Category: Global

Introducing Ematic’s new SEO service

Does it occur to you that online competition is getting fierce, and it’s harder to sustain a good profit from just relying on ads to bring customers? Let us introduce you how Ematic’s new SEO service can help.

Are you making the most of your Marketing Automation Capabilities?

Everyone understands that the future of marketing is a personalized experience for every user, and that having the ability to understand the customer journey and map key marketing communications at precise moments in that journey can result in a massive uplift in customer acquisition and retention. That’s why many companies consider automation capabilities as one of the important criteria when choosing their marketing platforms. Some even purchase advanced marketing automation platforms in hope of delivering an omni-channel 1:1 personalization experience. Assessing your maturity in marketing automation Let’s say you purchased a platform, painted a promising vision and set goals akin to a new year’s resolution. After months spent on platform integration, you kicked off by automating one or two marketing campaigns, such as welcome emails or manually curating a few segmented messages. Although things seem to be up and running, you realize that most of the time you’re still sending batch and blast communication on the platform, and the automation capacities are greatly under-utilized. Does it all sound too familiar? Don’t get us wrong. We are not over-advocating marketing automation as if it should be the centerpiece. However, there are certain aspects in your long-term strategy, like personalization at scale or consistent inbound pipeline, that can only be achieved effectively through the help of marketing automation. To give another perspective – you’ve invested in the platforms and paid for the capabilities, and know that a good return is out there which you should be able to capture. Not trying to fully utilize your automation functionalities is like joining an expensive gym membership exclusively for a single dumbbell. For someone who cares about ROI, won’t you have the itch to use it to its full capacity? Consider the following table, which illustrates different levels of maturity in marketing automation, to give yourself an indication of where you are against your target. Accelerating your marketing automation If you noticed a discrepancy in your assessment, don’t worry. This is a commonly heard scenario. Let’s face it – marketing automation by its nature is vastly detailed and complex. It is not as simple as plug & play and suddenly everything autopilots itself. The reality is, marketing automation success has a cascade effect. It takes a lot of upfront knowledge to set things right. Done poorly, one small mistake could create a snowballing effect. Not only do you need the right knowledge, but you also need a wealth of different supporting resources – data engineering to feed in data, marketing to curate communication, platform specialists to ensure logic flow and deliverability, to name a few. In most cases, the various resources are borrowed from other teams, and the speed of progress can really be dependent on required teams’ availability and priority. Complexity holds people back. It’s all too tempting to stick with what you know when it’s too hard to know where to start. Yet, if you are looking for a way to change it, it is important to acknowledge that although marketing automation is set to reduce manual effort, the implementation is not effortless. Leveraging external expert services earlier helps you overcome the friction faster and delivers the return you desire more effectively. Let’s get you a hand! At Ematic, we’ve built years of experience on marketing automation across many platforms. We understand your pain points, and can bring essential expertises to help all parts of your marketing automation process, from strategy planning, technical setup, campaign creation/management and analytics and optimization. Whatever problems you are facing, Ematic is here to solve. <<Contact us>> to explore how we can improve your marketing automation, or learn more about our service offerings.    

Marketing Automation is Not “Set it and Forget it”

