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.

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.

Click here to download!

The post A guide to how email marketing platforms help brands succeed appeared first on MarTech.

The tides of paid search and other performance channels seem to be shifting rapidly these days. Companies are changing hands, algorithms are updating and transparency is diminishing. With marketers looking for ad channels that they can consider both reliable and effective, this is where connected TV can enter the scene and support an already successful search strategy.

CTV is not just a brand awareness tool like its linear television predecessor, but it can also help advertisers achieve their performance goals, becoming the third pillar of performance marketing. Not only does it deliver performance results in its own right, but it also boosts the results of other paid channels, creating a halo effect.

Connected TV generates new demand

Connected TV is an essential tool for advertisers looking to generate new demand and avoid a dreaded performance plateau on your existing channels. There comes a time, after all, when adding more budget offers diminishing returns and the need for a new channel is necessary. 

Paid search relies on a self-identifying audience–a user’s interest and intent are clear based on their search. This makes them easy to target and capture. This audience is the low-hanging fruit. What happens when these leads have all been captured? The ease of identifying this powerful audience also means that it’s ripe with competition; your competitor is likely bidding on the same inventory.

Connected TV, on the other hand, creates and captures an incremental audience. CTV ads are precisely targeted to an audience that may benefit from a product or service but may not be in-market quite yet, thus creating new demand. Why is this important? The Harvard Business Review found 90% of B2B decision-makers purchase from companies they already knew at the start of the buying process. CTV allows advertisers to put themselves in this initial consideration set with TV ads that are high-impact, memorable, and carry the prestige generated by TV advertising.

From an SEO perspective, there is also the benefit of direct search. Connected TV puts the advertiser’s name out there, increasing the likelihood that they are searching directly for the company name itself and not just a product or service that you offer. These direct searches have a positive impact on your SEO efforts, underscoring the credibility of your brand and ultimately raising your ranking within the search results.

Paid search results skyrocket when CTV is added

Connected TV helps generate new traffic, which in turn, paid search and other paid channels can help capture. However, the benefits of adding CTV to the ad mix don’t stop there. When added to the ad mix, CTV actually creates a halo effect around paid search, social, and email, increasing their performance results in their own right.

A review of MNTN clients running paid search, social, and/or email before adding connected TV showed this trend across the board.

Only 30 days after adding connected TV to their strategy, MNTN clients saw an increase in conversion rates for both paid search and social, with increasing results over the next two months. When looking at email trends, these also showed a similar trend, with the conversion rates increasing 17.58% thirty days after adding CTV and 37.35% ninety days after. The first-party data was clear; Connected TV drives strong performance in its own right and makes other performance channels perform better too.

Video doesn’t need to be a barrier to reap the rewards of CTV

A key to success with connected TV is having video content–and enough of it–for regular refreshes. But before you worry that this is a blocker to adding CTV to your strategy, it’s not as hard (or costly) as you may think.

If you are already running social videos, this can be the perfect place to start. You can repurpose those same videos on the TV screen. CTV’s real-time reporting will help provide insights into what’s working and what’s not so you can make the appropriate adjustments before your next round of creative development.

If you don’t have video available to you, there are non-agency solutions that don’t cost an arm and a leg to make video creative. For example, at MNTN, we offer Creative-as-a-Subscription (CaaS) that bundles your media spend with creative development, so you don’t have to choose between spending on making ads or running them.

CaaS offers regular video refreshes, which deliver better results over time. Relying on the same video ads can result in ad fatigue or ad blindness. Regular refreshes disrupt this process and capture viewers’ attention. From our first-party data, we’ve seen that advertisers who regularly refresh creative have a 49.71% higher conversion rate and a 14.74% higher return on ad spend. Amazing what you can accomplish when creative fatigue isn’t a concern, right?

While spending time and money on the TV screen may feel counterproductive to a robust search strategy, Connected TV can actually help your search results thrive and reach new heights. You’ll be generating both brand awareness and key performance metrics with CTV while also boosting the impact of your already successful search strategy.

