Insight Category: Articles
How Zeta is Helping Marketers Identify and Reach Multicultural Audiences More Effectively
By Imani Laners, Vice President of Multicultural Partnerships. Marketers know their growth opportunities lie in the ability to precisely identify, reach, engage, and convert underrepresented audiences. Black, Hispanic, and Asian consumers in the U.S. have a collective buying power of $4.9 trillion, with annual expenditures increasing at arate faster than non-multicultural audiences.
Despite the opportunity, it’s historically been a challenge to precisely identify underrepresented groups with data. Marketers and media buyers need new strategies—and new partners—to overcome this challenge.
Zeta has worked closely with marketers to understand these difficulties and how best to address them. As a result, we’ve built a multicultural media division centered around our intelligence and activation solutions and how they can be used to create better experiences for multicultural consumers—and better outcomes for brands.
Through our platform, marketers can access 80 million U.S. based multicultural consumers aged 18 or older (from our Data Cloud of 235+ million consumers) with the intelligence necessary to understand each consumer’s intent at the most granular level. We create a more accurate view of each individual that can help you determine who will have the most impact on your business.
Let’s take a closer look at the advantages that make our multicultural practice unique and lead to a more precise understanding of underrepresented audiences.
More Precisely Identify Underrepresented Audiences at Scale
The challenge starts with identifying the Black, Hispanic and Asian consumers using data. Most data providers collect only a small handful of data points before jumping to a conclusion.
But a few website visits or product purchases is simply not enough data to confidently make a call on an individual’s ethnicity. It takes a multi-threaded, multi-layered identity approach to increase that confidence level accordingly.
Here’s what our methodology looks like:
- Integrate a multitude of data points from a variety of sources under one roof. We use a combination of third-party data from companies like Acxiom and Zeta’s own proprietary location and behavioral data. Key data points include race of household, household country of origin, device location, language of web browser, and more. We apply over 5,000 behavioral, transactional, and location attributes to determine activity and validate interests. All data is privacy-safe and non-personally identifiable (non-PII).
- Weigh all the various data points and assign everyone a score. Our custom algorithm built over many years synthesizes all of the data, examines all sources collectively, and assigns a confidence score.
- Assign ethnicity (or not). If the individual’s confidence score meets a certain threshold, we identify the individual’s ethnicity as Black, Hispanic or Asian. If they do not reach the appropriate threshold, their ethnicity remains unclassified.
Admittedly, this methodology is probabilistic, not deterministic. We cannot assign ethnicity with 100% certainty. But our process for identifying underrepresented audiences is significantly more precise than anything else we’ve seen in the market. Our Data Cloud features multicultural audiences totaling 80 million adult U.S. consumers aged 18 and over, which accounts for nearly 50% of the U.S. population. By combining and comparing data points across sources and using various data hygiene techniques on this data, we’ve found that other sources misidentify individuals’ ethnicity about 40% of the time.
Activate More Efficient, Effective Campaigns
Imagine you are delivering a campaign in Spanish, but 40% of your audience has been misidentified and doesn’t speak Spanish. Nearly half of your ad dollars are ineffective.
When you can more accurately identify the right audience up front, your campaigns are more thoughtful and resonate with the people they should, which means less waste, relevant connections, and higher performance.
A financial client, for example, did a general targeted campaign with ad creative that resonated with all audiences. At the conclusion of the campaign, we saw a 77% reduction in their cost per click (CPC) and post campaign we were able to identify the top consumers as Black and Hispanic. The campaign was a top performer for the client.
Our brands in other industries use this approach to a similar effect.
A grocery brand leverages our platform to help them identify their Black and Hispanic audiences better, which now allows the grocer to reach these audiences with more relevant content around culturally-focused holidays and events.
A non-profit organization in the healthcare space relies on Zeta to identify and reach underrepresented audiences that deal with over-indexing health ailments in their communities. Zeta helps the non-profit run campaigns tasked with driving those at-risk individuals to local clinics for proper diagnoses.
Better Understand Your Audience Through Insights
Marketers rely on Zeta to identify and reach multicultural audiences, but we can also provide post-campaign, multicultural insights on general market targeted campaigns.
Adding multicultural overlays to post-campaign audience insights allows marketers to better understand the multicultural makeup of the consumers responsive to the campaign. These insights help them understand the value multicultural audiences have on business outcomes. It also helps identify opportunities to optimize future marketing messages, creative, targeting, and more in order to be more relevant and connect more meaningfully.
We work with a non-profit, for example, that had never examined their donor base from an ethnicity perspective.
After running a campaign for the non-profit, we added an ethnicity overlay to the results in order to identify the multicultural makeup of the donors. This allowed the organization to see that while Hispanic donors had a higher acquisition cost, they also had a significantly higher value per donor compared to other ethnicities.
Not Just for Brands—Benefiting Minority-Owned Media, Too
Brands aren’t the only organizations that benefit from closer connections to underrepresented audiences. Minority-owned media companies also trust Zeta as their programmatic arm and audience extension partner.
These publishers create and monetize content for specific ethnicities. Having access to data-driven, multicultural audiences and insights at scale helps secure a larger share of media revenue — and impacts business outcomes for brands looking to support them with larger media buys.
One minority-owned publisher, for example, partnered with Zeta to run a campaign for an automotive client wanting to reach Black audiences. The target click-through-rate for the campaign was .09%, but Zeta achieved a .12% CTR — 33% higher than expected — even though it was their first time running the campaign.
Creating Multicultural Audience Communities
We understand that multicultural audiences are not monolithic. We are dedicating resources to continually improve the granularity of our multicultural data, creating sub-audiences that are more like a community.
For example, our Historically Black Colleges and University (HBCU) audiences represent and support Black collegiate and community excellence, reaching students, alumni, faculty, supporters and organizations, and the Divine Nine.
Zeta was the first to bring these HBCU data-driven audiences to the marketplace more than two years ago. Brands from a variety of industries—QSR, sports, insurance, military, home improvement, and grocery—have since shown interest in and/or have activated campaigns targeting these in-demand audiences.
One global QSR came to Zeta specifically for access to the HBCU audiences, then created a campaign to reach people that would be likely to apply for a scholarship to one of these universities.
We are creating more Black, Hispanic, and Asian sub-audience communities for brands and minority-owned media to leverage in the near future.
Growing Our Multicultural Intelligence
There is a great need in the marketing, advertising, and publishing worlds to connect more effectively with multicultural audiences, and we’re making great strides to fulfill that need. We’re building the largest multicultural media practice by continually dedicating resources, time, expertise, and intelligence to understanding underrepresented audiences better than anyone else. We’ve made significant progress, and we’re looking forward to continued improvements.
If you want to learn more about Zeta’s multicultural media partnerships, contact me at [email protected].
Want to see Zeta in action?
