How to Use Precise Geospatial Data to Effectively Target Your Market

Location matters and understanding how to leverage geospatial information can make or break your marketing tactics, especially when using direct mail. In this blog, we’ll review the most commonly used form of geospatial targeting, discuss its limitations, and propose accessible alternatives that take a more practical and data-driven approach to ensure that every dollar spent is contributing to the ROI of your marketing and communications efforts.

The Importance of Precision in Geo-Targeting

Precise geotargeting is a pivotal step towards maximizing return on investment (ROI) while minimizing financial waste – that’s because qualifying based on geographic proximity is the easiest and most effective way to ensure that every dollar spent contributes directly to reaching qualified audiences. This is especially true when using direct mail, which is one of the most expensive direct marketing channels. Using imprecise geotargeting always results in unnecessary overspending of marketing budget and artificially capping ROI potential.  

The problem with Zip Codes

Zip codes, although the most used geographical targeting tool, are quite the opposite of precise and often contribute to spending significant budget on unqualified prospects. Contrary to popular belief, zip codes serve the postal service merely as logical groupings of mail carrier routes, essentially a collection of disconnected neighborhoods and streets versus a cohesive geographic shape with determined boundaries.  The United States Postal Service (USPS) assigns zip codes to addresses to create abstract spaces for delivery locations, ensuring optimization of carrier routes.  This means that households throughout one zip code can have a completely different zip code than their surrounding neighbors, making zip codes one of the least precise methods for geographic segmentation. As a result, zip code targeting often misses valid prospects while spending budget on invalid ones.

Now that we’re on the same page about how crucial precise geotargeting is, let’s get down to the nitty-gritty. How do you do it?

How to Leverage Precision in your Geotargeting

The most precise tool for geographic targeting is defining and creating geospatial objects, often simply referred to as “custom shapes”. This is exactly what companies like Zillow allow their users to do: build a custom shape by dropping points on the map to precisely configure the geospatial object you’d like to target. So, all that’s really needed to get started with more precise geotargeting is simple: a provider that can give you such an interface to query their available lists.  What’s more challenging is figuring out exactly how to craft your custom shapes.  

Using Custom Shapes

Picture this: instead of casting a wide net with zip codes, custom shapes enable you to tailor your campaigns to hyper-qualified audiences. Your message reaches individuals who are not just interested in your products but are also strategically positioned in the regions where your offerings are most relevant. The result? A higher return on investment and an increase in campaign success rate. By making the strategic switch from zip codes to custom shapes, you’re not just sending messages; you’re crafting laser-focused narratives that resonate with your audience, eliminating the noise and ensuring that every dollar spent contributes to meaningful engagement.

The goal of using a custom shape can vary significantly based on your business and industry. For brick-and-mortar marketing, the sole goal of your custom shape might be to capture everyone within a specific drive time of a store location. For a tree-service company, custom shapes might be used to target households within a service perimeter that borders wooded areas. Regardless of the business model however, data providers that accept geospatial objects as list criteria can eliminate significant budget waste.

More Ways to Use Custom Shapes

Highways, Rivers and Neighborhoods

Recognizing neighborhoods, rivers, and highways, often defined by local communities, city planning departments, or geographical features, offer tangible and community-driven bases for segmentation. Particularly relevant in urban and natural landscapes, this method allows businesses to align their marketing strategies with the distinct characteristics and preferences of specific neighborhoods, water bodies like rivers, and transportation routes such as highways. Fostering a more localized and community-centric approach, this approach enables a comprehensive understanding and connection with the unique qualities of diverse environments.

Competitor Locations

By customizing geotargeting shapes around competitor areas, you can strategically tailor your marketing efforts to capture the attention of their audience. This allows for a nuanced and targeted approach, enticing potential customers in proximity to competitors and creating a strong presence in key market zones. It’s a savvy way to outshine the competition and make your brand stand out in the crowd.