The post Connected TV’s results transcend the TV screen appeared first on MarTech.

That’s a whole bundle of opportunities stuck in your funnel, clogging your pipeline and baffling your stakeholders.  

But there are things B2B marketers can do to help sales teams and their prospects overcome purchase indecision and win more customers faster. For proper context, and crafting the right strategies and tactics, let’s frame the challenge and the opportunity based on why and how business professionals and their organizations buy. 

B2B buyers are dealing with FOMU, not FOMO

Authors Matt Dixon and Ted McKenna analyzed more than 2.5 million sales-customer engagements for their recently released book, “The JOLT Effect,” and discovered that:

• 56% of the customers who expressed the intent to purchase were lost due to customer indecision. 
• Only 44% were lost due to sticking with the status quo — what the prospect has been doing or using. 

Making the case to move off the status quo has been a popular sales and marketing strategy for several years. When a deal got stuck, status quo-busting was done primarily through “fear of missing out” (FOMO) tactics, including:

• Reconvincing the buying committee of the benefits of the solution by demonstrating ROI.
• Using fear, uncertainty and doubt tactics, emphasizing the cost of inaction.
• The xx% discount urgency play: “This deal is only good for this quarter.”

These tried-and-true sales and marketing tactics and all the tools and content created to bust the status quo are no longer working. Why? The authors emphasize that human beings — even successful business and technology leaders — are wired to avoid loss. 

The fear of messing up (FOMU) is a major barrier for B2B buyers to pull the trigger on a purchase, no matter how compelling. Inaction is guiltless and perceived as less harmful than acting and making a mistake. 

“The pandemic and volatile economy are certainly factors, but not the underlying cause of what’s stalling a large percentage of business-to-business purchases and deals companies were confident they had closed-won,” said Dixon. “Upon further discovery, we found what is holding companies and their decision makers back is the ‘fear of failure,’ something often missed by sales teams.”

Customers change in seconds, markets shift in minutes and business threats and opportunities appear daily. Betting on a technology, platform or service provider in a world where the pace of change is relentless has many organizations and their decision-makers stuck. 

Dig deeper: Scarcity marketing: Does it still work?

How marketing can help overcome customer FOMU in the sales + purchase process

The “JOLT” thinking outlined in Dixon and McKenna’s book provides a strong foundation for marketing to lock arms with sales, product, ops and customer success colleagues to overcome prospects’ FOMU. 

To do this, the GTM team must have a strategy and playbook on how to help their customers tackle the status quo (i.e., why change now) and then focus on customer indecision (i.e., how to change now). 

Let’s break down the framework and outline prescriptive strategies and tactics marketing teams can use to work alongside their colleagues. 

J: Judging the situation to create the right game plan for each customer

First, as marketers, we need to know the pipeline and the best opportunities as well as our sales colleagues. As equal owners of revenue generation, marketers should work closely with sales and other major account resources to qualify based not just on their ability to buy but their “ability to decide.”

This is where your 1-to-1 and 1-to-few account-based marketing (ABM) strategies can have a true impact. In your ABM efforts, marketing can create tools and forums to get customers to talk about their fear of failure. Think therapy and organizing and breaking down information in your communications, webinars, small roundtable or meet-up you organize in the field. 

Over time using data, you will find patterns in the types of customer indecision, so you can more rapidly anticipate and put strategies into practice at the point of the prospect. Starting with hands-on work to test and learn the best plays is the right move for now. Efficiency and automation can come later.

O: Offering recommendations to simplify options for overwhelmed customers 

The market is filled with noise. Many buyers and buying committees suffer from being overwhelmed by too many choices. Our natural reaction as marketers to convince somebody is to throw more options their way. 

For example, integrations and configurations can easily overwhelm the decision team. A smart approach is to help them choose a path and a solution. Marketing can work with product, sales and ops colleagues to build and simplify packages based on their use case(s). 

We can also increase our sales enablement effort to help structure and equip salespeople to guide the customer to proven, popular choices that have worked for other customers. Note that more case studies are not enough. 

