences for their members. Additionally, the rewards they offer further encourage members to learn about all of the Coppola brands and venture outside of their typical interactions.

For example, as part of Coppola Rewards, members were eligible to win a once-in-a-lifetime trip to tour three different Francis Ford Coppola wineries throughout California and one of their newest wineries in Oregon. Members outside of California were able to redeem points for sweepstakes entries into this “West Coast Adventure” prize for one lucky Coppola Rewards member. Not only did this campaign drive new member acquisition into the Coppola Rewards program, but it also helped to spread awareness and promote their new and existing wineries to their member base.

Coppola also offers ways for members to learn more about their properties in Belize, Argentina, and Guatemala, by offering them as once-in-a-lifetime reward experiences. By providing access to these exclusive wineries, the brand sets themselves apart from the competition and makes their customers feel valued and special.

Find new ways to differentiate your brand and keep the rewards program fresh

As brands look to the future, it’s important to introduce new and fresh ideas that will help to set themselves apart from the competition. Francis Ford Coppola plans to stay true to their brand, while also highlighting what makes them unique. The data and insight captured through the Coppola Rewards program helps Francis Ford Coppola evaluate which campaigns have resonated most with their members, what members want to see more of, and the business units that are earning the most love from their consumers. Coppola uses this information to inform their decisions as they grow and evolve their program, and as they continue to navigate how best to unify their brand portfolio. 

One way Coppola is looking to expand their program is through introducing a “Coppola Experts” reward. Through the campaigns they ran this year, they found out that many of their members wanted to be able to talk directly to their winemakers, chefs, and gardeners. Therefore, they decided to roll out a “Coppola Experts” series which allows members to have one-on-one time with their experts through Skype sessions. Doing this allows members to deepen engagement with the brand, creating even bigger brand advocates out of their members. 

                                                                       

It’s a digital world, and retail marketers need to create an emotional connection between customers and their brands. It all starts with “Getting the Digital Handshake Right.”

 

from Oracle Blogs | Oracle Marketing Cloud https://ift.tt/3dKGJOc
via IFTTT

Disaster and Crisis Messaging Best Practices

Disaster planning is all about preparing for rare events, whether they’re epidemics, hurricanes, blizzards, wildfires, floods, earthquakes, or some other calamity. Crisis messaging should be a part of any disaster planning so you can communicate effectively with your customers and give them the essential information that they need.

Let’s talk about what that should look like in terms of messaging, subject line and preview text copy, tone, design, quality assurance, and segmentation.

Messaging

The No. 1 goal with any crisis messaging is to address the burning questions that your customers have and to demonstrate that you’re doing your best to address their needs and that of your employees. Doing so will improve customer satisfaction and reduce confusion—which you’ll be able to measure partly from call center volume and the sentiment of the social media activity around your brand.

What those questions are will likely be different depending on whether the disaster has already hit or not. When it’s an event that can be predicted at least a few days ahead of time, it gives you the opportunity to proactively address customer questions such as: 

• How can your company help people prepare for the coming disaster? Are you extending your store hours or call center hours? Are you providing preparedness checklists? Have you stocked up on high-demand items?

• How can you help your customers plan for disruptions to their service, store closures, etc.? Can you alert them to what’s likely to happen so they’re not surprised? For example, during the Nor'easter that affected the 2009 holiday season, Neiman Marcus sent a segmented email to those affected by the blizzard on Dec. 20, saying in the subject line, “Can't get to the mall? Shop online and get FREE DELIVERY by Christmas at any price‏.”

• Are you canceling services or events? If so, are you providing refunds or giving credit? Are you automatically rebooking services for a future date or does your customer need to pick a new date? Are you providing any incentives to encourage customers to rebook or not cancel?

• Are orders likely to be delayed? If so, how long is the anticipated delay? What should customers do if they’d like to cancel their order?

• Are you changing your cancellation, return, or warranty policies? Are you allowing more time for returns? Are you allowing returns in ways that you don’t typically?

• Will you be closing stores? If so, when will they be closing?