Complimentary Locations

Consider strategically aligning with complimentary locations. Picture tailoring your marketing approach to complement areas that resonate with your brand. This intentional move aims to resonate with potential customers in locations that naturally align with your offerings, presenting your brand as a harmonious choice. It’s a sophisticated strategy that positions your brand presence with purposeful precision, creating meaningful connections in the market.

Geo-Demographic Segmentation

The integration of demographic data with geographic locations forms the foundation of geo-demographic segmentation. This approach leverages sophisticated algorithms to combine lifestyle, behavior, and location data, resulting in more precise target segments, allowing businesses to tailor their messaging to resonate with the unique characteristics of each audience. In fact, here at Strata we use our proprietary geo-targeting software, to do just this, specifically targeting key customers with relatable and relevant messaging.

Neighborhood Focus

So, what does all this mean? Industries like healthcare, grocery, restaurants, retail and more increasingly find value in location-based marketing that transcends traditional zip code constraints. This strategy, extending beyond geographical boundaries, proves cost-effective in direct mail campaigns where postage is usually the largest expense. By using geospatial boundaries and targeted shapes, businesses strategically cut unwanted recipients, significantly reducing postage costs and maximizing the impact of their marketing efforts.

In the digital era, personalized and targeted advertising is paramount, and geospatial intelligence creates a more efficient and tailored connection with the audience. Beyond cost savings, businesses can enhance customer engagement by delivering location-specific promotions, fostering brand loyalty. Overall, this approach allows for the reallocation of resources, optimizing both cost and quality of marketing, and represents a transformative shift in elevating the overall efficacy of marketing initiatives.

In navigating the landscape of targeted marketing, the key lies in harnessing the right technologies to bring your strategies to life. Achieving precision through custom shapes, geo-demographic segmentation, and other advanced alternatives requires a tool that empowers you to draw those custom shapes on a map.

Looking to learn a bit more? Connect with a Strata expert today to hear more about our cutting-edge services that enable you to draw custom shapes with ease and reach the full potential of your direct mail and other marketing campaigns.

Key Tactics to Increase eCommerce Conversion Rates

eCommerce conversions don’t just happen overnight (not often, anyway), and set-it-and-forget-it tactics for your online store, no matter what product or service you’re selling, will only get you so far. Every visitor to your website who leaves without converting is one more missed opportunity that’s likely due to a lack of (or poor execution of) conversion tactics.

Measuring, testing, and optimizing your eCommerce platform – from website design and customer communication to the checkout process – takes dedication and willingness to experiment. Before you put in the effort, give this blog a quick read. We’re supplying you with several key practices to increase eCommerce conversation rates.

What Makes a Quality eCommerce Conversion Rate?

Before we get into what may be holding your company’s eCommerce conversion rates back and how to convert more customers, let’s talk about what an eCommerce conversion rate is, and what makes it seen as “successful”.

An eCommerce conversion can be a variety of things – a newsletter or rewards program sign-up, adding something to a wish list or shopping cart, making a purchase, or something else. The most sought-after and most commonly referred to eCommerce conversion is a sale, but many programs will record all of the above. Before measuring, make sure you can differentiate between these conversion types and get the information you’re looking for.

Conversion rate is calculated using the following equation:

Across the internet, there are various findings when it comes to the “most common”, average conversion rate – ranging from 1 – 5%. According to BigCommerce, “Even if you are doing everything right, you can still expect to win the sale around 2-3% of the time,” so ultimately, your goal should be a 2-3%+ baseline conversion rate. With that said, your company’s specific optimal conversion rate will vary based on several variables. These variables include, but are not limited to, the product or service, industry, product pricing, and target demographics.

Top Reasons Why Customers Don’t Convert

In an ideal world, a customer visits your site, finds the product(s) they need and/or like, and finally, makes a purchase – but this sequence is rarely the case. Here are some top reasons customers don’t convert:

  • Your site makes a bad impression
  • You don’t know your target audience and/or have not conducted enough research
  • Your site isn’t optimized and hasn’t been tested
  • Your images are bad and/or poor quality
  • Your copy isn’t persuasive
  • Your site’s pages are confusing or distracting
  • The CTAs aren’t clear
  • There’s a lack of trust
  • Your site has a confusing checkout
  • There are no retargeting efforts
  • Your site has outdated UI/UX design

…among others.

