Keyword research: the ultimate guide

Measuring Social Media Impact is no Longer a Mystery

Social-media marketing is in an interesting state right now. In the last five years, there have been huge changes in social; it’s grown to be a strong contender as a marketing channel. However, because it’s still somewhat young, many companies don’t see social as a true marketing channel and are not using it to its full potential. Compare this to email marketing, which has been around for years. Everyone and their grandma has an email address by now, and companies use email marketing very effectively.

Breaking Down the Silos
Social is definitely on its way to being another mainstream marketing channel. For a long time, traditional public relations (PR) and marketing were the tried and true methods of advertising. Now, there’s a new channel on the scene, and companies are asking, “How does this fit? How do you measure success?” You could say that social-media marketing has been a disrupter of marketing.

Awareness of what the technology can do will really help people break down the silos that often happen in marketing. You become comfortable with one method or type of marketing and focus all of your efforts there. With awareness of social-media marketing’s potential, you can break down those siloed walls, integrating social into your email marketing, lead generation, or even content creation.

The Fear of Change
The biggest challenge right now is the challenge of change. People fear change and are resistant to adopt new technologies. Companies are not traditionally set up for social media and are trying to figure out how to even approach social media. Is it customer service? Is it lead generation? Social media also generates brand awareness, but how do you measure brand awareness?

Sometimes, companies use social-media marketing and see zero success (according to their bottom lines). Because social media is ambiguous, from a customer-service standpoint, it can seem difficult to measure. If you don’t have the means to do proper analytics, you might not realize that your social-media efforts are, in fact, driving leads. Every business has to make money, and it has to keep moving forward that way, or it won’t be in business very long. Understanding what social-media marketing is — and that it will grow their bottom lines exponentially — will encourage brands to use it.

One of my favorite examples of the effects of social media is Skittles. Skittles has its own community; they call it Skittle Nation. They decided to write valentines for the people least likely to receive them. The person who won was a meter maid. Skittles did a huge promotion around it, and thousands and thousands of people wrote valentines for this meter maid. Then, they delivered them to the meter maid while she was actually giving out parking tickets.

The campaign had absolutely nothing to do with Skittles, but now thousands of people have heard about Skittles doing something awesome. But, it begs the question, how do you measure that effect? Because that’s a complete brand-awareness play!

The Right Tools
The difficult part is that Twitter doesn’t track everything the same way Facebook, Instagram, or Pinterest do. There are multiple analytics that come from those different platforms, but one thing they all track is links. To make coherent sense of the multitudes of data coming from a campaign like Skittles’, you need a tool to bring all of the data to one place.

Social media isn’t a mystery anymore. With the right tools and knowledge, you can see how your content is performing based on whatever metrics you want. Decide which metrics are important to you and then analyze them to determine whether they’re working. This translates to better ROI. By knowing what works for your company on social, you can glean insights on where your money needs to go and what you can get for it.

You know that social media is important, and it’s not a mysterious entity. You simply need to understand how to structure your business around it.

The post Measuring Social Media Impact is no Longer a Mystery appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.

from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/social-media/measuring-impact-social-media-no-longer-mystery/

Techniques for Aligning Social Content With Analytics

Nowadays, smart tools are available to help evaluate the performance of social content. However, if you’re looking to dig deep into the ROI of your initiatives by connecting specific posts to revenue — and falling short — you’re not alone. Linking social content to revenue is challenging, as most people don’t convert through social media. However, if you’ve set clear goals and understand which platforms work best for your initiatives, you’re off to a great start.

Techniques for Bringing Social and Analytics Together
Begin by thinking about all social content as campaigns. Adobe Social and Adobe Analytics automatically assign tracking codes to each post, making it easier to focus on the larger campaign initiatives rather than rely on Facebook insights or Twitter reports. Connecting social efforts to your bottom line begins with bringing social content and analytics together. Easier said than done? Not really. Here are a few simple techniques to help you get started.

1. Unify Your Metrics
Knowing what’s really going on with published social content is critical. Set up your metrics right at the onset, and you’ll have a much clearer picture. Consider unifying your metrics — both owned social as well as metrics derived from site visitors. Unified metrics will show you how both sides are performing as you bring top goals together. Maybe it’s video views, or perhaps, it’s driving return visitors? Whatever your goal, you can look at it clearly when metrics are unified.

2. Create Customized Segments
Segments allow you to better understand the role social plays in the customer journey by helping you get to know your social visitors — their likes and dislikes, who their friends are, and so on. Once all of your content is aligned with campaigns, it will be easier to learn about your audience — which channels they came from, which pieces of content they were interested in, and so forth. The better job you do with associating and organizing campaigns against your strategies, the easier it will be to apply what you know about your visitors’ interests to customized segments. Use segments in different reports to learn exactly where visitors participate with your site metrics.

3. Link Tagging Structure to Social Tactics
An unprecedented amount of social content is going out on different channels — so, how do you understand which tactics are working? Use content tags to view content through different lenses. The ultimate goal is to streamline content analysis, to break it down to make viewing and assessing performance easier. Base tagging structure around the specific tactics you use in your social content and make it actionable — organize to optimize!

For example, you might use tags to outline how you organize media content. Is it infographics? Photos of people? Images of your product? Identify the tactics you’re using, and then use tags to associate content in that way. This will speed up your assessment of these tactics for any number of posts rather than having to assess each one visually — a heady task when hundreds or even thousands of posts are involved. If you’re not planning on making changes to the media formats, then don’t tag that way.

Final Thoughts
As a social-content strategist, it’s easy to think about the current strategies that you’re using and apply them for quick analysis to improve the mix. Plan to do this both monthly and quarterly. Unified metrics, customized segments, and creative tagging — whether you’re measuring directly in campaigns or across campaigns — make it easy to put in the infrastructure and tools to streamline the social-reporting cycle. Understand who your social visitors are and optimize the way you create content for them as you’re churning it through. Remember, social ROI is what you make it — set yourself up for success from the beginning and use measurement tools to get it right.

The post Techniques for Aligning Social Content With Analytics appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.

from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/social-media/techniques-aligning-social-content-analytics/

Programmatic Display: Make the Most of Your Data With Today’s Technology

By 2019, 50 percent of display ads are forecasted to be transacted programmatically. Access to data and technology is driving this growth. Advertisers have access to increasing amounts of data, including site-visitor and partner information, demographic- and business-attribute data, and even offline info such as customer-relationship management (CRM) data — and all that can be used for targeting. Advertisers also have access to advanced technologies — like demand-side platforms (DSPs), ad exchanges, and data-management platforms (DMPs) — that they can use to target users in real time across channels and devices.

In North America, $11 billion is projected to be spent on programmatic advertising this year, with forecasts of $30 billion by 2019. Yet, at the end of last year, when marketers were asked their levels of understanding regarding programmatic, only 23 percent used programmatic actively, 36 percent were aware of programmatic but were not using it regularly, and 41 percent weren’t using programmatic at all. Programmatic is in its early stages, and its level of awareness is still growing.

During a presentation I put together for Adobe Summit 2016, we explored the programmatic world and how it helped Redbox, Chegg, and eHealth meet their advertising objectives. Here are some of the insights we gained:

Redbox: Time Savings and Better Performance Through Site-Analytics Integration
Redbox deploys audience targeting via Adobe Analytics, resulting in time savings and improved ad performance.

Redbox is a movie- and game-rental business that is focused, like many businesses, on driving a greater return on ad spend (ROAS) from its digital marketing programs. They target a number of different audiences — from online users who visited and interacted with the website to entertainment junkies to families — for display retargeting and prospecting programs. This often requires that their information technology (IT) department put relevant, trackable content on their site to build audience segments.

Redbox already used Adobe Analytics, which tracks, organizes, and reports on what different segments of customers do. Instead of deploying new tags for tracking, Redbox leveraged the integration between Analytics and the Adobe Media Optimizer DSP and used the existing Analytics audience segments for retargeting.

This integration saved Redbox time when creating, launching, and testing new segments; and it drove better performance due to access to granular audiences — all while reducing reliance on their busy IT department. Using Adobe Media Optimizer and Analytics segment targeting, Redbox achieved:

• A 30 percent lift in return on ad spend (ROAS) for retargeting campaigns,
• A 3x lift on ROAS for a specific campaign, and
• More than 8 – 10 hours/week of time saved.

Chegg: Using Multiple Data Sources to Effectively Reach High-Value Audiences
Insight from the programmatic process helped Chegg infer and expand its audience segments to improve returns and lower acquisition costs.

Understanding your audience segments is a key factor in programmatic advertising. In the ‘old days’, Chegg — an online business that supplies textbooks, online tutors, internship opportunities, and one-on-one help for students — bought advertisements from specific websites where they assumed students would be. They didn’t have insight into the return on investment they would receive, and they didn’t know what they were getting from their advertising buys. Insight from their programmatic ad-buying solution helped Chegg infer the data they needed.