• How can customers get current information? What webpage can customers go to for up-to-date information? What phone number can they use to contact your company to get their questions answered? For example, Xfinity emails customers who are likely to be hit by severe storms to proactively encourage them to visit their Storm Ready webpage and to download their free apps so they can get updates on outages. They also encourage them to download shows and movies that they can watch offline in the event that they do lose power.
  
  “Xfinity knows how disruptive service outages (WiFi especially) can be for their customers' daily lives,” says Ana Jablonski, Senior Consultant for Strategic Services, Oracle CX Marketing Consulting. “By understanding and anticipating what their customers need during a crisis, they are able to proactively provide resources throughout the year so customers can feel calm and prepared in a time of need.”

For disasters that can’t be forecasted and during ongoing disasters such as the COVID-19 pandemic, use your crisis messaging to address other questions such as:

• What’s the best way to get information on how your business is affected? Are you experiencing delays in customer service? If so, set the appropriate expectations and tell them alternative ways to get help.
  
  For instance, in a Mar. 12, 2020 email to users in the wake of new travel restrictions to control the spread of COVID-19, Expedia said: “We are clearly facing extreme call volumes at this time, and wish we could respond to everyone immediately. Please know that we are working as fast as we can to update our site with options that allow you to manage your itinerary directly, as well as re-deploying Travel Advisors from other parts of the business in an effort to assist those who are calling in. The quickest way to find out if your travel plans can be changed without a penalty will be to check the airline or hotel website directly.”

• Are you reducing capacity? If so, by how much? How might that affect your customers?

• When will your locations reopen? Will they resume normal business hours or will hours be longer or shorter than normal?
  
  For example, in the wake of Hurricane Sandy, Lane Bryant sent a segmented email on Dec. 4, 2012 to their customers near Oceanside, NY, announcing in the subject line: “We're Back - Our Oceanside Store Re-Opens Friday.”

• Are there alternative ways that your customers can get service? Can your customers get service from you some other way or can they get help from a partner, government agency, or charity?
  
  For instance, after tornadoes hit Nashville in early March of 2020, Comcast sent out a targeted email to customers in the affected area alerting them of new, public WiFi hotspots that had been added to allow for customers, friends, family and first responders to stay connected.

• What actions are you taking to ensure customer safety?
  
  For example, during the early phase of the COVID-19 outbreak, many airlines, stores, restaurants, and other public places communicated that they were increasing cleaning protocols and making more hand sanitizer stations available to customers.

Depending on the circumstances, you may also want to address how you are keeping your employees safe and ensuring the continuity of operations. For example…

• How are you keeping your employees safe? Is this why you’re closing locations temporarily? Are you allowing employees to work from home? Are you shifting workers to different locations to protect them (and your operations)? Are you instituting new safety procedures or a new sick-leave policy?

While most of your messaging will be about your company and your customers, there may be opportunities to be broader than that. For example...

• Can you direct your customers to trustworthy sources of information? For example, can you direct customers to the National Weather Service, the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention, or other local, state, or federal websites?

• Can you direct your customers to trustworthy charity organizations? For customers who may want to help those affected by the disaster, can you point them to reputable charities? If your company is donating to one or more charities, that’s a great way to strengthen this call-to-action and get people thinking civic-mindedly. For example, during the wildfires in California, grocery delivery company Good Eggs sent an email about how they are working with relief centers in Oroville, CA to bring Thanksgiving dinners to people displaced by the Camp Fire. The company encourages subscribers to donate to the effort as well.

Consider ending your messages with a reminder that crises and disaster recoveries are fluid situations, says Doug Sundahl, Senior Director of Strategic Services, Oracle CX Marketing Consulting.

“Make sure you let them know your organization is keeping a close eye on the situation,” he says, “and will continuously work to adapt in the best interest of customers, employees, and the community as new information comes in.”

Subject Lines & Preview Text Copy

Especially in times of crisis, clarity is the order of the day. Don’t be vague with your subject line or pull punches. Be direct.

For example, the subject line of REI’s Mar. 15, 2020 email was “We're Closing Our Retail Stores Until March 27.” That is much clearer than “An update on our retail stores,” which was the subject line of another retailer that was also closing its stores.

