your secret sauce: mixing mobile, social and email marketing
DESCRIPTION
TRANSCRIPT
1
Your Secret Sauce
Mixing Mobile, Social
and eMail SucceSSfullY
Signal
How often do the following statements cross
your mind when you think about what it’s like
to be successful marketer today?
“It’s difficult to know my customers well enough
since I don’t have one place where I can view
my data on them (like purchase behavior, social
media conversations and demographics) and my
marketing efforts (like email, mobile and social
media campaigns) together.”
“It’s much harder than it should be for me to have
meaningful conversations with customers and to
give them only the content that’s relevant to them.”
“There’s a lot of talk about ‘cross-channel marketing,’
but I still really don’t know how that’s any different
than what I’m doing already.”
If you’ve had these thoughts,
consider yourself among the majority.
You are no doubt devoting an
increasing proportion of your
focus—and your budget—to
digital marketing. But your
business, as many do, may
be struggling with how to
integrate channels such as
email, social media and SMS
in a coordinated way with your
other marketing efforts. Ditto
for determining how to create a
comprehensive picture of your
customers using data about
them that is fragmented across
various databases, surveys and
social media. These challenges
certainly make it difficult to
determine true ROI of your
digital efforts.
Finally, you’re probably tired of hearing buzz phrases
like “cross-channel marketing,” “conversational marketing
platforms” and “marketing automation.” These terms do
point to useful strategies and tools to help achieve them,
but frequently the “how” is far too vague.
Our goal is to change that.
In the following pages, the
buzzwords will be demystified
and you’ll learn strategies
and tactics for improving
performance of your marketing
campaigns by building your
customer knowledge and
translating those insights into
the type of communications
your customers will be delighted
to receive. You’ll learn how
to weave email, mobile and
social media marketing into
your marketing mix in a way
that gives customers what they
want, when they want it. You’ll
see how some of the nation’s
most successful businesses
have cultivated and grown a
base of passionate customers
using a strategy based on
listening, empathy and targeted,
personalized communications
designed to inspire loyalty and
repeat business.
index
The Recipe Demystifying the Buzzwords into a
Simple Framework for Marketing Success
The Ingredients Turning Data Into Integrated Email,
Mobile and Social Campaigns
The Taste Test Measuring Your Results
The Presentation Delighting Your Customers
1
2
3
4
Most importantly, we promise all the “highlighter-worthy” data and
tips you can handle. Whether it be convincing your boss to support
a key initiative, or simply tweaking the timing of your Facebook
posts to maximize comments and likes, you will walk away from this
paper with at least one actionable insight that will make you more
successful today.
Let’s dig in.
7
the recipe deMYStifYing the buzzwordS
into a SiMple fraMework for Marketing SucceSS
1
“Cross-channel marketing” and “cross-channel campaign
management” are often thrown around so vaguely that
they may appear to be no more than meaningless jargon.
But, when used correctly, these terms refer to critical and
very real strategies that are important to understand.
8 9
They can be broken down into the following concepts:
• Using multiple marketing media to communicate with your
customers. Most commonly, the media people are referring
to are email marketing, mobile marketing (in particular text
message marketing) and social media.
• Using all of your customer data to determine the media, timing
and content you should use to reach specific customer segments
and individual customers most effectively.
• Adding insights about how customers respond to you
marketing to your database. This will allow you to continuously
improve the relevancy and effectiveness of your campaigns.
• Building your base of subscribers and social fans/followers.
This can mean using media together to move customers
up the commitment ladder (e.g., asking Twitter followers to
join your email newsletter list). Or it can mean using multiple
media to increase the reach and effectiveness of promotions
or offers designed to generate lots of interest (e.g., running a
sweepstakes that people can enter via text message, web form,
Facebook page or tweet).
• Accomplishing all of the above from a single platform or
product that places all your customer data and campaign
information together at your fingertips to save time and money
and increase effectiveness.
Throughout this piece, we will discuss each of these concepts and
give you tips for executing them successfully. But first it might be
worth discussing why marketing across the full array of digital
channels is so important.
The reality is that some businesses still are not active in all of these
channels, or may only have a minimal footprint through a basic
website, a rarely updated Facebook page, or a minimal or nonexistent
SMS marketing plan. But the same can’t be said for their customers.
