-
The battle between reach and privacy has been a perennial struggle for marketers.
Many of the most common tracking tools used by marketers expose user data to more scrutiny than many of us would like to admit. And amidst the growing global conversation of user privacy spurred by the EU’s GDPR ruling and Facebook’s data scandals, this balance is more important than ever.
How can marketers reach consumers while respecting their right to privacy?
How Marketers Track Data
Generally speaking, the question of user privacy comes down to which method marketers use to track user activity across devices: Deterministic or probabilistic. If you want catch the attention of more customer, you have to invest in digital marketing services for small business.
- Deterministic tracking leverages specific customer data (such as logins, physical addresses, registration data, or even offline customer data) to track activity.
- Probabilistic tracking method uses data analyses to deliver anonymous information about users. For example, a marketer may display ads to PCs on a specific WiFi connection. The next day, the marketer sees a mobile device connected to that same network. It’s probable—but not certain—that the mobile user is the same as the desktop user, or at least belongs to the same household. A medical practice management system is a type of healthcare software that manages the day-to-day operations of a clinic, such as appointment scheduling, billing and other administrative tasks
The privacy issues here are clear. Deterministic profiles are great for marketing specificity, but they leave little to the imagination—and are built by the type of personal data tracking that makes headlines when a company’s data handling goes awry.
Probabilistic methods are harder to build, yet they’re easier to scale and are naturally protective of user data. Of course, each method of tracking comes with its own benefits and its own risks, and most brand marketers end up using a bit of both depending on their campaign’s goals.
The bottom line? Companies know how to reach their users, but some take their users’ privacy more seriously than others. Every business collecting information needs to take agency of its data policies and not leave data management decisions to its vendors.
-
Google AMP. Hero or zero? Friend or foe?
That was the question on every marketer’s mind when Google announced it would be testing its Accelerated Mobile Page framework in email environments back in February. To hear Google tell it, this is nothing but a positive thing. But should we really take their word for it?
We recommend that marketers take a step back and examine all the perspectives before chugging the Google Kool-Aid.
The benefits of AMP emails
Based on how the AMP framework upgrades the average email, it’s hard to disagree that it could offer some serious benefits to both publishers and users.
AMPs enable dynamic applications, widgets, and scripts to operate within each email, giving marketers a “control tower” for managing a customer’s information. If you are interesting in buy a Industrial magnet, check the 10 ways businesses can benefit from industrial magnets.
For example, online retailers wouldn’t need to send follow-up emails with updated shipping details on customer orders—it could all be managed from an app in the host email.
This provides simplicity from an email volume standpoint, and we could certainly see these improvements benefiting an email campaign’s open rates, engagement, and deliverability overall. If you need treatment for any mental health disorders such as depression, anxiety, ADHD, OCD, bipolar, PTSD is important that you look for the help from a psychiatry clinic.
What Google won’t tell you
The Kool-Aid is sweet, but it’ll give you cavities. By their nature, Google AMPs reduce control for customers and the email marketers who serve them:
- Loss of Data: When we create backchannels for data to be updated and managed from outside sources, we increase the risk of that data being lost.
- Security: Threat actors can embed malware in HTML scripts, and the AMP framework increases an inbox’s vulnerability to these attacks.
- Loss of Choice: Rather than trusting that our email data will be kept safe and archived, we now have to wonder whether our email details will be changing and updating without our knowledge.
Is it friend or foe?
Like most digital marketing advancements, AMP for email brings both benefits and drawbacks.
It’s not likely to disrupt the industry too much one way or the other, but we recommend that all marketers do their research before trusting any new system.
-
Your email campaign is in danger—and the harder you push, the worse it gets.
Yes, today we’re talking about email fatigue. For those unfamiliar, email fatigue occurs when a company oversaturates a subscriber with emails. Maybe the company makes contact too often. Maybe the emails are irrelevant to the subscriber’s interests. In most cases, it’s a little bit of both. According to research published by MediaPost, 74 percent of U.S. consumers feel overwhelmed by the number of emails they receive.
