Could Customer Experience Be as Simple as a Light Post?

What is it that creates a great customer experience? Is it a good interaction with customer service or with a mobile website or app? Is it personalization in messaging, or something else entirely? In a recent survey by Gartner, it said that by 2017, 89 percent of marketers expect customer experience to be their primary differentiator. That is up from 30 percent in 2010. With this increased reliance on experience, what can brands do to improve theirs? I recently had some great experiences as a consumer that shows just what experience business means.

Earlier this year I had the opportunity to present at a conference at Walt Disney World. I went a few days early to the Magic Kingdom Park with my family. For me and many others, Disney World is a place that fully immerses a customer in an experience — which is why I think first time guests have a 70 percent return rate.

How does one of the most valued brands in the world create an experience? Like many companies, Disney nails the big impacts at its parks — the castle, the characters, the lands, the entertainment, the rides, and the ambiance. To truly get a Disney-level experience, you need to look at the details. During my recent trip, it was the light post that caught my eye. Yes, the light post. Having already been to a lot of amusement parks that don’t focus as much attention on the paint of the railings and light posts, I appreciated the chip free sparkle and flawless paint that showed the effort Disney puts into creating an experience. Here are three potential light posts areas for your business that can be used to create an experience.

1. Social Media
A recent survey from J.D. Power shows 67 percent of consumers use social media for their customer service needs. That means your social media has become your first line of defense for customer complaints — as well as opportunities to create an experience.

Last year I sent a Tweet about how I was enjoying some Nesquik even though I was a full-grown adult. The tweet had some good engagement and I got a nice response from the brand. They sent me a direct message requesting my address and sent me a box full of Nesquik coupons and products. They created a much more loyal fan out of me after that simple interaction.

2. Content Strategy
We are inundated with new content. Facebook data shows there are approximately 2.5 million posts every minute. There certainly is a lot of content noise, but it can be an effective way to generate business. Per a study from the Content Marketing Institute, content marketing costs 62 percent less than outbound marketing and generates more than 3 times the leads. Jeff Barrett — Inc contributor, social influencer, and recent Adobe Summit Insider — had this to say about content strategy:

Easier access creates greater competition. It’s like the line for $1 sub day at Jimmy John’s — but you can skip ahead in this line. (1) Find the quickest way to a million followers. Chances are you don’t have that reach but other people do. Keep attracting influencers to work with you until you reach that mark rather than waiting the years it would take to grow that reach. (2) Determine the end result before you even begin. What do you want this strategy to yield? Purchases, brand loyalty, visibility? So many brands feel rushed to act and forget this step. Notice I didn’t mention content? It’s important but, if you create the best content without a goal (Old Spice) or without enough people to see it (Brand You’ve Never Heard Of), it will never work.

3. Customer Research
To provide a good experience, you need to understand your customer. The right research can provide a great experience that feels personalized. Brands like Adobe, McDonalds, Apple, Nest, and other large companies use consistent surveys, usage data, social listening, and other research methods to consistently improve products, jump on current trends, and prepare for the future.

For me, Marriott has provided these individual experiences countless times. Jokingly, I tweeted at a Marriott years ago about how I loved Andes Mints on my pillow at night. Ever since that one note, I have received an Andes mint — sometimes bags of them in the case of the World Center Marriott who hosted me during my Disney stay. That seemingly small customer interaction from research they have saved about me keeps me a loyal customer to their brand when I travel.

In a tech-driven world that continues to expand, experiences are what will separate you from the crowd. It is important to focus on the big castle that initially brings customers to your product, but you may find it’s the light posts that truly create an experience. Whatever your light post might be — social media, content strategy, customer research, or something entirely different — make sure you put a little extra care to give it that Disney sparkle.

The post Could Customer Experience Be as Simple as a Light Post? appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.

from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/digital-marketing/customer-experience-simple-light-post/

Domain names and their influence on SEO

Accelerate Marketing Execution with Digital Document Workflows

Your marketing team works hard to deliver exceptional results for your business, and efficient document management is key. For example, KLM Royal Dutch Airlines — the flagship carrier of the Netherlands — is known for prioritizing sustainable travel. But, beyond deploying smart aircrafts and using sustainable biofuels to reduce Co2 emissions, KLM’s action plan strives to increase efficiencies in sales and marketing, eliminating delays and streamlining processes.