To implement these strategies effectively, brands need the right technology and tools to support their personalization efforts. The Zeta Marketing Platform empowers businesses to offer highly tailored experiences driven by AI.
7 Exciting Ways To Innovate the Shopping Experience
The retail landscape is undergoing a dramatic transformation fueled by changing consumer attitudes and technological advancements. As consumers become more discerning, brands must step up their game to stay relevant. Enhancing both online and offline shopping experiences has never been more critical.
Let’s explore the top trends that are reshaping the shopping experience, along with real-world examples of brands leading the way.
1. “Phygital” Retail
“Phygital” retail seamlessly blends the convenience of online shopping with the rich, immersive experience of visiting a brick-and-mortar store. It involves integrating digital technology into physical retail spaces.
For example, when an item is out of stock in-store, customers can simply scan a QR code or follow a link to purchase it online. This strategy not only prevents missed sales but also enhances the overall shopping experience by replicating the ease of online shopping.
Example: H&M, a global fashion brand, has successfully implemented phygital strategies by using QR codes in-store. Shoppers can scan QR codes on clothing tags to view additional product information, check for available sizes and colors, and make online purchases if needed.
2. Self-Serve Options
Consumers are becoming increasingly self-sufficient, and retailers are responding by offering a range of independent shopping options. This includes self-serve kiosks, mobile checkout solutions, improved in-store Wi-Fi, and the use of QR codes to access additional product details and reviews. By providing these options, retailers cater to the diverse preferences of modern shoppers and enhance their overall experience.
Example: Walmart’s “Scan and Go” technology lets customers scan items with their smartphones while shopping. They can then pay via mobile, avoiding traditional checkout lines. This eliminates the inconvenience of waiting in line, and empowers customers to shop independently.
3. Social Commerce & Live Shopping
Live shopping is making a comeback—and it’s social. During live shopping events, brands and retailers leverage platforms like Instagram Live to showcase products as customers watch and make purchases directly on social media.
Usually, a host such as a stylist, influencer, or brand-representative highlights key products, while consumers tune in via a social media app like TikTok, a marketplace like Amazon, or platform like Talkshoplive.
The US livestream shopping market is projected to surpass $31 billion by the end of 2023, and leading brands like Macy’s, Nordstrom, H&M, and Walmart have been quick to embrace the trend.
Example: Department store Macy’s regularly hosts livestream shopping events on platforms like Instagram Live. During these events, they showcase their latest collections, answer customer questions, and create a sense of urgency to boost sales.
4. Location-Based SMS Campaigns
Location-based SMS campaigns have emerged as a powerful strategy to attract customers to physical stores. By sending SMS messages based on a customer’s location, businesses can inform them about nearby deals, promotions, or new product launches, encouraging them to visit the store in person.
Example: Starbucks, the global coffee chain, uses location-based SMS campaigns to notify app users about nearby stores, special offers, and new menu items. This strategy not only drives foot traffic but also fosters a sense of exclusivity for customers.
5. Virtual Changing Rooms
Virtual changing rooms have transformed the way customers try on products. Shoppers can use augmented reality (AR) technology to visualize how clothing and accessories would look on them without physically trying them on.
This innovation not only enhances the convenience of online shopping but also reduces the need for traditional changing rooms in physical stores.
Example: GAP, a well-known clothing brand, introduced a virtual fitting room feature in its mobile app. Shoppers can select items and use their smartphone camera to try them on virtually, providing a more interactive and engaging shopping experience.
6. Gamification
Gamification is a key way to make shopping more interactive and enjoyable. Brands can incorporate game elements into their apps, websites and in-store to engage customers and reward them for their participation.
This approach not only enhances the shopping experience but also fosters customer loyalty.
With 80% of Gen Z and Millennial consumers playing games, gamification is a particularly promising strategy for brands targeting a younger demographic.
Example: Hair care brand Living Proof made gamification a key part of their virtual store in the metaverse. Customers can take an AI-generated quiz about their hair routine and submit a selfie to detect hair type, volume, curl shape and color to receive personalized hair care recommendations.
7. Personalization
Personalization has become essential, enabling brands to engage with customers in more meaningful, authentic ways.
A McKinsey report revealed that 71% of customers expect personalized communication, and 76% of customers are frustrated by lack of personalization. In other words, a one-size-fits-all approach no longer flies in a world where customers seek tailored and relevant experiences.
There are many ways brands can bring in a personal touch, from individualized offers and recommendations to thoughtful follow-ups post-purchase.
Example: Target’s loyalty programs used to be highly transactional, rewarding spending with points. However, Target soon realized that this generic approach was missing the mark. The retailer launched a new and highly personalized loyalty program, Target Circle. It allows members to unlock offerings tailored specifically to their preferences and needs. With more than 120 million members, Target Circle is now one of the largest and fastest-growing loyalty programs in the U.S.
Innovating the Shopping Experience With Zeta
Adopting technology that sparks joy, convenience and value for consumers is crucial to keeping up in the fast-evolving retail space. Learn more about how the Zeta Marketing Cloud enables personalized shopping experiences, or discover how Toyota increased conversion rates by 360% with a tailored omnichannel strategy.
Want to see Zeta in action?
Request a personalized demo and we’ll be happy to show you how Zeta can transform your marketing.
Designing for Inclusion: How to Incorporate Accessibility Practices into Your Busy Workflow
By Tylor Loposser, Associate Creative Director. According to estimates from the World Health Organization roughly 1.3 billion people around the world live with some form of disability, and within the United States. These figures make it clear how important it is to consider accessibility when creating new campaigns.
In the realm of email marketing, incorporating accessibility might seem daunting, especially given the tight schedules we often work under. But as creators—be it designers, copywriters, developers, or marketers—we have the power and responsibility to shape inclusive experiences for everyone. By ignoring accessibility, we unwittingly create barriers for our audience that disenfranchise vulnerable populations and lead to poor brand experiences.
By understanding and embracing our role as arbiters of accessibility within our campaigns, we can help foster inclusivity and push the boundaries of email marketing to speak to a broader market—including those often overlooked. Whether it’s improving the inbox environment, combating institutional barriers, or addressing misconceptions about accessibility, every step we take matters.
In this post, we’ll explore how to seamlessly integrate inclusive design principles into your workflows and create repeatable, scalable processes that ensure your team consistently prioritizes this essential topic when building new campaigns.
Shift Your Mindset About Accessibility
Before we get into the nuts and bolts, it’s important to understand the Social Model of Disability. This model underscores the idea that it is not medical conditions themselves that incapacitate individuals, but rather the social constructs that perpetuate the issue.
We all, often without realizing it, contribute to these barriers, and play a crucial role in changing this narrative. Understanding social biases is the first step toward fostering more inclusive processes when creating campaigns.
The Social Model of Disability is comprised of three pillars:
- Environment: The environment in our example is the email. This includes the copy, the visual design and the HTML.