This is a bigger problem than many companies realize. Email campaign success relies on several key metrics: Open rates, click-through rates, spam scores, and unsubscribe rates, to name a few. These metrics are largely calculated by how many emails you send, how many subscribers open them, and the level of engagement they have with each email, also if you’re interested in protecting your email and systems, you can go to sites such as https://www.fortinet.com/products/siem/fortisiem to find more information about this.
Without getting too in the weeds, the rule of thumb is that the more emails you send that go unnoticed, the worse off your campaign will be. And when left unchecked for long enough, this lack of engagement can actually begin to damage your brand’s reputation.
Strategic Email Marketing
Combating email fatigue means learning about your subscribers and finding the optimal way to keep them engaged. This is a delicate balancing act, and every consumer has a different level of tolerance for what’s considered “too much.”
General practices for improving your email engagement include doing more research into your subscribers, giving users more inbox customization options, and A/B testing various email templates to see which produce the best results. It may sound simple, but without the right help, few companies can pull it off. That’s why we’re here.
We address email fatigue by working with you to develop specific email processes that integrate your current strategy, your email platform, and your available marketing assets. It’s a long process, but we’ll guide you each step of the way. After all, you worked hard to earn your place in your subscribers’ inboxes. Shouldn’t you stay there?
-
We’ll make this easy: No. It’s not.
Obviously, any marketing campaign needs to use cutting edge tech if it wants to generate leads for funnels and turn them into conversions, but technology alone won’t do the trick. What good are predictive learning analytics if you don’t know how to visualize the data? And why bother with machine learning if you don’t, say, apply those algorithms to personalize your email drip campaigns?
Our point is that to produce results, you need to know how to deploy such technologies, how to integrate each solution into your systems, and how to maintain your software over time. Also look look for the paystubs generator free for the security of a companies payment.
The Value of Third-Party Implementation Services
Industry leading solutions like marketing automation platforms or internet-of-things (IoT) incorporation aren’t easy to master. The initial investment can be difficult enough to justify, but when the software is incorrectly installed or configured poorly, it can create serious setbacks in any organization.
This is why implementation services are so important to project success. Having third-party backup with zero trust nework access to support your software investment guarantees efficiency for every project milestone:
- Defining requirements and understanding which software components will drive the most value
- Design architecture and how to integrate solutions into existing systems
- Personalized configuration and installation of solutions with minimal system downtime
- Testing to guarantee that every aspect works correctly before bringing customers into the fold
- Ongoing management and support that ensures your solutions remain properly integrated, no matter what changes may occur in your system
Half the Effort Doesn’t Get You across the Finish Line
In short, acquiring new technology is only half the battle. Many top software testing companies says that you can start reaping the rewards of your new marketing investment, you need to ensure that your software is installed, tested, and deployed by industry experts who can bring out the full value of your solution.
-
Your cookies are crumbling; and for once, that’s a good thing.
It wasn’t that long ago that many consumers didn’t even understand what cookies were or why they should care. Of course, these days, everyone knows about cookies—just in time to watch their demise at the hands of new government regulation and consumers’ own behaviors.
Mobile Cookie Crusher
Research continues to see an increase in mobile browsing in recent years, peaking at 52.2 percent of total worldwide browsing in 2018. This trend is one of the biggest factors affecting cookies as a campaign tracking tool.
On mobile devices, where unique device IDs tell websites who’s visiting, there’s less need for invasive cookies that surreptitiously track user behaviors—the phone provides all the goods. From a marketing attribution standpoint, this is great news. Cookies were a workaround solution for tracking user behavior across traditional browsing channels, but thanks to mobile, companies have access to more attribution tools than ever before.
