These ‘Climate Risk’ websites, which make up 10% of the domains in the five countries studied by the report — the U.S., U.K., France, Germany and Australia, contribute 33,500 metric tons (mt) of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) greenhouse gases per month. That’s equal to driving a car 86,000,000 miles or 3,449 times around the earth. Between January 2020 and May 2022, $115 million was spent on advertising on these sites.

The big picture. Overall, the energy used by programmatic advertising in these five countries every month generates the same amount of greenhouse gas as 24 million gallons of gasoline, according to the report.

Dig deeper: How advertisers can take the lead in reducing carbon emissions

This includes energy used in 

• Ad selection from servers and cloud computing; analytics; network traffic; storage; data providers; and vendor overhead.
• Media distribution via CMS; CDNs and hosting services.
• Consumer devices during views.
• Creative distribution from creative delivery including transfer and all vendors involved.

Global emissions per 1000 programmatic ad impressions are approximately 514.8 gCO2PM (grams of carbon dioxide and equivalent greenhouse gasses). That’s the same amount of energy as washing a load of laundry.

Average publisher emissions can range anywhere from as low as 187 gCO2PM all the way up to 1772 gCO2PM.

Why we care. Climate change is the greatest threat to human existence and we are running out of time to do anything about it. This is why every action matters. 

It’s easy to get overwhelmed by the scale of the problem and think this one change won’t accomplish anything. Repurposing ad spend away from those problematic websites “only” cuts 33,500mt out of programmatic advertising’s monthly total of 215,000mt. Even if we could get that amount to zero, it is a fraction of a percent of the 50,000,000,000mt of greenhouse gases produced each year.

Here’s the thing: We’re in the marketing business. We’re all about the cumulative impact of incremental change in attitudes. We don’t know where the tipping point is for this change. We could be a very small step away from it. Every action matters in getting to that.

Doing less with more isn’t only in your own self-interest, it’s also good business. Retail giant Walmart has saved billions of dollars by requiring more environmentally friendly packaging for the products it sells.

What can be done: Each ad impression travels through an “advertising life cycle,” which starts with the programmatic selection process and ends when the ad is delivered. Every step along the way contributes to the ad’s emissions. Knowing the impact of each part of the journey will help you discover excess energy uses. 

For example, ad selection is responsible for upwards of 60% of the energy used in programmatic advertising. You can lower that amount significantly by adjusting things like your programmatic supply chain.

The post ‘Bad’ digital ad spending can harm the environment appeared first on MarTech.

Below, we will introduce some of the basic concepts around marketing automation and ways you can get the most out of it. 

Table of contents

• What is marketing automation and why is it important?
• Key benefits of marketing automation 
• How marketing automation works
• Marketing automation best practices
• Popular marketing automation vendors
• Resources for learning more

What is marketing automation and why is it important?

Marketing automation platforms (MAPs) help automate activities across various marketing channels. The goal is to put repetitive tasks such as sending emails, posting on social media pages and managing data on autopilot. 

Marketing departments use marketing automation to ensure their campaigns generate desired outcomes rapidly and efficiently. Employees can focus on thinking through higher-level problems when automation is working correctly. It can take some time to set up initially, but the results can significantly impact your business once it is up and running.

Marketing automation is often associated with email marketing. After all, marketing automation began with IBM’s Unica email platform in the early 1990s. 

It’s useful to have an automated system for sending emails at scale to selected audiences or triggering emails in response to users’ certain actions (cart abandonment, for example). But using marketing automation only for emails can result in a disjointed customer experience. Thus, marketers must also consider its use across other channels too.

Key benefits of marketing automation

In addition to efficiency, marketing automation has several key benefits for marketing organizations:

Savings in time, energy and money

Marketing automation is responsible for increasing productivity among sales by 14.5% and reducing overhead in marketing initiatives by 12.2%. Intuitive marketing automation tools can give marketers their time back to invest in other initiatives and activities that boost a company’s bottom line in other ways.

Better targeting of audiences

A marketing automation platform that works for you will allow you to target your audience and monitor behaviors on your campaigns. Tracking real-time data and monitoring engagement allows you to capitalize on personalized communication across multiple channels. Consistent and relevant communication to your target audience results in major ROI and a boost in customer loyalty. 

Embed a seamless omnichannel experience

Remember, marketing automation takes over all the repetitive tasks when done correctly. When this happens, you can craft a seamless and personalized customer experience. Targeted emails, pre-filled forms based on user data and anticipating customer behaviors help to ensure your customers receive the same service each time.

How does marketing automation work? 

Marketing automation tools and platforms may have specific nuances to how they function, but at a high level, they automate workflows. They help us remove all the individualized sticky notes on our desks with reminders and put those reminders into a cadence that automatically gets done with minimal human involvement. 

At a basic level, marketing automation campaigns will send content to a list of contacts based on a specified behavior or predetermined criteria to get them to take a certain action. 

For example, let’s say you’re doing your last webinar before the end of the year, and you want to get some new leads into the pipeline to start January off strong. What would you typically do with marketing automation doing its part?

