Part II: Get Smart, eCommerce Marketers!

May 2, 2013 By Leave a Comment

Getting to know your subscribers and personalizing the messages they are sent is important in digital marketing, including in eCommerce. You may have a lot of data on your hands, but you need to properly segment that data and create timely, relevant messages in order to make good use of that data. Automation and combining media channels are other key parts of sending smarter, more personalized eCommerce emails that matter to your customers.

Automation

It’s easy to talk the talk, but harder to walk the walk. The collection and creation of relevant, personalized messages may not be as difficult as you think it is, though. For example, an automated eCommerce welcome message to new subscribers is a simple set up in the WhatCounts Smart Marketing Engine and lets customers know they are valued. Another simple eCommerce email to create and automatically send is a reminder to shopping cart abandoners, (who should have their own segmentation). A quick reminder email that says something to the effect of, “Hey, you haven’t finished buying the cool stuff in your shopping cart” can mean the difference between a lost opportunity and increasing your ROI.

Another important part of automation is bringing in content. In the Smart Marketing Engine, you can insert SmartGET and XSLT GET tags into your messages to automatically pull existing eCommerce content from your website, blog, RSS feed or any other place you store content. Want to learn more about automation? Check out the Automation blog post from a few weeks ago where we explain it in detail.

Combine Channels in eCommerce

You can’t just send your awe-inspiring eCommerce emails and call it a day. Smart Marketing includes sending relevant and timely messages across all channels, not just email. The goal is to build the most complete profile of your customers and prospects in order to reach them with the message they will respond to. Social and mobile are key components to sending Smart Messages in eCommerce.

In the Smart Marketing Engine, you have the capabilities to use social sharing, social posting and social tracking. If a subscriber reads your newsletter and loves the content, he or she can share it on a social network directly from the newsletter. We track this behavior in the system and create a social influencer score based on it and subsequent actions, if applicable. In turn, the social influencer score lets you build better Smart Segments.

Setting up social sharing capabilities in the Smart Marketing Engine:

eCommerce and social sharing

This is what social sharing looks like when it is added. Subscribers simply click on the buttons below to share content from the email on their favorite social networks.
eCommerce social shares visual

Mobile phone use is overwhelming desktop use, and is only predicted to continue on this path in the future (Mashable). Responsive design is one of the factors you need to consider as you create emails, as well as update your website. Different mobile platforms display emails, photos, graphics and links in different ways. Want to learn more about the specifics of designing for mobile? We’ve got a webinar waiting for you to download: How to Create a Winning Mobile Email Marketing Strategy.

Implementing segmentation, content, automation, as well as combining channels, is the way you get to know more about your eCommerce customers, which helps you bring them information they want. Digital marketing is all about developing a brand friendship with your subscribers, and a friendship always starts with asking questions about the other person. You learn what your friend likes – maybe flowers – so you send her flowers on special occasions.

Are you using Smart Marketing to get to know your subscribers and what they like? Are you acting upon the information you know about your subscribers to send them relevant, personalized messages?

For the inside scoop on Smart Marketing and eCommerce, download our free Shopping Made Smarter webinar.

Joy Ugi
Digital Marketing Coordinator, WhatCounts

18 Ways book cover
Audience to Evangelist
Learn 18 different ways to find and grow your email marketing and social media ROI! Promote email with social, social with email, learn how to set up a Facebook Page for email subscriptions, and much more. Download the free eBook now.
 Lifecycle email marketing is one of the hottest buzzwords in digital marketing, but how can you make it work for you? Download our free eBook and learn 5 lifecycle frameworks plus practical applications to your email marketing program.

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Part I: Get Smart, eCommerce Marketers!

May 1, 2013 By Leave a Comment

In the first days of email, the focus was on sending as many messages as possible to as many people for the lowest possible cost. My, how the digital marketing perspective has changed! Soon we began to see that we needed to use segmentation and include content people actually wanted to read, including in eCommerce.

