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THE ULTIMATE EMAIL MARKETING GUIDE FOR BEGINNERS

Email marketing is one of the oldest forms of digital marketing and there’s a reason for that  - it works! Using the power of email, businesses can connect with customers, build brand awareness, encourage brand loyalty, and nurture prospects to become paying customers. 

Since the coronavirus pandemic, email has become even more important to consumers as a way to keep up with brands. DMA’s Consumer Email Tracker 2021 report found that for the first time, the relevance of received messages (55 percent) became the main reason consumers like brand emails, surpassing discounts and offers (53 percent).

But while email marketing may seem like a simple channel to use, there’s an art and science to using it successfully. In this blog, we’ll look at the nuts and bolts of email marketing and give you great examples to gain inspiration for kickstarting your campaigns. 

What is email marketing?

The definition of email marketing is a form of digital marketing that uses email to promote products or services to potential or existing customers. 

Email marketing is an essential channel leveraged by B2C and B2B companies to build brand awareness, grow customer loyalty and drive conversions. 

Why is email marketing important?

Email marketing is one of the most profitable direct marketing channels, with Statista projecting global revenue from email to reach $17.9 billion by 2027. That’s a lot of companies using email successfully! 

Let’s look at three of the most important aspects of email marketing for your business. 

1) Data collection

One of the key reasons companies leverage email is for data collection. As third-party cookies are phased out, getting email subscribers is a great way to collect personal data from people who are interested in your business with consent.

With consumers wanting to protect their information, businesses need to adhere to data privacy regulations such as GDPR or CCPA. Email uses first-party data to collect information in a way that builds brand loyalty and awareness.   

2) Inbound marketing

Email can also help you to attract prospects and leads by using relevant content. So, how can email marketing fuel your overall inbound marketing strategy?   

Email is a great way to engage with prospects who have already shown an interest in your company, product, or service. They do this by opting in or signing up as a subscriber to a newsletter.  

The nature of using email for inbound marketing means that your leads are warmer as they have greater intent and interest in your business. It also means the Return on Investment is higher and costs can be lower as inbound email lists tend to have lower subscribers. 

3) Personalization

As you know who you are making contact with, content and messaging can be segmented and personalized using email. This means you can group lists in a variety of ways by people who:

• Show an interest in a particular product or service
• Have specific preferences e.g. they like cats!
• Are based in the same location
• Are a specific age and gender

The more you know about your customers or prospects the easier it will be to write a prospecting email that gets replies! It’s not about bombarding your lists however, be clever about the frequency and make sure you A/B test subject lines and content to see what resonates.

How to get email marketing lists?

With so many benefits to email, it’s no wonder that companies are looking to start or build their lists. There are several ways to do this.

• Use CTAs - Use clear and directed calls to action (CTAs) on your website or landing pages to urge people to sign up for email updates 
• Use social media - If you use any social media channels, let your users know that you have an email list for special offers or exclusives  
• Offer free downloads - People love freebies, so think about offering a free downloadable ebook or whitepaper  
• Use pop-ups or forms - Pop-ups or forms are common across websites and urge people to give their email addresses to find out more   
• Run a competition - Competitions are a great way to get people to provide personal information, just make sure the offer is enticing enough!
• Advertise a special offer - A discount or a two-for-one offer can urge people to join your email list 
• Offer a blog subscription - If you have a blog, consider setting up a subscriber list to get the latest content. Find out how to start a blog if that sounds like a fit for your business. 
• Get customers involved - You can give existing customers a referral incentive e.g get 20 percent off your next purchase if a friend signs up 
• Ask for feedback - As part of a feedback or testimonial form, ask people to opt-in to email   
• Host a webinar or podcast - These offer high value and people will provide information when signing up 
• Create a newsletter - This can be a good way to keep people up-to-date on new development, discounts or competitions    
• Just ask! - Sometimes it is simply about spreading the word and asking for an email address, you may be surprised how many people like your brand

How to do email marketing: Step-by-step guide

Now that you know the value of email and how to start and bolster your email lists, how do you create and implement an email marketing campaign?  

Collate a list

When you create an email campaign, the key metrics for success are the growth and quality of the subscriber list. You should look at creating lists that are segmented by type. That can be by audience, preference, or category but avoid putting every contact into one pot and hoping it will work! 

Look at what prospects or customers you want to engage and why. Then collate an email list using Excel or your email marketing tool. Label each list clearly so you can find them again easily and also track performance. 

Choose an email marketing tool

There are a lot of email marketing tools out there. So you need to do your research and choose the best one for your business. 

Some tools are free to start using and then charge by the number of contacts in your database. This is why keeping on top of your lists is important as you’ll be paying for each one: so be prepared to audit your lists regularly. A few tools to look into are:

• MailChimp
• HubSpot
• Marketo 
• GetResponse

Check out ‘A Practical Guide to the Top Email Marketing Automation Tools’ to find out how to choose the right one for you.

Plan an email workflow

A workflow is a series of automated emails that are put in a certain order to nurture a prospect or guide a customer to take a certain action. There are a few steps required to set one up:

• Set a goal for your workflow - For example, it could be to convert prospects to enter a free trial
• Create enrollment criteria - This decides who enters the workflow by the settings you choose. For example, it could be anyone who downloaded a specific ebook
• Decide on your email assets - This could be a CTA to drive someone to a blog or a custom landing page for a free trial sign-up
• Create your emails - Once you know your goal and have the assets in place, think about each step in the journey and the touchpoints 
• Include a time delay -  i.e. space the first and second email with a day in-between
• Run a test - Always run a test using a test email before activating any workflow to make sure everything is correct

Make your workflow live and keep an eye on it! - Check-in daily to see that your flows are working and the right people are being added to it. Make any changes or tweaks as soon as possible. 

Plan a calendar

An email calendar is like an editorial or social media calendar. It’s about planning the frequency and audience regularly to target prospects and customers. 

Decide on how often you want to communicate with certain segments or groups and set goals for each campaign. Tracking your email marketing activities by date will help you to see who you are targeting and when. 

You also need to keep times and days in mind when sending. Some will work better than others depending on your audience e.g on a commute or first thing in the morning. Test these out to see what works for your lists.

Plan your Email Campaigns

Download our FREE handy calendar template to get started right away with planning your email campaigns into 2023! It includes a list of key holidays you can plan for and a color coded key to help you organize your campaigns to the max.

Write email copy

Now to the most important bit - the content of the email. As a marketer, you should know your buyer personas or ideal customer/s and understand their pain points. If so, then you’ll be able to target messaging in a way that prompts a click on an email. 

With an email, the subject line is super important as it’s the first thing a person sees in their inbox. Think about A/B testing subject lines with certain groups to compare performance and see if it can guide your copy. 

It’s also key to keep your messaging clear and succinct and use CTAs to direct people to take an action. Use a content and copywriting checklist to keep your messaging clear and focused when writing every single marketing email.

Tip: Check out ‘The Anatomy of an Effective Marketing Email’ to find out all the elements to include to implement a successful email campaign. 

Press the send button

Now you’ve done all the hard work, it’s time to see how your email does in the real world. 

Test before you send (check copy, subject lines, images and ensure your links work), and then let it free! 

Beginner-friendly email marketing campaign examples

When you’re starting it can seem overwhelming to figure out how to set up an email campaign and what content to include. There is a range of different types of email to keep in mind (depending on your goals) when crafting your campaigns:

• Awareness building - new product, welcome, announcement
• Lead generation - downloadable asset, blog article, custom landing page
• Nurture - new offer, additional product, reminder
• Traffic generation - relevant blog article, trial or offer on the website
• Revenue generating - conversion 

Here are a few examples of good email campaigns from some interesting brands, to inspire you. 

Nike - Just In Time Email

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Nike's "Father's Day Gift Guide" direct mail piece reminds you not to forget to give your dad a nice gift for Father's Day and provides a call to action link so you can select something for dad from Nike's gift collection.  This direct mail piece is effective because it is both a promotion for that special day for dad and a branding campaign that does not leave out Nike's famous catch line "Just Do It".     

BuzzFeed - Animals Newsletter

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BuzzFeed's "The BuzzFeed Animals Newsletter" direct mail piece is targeted at animal lovers every where.  BuzzFeed also wants users to know that it offers different newsletters that are dispatched on a daily, weekly, bi-weekly or monthly basis. This direct mail piece also includes a call to action box where users can subscribe to their newsletters by entering their email address and selecting their choice of newsletters from a list of 13 newsletters with check boxes.  It's simple and to the point and allows BuzzFeed to target users by their newsletter interests for marketing purposes. 

NerdWallet - Nurture email

Personal finance company, NerdWallet uses email to nurture prospects so they can entice people back who have shown an interest in their service. This example below leads with an enticing headline ‘New ways to get more from your money’ along with including the text ‘New and tailored to you’ to drive personalization. 

