Top Six 2020 Marketing Trends to Improve the Customer Experience and Drive Commercial Value

What a week it was at Oracle Open World London #OOWLON February 12-13. I was honored to be on stage and sharing exclusively with our customers and partners the Top Six 2020 Marketing Trends that every marketer needs to be thinking about in 2020 if they want to be successful in the Experience Economy through improving customer experience and driving commercial value. 

The “Experience Economy” is an abstraction, a metaphor that is useful in describing the shift in power from the brand to the consumer, but some organizations have gone further, faster, and are aligning their investments, processes and human structures around the idea that they are trading not in products or services, but in the experiences of their customers.

The Experience Economy, as defined by Time, Me and Emotion: 

• Time: Customer experience is a battle against time – to be not too early  but not too late (REAL-TIME) in the Experience Economy. Customers expect answers in milliseconds ( i.e. taxi’s in minutes and packages in hours). 

• Me: It is about personalization and segment of one.

• Emotions: People buy any product due to functional need or emotional desire (with emotional desire you can charge more and supports loyal customers).

The Experience Economy is hitting every industry too:

• In sports football clubs, like Liverpool, Spurs and Manchester United are not competing against each other’s, or other teams in other leagues or sports like NBA or NFL, but they are competing with Netflix, Amazon Video, and Facebook.  To be successful in the Experience Economy, sports clubs need to be an entertainment brands. 

• In Financial Services, traditional banks need to be an adaptive bank—one that is intelligent, agile, and integral to our lives and businesses

• For Telecoms, they need to move away from being a commodity and become a household or business total connectivity provider 

What defines a Top Performer v. a Mainstream brand?

The six trends, below come from key findings from the research Oracle did with Econsultancy, interviewing 500 CMOs and marketing leaders.  The findings were split between Top Performers (18%) who exceeded their business goals and they represent 18%, and the Mainstream ( 82%)  who missed or met their objectives. 

Trend #1: Data Strategy Is Core to the Experience Economy

To be successful in Customer Experience, having a Data Strategy is a must – and it must play a key role across the customer lifecycle, balancing privacy with personalization. The common dominator of successful brands in the Experience Economy is data. Uber is not a taxi company. Deliveroo is not food delivery company. AirBnB is not a hotel chain. They are all data companies. They are all examples of businesses re-shaping traditional industries through mastering the opportunities created by their data and creating innovative approaches to product and services. Those who master their data will be able to deliver to their customers the experience they expect and deliver on their promise with every customer engagement. Every business needs a data strategy if they want to deliver innovation, personalization, targeting, scalability, orchestration, attribution and, most of all, on building a data-driven culture. 

47% of mainstream respondents report that their customer data management investment is paying off, well behind the mainstream at 62%.

Trend #2 Embracing AI & Innovation in Marketing

People, not brands, are driving transformation and innovation. 

Acquisition will focus on utilizing Artificial Intelligence to model next best action, next best channel, profitability, loyalty, and product affinity to increase relevance, engagement and conversion. Customer experience is already being redefined by introducing AI driven Chatbots, Conversational Search and Voice Assistants, so Acquisition is the next step. 

In the era of Digital Downturn, we expect to be seeing companies utilize AI to manage costs, drive efficiency and generate scalability through automation and data. AI will become an essential weapon in cost-reduction and effectiveness in modern marketing.

No wonder 90% of the business world is in transformation. 

Trend #3: The Digital Content Renaissance

Communicating brand-led stories and engaging new and existing customers has never been more challenging. 

The two drivers of cross-channel proliferation, reducing attention span and customer expectations around personalization, drive an ever more challenging situation for marketers. 

The focus should be on identifying and targeting those micro-moments with relevant content to help customers achieve specific needs based on their requirements. 

Data strategy will be required to drive strategic positioning and a testing program to shape micro-moment led content strategy. Content strategies also consider content amplification and the rise of influencers and the safety of your brand in terms of publishing.

Customer journey is a process that’s made up of critical moments of interaction and influence, yet only 36% of the mainstream is targeting micro-moments in the customer journey, in comparison with 52% of top performers. 

Trend # 4: B2Me

Traditionally marketing was categorized as either B2B or B2C, but things have changed; B2ME is here. B2Me is marketing to an individual based on the desires of that individual. 

