A Strata YouTube Channel Original
Choosing the right multichannel campaign mediums can be difficult if you don’t have a good starting foundation and the right tools. That’s why, in our most recent YouTube video, we walk you through the key things to keep in mind when making this decision, and how to pick channels that best fit your company’s marketing needs.
Evaluate Your Brand & Customers, First
Before you even look at where your audience is and what they want, look at your own brand, brand voice, offerings, and then your target audience. Once you have these nailed down, then you can think about your customers – because if you understand your customers, you can understand where it’s best to communicate with them. Get to know your customers on a deeper level through data and tracking so you can develop personas and demographics, and fully recognize their pain points, wants, and needs. Test and measure tactics, update and reaudit your customer experience, ask for customer feedback – whatever you need to do to truly know your audience and therefore get the most out of your multichannel campaign. After all, 86% of customers are willing to pay up to 25% more for products and services just to have a better customer experience. Once you know your audience, then, and only then, can you figure out exactly where to meet them on their multichannel journey.
If you want to know what comes next in choosing the right mediums of communication for your multichannel marketing campaign, click on the video below and hear more from our Marketing and Social Media Coordinator Bridget. Or, if you’d like to discuss this concept with one of our multichannel experts, contact us today to get your next (or maybe even your first) multichannel campaign started.
A Strata YouTube Channel Original
We’ve all heard the saying “know your audience” before, but what does it really mean, and how will it help you plan your next multichannel marketing campaign? In our most recent YouTube video, we dive into some tips & tricks for targeting your perfect multichannel campaign audience.
Really Know Your Audience
Before you even start your campaign, you need to nail down who your audience is and why you’re targeting them. Recent surveys show that 74% of consumers get frustrated when they receive content that has absolutely nothing to do with their interests, which is the main reason companies are quickly switching to multichannel marketing campaigns – designed to be customer-centric, provide a top-tier experience, and drive high ROI. But success still comes down to how well you know your audience, which is why it’s so important to create accurate customer personas. A persona is simply a fictional character that represents the ideals and motives of your target audience. Some common (and extremely useful) research tactics to create correct customer personas are researching buying habits, consumer preferences, search behaviors, and communication methods. Don’t limit yourself to just one persona if it’s useful to create more! You can utilize several different personas depending on how diverse your target market is. It’s important to think beyond your “classic customer,” and diversify your buyer profiles.
The Buyer Journey
Outlining and creating a framework for your buyer’s journey will dramatically affect your sales. Some key questions to ask yourself to understand their journey are:
- “What purchases are being made?”
- “Where are the purchases coming from?”
- “How are they making purchases?”
These questions will help you build a premium customer experience from campaign start to finish. The more data you’re able to acquire on their buying habits/decisions, the better you’ll be at mapping out their customer journey. After narrowing down your audience, you can better source all imagery, content, and workflows they’ll come across throughout the campaign.
Want to learn more about perfecting your multichannel marketing audience? Click on the video below to hear more on this topic from our Marketing and Social Media Coordinator, Bridget. 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.
Get to Know These Tracking Treats
Within the world of marketing, there’s a lot of buzz around the topic of cookies and what the future holds for tracking website visitors and generating personalized advertisements. While the topic’s relevant, not many people are completely informed on what cookies are and the impact they have on our ability to create better customer experiences. In this blog, we’re going over what cookies are, the differences between first-party and third-party cookies, and the future of online tracking.
So, What Are “Cookies”?
Although many of us are “foodies” here at Strata, and could talk about a good dessert all day, this blog isn’t about Oreo or Chips Ahoy. We’re talking about web “cookies” – text files put into a user’s browser page while they’re visiting a website. Cookies are known by several names – web cookie, internet cookie, browser cookie, or HTTP cookie, but they’re all the same, and in general, they track and log browsing activity against identification data such as IP addresses. Why is this information useful? Primarily, cookies help save information about a user in order to personalize their website experience and the advertisements they’re shown.
While cookies have enjoyed a childhood free of regulation, their “free-willy” time is coming to an end with recent regulatory initiatives driven by an increase in public concern over internet privacy. The first major change came when General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) made consent mandatory in order to track visitors on a website. To give you a feel for the impact of GDPR – about 11% of users click to “accept all cookies”, 76% of users ignore the banner completely, 12% close the cookie banner, and 0.5% of users actually open up cookie settings, read through terms and agreements, and sometimes make adjustments. These numbers are misleading, however – what GDPR essentially did was force the user to choose between viewing the desired content and accepting cookies OR (with exceptions) leaving the site entirely. So, while it looked good – almost all of the visitors in the stats above were still being tracked.
