Monica Daniels, Author at Zeta Global

The Best Ways to Measure Marketing Results

August 3, 2021 Monica Daniels

Blog

Marketers are quick to defend the “why” of their marketing decisions, but less than 40% can successfully measure marketing effectiveness. It’s unknown whether this stems from a lack of knowledge of marketing analytics or a lack of resources. Nevertheless, measurement is a crucial component to driving business growth and should never be overlooked. To help you build a successful marketing strategy, this blog will analyze a few of the best ways to measure marketing results.

1. Media Mix Modeling

What is it?

Media mix modeling is one of the oldest forms of measurement and planning. This analytics solution enables marketers to measure the impact of their spending across various channels, with insight into how different elements contribute to a single goal (e.g. conversions or revenue). Media mix modeling can also be used to tackle common pain points in brand marketing including:

Understanding impact across digital channels
Determining the right mix of spend allocation that will drive the highest return on investment
Predicting future channel performance based on optimized spend allocation

How does it work?

A media mix modeling analysis determines the relationship between a dependent variable (e.g. sales) and an independent variable (e.g. ad spend across channels). Oftentimes, media mix modeling is conducted at a geographical level. Let’s look at a hypothetical example for explanation: if a marketer spends more money on magazine advertising on the west coast, and more on TV advertising on the east coast, regional sales trends can be analyzed to understand the impact of these advertising efforts. Moreover, marketers can use media mix modeling to analyze how shifting spend from one publisher to another improves results.

What are its pros?

The main reason media mix modeling is so well renowned by marketers is that it gives insight into external factors that can determine the success of a campaign. Through long-term data collection, marketers can measure the impacts of seasonality, holidays, promotions, and more across both traditional and digital channels.

What are its cons?

Since media mix modeling is conducted at an aggregate level, it cannot account for recency, frequency, or sequences of media exposure at the individual level (e.g. impressions), all of which significantly impact effectiveness. Some other common flaws in using media mix modeling are infrequent reports, lack of insight on the brand and messaging, and failure to factor in the customer experience. For these reasons, most marketers also rely on attribution measurement.

2. Attribution Measurement

What is it?

Attribution measurement consists of various attribution models used to track engagements throughout the customer journey. The goal of attribution is the same as media mix modeling: to quantify the influence of media exposure on revenue. However, attribution analyzes campaign data at the event level (views, clicks, etc.) as consumers move down the sales funnel. This more accurate measurement further enhances the key benefits of programmatic marketing—feeding even better results into the always-on performance feedback loop within a marketing platform.

How does it work?

There are two key approaches to “attributing” a conversion:

Single event-based attribution (more commonly known as last-touch attribution): It’s important to note that this is the least accurate form of attribution measurement. This is because assigning 100% of the credit back to the consumer’s last touchpoint does not distinguish between the search engine navigation and the advertising that influences people to enter the keywords into the empty search box.
Multiple-event-based attribution (often called multi-touch attribution):
This form of attribution measurement enables greater precision and control. This approach assigns partial credit to each consumer touch before a conversion is made. Most modern marketers rely on self-learning algorithms that adapt the importance of exposure over time. Some DSPs even offer automatic budget reallocation based on the best-performing media to deliver better results by streamlining the feedback loop for their clients.

What are its pros?

Some pros of single-touch attribution are:

Easy implementation and low cost
Offers insight into what’s driving top-of-funnel conversions
Straightforward insight into cost-per-lead metrics

Some pros of multiple-touch attribution are:

Complete visibility of every touchpoint along the customer journey
Provides fast-paced insights to understand consumer behavior shifts
Allows for rapid optimization

What are its cons?

The challenge with single event-based attribution is obvious: only one channel receives credit. Let’s look at a hypothetical example for explanation: You’re watching a YouTube video and get served an ad from Walmart for new Beats headphones. You then Google search “new Beats headphones” to learn more about the product. The search results show a Walmart ad for the headphones—you click the ad and make the purchase. The Google ad ends up getting 100% of the credit for that purchase, although the buyer journey started on YouTube.

One of the challenges of multiple-touch attribution is that attribution modeling companies (e.g., C3, Visual IQ, Google/Adometry) vary in the results they provide (e.g., C3 found Adometry gave >360x more credit to Google). Also, consumer exposure is often tied to a single device and may undervalue omnichannel consumer experiences (unless a probabilistic identity graph that can measure activity across various devices for the same person or household at scale is applied).

