Tips For A Successful Email Marketing Holiday Season

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With the holiday season upon us with Black Friday right around the corner, it’s time to super-charge your email marketing strategy.

The holiday season represents a huge opportunity for marketers to connect with their audiences and drive sales. Holiday sales in 2015 are expected to represent approximately 19 percent of the retail industry’s annual sales of $3.2 trillion. Additionally, the National Retail Federation is forecasting online sales to increase between 6 and 8 percent to as much as $105 billion.

To help you make the most of it, here are 10 tips that will make your email marketing results merrier:

1. Mark Your Calendar

Email marketing is a highly effective method to reach people this holiday season. With 57% of email subscribers spending 10-60 minutes browsing marketing emails during the week, you’re likely to reach people no matter where they are. Here are this season’s most notable holidays to plan your email campaigns around:

Veterans Day – Wednesday, November 11

Thanksgiving – Thursday, November 26

Black Friday – Friday, November 27

Small Business Saturday – Saturday, November 28

Cyber Monday – Monday, November 30

Hanukkah – Begins Sunday, December 6

Green Monday – Monday, December 14

Free Shipping Day – Friday, December 18

Winter Solstice – Tuesday, December 22

Christmas Eve – Thursday, December 24

Christmas Day- Friday, December 25

Boxing Day – Saturday, December 26

Kwanzaa – Begins Saturday, December 26

New Year’s Eve – Thursday, December 31

New Year’s Day – Friday, January 1

2. Use Progressive Profiling To Send Segmented Offers

Predictive intelligence and individualized recommendations are great, but during the holiday season, your subscribers’ historical data (even very recent data) may not be very helpful because they’re shopping for others more than themselves. Rather than using data to make guesses, it can be more effective to just ask your subscribers what kinds of products they’re interested in.

For instance, on Nov. 13, 2013, Zulily sent a progressive profiling email that resulted in a brand alert email being triggered on Thanksgiving Day. And on Nov. 5, 2014, Sony sent a progressive profiling email where respondents received a targeted triggered email on Black Friday.

In both cases, that’s great timing for an email that the recipient is already primed to act on.

3. Add Seasonal Content To Your Triggered Emails

Triggered emails are not “set it and forget it,” they are “review and renew.” That’s especially true going into the holiday season.

Make your triggered emails more relevant to holiday shoppers by adding seasonal imagery to the headers and gift services footers to the bottom of those emails, and adjust the logic and timing of your cart and browse abandonment emails. For instance, time to purchase is compressed during big shopping days like Black Friday, Cyber Monday and Green Monday, so you’ll likely want to fire off your abandonment emails more quickly than usual.

4. Use Preview Text To Support Your Subject Lines

This is a quick win for the holiday season. Preview or snippet text is displayed under or to the right of the subject line in the inbox view of many major email clients, including the native iPhone email app, Gmail and Yahoo Mail.

Last November, only 47 percent of B2C marketers were optimizing their preview text so that it supported their subject lines. Anecdotally, it’s only slightly higher today.

Think of preview text as a second subject line — and you wouldn’t dream of having long URLs, administrative text and other nonsense filling up your subject line. Whether you use visible or hidden preheader text to create your preview text, don’t leave it to chance.

5. Use Social Media For Aspirational Discovery, And Site Search And Purchase Data For More Practical Discovery

Social media sites like Pinterest can tell you what people aspire to buy from you, and that information can be super-useful in getting your subscribers excited about the holiday season and thinking about the possibilities. That’s especially true early in the holiday season.

But what’s actually happening on your site and in your stores, regarding the products that your customers are buying or actively considering, can be much more telling and worthy of focus.

Consider using this information in your email campaigns more as we get further into the season, when the wisdom of the crowd can be a powerful tool to direct shoppers to your most popular products.

6. Resist The Urge To Email Chronically Inactive Subscribers

It can be oh-so-tempting to want to get a little holiday boost by emailing a bunch of your subscribers who haven’t engaged with your emails in a long time, but resist the urge. The vast, vast majority of subscribers who haven’t engaged in more than two years are likely long gone, with a good chunk of those having abandoned or changed their email address.

Email a bunch of those folks during the holiday season, and you risk getting junked or blocked — which means that you risked your ability to reach your loyal, engaged subscribers for a shot at re-engaging a tiny percentage of inactive subscribers. Not a good bet.

For a smarter, less risky bet, try to identify the seasonal shoppers among your subscribers, those who were engaged and purchased during the holiday season but then quickly became silent afterward and haven’t engaged since. Those subscribers are much better candidates for re-engagement efforts going into Thanksgiving week.