• You would send an invitation email to all the new leads to attend the stated webinar at a specific time. 
• You might include an end-of-year incentive to get them to participate and perhaps invite their peers.
• Those leads automatically fill out a form that will funnel them into two lists based on a “Yes” that they will attend or a “No” that they cannot attend.
• The people on the “Yes” list will start receiving an email or text nurture cadence that will keep your upcoming webinar top of mind in their inboxes and on their phones. 
• After attending the webinar, those attendees will be shipped over to the sales team to have a sales conversation about your product or service. 

As you can see, you did nothing except craft the content and inject it into the automation tool. The tool did the rest of the work until the sales call, for which people generally prefer speaking with people.   

Marketing automation best practices 

There are plenty of marketing automation tools available. The first rule of thumb is to do your research and see which one would be best for your business and which will help you reach the goals you’re trying to achieve the best. Here are a few other best practices to follow. 

Understand the journey of your buyers

For a marketing automation tool to benefit you, you must understand the journey of your target audience. 

• What do they really want? 
• What channels are they using? 
• What questions are they asking? 

If you know this information, you will find it easy to craft a workflow that works.

Ensure your content is relevant, engaging and consistent

Your audience is likely already bombarded by endless content, with most of it not being so good. How do you intend to cut through the noise? Test your content before feeding it to the automation tool. 

You want to produce what people actually want, not what you think they want. Once you have found what your audience finds relevant and engaging, deliver it to them consistently.

Avoid lengthy processes

Delight your customers but don’t bog them down with lengthy forms and overbearing popups. In each piece of content, focus on one asset, one opportunity and one call to action. The “keep it simple” rule of thumb applies here. 

Popular marketing automation vendors

Marketing automation software is very widely used by marketing automations. There are many solutions on the market.

Some specialize in B2B marketing, and as noted above, there are variations in the capabilities offered by each platform. Among the best-known and most popular are:

• Acoustic
• ActiveCampaign
• Adobe Experience Cloud
• Adobe Marketo
• HubSpot
• Mautik
• Oracle Marketing Cloud
• Salesforce Pardot

Dig deeper

A good marketing automation system keeps marketing to your target audience simple and consistent while being less time-consuming and cost-effective.  

For best results, follow the key points in this article and allow marketing automation to improve communication with your target audience. 

Here’s some further reading: 

• Find out if your organization needs a marketing automation platform to personalize the buyer experience. 
• Need help choosing a marketing automation platform? Here are 16 options that you can choose from. 
• When on a demo call with a marketing automation vendor, here are 15 questions you should ask before choosing one vendor over another. 
• The vendor marketplace is vast; here are several things you should expect from a B2B marketing automation platform. 

The post Why we care about marketing automation appeared first on MarTech.

Newest jobs in Martech:

Sr. Marketing Operations Manager @ TigerConnect (U.S. remote)

• Salary: $89,500 – $189,500 (est.)
• Manage, maintain and continually evolve our lead scoring, lifecycle models and operational fundamentals.
• Maintaining data integrity and data governance through operational programs and automated processes.

Manager of Demand Generation Marketing @ WorldSync (U.S. remote)

• Salary: $88,000 – $112,000 (est.)
• Build and lead a marketing function that includes collaboration with Product Management, Sales Leadership, Customer Success Management, and Executive Staff. 
• Build multichannel campaigns (inbound and outbound) that align messaging to the target audience and buyer journey.

Growth Marketing Strategist @ NewNorth (U.S. remote)

• Salary: $80,000 – $120,000 (est.)
• Develop marketing strategies for clients that drive real, measurable results.
• Engage with clients and delivering your expertise with confidence, expertly managing expectations.

Marketing Manager – B2B SaaS @ Localize (U.S. remote)

• Salary: $70,000 – $80,000 (est.)
• Contribute to the development and management of 1WorldSync’s global demand generation campaigns across channels (e.g., email, SEM, digital advertising, web, events.) including strategy, content planning, campaign setup, A/B testing, reporting, and optimization.
• Partner with Product Marketing Manager as well as Go-To-Market (GTM) and Sales teams to develop and optimize campaigns according to the product roadmap and 1WorldSync’s pipeline and revenue goals.

Director roles:

Principle Marketing Analytics Analyst @ Shutterfly Inc. (U.S. remote)

• Salary: $90,000 – $114,000 (est.)
• Answer measurement and data integration questions: define analytics approach, retrieve, and manipulate data needed to perform analysis, and deliver actionable insights to Marketing Management team. 
• Create and share out weekly reports to clearly communicate Email channel and campaign performance. Identify trends and draw insights and test results to help guide future planning. Dig into the category performance and drivers. 

Senior roles:

Sr. Growth Marketing Manager @ Backblaze (U.S. remote)

• Salary: $130,000 – $190,000 (est.)
• Lead growth marketing initiatives to ensure the best lead experience by creating awareness, promoting free trials or sales leads and ultimately converting leads to paying customers.
• Report out key performance metrics on a weekly/monthly basis and develop monetization trends and sales strategies to optimize our investment for ROI.

Global Lead Product Marketing Manager @ LiveRamp (U.S. remote)

• Salary: $130,000 – $160,000 (est.)
• Collaborate with product management to ensure market needs are translated into new product capabilities, and new product capabilities are effectively rolled out to the commercial teams.
• Draw from deep expertise of the product to clearly articulate how a given feature uniquely addresses customer use cases.