Continue this philosophy of directness in your preview text, which allows you even more characters to give your subscribers the most critical information.

Tone

If your brand is funny, irreverent, zany, or really casual, it can be easy to get tripped by up disasters. It’s best to dial down your brand personality and be heartfelt and serious. 

Whatever the situation, the chances are high that property and lives are being lost, so the last thing you want to do is be indifferent or make light of things. Imagine that you’re good friends with your most affected customers. You should express sympathy for those affected.

“We typically see a lot of these messages come from CEOs and presidents,” says Sundahl. “In and of itself, that usually puts a more conservative and serious tilt to the messaging, which is exactly what’s needed.”

Most of all, you’ll want to avoid any perception that you’re profiteering off the disaster. “Make sure the messaging never appears to be opportunistic,” he says, “but value- and benefit-focused in an effort to help consumers. It could very easily come across as trying to capitalize on a bad situation, which would likely hurt your brand image and jeopardize long-term sales.”

Design

Your message design should be simple. Now is not the time for flash or creativity. Clarity of communication is the goal, so anything that distracts from that should be jettisoned from your design.

“It’s important to formalize the email versus making it look promotional,” says Jason Witt, Senior Director of Creative Services at Oracle CX Marketing Consulting.

Generally, what this leaves you with is an email with clear branding at the top of the email, often followed by a headline, and then your body copy. We don’t recommend using hero images in these emails, as they push your copy down, can distract from your message, or project the wrong tone. You can see this design aesthetic in action at a glance in this collection of COVID-19 messages on ReallyGoodEmails.com.

Because these messages tend to be text-heavy, make thoughtful use of subheads and bullet points to break up text and to create easy-to-digest chunks of information. And make sure your font size isn’t too small or all the text will look impenetrable, says James Wurm, Head of Coding Services, Oracle CX Marketing Consulting. 

“Depending on how much copy there is,” he says, “I find 14pt to 18pt to be appropriate.”

Using reverse copy, where it’s light text on a dark background, is okay, but you’ll want to pay extra attention to legibility and contrast ratios, says Witt. “It needs to be ADA compliant,” he says. “That’s key!”

Remember: It’s a time of crisis. Your customers are likely stressed. They may not be at their best. Make your email easy to scan and easy to read. Cut extraneous words and ideas wherever you can to highlight the most important messaging.

Quality Assurance

In times of crisis, you’re moving fast. But make time for QA, even if it’s less than usual. Thankfully, crisis messaging is fairly simple in terms of design, so most of your QA is simply copy proofing. Make sure there aren’t any typos, missing words, or bad grammar.

Segmentation

Most disasters are regional in nature, so segmentation is key to getting your message in front of the appropriate subscribers within your overall audience. Do your best with the geographic information that you have about your customers.

“If the disaster affects all of your customers, as COVID-19 does for many senders, then you’ll still want to use some segmentation. However, in this case, you’ll want to exclude your inactive subscribers to avoid causing deliverability problems and driving up attrition,” says Clea Moore, Director of Deliverability Strategy, Oracle CX Marketing Consulting. 

“With any large, full-file send, there is the potential for a performance and reputation hit, especially if the email is sent as a service message from a transactional IP address that usually has low send volume per day,” she says. “So, loop in your deliverability expert or consultant and assess which subscribers you’re going to send to and determine if throttling the campaign is necessary.”

Sending your crisis message may only be the beginning of your adjustments, as some crises have a lasting impact on consumer behavior. And because we always want to be in sync with our customers, that may require you to adjust your messaging, frequency, and other elements. 

—————

Need help with your crisis messaging strategy? Oracle Marketing Cloud Consulting has more than 500 of the leading marketing minds ready to help you to achieve more with the leading marketing cloud, including a Campaign Deployment & Monitoring Services team that offers crisis and rush campaign support to get your emergency campaigns out the door in 2 hours or less.

Learn more or reach out to us at CXMconsulting_ww@oracle.com

For more information about digital marketing, please visit: https://www.oracle.com/marketingcloud/.

