Internal search for online shops: an essential asset

Seven Tips to Give Your Email-Marketing Signups a Boost

It’s true that customers can begin their journeys with your brand at many different touchpoints, both on and offline. During these first impressions, customers are often still anonymous. Many brands convert anonymous prospects to known prospects through email subscriptions. Use the following seven steps to increase your email-marketing signups!

1. Use Behavioral Indicators to Dictate a Tailored Email Capture Strategy.
Use the onsite behavior of your website visitor to dictate the precise moment that an email capture campaign would yield the highest rate of return without sabotaging the user experience. “The response variance between a static and behaviorally-driven email capture program is upwards of 300%,” according to Bounce Exchange’s Conversion Optimization team.

2. You Don’t Always Have to Provide an Incentive Right Away.
Chances are, if a customer is visiting your store or website, he or she already knows about your brand and is interested for one reason or another. Expanding on the first tip, use data to dictate whether you should provide an offer in exchange for an email subscription. In many cases, if you communicate the program value, customers will not need offers to convince them right away.

3. Make Sure It Is Clear What Subscribers Are Signing up for.
Here’s where you establish trust. Make it clear what subscribers will receive and that you will not use their email addresses for any other purposes. Do not opt them in to sister brands, partners, or other types of communications without their consents.

4. Don’t Overcomplicate Things — Keep Your Form Simple.
Remember, this is the start of a new relationship, and most folks don’t like things to move too quickly. Ask for only the email address at first. During a welcome program, guide your customer to a preference center where he or she can provide you with more information. Too many personal-information fields will result in signup abandonment.

5. Determine the Appropriate Permission Strategy.
At minimum, you should only be sending to customers who have opted in to receiving your emails. Depending on the types of communications you are sending, or the countries in which your subscribers are located, a confirmed opt-in may be required. Always consult with your legal team and/or deliverability team at your email-service provider (ESP) if you are unsure of the level of permission that is needed.

6. Check Syntax and Validate at Time of Capture.
Have basic rules in place to check email syntax on your capture fields. If you have a high bounce rate for new-to-list emails, look into an email validation service that flags when the email is invalid at the time of capture so that the user can correct any mistakes they may have made.

7. Kick off With a Well-Planned Onboarding Strategy.
Avoid your subscribers judging you as a spammer because you immediately start blasting them with too many emails and offers. Use your initial communications to set the right tone with your subscribers and encourage their continued engagement.

There is an evolving science to converting anonymous visitors to known prospects to loyal customers. Follow these tips to help guide you through the initial moments of that unknown-visitor-to-known-prospect aspect of the customer journey. Most importantly, deliver a consistent, valuable service, and do your best to build solid relationships with your customers based on exchanges of value for their investments.

The post Seven Tips to Give Your Email-Marketing Signups a Boost appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.

from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/email/seven-tips-give-email-marketing-signups-boost/

Dynamic Tag Management and the Overnight Test

This is a guest post from Cleve Young at Starwood Hotels. It’s a first look at how both practitioners and managers can benefit from dynamic tag management in different ways.

A big THANKS! to Cleve for contributing his time to create this post and share his experiences with all of us. Cleve is the Manager and Implementation Engineer at Starwood Hotels.

Business today has a relentless pace — we’re expected to do more, faster, and with fewer resources. It’s amazing that marketing and analytics teams accomplish this most of the time. But, more doesn’t always mean better.

People often reference time as being one of the most valuable commodities humans have; yet, we struggle and race to compress time, often losing track of the true value of our time. But, if you prioritize a brief timeout from the daily grind, you’ll realize more value than you ever thought possible.

Recently, I read an interesting article, “A Short Lesson in Perspective,” in which the writer discussed the “overnight test” — meaning, the author sleeps on his ideas overnight and reflects on them the next morning. This made me think about how I carry out my current job — analytics implementation and marketing technology integration. I’ve often fallen into the overnight-test methodology that allows for critical thinking. But, instead of using paper mockups, I use Adobe Dynamic Tag Management (DTM) as my sketchpad for testing ideas and thinking things through.

Tracking Needs Are Not Always Obvious (Sarcasm Ahead).
Many people — including some analysts — assume that digital analytics-tracking requirements are straightforward and obvious. And, in some cases, that’s true. However, most often, they become complicated quickly. For example, let’s say, the business folks want to know which webpage customers are logging on from. Sounds simple enough, right? Just fire a call when the user clicks submit on the login form. But, what happens when there’s a form error?

