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Five Steps to Personalize Your Mobile Experience for Better Customer Engagement

Mobile devices are everywhere, and brands are trying to crack the code for how to increase customer engagement on mobile apps — they are getting downloads but want better in-app conversion rates. What many brands fail to realize is that personalizing their customer experiences is the key they have been searching for to create the engaging mobile experiences their customers crave.

Five Steps to Personalize Your Mobile Experience
When you’re thinking through your mobile strategy, it can be difficult sometimes to know where to start. These five steps will help you navigate through the personalization process for your mobile strategy.

1. Determine How You Can Pique People’s Interests.
This is a key question to ask yourself when launching any mobile strategy. You must think through not just what you want to gain from your mobile campaign, but also what will make the campaign interesting or relevant to customers. If they don’t find your mobile experience worthwhile, they are unlikely to engage regularly with you on mobile — or possibly interact with your brand at all.

2. Use Analytics to Drive Personalization.
If you are gathering the right customer intelligence from your users’ mobile experiences, are you properly using those insights to optimize your personalization strategy? Multichannel analytics — mobile app analytics being an integral part — should drive targeting, segmentation, personalization, and ad placement. If you want your mobile strategy to be as successful as possible, you collect the most business-relevant insights and use actionable, context-appropriate marketing actions for the user segment(s) in question.

3. Simplify Your Mobile Experience.
Based on what paths your users are taking through your app, you can suggest relevant marketing actions for them and present them with messaging and offers that they’re most likely to be interested in. It’s important to realize that time — or, as some analysts call it, ‘mobile moments’ — is a valuable commodity for your high-value customers. As a result, personalizing your mobile experience in ways that make their lives easier is likely to yield the best outcome. For instance, if you know a customer bought a particular gadget, you could give him or her tips on how to use it more effectively or use messaging tools for real-time support.

4. Treat Mobile Conversions Differently Than Desktop.
By definition, mobile app users are on the go, moving from one contextual environment to another. Mobile conversions are vastly different from desktop conversions because — by virtue of being ‘mobile’ — you often have far more information about mobile customers than desktop customers. This gives you the ability to personalize your marketing actions with a higher degree of granularity. Whether that means tailoring in-app messaging to optimize their experiences or helping them avoid filling out yet another inconvenient form on mobile because you already have that information, you should treat mobile conversions in an entirely different manner from how you treat those on desktops.

5. Continuously Work to Improve Your App and Its Features.
This step applies to your mobile app as well as the features within it. If you want to know how successful your app or any of its features are, let the insights tell you the story. If a particular feature is not being used, is causing users to ‘fall out’ of your desired journey (to conversion), or is not being used by a particular segment of customers, it’s important to find out why. Continually iterating on your app based on what you think are the causes behind the observed (and undesirable) behaviors can be critical to your overall success. This allows you to make sure that your app is tailored and provides the desired experiences to the customers who are most important to you.

Bottom Line
If you want your mobile strategy to be successful, it’s important to motivate your customers to actually use your app. To do this, your mobile experience must engage your customers in a highly personalized, contextual fashion. If you don’t give them a compelling reason to use your app, it will likely be deleted, thereby depriving your customers and your brand of its value.

My recommendations are based on customer conversations and benefits I have seen world-class, industry-leading brands derive across a multitude of industry verticals.

For more on mobile strategy, tips, and advice, check out my last blog post.

The post Five Steps to Personalize Your Mobile Experience for Better Customer Engagement appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.

from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/mobile/five-steps-personalize-mobile-experience-better-customer-engagement/

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Advertising Fraud: What We’re Doing

Seemingly every few months, a new report on digital advertising fraud hits the newswires. What often follows is sadly predictable: journalists publish scathing articles quantifying billions of wasted ad dollars. Fatigued marketers scramble to ensure they are not exposed, with frantic calls and emails to hold partners accountable. Advertising technology companies respond by putting out press releases and email blasts arguing that their proprietary technology or third-party integrations make them immune – “it’s not us; it’s the other guy.” Finally, everyone goes back to business and it’s not a priority – until the next botnet is uncovered.

Wouldn’t it be nice to put this to bed once and for all for advertisers? Adobe’s TubeMogul thought so. That’s why

Here is a report card on the initiative on its one-year anniversary:

• Refunds issued to over 100 customers, totaling over $700,000 to date.
• 16,000 websites identified, blacklisted and blocked.
• Additional integrations made beyond White Ops FraudSensor™, such as DoubleVerify to provide an additional layer to isolate sophisticated invalid traffic.
• Partnerships with eight inventory partners to refund TubeMogul clients for invalid traffic.

“We have always said that one fraudulent impression is one too many, which is why we are proud that our industry-leading adoption of brand safety tools effectively protects our clients from suspicious traffic,” noted Brett Wilson, vice president and general manager of advertising at Adobe.

Ultimately, recurring headlines with the words “advertising fraud” undermine trust in the industry, particularly the perception of programmatic buying. It’s up to marketers to demand greater transparency with all partners – not just on ad fraud, but also in fees and measurement.

Adobe TubeMogul, a leader in video advertising that enables brands and agencies to plan and buy video advertising across desktops, mobile, streaming devices and TVs, was acquired by Adobe in December of 2016. Learn more about the acquisition here.

Brett Wilson is Vice President and General Manager of Advertising at Adobe.

The post Advertising Fraud: What We’re Doing appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.

from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/advertising/advertising-fraud-what-were-doing/

Answering the Call for an Audience-Acquisition Framework

Consider the age-old thought experiment, “If a tree falls in the forest, and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?” The same can be asked of even the best content in the world. “Content is king” only rings true if there is an audience there to “see and hear” it. While even modestly successful media companies will have some manner of audience to work with, today’s fierce competition for audiences, as well as their subscriptions and ad views, forces every media and entertainment (M&E) marketer to feed a constant cycle of acquiring, engaging, monetizing, and measuring audiences because these actions impact nearly every business’s key performance indicators (KPIs) for success.

A marketer’s ability to affect metrics — such as subscriber count, engagement frequency, time spent, or ad revenue — can make the difference in whether he or she gets that next promotion or bonus. Yet, moving these metrics in a significant way requires not only a formal approach to data-driven acquisition and retention, but also a technical capacity to execute.

Adobe’s latest whitepaper, Audience Acquisition Evolved: Acquiring and Engaging Audience Across Channels, shows you four things you can start on right now to prepare your team to execute a successful acquisition and retention program. In addition, it outlines a framework to encourage continual growth.

Following is a snapshot of the framework.

Onboard and Analyze
Data traits and behaviors are collected via analytics as new people engage with your ads, sites, and apps. In addition, analytics and personalization technology tell you what activities contribute the most to your KPIs.

Segment
Data from analytics, customer-relationship management (CRM), first-party data, and other data sources (including offline sources) is aggregated by a data-management platform (DMP) to form audience segments that can be used for targeting and personalization. These audience segments can be expanded using lookalike modeling, which identifies prospects with similar behaviors and traits that you can’t identify from existing first-party traits.

