STACKED: The New Metric for CRM Success

In my last installment, I presented the case for why the email address has become the most powerful targeting mechanism in existence. In this, my final post, I will address how this changes everything we knew about CRM in a digital world.

Do you see any similarities between the images below? One common theme, perhaps?

If you answered that all of the sites below require an email address to register, you are correct. CRM and Email Marketing are no longer about sending outbound email.

They’re about the email address.

It’s not necessary to actually send mail to get your message in front of a customer, anymore. Technology has finally enabled the CRM marketer to find their customers or subscribers anywhere, across any device or channel. Whereas in the past, a brand’s media team or agency did all the media buying, now paid, biddable media is directly within the control of the Email/CRM marketer.

But while exciting, these new capabilities come without their own set of challenges. It takes a major shift in mindset. Try telling someone in email or CRM that they can now bid on their subscribers via paid media channels. The absolute first thing they’ll say is that they do not “do media buying”. They’ll tell you other teams handle it.

What organizations must realize is that: If you are speaking to your own customers – whether it’s in display, email or social –  that’s ALL CRM.

After all, messaging and engaging with your known universe of customers is the very core of CRM, isn’t it? Why should the channel in which you engage with them matter, so long as it’s effective?

The email marketer of the future will forgo email marketing specific metrics and start to focus on delivering ROI on a per customer basis. Brands that adopt new platforms and technologies communicating with customers across every digital channel will dramatically increase the reach and frequency of messaging against their customer base. The 20% avg. open rate will give way to the 65% customer engagement rate, as the CRM database finds its home in the middle of a multi-channel marketing solution.

If you do not already have this capability, there are many technology solutions, including LiveIntent, that can help you manage your budgets, spend and optimization so that you can reach your customers in any media channel.

But regardless of how, the time has come to start preparing ourselves for the “Internet of Things”, where your car, your home, your TV, your wristwatch – EVERYTHING – will be connected and dependent on an email address to login or register.

The future of CRM is filled with limitless possibilities, all made possible by less-than-sexy, often mistaken for dead, email address: The clear winner of the Internet.

You can of course reach me via email at: skrauss@liveintent.com or tweet me any feedback at @scottkrauss!

Originally published on LiveIntent.com

STACKED: The Age of the Customer

“The Age of the Customer.”

Well that’s what Forrester calls it anyways. Here’s a great excerpt from the reports summary:

“Empowered customers are disrupting every industry; competitive barriers like manufacturing strength, distribution power, and information mastery no longer create competitive advantage. In this age of the customer, the only sustainable competitive advantage is knowledge of and engagement with customers.”

Some more data courtesy of Gartner:

Get the point?

It’s become mission critical to identify and communicate with your customers in order to create and maintain a competitive advantage. Yet it’s becoming harder to actually do so because of the proliferation of devices and media channels where your customers are spending their time. But it’s clear if you can piece this all together, you are poised to create incredible value for your organization.

In my last piece, STACKED: The Race for 1-to-1 Marketing at Scale, I highlighted some of the massive industry shifts taking place right now and laying the foundation for brands to become customer centric in their approach to marketing. This week, I’m going to cover exactly how you can prepare your company for “The Age of the Customer”.

The first step to engaging customers on an individual level based using historical information/knowledge (1st party data) is identification. If you can’t identify your customers, then you sure as heck can’t engage with them in any meaningful way.

Think about all the credit card companies offering you special promotions for that card you already have, or the cable companies constantly bombarding you with ads for new customer rates, even though you’re a long standing customer that pays much more. Why? Because on the web, it’s very, very hard to tell your customers from your non-customers, since most online customer targeting is reliant on an outdated form of identification known as “cookies”.

As LiveIntent President, Dave Hendricks, pointed out in his Click Z article “People Versus Pixels”, cookies are a very poor identification method. They are used to identify a computer not a person, and are limited by browser, which makes speaking to customers vs. prospective customers difficult, if not impossible.

In an increasingly customer centric world, it’s getting harder and harder to identify your customers across their many devices and media channels…scared yet? I wouldn’t blame you if you answered “yes” but…. There’s hope!