You can set it and forget it with marketing automation, but you really should not. There has been a lot of hype around marketing automation and it might easily come across as the shortcut to success. When thinking about marketing automation, many people tend to imagine that post-setup, they can go hands-free and the mechanism will autopilot itself. From our experience, this usually brings you more damage than benefit. Setting up your marketing automation and leaving it unmonitored is a waste of insights and potential opportunities. No matter how much research you’ve put into understanding your users and making a reasonable flow, your first few campaigns usually won’t be home runs as they are only built on hypotheses. We’ve heard many stories where a brand offered an attractive discount at route A but more customers took route B, or a complicated, well-curated user journey was set up but there was only a small audience drawn into the funnel. The behavior of customers is only one of the challenges. Even when you seem to set up a well-functioned program and your audience follows the path you lay, after a certain period of time, you might still encounter problems like outdated content, data discrepancy, logic conflict etc. Even a Ferrari needs to go to a pit stop regularly. So do your marketing automation campaigns. Contrary to the small effort put into post-launch optimization, some companies spend a disproportionate amount of time in the initial campaign setup. With ambition they architect a masterplan and spend a great amount of time assembling an army of marketing ideas, data and content. What happens next, is that in order to make everything function seamlessly, the scope of work becomes bigger than expected, months go by, and marketing automation still remains no more than a plan. The heavy initial investment results in low ROI, and the business starts to challenge if any of this is worthwhile. The Ematic Way How Ematic approaches marketing automation is vastly different. Our fundamental belief is that marketing automation requires long-term attention and continuous optimization. With that in mind, we apply an agile methodology and design a flexible service model to support it. What our agile methodology means – We don’t “set it and forget it”. We create a hypothesis-test-learn process and add / subtract elements in the automation program based on the feedback and insights from the actual data continuously to find the optimal setting for your campaign. Quick start and lower initial investment. Instead of a big bang launch, we start with identifying good opportunities which can be activated quickly. Once a few flows are verified and steadily brings in activation or revenue streams, we can then build on this foundation into a full program. We run a monthly scrum to deliver impact based on the given allocation of resources To strengthen this approach, we also make the following commitments: A team of experts always at your disposal : Making various domain expertise in marketing automation available at any time is important and truly helpful to accelerate your progress. This means you can quickly execute an idea, no matter how big or small it is. Service flexibility : You need resources ready at any time, but not all the time. That’s why we charge by credits based on required hours with roll-over flexibility to the next period, to give you the confidence that your investment doesn’t go to waste. With our expertise and our special service model, we are confident that we can add value to your marketing automation. Contact us to talk about your optimization plan.

Reimagine marketing automation with Ematic

We are excited to share some really good news – announcing Ematic’s new marketing automation services to help businesses implement, accelerate and optimize their customer journeys, workflows and cross-channel messaging capabilities. What is the service about? Although marketing automation is meant to help simplify the process, setting it up properly might be more complicated than one would expect. To deliver the right content to the right person at the right time requires a matrix of domain expertises from business, marketing, data, design to operation intersecting each other. For many businesses, it is a significant undertaking to get everything in place. Therefore we are offering a set of new services to complement your marketing automation needs. We bring essential expertises to all parts of the process, including strategy planning, technical setup, campaign creation/management and analytics and optimization. Whether you want to simply compliment in designated areas or require end-to-end support, we are sure we can tailor an action plan based on your business objectives and current settings. Who is this for? Ask yourself if you have been in need of : Specialist knowledge and/or skill – You want to activate marketing automation but you are short of necessary skills or expertises to design/ set up a journey and ensure everything is logically correct Resources – You have amazing automation ideas, but there’s always a missing piece from the puzzle – be it the data, the creatives or content support Optimization – You have long since implemented an automation flow but aren’t seeing the returns you expect Challenges can come from any part of the business, and we are not limited to a single dimension of problems. For example, it may be that the challenges have stemmed from the business strategy, or the technical implementation, but we’ve got your back. What’s special about our approach? We don’t treat marketing automation as “set it and forget it”. We believe marketing automation and customer journeys need constant attention to really benefit your business. At Ematic, we apply an agile marketing approach to deliver your business objectives – starting with fast activation of high ROI opportunities, and continuously develop your marketing automation roadmap over time. Followed with continuous analysis, testing and optimization, we create a process to turn your marketing automation into a spinning growth flywheel. Additionally, our methodology allows you to kickstart more easily without an overly expensive, lengthy initial setup investment. Not only do we have a time-based pricing structure, but we also roll-over any un-utilized hours to the next period, so that it gives you the flexibility of managing any given fluctuation during the engagement. Ending note At Ematic, our mission has always been to deliver real results for marketers. Since our humble beginnings of being “the Mailchimp guys”, over the past 10 years, we have expanded and helped numerous businesses adopt the right technologies for their marketing endeavors. Learning from our customers and the state of the market, our new services are designed to tackle the broader underlying challenges beyond technology to drive real impact. We are able to curate this service by marrying the learnings to the expertise we readily have in-house. With so much to unlock, we hope you are as excited as we are to begin the journey with our new services. Check out our marketing automation service to learn more about how we are able to help you, or contact us directly.