The email then uses clear and clever copy to entice people to click on clear actions - ‘Set your goals’ and ‘Start saving’ an attractive opportunity for most people. Clean and colorful imagery also helps to draw the eye with the predominant green, keeping it on brand. 

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NerdWallet's "New Ways To Get More From Your Money" direct mail piece is colorful, attention grabbing and reminds customers and prospects alike that they live up to their motto, "All Things Money, In One Place" by reminding customers and prospects alike that it is "new and tailored to you".  It offers customers tips on how to set goals and start saving with convenient call-to-action buttons. 

COMMENTARY:   This email marketing guide is for beginners, so it offers many examples of direct email pieces from other brands that should be studied so you can create successful direct mail offerings for your customers and prospects. There is no such thing as a "one-for-all" direct mail piece.  Your customers and prospects have different needs and wants.  They differ both demographically and socio-economically.  Having said this, it is important that you know who your ideal customer segments are and you should personalize your direct mail pieces for each customers segment.           

Courtesy of an article dated September 12, 2022 appearing in the Digital Marketing Institute

HOW THE VOLUME OF MARKETING DATA, INCREASING NO OF MEDIA CHANNELS AND PLATFORMS AND RESILIENCY ARE DRIVING CMO'S TO ADOPT DATA-DRIVEN MARKETING

Remaining resilient and competitive means doubling down on data.

Despite the tumultuous past few years, 75% of CMOs at SMBs say their team was resilient enough to adapt to periods of unpredictability.

Recent crises have catalyzed a focus on using data to make marketing budgets go further, by rewarding those who have invested time and resources into their data strategies, while many of the less data mature have failed to survive. And for those who have successfully ridden out the storm, data is now front of mind as another hurricane forms on the horizon.

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In fact, among the CMOs at SMBs we surveyed, a staggering 85% agree that being able to make data-driven decisions is a critical competitive advantage. As the global economy teeters on the edge of recession once again, marketers can look back to draw on a couple of lessons from recent economic crises.

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CMOs are cutting down on inefficiency - not ops spend

An encouraging number of CMOs are allocating more resources to bolstering their data operations and capabilities. As found in our recent study on the evolving role of the CMO, 73% have committed to investing in a marketing ops role, with 33% having only introduced this role in the last year. Combining management of the martech stack, data quality control, and analytics at once, the position is a smart addition to help eliminate internal silos and drive team efficiency by ensuring easy access to connected data, whenever it’s needed.

Our latest results also indicate growing interest in further enhancing data mastery, with 29% of CMOs increasing their data ops budget for 2022. The shift towards bigger spending, however, doesn’t run across the board. Almost as many (27%) say their budget has decreased while 44% are working with the same spending pot as last year.

Although unchanged budgets might simply reflect steady costs, other findings indicate there could be additional issues at play. An overwhelming 70% of CMOs name money, not time, as their most stretched resource. With finances already a significant concern, many may be under strain that’s leading them to tighten purse strings and cap their data ops spending.

While pausing investment might bring some short-term gains, allowing spend to stagnate will cause multiple issues over time. As analytics tools and practices evolve, teams will fall further behind and be less able to squeeze as much as they can out of marketing budgets. Continued underinvestment also makes it more likely they will battle with further inefficiencies that add to already unwieldy workloads and impact productivity. Businesses, therefore, need to balance costs carefully, running calculations of how much they can save from stalling data ops investment, versus the benefits a well-supported team can drive.

Key Takeway:

Stretched finances could soon result in budget cuts. CMOs need to use their resources and invest in key areas now if they want to tackle the recession armed with better insight.

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What’s shaping the CMO’s roadmap?

CMOs are struggling to keep up with new platforms and channels

Fast escalating digitalization is bringing a mix of opportunities and challenges for CMOs at SMBs. Where new platforms and channels bring more scope for audience engagement, they’re also seeing an exponential rise in data and complexity.

Keeping on top of sprawling multi-channel activity is getting harder and harder; pushing up time to insight and making it difficult for teams to achieve the real-time performance view they need to guide quick and informed decisions. With demand for frequent and granular reports from the rest of the C-suite growing, it’s easy to see why CMOs are feeling pressured. One-third (33%) cite multiplying channels and platforms as the biggest external factor impacting marketing today.

In contrast, there is a much lower level of concern around data regulation, such as the GDPR. Previously high on every CMO’s priority list, the European regulation is now seen as a major external impact by just 8%, relegating it to last place. Despite increasing fines for rule breaches, marketing leaders are more comfortable with regulations they know and have already adjusted to than the varied complications emerging channels and platforms create; highlighting the urgent need for them to adapt in line with rapid digital evolution.

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More channels and platforms have left CMOs buried under their data

As might also be expected, both capturing and using the data generated by increasing channels and platforms is proving a challenge. Nearly all (99%) of CMOs say their marketing team is working with at least 10 data sources, 52% say they’re working with 14 data sources or more, and 32% say their teams use external data sources for marketing analytics.

While similar research from 2019 revealed that nearly half (47%) of respondents had 6 or fewer data sources, three years on we couldn’t find a single respondent reporting so few data sources.

As more and more data streams in from different directions, teams are reaching their limit; with 67% of CMOs admitting they have been overwhelmed by the quantity of marketing data available in recent years. This may also explain why the unpredictability of black swan events and the growing complexity of audience behavior rank second and third in key external impacts on marketing, at 26% and 17% respectively.

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As marketers struggle to deal with infinitely increasing data sources, effectively tracking and responding to unpredictable events is becoming more difficult. The expanding variety of platforms and channels that consumers engage with is also creating similar problems for understanding audience behavior, with marketing teams struggling to achieve a clear view amid a relentless influx of disparate data.

Tellingly, for respondents who cited a lack of resilience and difficulty adjusting during black swan events, reports of data overload soar to 92%, and jump to 100% for those decreasing their data ops budget this year. For marketing teams that have not invested in strengthening data handling capacity and implementing streamlined processes, keeping pace with digitalization is a tougher task.

Key Takeaway

Marketing is going to get more complicated as digital development presses on. CMOs that ensure teams can handle the rising data tide will have the best chance of staying afloat and steering their way to optimal outcomes.

What’s stopping CMO's from investing in tech?

Optimism about company prospects is crucial, especially when it comes to thriving through a recession. But it’s also important for businesses not to view data capabilities with rose-tinted glasses.

In our recent Marketing Analytics: State of Play 2022 report, 68% of respondents self-identified as data mature, despite lingering dependence on outdated practices and spreadsheets.

Download the full report to continue reading HERE.

Courtesy of an e-book dated September 2022 titled, "What's Shaping The CMO's Roadmap: Recession, Resilience and Marketing Data" published by Adverity  

WHAT IS THE TOTAL ADDRESSABLE MARKET (TAM) AND HOW TO CALCULATE IT

What separates a jaw-dropping unicorn business concept ready for seed funding injections from an amateur-hour startup pitch no one takes seriously?

It might not be your first guess, but for me it is definitely a clear and concise TAM formula.

The potential of a product or service can be a strong selling point to show investors and stakeholders, especially if you have an actionable business plan that will complete the vision and alignment you’ll establish for your growth.

Therefore, calculating the Total Addressable Market of your business is your first step in creating a successful business. Let’s find out how you can do that together:

What is Total Addressable Market?

Total Addressable Market or TAM refers to the total market demand for a product or service; the overall revenue opportunity available in a marketplace for a product or service. In other words, it’s the eagle-eye view of where any new product or service will be introduced. Regardless of what we’re talking about and in every context, TAM is arguably the single most important piece of information in terms of understanding market potential.

Here, have a look at this simple diagram:

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As you can see TAM is the overarching big picture – the TOTAL market potential. 

From here, you should have a firm grasp on why this calculation is THE calculation investors are going to inspect first. 

Why Are Proper TAM Calculations Invaluable? 

In reality, reaching a proper TAM calculation is a worthwhile team-enlightening process in itself.

Along the way, as you ‘Narrow the Tam Funnel’ you’re going to define a number of other critical metrics, such as:

• Fundamental market data you should have anyway – i.e. potential size.
• A formula to attract and convert investors. 
• Thorough competitor data, broken down in relation to your venture – market fit. 
• Data-driven and formalized target customer information.
• The spectrum of currently available similar products/services.
• The major upward and downward trends influencing your TAM.
• Establish a clear go-to-market strategy or roadmap. 

If your market, product, and service analysis is weak, your TAM will be weak. If your TAM is weak, so is your SAM and SOM. This is pretty much always going to lead to monstrous blunders across the board. 

Before jumping into that, let’s include our two new key terms and some definitions. 

• TAM – Upon reaching 100%, with every individual in your chosen geography using in your product or service, you become the proud owner of a market monopoly.  