Chegg wanted to figure out the type of content they had on the site and where students were actually going. For example, Chegg was interested in knowing whether students were searching for and viewing a particular science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) book as well as other relevant information about the students.

Next, Chegg looked at STEM students and student grade levels. They identified both of these characteristics as being worth a certain amount of investment. However, it wasn’t until they merged the information that they actually started finding real value. They found that, while a freshman is worth about 1.5 times the lifetime value of a student, and a STEM student is worth about 25 percent more than that, the group that holds both freshmen and STEM students was found to be worth two times as much — greater than the sum of its parts.

They can now put their different groups into a ROAS curve to determine who they should be spending money on first. Overall, they saw a 22 percent drop in acquisition costs (and when you’re spending millions of dollars in this space, that’s a huge savings). Even better, the students they are targeting have the potential to give them twice the amount of returns or loan-to-value (LTV).

eHealth: Data Transparency and Integrated Ad Stack Drives Smarter Decision Making
In early 2015, eHealth — the nation’s first and largest private health-insurance exchange — overhauled its remarketing program. Since only a small percentage of people actually convert on their first visits, remarketing is very important to them. To achieve this, eHealth needed to reengage with its customers and rekindle the health-insurance conversation.

Prior to working with Adobe, eHealth was using five different platforms for display advertising. This resulted in reporting challenges such as duplicate counting of conversions, network competition in bidding, and discrepancies on audience and performance reporting. By using a combination of Adobe Analytics, Adobe Media Optimizer, and Adobe Audience Manager, eHealth has a more unified view of its audience and reporting across its media. All of the pixeling throughout the site is done uniformly, so activity is being recorded equally, allowing eHealth to drill down into its audience and form a more granular definition of who they are.

As an example, they’ve taken a look at their “quoter” audience. A quoter is someone who has visited the site and looked at various health-insurance plans but hasn’t actually purchased a plan. By knowing their customers, they’ve been able to segregate quoters who are moms versus dads. This allows them to serve up messages and creative that would appeal more to each audience segment, resulting in higher conversions.

In the end, this newfound transparency into audiences and media buying resulted in efficiencies and cost savings, whereby, eHealth reduced media-buying costs (CPMs) by $.22 during their last open-enrollment period and beat their cost-per-acquisition (COA) target by 19 percent.

To learn more or watch the full session, visit our Adobe Summit 2016 archive and look for session 201 under the Programmatic Advertising track.

The post Programmatic Display: Make the Most of Your Data With Today’s Technology appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.

from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/advertising/programmatic-display-make-data-todays-technology/

Digital Transformation: Invest in Your People to Get There Faster

Customer-led digital experiences are fast becoming the expectation — leaving many marketers feeling under-equipped to master the evolving digital landscape and struggling to keep up with the pace of change. Digital transformation — and even more so, digital innovation — requires powerful capabilities on the technical side; what’s often overlooked is that a primary driver and accelerator of these changes actually comes from the people side.

Your employees and their digital skills are the keys to your digital transformation. Do you have the right talent and capabilities to deliver the future?

Why Now?
There are two primary reasons why investing in your employees’ skills should be a major focus:

• First, digital transformation is complex, especially when it’s driven by rising customer expectations and desires for innovative customer experiences. If we’re talking about the macro-market perspective, it’s happening constantly in waves and gradients — and at this rate, it’s also increasing in pace. To achieve your desired results faster, your company will need to train and develop your digital marketers regularly.
• Second, high-performing employees naturally want to increase their values as well as skills in their fields. The shortage of skilled digital talent in the industry means it’s increasingly expensive to hire and retain top talent — in other words, if your company cannot provide opportunities for employees to gain further skills and knowledge in their fields, you have to ask, “What’s stopping them from going elsewhere?” Top-notch employees want to improve in the same way that top-notch companies do.

So here’s a 3-step solution for managing the human side of your digital transformation, because ultimately, it will be your customers who win.

Step 1: Assess Your Team to Determine Whether You Have a Digital Marketing-Skills Gap
You’ll likely find that your marketing team has a wide range of skills and capabilities. A one-size-fits-all approach rarely works, and you’ll want to maximize any training investment to target the most critical skills. Look for comprehensive digital skills assessment tools to help gauge your strengths and potential weak spots. Further, seek flexible resources that offer a range of learning options aligned to current industry standards and best practices.

Step 2: Find a Trusted Partner
In a recent study by MIT and CapGemini, 90 percent of surveyed companies reported a lack of essential digital skills. Further, 77 percent considered those missing skills a key hurdle in their digital transformations. This and other industry reports all confirm that you need a well-developed and informed approach for both handling the fast-paced evolution of digital technologies and retaining your best digital talent. This is one of the biggest reasons that Adobe partnered with General Assembly on our Digital Marketing Accreditation program — their training expertise and road-tested reputation contributed to the development of a digital learning program that’s not only effective, but also highly credible. Accreditation from Adobe delivers a digital learning experience, offering foundational modules spanning the digital marketing and media landscape, social and content strategies, cross-channel campaign orchestration, data and analytics, mobile marketing, and customer engagement.

Step 3: Make Digital Learning Part of How You Operate
The most effective marketers will supplement their technical capabilities with robust skills development programs that help them learn to attain maximum value from their digital tools, using digital best practices that drive business performance. Upskilling your employees should never really stop because companies should always be evolving and innovating. Digital transformation is, unfortunately, not achieved on a weekend retreat — it should be embedded in your company’s learning practices. The most successful programs will emphasize structured learning opportunities, access to new content and resources, and on-the-job experience development.

Accelerate Your Digital Transformation
Whether your company has rolled out a cutting-edge mobile experience, is trying to bridge the physical and online experiences, or is in the early days of trying to figure out just where to start, successful CMO’s all have something very important in common — highly competent people who can deploy, maintain, and capitalize on their digital capabilities.

Marketers need not just technical skills, but also firm understandings of the business practices that drive successful digital experience-led businesses. Look for learning resources that are fresh, credible, and current, reflecting the continuously changing digital landscape. When your employees are able to access learning, build their capabilities when needed, and apply them in real time — both you and your customers win.

The post Digital Transformation: Invest in Your People to Get There Faster appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.

from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/web-experience/digital-transformation-invest-people-get-faster/

Where do you want me to click?

Five Ways to Maintain a Healthier Email List

Maintaining a healthy email list is critical to the success of any email program. In a recent Only Influencer’s blog, Karen Talavera of Synchronicity Marketing reminds us that “the gold is in your list,” and while that may be true, today’s consumers often use multiple email addresses. In addition to their primary addresses, they may have one dedicated to marketing messages, one to work, another to school, and even shared family accounts. Not only are they managing a personal inbox that’s overflowing, but also multiple inboxes — most of which are probably overflowing too.

Nevertheless, consumers are still enamored with email. According to an Adobe study, consumers admit to spending up to six hours a day checking emails. It’s still the workhorse of digital marketing and the preferred way marketers reach their consumers. Here are some helpful hints for ensuring that you are able to reach and maximize investment of the “golden nuggets” in your list:

1. Acquire Email Addresses Legitimately
Ensure subscribers want to hear from you. Before you send any emails, be certain that the way you’re obtaining addresses is legitimate. Don’t buy lists or append email addresses to other data you may have on your customers. According to best practices — and, in some cases, the law — it’s necessary to secure express consent from everyone you send emails to. Sometimes, it’s best to send an email to confirm opt-in email addresses to ensure the customer intended to subscribe to your emails. A few days ago, I signed up to win a trip to Jackson Hole through a promotion that one of my favorite brands was running. Two days later, I received an email dedicated to young, hip fathers. I unsubscribed immediately. I’m definitely not their target audience. Ensuring from the beginning that the subscribers on your list actually want to receive your email is the best way to maintain a healthy and clean list.

2. Remove Bounces as They’re Happening
Monitor bounce logs carefully, and when an email does hard bounce, remove it immediately. Don’t make the mistake of repeatedly trying to send it in hopes it will successfully deliver. Set your system appropriately so that, after one hard bounce, you no longer send to that address. If you’re unsure of your email service provider’s bounce policies, check with your deliverability team.

3. Eliminate Invalid Addresses
Consider investing in third-party technology. Identifying and eliminating invalid addresses — meaning, those that do not exist and will not deliver — before you send emails to them is a key step in maintaining a healthy email list. The best time to do this is at the time of acquisition or immediately after. When integrated at point of sale or on a website, users can catch their mistakes and update them while they are still engaged. Keep in mind that this doesn’t excuse you from removing bounces or sending opt-ins — it’s simply another tool in the box. If you’re afraid of damaging your reputation — let’s say that you acquired addresses through point of sale, for instance — identifying invalid emails can help. The good news is that a number of tech companies are there to help you do it right. Reach out to your deliverability team for recommendations on the best available services.