It’s no coincidence that the rise of mobile browsing is aligned with an increase in privacy concerns. With our mobile devices, we’re giving applications more data than ever before—GPS locations, address book info, device storage, and more. And while these features open up some great marketing strategies, such as GPS proximity marketing that ties a business’s digital presence with its brick-and-mortar store, this data ubiquity presents some challenges too.
Amidst privacy concerns, governments across the globe are taking a stand on how companies leverage user data, with the biggest targets being the cookies themselves.
Cookies Are Personal Data
The use of cookies is already governed by particular rules. But the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), set to go into effect on May 25th 2018, is pushing this even further by clearly delineating the role of cookies as personal data. Does this mean cookies are done for? It may take some time, but we see this as the inevitable outcome. The mobile eclipse will continue to push desktop-centric attribution tools to the background in favor of newer solutions. And for marketers plugged in to the latest mobile marketing solutions, this can only be a good thing.
-
It’s no secret that eCommerce has seen some great advancements over the past few years, particularly with the proliferation of digital marketing. But so far, companies have struggled to bridge the gap between their online and offline marketing campaigns in terms of understanding which strategies actually drive sales.
It’s estimated 90 percent of retail sales still happen in brick-and-mortar stores, but with so many digital marketing components at play for the average business, how much of this profit is attributable to online marketing spend?
Advancements in Campaign Tracking
This concept is called offline attribution—understanding which online marketing channels drive the bulk of offline sales. To meet these goals, companies are advancing the way we look at digital marketing and are more tightly integrating their current assets to find these insights:
- Sophisticated paid search campaign studies are increasing, each of which provide data to better define connections between offline and online channels;
- Per Google, offline attribution is possible through the use of mobile location tracking data tied to search queries, a new metric called Store Visit Conversions;
- The increasing use of My Business listings for local businesses and other web-based snippets that let users directly attribute traffic to specific website components.
But companies like Google are taking things even further. The company is leveraging its considerable mapping tools and geographic tracking technology to better define in-store locations. This means that Google will have more insight than ever into the physical locations of each business to complement its arsenal of user-submitted search data—the perfect recipe for offline attribution.
As time goes on, we expect more companies to begin tracking these metrics and leveraging these strategies to learn what’s truly driving their sales.
-
The year 2017 marked some significant changes in the advertising landscape, particularly for paid television.
If you’re an advertising executive in the television industry, you may want to look away:
- In 2017, digital ads finally surpassed TV ads in total revenue generated.
- In Q1 alone, the U.S. paid TV market lost over 762,000 subscribers.
- Streaming service providers are on the rise: Netflix alone has recently achieved more subscribers than the entirety of the S. cable TV market.
You may notice a trend—the confluence of streaming service providers and low-cost digital marketing are slowly crushing television-based paid media. Digital advertising will inevitably push out old-fashioned TV ad spots altogether, but you marketers shouldn’t count out TV just yet.
Cross-Channel Marketing: Bridging the Old and the New
Television may be out of fashion, but it still has value to share. Forward-thinking companies like Google are helping users bridge their old-fashioned advertising assets with their more modern online marketing channels.
The company recently announced a real-time trigger allowing advertisers to publish specific online ads that correspond with events happening in the real world. Companies can leverage popular TV events, sports games, political addresses, holidays, and even the local weather conditions to create customized ad promotions at the click of a button.
By using tools that instantaneously publish ads based on what happens on live TV, advertisers gain an important connection between their established and digital ad channels. They no longer have to rely on intrusive commercials or interruptive outbound advertising to put their ad dollars to work; they address consumers in the moment and speak to them with fresh and relevant promotions.
These changes speak to the advertising necessity of connecting real-life events with the often abstract outreach channels used to address consumers. And while Google is currently leading the charge in this area, we’re willing to bet that ad campaigns with both televised and digital components will become the marketing norm in 2018.
-
The weather’s cooling down and the leaves are starting to fall, which means that 2017 is on its way out. What a year it’s been—the marketing landscape has seen some drastic shifts over the past year, many of which were related to big data, advanced analytics, and the use of cognitive machine learning (all of which you can gain a deeper insight of, on www.newdata.ai).