At this point, you might be thinking that we need to eradicate the cookie – if so, hold that thought. Cookies almost always make your experience on the web better – they’re your friend, not your enemy. To solve privacy concerns – which is the intent of all privacy-centric regulation – we’ll need to jump down a level. There are two major types of cookies – First-Party and Third-Party. Both contain the same pieces of data and technically can conduct the same actions, but they’re created differently, used differently, and have different benefits for distinctive situations. Let’s get into each one.
First-Party Cookies
Simply put, first party cookie technology is usually installed or authorized by a website’s owner and only tracks that user across that specific website. First-party cookies are set on the publisher’s server or on the JavaScript loaded to the website. Their defining technical feature is that, for the most part, only the domain that created the cookie can access it, thus they are seen as less invasive and are more welcomed by users.
These cookies allow website owners to collect analytical data, remember individual user settings or content (remembering what’s in a user’s shopping cart, their language preferences, or their username and password), and perform useful functions to provide better user experience. That last part is important – first-party cookies primary purpose is to deliver more relevant, user-friendly experiences to individuals. If you’d like to see the difference they make, just clear your browser cache and visit some of your favorite websites.
Third-Party Cookies
Contrasting first-party cookies, third-party cookies are not created by the domain of the website the user’s currently visiting, and therefore, can often seem intrusive and un-welcomed. This type of cookie is placed by another site, such as an advertiser or social media platform like ad.doubleclick.net – and is separate from the home domain. These cookies are usually used for online advertising purposes, and are added through a script, code, or tag to track a user across several websites. Enabling these cookies can help users see relevant discounts and catered advertisements, but can also possibly involve them in a breach of privacy. For this reason, third-party cookies are blocked by many browsers, and are currently being chastised as unethical.
Phase Out of Third-Party Cookies
In February of 2020, Google announced its phase out of third-party cookies by 2022. When this occurs, it will cause 56% of web browsers (the percentage that use Google Chrome) to block their use automatically. As stated by Google, their reasoning for forcing this phase out is to increase security and protect the user. You have to wonder, however – are ethics the driving principle here, or is this a strategic move to further corner the digital advertising market?
All-in-all, this change won’t make as much of a difference as you’d think, as a 2017 study showed that 64% of tracking cookies were already being blocked as users surfed the web. Those at Google seem to think that third-party cookies will not be replaced by another resource due to increasing privacy concerns, but they’ll continue to “support first-party relationships on our ad platforms for partners, in which they have direct connections with their own customers.”
What’s Next for Cookies?
No matter what the circumstances with third-party cookies, first-party cookies are definitely here to stay. If configured correctly, they’ll continue to function within most browsers – even if those browsers block third-party cookies. So – fear not – first-party cookies will provide marketers hindsight and insight on your website visitors for the foreseeable future – even if you might now be forced to use Google to reach them.
Now that you know a bit more about cookies, you may be motivated to improve and optimize your next digital marketing campaign. If so, contact us today.
Understanding How it Impacts Everything from Customer Acquisition to Back-office Operations
Industries are shifting, whether that’s a demand for goods and services, the way we deliver those goods and services, or new emergences in the way we do business. This is true for every business, including grocers.
Let’s take a look at some of the drivers shifting industry standards and how we can leverage one specific driver to create better opportunities for grocers.
Three Drivers of Retail
1. Shifts in Consumer Expectation
There’s perhaps nothing that changes more constantly than consumer expectation, and in the era of home delivery and subscription meal prep services, consumer demands are varied, and quite frankly, challenging.
Consumers expect the ability to buy anything, anytime, and from anywhere. Finding ways to cater to these new expectations is a major driver of business for grocers.
2. Stiff Competition and the Emergence of Ecosystems
An even more pronounced trend is the sheer level of competition that’s out there. Grocery chains are collapsing under the pressure of large-scale competition and the emergence of ecosystems. A great example is Amazon purchasing Whole Foods and using the Amazon infrastructure to fold Whole Foods operations into its business model.
3. Technology
The last driver for grocer-specific retail is technology. As technology advances, it opens doors to help grocers better compete for the attention of consumers. With the introduction of AI, advance analytics, and IoT, grocers have more capability than ever to analyze and connect with consumers.
