The truth hurts: Why CRM is still growing but still gruelling

A cursory glance at the headline statistics for the CRM marketplace demonstrates a sector that is apparently in rude health. And in purely financial terms, this is undoubtedly the case. A multi-billion dollar industry forecasting robust growth in the coming years, CRM is creeping its way up the agenda of CEOs and CIOs. Even the global economic downturn couldn’t dent its progress, during which it was one of the few software markets that continued to thrive. But if you scratch beneath the surface of these statistics and forecasts, the CRM sector is not all sweetness and light. And while it has progressed far from its problematic early days of aborted implementations and expensive zombie systems, there are still challenges underpinning a large proportion of CRM projects. It’s time to shed some light on the world of CRM.

CRM gathering pace

Worldwide CRM software revenue…

Using custom audiences to improve Facebook targeting 

How would you like to target advertising to people with similar characteristics to your existing customers and prospects? Like subscribers on your mailing list for instance? Well, that's the offer of Facebook's custom audiences. It's no longer new, in fact, checking the Smart Insights alert when it was launched, it dates back to March 2013 - Facebook launches "Lookalike Ad Targeting".

Custom Audiences are one of the more advanced features Power Editor users get to enjoy, Facebook gives you the lowdown on Custom Audiences in its help section but I'll attempt to provide you with a step-by-step guide here.

Firstly, this is not an introduction to Power Editor. If you've not used it before, this tutorial is not necessarily going to make a lot of sense. Power Editor is a useful Chrome app that gives you way more control and functionality than Facebook's…

Making your emails more relevant by appealing to different reader personalities

In Part 1 we introduced using Personas for Email marketing based upon motivation, in Part 2 I'm going to review the 4 main different personality traits that are common to everyone and show how to apply them to email creative. Aristotle was one of the first to identify them and named them: Melancholic, Phlegmatic, Choleric and Sanguine, however we will be using more descriptive names for these personalities in this post. By leveraging both personas and personalities, you not only know where to place content, images and set tasks but also know how to speak to them (TOV), what offers to deliver and help them to accomplish their task the way they feel comfortable doing so – thus enabling higher and potentially quicker, conversions. (Image courtesy of Henk Wijnholds) Based on the well-known…

Key questions to ask and insights to use when deciding on the best investment of your precious time and money

Using the latest insights showing how consumers and businesses are using digital media and technology is powerful in helping decide where you need to invest more/less time or budget. Using the right insights can also make an impact when presenting to colleagues or clients about improvements to marketing. In this post, I round-up some of the significant stats from 2013 which show the big trends in consumer behaviour across different digital platforms and channels that will help you question your priorities in 2014. If you’re looking for specific insights about a particular channel or network, perhaps in a region or country, we compile these together to make them easier for our members to find when creating presentations - see our Online marketing usage statistics and our online marketing benchmarks compilation.

Social…

3 tools to find out the most popular and relevant topics

Before we look at tools for finding the best hashtags for twitter growth, I thought it best to explain what a hashtag is (I still often get asked this when talking to clients): A hashtag is simply a way for people to label and search for social media updates. It may be a trending topic such as #cybermonday or a campaign-specific label such as a discount or campaign name.  In most social networks if you click on the hashtag you see updates where others have used it. Hashtags originated on Twitter, but their popularity means that they're now ubiquitous across social networks as this History of Hashtags shows. Hashtags can help get your message across and engage your audience in a concept. For example, we recommended Smart Insights used #PlanToSucceed as a hashtag to highlight the importance of planning and to…

The growth in popularity of hashtags 

Hashtags describing a topic or campaign offer prefaced by '#' are now a common feature across most social media platforms. So no longer just Twitter, but including Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram and Google+... If used correctly, then they can improve reach and social sharing of content for brand awareness and lead generation.

There are many Twitter tools to find trending hashtags and to ensure you use relevant hashtags.

Offerpop's Infographic provides a timeline history for the use of the #Hashtag from its initial use on Twitter to later adoption on Facebook and Google+. Greater engagement with hashtags is suggested by research referenced in the infographic which shows that 'Tweets that contain hashtags are 55% more likely to be retweeted than those that do not, and more than 70 percent of people use hashtags'. We don't…

Google's Gmail change may change Open Tracking reports

Google notified Gmail users on the 12th December that they had implemented a change to the way that linked images are handled in Gmail webmail. They explained: "...thanks to new improvements in how Gmail handles images, you’ll soon see all images displayed in your messages automatically across desktop, iOS and Android. Instead of serving images directly from their original external host servers, Gmail will now serve all images through Google’s own secure proxy servers". So images will now be seen by default by Gmail users unless they proactively switch them off in settings (or have previously done so). I first alerted email marketers to this on my Zettasphere blog on 6th December since the change has been in place for a while - it appears that around the 3rd December Google implemented a change. Now it's official, we're alerting Smart Insights readers to the change so…

Triggered email campaigns vs traditional email

We regularly feature advice on behavioural email marketing on our hub page since we think they are often an under-used or under-developed technique to cost-efficiently engage prospects and customers. "Triggered emails" is an alternative way of described them which EmailMonks uses on this infographic on 'triggered email marketing campaigns'. It clearly shows the value of this technique and how, with access to the right CRM system or email service provider, campaigns can be set-up; whether it's based on an action, event, demographics or other criteria. Companies now have more information available to personally react in 'real time' or at timely relevant touchpoints, to engage/convert and at times 'save a sale'. Relevance helps lift open rates for trigger emails such that they can often be the most important emails you send, so ripe for optimisation: 'Autoresponder open rates are 4x higher than generic emails, and triggered emails have…

SEO is.... alive!

In this post we're sharing this highly rated presentation to our Digital Marketing 2014 Summit from regular contributor and author of our SEO guide, James Gurd who explained how SEO has evolved and will continue to evolve. Despite the prenouncements by some that "SEO is dead", the evidence is that it still needs to be treated proactively and the latest best practices adopted. Key issues to consider in 2014 are: Content marketing, social and integration into SEO (of course!) More natural search queries prompted by Google's hummingbird and ad promotion of voice activated contextual search Author influence (through Google+ profiles and authorship markup) Specialist developments in technical SEO in particular for international domains Reporting SEO effectiveness given the Growth of Not provided / missing keywords This Slideshare was presented as a webinar by James Gurd, Digital Juggler at the Smart Insights Digital Marketing Priorities…

This post gives a summary of a webinar by Smart Insights expert commentator Stephen Bateman of Concentric Dots. Stephen started by showing the ongoing and increasing thirst for knowledge on content marketing, starting with this Google Trends data showing a large increase in each of the last 3 years since we have been advising on content marketing. You can also see the growth in popularity from this infographic showing B2B Content marketing trends for 2014 that we shared earlier in the Autumn. In Stephen's talk, he reviewed the challenges of content marketing and then suggested that a more strategic approach can give better alignment with consumer needs and business aims. You can view all 6 recordings from the Digital Marketing 2014 Summit here. The other summary posts of the trends featuring…