Negotiating agreements on behalf of its partners, KLM relies on global teams and joint signatures to execute contracts. Until recently, the process required massive amounts of paperwork and lengthy wait times; but today, 98 percent of all KLM sales contracts are signed using e-signatures.

With more visibility into contract status and a more manageable process for tracking and reporting, the time needed to complete the internal signing process decreased from weeks to mere days — placing a legally binding contract into the hands of an outside partner in just a few hours. And, having eliminated more than one one-million pages from their annual paper consumption, the new digital workflow also supports KLM’s sustainability goals.

Reach New Altitudes With End-to-End Speed-Marketing Execution.
Marketers can learn an important lesson from KLM’s success — digital document workflows create a new, more efficient way to do business. In simpler words, a digital workflow enables marketing to move more quickly.

Think about it — every signed contract that KLM executes is emailed directly to the company controller where it’s filed electronically. By reducing the volume of paperwork, no one spends time searching for documents, creating (and re-creating) new ones, or waiting for approvals or signatures to arrive on paper.

When marketers can reliably create, edit, and sign PDFs — both in the office and on the go — they create an efficient digital workflow that allows marketing teams and business leaders to move projects more quickly. From easy collaboration and digital document sharing to fast review, approval, and e-sign integration — better tools and processes accelerate marketing execution from end to end.

Work Anywhere and Edit Anything on the Fly.
Just as KLM discovered, when anyone can sign and return a document in seconds — from any location and device — you complete transactions in record time, never again bothering with overnight delivery.

Digital solutions, like Adobe Document Cloud, create a streamlined workflow that eliminates delays and speeds up marketing-campaign velocity — from creative approvals to getting assets into market.

As marketers develop their own digital workflows and processes, they should look for tools that create simpler user experiences and work consistently across desktop, mobile, and web platforms. For the most-efficient workflows, marketers should also ensure that their resources allow them to:

Create and Collaborate Using Smart PDFs:

• Create PDFs that store all the data and formatting of the original file;
• Collaborate, edit, and provide feedback quickly; and
• Send legally binding documents that recipients can sign — from any location and on any device.

Be Secure:

• Control who can view and make changes to a document with the power to redact information from certain individuals; and
• Send and track files online with peace of mind, knowing that they reach their destination securely.

Easily Use and View Digital Documents:

• Never be required to download additional applications to use or view documents; and
• Preserve the integrity of documents — no fonts, images, or other elements should be warped or lost in translation between computers and applications.

Remain Connected and Productive When on the Go:

• Use mobile apps to take your work with you;
• Perform marketing tasks on the go — convert, edit, and sign PDFs from a mobile device; and
• Use your device camera to capture a document, whiteboard, or receipt and save it as a PDF.

With these capabilities, digital document tools keep businesses at the forefront of efficiency and innovation. After all, modern businesses demand a modern approach to document management. Digital workflows make marketers’ jobs easier — plain and simple.

Transform Marketing With All-Digital Experiences and Watch Your Business Soar.
Documents are the central nervous system of any company. Transitioning from analog documents to digital solutions gives teams more visibility throughout the marketing process, increasing company accountability, strengthening client relationships, and clearing time for businesses like KLM to focus on other activities.

So, let your business soar. Accelerate marketing execution by taking your digital document solution to the next level.

The post Accelerate Marketing Execution with Digital Document Workflows appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.

from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/customer-experience/accelerate-marketing-execution-digital-document-workflows/

Yoast SEO 4.7: Introducing Italian

Ask Yoast: Give a division a separate domain?

Analytics Idol 2017 In Review

Though Adobe Summit 2017 has come to an end, 12,000 digital marketers made the journey to Las Vegas this year and left more knowledgeable, connected, prepared — and eager to push their companies to become the experience businesses of the future. I am proud to have led the Analytics Idol competition — a breakout session with close to 600 attendees who want to learn some tips and tricks to take back to their organizations and vote for them in true reality-show fashion.

View our slide-show presentation — “Analytics Idol 2017: Top tips & tricks” — to listen to this year’s competition and learn more about the contestants and their tips. Below, you will find a review of our five finalists and the world-class tips each revealed.