Technology, more than any of the other three drivers above, can stand out as a primary factor in operational effectiveness with the ability to reduce overall cost in the value chain.
This is particularly true in the realms of customer acquisition, customer engagement, commercial effectiveness, and warehouse/back-office operations.
Customer Acquisition and Engagement
When it comes to technology’s role in customer acquisition and engagement, the benefits are obvious. Better analytics leads to better targeted messaging across multiple delivery vehicles, such as digital ads.
Technology is also crucial to creating highly targeted and hyper-personalized offerings, enabling grocers to connect with consumers on a more specific level, resulting in better customer acquisition, engagement, and loyalty.
Another area of advertising where technology plays a crucial role is in enhancing digital direct marketing properties, like the addition of promotional QR codes attached to emails or digital coupons.
Commercial Effectiveness
Technology can also help grocers maximize their commercial effectiveness by using advanced analytics to make better choices. These choices can include everything from the products grocers carry to the way they’re priced.
It can also help in making decisions related to promotional initiatives, helping to take the guesswork out of what promotional offers to run.
Operational Efficiency
One of the most appealing aspects of heavy technological integration within grocer systems is the potential for higher efficiency in day-to-day operations. Technology opens the door to automating warehouse functions, as well as in-store and back-office operations.
Why it Matters
If there’s nothing else to take away from this article, let it be this: technology allows you to compete for business in a market driven by choice, increasing existing customer loyalty, and driving customers to physical stores instead of online ordering sites.
These three benefits make it imperative that grocers embrace technological solutions for many of their day-to-day operations and needs. In an era so heavily dependent on technology for communication and promotion, without it, grocers will fall behind.
Interested in learning more about the role of technology in the value chain for grocers? We have the tools that can help ensure your tech is where it needs to be.
Whether that means operational efficiency with an MRM system or acquiring new customers with our SmartMove, new mover program, contact us to see what Strata can do for you.
How to Apply the Latest in eCommerce Functionality and UX Design to Increase Adoption
Digital capabilities and payment technologies have changed the way consumers shop; your colleagues are no different. Yet many businesses struggle to keep current internal marketing portals (also commonly referred to as “marketing stores”) that offer some form of ordering/purchasing features. Legacy marketing store systems were often built without scalability in mind, and thus many remain in a form where orders still have to feed through to purchasing departments or internal marketing teams for approval and fulfillment. Not providing a fully self-serve, user-friendly environment makes it harder for marketers to leverage all of the assets they’ve produced, and low self-sufficiency slows down customer-facing functions.
The lack of investment in these systems is understandable; they don’t directly correlate to the bottom line. But if you take the long view, they’re invaluable when it comes to brand and sales enablement. Customer-facing teams are among your best channels for promoting your brand. And with marketing increasingly being held accountable for justifying every expense, it’s critical that what you produce is visible and accessible to stakeholders.
The good news is that big hitters like Amazon and Zappos continue to update and perfect eCommerce, so companies wishing to upgrade internally-facing purchasing systems can capitalize on what is already in existence.
User Experience Is Top Priority
Research is increasingly confirming that one of the most critical determiners of the success of a web application is the user experience.
User Experience (UX) comprises a site’s look and feel, architecture, overall ease of use, shopping cart experience, and more.
You can leverage these very same principles to optimize efficiencies in your brand merchandise and marketing content ordering and purchasing portals. The superior UX and secure, controlled online purchasing available via your favorite websites can now be safely – and more easily – applied to better serve business stakeholders such as sales teams, distributors, and field marketers.
A UX-optimized marketing portal can accelerate many basic sales and marketing functions:
- Increasing adoption and transparency: Pricing and inventory are readily visible and can be updated in real time. Purchasers are better informed, reducing the risk of order changes.
- Improving internal perception of the marketing team: Providing excellent customer service always makes a good impression.
- Speeding up purchasing, fulfillment, and billing: Put merch within users’ reach with features such as frequently purchased items and smart content: similar to what you see in eCommerce sites that feature product recommendations and related products.
- Expediting order submissions and processing: Whether you need to change a ship-to on the fly or quick-ship 50 different pieces of merchandise to 50 different clients, those options are easy to access and process.
One aspect of customer experience that seamless eCommerce functionality does well is convenience. Users want to find what they’re looking for quickly, receive it hassle-free, and pay with their preferred method. While many older systems take in static requests that have to be routed to marketing teams for approval and fulfillment, a more streamlined portal enables automation that empowers users to take care of these processes themselves – easily and quickly.
