From multi to omnichannel marketing

Photo by Pickawood on Unsplash

Not all marketing strategies deliver the same rates of returns. Omnichannel marketing outperforms single channel at the rate of 2.5x.

To get to that, it’s not enough to build an easy-to-navigate eCommerce site supported by marketing campaigns that reach out to them on various channels. All those components have to be integrated to work together through an omnichannel strategy.

The ROI of Omnichannel Marketing 

The returns of omnichannel marketing over single channel are quite impressive, according to the data offered on Clickz:

• Engagement rate: 18.96% on omnichannel vs 5.4% on single-channel

• Purchase frequency: 250% higher on omnichannel vs single-channel

• Average order value: 13% more per order on omnichannel vs single-channel

• Customer retention rates: 90% higher for omnichannel vs single-channel

One channel doesn't cut it

Most eCommerce businesses today do not rely on only one digital marketing channel. When competing for customer attention, you need to reach out to them in different ways in the hope that what they didn’t click on an email may still get a click on SMS or an ad served on social media.

 In a survey by HBR (Harvard Business Review), 73% of respondents said they use multiple channels during their shopping journey. That includes email, SMS, MMS, social media, as well as searches on the site.

The challenge for retailers is maintaining coherent and consistent communication that makes the most of the different ways of connecting.  A Facebook or Instagram ad may be what first grabs the customer’s attention, though they may need some follow up to convert to the level of putting together a shopping cart with an email or MMS  message that offers personalized recommendations.

So why do we call this omni and not just multichannel?

Multichannel marketing is simply messaging that a brand uses across various channels to try to increase its reach. In contrast, omnichannel marketing is not just about sending the messaging out across the different channels but linking up the data on feedback on each one back to the customer to personalize the experience through responsive adaption. 

Customer interests are not static but constantly changing as they respond to contextual triggers. Brands that utilize omnichannel use big data analytics to update customer data and adapt  each message that goes out accordingly. An omnichannel approach adapts to such shift to make marketing messages as relevant as possible.

Timely texts

Emails remain an important marketing tool for all businesses, especially eCommerce. However, widespread smartphone use makes texts a very effective way to get attention, as they work off a device many people keep at hand for most of their waking hours. 

Text messages the perfect medium for sending time-sensitive information. That includes:

• Announcement of new product drops, especially if one of the benefits you offer SMS subscribers is early access to what’s new.

• Promotions for  same-day  flash sales, particularly if they are set for certain times like noon to three. 

• Notification that something they wanted to order is now back in stock or is now on sale.

• An urgent notice that their selections in a cart they abandoned are in danger of selling out.

Channeling Success with Targeted Communication

Targeted messaging is much more effective than generic messaging. The basis of that communication is identifying customer segments, and it can get even more relevant with personalization with product offerings and promotions selected specifically for that customer’s interests.

No matter how responsive your customers are to emails or texts, it’s important to remember that a single channel does not fit all customers under all circumstances. You need to adapt to the needs and context of the moment to deliver the right message through the right medium.. 

For example, you could have a customer who has subscribed to both emails and texts. Even though sending an SMS is fast and easy, it's not an appropriate medium for longer messages. You also can use both channels for reminders say of an upcoming promotion or a price drop on something they have looked at but didn't end up adding to cart or that they added it to the cart but failed to complete the transaction.  

On that basis, you can get the right offer to the right person at the right time, and through the right channel.

Related:

Think Marathon Rather Than Sprint When Planning Content Marketing

Most Memorable Brand Slogans

Make Your Content as Accessible as Possible

What Edison Can Teach Us About SEO

7 Ways to Grab Customer Attention in Subject Lines

CRO is Like Basketball

Biggest Cyber Monday Ever

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This year’s Cyber Monday was the biggest ever. Impressive as they are, the numbers for sales only tell one part of the story. The other is which brands invested in ads in kicking off the holiday shopping season and how customers responded and reached out to them.

Crunching through the numbers, Adobe Analytics reported that this year’s Cyber Monday Sales broke US sales records, thitting  $7.9  billion, an amount that represent 19.3 percent YOY growth and which exceeded the predicted spend of  $7.79 billionthat would have translated into 17.6 percent YOY growth  for the day.