 

That’s right. The email address.

The email address, you see, is the key to unlocking all of the challenges being presented by today’s changing digital world. It is the perfect identification layer needed to distinguish customers from prospective customers, buyers from non-buyers, heavy spenders from light spenders. The email address is both knowledge AND identity, and that’s the key.

If you were to sneak a peak into any major retailer’s customer database, 9 times out of 10 the profile key (aka the unique piece of data that ties all information together) will be an email address. That means all of the transactions related to that account are stored against your profiles email address. Think about all the data Amazon.com has stored on your email address. It would be incredibly valuable and from a marketing perspective, almost priceless.

The email address brings with it incredible capacity to on-board unbelievably valuable data, data that can be used to target an individual with a specific promotion or offer based on their profile, and there is no other identification method in existence that can do that.

Sure, a unique customer ID will do the trick on your own properties, but as soon as someone leaves you become reliant on an unreliable cookie to do the work for you. But the email address has stood the test of time. It is the glue that holds the entire Internet together and continues to grow more valuable as the Internet has matured.

Email is like a Blue Chip stock; it’s not sexy or volatile, it just delivers and pays dividends.

The email address is mission critical in the Marketing Stack of tomorrow. Its ability to identify customers across channels and devices, as well as bridge offline data, makes it the centerpiece to a customer centric universe.

The question now becomes, “Are you set up to take advantage of these new capabilities? Do you have the data and the scale (number of emails) to beat your competitors and win the battle for mindshare?”

Technology is making available some truly game changing capabilities but only those who are prepared with the right data will be in a position to win in this new Age of the Customer.

In my next and final installment, I’ll be outlining what CRM programs will look like in the very near future and how marketers can use technology to maximize the value of existing customers.

Originally published on LiveIntent.com

STACKED: The Race for 1-to-1 Marketing at Scale

What an exciting time to be alive! If you are in the marketing/ad tech space, you have front row seats to the greatest shift in communications the world has ever seen. Gone are the days of creating a single message that gets distributed to all of your customers and prospects alike. Technology has now made it possible to identify your customers across their many devices, different media channels, and browsers, with the ability to use customer profile and behavioral data to select the right message. 

Many would call this the “holy grail” of marketing, a true 1-to-1 dialog with your customers based on where they are in their life-cycle. We’re not quite there yet…but we can see it on the horizon, and in the very early innings of this ballgame, the major technology players are all starting to assemble their lineups.

Outside of the incredible rise of programmatic buying and real-time bidding, one of the more interesting trends right now is the merging of Ad and Marketing technology. For a long time, these two have been completely disparate. Ad tech was used to target prospective customers, while marketing tech was used to communicate with existing customers. Simple. Easy. Limitited.

But now, the environment is changing. Industry-changing trends and technology have heralded the convergence of ad and marketing technologies, with the promise of a single technology stack for both prospecting and CRM.

Above all, these three events are the most accountable for this evolution:

The Rise of Mobile:

Look no further than the above chart to see the rapid rise in mobile. 2014 is truly an inflection point, as total mobile users will surpass desktop users. After that, there’s no looking back. We now live in a mobile-first world. But the rise of mobile posses some serious threats for the Ad Tech space, specifically in the area of audience addressability.

In a recent AdMonsters piece, “ID Is Key: Unlocking Mobile Tracking & Cross-Device Measurement, Part I” James Lamerti GM and VP of AdTruth had the following to say:

“Mobile inventory is less valuable than desktop because it’s very difficult to build audience in mobile – we simply have no identification layer,” says James Lamberti GM and VP of AdTruth. “We need the ability to speak to advertisers and confidently say, ‘Here is my mobile inventory, here are my heavy travelers, here are males 18 to 25, here luxury brand buyers, etc.’”