7. Merry Mobile-Friendly Emails

Lastly, and perhaps most important, is ensuring your emails are mobile-friendly. It’s no surprise that prior to (and during) holiday shopping trips, consumers are looking to their mobile devices for the top email offers in their inboxes. Data points in this direction, with internal analytics showing that 50-70% of merchants’ marketing emails are being read on a mobile or tablet device. Coupled with Goldman Sachs’ forecast that mobile commerce will jump to $626 billion in 2018, proves the importance of meshing mobile and email.

Note that 65 percent of all email in the US is now opened first on a mobile device. Take advantage of this device segmenting by sending email offers with key words such as “[fusion_builder_container hundred_percent=”yes” overflow=”visible”][fusion_builder_row][fusion_builder_column type=”1_1″ background_position=”left top” background_color=”” border_size=”” border_color=”” border_style=”solid” spacing=”yes” background_image=”” background_repeat=”no-repeat” padding=”” margin_top=”0px” margin_bottom=”0px” class=”” id=”” animation_type=”” animation_speed=”0.3″ animation_direction=”left” hide_on_mobile=”no” center_content=”no” min_height=”none”][INSERT HOLIDAY] SALE!” or “[INSERT HOLIDAY] – 30% Off Online Only!” Phrases such as “Early-Bird Special” or “24 Hour Sale” work well too.

Keeping mobile top of mind will improve your lead generation and customer acquisition numbers.

8. Have A Plan For Last Sleigh Day

Because Christmas falls on a Friday this time around, express shipping is likely to play a bigger role in the final days of the holiday season. Last Sleigh Day, which is Dec. 22 this year, marks the last chance for guaranteed Christmas delivery with express shipping for most retailers.

After you wrap up your Cyber Week promotions, be sure to include your order-by deadlines for standard shipping and express shipping in a module at the bottom of your emails. And if your brand is going to offer discounted or free express shipping going into Last Sleigh Day, be sure to communicate that to your subscribers.

For more expert advice on how to captivate your customers this holiday season, contact an Onimod Global Digital Marketing expert today.

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Here Are 9 Eye-Opening Digital Marketing Stats From the Past Week

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Instagram and Snapchat continue to heat up in the digital marketing world. Check out the gaudy numbers those social players are pulling as well as six other stats from the space in the last week that we found particularly interesting:

1. New York researcher eMarketer said today that 32 percent of U.S. companies with 100 employees or more will use Instagram for marketing this year. That number will increase to 49 percent next year before jumping to 71 percent in 2017. What’s more, eMarketer said, Instagram may be more popular with marketers than Twitter in two years.

2.  CEO Evan Spiegel and his team forecast that Sponsored Selfie Filters—a new ad unit from Snapchat—will reach up to 16 million viewers a day, BuzzFeed reported. The ad purchase will cost a maximum of $700,000 per day.

3. According to Fast Company, Snapchat earlier this year discovered that between 60 percent and 70 percent of users stopped watching its video ads after just three seconds. Coca-Cola, however, has evidently cracked the code by simply making content tailored for the app. Working in concert with Snapchat, the magazine reported that the soda giant is getting a Snapchat video completion rate of 54 percent for 10-second clips.

4. Twitter has started offering Conversion Lift, which helps brands measure the effectiveness of Promoted Tweets, enabling them to better target ads. Referencing Conversion Lift data, the San Francisco tech company claimed that people who see Promoted Tweets are 1.4 times more likely to interact with a brand than those who don’t see an ad.

5. Millward Brown polled more than 13,500 multiscreen viewers—i.e., people who own a TV and either a smartphone or tablet—in 42 countries on what they think about video advertising. The researcher found that the average consumer between the ages of 16 and 45 watches 204 minutes of video a day, split equally between TV and online. Indeed, the tube and digital video are now on equal footing for both Gen Y and Gen X consumers. What’s more, 45 minutes of the average online viewing time is done on a smartphone, while desktop accounts for 37 minutes and tablet for 20 minutes.

6. The aforementioned eMarketer study also found that 88 percent of U.S. companies will utilize at least one social-media network for marketing this year.

7. P.F. Chang’s is running a user-generated content effort around National Breast Cancer Awareness Month in October called #PFChangsPink. The brand saw a 1,300 percent bump in UGC from the goodwill initiative in its first eight days.

8. During last week’s Democratic presidential debate, Hillary Clinton’s Twitter handle got 293,696 mentions on the microblogging platform, besting challenger Bernie Sanders’ 278,405.

9. Mode Media, formerly Glam Media, said it has streamed more than 1 billion video views in the past six months. Mode.com’s channels include Glam (women’s lifestyle), Brash (men’s lifestyle), Bliss (health and wellness), Tend (parenting), Foodie (recipes and restaurants), among others.

