Are You Really Measuring What Matters in Social Media?

Measuring social media’s impact on your business is critical. Yet, identifying the right metrics and tracking and analyzing social media’s impact can be challenging.

In the early days of social media, when measurement was new and available data was sparse, most businesses relied exclusively on so-called “vanity metrics” to quantify success. Classical engagement — the number of “followers” or “likes” that social media channels collected — was the primary metric considered. Fast-forward a few years, and strategists had quickly realized they needed more informative metrics connected to meaningful key performance indicators (KPIs) that reflected their business objectives. They needed to determine social media’s impact on the bottom line to demonstrate social ROI.

Today, vanity metrics have a bad rap because they do not have a direct tie to revenue. Traditional vanity metrics include Facebook “likes,” Twitter “followers,” and “page views” or “unique visitors” for blog posts. While obsessing over the number of Facebook likes you collect won’t necessarily win over a buying customer, vanity metrics do have their place when used alongside other metrics.

Following are some thoughts regarding the role of vanity metrics and how aligning traditional engagement metrics with more strategic business metrics can provide the insight you need to make informed decisions about your social media strategy.

Aligning Social Media Vanity Metrics with Business Metrics — and Achieving Results
Successful social media measurement focuses on the KPIs that are linked to business objectives, with vanity metrics playing a role in rounding out the big picture. Is Facebook growing at the same rate as Twitter? How is the community responding to different strategies and different types of content? Insights from vanity metrics can help identify whether organic strategy is working or it’s time to implement a larger paid strategy across channels. Bottom line? Understand how to use them to complement KPIs, and you’ll know what’s moving the needle for you.

How to Make Vanity Metrics Work for You
Let’s look at a few metrics and the insights they can provide.

1. Focusing on Followers
You spend a lot of time and money building up your following across the multitude of channels and networks. If you monitor your follower growth over time, it will be invaluable in helping you understand what is working when it comes to community growth.

Is your organic growth picking up or slowing down? Many factors influence growth rates, but by tracking follower growth, you can pick up on revealing patterns in your data. Does certain content cause sudden drops in your number of followers? Are you reaching the right people? Digging deeper into the demographics of your followers (on platforms through which that data is available) will allow you to determine whether your followers really represent your target demographic.

Does your brand have too many accounts? Comparing growth rates on multiple accounts may allow you to assess less-active or compelling accounts and make decisions about whether account consolidations or additional paid strategies would be beneficial. It’s also important to look at other metrics to evaluate whether stagnant accounts are still performing well in other aspects such as engagement or click-through rates, traffic, and conversions.

2. Evaluating “Likes”
Analyzing customer engagement can be one of the most important ways to gain insights into your content strategy as well as your followers. Of course, all those shares, video views, and comments should yield a positive ROI for your business; however, if you know what type of content works best for your audience on each channel, it will help determine your investment strategy.

Do people “like” your content but not share it? Not all interactions are created equal, and some are definitely more valuable than others. Categorizing your content by media type, subject matter, or objective will allow you to look at which category drives the most bang for your buck.

Do your videos receive a lot of views but low completion rates? Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn now auto-play videos by default. This makes it rather challenging to analyze video performance. One way to look at it is through completion rates rather than total video views. Which videos compel your followers to stop scrolling and watch long enough to reach that all-important call to action and link?

Is there a correlation between the drop in followers and the content you published that day? Sudden follower drop can be as insightful as follower growth. Understanding the correlation between your followers who are bailing out and the particular types of content you are showing or your posting frequency can help to ensure you keep those fans you worked so hard to attract.

3. Analyzing Page Views
On the surface, page views — counting the number of “hits” your webpage or blog gets — is another vanity metric. No, by itself, it will not reveal how your content on the page is moving the needle for your business. For insight like that, you will need to explore not only what happens further down the conversion path, but also the contribution of the page view to the desirable user behavior on the site. However, using page views alongside smart segmentation and a few additional metrics will help you assess the quality of the page’s content.

Does some of your blog content attract ongoing traffic while traffic to other pages tapers off quickly? This could either indicate that some pages are better optimized for search engines (look at your persistent traffic sources!), or that some content is compelling enough for people to continue sharing (check out your social shares on various platforms). It could also indicate that some content types are more relevant to your audience, so grouping your pages by content type or topic, and then assessing average lifespan for each, may give you insight into what you should focus on in the future.

How many of your page views were “bounces?” If a visitor landed on the page but did not interact with any content or visit a different page, he or she may have found the page content irrelevant or not known how to navigate to content that may be of interest. Segmenting your bouncers according to devices used may shed some light on whether your pages perform well on mobile devices or have loading issues on some browsers.

What is the best referring channel? Do people who are visiting from different sources behave differently? Perhaps one source yields more bounces than average, and a different source drives more conversions down the line. Segmenting traffic can help you fine-tune content that is targeted toward different customer segments and identify where your target customers roam free.

A Multi-Tiered Approach to Measurement
We know there’s value in social media marketing, but being equipped with the right tools to demonstrate how and why has never been easy. With only 15 percent of today’s marketers able to demonstrate the quantitative impact social media has on their businesses, it’s clear that measuring what matters is tough. Business metrics tied to objectives may be seen as more strategic, and they are certainly instrumental in showing how social media is creating value overall. But, let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater just yet — vanity metrics are useful for uncovering the reasons behind trends. And, when used in conjunction with business-oriented metrics, they can offer powerful insights into the details necessary for fine-tuning larger strategies at a tactical level.

The post Are You Really Measuring What Matters in Social Media? appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.

from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/social-media/really-measuring-matters-social-media/

How to create the right meta description

The Key Ingredients to Make or Break a Mobile App Personalization Team

By now, you are probably well aware that mobile app personalization is the wave of the future. Customers are using mobile apps now more than ever before — to check bank statements, make purchases, access social media, catch Pokémon, and so much more. It’s 2016, and mobile app personalization is even more important this year than it’s been in previous years. Nowadays, most customers expect businesses to provide optimized experiences — every single time. To achieve your mobile app vision, you need to have the right people on your team. What ingredients are crucial to building a high-performing, mobile app personalization team; and how do those ingredients interact with one another to drive results?

Building Your Team
To create personalized, mobile app experiences for your customers, it’s imperative that you have the following invaluable people on your team:

1. A Data Analyst or Expert
First and foremost, you need a data analyst or expert. This person will analyze the data for patterns to determine where the most fertile opportunities for personalization exist. How? By prioritizing segments (or customers) and anticipating what those segments want from your brand.

2. A Marketing Strategist
Next, you’ll need a marketing strategist to help you take action on the insights provided by your data analyst. Marketing strategists ask, “How can I validate and operationalize these insights?” These two people — the marketing strategist and data analyst — are key to helping you determine both what your customers expect with regard to content and how to present that content in a personalized, seamless way.

3. A Solution Architect or Technical Expert
This person is responsible for designing sophisticated solution architecture. Robust. Powerful. A solution architect utilizes all data sources and solutions and applies a strategy to simultaneously meet the needs of both the customers and the business.

4. A Developer, and 5. A Designer
Finally, your team needs both a developer and a designer. The developer focuses on modifying the mobile app itself, while the designer brings the app to life visually.

Learning Some Tips of the Trade
You might already have a sophisticated vision of what you’d like to accomplish in the personalization space — but first things first. Mobile app personalization is a different breed. You need a specialized roadmap that uses strategy and prioritization to drive your program forward.

The first landmark: establishing a comprehensive and actionable view of the customer by ensuring the right infrastructure and process are in place to access your data. When you overlook data, you jeopardize your ability to personalize the experience. Your mobile app personalization team will work best when information is shared across all channels — meaning, you must replace the silo mentality with a more holistic, streamlined approach. To do this, it’s best to delineate how vital data is shared across all channels within your organization. Draft a detailed workflow — from step A through Z. The more data available to your team, the more personalized your customer’s journey will be — from beginning to end.

