Category: Stories

Automation could be the best thing to happen to digital marketing. The current marketing landscape is so vast and competitive that anything offering the ability to improve workflows – saving time and increasing productivity- without sacrificing the effectiveness of campaigns is worth its weight in gold.

The evolution of marketing automation technology presents opportunities that were unimaginable just a few years ago. Marketing automation has the potential to make lead generation easier and more efficient than ever. However, the success of any lead generation tactic has always be depended upon the effectiveness of the strategy supporting it.

Having a piece of software to take care of the bulk of your marketing, frees you up to focus on other areas of the business, like research and development, customer experience and a huge backlog of e-mails in your inbox.

But, as useful as it is, marketing automation is only as good as the marketing being automated.

Automation can’t make miracles. It can’t make bad marketing look good.

This makes the process before setting your automation extremely important. This is exactly where the human element should make its robust presence. The marketing team must come up with a solid strategy – one that gives automation the best possible chance of getting positive return on investment.

To achieve this, there are 6 steps that need to be pursued!

Step 1 – Market Research

 “Marketing without research is like driving with your eyes closed” – Dan Zarrella.

During your research, you should find out the following:

• Who is your targeted audience?
• What do they look like?
• What they consider when making a purchase
• What prices they feel are appropriate
• Their likes and dislikes of current products/services
• Things they would like to see improved

Collect this data, analyze them and also take a look at how competitors operate. 

Step 2 – Find your voice

People tend to buy on emotion and justify with logic. It seems that they want to feel a connection with a brand or business. This connection surely comes from how you present yourself.

Your brand’s tone of voice should be in keeping your audience and in speaking the same language as they are. Your tone of voice needs to be aligned with your overall brand message – one that instantly informs people who you are and why you are their best choice.

Step 3 – Establish point of communication

How are you going to reach your audience?

An obvious choice is social media. Facebook has over 2 billion users, Instagram over 800 million, Twitter 330 million and LinkedIn over 450 million. There is also YouTube, where over 1 billion watch videos every day, and platforms such as Pinterest, Snapchat, Viber, Google+, all of which have user bases in the hundreds of millions.

Your audience surely exists on social media, it is up to you to find out where.

Step 4 – Create a campaign

Design and build your campaign with the customer in mind. Your market research can help guide this process. Take what your audience is into and use it to inspire something memorable that fits in with your brand story.

You might not get it right from the first time, but you have the next step to amend that.

Step 5 – Testing, testing

It is always about testing. From designs to content to email headlines to customer segmentation, test everything. Test campaigns against different points of communications to find out what works, what needs improvement and what doesn’t belong there.

Test one thing at a time, gather all need information and concrete statistics and then, it is time for optimization.

Test, learn, adjust and test again!

Step 6 – Showing the human behind the automation

With the above steps in order, marketing is ready to be automated, but the human element shouldn’t disappear from the whole picture.

Automation delivers your message to your target audience as efficiently as possible, but it’s important to remember that you are marketing to people; and these people want to feel that there is a personal connection with the business.

To conclude…

Automation only displays what you feed it with. Follow the above steps and you will be rewarded with the results your efforts deserve!

Author: I. Papikas, Senior Product Manager, e-satisfaction.com

In my previous blog post we had the opportunity to get to know the Israeli community and culture through a short visit to Tel Aviv’s well known companies like SimilarWeb and a short talk with IBM’s partners responsible for the accelerator network on site.

The DLD Innovation festival is over and it’s a great moment to share the knowledge and expertise that we got from 5 days of exposure to Israel’s community and all the network that we had the opportunity to create in just a few days.

Overall

I couldn’t continue writing this article without mentioning once again the term Firgun, genuine, unselfish delight or pride in the accomplishment of other people. After just 5 days in Tel Aviv, I still feel it strong in my head, the feeling that it’s awesome to help others without a self gain and contribute to any community, either tech or business, with your own experience and expertise.

During our time in Tel Aviv, we visited a lot of companies and a lot of accelerator programs and funds. After each visit, I was more and more confident about the Israeli culture and network, including the reachability of investors and funds anywhere in the city.

One of the strongest feelings that I had from my visit is about how connected eceryone is in the Israeli startup community. On every presentation and talk, everyone started with two points:

• How big is the Israeli ecosystem in numbers (startups and entrepreneurs)
• How to connect with anyone in the city

Everything and everyone is connected and transparent so that individuals but also companies can work together towards common or similar goals. Knowing your ecosystem is not only networking but is power that if used right can help you go faster and further, and avoid unnecessary obstacles with no delay.

Jerusalem

Hearing Jerusalem, I had in mind an ancient city where there is too much religion and conflicts over religion. WRONG! Jerusalem is much more active than Tel Aviv, using its small size to allow all entrepreneurs, companies and funds to operate together and connect with people all over the world.

We had the opportunity to visit Jerusalem’s Made In Jerusalem, a non-profit organization that works close with Boston’s Mass Challenge organization in helping startups grow through their accelerator program. Made In Jerusalem showed us some of their most promising startups and shared with us their secret ingredient of success.

In addition, we had the opportunity to meet with OurCrowd, a special crowdfunding platform that allows investors to support startups using equity crowdfunding. They provide services and funds to startups through their platform, startups can create their profiles and connect with investors. The best thing about companies like OurCrowd is the fact that they are very easy to approach and they make funding much more easier.

DLD Innovation Festival

Startups? Yes. Investors? Must. Amazing Talks? Yes. Networking? Absolutely! That’s how I could somehow describe DLD Innovation Festival as we experienced it during Day 4, and you would still get only a glimpse of it.