To truly reach your customers most effectively, you need to reach
them with the content they want over the channels they prefer. And
there’s no escaping the fact that consumers today want to—and do—
communicate with brands through multiple channels. These include
email, website, Twitter, Facebook and SMS as well as traditional
face-to-face and voice interactions. And each and every one of these
interactions contributes to their overall view of the brand.
For this reason, it’s important that marketers not only be active and
effective in each of these channels, but also that they coordinate
their communications across them. Otherwise, customers may be hit
with inconsistent, conflicting messaging that lessens their confidence
in the brand—and in its ability to meet their needs.
This may jive with your current experiences and beliefs, or
perhaps you’re not yet convinced that consumers care about
interacting with your brand on social networks or their mobile
phone. We’ve got news for you: consumer expectations about
transparency, responsiveness and empathy have changed. And
the digital media that have emerged are critical both to fueling
and fulfilling these new expectations.
10 11
Need proof?
A 2012 Aberdeen study found
of top-performing retail companies expanded their use
of digital channels;
of lower-performing companies expanded.
A 2010 Accenture survey found
of smartphone users would like to download money-off
coupons to their phones;
would like to receive instant money-off coupons as they
pass by an item in a store.
A 2012 survey found
Half of American consumers are open to receiving mobile
offers, and a greater proportion would prefer to receive
offers on their phone via text messaging over email,
mobile applications or voicemail.
A 2010 Yankee Group study found
of consumers want to interact with businesses using social
media;
but less than one-third of companies have the strategies,
policies, and processes in place to meet that demand.
A 2012 study by American Express found
Social media-savvy consumers spend more when they
get good customer service than the general population,
tell three times as many people about their positive
experiences, and are more likely to ditch companies when
they don’t get good service.
Another consumer survey found
of consumers have a more positive impression of
companies they receive email from;
are more likely to buy—online or offline—from companies
that send them email.
Once you’ve been convinced
to take the initial step of being
present and active across all the
channels where your customers
live, you still need to find out
more about them so you can
reach them with more targeted,
personalized messaging.
Thankfully, there aren’t many
marketers lacking for data these
days. In fact, we have already
entered what many refer to as
the era of “Big Data.” A 2011
study by the McKinsey Global
Institute projects that the total
amount of data being generated
will grow by 40 percent each
year. The same study estimates
that retailers harnessing this
data fully could increase their
operating margins by 60 percent.
79%
75%
73%
52%
70%
57%50%
-1/3
3x
12 13
How many different databases, reports and tools do the data points
you routinely work with live in? If you’re like most marketers,
the answer is too many.
For marketers, the problem isn’t the amount of data available, but instead finding a way to harvest it in one place to make effective use of it in your marketing efforts. How many of the following types of data look familiar to you?
A 2011 eConsultancy survey
indicated that more than half
of marketers store the data
they gather their multi-channel
marketing efforts in in separate,
siloed locations.
While the term may not make
this clear, the fundamental
premise behind “cross-channel
marketing” is the ability to unify
all this data to directly inform
all of your digital marketing,
regardless of medium.
But accumulating and unifying
this data alone is not enough.
Too often, digital or direct
marketing is read as “sending
communications to people who
should be interested in them.”
While that’s a start, you must
also consider how to get people
interested in listening to you to
begin with. And after you’ve got
them listening, you need to keep
finding new ways to provide
novel and wonderful content
that reinforces why they chose
to listen in the first place.
Humans seek novelty and will
open their gates to many initial
brand conversations, but they
are also pattern-recognizing
machines. Your initial marketing
strategy will work quite well
as your customers open their
hearts for the first time, but
afterwards, they will learn to
filter your marketing efforts out
unless they remain consistently
unique, useful and engaging.
While companies understand
the value and cost-effectiveness
of engaging with customers
more directly through digital
channels, too often they are
reaching their customers in
disjointed and repetitive ways.
When brands don’t differentiate
content by channel, respect
a customer’s preference, or
produce new and useful content,
messaging fails. In a world
where people receive as many
as 5,000 ad messages a day,
each communication must be
channel-appropriate, thoughtful
and engaging.