Bonus stat: So far in 2015, only 14 percent of initial public offerings have been done by tech companies, per a Wall Street Journal article citing stats from Dealogic.

H/T: AdWeek.

Why Video is an Effective Digital Marketing Component

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Marketers are getting increasingly aggressive on the digital front. They are implementing innovative techniques to make their offerings more visible and appealing to the masses. To this end, it is time we seriously consider video as a new medium.

According to a blog quoting a comScore report, 64% of the visitors may purchase a product after watching a relevant video, while a Forbes survey reveals that 75% of executives watch videos

1. Classifying viewers

Your viewers are not going to be all of the same age and with similar interests. Your offerings, however, must be relevant to all – from fresh graduates to the veterans. So, you cannot expect one video to strike the same chord in every viewer’s mind. The trick is to understand the preference of different sections of your audience, and create different videos to target them simultaneously.

2. Getting a great videographer

A skilled videographer, who understands your requirement, is going to be your best friend in making appealing videos for your digital marketing activities. A good videographer can:

  • Capture and highlight the aspects of your offerings that your target customers should know and understand
  • Advise what kind of video you need – brand story, company introduction, customer testimonial, product demo, etc.
  • Make the video uniquely related to your offering by including actors or real people, animation or real videography, or a combination of various suitable components
  • Tell a story from the emergence of problem to its solution, and the result in the short video

3. Utilize social media to the fullest

For a successful video-based digital marketing campaign, presence on YouTube and other digital media is essential. The post says that 91% of the video snippets displayed on search result pages are from YouTube. Share your videos through Facebook, Twitter and other popular social media, with backlinks to your website brand page. Similarly, your website should offer links for sharing the video through various social media. By utilizing social media, you actually gain by leveraging every viewer’s reach.

4. Making a viral video

There is no particular trick to make a viral video. However, you can analyze all the popular viral videos to determine what makes people like them more than other videos. Presence of an influential personality is always helpful. Besides, most viral videos have an unusual or odd approach to story-telling. Focus on humor, children and/or animals, a tone; they are more likely to strike the right chord in your viewers’ minds. Besides, subtle reference to a current incident also works often.

5. Monitor video performance

Regular and frequent releases are good, but you also need to monitor the performance of your videos. Some of the common performance parameters are:

  • Number and type of viewers
  • Time spent on a particular video
  • Number of views per viewer
  • Click-through rate

6. In-house vs. professional studio

Depending on budgets and other factors, you can choose to hire a video production company or have an in-house team for the production. Usually, large organizations have an in-house team for video production. However, you can rely on video companies to produce highly appealing and effective videos for your digital marketing campaign.

So, consider videos a vital component when you think of digital marketing. All you need is to take the first step to enter this domain with conviction in order to reap the benefits.

Why Video is an Effective Digital Marketing Component

H/T: Martech Advisor

2015 Digital Marketing Stats: The Good, the Bad and the Intriguing

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We look at the 2015 stats that show great leaps forward and hurdles still to be overcome for digital marketing

A decade or more ago, digital marketing, or internet marketing as it was more frequently referred to back then (see digital marketing Vs internet marketing), used to be a wild-west like frontier. Opportunities were everywhere, and there were also plenty of people getting it horribly wrong. In the past 10-15 years things have changed markedly, and in general things have been getting a whole lot better for digital marketers.

 

the good the bad and the ugly

 

Much like the past 15 years, 2015 so far has brought plenty of good news for digital marketers; increasing digital ad budgets, increased focus on content and SEO has given them plenty of opportunities to show their worth and marketers. The stats that have come out so far from various studies and compilations this year demonstrate this clearly. However, they also show there are problems with digital marketing that companies are still not overcoming. Big data has been a big trend for a few years now, but it is clear that many businesses are not able to turn data into insights effectively. Accurate measuring ROI remains a problem for many, whilst some are still failing to get tangible results from Social Media.

That’s why we thought we’d present some of the best and worst of digital marketing stats of the year thus far. The good show how fast digital marketing is growing and getting ever more effective, whilst the bad stats demonstrate the challenges that still remain.

All the surveys and research that generate these stats often throw up some interesting tidbits of data that are often fascinating. We thought that we’d add these intriguing stats into our compilation for good measure.