Where are we now on that evolutionary track? We’re collecting more data than ever! While this seems like a plus for eCommerce marketing, all that data is overwhelming. “Use it or lose it” is our mantra, with the preference being the former option. Smart Marketing can help you take the important eCommerce data you’ve gathered about your subscribers and use it to send them relevant, targeted messages they want to see.

Here are two ways to break down the data you have to employ Smart Marketing in eCommerce:

1. Segmentation

eCommerce segmentation list

You need to organize your eCommerce data before you can use it. Smart Segments are created when you leverage client data, enhanced data, system data and third-party analytics. Imagine a sandwich of wonderfully delicious eCommerce data layered one on top of one another, but only including the best of each type of data. That’s how the Smart Marketing Engine can be used to create Smart Segments. The image on the right is an example of some WhatCounts Smart Segments.

Subscriber scoring is another way that you can segment your data: it tracks when people positively and negatively interact with your eCommerce  emails. For example, every time a subscriber opens an email or clicks on an email, it’s segmented as a positive interaction. As a result of this information, you can send highly-targeted eCommerce emails to certain subscribers.

2. eCommerce Content

A misconception that some marketers have is that their messages need to answer the question, “What do I want my readers to know about me?” In reality, we need to be looking at the eCommerce emails we send from the subscriber’s point of view, and use our messages to answer the question, “What’s in it for me?”

Creating and implementing the right content will do a great deal to aid you in retaining customers. One strategy in creating relevant eCommerce content is basket analysis, or looking at what a person has bought recently and suggesting items to go along with it. If someone buys a TV, they may also want surround sound, a DVD player, and some movies to make his or her experience with the TV that much better.
It’s also important to be mindful of the timing of your eCommerce messages. For example, our TV buyer is not going to be interested in the newest models of the same product. However, if he bought the first season of his favorite show along with the TV, send him an email when the second season comes out.

Another eCommerce content strategy is rewarding customers who have been long-time subscribers and buyers. All it takes is a thank-you email with a discount, deal, offer or some other type of reward. This makes sure current customers feel loved and stay engaged.

 

Getting segmentation and content right is how you can start sending smarter messages right now. Tomorrow’s blog post will cover Part II of this series, which will lay out the other two areas where you could be personalizing your eCommerce digital marketing. In the meantime, we want to know the creative ways you are reaching your subscribers by segmenting your data and creating dynamic content. Tell us below, or leave a comment on Twitter and Facebook!

Joy Ugi
Digital Marketing Coordinator, WhatCounts

18 Ways book cover
Audience to Evangelist
Learn 18 different ways to find and grow your email marketing and social media ROI! Promote email with social, social with email, learn how to set up a Facebook Page for email subscriptions, and much more. Download the free eBook now.
 Lifecycle email marketing is one of the hottest buzzwords in digital marketing, but how can you make it work for you? Download our free eBook and learn 5 lifecycle frameworks plus practical applications to your email marketing program.

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Live from the Summit: Part 1

April 24, 2013 By Leave a Comment

For those of you who could not join us for the Summit (sniff, sniff) here’s a reason for you to cheer up: We have summarized a few of the sessions that happened today for your reading pleasure. Even better, you can download the slides to each session to garner more details and view at your convenience. Since you can’t come to the Summit, we’re going to bring the Summit to you!

Summit Customer Case Study: SweetJack

Our CEO and President, Allen Nance, and Dan Caplin from SweetJack rocked the stage this morning as they talked about how this daily-deals company pulls content for its emails through the WhatCounts Smart Marketing Engine. How do they do this? Through the XSLT Translation SmartGET HTML, a tag that is placed in an email that pulls content from the SweetJack blog, as well as its eCommerce system. It may sound hard, but it’s only a matter of identifying where you have content stored, and then pulling it into your email with SmartGET. Want to learn more about the awesome ways in which SweetJack is using Smart Marketing to increase ROI? Download the slides here.