Partner Marketing Manager @ Lambda (U.S. remote)

• Salary: $103,000 – $165,000 (est.)
• Field incoming co-marketing requests, identify new areas of opportunity, and prioritize activities according to impact and reach.
• Work closely with the Sales team to strengthen GTM execution around new and enhanced partnerships.

Sr. Marketing Data Analyst @ GameChanger (U.S. remote)

• Salary: $100,000 – $130,000 (est.)
• Support the Marketing and Partnerships teams in tracking, reporting, and analyzing the effectiveness of marketing and go-to-market activities through the entire marketing funnel from awareness to retention.
• Build reports, data visualizations, and dashboards that clearly communicate findings to stakeholders.

Sr. Marketing Operations Manager @ Cotiviti (U.S. remote)

• Salary: $94,000 – $115,000 (est.)
• Build and execute strategic, best-in-class, multi-channel marketing campaigns for enterprise and line of business audience segments.
• Perform workflow set up in HubSpot including audience selection, dynamic content, etc. to ensure accuracy of campaigns.

Sr. Consulant, Go-to-Market Strategy @ Shift Paradigm (U.S. remote)

• Salary: $90,000 – $130,000 (est.)
• Execute on diverse client consulting projects, with a focus on strategic initiatives and their execution.
• Develop solutions for complex marketing, sales, and organizational challenges in collaboration with the support of specialists across delivery areas.

Marketing Operations Manager @ Britive (U.S. remote)

• Salary: $80,000 – $100,000 (est.)
• Proactively identify areas of improvement in campaign operations to continually evolve a best-in-class marketing automation system. 
• Own and improve supportive structure directly impacting a steady volume of campaign requests by creating and maintaining Hubspot program templates and documentation for Demand Generation and Field Marketing teams.

Associate roles:

Jr. Marketing Operations Associate @ Fictiv (U.S. remote)

• Salary: $70,000 – $80,000 (est.)
• Manage, or assist with data cleanliness, database health reporting, normalization, data cleanup, etc. 
• Responsible for maintenance, troubleshooting and ad hoc improvements across Martech systems like Sales-outreach (Outreach.io, or Salesloft for example), Marketo, scoring, enrichment and deduplication tooling.

Revenue Operations Analyst @ Goldcast (U.S. remote)

• Salary:$57,500 – $72,000  (est.)
• As the first person in the revenue ops function, you will report into the Head of Sales and act as a connective tissue between Marketing and Sales.
• You will connect data and systems, build workflows, and generate insights and analytics to empower marketing and sales to drive more revenue.

The post The latest jobs in martech appeared first on MarTech.

The key to RMN’s success is how interactions with brands can enhance the shopper experience. Digital media experts at Kroger and The Home Depot have spent years developing media networks keeping this key point in mind. If a branded ad interrupts the customer’s journey, it doesn’t help the brand, the retailer or, most importantly, the customer.

Helping when customers research products

Where can brands get involved in the customer journey? At The Home Depot, a supplier approached the retailer about retargeting customers on social media. Soon, the company created opportunities for other suppliers to deliver ads that drove customers to the retailer’s product pages.

This was back in 2018. In 2019, The Home Depot’s Retail Media+ (known as RM+) was launched. Brands now have opportunities to show ads on company owned properties, including homedepot.com, the retailer’s app, in-store and email, as well as offsite media channels like social and video.

“We didn’t want it to disrupt the customer experience,” said Melanie Babcock, vice president, Retail Media+ and monetization for The Home Depot. “Our customer spends a lot of time researching on our site before making a decision. They’re thinking about if they have the right tools, skills, time and capabilities for a project. You have a light to install, should you do it on your own? The consideration time is much less for traditional retailers.”

Because of this longer, more involved customer journey, the retailer decided  decided to let suppliers have the lion’s share of the RMN ad inventory. That means that most of the ads served to customers during their journey are endemic products, ones that can be bought at Home Depot.

“Onsight and in-store are very connected,” said Babcock. “We see that in our customers’ behaviors, and we wanted to be additive to that by keeping the customer in mind and not just monetizing the website. We’re bringing the supplier into the customer journey.”

Personalized precision with customers

Supermarket chain Kroger is another major retailer with a robust RMN, called Kroger Precision Marketing (KPM). KPM is managed under a wholly-owned subsidiary, 84.51˚.

“The common denominator is data science,” said Brian Spencer, KPM’s marketing director. “We have a legion of data scientists available under 84.51˚. There’s shelf assortment and other areas of personalization in our stores. That same talent base is what fuels the personalization behind Kroger Precision Marketing as well.”

Prior to starting its retail media business, Kroger built digital experiences for customers to search products, create grocery lists and receive digital coupons. These tools made it possible for KPM to introduce brands in a relevant way.

Unbranded search terms are 90% of the top 500 searches in Kroger digital touchpoints, Spencer said. That means many customers are looking for products without a specific brand in mind. Directing those customers to a specific brand or product is a logical next step in their journeys.

