Agile marketing emphasizes speed and flexibility, collaboration, communication, and data — the qualities needed to navigate today’s constantly shifting marketing ecosystem. It allows marketers to adapt their campaigns and test new strategies in near real-time. It’s popular because the approach is helping companies become more efficient at managing the entire marketing process — from swiftly changing priorities and increasing brand visibility to improving marketing’s productivity.  

In this post, we’ll cover:

• What is agile marketing?
• Core values of an agile marketing framework
• Why should marketers care?
• Who uses agile marketing tools?
• What types of tools or software enable agile marketing?
• How agile marketing can help marketers succeed
• The future of agile marketing 
• Additional reading

What is agile marketing?

Agile marketing is a framework that uses self-organizing, cross-functional teams that work in frequent small bursts (called “sprints”). This allows marketing teams to adapt campaigns and strategies quickly based on continuous feedback and data. 

Agile marketing borrows some of the principles of agile software development methodologies and tools like Kanban, a system of visual project planning (think sticky notes on whiteboards) and Scrum, a sprint-based approach to team collaboration. But marketing is not software development, which is why agile experts like Stacey Ackerman, MarTech contributor and agile coach, are developing frameworks like the Agile Marketing Navigator, specifically for marketing teams.

Gartner’s official definition of agile marketing, which they refer to as “agile marketing project management” is:

“A method that applies tools, processes and organizational design concepts, inspired by software development methodology, to make marketing programs more relevant, more adaptive and efficient.”

Core values of an agile marketing framework

According to the Agile Marketing Manifesto, which outlines the values and principles of agile marketing, an agile marketing approach incorporates the following core values: 

• Outcome over output. Agile marketing prioritizes customer and business needs first versus simply engaging with marketing for marketing’s sake. It requires input from all team members, who must agree on a desired outcome before any work begins. Initiatives and tasks are done with purpose. Team members work together and collaborate to finish all aspects of a project.

• It dispenses with perfection. Agile marketing uses an iterative approach that seeks to deliver value early and often versus attempting to achieve a flawless campaign right out of the gate. It leverages efficiency and viability, focusing on what’s executable now, what can be repurposed, and if a simple (versus complex) approach will suffice to get something launched quickly. The goal is to seize opportunities as they arise and refine as you go along.

• Data and experimentation. An agile approach is data-driven, with learning derived from constant experimentation and strategy driven by actual results versus opinions or adherence to outdated conventions.

• Cross-functional collaboration. Agile marketing depends on collaboration using self-functioning teams. It seeks to eliminate silos by with a cross-functional approach that unifies departments and fosters collaboration. Agile teams are aligned with their organization’s goals and objectives rather than a single department’s goals. It dispenses with hierarchies, though team leaders help drive projects and ensure workflows are maintained. 

• Responsiveness. Agile’s iterative approach makes it inherently responsive to changing needs. Rather than being tied to a static strategy or plan, it allows for perpetual deviation based on changes in the market, customer needs, or campaign performance.

Why marketers should care about agile marketing

Agile marketing focuses on quantity over quality. It’s outcomes-driven, allowing marketers to measure success in early intervals and pivot quickly when something’s not working. By following agile methodologies, marketers can try lots of new things, repeat what works, and support their decisions with data-backed evidence. 

Since agile teams are collaborative and self-guided versus siloed and hierarchical, marketers can develop and modify campaigns by coordinating with multiple teams and departments. This allows people to work outside of their job title, taking responsibility for all aspects of the campaign rather than a specific piece of it. It also enables quick pivoting and responsiveness based on what’s happening with your customers and market in real time. All of this helps you remain competitive while increasing efficiency and productivity.

Who uses agile marketing tools?

Agile marketing tools focus on collaboration, data management, task management and team communication. Multiple teams and employees use them to facilitate an agile marketing framework. Here are some of the teams and people most likely to use these tools:

• Stakeholders and practice leaders – to align marketing objectives with company goals, ensure team members have a vested interest in marketing output, and review progress. 
• Marketing, sales, and team leaders – to foster collaboration and facilitate execution.
• Project/program managers – to create plans, prioritize work, track progress, and liaise with team leaders. 
• Developers and tech managers – to maintain tools, develop digital assets, and optimize content/workflows.
• Content creators and marketers – to develop content assets, execute plans, and optimize campaigns.
• Analysts – to collect campaign data, create actionable insights, and inform campaign strategy based on data and results.

Which technologies support agile marketing?

Agile marketing uses a combination of technology solutions and tools to facilitate team collaboration, break down silos, track performance, and maintain project workflow. Here are some of the different tools you might encounter as an agile-enabled team:

• Marketing work management platforms. Platforms like Adobe Workfront and Airtable help distributed employees collaborate and communicate, track hours, provide visualization tools, and often have other features like data asset management (DAM) to help with seamless communication and workflow.
  
• Project management tools. Tools like Jira and Trello support agile frameworks with Kanban-style interfaces that help teams implement and manage agile workflows.
  
• Data gathering and analysis tools. Tools like Google Analytics and Adobe Audience Manager help teams collect data, create actionable insights, and inform campaign strategy.
  
• Collaboration and work management tools. Tools like Slack and Asana act as collaboration hubs, allowing teams to track progress and check-in without having to be in the same physical space.
  
• Customer data platforms (CDPs). Tools like Blueconic and Tealium collect, organize, unify, and activate customer data from different sources. This is the technology that enables marketers to create personalized experiences and test new channels.
  
• Digital experience platforms (DXPs). Tools like Acquia and Contentful help teams manage their content assets and provide a central content repository that allows for content collaboration and access. They also allow teams to orchestrate customer journeys, personalize and optimize messaging, and support multiple customer experiences.

• Marketing automation platforms (MAPs). Tools like Salesforce and Acoustic help teams automate marketing and sales processes like lead nurturing, email marketing, lead scoring, landing page creation, and more. 

Most companies are already using some tools and tech that facilitate collaboration, data analysis, and asset sharing. Thus, use the above list as a starting point when assessing your agile marketing readiness. Be sure to consider the solutions that you may already have in-house and what’s needed to augment them to support an agile framework.

How agile marketing can help marketers succeed

Agile marketing helps marketers succeed because it’s inherently more flexible, responsive, and customer-centric than traditional marketing models. Since one of the main values of agile marketing is collaboration, it facilitates close alignment and communication with company stakeholders and customers. This makes it much more likely that marketers will align the goals of their campaigns with their organization’s growth objectives.

According to AgileSherpa, marketers who use an agile approach are more satisfied—and confident— with their outcomes versus those who take a traditional or ad hoc approach. Benefits include a greater ability to handle fast-paced work, clarity around marketing’s contribution to their organization’s success, and the confidence to experiment with new and emerging opportunities.

When MetLife’s pet insurance division implemented an agile framework, they began selling more policies than ever. They were able to use this this successful approach as a model to roll out to other departments throughout MetLife. This is another big benefit of agile—since it’s iterative, it enables marketers to test and experiment different approaches until they find a formula that works.

What’s next for agile marketing?

Agile marketing is still in the early stages of adoption. Marketers need more training, certification, and confidence around what tools to use and how to use them. But it’s growing in popularity, with 31% of respondents in AgileSherpa’s latest report stating their marketing departments are fully agile and another 62% of respondents who have partially agile marketing teams preparing to go fully agile in the next year.

Agile frameworks are also extending beyond marketing teams, to total organizational agility. Per AgileSherpa, organizations that embrace an agile framework in other departments are seeing much greater benefits from implementing an agile marketing approach. Their data reveals that when finance uses agile, marketers are 2.5 times more likely to report success and when human resources uses agile, they’re three times more likely to report success.

Keep in mind that for agile to be truly successful, executive buy-in is needed. AgileSherpa notes a strong correlation with agile success from marketers who stated they had executive support. Agile marketing has matured significantly over the past five years and we anticipate even more exciting developments as more companies pivot away from traditional marketing frameworks that make it difficult to adapt to shifts in customer behaviors, market trends, and organizational needs.  

Additional reading

Everything you need to know about agile marketing, plus a guide to the Agile Marketing Navigator — an approach to agile designed specifically for marketers — dive into the MarTech archive for articles written by agile coach Stacy Ackerman.

You can also download a free eBook on the Agile Marketing Navigator.

If you’re interested in the broad history of agile development that sets the context for agile marketing, here are a couple of good guides:

• “To agility and beyond: The history—and legacy—of agile development.”
• “The Complete History of Agile Software Development.”

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“Pet insurance is a business that has a huge amount of white space,” said Sabrina Sebastian. “There was a significant opportunity to expand awareness and penetration rate of pet insurance which is less than 3% for all pet parents today.”

In 2019, global insurance provider MetLife had acquired PetFirst, a pet health insurance company founded in 2004. After the acquisition, Sebastian, PetFirst’s former CMO, and now MetLife’s AVP for Pet Insurance Marketing, was tasked with growing the MetLife Pet Insurance division.