- Institutions: The support system of people and processes that help to create accessible design. This is what we’re talking about in this article.
- Attitudes: The education, passion, and goals of the team that are responsible for implementation.
When all three of these pillars are addressed in tandem, it will be much easier to create new processes that seamlessly integrate inclusive principles into your designs.
Build a Connection With the “Why”
Having a genuine connection to your work amplifies its impact. Whether your drive stems from a desire to positively engage with your audience, meet business objectives, or drive innovation within your team, it’s crucial to understand and prioritize these initiatives. As you implement these new processes, understanding how your personal goals coalesce with business objectives is key. While some in your organization might be swayed by the legal implications or increased ROI of accessibility, others may be more concerned with using design as a tool for societal good.
You have your own reasons for triaging accessibility, but make sure your colleagues do as well. Try setting up a 1:1 with and ask them to think about why this work is important for them.
Build a Repository of Information
Creating a centralized repository, be it bookmarks in your browser, a Dropbox folder, or a hub on your company’s internal site, is essential for consistent knowledge growth and sharing. Your repository should include accessibility best practices, as well as detailed information about your audience demographics and behaviors. Make sure everyone understands the taxonomy and structure, so team members understand how to contribute new resources.
Break up your repository into the following sections:
- Resources: A mix of articles, podcasts, and books on accessibility that cater to different preferences, whether it’s reading, listening, or in-depth study.
- Tools: Essential tools like color contrast checkers, HTML testers, and checklists. For visual designers, there are also plugins to integrate accessibility directly into your design software.
- Statistics: Data that highlights the importance and results of your accessibility initiatives. Use these figures to align with audience demographics and guide discussions with leadership.
It’s essential to acknowledge the varied learning styles of your team, especially in a busy environment with little downtime. Offering a diverse set of resources allows colleagues to choose what medium suits them best. Additionally, simplifying this information into formats like checklists or one-sheeters can be beneficial. Once prepared, distribute these materials among the team, encouraging feedback to ensure adoption.
Identify Key Players and Their Responsibilities
Next, it’s crucial to identify who’s involved in the project. For some, this may mean collaborating with various team members; for others, it involves juggling multiple roles single-handedly. To make accessibility standards more achievable, consider creating roles and delegating tasks.
Accessibility isn’t always straightforward. Some team members, say a designer or developer, might be able to only influence one aspect of the project, whereas those in leadership roles can potentially enact change across multiple departments. Achieving internal consensus is critical so that everyone is working toward a common goal. Sharing the knowledge you’ve gathered, especially in larger teams, fosters understanding and collaboration.
Here are some examples of role-specific responsibilities:
- Leadership: Remove barriers from internal teams so that they are empowered to create new processes that help put accessibility at the forefront.
- Copywriting: Create clear, structured copy that aids designers in determining hierarchy, setting the foundation for content organization.
- Visual Design: Create messages that use color, typography, and imagery that are consistent with accessible design standards.
- Development: Build messages in a responsive manner, incorporate language tags, alt text, and code with intuitive structure for keyboard navigation.
Accessibility should be front and center from project conception to completion. Always consider your target audience at the outset and reflect and evaluate your work against a checklist.
It’s also helpful to create a roadmap that breaks down large accessibility initiatives into bite-sized chunks that are implemented over time. The roadmap should outline milestones for each discipline, ensuring steady and sustained progress towards your goals.
Accessibility is a Marathon, not a Sprint
Failure is an inevitable part of growth. Despite our best efforts to meet accessibility standards in our campaigns, oversights will happen. However, these mistakes don’t define our competence but rather offer opportunities to refine and redirect. By reflecting and adapting, we can inch closer to our goal of creating accessible content.
Having a supportive community amplifies our efforts. Surrounding ourselves with advocates and fostering an environment of constructive feedback ensures that our journey toward accessibility is continuous, collective, and rooted in inclusivity.
Remember, while you might be viewed as the “Accessibility Guru,” the broader vision recognizes you as a compassionate person who is crafting an experience that is welcoming to all users.
Zeta is on the Forefront of Accessibility Innovation
The Zeta Creative Services Team has helped our clients seamlessly integrate accessibility best practices into their existing processes while improving engagement and overall campaign ROI. With over 20 national and international awards in just the past year, we’ve been recognized not just for our innovative campaigns, but also our tangible results.
By collaborating with both brand agencies and in-house creative teams, we create a cohesive and accessible omnichannel experience. Leveraging channel-specific expertise, industry best practices, and data-driven testing, we’re uniquely positioned to improve engagement, optimize returns, and build experiences that are both inclusive and accessible.
Want to see Zeta in action?
Contact a Zeta Representative to learn more about how our Creative Audit can help your team find quick wins to improve your ROI.
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Rising Above the Competition: How to Excel in a Crowded Market
With competition reaching unprecedented levels, businesses are vying for customer attention, loyalty, and wallet share. Brands now find themselves forced to adapt and find innovative ways to stand out. However, that’s not so easy in times of economic uncertainty and reduced consumer spending.
In this article, we’ll explore strategies to outsmart the competition and gain new customers in the face of intense competition.
The State of Consumer Spending In 2023: Competition Is Fierce
If you’re a marketer or retailer and feel like your job has gotten harder recently, you’re not wrong. On one hand, 92% of US consumers are pulling back on spending, with retail giants like Walmart, Target, Home Depot, and Best Buy calling out “cautious consumer-spending shifts.” Non-essential categories, particularly clothing, are bearing the full force of economic uncertainty.
Meanwhile, competition for online (and offline) sales has heated up. In many cases, competitors are not just numerous but also highly active and aggressive. Since the pandemic, everyone wants a slice of the eCommerce pie, from well-established companies to mom-and-pop stores and startup brands. This has led many online advertising channels to become more expensive, and oftentimes, less effective.
This all leaves many brands grappling with a critical question: How can they stand out from the crowd in this hyper-challenging environment—without spending ad budget they simply don’t have?
Strategies to Thrive in a High-Competition Environment:
In a highly competitive environment, businesses need to adapt and excel. Let’s dive into some key strategies to help your band not only survive, but thrive.
1. Embrace Personalized Messaging and Offers
As customers pull back on spending, generic communication won’t cut it anymore. A personalized communication strategy is essential.
Getting the right message, to the right person, at the right time is hardly a new concept. However, the price of getting it wrong is higher than ever. In fact, 71% of consumers expect companies to personalize their communication with them, and 76% get frustrated when this isn’t the case.
Whether it’s email, SMS, ads, or on-site interactions, ensuring that your messaging is relevant to each customer is essential. Genuinely helpful communication is key from the initial touchpoint, to the first sale, to personalized recommendations and follow-up information.