• SAM – Serviceable Available Market: This is your slice(s) of the market. The total segment of TAM you can feasibly or reasonably target. For example, your New York pizza shop’s 1-10% of the pie-lover TAM within twenty miles of your prime real estate.

• SOM – Serviceable Obtainable Market: Out of that SAM, this is the more refined slice of the TAM you can hope to achieve within the first 1-3 years of opening your doors or trying a new form of pizza in the local market; app, etc. For example, if you don’t sell thick crust for some reason, your SAM and SOM will need to continue narrowing.

Another crude example could be the worldwide transportation market, which is gigantic – over $5 trillion. Imagine having a monopoly there… Fortunately, an unlikely scenario. Even for Uber, they were initially targeting the Taxi & Limo Sector (SAM), coming way down to a smidgen over $4 billion. Then the SOM they aimed for within the first 5 years was around $1 billion. 

From $5 trillion, to $1 billion. 

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Their TAM refinement didn’t stop there though, as in their original pitch deck they were only targeting a certain area of one city. If that went well, the next step was a second major city, and so on.

You can also take huge six and seven-figure TAMS and break them down into the different sub-sectors.

For example, clothing. Here are three TAM-SAM-SOM diagrams showing different pathways to approach along the supply chain.

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Right, with a basic foundation and core terms all laid out, let’s get to the soft gooey center in the middle of today’s subject. 

Your Goal

Your goal when ironing out the TAM for a product or service is to make this calculation the most educated, de-risked (as close to the truth), and data-driven estimation possible. And yes, it’s nearly always going to be an estimation rather than a fixed concrete number, because TAMs are often projections.

How to Calculate Total Addressable Market (3 Ways)

1. The Top-Down Approach: Not much calculating in this approach, other than coming to terms with the overall big-picture number without any real precision.

2. The Bottom-Up Approach: Using as many sources as possible to start with the smallest, most refined picture of the market you can hope to capture (ex: the Central SF area like Uber). So, starting with your highly-specific SOM and working your way up.

3. Value Theory Crafting: Using highly-educated, but nonetheless subjective or less reliable sources of data, to influence your calculation. Conjecture, opinions, base statistics, buyer WTP numbers (more on this below), etc. 

“The best TAM formulations are the result of using all three methods, combined with studious, prudent due diligence.”

Total Addressable Market (TAM) Formula

In all of its glory, this is as simple as it gets. 

[TAM = # of Customers x Pricing]

From leveraging distinguished industry and Wall Street-based analysts (paid and free), to using a huge assortment of publically available market and competitor data, there’s no excuse not to roll up your sleeves and do your homework – TAMwork. 

Let’s take a look at these two variables. 

Customers

• Geography: Where is the overall market (TAM), along with your SAM and SOM? Are we talking ecommerce? How many countries are we targeting, and where are your customers within them? Be specific, specific, specific! 

• Relevancy: Why are these your customers? And no, you can’t count a competitor’s customers or users as your own. 

• Testing?: How do you know these are your customers? Be sure you’re ‘showing your work’ and proving these assumptions as best you can. Show the logic. 

Your Pricing

• Pricing Basis: What is the basis for your pricing? How are you coming to these conclusions? Again, show how the math plays out step by step. 

• Units of Measurement: Depending on your situation, this can be a great number of things. The point is to be ultra-definitive with how your pricing is structured.

• Customer WTP: This is the basic number your customers or users are Willing To Pay. Typically WTP numbers are based on competitors so they aren’t really sources for YOUR pricing, since you are not your competitors. But, they can help paint a market picture. 

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Congratulations, you’ve now swept through the pillars of TAM, why it’s important, and how to properly calculate it.

Let’s finish this off by looking at the most common mistakes inexperienced startups and entrepreneurs make as they set out to tackle the numbers.

Some of this will be repetitive, but that’s a good thing. Stamp these details into your business mind!

Common TAM Calculation Mistakes

Inexperienced startups in the pre-seed, seed, and Series A funding round are where to look for pricing metrics that are WAY off.

It’s so common, yet they NEED to nail these concepts.

How?

Why?

Most often it’s a mixture of being too swept up into the product or business concept itself without crunching numbers or having no one who is really considered a number cruncher on the team. 

For investors, the first thing they want to KNOW, is how de-risked the numbers are and what kind of feasible ROI they can expect in the short and medium-term. At the end of the day, that’s where the rubber meets the road. No matter how mind-shatteringly-insane your new product concept might seem, if these numbers:

1. Don’t exist, or, 
2. Do exist, but they’re obviously way off,

Then you’re going to be sent back to the drawing board, heads hung low.

Nobody wants that, so here are the big three mistakes to steer clear of. 

1) Not Proving the Math – Going Top Down Only

“Listen, it’s a no brainer. We’re going to waltz in and nab up at least 3% of this $375 BILLION Market. Yep, that’s right folks, grab your wallets because we’re talking $11.5 BILLION smackaroos. You’ve got to get in on the ground floor before this puppy REALLY takes off!”

That’s what a corny top down-only pitch sounds like. Experienced investor eyes begin glazing over instantly, waiting for you to dial things down and prove your TAM. 

• How EXACTLY do you plan to enter into and capture this 3% of the market?
• How EXACTLY do you figure these are all your customers when the new product or service doesn’t exist yet?

Investors will begin firing off questions, testing each and every assumption that comes baked into that $11.5 billion top-down number you threw out. If they have to do your math for you, that’s a bad sign, and it’s likely your TAM will fall… dramatically. 

What if your team is left standing there, realizing you were focusing on a product that had a TOTAL product-lifespan value of only $11.5 MILLION?

What if it’s only $1.5?

#2) Basing Your Math on Competitor TAMs

“We’ve created the absolute best accessory for jeep owners in the known universe, and the jeep owner market worldwide is…cosmic.” 

Those aren’t your jeeps and those aren’t your customers.

Don’t base any of your math on competitor numbers, because it’s sloppy and you end up with a horribly misleading formula. 

• What kinds of jeeps are ideal for your accessory?
• What country or countries will you choose to target first?
• What specific kind of jeep owner are you REALLY targeting?

Starting to see how powerful this calculating ability is and why shows like old school ‘Shark Tank’ or ‘The Apprentice’ have become so popular (and educational)?

#3) Mistaking ‘Market Pain’ for TAM

“Smoking is a gigantic problem that in total creates X trillion….”

“Too many bicyclists are getting hit in big cities because…”

Problems are not TAMs.

If you attempt to base your math on the size of a social pain, rather than the response to your solution within a specific marketplace impacted by the problem, you’re starting off on the wrong foot. 

By avoiding these three mistakes, you can stay on the right path and provide a FAR more de-risked formula to base decisions, time, and money on. 

Conclusion

Before you take any action on a new product or service venture, know the TAM… be the TAM.

Projecting revenue growth using huge numbers is fun, but to attract genuine investor interests, or get serious stakeholders on board, or really just have a real shot at success, you need to REALLY see what is possible. Let your TAM + SAM + SOM calculations serve as your guiding light, always keeping your financials firmly rooted in reality, not steeped in hyperbole or hype.

COMMENTARY:   This is one of the best discussion of how to calculate addressable market based on three market measures:  TAM, SAM AND SOM.   

I have had to make addressable market estimates based on using different variables and assumptions.  Keep in mind that you are not shooting for absolute accuracy when you conduct your calculations.  Addressable market is a moving target.  You could get three different people and you would obtain three different estimates for addressable market.

In calculating TAM, SAM and SOM you should include what stage in the market life cycle your firm presently occupies as depicted in he following graphic:

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I would recommend that you calculates three different addressable market estimates.   Most Likely, Least Likely and Average of Most Likely and Least Likely for TAM, SAM and SOM.  If you are a startup base your revenue projections on your Serviceable Obtainable Market (SOM) over the next three years.  SOM is the portion of your Serviceable Addressable Market (SAM) that you believe you can actually grab based on your estimated costs to acquire new customers, churn rates and financial resources available to attract new customers.

TIP:  In estimating SOM, aim for the "low hanging fruit" first and work up from there.  If you are launching a new product, your existing customers will be the easiest and least costly to convert to the new product.  Existing customers are your early adopters, and most likely to covert because of the brand loyalty and trust you have built over the years.           

Hope the above helps.

Courtesy of an article dated February 23, 2021 appearing in UserGuidingBlog

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THE MARKETING TECHNOLOGY LANDSCAPE EXPLODES TO 9,932 SOLUTION PROVIDERS, INDUSTRY CONSOLIDATION SETS IN

According to ChiefMartech, the 2022 marketing technology landscape, the total estimated number of marketing technology solution providers increased from 8,000 in 2020 to 9,932 or +24% in May 2022.  Here are the key you want to know:

• The number of solutions is now 9,932 — up 24% from 2020
• Here is a slide version of the image you can use in decks and content
• Here is a high-res PDF you can use for printing and zooming in
• Here is an accompanying State of Martech 2022 report

The wild-and-crazy 11-year progression of the martech landscape looks like this:

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Or, if you prefer a more quantitative view of the 6,521% growth over those 11 years:

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The moniker “Martech 5000” is no longer appropriate because by 2022 the marketing technology landscape has grown to nearly 10,000 solution providers, so the new name is now the “Martech Map.” 