Those represent just online sales, but some of the same people also spent money in stores over the Thanksgiving weekend. According to the National Retail Foundation(NRF)  over 89 million gave business to both online and physical retail outlets, which represents an increase of close to 40 percent over last year.

Investing in the technology that enables multichannel shopping had a real payoff, according to the NRF. “The multichannel shopper outspent the single-channel shopper by up to $93 on average.”

So what role did marketing play in the billions of dollars of spending? Working with DialogTech, 4C Insights put out a report that presented the data on ads, social lift, and phone calls. What they found was that the top 10 advertisers were made up not just of retailers but also financial services, automotive and other industries. The impact of their TV ads appears in the increase in social media engagement that immediately followed their ads...

Read more in 

Why Cyber Monday 2018 Was Biggest Ever

Related posts: http://writewaypro.blogspot.com/2018/11/time-to-say-tis-season.html

http://writewaypro.blogspot.com/2018/08/capitalizing-on-holiday-marketing.html

Silver platter service goes digital

via GIPHY

Though luxury shopping was once the province of bricks-and-mortar locations, it now has arrived online.

When it comes to summer vacations, most begin planning online – including those in the luxury market. What many of us do is compare prices for various flight and hotel options on sites like TripAdvisor and Kayak, to find something within our budgets. For those whose time is more valuable than money, however, the goal of online shopping is different.

“Let me tell you about the very rich,” F. Scott Fitzgerald is famous for observing, “They are different from you and me.” The same goes for luxury marketing.

via GIPHY

Read more in

Luxury Marketing For The Digital Age

Expanding comments with AI

The problem with human moderators is that they have human limitations that cannot keep up with a

pic from https://d1avok0lzls2w.cloudfront.net/img_uploads/Blog-Comments.jpg

huge influx of comments. That was the problem the New York Times faced in balancing reader comments demand with an editorial standard of civility for all published comments. Its solution was a partnership with , an incubator owned by Google's parent company, Alphabet.

Back in September, the Times announced the partnership in an article that set out the challenge faced by its 14 moderators tasked with reviewing the comments on the 10% of articles that do allow them. That alone amounted to 11,000 comments a day. As the article invited readers to try their hand at moderating, it was entitled Approve or Reject: Can You Moderate Five New York Times Comments?

I took the test. The official summary of my results were: "You moderated 4 out of 5 comments as the Community desk would have, and it took you 81 seconds. Moderating the 11,000 comments posted to nytimes.com each day would take you 49.5 hours."

That summation was followed by this: "Don't feel too bad; reviewing all of these comments takes us a long time, too." According to my calculations, however, the Times actually allows more time for their moderators. Given 14 people working 8 hours a day, the number of working hours each day would be 112, or more than twice the number of hours they said would be required for my rate of moderation.

That investment of so many hours is not something they regret, as they regard it as a requisite part of building up "one of the best communities on the web." However, they recognize that needs must dictate a new approach. That's where the machine assistance enters into the picture, enabling the same number of humans to effectively moderate a much larger number of comments and reduce the delay for reviewing time.

Flash forward to June 13, 2017, and the Gray Lady herself announces: The Times Sharply Increases Articles Open for Comments, Using Google's Technolog

Read more in How AI Can Moderate Comments, Eliminate Trolls

The key to digital real estate marketing

“Location,” that key word emphasized how important  physical location was by repeating it twice in identifying the three most important factors in real estate. However, that may be outmoded in today’s trend for shoppers to seek out what they want online. To reach that market, it’s necessary to locate them via the web. That’s what Union Street Media (USM) is all about.

USM is a marketing firm that applies the model of capitalizing on social media to convert sales with targeted ads and communications through these platforms to the real estate industry. It has a staff of campaign managers whose job is to expand the reach of their clients’ sites through digital marketing strategies, including demographic analysis and reporting and tailored ads and communication to their target market.