That’s a pretty straightforward look at the problem. CRM data, however, can help unlock the ID layer. The email address, for example, is the perfect identification layer for a few reasons:

• Almost 50% of the world has one. 2014 will see more than 4B global email accounts. That’s 4x the size of Facebook.
• They are unique. Sure, people may have a few different email addresses, but they are unique to an individual.
• They are cross channel. You email is the same on the desktop, phone, tablet, TV, car, house etc…Every major platform (Apple, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, Pandora) requires an email address for sign-up.
• Email is where your customers are spending their time. Email is the #1 app on mobile and tablet devices, in terms of overall time spent. Marketers and Advertisers of course want to be on any platform where their customers are spending the majority of their time.

Facebook:

We have to give Facebook substantial credit for the convergence of ad and marketing tech. In one fell swoop, Facebook’s launch of Custom Audience successfully combined RTB and CRM. Custom Audience has now given way to other similar solutions from competitors. Twitter has a Tailored Audience product, Google offers CRM data matchingwithin Gmail and I’d fully expect that other major players with a large number of logged in users (Yahoo!, LinkedIn, Amazon, Pandora, Apple) to follow suit in the coming months.

With Custom Audience, Facebook really addressed a major pain point with CRM marketers. Prior to the launch, email was the only arrow in their quiver when it came to communication with their existing customers. In order to reach these customers, especially those that didn’t open regularly, the answer was often: “Send more email!” Not always a bad idea, but with Custom Audience, Facebook unlocked a brand new way of speaking to your own customers: 3rd party media. Now brands can increase their reach and frequency of messaging against highly valuable segments, using 1st party customer data to target based on purchase history or stage within the purchase cycle. This was a major, major win.

The Death of the 3rd Party Cookie:

There’s no doubt the 3rd party cookie is going the way of the dinosaur, as many in our industry are predicting it’s demise within the next 24 months. Browser makers and the rise of mobile have certainly accelerated their demise, but let’s be honest…they were never really any good to begin with. The accuracy of 3rd party cookies has never been good… ever! Maybe 30-40% of the time you hit the right audience, with the remainder being simply wasted. That kind of accuracy was never sustainable. So as the cookie fades to black we’re seeing companies begin to look for alternatives.

Just take a look at the M&A over the last few months:

Salesforce buys ExactTarget

Oracle buys Responsys

Adobe buy Neolane

Experian buys AdTruth (via 41st Parameter acquisition)

Criteo buys Tedemis

AdRoll buys Userfox

Lotame buys AdMobious

IgnitionOne buys Knotice

Each acquisition looking to address the same problem: how to target an addressable audience across their devices? 

The interesting trend you may or may not pick up on is that most of the companies acquired have roots in email. As I mentioned before, this shouldn’t really be much of a surprise given that the email address is as good of an ID as there is, likely the best.

The ability to identify with and target with accuracy is incredibly important. Just look at Facebook’s incredible rise as a mobile advertising player. They are projected to capture an astonishing 22% of all mobile ad dollars in 2014. This is no small feat, and really speaks to the need to provide marketers and advertisers addressability in a mobile-first world.

In a world with no cookies, 1st party log in data is King.

These are the major market trends that are forcing everyone from advertisers and marketers to technology providers to rapidly adapt their product offerings. In part two of this series, I’ll take a look at exactly how the major advertiser and technology companies are building platforms to address the current marketplace and the needs of marketers and advertisers.

Originally published on LiveIntent.com

For Publishers - It’s Time To Become More Like Facebook

Let’s start by stating the facts. Mobile content consumption is changing everything about the media landscape, faster than anyone could have ever predicted. In the wake of this massive shift, is publisher CPM’s and their ability to generate revenue from mobile page views. Just as publishers were starting to come to grips with declines in print ad spend…mobile has come along and completely upended everything. All one needs to do is look at this chart from the Atlantic to see what’s the future holds:

Its not all doom and gloom though…just take a look at what Facebook is doing in mobile and it’s clear that there is money to be made in mobile…plenty of it. Facebook went from no mobile ad revenues in 2012 to mobile now making up 40% of its overall revenue. Quite a stunning turn of events for a company that admitted in their IPO prospectus that their mobile growth was accelerating rapidly and they didn’t have a way (at the time) to monetize those users. Twitter is also growing mobile revenues at a triple digit pace….A lot can be learned from the success that Social Networks are now seeing in mobile.