With so many exciting tech updates on the marketing horizon, I thought this would be a great time to review three of the big data trends that have defined 2017, courtesy of research done by IBM. Let’s dig in.
1. Acceptance That More Data Isn’t the Answer
In our information-hungry society, we tend to think that data is the answer to everything. It’s not. Not even close.
Most companies have only begun to scratch the surface of all the data available to them—IBM’s research estimated that 88 percent of all available data was considered “dark” to most organizations, meaning that it existed in unstructured forms such as images, natural language, or generalized behaviors that can’t be measured by traditional analytics. Think about that—88 percent of data untouched, never mind the constant influx of new data that we have coming in from all channels.
In response, businesses are changing the way they look at data and realizing that more is not better. Instead, 2017 has been about looking at new ways to assess the data we have on hand derive more meaningful insights from the noise. From the volume of data to its variety, to the speed of data collection, this past year has marked a shift towards data quality over data quantity.
2. Cognitive Insights for Consumer Connections
The point of all data collection vis-à-vis marketing is to learn more about our customers and deepen the connections we make with them. Traditional analytics have shown some success at this goal, but in 2017, we’ve seen the industry take a more drastic shift toward the use of AI and machine learning tools to assess broad data sets. Part of this has to do with the fact that most businesses have an unmanageable amount of data to dig through. IBM noted that by 2016, 90 percent of the world’s data had been created in the past 12 months alone. And this trend is showing no signs of slowing in 2017.
Basic performance analytics can’t begin to crack “dark” data or derive any type of meaningful insights from huge and disconnected data sets, but with AI-based analytics and machine learning algorithms becoming common tools for big data analysis, we expect more businesses to tap into this wealth of information to create more meaningful connections with their consumers.
3. AI’s Role in Influencer Marketing
Influencer marketing as we know it today has been around for a few years, but its use is soaring in 2017. Forbes predicted that 2017 would be the year of influencer marketing, but what Forbes didn’t predict was the role that AI would play in connecting those influencers to brands. It’s no secret that companies that successfully leverage influencer marketing gain valuable brand exposure. But on the other side of the coin, the rise of influencer options makes it more critical than ever that businesses connect with the right social media personalities.
Companies are beginning to understand this and apply more powerful AI algorithms into their influencer search in hopes of finding the perfect candidates. Given that there are millions of influencers out there to choose from, we expect an influx of advanced influencer matching tools to enter the marketplace within the next few years.
Forecasting the Future of Big Data
The biggest data trend that we’ve seen in 2017 so far is the realization that data production has far outpaced data analysis. We have too much junk and no way to organize it—and business owners are tired of trying. In response, organizations have pushed development of new cognitive analysis tools that can assess these data sets in more advanced ways. And while the fruits of these labors have yet to be seen, we’ll be eagerly watching to see what the future has in store for big data.
-
In the end, everything comes back to marketing. The current trend of big data is no exception.
Marketing is the workhorse of profit growth, and as such, it’s often a key beneficiary when a business invests in emerging technologies. And when it comes to how big data can influence marketing strategy, the possibilities are nearly endless.
Big Data and Modern Marketing
It’s not hard to see how big data has begun reshaping the modern marketing cycle. While marketing was once a game of prediction and after-the-fact adjustment, big data analytics make it possible for companies to proactively find opportunities for growth.
For example, by finding patterns within massive amounts of product sales data, companies can learn more about how to optimize pricing at the customer level to maximize profits. Research by McKinsey found that even a one percent increase in product price increases operating profits by 8.7 percent. Big data offers a way to identify optimal pricing increases to support revenue growth without risking substantial numbers of customers.
These big data insights can be applied to every aspect of a marketing strategy, from supporting customer acquisition to reducing customer churn to improving a company’s existing products. Data is power when it comes to marketing, and armed with big data, marketers have plenty of new avenues to explore.