ChiefMartech has launched martechmap.com (beta version) a new interactive site that is free to use, but you must first register online to gain access.  This lets you search, sort, and filter the entire marketing technology landscape for 2022.   You can search by keyword.  You can filter by a vendor’s HQ country.  You can rearrange the display, zoom in, and even create a PDF of your own.

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ChiefMartech lets users contribute to the data set — and encourages users to do so.  Find something wrong in the data?  Missing vendor?  Vendor that’s changed categories or gone away?  Let ChiefMartech know.  MartechMap is a community project, and ChiefMartech gladly celebrates all of the contributors to the beta version.

The massive scale and rapid rate of change of the martech industry and the wealth of solutions within it was no longer well-served by a once-a-year, static graphic. It’s a point in time, which is interesting to see year-over-year. But we want this community resource to be something that is updated on a more continuous basis.

By now producing the graphic algorithmically, it’s easy to release updates in a matter of minutes — versus the dark ages of hand-placing little logos manually on a slide (hats off to you, Anand Thaker and Jeff Eckman, for all your prior help with that!). By using a vendor’s favicon from their website, which we can refresh at any time, we also save both ourselves and vendors from the angst of outdated logos.

The aesthetic is different with this grid of favicon logos, but the practical benefits of instant updates weigh heavily in its favor. Just as every other aspect of marketing and martech is evolving, so too should the martech landscape.

State of Martech 2022 Report

Of course, one of the perennial reactions to the martech landscape is: how can there be so many vendors? How has this market not consolidated yet? Surely it’s destined to collapse, any minute now, right?

These are good questions to ask. I ask them myself all the time.

It’s worth noting that 972 vendors from the 2020 landscape were removed for 2022, either due to being acquired or some less happy exit from the market. That’s 12% churn from two years ago! The martech landscape does consolidate.

But at the same time, new vendors keep entering the market (and more who have been in the market keep getting discovered in our ongoing research). While 972 vendors were removed, a whopping 2,904 vendors were added, which brought the net total from 8,000 to 9,932.

Frans and I have several models and theses that offer some explanation to these dynamics that we see in the market. This year, we’ve included them — along with a bunch of other great data about stack adoption patterns — in a State of Martech 2022 report.

It’s free for you to download (completely ungated):

Click To Display PDF File

(As a bonus, the report also includes all of the entries to The Stackies 2022: Marketing Tech Stack Awards, so you can review examples of how other companies have combined martech solutions in their marketing stacks.)

The research for this project and the accompanying report was generously supported by these six sponsors. We would kindly encourage you to check them out:

• Learning Experience Alliance (formerly MarTech Alliance)
• OfferFit
• Workato
• SAS Customer Intelligence
• Amplitude
• Goldcast

In addition, we’ve created a “gratitude graphic” that reflects the many contributors to the martech landscape data set. We hope you’ll join them for a future update that includes contributions you decide to make.

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Merry #MartechDay to you — I hope you enjoy this new graphic, report, and interactive site.

COMMENTARY:  The marketing technology solutions sector has reached nearly 10,000 service providers spread over 6 major categories and 49 sub-categories.  The US and UK combined represent over 50% of the total number of martech companies.  Due to the rapid rate of growth, the martech sector is now undergoing a shakeout and industry consolidation. 

The 2022 Martech Map, has identified 9,932 martech solution providers through May 2022.  An interactive version of the martech search engine is available at martechmap.com.  The interactive martech search engine enables you to slice and analyze the landscape in a variety of dimensions.

There’s been considerable consolidation over the last two years. 

• 972 new martech solution providers were either acquired, disbanded, or pivoted to something different. 
• 2,904 new entrants, from startups and more mature companies offering a better martech service were added.

So between 2020 and 2022, there was a net gain of 1,932 firms added to the list.   

We are steadily adapting to an abundance of apps in the martech market sector. Connected ecosystems are growing around the major martech platforms, and a new generation of “aggregation” systems are bringing greater cohesion to internal tech stacks.

Martech is a vibrant, rapidly changing industry that requires a once-a-year update.  ChiefMartech gives you a dynamic visualization online that is continually updated with fresh data. By signing up for free on martechmap.com, you can now explore the latest version of the landscape at any time.  Hovering over a logo will reveal the name of the company and a brief description from their website or Twitter profile. Clicking on a logo will take you to their website.

You can also search and filter the landscape, looking for specific terms that appear in their
description, or narrowing the result by the HQ country.

Courtesy of an article dated May 4, 2022 appearing in ChiefMartec and an article dated May 3, 2022 appearing in MarTech.org

WHAT IS DATA-DRIVEN MARKETING? AT A GLANCE INFOGRAPHIC

Data-driven marketing is the approach of optimising brand communications based on customer information. Data-driven marketers use customer data to predict their needs, desires and future behaviours. Such insight helps develop personalised marketing strategies for the highest possible return on investment (ROI).

Click To Image To Enlarge

Courtesy of an article appearing in Advertity.com

COMICS AND GRAPHIC NOVEL SALES HIT NEW HIGH IN PANDEMIC YEAR, GROWTH CONTINUES IN 2021

Combined comics and graphic novel sales hit a new high in the pandemic year of 2020, according to a new joint estimate by ICv2’s Milton Griepp and Comichron’s John Jackson Miller. Total comics and graphic novel sales to consumers in the U.S. and Canada were approximately $1.28 billion in 2020, a 6% increase over sales in 2019.  The increase was due to strong sales of graphic novels online and in mass merchants and strong digital sales, which overcame big declines in comic and book store sales.  Click to see the full report and charts.

ICV2' Milton Griepp said of the 2020 estimates. 

“The challenges of retailing in the pandemic had profound impacts on the market, including the acceleration of trends that have been in place for years.  The book channel increased its share dramatically vs. comic stores, and graphic novels increased their share vs. periodical comics, while digital sales were turbocharged.”

Sales of kids’ graphic novels in mass merchants and online drove graphic novel sales early, and as the pandemic went on (and anime streaming grew), manga sales took off. In the comic store channel, the seven-week shutdown by Diamond Comic Distributors and subsequent publisher cutbacks in periodical releases were a drag on sales, even as demand surged in the second half of the year.

John Jackson Miller said.

“The comic periodical market was ahead for the year before the pandemic struck, and the result of production cutbacks was that 30% fewer new comic books were released by the major publishers in 2020.  The fact that new comics sales were down by only 20% suggests that retailers did well with what they were able to get.”

Not only was demand high for new comics and graphic novels, the collectible side of the comics business was also strong.  John Jackson Miller added. 

“The collector market flourished during the year, allowing comics shops to earn significant revenue from their back-issue inventories.  Many new releases also saw significant levels of markup that our charts would not be able to capture, all of which helped stores offset the lack of new product.”

For both independent comic and book stores, healthy consumer demand, strong community support, and help from government programs and the Book Industry Charitable Foundation kept the store attrition rate lower than expected.

Milton Griepp said.

“I’m encouraged by the way independent retailers selling comics and graphic novels are coming out of the pandemic shutdowns.  Combined with the robust growth in other channels, the business is in overall good condition to serve the many new consumers that started enjoying comic-form entertainment over the past year.”

Big changes in comic distribution and reporting required substantial adaptations in the analysts’ methodology for 2020. Diamond Comic Distributors halted its release of sales information in 2020, as the movement of DC Comics to a new distributor made their reports an incomplete picture of the market. Instead, the analysis uses data based on sales tracked at point-of-sale by the ComicHub system at over 100 stores. We have used that data to build a model of sales for the entire comic store channel using comparisons developed during periods in which ComicHub and Diamond reporting overlapped.

We also altered how we use NPD BookScan data; NPD began incorporating ComicHub data into its reports in 2020, so we accounted for the ComicHub portion when estimating the size of the book channel. NPD BookScan collects weekly point-of-sale data on print books from over 16,000 locations including e-tailers, chains, mass merchandisers, independent bookstores, and more. NPD BookScan covers approximately 85% of the overall U.S. trade print book market. Some publishers classify titles that are primarily text, or art books, as graphic novels; those titles are removed from the analysis.

As presented above and in the accompanying infographics, the analysis by Comichron and ICv2 was divided up between periodical comics (what some call “floppies” or “pamphlets”), graphic novels, and digital download-to-own sales. All print figures are calculated based on the full retail price of books sold into the market, and do not account for discounting or markup. Digital sales do not include subscription-based “all you can read” services.