It's not just about closing a sale, it's about delivering an engaging, relevant, and effortless customer experience. 

Today’s customer are more informed, socially connected, mobile, technologically empowered, personal data aware, and in control of the sales cycle. 

B2Me applies whether the individual is buying for personal use or on behalf of their employer. We are talking about hyper- personalization at scale across the customer lifecycle, the importance of blending online and offline channels and the need for critical foundational components such as data-driven personas, active experience personalization while respecting customers privacy and agile omni-channel orchestration. It is your ABM strategy where you target organizations. 

The biggest difference in the CMO research concerning personalization were in three areas; 

1) Personalize across online and offline 

2) Personalizing the mobile experience 

3) Real-time personalization 

Trend #5: Developing a Customer-Centric Martech Ecosystem

With the proliferation of marketing, sales, and service technology, it is important to put the customer at the heart of what you do. 

A Customer-Centric Martech ecosystem is a paradigm shift. You need to first design your end-to-end customer experience at visionary level and then build, and your MarTech ecosystem will help you deliver on this

And don’t forget with every new piece of technology you buy you need to think about the data and data normalization, segmentation and activation. 

Sometimes it very tempting to go buy niche solutions to solve specific area with the customer journey, but be careful as you may be creating a data silo if you are not able to integrate the data with the rest of your MarTech and AdTech landscape. 

76% of mainstream CMOs believe that organization does not have the skills required to make most of MarTech – compared to 46% of top performers.

Trend #6: Moving Toward a SMART Agile Organization

The modern marketing organization is changing. Rigid hierarchies and structures are old news, with business shaping teams based on goals, functions, and the customer. 

There is a need to cut across the silos of CRM, digital, performance marketing, and brand teams that we see too often and move towards a joined-up approach with cross-functional leaders that are accountable for integrated strategy execution. In the age of the customer, there is an imperative to improve speed, predictability, transparency, and adaptability of marketing.

Where skill gaps exist, the right mix of hiring, outsourcing, and training needs to be planned ahead to ensure that businesses keep pace with the evolving marketplace and deal with any potential skill gaps.

Further to negatively impacting the customer experience, the lack of organizational agility often leads to inefficiency, increased risk and consequently increased costs for the business. 

I remember my previous role as Head of Acquisition was focused on bringing in new customers but no necessarily on what happens after they sign up. In a newer and more modern organization, my role  has changed to that of a Head of Growth.The difference is the Head of Growth is a P&L owner and cares about the cost to serve the customer acquired. The Head of Growth in Marketing has responsibility in product development, services, sales, and marketing.

Perhaps it is no surprise that marketing has more alignment with Sales and eCommerce. The biggest misalignment in the research is between Marketing, products, and Service.

The most insightful questions from our CMO research was, “How would you describe the optimal customer experience?” 

In response, they didn’t say the most innovative or valuable. No they instead said that an optimal customer experience was ‘effortless, ’ which we at Oracle aim to help our customers deliver.

Download the full CMO research here

Special thanks to Econsultancy and my colleagues; Nick Fleetwood, Andy Fisher and Abdul Hamid Ebrahim Jassat for working together to define the trends. 

                                                            

For insights into digital marketing trends and what is driving them, visit Oracle CX Marketing. 

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1,083,219 People Per Month and Counting: My New Favorite SEO Strategy

Podcasting.

You’ve heard about it before and I bet you’ve even listened to a handful of podcasts. But you probably haven’t created one yet.

Just think of it this way…

There are over 1 billion blogs and roughly 7 billion people in this world. That’s 1 blog for every 7 people…

On the other hand, there are roughly 700,000 podcasts. That means there is only 1 podcast for every 10,000 people or so.

Podcasting is 1,428 times less competitive than blogging.

So, should you waste your time on podcasting?

Well, let me ask you this… do you want a new way to get more organic traffic from Google?

I’m guessing you said yes. But before I teach you how to do that, let me first break down some podcasting stats for you, in case you aren’t convinced yet.

Is podcasting even worth it?

From a marketing and monetization standpoint, podcasting isn’t too bad.

I have a podcast called Marketing School that I do with my buddy Eric Siu. We haven’t done much to market it and over time it’s grown naturally.

Here are the stats for the last month.