Reach and Engage
Once the segments are defined, leverage them in campaign-management tools that deliver optimal ad experiences to your most profitable advertising channels. Use technologies — including retargeting, dynamic creative, audience extensions, and programmatic buying — to take action with your audience data.

Personalize
Use audience data to personalize all the digital experiences that you manage across devices. Technologies — including A/B testing, multivariate testing, and video recommendations — can help you deliver the perfect experience for each person. These personalized experiences will increase people’s satisfaction levels and time spent as well as drive repeat usage.

In Sum
Audience Acquisition Evolved explores what the latest research tells us about how acquisition and engagement are changing in the M&E industry, what the obstacles are, and how technology can help you address those obstacles. You will also receive actionable tips to accelerate your data-driven marketing.

Get a free copy today of Audience Acquisition Evolved: Acquiring and Engaging Audience Across Channels.

The post Answering the Call for an Audience-Acquisition Framework appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.

from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/analytics/answering-call-audience-acquisition-framework/

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Point of Sale: Retail & Travel Weekly

This week’s articles include perspectives on how not to slip up with chatbots, consumers openness to in-store monitoring, how Urban Outfitters saw significant lift from location targeting, and more.

• Why Chatbots Are Dangerous Territory For Retailers [Forbes]: As chatbots rise in popularity, retailers should follow some guidelines to prevent backlash from consumers.
• Many Consumers Are Open to Beacons [eMarketer]: Nearly half of survey consumers were open to in-store monitoring if it benefited them.
• Urban Outfitters achieves 146 pc revenue increase through location targeting [Mobile Commerce Daily]: Using data to deliver personalized push messages, Urban Outfitters saw some impressive results.
• How to Avoid SEO Disaster from a Replatform [Practical Ecommerce]: Tips and tricks to maintain SEO rankings and positions when moving to a new platform.
• Retailers Tout Personalization Push, But Are Delaying Some Features for Years [eMarketer]: Personalization will be a major focus for many retailers, but for some, rolling out some of the planned features could take a few years.

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-36/

The Global Brand Experience: Upgrade Your Customers to First Class

The post The Global Brand Experience: Upgrade Your Customers to First Class appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.

from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/digital-marketing/global-brand-experience-upgrade-customers-first-class/

Google AMP: One Year Later

The numbers are in, and consumers have given Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) initiative a thumbs-up. At Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Adobe Digital Insights will be releasing a new report that analyzes over 1.7 trillion visits to over 16,000 mobile websites (between Jan. 2014 and Jan. 2017). This data, aggregated and anonymous, comes through Adobe Analytics within Adobe Marketing Cloud.

As part of this report, we have new data showing that as of December 2016, top publishers within the United States now see 7% of all their traffic – across devices – coming through Google AMP.

Also as of December 2016, AMP has grown 405% from when usage began picking up in April 2016. And in November during a busy election season when coverage ramped up considerably across the board, AMP traffic spiked at 896%.

What we’re seeing is that on the one-year anniversary of Google’s efforts to speed up the mobile Web, many consumers have welcomed this technology as a fast and efficient way to access content on their mobile devices.

To AMP or not to AMP
In a world where consumers are increasingly fragmented across devices and platforms, media companies have lots to consider when deciding how to best get their content in front of audiences. There’s no one-size-fits-all and every channel has its drawbacks and opportunities.

Google has a vested interest in the Web given their core business, and their investment in AMP makes a lot of sense. But at an industry level, this technology truly does enhance how consumers access content on mobile devices; Facebook has a similar deployment with Instant Articles. Anybody who has tried Google AMP can attest to how smooth the experience is. And for a media company, this is what audiences are craving.

Within Adobe Marketing Cloud, we have the pleasure of working with some of the largest media companies in the U.S. When AMP was first made available, we announced our support and have worked with customers to successfully implement the technology.

What we’ve found is that beyond the technical hurdles – such as implementing the proper tracking before deployment – there’s a small cultural shift that has to happen as well. Developers must sit down at the table with designers to determine the best approach that satisfies both parties. At the same time, AMP is also a forcing function for brands to think not only mobile-first, but mobile-only.

AMP now represents 7% of traffic for top publishers and this will likely increase, especially as smartphones become the dominant way for consumers to interact with the world around them. Digital transformation is upending the media industry in so many ways, and brands will have to keep a close eye on developments like AMP to make sure the experience they deliver is stellar.

AMP is a technology to watch in the coming years and it is setting itself up to disrupt not only the mobile web for the media industry, but also the mobile web as a whole. If your company is ready to make the jump to AMP, make sure that measurement is front and center because success that can’t be measured is no success at all.

For details on how to setup AMP pages and how to track them, just check out our documentation. Happy AMPing!

The post Google AMP: One Year Later appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.

from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/analytics/google-amp-one-year-later/

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Take Your Data Science to the Next Level — Set It Free

Data science is a hot-button topic right now — and for good reason. Brands know they’re sitting on mostly untapped data goldmines, and there’s a good chance that means they’re not making the most of key insights about their business. Even if they don’t yet know exactly how to put data science to work to leverage this wealth of information, today’s businesses are becoming increasingly aware of data science, are intrigued by it, and want to know what it can do for them.

It’s a topic that my colleague — analytics guru, Jeff Allen — and I recently explored. First, we wanted to establish early in the conversation that one doesn’t need to be a scientist to act like a scientist — to apply scientific method and rigor to everything we do in marketing.

Where the Average Organization Falls
To start, we wanted to establish a benchmark, so at a recent gathering with fellow marketers, we asked them, “On a scale from 1 (I run the other direction when I hear the words ‘data science’) to 10 (I’m a data-science wizard!), how would you rate yourself or your organization on the data-science front?” More often than not, people tend to rate themselves somewhere in the middle. They’re comfortable and completely on board with data — they know, conceptually, that they need to be data-driven to truly optimize and personalize their brand experiences. But, there’s just something about the word ‘science’ that throws people for a loop.

Realistically, data science and its applications — automation, machine learning, and artificial intelligence, for instance — are meant to free humans from basic clerical tasks. Once freed from these more mundane duties, they have more time to spend on high-value must-dos that machines, well, can’t handle — at least not as well as humans can (for now, anyway) — including critical thinking, creative problem solving, and strategizing for optimal results and happy customers. A perfect example is the ATM.

When ATMs first hit the scene, tellers thought they were finished. After all, who would wait in line to withdraw cash or deposit checks when a machine could tackle it all — and tackle it all quickly, 24/7, and with zero wait or lag time?

However, in reality, ATMs not only drove more business for banks — meaning more branches and more tellers — but also turned the human money-givers into meaningful marketing extensions. Sure, tellers weren’t mechanical customer-care people anymore. Instead, they became something bigger and better, as they stepped into more strategic roles, driving higher long-term returns and increased customer satisfaction.

The best part is that, now, it has come full circle. Some banks have begun integrating the ATM/teller experience, allowing customers to use the machine while interacting with a live person. Think about that from a data-science perspective. The technology was meant to free humans from doing the very basic, very clerical tasks; and that’s exactly what ATMs did — and are still doing. But, after seeing how people actually interacted with them, banks pushed their companies — as well as the industry as a whole — to assess and act on what customers wanted in that moment. In this case, customers want the human touch paired with the convenience and accessibility of ATMs. It’s human meets machine — and it’s pretty powerful.