And, because digital customers are multi-taskers, they aren’t only looking for products available at a Kroger store. For instance, you could be planning a Super Bowl party and need to buy snacks. But what if you also are considering a new TV? Cases like that, but also many others, are where non-endemic brands fit in.

“As we explore non-endemic opportunities, top of mind is that this is activated in a way that isn’t intrusive or obnoxious to our consumers,” said Spencer. “If it’s something that makes sense for our shoppers, we’ll take a look.”

Expanding to offsite journeys

“Retail media data is very advantageous to all kinds of brands, particularly in the grocery category,” said Spencer. Grocery shoppers make purchases several times a month, and often multiple times per week. And these purchases cut across many categories. 

“That kind of information is obviously necessary for consumer packaged goods, but outside of CPG there’s greater interest because some of these non-endemic brands are looking for relevant ways to reach audiences,” he said. “Automotive brands or fast food brands, they may think of our data set as another way to activate across the open web.”

Offsite RMN opportunities are the fastest-growing area for KPM. Kroger has been a partner with streaming service platform Roku for three years. And this week, Disney Advertising announced a partnership with KPM for some Disney media properties, beginning with Hulu.

Dig deeper: CTV added to Kroger’s retail media network business

“Brands, but more typically agencies, are able to go in and activate programmatic display and CTV through a DSP of their choice, and set their own safety standards and activate through a self-service portal — and see sales results and optimize against in-store and online sales,” said Spencer.

“Retail media is more and more being considered as just media,” he added. “It’s more and more part of the total touchpoint consideration set that agencies are looking at. The traditional lines between shopper marketing and brand marketing are becoming more blurred.”

The Home Depot is also looking at how to expand RM+ offsite into CTV. It’s also piloting in-store video screens at 50 locations, currently, to see how shoppers’ digital journeys can be enhanced when they get to the store.

“We’re the last mile in advertising, which is always the most expensive part of the journey,” said Babcock. “There’s huge value to our supplier to connect to that customer and also to know more about that customer.”

The post How Home Depot and Kroger use RMN to improve shoppers’ ad experience appeared first on MarTech.

In today’s fiercely competitive market, delivering personalized experiences is crucial for customer engagement and loyalty. However, marketers who fail to adapt to the transition from decision-tree to trigger-based engagement strategies risk falling behind and missing out on the opportunity to captivate customers at every touchpoint with hyper-personalized experiences. 

In this workshop, discover how to seamlessly collaborate with your data team to unlock the full potential of your first-party data and create personalized experiences that captivate your customers at every touchpoint. 

Register and attend “How To Power Next Best Action with First-Party Customer Data,” presented by Snowplow.

Click here to view more MarTech webinars.

The post Power next-best action with first-party data appeared first on MarTech.

As our colleague Nicole Farley reports, “Advertisers can submit creative content such as images, videos, and text related to a campaign, and the AI will “remix” these materials to generate ads that target specific audiences and meet objectives like sales targets.”

Dig deeper: Three essentials for writing a good ChatGPT prompt

Here is our roundup of now available AI-powered martech products, platforms and features announced this week: 

• Constant Contact’s AI Content Generator allows customers to automate the copy drafting process for email, text and social media campaigns. It was developed using the company’s proprietary data and AI algorithms, which recognize content small business customers are most likely to engage with. This feature is currently free to all new Constant Contact customers for a limited time.
• Proxima has added AI to its proprietary database of 55 million B2C shoppers to generate audiences for prospecting on Meta, Google and TikTok. Those audiences are added directly to the data intelligence company’s platform and used for targeting new, high-value customers. It also generates media buying reports based on the insights it finds.
• Catchlight, a Fidelity Labs startup, has released an AI-generated prospect email feature for financial advisors. Using data-enriched profiles created by the program, the AI captures key characteristics to make natural-sounding outreach that is unique to each lead.
• Bloomreach Content, a headless content management system, now lets users add OpenAI’s ChatGPT Text Generator to it.
• Storyteq’s Brand Portals is an AI-powered creative production hub for localizing and activating global marketing campaigns faster. It provides a centralized place for marketers to quickly adapt multichannel campaigns through a self-serve AI-enabled platform.
• Silverpush’s Mirrors provides advertisers with access to a wide range of contextual signals that can be used to enhance their ad targeting strategies. By leveraging Generative AI, Mirrors will enable advertisers to understand the nuances of user behavior and preferences, allowing for more accurate cookieless targeting.
• Mobiquity Technologies’ ATOS 2.0 now uses AI-driven ad targeting technology to optimize ad placements in real-time, ensuring greater precision and improved campaign performance across multiple platforms.

The post This week’s AI product releases: Google adds generative to ads and more appeared first on MarTech.

Customer experience is the most important and toughest part of marketing. The scale alone can be staggering. CX involves every interaction current and potential customers have with a brand — from customer service to packaging to digital presence to physical store maintenance to positioning around external events and much, much more. 

Dig deeper: How Allied Beverage is transforming customer experience

How can anyone stay on top of all that? You need expert help. So, here’s our list (in alphabetical order) of the people you absolutely must follow to keep up with the latest in CX.

Jay Baer

Jay is a customer experience and marketing keynote speaker and emcee who has written six best-selling books on customer acquisition and retention and founded five multi-million dollar companies from scratch. He is also founder of ConvinceAndConvert.com, one of the world’s most popular online resources for marketers and business owners.