We got 1,083,219 downloads or “listens” last month. To give you an idea of what that is worth, Dream Host paid us $60,000 for an ad spot…

They’ve also been paying us for a while, technically we have a 1-year contract worth $720,000.

Now on top of the ad money, Eric and I both have gotten clients from our podcast. It’s tough to say how much revenue we’ve made from the podcast outside of advertising, but it is easy to say somewhere in the 7-figure range.

Keep in mind, when I make money through ads or generate revenue for my ad agency, there are costs so by no means does that revenue mean profit.

Sadly, my expenses are really high, but I’ll save that for a different post.

But here is the cool thing: Eric and I only spend 3 hours a month to record podcast episodes for the entire month. So, the financial return for how much time we are spending is high.

And if that doesn’t convince you that you need to get into podcasting, here are some other stats that may:

• 32% of Americans listen to a podcast at least once a month.
• 54% of listeners think about buying products advertised in podcasts.
• Businesses spent $497 million on podcast ads in 2018 (probably much larger now).
• 51% of monthly active podcast listeners have an annual household income of at least $75,000.

If you haven’t created a podcast, this guide will teach you how. And this one will teach you how to get your first 10,000 downloads.

Alright, and now for the interesting part…

How to get more SEO traffic through podcasting

Back in 2019, Google saw how podcasts were growing at a rapid pace and they didn’t want to miss out.

They wanted people to continually use Google, even when it came to learning information that is given over audio format. So they decided to make a change to their search engine and algorithm and started to index podcasts and rank them.

And depending on what you search for and the more specific you get, you’ll even notice that Google is pulling out details from specific episodes. This clearly shows that they are able to transcribe the audio automatically.

This shouldn’t be too much of a shocker as they’ve already had this technology for years. They use it on YouTube to figure out what a video is really about.

But here is the thing, just recording a podcast and putting it out there isn’t going to get you a ton of search traffic.

So how do you get more SEO traffic to your podcast?

It starts with topics

Podcasting is a lot like blogging.

If you create a blog post on any random topic that no one cares to read about, then you aren’t going to generate much traffic… whether it is from social or search.

The same goes for podcasting. If you have an episode on a random topic that no one cares to listen to, then you won’t get many downloads (or listens) and very little SEO traffic as well.

Just look at the stats for a few of our episodes.

Look at the screenshot above, you’ll see some do better than others.

For example, the episode on “7 Secrets to Selling High Ticket Items” didn’t do as well as “The 7 Best Marketing Conferences 2020” or even “How to Drive More Paid Signups In Your Funnel.”

You won’t always be able to produce a hit for every podcast you release, but there is a simple strategy you can use to increase your success rate.

First, go to Ubersuggest and type in a keyword or phrase related to what your podcast is about.

Once you type in your keyword or phrase, hit search.

You’ll land on a screen that looks something like this:

Then in the left-hand navigation, click on the “Content Ideas” option.

From there, you’ll see a list of popular topics on the subject you are researching.

This report breaks down popular blog posts based on social shares, SEO traffic, and backlinks.

Typically, if a blog post has all 3, that means people like the topic. Even if it has only 2 out of the 3, it shows that people are interested in the topic.

What we’ve found is that if a topic has done well as a blog post, it usually does well as a podcast episode.

See with the web, there are so many blogs, most topics have been beaten to death. But with podcasting, it is the opposite. Because there are very few podcasts, most topics haven’t been covered.

And if you take those beaten-to-death blog topics and turn them into podcast episodes, it is considered new, fresh content that people want to hear. And they tend to do really well.

Now you have to dive into keywords

Hopefully, you are still on the content ideas report and you’ve found some ideas to go after.

If not, just scroll down to the bottom of the Content Ideas report and keep clicking next… even if only a few numbers show, don’t worry, there are millions of results and as you go to the next page, more pages will show up.

Once you find a topic, I want you to click the “Keywords” button under the “Estimated Visits” column.

This will give you more specific keywords to mention and so you can go even more in-depth during your podcast episode.

Remember that Google is able to decipher your audio and knows what topics and keywords you are covering.

So, when you mention a keyword within your podcast, your podcast episode is more likely to rank for that keyword or phrase.