Key Tactics to Increase Your eCommerce Conversions

Although the barriers to conversion above are common, your company doesn’t have to fall short. Here are several ways to increase eCommerce conversions:

Encourage Loyalty

You’re likely aware that loyalty programs can generate a ton of value. In fact, research shows that customers spend upwards of 67% or more on the brands they feel loyal to. Brands that have high customer loyalty spend more time and money on customer lifetime value (CLV) through creating a community of loyal followers. Offer long-term benefits to customers (such as evolving their customer tier with every purchase and increasing their rewards), and customers will convert more often. Additionally, celebrate customer milestones with rewards, and/or give loyal customers early access to products. The more repeat, loyal customers, the better your conversion rate.

Optimize the Speed of Your Site

Research has shown that conversion rates improve by 17% for every second a site loads quicker. An additional study found that 47% of your customers will leave your site if a page takes more than two seconds to load. And another study found that “even a delay of a single second can result in a 7% reduction in conversions.” There’s really nothing worse than losing customers to slow site speed. Don’t worry, as there are tools to test and negate this issue, such as Google PageSpeed. Additionally, if your site seems slow, check its hosting plan, because it may have speed limitations. Lastly, check image sizes, as they may be too large, causing your pages to load slowly.

Add Areas of Proof

Show potential buyers that what they’re buying is truly a good purchase – and that you have the content to prove it. Provide case studies, testimonials, pictures, and reviews. “User-generated content is a goldmine—85% of consumers find them more influential than brand images or videos and 43% say it’s a great way to discover new products.” Including an area on each product page with images and text from real customers, or – a step further – “verified buyers” (accompanied by verified badges) can help increase conversions astronomically. After all, people not only look over, but trust these resources, with “92% read(ing) online reviews and testimonials when considering a purchase.”

Offer Free Shipping

A free shipping offer (especially at checkout) can increase conversions by making potential buyers feel like they’re getting an exclusive deal. Additionally, it’s been found that “free shipping that helps customers save $6.99 is more valuable than a $10 price slash…” Try offering this special discount at checkout, or upon exit intent.

Recover Abandoned Carts

Speaking of exit intent…around 35% of abandoned carts could have been avoided by checkout optimization, changes in product content, or site improvements. It’s important to make sure if a customer does attempt to exit without converting, that you aim to recover their abandoned cart with a cart abandonment marketing strategy in place.

Use Pop-up Windows

As we mentioned earlier, offering a discount upon exit intent gives you a fighting chance to stop the customer from leaving. Do this in a pop-up window, and you’re more likely to get the customer’s attention and keep them on board. Use pop-up windows to supply coupon codes, or have the visitor enter their email and be sent a code (which can additionally help you grow your mailing list and increase future conversions, as well).

Gamified email pop ups are also popular and seen as one of the most effective ways to convert eCommerce site visitors, as they create nostalgia and excitement. “With gamification, the user drops (their) reluctance to buying or subscribing to another newsletter, and by playing on the ecommerce platform (they create) a special and unique relationship with the brand.” Some examples of gamification tools are guessing games, wheel spins, or brain teasers to receive a discount or free item.

Make Yourself Available

Don’t miss out on a potential purchaser just because you weren’t able to answer a simple question. Make it easy for current and potential customers to contact you or acquire needed information, whether that’s by phone, email, or a chat. We’d recommend almost always including a live chat option, as “42% of customers prefer live chat compared to just 23% for email and 16% for social media or forums.”

Additionally, think about including an FAQ section or an area with support articles, how-to videos, and email or push notifications for new updates and offers. Communication is key. “Positive experience drives return visits and conversions – 74% buy based on experiences alone.”