• Twitter: @jaybaer (270K followers)
• LinkedIn: Jay Baer (42K followers)
• Website: JayBaer

Jeanne Bliss

Jeanne is a leadership and customer experience advisor, who has delivered over 2,000 speeches and workshops for nearly every business vertical. She hosts the podcast Customer Bliss and is the author of several books including the best-selling “Chief Customer Officer 2.0: How to Build Your Customer-Driven Growth Engine.”

• LinkedIn: Jeanne Bliss (26K followers)
• Twitter: @JeanneBliss (25K followers)
• Website: Customer Bliss 

James Dodkins

James is Pegasystems’ GTM Excellence, Customer Service & Sales Automation Director. He can honestly be called a rockstar, having played guitar with a world-touring, album-releasing heavy metal band. Check out his video “What Can Stevie Ray Vaugh Teach Us About Customer Experience” to see what those two worlds have in common. He also helped create the ACXS customer experience certification program.

• LinkedIn: James Dodkins (28K followers) 
• Twitter: @JDODKINS (3K followers)
• Website: James Dodkins 

Annette Franz 

Annette is founder and CEO of CX Journey Inc. and has been named one of “The 100 Most Influential Tech Women on Twitter” by Business Insider. She’s author of the books “Built to Win” and “Customer Understanding.” She has 30 years of experience in CX on both the client and vendor side, serves on the advisory board for customer experience at the University of California, Irvine, and is a member of the Forbes Coaches Council. 

• LinkedIn: Annette Franz (20K followers)
• Twitter: @annettefranz (27K followers)
• Website: CX Journey

Don Peppers 

Don’s first book, 1993’s “The One to One Future,” written with long-time business partner Martha Rogers, Ph.D., is widely credited with having launched the CRM revolution. BusinessWeek called it the “bible of the new marketing” and Tom Peters named it his “book of the year.” Among the many other books Don has written by himself or with Rogers are the definitive “Managing Customer Experience and Relationships” and “Customer Experience: What, Why and How.” He is also one of the LinkedIn Top Voices, which is the site’s official influencer program.

• LinkedIn: Don Peppers (329K followers)
• Twitter: @DonPeppers (10.5K followers)
• Website: CX Speakers

Colin Shaw 

Colin is a pioneer of customer experience. In 2002 he founded Beyond Philosophy, one of the world’s first customer experience consultancies. He is author of several best-selling books, including “Building Great Customer Experiences’ and “Revolutionize Your Customer Experience.” Colin is also one of LinkedIn’s Top Voices and co-host of the business podcast The Intuitive Customer, rated in the top 5% of all podcasts by BuzzSprout. 

• LinkedIn: Colin Shaw (295K followers)
• Twitter: @ColinShaw_CX (14K followers)
• Website: Beyond Philosophy 

Brian Solis 

Currently VP of Global Innovation at Salesforce, Brian is a renowned digital anthropologist who researches technology’s impact on business, markets and society. He’s the author of many bestselling books, including, “X: The Experience When Business Meets Design,” “What’s the Future of Business” and “The End of Business as Usual.” He’s a Top Voice on LinkedIn, where his newsletter has more than 62,000 subscribers.

• LinkedIn: BrianSolis (344K followers)
• Twitter: @briansolis (272K followers)
• Instagram: @briansolis (65K followers)
• Website: Brian Solis

Bruce Temkin 

Bruce leads the Qualtrics XM Institute, which provides thought leadership and training to help organizations with experience management. He is also co-founder and chairman emeritus of the Customer Experience Professionals Association. This non-profit organization runs the Certified Customer Experience Professional (CCXP) program, an industry-wide, standardized curriculum which confirms CX practitioners’ expertise in the field.  

• LinkedIn: Bruce Temkin (36K followers)
• Twitter: @btemkin (17K followers)
• Website: XM Institute

Steve Towers 

Steve is CEO and founder of The BP Group, a consultancy that helps upskill customer experience professionals. He has been keynote speaker for conferences and corporate events around the world. He is author of the books “Dare” and “The Process Tactics Playbook” (with James Dodkins).

• LinkedIn: Steve Towers  (31K followers)
• Twitter: @stowers (10K followers)
• Website: Steve Towers

Steven Van Belleghem 

Steve is co-founder and board member of nexxworks, a disruption consultancy. An in-demand keynote speaker, he is also author of many business books, including “The Offer You Can’t Refuse” and “When Digital Becomes Human” and the tech thriller “Hoogverraad” (sadly, only available in Dutch).

• LinkedIn: Steven Van Belleghem (49K followers)
• Twitter: @StevenVBe (39K followers)
• Website: Steven Van Belleghem  

More MarTech experts to follow:

• Marketing operations
• AI and marketing
• Email marketing
• B2B marketing
• Content marketing

The post MarTech’s customer experience experts to follow appeared first on MarTech.

Email continues to grow because it delivers consistent and impressive results. For every dollar marketers spend on email marketing, they generate $36 in revenue, a Litmus survey of 2,000 email marketers found in 2020, the latest year for which data is available.

