Microsoft users might want to take a closer look at the company’s update to its service agreement. Set to take effect this May, privacy experts are alarmed about the changes seem to suggest that Microsoft will now have the right toreview user content evenwithout prior consent.
The questionable changes were first reported on by Jonathan Corbett at the Professional Troublemaker site. Microsoft warned against the use ofoffensive languageas well as the sharing of inappropriate content. The company stated that violating the modified rules could result in the closure of a user’s Microsoft account.
“In the Code of Conduct section, we’ve clarified that use of offensive language and fraudulent activity is prohibited. We’ve also clarified that violation of the Code of Conduct through Xbox Services may result in suspensions or bans from participation in Xbox Services, including forfeiture of content licenses, Xbox Gold Membership time, and Microsoft account balances associated with the account.”
But what worried privacy experts, even more, is that aside from banning users from the company’s services, using offensive language can even be used by Microsoft as grounds to conduct an investigation and go through theuser’s private data. As pointed out by Corbett, the term “offensive language” is a bit too ambiguous and its definition can vary greatly between different people.
“Enforcement. If you violate these Terms, we may stop providing Services to you or we may close your Microsoft account. We may also block delivery of a communication (like email, file sharing or instant message) to or from the Services in an effort to enforce these Terms or we may remove or refuse to publish Your Content for any reason. When investigating alleged violations of these Terms, Microsoft reserves the right to review Your Content in order to resolve the issue. However, we cannot monitor the entire Services and make no attempt to do so.”
The updated rules could be particularly problematic for users of Microsoft’s gaming service Xbox Live. This is because, within gaming circles, trash-talking is normal among players.
This was pointed out by Corbett who couldn’t help but ask, “If I call someone a mean name in Xbox Live, not only will they cancel my account, but also confiscate any funds I’ve deposited in my account?”
Aside from Xbox Live, the updated agreement will also cover users of other Microsoft services such as Skype and Office. Given the scope, Corbett fears that the amended terms would allow any Microsoft staff to pry open anyone’s private data such as Skype call recordings as long as they are "investigating" something.
At the moment, Microsoft declined to comment on the issues raised related to the amended agreement.
We are all familiar with the customer journey. We know it’s essential to help our customers to be successful. But what about customer success marketing? How much do you know about it, and how does it affect us as marketers?
In this blog, I’ll cover what customer success marketing is and how it fits into your marketing plan.
What is Customer Success Marketing?
Long ago, before marketing automation and MarTech technologies permeated our world, successful businesses would often rely on word-of-mouth marketing (WOMM). With WOMM, marketers are looking to influence and encourage customers to spread the word about their products. Sometimes this is done with incentives, but the true success of WOMM is when your customers are happy to provide WOMM without an incentive.
George Silverman is often touted as a pioneer in word-of-mouth marketing. Silverman, a psychologist, created what he called “teleconferenced peer influence groups” in the early 1970s and found that when one or two physicians reported on their good experience with a drug, it could sway an entire group of skeptics. His tactics were so compelling that even ex-prescribers—those with negative experiences with a drug—changed their minds after hearing a positive review of the drug from their peers.
Customer success marketing, similar to WOMM, is sometimes referred to as customer marketing, retention marketing, or advocate marketing. Customer success marketing is the intersection of product, marketing, and customer success teams. Customer experience shouldn’t stop at the sale. Studies have shown that attracting a new customer costs five times as much as keeping an existing one. But, have we done enough to make sure that our customers are successful using our products? Do we have enough customer success case studies to share with our new prospects? What types of data we can get from our customer success teams to help shape our marketing efforts? These are all critical questions to ask to create a more cohesive team atmosphere and avoid silos.
How Does Customer Success Marketing Fit Into Your Org?
We have seen a trend that more and more companies are setting up customer success operations teams especially in the B2B arena and SaaS industry. Sometimes these teams are referred to as CS Ops. The companies utilizing these teams realize that the success of their business is inherently intertwined with the success of their customers. Their CS Ops team drives initiatives to provide upper-management real-time visibility into their customers’ “health,” which is represented by a combination of usage data and other contextual metrics (to evaluate how ‘sticky’ customers are).
CS Ops teams also drives company-wide adoption of outcomes-based metrics and processes. This “transformative power,” as Lincoln Murphy explains, has started to proliferate among companies even outside of the SaaS or technology companies. The reason? Simply put, no customer success = no company success. Your CS Ops team can take your company from a reactive state (customer support) to a proactive state (e.g., instance review, proactively provide solutions based on customers’ unique use cases, etc.)
Next Steps
If your company doesn’t have a CS team yet, consider adding one this year. You might also want to evaluate some of the available customer success solutions out there and start thinking of an organization-level tactical CS strategy.
If you already have a CS team, consider what it would take to facilitate cross-functional collaboration. Have your marketing team collaborate with your product team and CS Ops team, to come up with customer success case studies which can take your content marketing to the next level. It’s not a question of whether your company should be investing in retention, expansion, and advocacy, it’s how much you should be investing. If you do this well, you can turn your customers into your best growth engine.
Do you have a customer success team? Are you considering adding one this year? Tell me about your current team or your dream team in the comments.
Over the past few years, more people have turned to online shopping instead of brick-and-mortar stores because of convenience. In 2017, eCommerce businesses accounted for 9.1 percent ofUS retail salesduring the fourth quarter, higher than the 8.2 percent share f the previous year.
Amidst online sales growth and positive prospects of eCommerce,nearly halfof the industry’s revenue comes from Amazon. This prompted other online retailers to tap into artificial intelligence, or AI, in gaining an edge over the eCommerce giant through personalized shopping experience. In utilizing AI for their businesses, retailers gain critical analytical data on consumers, allowing them to improve customer experience.
From effective marketing strategies to efficient sales process, here’s a look at how using AI will benefit online retailers.
1. Easier Product Searching
Most sales online begin with a search, and if the results displayed are not relevant, this can prompt customers to look somewhere else. Keyword-based search is the usual method for websites to return a list of items based on entered words and description. However, this might not be the most accurate way to generate relevant results.