Lead source data
Purchase/transaction history
Survey data
Loyalty program and coupon
redemption history
Social media brand mentions
and sentiment
Customer conversations with
you over social media or
customer support touch points
Marketing campaign history
(e.g., campaigns received, open
rate and click rate)
14
The world’s best brands
recognize this and are
starting to move beyond
the multichannel “blast”
approach. Using digital
marketing tools such as
Signal, they can tie these
marketing channels together
and evolve from multichannel
to cross-channel marketing.
Instead of uncoordinated,
siloed communications for
each individual channel,
companies have the power
to originate their email, SMS
and social media marketing
communications from a single
platform. They can develop
a universal profile of each
customer across every channel
to learn which messages and
communication media each
individual customer prefers.
And they can see how customer
responses to different messages
and tactics change over time.
Once this is achieved, they can
keep these customers engaged
over the long term by giving
them what they most desire.
These companies have
discovered the very sticky
“secret sauce” that delights
customers: messages that
are targeted, personal and
relevant to each customer’s
individual preferences. Instead
of creating the customer
distaste that can result from a
steady diet of uncoordinated,
untargeted campaigns, these
communications create a
competitive advantage and
whet customers’ appetites for
repeat business.
the ingredientS turning data into
integrated eMail , Mobile and Social caMpaignS
2
16 17
Build a single database
A critical component of getting
the most ROI out of marketing
initiatives is to know what’s
working and what isn’t.
But according to Forrester research, about 87 percent of marketers and 85 percent of agencies misattribute credit: They either attribute all credit to the last touch point or have no way of attributing the credit in a meaningful manner.
Using digital marketing tools
such as Signal, you can manage,
monitor and measure all of your
customer relationships from
a single source. You can also
create and track unique offers
for each channel interaction
to determine what’s most
effective. Moving to a cross-
channel approach enables
you to simplify campaign
rollout across all media and
to automatically collect data
from every campaign in one
place. It allows you to establish
a consistent workflow across
channels to minimize the
complexity of scheduling and
sending messages, and to
implement a reliable approval
process from headquarters
for all digital communications.
At the customer level, it helps
you learn more about your
customers so that you can reach
them more effectively.
One Aberdeen Group study found that 47 percent of best-in-class
companies integrate customer data across all marketing channels,
versus 22 percent of average companies and 19 percent of laggards.
The same study found that companies that integrate data captured across all marketing channels achieve a 41 percent better company gross margin than those that don’t.
Best-in-C
lass
50% 47%
22% 19%
30%
40%
20%
10%
Average
Laggards
18 19
Even those companies that
don’t currently integrate their
marketing data realize the
importance of doing so. A
2011 IBM survey of nearly 300
marketers found that nearly
90 percent of respondents
expressed interest in an
integrated marketing suite,
as the industry’s need for
technology grows and adoption
matures. By connecting with
your customers through
social media, email, and SMS
using one source—instead of
maintaining separate, siloed
lists—you will eventually be
able to develop a universal
profile of each customer across
all digital channels. Using your
cross-channel platform, you can
also connect this information to
your point-of-sale and loyalty
marketing data to get a complete
view of your customers’
preferences and behaviors.
Ultimately, you’ll want to import
all of your customer data into
your digital marketing platform.
This should include all of your
internal customer database data,
which may contain information
like purchase history or loyalty
program participation, your
website or mobile apps, and
any CRM products you use
to manage customer loyalty
programs or offline marketing
efforts. If you have such an
internal customer database, or
a CRM marketing tool, be sure
to set up data syncing between
these tools and your cross-
channel marketing platform to
ensure that you have consistent,
up-to-the-minute data and
coordinated marketing activities.
Create communications that are more relevant and personalized
Right now, according to a 2011 McKinsey survey, 38 percent of
marketers say their companies have basic demographic information
on each customer, while only 18 percent say their customer data
includes detailed information such as interests or attitudes.
Respondents also reported that marketing decisions were most
likely to rely on internal sales data that has long been available to
marketing departments.
Marketing fails when companies ignore the expectations of their
customers and take these customer relationships for granted by
sending them too many untargeted messages. And today, many
marketers are not only sending messages that aren’t targeted, they’re
throwing money away on messages that never even reach their
intended audiences.