Good

  • Content marketing in 2015 generates 3 times as many leads as traditional outbound marketing, but costs 62% less. (Source)

 

  • Content creation and management now claim the second-largest share of digital marketing budgets. (Source)

 

  • 28% of marketers have reduced their advertising budget to fund more digital marketing. (Source)

 

  • 84% of top performing companies are using or plan to start using marketing automation by 2015. (Source)

 

  • 73% of B2B marketers use video as a content marketing tactic, and 7% of marketers plan on increasing their YouTube marketing.
    71% of companies planned to increase their digital marketing budgets this year (Source)

 

  • 78% of companies now say they have dedicated social media teams in 2015, up from 67% in 2012 (Source)

Bad

  • 62% of companies did not agree with the statement ‘we have the analysts we need to make sense of our data’ whilst 63% did not agree with the statement ‘we have a good infrastructure in place to collect the data we need’. (Source)

 

  • 70% of marketers were not confident in their companies ability to measure the return on mobile ad spend. (Source)

 

  • 52% of Americans think that most online shopping sites need improvement, whilst 79% of Brazilians2 and 87% of Chinese people think this. (Source)

 

  • 83% of consumers reported that they have had a “bad experience with social media marketing.” (source)

 

  • The top three social networks used by B2B marketers are LinkedIn (91%); Twitter (85%); and Facebook (81%). However, just 62% of marketers say that LinkedIn is effective, while 50% say the same for Twitter and only 30% of B2B marketers view Facebook as effective. December 2014 (source)

 

  • 20% of companies said Digital Marketing is very much separate from the rest of their marketing/advertising efforts, whilst only 14% said they were a ‘digital first organisation. (Source)

 

  • 91% of people have unsubscribed from company emails they have previously opted into. (source)

 

  • Only 8% of companies have an email marketing team, despite the fact it is often rated as the platform the delivers the highest ROI of any digital marketing tactic. (source)

 

  • Almost half–48%–of all emails are opened on mobile devices. Yet 39% of marketers say they have no strategy for mobile email, and only 11% of emails are optimized for mobile (source)

Intriguing

  • 15% of Google searches have never been searched for before. (source)

 

  • 60% of all Internet activity in the US originates from mobile devices and about half of total Internet Traffic flows through mobile apps. (source)

 

  • 50% of all mobile searches are conducted in hopes of finding local results, and 61% of those searches result in a purchase. (Source)

 

  • The most followed brand on Twitter is Facebook (source)

 

 

H/T: Smart Insights.

10 Online Marketing Metrics Critical To Your Campaign’s Performance

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When was the last time you conducted a thorough marketing analysis for your business? If your answer is, “I can’t remember,” don’t feel bad. Many business owners deprioritize marketing analyses in the face of more pressing needs.

The good news: There’s never a bad time to conduct a detailed marketing analysis that lays the groundwork for a comprehensive online marketing strategy.

As part of your analysis, you’ll need to pay attention to key online marketing metrics and digital marketing measurements that offer insight into how your online presence performs relative to the competition and what you can do to improve its performance.

If you want to learn how to improve your online marketing performance without breaking the bank, start with these 10 metrics.

1. Traffic Sources

While it’s important to keep track of your total visitor counts and other high-level traffic metrics, these data points don’t always provide the level of fine-grained insight necessary to adjust and shape your online marketing plan effectively.

For a closer look at your website traffic, pay attention to traffic sources. In Google Analytics, you can find this information in the Acquisitions tab.

Traffic sources can be broken down into four main categories: direct, referrals, search and social.

  • Direct traffic consists of visitors who typed your main URL into the search bar and navigated directly to your site.
  • Referral traffic comprises visitors who clicked external links to get to your site.
  • Search traffic consists of traffic generated by organic and paid search results.
  • Social visitors arrived through links embedded in your social media profiles and feeds.

Once you have a sense of where your traffic is coming from and how traffic figures change over time, you’ll have an easier time determining which areas of your online marketing strategy are working and which need tweaking.

2. Bounce Rate

Your website’s bounce rate is calculated by dividing the total number of visitors by the number of visitors who navigate away from the site after viewing just one page.

Bounce rate is a great proxy for overall interest in your website’s content and messaging. In most cases, lower bounce rates are better.

3. Time on Site

Time on site is another useful proxy for visitor interest. The longer your visitors spend exploring your website, the more likely they are to absorb information about your company and take meaningful action to enter your sales funnel.

Sophisticated digital marketing strategies focus on simultaneously reducing bounce rates and increasing time on site readings.

4. Conversions

Your website’s conversion rate is an absolutely critical measure of your online marketing plan’s overall effectiveness.

It’s important to note that website visitors can “convert” in many different ways including filling out a form with personal and financial information, signing up for a recurring membership, submitting an email address, completing an online transaction and more.

It’s your responsibility to define what “conversion” means for your business, measuring said conversions in Google Analytics or another marketing automation program such as HubSpot, and taking steps to boost your conversion rate.

5. Lead to Close Ratio

Lead to close ratio is another important metric that determines how effective your website and your online marketing ecosystem as a whole is to shepherd prospective customers through the buyer’s journey. It’s expressed as the total number of leads you generate divided by the number of sales.