In 2021, there were approximately 135.2 million dogs and cats owned by Americans, with about 3.9 million U.S. pets (mostly dogs and cats) insured that year. As a growth-focused business, MetLife saw a significant opportunity to expand the pet insurance division. They’d been using a traditional marketing workflow with modular teams that were highly skilled in marketing. 

Said Sebastian, “If we needed to tap into other teams, we would do that, but it was a really traditional way of working. We discovered that we also needed to rely heavily on our tech partners, our data partners, and our business partners.” 

This need is what drove the shift from a traditional marketing approach to an agile marketing framework.

Bringing cross-functional teams together

Agile marketing, which has its roots in software development, is a way for marketers to respond rapidly to the changing needs of customers and drive successful business outcomes. It’s done through a team-based approach using collaborative practices. This new way of working empowers marketers to do the right thing for the customer at the right time, eliminating a lot of wasteful process overhead.

“It’s a very natural way of working when you need to tap into another skill set or another opportunity that exists outside your core team,” said Sebastian. “When we started to think about how we wanted to operate and work differently, we asked ourselves, okay, what do we need to be able to do that?”

MetLife was already using agile pods in certain departments within the organization. Their global CMO and other senior leaders within the company provided the support that Sebastian needed to move from a traditional marketing to an agile marketing approach.

“We had the support and the executive sponsorship of the MetLife global CMO. He was behind these efforts and got everybody else excited about that,” said Sebastian. “It was great to have that support starting at the top and from senior leaders in all areas of the business. It really does require a cross-functional team.”

In addition to buy-in and support from leadership, Sebastian was focused on how to put together her multidisciplinary marketing team. She ultimately approached all the teams that needed to be involved in the process including traditional marketing, content strategy, data and analytics, technology, and the more traditional IT and infrastructure teams. 

“We went to those leaders and said, okay, we’re putting together this team and we’re putting together a new way of working and we want to tap into the resources that you have,” said Sebastian. 

When bringing together cross-functional teams, Sebastian emphasized the importance of starting foundationally and understanding that not everybody is a marketer. Marketing needed to take a step back and educate various teams on what they were doing, why they were doing it, and how they were planning to get it done. 

“Ultimately, we needed to get them ingrained in the actual business goals that we had in front of us, said Sebastian. “A lot of these people had never worked on Pet before. Then secondarily, a lot of the people had never been part of a marketing team before. So, we had to do a lot of training and education and really just make sure folks were on the same page.”

Getting agile off the ground

To get the agile group up to speed with the pet insurance division’s new agile marketing approach, Sebastian’s team did some on-site training to make sure that everybody understood the foundations and principles of agile marketing. This also allowed the team to get to know each other. 

“Part of the agile marketing process is just making sure that the team stays connected,” said Sebastian. “There are daily stand-up meetings and different ceremonies that take place throughout the process to make sure that everyone is on the same page. We also did a fair bit of education and work on our side to make sure that everybody was comfortable and getting to know each other as a team.”

The agile marketing approach is collaborative. That extends to the way teams are lead and managed. Instead of a single manager or leader, there are Product Owners (POs) that help facilitate communication and keep people connected. One of the principles of agile marketing is the team is self-functioning and self-governing. 

“It’s not that there’s not someone in charge,” said Sebastian, “But there’s not someone who’s the boss. You depend on the team to manage itself. We have a PO that does an amazing job of organizing all of the things that need and managing the activities that a PO should.”

Dig deeper: Introducing an in-depth guide to the Agile Marketing Navigator

Focusing on outcomes and business impact

One of the biggest challenges that Sebastian’s team had to overcome, beyond the de-siloing of teams, was to adopt a more business-focused mindset when it came to goals. That is, when teams are isolated from each other, they tend to focus on the goals of that specific team, whether it’s marketing, sales, technology, or business.

“The great thing about Agile is that the business goal is really the guiding principle of what we’re all working towards every single day,” Sebastian explained. “So we’re making sure that we stay close to that goal and understand the ‘why’ behind the work that we’re doing.” 

Said Stacey Ackerman, partner at NavigateAgile and MarTech contributor, “It’s really common in marketing to be going 100 miles an hour trying to do as much as possible, but if you ask anyone what goal they’re trying to achieve for the business or the customers, most marketers have no idea. What I love about agile marketing is that everyone from senior leaders to the team executing the work is aligned and working towards the same outcome. Therefore, marketers that are really succeeding with agile marketing are actually doing less work with better results,”

MetLife’s agile approach is focused on outcomes and adding value versus just being busy. It’s a big-picture mindset that ties marketing activities to those outcomes that add value to the business. “That’s one of the ways that we really have seen a shift in our team,” said Sebastian. “We’re not just doing things. We’re doing things that are really impactful, are adding value, and are helping us get closer to those big business goals that we have.”

Sebastian notes two key achievements from having implemented an agile marketing methodology within MetLife. The first is that, while there were already several other agile pods within the company, her agile team has been able to blaze the trail for agile marketing. “We’re laying out the foundation for how an agile pod should work. And we’re able to share that knowledge across the organization.”

Sebastian confirmed that they’re selling more policies now than they ever have. Year over year growth is in double digits. “This is definitely a way of working that we’d like to continue to expand at MetLife, specifically in the marketing space,” said Sebastian. “We’ve seen really significant impacts from the work that we’ve been doing.”

“The other thing that’s interesting is that we have a direct connection with the consumer. MetLife is a voluntary benefits company, so we have a large portion of our efforts concentrated in the group business, but we also have the opportunity with Pet to go direct to consumer. That’s one of the reasons that Pet was a good fit for agile marketing. We’re all about meeting pet parents where they are. Being able to connect in meaningful ways to the consumer, regardless of where you find them, has been really impactful for us.”

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Two years after the Covid-19 hit, the customer split between online and offline channels was at 61% and 39% respectively versus 56% and 44% in 2020, according to Salesforce’s 5th State of the Connected Customer Report.

Providing a seamless customer experience across the many variables inherent with a multichannel customer journey requires a significant pivot in how businesses deal with customers. Customer Journey Orchestration (CJO) is designed to help you leverage customer data to deliver personalized experiences regardless of when, where, or how a customer interacts with your business.

What is customer journey orchestration?

Customer journey orchestration uses data and technology to determine the best way to interact with each customer across the customer buying journey. It leverages powerful data analysis and automation to understand each customer’s behavior, preferences, and purchase history. It spans online and offline channels, ensuring a good experience no matter how or where a customer interacts with you.

The goal with CJO is to recognize a customer’s needs at every stage of the buying journey and deliver the most relevant content, messaging, and service to move the customer further along in their buying cycle.

The Customer Data Platform (CDP) Resource defines CJO as: “The process of delivering personalized experiences along the customer journey that lead to an optimal next step.”

Gartner defines the “customer journey” as “a tool that helps marketers understand the series of connected experiences that customers desire and needs — whether that be completing a desired task or traversing the end-to-end journey from prospect to customer to loyal advocate.”

Why marketers should care

Today’s customer journeys are undergoing a major transformation as experiences become more hybrid and digital becomes more embedded into how customers purchase products or services. 

Customers jump from device to device and channel to channel which makes the journey hard to predict. To keep these journeys seamless, marketers must be able to gather and interpret customer data from across channels.

Customer journey mapping is a part of this process. It helps marketers predict, visualize and optimize the customer buying journey for the various channels.

Who uses CJO tools?

CJO tools benefit many customer-facing teams within an organization, but it’s not just your marketing and sales teams that will work with (or be impacted) by this technology. Here’s a breakdown of how different departments use and work with CJO tools:

• Marketing/Experience: CMOs, CXMs, marketing directors, analysts and planners use CJO platforms and tools to develop and execute customer-centric campaigns, engage with customers in real-time, analyze data and performance metrics, and measure the impact of each interaction.

• Sales: Sales teams, particularly in B2B, use CJO tech to connect with prospects across a multifaceted buying journey, coordinate messaging with marketing teams, optimize the sales approach, and keep messaging and communication consistent across channels and interactions. 

• Customer Service: Customer service teams use CJO tools for responding to customer queries, closing service gaps, capturing valuable feedback and providing appropriate self-service options for customers who want to solve issues on their own. 
• IT/Development: IT and development teams work on the back end to create seamless integrations with other systems, implement and optimize software, align the CJO infrastructure with business objectives, and ensure there’s adequate compliance and security procedures in place to protect customer data.
• Executive/Leadership: Achieving seamless customer journey orchestration is a big endeavor both in terms of technology and company philosophy. You need leadership to steer the ship by aligning  CJO initiatives with short and long-term objectives, understanding the potential of the technology, making the appropriate investments in budget and staffing, and providing ongoing support as the technology is onboarded and implemented.  

What technology enables CJO?