You need to account for that potential error, so simple click-tracking may not work. Next, you realize that certain types of errors may cause different page reactions: page reload vs. non-reload vs. different page destination. If you move pages after you get the error message, how will you track the page originally attempted? How will you know when a successful login has occurred? Do you need some value passed in from the server, or is there a frontend indicator?

And, of course, just as soon as the login-tracking request hits your desk, you know the next question will be about those login errors. Since you’re efficient, you should take the opportunity to set up error tracking at the same time as form tracking.

Oh, and don’t forget the different types of potential form errors that can trigger at different times. And, of course, once the information technology (IT) security team hears about “this whole tracking thing,” they will want to be briefed and involved, as legitimate concerns exist regarding exposing error codes to the public (who knew?!). So now, additional security restrictions deliver a bit more complexity. Finally, remember you must be diligent about server call volume and do your best to piggyback on the regular page-load call.

The above scenario is a common, straightforward tracking request. Now, let’s add a cold-water splash of reality: don’t forget that the business needs this tracking info ASAP because development has already begun. And, it must be right the first time, or you risk needing to wait for the next build cycle to begin in 1–2 (or 6) months before you can make any further adjustments. Add to that, the senior executives who need to have the reports for this tracking right after it goes live. And, to complicate things even further, you must always keep in mind just how much your boss truly loves to tell execs about how “We didn’t get it quite right, so you’ll have to wait a few months for accurate reports.” We all want to keep our jobs — the paychecks come in handy! As an added bonus, it’d be nice to also retain even a little of our sanity — what’s left of it, anyhow.

In the line of fire of analytics requests, we’re typically so busy scrambling to gather final specs that we rarely make time to give draft plans the overnight test. This is really just a matter of thinking about time — consciously and subconsciously. Remaining cognizant of time enables you to achieve deeper thought and make additional connections, allowing a different perspective when you look at it next. Call it what you want — hunch, intuition, connection, gut feeling, reasoning, magic, cosmic awareness. Whatever it is for you, it’s important, and so is following up with multiple drafts. DTM became my best friend for implementation work in this drafting and thinking process.

Think, Plan, and Then Go Live — Don’t Wait!
With DTM in my toolkit, I’m able to give developers basic instructions, quickly use DTM to sketch things out with several draft approaches, and then apply the overnight test. If things still make sense the next day, I can easily test different methods to see which is — and which isn’t — working well and better react to unexpected user experiences or code flows. Direct call rules are great examples; I find myself using them most often for these exact reasons. I sometimes tell the developers to just fire a direct call rule, and I’ll take care of the rest. Few things will make you faster friends with developers than telling them they don’t have to set up Adobe Analytics tracking. In the past, I would spend hours a day writing up specs for developers, testing and retesting their updates, writing emails about needed tweaks (and, usually, re-explaining how Adobe Analytics works), asking for more tweaks, and repeating. With DTM, I can now avoid that back and forth with the development team and use the time I save to conduct more strategic work and more comprehensive tracking.

Think, Test, Experiment.
Here’s another timesaver: I can test actual analytics tracking before IT or frontend development ever needs to be involved. Not all tracking requests are for new or updated functionalities. Sometimes, we just want to track stuff we have never had a chance to track. Maybe the business question was complex, and the analytics team didn’t have time to do the back and forth with development for implementation. As analysts, we’ve all learned to avoid asking for regular tweaks to the tracking code since it makes you rather unpopular with that group.

Now, I use DTM to experiment with things — grabbing different values, timing, using different combinations of eVars and events, saving values for later use in session Data Elements, and a multitude of other things. Sometimes, this can be more complex and require a higher level of programming skills; and often, this involves scraping data from the page, which is not ideal long-term. But, remember that, with DTM, it’s really your thinking time — time in which you can experiment, review, and discuss the results with others.

Once a solid approach is in place, you’re better prepared to discuss full requirements with the development team. With DTM, you will only need your development team to take care of limited things — for instance, place certain data into a data layer or trigger a Direct Call rule or custom event — while you retain the flexibility to make adjustments afterward. That is worlds away from the old days of hardcoding the tracking, pleading for tweaks, and repeating the cycle after reviewing results.

