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The Art of the Click: Actionable Insight for Email-Marketing Success

The average person spends close to 6.5 hours a day checking and responding to emails. Clearly, we’re addicted. It’s understandable why most marketers believe email is the most effective channel for driving ROI.

The key to creating more satisfying email campaigns is to understand how, when, where, and why people use email. After monitoring more than 40,000 email-marketing campaigns over the last two years, we have some compelling insights to share. Here are a few of the main takeaways from our latest report — actionable strategies for email marketers looking to create great email experiences.

Tip #1: Content is (still) king

Consumers today are inundated with noise. Email on Acid reports a 52 percent increase year-over-year in email volume—a  whopping 61 percent more emails delivered to inboxes compared to 2014. How can your brand stand out? Strive to create personalized moments using customer insights to deliver unique content for each subscriber. The full impact of personalized email has yet to be seen and eye-catching content will entice higher open rates.

Tip #2: Timing is everything

Interestingly, the vast majority of marketing email is sent before 9:00 am because brands assume they’ll be able to catch people before they become consumed with work. However, here’s the reality: email sent at this time competes with every other daily email sent at the same time, forcing consumers to skim or delete content quickly. It’s the well known morning ritual of uncluttering the inbox. Data confirms that open rates are higher in the evening and delete rates are lower in the evening. Consider A/B testing to determine the ideal timing for your email-marketing campaigns. Of course, the value of your message should be clear and concise because average read time on email is only 12.3 seconds.

Tip #3: Great email experiences are compelling, personal, useful, and contextual.

Customer expectations are higher than ever before and marketers are scrambling to create unique experiences that strengthen the brand. To drive extraordinary email experiences, emails should be compelling, personal, useful, and available everywhere.

Compelling emails draw readers in with perfect imagery and content that appears seamlessly across devices. Personalized emails employ meaningful customer information in ways that connect with customers not only with regard to who they are, but also what they like. Useful email serves a purpose—it helps customers accomplish something quickly or makes recommendations based on prior behaviors or reminds them to do something that will benefit them. Finally, great emails reach customers at the moment where they are working, reading, watching, purchasing or doing whatever else it is that you as a business want to touch.  Whether they are in a store, on their mobile device, or using a dashboard in their car—your email needs to be there.

The Future of Email: It’s all About the Customer.

Understanding how customers engage with email can be tough and most marketers today employ a reactive strategy, sending emails and waiting for users to engage. However, with customers sharing more and more about their habits and preferences, marketers have unique opportunities to transform email programs into foundations upon which incredible experiences can be built.

The future of email is here, and it’s all about the customer experience. Data-driven campaigns are the cornerstones of exceptional customer experiences—dynamic, relevant, cross-channel, and cross-device. Using the full power of customer data to drive meaningful experiences and deliver holistic, in context email marketing programs isn’t just smart—it’s expected.

You can learn more about best practices in email marketing in our latest email excellency report, “The Art of the Click”

The post The Art of the Click: Actionable Insight for Email-Marketing Success appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.

from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/email/email-on-acid-actionable-insight-for-email-marketing-success/

Don’t Be Guilty by Association: Seven Ways to Maintain Brand Safety

Once upon a time, digital advertisers had to approach publishers directly to place their ads on websites. It wasn’t cost-effective, and it definitely wasn’t a very scalable way to operate, as marketers had to piece together each advertising campaign by individually contracting with hundreds of individual websites and publishers. However, on the up side, it gave advertisers control over where their ads were being placed.

Then, ad networks emerged as middlemen, offering a way to reach audiences across many publishers. But, ad networks are not necessarily transparent about their fees, margins, and inventory, and they lack efficient controls (like frequency-capping or budget-management) across multiple exchanges.

Now, over the last few years, the programmatic — or automated — purchase of display ads has been on the rise. This year alone, more than two-thirds of all digital display content will be purchased programmatically. Advertisers can now access multiple inventory sources and ad exchanges through a single unified platform (called a demand-side platform, or DSP). An auction is held to serve an ad to a particular visitor, and the price can be determined in real time. Further, with DSPs like Adobe Media Optimizer (AMO), there is transparency in the margins the advertiser is paying, which was never the case with the cloudier ad-network buys.