Read more in 

Location, Location, (Virtual) Location

Nested virtualization improves the odds for online gaming

                  

photo  https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/26/Roulette_wheel.jpg

In the past few years, 888 Holdings—one of the largest online gaming companies in the world and the largest one for legal online gambling in the United States—has grown rapidly and expanded into new product lines and markets. The Israel-based company delivers casino games, poker, bingo and sports betting to computers and mobile devices.

To meet the demands of more than 20 million subscribers in Europe and the U.S., 888 Holdings relies on cloud services. It also uses a nesting virtualization solution, which provides flexibility and rapid replication of environments.

CIO Eran Elbaz explains that his organization has to reconfigure and test its own applications, while also conforming to regulations in different jurisdictions.

Read more in

Nested Virtualization Solution Saves Time & Money

It's all about the delivery

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I planned to write on this topic before the Target incident. But once it happened, I felt its inclusion really highlights how getting shipping right is so essential for businesses today.

When was the last time you paid for shipping? Some would have to think a while for the answer because so many of us select the "free shipping" options available for online orders.  In truth, though, shipping services are never really free. Their cost can be quite significant, particularly for businesses that that operate in the supply chain.
Shipping is lifeblood of a supply chain business.....

We can see the difference in delivery services from retailers who optimize their shipping and those who don't in our own experience.  I ordered a few items on Target.com on May 28. The email confirmation gave a range for delivery for all the items of June 3 to 5. June 5 arrived, as did some of the items, but not all of them. The UPS tracking information provided still showed June 5 as the date of arrival, despite a notation of a delay on a truck, as confirmed by a Target representative on the phone.  The UPS man who delivered part of the order assured me that there was no way another shipment would come before Monday.

His prediction turned out to be correct, and that was the only insight I gained from UPS, which failed to give me a new arrival time despite my request for information via email.  (Note: Both Target and UPS claimed to want to help when I tweeted about it, but only Target offered some conciliation in the form of a $10 gift card.)

Read more in 

Logistics Don’t Always Deliver Joy Thanks to UPS for inspiring the title with its own tagline

Glassdoor

Glassdoor, once known primarily as a site for salary information and an insider's peek into corporate culture, has grown by building up its job search features, putting it squarely in competition with the better-known LinkedIn. That could be good news for job seekers and employees who want salary bumps or better benefits. Read more here:IIn Glassdoor vs. LinkedIn, Employees Win

The best of both the online and bricks-and-mortar worlds

With the all-important holiday shopping season around the corner, retailers are doing whatever it takes to win customers in the United Kingdom. eBay is betting on a combination of online ordering and in-person pick-up with a six-month trial of “click and collect,” where the online auction house provides delivery to Argos stores for a number of its sellers.

The partnership gives customers the best of both the online and bricks-and-mortar worlds. Read more in 

eBay Bets on In-Person Pick-Up Partnership

Google and MOOC.org

Google sees the partnership as a way to support educational innovation. "Our industry is in early stages of MOOCs, and lots of experimentation is still needed to find the best way to meet the educational needs of the world. An open ecosystem with multiple players encourages rapid experimentation and innovation, and we applaud the work going on in this space today," Dan Clancy, director of research at Google wrote.

Throw enough spaghetti at the wall and eventually some should stick. That’s the approach here. If we build a system to accommodate large numbers, eventually someone will stumble on what actually works. It’s the pursuit of innovation through trial-and-error on a large scale.

Read more in Google Infrastructure Adds to MOOC Momentum

How green is my internet?

The late Ed Koch, who served as mayor of New York City for multiple terms in the 1980s, was famous for asking, “How am I doing?” Extending the question to the impact of its operations on the health of the planet, eBay has developed a way to get an automatically updated response. And the online auction powerhouse hopes to encourage other businesses to ask the same question, too.

In March, eBay released Digital Service Efficiency (DSE) -- http://dse.ebay.com/ -- a dashboard designed to reveal the company's datacenter energy efficiency in the style of a car’s MPG rating. The metric is based on “four key areas: performance, cost, environmental impact and revenue,” eBay said. Quarterly performance reports are measured against the yearly goals.