Create Urgency

You’ve likely seen this one used more and more these days. Many companies are using persuasion triggers like time limits, scarcity of product, and product interest to increase excitement and urgency around specific products. Some examples of these persuasive phrases are:

  • Selling fast!
  • Only __ left!
  • Currently in __ shopping carts
  • __ shoppers are looking at this product
  • __% off for a limited time!
  • Best seller
  • “Influencer Name’s” Pick
  • Editor’s pick
  • Trending on “social platform”

Many people easily feel FOMO (fear of missing out), enjoy the feeling of obtaining something exclusive, and feel pressure to make quick decisions. Use these human instincts to your shop’s advantage!

Provide a Snippet

If your product is content or resource-based, showing a small portion can compel the visitor to want to read on and purchase. Provide a paragraph or two to pique interest. Or (even better) show a snippet quickly, and then blur it out as a teaser. Then, only offer the full snippet with the input of a name and/or email address, creating an even exchange of value. This way, even if the interested reader does not decide to purchase the full piece, you now have their information for future communication.

Always Be Testing and Improving

The key is to continually analyze, test, report, and work to understand the activity on your eCommerce site, whether from current, potential, or future customers. For the highest conversion rate possible, your company should never stop thinking about how you can improve experiences (whether that’s changing a button or image size, a call to action, page layout, or colors). No detail is too big or too small.

We have several more tactics heading your way, so look out for part two of this blog series within the next few weeks!

Strata’s skill and expertise in increasing conversions goes beyond eCommerce, with years of conversion experience through a variety of mediums. Interested in our services or want to chat more about eCommerce conversion tactics? Contact us today.

A Strata YouTube Original Series

Attribution is (or at least, should be) a vital part of your marketing. If you’re not sure where to start or are unsure how attribution works, we’re here to help out. Which is why we interviewed Harrison Sammak, Strata’s Director of R&D, to answer some of the most frequently asked attribution questions. Here’s a snippet out of the full YouTube video…

What is attribution?

In the context of marketing, attribution refers to the concept of knowing what activities your marketing team performed that had a material effect on someone engaging with you or your company.

Why is attribution so important when it comes to sales and marketing?

The goal of marketing is to generate and spread awareness, inform relevant audiences of your product or service’s value, and create opportunities for those audience members to enter your sales funnel. Without attribution, you can’t be sure your marketing is doing these things effectively (or not doing these things).

What is the biggest challenge associated with attribution?

The biggest challenge facing marketers that holds them back from a truly strong and accurate attribution system, is when their MarTech or attribution model doesn’t support a channel, and consequently, they avoid using this channel for marketing efforts (when it could be very successful).

Head over to Strata’s YouTube channel to watch the rest of the video and – hopefully, get all your attribution questions answered.

Harrison also answers:

  • How do you solve for these challenges?
  • What does attribution done right look like?

Click the image below to view the full video!

If you have any additional questions, want to learn more about attribution, or are looking to elevate and better understand your marketing, contact our team today. Our experts are ready to help you make smart happen.

Revolutionize Your Content, Customer Interactions, and Marketing Initiatives with This New & Exciting Resource

ChatGPT has proven to be quite valuable in its early usage – and while many marketers have skimmed the surface of its capabilities, the full variety of its marketing uses is still to be explored. In this blog, we’ll discuss the various possible uses of ChatGPT that have already been uncovered – and will explain how these uses can empower marketers, making marketing processes and execution easier than ever before! Want to be a ChatGPT power-user? Read on.

What is ChatGPT?

Before we dive into how ChatGPT can help your business, and more specifically, your marketers (or you, if you are the marketer), we want to first start by explaining what ChatGPT is. If you’re not familiar, ChatGPT is an AI (artificial intelligence) chatbot from the company OpenAI. The tool is derived from OpenAI’s “GPT” model (Generative Pre-Trained Transformer), adjusted and tweaked for conversational applications. It uses both “supervised learning” or SL techniques – machine learning defined by datasets, and “reinforced learning” or RL techniques – machine learning primarily defined by interpreting an environment, as well as trial and error.

OpenAI’s website explains the resource as “a model…which interacts in a conversational way. The dialogue format makes it possible for ChatGPT to answer follow-up questions, admit its mistakes, challenge incorrect premises, and reject inappropriate requests…(it’s) a sibling model to InstructGPT, which is trained to follow an instruction in a prompt and provide a detailed response.”