To address this, a visual search engine powered by AI allows customers to send an image instead and discover similar products on your website. High-end retailer Neiman Marcus first announced said feature on its mobile app in2015, recognizing the customer’s need to find related results based on photos.
Image via Neiman Marcus website
2. Better Customer Understanding
Feedback, whether posted on social media or review sites, allows businesses to quickly gain valuable insights about their products. Although 40 percent of sales and marketing leaders acknowledge thatword of mouthis crucial to a brand’s success on social media, less than half of these companies use this information for their customer analytics.
By using AI and natural language processing (NLP), retailers can sift through every online feedback, be it positive, negative, or neutral, to learn more about customer expectations and respond accordingly.
3. Personalized Marketing Strategy
AI-powered recommendation engines filter relevant information from numerous data about a buyer’s interest, preference, and behaviors on the site. Based on timely insights gathered, an online merchant suggests items uniquely patterned after your recent activity and past purchases on the site.
This shopping experience mimicking the personal feel of brick-and-mortar stores translates to customer satisfaction and spending. In fact, retailers with personalized strategies have observed sales growth of 6-10 percent, two to three times faster than others that don’t, according toBoston Consulting Groupstudy.
4. Immediate Customer Service
Chatbots and virtual shopping assistants, powered by AI, provide direct and quick customer engagement. For eCommerce businesses, chatbots can be used to automate customer service messages, send order-related information, resolve issues, and interact with clients in real-time. By using NLP to understand meaning and context of your customers’ messages, these virtual assistants can take on your brand’s personality and voice in creating human-like interaction.
Image via livingactor.com
In a survey done by Oracle on 800 sales and marketing leaders,about 80%want to use chatbots in their businesses by 2020 as a way to automate some processes and improve customer experience.
5. Systematic Sales Process
Prior to social media, sales strategies include cold-calling and ad placements in the hopes of targeting the right market. These days, AI is used to gather patterns and numbers to help businesses convert queries to actual sales throughdata-driven feedback.
Nowadays, people turn to social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram for shopping inspiration—a trove of data for AI companies likeYotpoto utilize in developing digital marketing tools. With proper use of user-generated content, customers discover products in a subtler, more natural way.
“Artificial intelligence programs can scan through millions of events to find patterns and correlations that we just would not notice on a day to day basis. So it might notice a correlation between sending a specific pitch deck to prospective clients before calling them results in better conversions,” Uzi Shmilovici, chief executive officer of Base CRM, explained.
Digitally native retailers have recognized the importance of creating personalized shopping experience through the use of AI as a way to give them an edge over others offering the same products. By leveraging AI-driven innovations, smaller eCommerce businesses, as well as bigger retailers like Amazon, get the leg up in attracting and retaining their customers.
In the midst of the fallout of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, Facebook recently announced that it will put an end to its Partner Categories program. The move effectively cuts off third-party access to the social media giant's data.
Facebook utilizes data from third-party data collectors to augment its own data pool for ad targeting. The company also allowed advertisers totarget consumers using datacollated from several sources, including Facebook, the advertiser itself and third-party services like Acxiom and Experian.
Third-party data has been useful to companies and advertisers that do not have their own customer data. However, the Cambridge Analytica affair proved that Facebook has very little control over how these data collectors get their data, which makes using it is quite risky.
In a truncated statement attributed to Facebook's product marketing director Graham Mudd, the company wanted to inform advertisers of its move to shut down Partner Categories, a feature thatallows third-party data providersto offer their targeting straight on Facebook. And while the company says it's a common practice in the industry, they believe this step “will help improve people's privacy on Facebook.”
The Partner Categories program started in 2013. It was borne by a partnership between the social media platform and big data brokers.
At the time of the program's launch, the company assured its users that they're very serious about privacy. But in light of what happened with Cambridge Analytica, it seems Facebook is re-evaluating its stance. Aside from the announcement about third-party access, the company has also updated its privacy control settings.
The move to restrict access to user data stems from Mark Zuckerberg's promise last week. Facebook's founder said in a post that the company has “a responsibility to protect your data, and if we can't then we don't deserve to serve you. I've been working to understand exactly what happened and how to make sure this doesn't happen again.”
In 1962, at the Seattle World’s Fair, IBM demoed the ‘Shoebox’—a machine that could understand 16 spoken words in English (10 of them were actually just digits, from ‘0’ through to ‘9’, but at the time, this was genuinely groundbreaking stuff).
Four years later, an early episode of Star Trek aired, featuring a conman trafficking mail-order brides. But the episode was notable for another reason—this was the first time viewers would have seen the crew of the Enterprise talking to its computer. Straight away, the technology played more than a passive role; the computer contradicts the episode’s eponymous villain Harry Mudd during his interrogation, to which he responds “Blast that tin-plated pot!” You can see the full dialogue, including some brilliantly blunt contributions from Computer, here.
In an era long before Apple or Amazon existed, a voice-enabled future was already beginning to loom large in the popular imagination, but for decades, these early experiments and sci-fi fantasies remained exactly that. Computers got exponentially more powerful, the internet changed the world, and mobile technology put all of this in the palm of your hand, but visual interfaces still ruled in this emerging 21st-century ‘screeniverse.’
But just as screen-centric mobile UX is reaching maturity, a new age of interaction is finally upon us. Siri has been softening us up for a while to the idea of speaking to our devices in a conversational way, but the experience remained clunky in many respects. Today, though, voice-assistants and conversational UI are quickly becoming the norm, and these interactions are becoming more seamless and satisfying every day.
So just how pervasive are voice interfaces right now?
In this blog, I’ll share what consumers think about voice assistants right now from our own 2018 CX trends research,how you can get started with voice, and what that means for marketers.
Our Recent Research Findings on Voice Assistants
We recently carried out some research around 2018’s top digital customer experience trends and found that more customers say they want to use voice assistants this year than other key technologies that are changing how we interact with brands.
Interestingly, people are far more comfortable speaking to a virtual voice via a speaker than they are messaging a virtual participant in an online chat.
This may be because voice assistants are able to remove friction from some everyday interactions that didn’t involve another human in the first place (such as checking the weather), whilst chatbots are often used for customer service and communications, where people still value human contact. Despite the healthy appetite amongst consumers for using voice assistants in 2018, nearly one in 10 people said ‘anxious’ was the word that best describes how they feel about this technology.