Depending on what industry you’re in, your company’s ROI could be even higher. Agencies in marketing, PR and advertising see a return of $42 for every $1 they spend on email, and businesses in retail, ecommerce and consumer goods are rewarded with $45 in revenue for each dollar spent.

The centrality of data and the need for updated technology

Email may have been around since the dawn of the internet, but the space doesn’t stand still. Email marketing, and the technology that enables it, have evolved to deal with challenges like spam and deliverability and also to take advantage of opportunities, such as the ever-increasing sophistication of data usage for hyper-personalization.

When MarTech surveyed marketers for the 2022 MarTech Replacement Survey, they said technologies for email distribution and for marketing automation (a chief component of which is email), were both in the top four software types replaced over the previous 18 months.

Dig deeper MarTech’s email marketing experts to follow

Marketing automation was the most replaced application, with 23% of respondents in 2022 saying they’d replaced it, versus 24% in 2021. Email distribution technologies were replaced by 21% of those surveyed in 2022, compared to 24% in 2021.

Most of the respondents who replaced email distribution systems were moving to a commercial application, either from another commercial vendor or a homegrown solution. The primary reason: to take advantage of new and better features.

Email marketing helps organizations acquire and retain customers, build businesses and make more money. Explore the platforms essential to email marketing in the latest edition of this MarTech Intelligence Report.

Click here to download!

The latest generation of email technology

When it comes to technology, maturity can be a disadvantage. New businesses can more easily leverage the latest capabilities of software development, while established firms may be saddled with legacy technologies and architectures.

Of course, technology players often introduce new features – some at a higher rate than others. But doing that on top of an aging infrastructure, while also keeping things running for an existing customer base, can be challenging.

While the COVID-19 pandemic may have driven communications between business and customers to digital channels like email, that preference seems to hold up even now that the pandemic is waning. Fifty-seven percent of customers said they preferred to engage with businesses via email in 2022, down from 65% in 2020, according to Salesforce’s State of the Connected Customer report.

Despite this preference, lots of emails land in inboxes without getting an open, much less a read or a click. Meanwhile, recipients spent an average of only 10 seconds reading brand emails in the first three quarters of 2021, a Litmus analysis of eight billion email opens found. That was down from 11.8 seconds in 2020 and 13.4 seconds in 2018.

These statistics explain why marketers, and the email marketing platform vendors serving them, are focusing on technologies to create more personalized, relevant and engaging messages that improve the odds of their content being read and acted on.

The personalization imperative amid data pressures

Meanwhile, other developments are changing the data landscape, making it harder to even gather statistics like these about users’ interactions with emails. Because of efforts to safeguard customer privacy, tech companies are making it harder for marketers to collect data about individual users.

In addition to the pending demise of third-party cookies, both Apple and Google are reducing the utility of mobile ad identifiers in an effort to safeguard customer privacy. Another change affecting email marketing, in particular, arose in mid-2021 when Apple announced Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) features in iOS, Mac OS and Watch OS that can limit the data available to marketers by concealing opens and IP addresses.

Another Apple feature, Hide My Email, lets users create their own unique random email addresses that forward to their inboxes. This means that a person could use a unique email address for every business with whom they have a relationship, foiling technologies that seek to tie together behavior from different sources to get a holistic view of a customer’s interests and needs.

These changes are spurring a dramatic shift to first-party data in all digital marketing disciplines, and they have led to the decline of the open rate as a meaningful email marketing metric, since MPP obscures whether, or when, emails are opened by using a cache.

Both the increased emphasis on data-driven personalization and the shifts in the data landscape have spurred vendors of email marketing platforms to augment the data available within their platforms and change the emphasis to metrics other than open rate.

Everything you need to know about email marketing deliverability that your customers want and that inboxes won’t block. Get MarTech’s Email Marketing Periodic Table.

Click here to check it out!

Enterprise email marketing platform capabilities

Email marketing platforms usually offer features for email creation and sending, but consolidation and integrations have added to what one might have once expected. Common capabilities of these platforms include:

• Message design and creation
• Workflow automation and collaboration
• Message previewing
• Email sending
• Deliverability management
• Data management
• Ecommerce capabilities
• Analytics and reporting
• Third-party integrations
• Automation and landing pages

Some providers may offer more advanced capabilities, such as:

• More full-featured customer data platform functionality
• Artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities leveraged through different parts of the platform

The benefits of email marketing platforms

While any but the most nascent of businesses will likely have adopted some approach to email, given its centrality to business in general, adopting an enterprise solution offers many benefits. These may include:

• Data unification across channels. Some email marketing platforms include full-fledged customer data platforms, but, even if they don’t, the customer databases associated with these systems can serve as a single source of truth across an organization. Such unification can provide businesses with a complete portrait of their customers, permitting them to leverage data for marketing, customer service and product development purposes. Platforms can also assist with compliance with CAN-SPAM and other privacy regulations.
• A more unified technology stack overall. Most email marketing platforms offer extensive integrations with other business technologies, allowing companies to more easily work across silos.
• Ability to identify more profitable audiences and segmentation strategies. The unified data trove gives marketers the opportunity to get to know their customers better, and also to identify lookalike audiences by connecting to additional data sources. Artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities can surface useful insights that marketers may not know to look for.
• More efficient workflows. Every email message that’s meant to be delivered to an audience or segment typically goes through an internal review and approval process. Some email marketing platforms feature the ability to collaborate and obtain approvals within the platform, which is especially helpful for larger more-distributed organizations and those in more regulated industries. Franchises and other multilocation businesses benefit from even more complex systems aimed at sharing useful assets and establishing guidelines, while also allowing those closest to the customers to add valuable customization.
• More personal and efficient communication with customers. Template design combined with data insights and segmentation can allow businesses to deliver more personalized, relevant and timely messaging. Automation and triggered-messaging features allow for more efficiency, as well. When systems include SMS or mobile notification options, this allows businesses to extend communications to those channels.
• Improved deliverability and design of email messages. Email marketing platforms’ deliverability systems – both technological and relationship-oriented – can help businesses ensure their messages make it to the inbox. Once they arrive, design and preview features give marketers more control over how their messages appear, no matter where they are viewed.
• Access to more advanced templating and interactivity. Interactive capabilities via AMP for email or CSS are more easily accessible with the help of email marketing platforms, allowing businesses to create more engaging messages with better return.
• Better ability to measure return on investment (ROI) and more. Data and reporting capabilities can tie email messages to specific business goals, allowing marketers to optimize content and targeting to achieve the best possible results.

Email marketing helps organizations acquire and retain customers, build businesses and make more money. Explore the platforms essential to email marketing in the latest edition of this MarTech Intelligence Report.

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Research shows that businesses make up to three billion decisions annually and a recent survey by Gartner reported that 65% of decisions are more complex (involving more stakeholders or choices) than they were two years ago.

Many businesses today, and the marketers that serve them, need better insight to bridge the gap between massive amounts of data and business decisions. Only 24% of companies say they are “data-driven,” whereas others face missed opportunities, inefficiencies, and increased business risks. The average S&P company loses $250 million annually due to poor decision-making.

Decision intelligence is a framework that bridges the gap between insights and decisions. It empowers organizations to make better, consistent, and data-driven decisions. Leaders and teams can make informed decisions at every level of the company!

What is decision intelligence?

Decision intelligence (DI) is an evolving discipline that combines data, analysis, AI, automation, and experience to make better decisions. DI helps guide decision-makers with actionable insights using optimization, simulation, and decision-analysis techniques.

In contrast to traditional decision-making approaches, which rely heavily on intuition and experience, DI incorporates methodical, analytical, and data-driven approaches.

The focus of DI is not just on the technology but on how it augments human decision-making processes. It is a multidisciplinary field drawing on expertise from various arenas, including computer science, statistics, psychology, economics, and business.

According to Dr. Loren Pratt, chief science officer and co-founder of DI software provider Quantellia, and author of “How Decision Intelligence Connects Data, Actions, and Outcomes for a Better World,” another key concept of DI is designing decisions like organizations design homes, buildings, and airplanes — by creating a blueprint first.

Much like a blueprint, a decision design helps align everyone involved in that decision — including stakeholders — around its rationale. She found that by treating decisions like a design problem, you can bring many design best practices to bear, such as ideation, documentation, rendering, refinement, QA, and design thinking.

In 2019, Google’s first Chief Decision Officer, Cassie Kozyrkov, established a new decision intelligence engineering discipline to augment data science with behavioral science, economics, and managerial science to focus on the next business advantage beyond the data.

Intelligent decisions are designed, simulated, automated, monitored, and tuned. 

Dig deeper: Why data-driven decision-making is the foundation of successful CX

What decision intelligence is not

Decision science. Decision science has usually been associated with the qualitative side of data. DS is the overarching term, while “decision intelligence” is the operational side. 

Strategic intelligence. Broadly, strategic intelligence means using BI insights to drive and support strategy. We also call this market intelligence which provides businesses with current industry trends and makes sense of consumer behavior to navigate a future course of action.

Calculated decisions. Not every output or recommendation is a decision, Kozyrkov says. In decision analysis terminology, a decision is only made after an irrevocable allocation of resources takes place. If you can change your mind for free, no decision has yet been made.

Applications of decision intelligence

DI applies to various decision-making problems, such as resource allocation, risk management, strategic planning, and, yes, marketing. I’ve used it in developing systems and platforms for complex energy, finance, policy, and marketing decisions.

Our last startup platform supported DI for go-to-market executives reducing the decision-making process from nine months to a fraction of time with greater visibility, training, and impacts.

DI has been applied in credit applications or fraud detection in financial services.  It has been used in retail to determine how much inventory to purchase, optimal stock levels, or price forecasts. According to Dr. Loren Pratt, employing decision intelligence can positively impact evidence-based decisions in a healthcare crisis.

Other use cases include customer satisfaction, marketing attribution, and competitive and go-to-market strategies. Designs of the framework of these decisions were standard for GTM; however, implementation required building an enterprise platform, training, and data support. But in the end, this decision-making time dropped from nine to one-to-three months. The average impact was over $10 million, including an apparel company discovering a new $90 million revenue stream embracing the platform. 