6. Repeat Sales Ratio

Most businesses thrive on repeat sales. In fact, many service providers now focus on recurring sales models defined by weekly or monthly payments. If this describes your business, you’re no doubt focused on getting your repeat sales ratio as high as possible.Even if you follow a more traditional retail sales model that emphasizes individual, one-off transactions, repeat customers are critical to your profitability.

7. Cost per Lead

Your cost per lead is expressed as your total marketing outlay divided by the number of leads generated in a given period.

Lower costs per lead are generally better than higher costs per lead, but it’s okay to deviate from this rule during periods of heightened marketing investment.

8. Cost per Sale

Cost per sale is expressed as your total marketing outlay divided by the number of sales in a given period. It’s a great measure of the average cost of a single sale.

However, keep in mind that cost per sale measures discrete sales costs and thus isn’t equivalent to return on investment.

9. Average Customer Value

Customer value is a relatively complex measure of the total amount of value a given customer produces during their relationship with your company.

By extension, average customer value is the measure of the average customer’s value contribution. This metric is determined by a number of different factors, including transaction size, transaction frequency and the average duration of customer relationships.

10. Return on Investment

In many ways, your return on investment is the “ultimate” measure of your marketing plan’s effectiveness. It’s a measure of your total marketing investment relative to your total revenue.

Virtually every tweak, adjustment and new initiative you launch with respect to your online marketing strategy should have one overarching goal in mind, which is to boost your return on investment.

Therein lies the key to profitability and growth.

Learn How to Improve Online Marketing from the Experts

These 10 online marketing metrics aren’t the only digital marketing measurements that you need to keep in mind as you plan and deploy your digital outreach strategy. They’re critical to a comprehensive marketing plan.

If you can effectively track and measure your traffic sources, bounce rate, time on site, total conversions, lead to close ratio, repeat sales ratio, cost per lead, cost per sale, average customer value and total return on investment, you’ll find yourself well ahead of the curve.

H/T: Business2Community

Social Media Marketing Tips for the Fall and Holiday Season

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October begins the holiday season for businesses and marketers. You should embrace the new seasons and holidays as part of your social media marketing strategy. The seasons are a perfect time to produce relevant content that revolves around current situations all your customers and prospects are currently in. Holiday shopping begins before Halloween for 20 to 40% of all consumers. The fall season is a very busy time for people to be searching the internet and browsing social media for Halloween costume ideas, fall recipes, fall decorating ideas and crafts, the list is almost endless. It’s important your business has a strong online presence during this pivotal time to take advantage of a large audience. Below are some marketing tips for your business to implement this holiday season:

1. Profile background to match the season
Consider customizing your social media profiles for the holidays. Your online presence should reflect the current season your business is experiencing. Showing an updated and current online presence will build up the credibility for your business in the eyes of the consumers. An idea could be to promote a specific product or service your business offers that would interest viewers the most during the specific holiday or season your currently in. Include an image of this on your social media background along with a theme to match the holiday or season. For instance, a jewelry store could highlight a couple seasonal jewelry pieces they sell on their social media background along with any seasonal specials.

2. Search for relevant hashtags to use during the season and implement them into your content strategy and editorial calendar
See what holiday or seasonal hashtags are being commonly used and see if your business can relate to it or if it caters to your customer’s lifestyle. Craft social media posts with the relevant hashtags a couple times a week to increase the reach of your messages. You could also make a special hashtag for your business that’s relevant each year the holiday season approaches. It will help keep the conversation going. For instance you could use your brand name followed by gift idea, like this #BrandnameHolidayGiftIdeas to showcase your products and services. Some other relevant hashtags could be #HolidaySavings and #HolidayDeals.

3. Write a blog posts that relevant to the season and your business
Look for opportunities to use seasonal topics and traditions to engage your audience in a timely and relevant way. This can humanize your business and help customers connect with you in a whole new way. For example, Napoleon Perdis, a popular makeup brand, created a series of “How To” tutorials demonstrating how a customer could apply Napoleon Perdis makeup to create classic Halloween looks.

4. Share social media posts relevant to the season
Showcasing what you have in common with your audience is a great way for your brand to humanize it’s image and strengthened your relationship with your current and future clients. Share tips relevant to the season like Gibson Air did with this tweet “Fall Energy Saving Tip: turn fans clockwise in the fall to force warm air down, improving the energy efficiency of your home” During the fall season HVAC companies should provide tips that relate to heating and preparing for the winter season. A jewelry store could highlight seasonal jewelry fashion trends in their social posts. Always keeping up with the trends will allow customers to see you as a credible information provider that’s always up-to-date and cares about delivering the freshest content to viewers. This will encourage customers to engage and search out information from your business.