CJO is a data-driven approach to marketing, so it makes sense that the tools and tech that enable it focus on capturing, unifying, processing, and analyzing data. But there’s more to providing a seamless customer journey than just data. Here are some of the tools involved

• Customer data platforms: Platforms like Segment and Optimove provide an aggregated view of customer data and help marketers create integrated customer profiles that can be used for personalization and segmentation.
• Marketing automation tools: Customer journeys require automated communication. Tools like HubSpot and Marketo are used to create personalized messaging based on customer behavior, preferences and other data points.
• Customer relationship management (CRM) software: The relationship between customer and brand continues even after the buying journey has ended. CRM platforms like Salesforce and SugarCRM can manage relationships, track customer interactions and activity, and foster ongoing engagement. 
• Analytics platforms: Data analysis, reports, and insights are typically baked into marketing automation tools, but standalone analytics and software like Google Analytics, Mixpanel, and Adobe Analytics can dig deeper, providing insights for every team involved in the CJO process.
• Journey mapping tools: Customer journey mapping tools like Lucidchart and Smaply help you visualize the customer experience with templates, diagrams, and graphics that produce a visual representation of the customer journey.  
• Customer Journey Orchestration Platforms: Enterprise CJO platforms like Alterian and Cheetah Digital bundle many of the capabilities from the above tools into one tool. Typical CJO platform capabilities include data gathering across channels/touchpoints, AI/ML-driven analysis and testing, customer journey visualization (e.g., journey mapping), and real-time campaign/journey activation (e.g., initiating chats, serving ads, etc.)

How does CJO help marketers?

Good experience matters to customers, often more than the products you sell or the services you provide. Forty-four percent of U.S. consumers said there was no excuse for a poor customer experience, according to a survey by Telus International. 

Respondents were unforgiving about this, noting that price, convenience and brand loyalty won’t get you off the hook if they have a bad interaction. In fact, 60% of respondents said they would rather sit in traffic than deal with poor service.

That’s why these CJO benefits are particularly important:

• It enables businesses to create a single view of the customer. This the only reliable way to provide a good customer experience across an increasingly multifaceted buying journey. 
• It puts customers first, looking at the whole buying journey rather than pieces of it. You can provide customers with personalized information, connect them with people and resources, and make their lives easier by offering the right solutions in real time.
• It empowers customers to find the information they need or want in the way: and on the channel: that works best for them.
• It improves efficiency by keeping your entire organization focused on the same business objectives, eliminating data silos, streamlining processes, and reducing repetitive or redundant tasks.

What’s next for CJO?

Customer journey orchestration is evolving and growing more popular among businesses, with the market projected to reach over $46 billion by 2030. It’s an approach that promises significant benefits for businesses and customers alike. Organizations implementing customer journey orchestration have achieved revenue gains of 10-20%, cost reductions of 15-25%, and customer advocacy score improvements of 20-40 points.

But making it work often entails big changes—and investments—in data, decisioning, and delivery capabilities. You need the right tools in place before you can deliver cross-channel, real-time personalized experiences, consistently across all consumer touchpoints.

Meeting customer expectations for great experiences is no longer optional. It’s a critical aspect of how businesses operate. Orchestrating seamless multichannel customer interactions is the best way to build good, lasting relationships with your customers. A strong customer journey orchestration approach also makes it easier to scale: and pivot: when customer behaviors and demands inevitably change. 

Additional reading:

• What marketers should know about customer journey analytics
• How to prepare teams for customer journey orchestration
• 4 critical platforms to support customer journey orchestration: Getting started on CJO
• Preparing people for Customer Journey Orchestration: Getting started on CJO
• How customer journey orchestration affects process: Getting started on CJO
• How to decide if you’re ready for a customer journey orchestration solution

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The new law will have significant implications for marketers, who will need to ensure they are handling consumer data in a responsible and transparent manner. Consumers, for their part, are more invested in maintaining control of their data and reluctant to exchange personal information (even for incentives) unless they trust that you’re being careful with their data.  Nearly three-quarters of consumers rank data privacy as a top value, a recent report by MAGNA Media Trials and Ketch found.

In this post we’ll cover:

• What is privacy in marketing? 
• Why marketers should care. 
• How important is privacy to consumers? 
• The four types of consumer data. 
• Privacy initiatives marketers should know about.
• Privacy-enhancing technologies. 
• What does this mean for marketers?

Estimated reading time: 9 minutes

What is privacy in marketing?

Privacy in marketing is all about data — specifically, an individual’s personal, identifiable or aggregate data and how companies collect it, use it, share it and forget it. The International Association of Privacy Professionals (IAPP) defines privacy as, “the right to be left alone.”

From a data privacy perspective, that means individuals have the right:

• To understand how their data is being used.
• To control who has access to it.
• To tell a company to stop using it.
• To have it deleted if they want. 

Privacy is not an all-or-nothing proposition. There are different levels of sensitivity when it comes to the types of data companies collect. For example, a consumer’s name and email address are not as sensitive as their health data (although with the implementation of ADPPA, that could change.) 

Why marketers should care

We can’t have all the shiny new marketing things — omnichannel experiences, customer centricity, personalization — without consumer data. But with big data comes big responsibility. 

It may have taken consumers and especially U.S. consumers, a long time to become educated about the fact that brands engaged in granular tracking of online behavior, using the data gathered for marketing purposes or even selling it. 

Ironically, U.S. brands were forced to take privacy seriously by European legislation (GDPR) because the worldwide reach of the internet meant brands could hardly guarantee to avoid engagement with European data subjects. The new horizon, however, is not just complying with applicable privacy laws — it’s being proactive about consumer privacy to build trust, establish community and secure loyalty.

How important is privacy to consumers?

Consumers care about privacy a lot, according to the MAGNA and Ketch survey, but this doesn’t mean they’re as focused on privacy compliance laws as, say, the entire digital marketing industry. 

90% of survey respondents had never heard of the Virginia Consumer Privacy Data Protection Act (VCDPA). But while people may not be closely following government-imposed privacy regulations — or how businesses comply with them — they’re paying attention to companies who get flagged for poor privacy practices.

Even if consumers don’t know the acronyms as well as we do, they’re concerned about how businesses handle their data, with just 5% having no major concerns.

Here are some top concerns, according to a recent survey by Tinuiti:

• More than 50% of consumers agree that there’s no such thing as online privacy.
• Roughly 40% to 50% (depending on age) of people think their mobile phones are listening to them. 
• 70% of consumers don’t like receiving targeted ads as a trade-off for providing their information.
• Over 40% of consumers are very worried about criminals gaining access to their data. 

While it’s true that consumers are more aware of how companies use their data and have some concerns, they’re still mostly in the dark when it comes to a business’s privacy practices — which makes them suspicious. Nearly 60% of consumers in a recent BCG/Google survey think companies are selling their data even though the reality is that most companies don’t do this. 

Marketers need to do a better job of educating consumers about how we use their data and what we do to protect it. We also need to be more transparent about how we use consumer data to personalize experiences. Familiarizing yourself with the types of data you’re collecting — and why — is a good start.

The four types of consumer data 

Marketers use four types of data – first-, second- and third-party data. More recently, what has become known as “zero-party data” emerged (although it’s actually a subset of first-party data). Here’s an overview of each.

Zero-party data

The term zero-party data was first coined by Fatemeh Khatibloo, VP principal analyst at Forrester Research. The term “declared data” might be a better descriptor, but Khatibloo placed the concept within the tiered hierarchy of first-, second- and third-party data.

Basically, zero-party data is derived from a customer expressing a personal preference, be it the color of an item, clothing or shoe size, quantity, birthday, how they wish to receive information or even page settings.

First-party data

This is data you collect yourself, usually through your website or app. It includes information like names, email addresses, phone numbers, customer purchase histories, etc. It can also include behavioral, location and customer interaction data (e.g., chatbot transcripts). You own this data. That is, you collected it and you can use it how you see fit within the constraints of your region’s data privacy laws, of course.

Second-party data

This is data that another company shares with you, usually under the auspices of a partnership or some other type of business relationship. It could be something as simple as an email list that you purchased, or more complicated like activity from apps, purchase history and proprietary research. The data, in this case, is owned by the company that collected it, but you have permission to use it.

Third-party data

This is data that you collect from sources that are not affiliated with you in any way — think consumer data gathered by website cookies placed on someone’s browser as they surf the web. 

Third-party data is used widely by marketers to target and personalize ads. New privacy regulations require companies to get express permission from consumers to collect and use cookies or risk stiff penalties. Companies like Google, Apple and Mozilla are (or soon will be) eliminating support for cookies to avoid these penalties.  

The new cookieless future will make it more difficult to target ads and personalize messaging. It’s the direct result of emerging consumer privacy laws like GDPR and CCPA. 

Privacy initiatives marketers should know about 

Some privacy laws like the EU’s GDPR, Australia’s Consumer Data Right (CDR) law and California’s Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) have already been passed.

A fourth initiative, the U.S.’s ADPPA, is currently still cooking on the legislative stove. It’s been approved for a vote in the U.S. House of Representatives, then it must pass in the Senate. If approved, it will be the first comprehensive national law governing how companies collect and use consumer data in the U.S.