DTM offers a great deal of flexibility in using event-based rules, page-load rules, Direct Call rules, and even Data Elements in creative combinations. For more complex tracking, I’ve had a page-load rule add an event handler to an element and then had a developer trigger a Direct Call rule on an event, which ran a Data Element to store a value for the session. Then, I implemented a second page-load rule that checked for variables that were set using the previous rules and populated Adobe Analytics variables. That level of complexity is not the standard, but DTM’s flexibility opens possibilities for you to imagine when your mind has the time to think things through. Once again, I’ve come back to the concept of thinking-time, or the overnight test.

Dynamic tag management, by itself, is not a cure all — every system has quirks and limitations. You won’t totally eliminate the need for IT involvement in analytics. But, if you take some time to really learn the tool and understand how the pieces work together, you’ll be surprised what you can do with it. You’ll have more time to think through complex (and more valuable) questions and explore options. Less time will be wasted chasing IT for updates or fixes and waiting for accurate data to be delivered. And, you can better answer more business questions and highlight the value you bring to your team and company. Over the past two years — throughout which, I’ve been using DTM — I’ve learned how to use it to gain a much richer dataset for analysis and reporting, more consistent data quality, more long-term flexibility, and fewer annoyed IT and project-management people. And, just as important to me, it’s led to less stress and more peace of mind. I like having this time to think.

The post Dynamic Tag Management and the Overnight Test appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.

from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/analytics/dynamic-tag-management-overnight-test/

The Power of Segmenting and Why Specificity Matters: Introducing Segment Comparison

Segmenting is a core strategy that is crucial to any marketer’s success. As not all customers have the same characteristics or behave in the same manner, it’s increasingly important to employ different marketing tactics for each distinct group. While traditionally segmenting has been thought about quite simply in regards to age, gender and even geography – as our threshold for data-driven marketing continues to increase, the definition of segmenting has shifted as well.

Let’s use Pixar movies as an example: while one might think that their cartoons are just geared to children, in reality their movies appeal to a variety of different groups including kids, parents, couples, teenagers. The messaging and movie promotion go far beyond just simply getting a five-year old to laugh. Pixar is smart in their approach: aside from traditional advertisements on children’s programming, the movie is also positioned on shows geared towards adults such as Ellen (as they did with Finding Dory), and promoted on social channels with specific storylines that are geared toward a group.

With the massive amount of customer and behavior data at our disposal, it’s even more important to identify the key characteristics of audience segments that are most significant to a brand – to better understand the behavior that drives more positive interaction, sharing and conversions among different groups of customers.

At Adobe Summit, we introduced Segment IQ to the world – and we’re now excited to announce the first live feature within that category: Segment Comparison for Analysis Workspace. First in a series of audience analysis and discovery tools within Segment IQ, Segment Comparison intelligently discovers the differences between your sets of target audience segments through automated analysis of all your metrics and dimensions.

In speaking with customers, we saw analysts spending an incredible amount of time comparing various segments with each other in order to understand the actionable differences between them. Segments often overlap with each other or have non-obvious differences lurking deep within the data, and uncovering these insights is like picking a needle out of a haystack – sifting through these cascades of data manually to find the most significant differences is often impossible.

With Segment Comparison, marketers and analysts can gain new visibility into which segments are most important to their businesses and why, so they can acquire and convert customers much more efficiently—saving time and budget.

The best part is that all of this is done with a few clicks of a mouse. Check out this short demo to see it in action.

Segment Comparison allows brands to complete a comprehensive segment analysis within just minutes, and compare every single dimension, metric or data point between any two segments automatically discovering the most significant differences between each. In initial testing with customers, Segment IQ is one of the most popular features we’ve released, and we’re thrilled to see how it expands from here in helping to create highly targeted marketing strategies that resonate with segments based on customers’ unique behavior.

The post The Power of Segmenting and Why Specificity Matters: Introducing Segment Comparison appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.

from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/analytics/power-segmenting-specificity-matters-introducing-segment-comparison/

To blog or not to blog?

How Passion Shapes the Work of Adobe Digital Index’s (ADI’s) Gaming Analyst

Gaming is a big part of my life and a core passion. Often, the minute my wife and kids fall asleep, you can find me playing the latest videogame or watching others play online or via Twitch. The gaming industry is a marvel to me — how much creativity there is, the complexity of the technology involved. My work as an analyst with the Adobe Digital Insights team lets me explore the gaming industry in depth by tapping into our extensive dataset.