The next landmark: define customer segments. For example, who engages with your brand via desktop, and who finds your brand on a mobile device? From here, you can identify critical touchpoints and prioritize opportunities for personalization accordingly.

The next stop on your itinerary allows you to address some important quandaries. For instance, how are your customers currently engaging with your brand? Are they responding to infographics, videos, and interactive-presentation vehicles? What do your customers need from you — and what are the best avenues to use to reach out to them in the future? Once these vital questions have been answered, you can begin testing your expectations for validity across those critical segments. If you get the green light, you can finally begin operationalizing and incorporating additional levels of granularity in your content. To really drive business goals, your core elements must be in place, allowing you to present your customer with an unforgettable, personalized, mobile app experience.

Moving Forward
Building a mobile app personalization team boils down to more than simply assembling a team of people or allowing a data-driven mentality to permeate the culture of your business. It’s about creating and implementing a personalization strategy that marries customer and business objectives. Create stellar experiences while you maximize business goals. When these two elements are synchronized, you’re bound to be successful.

The post The Key Ingredients to Make or Break a Mobile App Personalization Team appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.

from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/personalization/key-ingredients-make-break-mobile-app-personalization-team/

Customize Mobile App Experience in Three Steps With CRM Data

Imagine that your credit card company emails you about its new mobile app. You install and open it, enter your login information, and are immediately greeted with a perfectly tailored offer or recommendation. Your app is automatically synced with your credit accounts, and soon, you’re scheduling payments, transferring balances, and redeeming rewards — all from your phone. The company reminds you when payments are due and alerts you to high balances. Rewards offers grow increasingly relevant and valuable. You find yourself using the app almost daily, checking in for the content and promotions as much as for the accounting features.

How can a credit card company — or any company, for that matter — deliver a mobile app experience this rich and personalized right off the bat? By using the customer data they’ve already amassed in their customer relationship-management (CRM) system. When CRM data is integrated with mobile app analytics and targeting, brands don’t have to wait to gather data through app usage alone. They can personalize the mobile app experience from first use, ensuring a level of ongoing app engagement that leads to even deeper customer insights.

Now, imagine you could give your own app users an experience this personalized and engaging.
Here’s a step-by-step view of how CRM data combines with mobile analytics to deliver rich, customized mobile app experiences from the very first login.

Step 1: Acquisition
Are you able to pinpoint what’s working and what’s not in your mobile user-acquisition strategy? Marketers can create and track multiple unique acquisition links to promote and drive traffic to their apps. Acquisition links include deep links, which open a specific, relevant section of the app rather than the homepage. When a user downloads and runs an app after clicking on your link, you automatically collect the acquisition data. You can generate reports at any time to see how your marketing links are performing and what exactly is driving users to your app.

This level of insight into mobile-user acquisition leads to important discoveries. For example, you’ll likely find that acquiring users through organic channels — like email, mobile websites, and social media — leads to higher retention rates than paid-ad acquisitions do and reduces your overall cost per install (CPI).

Step 2: Authentication
When an existing customer downloads your app, the mobile app experience should be seamlessly linked with your web, email, and social experience. Instead of creating a new, distinct account, a user should be able to enter the same credentials he uses online, tying his cross-device activities to a single customer profile. The mobile user-authentication process is your crucial opportunity to learn who is using your app and to take advantage of the information shared with you previously.

If a customer has been shopping on your e-commerce site for several years, you can draw on her CRM data to apply her interests, preferences, spending habits, location, and more to the first-time mobile app experience. This level of personalization typically takes time to create when you’re relying solely on mobile analytics. If you are able to tap into your CRM data, however, app users can enjoy experiences that are consistent with what they’re accustomed to online.

Step 3: Targeting
Remember the imaginary app you downloaded from your credit card company? To show you truly relevant in-app offers, the company needs to know your credit score, past purchases, reward redemptions, and what other cards and products you use. This information is difficult, if not impossible, to gather solely through mobile app interactions.

Without this valuable offline CRM data, targeting is clumsy — sometimes, even nonexistent. Mobile app experience, content, and functionality are one-size-fits-all, making them static, impersonal, and unhelpful (if not completely worthless). With the CRM data, on the other hand, targeting sparks an ongoing feedback loop of customer insight — you show users offers with the option to check “Don’t show this again.” Their responses enrich their customer profiles, and you can continually improve the value and relevance of their brand experiences across all channels and devices.

From Analytics to Target in One Mobile Software-Development Kit (SDK)
Acquisition links and CRM data are great launch points for mobile app user targeting and engagement, but they’re only the beginning. Once you have loyal, active app users generating even more data and insight, you can refine your mobile app experience and features to sustain engagement for the long term.

Customer-data collection doesn’t have to slow down your mobile app growth and engagement. When you free your customer data from a silo and integrate it into all digital touchpoints, customers stay engaged from authentication to your app’s tenth upgrade — and beyond! That’s why Adobe created a single app SDK that integrates with Adobe Analytics, Target, Audience Manager, and the rest of the Adobe Marketing Cloud.

The post Customize Mobile App Experience in Three Steps With CRM Data appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.

from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/mobile/customize-mobile-app-experience-three-steps-crm-data/

Insights From an Optimization and Personalization Program

If you’ve recently been tasked with providing personalized experiences for visitors or customers, it may seem overwhelming at first — nearly impossible even. But, don’t panic! The first step is to make sure your team, your process, and your strategy/roadmap are in place.

In many organizations, people feel so overwhelmed that they often give up before they even get started; while in other companies, team members might rush to implement solutions too quickly and miss out on strategic benefits. Instead, take one step at a time — beginning with making sure you have the proper roles in place.

Putting the Proper Roles and Processes in Place
It doesn’t take an army. Teams can comprise 1–3 part-time or dedicated team members (depending on scale) and should establish a core governance model. The most essential role is that of the optimization and personalization team member who oversees the roadmap and coordinates testing or targeting activities across all digital touchpoints. This role can also be vital in communicating results and insights across the broader team and reorganizing the roadmap of upcoming activities accordingly.

Other important roles include an executive sponsor (who must remain informed of your successes and efforts), a content designer/creator (often you, utilizing a visual editor provided with the tool), and perhaps even a developer resource for testing more advanced features like site or app functionality.

To maximize your scalability through an assembly line of optimization and personalization activities, you should have an established process for the development, validation, creation, quality assurance, execution, and reporting of activities.

Finally, it’s important that you regularly collect ideas both from quantitative analyses (e.g., analytics or previous-activity reports/insights) and qualitative analyses (e.g., suggestions made by colleagues or specialists from different areas of the business, customer focus groups/surveys, etc.) and that you then run cost-benefit analyses as well to prioritize these activities with regard to what holds the most value (and can be reevaluated regularly based on new results). When both the organization and digital governance model are in place, the optimization and personalization solution should be everywhere you place content — enabling you to answer all of your test hypotheses and establish your personalization strategy with the accuracy born from analyzing the right data and accessing the insights from your reports.

Taking Successful First Steps With Real-Time Optimization and Personalization
Ideally, your analytics solution works alongside your optimization and personalization solution to surface insights regarding where you may need to test a more personalized experience (quantitative analysis mentioned above). This can be really powerful when automation is involved. Features like anomaly detection and contribution analysis within Adobe Analytics, for example, show an audience that is deviating from the mean appreciably in terms of engagement as well as the most probable root causes of this behavior. With a server-to-server integration that has an optimization and personalization solution like Adobe Target — sharing a unified progressive profile and synchronized data — this very same audience segment can be shared and placed into a test to determine the best method for reengagement. This is where real-time insights and analytics work hand-in-hand with optimization and personalization to make you more adaptable to changing trends and to prevent you from overlooking any audience that may be underserved at any point in the customers’ journeys with you.

