Have you ever wondered what your SMS referrals are doing after they've clicked?
A whopping 98% of text messages sent are read, putting SMS in a completely different league to other forms or communication in terms of open-rate. But with its simple style and 160-character limit, it can be tricky to track how your campaigns are performing once you’ve pressed send. Including a link in your SMS means you can direct recipients through to richer online content by adding the ability to track who and how many people are clicking through to your website.
Tracking how many clickthroughs you receive on a campaign is awesome if you’re looking for data and statistics on how well the campaigns are performing and who’s interacting – but what about what they do after they’ve clicked on your SMS link? This is where this handy tool from Google really comes into play; adding additional information into your SMS…
Here are the 3 most important reasons why you should pay attention to your ecommerce personalization strategy today more than ever before
If your team is like most ecommerce organizations these days, you have already made some progress in your personalization journey by serving relevant content to your ideal customer groups and optimizing experiences that you serve. The ability to deliver true 1-to-1 personalized experiences across all channels has been the dream of every marketer — personalization increases loyalty, drives higher conversions and grows revenue.
Unfortunately, it has been incredibly difficult to deliver on individualized experiences at scale and various attempts at personalization over the past four decades have failed, resulting in greater unpredictability in revenue. With recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI), this changes. It’s finally possible for brands and retailers to deliver on the promises of 1-to-1 personalization and serve the ideal experience to their each of their customers…
A review of different frameworks covering the customer journey, brand and content
Today, consumers do not search, engage and consume information within individual channels while making purchase decisions. Their journeys are fluid and choices are influenced by multiple channels, devices and screens, and a vast array of content, both online and offline. Therefore the challenge for businesses today is to understand how their customers behave and to establish a multichannel marketing strategy to effectively communicate with prospects in the right channel, at the right time. The frameworks and digital marketing models I review in this post can help build communications around the consumer rather than a product.
With the advent of the internet and the ongoing evolution of the media landscape, businesses are having to continuously play catch-up whilst the gap between consumer behaviour and business-readiness has never been greater:
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Get Ahead With an Integrated Marketing Campaign
Integrated marketing campaigns bring different channels together to deliver a message that helps the customer to properly identify the brand or product being promoted.
One of the best examples of an integrated marketing campaign done right is from Compare the Market and their meerkat. By creating a toy that customers could own, the campaign went far deeper than a mere advertising campaign on TV or the internet.
The fun and friendly characters have helped turn insurance into something that even children can connect to and after a year, the campaign had helped to increase the market share of Compare the Market by 76%.
According to David Pickton and Dr Amanda Broderick, authors of Integrated Marketing Communications, there are four essential C’s that need to be followed in order to craft an integrated campaign. For anyone looking for ways to create a successful strategy of their…
Chart of the Day: McKinsey Analysis rates machine learning marketing applications highly
I thought this was an interesting chart and article from McKinsey on 'What’s now and next in analytics, AI, and automation'.
McKinsey outline the range of opportunities for applying artificial intelligence in their article. They say:
'For companies, successful adoption of these evolving technologies will significantly enhance performance. Some of the gains will come from labor substitution, but automation also has the potential to enhance productivity, raise throughput, improve predictions, outcomes, accuracy, and optimization, as well expand the discovery of new solutions in massively complex areas such as synthetic biology and material science'.
At Smart Insights, we've been looking beyond the hype to look at specific practical applications for applying AI in marketing. Our recommendation is that the best marketing applications are in machine learning where predictive analytics is applied to learn from historic data to deliver more relevant personalization, both on site, using email…
How to avoid the costly data analysis mistakes that most marketers make
If you're a digital marketer, you can't failed to have noticed—there’s been a seismic data shift over the last several years that encourages empirical marketing based on data and analytics. The sentiment underlying this shift seems to be that if you think your art and copy are good, then you better have the stats to prove it.
This evidence-based approach is heartening in many ways, but many people are still learning how to apply its principles. Just because you have the numbers, doesn’t mean you know how to apply them. In this short article, I want to look at three 'boneheaded' ways that people are looking at their data and offer some suggestions to help put your data analysis back on track.
You’re Not Doing It At All
Sadly, a lot of people are in this category. But I get it. Again, the…
Chart of the Day: Using more than 10 hashtags per Instagram post could be damaging your visibility
Hashtags are one of the best ways to get your posts seen on Instagram. They can help pull your social media posts into topic-specific feeds, which can reach audiences beyond your current followers.
Many businesses will often resort to using too many hashtags on one post in the hope of it getting more visibility. A recent study suggested that it is far more effective to keep your hashtag count to less than 10 hashtags per post. If you where to use relevant hashtags and keep the count below 10, it is suggested you could reach up to 25,000 engagements per post.
Be careful if you use too many or the same hashtags in all your captions, you might be putting yourself at visibility risk or a shadow ban. This is when Instagram…
Marketers are expected to take full control of the customer experience in the coming years
The Economist Intelligence Unit asked 499 (one can't help but think they were aiming for 500) Chief Marketing Officers and Senior Marketing Execs about how they saw marketing evolving, and also conducted some in-depth, one on one interviews with CMOs from leading brands such as Unilever and JPMorgan Chase. They were looking to find out what key technologies and trends will drive change in the marketing industry over the next four years, and the results make for interesting reading.
Here we've summarised some of the key findings for marketers, but if you want the full report you can sign up to download it.
Hottest tech trends for marketers
The chart below is in many ways not all that surprising. Mobile has been a massive trend in marketing for years now, and makes up over half of web traffic. The…
These massive trends will change E-commerce marketing this year
We are now well into 2017. If you are to develop a winning e-commerce marketing strategy you'll need to start planning now. E-commerce continues to grow rapidly, but with the huge market acting as a magnet to brands large and small, competition will ramp up faster than the total growth of the market. This means customers will be harder to win, easier to lose and fussier on price and user experience.
To avoid falling behind the ever more fierce competition, you will need to both be aware of and benefit from the latest trends in e-commerce. These megatrends are global, have huge implications, and are not going to go away anytime soon. Ecommerce marketers will have to integrate them into their planning to be successful this year And if any of you think you can get away without creating a detailed plan - remember that…
Planning for GDPR Compliance – Are you ready?
The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) comes into force on May 25th 2018 and triggers the most significant changes to data protection law in two decades. It is essential for businesses and individuals to be prepared as failure to comply may mean stiff penalties for some breaches.
The team at SmartSurvey (the UK’s leading online survey provider) have put together a new infographic and a GDPR Compliance Checker to help you find out how well prepared you are or if you still have some issues that you need to consider.
GDPR infographic – download
Mo Naser is an industry expert in the field of online survey…