Dig deeper: Buying group marketing: The next evolution of ABM

L: Limiting exploration addresses customer information overload

The best sellers and marketers know that the more information the prospect consumes, the lower the probability they will find the answers they seek. We found that when teams continue to indulge the customer’s requests for additional information throughout the sale, win rates are only in the 16% range. 

This is our natural tendency: create and send more content, shoot over more emails, etc. Stop! This may work early on in initial engagement but rarely works later as they move toward a decision.

Today, we have the data and tools to identify and take action when a prospect or customer is putting off a decision and why. One strategy is to limit the information by, for example, curating a recommended reading list or compiling a simple tool kit. This limits the overwhelming amount of info and demonstrates you get their needs and that you are a valued partner who will be there through the relationship lifecycle. 

T: Taking risks off the table by instilling buyer confidence and creating a safety net 

De-risking versus simply discounting price is another smart strategy to combat customer indecision. For example, marketing can work with sales,  customer success and finance to:

• Craft a mutual value map, identifying key areas of ownership and accountable milestones and metrics.
• Co-create solutions and implementation roadmaps for the organization to bolster confidence with defined steps. 
• Adapt contracts that include services, incentives, and/or safety-net clauses to take FOMU points off the table. 

Marketing’s opportunity to shine by focusing on all stages of customer generation

Marketing can play a significant role in the full customer lifecycle by infusing customer indecision-busting strategies into their demand-to-revenue approach. The focus on defeating customer indecision also pushes us marketers to stop obsessing about generating mounds of new leads and trying to score and qualify only for sales to ignore them. 

The most successful marketing teams don’t stay in their swim lane. Instead, as part of GTM and account-based strategies, marketers can capitalize on this revenue generation need to impact all stages of creating and expanding customer relationships and revenue. 

Congratulations to Dixon and McKenna for their eye-opening research and instructive book for B2B sales, marketing and revenue professionals. 

The post How B2B marketers can help sales overcome customer indecision appeared first on MarTech.

Up to 91% of consumers are changing their shopping habits in response to bleak economic news, according to a new SheerID study. Furthermore, 76% of UK and 70% of U.S. consumers don’t expect their countries’ economies to improve over the next year.

As marketers, we know what this means. When times get tough, marketing budgets get cut. We also know businesses that keep investing in email marketing are better off when the economy improves. How do you make that happen with less money and fewer team members?

I can answer that question with six tips. They combine quick wins for short-term gains with longer-term strategic revisions designed to work now during economic uncertainty and later when times improve.

Besides my own recommendations, I also asked five other email experts for their best advice for recession-proof email marketing.

1. Go for quick wins to get more from your marketing now

Getting started can be the hardest part. These four approaches make your email marketing program more effective, build stronger customer relationships, and use your resources more wisely.

Do an email audit to uncover gaps and reveal opportunities

This is almost always my first step with clients because it can show you where you can act quickly using your current resources.

Create or update your strategic plan

Whether you have a spreadsheet full of strategy or a bare outline, having a plan can help you allocate time and energy more efficiently. If you don’t have one, come up with one, even if it’s just for the present quarter.

Establish or upgrade an email testing plan

An email testing plan will help you learn more about your customers and measure your email effectiveness. Go beyond subject lines and button colors.

Test one campaign-level approach against another, such as emotion versus urgency or value. This will give you deeper insights you can apply beyond your next campaign.

Get more email into your customers’ inboxes

How long has it been since you looked at a post-campaign delivery report? You might discover you’re blocked or restricted at a key ISP. Call a deliverability expert to help you break through a logjam and get seen by more customers.

2. Fine-tune your marketing program to show customers you know who they are

Think back to the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic and how your company shifted gears to reach customers. It’s an appropriate comparison, Adam Purslow of TheLoyaltyCo told me. 

“Similar to what we saw during COVID-19, people have less disposable income,” he says. “The key is to push on with engagement and speaking to customers and being aware that people aren’t going to spend as much. If people are going out to eat only once a year or so now, being the restaurant people go to becomes more important.”