Finally, we found that the biggest thing consumers wanted from digital in 2018 was improvements to the products and services they already use, rather than flat-out innovation.
For those thinking about developing a voice experience (e.g., an Alexa Skill), the takeaway is clear—don’t do it just for the sake of doing something new; think about how you can use voice to remove friction for your users and help them accomplish the things they’re already focused on.
Perhaps surprisingly, the proportion of people looking for disconnection (i.e., less technology in their lives) actually dropped compared with our 2017 findings—this adds to the evidence that people will be increasingly open to bringing devices like the Amazon Echo or Google Home into their living spaces over the coming years.
Experimenting With Voice
Our first public experiment with voice UIs as an agency was an Alexa Skill for The Higher Lower Game—the App Store-topping game we developed based on Google search data. This was a perfect entry into the world of voice for a few reasons:
The game was already successful, so we had an established audience to tap into
The simplicity of the game’s mechanic was ideal for a voice-based experience
The game is our own IP, so we didn’t have the pressures we might have on a client project
Here’s a quick video of the Skill in use, complete with some top trash-talking from Alexa:
Following that, we got an opportunity to work on an exploratory project for a major client, looking at how we might use Alexa to deliver interactive learning/coaching experiences for young people with under-developed communication skills. We had some fantastic audience research from the client to work with and assembled a small team (developer, UX consultant, and content specialist) to quickly design and build a prototype.
We began with a set of questions around what the technology could or could not do, and, with some rapid prototyping off the back of this, very quickly established that the vision we and the client had been so excited about wasn’t realistic right now. However, we still managed to create a demo that showcased, with a bit of smoke and mirrors, how our imagined interaction might work once the technology has moved on a little. Although we didn’t come out of this with a user-ready product, the project was still valuable:
The client was smart enough to treat this as a discovery project, rather wasting thousands of pounds commissioning a full build
The project helped all stakeholders understand what the technology can do, which will help inform better briefs in future
We’ll be ready to hit the ground running as and when voice assistants evolve
As our Design Director Tom Bradley explains, “We see so many businesses still approaching this type of work with an end product in mind, rather than viewing it as an experiment. It’s hard from an agency perspective too, as an answer of ‘not yet’ can feel like a failure; but sometimes the right thing to do next is to do nothing at all.”
The key is to test and learn quickly so you can pull back when necessary, without missing opportunities to get a competitive edge.
More recently, we’ve been involved in a developing a hotel-booking experience for Alexa, which came with its own set of challenges around use cases, scope, and API integrations. Once again, taking an MVP approach and avoiding a big-bang release has allowed us and the client to test the technology in a low-risk way, without large-scale investment.
After designing an initial conversation flow with nothing more than post-its on a wall, we were able to begin testing the basic UI with people using a role-play approach (being Alexa is always quite good fun!) This allowed us to refine the flows and the copy before we went anywhere near Amazon’s Developer Portal to begin building it for real.
Whilst this was a very effective way of working internally, it didn’t give us the best set of outputs for sharing progress with the client at the early stages. If you’re in a similar situation, I’d suggest getting the client involved in the project as early as possible and, ideally, have them working with you in your space to simplify communication and ensure the brief and objectives remain clear.
Ultimately, though, we were able to deliver successfully against the brief, thanks to:
A small, multi-disciplinary team
Low-fi prototyping and testing using role-play techniques
A client who understood the value of an MVP approach
Beyond the home, voice will also become increasingly central to in-car interfaces, perhaps even before manufacturers ever figure out how to do touchscreen UI properly. Major brands like BMW and Toyota will be integrating Alexa into their cars this year, whilst Hyundai have linked up with Google Assistant. In the car UI space, there’s basically a three-way fight playing out between Apple, Amazon, and Google. Again, it’s a messy situation for consumers to make sense of right now, but the overall trend is clear: voice is the new paradigm.
My own background is actually in SEO, and I’ve barely touched on the implications of voice for search here—that’s something for another blog—but what I would say is that if Alexa manages to monopolize the voice space, that could have serious implications for Google’s search dominance. Whilst the outcome of that particular battle is out of our hands, you can and should be optimizing your content for voice search right now.
5 Key Takeaways
If you want to create a voice experience that people actually want to use, remember these five things:
This is a fast-moving space. Keep up-to-speed with the latest research, or, even better, do your own.
Start learning to experiment as soon as you can, ideally on an internal project that doesn’t need to deliver a return.
Approach voice projects with a lean mindset—create a small, cross-disciplinary team with UX, content, and build skills, and test and prototype fast. Role-playing is your friend.
If you’re agency-side, talk to your clients about discovery projects, where it’s ok for the outcome to be “do nothing yet.”
Remember that while ditching the screen is a big deal, many of the same basic UX principles apply. If your voice experience isn’t making someone’s life easier, it probably shouldn’t exist.
Have you considered incorporating voice experiences into your marketing plan? What potential do you see for voice assistants for marketers?
Walmart will continue its buying spree of digital brands in 2018 as it aims to build and differentiate its online inventory in competing against Amazon. Marc Lore, eCommerce head of the world’s largest retailer, revealed that there’s a bigger strategy involved with Walmart’s bullish acquisitions during the Shoptalk conference in Las Vegas on last Tuesday.
“[We’re] trying to create a portfolio of these brands that give us proprietary content for a reason for [a] millennial to come shop inside the Walmart ecosystem,” Lore explained. “We’re not going out making billion-dollar acquisitions. We’re buying companies that can help accelerate us to the fundamentals.”
The retailer’s acquisitions are targeted to expand its reach into new demographics—a younger and hipper clientele of millennials. Jet was acquired for more than $3 billion in 2016, while online startups ModCloth and Bonobos were purchased in 2017 for about $50-$75 million and $310 million, respectively.
Lore said that Walmart is prepared to spend about$50 million to $300 million, or more, for future acquisitions. Since Jet appeals to affluent millennials in urban areas like New York and San Francisco, adding more digital brands to its roster makes it all the more attractive.