Here’s a great real-world example. Let’s say, you suddenly have a lot of traffic coming from a specific YouTube video, but it’s not converting. Smart tools (e.g., analytics with machine-learning) can help you understand more about why that audience is not converting as well as reveal how that audience is behaving appreciably different from how typical website visitors act. That information can lead to optimized personalization that can help that audience overcome the hurdle to conversion.

You can also save this audience as a specific segment. You know that a YouTube video motivated them to click through to your site but not to convert. This allows your marketing team to see whether a real-time, personalized message might motivate them to progress. For instance, the subject of the YouTube video might be a recent boot-camp workout in which they wear a specific type of shoe, but once audience members click through to the company’s website, they are unable to find that shoe. Perhaps, if they tested different treatments of a landing page dedicated to this workout craze — and the specific shoe worn in it — they could reduce the bounce from this referrer segment. It’s important not to jump to conclusions here. Running an A/B test can help you test your way into learning more about this audience.

Personalization can be as simple as pushing the previously mentioned personalized landing page or even a retargeting campaign or more nuanced drip-marketing campaign. However, if the data and tools required to personalize messaging are unavailable to your team, the nuanced option is unavailable as well. In the case of retargeting, the solution should not only provide rich data and accessibility of optimization and personalization across your organization, but also be able to be implemented within all of your digital channels — literally, everywhere you place content, including web and mobile sites, offsite in emails and partner sites, in mobile applications, and even on Internet-connected devices and screens. Sending a personalized retargeting email based on cart or content abandonment — coupled with personalized automated recommendations also targeted through Adobe Target — has yielded some of the biggest lifts in conversion we’ve experienced!

Democratizing Personalization and Maximizing Your Strategy
Personalization and optimization (including testing) tools — like Adobe Target — can allow marketers, analysts, and customer-service specialists to act on data-driven insights into what is working for certain audiences — and even for specific individuals — and update their digital experiences in real-time to match their preferences. Leveraging real-time data — alongside the full contextual view of analytics for taking action on testing, personalizing to shared audiences, or drilling down with the full weight of your data analyses — can increase your confidence in qualifying your content-personalization decisions without overlooking key data points or success metrics that could potentially be impacted. In essence, this provides confidence in the recommendations and business decisions you make based on your testing and optimization efforts.

Adobe Marketing Cloud — the free, collaborative environment that houses Adobe Target, Adobe Analytics, and other great Adobe solutions — provides a progressive, unified marketing-cloud profile that can also be easily appended through core services with additional customer-relationship management (CRM)/first-party data, second-party profile data, and even third-party data feeds for a full view of your customer (and what data is most predictive for personalization).

However, this data intelligence and the required analyses can be intimidating. That’s why having built-in, machine-learning automation and analyses within testing and personalization activities can speed you to insights, surfacing what is most predictive — relative to different personalized content choices — and delivering them in real time to maximize ROI. Essentially, they can be your automated data science and analytics team within a test or targeted activity. Choose tools that allow everyone on your team access to the data, testing, and machine-learning automation capabilities they need to feel confident that they are doing their jobs excellently.

Optimization and personalization teams that are confident in their results — based on a full view of their data and ease in analyses — help your customers, your employees, and your brand. Improved customer targeting gives your customers access to the offers, discounts, experiences, and information they desire most; provides your employees with the power to craft better, more persuasive, and more informed campaigns; and allows your brand to reap the benefits of happier customers and employees.

The post Insights From an Optimization and Personalization Program appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.

from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/personalization/insights-optimization-personalization-program/

Tips for a Rock-Solid Content Marketing Strategy

Marketing your business in today’s attention economy requires a different kind of thinking than in the recent past. Today, content has become paramount; and consumers seek engaging, personalized experiences that draw them in. You have to be more strategic than ever before if you want to capture their attention.

Content marketing has been around since long before the digital age. Joe Pulizzi of the Content Marketing Institute said, “content marketing is the practice of creating relevant and compelling content in a consistent fashion to a targeted buyer, focusing on all stages of the buying process, from brand awareness through to brand evangelism.” Marketers everywhere are focusing on creating higher value content that connects with their audiences in new and interesting ways.

It’s About Connecting With Your Customers.
Many businesses are coming up with tactics to market their content, but few have taken the time to develop and document a content marketing strategy. According to a recent survey by the Content Marketing Institute, only 32 percent of B2B marketers have a documented content marketing strategy. Ouch. It’s not much better with B2C brands — only 37 percent have a documented strategy to improve content effectiveness.

All of your content-marketing efforts are about connecting with your customers. But, developing a content strategy takes some thinking and planning. Coming up with a strategy is about taking a step back; defining your goals, audiences, and objectives; and ensuring the rest of your content team is on the same page.

Define the Elements of Your Content Marketing Strategy.
Strategies are the big-picture, ambitious, fundamental plans that will guide your business. You can’t create good content without a great strategy. Here are some ideas to get you started with building your strategy.

1. Identify Your Business Goals.
Understand why you are creating content in the first place and align it to your business goals. Are you trying to build a more loyal customer base? Or, are you looking to change the way your customers think about your brand both before and after making a purchase? Clarifying your goals is important, and those goals need to be reflected in your content. Each piece of content should tell part of the story of your business and its goals. Be clear about what you are trying to convey and understand why you are making the content.

2. Make Your Customers Feel Something.
Your content should give your customers something to care about, something that they are compelled to share. Whose problem are you trying to solve? Carefully considering your target audience(s) is key. What gives them pain today? What excites them? These are areas to investigate early on to ensure you create a style and personality for your content that your customers will love.

3. Know Where Your Customer Is Going.
Developing a content marketing strategy requires you to thoroughly understand your customer, and you can’t do that without mapping the customer journey. Gather every department and map out every way your customers connect with your business — through every touchpoint and every channel. Figure out what your customers’ needs are and see whether you are satisfying them. Find the choke points and the places where your customers are having negative experiences.

4. Use Analytics to Understand Whether Your Content Is Resonating.
To determine whether your content strategy is working, you’ll need hard data to understand what content was consumed, when, and by whom. Be sure to select the appropriate metrics that align with your business goals. Remember the old adage: “What gets tracked gets done.” Ensure that your respective teams have agreed to these key performance indicators (KPIs) and will be in position to respond to improve the overall experience.

5. Devise a Plan to Reuse and Connect Your Content.
Do you have a process in place for taking master content and repurposing it for your channel practitioners who will be integrating it into your marketing emails and building some of it into blog posts and other social-media content? Having a solid plan and workflow for content reuse will ensure that your respective channel teams will stay on brand, on topic, and keep content recreation cost at a minimum.

Create a List of Tactics and Change Them Regularly.
Now, create a list of tactics you want to try in implementing your strategy. There are too many tactics to list them all here, but they include things like testing content on new channels, guest-posting on credible blog sites, creating “snackable” content from larger pieces, or creating alternative formats such as how-to videos, promotions, and more.

While your tactics may give you some exciting results, attract more people to your website, or increase sales, that isn’t the end of the story. What worked today might be quite ineffective tomorrow. Your tactics must be dynamic, adjusting according to insights, data, and feedback you receive from your customers.

Your content strategy should reflect your organization’s core values and long-term goals. While tactics come and go, a rock-solid content marketing strategy can be your foundation for building a deeper relationship with your target audience and improving business results.

The post Tips for a Rock-Solid Content Marketing Strategy appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.

from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/web-experience/tips-rock-solid-content-marketing-strategy/

Gotta Catch Em’ All! — High-Value Customers not Pokémon!