Email retains its advantage over search, social and web marketing because we can message our customers at tactical times. We can gently nudge customers so they can act when their wallet allows. That’s why we need to be in their inboxes regularly with great deals and relevant content.

But we must continue with empathy and a customer-centric focus on our recipients. We are grappling with meeting KPIs, but that thinking is more about the brand and less about customers. When you help customers achieve their goals, they will help you achieve yours. 

Dig deeper: Authentic storytelling: 5 rules for the new frontier of marketing

3. Protect your profit margin by targeting the right customers

“Use segmentation and targeting to find the people who might have lapsed but are more likely to re-visit before customers who are slightly warmer,” Purslow says. “You have to be careful with your targets and not blanket them with money. Keep monitoring your uptake and reporting.” 

Scott Cohen of SmileDirectClub says the email channel has a target on its back “because we’re [perceived as] cheap. We are also the channel to nurture and market to the purchase cycle, which gets longer. We have to balance that longer cycle against immediate returns.”

According to Tom Ricards of Bloomreach, we must also be aware that customer segments are fluid. “Understanding the customers is absolutely everything,” he says. “We need to be able to respond to changing segments in real time.”

4. Gather more customer and transactional data and listen to what they’re telling you

As I mentioned in my previous MarTech article (3 ways data can steer you wrong — and how to glean better insights), we need more than data. We need the insights we get from the data we have.

As email strategist Jennifer Hoth told me, “Now is a great time to gather first-party and zero-party data to understand why they’re buying and to get to know them better, to go beyond just the transactional data to know them personally. 

“We need to understand who they are, what their world is like now, what’s keeping them engaged, and to be sure with your data that you’re sending relevant communications.”

5. Don’t let fear hold you back

In my 24 years of doing email audits, I have found that most marketers leave money on the table because they aren’t sending emails often enough. That’s because of fear of deliverability issues. 

I’m not saying, “Forget the fear and blast your list!” You have to be smart and work out the best frequency or cadence for your product or service and audience. Don’t refrain from sending out of fear because you could make things harder for yourself.

You might even have more leeway with frequency than you realize, says fractional CMO Skip Fidura. “You know every email you send out. Your recipients don’t know every email they receive. You might feel as if you’re sending out a lot, but it might not feel like that to your recipients.”

An email program that relies on an unending stream of “buy this now” emails will be even less effective if your customers have cut back on spending, no matter how many incentives you tack on. This is the time to put your data and insights to work for more personalized and personal emails.

“A client of ours sent out a small amount of highly personalized emails,” Purslow says. “Deliverability and open rates were great because the emails made subscribers feel like we were talking to them. As long as you’re clever with personalization, deliverability will not be an issue.”

6. Keep testing and learning

“It’s very important to know your audience and to always be testing,” Hoth says. “[Your audience] is always changing, especially in times like these. I appreciate being able to do A/B testing and to find out what tone works best with customers is genius, and it doesn’t cost what it would take to install a new technology.”

I’m just as passionate about testing, especially beyond campaign-level factors like subject lines. In both tough times and prosperity, it can pinpoint what moves your customers to act and whether your strategies and tactics effectively achieve your objectives. 

Dig deeper: 7 common problems that derail A/B/n email testing success

What these tips have in common

Yes, they do take time, and you might not have that luxury if you’re under more pressure to meet your goals. 

But these six tactics also force you to learn more about your customers: whether they’re stressed, looking for bargains, buying regularly or less often, or even disengaging. This gives you the knowledge to email more effectively now without shifting gears when prosperity returns for your customers. 

Email is the only tool you can adjust on the fly like this for quick results. Invest some of your precious time now to understand what’s happening and where you can adjust for short-term gains and long-term success.

The post 6 tactics to create recession-proof email marketing appeared first on MarTech.

It’s one of the most popular marketing and sales channels, but email isn’t as easy to leverage as it seems. For your emails to convert, it takes more than writing a few lines and hitting send. Everything plays a role in your email success, from the health of your email database to your copywriting skills. 