According to a Forrester study, marketers will waste nearly $144 million in 2014 on marketing messages that never even get delivered.
Signal gives you the tools to more effectively gather insights about
your customers from all of your customer touch points that you can
then use to create more highly targeted and personalized messaging,
while also flagging bad email addresses and mobile numbers for
elimination from your lists.
20 21
One simple way to start personalizing your messaging is to transform
your customer data into segments, which can be done in many
ways. For instance, you can segment by geography to increase
the relevance of your offers, instead of sending your San Diego
customers deals on winter coats. Or by store location, so your
customers get deals appropriate to the local store they shop at. You
can even segment by store attribute (e.g., stores with a pharmacy
attached) to further increase the relevance of your communications.
Mining your purchase data, you can also segment by the kinds of
products purchased to let customers know about the new edition
of a product they bought, or about a product recall. Or you can
segment by price of items purchased, so that you hit high spenders
and budget shoppers with the right kinds of deals to maximize
conversions. Another way to segment is by deal interests, so
you’re not annoying gadget lovers with ads for jewelry. You can
also segment by customer demographics, such as age attributes,
to ensure you strike the right tone in your messages to distinct
customer groups, instead of trying to talk to college kids and over-60
customers in the same way.
Timing is another important aspect of your communications.
Examples would be setting up automatic communications to go to
your customers on milestones that matter to them, such as their
birthdays, or on shared milestones such as the anniversary of the
date they joined your subscription list. You can also time your
messages to create the greatest return for your business, such as
offering enticing deals during low-traffic periods. And you can
ensure that your email and SMS messages speak to your customers
in a more personalized way by using dynamic data tags to address
them by first name, their address, or any number of other attributes
you select.
FRI
22 23
Reach customers across the email, mobile and social channels
According to a 2011 Edison Research study, more than 51 percent
of Americans ages 12 and up have Facebook accounts, up from just
8 percent in 2008. And a 2011 Pew Internet survey found that 70
percent of Americans are on email, while another found that 83
percent of Americans own cell phones and 73 percent of cell phone
owners send and receive text messages. Since your best customers
are likely active on all three channels, it’s important that you
understand their communication preferences across them all to truly
reach your individual customers most effectively.
Attract new audiences through social media.
Social media is the fastest-
growing channel and allows
you to reach an incredibly high
volume of people. Facebook
is on track to have more than
a billion users and Twitter is
expected to have over 250
million active users by the end
of 2012. Facebook and Twitter
are great ways for marketers to
reach new audiences and have
authentic two-way interactions
with consumers. Social
media is also a great tool for
facilitating conversations with
customers and for customer
service, and because of its
sharing capabilities that
increase the chances of your
messages going viral.
Getting someone to become
your fan or follower is also a
relatively low commitment
for consumers compared to
getting them to join your email
or SMS lists, so it’s a great way
to connect with new potential
customers. Unfortunately,
both Facebook and Twitter are
also undeniably scattershot as
marketing tools. It’s difficult to
segment and personalize your
communications effectively
using either, and it’s also likely
that even your most dedicated
fans and followers will not read
many of your messages.
The chronological layout of
Twitter timelines, coupled with
the sheer volume of tweets
many users receive, make it
almost inevitable that your
followers will miss some of
your tweets. And Facebook’s
EdgeRank algorithm can
prevent your posts from
appearing in your fans’ News
Feeds at all if you’re not creating
content that’s consistently
interesting to them.
These facts make a good case
for the need to write compelling
social media content. They
also underscore the value in
converting your social followers
51% have a Facebook account
70% are on email
83% own a cell phone
73% send and receive texts
24 25
into SMS and email marketing
subscribers. As people with a
genuine, expressed interest in
your products and services, your
fans and followers are the perfect
targets for these efforts. And by
recruiting fans and followers to
your email and SMS lists, you
can forge deeper relationships
with them by offering them
more personalized and targeted
content than you ever could
through social media alone.
To accelerate your email and
SMS subscription lists using
social media, first focus on
attracting more fans and
followers. Publicize your
presence on Facebook and
Twitter in your stores, on
your website, and in your ads.