How well do you know your high-value customers? How are you using analytics to drive more effective marketing practices at your company? How can I catch a Mewtwo in Pokémon Go? This blog post will help with some tips on the first two (but contact me if you know someone who can help with the third).

To effectively prioritize your marketing dollars and time, it’s important to have an in-depth view of your audience base and how they behave across your properties. Luckily, leading analytics tools, such as Adobe Analytics, can help. This subset of customer analytics or customer-journey analytics allows marketers to identify key behaviors, traits, and actions that are exhibited by prospects or customers, leading to the creation of much more powerful segments. Therefore, marketers are able to realize improved ROI, decreased costs, and increased satisfaction.

While I won’t go into Pokémon Go tactics here (make sure to save up your Pidgeys for the Lucky Egg!), I will force an analogy between the game and some of the features within Adobe Analytics that will help your organization see immediate insights that can drive measurable results.

Who Are My High-Value Customers?
First, what do high-value customers mean to your business? For a few, customer lifetime value (CLV) is a common metric used in their organizations, and they have clear understandings regarding customers’ values. Pokémon Go makes it easy, with each Pokémon having a different power and level. Unfortunately, customer value isn’t so simply determined, and for most organizations, CLV doesn’t exist or isn’t easily used. For those in retail, this can be more straightforward, as you can use calculated metrics to create a good proxy for this. For others, such as those in media, this may be more difficult. You may want to create some sort of engagement score from calculated metrics based on your goals (number of articles read, time onsite, return visits, email signups, etc.).

What Are the Behaviors of My High-Value Customers?
While creating calculated metrics seems easy enough, what if you don’t always know what these behaviors should be? For example, if you’re a product manager in charge of brokerage accounts for Goliath National Bank, your best tactic for gaining new accounts is to upsell current checking account holders. Instead of just blanketing all current checking clients, let’s understand all our current customers that became brokerage clients after being checking clients. By filtering this segment, we can then use a tool like pathing to see the path someone took before becoming a customer. In data workbench, we can use the latency table to view the events and days before a conversion occurred to analyze specific online and offline touchpoints that our clients may have interacted with before converting. We can also see post conversion to understand whether we have the right content to guide them to better experiences.

All of this gives us much better views into what some of the key triggers are before someone converts, but what if we want to see the differences between segments? For instance, I have a few Pokémon that have the same combat power, but I only have so many resources to strengthen them. So, how do I choose which Pokémon to train and make my main one? In real life, how can we understand the differences between our segments?

Segment Comparison, a feature within Segment IQ in Analysis Workspace, intelligently discovers the differences between your target audience segments through automated analysis of all your metrics and dimensions. Now, we can easily drop in “checking and brokerage clients” and “checking and no brokerage” or “high-value customers” and “low-value customers” and receive an interactive report that lets us see what the most important differences are between each segment.

Using these insights, we can identify the most statistically significant differences between different segments to drive better segment creation. Additionally, we can see the overlap between segments. For customers of Adobe Analytics and Adobe Audience Manager (AAM), all of your AAM segments are now available in each solution in real time. This allows you to use second- and third-party data, alongside features such as lookalike modeling, to expand your audience reach and see how these new segments overlap your current segments; it also enables you to identify overlap, avoiding duplicative or confusing marketing for better user experiences and reduced marketing spend.

Another simple tool for audience and segment exploration — also provided by Adobe Analytics Premium — is the audience clustering feature of data workbench. Most people think of audience clustering as segmenting on steroids, but you could also start this process with clustering and see where the algorithms identify statistically significant metrics or dimensions.

Select your input variables (such as those sourced from segment comparison) — the number of clusters, target population, and desired algorithm — and the feature will automatically analyze your data, dynamically categorizing visitors and generating cluster sets based on selected data inputs, thus, identifying groups with similar interests and behaviors for customer analysis and targeting.

For additional insights, this allows you to further explore what makes each cluster unique and gives you an easy way to take action and test your marketing campaigns on each cluster/segment. Using the tools mentioned before, you can understand where there is already overlap, bring the clusters into Audience Manager to expand and activate the segments, and then use Analysis Workspace to track and compare how these new clusters compare to your new segments.

I Don’t Like Pokémon Go, so I Just Scrolled to the Bottom for the Takeaways.
First, I saw eight people playing Pokémon Go this morning on my 20-minute bus ride to work, so at the very least, you may have picked up some vocabulary for the next time a gang of Poképlayers envelopes you on the street. Second, we went over a number of different features within Adobe Analytics that can help you gain insights on your different segments. Here are two in particular you should start using:

Segment Comparison
This is one of the most rapidly adopted features as well as one of the easiest to use. All you do is drag and drop two segments, and Adobe Analytics does the rest. See our YouTube channel for more on Analysis Workspace and Segment Comparison.

Clustering
For Adobe Analytics Premium customers, audience clustering allows you to jump ahead a few steps. You can use clustering to find key differences in your data. See how to set up and use clustering here.

The post Gotta Catch Em’ All! — High-Value Customers not Pokémon! appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.

from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/analytics/gotta-catch-em-high-value-customers-not-pokemon/

Point of Sale: Retail & Travel Weekly

This week’s articles include a look at whether your location-based data is actionable, whether companies really understand their customers’ journeys, and the impact mobile will have on the future of e-commerce.

• Is your location data actionable? [Mobile Commerce Daily]: Companies can combine data and content to own the next moment — the action that occurs when a consumer finds you.
• Do Companies Understand the Customer Journey? [eMarketer]: A new study reveals that a majority of senior marketers indicate they are not confident in their company’s understanding of their customer’s journey.
• Mobile is changing the fortunes of e-commerce leaders [Internet Retailer]: The future of e-commerce is increasingly mobile in nature — and some companies are being outpaced.
• Analytics Are the No. 1 Marketing Technology [eMarketer]: Analytics tools are the most commonly used marketing technologies.
• Consumers’ retail journey to improve with amplified social media strategy [Luxury Daily]: Most retailers’ social strategies could be improved to have more of an impact.
• The Complete Blueprint to Email Marketing Success [SuperOffice]: Email marketing continues to deliver ROI. Here are five tactics for delivering a better email marketing strategy.
• What to Include in Automated Emails, for Ecommerce [Practical Ecommerce]: Retailers should be looking at other types of emails — in addition to the traditional cart-abandonment email — to inspire consumers to return to their sites.
• 6 tips for Combating High Cancellation Rates on OTA Bookings [hospitalitynet]: While cancelation rates typically run higher for online travel agencies (OTAs), they can make it challenging to properly forecast demand. Check out these six ways to effectively deal with cancelations.
• Hospitality Reenvisioned Through Data and Mobile [Skift]: In the travel industry — more than ever before possible — companies are able blend in-person experiences with digital interactions to create more personalized, attentive experiences.

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-18/

Bridging Marketing with the IoT

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from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/web-experience/bridging-marketing-iot/

How Dynamic Tag Management helps Analytics Teams Beat the Clock

This guest post from Jennifer Yacenda of Starwood Hotels examines how both practitioners and managers can use dynamic tag management (DTM) in different ways.

A big thanks to Jennifer Yacanda for taking the time to work on this post and for sharing her experiences with all of us.

Managing analytics nowadays continues to be an evolving job, similar to the very first day I started my career in this field as a college intern. At times, it’s overwhelming, but secretly (or not so secretly), I love it. Every day is a new day with new challenges, new tools to learn, new deadlines to meet, and new questions to answer. Our world is becoming increasingly digital, and that introduces a whole new set of challenges. Since the digital world moves so quickly with such a high volume of information, our time feels compressed and much more precious. Taking some time to think about how you invest your time is critical to success, especially in analytics. As a director of analytics, this key to success is relevant for both (1) setting the right implementation strategy and (2) focusing on the right datasets that drive the most impactful insights. We own the full cycle of analytics, and it’s more important than ever before to carve out time for thinking across the spectrum of our work.