If your email marketing feels stale, these tactics are sure to help you:

• Understand how email deliverability works – and how email verification helps
• Craft emails that feel tailor-made for your ideal prospects
• Improve your metrics and increase email revenue.

How to make more sales with email: assess your current performance

Before you  drastically change your email marketing strategy, it pays to take a step back and assess how your emails have been performing. That will allow you to identify what resonates most with your audience so you can create more similar emails.

Take a close look at your metrics and notice what stands out. Your past three to six months’ performance will be a good indicator. Plan to double down on those approaches to boost engagement and conversions. Then, consider these tactics below to ensure your email marketing has the highest chance to succeed. 

Are your emails reaching the inbox? Check your email list

You might be spending significant resources on email marketing. Writing and designing great emails isn’t easy. But are those emails landing in your prospects’ inboxes? Low engagement can often be caused by an outdated email list and a poor sender reputation.

Your sender reputation is a score that internet service providers assign to you as a sender, much like a credit score. Everything you do determines your score, but  your email list health dramatically impacts it. For instance, whenever your bounce rate exceeds 2%, your score takes a hit. Spam complaints and fake emails also affect your reputation. When that happens, your newsletters and campaigns will  go to the spam folder. 

If you’ve never scrubbed your database, consider using a free email validation service first. With ZeroBounce, you can check 100 email addresses for free every month to ensure you’re adding only genuine contacts to your list. 

Segment your database for higher engagement

Your email subscribers are in different stages of their buyer journey with your company. While some may be long-term customers, others are still on the fence about purchasing. Each segment has different needs and expectations, and creating emails that speak directly to these groups should be high on your list.

Segmentation can be challenging for many marketers, but you can start with basic filters. Use criteria such as gender, location, and purchase history, then think of ways  to engage these prospects with the most relevant offers. Personalize every email campaign using available data, and remember that one email is usually not enough to make a sale. Drip campaigns are more effective as they periodically nudge your prospects and build familiarity with your brand.

Make your emails highly educational

When email conversions drop, many marketers tend to try a more aggressive approach – more emails, more direct offers and higher discounts. But could you benefit more from inbound tactics instead? 

Instead of pushing for sales, inbound marketing focuses on attracting prospects with relevant, helpful resources and experiences. Creating content that answers questions, solves problems, and makes people’s lives better is a great way to strengthen your brand. 

Even if you’re running a direct marketing campaign, you can still present your offers in an educational way. Instead of leading with a “buy now” approach, focus on the benefits of your products and services. Build loyalty with your audience by establishing your brand as a reliable, relevant source of information and education. 

Bonus tip: send your emails consistently

One final tip to  increase sales with your emails is to providea steady sending schedule. Whether you set up automated drip campaigns or send a newsletter, be consistent in your efforts. Sending emails regularly helps your reputation, boosts email deliverability, and keeps your business relevant to your prospects. 

So, if you have an email newsletter, remember to send it on time, ideally on the same day every week or month. Your nurturing campaigns should also be timely – check and update your automations to confirm each trigger works correctly. Staying on top of these details and sending useful emails to a healthy email list will boost your email marketing results quickly.

Explore ZeroBounce’s email validation and deliverability tools.

The post 3 ways to drive sales with email appeared first on MarTech.

Measuring campaign success is critical now more than ever.

Calculating the incremental lift and the resulting value that campaigns provide is a great way to assess the impact of your marketing tactics and improve the performance of channels and ROI.

So, what is incrementally, and how do you measure campaign effectiveness using incrementality testing and optimize them for success?

Register today for “Demystifying ‘Incrementality’ for Marketing Success,” presented by iQuanti.

Click here to view more MarTech webinars.

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Ignite Visibility recently surveyed over 120 marketing professionals about their present SEO and content marketing strategies and their outlook going into 2023. With 2022 being such a transformative year for SEO, the researchers at Ignite were curious to see where 2023 might take the world of digital marketing and paid media.