3. Panel-based Measurement

What is it?

Panel-based measurement analyzes activity for a sample of consumers and households. Then, it parlays the impact across the entire campaign. This ensures a more accurate collection of information across all of the same consumer’s devices relative to attribution. Panel-based measurement also captures metrics associated with brand awareness, affinity, and purchase intent.

How does it work?

Panels provide consumers an opt-in method (such as surveys) to track deterministic consumer activity. This gives marketers a trade-off in scale for an increase in precision. The panel results are then projected onto the larger population exposed to the marketing campaigns. Some advanced DSPs now incorporate panels and can use survey results to optimize inflight budget allocations.

What are its pros?

Panel-based measurement is useful for gathering long-term audience insights. Moreover, panels provide a valid, representative, consistent, and comprehensive view of audiences so that marketers can understand what matters most to consumers.

What are its cons?

Given the small sample size of a panel, there may not be sufficient statistics to ensure the measured results will be repeatable. Moreover, consumers who opt into a panel may not be representative of a marketer’s target audience.

4. Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)

What is it?

Customer acquisition cost (as the name suggests), is the cost of converting a prospect to a paying customer. It assesses the effectiveness of a marketer’s customer acquisition efforts by calculating the marketing cost per customer acquired during a specific timeframe (or specific marketing method). This can also help marketers determine which strategies are yielding the best results.

How does it work?

Customer acquisition cost (CAC) takes into account the entire customer journey, from the time a lead enters the funnel until they become a paying customer. The cost of acquiring a new customer varies from brand to brand and is dependent on the level of marketing efforts deployed for an individual:

Customer acquisition cost = Sales + Marketing Costs / # of New Customers

The idea is to keep your CAC as low as possible to see true business growth.

What are its pros?

The benefits of measuring marketing results with customer acquisition costs are vast. Some worth noting include:

It helps marketers avoid wasting resources by helping determine which channels are most profitable and yield the highest results.
Allows marketers to identify where adjustments can be made to the marketing process.
Customer acquisition as a whole can lead to increased revenue.

What are its cons?

For less established companies, customer acquisition costs can be extremely high and therefore detrimental to growth. Finding the right balance between cost-effectiveness, scalability, and predictability when acquiring new customers can be a challenge, yet all are needed to properly measure the true impact of marketing results.

5. Incrementality Measurement

What is it?

Incrementality measurement is how marketers go about obtaining the true results of any marketing initiative. Using incrementality measurement, a marketer can determine the exact influence (i.e., the incremental benefit) in achieving their desired business outcome (e.g., more revenue). It measures the true lift of a campaign against its set goals.

How does it work?

Incrementality measurement allows marketers to determine whether a given campaign creates real value (e.g., the sale WOULD NOT have occurred without exposing the consumer to an ad) or apparent value (e.g., the sale WOULD occur whether or not the consumer saw an ad). In order for incrementality to be successful, marketers must determine what KPI (revenue, registrations, etc.) they want to measure for and measure the exposed audiences against the appropriate baseline.

What are its pros?

Some pros of incrementality measurement include:

Easy to implement.
All buyers are considered (even those that buy without being exposed to an ad).
Ability to compare different bidding policies directly
Ability to compute the percentage of additional buyers or sales.

What are its cons?

Most marketers eat hidden costs when it comes to incremental measurement. These costs revolve around the construction of a control group, and they’re costs that marketers don’t need to pay.

Moreover, noise from organic buyers is not removed when using incremental measurement and only onsite events (sells or visits) can be analyzed (it’s impossible to compare clicks or costs).

The Conclusion: Which Approach Solves The Marketing Measurement Problem the Best?

While in certain instances media mix modeling, attribution measurement, and panel-based measurement are great for measuring marketing results, customer acquisition and incrementality measurement are the best approaches for solving the measurement problems marketers are facing today.

With the right partner, incrementality measurement and customer acquisition can paint a clear picture of the return generated by your marketing efforts by activating knowledge and media at the individual level and ensuring the right customers are being reached at the most opportunistic moment. To be successful, customer acquisition and incrementality measurement strategies must be cost-effective, scalable, and predictable period to period, month-over-month.

