Marketing Technology & Architecture Archives - Page 5 of 5

Five challenges of personalised marketing

Posted on: 10 August 2020

PERSONALISATION IS A CHALLENGING TOPIC

Some organisations just don’t get it. How do you change things at your company?

Almost two thirds of consumers expect to receive personalised offers as standard and 63% of consumers would stop using companies who provide poor personalisation. Effective personalisation presents a huge opportunity for marketers who can master it. The rewards are potentially great. But so are the risks of delivering it badly.

Marketers are finding it harder than ever to reach and convert consumers across channels. So smarter targeted messaging is an absolute must to connect with customers.

Working with clients in a wide range of sectors, we’ve been helping marketers crack the conundrum. The most successful organisations are combining a range of technologies and expertise in data, campaign management and channels to achieve impactful results.

Typically, we find there are five main challenges to overcome in creating an effective and sustainable personalisation model that can continually adapt to changing customer needs.

MULTIPLE VIEWS OF THE CUSTOMER

Customer data is typically acquired over time and is kept in different repositories and formats. Multi-channel personalisation requires a complete and accurate 360 degree view of every customer. Identifying, matching, cleaning and integrating diverse records and information is a complex challenge.
SEPARATE TOOLS AND CHANNELS

Enterprise businesses currently use up to 91 different marketing cloud services. Marketing technology (even when it comes from a single vendor) is hard to connect, because different tools have their own unique data models and capabilities. To provide a personalised, seamless, omnichannel experience, tools need to work in harmony.
DISCONNECTED DATA

Many customers are willing to provide more data, if they can see that it’s being used to their advantage to provide more relevant communication. Around the organisation, there’s demand for different insights at different times, so teams collect new data from a range of sources to meet a particular need. It’s hard to funnel this relentless deluge of new data into the mix and making it accessible immediately, to match current behaviour and preferences.
SILOED DECISIONS

Communication decisions may be made by a number of different teams – from customer services, marketing and sales to IT and operations. Customers receive communications from several platforms – they can be contradictory and repetitive. This undermines the whole purpose of personalisation, creating an impression that your organisation doesn’t understand the customer and places little value on quality. To compound the problem, feedback from different campaigns isn’t built back into a central knowledge base. Effective personalisation strategies avoid this by using automation to combine technology and decision-making.
OPERATIONAL INEFFICIENCY

Collectively, customer engagement teams aren’t productive because they’re underusing the technology in the business. That’s typically either because of its inherent complexity or a lack of training. Through a single personalisation platform, you can integrate all your campaign and communications systems into a single marketing stack that gives more power and insight to everyone.

FOR MORE INFORMATION

We’ve partnered with Braze, Tealium and Snowflake to combine world-class technologies that create a powerful, user-friendly platform capable of high-volume delivery of sophisticated, personalised campaigns.

CACI’s Customer Personalisation Platform empowers marketers to model and deliver incisive and high-impact personalised campaigns. Our experts help clients customise and deploy it to start delivering ROI quickly.

A Cookie-less world

Posted on: 23 March 2020

Third-party cookies have been a fundamental part of the online marketing mix; an essential tool that allows brands to capture data on their audience, deliver targeted advertising and build customer profiles. In particular, cookies are at the core of programmatic advertising, which accounts for 90% of the total UK digital display ad spend of £5.81bn in 2019.

But, the cookie in its current form is not long for this world.

With the ongoing focus on customer data privacy, following the implementation of GDPR, there are growing concerns around third-party cookies and how they are collected, leading to three of the biggest web browsers on the Internet taking steps to block or phase out tracking cookies; Safari and Firefox blocked third-party cookies by default in 2019, whilst Google is planning to phase out the third-party cookie on Chrome, the most popular browser with a market share of over 60%, by 2022.

When combined with the fact that the ICO guidance explicitly states that the way many websites go about obtaining consent for third-party cookies is not compliant, it’s clear that things are going to have to change!