Here’s a (very high-level) breakdown of some important consumer privacy initiatives:

• GDPR: The EU’s General Data Protection Regulation went into effect in 2018 and strengthens consumer privacy rights by, among other things, giving consumers the right to know what personal data is being collected about them, the right to have that data erased and the right to object to its use.
• CCPA: California’s Consumer Privacy Act, signed into law in 2018, went into effect in January 2020. It gives Californians the right to know why and how businesses collect their data, plus what data is collected. It also gives consumers the right to opt out/withdraw consent and the right to be forgotten (e.g., have their data deleted).
• CDPA: Virginia’s Consumer Data Protection Act will likely go into effect in 2023. As with CCPA, it gives consumers much more control over how companies obtain and use their data. It also places an emphasis on data security, meaning companies will be required to take reasonable steps to protect consumer data from unauthorized access, destruction, use, modification or disclosure. Here are some differences between CCPA and CDPA marketers should be aware of.
• ADPPA: The American Data Privacy and Protection Act, projected to pass in 2023, would (among other things) give consumers the right to know more about their data, including how companies collect, use and share it. It gives Americans the right to opt-out of targeted advertising and provides “strong protections” for minors which minimize the collection and sharing of minors’ data.

Of note, the ADPPA is the first consumer data privacy and security bill aimed at protecting Americans from what has essentially been unfettered access to and use of their data by U.S. businesses. 

It’s focused on reducing “commercial surveillance” and strictly regulates what data can be collected at all. It also limits how data can be used. Businesses absolutely need to understand what’s in this bill, which is why we took a deep dive into the specifics of the ADPPA’s main points, including how it will impact marketers.

Privacy-enhancing technologies

Businesses can get help from technology when it comes to addressing privacy issues. For example, both brands and publishers can take advantage of data “clean rooms.” Clean rooms are a type of privacy-enhancing technology (PET) that allows data owners to share customer first-party data in a privacy-compliant way. Clean rooms are secure spaces where first-party data from a number of brands can be resolved to the same customer’s profile while that profile remains anonymized. 

Closely related is “differential privacy.” This uses a cryptographic algorithm to add statistical noise to the data, enabling patterns in the data to be detected while information about individuals is shielded. There are many other types of PET.

What does this mean for marketers?

Consumer privacy laws like GDPR, CCPA and ADPPA impose strict rules around what, how and why data is collected. Meanwhile, consumers are becoming more invested in their own data — and how companies use or misuse it. People want more control and transparency. They want to reclaim ownership of their information from the Googles and Amazons of the world. 

In addition to knowing the latest privacy regulations, marketers should better understand how consumers feel about data, including what data they’re willing to part with in exchange for incentives like discounts, freebies and convenience. 

Two-thirds of respondents in the BCG/Google survey said they like getting ads customized to their interests, but nearly half are worried about sharing their data. Younger generations will give up more data for fewer incentives versus older consumers. And no matter what data you’re collecting, you need to cultivate trust and transparency with processes and technology that comply with data privacy laws and keep consumers informed.

All of this requires that marketers create a privacy-first, transparent and resilient approach to data usage and data privacy. Increasingly, it also means you’ll have better control over consumer data collection preferences and usage if you have your own data rather than relying on second- or third-party data for your marketing initiatives.

The post Why marketers should care about consumer privacy appeared first on MarTech.

Businesses use content marketing strategies to generate brand awareness, educate prospects and customers and establish credibility. Increasingly, delivering a good customer experience means delivering relevant, personalized content to customers in a way that works for them. Providing the content customers need when they’re ready for it ultimately leads to better outcomes for marketers.

That means scaling content so it’s always fresh, relevant and personalized across the many touchpoints consumers use when interacting with businesses. 

How important is personalization in content marketing? About 71% of consumers expect businesses to deliver personalized interactions, according to recent McKinsey data. Nearly three-quarters of people will look elsewhere for whatever item or service they need when this expectation isn’t met.

In this post, we’ll cover:

• What is content marketing?
• Why marketers should care about content marketing.
• How effective is content marketing?
• Who uses or works with content marketing tools?
• What types of tools or software enable content marketing?
• How content marketing can help marketers succeed.
• What’s next for content marketing.
• Additional reading.

Estimated reading time: 7 minutes

What is content marketing?

Content marketing is a marketing approach or discipline that relies on developing various content types and assets focused on getting people to act (e.g., sign up for a newsletter, place an order, ask for more information, etc.) 

Unlike paid advertising, content marketing primarily uses organic approaches to attract and engage customers. Content, in this context, includes written or visual assets (e.g., guides, articles, blog posts, graphics, videos, social posts, etc.) But paid content promotion sometimes factors into content marketing – for example, sponsored content on publications or gated content that requires a fee to access.

Content marketing is closely linked to inbound marketing and other customer experience-based approaches. It’s often used as a top-of-the-funnel tactic to attract prospects and turn them into leads or customers. Still, it can also be used to nurture existing relationships and convert leads into customers. 

The Content Marketing Institute’s (CMI) official definition of content marketing is:

“A strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.”

There are three types of content marketing models which include:

• Paid: Content sits behind a paywall or requires some sort of purchase to access.
• Owned: Content is produced by a business and published on its own channels (e.g., website, blog, social media).
• Earned: Content is published by someone other than the company (e.g., user-generated content, influencer content, media coverage, etc.).

Regardless of where your content lives or lands, there are two unifying features that define a good content marketing strategy — relevancy and quality.

Why marketers should care about content marketing

The consumer buying cycle is an increasingly self-serve process scattered across multiple touchpoints. To adapt to consumer expectations and keep up with competitors, marketers must create a large volume of high-quality content that can be effectively shared across many different channels. 

Standing out in this cluttered content ecosystem requires producing personalized content at scale. Content automation tools and platforms allow companies to produce, manage, share and amplify content while facilitating scalability. In short, you need content to compete in today’s customer experience-driven landscape and technology to produce content at the volumes required to make an impact.

How effective is content marketing?

About 91% of companies said they achieved some level of success with content marketing in 2021, according to Semrush’s 2022 State of Content Marketing Report. Most respondents said they planned to increase content budgets and hire more content talent in 2022. 

Currently, content marketers measure success by looking at traffic, search rankings and leads. But this is changing. Content marketers are increasingly focused on other measures like engagement, conversion rates and ROI. Of course, there are tech tools that help with this. 

For example, customer journey analytics tools, such as Qualtrics, monitor every customer interaction with a company and analyze how each piece of the journey contributes to action, like a sale, conversion, or request for information. 

Journey analytics evaluates every piece of content a customer interacts with across the entire buying cycle and assesses how it impacts a measurable outcome (e.g., a sale, new customer, conversion, etc.)

Who uses or works with content marketing tools?

The most common teams that work with content marketing tools are those that deal with driving website traffic, engagement, leads and sales. This includes:

• Marketing: Content is used to attract prospects and turn them into leads at the top of the funnel.
• Sales: Content is used to accelerate the sales process by providing prospects with the information they need to make a purchase.
• Customer experience: Content helps reduce customer churn and drive upsells/cross-sells by keeping customers engaged post-purchase.
• Support and service teams: Content helps reduce the number of inbound support requests by proactively addressing common customer questions and issues.

Some job roles that work with content marketing tools include:

• CMO: Guides content strategy and works with other C-level executives to establish content goals.
• Content manager: Oversees content creation and distribution.
• Content planner: Executes content strategy and plans content calendar. 
• Content writer: Creates content. 
• Editor: Reviews and approves content. 
• Designer: Creates visuals to accompany content. 
• Marketing analyst: Tracks and reports content marketing performance metrics.
• Sales manager or agent: Uses content to support the sales process.
• Customer success manager or agent: Uses content to keep customers engaged.

What types of tools or software enable content marketing?

A wide range of tools and platforms exist to help businesses create, distribute, target and measure the content they create. They include:

• Content management systems (CMS) like HubSpot and Joomla let companies create, store and manage website content (e.g., webpages, blog posts, ecommerce product pages, etc.).
• Digital experience platforms (DXPs) like Sitecore and Adobe Experience Manager provide robust content orchestration features including digital asset management, customer data management, personalization and testing and marketing automation.
• SEO software like Moz Pro and Semrush provides tools for keyword research, content optimization, link building and SEO rank monitoring.
• Social media suites like Sprout Social and Brandwatch (formerly Falcon.io) include features like social publishing, campaign optimization and social engagement to improve the reach and impact of posts. 
• Content intelligence platforms like Ceralytics and Parse.ly help companies track content performance across multiple channels and touchpoints. 
• Content planning and team collaboration tools like Asana and Trello help content teams manage projects and workflows, share files, create editorial calendars and assign tasks/to-do lists.

How content marketing can help marketers succeed

Gartner notes that companies demonstrating success with growth, margin and profitability typically prioritize customer experience. These companies are nearly 30% more likely to have higher CX budgets and focus on the entire customer journey, including what happens after a prospect becomes a customer.