Conduct a thorough audit of all your messaging and content to ensure you are communicating with customers as individuals at every stage of the customer journey. If you can’t do that, you may need to revisit or upgrade your tech stack to ensure you can offer customers individualized experiences based on their preferences, behaviors, and past interactions.
Best-In-Class Example: The healthcare and wellness industry has always been highly competitive. Challenger brand Hims & Hers entered the market at a time when it was dominated by traditional pharma companies. They couldn’t compete on ad spend, so they tapped into the power of personalization, offering tailored telemedicine and healthcare products. The brand experienced exponential growth thanks to personalized treatment plans, product recommendations, dosage reminders and check-in questions tailored to the specific health concerns of each individual customer.
2. Make the Customer Experience Frictionless
Once you’ve done all the legwork to acquire a customer, it’s crucial not to disappoint them. It only takes one negative experience to lose a customer, which is why the customer journey has to be frictionless.
Free shipping and hassle-free returns can go a long way toward making customers feel appreciated and taking the stress out of shopping.
When customers know they can easily return a product if it doesn’t meet their expectations, it reduces the perceived risk of online shopping. It also demonstrates a brand’s commitment to customer satisfaction.
Best-In-Class Example: Zappos, a leading online shoe and clothing retailer, allows customers to return items for a full refund within 365 days of purchase. With free shipping and a generous return window, customers can shop with confidence, contributing to Zappos’ success in the competitive retail industry.
3. Offer Perks to Foster Long-Term Loyalty
Who doesn’t like perks? To retain customers in a competitive landscape, brands should offer personalized benefits to reward and delight their customers.
According to KPMG research, 75% of consumers say they would switch brands for a better loyalty program, and 81% of millennials say a rewards program encourages them to spend more with a brand.
Brands that don’t offer personalized rewards are missing out on a key opportunity to drive growth.
Best-In-Class Example: There are many coffee brands out there, and the hot beverages market is fiercely competitive. Starbucks is well-known for its popular loyalty program, Starbucks Rewards. Customers accumulate points with each purchase and can redeem them for free coffee and tea, as well as goodies like a mug or drink tumbler. Members are even entitled to free refills and a birthday treat. Rewarding your customers isn’t just a nice thing to do, it’s a strong growth strategy: Starbucks says its rewards program generates 53% of in-store spend.
Gain a Competitive Advantage With the Power of Personalization
Competition is heating up, but it doesn’t have to be a barrier to success. By embracing personalization, fostering loyalty through perks and personalized recommendations, and ensuring a frictionless customer experience, businesses can get ahead of the competition and thrive in even the most saturated of markets.
Want to see Zeta in action?
To implement these strategies effectively, brands need the right technology and tools to support their personalization efforts. The Zeta Marketing Platform empowers businesses to offer highly tailored experiences driven by AI.
Why Marketers Need Generative AI for More Human Marketing
To further the impact of their ads, Stitch Fix deploys generative AI to for all Facebook and Instagram ad copy. The AI tool creates the copy, then human Stitch Fix copywriters come in to ensure it describes the outfit in the ad in an accurate, compelling way.
The brand explains:
“Prior to GPT-3, it would take roughly two weeks to plan and strategize each advertising campaign and draft the asset copy. Now, on average, it takes less than a minute for copywriters to review each asset and they receive a 77% pass rate.”
This is a perfect example of using generative AI to complement and augment—not replace—human capabilities—the formula more marketing leaders need to adopt posthaste.
A recent report from The Conference Board explains that while 87% of marketers have used AI or experimented with AI tools for at least one application, and 68% are now using AI at least “sometimes” in their daily work, these marketers are mostly tepid regarding how AI will impact creativity, work quality, and job availability.
This fear of artificial intelligence stems from a lack of understanding of the true potential of generative AI to (ironically) bring more empathy and personalization to the entire customer journey, while also helping marketers to advance in their careers.
And, if you’re leading a marketing team, it’s this fear that you need to help your team members overcome—for everyone’s advantage.
So Long, Farewell, to Transactional Marketing
Marketers have been incrementally chipping away at the goal of highly personalized marketing and optimized, omnichannel customer experiences for decades. But managing all the processes and workflows, plus collecting and analyzing all of the data, leaves little time for high-level thinking and strategic overhauls.
This leaves brands relying heavily on transactional marketing, focused largely on making one-time sales and neglecting the holistic, omnichannel journey and its impact on customer retention. Building loyalty requires careful attention to the customer’s experience and developing relationships over time, rather than a singular focus on sell, sell, sell.
Generative AI finally enables marketers to create more personalized experiences that drive meaningful growth by eliminating the roadblocks. We’re talking about real improvements to your strategies and business outcomes—not just chasing down the next transaction.
Take data analysis, for example.
Collecting data and crunching numbers is key to nearly every marketing initiative, allowing you to predict customer behavior, create effective segments, report on performance, and more. But most of your team’s time is spent collecting and analyzing the data, while only a small portion is allotted for using insights to make strategic recommendations. When you add generative AI to the mix, the tools can crunch the numbers, automate time-consuming processes, identify trends, find opportunities for improvement, and make recommendations for optimization in a fraction of the time.
Woah, wait a minute—does that mean we’ll be eliminating jobs?
No, the human marketer remains critical.
Ultimately, it’s the human marketers that can humanize the brand.
It’s the human that understands the business, the culture, and the customers.
It’s this human that comes up with the AI inputs to generate the most relevant outputs.
But without these resource-intensive tasks on their plates, your team members have time to step back and look at the proverbial forest through the trees. To think beyond open rates and click-throughs and Facebook follows, and consider whether marketing is truly meeting business objectives—and how you can make meaningful impacts.
Let’s make it more tangible.
Think about creating an email marketing campaign. Historically, we’ve spent an awful lot of time creating and testing subject lines. You probably draft and A/B test at least two subject lines based on whatever your copywriter thought would be the best options.
Test, wait, see results.
Hopefully, at least one is decent and your campaign can move forward. Maybe both perform rather poorly and you start from scratch.
With generative AI, the tools can audit all of your campaign history and the segments you’re sending to—and quickly create several subject lines that will perform well. That’s it. DONE. Now the team members that were spending days or weeks optimizing your emails have the bandwidth to consider your overarching email strategy:
- How is email contributing to the overall customer experience?
- How could we improve our email experience?
- Should email even be part of our experience?
- What should we test next?
The teams that embrace generative AI will see their roles evolve—but not become obsolete— because the tools allow us all to think bigger and take bolder actions. They’ll be able to use these insights to build more sophisticated experiences that better meet customer needs.
So long, farewell, to transactional marketing.
AI Benefit Beyond the Business—Building Up Employees
Not only is AI a minimal risk to human marketers, it also presents a valuable opportunity for improving job satisfaction and career development. Because AI elevates the role of the human in the organization, it provides the opportunity for people to truly grow and shine in their roles.