And importantly, today’s best eCommerce-centric online marketing stores let users upload mailing lists to attach to their orders, rather than offering only a few predefined ship-to address options.
The Personalized Shop…
The level of personalization and ease of use that an eCommerce-style corporate marketing portal provides does well for internal brand perception. Consumers still highly value relationship – strong customer relationships boost loyalty, improve net promoter scores, reduce acquisition costs, and increase the likelihood of conversion, upsells, and expansion. Again, your colleagues are no different. When your tech can support them in every step of their tasks, you are building internal loyalty and teamwork.
Further, because eCommerce is primed to handle large amounts of data with minimal risk, it’s the ideal space to deliver personalized content and services and test new strategies.
…Integrated
If you integrate your internal corporate marketing portal with a robust content management system, you can take your online ordering and purchasing well beyond a more dated inventory library. You can deliver engaging content based on user activity and other data points.
You can also use personalization to move the relationship across channels conversational (chatbot-based) ordering and other purchase-based trigger communications. Such technologies make processes seamless, hassle-free, and scalable into the future.
Ready to talk about taking the best in UX and eCommerce to your online marketing store? Contact us to learn more.
Helpful Tips to Generate Response from Your Next Postcard Mailer
An effectively designed, well-thought out direct mail postcard can net response beyond expectations. Create a postcard that’s going to stand out – rather than get tossed out – with these suggestions. (Note: incorporating some of these tips will depend on your goals and budget).
- Consider Going Big
There are a few reasons to consider an oversize postcard format:- A larger size naturally attracts more attention.
- Oversize postcards have been shown to perform better in terms of response rate, according to recent Association of National Advertiser reports.
- They are less likely to get lost in the shuffle.
- Extra space means more room for impactful design and messaging.
However, you’ll want to consult USPS mailing guidelines for postcards. Postcards that exceed 4.25-inches by 6-inches in size are classified as a letter mailing, and will cost more to mail.
- Design to Draw the Eye
To have any chance of competing for attention in the mailbox, postcards need eye-catching design that also works to support a campaign’s messaging and goals.- Avoid an overly busy design. Rather, design around a focal point using visual design hierarchy principles.
- If your postcard needs to feature several products (e.g., weekly sale items), use a grid layout to achieve an organized rather than chaotic appearance.
- Choose the Right Paper
Paper weight and texture can communicate volumes about the value of your mailing – something to think about investing a little extra in, depending on goals and audience:- A thicker weight feels sturdier and more dependable and will stand up to the mailing process.
- A too-thin paper risks coming across as flimsy and getting damaged in the mailing process.
- Textured paper adds a tactile element, another way to draw attention.
(Again, USPS guidelines are a factor: a thickness greater than 0.016-inch will cost more to mail.)
- Try Unusual Formats and Print Techniques
As with paper choices, these attention-grabbing features can increase project costs, so ROI will come into play when making these decisions.- Try a die-cut format for an unusual, eye-catching shape. Tie the shape into your company’s product or service offerings for added resonance.
- Perforated tear-off coupons can add sizzle to your offer.
- Including a simple giveaway (e.g., a magnet) will add noticeability and value.
- Printing techniques like foil-stamping and embossing can instantly draw the eye. They may be best used for higher-end mailings – think invitations to a new location’s open house, introducing a premium product or service, and other similar promotions.
- Make Copy Work Hard
The space constraints of a postcard mean you need to choose words wisely. Write to focus attention on the action message – what you want recipients to do.- Craft an attention-commanding headline that builds curiosity.
- Include very minimal supporting information – just enough to tempt recipients to follow through on the call to action, or take advantage of your offer.
- Use copywriting “power words” – words that spark interest and action. Check out a list here.
- Be clear, don’t confuse your readers, and be action-oriented: Tell recipients how to take the next step.
- Make It Personal
Relevant mail is far more likely to be saved and acted on. With the depth and breadth of data available today, the sky’s the limit regarding personalization. Here are a few pointers:- Personalize with an offer on products you know a recipient likes based on purchasing history, or include an image of a product recently viewed online.
- Include region-specific maps for your businesses closest retail location of office site.
- Use personal URLs (PURLs), a form of personalization that incorporates a prospect’s name into the landing page web address, to instantly capture attention.
Investing in marketing automation software greatly boosts efficiency and accuracy in executing a personalized campaign. Also, make sure to choose a printer with variable data print capabilities.