The Zeta Marketing Platform helps marketers solve these challenges with independent technology that is data-intensive and identity-based to deliver against the higher standard of customer acquisition and incrementality measurement. By activating media, holding exposures, and measuring the impact of your marketing efforts at the individual level, your brand can see measurable results that drive business growth.

Zeta Unveils New Master Data Management Innovation, Eliminating Dependency on IT

All Zeta Marketing Platform and CDP customers will have access to Data Conductor, a low-code self-service feature to enhance control, speed, and flexibility over first-party data activation.

July 29, 2021 Ryohei Okabe, Sr. Director, Product Management

Blog

As growth expectations accelerate the required pace of digital transformation, they are taking a toll on every organization. From re-organizing, integrating, and managing first-party data from multiple sources, to implementing a faster path for go-to-market, brands are overwhelmed with the operational requirements standing between them and achieving their marketing goals.

For example, here at Zeta We’ve heard regularly from customers that even simple changes such as accepting new data from an existing source could mean 3-6 months of just waiting in their IT department’s backlog.

Today, we’re excited to introduce our latest Zeta Marketing Platform innovation, the Data Conductor—a low-code, easy-to-use interface that puts the power of first-party data activation in the hands of the Marketer.

What Is Zeta’s Data Conductor?

The new Data Conductor feature eliminates the IT dependency on both cumbersome data implementation and ongoing management that were historically required to enable data-driven marketing campaigns. Updates such as adding a new data source that would have required exhausting coordination with IT with complicated code changes are now reduced to basic inputs in the UI that are easily tailored per use case. We believe low–code is the future of best-in-class customer experiences, empowering Marketing organizations with greater speed and agility, that will ultimately improve campaign performance while also relieving stress across business operations.

According to Gartner’s 2021 Forecast, the low-code development technologies market will grow by 23% in 2021 due to the surge in remote development during the COVID-19 pandemic. Fabrizio Biscotti, research vice president at Gartner has said, “Globally, most large organizations will have adopted multiple low-code tools in some form by year-end 2021. In the longer term, as companies embrace the tenants of a composable enterprise, they will turn to low-code technology that support application innovation and integration.”

Zeta’s new low-code onboarding solution is intuitive and marketer-friendly, making it as easy as possible to harmonize all data systems and sources together, activate customer engagement campaigns, and drive outcomes faster – with minimal help from IT partners.

What You Get With Data Conductor

Visual workflow tool that accepts any data source: Onboard and configure all real-time and batch data sources with inline ETL for both ingestion and syndication. Connect any data source, configure hygiene and enrichment rules, and manage data destinations.
Rapid ingestion framework and schemaless architecture: Ingest structured, semi-structured and unstructured data with speed and scale, powered by a schemaless and extensible architecture that works with the tech you already have.
Data transformation: Perform industrial-grade data transformation to optimize data formatting, structure, and values for better unification and enrichment.
Configurable business rules: Tailor data cleansing and validation rules by source to address the needs of your brand.
Data enrichment: Enrich and extend identities with Zeta Data Cloud’s proprietary data from 220M U.S. consumer profiles, 500M+ identities globally, and thousands of data points.
Market-leading database connections: Zeta’s flexible customer data platform can sit on top of any Snowflake or Google BigQuery database and segment and stream data directly with a flexible UI.

For additional information, please visit our CDP+ resource page.

Zeta to Announce Second Quarter 2021 Results on August 10, 2021

July 22, 2021 Zeta Global

Press Releases

NEW YORK, July 22, 2021 – Zeta, a cloud-based marketing technology company that empowers enterprises to acquire, grow, and retain customers, today announced the planned release of its second-quarter 2021 financial results after the market close on Tuesday, August 10, 2021. Co-Founder, Chairman and CEO David A. Steinberg and CFO Chris Greiner will host a conference call later that day, at 5:00 p.m. Eastern Time.

A live webcast and replay of the conference call will be accessible on Zeta’s Investor Relations website at http://investors.zetaglobal.com.

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About Zeta

Zeta Global Holdings Corp. (NYSE: ZETA) is a leading data-driven, cloud-based marketing technology company that empowers enterprises to acquire, grow and retain customers. The Company’s Zeta Marketing Platform (the “ZMP”) is the largest omnichannel marketing platform with identity data at its core. The ZMP analyzes billions of structured and unstructured data points to predict consumer intent by leveraging sophisticated artificial intelligence to personalize experiences at scale. Founded in 2007 by David A. Steinberg and John Sculley, the Company is headquartered in New York City. For more information, please go to www.zetaglobal.com.