 

 

 

from Oracle Blogs | Oracle Marketing Cloud https://ift.tt/3bCnTa6
via IFTTT

The New Way to Chat With Your Visitors

Marketing has evolved into an omnichannel approach. This means you can no longer just go after one channel to succeed.

Back in the day, companies like Facebook grew into billion-dollar businesses through one channel.

Facebook used email to grow and they did it by having you invite all your contacts to join Facebook.

Yelp was also similar. They grew into a multi-million dollar business through one channel… SEO.

Dropbox grew through social media. If you tweeted about Dropbox, they would give you more space.

These marketing approaches worked well for all of these well-known companies, but what’s wrong with them?

The law of shitty click-throughs

What worked for Facebook, Yelp, and Dropbox were all great strategies, but over time, all good marketing channels got saturated and stopped working like they used to.

As Andrew Chen puts it, first it works and then it doesn’t.

It really is that simple. Sure, those channels can still drive traffic and always will, but as people get used to them, they won’t work as well.

Just check out this image below.

Can you guess what that is?

That was the first banner ad. AT&T created that banner ad and placed it on HotWired.com in 1994. And here’s what’s really crazy… out of all the people who saw it, a whopping 44% clicked on it.

Just think about that… that banner ad had a 44% click-through rate.

We can all agree it’s not an amazing banner ad or design, it just so happens that it was new and novel at the time, so it generated massive amounts of clicks.

Just like how SEO was more effective earlier on, or paid ads were more affordable and produced a higher ROI, or referral marketing was much more effective. There are a lot of single-channel case studies that worked in the past.

Again, it doesn’t mean any of these channels don’t work, it just means that they don’t work as well as they used to work.

So how do you survive in a competitive market?

You take an omnichannel approach. You don’t have a choice other than to use all of the marketing channels out there.

Yes, they will be competitive and saturated, but they still work.

It’s a game of papercuts… papercuts are small and don’t do much damage, but if you have tons of these small papercuts, they will add up and can do some damage.

The same goes with your marketing. If you add up all of these channels that produce a small amount of ROI, it will add up to a big number at the end. But when you look at each channel individually, the results aren’t that sexy. But when you combine them, it looks great.

Start with chat

What do you check more, your text messages or your email inbox?

I bet you are going to say text messages because you look at your phone more often than logging into your email inbox.

But here is an interesting stat for you… did you know that over 6 billion SMS messages are sent daily?

Now can you guess how many emails are sent daily?

269 billion!

That’s a big difference.

And do you know how many people visit Facebook each day?

1.62 billion.

Now the point of me sharing those stats isn’t to try and tell you that email is better than text. Or that Facebook isn’t as valuable as text messaging.

It’s more so to show you that they are all massive channels that people are using each and every day.

So why wouldn’t you try and leverage all of them?

And you can easily do so through free chat marketing tools like Manychat that allow you to communicate to your visitors using text messaging, email marketing, and Facebook Messenger.

Once you have created your Manychat account, go here to watch how to set it up. They have tons of very helpful videos that teach you how to do things like setting up Facebook Messenger bots and connecting your Facebook page so you can start sending out messages.

Now that you are all set up, I want you to use the following templates for your business as I know they convert…

Templates that convert

My team and I have tested out tons of different messaging for all channels, such as email, messenger and text messaging.

Here are the ones that have worked the best for us…

Text messaging templates

My favorite text message to send someone is:

[first name]?

When someone sends you a text with just your first name and a “?” what do you do? Chances are you respond with… “who is this?”.

Once someone responds with who is this, our sales reps typically respond with…

This is John from Neil Patel’s team. I just wanted to follow up to see if you have any questions or if we can help you with anything.

It’s simple and it works well and it has boosted our sales by 4.69%.

Another one that works well is a “flash sales” text message…

Flash Sale: All product on [yoursite] are [x]% off for the next 24 hours. [insert URL]

This one works really well during holidays or anytime you want to run a promotion. Depending on the size of the business you run and how big your list is, you will usually see an additional 2 to 3% in revenue for that month.