Facebook ads are another
cost-effective way to get more
fans. Entice people to join by
offering fans and followers
exclusive content they won’t find
anywhere else, and emphasize
giveaways and discounts. By
acquiring social followers and
then offering them deals they
appreciate, you can help them
see the value in joining your
lists.
To get them on your lists, invite
your Facebook fans or Twitter
followers to text for a special
offer. Ask that they join your
SMS or email list in return
while emphasizing their ability
to unsubscribe at any time.
Run social promotions and ask
entrants to opt in to your email
or SMS list as the price of entry.
And reach new audiences using
referral bonuses that ask all
new subscribers to refer their
friends to also join, right from
the confirmation page they get
after signing up using your Web
form. Give each friend an offer
or coupon for joining, and give
the referrer a special offer of
even greater value if they refer a
specified number of friends.
Build stronger connections through your subscription lists.
While attracting fans and followers can gain you access to a wider
array of customers, your email and SMS lists hold the key to building
deeper connections with them through greater personalization and
segmentation of your communications.
Social media is unparalleled for social interactions, but email is more
accepted as a transactional tool and is a place where people expect
to receive business messages. It is the “tried and true” digital channel
that businesses are most experienced with and use most. Compared
to SMS and social marketing, it offers marketers opportunities to
be more visual, content-rich, and nurturing. Its lack of character
limitations make it a low-cost way to deliver persuasive, more in-
depth appeals. And since opting in to your email list requires more
of a conscious decision than clicking “like” or “follow,” you can feel
confident that you are reaching people who want to receive your
marketing content.
Email has another advantage over social media in its potential for greater
bulk segmentation and personalization of communication. It additionally
offers sophisticated tracking potential when compared to social media,
where you can’t currently track who your message was delivered to, who
read it or who clicked on your links.
SMS (text) marketing does not allow for the in-depth content possible
over email or the web, but it offers simplicity, along with something
no other medium can: an unparalleled way to reach your most
dedicated customers anywhere, in real time. Eighty-three percent of
texts are read within one hour, and mobile has three to five times the
reported clickthrough rate of other media. This immediacy makes
SMS the best medium for real-time offers and alerts.
26 27
Schedule your content in advance across channels.
As you build universal profiles
of your customers by connecting
with them over social media and
opting them in to your email
and SMS subscriber lists, you
will be able to undertake a more
integrated approach in planning
your communications. In doing
so, you will learn that each
medium demands a different
approach in terms of messaging
and optimal timing.
For instance, email open
and click rates are highest in
the early morning, and also
attractive in the mid-afternoon
and early evening. Mobile
marketing’s immediacy and
timeliness make it a great choice
for midday communications,
when email open rates are
lowest. And when posting social
media messages, it’s worth
considering that Facebook’s
high activity periods include
lunch, early morning, late
evening, and weekends, and that
Twitter has the highest activity
at lunch and at 6 p.m.
When creating your digital
communications plan, you
should also take message
frequency into account.
To prevent people from
unsubscribing to your SMS list,
you should reserve some of your
most compelling and timely
offers for your text subscribers
and start out with one text a
week or less. Restraint is also
a plus when it comes to email:
according to one study, the
optimal frequency is one to four
emails a month.
In contrast, Facebook requires
more frequent content, since
the site’s algorithm determines
whether your fans are clicking
on your posts regularly and
removes you from their News
Feeds if they don’t — even
though they “like” you. Consider
posting every other day to
start. One analysis found that
Facebook pages updating with
this frequency had the most
likes. Twitter accounts tend to
benefit from even more regular
updates. Try tweeting at least
once a day to start, and consider
posting more often. And don’t
be afraid to repeat tweets,
since Twitter dashboards are
chronological and your followers
are likely to see only your most
recent posts.
By scheduling your content in
advance, you can make sure
that you’re selecting the right
communication frequencies for
each channel, and that you’re not
bombarding your subscribers
with too much content overall.
You can also save time and
coordinate the approvals of your
messaging more efficiently, and
also more easily test which times
of day and days of the week are
most effective in reaching your
customers across these media.
While we’ve provided some
basic guidelines for timing and
frequency, you may find that
different approaches work best in
the execution of your campaigns.
NooN 6 P.M.6 A.M.