5. Create a Pinterest board revolving around the holiday
Pinterest is a great source of traffic and a great way to increase the reach of your messages. During the holiday season people are searching Pinterest for specific holiday or seasonal ideas, tips and gifts. This is a great opportunity for you to develop a special holiday Pinterest board to increase your reach and visibility online. If you are an HVAC company you could create a Pinterest board titled “Fall Décor Ideas” where you would share fall décor ideas for homes. You would be providing content that’s relevant to your customer’s lifestyle, your business and the current season which is always a win-win situation.

6. Create a social contest revolving around the holiday or season
Giveaways are a great way to create exposure and a buzz around your product, service or brand. A contest that matched the season would be a strategic way to capitalize on a trending topic. For example, TomTom launched a holiday-themed sweepstakes giveaway and called it “TomTom’s 12 Days of Giveaways”. Create a special Facebook tab for your contest to further capture data to further analyze to develop social media strategy. Make a contest that requires users to enter an email, to help build up your email list so you can update subscribers on future contests, promotions and announcements. In fact 55% of brands use email as their number one holiday marketing channel (Accenture)

7. Create a special YouTube playlist revolving around a seasonal or holiday topic
You can create your specific playlists on your YouTube channel to feature videos that has information your customers may be searching online during a particular season or holiday. For example Travel Channel is featuring a “Fall in Finger Lakes” playlist on their YouTube channel during October and features the best attractions to experience during the fall in New York’s Finger Lakes region.

fall season social media marketing tips for YouTube

8. Implement event marketing and host a holiday themed event, that’s promoted on social media
Events are a great way to interact with your customers and to increase your exposure. Social media can further the experience of your events in many ways. You could create a special hashtag to create a conversation around your event and promote it on your social profiles. You should also develop photo albums on your social networks to share photos of the event. A holiday or seasonal themed event shows your customers and your community your fun and creative side.

9. Create seasonal specials and coupons
If you’re looking to boost engagement, offering coupons and discounts are one of your best options. Try developing a seasonal special that you can offer each year to keep customers coming back. Share these specials in social media posts to increase your reach.

Use these marketing tips and ideas to make the most of the spike in holiday traffic and spending, and create a positive impression of your small business that will last long into next year.

H/T: Toni Corsini

9 Compelling and Fun Digital Marketing Stats From the Past Week

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With summer largely in the rearview mirror, marketers are attending conferences and generally revealing more media- and brand-related data. Here are nine of such stats that caught our eye last week.

1. During a Re/code podcast, BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti said that more than 75 percent of his digital publisher’s views for all content come from non-BuzzFeed networks. More specifically, he shared that Facebook video produces 27 percent of the views and Snapchat brings in 21 percent.

2. PubMatic CEO Rajeev Goel told an audience at Dmexco that about 40 percent of Germans use ad blockers, a significant spike from the estimated 10 percent of Americans who block ads. Publishers are rightfully scared of the phenomenon, especially since Apple’s IOS9 system became available last week. It allows developers to sell ad-blocking apps on it for iPhones.

3. Also speaking at Dmexco, Amy Cole, head of brand development for Instagram EMEA, made the case for brands to buy ads on Instagram, citing data from 400 Nielsen studies covering two years of campaigns. Per Cole, 97 percent of ads have generated “significant” ad recall, with the average campaign boosting recall by 17 points.

4. JD.com, China’s largest business-to-consumer site, has more than 600 million users and 373 million people who purchase straight from the site.

5. Anonymity app Whisper touts more than 10 million users, 10 billion page views a month and a whopping 1 million app users every minute.

6. Remember Lauren Conrad from MTV’s Laguna Beach and The Hills? A decade after the shows, she’s a bona fide media mogul, with multiple clothing lines, bestselling books and her own lifestyle brand. What’s more, she’s a social-media star, with about 4.4 million followers on Instagram, 3.5 million on Twitter and 1.9 million on Facebook.

7. Monetate, which has access to more than 7 billion shopping experiences from its customer base, found that during the second quarter, traffic to e-commerce sites also increased 30 percent year over year. The digital marketing company also said that sales conversion rates jumped 46 percent over the same time period—largely driven by mobile shoppers.

8. Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders live-tweeted last Wednesday night’s Republican debate. As Digiday reported, analytics company Socialbakers found that Sanders received 452,000 interactions—entailing retweets, replies and favorites—on his tweets that day alone. Compared to his average interactions of 36,700 per day over the previous month, according to Socialbakers, that’s a huge uptick.