Content Curation

Want to streamline your process of engaging with readers? We thought you might, and that’s why we asked Phil Hill from Flashissue to tell us about content curation. It’s not the same as stealing information, nor is it the same as aggregating piles of information. Content curation has its own special flavor. Content curation consists of finding the content you like and then putting it on display for others to see, with some sort of introduction or commentary attached that gives the reader a perspective about that content. Phil gave us ideas about how to create a fluid process for newsletter marketing through content curation using industry-related articles. Find out more!

Those were just a few of the highlights from today. We’d love to share the food and fun we are having this evening at the Atlanta Botanical Garden, but we just can’t get all of it into this blog post. Look out for more takeaways in tomorrow’s blog post!

Joy Ugi
Digital Marketing Coordinator, WhatCounts

18 Ways book cover
Audience to Evangelist
Learn 18 different ways to find and grow your email marketing and social media ROI! Promote email with social, social with email, learn how to set up a Facebook Page for email subscriptions, and much more. Download the free eBook now.
 Lifecycle email marketing is one of the hottest buzzwords in digital marketing, but how can you make it work for you? Download our free eBook and learn 5 lifecycle frameworks plus practical applications to your email marketing program.

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4 Things to Look Forward to at the Digital Marketing Summit

April 16, 2013 By 3 Comments

WhatCounts Digital Marketing Summit

The WhatCounts 2013 Digital Marketing Summit is only a week away, and if you’re one of the people who has perused our agenda and bought your Summit tickets, congratulations! You’re in for two days of sessions that we hope will blow your marketing minds. Here are a few reasons why you are going to love the Summit:

The Smart Marketing Story

All of the sessions will be focused on Smart Marketing and personalization, from right data, to content, to automation. Our CEO and President, Allen Nance, gave you an overview of Smart Marketing during a webinar a few weeks ago, and the Summit is where we dive deeper with you into what it means in both a strategic and practical sense for your digital marketing. This is an opportunity for you to talk first-hand to peers and industry leaders about what it means to market smarter. You can even have one-on-ones with WhatCounts staff to pinpoint what different areas look like in the Smart Marketing Engine. (There will be a signup sheet at registration.)

People Who Know What They’re Talking About

We’ve got industry experts, marketing pros, and experienced staff and clients leading our Summit sessions. We’re bringing out the big guns just for you, including our keynote speaker: Tom Webster from Edison Research who deals with lots of data on a daily basis and will be talking about how to scale big data down to a useable size. There’s not enough room here to list all of our speakers, but you can read about some of them on the agenda page of our website. All of the speakers have one goal in common: they want to impart helpful knowledge to you that you can then take and apply to your digital marketing campaigns.

Practical Application: Hands-On, Customer Case Study, Industry

We’re not just going to talk about personalization in digital marketing, we’re going to show you how to do it, too. There are three types of breakout sessions at the Summit. The interactive, hands-on sessions will be a chance for you to dialogue with the speaker and other attendees about the session topic, as well as learn how to apply a concept in the Smart Marketing Engine. The Customer Case Study sessions will give you specific examples of challenges that some of our clients have faced, and how they’ve solved those problems by applying smart marketing and personalization. Finally, the industry sessions will tackle subjects such as social sign-on, mobile marketing and A/B testing.

Digital Marketing Networking Opportunities

Not only will you get to learn from the best of the best, but you’ll be surrounded by marketing peers. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, so go ahead and learn from what other attendees are doing. There will be plenty of time during lunch and breaks to chat, as well as during our evening events at the Atlanta Botanical Garden and Gordon Biersch restaurant. Make sure you are signed up for these events so you don’t miss an opportunity to network.

If you’re not signed up for our Digital Marketing Summit and wish you were, then do it now. We’re offering a last-minute discount for all registrants this week, and we’re sure you’ll love it. Hope to see you at the Summit!

Joy Ugi
Digital Marketing Coordinator, WhatCounts

18 Ways book cover
Audience to Evangelist
Learn 18 different ways to find and grow your email marketing and social media ROI! Promote email with social, social with email, learn how to set up a Facebook Page for email subscriptions, and much more. Download the free eBook now.
 Lifecycle email marketing is one of the hottest buzzwords in digital marketing, but how can you make it work for you? Download our free eBook and learn 5 lifecycle frameworks plus practical applications to your email marketing program.