Email FacebookMobile Twitter
Communications Timing High-use rates for each medium
28 29
Give people a reason to stay engaged.Once you’ve got subscribers, fans and followers, retaining them is as
important as attracting new ones. And the key to both acquiring and
retaining your digital subscribers is to offer them added value that
they won’t get anywhere else in the form of exclusive news and offers.
Here are a few ways our customers have done this successfully.
Appeal to their wallets
Coupons are a great way to get people to join your lists and to keep
people engaged after they’ve become subscribers. To encourage
subscriptions, use your cross-channel platform to add a web form
as a tab on your Facebook account, or send a tweet with a link to
your form on Twitter. Offering incentives for opting in by filling out
the form is a good way to spur your lists’ growth. The fast-food chain
Culver’s, for instance, offers new subscribers a free value meal for
joining its eClub on Facebook and a free scoop of frozen custard for
joining its Text Club.
Another approach is to get people to text in to receive a coupon
or offer. Ask your Facebook fans or Twitter followers to text to join
your SMS or email list in return for a special offer. The movie and
game rental company Redbox has had success doing this by offering
customers a free rental in return for joining its email list. Using your
cross-channel platform, you can create plain text or web-based
coupons for insertion in SMS, email or social messages, and track
how many coupons were delivered through each marketing channel.
You can also make these coupons finite in number so when your
campaign has sent the total number of coupons in the group, no
additional coupons will be sent to participants. And you can export
coupon codes from your point-of-sale system to track redemption
rates. You can even choose to create public coupons that your
subscribers can share with their friends across channels.
Whatever strategy you choose, be sure to mix it up and test different
options. A couponing strategy is only successful if the coupons are
being redeemed, and certain customers may redeem one type of
offer more than another.
Declare a winner
In our experience, digital sweepstakes are one of the most effective
ways to draw people into your brand. For example, Memphis
Car Audio worked with DDC Marketing to develop an integrated
sweepstakes campaign tied the release of the movie Fast Five, with
a trip for two to the movie’s Brazil premiere as the grand prize. The
sweepstakes was promoted on multiple channels, including the web
and Facebook, and people could enter via mobile, web, or Facebook.
DDC Marketing used the Signal platform to develop, launch,
and manage the sweepstakes across the mobile, social, and web
channels. By running the sweepstakes and adding entrants to their
email list as the price of entry, the company successfully reinforced
its brand, drove in-store traffic, and added more than 93,000
subscribers to its email list.
30 31
Get them in the game
Engaging people through polls, trivia and fun surveys can be a good
way to keep people interested. They can also help you grow your
subscriber, fan and follower base. Whether it be a prize, coupon or
simply the fun of sharing their opinion or trivia knowledge, people
get value out of participating in promotions. Given that, what better
way to give people a compelling reason to opt-in to your list or “like”
you on Facebook than to run a promotion? “Give, then get” is the
foundation of all great marketing.
These promotions can also help you grow your database of customer
insights. You can learn about your customers through the actual
poll answers and survey responses they give as well as by seeing
what prizes motivate them, what kinds of trivia they know, and what
coupons they respond to. The data from every promotion you run is
saved with that person’s profile in your Signal database. Armed with
this data, you can create more meaningful customer segments to
better target your emails, texts and social posts. Liked that coupon?
Here’s another just like it. Picked pizza in that last poll? Did you
know we just added pizzas to our menu? Sorry you didn’t win that
holiday sweater shopping spree, but we’re having a sale on them now
— you should check it out.
Provide updates, news and exclusive content.
Another way to keep your subscribers engaged is by giving them the
key information they want. Let them know about the opening of new
stores near them, about changes to the hours of the store they shop
in, and about new products they might be interested in. Also be sure
to offer them exclusive content they won’t find anywhere else, with
an emphasis on special deals and offers. One study found that 37
percent of Facebook users “like” fan pages just to receive coupons
and deals. Reward your email and SMS subscribers with even more
appealing offers than you give your social followers for joining and
remaining on your lists.
new
33
the taSte teSt MeaSuring Your reSultS
3
Once you’ve gotten your cross-channel marketing plan
underway, it’s integral that you measure its effectiveness.
You should do this both by taking a big-picture view
of your list growth and by analyzing the detailed results
of your individual campaigns.