ICv2

ICv2 is the #1 industry source on the business of geek culture, including comics and graphic novels, hobby games, and the media world surrounding them, on its website, www.ICv2.com, and in its magazine, Internal Correspondence. For the people on the front lines of the geek culture business, staying ahead of the trends isn’t something that can be left to chance-it’s a basic necessity for being successful. That’s why ICv2, where trend-watching is a science, is the #1 source of news and information for the buyers, gatekeepers, and tastemakers.

Comichron

Comichron is the world’s largest public repository of comic-book sales figures, featuring data from the 1930s to today about comic book and graphic novel circulation, cover prices, and market shares on its website, www.comichron.com. With data and analysis on the distant past as well as the present, Comichron serves as a trusted resource for academics studying the historical reach of the medium and for collectors seeking accurate information about how many copies of a comic book originally circulated.

The “Other” channel in our channel breakdown includes the Newsstand (periodical sales through specialty retail and mass merchant chains) and crowdfunding (Kickstarter, etc.) channels. Kickstarter was a contributor to growth, with comic funding up 60% in 2020.

This is the eighth joint market size analysis from ICv2 and Comichron; the first was for 2013 sales. Previous years’ reports are at https://www.comichron.com/yearlycomicssales.html

COMMENTARY:  According to Comichron, which collates comic book sales across the direct market, in summer 2021 comic book sales were at one of their highest points in the last 25 years. The top 300 comics sold at least 24.2 million copies in June, July, and August - more than any summer quarter except 1997 and 2016. This success is particularly remarkable, given in 1997 there were literally twice as many comic book stores, while 2016 saw the high-profile "DC Rebirth" initiative that relaunched DC Comics' entire range..

Summer traditionally performs well in terms of comic book sales; that's why most publishers save major events and relaunches for the summer, when footfall and demand are at their highest. But the strength of summer 2021 is particularly remarkable given all publishers are currently releasing fewer books each week as a result of the pandemic. Sales have been bolstered by variant incentives and one-shots, major relaunches including the likes of X-Men and Moon Knight, and events such as the X-Men's Hellfire Gala, War of the Bounty Hunters, and Fear State. Marvel continue to benefit from Star Wars, with both War of the Bounty Hunters and Star Wars: The High Republic - a bold transmedia initiative - flourishing. Image Comics, meanwhile, will be especially pleased with the sales figures for King Spawn #1; including international sales, it will be their first book to break half a million in the 21st century, likely bolstered by variants.

Share of adults who are fans of comic books in the United States as of April 2019, by age group:

Courtesy of an article dated June 29, 2021 appearing in Comichron and an article dated October 14, 2021 appearing in ScreenRant and an aricle dated Dated December 18, 2019 appearing in Statista

HOW TO TARGET THE RIGHT AUDIENCE FOR YOUR BRAND

“You can’t be everything to everyone,” is an old marketing adage.  Doing so makes you nothing to no one, or so the saying goes. But how many companies are brave enough to act on this principle?

It is easy to talk behind closed doors about actively choosing to not target specific audiences, and quite another to actually execute campaigns and messaging that may effectively eliminate you from consideration for future business. This is how McDonald’s ended up serving salads no one bought, it's how one of the greatest flops of all time, “new Coke,” happened. Coca-Cola is generally thought of as one of the most successful brands in history, and even they got sucked into the idea that you need to change to find new customers. The question is: at what cost?

Whenever you address a new market or audience, your current customers will ask the question, “Do I still fit with this brand? Do they still serve me and my needs?” When you have built up credibility and strong brand loyalty, this question is a whisper.   Targeting markets and customers requires caution:

• Address too many new markets too quickly, and you’ll feel the effects of slow sales, lower customer loyalty, and decreasing momentum in your business.
• If you try to be everything to everyone from the very beginning, you’ll fail to win any market. You have to pick an audience to target and tailor your marketing message for them. Here’s why.

Targeting everyone creates brand confusion

As we’ve evolved, our brains have learned to lump things we see and interact with into general categories—dangers to be aware of, things that are enjoyable, edible goods, anything and everything you can imagine. This helps prevent us from becoming paralyzed by decision making. Unsurprisingly, brands and products are also affected by this system.

You cause brand confusion by trying to target everyone. To continue the McDonald’s example, when they first introduced salads to the menu, they were working to target an entirely new customer base: those who want healthy food.  The issue here is that McDonald’s has stood for convenience, speed, and consistency forever.  When you go to a McDonald’s, you’re looking for a very quick, portable meal that won’t slow down your road trip or take up much of your work day.  If that’s what you associate with McDonald’s, and then they start offering salads—hard to eat on the go, and not all that fast—why would you even consider buying them?

On top of causing confusion, when you begin targeting an unrelated customer set, your brand feels inauthentic—to both the people already buying from you, and those you’re trying to target now. New Coke was an attempt to appear modern compared to the fresh view of Pepsi. Except Coke didn’t need to do that. Their customers felt betrayed by the change in formula, and anyone who wanted to rebel against the established and storied brand of Coca-Cola was already drinking Pepsi. It wasn’t about the taste, it was about what the brand stood for. Changing that attracted nobody and just upset Coke’s loyal brand followers.

Earn the right to expand your market

A natural question to ask is “If we target one group, can we later grow by targeting more groups?” Consider Amazon as perhaps the best example of expanding from one small offering to, well, the entire world of consumable goods. When Amazon started, they sold books online. That’s it. Then they branched out into consumer electronics, and then added their leading revenue maker, Amazon Web Services.

If Jeff Bezos had launched Amazon as an online bookstore and provider of business networking infrastructure from the start, would that combination have made sense to anyone? Would anyone have trusted that the software was any good? Personally, I would have been entirely lost—and I expect the executive teams who decide to purchase AWS for their business would have felt the same way.

You don’t just get the entire war chest at the beginning—you have to earn the right to expand your target market. A great example of doing this successfully is Lululemon. When Lululemon was founded in 2000, it made only yoga clothing specifically designed for women. Talk about niche. After becoming known for making exceptionally comfortable, durable, and high-performing yoga clothing, Lululemon expanded into other areas of fitness including running, cycling, and weight training with a focus on a CrossFit-loving clientele. It was only after dominating the women’s activewear market that Lululemon moved into men’s clothing. They first became the go-to brand in one segment of one part of the activewear industry and then, slowly but surely, grabbed more and more market share from adjacent segments.

Growth has costs—more so if you overreach

Even a brilliant business mind like Jeff Bezos has had to struggle with the growing pains of rapidly expanding into new markets. As recently as October of 2019, Amazon has conceded profit to fuel growth. Very often, Amazon has entered a market by first offering a product on its platform, and then figuring out how to produce it cheaper themselves at a similar quality, and then offering their own line. This is how AmazonBasics came to be, and it certainly ruffles a few feathers—and clears out a few checkbooks along the way.

Additionally, investing in growth means having less liquid cash readily available. Having cash is an asset, especially during tough economic times, as we are all acutely aware. Access to capital is cheaper due to low interest rates, and typically weaker competition is pushed out of the market—freeing up superior talent you can bring into your organization, not to mention customers suddenly looking for options. Those with cash come out on top as growth and expansion become more readily accessible. If all of your capital is tied up in playing in a few too many sandboxes, you’re in a bad position to take advantage of these opportunities as they present themselves.

Long-term growth and scale requires patience and honesty

We all want to be the next Lululemon, a small business turned public company with massive numbers of loyal fans across various market segments. But is your business truly ready for that? Have you earned that sort of success?

No doubt, success to that degree requires a bit of luck at important moments. But, even more so, it requires smart strategic thinking about who your buyer is, and how you can wow them time and time again. It requires the patience to recognize that just like a human relationship, your brand will not be loved by everyone in a day. It requires the patience and discipline to see your strategy through and to adjust when needed. And it requires the honesty to recognize that you’re simply not capable of being everything to everyone—which is completely okay.

Own your share of the market. Serve the people only you can uniquely serve, and do it with excellence. Make their lives better each and every day, and when the opportunity arises to strategically move into an adjacent market and improve that customer’s life as well, take it with confidence. But earn it first.

COMMENTARY:   In order to target your ideal customers you need to know the following:

• Who they are
• What they do
• Where they are
• What appeals to them
• How connected they are
• What the do online

The following infographic explains each element of what you need to know about your target market.

How to Define Your Target Market

To build a solid foundation for your business, you must first identify your typical customer and tailor your marketing pitch accordingly.

1. Look at your current customer base.
2. Check out your competition.
3. Analyze your product or service.
4. Choose specific demographics to target.
5. Consider the psychographics of your target.
6. Implement target marketing.
7. Evaluate your decision.
8. Use additional resources as needed.

Target marketing does not mean that you are excluding markets that do not fit your criteria. Rather, target marketing allows you to focus your marketing dollars and brand message on a specific market that is more likely to buy from you than other markets.  This is a much more affordable, efficient, and effective way to reach potential clients and generate business.