4. Pay Attention to Inactive Subscribers
There’s a host of reasons why subscribers may suddenly become inactive, and it’s not uncommon for people to be engaged with a brand one day and not the next. Maybe they’ve purchased that one product they were looking for and no longer need a relationship with your brand. Whatever the reason, your emails are no longer relevant. Inactive subscribers hurt your list. They’re not engaging, they’re not opening or clicking, and you’re sending to them without purpose. At best, you’re junking up their inbox — but at worst, you could be damaging your brand’s reputation or your relationships with consumers.

How do you manage inactive subscribers for a healthier email list? While the solution is different for everyone, the rule of thumb is that you should reduce the frequency of emails sent to subscribers who haven’t engaged with your brand for 6 to 12 months. Determine the level that’s appropriate by asking someone who is familiar with your program such as an account manager or deliverability team. Use data to segment those audiences through other channels or to place them into different communications from your day-to-day sends.

5. Look for Reengagement Opportunities
Of the many ways to draw new interest from inactive subscribers, one is simply to ask. Send a straightforward email asking subscribers whether they still wish to receive communications from you. Let them know that — for their benefit — if they don’t opt back in, you will remove them. Invite them to opt down through a preference center or try sending new messaging. If you’re still not achieving engagement, consider communicating with users through other channels such as sending direct mail pieces that drive them to a local store or an online action or connect with them through targeted, social advertising. Testing is a key part of the process. Test everything — from the subject line to the closing and beyond. There’s opportunity to encourage reengagement; you simply need to figure out what works for specific segments. However, at the end of the day, it is okay to say goodbye to subscribers who no longer want to receive your emails. They’ll only produce diminishing results on your list and are no longer golden nuggets.

Final Word
Too often, I’ve seen brands get in trouble by trying to reengage with very old lists, purchasing lists, or by sending blindly to subscribers who are not engaging. If your messy list needs a deep clean, chances are there’s an in-house fix that allows you to look at what you’ve been doing end to end to both identify and prevent further mistakes. Analytics, combined with an integrated customer profile, allows you to see how your subscribers are engaging with you across channels and how best to engage with them. Use data to drive meaningful conversations and have a warmup process in place for new subscribers. Keep it legitimate, eliminate invalid emails, and pay attention to inactive subscribers for a healthy, robust email list that’s sure to deliver.

The post Five Ways to Maintain a Healthier Email List appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.

from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/email/five-ways-maintain-healthier-email-list/

Data Analysis Can Help You to Embark on New Frontiers and Generate Fresh Ideas

In the field of research and data analysis, it is a well-known phenomenon that the outcome of almost any study is usually within the bounds of the investigators’ assumptions and expectations. This researcher bias has affected data collection and analysis since humans began collecting data about their environments, and it affects the data selected, sometimes resulting in less reliable conclusions.

It is human nature to “go with the flow” and sometimes take the path of least resistance, accepting time-honored observations in our fields or societal trends as near absolutes. But, with the mountains of digital data available today about billions of transactions and customer behaviors, it may be possible to see beyond assumptions into new vistas.

I ran into this idea head on while researching a very sizeable sample of more than 600 billion visits to banking websites and apps between January 2015 and March 2016. In addition to the analysis, Adobe Digital Insights surveyed 1,000 US consumers regarding their online financial planning and online-banking behaviors.

One thing I expected to find was the correlation between credit applications and interest rates. A common understanding in the banking industry is that, as interest rates fall, credit demand increases and vice versa. This has been the classic assumption for years.

However, that is NOT what I found. Rather, it was clear from the data that credit appetite in the US is not primarily driven by interest rates. It was pretty clear that there was a strong seasonal component to credit applications with a significant spike during the Christmas holiday season.

Now, the average consumer might say, “Well, of course.” However, the data analyst might say, “Well, that flies in the face of time-honored assumptions.” In fact, I suspect that this trend has been going on for quite some time, but it is only in the last couple of years since we have been gathering the huge amounts of digital analytical data that this trend could be clearly seen.

One approach would be to ignore this and continue with traditional thinking. However, we live in a very new world now where digitally sophisticated consumers with multiple mobile devices expect instantaneous, personalized, and relevant experiences whenever they go online. If they don’t get those experiences, they associate those disappointing outcomes with the brand’s products and services, and they will likely look elsewhere.

Another choice would be to look at this revelation as a powerful marketing opportunity to increase customer service and the value of your service. For example, I noticed that leading up to the holiday season, credit applications increase meanwhile approvals decrease. It makes sense that, as more people apply, there will also be more applicants with less credit worthiness.

What a great opportunity! How about coming up with a marketing campaign for your organization (could be financial, travel, etc.) that offers — during the summer months — credit monitoring or credit-repair services in proactive preparation for customers’ needs a few months down the road? If you are a lending institution, you could take last year’s list of applicants who didn’t receive what they were hoping for and craft a series of service offerings to help them achieve their objectives this year. Campaigns like these would appeal to today’s customer who is always on the lookout for relevant, personalized experiences.

The message I got from this was profound: Don’t be afraid to take risks, push the envelope, and look at data in a new way — especially if it challenges the current assumptions in your industry. And, don’t be discouraged if your organization is not quite ready to take the plunge in the new direction you are suggesting. Awareness is spreading that banks and financial institutions in the United States are behind other countries with regard to adopting mobile technology and building robust, great experiences to meet customer demands. Ultimately, any business that wants to survive will have to undergo a digital transformation — or become the victim of the easy SWIPE a potential customer will make to reach your competitor instead.

The post Data Analysis Can Help You to Embark on New Frontiers and Generate Fresh Ideas appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.

from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/analytics/data-analysis-can-help-embark-new-frontiers-generate-fresh-ideas/

WCEU Love & and a discount on all Yoast products!

Mobile-App Analytics Are the Key to Successful App Optimization

Some estimates say that as many as 60 percent — over 400,000 — of the apps in Apple’s App Store have never been downloaded even once! And, in a study conducted on data from over 125-million mobile phones downloading apps from the Play Store, the average app loses 77 percent of its users within three days after it’s installed. On top of that, 90 percent of the users stop using the app after a month, and only five users keep using any given app.

There is a clear need for app developers and marketers to come up with better apps and better ways to monitor their uses. They need to optimize their performances and capabilities.

While mobile app analytics can tell you a lot about what is happening with your app after the download, Forrester reported that only 46 percent of companies are using a mobile app analytics solution. This means that the rest (more than half!) can’t see what their customers are doing, primarily because they aren’t even bothering to watch. These companies are missing out on valuable conversations, relationships, and income, all because they lack data desperately needed to guide their business decisions — data that is readily available.

Following is some of the mobile app analytics data available today that can give you amazing insight into how your app is being used.

App-Acquisition Metrics
The mobile app marketer embeds campaign-specific tracking links in paid, owned, and earned media that can then be tied to the app once a user has downloaded and installed it. With that, they can determine which marketing activities lead to an app download and launch event. This gives the marketer the insight necessary to make informed decisions about how to adjust future acquisition and reengagement campaigns to drive download and launch rates.

App-Lifecycle Metrics
Insights into app behavior and customer preferences are critical if you are to understand whether your app is effective. Metrics such as app launches, crashes, days since last use, and average session length are just a few of the lifecycle metrics available. This data allows you to see patterns that could reveal why someone decreased his or her use of the app. With this information, you can encourage interactions, create loyalty, and drive conversions.

App-Store Data
Just knowing how many times your app was downloaded doesn’t help much. You can also discover the region, platform, category ranks, in-app purchases, royalties, rankings, and much more.

Cohort Analysis
The next step in app analysis, cohort analysis, looks at certain groups of users and follows their behaviors over time. You can infer the expected lifespan of the app, how upgrades affect engagement, and how early- versus late-adopter behaviors differ.

Location Services
One of the most powerful pieces of information that you have access to is your customer’s location, providing an unprecedented opportunity for personalization. You can help someone find a resource he needs or do location-based targeting using GPS and beacons. Sports stadiums and retail stores are exploring the power of beacons to deliver location-specific services to users.

Developing a great app is challenging, and you need data about how people are using it to assess its success and make it better. The key is measuring engagement, and mobile app analytics allow you to understand what factors attract your audiences to your content and provide you with opportunities to discover ways to deepen involvement.

It may sound cliché, but with the right mobile app analytics data, you can turn insight into action and understand what steps you need to take to create a great app.