34 35
It’s critical to retain subscribers
and maintain valuable touch
points with your guests. To
ensure subscriber retention,
or “stickiness,” your calls to
action when asking for the
initial subscription should
clearly and honestly state the
content people will receive
when they join your list. If
your attrition rate (rate of
people unsubscribing) is over
10 percent, then you’re doing
something wrong.
In addition, you should get
comfortable with doing cohort
analyses to help track stickiness.
Simply put, cohort analysis
means dividing your subscribers
into groups to better profile your
list. For example, by dividing
your list into groups based on
length of subscriptions, you can
see if most of your customers
have been subscribers for one
to three months, three to six
months, six to nine months,
or up to a year or more. This
serves as a useful indicator of
how successful you’ve been in
retaining subscribers over the
long term.
Another metric to consider is the
depth of customer insight you
have gathered for your individual
subscribers. Have you succeeded
in developing a universal
profile of your subscribers that
includes their social, email
and SMS touch points? Have
you continued to gain more
insights into their demographics,
communication preferences,
product preferences, where they
are in the customer life cycle,
and the types of offers they
respond to? It is this information
that will enable you to better
personalize your offers and build
customer loyalty.
To analyze the success of your cross-channel marketing, first take a
look at the growth of your number of social fans and followers as well
as the growth of your email and SMS subscriber lists. While the size
of your lists is important, so is their net growth. If your lists aren’t
growing over a period of time, it means you’re not doing enough to
promote your lists and their value.
Every opt-in or new follower is a win. By reviewing the volume of
permission-based opt-ins over time, you can interpret your success
overall, and on a campaign-by-campaign basis. For example,
the Signal platform shows how easily you can track which ads or
promotions in an enrollment campaign led to new subscribers, which
is key to determining ROI — and to determining which tactics you
should focus on in future campaigns.
Evaluate the growth of your database.
36 37
SMS
For SMS marketing, the key benchmarks to consider are delivery
rate, click rate and unsubscribe rate. Open rate is not as much of an
issue given that recipients have little choice but to see their messages
upon receipt. Instead, click rate is a critical gauge of whether your
offers are working. A recent Signal review of large-scale messaging
campaigns found an average click rate of 6.16 percent for texts
containing a URL. You must also carefully monitor your unsubscribe
rate, since consumers have little patience for receiving content that
is not of value to them over SMS. A high unsubscribe rate is a clear
indication that you need to enhance your SMS offers.
Social
For social media campaigns, click rate is important, just as it is with
SMS and email. But it differs in that its other key metric is engagement.
And to truly judge the effectiveness of the social content you create,
you have to look at all of the different actions people take with it,
from retweets to likes to forwards to comments. Your cross-channel
platform allows you to get a consolidated view of your social fans and
followers and their activities in one place. You can see trending stats
for fans, likes, comments and wall posts on Facebook. You can view
trends for followers gained and lost, mentions, messages and retweets
on Twitter. And you can—and should—also track the performance of
individual campaigns by creating unique coupon codes for your social
campaigns and by creating distinct URLs for each campaign to track
the source of your clickthroughs.
Analyze the performance of your campaignsUsing the analytics capabilities of your cross-channel platform,
you can diagnose how each of your campaigns performed
by comparing the results to past campaigns and to overall
benchmarks for each digital medium.
The key benchmarks to consider for emails are delivery rate, open
rate, click rate and unsubscribe rate. Recent industry averages for
North America are delivery rates of 96.3 percent, open rates of
24.8 percent and click rates of 5.2 percent. Your delivery rate is a
reflection of the accuracy of your email list. If your open rate is poor,
you might try to tweak your subject line. If people are opening your
emails but not redeeming your offers, it means you might need to
rethink your offer strategy. And if your unsubscribe rate is high, you
know that you’re not offering compelling enough content to keep your
subscribers interested — so you might want to continue experimenting
and to also include a greater proportion of your most successful offer
tactics in your communication mix.
38 39
When it comes to coupons,
redemption rate is the true
metric of how compelling
your offers are. If people are
opening but not redeeming
them, it’s a sign that you need
to rethink your offer strategy.
If a third or more of your offers
sent are being redeemed,
you’re doing something right.