Content plays a role in every stage of the customer journey — from attracting prospects to building relationships with customers. The payoff is high for businesses committed to delivering personalized interactions driven by high-quality, relevant content.

Fast-growing companies drive 40% more of their revenue from personalization versus their competitors, a recent McKinsey report revealed.

Consumers respond to this approach. That is, they want personalized, relevant content from businesses. Per McKinsey, nearly 80% of consumers said personalized content was a key factor in their decision to purchase or repurchase from a brand.

Getting it right means creating content at scale. Content powered by AI will be a key driver of personalization. Brands that have fully invested in content marketing are now turning to AI to create more personalized content experiences for their customers.

What’s next for content marketing

Globally, the content marketing industry is projected to reach 9.6 billion by 2023. The industry’s dominant players include Oracle, HubSpot, Adobe and Salesforce, but content marketing encompasses many types of software and services including marketing agencies, resellers and the technology vendors themselves.

As the demand for high-quality, personalized content continues, content marketing and the tech needed to facilitate it will become increasingly essential for companies of all sizes. The proliferation of touchpoints and devices: the “how” and “where” of the customer journey: is also a key factor in the growth of content marketing. 

Artificial intelligence and content technology will help marketers keep up with the demand for personalized content, automating many of the tasks inherent in content creation and planning. But human ingenuity — and creativity — remains an essential component of effective content creation and strategy. As companies continue refining and improving the customer experience, content marketing will continue to take center stage. 

Additional reading

Here are some resources to help level up your content marketing efforts:

• Finding content marketing opportunities that influence search performance: Start with your existing pages to identify opportunities, which typically involve some form of repurposing, reformatting and updating.
• Content marketing ideation: Where do good ideas come from?: It’s not easy to keep coming up with new ideas for content. Here are steps you can take to help with the process.
• 3 content challenges and how marketers can overcome them: Increasing content demands are increasing problems.
• How to measure content marketing ROI and ROE: Why Return on Effort is an essential metric for content marketers.

The post Content marketing: What it is and why marketers should care appeared first on MarTech.

After a long career in publishing that included stints at Harper’s Bazaar and as Yahoo’s Food editor in chief, Kerry Diamond, founder and editor in chief of Cherry Bombe, opened a restaurant. “I had never worked in restaurants, but I’d done everything related to books and magazines and newspapers,” said Diamond.”

“Publishing was my world, but the restaurant really opened my eyes. I realized women’s stories weren’t being told or prioritized in the industry. I was learning about all these incredible women and I wanted to help tell their stories. I had this idea to do a magazine called Cherry Bombe. I spent about a year working on it and it came out in May 2013.”

In 2013, Cherry Bombe launched as a print magazine. They needed to start their email list — and build their online presence — from scratch. At the time, they were hindered by a clunky email marketing platform that made it difficult to customize messaging and nearly impossible to align the brand’s aesthetic which was inspired by a rich history of beautifully designed print magazines. 

They also needed to take more ownership of their content and communication strategy which was largely built on Instagram. They migrated to Mailchimp in 2014 for the ease-of-use, template options, and the ability to easily market products and track revenue through campaigns. But the secret sauce to their highly engaged email list lies in Cherry Bombe’s compelling, consistent content — stuff that readers are eager to receive in their inboxes. 

The platform has helped them crystallize their brand’s look and messaging even while audience outreach and engagement remained focused on Instagram. During and after the pandemic, Cherry Bombe knew they needed to take more ownership of their messaging and audience outreach by focusing — and recalibrating — their email marketing approach.

It was Instagram first

Back then, Cherry Bombe didn’t have an email strategy. They were a brand that had built itself on Instagram. Diamond’s team was using the platform to communicate with its audience. Emails were just a supplement to the social media presence.

“We had a really great Instagram community and we were making a lot of our announcements via Instagram,” explained Diamond. “In the early part the pandemic, I started to notice changes to Instagram that troubled me. I noticed brands just weren’t growing the same way on Instagram. TikTok was starting to take a lot of attention away from Instagram and as much as I love Instagram, I knew we needed to control our communications with our audience.”

What’s old is new again

For Diamond, who had her roots in traditional publishing and understood the value of well-crafted and beautiful content, email seemed like the best way to take control of Cherry Bombe’s messaging. She’d been working with Mailchimp since 2014 and with a list of nearly 25,000 subscribers, Cherry Bombe had the tools in place to take control of their messaging.

“The obvious answer was Mailchimp,” said Diamond. Founded in 2011, Mailchimp is an email marketing platform with a reputation for being user friendly and affordable. When Cherry Bombe decided to refocus on using email to connect with their members, they used the platform to redesign their weekly emails which are sent out every Friday. 

Said Diamond, “We wanted to keep it simple and beautifully designed. It was great because our email list grew, but it also stabilized.”

Cherry Bombe saw less churn with their newly designed email approach. They also got more serious about tracking results and paying attention to what worked in terms of things like subject line and send times. “We love the AB testing and we discovered some funny things like fewer people opened our emails when they had emojis in the subject line,” said Diamond.

By linking Mailchimp to their Shopify account, Cherry Bombe were able to monitor what drove subscriptions and other purchases on their website. They regularly track email performance including opens, clicks, and actions so they can further refine their email marketing approach and better understand their members.

Using email for profitability and entertainment

Cherry Bombe has two main goals when they send out emails — to be profitable and to entertain their members. These goals aren’t mutually exclusive. An entertaining email is an email that gets read and shared. It also motivates users to visit Cherry Bombe’s website to purchase from their online shop which sells issues of the magazine, the Cherry Bombe Cookbook, and gift cards.

Said Diamond, “I want to entertain people, you know, I want to make people smile when they get this email. Cherry Bombe is a very celebratory organization. I want people to open the email because they  find something interesting or learn something.”

Cherry Bombe’s email strategy is a thoughtful one. They send out Friday emails to their subscribers, announce events like their annual Cherry Bombe Jubilee conference, and send occasional new product announcements. 

Diamond is cautious about flood subscriber inboxes with too much email. So far, this strategy is working based on the following metrics:

• Cherry Bombe’s e-newsletter churn rate has remained consistently low (~1%), especially since the pandemic when many people expressed that Cherry Bombe was a way for them to stay connected to their community.
• New newsletter subscribers increased by 50% since the beginning of the pandemic in Spring 2020, with more than 5,000 new subscribers (this is organic growth without any paid media support).
• Open rate is nearly 50% with a CTR above 2%.

“I would love to do a handful of emails about product launches among people in our community. There’s a real trend right now of launching products, especially among young women of color, and I’d love to do a newsletter about everything that is happening in the CPG space in the food world. But I’m weighing it carefully because I don’t ever want us to get to the point where it’s too much, so I’d rather we take our time and be thoughtful about that.”

Think about the emails that are actually opened

Diamond advises businesses to think about the emails that people open (and read). This is the best way to reduce churn and offer value. 

“It’s almost a crime today to put out a boring email. If you’re doing that, then you really need to rethink everything. Put yourself in the email recipient’s shoes and think about why you open emails and what makes you smile or act. Then put that into practice. If you can learn how to follow and trust your gut, you’re 99% of the way there as an entrepreneur,” said Diamond.

The post How Cherry Bombe uses email to make customers smile appeared first on MarTech.

In B2B marketing, caring for customers is often referred to as “customer success.” We’ll look more closely at the terms “service,” “support” and “success” below.

In a 2021 Qualtrics/ServiceNow study, 43% of respondents said they’d likely switch brands after only one negative customer service experience. Another study by Statista revealed that between 2016 and 2020, 40% of U.S. customers said they stopped doing business with a company because of poor customer service.

Technology, as is often the case, is helping companies meet customer expectations around customer service and success, bridging communications across multiple channels and devices, and setting customers up for better buying experiences.  

Several important trends are driving the adoption and reinvention of the enterprise customer service stack.  They include the need to future-proof the customer service tech stack, a drive toward more asynchronous text-based communication, and a push toward unifying channels and communications to enhance customer experience.

It’s clear that customer service and success — and the tools that enable and facilitate them — are essential for any business, no matter the size or product. 

In this post we’ll cover:

• What are customer service and success?
• Why marketers should care.
• Who uses or works with customer service and success tools?
• What types of tools or software enable customer support?
• How prioritizing customer service and success helps marketers succeed.

What are customer service and success?

Customer service and success are two sides of the same customer experience coin, but there are slight differences. 

Customer service and support (CSS) is focused on handling customer inquiries and complaints in real time. It’s reactive, satisfying customer problems and addressing issues quickly in a way that benefits both the customer and the company. 

Customer success is about anticipating your customers’ needs and creating an ideal experience throughout the entire buying journey. Its proactive, employing tools and systems that help meet changing customer expectations (and behaviors) in an agile, scalable way. 

While customer service is important for all businesses, customer success has been traditionally associated with companies that rely on recurring revenue, such as subscription-based businesses and B2B organizations with long sales, onboarding, and implementation cycles. 