But there are a few things I’ve learned through this whole process:

1. You don’t have to keyword stuff – you don’t have to mention a keyword 100 times or anything crazy if you want to rank well organically. Mention it whenever it is natural.
2. Episodes titles that contain popular keywords tend to do better – do your keyword research and include the right keywords within your title (I’ll show you how in a bit).
3. Episode titles that contain questions do well – eventually, you’ll also see these episodes perform even better because when people ask questions in the future on smart assistants like Alexa and Google Home, you’ll eventually start to see them pull from podcasts.

So how do you find the right keywords and questions to incorporate into your podcasts?

Head back to Ubersuggest and type in a keyword or phrase related to a podcast episode you want to create. This should be a bit easier now because you’ve already leveraged the Content Ideas report to come up with popular topics that people want to hear about. 😉

This time, I want you to click on the “Keyword Ideas” report in the left-hand navigation.

You’ll then see a list of suggestions that look something like this.

As you scroll down, you’ll continually see more and more keywords.

Don’t worry about the CPC data, but you will want to look at the SEO difficulty score as the easier the score the better chances you will have of ranking your podcast episode on Google. Also, look at search volume… the higher the number the better as that means more potential listens.

My recommendation for you is to target keywords and phrases that have an SEO difficulty of 40 or less.

Once you have a list of keywords, I want you to click on the “Related” navigational link on that report.

Now, you’ll see a much bigger keyword list.

In this case, you’ll see 405,513 related keywords that you can target. Again, ignore the CPC data but target keywords with an SEO difficulty of 40 or less and the more popular the keyword the better.

Lastly, I want you to click on the “Questions” navigational link…

Then scroll through the list and you’ll see a list of questions that you can target.

According to Comscore, over 50% of the searches are voice searches. A large portion of those are questions, so covering them within your podcast or even labeling your titles based on questions is a great way to get more traffic.

If you don’t think going after questions is a good strategy to get more traffic, just look at Quora.

With roughly 111,114,424 estimated visits a month from Google, Quora is getting a lot of traffic by optimizing their site for question-related keywords.

Conclusion

Google is the most popular site in the world. Whether you love SEO or hate it, you have no choice but to leverage it.

One way to get more SEO traffic is to write tons of content and leverage content marketing. It’s a competitive approach and you should consider it.

But another solution that’s even easier is to create a podcast and rank it well on Google.

And ideally, you should be doing both.

Do you have a podcast? Have you tried ranking audio content on Google?

The post 1,083,219 People Per Month and Counting: My New Favorite SEO Strategy appeared first on Neil Patel.

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When Good Enough Shouldn’t Be: The Best Email Frequency

How often should I email my subscribers? Without a doubt, that’s one of the top five most frequently asked questions my clients have asked me over the years. My quick answer?

If the content is relevant, then frequency is irrelevant. 

Put another way, if your emails contain information, offers, news, updates, and other content your subscriber wants, needs, or expects, then you can essentially send as often as you’d like. That’s the ideal, but the concept of an always on, completely fluid construct of emails that are triggered as necessary where the right content is always available and automatically pulled when needed simply isn’t possible today. AI and other technologies are helping marketers get closer to that ideal, but the reality is that it’s many years off for most email teams right now.

So, while we wait for the future to arrive, what’s the next best thing? How do I know what the best email frequency is? 

First, it’s important to start with the customer. This rocks some worlds but...the customer may not want as many emails as you are sending. That can be tough for many brands to accept because cutting back email volume is associated with cutting back revenue. Some see the “send button” as the “revenue button.” While it’s true that every time you push send, conversions and revenue spike, there are many long-term negative implications of over-mailing, including high list churn, poor deliverability, and brand damage.  

But you can avoid those negative consequences while not forsaking your short-term revenue goals by being thoughtful about figuring out which subscribers should get each of your non-triggered promotional emails. The frequency of promotional emails across the industry continues to grow, so the risks are growing, too. Ironically, volumes are growing in part because of the ongoing effectiveness of email. 