Adobe just released the Gaming Report 2016, which is based on analysis of consumer data comprising 2.5 billion visits to retail gaming and gaming-related websites from January 2015 to March 2016. Using my knowledge and experience in the gaming world, I spotted trends, sought unexpected relationships in the data, and shaped a nuanced story about the industry.

This is our second year developing a gaming report, and I wanted to delve into what’s driving industry growth. Many analysts tell the parts of the story we already know — gaming is growing year over year. I wanted to explore how different parts of the industry create the context for such explosive growth — what roles do social communities, new technologies like virtual reality (VR), and online gaming play in fueling that growth? Here are some essential lessons I learned along the way.

Use Your Unique Knowledge in Research Design and Source Selection.
My first challenge was to develop a fair way to encompass the gaming world, which builds upon our data, collection, and methodology. For example, a couple of important data sources I noted were online discussions and social media. What’s really helping to develop the industry are the powerful communities that form both before and after games launch. Digging into more than 20 million social engagements that were captured from June 2015 to July 2016 — on platforms ranging from blogs to Twitter to YouTube and beyond — provided unique insights for the report.

Tell Your Story and Take a Stand — Supported by Data.
One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned as an analyst is that you have to tell your story and state your opinion. People’s opinions may vary, but you just have to back yours up with data and solid analysis. For example, when I looked at the growth trends in the data and compared them against the industry numbers reported in Fortune, I was comfortable making the projection that gaming PC and console sales will reach $25.3 billion in 2016. Fortune reported that the overall industry grew five percent in 2015, and I also found that online gaming revenue grew 42 percent between Q1 2015 and Q1 2016. It’s our extensive dataset that allows me to accurately size a key portion of the gaming space.

Collaborate to Expand the Value of Your Work.
Collaborating with colleagues can also help you expand your work. One of my colleagues has deep expertise in economics and has been instrumental in developing Adobe’s Digital Price Index. The index tracks consumer spending in specific product categories. We decided to capitalize on that work and develop a category that looks at videogames and videogame consoles. His project benefits from my expertise in gaming by expanding to add another category, and my report benefits through better analysis. The data revealed an interesting trend in console vs. PC gaming. Console gamers experience the steepest discounts in sales prices in November, enjoying up to five percent price reductions around the holidays. High-end computer rigs used for gaming see less discounting but have experienced the least deflation over time at two percent.

Dig Deep to Obtain the Real Story on the Latest Trends.
Your passion can also help you focus on the trends that really matter to a specific audience. Virtual reality and augmented reality are hot right now. The sheer number of mentions of VR, AR, and related hashtags have increased 548 percent since January 2015. It became clear that there are currently four big players: HoloLens, Vive, PlayStation VR, and Oculus. In this year’s analysis of discussions regarding virtual-reality devices, there was a significant swing from Oculus to Vive. The mentions for Oculus dropped to 37 percent, while Vive mentions grew from 2 percent to 46 percent! When we first saw the data, we realized we had to dig deeper to obtain the whole story.

When we compared the devices, it became clear that Vive — which was second to market — offered features such as multiple sensors in the room and dedicated virtual-reality controllers for a more immersive experience. Another factor driving Vive’s social engagement is their positioning in the market. Vive is partnered with the gaming marketplace Steam, while Oculus is owned by Facebook. Oculus is set to make some major improvements in the fourth quarter of 2016 — such as more sensors and new controllers — so the VR device story is likely to evolve quickly. The PlayStation VR also stands to be a force to be reckoned with since it removes the hidden PC cost of VR and links directly to gaming consoles.

The key lesson here is that you have to dig deep, consult many sources, and do in-depth analysis to really understand the forces at play in such a complex industry.

Perhaps, the most important takeaway regarding what makes research successful is following your passions. Researchers on our team are passionate about everything from finance to social media to machine learning. When I came aboard, the desire to do more gaming analysis connected with my personal interests. When you have a passion, there’s a drive — you’re not just going to treat information like data points. Instead, you’ll investigate why it’s significant, you’ll examine the broader context, and you’ll determine why the story matters. Ultimately, your interests make you a better analyst.

Next up for me? Taking a closer look at how eSports and specific subgenres of the gaming world are shaping the industry’s explosive growth. I can’t wait to dig into the data!