WHAT ARE THE ALTERNATIVES TO TRADITIONAL COOKIES FOR PROGRAMMATIC ADVERTISING?

Without the third-party cookie, the digital marketing landscape is going to need to evolve. Various methods to allow for tracking of customers and customer behaviour are already being discussed and developed as alternatives in this possible new cookie-less world.

For example, the IAB has grand plans for a standardised unique ID across the internet that would be an “improved mechanism for audience recognition and personalisation”. However, it sounds as if it will still be based on cookies and will need a lot of collaboration requiring a complex accountability system. If this proposed solution does happen, it will not be quick.

Numerous ad tech and analytics vendors are developing solutions for tracking that don’t rely on third-party cookies. Cookies have never been effective for mobiles, hence the mobile ad/device ID such as Apple’s IDFA or Google’s GAID. Whilst these systems still present privacy issues, companies like Apple and Google may be willing to work with advertisers to find a compliant method.

In addition, being able to effectively capture customer or prospect data to accurately identify, target and activate across multiple devices requires good technology. Managing campaigns across multiple marketing channels needs marketing automation, hence the rise of tools such as Customer Data Platforms (CDPs).

Digital fingerprinting – that is, using seemingly insignificant information like device used and browser plug-ins, in order to identify an individual – had emerged within the advertising industry in part to tackle cross device tracking issues which are inherent with ad IDs. However, Google, Apple and Firefox have already taken steps to implement anti-fingerprinting measures in order to deter advertisers from moving to this method in place of the cookie, making it unlikely to be a viable alternative.

WHAT’S THE RIGHT SOLUTION?

The truth is, there is no obvious alternative to the cookie just now.

It is likely the death of the cookie will benefit the large players, particularly Google and Facebook, as advertisers will be forced to use their first party data in walled gardens, meaning we could be moving to a blunter approach, returning to last click attribution.

To find out more about the impact of the loss of the third-party cookie on digital marketing and for further insights on what advertisers can do in the interim, download our guide – The End of the Third-party Cookie?

How to build a business case for Adobe Campaign

Posted on: 19 November 2018

There’s good reason for Adobe Campaign being recognised as the leading multi-channel campaign management tool by analysts. It’s packed with powerful features that enable marketers to orchestrate communications and experiences across multiple channels.

Given the power of the tool when compared to other products in the market, Adobe Campaign may appear aspirational. In reality, (and having done a number of business cases for investment in Adobe Campaign) the case can be easily made. Even when moving from a low-end email service provider.

Costs to consider when building your business case:

Licence cost of Adobe Campaign
Implementation cost to configure your instance of Adobe Campaign
Campaign migration costs for transitioning existing campaigns to Adobe Campaign (note, this may be a good chance to improve your campaigning rather than doing a “lift-and-shift”)
Training of your team
Ongoing user support for technical and campaign users of Adobe Campaign
Outsourcing of the Adobe Campaign function which is an increasingly popular option allowing you the best in market tool along with an expert team of users
Costs for integration with further channels (SMS, Push, WhatsApp, Programmatic Display)

What’s crucial is to calculate both the CapEx and OpEx costs to get you running with Adobe Campaign. Pulling together this list can be daunting, however, CACI and Adobe can help you build a full plan with costings.

What return can I expect from Adobe Campaign?

Now comes the other side of the equation. What return do you expect to achieve from moving to Adobe Campaign? This return may be an operational cost saving by moving suppliers or, the opportunity to improve marketing performance.

Operational cost savings can come from combining existing tools into one multi-functional tool. Multiple tools that are commonly combined include ESP, SMS, campaign selection tool, customer database, and mobile app messaging. Not only is there a potential cost benefit of doing this, there is also the added power and simplicity of managing everything through Adobe Campaign. Our client, The O2 invested in Adobe Campaign and Email Studio, and have reported a reduction in campaign production timelines by 80%. Watch the customer success story.