Contacts

Investor Relations

Cherryl Valenzuela

ir@zetaglobal.com

Press

Megan Rose

press@zetaglobal.com

Back to School Marketing 2021: A Guide for the Retail Industry

Can’t-miss retail trends and predictions for the 2021 shopping season.

July 19, 2021 Zeta Global

Reports

Retail marketing professionals take note—back-to-school spending for 2021 is expected to reach $32.5 billion. That’s almost 17% higher than pre-pandemic levels (2019).

As students, teachers, and parents ready themselves for a complete return to in-person learning, retailers must be ready to answer the call for new clothes, book bags, binders, laptops, and more.

To help retailers ensure their marketing is relevant, timely, and capable of captivating consumer attention, we composed this infographic to highlight the most important trends and insights for the 2021 back to school season, and share a series of can’t-miss predictions.

Jene Elzie to Join Zeta’s Board of Directors

25-year marketing, sports, and entertainment veteran adds to Zeta leadership strength as company growth initiatives continue.

July 1, 2021 Zeta Global

Press Releases

NEW YORK, NY – July 1, 2021 – Zeta (NYSE: ZETA), a cloud-based marketing technology company that empowers enterprises to acquire, grow, and retain customers, announced today that Jene Elzie has been elected to the Zeta Board of Directors as a Class I director, increasing the size of the Board to six directors. Ms. Elzie will support the next phase of Zeta’s growth and its commitment to helping enterprises thrive in a rapidly changing digital ecosystem.

With more than 25 years of experience developing and implementing growth strategies in the marketing, sports and entertainment industries, Ms. Elzie is currently chief growth officer at Athletes First (A1) Partners Agency, a role she has held since 2018. Prior to A1, she served as Vice President of International Marketing for the NBA, where she oversaw the league’s marketing endeavors outside of the US, as well as Vice President of Marketing & Communications for Europe, Middle East & Africa. Ms. Elzie has also served roles at NBC Universal/Comcast (2007-2013) and The Tennis Channel (2003-2007), and is currently on the boards of directors at Varsity Brands and the Public Radio Exchange.

“Jene Elzie is a highly-respected leader with a deep understanding of marketing and has proven success creating unmatched customer experiences. We are honored to welcome her to Zeta’s Board of Directors as we continue to scale growth,” said David A. Steinberg, Zeta Co-Founder, Chairman and CEO. “I look forward to partnering with her for her expert perspective as we continue to execute our strategy, drive profitability, and enhance value for all of Zeta’s shareholders, including our investors and employees. We are very excited she chose Zeta.”

Ms. Elzie stated, “Zeta is in the right position at the right time as our world continues to digitally transform, and to be the trusted marketing technology partner for global companies is an enormous opportunity. Just as importantly, Zeta’s culture is open and collaborative, and I look forward to working with David and the Zeta leadership in this next phase of the company’s growth.”

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About Zeta

Study Reveals Zeta Delivers More Effective Acquisition Campaigns

A Total Economic Impact™ study analyzes financial and business benefits enabled by Zeta.

June 29, 2021 Zeta Global

Press Releases

NEW YORK (June 29, 2021) – Zeta (NYSE: ZETA), a leading cloud-based marketing technology company that empowers enterprises to acquire, grow and retain customers, today released findings from a commissioned Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Zeta.

The study focused on the long-term financial and business impact for enterprises that activated Zeta’s proprietary, identity-based data, which today includes over 220 million opted-in individuals in the US, as the foundation of their marketing campaigns across a variety of channels. Results revealed that interviewed Zeta Marketing Platform (ZMP) customers that activate the Company’s proprietary data achieve 50% higher customer acquisition effectiveness on their marketing investments and accelerated revenue over a period of three years.

Zeta’s Co-Founder, Chairman and CEO, David A. Steinberg stated, “We built the Zeta Marketing Platform to help marketers achieve stronger return on their investment. For years, we’ve collaborated with our customers to design precision campaigns, based on Zeta’s unique audience insights, and execute omnichannel acquisition strategies with agility. We believe this TEI validates and quantifies the benefits Zeta delivers. As the marketing ecosystem evolves and CMOs recognize how critical identity-based data is to acquire new customers, Zeta remains committed to putting marketers in control of their data, providing flexibility and transparency, and accelerating their growth.”