On May 24, eBay posted its first quarter results on its DSE blog.

Read more in 

Everybody Wins in eBay's Eco-Friendly Bid

Writer's homework

When I read articles by people who didn't bother to investigate the subject properly, I really wonder, why are they getting paid for this? I just read a Guardian piece on the advantages and drawbacks of  massive open online course AKA MOOCs.  Iit includes an assertion that the courses only can be given for subjects that involve multiple choice tests: 

Moocs are limited to subjects that can be assessed with multiple choice exams, marked automatically.Written any essays in your degree? Your professor's critique of them can't be replicated by a mooc – yet.

First of all, MOOCs like Coursera have come up with a way around that, as I explained in a blog posted last year:

Another innovative aspect to Coursera is the way it assesses student work in courses that are not limited to technology or mathematics.

As founder Ng observes, "Multiple choice doesn't really work for a poetry class." Also, with thousands enrolled in a single class, instructors would find it impossible to personalize responses to student work.

Coursera's solution to that problem is the introduction of "a system for peer grading, in which students will be trained to evaluate each other's work based on a grading rubric provided by the professor." This is not all that different from peer reviews encouraged in writers' groups, which some teachers employ in their own classroom, though the Coursera system is designed to ascertain that the students comprehend the instructor's standards before being allowed to grade another's work.

 Second of all, there are already some systems to automate grading for written work as I explained here:

For example, Pearson’s Write to Learn is designed to offer instant feedback and personalized direction on student writing. The software can be accessed at computers in the school or through an Internet connection remotely. Teachers using the software are happy to have much of the grunt work associated with guiding students through revision and editing lifted from their shoulders.  The automated critique also reduces personal confrontations. As one teacher featured in a Write to Learn case study says, there's no "evil professor" who delights in finding fault in student work.

Educational Testing Service's e-rater is another automated assessment tool. It can score 16,000 essays in 20 seconds, a breathtaking rate of productivity when compared to the one to two minutes per essay typically allotted to human scorers.

Students responded positively when the New Jersey Institute of Technology introduced e-raters. An assistant professor there, Andrew Klobucar, observes that whereas students see drafting and revising multiple times as "corrective, even punitive," when assigned by evil professors, they do not have the same negative view when doing it for an e-rater.

I do wish writers would do their own homework when offering an opinion on the current state of educational technology.

Is your face your calling card?

Many books include pictures of the author on the back cover or inside the jacket. That is one thing I never bother to check when considering whether or not I want to read a book.  I  still don't really think about the author's appearance as I read. And I don't really think about my own as I write. 

I use a quill for my signature picture here, as well as on my other blogs. It also serves as  my profile photo  on Facebook, Google+ and Twitter. I feel it conveys what I am about more accurately -- in terms of my role as writer - than my photo would. Or maybe I'm just camera-shy.

On  the other hand, my actual photo does serve as my profile picture for the UBM boards on which I write. The policy there, as it is for many newspapers, is to require a photo for the writers. Those who comment only and don't blog can get away with using any picture they like for their profile photo or just use the default picture if they don't bother to upload one of their own. 

Once I had my picture posted in that way, I put it in for my LinkedIn profile, as well. It seemed more consistent to have the same picture represent me there. Also the more standard practice on LI is to use an actual photo than a representational picture.  I still can't see attaching a photo to a resume, though anyone who wishes to find my photo simply has to do an online search to find one in a fraction of a second.

While the net dooes tend to attach author faces to content,  I don't believe I am more drawn to articles that feature faces.I must be  in the minority, though, because I'm certain that those who demand faces find that they are effective at drawing more audience interest. 

. What do you think about  the face as calling card?

A fitting solution?

Analytics applied to the problem of finding clothes that fit: Does This Look Good on Me?
 my latest post on All Analytics.

Technology and education blogs

I wrote about Coursera's innovation in the online education and the possibilities of automated readers for writing assessment

Strengthening memory

Is there still a value in memorization when we can simply Google what we wish to know? Some believe that technology should not take the place of human accomplishment. That is one of the values behind Memrise, the site I wrote about for Internet Evolution