As Debbie Weinstein, Vice President and Managing Director of Google, UK and Ireland, explains in The Drum:
“…marketers find themselves in an environment of unparalleled complexity where the choice to embrace and engage with AI can transform their daily activities and facilitate even more strategic and higher value output than ever before.”
Sunshine Farzan, Global Head of Marketing & Communications at Standard Chartered Bank, agrees with Weinstein and explains in Forbes that AI accelerates marketers’ career development by:
- Fostering collaboration and innovation
- Encouraging a data-driven mindset for decision making
- Prioritizing high-value activities
Rob Schimek, Group CEO at insurtech company boitech, whose team has harnessed the power of ChatGPT to foster innovation, believes the collaborative environment powered by AI supports both continuous learning, as well as a sense of ownership and professional growth among team members.
Schimek is a firm believer in the complementary relationship of marketers and machines to benefit both brands and employees:
“By integrating AI into our brainstorming processes, we can harness diverse ideas and perspectives, and deliver innovative end-products to meet more customer needs. The synergy between humans and AI amplifies our collective potential, boosts productivity, and enables transformative outcomes for both tech and our partners.”
Real World AI Examples with Real Results
Many marketers are already finding meaningful ways to deploy generative AI to drive performance improvements, create better experiences, and accelerate growth. Some of the top activities marketers are trusting to AI include:
- Targeting ads
- Personalizing content and offers in real time
- Optimizing email send times
- Calculating conversion probability
- Optimizing email subject lines
(Source: Statista)
Here’s a look at how a few real companies are deploying AI to these ends.
Credit card company achieves 45% lift with AI-driven Next Best Offer
Next best offer programs are typically run by whatever the business wants to sell. Maybe there’s too much inventory on certain SKUs, or management wants to drive a new product to show launch success.
But these aren’t customer-focused or data-driven offers.
One of the largest credit card issuers decided they needed smarter next best offer programs. Using real-time decisioning powered by Zeta, they shifted from single thread (regressive) to multi-modality prediction for 20+ products.
This new, customer-centric approach to decisioning incorporates variables such as browser events, authentication status, and credit standing combined with Zeta’s in motion attributes and pre-authenticated eligible card member data for improved personalization performance.
Customers appreciated the more personalized approach. Processing 17 million site interactions per day with a 300-millisecond average response rate, the new decisioning drove:
- 85% improvement in prediction accuracy
- 45% average instant lift in conversions
Optimizing Email Send Times Drives Eyeballs and Interest for Retail and Financial Senders
Email send time is not usually intentional or intelligent. Go-live dates and times are very much governed by internal teams, hand offs, and sign offs—not by the customer, their interactions, or their shifting behavior across devices and seasonality.
One of our clients was falling into this internal-drivers trap.
A marketing services company that runs various retail and financial services marketing initiatives was relying on standardized deployment times for their email marketing campaigns.
The problem was that not everyone opens their email at their standard send time of 10:00 am. And even if recipients do open the email, 10:00 am might not be a time that specific customer segments are likely to click through and shop.
To transition away from this one-size-fits-all approach, the marketing company used AI and machine learning built into Zeta’s Prime Time solution to understand the engagement habits of individual customers — and optimize send times accordingly.
Compared to business as usual, the AI-driven email send times not only increased opens, but also engagement:
- 3% increase in open rate
- 7% increase in click-to-open rate
- 16% increase in click rate
Global Fashion Brand Increases Gross Margin by Adding AI to Existing Campaigns
Many shoppers are discount-driven, but offering discounts to shoppers that don’t need them can tank your margin.
One of the world’s leading fashion brands uses AI-driven signals from Zeta’s Data Cloud in their marketing campaigns to identify shoppers with price sensitivity. This allowed the brand to reduce discounts to price-agnostic customers, saving the savings for the discount-driven audiences.
This translated into a forecasted 17% increase in gross margin.
Move Your Team Boldly Forward
Generative AI is a powerful tool that can help your marketing team move beyond transactional marketing to create more personalized and effective experiences for your customers. By automating time-consuming tasks and freeing up your team members to focus on strategic thinking, generative AI can help you to:
- Improve marketing performance
- Save time and money
- Advance marketers in their careers
It’s your job to align your team members with these advantages and quell any uncertainty surrounding this new and powerful technology.
As Weiner explained:
“Let’s be clear: AI is not going to replace the knowledge and experience people bring to the table. AI technology needs to be guided. That guidance, expertise and understanding of your brands comes from you. I see AI as a tool that helps people focus on what they are good at and do more of what they love.”
Related Products & Solutions
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Create individualized experiences and drive outcomes throughout the customer lifecycle.
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Data and AI come together to deliver true customer intelligence and solve complex business problems with unprecedented speed and scale.
New App Unlocks the Power of Customer Growth Intelligence within Snowflake
Zeta’s much-anticipated Customer Growth Intelligence application is now available in the Snowflake Data Marketplace. Zeta participated in the private preview of Snowflake’s Native Application Framework, among the select few companies invited to contribute to this initiative.
Zeta’s Customer Growth Intelligence app brings the power of our leading-edge Martech software directly to your Snowflake instance. Using Snowflake technology Streamlit and Snowpark, the application provides unprecedented visibility into customer and prospect behavioral patterns, channel availability, and price sensitivity. The best part? You don’t need to transfer files or share data outside of your Snowflake Data Cloud so you can maintain data privacy and governance.
The Customer Growth Intelligence app uses Zeta’s ID graph, which contains profiles on over 235 million Americans, paired with Zeta’s proprietary data sources and artificial intelligence to enable you to slice and dice client and prospect data and create valuable intelligence that can power innovative campaigns and improve business outcomes. With the app you can:
- Create a 360-degree customer view: Better understand your customers, what they’re interested in, where they can be found, and their potential availability across various channels.
- Accelerate advertising revenue: Improve the efficiency of your ad spend by directing your resources towards the most relevant channels, ensuring improved targeting and maximum ROI.
- Improve audience segmentation: Learn about where your customers are spending time and money to create highly targeted campaigns that resonate with your audience.
- Increase customer acquisition: Leverage predictive conversion trends to anticipate future purchase behavior and foster long-term brand loyalty and growth.
Below are examples of use cases where you can apply the Customer growth Intelligence app.
Unleash the Power of Data Enrichment
Channel match distribution reveals the number of customers that can benefit from enriched Zeta Data across activation channels. By presenting the match rates for various match keys such as email, postal, and first name, Zeta enables brands to understand the extent of data enrichment available, and its potential impact on their marketing efforts. By enriching your first-party customer data, marketers can optimize their targeting and engagement strategies to increase campaign ROI.