In the study, Forrester interviewed four decision-makers at enterprise organizations with experience leveraging Zeta’s data to obtain insight with respect to costs, benefits and risks associated with their investments. In the study, marketing leaders highlighted key challenges before working with Zeta, including reaching and activating consumers in certain markets, finding affordable data and geolocation data, and concern about data deprecation due to reduced access to third-party cookies, mobile data, and new consumer privacy legislation.

One interviewee reported, “Zeta is always beating benchmarks, improving on metrics, and outperforming the solution we had before. On top of that, they’re a great marketing partner for us; it’s clear they’re experts in this field. Zeta’s been a significant enabler of what we’re able to accomplish as a company.”

Interviewed customers indicated that Zeta was able to help solve these challenges with key benefits and strengths, including:

Unique power of intender audiences: Interviewees noted Zeta’s data performs better than alternative sources of data to target the audience segments they were interested in activating.
Proven efficiency of an integrated data + activation solution: The ZMP powers all omnichannel actions, reducing costs from multi-vendor needs while continuing to deliver superior results.
Transparent, quality audience data not reliant on third-party cookies: Zeta’s customers are confident they can pursue strategies that are not dependent on 3rd party cookies with full transparency on how data is collected and analyzed to drive specific campaign signals.
Increased speed and agility: Zeta improves enterprise speed to market with quick implementation and optimizes campaign growth strategies. An interviewee stated that unlike other solutions, Zeta implementation is like “flipping a switch.”
Strong partnerships with marketers: Customers referred to Zeta as a strong and responsive partner who valued the relationship.

A Chief Revenue Officer customer interviewed further mentioned “Zeta does really, really, well with audience building. Their proposals are really well thought out and thorough in terms of explaining how they’re going to get to that audience and the setup. I’ve been really thrilled with the communications.”

To download the Total Economic Impact™ of Zeta Global, please visit https://marketing.zetaglobal.com/forrester-total-economic-impact-report.

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About Zeta

Zeta and Dun & Bradstreet Join Forces to Launch the Industry’s First Combined Consumer and Business Data Cloud for “Business-to-Person” Marketing

The alliance represents Zeta’s entrance into the B2B space and Dun & Bradstreet’s emergence into B2C marketing.

June 24, 2021 Zeta Global

Press Releases

NEW YORK (June 24, 2021) – Zeta Global Holdings Corp. (NYSE: ZETA), a data-driven marketing technology company that empowers enterprises to acquire, grow and retain customers, and Dun & Bradstreet, Inc. (NYSE: DNB), a leading global provider of business decisioning data and analytics, today announced they have entered a strategic alliance.

The Zeta-Dun & Bradstreet alliance will bring together trusted consumer and business data into a single private data cloud that contains profiles on over 220 million individuals in the United States. The data cloud combines Zeta’s business-to-consumer (B2C) data, including intent, behavioral, transactional, and location-based signals, with Dun & Bradstreet’s business-to-business (B2B) data, including employer data such as companies, titles, and emails, to power a new market sector, business-to-person (B2P), which will enable businesses to unlock the buying power of decision makers through more personalized, insight-driven marketing touchpoints.

“Our alliance with Zeta demonstrates our combined commitment to address our clients’ needs in a more consumer-influenced market and to establish the B2P sector to help marketers blend personal and professional personas with emotional and hyper-targeted campaigns and messages that drive results,” said Kevin Coop, President, North America at Dun & Bradstreet. “By working with Zeta, we’re continuing the upward momentum in our sales and marketing growth strategy as more businesses rely on the combined power of trusted data and a powerful go-to-market platform to connect with more buyers.”

This alliance represents a new opportunity in the way both companies address the needs of businesses today. For the first time, Zeta will expand its offering to both the B2B and small-and-medium-sized businesses (SMB) markets with the enrichment of Dun & Bradstreet’s business data. Dun & Bradstreet will elevate its marketing activation capabilities, offering Zeta’s consumer marketing capabilities to SMBs.

“We believe this alliance is a unique opportunity for businesses to achieve stronger connections with decision makers across the U.S.,” said David A. Steinberg, Co-Founder, Chairman and CEO of Zeta. “We are thrilled to be going to market jointly with Dun & Bradstreet to deliver innovative capabilities to the B2B and SMB markets, generating new lines of revenue for both companies. Together, we will place our customers on a path to even more successful outcomes. Dun & Bradstreet, through a multi-year commitment, will become one of Zeta’s most strategic alliances.”

