How to effectively manage your data for marketing automation success

As a data-driven initiative, marketing automation is heavily dependent upon the accuracy, completeness and validity of the data that the technology will run on. Inaccurate and out-of-date data, gaps in information and poorly integrated data will all serve to compromise the core objectives of marketing automation, hindering the ability to create relevant, timely and engaging communications, and ultimately undermining efforts to increase loyalty and sales. Worse still, marketing processes driven by bad data can actually damage customer relationships, as demonstrated by numerous studies. 'According to one survey, 55% of respondents had been sent information about an irrelevant product by a business in the previous 12 months,' says Nigel Turner, VP of information management strategy at Trillium Software. 'A large minority (47%) said they are ‘annoyed’ when a business gets their personal information wrong, and 35% said such errors reduce their faith in…

How to choose the best marketing automation system for your business

Whether you’re an existing user of marketing automation or you’re preparing to invest for the first time, the rush of acquisitions in the sector can be disruptive to your technology decision-making. For those yet to invest, it can cloud the solutions in uncertainty. While existing users of one vendor have the disruption of suddenly finding themselves customers of a different company entirely. And if you’re an Eloqua user that isn’t happy about becoming an Oracle customer, then it means you’re back into the market for a new solution. But the recent spate of activity is entirely reshaping the marketing automation landscape. 'In some ways, the discrete category of marketing automation is fading away a bit,'says Gerry Brown, Senior Digital Marketing Analyst at Ovum. 'IBM, Oracle, Salesforce.com, Adobe and Teradata have all been involved in mopping up best-of-breed marketing automation companies of…

Resources and examples to inspire effective mobile experiences

Responsive Design (RWD) is a key trend in creating effective online customer experiences driven by the need to cost-effectively build sites across desktop, tablet, phablet and smartphone. I featured it at #13 in the digital marketing techniques that would be important in my 2014 digital marketing trends post and Smart Insights readers voted investment in mobile as the second trend with the most commercial potential for 2014. To help marketers to create effective experiences we have featured many articles discussing best practice, examples and implementation for responsive design on Smart Insights through 2012 and 2013 which I thought it might be helpful to collect together here: An Introduction to Responsive Website Design for Marketers Planning your RWD Case Study on Oxfam in Ireland on RWD …

A summary of research findings on email communications strategies

At Pure360 we work with a lot of marketers with different aims, objectives and strategies. To gauge the current state of email marketing strategies used, we recently completed this in-depth email strategy research based on a survey in partnership with PlanToEngage.

Over 600 email marketers responded, giving us a wide range of results. Results fell into the following categories; strategy, best practice and measurement & reporting.

The results were surprising; indicating that many email marketers are not currently practicing their email marketing with a strategy in place. Therefore many of the practices which would logically follow such as an editorial calendar or automated campaigns are also not being practiced.

Email Strategy

Having a clear and focused email strategy is vitally important to your marketing mix; without a well-defined strategy your email marketing ROI is likely to suffer. This may seem fairly…

Examples and the Pros and Cons of Parallax Web Design

We are all more aware than ever that web design styles are shifting  towards user experience as opposed user tasks and usability. Users demand to be engaged, entertained, educated and enticed into absorbing content online. Parallax web design, used in the right context, has the ability to deliver a really strong connection to an online brand experience, based on the interactivity of the website, the journey and the focus, realism and context given to the content or product. Often, examples of Parallax web design focus on product examples, such as Google's Nexus 7 page, but I hope to show in this post that there are opportunities for other types of organisations such as B2B businesses or charities to use Parallax design for deeper engagement. The examples show that Parallax design can offer a more interactive version of infographics, better suited to…

Ideas to increase visibility and sharing on Slideshare

I thought this was a nice piece of content marketing by Slideshare, so thought it was worth sharing to highlight Slideshare’s ongoing importance if you market to professional B2B audiences. As Dan said in this previous post on 7 Reasons B2B marketers should love Slideshare: "Assuming that you’re a B2B marketer, and have good content that can be directly used or re-purposed for Slideshare, we think that Slideshare is a grossly under-utilised tool, especially since the “Pro” version launched" This new Slideshare from Slideshare is worth scanning if your a B2B Marketer since it’s a nice summary of what worked for companies recently with examples. SlideShare Zeitgeist 2013 from SlideShare Apart from the deck itself, the content marketing I…

An introduction to using the Balanced Scorecard for performance management in Digital Marketing

The Balanced Scorecard is a well known performance management tool. It suggests following a cause-and-effect logic to build a tree of business objectives moving from a financial perspective down to customers, process and education and growth, and then enriching the entire scheme with KPIs and action plans.

Who said that it is for international companies only? What about an Internet company that wants to manage its performance? I believe that the BSC framework will be very useful to focus strategic efforts on what matters.

Let's have a closer look at the marketing strategy of a business on the Internet. These will be some general thoughts that need to be adapted to the vision and mission of a specific company. So if you decide to follow these ideas then you must take them as a starting point for your own research and…

4 interview questions you must ask new content creators

Today, when content marketing is absolutely essential for all companies to thrive, creating the perfect writing team is absolutely essential. This is why hiring the right content creator is of the utmost importance as you do not want to be stuck with a content writer who has no idea how to write interesting, relevant and well-written articles. Some companies seem to get it so wrong that they often end up with Content Creators who don’t even have basic writing skills. Content Creators can be split into Content Writers and Designers since content can be both textual and visual. James Carson has identified other related roles such as community or outreach manager as part of his post on who you need on your content marketing team. Given content skills are important, specialist skills it makes sense to…

Research shows how just-in-time content can re-engage abandoning visitors

When it comes to bounce on B2B landing pages, the numbers are depressing. Marketers put a lot of time and energy into these crucial pages, and research says the large majority of businesses depend on landing pages as part of their lead-generation strategy. Yet the majority (more than 50%) of traffic will bounce, perhaps never to return. The waste and inefficiency can be HUGE if landing pages aren't optimised or other relevant content isn't available. [Editor's note: This post reviews different ways to measure engagement and explains bounce rate and typical benchmarks if your not familiar with it. Bounce rates for blogs can be in the range 60-80%, so it's worthwhile designing the blog to encourage some of these visitors to engage more]. Much of the time spent developing effective landing pages focuses on content optimization and enticing calls-to-action (CTAs) to grab…

Five techniques Conversion Optimisation Experts use to get the most value from their CRO efforts

Conversion rate optimisation (CRO) can be frustrating when you have setup a CRO programme and are working hard on it, but not getting the results you expected. This article details five tips we find are important to apply to get your CRO efforts back on track. We have used this approach to deliver double, and sometimes triple-digit, sales increases. Implement this advice into your CRO programme and transform your business.

5 Tips to improve CRO

Tip 1: Avoid ‘best practice’

If you get your ideas for what to test on your website from downloading an expensive report then it’s odds-on you are seeing mixed results. What works on one site isn’tt guaranteed to work on your site and the tactics involved in persuading visitors to purchase varies enormously from site to site. You need to get into the mind-set of your…