Good morning, readers! Today, we’ll discover some business-to-business digital marketing ideas that can really help your marketing efforts shine, will gain insights from more than 1 billion ecommerce emails sent in 2017, will talk about why it’s so important that we focus on the right numbers when it comes to content marketing (and those numbers may not be dates on a calendar!) and will learn how some companies are taking a different approach to personalization.
B2B digital marketing ideas that stand out from the crowd
Personalized email marketing. Optimized landing pages. Webinars that drive lead generation. Sure, we’re all familiar with these tried-and-true digital marketing tactics, but are there other, less traditional marketing techniques that we may be overlooking? According to Kaleigh Moore in Business2Community, the answer to that question is a resounding “yes!”
For example, your business may benefit from launching a community. More than the public communication that happens on your social channels, setting up a place for private communication to occur between customers and your brand—either via a Facebook group or Slack channel—allows communication to flow more freely and leads to a greater overall sense of closeness. And it has other benefits; In fact, one marketer Kaleigh interviewed said their engagement stats rose across the board! Check out all of Kaleigh’s out-of-the-box tips here.
Email marketing insights from 2017, including Black Friday
In this week’s MarTech Series, Omnisend released ecommerce email marketing statistics for 2017. The statistics were gleaned from data gathered from more than 128,000 campaigns and automated emails sent by 7,200 brands—a total of nearly 1 billion emails—using the company’s platform.
Among the more interesting findings in the data were the fact that while cart abandonment emails are still the most effective during Black Friday with a 1.65% order rate, the rate reflects a 31% decrease compared to the rest of the year. Additionally, sending a series of 3 automated emails can lead to 90% more orders when compared to single emails. Read more of the survey’s findings here.
Content marketing pace vs. performance
Let me ask you a personal question: Am I the only one who sees our marketing team’s full content calendar and feels a sense of accomplishment, or sees a sparser content calendar and develops a sense of anxiety? I suspect that many of you feel similarly; like us, your thought process is that as an organization you have valuable info to share with clients and prospects and the more info you can share, the more leads you’ll be able to generate, right? In MarTech Advisor, Mark Nardone says not necessarily.
In his piece, Mark hands out a valuable reminder: pace isn’t everything. Before we celebrate the successful completion of the 4th of 5 ebooks on our content schedule, it would behoove us to ensure that the ebooks we’ve been creating are meeting or exceeding our goals for creating the content in the first place—generating clicks, leads, and downloads. It’s easy for us to get temporarily sidetracked by the wrong set of numbers, but Mark’s piece helps remind us of our true goals. Read all of his tips here.
A novel approach to personalization: less data, more asking
“Are you doing personalization wrong?” That’s the thought-provoking title of Adrian Swinscoe’s piece in CustomerThink. And what he finds is that companies aren’t doing it wrong, but they’re certainly doing it differently, relying a little less on data- and technology-led “best guesses” and instead taking a more dialogue-forward approach.
For example, data platform provider Jebbit tends to believe that businesses have more data than they’ll ever know what to do with, and should focus their efforts on asking for and collecting “three of four data points that will take them beyond the standard transactional or behavioral data…that will allow them to move into ‘the why behind the buy.’” Is Jebbit on the right track? It appears that may be. UK clothing brand Boden has been following Jebbit’s approach and has seen, on average, a 33% increase in cart size and 52% higher conversion rate. Read Adrian’s entire piece here, and let us know what you think.