- Partner with a Direct Mail Expert That Can Tie It all Together.
Developing an effective direct mail postcard campaign becomes much simpler when you work with a vendor that provides professional design, printing and mailing services. With expert guidance on the creative points discussed above, plus someone else to handle the print and mailing details, you get more time to focus on big-picture goals and strategy. Plymouth Meeting, PA-based Strata Company specializes in data-driven direct marketing and technologies that help companies create more relevant, personalized marketing. A leader in direct mail marketing for nearly two decades, Strata has experience helping businesses create highly targeted multichannel marketing campaigns. Contact us to learn more.
Why You Can’t Afford NOT to Automate
When it comes to customer communications, few industries escape the grasp of government regulations. Among the many benefits of automating processes surrounding customer communications is more reliable compliance assurance.
And in the not-so-distant future – indeed, present day for some organizations – is robotic process automation (RPA). The financial services industry is already tapping into the power of RPA in compliance monitoring and testing and improved process effectiveness and efficiency.
Organizations that don’t embrace process automation now risk being left behind competitively. And from a compliance standpoint, organizations without automation will increasingly struggle to keep up with constantly changing and emerging regulatory requirements.
Compliance Challenges Are Inherent in Communications
The risk of noncompliance looms for organizations undertaking mass customer communications – especially when they involve manual processes carried out by multiple employees across multiple departments.
- Human error opens the door to many avenues of noncompliance – inaccurate information, for example, or communications being sent to incorrect recipients.
- Meanwhile, slow, unwieldy processes strain staff resources and IT departments and can result in missed deadlines for time-sensitive regulatory updates.
How Automating the Customer Communication Processes Improves Compliance
Increases Accuracy of Data Output by Reducing Human Error
Process automation helps reduce the risk of human error by instantly processing complex data, preparing it for output into multiple forms of correspondence.
The source of the data and its hygiene are still underlying factors, of course. However, assuming the source data is accurate, robotics controls the integrity of that data and ensures it is intact as it passes through different process points.
For example, without a single central platform to store multiple data points, a customer service representative may have to navigate disparate systems to gather necessary information during a service call. Automated recording and transfer of data in a central location streamlines the entire process, eliminating possible entry points for errors.
Or consider a healthcare system that undertakes enterprise-wide physician announcement mailings. The time sensitive nature of such communications is prime territory for process automation. Or a call center responsible for setting appointments on behalf of hundreds of hospitals.
Increases Agility in Achieving Compliance with Regulatory Changes
Requirements under regulatory mandates can shift at any time, and businesses typically have a narrow window in which to adapt and ensure that business actions falling underneath it are compliant.
Process automation improves the speed and agility of compliance activity by:
- Facilitating quick, easy document retrieval
- Eliminating time-consuming hard file searches
- Better equipping leadership during audits with compliance status reports
For Large Businesses: Unify and Streamline Compliance Efforts
In large businesses and enterprises or matrixed organizations with many stakeholders, adapting to meet regulatory changes can be can be a slow-moving beast. Automation can help implement changes quickly so that new required procedures/communications are executed with more immediacy.
For Mid-Size Businesses: Proactively Address Compliance
For mid-size businesses, automation can be well worth the investment too. In some cases, a lack of compliance can be the death knell for a newer or less established large business with deep pockets. Mid-size businesses skittish about moving to automation should review the integrity of their quality control measures and perform a cost-benefit analysis. They may be surprised to learn how affordable a customer communications management system could be.
Boosts Customer Satisfaction – And Lowers the Incidence of Complaints
Customer satisfaction goes hand in hand with improved compliance. For example, in the healthcare industry, process automation surrounding patient communications increases ease of contact; better access to accurate, up-to-date information; faster service by call centers – all factors that, in turn, increase patient satisfaction. More satisfied patients mean fewer complaints – and reduced risk of audits by agencies like CMS.
Make Process Automation Work for You
Automated compliance-enabling functions that cater to industry- and organization-specific needs can be built into CCM systems, and should be considered from the outset. Work with a process automation technology partner that will take a collaborative approach and has the expertise to design automated processes that will support proactive and complete compliance.
Plymouth Meeting, PA-based Strata Company provides CCM solutions to clients in regulated industries where compliance, accuracy and timeliness are a must. Our correspondence management systems integrate seamlessly with a variety of systems to allow for the secure, seamless transition of data and output. Contact us to learn how compliant communications technologies can benefit you, your business, and your customers.