Unlock Revenue Optimization Opportunities
Predictive price sensitivity empowers brands, especially in retail, to make data-driven pricing decisions. By identifying price-sensitive customers, you can tailor their promotions to avoid unnecessary discounts and prevent lost revenue. Zeta’s sophisticated pricing models leverage proprietary signals to distinguish between price-sensitive and insensitive customers, tabulated against age and income levels. This enables brands to implement targeted pricing that increases revenue and profitability while maintaining customer satisfaction.
Perfect Timing for Maximum Engagement
Click behavior helps brands perfect their timing for maximum customer engagement. With access to proprietary behavior data, marketers can identify the perfect moment to interact with specific customers. By understanding when customers are most receptive, brands can craft well-timed campaigns that resonate with their buyers leading to increased click-through rates and conversions.
Anticipating Success with Future Insights
Conversion prediction helps brands understand future trends. By leveraging ensemble time series models and forecasting, Zeta provides key metric predictions, such as conversions and site visits for the upcoming month. Zeta can also predict what metrics will look like for a competitor using proprietary signal data and the Zeta Identity Graph. Using this information brands can proactively plan for predicted trends to optimize conversions and campaign outcomes.
Fast, Easy Setup and Implementation
Once the Customer Growth Intelligence app is loaded into a brand account, the only input needed is a hashed email list of current customers. The rest of the work is done by the app.
Visit the Snowflake Data Cloud Marketplace and enable the Zeta Customer Growth Intelligence app at no cost. Learn how Zeta can enhance your first-party data to unlock unprecedented insights and meaningful customer engagement. This dynamic partnership empowers your business to unlock the full potential of your Snowflake Data Cloud and build individualized experiences that drive growth and success.
Want to see Zeta in action?
Request a personalized demo and we’ll be happy to show you how Zeta can transform your marketing.
Using Intelligence to Drive Customer Growth in Retail
Retailers are under siege. COVID-19 hangover, supply chain issues, labor shortages, rising labor costs, inflation, economic uncertainty; the list goes on. Thankfully, many retailers aren’t yet feeling the pinch. In many cases, the last two years have been huge, with several retailers posting record sales and profits. But this hasn’t come without some challenges.
The very fabric of retail spending is changing faster than ever before. Traditional brick-and-mortar shopping experiences are not attracting consumers like they used to, online shopping has exploded, and a new generation of shoppers is demanding investments in DEI and sustainability. But value is still king, and dwindling discretionary spending and a resurgence of travel means there is less money to go around and that competition is on the rise.
All these factors put a strain on margin, which underscores the importance of profitability. Marketers need to find ways to do more with less and make better use of their existing investments to win in a hyper-competitive market.
It’s important that retailers prepare for uncertainty and put themselves in a position to win by investing in technology that gives them a leg up. In this article we’ll explore three ways that retailers can leverage their technology to drive customer growth while protecting margin and increasing profitability.
Start By Getting Closer to the Data
There’s no shortage of data. Most marketers have more data than they know what to do with. The old cliché of drowning in data and starving for wisdom is more relevant than ever. According to a recent study by Forrester Consulting commissioned by Zeta, almost half of marketers don’t trust their tech stacks. This is a big problem. Marketers report that fragmented technology leads to:
- Manual effort required to analyze data for actionable insights (57%)
- Challenges testing and optimizing campaigns (52%)
- Difficulty tracking and observing customer preferences (52%)
- Difficulty building holistic customer profiles (49%)
If you can’t trust your tech, you can’t rely on your data. And if you can’t rely on your data, you’re flying blind because data is the key to understanding growth and profitability.
By combining first and third-party data you can unlock incredibly detailed insights on your customers: who returns things and who doesn’t, who pays full price and who only buys with a coupon, who purchases multiple products and when. All these factors give you a more unified picture of what’s driving revenue. It also shows you how much wallet share you have in specific categories.
Growing spend from current customers is one of the fastest ways to drive increased profitability. The key to doing so is having access to real-time data that can gauge customer intent during the awareness and consideration stages. By leveraging view and click behavior combined with competitive shopping insights, you can proactively connect with consumers before they make a purchase to ensure you are top of mind.
By adopting technology that helps unify your data and augment it with additional demographic, psychographic, and behavioral information, you can better understand your customers, your competition, and where you should be spending your resources to increase margin.
There are three themes to consider when thinking about how to better leverage your data: Identity, Intelligence, and Activation:
Identity
In most cases, about 96% of people who visit a website are unknown. Identifying these people is critical to building a relationship as soon as possible. Each click, pageview, and purchase is data that can be used to personalize their next experience.
Even brands with loyalty programs can’t identify all the consumers shopping in store. Probabilistic matching helps solve this problem. Modern martech can use limited information such as location and the name on a credit card to match an anonymous shopper to a known profile. Brands can also now determine that multiple disconnected past sessions or purchases were actually the same person on different devices or channels. This brings identity full circle; connecting interactions from all channels across the consumer journey which has a dramatic effect on ROI.
Zeta’s ID graph, which contains profiles on over 235 million Americans, enables you to identify previously unknown visitors and bolster your first-party data with demographic and behavioral data. This creates a persistent customer ID that can be used throughout the entire purchase journey to create smarter, more relevant campaigns and promotions.
Intelligence
Data without intelligence is useless. There’s simply too much incoming information to parse through manually. You need a platform with AI at its core to extract relevant insights and important information.
You can’t rely on outdated strategies, such as media mix modeling, to develop your marketing strategy any longer. You need to adapt and leverage real-time techniques like deterministic incremental attribution to optimize marketing and media budgets. AI helps democratize that intelligence without the need for bloated analytics and data science teams.
Zeta helps you harness the power of AI to segment your customer base into actionable groups using proprietary propensity scores combined with factors like cart size, average order value, purchase frequency, and engagement levels. By identifying your most profitable customers you can better deploy your resources to increase margin while decreasing churn.
Activation
The final piece of the puzzle is activation. All the data and intelligence in the world isn’t going to make a difference if you can’t act in real time across channels. Understanding which channels are important to each individual consumer will not only increase your response rates but allow you to become more efficient in your spend.
Adopting a platform like Zeta that combines the capabilities of a CDP, ESP, and DSP with a proprietary data cloud enables you to create truly individualized experiences that span every conceivable channel and retain customers.
The Benefits of Customer Intelligence
Fusing Identity, Intelligence, and Activation together unlocks some truly transformational benefits that will help you maintain profitability and margin while navigating changing consumer behavior and shifting market conditions.
Increase Spend Efficiency
Marketers need to be careful about where they spend their money. Resources are scarce, and without a strategy it’s easy to run through your budget. Without a persistent customer ID, you run the risk of wasting valuable resources by engaging the same consumers on different channels with disconnected messages and irrelevant offers. Not only is it frustrating for the customer, but it’s also expensive and inefficient for you.