How to Achieve Data-Science Success
So, how do brands become living, breathing, activating, data-driven organizations — with data science at the center?

1. Change Customer Culture.
When the right people ask the right questions, really understand qualitative and quantitative measures, follow scientific methods, and perform the marketing alchemy that comes with them, magic — well, okay, data science — happens. Those changes, as with virtually any optimization initiatives you implement, require universal buy-in from the top down. And that means you must garner some small wins and evangelize like a madman to have yourself and your initiatives heard.

To achieve success in the data-science universe, you need it to become a meaningful part of your corporate culture. You can’t simply relegate data science to the data scientists and hope for the best. You must democratize it across different types of marketers and brand advocates and allow their diverse business goals and initiatives to steer the next steps. To do this, many tech companies are turning to business intelligence programs that allow anyone in the organization — with or without degrees in data analysis, statistics, or computer science — to access and analyze their data and create reports reflecting the trends that are impacting their audiences and markets. It’s much like the ATM example — a transitional way of thinking that can move the needle in a big way.

2. Data Is Your Friend — if You Know How to Interpret It Correctly.
There are also the notions of causation, correlation, and confounding variables. A variable in our data may be shared by two elements, which would make some marketers quick to say this or that caused it and point to data that they believe tells the story. But, remember — and this is science 101 here — correlation is NOT causation (nor vice versa). Be sure you’re aware of your variable’s hidden effects on X and Y as well as any sample biases, systematic errors, and not-so-great statistical practices being kicked around. Explore, hypothesize, test, rinse, repeat.

One of the biggest issues I see from organizations with relatively new data-science focuses is that they tend to head into experiments or campaigns with the belief that something is a certain way — that something is right or that X drives Y, for instance. If you already believe it, chances are that you can prove it if you dig through the data long enough — but that’s not good. To be effective and leverage data science properly, you need to A/B test and use the scientific method to make the right decisions and avoid the wrong ones. Again, explore, hypothesize, and test — and take NO shortcuts in between.

3. Leverage the Power of Machine Learning.
Data science accelerates data exploration, allowing us to rapidly derive insight and meaning. So, what’s the next step? How do you exploit these insights, make decisions, and take action? Machine learning plays a big role in exploiting these insights — enabling you to tap into the power of data to optimize and personalize individual visitor interactions. By exploring data for trends, similarities, and probabilities and, at the same time, delivering experiences that take advantage of this exploration, you’ll have personalization power that far exceeds anything you could do manually. Your customers want it — and once you see the potential, your organization will want it too. Machine learning should enable constant and continuous exploration AND exploitation. While I encourage marketers to understand some statistical basics, they shouldn’t have to worry about the statistical rigor of the tools they use.

4. Trust the Auto Pilot.
To really take your data science — and even optimization — efforts to the next level, you need to embrace automated personalization. To do that, you’ll have to trust the machine. Cultural best practices, then, need to align — and that can be a tricky request for some companies. We have the tools, so don’t worry about that. But, you need to come to the table ready to tap into and — more importantly — trust your machine marketing partner. That can be a tall order for some marketers.

Democratizing data science helps, though. Even if you don’t have a data-science team, the work can still happen if you share the love and the actual load that comes with these processes. Tellers trusted ATMs to do the job, and look at everything they achieved — more success, more opportunities, and more elevated roles within their organizations as well as the entire banking industry.

For organizations to take this to the next level and embrace the automation of data science, they need to conjure up a certain level of trust. They need to put a lot of important intel and processes into the hands of their machine autopilots. Both culturally and from a best-practices perspective, these organizations will all have to figure that out. We have the tools and technology, but there’s a certain amount of cultural and organizational shift that many companies will need to think about both before and during their data-science integrations.

Continuing From Here
This is just the beginning of the data-science conversation. For now, think about the ways your company can embrace and integrate data science, whether you bring in an expert or democratize the process across existing resources. There are many opportunities and there’s tremendous potential if you can make the cultural and procedural shifts that data science requires. But, done right, it’s well worth the effort.

This post first published on SmartDataCollective.com. 

The post Take Your Data Science to the Next Level — Set It Free appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.

from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/personalization/take-data-science-next-level-set-free/

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Money Matters: The Digital Enrollment Imperative in Financial Services

The account-enrollment experience is critical to customer conversion; yet, many institutions still use paper-intensive legacy systems. As consumers are researching and comparison-shopping — seeking the best locations and methods for managing their money — every aspect of the experience counts. And, as customer preference expands into self-service and digital interactions, it is important to provide a personalized experience that can span across channels and devices — especially mobile.

Fortunately, optimizing the account-enrollment experience pays huge dividends. Nedbank recently streamlined their enrollment process with Adobe Experience Manager Forms, Adobe Experience Manager Sites, and Adobe Analytics and were able to increase conversions from 33 to 80 percent. Progressive financial institutions are rendering and updating forms more quickly, making them more dynamic and their offers more personalized, AND effectively managing the workflow to support these seamless experiences using integrated technology.

Four Challenges — and Solutions — to Delivering the Optimal Customer Experience
To provide an optimal enrollment experience across digital channels, marketers must overcome four common challenges. Never fear, though — we have solutions!

Challenge 1: The Mobile Experience is Broken.
Enrollment forms and documents continue to offer desktop- or paper-like experiences, causing customers to start applications on mobile devices but eventually abandon them or switch to in-person visits or phone calls, which are much more expensive for the business.

Solution: Focus on the cross-channel customer experience and leverage responsive forms and documents that are integrated with existing apps and websites. Content can be personalized and reused from other digital channels. Allow users to work offline and synchronize when they are connected. Make sure interactive form and document elements adapt to any screen size and user response.

Challenge 2: Workflows Don’t Work or Scale.
Many departments and services still rely on manual or paper-based form filling, signing, and approval processes due to compliance or data-security issues. These are error-prone, involve manual data reentry into backend systems, and are expensive to store.

Solution: Use electronic form filling and electronic signatures that meet legal and compliance regulations. Provide the capability for photo recognition of documents to auto-populate form fields (such as from a driver’s license).

Challenge 3: There is Reduced Flexibility and Slow Time-to-Market for Updates.
With hundreds of forms, businesses often have to rely on expensive development resources to create or update form and document experiences, reducing the flexibility to make updates and increasing time-to-market for launching new enrollment services.

Solution: Increase organizational flexibility with user-centric form management and automated workflows integrated with backend systems. Have your systems designed to reduce demands on information technology (IT) departments if forms need to change.

Challenge 4: Companies Lack Visibility Into Customer Experiences.
Most organizations lack insight when it comes to how long it takes to complete enrollment applications and where customers are abandoning the processes. Hence, they struggle — or completely fail — to improve the enrollment experience.

Solution: Measure and optimize the experience with usage and workflow analytics and personalized correspondence. Enable analytics tracking, A/B testing, and targeting to optimize and personalize the forms experience.