The alliance will initially focus on unifying and activating data from Zeta’s and Dun & Bradstreet’s respective data clouds to create B2P marketing. With the unification and activation of both companies’ data assets, customers will have access to:

360-degree identity profiles for deeper B2B personalization: Businesses will have access to over 220 million individual profiles in the U.S. tied to an individual Zeta ID, based on opted-in data. The enriched ID includes over 2,500 behavioral signals per user across online, mobile, social media and news platforms, and is matched with their professional business title, email, and company name, to create a 360-degree view of each individual, both personally and professionally. B2P does not solely rely on third-party cookies, providing a solution framework in the future of identity and addressability.
B2P audience activation: Unique audiences that combine both business and consumer attributes can be activated through the Zeta Marketing Platform.
D&B Rev.Up Now will offer SMBs enterprise-level consumer marketing capabilities: Building on Dun & Bradstreet’s marketing solutions, D&B Rev.Up Now brings enterprise digital marketing technology – once only available to large-size businesses – to SMBs so that they can find and engage their best customers. The all-in-one advertising service delivers easy-to-use, fully automated and highly targeted marketing solutions for B2C businesses looking to acquire new customers with little to no marketing or technical expertise needed.

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Additional information:

To learn more about how Zeta empowers enterprises to acquire, grow and retain customers, visit www.zetaglobal.com.
To learn more about the power of B2P Marketing and the Dun & Bradstreet-Zeta alliance, visit the Dun & Bradstreet blog.

About Zeta

About Dun & Bradstreet

Dun & Bradstreet, a leading global provider of business decisioning data and analytics, enables companies around the world to improve their business performance. Dun & Bradstreet’s Data Cloud fuels solutions and delivers insights that empower customers to accelerate revenue, lower cost, mitigate risk, and transform their businesses. Since 1841, companies of every size have relied on Dun & Bradstreet to help them manage risk and reveal opportunity. Twitter: @DunBradstreet

Examining AI and the Customer Experience

A great customer experience needs the right relationship marketing strategy. Here’s how Artificial Intelligence can help you get personal, at scale.

April 24, 2021 Monica Daniels

Blog

To provide today’s shopper with a strong end-to-end customer experience, artificial intelligence is non-negotiable. In this blog, we’ll examine AI and the customer experience to shed light on why these two things go hand-in-hand.

What makes a great customer experience?

At its core, a great customer experience will..

Delight shoppers
Mitigate barriers to entry and purchase
Be entirely seamless from start to finish
Help cultivate a long-lasting relationship
Make the shopper feel like an individual and not just another number

When you’re running a small business, accomplishing these things is easy.

But when you’re an enterprise, maintaining this kind of customer experience is far more challenging. That difficulty is why so many enterprise marketers are guilty of (be it consciously or unconsciously) taking what amounts to a one-size-fits all approach to their campaigns.

Communication, AI and the customer experience today

Today’s customer experience is dictated by what the customer wants, not just in the way of products and services, but communication and engagement too.

Apps
Email
Paid Ads
Lightboxes
On-site chat
Push notifications

These are just some of the forms of communication and engagement that AI can support.

Building more intelligent customer experiences

By blending AI and the customer experience, enterprise marketers gain the ability to create personal, customized experiences at scale for every part of the customer journey. Here are some of the areas where artificial intelligence software can enhance the customer experience.

Chat bots are an essential part of any well-rounded enterprise marketing strategy because they aid in the creation of a ‘sticky’ customer experience. AI-powered chat bots can not only hold eloquent conversations to meet customer needs faster and more efficiently, but they can even understand how your customers use specific products and services.

Image: Digital Genius

When a customer signs up for a newsletter, service, or ecommerce platform, the traditional enterprise marketers like to lean on email drip campaigns. These emails will include anything from a “warm welcome”, to special promotional offers, to general company content. But is this the right approach? Well, it really depends. Marketers need to stop and think how they can get the most engagement, with the least invasive communication, over the right channels.

By incorporating AI and the customer experience into one, enterprise marketers can get the clear answers they need to make the best decisions possible. Instead of relying on basic metrics like open rates or clicks to understand what’s working and what isn’t, marketers can learn from every aspect of a consumer’s engagement across all channels and devices. In other words, they can get down and dirty visibility into what consumers like and what they don’t like as it relates to a brand’s marketing efforts.