With a clearly defined target audience, it is much easier to determine where and how to market your company. Here are some tips to help you define your target market.

• Look at your current customer base - Who are your current customers, and why do they buy from you? Look for common characteristics and interests. Which ones bring in the most business? It is very likely that other people like them could also benefit from your product or service.
• Check out your competition - Who are your competitors targeting? Who are their current customers? Don't go after the same market. You may find a niche market that they are overlooking.
• Analyze your product or service - Write out a list of each feature of your product or service. Next to each feature, list the benefits it provides (and the benefits of those benefits). For example, a graphic designer offers high-quality design services. The benefit is a professional company image. A professional image will attract more customers because they see the company as professional and trustworthy. So ultimately, the benefit of high-quality design is gaining more customers and making more money.
• Choose specific demographics to target - Figure out not only who has a need for your product or service, but also who is most likely to buy it. Think about the following factors:
  • Age 
  • Location
  • Gender
  • Income level
  • Education level
  • Marital or family status
  • Occupation
  • Ethnic background
• Consider the psychographics of your target - Psychographics are the more personal characteristics of a person, including  how your product or service will fit into your target's lifestyle:
  • Personality
  • Attitudes
  • Values
  • Interests/hobbies
  • Lifestyles
  • Behavior
• Evaluate your decision - Once you've decided on a target market, be sure to consider these questions:
  • Are there enough people who fit my criteria?
  • Will my target really benefit from my product/service? Will they see a need for it?
  • Do I understand what drives my target to make decisions?
  • Can they afford my product/service?
  • Can I reach them with my message? Are they easily accessible?

Courtesy of an article dated August 31, 2021 by Joe Mills for Element Three

HOW A DATA-DRIVEN APPROACH CAN ENGAGE CUSTOMERS AND BOOST MARKETING RETURNS

Digitally savvy consumers know there’s an abundance of choices when it comes to purchases. With high expectations, most will seek out appealing items with little regard to brand loyalty. Churn and attrition are at an all-time high.

The response for organizations sounds simple enough: Provide a consistently good, engaging customer experience, optimize it on a variety of devices and deliver it when customers want it. Why has it been so hard for organizations to do this?

The answer starts with the way companies operate on the back end. With multiple organizational silos, no online/offline data synthesis, rigid customer databases and other inflexible legacy systems, organizations only have a piecemeal view of the customer. It’s hard to take advantage of all the existing corporate customer data that’s available, much less the rich variety of external data. As a result, marketing efforts are fragmented. Communications are inconsistent and ineffective. And revenue growth is hindered.

By taking a technological approach that synchronizes marketing processes with the customer journey across multiple channels, organizations can achieve great results – in terms of revenue, customer advocacy and loyalty. First, they need to get a panoramic view of each customer. Then they can understand and anticipate customer behavior; orchestrate the next best action across any channel; and accurately measure results to inform future actions.

SAS recommends that you connect your marketing efforts with all the relevant data from customer interactions as well as back-end operations.  Then, through advanced customer and marketing analytics, you can deliver an integrated, omnichannel experience and truly compelling content. By responding to your customers on their terms – right content, right time, right device – you can keep them coming back for more and raise their value to your business.

Step 1: Synchronize Marketing Processes Based on a Comprehensive Understanding of the Customer

When marketing departments, call centers, service operations and merchandisers operate independently based on their own distinct views of the customer, both customer engagement and marketing efforts suffer.

Consider a scenario where a customer’s browsing history (showing his preferences or inferred interests) is in one database while offline point-of-sale data about the customer is in another database. If these databases are not connected, there’s a good chance you will have less relevant interactions with that customer than what the customer expects. Or you may see the “echo effect,” where you reach the customer through one channel but he responds through a different one – leaving you unsure how to attribute the response or plan your next offer.

Many organizations don’t use their existing corporate data to the fullest extent. They overlook opportunities to enrich customer data with information from service records, operations or contact centers. Many also fail to use external data sufficiently, missing chances to broaden their understanding of the customer with data from social media, open data, third-party data, etc. In an ad sales scenario, these proprietary data sets can present a unique differentiator in the marketplace and enable you to create highly targeted campaigns for your advertisers.

SAS Customer Intelligence solutions provide a panoramic view of the customer by consolidating all first-, second- and third-party data. From digital data to CRM information and call center records, SAS captures, integrates and transforms disparate data sources, breaking down multiple customer data silos. Built-in data management capabilities ensure that you can use your data effectively to engage customers, and boost ad sales. Use SAS to:

• Improve data quality where the data resides, regardless of whether it’s in a marketing or operational system. SAS profiles, standardizes, monitors and verifies data without moving it, which creates significantly faster, more secure processes. So you can speed up many marketing processes to run in real time and near-real time instead of weeks and months.
• Access the data you need, no matter where it’s stored – from legacy systems to Hadoop. You can create data management rules once and reuse them, for a standard, repeatable method of improving and integrating data – without additional costs.
• Be confident that your data is reliable and ready to use for analytics, whether you’re doing segmentation, content recommendations, next best offer, retention or lifetime value scores.
• Create a panoramic view of the subscriber that connects all touch points, contact history and online/offline interactions.

Step 2: Understand Customer Behavior and Fuel Content Engagement

Content is core to enticing and keeping consumers. You can attract the right customers by optimizing your content. But it’s just as important to optimize the customer’s overall experience. Using advanced techniques like text and predictive analytics, you can improve search engine optimization (SEO) for digital content, quickly categorizing content and text mining words, phrases and topics for customers.

Beyond SEO, you can profile and segment customers based on their historical behavior, profitability and lifetime value. Through a range of predictive analytic models, including affinity analysis, response modeling and churn analysis, you’ll know whether it’s a good move to combine digital and print subscriptions. You’ll recognize which content merits a fee versus which content you can monetize without a paywall.

To keep your marketing efforts fresh, you’ll need to continually supply models with updated data as you interact with customers and prospects. For example, your models should include purchase transaction data, online data from website users, direct marketing response data and more.

Figure 1 - Decision Tree to quickly idenify variables that can best predict iPad usage and high versus low user populations (Click Image To Enlarge)

Through advanced analytics, you can use these models to predict behavior and: 

• Identify how different customer segments are most likely to respond to specific content, campaigns or marketing actions. Your approach will be based on analytically driven, granular segmentation of both known and unknown customers.
• Reach the target population that’s most likely to respond positively to certain content, campaigns and other marketing activities. With predictive modeling, you can understand and predict the behavior of each targeted group.
• Improve economic outcomes using optimization to make the most of each individual customer communication. Take into account resource and budget constraints, contact policies, the likelihood of customers responding, and more.

Step 3: Automate and Synchronize Customer Engagement Across Channels

Once you’ve determined which analytics approach is best, you’ll need to automate your engagement activities with customers. SAS Marketing Automation helps you to quickly define target segments, prioritize selection rules, choose appropriate communication channels, schedule and execute campaigns, analyze results, and make adjustments to improve future campaign performance.

Use SAS to orchestrate data-driven marketing activities across all of your channels. So you’ll be able to present customers with the best, most profitable offers to keep them engaged or to win them back from competitors. Analyze – in real time – how people get to your site and what they do while there. Then present them with engaging content at precisely the right moment. Use SAS to:

• Build an omnichannel marketing environment so you can align outbound and inbound marketing tactics across all channels.
• Develop event-triggered campaign tactics to ensure timely, relevant marketing strategies.
• Know the next best action to take for each customer by incorporating analytics into your marketing execution efforts.
• Track the effectiveness of all marketing activities and monitor campaign results in real time.
• Reduce your reliance on IT for campaign creation and deployment with an easy-to-use interface. 

With a complete view of the customer, a deep understanding of behavior and automated engagement efforts, you’ll be able to make decisions that resonate for customers and invigorate your marketing efforts. For example, if you know a customer checks email every Friday, you’ll send her an email on Friday – because you’ll know that’s the best way to reach her. You’ll also be able to decipher between premium content versus content that should be free. You’ll know what will hook your customers, whether they’re using your services for the second time or the hundredth time.

Today’s customers demand value and expect a consistent experience regardless of the channel or device they’re using. SAS positions you to meet these ultra-high customer expectations at every touch point.

Figure 2 - A marketing campaign response measurement dashboard (Click Image To Enlarge)

Step 4: Effectively Measure Campaign Performance and Attribution

It’s hard to understate the importance of accurate, useful measurement. Combining SAS Reporting capabilities with SAS Visual Analytics – a visualization and exploration suite built to handle big data – it’s easy to examine the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns and tactics based on your budget and success metrics. Use response attribution modeling to understand the customer’s conversion path, and to know where to assign marketing credit. Then you can create future marketing mix optimization models, test/control strategies, predictive models and marketing campaigns.