So what are the best ways to smartly, even surgically, select who should get those emails that are sometimes sent multiple times in a day? In keeping with my previous posts on the best time to send emails, optimizing automated emails, and fixing email performance problems, let’s look at the Good, Better, and Best approaches to email frequency: 

A Good Email Frequency Involves Seasonal Optimization

Most businesses have some cyclicality to them, and those seasonal pushes often mean boosting email volume by 3x or more during peak periods. This spike may be a function of any or all of the following tactics:

• Incremental sends, which involve sending additional emails, often multiple times per day

• Re-sends, where the same email is sent multiple times, often only with a change to the subject line

• Deeper audience selection, where emails are sent to a broader, less active audience of subscribers that include subscribers that you typically suppress from sends due to their lack of activity

Each of these is a common approach to increasing volume in an attempt to maximize revenue during peak seasons. However, applying the right rules is important to reduce the risk of jeopardizing your subscriber base long term or your IP reputation and associated deliverability success in the short term. Let’s look at each approach separately: 

1. Incremental Sends

For B2C brands, the November to December holiday season is the most common period where they increase their email frequency above their typical levels. Sending two or even three times a day isn’t uncommon for many retailers. Whenever your peak seasons are, you’re likely increasing your email frequency significantly to try to capture your customers’ heightened interest.

Reduce the risks of using this tactic by being selective about which subscribers you target with incremental sends. Ask yourself…

• Which segments of my audience are the most likely to engage with me during a particular peak season window? Examine previous periods. How many subscribers didn’t open any emails at all during that period? Could that have been predicted to begin with?  

• Which subscribers have a pattern of only engaging during that time of the year?  

• Can I conduct a matchback to offline activity via email address, loyalty program, or some other approach to understand the impact of offline conversions? As we know there can be a halo effect associated with email impacting store traffic even without opening or clicking on an email.

Answering those three questions will help you focus your incremental sends on subscribers who are likely to act, either online or offline, and avoid sending incremental emails to those who are unlikely to act.

2. Re-Sends

If you've not tested the impact of this across different segments, try it out. Re-sends can go to recipients of an email that:

• Didn’t open or click

• Opened but didn’t click or convert 

• Clicked but didn’t convert

Based on experience with our clients, non-openers are the least likely to respond to re-sends, especially if they haven’t engaged lately. For example, if your brand sends at a high frequency and a subscriber hasn’t opened any of your promotional emails over the past 30 days, the odds of them converting on a re-send of an email on the same day are extremely low.

Reduce the risks of using this tactic by thinking of your re-sends like browse abandons. For those subscribers who demonstrated that they were reasonably serious by clicking but not converting, target them with a re-send that highlights a time-sensitive aspect of the promotion, such as “Just hours left until your 50% off promotion expires!”

It’s pretty simple to test and see for yourself how each of these groups responds to re-sends and where the biggest conversion opportunity is.  

3. Deeper Audience Selection

Mailing subscribers who haven’t heard from you for some time can be trickier to navigate for several reasons. You haven’t been mailing them recently because their engagement level was so low that it was hurting your engagement and you didn’t want it to affect your deliverability. So, it comes to reason that starting to mail them again presents similar risks. You can expect:

• Spam complaints to rise

• Engagement rates to dip

• Potential bulking or blocking by inbox providers, because of those first two issues

Reduce the risks of using this tactic by being selective about going broader with your audience. For instance, you can reduce your deliverability risks by only adding inactive subscribers who have made purchases in the past.

You can also reduce the fallout from loosening your audience criteria by reaching out to these subscribers well ahead of the holiday period. Try to warm up this expanded audience by including them in some campaigns leading up to the core season, so if deliverability issues do appear, you have time to mitigate them rather than trying to solve that during the mission critical period.

A Better Email Frequency Includes Engagement Segments

Established brands generally have 18 months or more of email engagement history for the majority of their subscribers. This is a gold mine of data that can be used to generate basic segments that indicate value metrics associated with recency, frequency, and monetary (RFM) dimensions of engaging with you.

 RFM segments, as they are known, have been around for many years, but broad application into email is more recent. Some digital marketing platforms and email service providers, including Oracle Responsys, have RFM values built in. But if yours doesn’t consider creating them manually for your file. Subscribers are behaving very differently, so we should treat them differently—and this is a great rubric for doing so.

Consider the differences in the following audiences: 

• Hyperactives. Based on the last 6 months of send data, these subscribers have opened or clicked on 80% or more of emails you’ve sent to them. This data is even more helpful if you can layer on a value dimension—the monetary one—to understand which of your hyperactives are generating the most value for your brand. This is an audience you may not be mailing enough! The focus here should be on further personalization and loyalty expansion.