But these days, all companies — including B2C and retail businesses — need to prioritize customer success. It’s an essential marketing and future proofing strategy. 

Why marketers should care about customer service and support

Customer service can make a brand or it can break it. Companies that excel at it get customers for life, ones who become the kind of word-of-mouth brand ambassadors that marketers’ dreams are made of. 

Mess it up, though, and you can make brand-enemies for life. To really succeed, customer service has to be an enterprise-wide value and not just part of a business unit. 

Who uses or works with customer service and success tools?

Customer service and success teams keep customers happy which helps ensure continued business from existing and new customers. Both teams serve customers and help make their experience with the company a good one. To achieve this, they each have a slightly different focus.

The customer service representative (CSR) team is responsible for handling customer inquiries, complaints, and problems. They help resolve issues in real time. 

Some examples of CSR roles include:

• Agent/representative:  A customer’s main point of contact with your company – fields customer inquiries, handles complaints, and resolves problems.
• Supervisor: A management role that oversees support team operations, assigns tasks to agents, and makes sure goals are met.
• Quality assurance (QA): QA monitors and evaluates CSR team activity (e.g., calls, emails, chats) and makes sure the CSR team provides high-quality customer service. 

The customer success management (CSM) team advocates for customers, prioritizing their needs and providing a big-picture overview of the customer experience for other teams (including marketing, sales, and CSR teams). 

CMS teams tend to have a longer view of customer success which includes identifying and addressing issues that might cause customer churn. Their primary goal is to help customers get the most from a product or service. 

Some examples of CSM roles include:

• Customer success manager/advocate:  Another key point of contact between the customer and organization, the CSM addresses issues (e.g., long wait times, inconsistent communication) that might cause customer dissatisfaction and/or churn.
• Implementation specialist: A specialized role focused on helping customers set up and use the company’s products or services.
• Product specialist: An expert who provides detailed guidance and answers to product/service-specific questions. 
• Tech support engineer: A technical expert who helps customers resolve more complex technical issues or problems.

What types of tools or software enable customer support?

The market for helping companies better serve their customers is vast. The U.S. contact center software market alone was valued at nearly $24 billion in 2021 and is projected to grow 23% by 2030. 

Several trends are fueling this growth, including the rapid adoption of cloud and virtual contact centers, chatbots, and prescriptive AI that automates previously manual tasks like case routing and problem resolution. There’s also a very real need to streamline customer interactions across multiple channels (otherwise known as customer experience).

Gartner identified four components needed for CSS tools. They are:

• Call management – log and manage incoming calls and transactions.
• eService suites – self-service tools that empower customers to communicate with an organization using email, chat, and social media.
• Field service and dispatch (FS/D) – assign and track work orders for field service technicians.
• Contact center – a centralized location where CSRs handle customer contact across all channels and communication types (voice, web, fax, mobile, etc.).

There are four main types of software associated with CSS including:

1. Call center: enables CSRs to manage phone calls, track call activity, and measure performance. Examples include Five9, Ringover, and Twilio. Features typically include inbound call center capabilities like call automated call routing, call recording, and call queueing, interactive voice response (IVR), and call analytics.

2. Live chat: Can be a standalone tool or integrated with all-in-one customer service platforms. Llive chat software helps customer service reps communicate with customers in real-time via chat. Examples include Tidio, Qualified, and MobileMonkey. Key features include AI-enabled and 24/7 chatbot availability, co-browsing, conversation archiving, and a shared team inbox.

3. Help desk: provides a centralized place for customer support reps to track, manage, and resolve customer inquiries and issues. Examples include Zendesk Support Suite, Zoho Desk, and Intercom. Common features include tracking/ticketing systems, knowledge base management, and self-service portals.

4. Knowledge management (KM): provides a central repository for storing and organizing customer service and support-related information (FAQs, training materials, product documentation, etc.) Examples include Guru, Notion, and Zendesk. Focus is on facilitating knowledge dissemination with features like versioning, history, collaboration/feedback, permissions, knowledge sharing, templates, etc.

Gartner defines customer success as an approach versus a category of software:

“Customer success is a method for ensuring customers reach their desired outcomes when using an organization’s product or service. A relationship-focused customer success strategy includes involvement in the purchase decision, implementation and use of products or services and customer support.”

Customer success teams get a slightly different flavor of software tools compared with their CSR counterparts. These include:

1. Customer success platforms: These help CSM teams track customer health, advocate for the customer internally, and prevent churn. Examples include HubSpot Service Hub, ChurnZero, and Gainsight. Key features include customer health scoring (by analyzing historical customer behavior data), customer profile creation, journey mapping, and playbooks. These platforms focus on improving the lifetime value of a customer by identifying when and where support is needed the most.

2. Customer relationship management (CRM) tools:  CRMs store customer profile information (contact information, interaction history, customer notes) and manage sales and marketing processes. CRM tools help build and support customer relationships, improving the entire process of customer data gathering and organizing. HubSpot and Salesforce are two of the most well-known CRMs, but there are many others including Zoho CRM, Pipedrive, and Monday.com. 

3. Product analytics (PA): PA helps CSM teams see which features customers are using (or not using) and how they’re using them. PA tools get marketing and product teams on the same page, with data that informs customer health scoring and can be used to prevent churn. Pendo is one example of a product usage data tracking tool as is Amplitude Analytics (for digital products).

4. Customer journey orchestration: This is used to visualize the customer’s journey across touchpoints and own the end-to-end customer experience. Mapping customer journeys can help teams identify gaps and optimize the experience. Examples of tools that facilitate this include Treasure Data, a customer data platform (CDP) and Qualtrics, a customer experience platform (CXP).

How prioritizing customer service and success helps marketers succeed

Getting customer service and success right translates to more sales, more customers, and a better bottom line. Good experience is often the biggest priority a customer has when doing business with a company—trumping price, product, and brand. 

Nearly 60% of 1000 consumers in a recent Forbes survey said they would pay more for good service. The same survey found that convenience is valued over price, with 70% of respondents saying they’d pay more for convenience.

A strong customer service and success strategy can be a powerful marketing tool by:

• Providing valuable customer insights that inform marketing campaigns. 
• Reducing customer churn.
• Facilitating communication between customers and businesses.
• Motivating positive customer reviews and testimonials.
• Increasing customer loyalty and customer lifetime value.
• Being more competitive. 

A study by Deloitte revealed that companies who prioritize customer experience (e.g., “customer-centric” companies) were 60% more profitable than those who don’t. These companies spend time getting to know their customers and focus on using tools and processes that solve customer problems and deliver better customer experiences.

A strong (and deliberate) customer service and success process supports marketers by improving   customer experience. It creates happy customers which leads to more sales, improved customer lifetime value, and much more successful marketing campaigns. It’s also the best way to futureproof your organization by keeping up with changing trends in customer expectations and behaviors while staying one (or ten) steps ahead of the competition.

Dig deeper: What is CRM and how does it support marketing?

The post Customer Service and Success: What they are and why marketers should care appeared first on MarTech.

In addition to the traditional affiliate relationships with publishers, performance marketing opportunities now include influencers on social media, ecommerce-focused web destinations and creators all across the digital landscape. Tech platforms help broker these relationships by setting and measuring specific goals and compensation that help deliver results from the third-party publisher, creator or influencer back to the brand.

It can be a powerful tool for marketers since it allows you to track and optimize campaigns in real-time based on measurable actions. It can help with the ROI of your marketing budget by providing data and insight about how, when, and where to allocate your spend. 

Even so, performance marketing remains vulnerable to fraud from bots and other malicious actors. Marketers need to be vigilant and skeptical about the data they’re seeing to avoid paying for actions that aren’t real. 

There are many tools and software solutions that facilitate the planning, launch, tracking and optimization of performance marketing campaigns. These tools range from simple website tracking tools to more sophisticated platforms that offer a complete suite of performance marketing capabilities. In this post we’ll cover:

• What is performance marketing?
• Types of performance marketing models.
• Why marketers should care.
• How reliable is it?
• Who uses or works with performance marketing tools?
• What types of tools or software enable performance marketing?
• How performance marketing can help marketers succeed
• What’s next for performance marketing
• Additional reading.

Estimated reading time: 10 minutes

What is performance marketing?

Performance marketing is any online marketing activity that can be tracked and attributed to a specific action or result. 

It encompasses any digital marketing tactic that can be tied to a measurable action – influencer, video, affiliate, search, and content marketing are all fair game in the performance marketing ecosystem.

There are three main types of performance marketing payment models:

• Percent of sale – The advertiser pays a commission on each sale generated.
• Leads – The advertiser pays a fixed amount for each lead generated.
• New customers – The advertiser pays a fixed amount for each new customer acquired.

There are also hybrid performance marketing models that encompass multiple payment types. For example, an advertiser might pay a lead generation fee plus a percent of sale commission to their performance marketing partner.

