Automation

Email marketing can be an incredibly powerful tool, often offering a return of 30 times your initial investment. But, like any tool, it can only work well when handled expertly

Whatever your choice of marketing tool may be, the main aim is bound to involve maximizing the return on your business earnings. Email marketing is no different. After all, you are in business to make a profit, and who doesn’t want their venture to be as successful as possible? If you’re new to email marketing or, indeed, marketing in general, you may still be getting used to the various acronyms and buzzwords that tend to fly around. So, let’s start with explaining precisely what a ‘return on investment’ (ROI) means.

It's all about ROI

The world of business, no matter which industry you are in, is very fond of acronyms, buzzwords, management-speak, and all manner of jargon. This is great when you are embedded…

Email Marketing Expert Dan Grech explains his one goal for 2017: 'Do less'.

I've never really been a fan of ‘expert predictions’, especially when it comes to Digital Marketing. They remind me of Mystic Meg caressing glass balls, making some tenuous claims for the sake of entertaining an audience. I don’t think much will change in Digital Marketing in 2017. Like in previous years, email marketing will continue to hold the highest potential ROI against other marketing channels - yet so many businesses will get it wrong. Google will continue to make seemingly bizarre changes that we'll complain about - then we’ll accept them as being 'for the greater good' of online advertising. Video will continue to grow - yet people will scratch their heads at why a live broadcast of an eating contest on The Lad Bible's Facebook page gets more engagement than a 60 second YouTube pre-roll with a 6-figure…

Barriers to adoption of Marketing Automation and how overcome them

In research TFM&A (2014) identified that there were 5 main benefits to marketing automation: personalisation, campaign management, triggered emails, control and insight.   But with such clear benefits why are more organisations not adopting the tools that can lead to greater business success? In this blog I’ll be explaining the key barriers to adoption of marketing automation and give an action plan for marketers who want to persuade their organisations to adopt an automated approach.

Who are the non-adopters?

The barriers to adoption of marketing automation vary greatly depending on the type of company, their needs and their previous investments. In  research carried out by CommsBox we identified 4 key types of non-adopter. Although by no means exclusive, they give an in-depth insight into the difficulties that companies face when making major investments in change. You might recognise elements of your own organisation here: Trailing…

How Big Data enables the relationship between data types to be explored

In my previous article in this series exploring the application of Big Data to marketing, I looked at how the Velocity component of Big Data provides greater understanding of your customers, improving marketing performance. In this post, I will explore the third of the 3 Vs, the potential impact of Variety on Marketing Variety covers the multiple types of data that are now available from the established structured data of tables and columns, with defined elements and values, to the many unstructured free format types of data. In recent years the amount of unstructured data and machine generated data is increasing at an exponential rate, being the major proportion (>80%) of the vast volumes of data now in existence. So what does this…

Part 3 in a series showing how Big Data can support marketing

In my previous article in this series exploring the application of Big Data to marketing, I looked at how the Volume component of Big Data provides breadth and depth to your understanding of your customers. In this post, I will explore the second of the 3 Vs, the potential impact of Velocity on Marketing.

Let’s first look at what we mean by Velocity and put down a simple definition of ‘Velocity is the speed of data growth/change’.

In the last few years, the accumulation of data has grown at an astonishing rate, with the amount of data increasing by 2.5 exabytes each day or 40% annually at current rates and accelerating.

The big question is, what does velocity mean for businesses looking to tap into it and does this speed of growth/change…