• Zombies. Based on the last six months of send data, these subscribers haven't opened or clicked on anything. However, they were high-value subscribers at one point in time. Is it possible to bring them back from the dead? These are prime re-engagement targets that warrant a different frequency and content strategy.

• First-timers. Based on six months of data, these subscribers were moderately engaged in terms of recency and frequency of engagement early on, but haven’t opened, clicked, or converted since. This audience is a prime target to turn into first-time purchasers or repeat buyers.

Several other behavioral segments can be created to join these three, depending on how your audience behaves and what the natural buying cycle is for the products or services your company sells. Note that not only is the frequency likely different for these audiences, but the content and messaging will become sharper and more relevant based on what we know about them.

Finally, given that we’ve done our homework with these audiences, the more that the messages sent to them can be trigger-based, rather than simply a part of the natural promotional calendar, the more they are likely to engage with the brand on the optimal path. Think about the push to get a one-time buyer to be a repeat buyer and what you know about the first purchase that could be instructive regarding their second. Granted, lots of factors come into play here—including that you might be selling a durable good that your customer only buys once every three years—but think about what that messaging should be after the first purchase to ensure you are a part of the consideration set for the next purchase.

The Best Email Frequency Incorporates Predictive Modeling

You knew it was coming: We’re going to talk about artificial intelligence now. All that data we talked about for the Better approach? It’s useful here too, but we can also combine it with other subscriber data like past purchase history, gender, acquisition source, and so on to establish propensities and anticipated behavior to inform frequency.

Most subscribers will go through natural ebbs and flows with a brand. Imagine going on a large vacation at a resort, or purchasing a car. For most people, these are not frequent purchases. From an email standpoint there will be peaks and valleys of engagement based on the natural lifecycle.

A predictive model powered by AI can determine the probability that a subscriber will engage with an email or, even better, make a purchase. Imagine if each of your subscribers was rated from 0 to 100 based on their likelihood to that they would engage with your next email in the next 3 days. If you were considering ramping up frequency from once per day to twice per day, with this rating you’d have the ability to, for instance:

• Select only those with a 35% or greater chance of engaging with a re-send

• Select those with an 80% or greater chance of engaging with a 3rd send from among those who didn’t engage with the re-send

• Know who to target if sales are short at the very end of the quarter to minimize the risk of fatiguing or burning out your email list

We’ve run this kind of predictive activity modeling successfully over and over for clients where it has allowed them to send less email and generate more revenue when compared to a control group that didn’t use the modeling. For example, we conducted a two-month experiment with an outdoor apparel retailer where one audience segment received their regular email cadence and another segment included some recipients received slightly more email and others slightly less. The segment that used predictively activity modeling sent 19% less email but generated:

• 17% higher open rates

• 29% higher click-through rates 

• 29% higher conversion rates

• Revenue equal to the control group

By avoiding unproductive email sends, brands create better subscriber experiences and are rewarded with fewer unsubscribes and less email fatigue, and therefore higher subscriber lifetime value. Plus, the higher engagement rates improve deliverability, which is especially critical for high-volume senders who receive the most scrutiny by inbox providers.

A lot of factors go into answering How often should I email my subscribers? Seasonal optimization, engagement segments, and AI-powered predictive modeling can all play a role. I hope that the issues I discussed in this post have armed you with new approaches and insights into how to best approach this tricky balance as you head toward your next big promotional period. 

Want more ways to uplevel your email marketing and avoid settling for good enough? Check out:

• When Good Enough Shouldn’t Be: Fixing Email Performance Problems
• When Good Enough Shouldn’t Be: Optimizing Automated Emails
• When Good Enough Shouldn’t Be: The Best Time to Send Emails

—————

Need help taking your email marketing program to the next level? 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, designers, copywriters, trainers, deliverability experts, and more.

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

To learn more about email frequency and the tools to make email marketing successful, visit Oracle CX Marketing.
 

 

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Conversions Aren't Always Sales: How Moments of Connection Keep Customers Coming Back

When outdoor retailer Orvis set out to launch a new line of adventure products for dog lovers, they faced a challenge familiar to every retailer.

On one hand, they knew an email campaign that simply advertised the new canine products might generate a limited number of conversions. On the other hand, an upfront promotional discount would likely result in lost revenue, since many customers might’ve been happy to pay full price for the very same items.