John Ebber in this AdExchanger.com article Margins and The First Inning sums it up quite nicely:

“Big properties with addressable first-party data - logins - seem to hold the cards for true, by-the-impression, sometimes real-time biddable, audience buying in mobile.”

And there you have it…the secret to Facebook’s mobile success…logins. When advertisers buy mobile ads from Facebook, they know they are targeting the exact audiences they want to reach. Whereas if they are buying mobile display inventory across multiple exchanges it's more akin to finding a needle in a haystack. Why? Because mobile lacks a cross device ID. Right now there is no reliable way to target specific audiences. Facebook has capitalized on this in a huge way by offering up their rich profile data for targeting and placing large ad units within the Newsfeed. The combination of these two factors has made Facebook an overnight player in the mobile ad space.

            So what does Facebook’s success in mobile have to do with publishers? Well in my opinion, everything. The real key to Facebook’s mobile success has been the fact that they have logged in users. While many publishers don’t have perpetually logged in users like Facebook, they have another weapon. The Email Address. If you have someone’s email address then they are as good as a logged in user. You can target to that email address with your 1^st party data, 3rd party data, offline data etc... The Inbox needs to become your focus for finding perpetually logged in users. And with email being #1 in terms of time spent in mobile, it’s a good chance that’s exactly where you’ll find your subscribers:

(Source: http://www.emarketer.com/Article/How-Do-Internet-Users-Divvy-Up-Their-Desktop-Mobile-Web-Time/1009841)

The other reason Social Networks are so successful is their Newsfeed. Allowing for infinite scrolling means you have far more opportunities than a standard webpage for the number of ads that can included because the “page” is never ending. I think publishers can take a page from social here and create a similar experience with their emails. Email has always been, particularly for publishers, a channel of aggregation. Meaning emails typically contains links and possibly small summaries for a multitude of articles from a publisher’s site. But what if we could re-think this dynamic and begin to create Newsfeed like emails? Could publishers solve the two biggest challenges in mobile (room for ads & targeting) with email? I certainly think there’s room for an email newsletter that is much greater in length to what we typically see today. No longer would subscribers have to go back to a site...the ads would be served right within the email. Two birds, one stone...email newsfeed!

Email Never Lies

Tell me lies
Tell me sweet little lies
(Tell me lies, tell me, tell me lies)
Oh, no, no you can't disguise
(You can't disguise, no you can't disguise)
Tell me lies
Tell me sweet little lies

- Little Lies by “Fleetwood Mac”

There’s a considerable amount of lying in the world of digital advertising. Unintentional…yes, however lies nonetheless. The lies being told are about your identity. Advertisers, who are looking to target specific audiences online, are being misled about who you are, what you’re shopping for and what you’re interested in. Which is why most of us have been targeted and served ads that make absolutely no sense based on who we “actually” are.

So who’s telling these lies? Cookies…cookies are like your local weatherman, if they’re accurate 50% of the time they’re doing a good job. Explained perfectly in this Digiday article “The Big Data Accuracy Myth”. It’s not that cookies are pathological; they’re just not very good at telling the truth. In the “Desktop” web, technology companies, publishers and advertisers heavily rely upon cookies to reach targeted audiences. Unfortunately the cookie by its very nature is not a highly reliable signal. Why? It’s quite simple, the way people use PC’s is vastly different from they way they use say Tablets or Smartphones.

Just think of the PC at your home…does it have more than one user? My wife and I both use the same PC at home as well as the same browser…so when I’m browsing the web, who am I? And when my wife browses, who is she? Can a cookie tell us apart? If my wife was on a designer shoe site, will an advertiser re-target me when I hop on to check the score of the Mets game? These are the little lies being told on the web. Advertisers are missing their mark because there’s just no way cookies can be 100% accurate.