It’s important to note that performance-based marketing tactics like paid search, where advertisers only pay when a user clicks on an ad, is not performance marketing. While PPC/CPC campaigns focus on an action (the ad click), they don’t necessarily lead to a performance-based outcome like a sale or sign-up. 

Why marketers should care about performance marketing

Performance marketing opportunities have opened up beyond traditional affiliate relationships with publishers to include influencers on social media, ecommerce focused web destinations and creators all across the digital landscape.

Tech platforms help broker these relationships by setting and measuring specific goals and compensation that help deliver results from the third-party publisher, creator or influencer back to the brand.

How reliable is it?

It’s impossible to talk about digital advertising (the machine that drives performance marketing) without addressing the $68 billion dollar elephant in the room—ad fraud.

 Globally, digital ad fraud will cost companies nearly $70 billion this year, with $23 billion lost by U.S. companies alone. That will amount to about $100 million per day by 2024.

A (short) list of why ad fraud happens:

• Bots simulate real user traffic on websites or apps to generate ad impressions.
• Invalid traffic is generated by humans who click on ads to deplete their competitors’ budgets, or are paid to click/view ads (click farms).
• Fake websites (with fake traffic) are created to inflate impressions for programmatic ad buys.
• Domain spoofing imitates a premium website (e.g., the New York Times) to sell fake ad inventory.
• Cookie stuffing which uses affiliate tracking cookies placed on a user’s device to track a purchase on a site like Amazon (thus stealing the commission from a legitimate affiliate).
• Ads are stacked and the same inventory is sold multiple times – technically the impressions are real, but web visitors only see the ad on top of the stack
• App install fraud occurs when a bot generates fake app installations or a user is incentivized to install an app and then quickly uninstall it

Since performance marketing campaigns look at actions (sales, conversions, leads) rather than superficial metrics (views, clicks, impressions) it’s theoretically a better approach.

Even so, the scale of click fraud is so massive it inevitably impacts the amount you’ll pay for your desired action. The cost of digital ads is increasing – up 11% in the first quarter of 2022 versus the previous year with no noticeable improvement in performance.

That makes it more expensive for your affiliates and partners to buy digital ads and increases the cost per action (CPA) for you.

Another issue: while faking sales is difficult, faking certain actions isn’t, particularly on mobile devices. Bots can simulate real user downloads and app installs, click on links and fake in-app events.

The best way to ensure that your performance marketing campaign is, in fact, performing is to monitor the quality (and validity) of the actions you’re paying for.  For example, you can use a lead verification tool like LetsVerify to ensure that the leads you’re paying for are real people who have been contacted and are interested in what you’re selling.

Dig deeper: Gannett ad mishap highlights concerns about programmatic advertising

It’s also worthwhile to monitor your CPA along with lead quality and/or sales volume. If your CPA is going up (or suddenly spikes), this can be a sign that you’re being targeted by fraudsters.

Who uses or works with performance marketing tools?

Performance marketing is a very specific and data-driven — and digital — approach to generating results, so it tends to fall within the purview of digital marketing teams. 

That said, regardless of where performance marketing sits within an organization’s marketing ecosystem, many people/departments use its tools and strategies.

Here are some ways different groups use performance marketing technologies:

• Marketers plan, execute and measure performance-based campaigns.
• Publishers track performance and get paid for results.
• Influencers find opportunities, set goals and measure performance. 
• Advertisers find publishers and influencers to work with, set performance-based goals and track results.
• Business growth leaders identify and track opportunities for growth.
• Agencies find and work with publishers and influencers on performance-based campaigns. 

What types of tools or software enable performance marketing?

Tech tools in the performance marketing space span from tracking and attribution to influencer and affiliate management. They also include features for identifying and reaching out to influencers, publishers, and partners.

The types of performance marketing tools include:

• Partner software: This helps brands find, connect and manage relationships with performance-based partners like publishers, influencers and affiliates.  Tools like PartnerStack and Everflow enable businesses to manage influencers and referral partners (e.g., consultants, agencies, customers), track their performance and get paid for results. 
• Referral/affiliate software:  This allows marketers to manage affiliate programs and partners with features that enable commission payments, program launch and marketing automation (e.g., emails, social media, paid search, etc.) Tools like LeadDyno and OmniStar Affiliate fit within this category. They also help with recruitment, SEO and tracking/reporting.
• Influencer management software: Influencer management software helps brands identify, manage and track relationships with influencers. Tools like Grin (for eCommerce businesses) and Upfluence help with influencer discovery and outreach, performance tracking, campaign management and payments. 
• Marketing attribution software: Businesses can use this to attribute results to specific marketing activities using marketing analytics and data. Attribution tools also help marketers understand which activities are driving the most ROI. Tools like Google Analytics and MixPanel focus on website analytics while campaign-specific tools like Sprinklr and Pointillist measure customer journey analytics across all digital marketing channels. 

There’s a lot of crossover with features and functionality among these types of tools. So it’s important to choose a performance marketing platform that offers features specific to your needs and easily integrates with your tech stack.

How performance marketing can help marketers succeed

Performance marketing can be a very effective way for marketers to drive results and grow their business. Instead of paying upfront for advertising programs and inventory that may not produce results, performance-based campaigns are a low-risk way to test and measure what’s working (and what’s not.) 

In addition, performance marketing allows you to effectively allocate your marketing budget by only paying for results. This can help stretch the marketing budget further and ensure that every dollar is working as hard as possible to drive ROI. 

Key benefits include:

• Trackability:  Performance marketing provides marketers with data and insights that can be used to continually optimize campaigns and improve results. Campaigns are tied to specific transactions and KPIs, so performance can be tracked and reported at a granular level.
• Diversification: You have the capacity to expand your reach beyond traditional sales channels and revenue streams. It gets your partners and affiliates involved in the success of your business, which can lead to long-term relationships. It also helps you reach new audiences and niche markets in organically discoverable ways (e.g., when an influencer promotes your brand or product to their followers). 
• Efficiency: It is a low-risk way to grow your business. You only pay for results (e.g., a sale, sign-up, etc.), so there’s no wasted spend on inventory or ad placements that don’t produce results.
• Creativity: Working with partners, performance marketers can develop unique campaigns and content that resonates with their specific niche audiences. This means you capitalize on new trends, technologies, and channels as they emerge.

What’s next for performance marketing

There are several digital marketing trends converging right now that are impacting the efficiency and ROI of standard CPM and CPC/PPC-based digital marketing programs. 

• Digital ad fatigue: The average person is exposed to between 6000 and 10,000 ads a day. This is fueling an ad avoidance phenomenon among internet users. Most consumers are proactively avoiding advertising with ad blockers, ad skipping and the consumption of ad-free media. According to Blockthrough, an adblock recovery platform, 81% of people who use ad blockers in the U.S. do so to avoid annoying or intrusive ads.
• Increased competition: There’s a marked increase in advertiser competition online, as the number of brands and businesses competing for consumer attention continues to grow. Two-thirds of global ad spending will be digital in 2022. According to eMarketer, spend is expected to exceed $867 billion by 2026.

• Data and privacy issues: Consumer concerns about how companies use their data, combined with an increased need to comply with privacy laws like GDPR and CCPA, are impacting the effectiveness of digital marketing campaigns. Consumers are increasingly aware of their data being collected and used and less willing to click on ads or give up personal information. 
• The death of cookies:  With the demise of third-party cookies on browsers like Safari, Firefox, and (very soon) Chrome, digital marketers will need new ways to target audiences and track campaigns. This has marketers relying on first-party data and server-side tracking, or the use of alternative tracking methods like unique identifiers that are privacy compliant. 

Performance marketing, which focuses on quality over quantity, enables marketers to develop unique campaigns on emerging digital channels which tend to resonate more with digital audiences. Since they’re tied to actual results (e.g., sales, revenue and leads), they also deliver a higher ROI. 

These campaigns can also garner a wide reach in terms of impressions, clicks, and views since performance marketing partners use a variety of tactics, including reaching out to their existing networks. 

As a result, performance marketing is poised to continue growing in popularity among marketers looking to drive real results from their digital marketing programs. 

Additional reading

Want to learn more about performance marketing’s capabilities and applications across the digital landscape? Here are some resources to help you improve your practices:

• Why marketing attribution is both a challenge and a necessity: While some are skeptical about the attribution narratives derived from touchpoint data, others insist that measuring marketing is a must.
• A new way to navigate agile marketing: Not all companies can afford a coach, but even small companies can benefit from agile marketing.
• Technology and brain science can drive performance: Harness the full potential of your martech solution by triggering brain responses.

The post Why we care about performance marketing appeared first on MarTech.

Xanterra Travel Company owns a collection of travel and hospitality brands. All share the mission of providing travelers with unforgettable experiences. 

The company manages concessions at many well-known national parks and destinations including Glacier National Park, The Grand Canyon, and Mount Rushmore. It also owns or manages over 30 hotels adjacent to these iconic locations, along with six rental yachts, seven golf courses, and 89 food and beverage outlets.