Key takeaways from the study include:

• Over 74% of marketers now use creative assets, such as images or videos, in their content.
• 73% of marketers have turned to YouTube as an important part of their SEO strategy in 2023.
• The majority of marketers noted they saw no change in their rankings after the Helpful Content Update. In fact, far more respondents noted their rankings increased, rather than decreased, as expected after Google released the update.
• Internal links are becoming more important.
• 34% of marketers will spend the majority of their 2023 budget on video content, whereas only 10% of marketers will spend the majority of their budget on blog content.

When asked about the survey’s results, Ignite Visibility CEO, John Lincoln, said, “With SEO constantly evolving, we can never take our focus off of what the consumer wants. I think the biggest takeaway from this study is that when it comes to all the different pillars of SEO the biggest focus in 2023 is going to be on content marketing. Content is going to become more shareable and video-focused to really draw consumers into a brand. I’m excited about this shift and how it will further integrate SEO with other marketing channels.”

Download the study here.

The post New SEO study reveals the biggest investments of 2023 appeared first on MarTech.

If you had undeniable evidence that Domain Authority is irrelevant when it comes to the rankability of your organic content, what would you do differently as a marketer? If you could stop focusing on metrics that don’t matter for SEO, imagine how much more of your effort could be put into the one thing that matters: Developing content that ranks.

In this bold presentation DemandJump’s Chief Solution Officer, Ryan Brock, will dare you to evaluate how much stock you put into your website’s Domain Authority and why. 

Register today for “Domain Authority is Dead: Focus on SEO Content That Ranks,” presented by DemandJump.

Click here to view more MarTech webinars.

The post Domain Authority is dead: Focus on SEO content that ranks appeared first on MarTech.

As you package your message into a creative art form, you attempt to elicit thoughts, feelings, emotions and behavior. But how do you influence your customers’ behaviors? It starts with understanding how your audience’s brain processes information and ends with post-purchase advocacy. 

Depending on the stage in the customer journey, you might want to elicit different thoughts and behaviors. This article uncovers how to develop creative assets that trigger different activities in various brain regions while aligning with your business strategy. 

Connecting creative work to the customer journey with brain science

In an interview, Tony Crisp, an innovative brand strategist and founder of CRISPx Brand Agency, described a methodology he pioneered to connect creative work to the customer journey using brain science, simplified into four distinct stages: 

• Seek.
• Choose.
• Use.
• Fix. 

Crisp maps each stage to a primary neurotransmitter that he wants his creative team the trigger as part of the framework.

“There are certain neurotransmitters that motivate mammals to move,” explained Crisp, “and the DOSE framework provides my creative team with guidance” at different stages in the customer journey, as shown below. 

Dig deeper: Optimization science: Technology and brain science can drive performance

Seek stage: Dopamine

Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that drives your customer’s behavior in the pursuit of goals. Are your marketing efforts aligned with your customer’s goals? As the catalyst for the golden rule of content marketing, you can get your customer to take action by triggering a dopaminergic surge at the right time.  

Critically, your customers generate the largest dopaminergic spikes when anticipating rewards, not obtaining them. As a result, you want to entice your audience to take action by creating an elevated sense of anticipation. When your audience anticipates value for merely clicking a button, you can easily get them to click, share or call. 

If your audience anticipates that clicking on a link in your marketing e-mail will deliver an informative white paper with rewarding content, you’re likely to drive up your clickthrough rate. Similarly, if your PPC ad offers details about the solution your audience seeks, you’re likely to increase ad conversions.

During the “seek” stage, prospective customers search for a solution to a problem. As a result, Crisp advises his creative team to develop assets and experiences that trigger the release of dopamine to facilitate goal-directed behavior. Why is this important? When you help customers attain their goals, you can guide their behavior right into your shopping cart. 

Choose stage: Oxytocin 

Oxytocin is a neuropeptide that facilitates pair bonding. Your pituitary gland releases oxytocin when you cuddle with your partner or hold your child. It makes you feel connected to another person and influence your decision-making process — which includes decisions related to products and services. 