Zeta is a single platform that connects the main components of your martech stack, including your CDP, ESP, and DSP. With Zeta, you get real-time data from all channels, underscoring the most profitable ones. This helps marketers invest wisely on important channels and quickly see what’s working.
Zeta also offers AI-Based analytics to better allocate media and improve ROAS. This means smarter decisions about where to allocate resources and easier identification of the best marketing channels and strategies for specific audiences.
Market to Your Best Customers
While this might sound straightforward, it’s more challenging in practice. First, you must figure out what actually makes a good customer. For many retailers, a good customer is someone who frequently buys from them. However, when you start looking at customers on an individual basis from a profitability standpoint, the equation shifts.
Returns
Take returns for example. In 2021 there was a staggering $761 billion in returned merchandise and in 2022, 16.5% of retail purchases in the U.S., both in-store and online, resulted in a return. This is having a huge impact on retailer margin.
Typically, in-store purchases have a margin of 32%, but it drops to 30% for online purchases. When a customer opts for Buy Online Pickup In-Store (BOPIS), the margin further drops to 23%. It’s even lower, only 12%, when items are shipped from the store.
As consumers buy more online, they often buy multiple sizes during one transaction in case something doesn’t fit. This not only pulls inventory that could be bought by someone else, but it also guarantees a return which further erodes margin by an additional 10-15%. Consumers that return multiple items in a transaction can effectively kill margin in one fell swoop.
So, while you might have a customer that buys frequently, seeing them through this lens reveals that they may be costing you money.
Zeta is addressing this issue by developing an AI model that predicts the likelihood of returns. By identifying customers less likely to return items, businesses can focus their marketing efforts more effectively, safeguarding their margins and recognizing their truly valuable customers.
Discounts
Another example is discounts. If you have a customer that only purchases when they receive a 20% off coupon, each purchase has smaller margin than someone that pays full price. Most retailers have loyalty programs in place to reward repeat purchases, but what if you could reward a consumer in a more personalized manner by offering greater rewards to full-price buyers, and fewer rewards to a consumer that only buys on sale?
With Zeta’s AI-based models you can predict the revenue and margin of each individual customer for the next 12 months, leveraging key data points such as lifetime value, recency, frequency, average order value, email engagement metrics, and web behavior. This translates into a more relevant and engaging shopping experience for customers while protecting your margin and profitability.
Zeta also helps you identify which customers are most likely to respond to specific category offers or products as first- or second-time buyers. This knowledge empowers you to unlock cross-sell opportunities and tailor your marketing strategies, messages, and incentives to effectively engage both new and loyal customers.
Predict Shopping Trends
Imagine if your marketing technology could give you a peek into the future, helping you predict and prepare for what’s ahead. Retailers traditionally plan their strategies around seasonal events like back-to-school or holiday sales, aiming to maximize revenue before offering discounts.
But, in today’s unpredictable economic environment, that’s not enough. Retailers need to tap into identity and intelligence data to get an edge. Instead of just focusing on broad trends, it’s crucial to consider every factor that could influence consumer behavior and sales.
Weather is the perfect example. While weather can be a depressive force on sales (think: snowstorms), it can also be used to predict the future. Weather is often an excuse for retailers missing their goals, but with Zeta, you can flip this on its head.
Take a craft store looking to boost foot traffic as an example. If there’s rain forecast over the weekend, they know families, especially those with young kids, will seek indoor activities. By reaching out early,to potential customers living near the store, they can encourage visits before the bad weather sets in. They can even further narrow their targeting to those who typically buy items at full price, optimizing their margin.
By integrating data models that consider historical purchase trends, weather patterns, and broader economic data, retailers can fine tune their inventory management, minimizing stockouts. This rich data pool not only aids in preparation but offers insights that can be extrapolated upon.
Becoming Truly Customer Centric is the New Imperative
In today’s inflationary, often unstable retail landscape, becoming truly customer centric is no longer a luxury but a necessity for companies seeking sustainable growth. By “be more customer centric” we mean get closer to your data so you can better understand what your customers want and need. Now, more than ever, it is critical that marketers look at their programs holistically so they can further grasp where their revenue is coming from, and which customers are most valuable.
Zeta’s AI-Powered Marketing Cloud Helps Retailers Drive Profitable Customer Growth
Zeta is the only platform that is made up of a CDP, ESP, DSP and the largest private, unwalled, data cloud which equips marketers with the tools for successful. The Zeta Marketing Platform has been designed for marketers’ needs with the unique flexibility to wrap around and augment the brand’s tech stack, providing speed to intelligence, deeper analytics, and activation to deliver greater ROI. With Zeta’s modern, schemaless architecture, you can seamlessly ingest and reconcile data from anywhere in your technology stack, enabling you to build a unified view of customer behavior that can be enriched with Zeta’s proprietary Data Cloud.
But it doesn’t stop there. Zeta offers flexible data connectors that put you in the driver’s seat, allowing you to take advantage of our pre-built connectors or create custom integrations that align with your unique needs. This level of control ensures that your integration efforts are truly elevating your marketing ecosystem.
Whether the ZMP is the single platform environment removing the need for multiple point solutions, or it’s connecting the dots to extract more value from current tech investments, the AI-powered Zeta Marketing Platform is at the forefront of the next generation of marketing technology.
Want to see Zeta in action?
Request a personalized demo and we’ll be happy to show you how Zeta can transform your marketing.
5 Key Strategies to Win New Business in an Uncertain Economy
In times of economic instability, marketers face the daunting task of achieving more with fewer resources. The rollercoaster ride of an up-and-down economy combined with the looming threat of inflation has forced businesses to reevaluate their budgets and make tough decisions. In this article, we delve into the key strategies that can help marketers thrive amidst economic turmoil.
Keep maintaining momentum
The old adage “When times get tough, the tough get going” holds true for marketers facing uncertain economies.
While it’s tempting to reduce marketing efforts, history has shown that consistent and strategic marketing pays off in the long run. Keeping up momentum when competitors are cutting back can ultimately lead to capturing a larger share of the market.
Ensure messaging is relevant and personalized
In uncertain times, consumer preferences can shift rapidly. Around 75% of consumers tried a new shopping behavior in the last 18 months, and more than 80% of them intend to continue experimenting with new shopping habits. With customer loyalty up for grabs, generic marketing messages won’t cut it anymore.
The solution lies in personalization: tailored messages, offers, and content that truly resonate with individual customers. Hyper-personalization goes beyond merely addressing customers by their first names. By understanding customer pain points, aspirations, and buying behaviors, marketers can craft messages that drive repurchases and enhance customer loyalty, even in uncertain times.
Offer special promotions to persuade cautious customers
It’s essential to remember that consumers are still spending money, albeit more cautiously. This is an opportune moment to capture their attention by offering added value.
Running special offers and deals like gifts with purchase, where feasible, can entice price-sensitive consumers to make purchases. By carefully analyzing consumer behavior and gross margins, marketers can identify areas where discounts can be strategically applied without severely impacting their bottom line.