9 Inspiring Examples of B2C Marketing Automation

This content is provided by our partner Campaign Monitor. Campaign Monitor is the premium, best in class email marketing and automation tool. Content source: https://www.campaignmonitor.com/blog/email-marketing/9-inspiring-examples-b2c-marketing-automation/   Marketing automation is designed to simplify the email marketing process for your entire digital marketing team. These automated emails are highly effective and have the ability to drive massive revenue and results for businesses, as they achieve 86% higher open rates, produce a 196% increase in click-through rates, and generate 320% more revenue than standard promotional emails. With stats like that, marketers can’t deny the power of marketing automation.   What is B2B marketing automation? Marketing automation is the process of software automatically sending campaigns to your customers and prospects based on triggers you define. As opposed to one-off email campaigns that you create and send to a whole list of people, automated emails are set up once and then sent out each time a subscriber meets your pre-defined trigger.   What is marketing automation primarily used for? Marketing automation is an excellent and powerful way to engage with your customers, and is particularly useful for marketers who are looking to streamline email campaigns to reach the right subscribers at the right time.   What are marketing automation platforms? Marketing automation platforms are the providers of the automation software. These platforms provide marketing teams with various technologies to help them spread their marketing efforts across multiple channels, including email, social media, and websites.   What are the benefits of marketing automation? When it comes to marketing automation, there are simply too many benefits to list. However, there are a few that are worth noting: Reduces repetitive tasks: Freeing up the marketing team’s time. Personalization: Making the customers feel as if they’re more than another face in the crowd with unique messaging. List segmentation: Allows you to deliver relevant content to the right readers.   Even better, automation has reportedly resulted in 80% ROI, +46% growth, +26% more leads, and more productive marketers.   9 examples of B2C marketing automation 1. Welcome email series Welcome emails are your first chance to make a great impression on subscribers. Using marketing automation, you can create a stellar experience for your subscribers with a one-time welcome email or a series of emails that help onboard them. Broadway.com, the online retailer of tickets for Broadway shows, is a great example. They place a subscribe form at the bottom of their website to capture subscribers, and, when someone completes the form, they send them a welcome email with valuable discounts to incentivize their first purchase.     By sending the email immediately after someone subscribes, Broadway.com maximizes opens, clicks, and purchases by presenting the subscriber with discounts while their business is still top of mind. Sending a welcome email like Broadway.com is a simple way to drive revenue back to your business. Check out this next example from Topshop:   Right off the bat, Topshop engages their newest subscribers with an immediate offer to get them shopping and offers a small discount. You can also send a series of educational or onboarding emails like Birchbox does. Birchbox first sends a welcome email after subscribers have signed up. Then they follow up the welcome email with an automated series of messages, including beauty tricks, makeup tips, and special offers to keep their subscribers loyal and engaged.   2. Reminder emails Sending a reminder email based on a date is a great opportunity to not only deliver a timely message to your customer, but also keep them buying your products and services over time. Nissan collects relevant information about their customers, including the purchase date of their car.  They can then use the purchase date to automatically trigger a reminder email six months after the car was purchased to schedule the first service appointment. Maintenance fees after the car is sold account for a huge portion of Nissan’s overall revenue, so this is an important part of their strategy. 3. Birthday or anniversary Sending your customers, a special offer on their birthday or anniversary is another highly effective strategy to drive revenue while increasing customer happiness at the same time. The first step is to collect your customer’s birthdate and add it to your email list. Many companies, like jewelry retailer Monica Vinader, make this a required field through the online checkout process, while others ask for this information when someone signs up for their email list.   Once you have your customer’s birthdate in your email list, you can set up an email to automatically send on his or her birthday. While the leading message should be celebrating your customer’s birthday, this email is an excellent opportunity to generate revenue, so try including a special birthday discount to encourage recipients to make a purchase. You could also use this to recognize the birthday or anniversary of someone signing up for your product, making their first purchase, or other user or company milestones. Check out this example from Birchbox: 4. VIP It’s simple to set up a series of automated emails that can make your VIP customers feel special and keeps them engaged and spending. Sephora does an excellent job with their VIB (Very Important Beauty) Program, which offers early access to new products and special promotions for customers who spend a certain amount of money. Once someone spends the required amount, they’re entered into the VIB segment of the email list and automatically receive an email introducing them to the VIB program.     This email welcomes them to the program and provides an exclusive VIB-only offer that encourages them to make additional purchases. You can do something similar using data you have to trigger a customer journey based on someone entering a VIP segment. We even provide pre-built segments for this purpose. Check out this engaging example from Converse that similarly welcomes their VIPs and offers a discount: 5. Re-engagement You can encourage email subscribers who haven’t purchased in a while with an email-exclusive offer, “Save on your next order” discount, or abandoned cart deal like Nau does in the