But, with all these advantages, there has also been a rise in concern regarding where ads are appearing.

• Is the publishing site agreeable with the advertiser’s brand?
• Is the content on the specific page where the ad will appear consistent with the messaging of the ad, or will the ad/brand perhaps appear insensitive given the content on the page?
• Are there any legal issues that may arise when advertising certain products and/or services with regulatory restrictions adjacent to certain types of content?

The Importance of Brand Safety
Countering risks such as these is what we refer to as brand safety. For instance, a reputable news site may be an ideal advertising destination to place an ad for a truck manufacturer — except if the ad were to be placed on a page reporting an attack in which suspects used a truck to carry out the tragedy. Another example of poor ad placement is an airline advertisement being displayed on a page covering news of a recent flight disaster. Brands also may not want to show their ads on pages that contain pirated content. In some countries, ads for products like cigarettes and alcohol are banned from sites that children may frequent.

Failing to pay attention to where your ad is appearing, as well as the resulting audience sentiment, can make even the most reputable brands appear insensitive and expose them to both legal and social scrutiny.

According to the Integral Ad Science’s (IAS) H1 2016 Media Quality Report, brand-safety risk within programmatic advertising is 62 percent greater than publisher-direct ad buys. In a world where people are growing progressively more aware of brands’ images — and are more likely to support the companies they perceive as being ethical and fair at all levels of their product’s life — it makes sense for advertisers to become familiar with ways in which they can preserve their brand safety in the world of automated digital-ad buying.

Seven Ways to Ensure Brand Safety
Below are some tips that advertisers can use to counter brand-safety risk. The first two are basic steps that any responsible advertiser should take, but they deserve mentioning, nevertheless.

1. Partner Responsibly.
It is important for an advertiser to partner with a reputable DSP that is either certified in brand safety or has partnered with a certified vendor. Among other things, this will allow only a filtered inventory of sites to be made available for bidding, and thus, reduce brand risk.

2. Know Your Audience.
Most advertisers know the age, gender, and location of their target audience. Layering on more targeting — for instance, education level, memberships, or family size — may decrease your audience size but will give you access to the right people in the right environment or domains. This especially works for advertisers that are focusing on more than just impressions.

3. Use Pre-Bid Decisioning. (Highly Recommended)
Often, brand-safety analysis is done in hindsight, as many companies rely on post-bid reporting to show where ads were placed. However, if inappropriate content is discovered, it’s often too late to protect the brand’s reputation.

By contrast, DSPs like Adobe Media Optimizer have partnered with IAS to do pre-bid decisioning before ads are placed. Pre-bid decisioning involves thorough evaluations of webpages on multiple variables, including URL analysis, semantics analysis, images, inbound/outbound links, and metadata analysis. Each of the areas can be further customized with keyword blocking, geo-compliance, and custom site lists. Pre-bid decisioning is a preferred strategy for brand safety because most sites can be assessed both thoroughly and quickly before any advertising appears.

4. Run Your Domain Report Post-Bid.
If advertisers lack access to a sophisticated DSP that provides pre-bid decisioning to prevent ads from being placed on questionable websites, they can at least run their domain report after-the-fact to determine what sites received the impression. Though this obviously won’t prevent ads from being published on offensive websites initially, it does allow advertisers to exclude offending sites from future ad buys.

5. Eliminate Harmful Websites by Category.
Sites on the Internet are filtered into categories based on their content, and these category names are then made available to advertisers to include or exclude. Generally, the following entire-site categories that tend to be eliminated as harmful are adult-themed, alcohol, adware/malware, hate speech, illegal downloads/pirated content, illegal drugs, offensive language, and violence. Of course, these are just the most common categories that brands should consider — each brand is different, and there is no right or wrong answer. Each brand will need to weigh the opportunity presented by the audience it can reach with the impact of the content it associates with.

6. Create Keyword Lists.
Keyword lists can help identify content that may exist on sites in otherwise “safe” categories. They are also used to block content and geographies, as needed, in an advertising campaign. To build upon an earlier example, an airline may want to include keyword terms related to flight disasters that may be reported on news sites or blogs to avoid showing ads on those specific pages.