As part of the Greek Delegation, invited by the Embassy of Israel in Athens, I could wander all round DLD and network with so many people with different ideas, networks and feelings. I had the opportunity to meet and network with accelerator programs from Italy, Israel (obviously) and partners from Romania, China and a few other countries.

DLD gave us the opportunity to be part of amazing talks given by people with strong profiles like Yossi Vardi, Chairman of DLD, Chris Fabian, Head of Innovation in Unicef, Keren Fanan, Global Head of Growth in Gett, Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon, Jeroen Tas, Chief Innovation Strategy Officer in Philips and Pierre Louette, General Secretary in Orange, just to name a few.

Conclusion

Would I go again? Absolutely! We are more than ready to create partnerships and technology transfer between Greek and Israeli companies. However, I believe that the goal of all this is to be able to nurture Greek culture to become a very big and rich ecosystem of startups and entrepreneurs, an action that will improve our way of living (and thinking) so that we can create a better future.

Pop up windows and intertitials are used more and more to achieve a bunch of multiple goals in e-shops and websites, such us mailing list subscriptions, inbound lead generation and Facebook fan page expansion, but it seems that for mobile uses this kind of tactic should be dropped.

Google recently announced in its official blog that “To improve the mobile search experience, after January 10, 2017, pages where content is not easily accessible to a user on the transition from the mobile search results may not rank as highly.”. We knew that Google is quite serious about mobile and cares a lot about UX, thus Google wants to make sure that all content is easily accessible on mobile devices and, the use of interstitials usually make content tougher to access.

What does this mean?

The general rule of thumb is that any intertitial used in mobile sites should NOT be making content less accessible. Examples of such intertitials are shown bellow (source)

These types of pop ups, do annoy users and do get penalized by Google, when displayed in mobile. However, not all pop ups and intertitials are bad. There are certain types of interstitial that Google will not penalize, and these can be seen in the following image (source):

These interstitials are legitimate as they do have a reason to be displayed and this is why they are treated differently from Google. In general, the types of interstitials that Google is ok with are the following:

• Pop ups and banners that take a “reasonable amount” of the screen
• Windows that are used to inform users on cookies or other legal issues
• Login screens or payment process pop ups
• Windows that appear when someone clicks on a link or button

Are e-satisfaction questionnaires ok with this?

The good thing about e-satisfaction is that the primary way to integrate checkout questionnaires is to embed it in the content, so in the checkout phase, there is no problem with Google.

However, in browse questionnaires we did have an issue. The way that e-satisfaction is displayed can be seen in the following snapshot.

The issue in this case is that Google might consider the amount covered in this screen is not “reasonable”, so we proceeded with the following two improvements that are already available for you to use:

• You can determine when to present a browse question to the visitors of your site, thus making this pop up appear on specific users and under specific conditions. You can learn more about how to set this up.
• You can set up the question to be initially minimized and let users determine if they would like to provide feedback.

Conclusion

If we had to make one recommendation is to use only intertitials that do play an integral role in your strategy and we believe that e-satisfaction is an integral part of a human oriented strategy, so we are optimizing it for you. Do not overuse, do not over-push and always respect the customer journey of your customers. The overuse issue for Google is quite new but we will still have to wait and see what the future holds, so take some time now to make you site more and more friendly to mobile users and have all the above in mind.

If you want to discuss more about this issue or learn more about e-satisfaction, we would love to arrange a call with a member of our team.

Book a Demo

 Leverage with Refer a Friend Campaign

 

The Maison Marasil – Fragos S.A. company, which operates in the children’s clothing industry, in collaboration with e-satisfaction, created a campaign with the aim of rewarding satisfied customers and also attracting new customers in maisonmarasil.com (Refer a Friend campaign). The campaign yielded pleasant and encouraging, for other e-shops as well, results.

Objective

The Refer a Friend campaign has the objective of rewarding the satisfied customers of Maison Marasil and especially the ones that would recommend the e-shop to their friends and colleagues (the so-called promoters). E-satisfaction targets this segment of loyal customers through Net Promoter Score metric (known as NPS in international references). A 5% discount coupon acted as a motive for their next purchase and also resulted as a reward for the customer.

Another objective of this campaign was, to create a new path that will attract easily and quickly new customers to the e-shop, by providing them with a 5% discount coupon for their first purchase.

Automations

This campaign is displayed only to the customers of Maison Marasil that are willing to promote the e-shop to a friend or colleague. Namely, these clients had rated with 9 or 10 (in a scale out of 10) the following question “How likely are you to recommend our e-shop to your friends or colleagues”.

After the completion of their order, the customer-promoter can fill in the e-mail of a friend in order to receive automatically two different newsletters with unique discount coupons of 5% discount for their next purchase.

Results

The Refer a Friend campaign yielded remarkable results and created new paths for both Maison Marasil and e-satisfaction, as resulted in just 50 days of function in bringing 118 new orders, by
using e-satisfaction’s free marketing mechanism!

In more detail, from the 1.020 customers who viewed the campaign, 359 clicked on it (Conversion Rate 35%). Furthermore, the 118 new orders resulted in the following:

• Increased average number of items per order
• 3.1% increase in turnover was achieved!

What is e-satisfaction?

e-satisfaction is the #1 Humanized Marketing Platform for e-Business that combines customer feedback with actual automated marketing mechanisms that aim to recover or retain your customers. e-satisfaction is used by hundreds of e-businesses, helping them to go one step closer to customer centricity.

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