How can a retailer maximize their campaign’s conversion rate, without losing value by over-relying on promotional pricing?

Orvis solved the puzzle by breaking free of the false assumption that “conversion = sale.” Instead of sending out a digital flyer for their new products, they created an interactive quiz that helped subscribers choose the ideal dog breed to join them on their next outdoor adventure.

By putting customers’ interests above their own internal sales goals, Orvis cultivated vastly stronger loyalty than they could’ve obtained with a promotional email.

Here’s what this approach will mean for your next campaign.

Conversion is not a one-time event — it’s an ongoing process.

According to the old school of salesmanship, a conversion is a sale, pure and simple. If you want to make sales, this thinking goes, then you’ve got to keep repeating your pitches — until some of your customers finally “give in” and buy the products you’ve repeatedly presented to them.

While some marketers continue to live by this outdated approach, it’s not very useful for fostering long-term trust and repeat business. It treats customers as if they’re enemies to be defeated, rather than allies in need of assistance. And that’s a major mistake — because more than half of customers will happily pay more for the privilege of doing business with brands that treat them as personal friends.

What’s more, conversion doesn’t have to be a one-time event at all. Although some customers might “convert” by making a single purchase via a promotional email, you’re not likely to see much repeat business from them. They may have converted to a particular product or offer — but not to your brand.

Instead of focusing on those one-time conversions, you’ll cultivate much steadier revenue — and more repeat purchases — by fostering relationships with customers who’ll go out of their way to buy from you, even when you’re not offering a promotion.

Trust goes both ways — and your brand has to take the first step.

Like every healthy partnership, a long-lasting customer relationship is built on trust — not only your customers’ trust in you, but also your trust in them. The more you demonstrate that you value your customers even when they’re not making purchases, the more they’ll come to accept you as part of their everyday life.

For example, we’ve all had the stressful experience of shopping for clothes at a store that pays employees on commission. Staff members follow us around the sales floor, urging us to try on more items — sometimes outright pressuring us to purchase accessories we don’t want. Although the commission policy was put in place to drive sales, its actual effect is to drive customers like us away.

Contrast this with your favorite clothing retailer, whose employees leave you free to shop at your leisure — always ready with a helping hand, but never pushy or impatient to make a sale. By trusting you to make purchases in your own time, they cultivate your trust in return — and as a result, they get far more of your business than their commission-based competitors ever will.

Take the first step in demonstrating trust to your customers, and many of them will reciprocate by extending that same trust to you in return.

Moments of connection drive repeat sales and loyalty over time.

The most proven driver of repeat sales isn’t repetitive pitching — it’s moments of emotional connection. Those moments happen every time your customers join you in a meaningful, memorable experience.

If this sounds too fluffy, consider the following hard numbers: 95 percent of purchase decisions are driven by subconscious emotions. Customers who feel “connected” to a brand are more than twice as likely to make a purchase. A full 81 percent of customers who feel that connection will recommend your products to their friends and loved ones.

In short, customers who feel emotionally connected with your brand may not make a purchase today — but they’re far more likely to make multiple purchases in the longer term, and to spread the word to the people who matter in their lives.

With these facts in mind, try taking a step back from the sales-first mindset as you plan your next campaign. Instead of product pitches, think about how you can create shared moments that foster emotional connections with your customers.

They’ll get the underlying message: You trust them to remember your brand. In return, they’ll trust you to become a part of their life.

                                                             

An emotional connection with your customers can make all the difference, but how do you establish one? Find out with “B2C Personalization Blog Series Part 1: Taking the First Step Toward One-to-One Marketing.”

 

 

 

 

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Why Your B2B Company Needs a Loyalty Program

Loyalty initiatives have been traditionally considered a better fit in the B2C rather than B2B space. With long, complex sales cycles and buyers that aren’t as responsive to discounts and coupons, many B2B marketers have rejected the concept of loyalty programs. However, due to increased competition and price wars, B2B companies are realizing the value in investing in loyalty. Let’s take a look at the reasons more and more B2B companies are turning to loyalty to help them attract and retain customers and some of the tactics they are using. 

Incentivize customers and increase retention

Customer churn can cause serious concern for B2B businesses. Despite having a lower number of customers compared to B2C businesses, B2B transaction value is much higher. This is because B2B customers are likely to order in bulk and are tied into longer term contracts and subscriptions.