9. Speaking of h-u-u-u-uge, on the other side of the political aisle, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump accrued more than 7.5 million Vine loops (the mobile app’s views metric) on his account, but he hasn’t used the video platform since 2013.

And a bonus stat that’s really not about digital marketing: Hampton Creek is a packaged-goods startup that focuses on data to create new foods, which are intended to be more profitable, environmentally friendly and healthy. Last week, Hampton Creek CEO Josh Tetrick told an audience at Salesforce’s Dreamforce conference that his team taps into data from more than 400,000 species of plants.

H/T: Ad Week

4 Keys to Digital Marketing Maturity

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In early 2015, Adobe surveyed nearly 1,000 digital marketers in the United States and Canada to learn priorities and tactics to be deployed in 2015. Industries included in the survey spanned everything from financial services to entertainment and retail.

The conclusion? Digital marketing is moving into a new era. First came the era of innovation. Search put consumers in control. Mobile devices set them free. Social networks connected them. And with each revolution, technology was invented to create, measure and control methods to reach consumers.

But Adobe says digital marketing has “grown up.” We’re at a stage where knowledge, process and a customer-focus drive strategy — not tools and tactics. After years of toying with various new capabilities, marketers can finally stitch everything together to achieve real, meaningful business objectives.

Adobe’s data shows that organizations that have consciously invested in holistic improvements to their digital marketing program are seeing bigger payoffs. A large minority (36%) see elements of their strategic plan as moving them to greater maturity, but these elements are not necessarily linked, where digital maturity is a byproduct, not an overarching goal. Most, however, take an organic approach, with no formal plan for maturing their digital marketing capability. They respond to new conditions but don’t plan ahead for them. Only the elite — one in five — say they have made specific plans and investments with digital maturity specifically in mind.

The Elements of Digital Maturity

Adobe says organizations can evaluate their future digital maturity across four broad categories.

  1. Structure — How are divisions, departments and teams organized to best reflect market conditions?
  2. People — What is the company’s approach to building skills? How are people hired, trained and retained?
  3. Process — How do things get done? How are they resourced, managed and supported by technology?
  4. Technology — What platforms, systems and tools are available, and how they have they been integrated?

While Adobe says each area has its own importance, their research suggests that organizations realize the most gains when these four elements work in tandem. Often organizations will find that they are further along in some dimensions than others. The challenge is to build in areas of weakness without losing momentum in areas of strength.

You can take the same survey Adobe fielded to other financial institutions and test your organization’s digital maturity. To take the test, click here.

1. Digitally Mature Organizations Invest In People, Process and Tools

Many companies think of new capabilities narrowly, in the context of technology. But those with a planned approach to digitally maturity understand that it also means integration into existing processes, sufficient staffing and alignment with strategy. Mature organizations are strong at adopting and nurturing new capabilities and picking up the responsibilities that come with them.

Mature digital marketers recognize that optimization is achieved in small ways on many fronts. This is true for every tactic, channel and customer initiative. For example, huge returns on paid search in the middle part of the last decade gave way to incremental gains based on repetition, analytics and testing.

An organization embracing a “Culture of Optimization” continually leverages data to identify areas of digital improvement. They test, and make frequent and iterative changes. Quite simply, they figure out what works and what doesn’t.

For an organization to establish a true “Culture of Optimization,” this work is on-going, and is instituted across all digital properties. According to Adobe, part of creating your “optimization toolbox” involves significant cultural shifts — a new mindset, with new processes and maybe even new roles. The challenge, Adobe says, is not to just deploy an assortment of techniques and practices, but to be effective and efficient in how they are used.

2. Mature Organizations Adapt to the Consumer

Companies of all sizes, in every sector, like to think of themselves as “customer-centric” — particularly financial institutions. The reality is that many don’t have the processes in place to really listen to consumers, nor the capacity to meet them where, when and how they want.

This disparity is prone to exist almost everywhere brands and consumers interact, but it’s most evident in the mobile channel.
The rise of mobile is the biggest catalyst of change
in marketing today. However, many banks and credit unions have been slow to adopt comprehensive mobile strategies — and thus slow to create the sites and applications their mobile customers need.

Mature digital marketers recognize the strategic advantages of mobile and are reaping the rewards. They far outperform their peers, achieving a mobile conversion rate 12% better than average. And the reasons for this success tie back to fundamentals; how companies approach mobile is a reflection of their broader pursuit of maturity.

Mobile isn’t just a channel. In fact, Adobe says mobile should be woven into the very fabric of your marketing strategy. Every process should at least include the question, “How is mobile relevant here?” Companies should strive for a more strategic approach with experiments and initiatives contributing to greater mobile maturity in every area. Mobile is a new frontier of measurement, customer experience and technology — all of which require training and ongoing education.