In a classic study from 2013, researchers from the University of California, Los Angeles, Claremont Graduate University and the University of California, Santa Barbara, explored the link between oxytocin and decision-making when exposed to marketing content. 

As part of the study, participants were administered oxytocin before watching public service advertisements. The participants who received oxytocin demonstrated a significant change in behavior: they “donated to 57% more causes, donated 56% more money and reported 17% greater concern for those in the ads” than those who took a placebo. 

Researchers concluded that advertisements involving emotional content related to a connection with another person are particularly potent. A video promoting skin lotion, for example, is more likely to trigger the release of oxytocin if it shows another person applying the lotion to someone instead of simply showing the bottle itself. 

Customers in the “choose” stage are likelier to select your brand if they trust it, according to Crisp. The neuroeconomist Paul Zak revealed that the “amount of oxytocin recipients produced predicted how trustworthy — that is, how likely to share the money — they would be,” per a 2017 Harvard Business Review article. 

The issue, then, is how do you get potential customers to trust your brand over competing offerings before purchase? When marketing to potential customers in this stage, Crisp asks his team to consider what creative assets are most likely to trigger the release of oxytocin to develop trust between an offering and his client’s brand. 

Use stage: Serotonin

Serotonin is a multifaceted neurotransmitter that plays a role in everything from mood and cognition to appetite and digestion. The implications of serotonin in marketing are complex and not fully understood.

Though in an infantile stage, research suggests serotonin plays a role in mood and consumer decisions. Accordingly, customers “in positive mood states,” for example, are more likely “to evaluate “advertisements, brands and consumer goods more positively”  

Researchers from Otto-von-Guericke University Magdeburg and the California Institute of Technology sought to understand serotonin’s role in product choice. They found that depleted serotonin levels correlated to choice deferral. 

As a result, the researchers concluded that marketers who “incorporate the compromise effect with the intent to promote the choice of an intermediate compromise option might be less effective when the target population’s serotonin levels are lowered,” which might occur among older consumers or in winter months, for example. 

According to Crisp, serotonin is important in purchasing and consumption processes. As a result, the DOSE methodology focuses on increasing serotonin levels during the “use” stage. How do you ensure your customer’s satisfaction after using your product and service? 

Fix stage: Endorphins

Endorphins are naturally occurring peptides that inhibit or reduce physical or psychological pain. As for the latter, endorphins can reduce stress and can improve mood. How does the concept of pain connect to the customer journey? 

Crisp suggests poor experiences can induce pain during the “use” stage. What happens if your customer has a problem using your product and service? How skilled is your customer support team at alleviating customer pain? 

In the DOSE methodology, customers only enter this stage when problems occur during the “use” stage. How do you make your customer feel good enough to use your product? Do you need to address the problem as part of your overall business strategy, or must you deliver your resolution in a nicely packaged message?

Regardless of the scope of what you must resolve, Crisp suggests that marketers must determine how to mitigate pain, particularly psychological pain. And that can happen by linking your resolution to the release of endorphins. 

Dig deeper: How marketers can use cognitive biases to influence customer decisions

Looking at the customer journey from a scientific perspective

As you incorporate marketing science into the customer journey, you’re not limited to any framework or methodology. Instead, view DOSE as an overarching approach that guides your team’s creative thinking. 

The DOSE framework is part tactical and part philosophical at Crisp’s company. It’s tactical in offering specific actions corresponding to the customer journey. At the same time, it’s philosophical because it provides an overall marketing approach. 

Perhaps most importantly, however, DOSE ensures that marketing and design teams understand the critical link between art and science. Depending on your goals, you might want to trigger a variety of neurotransmitters and hormones that activate various brain circuits at every stage of the customer journey. As such, it’s up to you to decide to what extent you follow a given methodology. 

Regardless if you use the DOSE methodology or a different framework for connecting creative work to brain activity, one thing is certain: You can give your brand a competitive advantage with a healthy dose of marketing science. 

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