“We’ll continue to push the assortment,” he pointed out. “We’re working on a lot of premium partnerships right now that will augment and uplift the assortment and of course add Bonobos, Allswell [Walmart’s new bedding and mattress brand] and ModCloth to Jet as well.”
But having few digital brands with their own unique inventory is not enough for Walmart as they continue to be on the lookout for more startups. “We’re looking and talking to more companies now than we ever have,” Lore said. “We’re looking for the right opportunities.”
While the aggressive acquisition of independent brands allows Walmart to learn about merchandise expertise in specific categories, these online startups will also benefit from the retailer’s supply chain infrastructure.
“The concept is let’s cross pollinate talent. Let’s cross pollinate learnings and let’s have a common backbone and backend through Walmart’s supply chain infrastructure. This wasn’t about let’s figure out how to rip out costs. It’s about how to play offense,” Andy Dunn, founder of Bonobos and Walmart’s SVP of digital consumer brands, emphasized.
Dunn joined Lore on stage torefute reportsthat his colleague was being ousted following Walmart’s disappointing online growth in the last quarter of 2017. Despite the holiday shopping season, online sales growth decelerated to 23 percent from previous quarter’s 50 percent. Moreover, Walmart’s fourth-quarter results missedWall Street’s forecast earnings, causing shares to drop by more than 10 percent.
Marc Lore, CEO of @Walmart E-Commerce discussing the slower growth during Q4 in 2017. Focus was on long term growth. Plan is to continue doing what they are doing. Goal is 100 metro markets that offer same day delivery. #shoptalk18#ecommercepic.twitter.com/oLl0QIVHEv
But Lore isn’t worried about the lackluster results. “Basically that Q4 was largely planned. We attempted to create a healthier Q4. We told The Street we’d do $11.5 billion in the year, and that’s what we did. We also said we’d have 40-percent growth this year and we recently reiterated that growth.”
He downplayed the speculations of an early exit as well, reiterating his commitment to staying for five years, and possibly more.
Google wants its publishers in Europe to solicit users’ consent on its behalf under the new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) privacy rules. The GDPR rules which will take effect on May 25, requires companies to gain explicit consent for collection and use of personal information in targeted ads. And Google’s consent plan is something that ad giants like Facebook and Amazon can follow.
“To comply, we will be updating our EU consent policy when the GDPR takes effect and the revised policy will require that publishers take extra steps in obtaining consent from their users,” the company explained in itsblog poston Thursday.
Obtaining users’ permission secondhand is legal, according to the experts. But for own platforms such as Google.com, Gmail, and YouTube, Google will directly get consent from its users.
Under the GDPR, there are two categories of data handlers, the controller, and the processor. Controllers are identified as the source of data, like website owners and publishers. Processors, such as marketing technology providers, do the actual processing of data collected from external sources.
Google, with its myriad of products, platforms, and services, cannot be simply classified as acontroller or processor. The company identifies itself as a controller for some of its ad products, including DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP), DoubleClick Ad Exchange (AdX), AdWords, and AdSense. On the other hand, Google operates as a processor of personal data gathered in services like Ads Data Hub, and Google Analytics, among others.
However, Google said that it will introduce new contract terms and take on the role of co-controller of user data for its publishers. This gives the tech giant autonomy over gathered data and its for their own purposes. At the same time, Google is sharing the burden of protecting the data especially since noncompliance with the new law could result inhefty fines.
“The concern with GDPR is, everybody in the data supply chain could become liable. If the publisher fails to get sufficient consent for Google when [Google’s] tags or pixels are on [the publisher’s] site, the publisher could be potentially liable. Google, of course, could certainly be liable for collecting that data without the proper GDPR compliance process,” Gary Kibel, partner at law firm Davis & Gilbert, explained.
By formulating its own consent plan as a joint controller, Google may be able to ensure compliance from its publishers. Likewise, it reduces the risk of publishers collecting data without obtaining consent.
But as more peopledecline to give consentfor personal data use, publishers might have a hard time earning money from targeted ads. As a countermeasure, Google plans to roll out non-personalized ads to help publishers. It will also be working with industry groups, such as IAB Europe, for other solutions ahead of the May 25 deadline.
Last week, we hosted an incredible panel on women in technology. It was well received and sparked some phenomenal questions and conversations surrounding diversity and in the workplace. (You can watch it here if you’re interested!) After the panel wrapped, I returned to my desk and talked with a coworker about the most significant takeaways of the day.
“I feel like sometimes companies get into trouble and then immediately appoint a woman into a new position to try and change the narrative,” she said.
“That’s a good point. But women are not band-aids. It’s not their job to make a workplace more diverse, and it’s not a reasonable expectation that on top of their duties, they also have to clean up the mess,” I replied.
This was exactly the point our panelists made: Diversity is not a one-and-done “fix” to culture or performance problems your organization is facing. Rather, it’s a thoughtful commitment to inclusivity and elevating different voices that enriches your organization inside and out.
In this blog, I’ll cover why your company culture might need an overhaul and give a few suggestions from our panel to get you on the road to a more committed view of diversity.
Is It Diversity for Diversity’s Sake?
One of our panelists, Sandra Zoratti, said: “Diversity is a red-hot topic, but diversity for diversity’s sake is not the point. Our differences make us better. Measurably better. Here’s the proof: An MSCI report showed that companies with at least three women on the board had consistently higher returns on equity than companies with less diverse boards (read: a financial and competitive advantage). As a result, Wall Street has rallied to support increased female board membership to enrich corporate diversity. In turn, institutional investment giants like BlackRock and Vanguard have publicly committed to challenging any and all corporations not embracing diversity. It’s time we all embrace diversity and harness it’s powerful force to significantly strengthen us all.”
Appointing a single diverse board member in an otherwise non-diverse board will not turn your company around. Examine your culture through different frameworks. Even if you are not a senior leader, would an employee, no matter their background or seniority, feel comfortable bringing up a problem or a pointing out something that may become a problem down the road? If not, it’s time to ask yourself why even if you might not like the answer. As Jim Ruberto said, “Monoculture dies, diverse culture thrives.” When selecting a team, it’s important to seek a wide variety of diverse opinions to create a more cohesive organization.