What the Future Holds
Big data offers some exciting new possibilities for the future of marketing. We’re already seeing how big data analytics are redefining old strategies and opening the doors for other system-wide integrations, such as integrating marketing stacks at the data level to creating end-to-end systems of insight, but other areas offer similar opportunities for growth.
Moving forward, we expect to see exceptional growth in operational analytics, social media marketing, and customer relationship management, across the board. These are key areas of focus for emerging marketing technologies—and once people become accustomed to big data as an inevitable part of marketing strategy, the opportunities will only increase.
-
The marketing world is abuzz about artificial intelligence (AI), personalization, and so-called “data-driven solutions.” These tech-enabled strategies promise a completely new way to reach consumers, where algorithms swallow up consumer data, craft in-depth buyer personas based on their behaviors, and deliver customized messaging to each individual.
And while we certainly haven’t yet reached Asimov levels of computerized intelligence in our marketing platforms, the industry has seen some significant advancements over the past few years. But, we are hoping to hire SEO agency Austin, who can help us meet our marketing and SEO needs.
- AI-enabled media buys: Algorithms that manage automated PPC campaigns and help marketers determine the most cost-effective channels for digital advertising.
- Web personalization: By tracking and assessing hundreds of data points provided by consumer demographics, location, and browsing history, site owners can promote offers and experiences that are custom-tailored to user behaviors.
- Customer service: AI-enabled chatbots are proving to be powerful customer experience management tools, accessing millions of customer-provided data points to spot problems, detect patterns, and offer fast problem resolution without the input of human agents.
Despite these notable applications, not everybody believes in the future of AI marketing. Indeed, a growing subset of the marketing population believes that AI is just another buzzword that offers dubious value.
Is AI Marketing Overhyped?
Emarketer published results of a study conducted by marketing automation provider Resulticks, showing some cynical results about the current state of tech-focused marketing. Of the 318 senior-level marketers surveyed:
- 47 percent believe AI is overhyped
- 31 percent believe big data is a big joke
- 14 percent believe that personalization is still out of reach
Part of the problem, they argued, has to do with the nature of marketing itself. Marketing is a game of persuasion; a delicate balance between promising and delivering. And of those surveyed, many believed that technology companies are notoriously bad at delivering on the solutions that sound so revolutionary in their advertisements.
These detractors may have a point. AI is still regarded with a sort of mysticism in the marketing world; marketers don’t really understand how these algorithms work, but they press forward with their use all the same. And while AI solutions such as intelligent chatbots may be commonplace these days, the marketing world has yet to truly embrace AI as a fundamental aspect of data aggregation and customer management. In this sense, AI could certainly be considered “overhyped.” However, overhyped doesn’t mean ineffective, and while many might consider AI unworthy of the praise it receives as the marketing wave of the future, it would be shortsighted to dismiss it as a mere gimmick.
Automation Is the Future
In truth, we can’t escape AI automation’s growing influence in the marketing world. Whether or not it’s overhyped may be subjective, but there’s no arguing that the influx of data analytics tools and machine learning applications entering the mainstream is changing how marketers approach data science. Data taken from Salesforce’s 2017 State of Marketing Report shows that 67 percent of marketing leaders currently use a marketing automation platform, with 21 percent expecting to adopt one within the next two years.
At this time, AI’s primary function is that of productivity tool—marketers can use standard algorithms to streamline their paint-by-numbers processes, freeing them up for higher level decision making about strategy. Time will tell whether it has the potential for more, but as of now, there’s no denying that AI has a role to play in marketing success.
Author Archives: Mark Olson
ENABLING EFFECTIVE AND EFFICIENT MARKETING.
Ex3 Solutions, Inc.
275 Rose Avenue
Suite 212
Pleasanton, CA 94566
© 2026 Ex3 Solutions, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Privacy Policy | Terms of Use Designed by Reinhardt Designs