Brad Millett, Senior Analytics Strategist, Blast Analytics & Marketing
Tip 1: Use data from your Activity Map to automatically fill in gaps in data.
Brad recognized that customer data occasionally drops off the map. To fill in these gaps, he was able to leverage data that is automatically populated by the Activity Map! Brad then demonstrated how to use a combination of calculated metrics and segmentation to resolve the issue. This tip works very well because the data is captured simply by having a recent version of your Adobe Analytics code.

Tip 2: Define and visualize your customer’s journey.
At Blast A&M, Brad has discovered that customer journeys tend to vary, and every business uses different levers to help their customers along the many stages of their journeys. In this tip, Brad suggests a framework for identifying these stages, mapping them to key performance indicators (KPIs), and using Analysis Workspace to represent them visually. In addition to mapping each stage to KPIs, Brad highly recommends creating segments that can be applied easily for deeper analysis. Finally, it’s important to act on this data, which means empowering your teams to interact with the data via Workspace curation.

Hila Dahan, Cofounder and Principal Analyst, 33 Sticks
Tip 1: Though difficult, connecting the disparate dots along a customer’s journey is vital.
Hila showed us a strategy for linking activity across several different platforms to track a customer’s journey from end to end. First, Hila suggests including your offline data in Adobe Analytics by creating a handshake between your offline database and Adobe. Then, take advantage of Customer Attributes in Adobe Analytics to map your most important characteristics. Connecting this data allows for analysis and personalization and creates a customer journey that is more properly stitched together.

Tip 2: Democratize analytics data through an integration with Slack.
Hila and her team use Slack — a workplace communications tool that is enabling companies all over the globe to stay in touch. To empower your team to be better informed of data anomalies, Hila built a brand-new integration with Slack that she recommends using. Just visit the 33 Sticks – AskAdobe page to install the Slack application and enable it for Anomaly Detection. The benefit is that analysts receive alerts in a tool they’re already using so they can openly communicate with others. In addition, anomalies that are especially difficult to understand can be ‘starred’ for follow-up in Slack.

Rob Adams, Senior Digital Analyst, W.W. Grainger
Tip 1: Attribute product recommendations to actual 1:1 revenue.
Rob’s group is a heavy user of Adobe Target-driven product recommendations and focuses deeply on analyzing the success of these algorithmically presented products. To do this analysis, Rob and his team needed to directly attribute each product recommendation to actual 1:1 revenue. He was able to do this using a merchandising eVar (bound to ‘Add To Cart’), a classification file (to identify location and experience information), and ReportBuilder (to conduct extremely granular analysis). For even more details, watch the Analytics Idol slide show.

Tip 2: Break out month-over-month data more fairly.
How many times has your company looked at month-over-month data? Well, maybe it’s time to break out that data in a way that’s a little fairer. Rob suggests that companies take advantage of the time-parting functionality they already possess to also separate business days from non-business days. Doing so may help explain why a 2.4 percent drop in revenue in February was actually a 2.5 percent increase in revenue in comparison to January — all because there were more days to do business in that first month. A combination of your time-parting eVar, classifications rule builder, an Analytics sub-classification, and ReportBuilder all make this possible.

Prolet Miteva, Senior Manager of Web Analytics Platforms, Autodesk
Tip 1: Motivate your team to be passionate about data.
Prolet’s team noticed a problem — her marketers were not excited about data. To solve this, she decided to go where her users were and give them data there. Deciding to start small — focusing on basic traffic and scroll information, navigational sources, and firmographic and technological data — Prolet chose to build an in-house extension for Chrome that would bring the data right to their fingertips. Her marketers were then able to access to each of these data types at the click of a button — right in their browser! Prolet found that this drove adoption of data, better questions from her marketers, and further interest in Adobe Analytics deployment.

Tip 2: Know the potential audience size you can target for personalization and testing.
Understanding the potential audience size for a target offer is a requirement for choosing your segmentation wisely. Prolet has identified a slick way to do this — leverage Adobe Analytics segmentation and the integration of Adobe Analytics and Adobe Target. First, define your Adobe Marketing Cloud audience, evaluate the audience size, create a sequential segment to handle the transfer of audience data between systems, and then create a comparison workspace. The benefit is that you get the power of Analytics segmentation with the verification of your population size — all before you deploy your test.