Are You Thinking About Age, Too?
“My biggest challenge has been age discrimination. A lot of people based on my age, based on being female, would take one look at me and say, “oh, she has no idea what she’s talking about.” We tried a lot of ways to band-aid that. We changed our appearance, we started wearing suits. We wore glasses instead of contacts. And it still happened. What we figured out was that we needed to attack that head on. We needed to approach people before they approached us and judged us.”—Emily Long, Senior Director of Business Development, Zia Consulting
Workers both young and old can often feel marginalized because of their age. For younger workers, this can keep them locked into a position that they are overqualified to hold. More advanced workers may feel dismissed by younger teammates when it comes to technology discussions despite their experience and historical knowledge. In either case, the true value and unique voice of the employee is lost when assumptions are made.
Not only should your company have a diverse mix of nationalities and gender identities, it’s also important to have a mix of ages. Having trouble with this when it comes to hiring? Strip all of the titles, dates, and company names from a candidate’s resume. What have they accomplished? Do their skills align with what you’re looking for? It’s tough to set aside bias but to build the best possible culture for your organization, it’s important to challenge yourself and your team. Remember: you might fail. It’s okay. Keep trying.Click To Tweet
Is it Safe to Disagree?
“I think with credibility comes authenticity. Your voice comes from authenticity and from your ability to object. I often ask my team to object. I don’t want people to agree with me if they don’t agree with me. Early in your career, you agree with everything. You don’t want to disagree. But that brings no value to anyone.”—Lee Ho, Digital Marketing Director, Avaya
Ask yourself, is “no” an acceptable answer when you pose a question to your team? Are you operating in a culture where it’s not okay to have a different perspective? What do you stand to lose if someone disagrees with your choices? Or, perhaps a better question, what do you stand to gain from disagreement? Whether it’s creating a new campaign, developing the strategy to enter a new market, or diving deeper into an existing issue hoping to find a new solution, constant complacent agreement will never foster progress.
Two Challenges (for Everyone)
I’d like to end this with two challenges:
“I was with my previous employer for 25 years. So before I took a risk and came over to the Digital Analytics Association 2 years ago, that was a really big, scary move. But I look back and not only was that the best thing I ever did, I probably should have been willing to take risks sooner. A lot of times in my organization, we will talk about how someone feels like they might have messed up. I like to say, “You know what? We don’t cure cancer here. So be willing to go ahead and take a risk. If you make a mistake, it is fixable. You can definitely turn it around.” I think taking a risk is a great opportunity.”—Marilee Yorchak, Executive Director, Digital Analytics Association
Take a risk and revel in the opportunities it will provide for you.
“As a CMO who happens to be female, I must lead the charge for change. It is vital that I not only talk the talk, but walk the walk—for our customers, our partners, and the people I lead and serve. I challenge every CMO to take a hard look at their teams and to recognize any diversity gaps that may exist currently. Fearless leaders know that it’s okay to acknowledge your shortcomings, as long as they are never content with complacency. Without a diverse mix of viewpoints and experiences to pull from in the work we do in our marketing teams each day, we are forever limiting the potential and success of global organizations everywhere.”—Sarah Kennedy, CMO, Marketo
While Sarah challenges CMOs specifically, I’d like to open this up to everyone at every level. The time to make changes is not when you are in the C-suite, it is now. Look at your team, your company, and those around you and consider what change you can encourage now.
How would you rate your company culture right now on a scale of 1-10? Tell me about your company culture in the comments. I’d love to hear about what works and what doesn’t work for you.
Here are seven specific best practices to get there.
1. Ask for Organizational Goals up Front
I can’t tell you how many times I see marketing leaders develop a plan and budget without any context for the business or division’s overall goals. What are your revenue targets next year? How about net-new sales, margin, customer retention, and other key business metrics? How can you write a marketing plan and budget without knowing what everything is building towards? This step alone will help you align your priorities with those of your CFO and others.
2. Get Sales Buy-In First
Before taking your plan and budget to the CFO, run it by your sales counterparts. Make sure they understand how vital your plan is to help them hit their number next year as well. If you can go back to the CFO together, saying jointly that these efforts are required to hit and exceed sales goals, you’re in far better shape to justify and keep what you’re asking for.
3. Cut Unsuccessful Line Items From Last Year (and Explain Why)
If you keep everything from last year by default, it’s far too easy to assume that you’re just doing a “land grab” for more money. Even if you had a great year, I’m sure there were initiatives that didn’t pass muster or deliver the results you had hoped.
As a way of making your plan both more efficient and credible, cut any items that were unsuccessful, highlight that in your plan and clarify why. This will also serve to demonstrate the rationale you likely used to justify any additions to the plan for the coming year.
4. Organize By Business Objective (Instead of Marketing Function)
This won’t work for everything, but at minimum, you should be able to sort certain initiatives by sales, customer retention, etc.
5. Project Results Wherever Possible (Revenue, Not Just Spend)
Most marketing budgets focus entirely on costs. And even if you couch everything in terms of the overall business objectives they support, it’s far better to project precisely what results you expect from any new budget requests. Better yet, create a mini ROI calculator inside your budget so that any negative impact of cuts are clear.
6. Make Future Expenditures Contingent on Early Success
It’s tempting to ask for everything up front. But in today’s fast-moving markets, it’s also difficult to accurately predict what you’ll really need in the second half of next year.
Rather than propose a firm budget for the full calendar year, identify certain line items that are contingent on early success. This can be defined as success in early marketing objectives or success in overall business performance. But either way, this makes your “core” budget request more manageable and demonstrates that the bigger number won’t come into play unless it’s justified by performance.
7. Tie Staff Bonuses to Sales Performance, Not Marketing Tactic Completion
I’m not talking about commissions. Most marketing teams have bonuses built into their budgets already. But in most cases, they get paid if the marketing objectives or tasks are completed no matter how sales performs. This year, consider tying marketing bonuses to broader company performance. At minimum, tie your demand generation team’s bonus to sales opportunity growth and/or closed business. Tie the retention team’s bonus to churn reduction or growth of lifetime value.