A Look Back at the Best Emails from 2021

In the past year, there have been some heavy-hitters in terms of effective email campaigns and we wanted to give credit by highlighting some of the best emails from 2021.

5 Martech trends you need to know for 2022

As digital transformation accelerates, many businesses now see marketing tools as a fundamental investment. In 2021, the COVID-19 has facilitated the growth of online sales. Looking forward to 2022, how would marketing technology evolve, and what are some new trends worthy of attention?   Here we summarize the top 5 marketing technology trends, to help you navigate through the dynamic market landscape. #1 Get ready to the cookie-less future Almost every marketer knows the era of data privacy is coming, yet more than three in five brands are not ready for a cookie-less future, found Adobe. From third party data to first- , zero- party data Despite Google extending the third-party cookie phase-out to 2023, marketing leaders have limited time to rethink their marketing strategy with owned data (first-party, zero-party) in mind. After all, the removal of third-party cookies from Chrome (65% of the global browser market) means significant erosion on the accuracy of audience targeting and effectiveness of advertising campaigns (ROAS). The need to centralise customer data in one place A future-proof cookie-less solution involves first- / zero- party data , user cohorts, contextual and more AI-driven ensembles to understand and interact with audiences. First party data is the data your customers give consent for you to collect, like website behaviour, email, phone etc. Zero-party data is data that your customers intentionally share with you – think of the data you collect from the customer survey, quiz etc. Both first- and zero- party data come directly from your customer and are owned by you. Despite customer-centric marketing being no new concept, it becomes unignorable in the cookie-less era. The need of using a centralized customer data platform (CDP) to streamline data collection, build a single view of customers and connect data to multiple channels thus arises fast. In western countries, CDP has been widely adopted. Around 50% of businesses either have adopted or are adopting a CDP solution. In Asia, the progress started slower. However, as the massive consumer migration from offline to line, the demand of customer data integration grows rapidly under COVID-19. In 2022, we expect to see a significant uptake of CDP adoption.  Advice from Ematic The direction is clear, but the path is murky. The problem a lot of brands are facing nowadays is indeed not the technical integration, but the lack of a data plan. Remember, simply hosting data will not help you solve anything until you start using it. If a full-blown “first-party data strategy” sounds too daunting, you can always start testing the water with mapping your key user journeys into narrow use cases and orchestrating cross-channel communication. #2 Personalization continues to conquer the market Now you want to put first-party/ zero-party data collection in your marketing game plan, but to do so you first need permission from your customers. Your success in consent-based marketing is built on a solid foundation of trust. Relationships are bilateral. Customers would be much more willing to share data with you when they know what value they exchange their data for. Remember when you agreed to share with Netflix three shows you like for a personalised recommendation? If so, then you know exactly what we are talking about here. Personalization becomes “Basic Expectation” It is no secret that personalization is no longer a good-to-have but a must-have. According to Accenture, 91% of consumers today say they are more likely to shop with brands that provide offers and recommendations that are relevant to them.. While 85% of businesses believe they provide a somewhat personalized experience to customers, only 60% of consumers agree with that (Twilio Segment, The State of Personalization 2021 Report) Obviously, there is  a gap between what companies deliver and what customers really want. But where does it lie? Just doing as you already do is not enough, you need to do BETTER Firstly, personalization is about journeys, not sessions. Despite that brands own multiple channels to communicate with customers these days, these are often run in silo. As a result, similar marketing messages through the different channels reach the customer without orchestration, oftentimes resulting in annoying over-communication. On the other hand, while 70% marketers apply personalization on email, only around 20% use personalization in other channels. As a result, overall user experience remains fragmented. Secondly, personalization needs to be done at scale. Manual rule-based segmentation to deliver personalized experience only goes so far. Consumer behavior is extremely complicated and non-linear – they can browse several different things across several devices, get into something and soon be attracted by the other. Simple conditional rules cannot describe them well, but setting up a lot of rules is also overkill. That’s why most of the personalization is done on a small scale. Luckily, AI can be used to alleviate such problems and realize real 1:1 personalization, with its capability to quickly understand the real intent of customers, predict actions and provide real-time recommendations. With the necessity to deliver better personalized experience, it is imperative for marketers to keep multi-channel orchestration based on user journeys and AI-supported predictions at the core. #3 Channel spotlight: Emails, chatbots and their trends Among all the marketing channels, emails and chatbots are in the spotlight of 2022. Email is back (and cooler!) Thought email is outdated? Well, think again. 78% of marketers said they’ve seen an increase in email engagement over the last 12 months. In addition, Email still performs as one of the highest ROI marketing channels, according to a survey by Hubspot. Aside from its decent performance in driving engagement and conversion, email addresses are used as a common user identifier that connects other first-party data. No wonder email has made a strong comeback in recent years. On social media, we’ve seen marketers actively trying new formats to wield their creativity. In email, there’s no exception. More and more brands start to include interactive content to drive engagement. Some examples include British Airways, who use a countdown timer to remind customers of the time left in the sale; Amazon’s direct rating