David Bressler, Analytics Lead, Net Conversion
Tip 1: When event data is missing, use stats, page views, and correlation analysis to fill in gaps.
David knows that ‘things’ happen with data, and sometimes, you have to be creative to resolve those things. When you can, David suggests simply using a combination of page views and an additional calculated metric to fill in the gap. When this won’t suffice, David recommends using his process for leveraging a correlation analysis and linear equation to empower your calculated metric with even more accuracy.

Tip 2: Create a calculated metric that truly shows average page-load time.
David walked the Idol attendees through a valuable and arduous process to better understand how page-load time affects conversion. Based on his analysis, a one-second improvement in page-load time helped drive a 3 percent increase in conversion. David then revealed his secret sauce — a combination that includes an app measurement plugin, a classification rule builder, a few segments, and one MASSIVE calculated metric to obtain the data he needs. You really must see it to believe it!

Congratulations to all five of the Analytics Idol 2017 finalists — and special congratulations to David Bressler for his winning combination of tips that earned him the title “Analytics Idol 2017!”

The post Analytics Idol 2017 In Review appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.

from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/digital-marketing/analytics-idol-2017-review/

For a Chart-Topping Optimization Program, Accept AT&T’s Challenge.

At AT&T, it’s safe to say, we don’t need any more acronyms. Just to survive in the world of AT&T, a pages-long running chart of acronyms is already necessary — and, whether necessary or not, acronyms are a nuisance. They like to hide in long strings of disorienting business jargon, alienate new team members, and trip up readers.

But, for the AT&T Center of Excellence, ABBA was different. It garnered the nostalgic inspiration so often created by ABBA’s songs — think of the youthful abandon of the “Dancing Queen,” so full of possibilities. When “Dancing Queen” hit number one on the charts, it did so in not only Sweden and Britain — where the music originated — but also faraway lands like Mexico, South Africa, and the US. People who heard it bought into the song’s vision and made it their own — just the type of buy-in we needed for our Center of Excellence.

Like the band, we used the acronym to create something uniquely our own. For us, ABBA means A/B Business Advisor, and it represents our Center of Excellence (or optimization program). And, while we admittedly make our work more fun by singing songs, ABBA has also become a serious tool for advancing AT&T toward the delivery of exceptional customer experiences.

AT&T’s Chart-Topping Optimization Program
Here’s a peek into our program — how we built it, the challenges we faced along the way, why it works, and the key takeaways you can use to start building your brand’s internal optimization program.

Set the Stage — Design the Right Organizational Structure for You.
The average optimization team is swamped with endless testing requests from throughout the organization, so brands that are attempting to onboard the entire organization to optimization often become paralyzed with bottlenecks. To combat this, many brands try to spread the optimization resources across multiple, highly matrixed business units. What they often find is that, while the spirit of giving everyone in the organization autonomy to conduct A/B tests may be strong, it’s often unrealistic at scale. First, with each business line conducting independent tests, hundreds of tests could be going at once, hindering proper governance to avoid wasteful redundancy. Second, data discipline is likely to be low or lacking all together. Remember that your tests are only as good as your lowest-quality data. So, when designing your optimization structure, data discipline must be a top priority.

To avoid these challenges and reap only rewards, we designed ABBA, an open-source structure. Instead of centralizing everything, ABBA centralizes the empowerment initiative in the organization. Sourced from our Center of Excellence, each group within the company — consumer, business, myAT&T sales, service, support, att.net, DirecTV, U-Verse, B2B, and so forth — has access to designated business advisors. Once deputized as main points of contact, these advisors are responsible for educating, evangelizing, and prioritizing tests within their assigned units. For instance, if the DirecTV team wants to do something on AT&T.com, their designated advisor is there to help drive that project within the Center of Excellence.

Rather than create a chokepoint, this model gives each business unit’s leader the freedom to swim themselves, allowing the Center to focus on strategic vision versus actual execution. The Center works only with ABBA members, and in turn, ABBA members work within their groups. The Center then manages delivery, organization-wide prioritization, and across-the-board decision-making.

Today, our Center of Excellence for A/B testing oversees as many as 50 tests — all running concurrently onsite across the organization at any given time — without risk of cross-contamination or redundancy. As a result, we’re designing better tests and obtaining better results.