If you want to be taken seriously as a profit center marketer, you need to separate your operational dashboard from your executive dashboard. Put another way, keep those operational metrics to yourself (and your marketing peers). When communicating marketing’s contribution and value back to (and up) the organization, focus on metrics that are already familiar to your CFO. This does not include “inside baseball” marketing acronyms. It does not include email open and click rates. It does not include retweets, social engagement, share of voice, web traffic, or even cost per lead detail.
Your CFO dashboard should focus on marketing contribution to sales pipeline, overall acquisition cost relative to lifetime value, impact of marketing efforts on increasing sales opportunity conversion rates, etc. Internally, within your marketing organization, feel free to focus on metrics that make your marketing better. Externally, to reinforce your team’s profit center focus, prioritize metrics with a direct line to revenue, a direct path to margin, metrics that are already in the CFO’s own dashboard.
This is more than just nomenclature and inter-office communication. This is about simplifying and aligning how marketing is perceived, evaluated, and prioritized within the organization. It’s about changing the very culture within marketing to focus, ultimately, on metrics that matter.
There are numerous ways this can be done, but I’d start with this:
When’s the last time you looked at your CFO’s dashboard? The metrics she prioritizes, the terms she uses, the levers she’s primarily concerned about?
How closely are your metrics aligned with those of the sales organization?
Even if you’re reporting on these metrics currently, are you cluttering the dashboard with activity-based and operational figures that distract people from what really matters, from what you’re truly focused on?
Make sure others in your organization understand the difference between your CFO’s dashboard and your internal marketing dashboards as well. It’s not that the internal dashboards aren’t important. They’re just a means until the real ends.
Want to hear more from me on how to create a budget your CFO will support? I’d love to tell you about it at my session at the annual Marketing Nation Summit. Let me know in the comments what budget successes you’ve had so far this year and what you’re looking to still improve upon.
Investors have been anticipating the close race to the $1 trillion market cap between Apple and Amazon, but analysts at Morgan Stanley are also counting on Microsoft to hit the mark within a year.
The investment bank hiked its stock price target for Microsoft to $130 from $110 in a detailed report released to clients on Monday. It was 49 percent higher than Friday’s close of around $87 and on track to reach the $1 trillion market value target.
Following the Morgan Stanley report, Microsoft shares rose 5 percent in midday trading on Monday. With a midday market value of $707 billion, Microsoft was right behind Amazon at $733 billion and Apple at $849 billion.
Morgan Stanley’s bullish outlook is attributed to the software company’s growing cloud services under the Office 365 subscription and Azure platform for businesses. Microsoft is expected to grow its share of the cloud market because of its large customer base anddistribution channel, unlike cloud giants Amazon and Google. After becoming Microsoft's CEO in 2014, Satya Nadella’s push for cloud computing, instead of making phones, has translated into surging stock prices for the company.
“With Public Cloud adoption expected to grow from 21% of workloads today to 44% in the next three years, Microsoft looks poised to maintain a dominant position in a public cloud market we expect to more than double in size to (more than) $250 billion dollars,” analysts Keith Weiss and Melissa Franchiwrote.
Morgan Stanley analysts cited results from a recent surveyof chief information officers that highlighted preference to cloud services versus local servers. Large companies are predicted to channel more of their tech budgets to cloud computing with Microsoft, Amazon, and Cisco in the next few years.
Microsoft still has other business lines, like the Xbox gaming segment and social networking through LinkedIn, that can contribute to its robust growth. However, investors are still betting on Microsoft’s cloud business to primarily drive sales and profit surge of nearly 10 percent in the following years.
Google has announced the rollout of its mobile-first search indexing, after more than a year of testing and experimentation. The move was first detailed in 2016 when Google wanted to use phone-optimized versions of websites to index pages in its search results.
The shift to mobile-first indexing comes from the rising trend of more people using mobile devices to browse and search the web. However, some sites have significantly different versions of content for desktop and mobile browsers, the latter often a watered-down copy of the former. “Mobile-first indexing means that we'll use the mobile version of the page for indexing and ranking, to better help our – primarily mobile – users find what they're looking for,” Google explained its blog.
Google insisted that it will only use one index in displaying search results, but will prioritize mobile-friendly sites over desktop versions. It emphasized that the index only changed how content is gathered and not how it is ranked.
Google also allayed fears that desktop content will be removed from the index, or that mobile sites not included in the initial wave would be at a disadvantage when compared to first joiners. And if a desktop site is more relevant to the search over mobile alternatives, it will be included in the results.
We also have freshly updated documentation about Google mobile-first indexing, including this helpful chart that covers what happens if there's only desktop content (Yes! It continues to be included!), AMP content and so on. https://t.co/T5w9WOp1Hcpic.twitter.com/O515eRzjdb
The company will select sites that follow best practices for mobile-first indexing, notifying them via Search Console. Webmasters of these sites should notice increased visits from the Smartphone Googlebot. After the shift, the mobile version of sites will be shown in Google’s search results and cached pages.
Google assured that it will continuously evaluate content in its index to determine how mobile-friendly sites are based on best practices. Moreover, it will still prefer mobile versions of sites over Google’sfast-loading AMPpages in indexing.
The tech company has always pushed for mobile-optimized sites,boosting the rankof mobile-friendly pages on its search results in 2015. Last January, Google announced thatpage loading speedwill also be a ranking factor for mobile searches and slow pages will be downranked starting July 2018.
In a bid to improve its services, Walmart is currently testing automation in several of its stores across the country. The robots are designed to manage repetitive tasks and give the staff more time to focus on helping customers.
The retail giant hasdeployed around 50 robotsthat scan shelves to check for mislabeled items, products with incorrect prices and out-of-stock goods. The collected data is then relayed to a cloud database. Workers can then check to see what products are running low and have to be restocked.
The robots are developed and produced by Bossa Nova Robotics. Officials from the San Francisco-based company said it took them almost six years to develop the automated units' shelf-scanning technology.
According to Walmart's management, the robots will free employees from repetitive and predictable tasks and give them more time to concentrate on giving their customers better service. Walmart says theproject is still in its initial stagesand the company is still gathering feedback from customers and colleagues on the robots' performance and whether they get in the consumers' way.