In a world full of lies, who can you trust? Email…you can trust email. Email is something that is personal and unique to each one of us. Email is as personal to us as our Facebook account or social security number. And while I share many things with my wife; the computer, the television even dessert sometimes….I do not share my email account with her. Nor does she share hers with me and I suspect that this probably sounds very familiar to most. You just don’t share you email with anyone, it’s yours, period. Which makes it the perfect attribute for targeting because there is a 1:1 relationship between an email address and its owner. So whatever data you have stored against that particular email address now becomes the basis for how you segment and target and subsequently increases your accuracy two fold.

And as mobile continues to eat the world; the email address becomes increasingly important. Without the use of UDID’s and the overall decline of 3^rd party cookies, mobile is scrambling to find a unique identifier that can be used to target consumers.  In a recent AdMonsters piece, “ID Is Key: Unlocking Mobile Tracking & Cross-Device Measurement, Part I” James Lamerti GM and VP of AdTruth had the following to say:

"Mobile inventory is less valuable than desktop because it's very difficult to build audience in mobile – we simply have no identification layer," say James Lamberti GM and VP of AdTruth. "We need the ability to speak to advertisers and confidently say, 'Here is my mobile inventory, here are my heavy travelers, here are males 18 to 25, here luxury brand buyers, etc.'"

The thing is…an identification layer already exists; it’s called the email address. And oh yeah….email is the app people access on their smartphones the most. A match made in heaven wouldn’t you say?  More people have email accounts than Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and Pinterest combined. It’s cemented its status as the unique identifier of the web and if you’re not using it to target, you’re being lied to…

A Glimpse Into The Future...

There's been quite a bit of chatter around the Salesforce.com/ExactTarget merger this week. With many industry experts & analysts all chiming in with their opinion. If you're an avid reader of all things digital media/ad tech/marketing tech...chances are you saw a move like this coming and likely many more just like it on the way. It's certainly no secret that companies like Salesforce.com, Adobe, Oracle, Google etc...have all made moves to bolster their end to end tech stacks, in an effort to become a one stop shop for their customers. Moving into the CRM/Email Marketing Space is simply the logical evolution here. Which is why I've aggregated a series of articles....all highlighting why we'll see this trend continue.

First, just take a look at the Marketing Technology LUMAscape. Consolidation is bound to occur:

MARKETING TECHNOLOGY LUMAscape from Terence Kawaja

The Data Providers: One Quadrant Chart To Rule Them All

Great insight from Ramsey McGrory, President & CEO of AddThis in this AdExchanger piece:

"In this piece, I did not call out a Z axis of diversified IT players such as IBM, Adobe, Salesforce, Oracle, SAP or even Amazon and Google (DSPs, ATDs, DMPs, Exchanges and the like fall somewhere on this Z axis as well). I believe they represent the sector focused on delivering some combination of infrastructure, data and services to companies that are consumer facing. These IT juggernauts are competitive with the largest consumer technology companies, and while they may not own data themselves, they must have data at scale integrated into their platform to provide valuable products and services."

The Data Driven Enterprise Marketing Revolution

Bizo's Russ Glass provides some great insight in this AllThingsD piece:

CRM as the system of record

"Salesforce has been spending much of the last decade building its CRM system. Since more than 75 percent of the companies that use Salesforce are B2B, the company’s CRM platform is arguably the system of record for the B2B marketer. This puts Salesforce, as the fastest-growing scaled vendor in the space, in the driver’s seat to become the platform where marketers keep their treasure trove of prospect and customer information and interaction data. Oracle, NetSuite, IBM, Google, SAP — and arguably even Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter — don’t want to see Salesforce have the lock on such valuable data. To fend off the Salesforce threat, these companies are developing their own audience data strategies, ranging from aggressive acquisitions to building cookie data exchanges, or even building their own social networks (if they’re not one already). As each realizes, the vendor that controls audience data “wins” because all marketing decisions are keyed off of this information."

B2B Audience Targeting Works On Facebook, Says Bizo's Russ Glass

Yet another gem here from Russ in this AdExchanger.com interview:

Is the marketing automation sector interested in your B2B data?