The luxury of an overnight test, as described in “A Short Lesson in Perspective,” resonates with me as a digital analyst — it’s clear that analytics and the creative process go hand in hand. This overnight test, as described from an advertising executive’s perspective, starts with (1) a raw brain dump of ideas, scribbles, and inspiration; followed by (2) ideas that stand the test of time by marinating; (3) a morning follow-up session to revisit and filter ideas, eliminate losers, and highlight winners with the end goal of delivering (4) a finalized creative concept for a campaign. With analytics and marketing-technology implementations, the decisions to use a prop or an eVar or to fire it on page load or on the next page become parts of maps that litter my office walls and whiteboards to outline our customers’ journeys in the language of variables. DTM gives us the canvas on which to develop our vision, to revisit the approach when the time is right (after experimentation), and to deliver something that makes sense for our business. DTM allows us to take that necessary step back — like an artist takes a step back from the canvas — to see the bigger picture.

Just Like Art, Implementation and Tracking Requirements Are Subjective.
When thinking through the implementation process of a new tracking project, there are a number of steps in the works before it even comes to our queue. Our business’s digital, brand, and marketing teams leads are in various phases of their own planning processes for new functionalities, new microsites (featuring that new brand program), or new landing-page redesigns. At some point — often without a ton of advanced notice — we’re asked to be the judge and juror on success. A stakeholder may come to us with the simple request, “I need tracking” but not provide any guidance. We’ll often receive a set of wireframes or a development site where we’re expected to poke around and develop a tracking strategy. As artists and implementation experts, we’re asked to think through it all on our own. Tracking can be an elusive concept, and DTM has become a tool that truly helps us start the creative process where we draw up projects and develop the right information-picture over time. It provides flexibility that we have never had before.

Implementation and tracking strategists quietly weave the intricate patterns of measurement throughout our digital ecosystem, collecting key pieces of data to derive answers about our consumers. It takes a combination of thinking, philosophy, business acumen, and curiosity to understand 1. What the business is building (what’s success mean to them), 2. What the customer will experience (what actions will they take), and 3. What questions will analysts need to answer (what’s the data structure look like). We also need to know — or at least think through — whether our strategy is within budget depending on server call implications.

Artists Need Time to Do Their Best Work
Like advertising execs — whose timeframes for developing creative concepts have shrunk in the digital world — most analytics teams have rapidly growing numbers of requests that flow through the organization since “digital” also means “more measurable.” With advances in technology, time is that much more of a luxury. Allotting time to think is a challenge as more channels develop, consumers create more data, and more executives understand the value of data. Simultaneously, small analytics teams — those at the most basic levels — are staying the same size but also being asked to (1) make sure that data is collected in a meaningful way and (2) interpret the results, drawing out valuable insights for their organizations. How is an artist to work under these conditions?

Despite being forced into this world of doing things faster, as measurers leveraging DTM, it’s clear we found a way to slow down time and employ the overnight-test approach to our tracking strategy. At the same time, DTM gives us more flexibility and agility than ever before. I remember the days of being beholden to the hard dates of the information technology (IT) release schedule. There was a certain fear that we couldn’t get anything wrong, that we had to be spot on. I remember implementing Adobe Recommendations, missing a case-sensitive “I,” and missing out on 6 months of using a product. Those days are gone. DTM has allowed us to apply fixes without the wait.

Enter the heroics of DTM to save the day and help us add and change things so quickly. We’ve been able to save the day on more than one occasion with quick DTM updates. We’ve been able to add tracking to robust internal applications with little development work or ramp-up time from our different development teams. DTM has allowed us to make friends and build bridges in unexpected places within the organization. How do you put a value on that?

The implementation of marketing technologies is a balancing act, one that will become more difficult as we go.

DTM, as a Tool, Is Powerful — Adopting Tag Management as a Culture Is Difficult!
As an analyst, as a leader, and as a human being, I have the instinct and desire to say “Yes!” to all of the requests from business owners who are looking for ways to measure their products as well as their decisions. They’re looking for data to help make more informed decisions. With everything becoming more digital, answers are now more knowable (assuming the right talent is in place). Growing parts of all organizations are turning to analytics for the first time — looking to learn something from data, to make better decisions. As a realist, I know we do not have enough resources in place.

“DTM has allowed us to make friends and build bridges in unexpected places within the organization. How do you put a value on that?”

That being said, while DTM enables us to say YES to tracking more projects with its relative ease and simplicity, it also reminds us that we must LEARN to say NO at times. We simply don’t have enough analysts or server call budget to keep up with the requested amount of data we could capture. DTM allows us to work so quickly and to do so much in new places and new channels. But, the increasing requests make it more and more difficult to take a step back and truly gain a sense of the full picture. With a limited staff, how do we document everything? How do we understand or communicate our entire implementation? How do we keep track of all the variable maps? What is our backup plan?

We gain efficiency by tracking more across more channels and driving more value. Unfortunately, our increase in efficiency and effectiveness hasn’t translated to an increase in budget to hire more folks to manage and govern this valuable asset. And, we haven’t seen budget increases in respective IT teams or quality assurance (QA) to make sure analytics is included in all parts of the release cycles. We’re now working with more teams than ever before — mobile app teams, marketing teams, and internal application teams. We have more frequent release cycles to monitor in case something breaks or something new hasn’t been tracked. We have more last-minute requests. But, because we’re moving so quickly across so many teams, things can be lost in the shuffle without the proper resources and oversight to ensure documentation is in all the right places while still moving at scale speed.

Wrapping Up
There have always been challenges facing analytics teams. DTM has fundamentally changed the way analytics teams function — more flexible, faster, more platforms, and less reliance on IT as well as allowing us to do more, think on our feet, and paint better pictures about our customers. However, it does not solve all of our problems. It gives us time and flexibility to think through things in this crazy-paced world we are now living in. But, the culture still exists in which analytics teams are small and strapped for resources. We answer more and more requests while tracking more things, which makes it challenging to ensure our time and energy is focused on the right priorities. DTM is an important step in the right direction, but it’s just a single step in the overall process.

As we elevate our implementation techniques, we must be sure we are elevating all parts of our analytics practices and business cultures — we need to develop tools and define processes that also elevate our governance, documentation, and communication to the same level.

“Success is like a snowball — it takes momentum to build and the more you roll in the right direction the bigger it gets.” — Steve Ferrante

The post How Dynamic Tag Management helps Analytics Teams Beat the Clock appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.

from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/analytics/dynamic-tag-management-helps-analytics-teams-beat-clock/

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Announcing Audience Lab — A Tool to Improve Testing

Audience Lab, a new feature of Adobe Audience Manager, is doing a lot to give marketers greater levels of control over audience targeting when testing variables in their advertising stacks.

Improved Testing With Audience Lab
Audience Lab gives you the ability to split one of your audience segments into mutually exclusive buckets. For example, if you have an audience segment of males, you could split that segment into two identical but exclusive groups of males to use for testing. With the audience variable controlled, you can layer different targeting variables to determine what drives the most conversions — for instance, you might test different ad creative to see which one gets a better response from your male audience.

An Easier Way to Test Advertising Elements
Marketers are always looking for the best ad creative, targeting criteria, or targeting platform to drive the best results. It is challenging to ensure that users in test groups don’t overlap when testing multiple targeting platforms, even more so when testing different creatives across targeting platforms — and both are use cases that Audience Lab supports.

For example, when testing two different demand-side platforms (DSPs), you don’t want to send the same set of users to both systems — you won’t know which DSP truly drove the conversion for a given user. Another option is to use two different, mutually exclusive segments; but, that would introduce an audience variable to the test. To obtain a really accurate measurement, you have to minimize the number of variables between the two systems so you can confidently say that the difference in performance is due to a feature of the DSP and not an outside factor.