Customer Feedback and Support

Machine learning takes predictive analytics to a whole other level. Imagine support that can learn about every individual customer and respond intelligently, predict and avert potential complaints and reprioritize customer requests intelligently to optimize response time, all the while learning how to do this better. That’s what artificial intelligence and machine learning can bring to your relationship marketing plan. No matter which stage of the customer journey, you can never go wrong with delighting customers by solving their problems in record time.

How to Use an Omnichannel Strategy for Your Retail Brand

As more customers become digitally connected consumers, an omnichannel strategy is an essential way to bridge the gap between offline and online retail.

April 22, 2021 Monica Daniels

Blog

An omnichannel strategy is how a retail brand plans to provide a seamless engagement experience across channels, devices, and the customer lifecycle. While small businesses and startups can get away with using channel-specific marketing strategies such as email, enterprise businesses can’t. Large-scale enterprise marketers need to be everywhere. It’s the only way they can make sure their message or offer is in front of the right consumer, in the channel they want to be engaged in, at the exact moment they want to be engaged.

Why an omnichannel strategy is more important than ever?

Several years ago, when we first started stressing the importance of an omnichannel strategy for retail, we cited the number of owned connected devices per consumer as good reason for paying attention.

At the time, the average digital consumer owned 3.64 connected devices. Today, the average American has ready access to 10 connected devices. That’s about a 3x increase in less than five years, and it’s a number that will continue to grow with the expansion of 5G and improved processor speeds.

Of course, consumers don’t want to be bombarded by a retailers messaging on every device they own or in every channel they’re active on. Therefore, retail marketers must take employ a tactful omnichannel strategy that ensures they’re maintaining coordinated, continuous engagement with consumers. Engagement that takes place in the right place, at the right time, and in the right context—always.

How retailers benefit from an omnichannel strategy?

Building an omnichannel strategy is a big advantage for anyone in retail. Whether you do most of your selling online or offline, the modern consumer views your brand as a unified entity. That means they expect the same experience whether they’re on your website, standing in a store, reading one of your emails, or using your app on their smartphone.

Put another way, your customers want to be able to start their shopping experience on one device and in one channel, and seamlessly finish shopping on another device, in another channel, at another point in time.

Pretend a woman named Ashley is checking her email first thing in the morning while sitting in bed. She sees a promotion from one of her favorite brands—Sephora—advertising a new shade of lipstick. Excited by the offer, Ashley opens the email and clicks on the promotion, but before she can make a purchase, she starts getting ready for work.

Several hours later, Ashely is at the office absorbed in work. She’s forgotten all about the promo until she sees a push notification on her phone from the Sephora app. Reminded of her interest in the lipstick, Ashely unlocks her phone, opens the app, and completes her purchase in less than 90 seconds

Extremely rudimentary as it is, the above is nevertheless an apt example of how retailers can benefit from investing in an omnichannel strategy and omnichannel technology.

Contextual view of the customer journey

For brands, understanding the behaviors of offline customers as well as behaviors of offline customers that transition to online is essential. Bridging this gap and effectively mapping the customer journey used to require surveys or collecting an email address in-store or the conduction of costly consumer research. But this is no longer the case. Now leading omnichannel technology providers can help retailers obtain a contextual view of the customer journey simply by studying signal data with AI.

A unified view of the customer journey also tells retailers which parts of their omnichannel strategy are strongest versus weakest. This makes it easier for retail marketers to examine and optimize their strategy.

Omnichannel marketing leads to more efficiency and effectiveness

Here’s why Omnichannel delivers more efficiency and effectiveness…

It gives prospects, existing customers, and lapsed customers the personalized, individualized experience they expect.
It allows marketers to make more compelling offers that are delivered in the right place (device and channel), at the right time (context).
It puts more control in the hands of retail marketers, and makes it easier to measure the true impact of their campaigns on the bottom line.
It makes it easer for marketers to how each individual consumer interacts with a given campaign or piece of creative which, analyzed overtime, leads to higher conversion rates.

Looking to learn more about omnichannel?

If you’re interested in learning more about omnichannel, or how you can apply an omnichannel marketing strategy to your retail brand, reach out to Zeta.