"To be honest, it's the crux of what is so exciting about the next stage of this space. Real-time bidding (RTB) brings phenomenal value, but there's a little bit of "so what?" When you can start to integrate automation into the core systems that marketers are using to be successful, now things get exciting because you've enabled more efficiency in the enterprise and the marketing team than they've had before. I'll give you an example. Bizo has integrated with Eloqua – one of many systems that we're integrated with – and this enables a marketer with the same process that they’re doing day-to-day, but through automation. It syncs email with social and display such that within a certain marketing automation wave, a consumer is going to get the display ad that syncs up with that message. As they move down the funnel, they’re going to get different ads, case studies – whatever the marketing may demand, based on where they are in the tunnel. From an outbound standpoint, you just automated a huge part of what the marketer does beyond email.

What's even more aligned with the Holy Grail of marketing is that all of that information about number of display ads viewed and that this person was served two social ads – that's now all part of the attribution data. You as a marketer can see how you are going to most effectively model to drive success. That’s a big example of the power that automation, integrated with the right marketing systems, can create."

Is offline starting to play in your world more?

"It is, but the last statement you made is important in here. We use offline data to help our clients associate their CRM system and all of their first-party data with our broader data set. Bizo doesn't maintain any kind of PII ourselves, but we help out clients be smarter about their data sets and more effective with their data sets through offline data. The onboarding process actually tailors the offline data."

What is the offline data these days that people try to onboard or use through you guys?

"It's the business email address. That's the key to the B2B "kingdom" – the business email address."

Russ is dead on here and not only is email king in B2B but B2C as well - hence the ExactTarget acquisition.

CRM Vendors In Hot Pursuit Of Paid Media

More goodness from the fine folks at AdExchanger.com:

"With digital marketing budgets expected to rise this year, customer relationship management (CRM) software vendors are ramping up their pursuit of paid media budgets.

“Marketing is perhaps the hottest area in the customer-facing realm right now, and it is evident the place has multiple holes to fill and many approaches to take,” observed Paul Greenberg, president of The 56 Group, a consulting firm that focuses on CRM strategic services.

Combining data sets – i.e. “breaking the silos” to serve customers relevant ads and offers – is one of the holes that marketers are trying to fill. CRM vendors are approaching the problem by offering more ways for companies to fuse their CRM data with advertising.

Customer demand drove Salesforce.com’s decision to produce Social.com, a tool that lets marketers connect their purchase and customer loyalty data, as well as data from contests, whitepaper downloads and other conversion pages to their social ad campaigns, according to Peter Goodman, VP of Salesforce Marketing Cloud."

Changing Lanes: Solving the Decade-Old Problem of Cross-Channel Ad Attribution

Surprised to see another AdExchanger.com article? Don't be! Kim Reed Perrell CEO of Adconion Direct offers some great insight here:

"However, unifying digital spending is a way for most advertisers to begin aligning their attribution capabilities. Simply put, if your media campaigns aren’t served, managed and distributed from a single platform for a single user, you can’t know the impact of one touch point to another for any given user and therefore can’t make meaningful attribution models."

JEGI's Tolman Geffs Talks CRM Developments, e-Commerce Trends

In this AdExchanger.com article, Jordan Edminston Group's Tolman Geffs details their view of the market:

"Trend number two is integrating that customer experience through the e-commerce platform back into the CRM system and then into the marketing machine. That integration is the key next step. For the next three to seven years, you’re going to see a tremendous amount of investment, growth and M&A in that area. Salesforce buying ExactTarget is a great example of that. That’s an example of integrating CRM into marketing messaging.

For the players in ad tech, this is an emerging stack that a number of them will get acquired into. You’re already seeing this with folks like Oracle, IBM and SAP building both stacks of e-commerce capabilities and enterprise marketing capabilities. They’re going to continue making those acquisitions and those will be increasingly integrated."

At The Merkle Summit: Building The Marketer's Competitive Advantage

David William CEO of CRM powerhouse Merkle provides his view:

"Revisiting his “Connected CRM” (cCRM for short) theme of the previous year, Williams provided an update and noted the move “from the campaign-focused world to the customer-focused world,” and how it’s now about utilization of relationships, rather than “the matching” of data points. And, for the marketer’s bottom-line purposes, it’s about how those relationships get monetized."