The post Mobile-App Analytics Are the Key to Successful App Optimization appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.

from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/analytics/mobile-app-analytics-key-successful-app-optimization/

Choosing Your Facebook Advertising Method

Not sure where to begin with Facebook® advertising? A critical part of the digital marketing mix, brands with optimal ad strategies reap the benefits by having their messages seen by people who meet specific targeting criteria. However, with newsfeed ads, boosted posts, and more, implementing an effective advertising strategy can be daunting. Success depends, in large part, on choosing the right objectives and ad types that can be optimized toward conversion goals. How do you pick a Facebook advertising method that delivers? Here are some quick tips to help make sense of advertising on Facebook for fail-proof social-media marketing.

Align Goals With the Right Objective
Before creating an ad on Facebook, you’ll need to choose a specific “advertising objective.” Currently, there are 13 objectives to choose from, each designed to serve a different purpose. Think about what you want people to do when they see your ads. Are you looking to raise awareness for your brand, or do you want to drive more direct actions like website clicks or video views? Objectives are specific, and Facebook optimizes your ad according to the objective you choose. Be clear about what it is you’re looking to achieve and pick the right Facebook objective for the best results — whether it’s post engagement, website clicks, lead generation, video views, or any other objective!

Boosted Posts Are Optimized Toward Engagement
After picking an advertising objective, you still need to select a specific ad type. Boosted posts are one of the most popular ad strategies offered by Facebook — often, social-media managers think they are also a smart way to improve organic reach. After all, boosting a well-performing post means more eyes on your content, which should equal more clicks to your website and more conversions, right? Not necessarily. Boosted posts are optimized toward engagement (likes, shares, and comments) but not designed to promote actions such as filling out a form or downloading an e-book. If you want to drive specific actions, pick Facebook ad types that aim toward conversion goals.

A recent test, conducted by Adobe and Thermo Fisher Scientific, compared a few different ad types — a newsfeed ad versus a boosted post and a newsfeed ad versus a carousel ad — to see which type achieved better results for reach and engagement. For each test, simple ads were created using the same image, copy, targeted audience, and spend. Each ad ran for a seven-day period.

In the first test, the newsfeed ad had 101 percent more reach than the boosted post. The results were similar for impressions, with nearly 200 percent more on the newsfeed ad than the boosted post. On the other hand, since the boosted post is optimized for engagement, it’s safe to assume that it performed better than a newsfeed ad for likes, shares, and comments — and it did. The boosted post delivered 80 percent more engagements than the newsfeed ad. Bottom line? Make sure your objective is aligned with the ad strategy you choose. If increasing reach is your advertising objective, boosted posts may not be the best strategy.

Choose Ad Types That Optimize Toward Conversion Goals
In the test, the primary objective of the newsfeed ad was to drive traffic to the website, and a secondary objective was to fill out a form and make a purchase. With 3,000 percent higher website clicks than the boosted post, the newsfeed ad delivered. What’s more, once users arrived at the site, the ad accumulated 604 percent more page views and 100 percent more forms filled out over the boosted post.

When the carousel ad was tested against the boosted post, the results were similar. The carousel ad reached 81 percent more users than the boosted post, with 31 percent higher impressions. Unsurprisingly, the boosted post delivered 69 percent more engagements than the carousel ad. However, in this comparison test, the carousel ad achieved an incredible 1,400 percent increase for website clicks over the boosted post. For conversion goals (filling out a form, downloading, etc.), the results were 500 percent higher when the carousel ad ran. The takeaway? If you’re advertising on Facebook to drive specific results — whether capturing leads or making sales — choose the right objective from the beginning and then choose ad types that can be optimized toward conversion goals.

In Summary
There’s no magic bullet with Facebook advertising — the ads that drive results are always the best. However, if you define your business goals from the beginning, and choose objectives and ad types that align, it’s much easier to optimize toward specific conversion goals. With robust audience targeting and enhanced testing capabilities, Facebook is a powerful advertising platform and a smart way to secure a better return on your advertising investment.

Facebook® is a registered trademark of Facebook, Inc.

The post Choosing Your Facebook Advertising Method appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.

from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/social-media/choosing-facebook-advertising-method/

Point of Sale: Retail & Travel Weekly

This week’s articles include a view into five trends reshaping the shopping experience; an announcement from Facebook regarding combining videos, images, and text for organic posts; and how many retailers are looking for ways to identify users on mobile devices to provide better experiences.

• “5 Trends That Are Radically Reshaping Shopper Marketing” [AdWeek]: iBeacons, augmented reality, and the rise of virtual reality stand to have a significant impact on retail in the near future.
• “Facebook gives retailers more leeway to tell their stories” [Internet Retailer]: Facebook has opened functionality to retailers, allowing them to combine video, images, and text for organic posts.
• “Most Retailers Want to Know Who You Are” [eMarketer]: Many retailers are exploring ways to better identify individuals on mobile devices to give them better experiences.
• “What Grade Do Marketers Give Their Personalization Efforts?” [MarketingProfs]: A recent survey shows retailers are most satisfied with their personalization efforts in their mobile apps.
• “Shopping apps slim down, running risk of inhibiting experience” [Mobile Commerce Daily]: Retailers considering slimming down their apps should consider the impact it could have on the customer experience.
• “Before Advertising, Make Sure Pages Will Convert” [PracticalEcommerce]: Driving additional traffic to a page will not matter if the landing page and website are poorly designed.
• “In The Graveyard Of American Malls, Bandier Is Reimagining The Brick-And-Mortar Store” [Fast Company]: New retail concepts are emerging — such as hybrid stores — combining experiences with opportunities to purchase related items.
• “4 Charts That Illustrate the State of Mobile Travel App Bookings” [Skift]: Compared to last year, more people are feeling comfortable and booking through mobile channels.
• “Digital should serve the guest, not take over” [Tnooz]: Technology should be there to support the experience and support a brand’s digital reputation.

The post Point of Sale: Retail & Travel Weekly appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.

from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/news-and-resources/point-sale-retail-travel-weekly-58-14/

Getting Your Organization to Buy in to an Effective Testing Program

The success of your website launch is predetermined and can be quite accurately predicted based on the nature of your testing program. If you aren’t testing, you can pretty much expect trouble! True, it costs money and precious resources to test; so, how do you get your organization to buy in to having a robust testing program?

The Cloud Gives Us Tremendous Capability, Making Testing all the More Important
With cloud technology, it is possible for a large enterprise to have hundreds of websites, each with its own individual brand. Without a standardized infrastructure, it can be a recipe for disaster.

There was a major pharmaceutical company we worked with that had 300 websites coordinated by Adobe Experience Manager (AEM), with each site being its own individual brand. Their infrastructure wasn’t standardized. Sites were used by patients and doctors, and the development teams couldn’t keep up with the demands for changes. They cut corners, stopped testing and using best practices, and the platform became very unstable. They suffered from infrastructure sprawl, and there was no governance on the platform — everyone wanted everything immediately, so there wasn’t a willingness to test and validate the experience first.

Performance and the end-user experience suffered, and the high-quality code base provided by AEM was rendered ineffective. We straightened them out, but not before the launch was a massive failure.

Testing on Healthcare.gov didn’t start until six days before launch. An anonymous source close to the site’s development team said the project suffered from a “lack of an end-to-end business and technology vision for the project,” and that “the hardest part of any technology project is not the technology — it is the business process decisions, what is the system supposed to do and how it will it do it [sic].”

Get Your Organization Onboard Without the Pain of Failing First
Remember, you only get one chance to make a first impression.

1. A pilot test can reveal unforeseen challenges that might arise during implementation. Correcting problems before launch will be much cheaper than the expensive scramble that could ensue after launch when customers try to engage with and learn about your company and even make purchases.
2. During testing, you might learn that a change in strategy could result in increased sales and customer satisfaction, especially preferences within a diverse visitor and customer base.
3. Testing gives your teams opportunities to practice working together before launch, building important relationships and workflows.
4. Testing protects your brand. Customers will equate a lack of relevant engagement, errors, and downtime with your company’s image and ability to deliver its promises.
5. “If you’re struggling to communicate the value of testing to your management or fellow team members,” says Christine Perfetti, usability testing expert, “stop explaining the benefits and start demonstrating them. I’ve yet to see a test where the design team fails to gather some new piece of valuable information about the users’ needs.”
6. Help your organization understand that testing doesn’t have to be a big deal. Start with three or four users and begin gathering data.
7. Alleviate the fear that testing will disrupt schedules because it could drive major design changes before launch. Rather, make testing part of your company culture — and do it from the beginning — testing every module and every integration as part of the normal workflow.

Testing all aspects of how customers connect with your company — the customer journey — ensures that you have thought about and understand your customers’ needs. Customers today are digitally sophisticated and demand a high level of performance from the sites they choose to patronize. You have less than 15 seconds to convince your customer to stay at your site — and your competitor is just a quick finger swipe away!