With adaptive, agile marketing, you can test your offers and content quickly, on a small scale, and nurture continually richer customer interactions. Then get rapid feedback to show you when and how to modify the customer’s experience to get the most impact. Plus, you’ll have easy access to campaign reports and dashboards so you can track and manage campaigns across all of your channels.

Figure 3 - Campaign and offer performance reports are integrated with revenue metrics and demographic indicators (Click Image To Enlarge)

COMMENTARY:  

A New Definition of Data-Driven Marketing

What is data-driven marketing, how can event marketers effectively use it to drive conversions, and why does it matter? For decades marketers were forced to launch campaigns while blindly relying on gut instinct and hoping for the best. That all changed with the digitization of business and an increasingly demanding and digitally connected consumer. Now more than ever, there is a greater urgency to develop data-driven marketing campaigns as organizations have come under increasing pressure to deliver results or ROI for their marketing spend. To be successful in this landscape, a modern marketing campaign must integrate a range of intelligent approaches to identify customers, segment, measure results, analyze data and build upon feedback in real time.

While almost every area in marketing has been folded into the digital marketing ecosystem, in-person events have remained elusive to today’s modern marketer. In fact, when it comes to tracking your marketing efforts and determining which channels provide the best return on investment (ROI), most marketers will agree that results from in-person events are still difficult to track:

• 69% of marketers say that tracking ROI for events is their primary challenge. (Aberdeen Group)
• Only 48% of marketers report having any event ROI metric in place (Regalix)
• 82% of marketers cannot quantify the data received from attendee interactions at their corporate events (Kissmetrics)

Indeed, events often lag behind other marketing methods by a significant gap, with the success or failure of many events based solely on anecdotal evidence instead of quantitative measurement and logic.

Furthermore, because data-driven marketing produces highly personalized, engagement-focused campaigns for everything from enterprise servers to event apps, consumers are now beginning to expect a high level of personalization with each transaction.

What is data-driven marketing?

Let’s start out by trying to develop a simple definition for a relatively complex concept and practice. Data-driven marketing captures insights and data from a prospect, analyzes and scores the prospect’s data and behavior, and then subsequently triggers marketing actions and campaigns based upon marketing analysis. An appropriate analogy is to think of data-driven marketing from the consumer side in the average online shopping experience. When you purchase an item online, data-driven marketing strategies provide recommendations of complementary products to provide a better overall experience. If you’re looking at airfare rates for your next vacation to Hawaii, a data-driven marketing approach will focus on restaurants around the island with cuisine you regularly Google, potential places to stay based on positive reviews on Facebook, visitor’s guides that reflect your online budget-hunting practices and local activities such as scuba diving, listed on your LinkedIn profile.

By comparison, when you look at data-driven marketing from the marketer’s side, you’ll find a much more complex process. As you are able to obtain and update information on the customer from secondary sources, such as social media sites and web search data, you can create an approach that is customized to their buying behavior, interests, past purchases, web searches, social media posts and similar information. In other words, this approach allows you to optimize your funnel and customize your buyer journey to that particular prospect’s needs. You can also survey prospects to obtain primary sources of data, but be aware that there is often a bias between what individuals or groups claim versus their actual behavior. For example, an event attendee who was ranting about poor service at the luncheon one day may be raving about the closing keynote, leaving you with plenty of praise on the keynote but failing to mention the luncheon on the exit survey. Once you’ve obtained the data you need to make a comprehensive group, you can divide your prospects up into the personas they fit into best. This allows you to customize and personalize your approach, timing, channel and subject matter to optimize the results for each persona group.

The problem many marketers run into at in-person events is that they often don’t have the information they need to determine how to best engage each prospect. The closest option currently available are scans that provide contact information and basic registration information. But scans don’t provide the data you need to track that prospect’s engagement before, during, and after the event to prove the event ROI that particular group of prospects has generated for your company. As an example, at a recent conference, my badge was scanned by a gentleman from a company that prints promotional items. I was looking through the items in his booth to determine if there was anything I could use for our company’s next event. Though the exhibitor could have collected further data from me at the time, it would have been at the cost of other prospects that he could not help while gathering my information. When I returned home from the event, I had several recommendations for items that didn’t meet our needs because the minimum quantity was much too high, the quality wasn’t good enough and the prices were too expensive. The company had my contact information, but didn’t know enough about me or my organization to make appropriate recommendations. A data-driven marketing approach to this in-person event would have drastically improved my experience while increasing the marketer’s Event ROI.

How does data-driven marketing improve your ROI?

If you’re still wondering how data-driven marketing can make a difference to your company, you’re not alone. Though there was a 14% increase in confidence in putting big data to work in marketing departments from 2013 to 2014, with expectations for additional growth, many marketers still don’t know how the additional data provides a solid improvement in ROI or how to use the data to their company’s best advantage. In fact, companies that have implemented data-driven marketing into their marketing toolbox and recorded the results have often seen a 10-20% improvement on their ROI. Like any tool, it must be used correctly and implemented with other tools in your kit, such as using social media data, search analytics, SEO, content targeting and developing better buyer personas.

Why does data-driven marketing make such a big difference? Using the marketing convention example above, if the company had used data-driven marketing techniques to track my information, they would have known my organization was operating on a modest budget. All these factors made their special offer on a tri-fold brochure with a minimum order of 5,000 a very bad fit. Instead of learning more about the client, the company made a suggestion based on what was popular with their clients in general, few of whom had the needs of our organization, and lost a prospective sale. A targeted campaign based on data-driven marketing would have recommended a small-minimum product order that was inexpensive, while offering additional items that would have fit well with our company’s mission.

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Courtesy of an article titled "How a Data-Driven Approach Can Engage Customers and Boost Marketing Returns" appearing in SAS blog and an article dated May 26, 2016 appearing in Certain

TRACKMAVEN B2B STUDY: INSTAGRAM HAS HIGHEST SOCIAL MEDIA B2B ENGAGEMENT RATES

While LinkedIn leads as a business-to-business platform in terms of penetration and scale, B2B social media engagement is actually highest on hip photo-sharing platform Instagram, according to a new study by TrackMaven, based on an analysis of 316 B2B brands across the major social networks.

Unsurprisingly, B2B brands have been busy on LinkedIn, building relatively large followings of vendors and customers; thus brands in the professional services category have a median LinkedIn audience of 1.2 million followers. They’re also active on Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest, with varying rates of success: for example, the median number of Pinterest followers was less than 3,000 for most of the brand categories studied.

However Instagram – not necessarily most people’s first example of a B2B medium – stood out for delivering high engagement across a range of categories, with measurement defined by TrackMaven as the number of interactions per post per 1,000 followers.

Here are the B2B engagement rates for the major social media networks according to TrackMaven:

• Instagram yielded an engagement rate of 22.53.
• Pinterest at 15.88.
• Facebook at 5.99.
• LinkedIn at 1.09.
• Twitter at 0.86.

Instagram was the biggest source of social engagement for 15 out of 17 categories, including aerospace and defense, chemicals, computer hardware, construction, electrical equipment, energy, engineering, logistics, machinery, medical, motor vehicles and parts, pharma, professional services, software, and wholesales.

Just two categories did better elsewhere, with biotech seeing bigger engagement on Facebook, while financial services’ highest engagement came on Pinterest.

The rise of digital, including social media, has had a disruptive effect on B2B publishers similar to the impact on consumer media. According to figures from Connectiv (formerly ABM), from 2008 to 2014 B2B print ad revenues declined from 34% of the industry’s total revenues to 24.4%, while over the same period, digital advertising increased from 10.3% to 21% of the total business. Data and business information services rose from 5.8% to 10.2%, and events increased from 42.8% to 44.4%.

COMMENTARY:   TrackMaven's B2B brand social media study included a grand total of 508,060 social media posts and over 100 million social interactions. The 316 brands featured in their analysis include the leading B2B brands in the Global 500 and B2B leaders on social media as identified by the TrackMaven platform across 17 industries.

Which B2B industry has the best social media strategy?

Let’s start with a view of the complete B2B landscape on social media in one summary graph from the report. The graph below plots the average follower growth, average engagement ratio, and median social media audience size for B2B brands by industry across 2015.

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In a nutshell, you should aspire to land in the top right of this graph. Score high on the y-axis (follower growth) but low on the x-axis (content engagement), and your brand is growing but not engaging your audience. Score high on the x-axis but low on the y-axis, and your audience is interacting with your brand on social, but not bringing anyone new to the table.