The units are like self-driving vehicles and are typically used early in the morning. But the company is amenable to testing the robots at other times—like the midday and at night - when there are more customers in the store.
The shelf-scanning robots are just the first in a series of changes Walmart appears to be considering. The company has already filed several patents on technology that they plan on using, including a wearable device that will track shoppers' movements.
Walmart isn't the only company checking out what Bossa Nova Robotics' machines can do. Three other major retailers have contracted the company to test its automation technology.
The use of automation in retail has already been the topic of debates. Some consumers have raised questions on what the role of robots would be while others have concerns about how this will affect jobs. But there are also those who believe automation can make shopping trips easier.
You received some solid data from your recent email marketing campaign, but are these the real indicators of success or are they just imitating? There are some key marketing metrics out there that, if interpreted incorrectly, could give a false account of positive return on your campaigns. That’s why it’s important to know what to test and how to test it.
In this blog, I’ll uncover some misleading metrics along with the real keys to success for email marketing to make sure you don’t lose yourself.
This Email Did Amazing! Let’s Recycle the Same Content
In college, I dressed as Batman for every party I attended. For a while, I received praise and laughs and soaked in every second of it—until one night I was greeted with, “Oh. You’re still doing that, huh?” I retired my party utility belt the next day. What’s the point of telling this story from my “party glory days?” People get tired of seeing the same thing! Learn from your successes, analyze what’s working, and apply them to new content so that you are always rotating creative. Try some new video marketing or shake things up with new writing style and tone. Be unpredictable in a good way. It’s more exciting for your audience.
You know your subject line affects your email’s open rate but are you measuring how it affects downstream metrics like clicks, click to open rate, and unsubscribe rates? Think of your subject line as the introductory handshake before a discussion—be transparent, be direct, and be interesting. Take a look at these subject line tips to help improve your copy and the recipient’s experience. A good subject line might attract a recipient’s curiosity. A great one gets their attention. High open rates do not correlate to high click-to-open rates. Therefore, we needed to look at overall engagement.
Click-through rate is unique clicks/emails delivered. This metric lets you know how the entire email faired but not specifically how copy and imagery worked within it. CTR does NOT factor into what happened with deliverability. To measure the content and its performance in the email itself, you’ll have to use click-to-open rate. This is unique clicks/unique opened emails, meaning it tells you how the email performed AFTER it was opened.
If you’re handing out samples at Costco:
You’re a saint.
Click-through-rate is the number of approving nods you get before they try.
Click-to-open rate is the number of nods you get after they taste.
Sure, they might like the idea of the name Bacon Butter Batter, but if they try it and spit it out, you’re definitely not getting the sale. On the other hand, the look of the batter might gross most people out which may hide the fact that the brave few who tried it absolutely loved it. If your deliverability isn’t doing so hot, your click-through rate will suffer, but it doesn’t indicate what happens after the email is opened. A subject line that beats the control on open rate but loses on click-to-open rate is not necessarily the winner.
Speaking of deliverability, have you ever had a package shipped to your house and found it “cleverly” hidden under your welcome mat or in the bushes? Or maybe you were home waiting, but the driver simply left it on your doorstep without a knock or doorbell ring? Technically speaking, the package has been delivered but not properly.
Emails can suffer the same fate (in a digital sense.) The deliverability rate of your email list is vital to any and every campaign you send as it can affect future campaign deliveries. Monitor it by managing soft (temporary) and hard (permanently failing) bounces, maximize inboxing (% of emails that hit inbox), and cleaning up your lists. If you stagger your sends by engagement, you’ll see higher deliverability rates and much higher inboxing.
Don’t confuse your clicks, keep it fresh, look at the big picture, and handle with care. With some testing and updates to your marketing strategy, you’ll be rocking the mic in no time. For a few more key measures, I recommend checking out this beefy list of metrics to test by our email marketing deity Michael Madden. Do you have any recommendations to share? Comment below!
Amazon has obtained approval on anew patentfrom the US Patent and Trademark Office for a delivery drone that can respond to human gestures and voices on Tuesday.
The patent, filed in July 2016 and published recently, is in line with the company’s goal to maintain a fleet of unmanned aerial vehicles that will rapidly deliver packages in 30 minutes or less. Through visual cues, voice commands, and a person’s gestures, the drone can establish its flight path, release the package, or ask humans about the delivery.
Patent illustration for Amazon drone
The document included several illustrations of the design, one of which shows the delivery drone and a man outside his home. He was wildly flailing his arms in what Amazon called an “unwelcoming manner,” a gesture as if to shoo away the drone overhead. A blank voice bubble suggests possible voice commands for the drone.
A diagram of the drone's communication systemincludes speakers and microphones, as well as navigation components like depth sensors and cameras to detect visible, infrared, and ultraviolet light. Through its array of sensors, the delivery drone would recognize audible and visible gestures and react accordingly.
The patent also detailed the steps a drone would take when it reads body language—thanks to its human gestures database—as it delivers the package. Once it’s clear to deliver, the drone releases the parcels from the air or lands on a certain spot to place the package. It would be able to verify the recipient’s identity via an app, speech recognition, or remote operator.
Moreover, the delivery drone can add new movements to its database to improve the accuracy of its gesture-recognition system. “In some examples, when in the learning context, a human operator may interact with the UAV in order to ‘teach’ the UAV how to react given certain gestures, circumstances, and the like,” the patentstated.
The eCommerce giant has declined to comment on the gesture-recognition concept, but this isn’t the first time that Amazon has applied for something this ambitious. Since announcing plans to design an air delivery service, the company filed patents for mobile flying warehouses by using airships and self-destructing drones.
Marketing has always struggled to show its value. Perhaps this explains why there are still a small number of CMOs in the boardroom. Only 21% had a marketing background among FTSE 100 CEOs. The annual Robert Half FTSE 100 CEO Tracker showed that majority of CEOs (43%) have a background in finance. That big discrepancy suggests a gap in value placed on the disciplines.