And my favorite text campaign is…

Check out this new blog post, [subject of the blog post] [URL]

An example would be… “Check out this new blog post on doubling your SEO traffic [URL]”

When I send out text message alerts for new posts, it usually increases the traffic to that blog post by another 4%.

Email templates

You’re probably familiar with this email template as you get it from me every week. 😉

Subject: How to Generate Leads When You Have Little to No Traffic

If you have a ton of traffic, it’s easy to generate leads.

But what if you have a new website or one with little to no traffic?

What if you don’t have any money to spend on paid ads?

What should you do?

Well, there is a solution. Here’s how you generate leads when you have no traffic.

Cheers,

Neil Patel

I send out an email every Tuesday and Saturday that looks something like that.

It’s a simple text-based email where the subject line is the title of your blog post and the text of the email states a problem and solution, with the solution being a link to the blog post.

To give you a rough idea, that email format has been getting me 29% to 33% open rates and 4% to 7% click-through rates.

And if you are selling info products through webinars, there are 8 types of emails I use to generate sales (check out that post if you want to learn how to make good money selling info products):

1. Invite sequence – these are a series of emails that invite people to watch your webinar. (here are my invite emails)
2. Indoctrination – you need to build a connection with people. People are more likely to convert if they know more about you and trust you. (here are my indoctrination emails)
3. No shows – just because someone signs up to watch your webinar, it doesn’t mean they will attend. For everyone who doesn’t attend, you’ll want to email them and get them to watch the replay. (here are my no show emails)
4. Encore – not everyone will watch your whole webinar. If they don’t stick to the end they won’t see your offer. You’ll want a few emails that push the replay. (here are my encore emails)
5. Objection handler – there are a handful of reasons someone may not buy. You’ll want to answer each of those objections through email. (here are my objection handler emails)
6. Countdown sequence – you’ll want to close off your course. Letting people know that they only have a few days left to buy is a really effective way to generate sales. These emails will roughly make up 1/3 to half of your sales. (here are my countdown emails)
7. Last chance email – on the last day you’ll want to send a few emails letting people know it is about to close. (here are my last chance emails)
8. Free trial offer – the majority of people won’t buy from you. Offering the last chance free trial offer is a great way to roughly get 15% more sales. (here are my free trial emails)

If you are selling products, there are 3 main emails that I’ve found to work well. The first 2 are for cart abandonment.

Subject: Did you forget something?

We noticed that you left something behind. Don’t worry though, we saved the items in your cart so you can easily complete your purchase.

[insert picture of products]

CTA button: Return to cart

This simple abandonment email typically increases sales by 1.73%. I know it’s not a lot, but it’s all about the papercuts as I mentioned above. 😉

Subject: Still thinking about it?

If you can’t decide on whether [insert product name] is right for you, here are some of the benefits:

[insert benefit 1]

[insert benefit 2]

[insert benefit 3]

[insert benefit 4]

[insert benefit 5]

[insert benefit 6]

So, what are you waiting for? You have nothing to lose with our 30 day no questions asked money back guarantee.

CTA: Complete my purchase

On average this email has provided our customers an increase of 1.44% in sales.

Subject: Who doesn’t love 15% off?

Explore new [type of products you sell] that will help you with [insert benefit].

Sale ends at [insert date and time].

CTA: Claim my discount

Now with the discount/coupon code email, we’ve found the results to vary a lot. The bigger the discount, the more sales you will typically receive. The biggest gains are when companies offer over 30% or greater discount.

Facebook Messenger templates

Unlike email and text, you can’t just easily just message people on Facebook Messenger and do whatever you want. There are rules…

• You can message a subscriber within the last 24 hours of your last interaction.
• Within that 24-hour time period, you can send promotional material.
• After the 24 hour period, messages must contain one of these 4 tags: confirmed event update, post-purchase update, account update, or a human agent.
• For users who opt-in to receive messages after 24 hours, you can, of course, message them.

As for templates that work, because Facebook is continually changing Messenger rules, follow these templates over at Manychat as they constantly change based on real-time data of what is working or what isn’t.