Mixpanel: A product analytics to convert, engage, and retain more users

  About Mixpanel Are you transforming your business with data? Mixpanel can help you gain insight into every step of a customer’s journey to see exactly how they’re using your product. This product analytics solution provides unparalleled tools to slice and dice the data on your product, from retention and engagement to funnels and cohorts. It is the leading web and mobile analytics platform used by over 6,000 customers to understand your users better and build better products. Using Mixpanel, you can learn about your product’s behavior: what motivates users to complete a specific event? Where does traffic drop off? Moreover, with Mixpanel, you can unlock actionable insights based on events in real-time. From there, you can see the trends across your entire product.   Mixpanel Features Besides Mixpanel, some powerful platforms are available in the market right now, such as Amplitude. Both platforms are powerful, self-serve analytics tools that give deep insights into your customers. Mixpanel is designed for a mid-market segment, while Amplitude is suitable for a high-market segment. Mixpanel offers two different tiers of pricing depending on your company’s goals. You’ll be charged based on a Monthly Tracked User (MTU) or event-based. On top of that, Mixpanel has a variety of features that will be helpful to your team in different ways: Interactive Reports: With a few clicks, you can query your data and get visualizations in seconds. This makes it simple to answer inquiries about how your product is being used, who stays, and much more. Team Dashboards & Alerts: Summarize how the items you send affect the figures that matter, and track all of your product’s KPIs in one spot. Limitless Segmentation: Any form of analysis can be broken down by any event or user property, such as operating system or location. Group Analytics: Calculate measures such as product uptake, active usage, and retention at the account or company level. Data Integrations: Set up and simplify the exploration of product and user activity data without the need for SQL. Data Management: Define, manage, and transform your data with ease so that you can confidently analyze it. Security & Privacy: By adhering to international data regulations such as GDPR, CCPA, HIPAA, and others, your information will remain confidential and secure. Scalable Infrastructure: Analyze your raw user event stream data at scale, with no pre-computation required.     How Ematic Can Help If you’d like to learn more about Mixpanel, Ematic can assist you to set up a demo and guarantee you’re receiving the best deal. Furthermore, if additional assistance is required, we provide implementation services and consultancy to ensure a seamless onboarding and maximum adoption of the solution. To find out more, please contact us!  