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Here We Go! News and Events You Can Use

March 25, 2013 By 1 Comment

news in the mailbox

The Facts Don’t Lie About Email Personalization
Here is the news about why you should be using personalization all in one place. If you’re not convinced after reading this that you should be doing more to personalize your emails with your data, you may need an email marketing intervention. These are real stats from e-tail and event companies that apply to what we’re all trying to do: Send the most effective email marketing campaigns and see better response rates.

3 Reasons Why Responsive Web Design is the Best Option For Your Mobile SEO Strategy
We included this news in the last GameChanger, and we liked it so much, we’re sharing it again. Responsive web design is the trend, and for a good reason – it works! More and more people are viewing websites on their mobile devices, so that means your website should be in a mobile-friendly format. Creating a simplified, smaller version of your website to be read on mobile phones is imperative.

shoppingbags

Shopping Made Smarter
Want some strategies to improve your eCommerce efforts? Check out this Marketing Profs webinar about Smart Marketing in eCommerce. Get the news on how Smart Marketing can help you use the data you are collecting to make your marketing efforts better. And who presents this free, 45-minute webinar but two experts: Doug Broujos, WhatCounts VP of Services, and Tim Brechlin, a WhatCounts Services Account Manager.

LA Smart Marketing Road Show
This week we’re kicking off the first Smart Marketing RoadShow! And where else to do it but in LA at the W Hotel with our friends at Rapleaf? WhatCounts is talking about personalization, data, content and automation and we want you to get in on the action. Sign up today!

WhatCounts Digital Marketing Summit

The 2013 WhatCounts Digital Marketing Summit
Our 2013 Digital Marketing Summit is a month away and we’re so excited about the news that we’re giving everyone who registers now 25 percent off! All you have to do is enter promo code summit13 and you’ll get a discount on a trip down to beautiful Atlanta on April 24th and 25th. There’s a lot going down at this Summit: We’re talking Smart Marketing strategy, customer case studies, hands-on training, and industry trends. You won’t want to miss keynote speaker Tom Webster from Edison Research – he’s going to reveal the way to make Big Data small. Check out all the speakers who will be at the Digital Marketing Summit and then tell us you’re coming!

Joy Ugi
Digital Marketing Coordinator, WhatCounts

18 Ways book cover
Audience to Evangelist
Learn 18 different ways to find and grow your email marketing and social media ROI! Promote email with social, social with email, learn how to set up a Facebook Page for email subscriptions, and much more. Download the free eBook now.
 Lifecycle email marketing is one of the hottest buzzwords in digital marketing, but how can you make it work for you? Download our free eBook and learn 5 lifecycle frameworks plus practical applications to your email marketing program.

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Get Ready, Get Set, Go! Upcoming Events with WhatCounts

February 25, 2013 By Leave a Comment

It’s the beginning of the week again, and what a perfect time to update your calendar with events that will help you learn how to send your customers smarter, more personalized messages. WhatCounts is excited to give you a kick start on your email marketing initiatives through our own events and by inviting you to meet us at events sponsored by industry leaders.

WhatCounts Events

March 13: Smart Marketing: Big Data, Personalization & Automation webinar
Personalization is the key to smart email marketing today. Join us online for our first ever Smart Marketing webinar led by WhatCounts CEO Allen Nance. This free how-to will teach you what you need to be doing differently when it comes to data, personalization and automation. We will explain how some of our top clients are sending smarter messages to their customers, and how you can, too!

Apr. 24 – 25: The WhatCounts Digital Marketing Summit in Atlanta, GA
This is the next opportunity to discover how the Smart Marketing story applies to you through two days of intensive digital marketing education on web, email, mobile and social media. The conference will feature a keynote presentation by Tom Webster, VP of Research at Edison Research, about making big data small. Not registered yet? Get to it. Do one better and sign up to be a sponsor!