Audience Lab makes testing different DSPs — to choose the best one — much easier, allowing you to minimize the number of variables between the two DSPs. If you were to put two different segments — male and female, for example — into two different DSPs, each DSP would perform differently because each one is targeting a different audience. Instead, Audience Lab allows you to take one segment, split it equally into mutually exclusive test segments, and then run those test segments through two different DSPs. Since you’re using the same audience, any differences in performance will be related to the DSPs themselves, giving you the information you need to choose the one that performs better.

To kick things up another notch in complexity, what about the challenges presented when a consumer uses multiple devices? Audience Manager’s Profile Link — a cross-device feature set — lends a hand there. Audience Lab uses Profile Link’s profile merge-rule framework to qualify a user’s multiple devices into the same test segment. This helps further control the audience variable. Users won’t see different creative or be bid on by both DSPs simply because they use more than one device.

The Right Information to Know What Works
With Audience Lab, you can confidently say, “We used the same audience, the same creative, and the same strategies, so any differences in performance must be related to the DSP itself.” The differences could be related to the DSP’s algorithms, inventory, or something else that is inherent to the DSP you are testing. When you narrow those things down, you can make a more informed decision about which DSP drove more conversions.

Market Demand for Improved Data-Management Platforms (DMPs)
Market demand was a major driver behind Audience Lab’s development. Clients were looking for this kind of segmentation in their data-management platforms — and many were trying to create these mutually exclusive segments manually. That can be a real challenge, possibly involving a lot of manual effort such as creating rules of segmentation to determine which mutually exclusive segment a user should be in. These rules are rarely user-friendly.

Audience Lab makes the whole testing workflow easier, allowing users to split these segments and providing them with reporting so they can see one source of truth on conversion. Audience Lab takes Adobe’s already competitive DMP, Adobe Audience Manager, and makes it even more useful for marketers.

The post Announcing Audience Lab — A Tool to Improve Testing appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.

from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/web-experience/announcing-audience-lab-tool-improve-testing/

Running the Marathon: How to Understand and Leverage Customer Experience to Increase Sales

If you are like most CMOs, you periodically find yourself up to your ears in sales data, trying to find some way to meet this quarter’s sales goals. All brands want to increase their sales. It’s easy to get caught up in digging through your numbers and metrics reports to find ways to increase your revenue and profits year over year.

Your metrics reports likely focus on things that are directly tied to sales. How much does the average customer spend per transaction? What is the cost of acquiring a new customer? How much of your product is returned? These are all important things to know, but if cash transactions are all you’re focusing on, you’re likely missing a key part of the picture — a deep understanding of your customer’s experiential journey from first awareness to recurring, delighted customer status.

The marketing department, as well as other departments within a business, are often siloed. Each has its own perspective regarding the customer’s psychology and what he or she may respond to, because each department sees the customer at a different point in that customer’s journey. Further complicating the matter, teammates often have different customer metrics they are each working to improve to meet their end-of-quarter metrics. In a perfect world, marketers, creative teams, sales teams, and optimizers would all achieve their individual quarterly metrics, resulting in higher revenues. However, in reality, this has great potential to create fragmented customer experiences.

While these fragmented experiences may create short-term increases in revenue, they sacrifice long-term revenue growth because they lack unified customer experiences. Clearly, this is a balancing act, but if you’re playing the long-term revenue-growth game — you want to win the marathon not just complete the sprint. Deeply understanding your customers as well as their journeys to purchase your products — and then delivering personalized experiences to them — are the keys to winning long-term, sustained revenue growth.

Short-Term, Single Transactions Vs. Long-Term, Experiential Business Metrics
If your business is focused on individual transactions, you may not even realize it. Sure, it’s important that you understand transactional metrics like “Add to Cart” or your cart abandonment rate. Every business should understand how it’s doing with regard to sales transactions. However, even if every single metric that you track has a direct line to revenue, you’re still missing a key piece of the puzzle.

Without understanding your customers’ experiences, you lose out on understanding how to truly create customer experiences they are happy with. Your customers are now able to be completely connected to your brand — but that doesn’t mean that they are. Without delivering truly personalized experiences — those that map to their individual customer journeys and serve their needs precisely — you are not only missing out on increasing their purchases, but also their loyalties to your brand. If you don’t understand their experiences or their levels of engagement with your brand, it is tough to understand whether they are satisfied or brand-loyal.

Why You Should Aim for Experiential
When optimizing your customers’ experiences with your brand, your focus on positive experiences is likely to directly impact customer satisfaction and increase brand loyalty. Creating highly personalized customer experiences through messaging and advertising can even lead to increased sales. In fact, when a major telecom company made an effort to personalize its messaging by creating increasingly targeted customer segments, it saw a 12 percent lift in revenue from existing customers.

That’s because customers who regularly use your services or rebuy your products are gaining a far more satisfying experience than those who aren’t. The mobile app or website is meeting needs they have, which is why they return regularly. The same can be said for your blog or social channels — customers who are having positive experiences with any of these types of channels are more likely to trust your brand. As a result, they’re more likely to convert in the future, convert more regularly, and refer their friends to your brand. Put simply, personalized experiences — those tailored to the customer’s journey — ultimately build delight and trust; and in turn, delight and trust increase loyalty and referrals. These types of behaviors cannot be won through purely singular transactions.

Deeply Understanding Your Customers and Creating Memorable Experiences
You might be wondering how to understand your customer on a deeper level and create the team-aligning, customer-journey map that will produce an ideal customer experience, ultimately converting your customer to a long-term, delighted, brand-loyal consumer. The strategy is simple.

Invest in understanding your customer better by gathering both qualitative and quantitative data to create a customer-journey map. Usability studies, customer interviews, ethnographies, website FAQs/search logs, customer surveys, customer support/complaint logs, web analytics, social-media listening, competitive intelligence analyses, and A/B and multivariate testing are all great ways to construct and validate a deeper understanding of your customer.

The next key step is to align your teams to the customer-journey strategy outlined in the map by matching some of their quarterly metrics to the same target — a unified customer experience that focuses on a long-term, experiential customer journey and includes transactional experiences along the way. Welcome to the marathon.

Final Thoughts
At the end of the day, no one wants to feel like just another number on a metrics report. Creating personalized experiences that meet — or even exceed — your customers’ expectations regarding their ideal journeys allows your customers to feel confident that your business is precisely the company they should endow with their brand loyalty and repeat business. It helps your customers trust you as a brand and feel that you truly understand their needs, resulting in a long-lasting, mutually beneficial relationship. Putting your focus on creating the experience rather than the transaction is always a winning bet.

The post Running the Marathon: How to Understand and Leverage Customer Experience to Increase Sales appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.

from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/web-experience/running-marathon-understand-leverage-customer-experience-increase-sales/

The basics of email marketing

5 Tips for Finding a Mentor Who Can Completely Transform Your Career

Be honest with yourself.
The Leadership Insiders network is an online community where the most thoughtful and influential people in business contribute answers to timely questions about careers and leadership. Today’s answer to the question: How do you find a mentor? is written by Bill Ingram, VP of Adobe Analytics and Adobe Social.

In today’s highly competitive business world, having a mentor can signify the difference between success and failure. For anyone seeking professional growth, mentors may be one of the most valuable resources you can tap into to provide guidance, advice, support, strategic feedback, and often a fresh perspective to an issue.