Evolving Consumer Expectations for Marketing Personalization

Learn ways in which marketing personalization can help you keep up with evolving customer demands and future-proof your business.

April 19, 2021 Monica Daniels

Blog

Retailers are in a perfect storm. On one hand, they’re faced with an overwhelming amount of demands from consumers. On the other, many of those demands (e.g., the increasing expectation for personalized experiences) provide an opportunity to build more meaningful interactions and increase brand loyalty. Yet maximizing the personalized shopping experience relies heavily on a brands’ ability to strengthen its customer relationships. This means understanding their wants and needs and matching experiences to expectations. In this blog post, you’ll learn ways in which marketing personalization can help you keep up with evolving customer demands and future-proof your business.

Connecting with the consumer

As the acceleration to digital increases, consumers are becoming more and more connected to a range of channels and devices. Digital retailers must keep up with the shifting tides while still meeting these Connected Consumers’ needs and expectations. To connect with these always-on, hyper-aware consumers and compete for their attention, brands must deliver relevant experiences that are unique and personal. Or face the possibility of getting lost in the clutter.

Since ecommerce inherently lacks the benefits of brick-and-mortar, it’s pertinent that these experiences treat online consumers as individuals (i.e., simplified customer service, tailored product recommendations, etc.)—all while capitalizing on the speed and convenience online shopping offers. This can be a challenge for both big and small brands—whether it be struggling to implement a unified system, catering messaging accordingly, or simply not having the resources to deliver personalization at scale. Let’s dive into all the details—why personalization is important for online retailers, what it looks like, and how brands can overcome its challenges.

The importance of marketing personalization

The growing online presence of the Connected Customer has brands battling for visibility each step of the way, from social media to pay-per-click advertising and email communications. Ultimately, the number of digital touchpoints potential customers are coming into contact with is dramatically increasing. In turn, the customer experience is also becoming gradually more complex as they transition from brand awareness, to purchase, to loyalty.

A recent study on personalization in marketing found that 72% of consumers only engage with marketing messages that are personalized and tailored to their interests. This statistic provides online retailers with substantial proof that personalization is key to growing your customer base and driving loyalty. There are several courses of action for creating personalized experiences, but choosing an effective method that is grounded in testing hypotheses should always inform your strategy. For example, your brand might recognize a customer’s spending habits, but how you communicate this in a way that resonates with the individual makes all the difference.

Data-driven approaches to personalization

To prevent consumers from becoming inundated by irrelevant communications, brands need a clear strategy backed by data insights. Basing communication on two types of customer data—contextual and actionable insights—will help you mold a more personalized experience.

1. Contextual Insights

Geolocation technology is one substantial example of how context can be used to drive personalization. By tracking a consumer’s location subsequently after downloading a brand’s app, you can deploy promotional offers when they’re near a brick-and-mortar location. This form of ‘ in the moment marketing’ taps into the localization of retail and takes advantage of the circumstantial opportunity to offer a more personalized shopping experience.

2. Actionable insights

Alternatively, a personalization strategy that is based on actionable insights may make use of email communications. These can be targeted based on a consumer’s expressed interests and previous shopping habits. Offering promotions for products that a customer has shown intent to purchase is one way to anticipate their needs. These recommendations can be embedded, at scale, through the use of modular templates and messages that talk directly to an individual customer.

Segmenting your customer base

Segmenting your customer base can also help to tailor a message across larger groups with similar qualities. Creating customer profiles or personae can be a helpful way to distinguish key groups and identify the most effective touchpoints to reach them on. Let’s look at a hypothetical scenario as an example: If you conducted a study and found that 35% of 55-64-year-olds engaged with retail brands on Instagram while 60% of 25-34-year-olds engaged with brands through the same channel, it’s clear that the channel is a more effective touchpoint for younger audiences. Regardless of the outcome, data is the driving force in each scenario that allows brands to personalize their communication and reach the right consumer, at the right time, on the right channel.

Delivering personalization at scale

To keep up with the Connected Customer, the experience must be tailored through systems free of outdated mass-marketing strategies. This means having a partner with the right technology to understand insights on prospects and customers in real-time. Zeta’s Data Cloud offers marketers access to an identity graph of more than 200 million U.S. adults and leverages up-to-minute customer data to help create meaningful message personalization across devices and channels. Although it may seem like a heavy lift, investing in marketing personalization will pay off for your brand in the long run.

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