Personally, the more exciting element of investing in Adobe Campaign is the opportunity to produce more engaging, more coordinated, cross-channel direct marketing – to actually deploy customer journeys with personalised marketing messages. Journeys that drive a significant and measurable financial return to your business.

When calculating your opportunity to improve marketing performance consider:

What would an improved response rate to marketing communications mean?
How would reduced churn or unsubscribe rates influence CLTV?
If customers are more engaged with my brand, what difference would this make?
What would the financial benefit be of reactivating lapsed customers?
Through personalised comms, what improvement could we see to offer conversion?
By improving campaign selections how much could we improve cross-sell purchases?

The perfect business case for Adobe Campaign would be composed of both an efficiency factor and an improvement in marketing response. Especially given that improved efficiency should enable the team to launch more campaigns, do more testing, and give more time to consider strategy. Combining both areas together should give you the case to invest in market leading technology that will really take your marketing efforts forward.

If you’d like help compiling your business case for Adobe Campaign, get in touch.

The 3 pillars of digital marketing strategy (Which one is failing you?)

Posted on: 20 July 2018

Whether your challenge is acquiring more leads, converting prospects or creating more value from your customer base, digital marketing success is almost impossible without the right data, technology, and people.

There are three key digital marketing pillars available to digital marketers: data, technology, and people.

By themselves, each serves a purpose, but they’re often siloed and inefficient. Combine them together, though, and you have the foundations for highly effective digital marketing strategy.

Data, tech, and people: the three digital marketing pillars

When we ask digital marketers what their greatest challenge is, it’s almost always that they want to maximise the value of their existing customer base.
And for many, this is more of a priority than attracting new customers.

Little wonder really, when on average it costs around five times more to attract a new customer than to retain an existing one. And when you consider the volumes of data brands now have at their disposal but don’t use, the potential to extract far greater insight on their customers is immense.

Truly, data is your most valuable asset by far. But without the technology, structure, and process in place to support it, that asset can easily go to waste.

Data: comes in all shapes and sizes

There’s a whole host of data available to organisations which can come from a variety of different channels and activities:

Demographic data – who the users are and their interests
Behavioural data – customer activity to date
Contextual data – what’s happening in real-time

Technology: the great enabler

On its own, technology won’t solve a thing. But combine it with the right data, and the talent needed to interpret it, and it can bear significant fruit. Three broad types of technology have important roles in your digital marketing stack:

Facilitative – external tools which are developed by third parties and are often ‘off-the-shelf’
Web analytics – to measure customer activity and behaviour online, including bespoke reporting
Internal – self-developed systems meeting your unique needs, which can’t be bought ‘off-the-shelf’

People: the human piece of the puzzle

As we know, people come in all shapes and sizes, and digital marketing is no exception. To get the most out of yours, though, you’ll need to stay on top of:

Team structures and skillsets – the make up of your team and who does what
External suppliers and agencies – the skills your team needs to outsource
Management levels – understand how data flows to management teams and how it will be interpreted

Combining Digital Marketing pillars for ultimate success

When you combine the forces of data, technology, and people, you create a self-populating circle of information and insight. Each one informs the other.

Without data, most tools and technology are completely useless. And just like a purchase database is useless without data, an Email Service Provider (ESP) relies completely on data to work effectively.

If the right technology can’t feed this data back to marketing and other teams in turn, it’s incredibly difficult to extract the right insight, which is critical to optimisation and marketing activity development.

And the reverse is also true, if you want to truly maximise opportunities to grow your customer base. There are scores of technologies that produce, rather than consume data. Tools like web analytics software constantly produce customer activity records which are then fed to marketers. And how this data is used is ultimately up to the people in the organisation.

But technology can also have a significant impact on the people in organisation. For a tool to succeed, it needs the right aptitudes, skills, and personnel. It can even make some roles redundant.

ig 1: The three pillars of digital marketing and how they fuel one another.

We tend to find that most organisations focus on one or possibly two of these elements. Some marketers have a deep opinion on which is the most important. But the truth is, without all three feeding each other, truly effective insight is almost impossible to attain.