Adobe says mobile optimization and personalization are keys to ensuring the experience meets consumer expectations. And yet only 23% of digital marketers plan to optimize their mobile experiences with A/B testing, multivariate testing or segmentation.

Customizing mobile content is another leading indicator of a company’s digital maturity, which can yield an average 66% increase in mobile conversion rate. But even among the most sophisticated digital marketers, only a handful optimize content at the user level.

3. Planned Maturity Builds an Advantage Through Learning

Adobe says there’s no finish line when it comes to digital marketing. Smart marketing organizations recognize that they’ll never achieve technical perfection or mastery over every corner of digital. Instead, they try to put the systems in place to learn from many sources of information and act on those lessons.

Knowledge is never more powerful than in areas where it is scarce. Emerging digital capabilities give the companies that master them early an advantage. For instance, automation of the testing process alone was shown to increase conversion by 15% in Adobe’s study. That kind of advantage is one of the principle goals for those with a planned approach to achieving digital maturity.

In the short-term, organizations with a deliberate, strategic approach see even greater improvements in conversion rates. For example, digitally mature respondents report mobile
app conversion rates nearly 50% higher than those
with an organic approach.

But the most important impact of their investment
in knowledge may well benefit planned-maturity organizations in the long term. By staking their claim to emerging opportunities like mobile customer experience, real-time and location marketing, brands are ensuring growth. Usage and budgets in these areas are still in their infancy, making this the time to learn, make mistakes and build expertise. As they come into their own, mature brands will be ready to profit.

4. Mature Organizations Think Ahead

Strategic initiatives without funding are little more than good intentions. Most organizations want to build their digital marketing capabilities, but Adobe says they’re not willing to extend their budgets to do so effectively.

Digital marketing has embraced a number of inbound marketing techniques to complement (and in some cases replace) paid channels. But Adobe cautions companies focusing on
this side of their capabilities, saying they have to look farther out to evaluate success and justify the investment. Building content and optimizing its delivery is not merely a campaign-to-campaign practice. This approach works in tandem with an investment in areas like analytics, social and marketing optimization.

For those financial institutions responding to change instead of leading it, Adobe says “push advertising” plays an inflated role in their digital programs. It is a thread to the past, one area where they understand what they’re buying, how to buy it and roughly what they might get in return.

For companies pursuing digital maturity, advertising is only one part of the story — a piece of a larger and more diverse mix that better reflects the complexity of how people behave and how digital marketing is evolving.

You can download the entire PDF report, “Four Advantages of a Planned Approach to Digital Maturity,” instantly from Adobe by clicking here (no registration required).

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HT: The Financial Brand

Helping Users Fill Out Online Forms

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A lot of websites rely on forms for important goals completion, such as completing a transaction on a shopping site or registering on a news site. For many users, online forms mean repeatedly typing common information like their names, emails, phone numbers or addresses, on different sites across the web. In addition to being tedious, this task is also error-prone, which can lead many users to abandon the flow entirely. In a world where users browse the internet using their mobile devices more than their laptops or desktops, having forms that are easy and quick to fill out is crucial! Three years ago, we announced the support for a new “autocomplete” attribute in Chrome, to make form-filling faster, easier and smarter. Now, Chrome fully supports the “autocomplete” attribute for form fields according to the current WHATWG HTML Standard. This allows webmasters and web developers to label input element fields with common data types, such as ‘name’ or ‘street-address’, without changing the user interface or the backend. Numerous webmasters have increased the rate of form completions on their sites by marking up their forms for auto-completion.

For example, marking up an email address field on a form to allow auto-completion would look like this (with a full sample form available):

<input type="email" name="customerEmail" autocomplete="email"/>

Making websites friendly and easy to browse for users on mobile devices is very important. We hope to see many forms marked up with the “autocomplete” attribute in the future. For more information, you can check out our specifications about Label and name inputs in Web Fundamentals. And as usual, if you have any questions, please post in our Webmasters Help Forums.

H/T: Google Webmaster.

#NoHacked: Identifying and Diagnosing Injected Gibberish URL Hacking

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Hackers can turn your nondescript website into a malicious spy bot in a matter of minutes, sending sensitive user data to hackers without your even realizing it. Worse, they can hack into your website databases and destroy or manipulate important information, injecting your content with malicious links and even hijack the hosting server to be used in botnet DDoS attacks.

But enough of this scare fest. It’s not all doom and gloom out there on the Web. There are things that you can do to secure your website from hackers and becoming a target for online vandals.

How do you identify and diagnose a trending hack? Even if your site is not infected with a specific trending hack, many of the below steps can be helpful for other types of hacks. Read more