How Nedbank Improved Digital Enrollment
Established in 1961, Nedbank is the fourth-largest bank in South Africa, a country that has 11 official languages and is still on the path to finding its identity in today’s global economy. Through a series of mergers and acquisitions, Nedbank was left with multiple internal groups that were serving customers. As a result, Nedbank’s ability to deliver consistency with regard to both messages and experiences — regardless of touchpoint — was limited. To address these challenges, Nedbank completely overhauled its digital enrollment processes. The initiative included software that allowed nontechnical marketing and operations people to take greater roles in designing and managing the processes. As mentioned before, the rate of successful form completion increased from 33 to 80 percent, and they reduced the number of form templates from 228 to 38. This helped Nedbank provide a seamless, personalized banking experience whether the interaction was on the web, mobile web, or via app.

Final Thoughts
Nedbank is not an anomaly. Companies that invest in both digital enrollment and in improving the customer experience are gaining competitive advantages. Those that don’t risk losing business or market share to those that do. Transforming your organization into an experience business that provides multichannel account-enrollment processes isn’t about the latest fad. It is a real evolution in customer service that results in increased speed to market for your forms and processes, increased customer engagement, reduced load on IT, higher conversion rates, and an improved customer experience.

Now is the time to extend your digital-marketing capabilities to the forms and applications processes. If you are optimizing third-party advertising, site-based messaging, or site pages, why stop at the activity in which you actually convert new customers?

Learn more. Download our white paper, Money Matters. The Digital Enrollment Imperative in Financial Services.

The post Money Matters: The Digital Enrollment Imperative in Financial Services appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.

from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/web-experience/money-matters-digital-enrollment-imperative-financial-services/

Why Automation Is Your Strategic Advantage in the Personalization Wars

With 47,000 rooms and 20 million guests staying with them annually, MGM Resorts — located on the world-renowned Las Vegas strip — had to make a shift from pushing products on guests to offering them the personalized service they wanted. Regardless of the method, they needed their customers to constantly be doing something — downloading an app, consuming a product, clicking on this push notification — for the brand to reach their engagement and conversion goals. This is undoubtedly a daunting task to accomplish in a landscape where millions of customers already had their ideas of the perfect vacation in mind — and often planned — before ever stepping foot on the strip.

So, using automated personalization, MGM Resorts wanted to put the control back into their customers’ hands by asking — not telling — customers what they wanted to do. But, with 20 million guests annually, how is this type of one-on-one personalized experience even possible? In 2013, the resort looked to Adobe to find their solution. With the right analytics and personalization tools to automate and, therefore, scale their efforts, they were able to not only ask guests what they wanted to do, but also then offer them the resources to follow through via rich imagery and up-to-date information — and all at their fingertips, whether through their apps or their website. As a result, engagement and conversions skyrocketed and so did MGM Resort’s ROI.

Suffice to say, the marketing umbrella has widened quite a bit since digital burst on to the scene. From optimization, testing, email, and mobile to social and cross-platform extensions like beacons and geofencing, the opportunities are endless. But, despite the incredibly diverse landscape, at the end of the day, the goal is the same. Like MGM Resorts, you want customers to do something — to take action, to convert, to opt in, to hit some type of benchmark — and you want them do whatever that is with you and not with your competitors. Pretty straightforward.

And, most recently, that ‘doing something’ is being fueled by the one-two punch of data science and machine learning. By tapping into artificial intelligence and machine learning to create spot-on relevant experiences and automation to scale, brands can curate unparalleled customer journeys that far exceed what human marketers can deliver.

The Next Stage of Customer-Driven Relevance
None of this is new either; but now, a higher level of access, intel, and integration is enabling companies to gain more, do more, and deliver more for every consumer every time. Those old-school recommendation engines definitely did the job and were better — hands down — than no personalization at all. But, these tools are growing smarter and more advanced, and today, companies are pulling out all the stops, incorporating offline data, and improving algorithms themselves to create constantly personalized experiences at scale.

One national home-improvement chain, for example, is doing some very interesting things with their recommendation engine, incorporating all sorts of offline data. They have two different data flows feeding their engine, adding new dimensionality to the entire experience — specifically, the data consumed by their recommendation engine creates more granular relevance. The organization creates more things for the engine to work with so it can make better decisions thanks to finer, sharper algorithms created and refined specifically for this brand. That level of granularity allows the company to deliver much more spot-on relevance and to reap increased conversions and other key performance indicators (KPIs) as a result.

Here’s another prime example. We work with a major US-based bank that’s really doing it right. The bank’s website has numerous slots on their homepage, as well as all across their site, that show different permutations and user-specific content based on each visitor’s product consumption and behavior. A human marketer could not possibly sit down and create all the potential content combinations that exist based on click throughs, account status, credit card usage, and other relevant details. But, by allowing machine learning to take the reins, the bank’s robust automation engine can cook up ideal combinations of creative, content, and onsite ads. The result is a highly customized experience that draws customers and prospects further down the path toward engagement, activation, and long-term loyalty.

What It Means for Brands, Marketers, and Everyone in Between
Done right, the impact of processes and workflows driven by machine learning like this can be dramatic since the customer is much more likely to experience relevance. Done right, experiences are smoother, increasingly meaningful, and in line with each customer and what he or she is trying to accomplish. But, despite delivering all this relevance, the best machine-led personalization is totally seamless and behind the scenes. To the customer, it just happens. It’s the marketing equivalent of, “If a tree falls in an empty forest, …” — you’re delivering spot-on relevance in a completely frictionless way. It’s a massive improvement but one at which no one will ever bat an eye.

In my experience, this is something that — oddly — agitates marketers. They don’t want to go the automation route, because they don’t want to give up control — and I understand that. No one wants to feel obsolete or as if they’re being left behind, and companies that aren’t culturally prepared for this kind of seismic shift can be tough sells. However, adopters are completely convinced that machine learning works magic. They’ve seen the proof and are now believers.

Until you have something to compare it all to, it’s difficult to really wrap your mind around what you’re missing. Many brands we’ve worked with start realizing what the curated or random experiences were generating — compared to the bigger, better, algorithmically generated ones — but not until they took leaps of faith and began leaning on the machine and benchmarking every step.

The Future of Marketers (Admit It: You Want to Know)
None of this means that marketers are obsolete — far from it, actually. With an automated system in place, marketers do lose some control but more than make up for it in other ways. Sometimes, they literally intervene — the marketing calendar says this needs to happen this month; thus, regardless of what the algorithm says, the marketer is going to intervene. And that’s fine so long as they don’t go overboard. But, if they start applying too many rules, the machine can’t do its job effectively. They’ll, essentially, tie its virtual hands behind its back and limit its ability to deliver those spot-on experiences — and that serves no one. Sure, the marketer maintained control, but at what cost?

The alternative is to give marketers control at the other end of it all, when outputs are apparent and results are ready to be viewed. At this stage, marketers can really understand what’s happened, so it’s not just a black box. Here, marketers can look at the full picture and determine the dominant variable — maybe it was this audience that’s made up of people who are this age, live in this market, and have these behavioral traits. Maybe, together, that’s what moves the needle and makes this segment a top performer.

