Personalized Marketing Lacks The Correct Tools

Less than 10% of marketers say they have the correct tools to deliver personalized one-to-one marketing, according to a white paper commissioned and released Thursday by Kahuna Mobile.

Personalization has been proven to radically increase the ROI of email marketing and segmented campaigns increase open rates by as much as 760%, according to the Direct Marketing Association.

Consumers are looking for relevant experiences from the brands they shop at. Consumers are more than four times more likely to respond to a personalized email than a generic one, and 72% of consumers are frustrated when they receive irrelevant emails per a recent Autopilot study that surveyed 1200 consumers. 

Yet, the higher quality data tools required for authentic and individualized personalization still remains troublesome for many marketers, according to the Kahuna Mobile report.

Marketers need to rethink their efforts to deliver one-to-one marketing, not just to keep up but stay ahead of the trends, per Julie Ginches, CMO of Kahuna.

The study surveyed top marketing professionals at Ascendant, an invite-only professional networking group, to pinpoint any issues marketers are facing when incorporating personalization into their marketing campaigns. Some 59% of respondents state they hold the title of vice president of marketing or above, and 88% market directly to consumers.

Every marketer surveyed expressed that omnichannel marketing was important, but only 6% believe they have a mature omnichannel marketing program.

Some 78% of companies surveyed responded that they were restricted in investing in omnichannel personalization by resources and inadequate time, while 91% of marketers expressed that they either did not have or did not fully utilize the tools they need for individualized marketing.

A further 72% of marketers responded that inconsistent data across technologies were a major challenge in implementing better marketing tools.

Personalized Marketing Lacks The Correct Tools

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IBM and Facebook Join Forces to Augment Personalized Marketing Campaigns

August 21, 2015

In case you haven’t noticed, marketing and ad campaigns on the Web are continuing to become more and more personalized, thanks to advances in targeting technology and an ever-growing mass of consumer data. One of the pioneers in this area is of course Facebook, which has access to an unfathomably large and growing user base willingly supplying a wealth of personal data that serves as the basis for its Custom Audience insights for marketers.

Technology giant IBM now plans to expand its own marketing tools and services with the recent signing of a deal with Facebook. Under the agreement the two companies will collaborate on merging their data to form a more comprehensive and effective version of the IBM Marketing Cloud campaign management platform. The goal is to address the three components of a successful campaign that must come together in order to attract the most business: ads should be personalized and friendly, only delivered to users it will be relevant for and delivered at an opportune moment.

The Marketing Cloud platform relies heavily on retail data such as purchase and item viewing history. By correlating this data with users’ Facebook data, marketers have access to a much broader range of information for personalizing ad campaigns and meeting the aforementioned criteria. As a result ads can be better targeted to specific market segments and tie in seamlessly with activity on retail sites.

The two companies will work together further in the brand new IBM Commerce THINKLab, of which Facebook is the first member. THINKLab is a research and collaboration effort dedicated to working directly with brands to develop beneficial new technologies and techniques for creating customized customer experiences.

This announcement reflects IBM’s interest in rethinking its business model and expanding support for newer technologies and trends in the industry. The company also signed a deal with social media service Twitter to incorporate its immense store of data into Watson, IBM’s cutting edge artificial intelligence platform. Now the company can focus on helping marketers develop successful ad campaigns that are more personal than ever without coming off as creepy to unsuspecting social media users.

IBM and Facebook Join Forces to Augment Personalized Marketing Campaigns

YC-Backed Answerbook Helps Retailers Automate Personalized Email Campaigns

A team of e-commerce vets is today launching a new service aimed at online retailers called Answerbook which allows companies to better target shoppers with highly personalized emails based on those customers’ website and email interactions as well as their purchase history. The solution today is largely aimed at smaller retailers, like those hosting their sites on e-commerce platforms like Shopify, where they have somewhere between half a million to a million in sales.

However, the company is already talking to larger businesses in an effort to develop an enterprise tier to its service, we’re told.

Answerbook was founded last year by Chris Nguyen and Lee Liu, both of whom have backgrounds in e-commerce and using data for targeting purposes. The two had previously built and sold their recruiting site JobLoft to onTargetjobs in 2007, and then sold dating site Cupid.com to EasyDate. They also founded a social commerce site called TeamSave in 2010.

While in all their prior efforts, the founders had learned the value of leveraging data in order to attract and re-engage users, it was with TeamSave that they began building an internal personalized marketing solution, using things like website preferences, clicks and purchase history to better reach their customers.

Explains Nguyen, smaller companies don’t have the tools to do advanced targeting the way that the bigger guys, like Amazon, eBay and Walmart do. And the solutions for email personalization that are out there today often only look at customer purchase history, not other factors.

“We started talking to e-commerce companies, and they said, ‘we have this problem – we’re sending blast emails everyday but we don’t know how to personalize this information,’” says Nguyen. The companies have internal teams who could pull data to personalize their emails, but by the time they did, it would be too late for that data to still be actionable. “Can you help us automate that?,” these businesses said.

“I love the fact that companies like Shopify allow you to make a fast and efficient online store in days, but they lack the resources to truly understand the marketing aspects,” Nguyen adds, explaining the hole in the market he hopes Answerbook can fill.

To use Answerbook, retailers place a single line of JavaScript code on their website, similar to setting up something like Google Analytics. Afterwards, they’re then able to track things like what pages and products a customer is viewing, what they’re placing in their cart, their purchase history and more. Combined with email interaction behavior, this data can then be used to create a series of personalized emails for each customer.

Included in Answerbook’s service are a half-dozen “triggers” a retailer can kick off, which help them to configure emails related to things like price drops, cart abandonment, items that have returned to stock, website abandonment, or they can send emails that simply recommend products or showcase what’s new and trending this week on the retailer’s site. Businesses can also choose to create their own custom triggers, or combine the ones provided to more narrowly target their customers. And Answerbook today works with other email services the company may already be using, like MailChimp, for example.

The company has been in private testing with a small handful of retailers ahead of its public launch. One online phone case company saw a 40% lift in sales after setting up Answerbook to email reminders to customers which included a 15% promotion to complete their orders. However, because of each business’s potential needs, and because of the newness of the service itself, a sales lift of that much may not be typical. Nguyen admits that the lift can range anywhere form 15% to 40%, depending on the given situation.

Answerbook is currently priced beginning at $50 per month for 500 customers analyzed and then increases in tiers that go from $150/month to $199/month, with an enterprise option in the works.

The company has also raised $700,000 in seed funding from Y Combinator, Kima Ventures, Tamares (a Palantir backer), and a group of San Francisco Bay area angels.

Longer-term, Nguyen says that Answerbook’s goal is to do more than personalize emails, but to personalize the targeted messages customers receive elsewhere, too. In the future, the service will include support for mobile commerce as well, allowing retailers to personalize their in-app push notifications and even SMS texts.

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YC-Backed Answerbook Helps Retailers Automate Personalized Email Campaigns