That said, it may not be that important to you how ChatGPT works, but if you’re in marketing, it’s important to know how you can make it work for you. Let’s explore several ways your company can (and probably should) be using it.

How Can ChatGPT Make You a More Efficient Marketer?

In today’s highly digital world, marketers are constantly seeking innovative ways to enhance their marketing efforts. ChatGPT has begun to revolutionize the field of marketing, and although the chatbot is quite new, marketers are already using the tool for content creation, meaningful customer interaction, and the conception of successful marketing campaigns…here’s how:

Ease of Research

Marketing practices, tactics, and tools are always changing and evolving. To stay in the know, marketers should really be consistently keeping up with the times – reading news articles, newsletters, whitepapers, journals, blogs, and so on. Yet, it’s hard to stay on top of it all. With ChatGPT, you’re able to input content (such as a blog post, journal piece, or news article) and receive back bullet-pointed summaries or easy-to-read paragraphs, saving you time and making you much more efficient and aware of the industry.

Market Research and Insights

ChatGPT can also be used for conducting market research and gathering customer insights – conducting surveys, gathering feedback, and analyzing customer sentiments. By collecting and analyzing vast amounts of data, ChatGPT can be used to gain a deeper understanding of target markets, help you find trends, and help you make data-driven decisions to refine your marketing strategies.

Idea Generation and Brainstorming

Tired of constantly having to generate fresh ideas and overcome writer’s block? ChatGPT can act as a reliable brainstorming partner, offering creative suggestions and helping you to overcome creative hurdles. Marketers can interact with the model, ask questions, and receive valuable insights, stimulating creativity and generating innovative concepts.

Engaging Content Creation (Blogs, Articles, Advertising, Social Media, and Product Descriptions)

One of the most significant applications of ChatGPT is generating engaging marketing content. Simply provide the chatbot with a brief outline or a few bullet points, and it can produce a well-structured, informative, and engaging piece – from a blog post to a longer article. ChatGPT’s vast knowledge base and ability to understand context and generate coherent sentences enables it to generate fairly publishable content. Yet, it’s important to always fact-check and edit, as (like humans) ChatGPT can still make mistakes.

ChatGPT can also aid in the creation of shorter-form content, such as social media posts, advertising headlines, and emails and email subject lines, empowering you to keep a consistent online presence while saving valuable time and energy. Plus, the tool can adapt to various writing styles and tones, so you don’t have to worry about your content being unaligned with your brand’s voice.

Finally, ChatGPT can help you draft attention–grabbing and persuasive product descriptions – saving you tons of time and leaving your creative energy for other important initiatives.

Interactive Content Creation

ChatGPT can also help you generate interactive and dynamic content to captivate target audiences. Whether it’s with interactive quizzes, chat-based storytelling, or personalized content recommendations, ChatGPT opens a world of possibilities for marketers to deliver engaging and memorable experiences, not only enhancing brand visibility, but also encouraging social sharing and viral marketing.

Language Translation and Localization

In an increasingly interconnected world, multilingual content creation and localization have become significantly more important. ChatGPT’s multilingual capabilities can help you translate articles, blog posts, and other marketing materials into different languages – all while still preserving the original intent and tone, opening new opportunities for your business to reach global audiences and establish a strong presence in international markets.

Although this is a large list of ChatGPT capabilities, we feel it doesn’t (and never will) end there. It seems the world of AI is constantly evolving and reshaping the way we interact with each other and reach customers as marketers. Because of this, you may not be surprised to hear that this piece was derived from an interaction with the chatbot itself!…

The “First Draft” of this Piece? Created by ChatGPT.

In order to create this blog, you could say we had ChatGPT “write” a rough draft. We input two phrases…

1. “Write a blog on how to use ChatGPT for marketing”

2. “Write a blog on ChatGPT uses for content creation”

…and let the bot do its thing! After getting a lot of information, we fact-checked, made edits, and added our personal understanding and experience of the tool and its uses, as well as a bit of our own unique voice. Click here to see the original pieces.