Craft tailored campaigns to win new customers
Businesses can gain a competitive edge by crafting highly targeted omnichannel marketing campaigns across paid and owned media. Instead of employing a one-size-fits-all approach, businesses should ensure they have the necessary tools to create tailored messages, offers, and experiences that drive engagement and conversions.
To this end, Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) have emerged as a crucial tool for marketers. With a CDP, marketers can seamlessly layer transaction histories, browsing behaviors, demographic details, and other key data points, enabling a 360° view of individual consumers. Armed with these insights, marketers can curate hyper-personalized campaigns across social media, display advertising, email, SMS, and more, speaking to individual preferences and needs while fostering engagement and driving conversions.
Optimize your marketing spend with advanced analytics
In an uncertain economy, every advertising dollar counts. To ensure that your marketing efforts are yielding the best possible return on investment, it’s essential to ensure your campaign measurement, analytics, and tracking capabilities are up to scratch. A CDP can help marketers figure out which campaigns, channels, and audiences are working, and which aren’t, so marketing teams know what to focus on.
Your Roadmap to Success:
Download the “Navigating Economic Headwinds” eBook
If you would like to learn more about the insights and strategies needed to navigate the current economic landscape, you can download our eBook, “The Marketer’s Guide to Navigating Economic Headwinds.” In this comprehensive guide, we delve deeper into the strategies discussed in this article and provide practical tips for achieving marketing success in uncertain times.
Thriving Through Economic Challenges with Zeta
While an uncertain economy may present obstacles, it also offers opportunities for forward-thinking marketers. By embracing hyper-personalization, harnessing the power of CDPs, and strategically maintaining marketing spend, businesses can not only weather economic storms but also emerge stronger and more resilient. Learn how Zeta can help you rise to the occasion.
Want to see Zeta in action?
Request a personalized demo and we’ll be happy to show you how Zeta can transform your marketing.
Why Personalized Customer Experiences Are Non-Negotiable
In the post-pandemic landscape, the way consumers interact with businesses has undergone a profound transformation. The shift towards digital interactions has sparked an evolution in expectations, rendering traditional approaches to customer engagement outdated. As businesses strive to navigate this new terrain, one principle has emerged as a non-negotiable game-changer: personalized customer experiences.
One Size Does Not Fit All: Personalization Matters
Picture this: You’re scrolling through your inbox, bombarded by a flurry of promotional emails that seem to have little to do with your interests or needs. Annoyance bubbles up, and you click “delete” with a sigh. You’re not alone in this sentiment. A staggering 76% of consumers admit to feeling frustrated when companies fail to deliver personalized interactions, according to a McKinsey study.
It’s not just a fleeting annoyance, though. Irrelevant marketing messages can mar customer experiences, leaving a negative aftertaste that lingers longer than you might imagine. When ads miss the mark, they don’t just fade into oblivion; they have the potential to taint the brand’s reputation and undermine the hard-earned trust between businesses and their audience.
The rise of digital interactions has given birth to a new era of expectations, where relevancy and connection are non-negotiable. This is where the importance of a more targeted and personalized approach comes into play.
The Joy of Relevant Marketing Messages
Enter the realm of relevant marketing messages—a territory where the harmony between consumers’ preferences and brand communications sings a sweet melody.
Imagine receiving an email that speaks directly to your interests, offering recommendations based on your past purchases and browsing behavior. Suddenly, that email transforms from an inconspicuous note in your inbox to a thoughtful gesture that feels tailor-made for you.
The power of relevant marketing messages is not just anecdotal; it’s backed by hard data. In fact, a staggering 71% of consumers expect companies to deliver personalized interactions, and a substantial 78% of them respond positively to personalized content by being more likely to repurchase. This is more than just a passing preference; it’s a paradigm shift that has made personalization the bedrock of modern marketing.
Meet the Brands Rocking Personalization
Forward-thinking brands are already leveraging personalization strategies to drive consumer satisfaction and loyalty. Here’s how they are doing it.
Hibbett Sports
Hibbett Sports is an athletic-inspired fashion retailer with nearly 1,100 stores across 35 states. They partnered with Zeta to launch an ambitious personalization strategy, and the outcomes were striking.
Email campaigns saw increased open rates thanks to compelling, individualized subject lines, higher click-through rates from personalized recommendations, and improved purchase rates due to precisely targeted, one-off promotions.
Hibbett Sports’ pursuit of personalization didn’t end with emails. This strategy cascaded across PPC, display advertising, and social media, creating 1:1 user experiences across various channels. Learn how they did it here.
The RealReal
The RealReal is the world’s largest online marketplace for authenticated, resale luxury goods.
The RealReal leveraged new data points provided by Zeta to personalize their messaging and content across display, social, and email.
By personalizing omnichannel experiences in real-time, The RealReal was able to significantly boost their return on ad spend, increase email open rates, and foster individualized relationships with in-market customers. Learn how they did it here.
Generali
Generali is a leading insurance provider offering comprehensive solutions tailored to customers’ needs. They recently implemented an AI-based omnichannel marketing strategy.
Instead of relying on rules-based personalization, Generali worked with Zeta to craft individualized experiences that changed depending on user engagement levels and behavior. This helped engage visitors through messaging and promotions that felt authentic, resulting in hundreds of sales-ready leads that closed at a 24% higher rate. Learn how they did it here.
How to Approach Personalization: Crafting Tailored Experiences Through Data Insights
By tapping into data-driven insights, companies can create experiences that resonate deeply with their audience, fostering connections that go beyond the transactional. Here are three pivotal data points that pave the way for personalized interactions:
1. Consider Shopping Habits
By analyzing past purchases, companies can decipher what products or services resonate most with each customer. This data-driven insight fuels the creation of tailored recommendations and offers, making every interaction a step toward building lasting customer loyalty.
2. Track On-Site Behavior
Monitoring on-site behavior like page visits, dwell times, and interaction patterns enables brands to customize content and interactions, ensuring that each touchpoint reflects the user’s unique journey and objectives.
3. Use a Customer Data Platform (CDP)
CDPs act as the cornerstone of personalization efforts. They can connect fragmented data from online and offline sources and make it possible to blend in additional data layers to construct a comprehensive customer profile. This level of visibility empowers companies to not only identify anonymous visitors but also to create hyper-targeted campaigns that leverage the full spectrum of customer insights.
Interested In Leveling Up Your Personalization Strategy?
The Zeta Marketing Platform empowers you to offer your customers highly personalized experiences driven by AI. Discover how Zeta can help identify anonymous customers, connect your data sources, and enrich your customer information with thousands of attributes and intent-based signals at scale.
Want to see Zeta in action?
Request a personalized demo and we’ll be happy to show you how Zeta can transform your marketing.