Armed with data-driven intel, the marketer can call the shots — maybe do more of this, test something new based on the results, or up the ante for this vital segment. By digging in, making decisions, and informing future activities, marketers wind up with some very high-value, high-level control. They can shape the decisions made and inform future activities, and that’s the kind of control that really matters. Through that lens, it’s clear that marketers aren’t giving anything up; instead, they’re gaining greater clarity and potential. Risks drop, returns soar, and everyone’s happy. What could be better?

Where Machine Learning Is Headed
Hands down, I think the theme of machine learning, automated personalization, and data science is more, more, more. We’ll see more adoption, which in many ways, I credit to the cross-pollination of the academic world and the tech and innovation industry. People are leaving global universities with well-articulated senses of machine learning and data science as well as a variety of smart, strategic industry applications and use cases right out of the gate.

Further, a variety of shifts and enhancements accompany that. For starters, we need to have tools in place that make machine learning, data science, and automated personalization incredibly user-friendly and more democratized than ever before. Some companies will be unable to carve out the dedicated talent and resources needed to make all these now-essentials a reality. By simplifying and streamlining everything and layering in sophisticated, programmatic systems, companies can share the wealth.

As that happens, companies in regulated industries — healthcare and financial services, for instance — will have to figure out everything from appropriate recordkeeping to archiving and privacy. It sounds simple, sure. But realistically, it can be quite challenging, especially when you’re talking about millions of unique experiences — millions of experiences that must be combined to create spot-on relevant touchpoints for countless consumers. We’ll figure it out, but until then, it’s a lot to digest.

Finally, we must come together to resolve this whole cross-device, cross-interaction, Internet of Things (IoT) world in which we’re currently living. To be successful, companies need to look at the probabilities and propensities of consumers to do this or that based on previous interactions, expressed wants and needs, and third-party data. Right now, organizations can take advantage of a variety of data inputs — the volume and complexity of data as well as its sources — and create really interesting opportunities on the machine-learning front. And, while that will benefit both businesses and their customers, it will also make the need for machine learning that much greater.

There’s so much more on the horizon — and I, for one, can’t wait! Adobe Marketing Cloud and Adobe Target are both positioned to facilitate and advance this next wave of marketing, and at its core, encourage consumers to “do something” — something bigger, something of higher value, and above all, something with OUR companies. Because, at the end of the day, that’s the goal no matter your industry, your niche, and your target audience.

The post Why Automation Is Your Strategic Advantage in the Personalization Wars appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.

from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/personalization/automation-strategic-advantage-personalization-wars/

New online course: Technical SEO 1

Convert Web Surfers Into Loyal Mobile App Customers

Today, mobile users spend about 85 percent of their time on smart phones using apps. Their demands for quality, personalized, relevant experiences are ever increasing. Every brand wants to have apps that are downloaded and viewed on the coveted smartphone screen. Unfortunately, the average app loses about 77 percent of its daily active users within three days after being installed and about 90 percent within the first 30 days. While promoting and driving traffic to your app is important, it is crucial to understand a few strategies to keep users returning to the app over time.

Convert Web Users to Mobile App Users.
Generally speaking, people who use mobile apps are more loyal and engage more often with your brand. For instance, REI found — alongside other results — that its average order value increases when customers begin using its apps in addition to its website. Getting exposure in the medium where consumers spend the most time is a win-win proposition for all involved. Relevant, targeted, rich mobile apps also help you to diversify your marketing mix across several devices, channels, and platforms.

Track Mobile App Users.
As you start promoting your app, you’ll want to measure how and understand which of your marketing efforts attract the most valuable users. It is worth noting here that about 50 percent of marketers don’t measure their mobile investment, and of those who do, only 18 percent of them are confident in their abilities to measure mobile marketing ROI. So, when all is said and done, marketers can truly succeed in promoting their apps and retaining app users only when they know how every marketing effort is impacting in-app behaviors and conversions downstream.

To measure where your users come from, consider using marketing links — which are available as part of Adobe’s mobile-marketing solutions. These marketing links can be placed in owned, earned, or paid media to immediately start tracking app installs.

By using these links, marketers can tie a user’s in-app behavior to the channel or source of acquisition. Visualizing app-usage key performance indicators (KPIs) across acquisition sources, media, keywords, and more can help marketers understand which acquisition efforts perform best and how they should finetune future investments.

Link to Deep Inside Your App.
While motivating users to install your app is the first important step, getting them to use the app over time is a major challenge. Unlike websites, content or services inside an app can’t really be found on a search engine. Unless the user knows what to look for and where, navigating an app is by and large an experimental exercise. If users can’t readily find what they are looking for in the app, they can quickly lose interest and adversely affect retention. To combat this, marketers can use app deep links — links to specific locations or activities inside an app — to send users directly to content or services that are relevant. By specifying a deep link when you create a marketing link, you can make sure that — when they click on an ad, for example — customers immediately reach what they are looking for in your app, and you can track what got them there.

Use Reports for Valuable Insights.
The trackable marketing link will help you understand how many clicks and app installs happened and — depending on the system you are using — can integrate with other analytic reports such as:

• Pattern Reports — These will show you how different customers move through the app and the different paths they take.
• Funnel Reports — These help you follow the conversion path. Maybe your customer starts at a homepage, then moves to an app-download page, then a product page, then checkout, and finally, the thank you page. You can also see where visitors drop off before conversion, giving you valuable insight.
• Cohort Reports — These reports look at retention over time. For example, if you acquire 100 users, how many did you retain for a given campaign? This information provides great insight on the lifetime value of different customer segments.

Seven Tips to Lead Web Users to Your App.
As you begin your journey of converting web users to app users, these seven quick tips will help you create a successful experience for your users:

1. Define your goals and match campaign goals with key business goals.
2. Determine which channels you will use and diversify to get the best return and avoid saturation in any single channel.
3. Validate your setup and be conscious about how you test landing and other pages. Understand all the variables for different platforms and take benchmark measurements to make sure you reach your KPIs.
4. Display a download link for your app on your web and mobile sites and then track it.
5. Constantly A/B test and iterate to determine which of your campaigns are the most effective.
6. Provide a single call to action on your pages. Minimize user choices wherever possible.
7. Personalize the app experience for what a user needs. For example, a user who installs your app from your mobile website should be taken directly to the same content in your app as the content they were viewing on your website.

Motivating your customers to download your app and then tracking how it is used can take your business to a whole new level. Start small to ensure that you deliver the intended experience and receive the expected outcomes — and then learn more and grow.

The post Convert Web Surfers Into Loyal Mobile App Customers appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.

from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/mobile/convert-web-surfers-loyal-mobile-app-customers/

SEO basics: What is crawlability?

Ranking in the search engines requires a website with flawless technical SEO. Luckily, the Yoast SEO plugin takes care (of almost) everything on your WordPress site. Still, if you really want to get most out of your website and keep on outranking the competition, some basic knowledge of technical SEO is a must. In this post, I’ll explain one of the most important concepts of technical SEO: crawlability.