WhatCounts Summit

Industry Events

Come say hello to a member of the WhatCounts team at these upcoming conferences and events. Or, connect with us now so you can be sure to meet up with us and share your email marketing ideas!

February 25 – 28: eTail West conference in Palm Desert, CA
March 6 – 7: Dx3 Canada in Toronto, Ontario
March 17 – 19: Digiday Publishing Summit in Scottsdale, AZ
March 19 – 20: LeadsCon in Las Vegas, NV

You’re welcome for packing your calendar full of events that will help you create smarter messages to send to your clients. At WhatCounts, we do our best to equip you with resources that help you get your job done to the best of your ability.

Joy Ugi
Digital Marketing Coordinator, WhatCounts

18 Ways book cover
Audience to Evangelist
Learn 18 different ways to find and grow your email marketing and social media ROI! Promote email with social, social with email, learn how to set up a Facebook Page for email subscriptions, and much more. Download the free eBook now.
 Lifecycle email marketing is one of the hottest buzzwords in digital marketing, but how can you make it work for you? Download our free eBook and learn 5 lifecycle frameworks plus practical applications to your email marketing program.

Share this page:

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Publicaster Edition Winter 2013 Release Is Live!

January 16, 2013 By Leave a Comment

If you’re a WhatCounts Publicaster customer or interested in our product, you will be happy to know that our Winter 2013 release updates have gone live in the platform as of today. We’ve got 5 awesome new features that we are sure you will love, including opt-in conversion tracking, inline CSS converter, behavioral profile actions, new segmentation conditions and post-link editing. For a brief overview of each of these features and how to use them, check out our handy video below. Want the Cliffs Notes version? Breeze through the feature descriptions below the video:

 

Opt-in Conversion Tracking

Would you like to be able to track conversions originating from email beyond a simple click-through rate? With opt-in conversions, you can now easily track additional conversions like downloads or product purchases on your site by adding a conversion tracking snippet on specific pages on your site. When a user reaches that page and an opt-in cookie exists, the conversion is recorded and associated with the form/subscriber. This feature also works with secure tokens instead of cookies.

Inline CSS Converter

To save you time when working in the Creative Manager and make sure your designs retain their integrity in different email clients, you can now click on the Inline CSS Converter button which will automatically convert your global CSS styles to inline CSS statements which are allowed by ISPs.

Behavioral Profile Actions

This feature allows you to update any fields in a user’s profile with one or more custom values, based on the subscriber meeting a specific behavioral condition.  This feature helps you capture advanced behavioral data on users quickly and securely from our platform without requiring a custom API integration.  By storing this data in fields in the user’s profile, it’s very easy to view / query / export this data and create segmentations on this data to make informed decisions about your subscribers.

New Segmentation Conditions

We’ve created new segmentation conditions for opt-in forms and conversion tracking which allow you to segment users who have opted in via a certain form, query the date they opted in or target subscribers who have opted in to multiple forms.  The conversion conditions also allow you to create segmentations against the order amount so you can easily create a follow up or reminder email to your best customers to drive even more revenue.

Post-Send Link Editing

Ever had one of those uncomfortable moments when you realize you’ve sent out an email with the wrong link? Now you can easily edit your links with post-send link editing. Fix your links before your subscribers even notice and sleep better tonight!

With the Winter 2013 release of the WhatCounts Publicaster Edition, WhatCounts reinforces its commitment to helping you send smart personalized digital messages.  If you’d like to enjoy the benefits of flexible deployment options, a dedicated account model, campaign and strategic services, and video & social enhanced email to help find and grow your email marketing ROI, contact us today at 866-804-0076.

 

Sarah Zibanejadrad
Inbound Marketing Coordinator, WhatCounts
Twitter: @SarahZiba

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Join WhatCounts in Atlanta

January 11, 2013 By Leave a Comment

 

Digital Marketing Summit in Atlanta

Join over 200 marketing professionals from major companies in Atlanta, GA on April 24th – 25th to learn about the industry’s latest developments at the 2013 WhatCounts Digital Marketing Summit.  We’ll have plenty of experts from a multitude of fields here to discuss the next big thing and help you maximize results from your marketing campaigns. We’ll even offer hands-on sessions with small groups so that you can get the attention you deserve and the information that you need — where else can you get that kind of results-driven education? Get to know the WhatCounts team in-person and receive high level product training while you’re at it. We’ll also be hosting networking events at great local venues, such as the Atlanta Botanical Gardens, to give you a chance to meet and greet your peers.