Conclusion

You have no choice but to take an omnichannel approach with your marketing.

Sure, all good channels eventually get crowded and click-throughs will decrease over time, but if you go after all of the main channels the marginal gains will add up.

And the easiest way to start with going omnichannel is with chat. I know you are probably using email, but I bet you aren’t using text messaging or even Facebook Messenger bots. And I bet you aren’t using push notifications either.

So, how many marketing channels are you using?

The post The New Way to Chat With Your Visitors appeared first on Neil Patel.

from Blog – Neil Patel https://ift.tt/3dBBmAK
via IFTTT

How Do Digital Analytics Change Content Marketing?

Content marketers face many challenges when it comes to making their content stand out in a crowded content space across all channels. Plus, content marketing also must do a better job when it comes to segmenting and personalizing the content. But, keyword optimization isn’t going to effectively address either of those challenges. 

Enter digital analytics. Offering a competitive advantage, this data-driven marketing tool has been proven through various research to enhance content marketing results. Digital analytics is possible through various types of available software that does the data collection. 

Assess Content Impact

Digital analytic tools like Google Analytics enables you to gauge how your content performs and engages or where it may miss your target. For example, Google Analytics provides data on the impact your content has on conversions. Google Analytics and other tools like heat maps provide further evidence of what content captures the audience’s attention. 

There is also the need to understand how your content impacts search engine results. Google Analytics offers a way to examine search traffic trends over a designated period of time. Doing so can help improve how you develop a SEO content strategy while also tracking previous ranking performance, which may also reveal larger shifts in audience interests or pain points. 

Improve Personalization Efforts

The first way that analytics changes content marketing is by enabling a greater level of personalization within the content. Having so much information about your customers well beyond basic analytics like gender, age, and location means you can write directly to them and their needs.  

It’s previous customer interactions that now direct what content to share in regards to a product or service they bought. Now, content can be directed to those customers about what they specifically bought and how they can get more value out of it. Additionally, the analytics also tells you what time of year they bought so you can plan content for them around the same time to encourage reorder. 

Receiving this type of personalized content can make a comfortable feel more like the brand is interested in them as individuals. In turn, this can deepen brand loyalty and create more positive customer experiences. 

Heighten Channel Visibility

Digital analytics and data-driven marketing also change the impact and visibility of your content across channels. The analytics determine what content is working on what channel and when. Prior to this capability, marketing teams had to essentially guess what might work in terms of a promotional campaign. They couldn’t know for sure if a revenue boost came from a particular campaign or if it was some other factor. 

However, with digital analytics, they know for sure. The analytics can pinpoint each engagement and correlate directly with a particular content-driven campaign like an ad, video, blog post, or email blast. 

Effectively Follow the Customer Through Their Purchase Journey

Digital analytics also helps marketers track customers throughout their purchase journey—from initial interest and research to active shopping ad through the purchase process. Because of today’s multiple channel options, that journey looks very different and can even change from transaction to transaction. There are more online and mobile channels than ever before where the purchase journey could be influenced, altered, or even cancelled. 

Insights are provided thanks to digital analytics tools, such as website cookies and click-through rate (CTR). This tracking system helps marketers understand what’s working and what they need to improve across the entire purchase journey. The data insights also help to create a more detailed customer profile from all the purchase behavior. From there, marketers can improve how they develop a uniform, satisfying experience for each customer across all channels. 

Forecast Customer Behavior

Perhaps one of the most intriguing things that data analytics enables is the ability to forecast customer behavior so content can be geared toward that predictive behavior for greater engagement and sales. Digital analytics enable marketers to leverage audience profiling data to predict customer wants and needs so that targeted content can be created to influence those purchase decisions. 

It’s the equivalent of knowing what customers want before they know they want it. This capability to craft that inside-knowledge content can serve as a definitive competitive advantage. 

Not the Whole Story

Although digital analytics can’t uncover everything to help improve content marketing campaign results, it’s an effective tool that has been an immense aid to the marketing effort. And, with the introduction of more digital analytics powered by artificial intelligence, more things like brand perception and more details related to SEO impact will help further shape content marketing.   