7. Buy in Private Marketplaces.
A private marketplace is an invitation-only, real-time bidding (RTB) auction in which a publisher (or several) will invite a select number of buyers to bid on its inventory. The purchases are fully transparent, and the buyer knows exactly which site the ad will run on. There are some platforms (including Adobe Media Optimizer) that allow both programmatic and private marketplace buys via a single platform.

It is obvious that, although automated buying may increase brand risk in the short term, it is this very same automation that is now working to create scalable ways to maintain brand safety. With the right partnerships and correct proactive measures, advertisers can eliminate brand risk entirely.

Partnering With IAS: The Way Forward for Adobe
Adobe Media Optimizer is a leading DSP that has chosen to partner with Integral Ad Science (IAS), the industry’s recognized leader in brand protection, ad verification, and ad-viewability data. IAS is a global technology and data company that empowers the advertising industry to effectively influence consumers everywhere and on every device. IAS references its certification by the Media Rating Council (MRC) to validate their brand-safety technology. By partnering with IAS, Adobe ensures brand safety at the page level while remaining protected against fraud and several content risk categories.

The post Don’t Be Guilty by Association: Seven Ways to Maintain Brand Safety appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.

from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/advertising/dont-guilty-association-seven-ways-maintain-brand-safety/

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The Message is Maturity: Adobe Is a Leader in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Digital Marketing Analytics

“Gartner analysts call digital marketing analytics the core of successful digital experience.” And having the right tool for the job — a differentiator that helps support customer journeys across multiple channels and devices — is everything. Leaders today are imploring their analytics teams to provide more robust, cross-channel insights to allow for better understandings of strategic objectives. And they’re looking for technology that can keep pace.

In the second-ever Magic Quadrant for Marketing Analytics, Gartner placed Adobe as the overall leader in the combined categories of ability to execute and completeness of vision. With comprehensive integration, advanced segmentation capabilities, and market-leading innovation, Adobe Analytics helps make complex data simple for delivering powerful marketing insight — and then, quickly turning that insight into action. More than being informed, Adobe Analytics provides seamless integration for immediate action across verticals, and the vision is now extending to customer intelligence. Here’s a look at the strength of Adobe Analytics — a best-in-class, cost-effective, practical solution for the retail, financial services, B2B, and travel and hospitality industries.

Retail: Providing Flexibility and Functionality for Critical Reporting and Insight Discovery
For online retailers, tying metrics to products is critical — so, shouldn’t reporting be as flexible as possible? Having the ability to view any report by product (and vice versa) is smart; but placing limits on this ability decreases analytics opportunities. Adobe Analytics makes it easy for online retailers to discover revenue-generating insights while helping customers find the products they need. Through robust product-category merchandising and product-finding methods, accurate pathing analysis, and advanced cross-sell reporting, retailers can better understand their customers and put the right products in the right places at the right times.

Financial Services: Measuring and Influencing Customer Journeys for a Competitive Edge
Advancing digital maturity across financial-services institutions means being able to not only see the full lifecycle of the account application process, but also understand which marketing campaigns led to approved applications so that promotional spend is targeted and optimized to customers with higher lifetime-value propensities. Adobe Analytics is the only tool that allows financial-services organizations to see the customer lifecycle and associated product affinities by customer groups, which helps optimize revenue via its industry-leading feature set and connects online behaviors to post-website revenues and profits. Additionally, Adobe Analytics enables users to study cohorts’ share-of-wallet trends from different time periods to indicate whether website and app promotions are growing or declining with regard to relevancy, so that you can work toward increasing product adoption.

Business to Business (B2B): Connecting Highly Complex Customer Journeys
B2B and tech companies achieve digital success by associating all metrics with customer engagement over time. The customer journey typically involves an entire buying team and is highly complex — never linear and rarely contained to just one channel — and analytical insights must be based on this reality. Adobe Analytics is the leading analytics vendor for discovering high-value audiences and creating segments to fuel customer-touching engagement activities. Adobe Analytics customers can easily break down reports by any number of variables, build and customize on the fly to streamline lead-generation activities, or discover hidden opportunities with anomaly detection and contribution analysis. Since most of the success for B2B companies takes place offline, Adobe Analytics can connect online leads to downstream sales and revenue, helping to optimize campaigns and prioritize customer outreach by sales team.