The post Getting Your Organization to Buy in to an Effective Testing Program appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.

from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/web-experience/getting-organization-buy-effective-testing-program/

Do’s and don’ts in SEO copywriting

Do Your Testing Programs Help Unearth “Eureka” Moments? They Should!

From gravity to relativity to radiation, each of the world’s great scientific discoveries started with an inspired idea. These ideas were tested in a series of experiments based on the scientific method, culminating in eureka moments when the scientists triumphantly announced their discoveries to the world.

Marketers experience similar joy when they find insights that will boost sales or other key business metrics. Luckily, you don’t have to hire a scientist or wait for serendipity to strike to make these discoveries. Just as scientific discoveries are results of deliberate experimentations following established principles, marketing discoveries can be unearthed in similar fashion. Recent technological advances have made it possible to perform online tests in real time with real data based on an unlimited array of factors in the user experience. Here are five steps to finding your eureka moment.

1. Make Smart Guesses
Discovery starts with a hypothesis. This is sometimes described as an educated guess, but it is really an idea based on observation and possibly mixed with some conjecture. Modern analytics solutions make it possible to examine real-time data in detail to find patterns to form the basis of a test. Machine-learning algorithms can help to refine these even further, so you are starting with ideas that have high potentials. Your hypothesis will have extra value when it is tied to business goals and performance metrics.

2. Fire Up the Lab Equipment
A scientist’s lab is equipped with balances, centrifuges, and many other devices. Your digital lab is equipped with many tools too, all housed in your nearest computer. These tools are in the form of tests. Here are the tests — in order of complexity — that are available for you:

• A/B: Tests two versions of a single digital experience
• A/Bn: Tests unlimited versions of a single digital experience
• Multivariate: Simultaneously tests alternative elements of a digital experience to find the best combination
• Multichannel: Tests different aspects of the customer journey across channels
• Targeted: Tests different versions of content targeted to various audience segments

As you become more skilled with these tests, you may have many of them running at the same time. It is important to implement safeguards, such as setting a priority or targeting criteria, to prevent a visitor from being in more than one test. Otherwise, you risk your ability to clearly interpret results.

3. Analyze Results and Perform Follow-Up Testing
Scientific theories are not based on one experiment; similarly, you cannot base a campaign or change in marketing strategy on one test. For instance, you may find that putting a video on the homepage increases retention, which was your original hypothesis. But, did you test different videos to determine which would have the greatest effect? Did you test where on the page to place the video? Do you know that this increase in retention will improve business performance? All of these questions can form the basis of additional testing to optimize the original result.

4. There Is No Such Thing as Failure
The only potential failure is the failure to learn something. You can learn from all of your results, especially unexpected results and results that disprove your initial hypothesis. These results often spur deeper thought and investigation, and as a result, the new tests you run may surface insights that you wouldn’t have found otherwise.

Similarly, even if you have a clearly positive result, it may not be for the reason/s you predicted. Do more testing to be sure that you have learned what really caused the success. You succeed every time you learn something — no matter what the test result is.

5. Broadcast Your Story
The best testing program in the world will fail without communication and collaboration. It starts before the program begins by getting buy-in from key leadership. After the tests, follow up with communications explaining the reasons for doing the test, the goals and metrics, and the results. Be sure to translate results such as “a 4 percent lift” into easily understood and appreciated monetary terms. Send these results to a wide audience to generate more interest in your testing program.

This blend of tools and strategies will lead you to many marketing “eureka!” moments. For more detail, additional examples, and customer success stories, download our free report, Finding Eureka: The New Science of Online Testing.

The post Do Your Testing Programs Help Unearth “Eureka” Moments? They Should! appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.

from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/analytics/testing-programs-help-unearth-eureka-moments/

Make Programmatic-Ad Buying Work for You With Dynamic Creative Optimization

Dynamic creative optimization (DCO) has evolved to become a powerful force in online advertising. It has pushed the limits of personalization technology, and with today’s audience demanding relevant personalization that is in context and as close to real-time as you can get, it is a force to be reckoned with.

As with all personalization strategies, you must first overcome your audience’s disappointment with most personalization efforts to date. Research from the Economist Intelligence Unit in 2013 found that 70 percent of consumers feel “jaded” and view personalization efforts as “superficial” at best. If consumers feel well served and presented with relevant opportunities, they are much more likely to convert.

Properly done, your DCO efforts can result in huge upswings in conversions — and your potential customer feeling noticed and served.

True Personalization
True personalization is about taking an offline experience and leveraging it online and taking an online experience and leveraging it offline. From a technical standpoint, when a customer clicks on a stock-keeping unit (SKU), it becomes a valuable search term. It engages with content and is combined with everything you know about that individual from your data as well as from 2nd- and 3rd-party data sources. All that information has to be leveraged into the next step: creating the programmatic-advertising pieces that will be relevant to your customers’ needs and visible at their subsequent online destinations.

The Programmatic Site-Retargeting (PSR) Journey
For example, if a potential customer visits your website to look at a particular ring in the jewelry department, chances are that he or she is shopping for that kind of ring. You might then bid high with a PSR ad broker to place ads for that product on the next websites that customer visits. If you discover that the customer has shopped around on other sites for that kind of ring, you might even bid higher. Check out this infographic about the real-time bidding process.

Make Information Technology (IT) Your Creative Partner
Creating that programmatic ad is a process that generates a creative layout with a dynamic structure in which the relevant elements are pulled in. You must have an effective partnership with your IT department to bring all these pieces together. Every SKU has to be tagged to a website element, and content feeds have to be coordinated. In some cases, you may choose to have a different landing page — that has the look and feel of the programmatic content — for each ad. This all takes coordination with IT.

But, when all these puzzle pieces come together, the results can be quite dynamic, increasing efficiency and reducing creative costs across all stages of the funnel for any vertical market.

Drive Higher User Engagement
With dynamic creative optimization, advertisers have a powerful tool to seamlessly build, personalize, and deliver creative assets in real-time to drive higher user engagement and conversion rates across devices. Some of the benefits include:

1. Decreased time to market, with significant creative-cost savings, for new creative elements;
2. Personalized creative, instantly and dynamically;
3. Assistance with iterating and optimizing variations at scale — you can continually test different strategies;
4. Targeting of the full funnel at every stage of your customer’s journey:
   – Awareness: prospecting (creative optimization), geographic/weather targeting, lifestyle interest, demographic data, business attributes;
   – Consideration: homepage retargeting, partner/publisher data, email offers, and interactions;
   – Conversion: product-page retargeting, offer-page retargeting, buying-process abandoner retargeting;
   – Loyalty: loyalty-/member-page retargeting, customer-relationship management (CRM) data/customer targeting;
5. Unification of programmatic-ad technologies;
6. Delivery of a unified customer experience.

The expansion of programmatic-ad buying and optimization is giving agencies and customers better insight into, and control of, campaigns and the ability to target and optimize like never before. Take advantage of automated ad buying with people-based marketing practices and make dynamic creative optimization work for you.

At our Summit 2016 session, S209: Dynamic Creative Optimization: Smarter Engagement With Better Conversions, participants took a deep dive into programmatic-ad buying and dynamic creative optimization. Check out the session recording.

The post Make Programmatic-Ad Buying Work for You With Dynamic Creative Optimization appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.

from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/personalization/36187/

Adobe Digital Insights Turns Marketers On To Unexpected Insights In Expansive Data

Your data sets are holding unexpected insights
As you can imagine here at Adobe, across our marketing, document, and creative cloud offerings, we have some amazingly huge databases. And a few years ago we began wondering what those terabytes of data could tell us.

In 2012, we started actively mining our wealth of data, to discover trends and perspectives of interest to marketers, most of whom were (and still are) struggling to get ahead of what is happening in the digital marketplace. We wondered: Is there anything that would better prepare marketers for this very challenging and ever-changing new world?

The Adobe Digital Index Was Born
The Adobe Digital Index was born out of this idea. We started with aggregated and anonymized data from the Adobe Marketing Cloud and, since then, our team has grown tenfold. We now release over 100 reports a year. Since those early beginnings just four years ago we have expanded far beyond our original charter and have become the go-to source for the latest trends, insights and predictions on a wide variety of themes. Topics include ecommerce, mobile, video, social media and advertising—all of it gathered by mining data within the ever-expanding Adobe Marketing Cloud.

For All Marketers
As I look back, it is clear that the ADI reports and studies haven’t been just for digital marketers; they have been for all marketers. Nearly two-thirds of Americans have smartphones and, globally, there are over 2.6 billion smart phone subscriptions.

With adult users in the US spending 5.6 hours a day with digital media, and an average of 28 per cent of web traffic coming via smartphone (ADI Report, 2015), all marketing is now digital marketing.