                                                        

Find out what else digital analytics can do to boost your campaigns. See how to “Go Further with Digital Analytics.”

  

 

 

from Oracle Blogs | Oracle Marketing Cloud https://ift.tt/2QVMpee
via IFTTT

Chris Ducker – The Most Important Things to Build a Personal Brand (FS368)

Today we have one of my favorite people on the show today. I’ve known Chris Ducker since way back when both of us were getting started as bloggers. At the time, Chris was chronicling his effort to combat burnout as a “brick and morter” CEO by becoming a Virtual CEO. Chris has run call centers and virtual staffing agencies involving hundreds of employees.

Over the years since, Chris has become known as the go-to expert on personal branding through his website at chrisducker.com, as well as through his YouPreneur podcast, community and conference.

Listen to the episode:

Subscribe to The Fizzle Show in your favorite podcast player:

iTunes | Overcast | Pocket Casts | Stitcher | Spotify

---

The post Chris Ducker – The Most Important Things to Build a Personal Brand (FS368) appeared first on Fizzle.

from Page Array – Fizzle https://ift.tt/3avgFoi
via IFTTT

Prepare for the Holiday Season by Experimenting & Testing Now

Given the ongoing health and economic situation, which is expected to last into the summer, the 2020 holiday season is going to be more vital than ever for B2C companies. Even during “normal” times, ensuring that you have a successful holiday season takes year-round preparation, which is why Oracle CX Marketing Consulting provides year-round advice through our new Holiday Marketing Quarterly. 

Our second quarter checklist for holiday readiness covers six areas:

1. Holiday Messaging Competitive Intelligence

2. Subscriber Acquisition Source Optimization

3. Unsubscribe Process Optimization

4. Preference Center Refreshes

5. Improved Analytics & Reporting

6. Experimentation & Testing

Check out the full 13-page guide for details on each of those areas, but in this post we want to focus on that sixth action item of experimentation and testing. That’s because the holiday season is a dangerous time to try to innovate. More than any other time of the year, it’s the most expensive time to have a failure. On the other hand, the second and third quarters are a great time to experiment with different tactics and strategies in a much lower-stakes environment. 

For retailers and other B2C brands, selling seasons like Mother’s Day, Memorial Day, Father’s Day, Independence Day, back to school, and Labor Day offer opportunities to test out new messaging, designs, tactics, and strategies, as well as try out new capabilities and functionality. If they work, you can use them during the holiday season. If they don’t, well, you avoided them not working out in a much more costly way during November and December.

Here are several areas to consider exploring to set your company up for a more successful holiday season and to make the most of the coming rebound in economic activity:

Add More AI

Artificial intelligence and machine learning can help marketers identify trends and relationships in a sea of data that they otherwise wouldn’t be able to see. You can then put those insights to work to send more relevant emails. 

“AI is the buzzword in the industry—really, in the world—at the moment,” says Jarrod Browning, Project Manager in APAC for Oracle CX Marketing Consulting. “Anything that can make data-driven decisions that the client can trust and not waste time on themselves is a big asset.”

One of the AI-powered improvements that we’re finding great success with among our clients is send-time optimization. While picking an email send time based on aggregate subscriber response is good, picking send times based on individual subscriber responses is better. That’s what send time optimization enables, plus it’s easy to implement. Now it doesn’t work for all subscribers and isn’t appropriate for every campaign, but send-time optimization has a huge role to play in answering the age-old question When is the best time to send emails?

Another AI-powered capability that we like is predictive activity modeling, which determines how likely an individual subscriber is to engage with a particular email campaign. Oracle CX Marketing Consulting’s Strategic Services team uses this modeling with many of its clients to maximize reach while keeping engagement high so as to avoid deliverability problems. As Gmail and other inbox providers continue to tighten their engagement-based filtering algorithms, the ability to direct your email volume toward that portion of your audience that’s more likely to respond is valuable, especially during the holiday season when promotional email volume spikes across the industry.

AI-powered content recommendations and AI-powered copywriting tools are others to consider.

