Email marketing in action. A case study in using something more advanced than MailChimp

I've been a heavy user of MailChimp for many years. And as a tutor and examiner for the CIM's digital qualifications I can see that I am not alone. The majority of my students seem to have experience of the platform and only the very larger brands seem to regularly be using anything else like a fully integrated CRM system for email. MailChimp has some awesome features. And for companies with small mailing lists and limited resources or technical expertise, it's an excellent first choice for regular emailing. But it has some severe limitations. You can't really do much personalisation. Sure you can put a first name in and you can use Autoresponders to send specific emails in response to a trigger but they are complex to set up and lack the sophistication of a more specialised marketing automation…

Predict what your email database will do to improve your click rate

The growth in Data Science techniques during the last few years has generated a vast interest in using analytical techniques to optimise engagement on email campaigns. Whether a company wishes to compare the performance of two email templates, compare the performance of multiple email templates or see the association between several characteristics of an email and a single metric, Predictive Analytical techniques allow them to acquire the answers they need. Below we are going to outline 3 techniques you can implement from ‘getting started’ lists of around 500 subscribers, to highly advanced models geared towards enterprise users.

Understanding Sample Size

For these techniques to make sense, it is important to have a basic understanding of statistical significance and what size of list may be required for your tests to be useful. Very basically, the larger the sample size, the more statistically significant…

Optimise your customer analytics by getting the models right

Customer analytical models can deliver huge value for companies that invest in them to improve their sales and marketing activities. But even well-known big brands can get it wrong when designing, implementing and operating these models. From Barclays to John Lewis, Cineworld to Pizza Express, businesses across all sectors are benefiting from the use of customer analytics. These days, it is unusual to find a company that does not analyse customer data, even in its simplest form. Customer analytics may fall under business intelligence, marketing operations, finance or even customer support, but wherever it lies it will have the potential to improve the optimisation of sales and marketing functions. Companies often want to know which products or services specific customers are most likely to purchase, which customers need a nudge to help…

Google's new Autotrack library enables additional tracking of site visitor interactions

Value: [rating=3] Recommended link: Google Analytics announcement about the Autorack plug-in If you've been involved with customising Google Analytics for different businesses, you will know there are some oddities which make it difficult to track some on-site user interactions which are helpful to know. For example, how do you track clicks out to other sites or outbound form fills. These deficiencies have been around ever since the service was purchased from Urchin. However, there have been workarounds available as plug-ins which we have used on Smart Insights and when helping customise other sites. Google's new Autotrack plugin library for the first time provides a quality, Google Authorised library providing a simple way to record 'clicks out' as events and also has some great new features which effectively mean it is '6 plug-ins in one' Here's a quick run down of what's available in the…

The potential to completely transform your digital marketing using any combination of these five emerging technologies is not to be underestimated

Technology and marketing go hand in hand, and more so than you might think. If it were not for the technological advances in the 1980s and the emergence of databases then relationship marketing would not be possible. Of course, not only marketing technology but the entire world as we now know it would be a vastly different place had search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and Ask not arrived in the 1990s, which manifested the beginning of search marketing. Then we saw the age of mobile take hold with the emergence of 3G mobile networks and the arrival of the smartphone in 2007 with Apple’s first iteration of the iPhone, now a truly ubiquitous technological advancement that has changed the lives of millions of people. Now here we are in 2016. In the…

Facebook rolls out instant articles to everyone on April 12th

Importance: [rating=5] (For Publishers) Recommended source: Facebook Media Facebook’s Instant Articles is only nine months old. But, given its great success over that gestation period, Facebook has now deemed it developed enough to be unleashed on publishers of all stripes.

What is Instant Articles?

If you not all that familiar with Instant articles, it’s probably because it works so seamlessly you haven’t really noticed it. When you click on an article from a news publisher that uses Instant articles whilst on a mobile device (most of the bigger publishers do now), then instead of being taken to the publishers site and waiting for the whole thing to load, which can often take a fair while on a mobile device and consume a considerable amount of data, you are taken to an Instant articles page hosted by Facebook. This massively improves load times and keeps…

Going beyond opens and clicks to evaluate and improve subscriber engagement with your email programmes

How engaging are your emails? It’s likely that you review open and clickthrough rates for individual  email campaigns and newsletters, but can you measure and prove how engaging your email marketing is on a long-term basis across multiple emails starting with the first welcome email. Dan Hare showed that it's challenging - he presented data which shows between 50-90% of subscribers may never open or click in a 6 month period. In this article I’ll show some more advanced techniques we recommend to assess subscriber engagement which go beyond the basic email metrics of delivery, open and clickthrough rates. [si_guide_block id="68233" title="Download Expert Member resource – Advanced Lifecycle Email Marketing Guide" description="A best practices briefing for high email volume businesses to take their email marketing to the next level. This guide is…

Adwords bidding landscape has changed as Google confirm the right sidebar on desktop SERP is to be removed.

Importance: [rating=5] (For PPC Managers & SEO managers) Recommended source: Search Engine Land Google have ended their six-year experiment with the Sidebar ads, instead opting for three above-the-fold text ads for queries on the desktop SERP and a further 3 ads at the bottom. “We’ve been testing this layout for a long time, so some people might see it on a very small number of commercial queries. We’ll continue to make tweaks, but this is designed for highly commercial queries where the layout is able to provide more relevant results for people searching and better performance for advertisers.” A fourth ad will be shown for only the highly commercial queries such as "Car Insurance", "Hotels in New York" and "Cheapest Smartphones", so the types of search where people express a deep intention to buy. Although we were a…

Use these highly actionable tips to give your customer acquisition a huge boost this year

Today, consumers expect brands to have personalities — just like people. They demand that companies break the fourth wall and find ways to authentically connect, whether through personalization or engaging with them in real time at the right moment across channels. The desire for authentic, personal brand interaction isn’t going anywhere. As you enter the new year, it’s wise to keep in mind the effects this consumer mindset has on your customer acquisition strategy. Here are the five digital marketing trends I see as the most imperative for customer acquisition and growth in 2016.

1. Online video consumption is king.

The 18-to-24 age group is becoming harder and harder to reach through traditional channels such as television. Between the second quarters of 2011 and 2015, television viewing by this age group dropped by nearly eight hours per week.…

Digital marketers could face a double whammy on top of the finally agreed EU data law.

A parliamentary Select Committee has announced it wants the Government to introduce much stricter data laws that go beyond the recently announced EU law - General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

In its fourth report subtitled 'The Big Data Dilemma' (PDF download, no registration), which has just been announced (10th February), the Science and Technology committee wants the UK Government to go further than the forthcoming EU data, which will itself dramatically increase the ability of the ICO to impose larger fines for data breaches.

Downloading the 52 page report explains a lot more than the MPs thoughts on how regulations should change. It also gives a lot of detail on context and the opportunities for Big Data from a commercial perspective. This makes it essential reading for any one responsible…