While these original pieces of writing were helpful in the creation of this piece, it still took human, marketing-experienced professionals to bring the piece to life and give it our own effective spin. For any marketing activity where you use ChatGPT as a resource, it’s still important to use your own understanding and experiences, or those of a qualified marketing partner, to take the piece to the next level – meeting your customer base where they are and providing them with materials and communication that suits their needs and expectations.

Interested in chatting with our marketing professionals about ChatGPT? Or want to get additional help to bring your marketing initiatives to the next level? Feel free to reach out, here.

How to Leverage Direct Mail to Gain Business Insights

State-level consumer legislation, monopolistic power-moves by tech giants, death of the third-party cookie…all these recent events have begun to erode the efficacy of modern marketing tactics, rapidly forcing marketers to rely primarily on their own first-party data. That’s why today, we’re discussing a surprising tactic that will quickly and easily allow you to rapidly build your first-party data pipeline: direct mail.

Today’s Growing Data Hurdles

Today, 46% of brands use data to boost customer loyalty, and – 43% of them focus their data use toward conversions. Yet, many companies haven’t yet caught on (in the grand scheme of things). 25% don’t use automation to understand and utilize their data, and only about half use automation in their operations. It’s important to be ahead of the curve – a part of the data and automation-using 50%, to surpass your competition and understand your audience(s). As AI and machine learning availability increases, valuable insights are more readily available. But – with this increase comes an increase in security measures and data hurdles, as we noted above. It’s vital to understand that while there is more information out there than ever before, there’s also more and more protection over this information.

The importance of acquiring data (ethically) grows each year, as competition increases for nearly every market, and customers expect marketing that’s authentic, relatable, and catered directly to them. They often expect highly personalized marketing – and are not very persuaded by that that is generic.

Data, reporting, and automation can do many things for your business, from keeping clients and your team in the know, to making better marketing decisions and creating better strategies, to keeping your budget under control. It can create more personalized experiences for customers, help you advertise the right features to the right people in the right channels at the right time, have better context around and understanding of your product and marketing efforts, construct predictive analysis, and ask/answer the right questions. So, if tech giants, legislators, and search engines are increasing protection and making usual data practices more difficult, there’s a need to think outside the box.

How Direct Mail Provides Quality Data Insights

Around 50% of companies today are using, primarily, first-party data. Most of these companies are large and have significant investment in the reporting that they can still get to ensure campaigns are well-strategized and customer experiences are personalized and well-tracked. One physical experience – direct mail, is still top-dog in supplying well-informed data. And – it’s one tool that can never be blocked from your inbox, is rarely perceived as unethical, and is very minimally flagged as spam.

Additionally, unlike many digital data practices, with direct mail, you’re not targeting a blanket of people with similar traits and somewhat blindly hoping for the best. Instead, you’re sending to specific addresses that have quite a bit of data information associated with them. Here’s what we mean…

Say you’re launching digital ads to an audience profile. Google (for instance) is picking specific people that match that profile, but you are unaware of these specific audience members and never have or acquire a list of these people.

Next, let’s say you’re launching a direct mail campaign. You have to send the direct mail pieces to specific addresses. You have a list of these addresses and their associated tenants. From this list, you can likely already extrapolate their income (based on their address’ home value), and later, you’ll very likely be able to extrapolate their age, interests, ethnicity, and possibly more from returned BRCs, QR code scans to online forms, coupon redemptions, and other interactions with your direct mail. And, if there’s a major shift in their actions and engagement, you are often able to tell when they’ve had a life change, or that a totally new potential customer has moved in.

Plus – users almost always have to opt-in these days or accept digital marketing initiatives like ads, emails, and pop-ups, but that’s not the case for direct mail. What we’re ultimately saying is, it seems that the more potential data that’s out there, the more security concerns and protection. So – it’s important to have not only a back-up practice, but a tried-and-true marketing effort that will always deliver high ROI and quality analytics.