What We Have Learned
Looking back at the amazing journey and evolution of ADI, we surprised ourselves with broadly applicable insights and predictive accuracy. It became clear that this wasn’t just marketing data. We can see that marketers can discover so much by looking at their data with new perspective. In particular:

1. The data you have in your marketing data sets probably has a much broader use than you think. Examine your data with fresh eyes and ask yourself how you might use that data in a different way than had been envisioned.
2. Look at your data sets and see where they could be applied beyond your marketing campaigns. Have other departments look at your marketing data and see if that data can illuminate the customer journey in ways you didn’t expect.
3. Think about data sets that you have previously looked at as stand-alone and, now, put them together side-by-side so you can notice patterns that might not have been apparent in a single data set. Look at ways to combine your customer data, inventory data, log data, search data, analytics, CRM data, session data, and the many other data sets you have access to, and think about unexpected ways you might merge them to gain new insights.
4. You don’t need massive amounts of data to do a meaningful analysis. Use what you have, but look at it from a different point of view. To quote my high school history teacher, “You gotta turn the ball and see what’s on the other side.”

Adobe Digital Index becomes Adobe Digital Insights
We are excited to see that ADI is filling an important role, but we know that, given the new data sources we’ve exposed over the years, we have a higher calling—to provide value beyond marketing, to global leaders, influencers, and even government leaders. It’s time to expand and to re-brand ourselves to more accurately reflect our evolution. In addition to bringing on more analysts, the Adobe Digital Index will now become known as Adobe Digital Insights (still ADI!) to reflect our quest for new opportunities to understand the impact of the digital world on modern life.

One way we will expand our focus is by including data from the Adobe Creative Cloud in our analyses. This is an exciting new realm that will, for the first time, reveal insights into the nature of creativity itself. And, most importantly, organizations will be able to understand how they can quantify the ROI of creativity!

ADI will investigate the conversations that creatives are having as they design content, study the images themselves, and look at how video is being consumed. We want to try to find out how the ways in which Photoshop and Illustrator are used can inform about broader trends. For example, do preferred colors and styles create moods and trigger economic trends? We don’t know where this will lead but, if experience tells us anything, the results will be illuminating.

Our team at Adobe Digital Insights looks forward to a bright future where we continue to provide ground-breaking content which helps everyone understand the digital trends that impact us all. In fact, I think it might be time for marketing pros to create their own, if I may be so bold as to coin some new marketing jargon, “Quantent Marketing” teams which capitalize on this vast new opportunity to inform through data. Please continue with us on this exciting journey at http://www.cmo.com/adobe-digital-insights.html.

The post Adobe Digital Insights Turns Marketers On To Unexpected Insights In Expansive Data appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.

from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/personalization/place-holder-for-adi-insights-rebranding-post/

DIY: Duplicate content check

LeBron, Steph, and Draymond Teach us About Corporate Relationships

First my apologies to Warriors loyals, as a Jazz fan I still can’t talk about the 1997 and 1998 finals. Suspensions, technical fouls, ejections, miss placed kicks, and emotions all ran high during the historic 7 game series between the now NBA champion Cleveland Cavaliers and the 2015 champion Golden State Warriors. The rematch of last years finals that saw super hero like series from LeBron James who averaged 36.3 pts, 11.6 rebounds, and 9.7 assists in the final 3 games of the series was everything I hoped it would be.

There were 3 specific moments in the finals that can be mirrored in the workplace.

1. Helping the enemy – Fourth quarter Game 7 – mid way through the fourth in a back and forth game Steph Curry falls to the floor after a hard pick. There is a timeout and LeBron picks Steph up and gives him a good game butt slap. In a back and forth game and series it would have been easy to just let a teammate pick him up, but LeBron showed that mutual respect between two modern day warriors. We all friends and potential enemies in both the workplace and those who are company deems “competitors”. When it all comes down to it we are all fighting for the same thing, a better life for ourselves and our families. Since becoming a father of my own I have definitely strived to be more of an example when it comes to working relationships with people that I may not like.
2. Mutual respect – Draymond vs. LeBron was the strongest personal rivalry I can think of since the Dennis Rodman vs Karl Malone days….anyone remember the WWE PPV Bash at the Beach? There were words, fights, suspesions, everything you could have wanted from two competitors, but when was all said and done Draymond found LeBron after losing and told him “Much Respect”. We all have strengths and weaknesses. You may not always like the people you work with, but showing respect will go a long way to strong production.
3. Jump back after losing – competitors don’t like to lose. They want to win every single game and Steph Curry is no different. After losing in the finals he said “The loss will fuel us”. He is moments removed from an emotional series where he had a less than normal Steph performance and he is already focusing on that next season and wanting to get back to the finals. When we get knocked down it should only fuel us and make us want to get to the next level, to work a little harder, and to turn a weakness into a strength.

I love basketball and always have since I was a kid counting down 3-2-1 buzzer beater shots in my backyard with my brothers. Some people may not like sports as much as me, but there is a lot of value that can be learned to those who look for it. I may have jumped on the Warriors bandwagon after my Utah Jazz failed to make the playoffs, but my respect for LeBron has grown immensely even if he is still 3 short of the all-time best.

The post LeBron, Steph, and Draymond Teach us About Corporate Relationships appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.

from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/digital-marketing/lebron-steph-draymond-teach-us-corporate-relationships/

Bridging the Gap Between Online and Offline Customer Experiences

Online marketing efforts have become highly sophisticated in recent years. In fact, the amount of data available to assess your customers’ online behaviors can often become overwhelming. But, what about all the data that’s available from your offline efforts? Your direct-mail campaigns, your call-center logs, and your point-of-sale (POS) systems offer data that’s too valuable to overlook.

Complete the Customer-Experience Picture.
If most of your marketing efforts are to serve your digital customers, you could be getting an incomplete picture of your customers’ experiences with your brand — and leaving many of them unserved. Here are a few ways to close the gap between online and offline customer experiences.

Be Consistent With Your Online and Offline Experiences.
It isn’t uncommon today for someone to see your ad on the side of a bus and then go online to find your brand. If they don’t see the same design and messaging online, your campaigns will be at odds, and your brand credibility will decrease. Consumers expect their online and offline experiences to be consistent.

Gain a Thorough Understanding of the Customer Journey.
Examining online behavior only tells part of the story and could even be misleading. You need an integrated customer profile that includes your customers’ online and offline transactions and behaviors. For example, tracking only online purchases will not reveal a high number of trouble calls made regarding the product or service.

Reinforce Proximity and Intimacy With Your Customers.
This could be as simple as adding the address and opening hours of a customer’s most frequently used store (based on geolocation and shopping habits) or pointing out the sections of a catalogue where relevant items might be found (based on declared interest or buying history).

Considering all your online and offline channels as part of the same brand-marketing strategy may be the most effective way to attract new customers and serve your existing ones. But, how can you accomplish this when your offline data is usually spread out on different systems and in different formats, often completely separate from online analytics? And, how can you deliver personalized content on offline channels when customer profiles are often fragmented? Start with a few of these tips.

• Understand the data you are currently collecting and the full range of capabilities on your offline channels. For example, there are numerous ways to track who responds to your direct-mail campaigns such as direct-mail tracking codes, custom 1-800 numbers, and personalized landing pages.
• Capture call-center data such as first-call resolution rates.
• Leverage your POS-system capabilities. Consider printing offers — perhaps, taking the customer to a personalized landing page — directly on receipts.
• Find out whether your inbound phone calls are coming from your digital offers. Does having your phone number on your website actually result in conversions? If you have multiple numbers, which one converts the best?
• If you have your website and phone number printed on direct-mail pieces, print ads, or outdoor advertisements, track how many web visitors and phone calls come from those sources.
• Is your brick-and-mortar store consistent with your online and offline assets? A kiosk could integrate your physical and digital experiences and collect customer preferences.

Armed with information about your customers’ preferences and behaviors, you’ll be able to create successful cross-sell, upsell, and loyalty programs by focusing on the customer instead of the channel. You will be able to create meaningful segments of your customer and prospect bases, increasing the likelihood that your offers will resonate and generate sales.

Achieve Optimal Results — and Your Marketing Goals!
Your efforts will be most efficient and result in the best ROI if you engage customers with automated, personalized experiences in both online and offline channels. Orchestrating data, offers, and channel execution based on customers’ interactions and preferences on an integrated platform will produce the best results.

Your goal is to go beyond marketing to individual channels, and instead, market to the individual — wherever, whenever, and however he or she needs it and at the very moment his or her need arises. Integrating your online and offline channel marketing efforts can bring you many steps closer to serving all your prospects and customers.

The post Bridging the Gap Between Online and Offline Customer Experiences appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.

from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/campaign-management/bridging-gap-online-offline-customer-experiences/

DIY: Test your mobile site!