Harmonize All Members — Scale to Support Your Entire Organization.
When creating your organizational structure, your goal should be to not only manage efficiency in testing, but also support the entire organization, even from a small, central management team.

For us, this was a hefty, but essential, challenge to overcome. Within sales alone, we have 50 to 70 product marketers who can submit test requests — but we would be brought to our knees if we received test requests from every marketer. To buffer against paralysis, team leads do more than take requests, prioritize them as-is, and send them to the Center of Excellence. They become consultants who guide testing to produce the most meaningful results for their teams.

For example, to avoid redundancy, leads both inform their teams when requested tests have already been conducted in other parts of the organization and present their teams with the results. They also evangelize tools we’ve developed to simplify the process, including our knowledge base of past tests and optimizations that led to wins. By making sure we’re not always starting from scratch — but rather, using and building onto what we already know — we provide valuable tools for saving money and supporting our large organization and all our internal teams in the timeliest way possible, despite (or, perhaps, due to) having a small, central managing team.

Next, as The Center of Excellence tracks and reveals meanings and best practices from trends, team leads help filter these best practices across the organization. For example, the central team had a hunch that they could surface more-definitive insights by conducting bolder tests. To test this hunch, instead of focusing on neutral tests (such as light-blue versus dark-blue website buttons) as a company, team leads helped us focus on bolder tests (like blue versus yellow or gold website buttons). The results confirmed that bolder testing offers clearer insights into what works and what doesn’t. In turn, by guiding their teams to focus on conducting bolder tests, team leads could help us create an organization-wide initiative to test toward greater wins.

Excite Your Audience — Evangelize the Program to Secure Buy-In.
To support the entire organization, we first had to build momentum with both bottom-up and top-down buy-in. To do this, we began small. When we identified a problem that one team was facing, we shared — and, therefore, evangelized — successes among other teams facing the same problem. In doing so, we convinced new teams to come on board.

From there, momentum spread. Big wins spread the quickest, so as new teams — from sales to entertainment to B2B — bought in to the benefits of working under the Center of Excellence, word quickly spread through all levels of AT&T. In 2016, the Center of Excellence was presented our annual technology award from the highest levels of AT&T. Consequently, in addition to continuing to filter up through the organization, buy-in began to filter down as well.

Today, we’re building a deep base of tests to allow departments throughout the company to use stored information. Departments have shared their data, tests have spanned a wide range of segments — and cohesively, they’ve created a seamless, organization-wide A/B platform.

Top the Charts — Start Small to Create Big Wins.
Once we experienced buy-in across AT&T, Dave Bilbrough, enterprise platform architect at Adobe, tested our Center of Excellence model across numerous industries and companies of all sizes — and, it worked!

Starting small, and with Dave’s guidance, a large retail bank operating in the southeastern US began implementing a similar model in their car-insurance division. After quickly experiencing double-digit boosts in conversions, they expanded the program to other parts of the bank. And, guess what — they experienced equally powerful wins in other business units as well, with double-digit boosts in conversions and delighted customers in its wake.

We Want Our Story to Help You.
In speaking of the sensation that was the “Dancing Queen,” The Guardian’s Tim Jonze wrote, “Pete Waterman, who knows a thing or two about writing a hit, believes it exemplifies how the best Swedish artists are able to soak up popular trends and regurgitate them as something fresh.”

Now, It’s Your Turn. 
So, here is AT&T’s challenge for you: Don’t just emulate our story — instead, create something fresh, something better. Start with what inspires your team. For us, it was ABBA songs; for you, it may be zombies or — one of my personal favorites — Beetlejuice. Then, create strategic networks of small teams to avoid the bottlenecks often associated with large centralized teams. If your team is already small, you’re better positioned to create wins from the very beginning. On the other hand, if you’re a large team, develop a system to scale your efforts so you can both support and filter learned best practices throughout your entire organization. Further, don’t be afraid to start small, with one or two internal teams, and build momentum along the way. And, don’t be shy about passionately tracking and communicating wins at every opportunity and within every level of your organization.

The post For a Chart-Topping Optimization Program, Accept AT&T’s Challenge. appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.

from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/analytics/chart-topping-optimization-program-accept-atts-challenge/