What is the crawler again?

A search engine like Google consists of a crawler, an index and an algorithm. The crawler follows the links. When Google’s crawler finds your website, it’ll read it and its content is saved in the index.

A crawler follows the links on the web. A crawler is also called a robot, a bot, or a spider. It goes around the internet 24/7. Once it comes to a website, it saves the HTML version of a page in a gigantic database, called the index. This index is updated every time the crawler comes around your website and finds a new or revised version of it. Depending on how important Google deems your site and the amount of changes you make on your website, the crawler comes around more or less often.

Read more: ‘SEO basics: what does Google do’ »

And what is crawlability?

Crawlability has to do with the possibilities Google has to crawl your website. Crawlers can be blocked from your site. There are a few ways to block a crawler from your website. If your website or a page on your website is blocked, you’re saying to Google’s crawler: “do not come here”. Your site or the respective page won’t turn up in the search results in most of these cases.
There are a few things that could prevent Google from crawling (or indexing) your website:

• If your robots.txt file blocks the crawler, Google will not come to your website or specific web page.
• Before crawling your website, the crawler will take a look at the HTTP header of your page. This HTTP header contains a status code. If this status code says that a page doesn’t exist, Google won’t crawl your website. In the module about HTTP headers of our (soon to be launched!) Technical SEO training we’ll tell you all about that.
• If the robots meta tag on a specific page blocks the search engine from indexing that page, Google will crawl that page, but won’t add it to its index.

This flow chart might help you understand the process bots follow when attempting to index a page:

Want to learn all about crawlability?

Although crawlability is just the very basics of technical SEO (it has to do with all the things that enable Google to index your site), for most people it’s already pretty advanced stuff. Nevertheless, if you’re blocking – perhaps even without knowing! – crawlers from your site, you’ll never rank high in Google. So, if you’re serious about SEO, this should matter to you.

If you really want to understand all the technical aspects concerning crawlability, you should definitely check out our Technical SEO 1 training, which will be released this week. In this SEO course, we’ll teach you how to detect technical SEO issues and how to solve them (with our Yoast SEO plugin).

Keep reading: ‘How to get Google to crawl your site faster’ »

 

from Yoast • SEO for everyone https://yoast.com/seo-basics-crawlability/

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Point of Sale: Retail & Travel Weekly

This week’s articles not only include a checklist for e-commerce marketing in 2017, but also look at how retailers are starting to offer fewer online discounts, the continued growth of mobile commerce, and more.

• 2017 Ecommerce Marketing Checklist [Practical Ecommerce]: Six recommendations — including planning to measure and leveraging content marketing — to ensure success for retailers in 2017.
• Retailers Are Testing Price Increases Online [eMarketer]: Prices increased in January at a higher rate than expected, possibly due to retailers offering fewer discounts.
• Q4 mcommerce spending grew 45pc year-over-year: report [Mobile Commerce Daily]: Mobile commerce continues to grow at a significant rate, indicating that retailers need to be ready to support mobile commerce.
• Please (Don’t!) Unsubscribe: Why Consumers Get Email Fatigue [eMarketer]: Lack of relevance and recieving too many emails are common reasons referenced for individuals unsubscribing from email lists.
• The Impact of Email List Segmentation on Engagement [MarketingProfs]: Segmented campaigns have higher average open rates and click-through rates.

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-35/

What You Need to Know About the Cornerstone of Data-Driven Marketing: Data Management Platforms

The post What You Need to Know About the Cornerstone of Data-Driven Marketing: Data Management Platforms appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.

from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/analytics/need-know-cornerstone-data-driven-marketing-data-management-platforms/

Adobe Summit to Include Specialized Industry Sessions

In addition to the incredible sessions and labs that are the cornerstone of Adobe Summit, we’re continuing the popular industry sessions this year as well. As the title suggests, industry sessions focus on customer stories and solutions for specific industries. On Thursday, March 23, the 90-minute Super Sessions take a deeper look at how top brands are leveraging Adobe’s cross-solutions to create business successes.

Seven Industries Bringing You Specialized Sessions
Following are the seven industries that will hold specialized sessions at this year’s Adobe Summit as well as the descriptions of what these sessions will cover.

1. Financial Services
Creating consistent, personalized, and high-quality customer experiences in financial services is far more difficult when factoring in multiple online and offline channels, higher concerns for privacy, and the need to combine data from separate legacy systems. Learn firsthand how banks, insurance companies, and wealth-management firms are using Adobe Marketing Cloud to overcome these challenges and improve cross-channel customer experiences as well as increase engagement and sales across digital channels.

2. Healthcare
Advances in digital and mobile technologies, increased consumer demands for transparent and personalized experiences, the explosion of social media, and changes arising from the Affordable Care Act all present new challenges and opportunities — and marketing and strategy executives are responding. Learn how healthcare companies are using Adobe Marketing Cloud solutions to not only connect and communicate with patients, consumers, and physicians, but also build engagement and lasting relationships.

3. High Tech/B2B
Seismic shifts in digital adoption continue to expand and evolve the role of marketing in high-tech organizations. Tech firms depend on their marketing organizations to contribute consistently to sales goals, reduce cost-to-serve through intelligent self-serve options, and influence innovation objectives. Learn firsthand how tech companies are using Adobe Marketing Cloud solutions to achieve competitive advantage and respond to ever-increasing customer demands for digitally rich and personalized experiences.

4. Media & Entertainment
Attracting and retaining audiences across every channel and every device is growing increasingly more complex in the wake of the digital disruption and transformation taking place across the media and entertainment industry. TV everywhere, direct-to-consumer advertising, over-the-top (OTT) content, and digital publications require more disciplined measurement, analytics, and data-driven marketing — with a focus on audience intelligence and revenue optimization. Join us to both hear from top media companies about their best practices and learn how Adobe Marketing Cloud is powering revenue growth and business success across the industry.

5. Retail/E-commerce
Consumer shopping behavior continues to evolve, as innovative merchants disrupt (enhance) traditional shopping experiences, and customers are easily wooed away by hot deals and discounts. Retail organizations are challenged to understand the people, processes, and technologies that will help them stay ahead of their competition. These sessions will deliver insights and best practices from some of the world’s leading retailers that are transforming their organizations to deliver great experiences across all consumer touchpoints.

6. Travel & Hospitality
According to recent Adobe research conducted Econsultancy in association with Adobe, 56 percent of travel and hospitality marketers believe that the way to differentiate themselves is through the convenient, fun, and valuable delivery of guest and traveler experiences. Learn firsthand how leading travel and hospitality companies are transforming and personalizing guest experiences as well as how Adobe Marketing Cloud is powering these successful organizations to drive profitability and guest and traveler satisfaction.

7. Government
Some of you are in the midst of modernizing government, others are gathering resources to dive into digital transformations, and many of you realize that your digital experiences can be improved upon — but, you have no idea where to begin the journey. Whatever stage you’re in, there is tremendous opportunity in gathering insight into how others are tackling the same types of challenges in government that you’re facing.