Interested in acquiring the right data and lists to meet your customers with effective marketing where they are, with what they want and need? Contact Strata.

What Makes Data Good Data

We always, always appreciate conversations with customers. Especially those that make us think more thoroughly about our services. We’re constantly open to changing and evolving to provide the best offerings possible for loyal and new customers alike. Recently, we’ve had quite a few conversations about data, and have realized that it’s important for us to provide some insight into our somewhat unique data philosophy, specifically as it relates to direct mail. We’re all about the best data – not always (and not usually) the most data.

Our Direct Mail Data Philosophy

Direct mail may not be the cheapest form of marketing – but it’s often one of the most effective. In fact, 61% of customers find direct mail influential in making purchasing decisions. Compared to email’s average lifespan of 2 seconds, direct mail can last 17 days. We could go on and on about why we love direct mail, which is why we made a complete blog with tons of other eye-popping stats.

While direct mail is very effective – it’s only as effective as the data behind it. We believe it’s important to reach the right people, which is not usually all the people, and this can sometimes be puzzling to our customers. Our philosophy? We’re more worried about and interested in the success of your campaign rather than the number of people we send to. Plus, while we appreciate business income, we more highly value long-lasting business relationships built on trust (which primarily comes from a good track-record). In short – quality over quantity, always.

When we pull our data, you’ll notice that compared to others in the industry, we don’t always end up providing as many contacts. This may look and seem like “less”, but it’s really providing you with “more”. We won’t give you more contacts than necessary, we won’t waste your time with leads that are dead on arrival, we won’t waste your money on mail that ends up in the trash, and we will deliver higher ROI. Many others in the industry will provide you with a bigger list, but one with a portion of people who will trash your direct mail – wasting your time and budget. So, next time you see a long list of “prospects”, don’t let it knock your socks off before diving into who those people really are, what they want, and whether or not they’ll actually respond to you, and, more importantly – become a customer.

Why Our Data is Strong

Strata has years of experience as well as many great connections within the industry. Our data compilation process is rigorous, and one that we’ve worked on for years to define and strengthen. To ensure it’s effective and valuable, we continually evaluate our data sources time and again, never assuming they’re “good as they are”. And similar to how open we are to customer feedback, innovation, and change, we’re always open to changing and improving our data sources so that data we provide, again, will actually return ROI.

Interested in working with Strata to get the most out of good data? Contact us.

A Strata YouTube Channel Original

Multichannel campaigns can be complicated to create, and once you create them, even more work needs to be put in to make them as effective as possible. In the last YouTube video of our Multichannel Marketing series, we’ll go through how to optimize your multichannel campaign for the best success and highest ROI.

What’s an Optimum Multichannel Campaign?

An optimum multichannel campaign is a campaign or workflow that converts every possible campaign member. Keep in mind – that doesn’t mean every person in the campaign, as there will always be some members that are truly impossible to convert. Why? Things happen. People start new jobs, financial positions change, people move, etc. The list goes on. The point of optimization is to optimize for what can be controlled, and in this instance, that’s the customer journey or workflow.

Two Categories of Multichannel Campaign Optimization

  • Theoretical: This category happens before starting your campaign. It’s the last but usually the most time-consuming portion of actually building your workflow. It’s done through effective use of assumptions and historical data from similar campaigns. The steps to do this? Assign estimate conversion rates to each of your workflow components and then use them to calculate expected conversions – taking the output of one component as the input of the next. Although it’s very time consuming, it’s worth it in the end. Theoretical optimization helps you optimize both your campaign and create stronger projections for your campaign’s performance.
  • Empirical: This category happens while the campaign runs. Instead of using historical data from other campaigns, you’ll use historical data from this campaign. So, factors like audience and creative can be held constant. You’ll still go through the same process – assigning your empirical conversion rates to each of your components, and going through the calculations to more accurately predict overall campaign outcomes. Measure your component’s KPIs while simultaneously updating projections based on the changes to your workflow.