Travel and Hospitality: Maximizing Customer Experience Every Step of the Way
With an intense customer-experience focus, the travel and hospitality industry faces unique challenges. Maximizing capacity and upsells to reservations requires a clear understanding of key variables such as product-search merchandising, reservation reporting, advanced booking, cross-selling, cost and margin analysis, post-purchase analysis, and booking loyalty. It is critical that reservation reporting be as flexible as possible. The ability to create an unlimited number of persona-based segments, model them, and compare them via machine-learning innovations (such as Segment IQ) is unique to Adobe Analytics. Additionally, Adobe Analytics enables travel and hospitality companies to associate all their custom metrics with the reservation process and provides the ability to break down any report by reservation/product and vice versa. With Adobe Analytics, you can build or customize any report you want on the fly.

Future Plans: What Adobe Is Doing for Customer Intelligence
Adobe was one of the pioneers of web analytics and evolved the market from web to digital analytics to marketing analytics and is now focused on customer intelligence. The recently released Gartner Magic Quadrant for Digital Marketing Analytics 2016 confirms this legacy, positioning Adobe as a leader — in both execution and vision — with a comprehensive set of marketing tools for users of all skill levels. Paired with cross-channel enablement and advancements in our user interface, our dream of democratizing the power of data is coming true for our clients across many verticals.

The post The Message is Maturity: Adobe Is a Leader in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Digital Marketing Analytics appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.

from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/analytics/the-message-is-maturity-adobe-is-a-leader-in-gartners-magic-quadrant-for-digital-marketing-analytics/

Four Reasons Smart Marketers Use Product-Feed Advertising on Social

Feed-based advertising on social media is attracting much attention nowadays and for good reason — it works. How do we know? For nearly 15 years, marketers have been relying on product display ads to boost advertising campaigns. With documented success in both search and display, isn’t it time to carry these results over to other marketing channels as well?

Social media has exploded in the past few years, but improved advertising is what’s really driving excitement for marketers. With sophisticated targeting capabilities, advanced analytics, and now, product ads — dynamic product ads on Facebook®, in particular — opportunities are available that weren’t possible just a few short years ago. Dynamic creative across social channels is a fairly new concept. But, if you’ve had success in the past with product-listing ads (PLA) in search or dynamic creative in display, now is the time to experiment.

Benefits of Product-Feed Advertising
Product-feed advertising on social may be your solution for delivering highly targeted, personalized ads to your audience in real time and at scale. Following are four advantages to consider with regard to product-feed advertising.

1. Boosts Ad-Performance Efficiencies
Reaching the right people with the right message isn’t always easy — and no one enjoys seeing ads they care nothing about. In truth, brands have work to do when it comes to improving ad relevancy and targeting. By automating much of the process, feed-based advertising creates efficiencies across the board, boosting ad performance in ways that truly move the needle.

How much efficiency can dynamic product ads drive? Here are the results from one US retailer that is using Adobe Media Optimizer to run Facebook’s dynamic product ads. The performance of dynamic product ads were compared to standard website custom-audience ads. You can see below how Facebook’s dynamic product ads significantly outperformed standard website custom-audience campaigns that were serving static ads. Improvements were observed across all key metrics:

• Lift in click-through rate (CTR): 75 percent;
• Reduction in cost per click (CPC): 78 percent;
• Reduction in cost per order (CPO): 60 percent; and
• Improvement in return on ad spend (ROAS): 23 percent.

2. Delivers Consistent Customer Experiences
If you’re serving product ads to your audience based on previous website behaviors, then it’s absolutely critical that the products you deliver in search and display as well as on Facebook are consistent. Consistency is important not only as consumers return to your website, but also in the ads they view on search or somewhere else altogether. As audiences move from device to device, feed-based advertising allows you to reach them with relevant products at the right time. In addition, since people are almost always logged in as themselves on social channels, you have access to a tremendous amount of personalized, authenticated data.

3. Streamlines the Creative Development Process
The purpose of programmatic feed advertising is to make things easier for marketers. As most of us know, it’s one thing to buy media and quite another to create it. Particularly with digital advertising, creative development can have a long lead time, and it’s easy to develop creative fatigue. Programmatic advertising addresses this issue by accelerating the development process. Because you’re assembling ads from the product feed itself — rather than relying on a creative agency or in-house team to put them together — you save time and money. Creative development can be costly, and feed-based advertising alleviates much of this expense.