Make Your Customer Experience More Seamless

Consumers expect frictionless interactions with your brand across whatever series of channels they use—and they become quite irritated if they see that you’re not paying attention to what they’re doing and waste their time with irrelevant messaging.

That makes it essential that you’re able to see customer activity across channels and respond across those channels to create a seamless and smooth omnichannel customer experience. That’s the ideal, but it is challenging. Thankfully, it has become considerably less challenging in recent years.

“We’ve been talking about omnichannel orchestration for years in the marketing community. However, technology has now caught up to the concept,” says Kaiti (Livermore) Gary, Director of Strategic Services, Oracle CX Marketing Consulting. “With easier and faster integrations between various parts of the marketing tech stack, it’s now easier than ever to execute on omnichannel strategies.”

Even so, you may want to start small and try to better synchronize just two channels. For example, consider using a tool like Oracle Maxymiser to personalize your landing pages so someone coming from an email will have a tailored experience that continues the interaction they started in their inbox.

Ramp Up Your A/B Testing

Listening to your customers is vital, and A/B testing is just one more way that you can listen to what your customers are telling you that they prefer. Just make sure you avoid these A/B testing pitfalls so you don’t waste your time, missed out on golden opportunities, or—worst of all—confidently come to the wrong conclusions. 

Among the biggest missed opportunities that we see with email A/B testing is that triggered emails are chronically under-tested. This is unfortunate because automated emails typically produce the biggest returns. That means that the A/B testing opportunity for triggered emails is bigger, too. Plus, improvements in triggered campaigns deliver better subscriber experiences over a longer period of time because they’re ongoing campaigns.

“Testing definitely isn’t just for one-time promo emails,” says Helen Lillard, Principal B2C Consultant, Oracle CX Marketing Consulting. “Set up audience journey programs like welcomes, nurtures, and reengagements with testing so that you can test your content, offer, subject line, and other elements for weeks at a time and get really solid results.”

Experiment with Competitive Differentiators

Want to get an edge? Then you should explore tactics and technologies that have low adoption, but high impact. We surveyed our Oracle CX Marketing Consultants to determine exactly which trends fit that description. We call those low adoption–high impact trends Competitive Differentiators.

One of these trends is dark mode-optimization. Instead of the usual dark text on a light background, dark mode features the reverse: light text and a dark background. It’s a major trend in user interface experiences across a wide range of apps, including email clients.

“Dark mode for email is here to stay,” says John A. Lillard, Principal Consultant for Implementation Services, Oracle CX Marketing Consulting. “Unfortunately, it’s not an easy fix. Marketers have some tough work to do on the creative side to make sure that colors change as intended and their emails stay legible.”

There are no magic bullets, but we have pulled together all of our best tips for how to optimize your emails for dark mode. It’s likely that dark mode support and hacks will change over time, so this is definitely an area to keep an eye on.

Another competitive differentiator, according to our consultants, is Email Annotations in Gmail. By adding additional coding to your emails, you may have different and more compelling envelope content displayed in the inbox. The operative word here is may. There are both opportunities and concerns with Email Annotations, so it’s not for everyone.

Those are just two of the 14 Competitor Differentiators our consultants identified. Also check out the trends that we rated Unproven Opportunities and Proven Essentials.

Whether you’re looking for incremental improvements or big wins, the warmer months of the year are the ideal time to try new things and take some risks. For more advice on what to do now to get your marketing program in great shape for the holiday season, download the 13-page second quarter edition of our Holiday Marketing Quarterly.

—————

Need help taking advantage of email marketing trends or running more tests? Oracle CX Marketing Consulting has more than 500 of the leading marketing minds ready to help you to achieve more with the leading marketing cloud, including strategists, analysts, and designers who are experienced with the trends that are driving the biggest returns for brands.

Learn more or reach out to us at CXMconsulting_ww@oracle.com.

Find out more about digital marketing at: https://www.oracle.com/marketingcloud/.

 

 

from Oracle Blogs | Oracle Marketing Cloud https://ift.tt/3boigfD
via IFTTT