To hear from our Director of R&D, Harrison, on what else you’ll want to do, as well as what tools you can use to optimize your campaign, click on the video below. Or, if you’d like to discuss multichannel marketing optimization with one of our experts, contact us today.

A Strata YouTube Channel Original

Figuring out your multichannel campaign workflow can be difficult (at first). At its core, a workflow should be a living, breathing thing, and you most likely won’t come up with the optimal flow right from the get-go, and that’s alright, you’re not really supposed to. When building a workflow, your goal should be getting to a point where you’re tweaking it throughout the campaign, not reengineering it. That said, in our most recent YouTube video of our Multichannel Marketing series, we go over best practices for creating this flow, and the ways in which you can make it work well for you and your company.

Are All Workflows the Same?

The answer’s no. Look at the construction of your workflow as an iterative process. Something you sit down with, leave, come back to, leave for another cup of coffee, come back to and test out, make calculations for, leave, come back to, leave for more coffee, etc. Go in with the expectation of optimizing it a handful of times. Remember, it’s personalized to you and your company’s goals.

Its Importance

Having the most effective campaign from the get-go is one thing, but building a workflow and truly thinking through a theory for that workflow is another. It allows you to better test and evaluate your campaign’s goals. If you begin to see a disconnect between your campaign goals and what you currently have after constructing a workflow and calculating your multichannel KPIs, you have a problem. But, the good news is that you can work to solve it before spending money, and possibly disrupting your reputation. This is one of the main reasons workflows are important to have – so you can catch any kinks before launching your campaign.

First Steps

When starting to create your workflow, there are a lot of framework options you can build upon. The video that we’re referring to in this blog is for building a ‘base’ workflow, but, for information on how to tweak your ‘final’ workflow, check out this video when you find some time.

A commonly used workflow strategy formulation starts with defining the highest and lowest levels of the marketing funnel that you want to address. You can have as many ‘funnel buckets’ as you want, and they’ll vary based on your industry and business model. Here are some basic ones that can be used:

  • Awareness
  • Consideration
  • Evaluation
  • Purchase

We recommend laying these out as lanes in a flowchart. It helps to visualize the different stages of engagement for your campaign members.

To see next steps for building your multichannel workflow, click on the video below. You’ll hear our Director of R&D, Harrison, go through best practices and tips and tricks for getting yours set up. Or, if you’d like to discuss this concept with one of our multichannel experts, contact us today.

A Strata YouTube Channel Original

In this ever-changing market, not even a marketing genius can accurately gauge performance of a multichannel campaign without organized, analyzed data across channels. That is why setting and tracking key performance indicators (KPIs) is very important. Follow along as we walk you through a few things to keep in mind when establishing and understanding KPI’s for your multichannel campaign.

What’s a KPI?

Like we said above, KPI stands for key performance indicator. It’s a quantifiable measure of performance over time for a specific goal. In this case – that goal is multichannel marketing success. KPIs lay out marketing goals in the form of specific milestones to calculate progress and insights, and these insights help marketers make better decisions. In order for KPIs to be successful and helpful, a marketer or team of marketers needs to handle and record analytics from several touch-points. Without KPIs there’s no way to accurately and effectively measure the efficiency of your multichannel performance.

KPIs at Their Core: Layer One

There are two levels of KPIs for multichannel campaigns. The first layer is the component layer, and it’s used to analyze the individual components of a campaign. This layer helps establish realistic goals for the campaign and provides low level insight to analyze and optimize as your campaign progresses. Conversion rates vary by standards like industry and medium, which are easily researchable.

Yet, actual conversion rates have huge ranges based on the nature of your call to action – like your messaging, imagery, and your audience, and which segment of the funnel they’re in. If your campaign’s messaging can be considered “industry standard”, save yourself some time and use an average conversion rate, even if it looks low.

Further into KPIs: Layer Two

Want to learn about the second layer of KPIs, and how to establish them for your next multichannel campaign? Click on the video below and hear more from our Director of R&D, Harrison. Or, if you’d like to discuss this concept with one of our multichannel experts, contact us today to get your next (or maybe your first) multichannel campaign started.