Dig deeper: Automating decisions with real-time situational context

Benefits of decision intelligence

McKinsey senior partner Kate Smaje states that organizations are now accomplishing in 10 days what used to take 10 months. Having DI supports the continually increasing pace of decisions required to stay competitive.

The first benefit is DI aids leaders in navigating complex decisions with more focused and comprehensive information. As you design the decisions, you can structure cross-organizational information toward specific goals or objectives. Having this kind of visibility facilitates navigating trade-offs between competing objectives. It eliminates more of the analysis paralysis found in most strategic and high-level tactical decisions. 

Next, DI reduces risk and uncertainty. Decision-makers with real-time data and insights can leverage DI to identify and proactively mitigate potential risks. With the visibility in trade-offs, organizations can better apply risk/reward plans to avoid costly mistakes hindering a competitive edge.

Decision Intelligence enhances efficiency and productivity. By automating specific decision-making processes and providing decision-makers with real-time data and insights, DI can help streamline decision-making and improve productivity. You are reducing decision latency. These processes can be built or programmed into systems to free up time and resources to explore more options or allocate to other important tasks and initiatives.

Finally, organizations leveraging DI gain a more potent competitive edge by leveraging data and technology by evaluating, then acting on, more intelligent and faster complex decisions which typically cripple momentum or transformation.

Limits and challenges of decision intelligence

With data, AI, and automation involved, it’s not surprising that there are some challenges and limitations that are also present with DI.

Ethics/bias. DI can methodically help reduce bias and reinforce ethical decisions. At the same time, with any data-driven and automated system, decisions leveraging DI built by humans still risk being developed based on biased or discriminatory data or algorithms. Awareness training, along with all other organizational data-driven efforts, is a must.

Data availability. Leaders and project managers must be aware of data access and availability limitations. Decision effectiveness is often challenging to find on smaller datasets. Sometimes things go wrong, but it’s more based on luck than data. For complex and infrequent decisions, an organization may need help to define an approach for measuring decisions. In such cases, technology limitations may prevent a solution. Organizations need to formalize such decision-making processes and can only use technology. Also, it’s worth highlighting what could be missing or the scope of what’s possible.

Resistance. An important part of DI is ensuring more transparency, consistency, and training in the decision-making process. The traditional culture of decision-makers will initially be resistant as it feels that it dismisses their experience or instinct or runs against their specific agendas. Those in charge of DI efforts need to communicate how DI benefits their efforts and leads to better outcomes for individuals and organizations.

Leaders can overcome these challenges and limitations through clear communication and a well-defined scope of its application. Each new initiative can grow and enhance an organization’s decision-making culture.

Tips and factors

• Choose a focused decision. Begin by implementing DI in functions where business-critical decision-making needs improvement (e.g., data-driven, AI-powered). Alternatives include large complex decisions or ones that can be scaled and accelerated through automation.
  
• Begin with outcomes. There’s a flood of data in your organization, but you should only gather relevant data to that outcome to design a decision model. Add additional data or test theories of additional information once you’ve started with your early set.

• Map out decisions. Document assumptions, thoughts, emotions, concerns, and fears involved in your decisions. Review them quarterly or semi-annually. It will increase your organization’s decision-making muscle.

• Don’t automate everything. Humans, especially when it comes to complex and sensitive decisions, are necessary.

• Authority should be to the decision. Provide authority to make decisions to the people closest to the point of impact of that decision. Ownership will incentivize effective decision-making.
  
• Develop new decision-making habits. Teach decision-makers to apply systematic best practices, such as critical thinking, trade-off analysis, recognizing bias, and listening to opposing views.

• Beware narrow framing. In the book “Decisive” by Chip and Dan Heath, the authors explain that a straightforward way to improve decision-making is to avoid limiting the scope of the frame. A decision is rarely just a “yes” or “no.” There are always multiple options, so have at least three available for any decision.

Conclusion

Decision-makers frequently need more information, time, and experience to make complex decisions. A study by Bain found that business performance seems 95% correlated to the effectiveness of decisions. Decision intelligence systems improve efficacy by explaining and justifying the decisions, learning from past decisions’ feedback, and comparing the impact to improve decision effectiveness.

Decision intelligence is a crucial tool that can help you make better decisions. By combining data science, AI, and human expertise, DI can help reduce uncertainty and improve effectiveness. However, DI has its challenges and limitations. You must be aware of these risks and take steps to mitigate them.

The post How to use decision intelligence to tackle complex business challenges appeared first on MarTech.

Every marketer measures the impact of their activity but do they truly know the effectiveness of their activity and advertising spend? For the majority of marketers, the overwhelming answer is no. On average, marketers estimate they waste over one quarter of their budget (26%) on ineffective channels and strategies, according to a study by Rakuten.

Though marketing attribution may seem like a difficult task, in a world where ROI is king, accurate marketing attribution needs to be at the forefront of every marketer’s mind to maximize the efficiency of their activity in 2023.

This guide deep dives into how marketers are successfully moving the needle and implementing true multi-touch algorithmic attribution to measure and optimize their activity.

Don’t miss out on the opportunity to make sense of your marketing attribution and get to value quickly with our easy-to-follow guide. Visit Digital Marketing Depot to download the 101 Guide to Marketing Attribution from Snowplow.

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