By subsequently looking at
ticket totals when a purchase
is made with a marketing offer
redeemed, you can start to see if
you are getting true ROI out of
these offers. Compare this figure
to non-offer ticket totals. How
does it stack up? Sometimes a
small discount on an item can
be the nudge to drive store
traffic and additional purchases.
Over time, you will also get a
sense of how much it costs you
to acquire a subscriber. For
example, if you run a billboard
advertisement for $10,000
containing a call to action to get
people to join your SMS list, and
are told you would get 500,000
impressions, that’s roughly $.02
per impression. If 10 percent
of people opt in, you’ve paid
$10,000 for 50,000 subscribers,
or roughly $.20 for each
converted subscriber. Figures
like these should go into your
projections and calculations
to help you understand if your
program and its elements
are profitable. You can learn
how much it cost you to add
a subscriber using in-store
signage versus a newspaper ad
versus QSR codes on product
packaging, for instance. And
by looking at redemptions, the
average number of digital offer-
based visits each month, and
your subscribers’ average ticket
total, you can also start to put
together the average monthly
value of a subscriber.
Determine which channels yield the best results
By measuring the results of your campaign initiatives in the email,
SMS and social channels, you can learn which content works best
on each channel for each person. You’ll be able to see what kinds
of deals each likes, and whether they respond more favorably to an
afternoon tweet, an early-morning email, or a midday text.
Using this information, you will be able to continually improve your
marketing communications to make your messages more targeted
and personalized for each of your customers. In the process of
your campaigns, you can also test which individual elements of
a communication work better by using A/B testing. For instance,
you can test the relative strengths of two email subject lines by
sending each version to a portion of a target audience with separate
redemption codes and tracking which gets the best results. You can
do the same for different channels by attaching a different code to
each campaign element to learn whether your email, social or SMS
communications were most effective in spurring responses. And you
can see whether different segments of your audience respond better
to certain approaches. For example, you may find that social coupons
are more effective with younger customers and that email works
better with your older customers.
vs vs
40
Monitor the conversation.While tracking your campaigns is integral, it’s also essential to have
a big-picture understanding of how people are talking about your
business or brand. Whether your goal is to collect all of your praise
or to support customers having issues, you can use your cross-
channel platform to track sentiment and recent messages. You can
also scan popular content filters and easily categorize content so
that you can act quickly to resolve problems related to conversations
about your brand on social media.
the preSentation delighting Your cuStoMerS
4
42 43
Transitioning to a cross-channel
approach takes time, effort and
determination. And if you’re not
there yet, you can take comfort
in the fact that you’re not alone.
According to one Aberdeen
study, just 54 percent of best-
in-class companies do business-
actionable analysis of mobile
marketing campaign results and
over 60 percent of the best-in-
class aren’t yet using customer
behavior information to target
and segment their messaging
through the mobile channel.
But it’s also clear that times are
changing — and that those who
don’t change with them will be
left behind. A 2011 McKinsey
global survey of marketers
found that the most important
digital-related challenge for
marketers and business leaders
is that “the ability to generate
and leverage deep customer
insights is becoming a necessity
to compete effectively.”
A cross-channel approach
helps you efficiently collect
and act upon extensive
customer insight. It enables
you to more effectively manage
your marketing resources
and better understand where
you’re money’s working and
where it isn’t. It crashes down
the silos that separate your
digital marketing channels
and gives you the ability
to truly create a coherent,
streamlined and consistent
brand presence across channels.
Most importantly, it allows
you to communicate with your
customers in a more targeted,
more personal way. In a world
where mass marketing is losing
its effectiveness, cross-channel
marketing gives you the ability
to engage customers on their
terms with the content and
offers they want. It’s the “secret
sauce” that keeps them coming
back for more.
About Signal
Signal develops and provides marketing solutions
designed to help companies acquire, retain and develop
customer relationships via mobile, social, web and email.
The company’s easy-to-use software-as-a-service cross-
channel campaign management platform (Signal) enables
marketers to rapidly develop, execute, and analyze
campaigns using multiple channels, all feeding a common
customer database embracing the concept of a universal
profile. Used by many leading brands, retailers, online
services, agencies, and broadcast media, Signal processes
millions of customer interactions each month.
www.signalhq.com
877–450–0075