Commentary
How to Beat Amazon and Walmart at E-Commerce amid Covid-19
Make personalization a priority to stand out from e-commerce giants like Amazon. Offer true advice and perhaps extended warranties or return policies as a way to build trust. Value ads like tech support personally have gone a long way for our brand. Make sure you are encouraging and incentivizing customers to take the next step with your company.
How to Apply Digital Marketing Principles to Traditional Media Channels
Traditional channels such as TV, radio, and OOH might have limitations on targeting when you compare them to digital channels, but I challenge everyone to think beyond the simplistic mass marketing vs 1:1 argument. The scale and reach potential of these traditional channels is still massive, and by asking the right questions and changing your perspective to focus on what they can deliver, there most likely is a way to incorporate them effectively in your mix.
How Email Publishers Are Thriving and Adapting amid the Pandemic
Over the past eight months, while so many channels have faltered, email publishing has flourished. Email open rates grew by 13% year-over-year between January and April, while conversion rates rose by 17%, peaking in March. Media companies have increased their email frequency significantly since the pandemic began, and retail email volume has risen as well.
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4 Ways to Retain Customers with Event Marketing
Customer retention is usually faster and costs a lot less than acquiring new customers. By putting your customers through the funnel, you’ve already done the hard part. To keep the momentum going, it’s important to create a set of initiatives that increases customer value, encourages further purchases, and fosters brand ambassadors to promote your company.
Experiential marketing through events helps brands achieve these goals. The aim is to create memorable experiences that engender high degrees of loyalty. Here are four ways you can leverage event marketing to retain your customers.
Leveraging Voice: A Path for Brand Marketers
It’s important that companies can see who their customers are and what transactions are associated with each customer via voice assistants. This sort of knowledge is necessary for brands to make the channel a valuable part of an overarching loyalty strategy.
Given that voice is currently owned by just a few select companies, it’s important for brands to figure out how they will leverage voice differently from company to company or device to device. Will retail brands keep the same strategy with Amazon’s Alexa and Apple’s Siri, or will they find unique ways to take advantage of these platforms across differences?
What Does Customer Experience Mean in a Voice-First World?
The trend of moving customer experience beyond the screen has been dubbed “conversational customer care.” It’s still unclear just how many channels are included under this umbrella or how the future of conversational customer care will look. Brands that are dealing with demanding customers can’t afford to sit back and wait for this to play out. Screen-free customer experiences could be the future. They could be just a single touchpoint in the broader context of customer experience strategy. Or, they could just be a passing fad.
But the chances that voice-first customer experiences are a fad seem to be shrinking.
This Election Season, Candidates Should Take Voter Data Privacy Concerns into Account
In the wake of Cambridge Analytica and privacy regulations like GDPR and CCPA, the advertising landscape has changed, as have consumers’ perceptions about data collection and privacy. Candidates still need ways to reach their target audience effectively, and they should do so while being mindful of compliance issues and Americans’ privacy concerns.
The 2019-2020 advertising cycle will generate an estimated $6 billion in political media spending, $1.6 billion of which will be spent on digital video, according to Politico’s spending projections. This is up from $0.74 billion on digital video in 2018, so we are talking exponential growth. Many candidates will wash their hands of marketing decisions, entrusting their staff and partners to decide how to best use their campaign dollars. But candidates should use their advertising strategies to make a political statement—to show voters they care about ethical data practices.
5 Ways to Reduce Errors in Voice Ordering
Restaurant chains like Wingstop, Domino’s, Panera, and Round Table have created their own skills to make it easier for people to place orders through voice assistants like Amazon’s Echo and Google Home. But before voice ordering can truly disrupt the restaurant industry, restaurants have to find ways to reduce the friction and eliminate the kinds of errors that lead to the wrong orders being delivered.
Here’s how some of the country’s top restaurant chains are overcoming the challenges associated with voice ordering and developing more frictionless customer experiences.
96% of Companies Say They’re Losing Subscribers for Fixable Reasons
Ninety-three percent of companies that rely on subscribers say retaining existing customers is as or more important than acquiring them, and 96% say they are losing subscribers for reasons they should be able to ameliorate. That makes pooling industry resources and determining means of improvement urgent, and that is the precise subject of a new report by Brightback, a customer retention software firm.
Brands Can’t Tell Stories If They’ve Lost the Plot
In 2020, a marketer’s goal should not be to create more content. It shouldn’t even be to create better content. Most brands, after all, are already doing a good job of generating content that provides value, service, comfort, and utility to people’s lives. What’s missing is a fundamental alignment between content and other marketing disciplines. Content, from a metrics standpoint, needs to speak the same language as paid media so that marketers can demonstrate the impact it has to their CMOs.
Survey: What Marketers Want from Location Data
Marketers surveyed showed an especially keen interest in understanding how they can integrate location data with other kinds of information. Asked how they deploy location data, 27% said it’s a “key component of a broader strategy to map the customer journey online and offline.” Twenty-six percent, the second-largest segment, said they were interested in learning how to marshal location data in conjunction with other data to achieve more advanced goals than their current practices allow.
How B2B Companies Can Survive in a Clickless Search Ecosystem
The dawn of the clickless world might raise alarms for B2Bs companies, and that’s fair. This trend will likely pose a challenge for companies that rely heavily on Google for new business leads — especially small businesses that generate a majority of leads from search traffic.
However, the clickless world also presents an opportunity for B2B brands to streamline their online presence. In this new ecosystem, B2B brands can generate awareness and encourage customers to contact their business even before a customer actually sees their website.
Location Weekly: Foursquare Partners with Vistar Media, Yelp Launches Store Visits
In this 452nd episode of Location Weekly, the Location-Based Marketing Association covers Foursquare partnering with Vistar Media, Al Arabia Outdoor using Streach to measure OOH in Saudi Arabia, Walmart shutting down its Jetblack text service, Panera reaching 9.3M with AR campaign, Unilever piloting drones for ice cream delivery, and Yelp launching a new Store Visits product.
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