Marketing as a Growth Driver
However, things are changing. Raconteur cited executive search firm Heidrick & Struggles, revealing the proportion of European CEOs with a marketing background to have grown from 15% to 21% between 2011 and 2015. It also pointed out current Tesco CEO Dave Lewis being responsible for Unilever’s Dove Real Beauty campaign. Another example was Procter & Gamble’s former UK marketing chief Roisin Donnelly joining the board of Just Eat.
Not only that, Deloitte found that 27% of surveyed CMOs said their role is primarily responsible for growth strategies and revenue generation, above the CEO (21%). The report also revealed that for 68% of CMOs, being the growth driver is the top or one of the highest expectations by senior management and the board from them.
A shifting focus to a more customer-centric world makes this true: Consumers demanding personalized and on-demand products and services, and brand recall becoming more critical than ever as customer attention span decreases. And who’s on the ground, interacting with customers? CMOs and their teams. This makes them key players in the boardroom, being considered the voice of the customer at the leadership table.
The CMO job description has also undergone massive change in recent years. In addition to creative work, it now also involves a lot of analytics. Delivering key results using a balanced combination of both skills makes it a challenging (but exciting) role.
As a marketer, how can you fulfill your increasingly important responsibility and justify the investments the organization makes to execute your growth strategy? How can you achieve results by combining creativity and analytics?
The Alexa of Marketing
The secret behind the success of intelligent personal assistants such as Alexa is the power of an artificial intelligence system built upon, and continually learning from, human data. Not only does Alexa help you turn on the lights, read your emails, or remind you what to buy at the grocery store, it also gathers data to continuously improve and add value.
In marketing, the future lies in how data can be leveraged to guide marketing activities at scale and in real-time. That’s become possible with your own “marketing Alexa”—a kind of marketing technology that leverages AI, predictive analytics, and machine learning to strengthen your marketing strategy with data-driven decisions and actions—from lead generation and ranking to branding and campaign management.
This explains why four in 10 CMOs knew more about AI than the average consumer (vs. 18% of consumers), and that 55% expected AI to have a more significant impact on marketing and communications than social media ever had, according to Weber Shandwick and with KRC Research.
Gartner also revealed that in 2017-2018, CMOs allocated 9.2% of their total marketing expense budget on marketing analytics—behind any other capability. Moreover, when Deloitte asked which areas had the most impact on CMOs’ ability to generate revenue, one of the top solutions was targeting, personalization and predictive analytics (44%), which allow them to harness their data.
The main benefits of an AI-powered platform are delivering customer experience, identifying, understanding, and growing customers, and measuring and optimizing marketing performance.
Let’s see how AI and predictive analytics power marketing’s own version of Alexa.
Knowing Your Customers
Consumers today are upending the market. They are tech-savvy, demanding, and knowledgeable, expecting personalized approach regardless of the channel they use to interact with a brand. For any marketing activity to work, the first requirement is to truly know your target customers because who else are you doing all the work for? You can ask your intelligent personal assistant to:
Discover Your ICP
Using a robust set of indicators made from first and third-party data, an AI platform can scan your database to identify valuable customers and predict their likelihood to convert. The characteristics that make your actual customers unique compared to all the leads or prospects in your database paint a picture or profile of your target, your ideal customer profile (ICP).
Segment Your Market
Now that you know your ICP, it is easier for your AI platform to divide your target customers into segments, with each having its unique campaigns, messaging, and general strategy. You can also ask the platform to do more than traditional segmentation, with new data sets such as technologies in use, social influences, firmographic data, and intent-based data. Letting you customize your approach per segment enables you to better connect with customers and leave a lasting impression.
Jumpstart Your ABM Strategy
Your targets may be large organizations that have complex purchase processes with many decision makers across departments. AI platforms can leverage account-based marketing (ABM) which enables you to gather consensus from all buyer participants to close a deal. With ABM, you can get more, such as customer retention and cross-sell and upsell opportunities, generating higher value deals in the long run.
Create New Audiences
Once you have your ICP and ABM in place, then you can ask the platform to explore predictive audiences. This helps you understand your target audiences better, create account lists for ABM, and see other green field accounts identified for you. With your target audiences ready, your AI system can provide you with insights to refine your current strategy, or even expand to new markets, geographically or even into a new vertical.
Knowing Your Wins
These are what you are going to bring in the boardroom—data-driven creative outputs and strategic actions and results. It is essential to communicate the business value and financial impact of your marketing initiatives vis-à-vis the overall enterprise strategy. And what better way to do that than providing the data proofs that boardroom officers want to see. Helping you prepare for your next board meeting, you can ask your marketing personal assistant to:
Focus on the Right Prospects
With insights at hand, an AI platform helps you focus your energy and budget to customers who have the highest likelihood to buy. This is important so that every penny, time, and effort spent on one customer by the whole organization bears fruit. Having a clear view of who, what, where, and how to target is gold for marketers today.
Optimize Customer Engagement
Delivering personalized customer experience has become a necessity for brands. Knowing your ICP and other marketing indicators, you are more than capable of being attuned with your customers and create a very targeted approach to their lifestyle and behavior. Your platform can also help you build rapport and deliver what customers truly need by being consistent and present across their buying journey.
Empower Your Sales
An AI platform shows the context behind why a target is labeled as such to sales so they can prioritize. By prioritizing leads and accounts that are more than likely to buy, they become more efficient. The intelligence on buyer persona and metrics that predict the performance of existing leads and accounts help sales improve results. And in return, contributes to the achieving the revenue for the organization.
Grow Your Market
By using existing data, the platform can find new targets in new markets. Indicators that describe high-value customers in your existing market can lead you to new customers with the same characteristics in the new market. This saves a lot of resources that you would’ve used in market research and strategic analysis.
CMOs are aware of the critical role they play as the voice of the customer in the boardroom. And an AI-powered, intelligent personal assistant such as MintigoAI helps to show marketing’s value. But to truly drive growth for the business, there must be a change in organizational mindset towards a more customer-centric approach. And the boardroom, being the source of tough decisions on vision and strategy, must promote the collective work of driving the organization’s attention and focus on the most important aspect: the customers.
What potential do you see for an AI-powered marketing personal assistant? How might this make your job easier? Tell me about your future vision in the comments.