In a recent survey of 45 CEOs who had mentors, 84% reported that mentorship relationships helped them avoid expensive mistakes and learn insights into their career paths more quickly. At their best, mentors can help you unlock your full potential, garner otherwise inaccessible knowledge about your industry or specialty, and endure setbacks without losing focus or confidence. Choosing the wrong mentor, on the other hand, can result in an unproductive, frustrating relationship that moves you no closer to achieving your career goals, potentially severing a connection. Here are a few tips I’ve picked up over the years for finding the right mentor and forging a constructive, edifying relationship:

A mentor should inspire you to improve
No one is perfect, and your first step to finding a mentor is self-awareness. Be honest with yourself, and determine exactly the area(s) you need to improve in order to thrive in your professional life. Your mentor should be someone who not only excels in these areas, but also inspires you to do the same. One of my early mentors was a masterful organizational manager whose influence remains with me today. Are you looking to be a more effective communicator? Then seek out people who make you think, “I wish I could express myself like that during meetings.” Do you need to build your product management skill set? Then find someone who exemplifies those abilities in your eyes.

Be clear about what you want—and don’t sugarcoat it
Before you embark on a mentor/mentee relationship, you need to be upfront about your expectations. What are your goals, and why do you think this person can help you achieve them? Honesty is critical, especially at this early stage. Don’t tell your potential mentor what you think he or she wants to hear. Speak your mind, and determine together if this relationship is beneficial for both parties.

There’s such a thing as too experienced
If you’re a recent college graduate just entering the workforce, it’s unlikely that a C-suite executive is the right mentor for this stage of your career. Whatever your position, look for someone who can walk in your shoes, and understand or empathize with the specific challenges you face. As a mentor, some of my most productive relationships have been with people a couple of levels below me at my organization. At the same time, be careful about approaching colleagues who have too similar of a resume. These relationships can easily become competitive—a dynamic that benefits neither of you.

Look for someone who shares your passion and problem
While an effective mentor obviously needs to be enthusiastic about you and your career, one of the best ways to ensure excitement is basing the relationship on a shared interest. So ask yourself, “What problem am I passionate about solving?” Maybe it’s a challenge facing your organization or industry. Maybe it’s a social issue, like education. Whatever the problem might be, look for someone who is attempting to solve it and ask to be involved.

 

Earn your mentor’s respect
From a mentor’s point of view, you are an investment—and one that won’t necessarily pay off. If you want the relationship to flourish, you need to earn it. This means suppressing your ego when your mentor offers criticisms you’d rather not hear, and doing your best to trust that person when his or her advice contradicts your own judgment. You also need to treat your mentor’s attention as a valuable resource, so be sure to have a plan for every meeting. That way, you get the most out of each interaction without ever wasting time.

This post first appeared on Fortune.com and can be found here. 

The post 5 Tips for Finding a Mentor Who Can Completely Transform Your Career appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.

from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/digital-marketing/5-tips-finding-mentor-can-completely-transform-career/

Five Questions Customer Experience Professionals Are Asking Today

Everyone is talking about customer experience. What it is, why it’s important, how to deliver it, and how to improve it. Everyone, it seems, has an opinion.

Which is why I thought you’d be interested in hearing what the experts are wondering about.

These are the directors and managers of CX inside Fortune 500 companies. The CMOs and IT leaders my firm and I advise and support in the day-to-day of planning and delivering on the promise of customer experience. They all have questions, of course. These five are among the most common.

1. How can we better understand the impact of emotion on customer experience? Popularized in books like “Predictably Irrational” and “Thinking, Fast and Slow,” leading behavioral economists believe that rational considerations account for less than a third of customer behaviors and decision-making. Yet most companies spend most of their efforts on improving practical, functional aspects of experience, neglecting the emotional impact of experience on customer loyalty. Which is why smart CX leaders want to better understand the way their customers feel about their products, services, and experiences.

2. How do we deliver a true omnichannel experience to our customers? The reality is, customers expect an omnichannel experience. The challenge is that the ability to meet these expectations across channels is hard. It requires an integrated approach to experience design and delivery across myriad customer-facing systems, processes, and functions. In our experience, those firms most successful at delivering on this leverage IT to help lead the digital transformation by helping their organizations address customer interactions more holistically.

3. How can we better personalize customer interactions across the entire journey? With the rise of marketing and sales automation software, marketers have become much better at personalizing offers and messaging across the buyer’s journey. But customer experience is much more than marketing, which is why customers increasingly expect every interaction to be customized based on the customer’s unique wants and needs. (Think Amazon and Netflix.) This is why CX professionals are working to leverage customer data to personalize experiences across the entire customer journey and to deliver it through all channels.

4. How can we measure the experiences we deliver in less overt ways? Every company recognizes the importance of measuring CX. But most voice of the customer (VOC) programs rely heavily on customer surveys. Customers? They’re sick of NPS, satisfaction, and how-was-your-most-recent-experience surveys of all kinds. While the future of customer experience measurement leverages less invasive feedback tools like social listening and text analytics, it is far from defined. Which is why the winners will relentlessly look for and find ways to better understand what their customers want, think, feel, need, and do—without having to ask them.

5. How can we make customer experience measurement actionable? While most companies have VoC programs in place, only 29% think VoC is effective in driving action. The thing is, making CX measurement actionable isn’t a mystery. It’s just difficult. It starts with the ability to bring customer feedback to life in ways that create a deep understanding of customers and doing so across the organization—from executives to line staff. It’s worth the work. After all, Aberdeen notes that best-in-class organizations have 55% greater customer retention. So take a page from the winners, and don’t just listen—act. –

This post originally appeared on CMO.com on To see the original post, click here. http://scl.io/G4Ve3vzT#gs.XmizfVE

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from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/web-experience/five-questions-customer-experience-professionals-asking-today-read-httpscl-iog4ve3vztgs-xmizfve/

Three Ways to Drive Customer Loyalty Through Cross-Channel Campaigns

At this point, we’re well entrenched in a customer-first landscape — and that customer is always on and has a heightened sensitivity to every touchpoint and every brand experience that comes his or her way. For today’s consumers, the last millisecond is a very real, very compelling force — if they don’t get what they want or need from a brand or experience, they’ll immediately move on to something else. And, most likely, they won’t be back anytime soon.

Given these shifts, all eyes have — understandably — turned to customer loyalty and what it means in this fierce new landscape. If consumers are so sensitive, so on, so in control, and so deeply invested in the notion of the last millisecond — is customer loyalty even possible? And, if it is, how do brands and marketers connect and engage with today’s consumer — a consumer who seems anything but loyal?

Can Today’s Consumers Be Loyal?
The short answer is yes. Yes, customer loyalty is possible — even deep, long-term advocacy is possible. Marketers who approach their audiences strategically are the ones who will be most successful in this arena. And those strategic approaches need to be anchored both by the acknowledgement that customers are in control, and from there, the creation of meaningful connections with those customers.

How Do You Build Customer Loyalty?
So, what specifically does a customer-loyalty strategy look like today? Ultimately, it boils down to three things:

1. Understanding and Treating Each Customer as an Individual
It’s essential that marketers understand how audiences engage with brands both on an ongoing and real-time basis — including everything from the platforms that brands use to engage customers to the offers and messages they put in front of them. Everything matters, and everything needs to resonate.

Think about it. What works for Bob in New York City might not work for Jane in San Francisco — now multiply that by the hundreds, thousands, or even millions of consumers who visit your brand each year. An iterative testing process is essential to understanding your customer segments and addressing their unique needs — needs that grow, shift, evolve, and flat-out change with time. By delivering their individual wants and needs today — and then meeting them wherever they land tomorrow — you’ll naturally build deep, meaningful, ongoing loyalty and advocacy. Why? Because it’s clear to your customers that you “get” them. And, in this relationship-centric era we’re all living and operating in, that’s incredibly powerful.