The post How Passion Shapes the Work of Adobe Digital Index’s (ADI’s) Gaming Analyst appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.

from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/analytics/passion-shapes-work-adobe-digital-indexs-adis-gaming-analyst/

Successful Mobile App Engagement: This App Understands Me!

Apps provide you with unprecedented opportunities for engaging with your customers in ways that have never before been available. Done right, you can increase business and create evangelists for your brand. Customers not only demand personalized and contextually relevant experiences, but also prefer that those experiences take place through apps.

So, Why Are Most Mobile Apps Destined for Deletion?
Yet, of the approximately 2 million apps that are available in the Apple App Store, why is it that as many as 60 percent — over 400,000 — of them have never been downloaded even once?

In a study of data from over 125 million mobile phones downloading apps from the Google Play Store, the average app loses 77 percent of its users within three days of being installed; 90 percent of users stop using an app after a month; only five users continue using any given app; and 26 percent of apps are used only once.

Mobile apps open new opportunities and new workflows for customer engagement — but only if customers are using them! Factors that contribute to your app being left behind or uninstalled include:

1. Insignificant value above and beyond the web experiences
2. Irrelevant and out-of-context messaging and experiences that are not on point; and
3. Instability of the app itself, resulting in crashes and general misbehavior.

Value that is unavailable anywhere else can be delivered through mobile apps, but the old saying applies now more than ever — you only get one chance to make a first impression.

It is worthwhile to get your app in shape because, with today’s sophisticated user, mobile can capture those sought-after mobile moments — engaging users at the right time and place with the right message or offer.

The app store gives your business new injection points into other markets as well, moving people from free trials to subscriptions and then renewals. Mobile can expand your marketing opportunities as well as your opportunities to enhance the customer experience. Based on how someone uses your app, you can do cross-app promotion and even connect the experience back to the desktop.

Why Is It So Vital for Your App to Be Engaging and Useful?
For your business, a good app can provide deeper contextual insights into your consumers, generate new sales and engagement opportunities, and be a stronger conduit to your customers.

Here at Adobe, we have transformed from a traditional box-software business to a subscription model and then to mobile apps. Creating new and exciting versions of our software for mobile environments has opened new ways to generate great customer experiences, increase revenue, and establish feedback channels with customers.

Build Your Mobile App on a Foundation of Best Practices.
Many companies are taking advantage of the benefits mobile apps have to offer. One is Saint-Gobain Distribution in Denmark — a major distributor of construction materials around the world — which has created robust apps that serve their customers well. Their experience reveals a number of best practices.

1. Examine Your Customer Journey From End to End.
   Without a complete understanding of your customers’ needs and individual experiences at every touchpoint and on every channel, you can’t create a great app experience.
2. Remind Customers of Important Details About Your App.
   As soon as they download the app, customers need to know details like how to log in and set it up, how to access additional capabilities, and any other pertinent information that will enable them to make the most of it.
3. Warm the Customer Up to the Idea of Push Notifications.
   Show your customers the value in receiving push notifications before you ask them to sign up to receive them.
4. Understand Your Mobile Platforms.
   For example, if a push-notification request comes from an app on the iOS system, the user will see a pop-up message requesting permission. If the user says “no,” that will permanently prevent future notifications. The experts at Saint-Gobain designed their app to first ask customers whether they would accept push notifications. For those who said “yes,” the operating system was alerted, and the iOS notice popped up. However, users who said “no” were taken down a different pathway without involving the operating system, allowing another chance to ask later.
5. Use In-App Messaging.
   In-app messaging can teach your customers that their phones can be used for more than just research and messaging.
6. Take Advantage of the Sensors in Many Mobile Devices.
   Leverage the sensors that are now commonplace in many mobile devices — especially in phones.
7. Incorporate Innovative Beacon Technology.
   Beacon technology offers both you and your customers almost limitless possibilities and potential benefits. And — increasing their potential value further — few companies have yet to jump on the beacon bandwagon, meaning you still have plenty of time to put your company ahead of the competition!

Your App Should Prove That You Truly Understand Your Users.
Mobile applications can transform customers’ perceptions of your brand, delivering powerful, personal, and relevant experiences at the right time and in the right place. Do a critical self-assessment of your own apps. You still have some work to do if, after using your apps, your customers aren’t saying, “Wow, this app really understands me!”

The post Successful Mobile App Engagement: This App Understands Me! appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.

from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/mobile/successful-mobile-app-engagement-app-understands/