Future-proof your customer data infrastructure

Now more than ever, customers expect personalized, integrated, and frictionless digital experiences – and it’s rapidly changing how businesses build and adapt their customer data infrastructure.  Therefore it’s no surprise that businesses are demanding solutions that provide more flexibility, visibility, and control over how they collect and integrate their customer data.  Achieve your goals today and adapt for the future We’ve discussed the shift in how businesses adopt and deploy software, moving away from the “build or buy” mentality to a combined model of implementing customizable infrastructure “building blocks” that allow for adaptability.  Businesses are also becoming increasingly aware that flexibility is crucial to future-proofing their data integration strategy, ensuring sustainable data infrastruture and meeting the needs of customers in this evolving landscape. Whether you choose to build, buy, or some combination of the two, a future-proof data infrastructure will meet your company’s needs today and offer the flexibility to adapt for the future. That’s why trends like composability are gaining so much momentum. Composability allows for extensibility and the customization of out-of-the-box features that enable new business scenarios and use cases. According to Gartner, 60% of organizations will seek composability in new application investments by 2023 because monolithic application experiences no longer meet the requirements for continuous business agility. How Twilio Segment tackles composability Understanding the importance of composability, Twilio Segment introduced “Destination Actions” – a new framework for building, enabling, and configuring destinations on their platform that allows adapting to any use case with composable customer data integrations. The destination actions feature: Easier setup – Destination Actions eliminates the majority of required settings in the destination setup process by moving hardcoded mappings from code to UI-based configuration. Increased transparency – Each partner destination and associated product capability is exposed in a well-defined schema that is visible directly in the Twilio Segment UI. Customizability – All settings are made modifiable at both the field level and endpoint level. For example, a user could re-wire a track call to update a user profile in a destination. Customizability without sacrificing usability  Customer data platforms like Twilio Segment are used across the business by a wide variety of teams, from Engineers and Developers, to Marketers, Product Managers, Data Analysts, and more. These teams work tirelessly to meet the diverse needs of your customers…shouldn’t your CDP do the same? Destination Actions offers the customizability that developers expect without requiring as much code, so less-technical teams can extend their customer data integrations however makes the most sense for them. Let’s take a look at an example… A travel booking company, Fly Inc. wants to use Braze to send targeted emails for their holiday traveler campaign, but the standard configuration doesn’t quite fit its use case. With Braze’s Actions-based destination, only a few settings are required to get data flowing. Once the user reaches the Mappings screen, they have full transparency and flexibility into how their data is delivered.  In this standard configuration, we’re sending events, purchases, and customer traits to Braze, using three different Actions. Fly Inc.’s main purchase event is Trip Booked, but our Braze classic destination registers purchases as Order Completed. By using the new Braze Actions-based destination, they can easily edit this trigger to fit its use case. What if the campaign requires more personalized targeting? Let’s say, for instance, Fly Inc. wants to include people who visit their pricing page, but supporting page calls is not a Braze best practice out-of-the-box. With Braze Actions, the user can add another instance of the Event Action, but this time, trigger the event when the pricing page is viewed. Next, they can edit the mappings to get an event in Braze called Viewed Pricing.  This is just one of the many ways that Destination Actions can be used to customize how data is sent to downstream destinations using Twilio Segment. Available Actions-based Destinations on Segment Segment focuses on adding more action-based destinations as the core competency.  There are 5 action-based destinations integrated seamlessly with Segment, including  Amplitude: event tracking and segmentation platform for web and mobile apps Braze: engagement platform that delivers omni-channel messaging experiences Customer.IO: automated messaging platform to craft and send emails, push notifications and SMS messages Full Story: Event tracking and segmentation platform for web and mobile apps Slack: Team communication and collaboration platform that offers IRC-style features like chat room and direct messaging And 4 more in Segment’s public beta: Google Enhanced Conversions Facebook Conversions API TikTok Conversions Google Analytics 4 Interested in Segment’s CDP? This content is provided by our partner Twilio Segment. Segment is a market leading customer data platform (CDP) by the silicon valley unicorn Twilio, which helps you unify  your customer data for all sources and create a single view of the customers. Content source: https://segment.com/blog/introducing-destination-actions/