Want to make 2012 your best year yet?
Here are our top tips for getting the most out of your customer engagement programmes for the next 12 months:
1. If you’re not already tracking the engagement level of your customers, now’s the time to start
Customer engagement is all about building relationships – and like any relationship it pays to keep an eye on how the other partner is feeling: do you need to spend more time with them or less? Are you giving them good reasons to notice and interact with you or are you turning them off? Continue reading →
The battle of the iPhone versus other smartphone platforms may be hotting up overseas, but it seems in New Zealand we just can’t get enough of Apple.
As part of our new in-depth reporting feature Insight, we’ve been looking at the devices Kiwis use to read the millions of emails deployed via our Engage platform each day, and while it’s still too early to draw statistically significant conclusions there are some interesting trends emerging. Continue reading →
A few months ago I blogged about the concept of marketing automation as a valuable tool for customer engagement.
But there’s nothing like a real case study to help bring buzz words to life, so I thought I’d share some work we’ve been doing with Harvey World Travel who place a huge emphasis on keeping in touch with their thousands of customers.
Late last year, they began managing all their email communications using our Engage platform and since that’s been running smoothly with great uptake, we agreed that it was time to take the next step and focus on further enhancing the end-to-end experience for their customers.
The result is a really great example of a multi-channel automated customer on-boarding and engagement programme, and the marketing team has kindly agreed to let me share it with you here. Continue reading →
We all know that “Content is king” so how do you make sure yours rules?
The Marketing Association’s new Copy Essentials Digital course could be a good place to start. It promises to help you learn to write more effectively for the web, email, banner ads and search.
When: Wednesday 16 November, 8.30am – 5.30pm
Where: University of Auckland Business School, The Owen G Glenn Building, Auckland
Check out the Marketing Association site for more information.
In the meantime, here are a few of my favourite online writing tips: Continue reading →
Nothing beats the instant gratification of an email campaign: unlike many other channels, you can see exactly how your message is landing with your audience – and make improvements based on those observations almost instantaneously.
But measuring success can be more of a minefield so I thought I’d share a simple overview of what the different metrics mean, and how to decide which one is right for your next campaign.
A big part of determining the best metric for any communication is defining your goal at the outset: are you trying to achieve sales or conversions, or are you wanting to motivate people to click on a link?
If it’s clicks you’re after, two of the most common measures are CTR and CTO.
CTR or Click Through Rates refer to the number of people who have clicked to open a link in your email as a proportion of the total emails you sent.
The downside to this measure is that it can give you a distorted picture of the effectiveness of your email. For example, a low CTR number may not reflect on the quality of the message within the email itself, instead it may indicate that your subject line just isn’t grabbing your customers’ attention so they’re not even opening the email. While there are many factors that can affect CTR, you can rest assured that your result is right about average if you’re regularly attracting a CTR of around 7 – 8%.
Continue reading →
The increasing use of smartphones and tablets is reinvigorating email uptake with many consumers now checking their inboxes not just once but several times a day – and often while they’re on the move.
This mobile trend is definitely one that we marketers should take notice of, but does it really mean we should be producing our email campaigns in multiple formats optimised for every device ever invented?
Here are three easy ways to ensure you reach your customers successfully, whether your message arrives in their hands or on their desktops. Continue reading →
Our friends at the NZ IAB recently drew my attention to a May 2011 Pew Internet report that found that 92% of online adults in the US use email, with 61% using it on an average day. That puts it neck and neck with use of search engines in terms of frequency of online activity, and ahead of use of social media sites (although that is increasing).
According to the research, email and search have consistently ranked as the most popular adult online activities in the US since the Pew Internet Project began in 2002. Continue reading →
A NZ Herald article last month suggested that Kiwi businesses are yet to embrace cloud computing.
You may not know it, but if you’re a Ubiquity client and using our platform Engage, you are actually already ahead of the pack and “working in the cloud”. Here’s a brief intro to the technology and how it can benefit you as a marketer.
The concept of cloud computing or “software as a service” has been around for more than ten years, and it’s great to see that it’s now gaining momentum in the marketplace.
Essentially, it means you no longer have to worry about installing particular software – such as one-to-one marketing technology or data storage – on your team’s in-house PCs. Instead, you rent access to a third-party platform which is housed off-site, and that brings with it numerous benefits: Continue reading →
News that the Department of Internal Affairs is running a survey on spam got me thinking about how we’re doing as a country on this issue since the anti-spam legislation was introduced almost four years ago.
From what I’ve seen, the majority of New Zealand businesses have got their act together – certainly most of the spam I receive these days comes from overseas (big windfall from Nigeria anyone?). So I was interested to read the statistics on the department’s site, which show that some big businesses have been found in breach of the regulations recently.
According to the department’s stats there have been 33 formal warnings issued to date this year, and three infringement notices given, and while there are plenty of obscure names in the list of offenders, there are also some recognisable Kiwi companies among them.
Continue reading →
Over the last year, I’ve noticed an increasing level of interest from marketers in whether our Engage platform has an API.
Not long ago, that sort of tech talk would have been reserved for in-house IT teams and CIOs, but with the rise of digital marketing, it’s not surprising that many marketers want to understand more about the features and benefits of the technology they use to engage with their prospects and customers.
“API” is definitely one of those features to look out for.
While it may sound like the latest sci-fi creation from Steven Spielberg, it’s actually an abbreviation for one of the most useful developments in marketing technology, and something that’s worth knowing about even if it’s just to impress your IT team.
Continue reading →
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