So which B2B industries excel on social media? Here are just a few of the key takeaways:

• Biotech, engineering, and financial services brands are in the social media sweet spot. Brands in these industries have both substantial audience growth and high content engagement on social media, indicating impactful social content. The financial services industry’s 81.77 percent average follower growth per brand is especially impressive given the industry’s large median social following.
• Machinery manufacturers are adept at growing their audiences. Across the B2B landscape, brands in the machinery sector see the highest social media audience growth, with average annual follower growth across all five major networks of 129.02 percent. Engaging content is a correlated factor; social media content from machinery brands is ahead of the B2B pack, as indicated by its high engagement.
• Biotech brands know how to engage audiences. Across the B2B landscape, biotech brands have the most engaged social media audiences with an average engagement ratio of 12.46. Financial services brands are a distant second at 9.94
• Are software brands in a social media bubble? Software brands see fantastic social media growth — up 82 percent of total followers across 2015, on average — but the worst content engagement with a 2.62 engagement ratio. Is the allure of Silicon Valley attracting followers to top software brands without the content to back it up?

How to create a B2B social media strategy that works

Our analysis points to a major contradiction in B2B brand popularity. If you look at brand popularity based on follower count, then LinkedIn is the big B2B winner. Overall, B2B brands have the largest audiences on LinkedIn, according to our research. The median social media audience size for B2B brands is:

• 109,000 followers on LinkedIn;
• 34,000 page likes on Facebook;
• 18,000 followers on Twitter;
• 3,000 followers on Instagram;
• and 420 followers on Pinterest.

This finding probably comes as no surprise. After all, LinkedIn is B2B marketers’ social channel of choice. It’s used by 94% of B2B marketers, and the 10 most-liked brands on LinkedIn are all B2B brands. But is this a case of a self-fulfilling social media prophecy? I’m a B2B brand, therefore LinkedIn is my primary social channel?

Our research indicates that this might be the case — and it’s likely holding B2B brands back from newer, more impactful networks.

Let’s look at B2B brand popularity by a different parameter: content engagement. When we analyzed the average engagement ratio (number of interactions per post per 1,000 followers) for B2B brands on each social network, Instagram is by far the B2B powerhouse. The average engagement ratio for B2B brands is:

• 22.53 on Instagram;
• 15.88 on Pinterest;
• 5.99 on Facebook;
• 1.09 on LinkedIn;
• and 0.86 on Twitter.

We cover this finding (and many more) in detail in our report, but here’s the quick and dirty bottom line: Challenge the LinkedIn legacy effect for B2B brands. Explore newer, visual-oriented networks where there are high levels of engagement and less competition.

Courtesy of an article dated April 4, 2016 appearing in MediaPost Social Media Marketing Daily The Social Graf

THE ZENO GROUP'S THE HUMAN PROJECT™ 2016, SAYS MILLENNIALS HAVE A LOVE/HATE RELATIONSHIP WITH TECH

Surprisingly, Millennials have a love/hate relationship with technology, according to a study from Zeno Group and research firm CEB Iconoculture.

Teens and 20-somethings have a more balanced relationship versus the dependency that generations before them have, says Therese Caruso, managing director, global strategy + insights for Zeno Group. 

Therese Caruso says.

“There has never been a youth generation that looks and acts like this one, and that wields more influence. They are shaping the global conversation and workplace of the future. The only way for brands to connect is to act like a best friend – the values young people assign to their deepest relationships are the same values they want to see in brands. The Human Projectconnects brands through shared values and beliefs and tells the story about what compels this audience to become advocates and evangelizers.”

 

Caruso continues.  

“They acknowledge that technology can support their goals, but also that it can work against them.  Since youth are hyper-aware of health/wellness and the connection between health and tech overuse, they do put their tech down in a less ceremonious, more practical way than Millennials.” 

Barby K. Siegel, CEO of Zeno Group said.

“The goal of The Human Project is to challenge marketers to view key audiences not as targets or even consumers, but as real human beings.  It is no longer enough for marketers to understand category-specific behavior, but must now tap into a deeper set of core values.”

Kate Muhl, Research Director, CEB Iconoculture Consumer Insights, said.

“It’s urgent that marketers understand today’s global youth. Not just because they’re important consumers in their own right, but because youth are reshaping the culture in which brands are operating. It’s time for brands to take the level of research focus and priority they’ve given to Millennials and apply it to this new generation of consumers.” 

The Human Project Infographic - Zeno Group from Zeno Group

According to the global study, "The Human Project," Millennials feel particularly bullish about their future:

• 60% are optimistic about their personal finances, compared to only 40% of the general population.
• 67% are optimistic about their jobs compared to 40 % of the general population, according to the global study, “The Human Project.”

The biggest takeaway for marketers is how influential and different global youth are from past youth generations, Caruso tellsMarketing Daily.

Caruso says.  

“They are leading change through a different conversation around education, lifestyle and entertainment, purpose and politics.  Their influence and vast differences in values and behaviors are two aspects that feed into other key insights.”

It’s really important that marketers understand global youth now, she says.

“Not only are they influencing everyone, including the purchase decisions of their own parents and siblings, but they’re reshaping the culture in which brands are operating,”

Caruso continues.

“And it’s not enough to study what they’re reading or purchasing because simple demographics are not a reliable measure. The only way for brands to really connect is to act like a best friend — the values young people assign to their deepest relationships are the same values they want to see in brands.”

Youth are extremely health aware and guided by a life of balance. They know how to indulge and practice prudence/integrate foods and habits that can live together in a healthy body and mind, she says.

Caruso says.  

“Today’s youth views happiness differently — there must be a mix of success, balance and purpose.  Happiness is more practical and personal: being informed/connected, achieving goals, feeling good mind + body, indulging and practicing prudence, choosing to live their own life of purpose.”

Ultimately, their favorite brand is themselves — they use brands to build their own personal brand, she adds.

The report also lays out what Zeno Group has branded as the “7 Global Truths” about this generation -- what brands and businesses believe to be the most important consumer constituency, from the influence they will wield in the upcoming election, to their relationship with technology, to how they are redefining the role of leader, and how they are connecting with the world's top companies; and maybe most importantly, how the world’s most successful companies are connecting to them.

1. Youth Wield Powerful Influence. There has never been a generation with more influence both inside and outside the family and this has changed the dynamic of the modern family. Seventy-eight percent of parents with children in this group feel that their kids are more involved in their family’s decisions than they themselves were as children.

2. The New Leadership Paradigm. Global Youth do not view leadership by the traditional, top-down mode. Rather, they prefer a lead-by-example, collaborative model – “leaders bring people together to get things done.” On a scale of 92 values, leadership is ranked extremely low at 65 or high, while equality is ranked number two by the U.S., the U.K., Canada and Australia.

3. Friendship Built on Values vs. Shared Interests. Global Youth build friendships not on proximity or convenience, but on shared values, like morals, ethics and beliefs, and priorities. Thanks to this group’s strong sense of identity, peer pressure is also starting to fade.

4. Technology + The Love/Hate Paradox. Global Youth work to maintain a balanced relationship – not a dependency – on technology. They are keenly aware that technology can support their larger goals, but also know it can work against them.

5. Youth Are Health Aware, Guided by Balance. Global Youth research and educate themselves on all-around health and wellness, and they aren’t interested in “traditional diets.” Out of 92 values, health was ranked number one among Chinese youth – differing greatly from the values of their parents.

6. Happiness Re-Defined: The New WE/Z Happiness Equation. Global Youth view “happiness” as equal-parts balance, success and purpose. Success tops the list as the highest-ranking value among Global Youth in the U.S., Canada, U.K., India and Australia. Purpose is overall a high-ranking value among Global Youth with parents in Canada, Australia, the U.S. and the U.K. ranking purpose significantly lower than youth.

7. A Brand Called “Me”: Youth vs. Brand as Status Symbol. Global Youth are passionate about brands that help to enhance and build upon their own, personal brand. In order to earn this group’s trust and loyalty, brands must understand their mindset and personal goals.

The study gathered data from more than 5,000 individuals in the United States, Canada, China, India, Australia and the United Kingdom. The study defines “Global Youth” as those born between 1991 and 2001 and divides them into two distinct groups:

• “Gen WE” (14-20)
• “Gen Z” (21-25)

Examining the nuances into how Youth think, act and behave is imperative for companies and brands as they look to maintain relevance with today’s most digitally intuitive generation, Caruso says. Gen WE and Gen Z are masters of platform, more self-aware, success-driven, socially responsible and more global-minded than any generation before them.

About Zeno Group

Zeno Group is a global, integrated communications agency, born from PR. The award-winning agency is committed to work that delivers true business value for clients across consumer, corporate, health and technology industries. Zeno is the unprecedented three-time PRWeek US Mid-Size Agency of the Year winner (2011 – 2013), winner of PRWeek Malaysia New Consultancy of the Year (2015), recipient of the SABRE Silver Anvil (2015) and most recently recognized at PR Cannes Lions (2015). Zeno Group is a DJE Holdings Company.

Courtesy of an article dated March 3, 2016 appearing in MediaPost Marketing Daily and an article dated March 2, 2016 appearing in Zeno Group