WANT TO KNOW MORE?

Our team of digital consultants have helped many organisations from John Lewis to Heathrow Airport, if you need help with you digital marketing strategy, get in touch.

Reporting in Adobe Campaign: Three tips from the experts

Posted on: 26 April 2018

Adobe Campaign’s cross-channel engagement abilities are beyond doubt – but the tool’s reporting functionality can do more than some users realise. Here are our hints, tips and tricks for reporting using Adobe Campaign.

As I work alongside organisations to implement, integrate and use Adobe Campaign, there’s one area that I’m often asked about. Reporting.

Generally, marketers using Adobe Campaign are well aware of the tool’s data management, campaign orchestration & automation capabilities. After all, it’s the main reason they invested in the software. However, in addition to sending campaigns, they want an easy way to report on results.

More often than not, I find marketers want help in three areas:

Advising on how to make the most of the out-of-the-box reports
Creating custom reports and dashboards tailored to their own particular needs, data and KPIs
Integrating data from Adobe Campaign into specialist reporting and analysis tools (e.g. Tableau, FastStats, PowerBI)

Adobe Campaign’s reporting capabilities are both powerful and flexible if you use them right. And in this short post, I’ll explore three ways to use Adobe Campaign reporting to help you get the information you need to track your KPIs and make smart decisions.

1. USING OUT-OF-THE-BOX REPORTS

For most operational uses, Adobe Campaign’s suite of out-of-the-box reports are great. The delivery reports in particular show a wide range of metrics, from reporting on non-deliverables and bounces through to providing a breakdown of opens by device and KPIs on all URLs clicked.

You can easily select a report showing the KPI you’re after, and all of the reports are easy to navigate. There’s no configuration required and they’re easily exportable – say as a PDF or XLS –providing a quick option when you need to share information with your colleagues.

Helpfully, you can also report on multiple deliveries at once through simply selecting them within the folder interface – the Delivery Summary report in particular is useful when comparing results across multiple campaigns.

TOP TIPS: Out-of-the-box reporting

Structure your campaign folders logically to help reporting on aggregate KPIs (useful when viewing reports via the dashboard)
Ensure opt-out and mirror page links are configured correctly so that their clicks are classified accordingly
Use the out-of-the box reports as a starting point for any custom reports you may want to create

2. TAKE YOUR REPORTING TO THE NEXT LEVEL WITH BESPOKE REPORTS

Once you’re comfortable with the out-of-the-box reports, you’ll want to take it to the next level and create bespoke reports.

The reporting interface within the platform allows you to create a range of reports and dashboards, with visualisations from tables through to pie charts, histograms, gauges and funnels. You can also add your own HTML containing commentary or explanatory information.

Importantly, the platform offers complete flexibility in terms of what data is reported on, including any custom attributes and even bespoke schemas. A useful tactic can be to build custom schemas to contain aggregated data that you wish to use within your report. You can then populate this data using scheduled workflows.

We used this exact approach with a recent client who was looking to have an aggregated month-by-month sales breakdown report, populated from the underlying transactional data already integrated into their data model.

In addition to being exportable, bespoke reports can be published and made accessible from the web, either open or behind a login.

TOP TIPS: Bespoke reports

Create reports using schemas storing aggregate KPIs – this is a great approach when looking to report on weekly/monthly snapshots
Schedule prompts to send alerts to users when data in reports has been updated
Use bespoke filters to help you navigate to the right view quickly

3. INTERROGATE DATA THROUGH CUBES

If your license includes the Marketing Analytics Module, cubes are a great way of presenting and interrogating data.

Similar to bespoke reports, they can be built from any schema, and there’s complete flexibility around configuration of dimensions and measures – useful if you have a wide range of custom attributes.

Usefully, you can also save a list directly from a cube by simply clicking on the shopping cart button once you have selected the required cells. If your cube is using recipient data then it is straightforward to then use this list as a target in a marketing campaign.