“We’re a company that grows through acquisition,” explained Andrew Heltzel, Xanterra’s corporate director of marketing, CRM and analytics. “We just sort of get what we get”, Heltzel said, in the way of data and systems when acquiring a property. 

Five years ago, Xanterra set out to consolidate customer data collected across its properties into a single record per guest. The goal was to enable the company to personalize marketing messages and unearth opportunities for cross-selling and up-selling the 20 million people it serves annually.

To achieve this monumental task, Xanterra partnered with Redpoint Global, a customer experience platform that presents its offering as an evolution of the traditional customer data platform. Redpoint specializes in creating a “Golden Record” for each customer by combining and resolving multiple profiles into a single identity, enabling much more targeted and relevant personalization.

The goals of the implementation were: 

• To create a single-source-of-truth profile for each customer that identifies individuals across properties.
• To consolidate those data into a single record.
• To enhance customer records by appending third party data.
• To accomplish these tasks in real time.

Onboarding the technology

Because Xanterra makes frequent acquisitions and inherits martech and data from companies acquired, it doesn’t have the luxury of standardizing on a single system. Heltzel and his team needed a solution that overcame the complexity of combining data from many systems. 

Implementing a customer experience platform “allowed us to leave our existing infrastructure in place. We brought in over 100 different sources of data and established a ‘golden record’ across the different interfaces and source systems.”

Heltzel notes that when scoping out vendors — a process that began in 2017 — he was looking for a vendor that understood Xanterra’s data complexities and brought the best and fastest solution compared with the competition. 

To kick off the vendor selection and onboarding process, Xanterra established a core team of about 15 individuals made up of leaders from every brand in their portfolio. “This was probably one of the first enterprise-wide projects that impacted all the companies within the organization,” explained Heltzel. “It was new territory for us.”

The  onboarding process took about six months. “It was surprisingly fast in my view,” said Heltzel. “We could have gone even faster, but we decided to go through the implementation process brand by brand. Redpoint allowed us to leave our existing infrastructure in place. We brought in over 100 different sources of data and established a Golden Record across the different interfaces and source systems.”

A leap forward in personalization and ROI

Once all the data were combined and customer identities unified, Xanterra began delivering personalized messaging to audience segments.

The impacts were felt almost immediately. For the first time, Xanterra was able to segment its audiences in a way that allowed the company to deliver offers to specific groups of customers (e.g., a family group, golfers, retirees, etc.). Some properties saw increases in email ROI of more than 400% in the first year.

“It was absolutely stunning,” said Heltzel. “We were coming from basically nothing — just a batch and blast type of email tool that didn’t even allow us to manage customer preferences.”

Dig deeper: How a smart email strategy helped Apple Rose Beauty thrive during the pandemic

Technology as a means of future proofing

For companies looking to undertake this advanced level of digital transformation, Heltzel’s main piece of advice is to do your homework up front. 

“We took our time doing due diligence around the type of customer experience we wanted to achieve,  which was delivering real-time personalized experiences across every channel. Hands down, all of our marketing leadership said yes, that’s the future. That’s where we need to be,” Hetzel said.

The post How unifying customer profiles is paying off for this iconic travel brand appeared first on MarTech.

“I went into corporate America for about 10 years and was on the fast track, being promoted every couple of years,” Apple Rose Beauty founder Kristy Alexander told us. “I was up for another promotion when I decided to travel around the world. I found myself in Thailand, volunteering with an organization that helped rescue women from human trafficking. That really changed the direction of my life.”

While in Thailand, Alexander met two survivors of human trafficking, Apple and Rose. She founded her cosmetics company in 2015, naming it after the women to honor them and highlight a larger mission — to help stop human trafficking. Alexander employs human trafficking survivors and supports organizations that rescue and rehabilitate women like Apple and Rose.

Apple Rose Beauty, headquartered in Jacksonville, Florida,is a luxury skincare company. Its organic face care products are formulated for people with sensitive skin. “I developed the products for my own skin,” said Alexander. “I have sensitive skin and I’m also sensitive to fragrances. I wanted to create a natural line that was lightly scented or had no scent at all and gentle for sensitive skin, but still very effective.”

Alexander credits her dream of opening a cosmetics business to a chemistry class she took at age 15 in her native country of Trinidad and Tobego. While taking the class, she analyzed cosmetics and discovered it was something she really enjoyed.

Using email to build strong customer relationships

When started the company, Alexander knew she needed a strong email marketing strategy. She wanted a flexible, scalable email marketing system with built-in automation features. She chose ActiveCampaign, a marketing automation platform that includes email marketing and CRM capabilities. 

“The technology brings together what people think of as email marketing, marketing automation, and CRM,” explained Maria Pergolino, ActiveCampaign’s CMO. “We bring these technologies together with robust automation so that companies can run campaigns and elevate their voice to multiple audiences.”

“I was looking for something that was flexible in terms of automation and communicating with my customers,” said Alexander. “ActiveCampaign stood out from other CRM companies that had rigid automations which didn’t allow me to think about flexible ways to communicate with my customers using ‘if…then…else’ scenarios. The other piece was that I needed a platform where I could own and grow my customer relationships.”

In the early days of growing her business, Alexander worked with an advisor and tried several CRM tools. “I’m probably one of those people who tried them all,” she said. “We kissed a lot of frogs first before we got here.”

Five years later, having built a robust email list, Alexander faced another challenge — reaching customers accustomed to touching and feeling her products during a time when this became impossible — the pandemic.

Using technology to strengthen offline customer relationships

Alexander uses ActiveCampaign for email marketing, but she also leverages its Facebook integrations to automatically upload her customer list for Facebook paid advertising. She’s able to customize campaigns on Facebook with messaging that’s tied to customer behavior.

When COVID-19 hit, Apple Rose Beauty was doing most of its business offline through partnerships with retailers like Macy’s, local marketplaces, and other physical locations. Alexander’s strategy of cultivating strong offline customer relationships helped her rapidly pivot to the online space. Prior to the pandemic, online sales were only about 30% of her business.

Said Alexander, “I’d always heard of the importance of email marketing, but it was never my focus prior COVID. We onboarded our customers from whatever channels that we got them and we tried to get their email addresses so could remarket to them. We did a lot of in-person activation in store and in markets.”

In-person feedback helped Apple Rose Beauty home in on who their customers were — the people who were really drawn to the brand. This gave Alexander and her team a solid understanding of their customers’ challenges and pain points which informed the development of the brand positioning.

“When COVID hit, I hadn’t realized how much that in-person feedback was beneficial for our brand or how much it informed our entire go-to-market strategy. Post-COVID, we missed that instant feedback. We were still sending emails, but they were the traditional one-way communication. And we thought, how can we recreate this type of relationship that we originally had with customers interacting with them in person?”

Making email conversational

The inability to communicate with customers in person inspired Alexander and her team to rethink how they were using automation and specifically how they were leveraging ActiveCampaign. They transitioned to a more conversational type of email marketing, asking customers to reply back to them.

“When COVID hit, we were in this state of not knowing what was going on. We were used to seeing our customers and so we were really wondering how they were doing and how they were dealing with the pandemic. That’s what our initial emails were about — just reply back and let us know how you’re doing. What do you need?”

Asking customers how they were doing helped kick off the process of transitioning Apple Rose Beauty from offline to online sales. Their customers knew the company had a website, but they were used to buying in person at Macy’s or local markets in Jacksonville, or in Atlanta where Alexander is based. 

“With skincare, it’s very touchy feely, it’s giving customers an opportunity to smell the product and see how it spreads on their skin,” said Alexander. “So, we were a very high touch company pre-COVID, both locally and throughout the U.S.”

Skyrocketing online sales and a new business approach

With the focus on ecommerce and a new personalized email communication strategy facilitated by ActiveCampaign, Apple Rose Beauty was able to grow their online sales by 300% in 2020. “We were able to develop a type of relationship with our customers that a lot of retailers aren’t necessarily able to in an online setting. They really feel like we care. And it’s not just marketing or promoting to them, but they feel like they can have a conversation with us,” said Alexander.

Alexander notes that about 70% of the business is now online, a complete flip from pre-pandemic times. While they’ve begun a slow return to in-person events, she has no plan to return to the way it was before. 

“We can scale a lot more with email marketing and with online sales, she said. “We’ve also transitioned our acquisition model to using more paid advertising and online advertising. Where once our new customers were coming from those in-person markets, we’ve now transitioned to online customer acquisition.” 

This strategy has enabled Alexander’s small team of three to achieve six figures sales annually and continue to grow. She credits the strong relationship she’s built with her customers—plus her focused digital transformation strategy — for this success. 

“Customers are the lifeblood of the company, right? If you don’t have customers, you don’t have a business. Pay special attention to that customer relationship because that’s very important to nurture and to maintain. You want to make sure that, as a brand, you have control over communication and messaging so you can stay focused on nurturing that relationship.”

Dig deeper: More case studies from Jacqueline Dooley

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The post How a smart email strategy helped Apple Rose Beauty thrive during the pandemic appeared first on MarTech.