Data Storytelling: Craft Meaningful Visual Stories That Drive Action

It is no secret that there is an overload of data in today’s world, often impeding the decision-making process for many brands. And analytics without decisions is a waste of the resources used to acquire these programs as well as a missed opportunity for ROI, innovation, and transformation. Resources, such as Brent Dykes’ Web Analytics Action Hero, are emerging to provide guidance for a drive to action.

Decision making requires emotion, according to brain science, and data stories act as the bridge between logic and emotion. Using stories, we build an emotional bond with our audience, accessing the brain on both the logical and emotional sides. Humans hear statistics, but we feel stories.

To communicate high-value, data-driven insights, analysts need stories. But, data storytelling is difficult. Read on to learn how to build a compelling story with the right blend of narrative, data, and visualization.

Narrative
The classic narrative structure has a beginning that sets the stage, a middle that builds to a climax, and an ending. In data storytelling, that structure is modified based on audience impact. In thinking about an audience’s goals first, start with the “ah ha” moment, the major finding or key insight that tells them why they should care. Then, give them some background on the current situation and demonstrate why they should believe you. Having set this hook, now you can show your work — just enough to create context and to make the connections that reveal the deeper insight. Finally, end with solutions and next steps.

Data
As analysts, we struggle with the dilemma of when to generalize and when to be detailed. Resolving this struggle requires understanding one’s audience and tailoring the presentation to their needs. Our job is to be knee deep in the noise and data, finding the insights among the false leads. When we report on these insights, audience members of different specialties are not as familiar with the data, so we need to help them catch up to our head start.

The analyst’s job is to summarize and deliver what an audience needs in a way that explains and does not merely describe. Our job is to eliminate the noise and detail that they don’t need and then add focus.

Visualization
There is a place for detailed written explanations but not in a presentation. You should be the one communicating — not the slide. In fact, you should go way beyond the slide; instead, interact with the individual pieces of a chart to tell the story in a way that explains the symbolized data.

Visuals don’t always have to be pie charts or bar graphs; they just have to be something that helps provide context, connects the pieces of the story, and moves that story forward. For example, a simple overlay of key statistics on the homepage may communicate meaning better than a customer flow diagram. Again, the tools we use to find the insights are not necessarily the same ones we use to explain those insights to others. Depending on what our audience needs and the point we’re trying to convey, we might display the data in a completely different way from how we arrived at the insight. We need to zoom in, give the data some focus — and most importantly, give it context.

When you bring together narrative, data, and visualizations, the synergy of these three clearly elucidates powerful insights that should spur decision and change. It shows that the Hopi people are right when they say, “Those who tell the stories rule the world.”

The post Data Storytelling: Craft Meaningful Visual Stories That Drive Action appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.

from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/analytics/data-storytelling-craft-meaningful-visual-stories-drive-action/

Digital Interfaces Make In-Store Shopping A More Personalized Experience

Over the past year, brick and mortar retailers have been pressed to find new ways to attract shoppers and bring relevance to the physical retail experience. In response, software and hardware providers have been pushing the boundaries of what can be accomplished in a physical store. One such example is Adobe, which has developed a new technology called the Adobe Experience Manager, a system used to personalize a customer’s experience using Adobe Marketing Cloud. The purpose of the technology is to create a continuous customer experience that allows anyone to walk into a store and have an immediate digital experience connected to the physical store. This is what Adobe emphasizes is important in becoming an “experience business,” which allows marketers to directly reach consumers like never before.

PSFK spoke with Director of Industry Strategy for the Adobe Marketing Cloud, Michael Klein, to learn about how data and technology are changing the way consumers shop.

How are traditional retailers adapting to the IoT era?

This is a very interesting time for retail because retailers are recognizing that they need to do something to differentiate themselves. The fine line between those who will succeed and those will who fail will be in the technology they implement, whether it is well-thought out or whether it’s used for its own sake.

Over 90% of retail in aggregates is still taking place in a physical store. The question that many retailers, especially the multichannel ones, are asking themselves is: how do I create balance between the brick and mortar stores, where historically I have seen the most of my business, and the data-gathering capabilities of the internet? With customers being connected more than ever before, what’s very much on top of our minds is where the customer is going, what his or her journey is like and the touchpoints of their interaction with the brand.

How can then the brands bring the technology to the stores effectively?

We are having a lot of conversations around the store associates and how we can empower them with the right data. The experience of visiting a physical store is still important for customers so we wanted to know how brands could differentiate themselves by providing a personalized experience. The answer we came up with was AEM screens as well as other tools available within the Adobe Experience Manager.

How can retailers better use the data available to them?

Through the Adobe Experience Manager, we are bringing transactional and traditional, demographic data and behavioral data to ensure a more personalized experience. For example, if you think about someone trying to redecorate their house — I understand their demographic, household’s worth, recent purchases, etc., so I can market to them better by suggesting other items they might be interested in. Thanks to a combination of demographic data, transactional data and behavioral information, we can create better customer journeys.

You have just mentioned the importance of anonymity, but how does that play into being constantly followed by advertisements with the use of cookies, etc.?

While we observe some instances of push marketing, we do believe that there needs to be anonymity built into the customer journey, allowing them to identify the moment that is appropriate for them to start that interaction. Whether you are a Millennial, Gen X, Baby Boomer or Golden Ager, our data shows that majority of consumers would like to enter a store anonymously. Typically over 70% of consumers do not want to be approached personally upon entry. However, once they are in the store and once they signal, either through raising their hand or engaging with a digital screen that they want assistance from the store associate, that’s where the ability to create a personalized shopping experience becomes a differentiating factor for many brands.

Where do you draw a line between being helpful to consumers and being too intrusive?

The line is gray, but for me the question that the brands have to ask themselves is: what is the value proposition for the consumers? If there is none or very little, then this is just a ploy, a one-way street to receive more information. Those retailers who are creating some quid pro quo or or some value to the consumers are going to receive better data and information that they can use to further personalize their marketing efforts.

This post originally appeared on psfk.com. 

The post Digital Interfaces Make In-Store Shopping A More Personalized Experience appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.

from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/web-experience/digital-interfaces-make-store-shopping-personalized-experience/

DIY: Optimize your browser cache

Measuring and Optimizing for Wearables: Take Your App to the Next Level

Wearables have come a long way since Dick Tracy’s two-way wrist radio or Maxwell Smart’s shoe phone. Such connected devices were once little more than fodder for comic strips and sitcoms; now they make up a serious line of mobile technology that requires serious measuring and optimization to enhance the way consumers interact with wearable tech.

By far, the most popular wearable is the smartwatch. Everything about smartwatches is changing the way brands approach mobile marketing. From their short interaction times — or micro-moments — to their simplistic navigation, wearables like the smartwatch are forcing app developers to think outside the box in an effort to enhance the customer experience.

Wearables also possess precious little real estate in terms of screen size, so if your app doesn’t resonate with customers, they are going to make room for something else. Let’s focus on how your brand can measure and optimize the customer experience across wearable devices by looking at one of the most popular wearables on the market: The Apple Watch.

Points of Visibility and Interaction for Your App
Before you can connect with your customers via a wearable app, you first must understand the different ways customers are going to see and interact with your app. While our example focuses on the Apple Watch interface, the following use case speaks to a process that would be applicable on other wearable devices as well.

• The Home Screen: Apps are found on the home screen, where placement occurs automatically once the app is installed on the mobile device. The home screen is used for multiple watch-app icons that can launch simple information screens or controls. It also presents a honeycomb layout where your app will be competing for attention with several other app icons. Here, value is low because an app on the home screen shows no signs of customer loyalty. In fact, your customers may not even know your app is there.
• Glance View: The Glances feature is used by swiping up from the bottom of the watch screen. This feature is used for single-screen information and controls. Because the Glances feature on compatible apps has to be manually enabled, the likelihood of your app being chosen is moderate. Enabling your brand’s app for Glances is crucial, because the business value for these interactions remains high.
• Complication: While complications may appear small, the business value is off the charts. Complications give users access to frequently used data directly from the watch face, meaning your brand has the potential to make an impression on your customers every time they check the time. The downside? Because of the limited real estate that’s competing with the clock, the weather, and other popular complications, the likelihood of placement is low.

Apple Watch: Analytic Tips
How can analytics help to improve the user experience across your wearables app?