TOP TIPS: Cubes

Provide access to your analysts/business intelligence teams – they will appreciate being able to quickly interrogate and compare data sets within Adobe Campaign
Ensure dimensions and measures are configured to cover all your key attributes (e.g. segment code, lifetime value, etc)
As with any reporting, ensure you set up useful metadata on your campaigns

If you want no-nonsense reporting quickly, out-of-the-box reports offer a simple and intuitive way to make sense of your data. Adobe Campaign’s custom reporting abilities enable you to take things a step further, whilst cubes are great for quick interrogation of your data.

As with any reporting however, the key is to define the KPIs and structure you need considering the business decisions your organisation needs to make. We rely on our expert colleagues within our reporting and visualisation teams to make sure we get this right for our clients at CACI.

Because a report is only worthwhile if it helps you meet your business objectives.

Four ways to integrate the Adobe Experience Cloud

Posted on: 27 April 2017

One of the strengths of Adobe Campaign compared to other CRM solutions is the way it slots so seamlessly into the other parts of the Adobe Experience Cloud – both the core services and the other applications – many of which are already key tools for our clients.

Lining up Adobe Campaign with your other software is a powerful way to leverage your CRM data and to further enrich it – providing valuable customer insight.

Here’s a quick guide to some popular ways to get the most out of Adobe Campaign by integrating it with other Adobe Experience Cloud applications.

1. Adobe Analytics + Adobe Campaign = Better Conversion and Reporting

Using web analytics software has become standard for anyone looking to optimise their customers’ experience online. The ability to understand how your customers interact with you online is key to running a successful test-and-learn and cross-channel personalisation.

In a survey we ran in 2017, we found that at least 50% of brands using Adobe Campaign are also running Adobe Analytics. Here are three use cases that we have delivered for clients to improve conversion:

Behavioural data from Analytics into Campaign to drive automation and personalisation
Conversion data from Analytics into Campaign to power real-time campaign optimisation
CRM segments via link tracking into Analytics to power segment-level behavioural analysis

2. Adobe Target + Adobe Campaign = More Conversions

Tailor your customer’s experience to their context – say, their device and the time of day – and they’re naturally more likely to convert. Use your CRM data to add further depth to the picture, and it’s a powerful combination.

But plug in Adobe Campaign, and you can do more. Leveraging online behavioural data enables experiences to be personalised in real-time – improving relevance and therefore engagement. And the more detailed your picture of the customer, the easier marketing attribution becomes – so you know where to spend your next marketing pound for the best return.

3. Adobe Audience Manager + Adobe Campaign = Reduced CPA and Increased Retention

Integrate Adobe Campaign with the Adobe Audience Manager DMP and you’ll open up all kinds of customer acquisition opportunities – like finding much more detailed lookalike audiences and meaningful segmentation. You can also make your retargeting far more nuanced and avoid advertising to recent purchasers, dissatisfied customers and low-value opportunities.

It is also possible to use this connection to take your CRM programme into display channels and target existing customers with repeat purchase and retention campaigns. CACI has seen significant improvements in performance of CRM programmes through integration with acquisition channels.

4. Adobe Experience Manager + Adobe Campaign = Content Efficiency

With so much content being produced, it’s sometimes difficult to keep track of everything – and that means budget gets wasted. Adobe Experience Manager allows users to accelerate the creation and delivery of digital content across channels. And by combining content authoring and asset management in a single environment, everything’s under control.

Add in Adobe Campaign, and you can match the best content to the most relevant contacts – so you make more of your assets, more often.

Integration is a journey. Where would you like to go?

Our friends at Adobe tell us that adopting Adobe Marketing Cloud is a journey. As new ideas and use cases emerge, teams like web, campaigns and reporting climb out of their siloes, and are encouraged to interact, because they’re working with common data.

There are challenges with any change, but having a clear vision of the outcome you’re aiming for is an important start. And as integration becomes more natural, you’ll begin to find the seamless connection between platforms make it easier to manage each customer’s journey, from end to end.