In Conclusion
As in previous years, Adobe Summit 2017 has tons to offer: the latest trends in technology; industry sessions, research, and solutions; tried-and-true methods for increasing customer satisfaction, engagement, and brand loyalty; new strategies for not only connecting with consumers, but also cultivating long-term relations with them; multiple opportunities to rub elbows with and learn from your peers; and so much more.

And the best part is — every Adobe Summit is packed full of memorable experiences everyone can enjoy learning from! For instance, in addition to these specialized industry sessions, you don’t want to miss the Industry Mixer in the afternoon of Wednesday, March 22. Stay tuned for more details.

The post Adobe Summit to Include Specialized Industry Sessions appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.

from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/digital-marketing/adobe-summit-include-specialized-industry-sessions/

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Devices don’t buy products; people do

As the number of gadgets in each household proliferates, contributor Asa Whillock discusses the benefits of marketing to people rather than devices.

The rise in the number of devices used by individuals has created new challenges — as well as opportunities — for marketers wanting to target their audiences consistently. A typical household utilizes more than seven different devices, and the average person within that household uses about half of them.

As a marketer, you want to have compelling, consistent and continuous conversations with your consumers. Perhaps your consumers have registered for your site from both their phones and their laptops, providing you with added insight into who those individuals are. However, if companies track, let’s say, 10 percent of their interactions with consumers this way, that means that nine out of 10 times, they aren’t communicating with them in a seamless way.

Today, there are two approaches to addressing this — one of which is the Google and Facebook approach. Using this method, we can say that we saw a Google or Facebook login on three different devices, and therefore, reasonably assume that all three of those devices belong to the same person, thereby increasing our advertising value and informing our strategy.

The challenge with this deterministic approach is that it’s oriented entirely around purchasing media with a specific company. Now it’s no longer the marketer’s customer, and you’re locked into buying media on their channel.

Another approach is probabilistic. In this scenario, you may not have logins connecting all of a user’s devices, but you can see that certain devices from the same IP address appeared on the advertising exchange.

While this approach is useful and doesn’t rely on media purchases, marketers are concerned about the confidence level with this method. Also, there is no concrete evidence confirming that just because they use the same IP address, or have similar HTTP header data, they belong to the same person.

The key here is to combine the best of both worlds: observances and algorithms. You also need the most deterministic data available to increase your confidence when tying devices to people — and to achieve confidence in your results while also being able to scale.

The benefits of advertising to real people
The benefits of marketing to people rather than devices are pervasive across a marketer’s role. The first area to look at is measurement. Advertisers are saying, “Give me confidence in the data that I have about the people who visit me, not just a pile of devices.”

When simply looking at impressions, the numbers can be misleading. Being able to accurately assess how you are reaching the people in your audience is critical.

Cross-device identification also helps advertisers detail a consumer’s path and understand how a two- or three-step journey across different devices changes how consumers interface with their brand.

For example, consumers who see display advertising on mobile and desktop may convert at triple the rate of consumers who only see desktop advertising. This not only affects your analytics, but also impacts how you might segment your audiences and what types of messaging you decide to put in front of them.

The alternative to cross-device identification is that the consumer feels that the brand doesn’t really know who they are. Imagine starting from square one with a merchant every time instead of one that recognizes you and caters to your preferences.

Being more aware of what a particular person is interested in — and then delivering a consistent experience across their devices — leads to a significantly improved outcome. People-based marketing can enable customization of all devices a consumer uses to consume your brand, allowing you to deliver relevant and personalized experiences on every visit.

The key is to expose content to people across all the devices they use, which can save companies from spending money on additional unnecessary ads. You may reach customers five times across the five devices they each use, and then cap further advertising if they’re not necessarily interested.

Perhaps the consumer has converted on one of those devices and you can suppress further ads or sequence ads about an additional offering. This provides opportunities to sell value-added services or other similar products.

This scenario has proven to be dramatically more effective for both the marketer and the consumer. In fact, we’ve found that advertising to consumers on two or three of their devices allows you to use half as many ad impressions to convert them.

Transparency in people-based marketing
People-based marketing is becoming a critical part of advertising. Marketers want to feel confident in their data and be able to speak directly to their consumers with competence and accuracy. However, transparency is a key component of people-based marketing.

Transparency is about empowering the consumer while simultaneously leveling the scales and empowering the marketer. Consumers want to know what kind of data is being used to represent them, as well as what devices are being connected with them or their activities. They not only want clarity regarding how their devices are linked, but also control.

Consumers want the option to say when they don’t want certain devices linked to the others. Transparency is a good practice that benefits consumers and marketers alike.

By utilizing a practice that is clear and well understood for the consumer, marketers can leverage sustainable and hygienic data for their organization that is gathered with the highest levels of consumer transparency and trust.

We’ve found that when you have this level of transparency and can educate the consumer, they become more comfortable with the experiences. Growing this confidence is perhaps the most critical part of the process, as it brings consumers on board with the business activities and improves their overall experiences with the brand.

As the advertising industry paradigm shifts from marketing to people instead of devices, it’s critical that advertisers stay ahead of the curve to provide their consumers with a better, more consistent and personalized content experience across digital touch points.

The post originally appeared on MarketingLand.com. 

The post Devices don’t buy products; people do appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.

from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/advertising/devices-dont-buy-products-people/

Gartner’s Third Magic Quadrant for Digital Marketing Hubs Was Just Released. Guess Who’s a Leader (Again)?

For the third consecutive year Adobe has been positioned as a Leader in the Digital Marketing Hubs Magic Quadrant report from Gartner. The Gartner report continues Adobe’s excellence in the Marketing cloud/hub/suite reports from major analysts. In fact, Adobe has never NOT been a leader in any major analyst marketing cloud report. You can look it up. (And you can find the actual report here.)

While it’s always nice to be recognized by very smart industry analysts, Adobe believes that what’s even more important than being leaders in the Gartner Magic Quadrant, is that this emphatically validates Adobe’s Experience Business vision.

Gartner’s Magic Quadrant’s have an axis for Completeness of Vision and for Ability to Execute. Here’s how Gartner defines those:

Ability to Execute:  product/service, overall viability (business unit, financial, strategy, organization):  financials, sales execution/pricing, market responsiveness and track record, customer experience, marketing execution, operations.

Completeness of Vision: market understanding, marketing strategy, sales strategy, offering (product) strategy, business model, vertical/industry strategy, innovation, geographic strategy.

Adobe is highest and furthest to the right in both Ability to Execute and Completeness of Vision. So what is Adobe’s vision?

The Experience Business
Being an Experience Business means leveraging data, content, and data science to deliver experiences that are relevant and personalized, on any channel, to any customer. Adobe unifies data and content in an open and common platform to create the amazing customer experiences that build loyalty. Because in a world where customers identify the experience with the brand, nothing else matters.

When we started in this business, we disrupted the market, and we disrupted ourselves. In the last 7 years we have put together a remarkable collection of marketing technology. We have transformed the industry while pioneering the digital marketing category.