Retaining customers and keeping them satisfied is a huge priority. Forrester Research says that a 2% increase in customer retention has the same effect on profits as a 10% cost cut, and the average company loses 10% of customers every year. Customers need to be incentivized to repeat purchase from your company. Forrester Research recommends B2B marketers develop an engagement plan featuring a mix of rewards falling into three categories:

• Material rewards that incent and reinforce desired behaviors

• Experiential benefits that engage channel partners, customers, and end users alike

• Recognition and customer acknowledgement that appeals to advocates

Differentiate and attract

B2B companies have fewer customers than retailers and brands, and the cost to acquire new customers is considerably higher than in the B2C markets. This is because customer segments are narrow, and competition is extremely fierce.

In a study Google conducted with CEB, 86% of B2B buyers perceived no significant difference between competing company products. When products are non-differentiated it can be difficult to communicate competitive advantage, and as a result, many B2B businesses engage in price wars in an attempt to win market share. According to B2B International, 80% of business-to-business buyers do not prioritize price. This means that price-focused businesses do not appeal to the majority of B2B buyers. In order to avoid competing on price, B2B companies need to be very targeted in their marketing efforts and build in ways to add more customer value. A loyalty program that adds true value to the target customer can set your business apart.

Reward for referrals

Referrals are extremely important in B2B customer acquisition. 84% of B2B buyers start the purchasing process with a referral, and peer recommendations influence more than 90% of all B2B buying decisions.

By implementing a robust loyalty program, you can motivate and encourage customers to become more active and engaged with your brand. Make referrals easy for already satisfied customers by building a referral program into your loyalty initiative that rewards existing customers for successful new business opportunities.

Capture data and personalize experiences

Using data effectively allows B2B marketers to understand their accounts better and target them with more relevant and personalized communications and experiences.

B2B companies are finding value in adopting data and analytics to drive marketing efforts and identify customer needs. According to a survey of B2B marketers by Dimensional Research, 70% of respondents use big data, historical information and predictive analytics to improve their marketing effectiveness.

Loyalty programs, such as those powered by CrowdTwist, capture not only transactional, but engagement data and use it to serve customers with relevant content, communications, and product recommendations.

Effective B2B tactics

Create customer tiers. By using a tiered loyalty program design, you can segment your customers based on contract size and value to your company and offer different rewards and perks at different tier levels.

Offer exclusive access. To build in value with B2B customers, offer exclusive access to new products, new enhancements, events or services.

Collect information. Motivate your most loyal customers to provide feedback on their level of satisfaction with your products and services through surveys and use this data to drive future enhancements.

Educate through content marketing. Utilize customer data to understand your customers’ specific business needs and create content that addresses their challenges and pain points. Customers will become more engaged and brand loyal when they feel that your company understands their business. Furthermore, educational content can also help B2B customers get further along in their career, helps strengthens the bond, and positions your company as a trusted content resource.

Provide discounts and perks. Give customers incentive to repeat purchase from your company by offering valuable rewards such as shipping discounts, free products and % off orders. By offering these incentives to your more valuable accounts, you can drive brand advocacy and referrals.

Offer relevant rewards. Rewards also drive brand advocacy and referrals. Offer free products, or invitations to client dinners and events, conference passes and so on to your top, most influential customers.

Surprise and delight. This is where a B2B business with a great loyalty program and great customer service will really shine. Make your customers feel valued for every positive interaction with your company, whether it’s for promoting your business in their company news, or because they’ve just purchased an add-on product. Let them know they’re appreciated by surprising and delighting them with an unexpected perk or reward.

Conclusion

In the B2C world it’s easy to offer loyalty programs with membership perks and discounts to encourage repeat purchase and loyalty. In the B2B world, customer acquisition and retention challenges are very different. B2B businesses compete in their space based on the value they can add to keep their existing customers satisfied and attract new business. Effective use of data, personalization, and customized content helps set B2B businesses apart from competition and provide exceptional customer experiences. 

                                                              

In the experience economy, the walls between B2C and B2B are crumbling. What does this mean for digital marketers? Read “The Experience Economy Is Here: What That Means for Digital Marketers and How They Can Thrive.”

 

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