Interested in sponsoring the event? We don’t have many sponsorship opportunities left, but snatch one of few while you still can to get your brand seen by some of the top executives in marketing today.

To get a better idea of what the schedule will be like and what you’ll be in for, take a look at a sneak peek at our 2013 WhatCounts Digital Marketing Summit Agenda.

Tickets are still available, but we’re only offering a limited number. Don’t wait and lose your chance — Register today!

 

Sarah Zibanejadrad
Inbound Marketing Coordinator, WhatCounts
Twitter: @SarahZiba

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How Can WhatCounts Help?

December 14, 2012 By

We are often asked “What can WhatCounts do for my business?  My response is always the same, “What do you need us to do?”  It is often met with trepidation and the fear that I am going to conjure up a synthetic response to appease a client and that I cannot deliver on.  The truth is, we can do a lot of things and we are quite proud of all of them, but a good portion of it might not be relevant to your business.  I personally hate buzzwords like synergistic geo-targeting, and in 2013 the term solutions certainly can fit into that bucket, but I do truly believe we can provide a solution once we figure out what problems you need solved.

Costco found a lot of value in allowing us help them implement an abandoned shopping cart program, you might not even have a shopping cart for people to abandon.  Our clients in the financial sector like SunTrust, Regions Bank, and Commonwealth Bank of Australia MUST have high security and be able to follow Federal regulations while your industry might not have any regulations.  I hope you have had the chance via past blogs in webinars to our phenomenal Strategic and Creative Services teams, but that might be beyond your reach for your campaigns today.

Through our website, webinar, whitepapers and blogs, we hope that we are providing relevant, timely and targeted content that speaks to you.  We have over 800 clients that we can draw from previous experiences on, as well as an incredibly intelligent staff to create dynamic and innovative paths to digital marketing success.   As we approach the holidays, I’d love to hear from you; What can WhatCounts do to help you?

 

J. J. Imbeaux
Business Development Analyst, WhatCounts

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WhatCounts December Tweet Chat

December 5, 2012 By

December Twitter Chat About Email

It’s about that time again — WhatCounts is hosting another tweet chat to help you find and grow your email marketing ROI. Hop on Twitter next Thursday, December 13th to discuss a topic that is near and dear to us: Email Creative. Have questions? Need advice? Looking to improve your current email campaigns? Want to provide your fellow email marketers with suggestions? We’ll be covering it all and will have our Creative Manager Alex Bardoff on-hand to throw in his two cents on great email creative. To prepare for the discussion and get an idea of how Alex can help you, check out last month’s webinar: 11 Signs of Great Email Creative.

Not sure how Tweet Chat works? We’ll walk you through it: hop on Twitter at 2:00pm ET/11:00am PT on Thursday, December 13th and search the hashtag#wcemail in the search bar along the top. Like a discussion board, you’ll see other Twitter users begin to hop onto the conversation. We’ll be starting the conversation and monitoring the event under the Twitter handle@whatcounts. You can follow us on Twitter or use TweetChat.com for quick access to the chat. Feel free to contribute to the discussion in any way you’d like (except spam, we hate that).

If you’d like to join us for our first #wcemail Tweet Chat, here’s all you need to know:

Join WhatCounts and Other Email Marketers for a Tweet Chat on:

Email Creative

Where: On Twitter using the hashtag #wcemail

When: Thursday, December 13th at 2:00 PM ET/ 11:00 AM PT

Who: Email marketers in any industry, hosted by @whatcounts

We hope to tweet you there!

 

Sarah Zibanejadrad
Inbound Marketing Coordinator, WhatCounts

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