• Capture How the Watch App Is Launched. Which app users are more valuable to your brand: users who launch the app from the complication or Glances, or users who launch from the home screen? Placing launch points — such as home screen, Glances, complication, or push notification — into conversion variables (eVar) can reveal how users are accessing your app.
• Glance View: Send Event and eVar of the Type of Content Shown. How many glance views are shown, and how many of those lead to launching your watch app? Do certain glance-view content types lead to more watch-app launches? This information can help your brand hone in on content that is connecting with users — while eliminating content that isn’t.
• Capture eVar to Distinguish the Watch App From the Phone App. This allows you to view reports and see the relationship between the phone app and the launch app. It can be accomplished with the a.RunMode context variable that is automatically generated from the software development kit (SDK), where “Application” = Phone, and “Extension” = Watch.
• Look for the Effects of the Watch App on the Phone App. Since watch apps and phones apps have a child/parent relationship, it’s important to keep users satisfied with both experiences. Positive examples include less app churn for phone users, more content consumed, and more time spent in app.

Apple Watch: Testing and Optimization Tips
Adobe Target and Target Recommendations can help brands test and optimize experiences across wearables to suggest content that will motivate your customers to respond.

• Use Target Recommendations for Best Use of Glance Views. You can use Recommendations to drive the message based on past activity. For example, a news app shouldn’t just show a generic top headline. Instead, a headline for a news subcategory — such as tech, sports, or finance — can be created based on the greatest time spent by the user on that subcategory within the phone app.
• Test What Content to Show Upon App Launch, Depending on Launch Source. If your app has specific content launched within complications, you can test on app launch to determine whether other content is more useful to the user. Adobe Target can be used for wearable-app optimization by testing and determining what would be the best experience to deliver to the user based on the launch source. For example, one medical app shows the next scheduled medication time within a complication. For them, a target — based on the launch of the app via a complication — is to test whether you show a list of potential food and drug interactions with the scheduled medicine, or you show a schedule of upcoming medication times.
• Use Rules-Based Targeting to Personalize What Content Is Shown When. Ensuring content is delivered at the right time for the user is key to wearable-app optimization. For example, a stock-trading app should display current quotes with trading options during market hours only; any other time devalues the information. Before and after trading hours, the app can be customized with daily stock news, wrap-ups, and insights regarding the day ahead, creating high value for app users around the clock.

Interested in learning how to analyze, test, and optimize your brand’s app for over-the-top (OTT) devices? Then be sure to check out my previous post.

The post Measuring and Optimizing for Wearables: Take Your App to the Next Level appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.

from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/mobile/measuring-optimizing-wearables-take-app-next-level/

Data Science for Dummies: Unleash the Beast Within

We aren’t all data scientists — but, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t roll up our sleeves and acquire the full potential of our Big Data and data-driven marketing initiatives. My colleague, John Kucera — a data scientist himself — explained in his recent Adobe Summit session that each of us are born with a natural curiosity for science. However, in the words of Carl Sagan, “Every kid starts out as a natural-born scientist, and then we beat it out of them.” That means it’s well within our reach to think, act, and behave like data scientists. As marketers, we just need to commit to reclaiming our scientific edge — to acting, thinking, and testing like scientists: data scientists.

Curious and Curiouser
It all starts with regaining our innate curiosity and skepticism: two keys that separate scientists’ — and data scientists’ — processes from the rest of the pack’s. Passionate curiosity should manifest itself as a relentless quest for the truth in each and every one of your marketing campaigns. Suppose you change your banner for winter coats, causing conversions to go through the roof — amazing! But, that doesn’t mean you should always have winter coats in that hero spot.

It’s the curiosity — what was it about this creative in this placement that drove that success? And, it’s also skepticism — was it simply your brilliant thinking that made this conversion magic happen? You must don your scientist hat, fire up those Bunsen burners, and work to uncover what contributed to this win, so that you can replicate the experience again and again.

Data science sits at an interesting intersection — ultimately, where marketing and science meet — an area in which we’re all razor focused on solving problems. That’s what these two fields have in common, and that’s where marketers can dive in and put their know-how, analytical thinking, and machine-learning sidekicks to great use.

Getting Started
Still feeling stuck about how to proceed? According to John, it starts with harnessing your curiosity, asking questions, exploring data, and developing hypotheses. Depending on your business and industry, some good questions to get you started might be:

• Which customers should I focus on, and which audiences can I influence?
• Where are these customers coming from? SEO? Mobile? Web? In-store?
• What changes can I make to influence their behaviors?
• Where should I make these changes? My website? Mobile experience? App? In-store?
• How much key performance indicator (KPI) improvement can I try?

The insights you find through exploring — usually done through a platform like Adobe Analytics — lead you to ideas for creating hypotheses. Need some examples?

• Students prefer hotel deals in which they receive one night free after staying three nights.
• People from the western United States prefer skiing to snowboarding.
• Visitors respond to ads on the left side of the page more than the banner ad.

Again, these are hypotheses based on what you’ve observed through your exploration of the data. There seem to be meaningful trends, but you must better analyze and interpret the data to see if that’s truly the case. To do that, we need to determine whether it’s causal or correlated. Because correlation is not causation. Commit that to memory — maybe even jot it down and pin it to your wall.

John shared an amazing example of this during his Summit session. Examining historical data, it was noted that, as temperatures around the world increased, the number of pirates sailing the seven seas decreased dramatically. Clearly, this dip in the global pirate population is causing global warming. Let me reiterate: correlation is not causation.

Acting Like a Scientist
Correlation is not causality. Healthy skepticism — and, yes, common sense too — is critical to the data-science process. But, marketers must also tap in to other key traits to be successful on the data-science front — even just as simple casual observers and fans.

1. Awareness of Precision
Every measurement has an amount of error associated with it. Your goal? Avoid overcommitting when your potential upside is overshadowed by the error tied to it. So, if committing lots of resources and budget will yield a two-percent improvement that comes with an error margin of five percent — don’t do it. That two-percent jump is just noise. But, if the error measurement is .05 percent, and your upside is two percent, shout it from the rooftops and get going!

With a bit of skepticism, of course, on scenarios that are so overwhelmingly positive.

So, how does one obtain those error measurements? One example is Adobe Target’s sample-size calculator, which lets you input data about visits to your site, conversion rates, and how long you want to run a test. Then, it spits back a rundown of how many items you can test and what level of error you’ll get as a result. Easy as that.

2. Establish Your Control
To excel in this arena, you need the mental discipline of a scientist — or, something close enough. Back to the winter coat example: let’s say you ran that promotion in the late fall when people really needed jackets. You had a prominent banner on the homepage touting an amazing brand of coats, and you saw enormous conversion rates.

But, you are a scientist. And, you are a skeptic.

Without a control, it’s hard to say how meaningful that promotion was. But, with a control — maybe one group who is not shown the coat promotions — you’ll be able to start analyzing what’s really going on. Maybe the promo did make all the difference, and people who weren’t exposed didn’t convert anywhere near as much. Or, perhaps, people just bought coats — it was November, after all.

3. And (again) — SKEPTICISM
Ironically, if you are skeptical enough of the data and how it was collected, you gain a deeper trust of the data as it passes your tests. This allows you to trust counterintuitive results and use them to your advantage. Once I see that this promotion drove these results — thanks to having a control, establishing an error margin, and testing other possibilities — I trust that this campaign moved the needle, and I can start rolling out additional elements confidently. Because when you do — ultimately — trust the data, you can reap benefits in a big way.

Let Technology Be Your Data-Science Surrogate (But Take the Credit Yourself)
Again, you don’t have to be a data scientist — after all, you’re a marketer, aren’t you? But, as we’ve discussed, that doesn’t mean you can’t use data science to be a better marketer. Adobe Marketing Cloud offers built-in data science, including predictive analytics, audience discovery, and of course, Adobe Target’s statistics-driven decision engine that powers website personalization such as recommendations. Together and individually, these solutions take the heavy lifting and much of the time-consuming pieces out of testing your hypotheses, looking at thousands of correlations instantly, based on historical and real-time inputs. By automatically personalizing content to visitors, these systems can improve conversions or revenue with machine learning that discovers correlations between visitor properties and responses.

And, above all, trust your autopilot. Yes, skepticism is important, but it’s also essential to let your machine partner optimize and personalize — without your backseat driving. That might be much easier said than done, depending on how you’ve tackled personalization in the past, but worth it.

Your next step? Focus on reinvigorating your natural curiosities so you’re not only asking why something’s happening, but also unleashing your inner scientist to explore, hypothesize, test, and optimize. Be smart and be scientific in your approach — an approach powered by precision, an emphasis on the control, and of course, healthy skepticism. Automation can take some of the heavy lifting and self-doubt out of the process, provided you can trust your sidekick.

When the pieces come together, it’s powerful — and you don’t even need to be a data scientist to realize some serious end results. Just roll up your sleeves and tap into your inner scientist — he’s definitely kicking around in there, waiting to be unleashed on your next marketing initiative.

The post Data Science for Dummies: Unleash the Beast Within appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.

from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/analytics/data-science-dummies-unleash-beast-within/