Today’s consumers identify all interactions and experiences with a brand as the brand. Adobe has become the de-facto platform for all customer experiences and engagement in an enterprise. Adobe Marketing Cloud is the central consumer engagement platform that enables enterprises to develop consistent, continuous, and compelling consumer experiences.

Enterprises can’t become experience businesses with old technologies and methodologies. What got you here won’t get you there—you need a digital transformation. Existing stacks built on outdated Old platforms are unable to deliver on the vision for the experience business. You need real-time, cross-channel engagement fueled by deep customer intelligence. For this you need Adobe’s Cloud Platform.

Industry recognition for leadership feels great, we don’t deny it. But we aren’t in this business for the accolades, but rather to realize our vision of helping companies accelerate their ability to become Experience Businesses. It’s who we are and what we do. And we expect to be doing it for a long time to come.

Gartner Magic Quadrant for Digital Marketing Hubs, Andrew Frank, Christi Eubanks, Lizzy Foo Kune, Martin Kihn, Jake Sorofman, 14 February 2017.

This graphic was published by Gartner, Inc. as part of a larger research document and should be evaluated in the context of the entire document. The Gartner document is available upon request from Adobe.

Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

The post Gartner’s Third Magic Quadrant for Digital Marketing Hubs Was Just Released. Guess Who’s a Leader (Again)? appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.

from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/digital-marketing/gartners-third-magic-quadrant-digital-marketing-hubs-just-released-guess-whos-leader/

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The Best Mobile Messaging Becomes (Just the Right Amount of) Personal

Is there a platform in existence that is more personal than mobile? It’s literally in the palm of your customer’s hand. While omnipresent — and practically omniscient — connections to your customers are compelling, mobile isn’t always a case of more is more. Instead, good mobile messaging comes down to respecting the intimate nature of the platform — as well as the relationships you build through it — and understanding the strengths and weaknesses of different types of mobile communications and engagements.

Navigating the World of Mobile Messaging
Here’s a quick summary to better acquaint you with today’s mobile-messaging options.

Push Notifications
Push notifications are messages that are sent from an app to someone’s mobile device. Done right, they’re undeniably powerful — and, for brands lacking massive creative teams, they’re simple and straightforward. Further, they provide an opportunity for deep linking into the app — pulling users in to create or continue valuable experiences. Unsurprisingly, the key is to leverage the trust you’ve built with users so you can extend the relationships even further — ultimately, benefitting you both.

An important first step for using push notifications is to make sure you truly understand what your users want to do with your app — and then, help them accomplish that with notifications. Identifying the purpose of your message — for instance, you might send operational notifications (“Your prescription is ready for pickup.”) or marketing messages (“Check out our new spring collection!”) — also helps determine how to measure its effectiveness. When sending operational notifications, you can measure success by looking at how many users opened the app from the push notification. On the other hand, you can measure the success of marketing messages by looking at the number of users who fulfilled the call to action.

Push notifications have drawbacks to consider too. For starters, your target audience must be convinced to not only have your app, but also opt in to receive notifications. The opt-in rate varies by industry but averages about 40 percent — quite high when compared with email. However, push notifications tend to be very short, so recipients can often read them regardless whether they actually swipe them open. Therefore, they can feel a bit more invasive if they aren’t relevant and valuable. So, ensure your opt-in is ripe with value — and more importantly, that you deliver on that value.

SMS/Text Messaging
With regard to trust and intimacy, SMS messaging — also known as text messaging — has a lot in common with push notifications. However, text messaging can also be used to enable two-way communications between brands and their customers. Ultimately, the power of texting lies in the fact that it is both incredibly abundant nowadays, and people are comfortable with it — four in five adults use text messaging, and 97 percent of mobile users send at least one text per day. What’s more, 90 percent of all texts are read within three minutes. When you send a text to your audience, you know they will not only see it, but also engage with it.

Still, as with most things, there are some drawbacks for marketers to think about. While SMS can be great for promotional and authentication purposes, it poses a few limitations on goals beyond that. For example, while push notifications allow for deep linking into the brand experience via the app — allowing marketers to create engaging and continuous app and brand experiences — SMS does not offer a way to invite customers deep into your app with a single click.

It can feel limiting to consumers as well. It’s probably not the ideal platform for information that customers may need to access later — think receipts or confirmation codes, for example — because texts are trickier to search through than emails. So, if you’re sending valuable, long-term information to a customer, it may be best to look at other options.

Mobile Email
There are key benefits to mobile email beyond just these types of account-related messages. Communications — user achievements, milestones, and other badges of honor, for instance — are touchpoints that consumers will likely want to hold onto. In cases such as these, email tends to win. A good rule of thumb is to ask yourself, “Will the consumer need or want this message at some point in the future?” If the answer is “Yes,” email away. It takes people an average of 6.5 hours to view an email but only 15 minutes to view texts and push notifications.

Mobile Social Messaging
Unsurprisingly — with constant reimagining and refreshing to meet consumers’ latest wants, needs, and even demands — mobile is one of the fastest-growing platforms available. Because brands are unable to push messages to consumers they don’t know or have permission to chat with, the communication flow from mobile social messaging tends to be more welcomed, more positive, and more warranted — users actually want to hear from brands they are connected with and will likely act on high-value messaging.

For instance, some of the most successful businesses on the platform are using mobile to offer real-time customer support and inspire other two-way communications with users, cutting back on wait times and enhancing overarching brand experiences. The WhatsApp social-messaging platform clocks engagement rates at around 70 percent — much higher than Facebook and with virtually no barrier to engagement once you’re in. Because WhatsApp doesn’t allow marketing, media, or ads, brands are free to engage with users one-on-one with messages that are sure to be relevant and engaging.

In addition, Chatbots like WeChat offer consumers the opportunity to seamlessly ask for and receive perfectly personalized and real-time brand experiences at all points of their customer journeys. In some parts of the global market, in fact, major brands are creating chatbots instead of websites to offer consumers what they want at their fingertips, alongside humanlike engagement opportunities and personalized customer service.

While you’ll need to work harder to generate consumer engagement, the payoff is well worth the time. These new platforms not only enhance brands’ abilities to deliver personalized experiences, but also take loyalty to the next level.

Building Trust and Loyalty for the Future
All it takes is one click for a customer to unsubscribe and be gone forever. So, as with anything else, it’s important to determine the right mobile channel (or channels) for your business — and, in most cases, that involves a more iterative testing process.

It’s better to have a well-articulated, high-value outreach than something cutting edge that totally misses the mark. Test, analyze, optimize — and test again. And, above all, remind yourself of the power you possess, because — for the first time ever — you, your brand, and your message can, quite literally, be in the palms of your consumers’ hands in highly targeted, entirely one-on-one ways.

At the end of the day, that is powerful — more powerful than anything we’ve ever seen on this scale. So, go ahead — send a (perfectly timed, highly personal, incredibly valuable) message.

The post The Best Mobile Messaging Becomes (Just the Right Amount of) Personal appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.

from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/mobile/best-mobile-messaging-becomes-just-right-amount-personal/