2. Operationalizing Experiences so They’re Easy for Your Customers
I’m loyal to brands that make things easy for me — and you probably are, too. For example, if a brand allows me to stay logged in on their site, I never have to retype my credit card and shipping info. It’s simply a better, more seamless experience that removes a few extra steps from my busy day. And guess what — as a result, I am more loyal to the brands that are delivering those experiences. If you want your consumers to not only become, but also remain loyal, you need to follow suit. Create engaging, well-optimized experiences — and make them easy for consumers to navigate.

3. Ensuring You Recognize the Customer — Regardless What They Look Like Now
We’re in a multiscreen, multiplatform universe where everyone is connected around the clock. Customers who always use your app could just as easily access your brand experience via mobile web, desktop, or tablet — and you’d better recognize them when they do. Consumers not only want — but also demand — cohesive, consistent experiences that cross platforms and mediums. Is this a big task? Absolutely. Do we have the capacity to deliver, though? Absolutely. And, the more we can deliver, the more we’ll cultivate organic loyalty and advocacy — in addition to increased engagement and conversions.

Why Does Retention Matter Most?
Years ago, brands were heavily focused on customer acquisition, which makes sense — you need an audience first and foremost, right? But, as brands began to grow and evolve the power of retention, the tables turned a bit. Today’s customer journey has become increasingly cyclical with constant opportunities to engage and reengage as customers travel through their own brand lifecycles — lifecycles that, done right, spark meaningful, long-term relationships with plenty of value for both sides.

It’s what we aim to do every time we architect targeted customer-loyalty programs — connect the dots on what individuals and segments are looking for and deliver relevant experiences, touchpoints, and journeys that align. Done right, this is incredibly powerful because you’ll build out a loyal customer base. Loyalty programs not only represent long-term value for your brand, but also create ripple effects that draw new consumers into that cyclic brand journey —consumers who come to the table ready to engage, ready to take action, and ready to become your next loyalists.

The post Three Ways to Drive Customer Loyalty Through Cross-Channel Campaigns appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.

from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/campaign-management/three-ways-drive-customer-loyalty-cross-channel-campaigns/

Adobe Accelerates CX Innovation With Digital Asset Management

“Eighty percent of the content we create comes from your tools. And each year, we create almost twice as much content as the year before.”

Earlier this year, we met with a retail customer who made this claim. While it was a remarkable data point, it also points to why customers look to Adobe as the logical choice for a single place to manage all of their amazing content. For this retailer, having a single source of truth for product shots and marketing content will help drive an ever expanding and complex global business.

A couple of years ago, we significantly ramped up our investment and accelerated our strategy in Digital Asset Management (DAM). Our goal was to transform DAM from a siloed enterprise application to a mission-critical foundation that manages and transforms our customers’ creative investments into digital experiences at every touchpoint in the customer journey.

Adobe has just been recognized for this investment by being named as a “Strong Performer” in “The Forrester Wave™: Digital Asset Management for Customer Experience, Q3 2016,” report released Aug. 15.

Enterprise Customers Have Deeper, More Complex Requirements
Far from fancy photo libraries of the past, today’s DAM solutions need to add value to business strategies, have a way to measure asset performance, and be accessible to serve and receive assets across the enterprise. For example, a global luxury brand manages millions of assets among thousands of global users and agencies. AEM Assets is able to manage the scale and workflow, automate time-consuming tasks, as well as improve access and use assets at any point in the customer journey — from building brand awareness to enhancing post-purchase experience.

As a core enterprise business system, DAM must easily connect to other enterprise technologies and ecosystems to drive a positive customer experience. Adobe has worked with more than 50 software partners to develop pre-built connectors to Adobe Experience Manager to make it easier to connect to your best-of breed enterprise systems for commerce, publishing, translation, rights management, and broader content marketing needs.

Powered By Machine Learning And Valuable Analytics Data.
When you begin to manage assets in the millions, and even billions, finding the right asset could be like searching for a needle in a haystack. Imagine the experience of a global auto manufacturer, whose complex business has both B2B and B2C requirements that must be satisfied. As a result, they have a wide variety of digital assets: billboards, campaign content, manuals, product shots — all of which need to be shared and accessed by a complex web of partners, resellers, and employees. With this much content and complexity, businesses will need the help of machines and technology to drive better automation and business decisions. Here are two areas where we have driven innovation into the core of DAM:

Next-generation functionality with automated tagging. Later this year, all customers will be able to enjoy the magic of SmartTags — a trained algorithm to automatically and predictably tag assets with a variety of descriptors including photo type (macro, portrait, etc.), popular activities (running, skiing, hiking), certain emotions (smiling, crying), popular objects (car, road, people), animals, popular locations, primary colors, and more. The algorithm also may add new tags to previously tagged images to make them more discoverable, increasing their value across the organization.

Actionable asset insights. Customers now can track usage of rich media files to obtain data on how assets are utilized and how well they are performing. This easily accessible data allows the everyday marketer to gain immediate insights and use that information to optimize their investments in creative that drives marketing campaigns.

Adobe Continues To Innovate
We believe the benefits our customers see are the real reason for our recognition as a strong performer in the Forrester Wave. Adobe will continue to help customers reimagine how they want to manage and deliver digital assets at scale. We’ve created hundreds of new features in the past two years, and that’s just the start. We’ve added more global content and DAM experts, shared more best practices, and continue to fuel a strategic roadmap for ultimate customer satisfaction. AEM Assets will continue to address challenges of growth, governance, and the broader need for content marketing within the enterprise. Brands will have all content in one system to drive campaigns and sales, and support lines of business at all points in the customer journey.

Today, a customer’s investment in DAM is an investment in their top-line growth and in their consumers’ experience. By extending content across channels in highly scalable ways — dynamic personalization, device-agnostic asset formatting, direct integration with creative tools, and support for high-resolution images and rich media — the DAM becomes a foundation of the customer experience and can therefore have a direct effect on consumer engagement, response rates, conversion, brand consistency, and satisfaction.

For more information on how Adobe Experience Manager Assets can help your organization manage a growing amount of content that comes with personalized marketing, view the latest webinar and see more details on how to improve your content marketing.

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from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/web-experience/adobe-accelerates-cx-innovation-digital-asset-management/

Point of Sale: Retail & Travel Weekly

This week’s articles explore ways to use mobile to integrate the customer journey, differences between marketing mix modeling and attribution, methods of optimizing the long tail of SEO for retailers, and more.

• Marketing Mix Modeling vs. Attribution: Which One Is Right for Your Business? [MarketingProfs]: Lots of buzz exists around attribution — and understanding the main differences between media mix modeling and attribution is the first step in deciding what is right for your business.
• Retailers should tap mobile media to integrate the customer journey [Mobile Marketer]: Mobile still represents a tremendous opportunity for organizations that want to interact with consumers in a multitude of ways.
• SEO: How to Maximize the Long Tail [Practical Ecommerce]: Optimizing the long tail of products you have may involve developing an optimal architecture.
• UK Internet Users Click on Personalized Emails [eMarketer]: According to a new survey of UK users, personalizing marketing emails is the most influential method for motivating them to click.
• RetailMeNot’s future lies in data-based decisions for content-driven commerce [Mobile Commerce Daily]: The mobile coupling platform will be putting data at the forefront of it’s offerings and is suggesting other retailers do the same.
• Expedia escalates mobile travel disruption with innovation site, think tank [Mobile Marketer]: Expedia has started a new venture called “Expedia Labs” to showcase new technology and develop new Expedia apps and experiences.
• Hot industry trend: Video marketing for hotels [Hospitality Net]: Video represents a new opportunity for travel companies as more and more consumers expect video content.
• To Improve Foundational Customer Experience, Airlines Should Look To Operations [Skift]: Creating a connected airline with unified technology and a streamlined business process will be the expectation travelers have.

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-17/

Social for the Modern Marketer

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from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/social-media/social-modern-marketer/