4. Provides Ability to Scale
Think about the travel industry with hundreds — even thousands — of destinations to promote at one time, or a large retailer with hundreds of thousands of products to promote. Automation makes it easy to retarget users with relevant ads, reaching them with products they care about when it matters most. Feed-based advertising streamlines the process so that you can combine the right ad or destination with the data you have, effectively creating, managing, and optimizing social ad campaigns on Facebook and Instagram at scale.

Bottom Line
Keeping your brand in front of potential buyers is key, and product-feed advertising on social is a smart, practical strategy that can be personalized and retargeted for maximum impact. If you’ve already enjoyed success in search or display, now is the time to experiment in social. Feed-based advertising can deliver consistent customer experiences across channels, accelerate the creative development process, and boost performance efficiencies across the board. With increased relevance, enhanced targeting, and customized experiences at scale, product-feed advertising on social just makes sense.

Facebook® is a registered trademark of Facebook, Inc.

The post Four Reasons Smart Marketers Use Product-Feed Advertising on Social appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.

from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/social-media/four-reasons-smart-marketers-use-product-feed-advertising-social/

Four Secrets to Building a Unified Customer Profile

Unified customer profiles are all the rage today. And, there’s good reason for that. They can drastically improve your customer experiences and allow you to better target campaigns to audience segments and personalize messaging to existing customers and targets.

However, many organizations find themselves overwhelmed by the process of creating unified customer profiles. With so many disparate data sources, finding a way to map one ID across them all is nearly impossible. So, it’s understandable that organizations may not know how to get started.

The Secrets to Building a Unified Customer Profile
To build a unified customer profile, you must keep some important things in mind.

1. Stop Searching for the Holy Grail.
Many organizations face serious delays because they try to find ways to map one ID across all their data sources. This is almost sure to fail, or at the very least, cost time that you don’t have. Rather than trying to do everything at once — integrating all channels, all users, and all campaigns — and finding yourself overwhelmed to the point of paralysis, it’s better to start with the IDs you have and determine how you can link them to master IDs. Beginning with data you already have allows you to understand which marketing channels you have good connections for and which you can begin delivering on.

2. Just Keep Swimming.
When building a unified customer profile, you will almost certainly reach a point when you want to quit. It will seem as though you’re doing tons of work but not gaining the results you’d like as quickly as you’d like them. Continue pushing through. This does not mean that you’re on the wrong track. Remember, you will not have an end-to-end solution right out of the gate — no one does. Instead, focus initially on authenticated, first-party data. From there, you can slowly add in more sophisticated profiling as the process progresses.

3. Avoid Being Attached to Trash.
If you’re like most organizations, you have some segments that have been around forever. Either you never use them, or they’re full of old, bad data. There’s no reason to move that outdated information over to your new system. Keeping outdated garbage data does not help you achieve a unified customer profile — and, it will not help you meet your goals either. Instead, start with the data you have. The new data you have coming in will be more beneficial to your targeting than your old ideas or best guesses were. Let the data do the segmenting work for you.

4. Remember Bigger Doesn’t Equal Better.
Sometimes, we hear people brag about how huge their newsletter sends are: “We reached over 100,000 people!” What they don’t consider is whether those 100,000 people were likely to even care about what they had to say. If you’re constantly approaching people who aren’t interested in your brand or product, you’re wasting your time, money, and effort. Instead, use a unified customer profile to determine which audiences are most likely to respond to which campaigns. As you learn more about your audiences, you’ll likely find that your audience segments decrease — but that decrease will leave you with audience segments that are most likely to act.

Unified Customer Profile Benefits
Building a unified customer profile can be a daunting task. However, the benefits of a unified customer profile — increased marketing efficiency, better understanding of your customer journey, and a more comprehensive audience profile — far outweigh the effort of working through your data. Approaching the task in a methodical method can help smooth out the process. This particular task is a prime example of how slow and steady can win the race. By first making measurable progress in the areas that you can — and adding on as you go — you will help achieve a unified customer profile more quickly.

The post Four Secrets to Building a Unified Customer Profile appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.

from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/analytics/four-secrets-building-unified-customer-profile/