Marvelous springtime is here – and digital marketing is headed for another record-setting year. Marketing technology investment is at an all-time high, as digital engagement has emerged as the only way to keep in touch with consumers amid the ongoing pandemic. In a recent survey, 79% of decision makers said that the Covid-19 pandemic has increased budgets for digital transformation.
But before bringing in the new, let’s kick out some of the old.
Right now is a good time for some serious spring cleaning – like going through all the spices in your pantry to check for freshness and expiration dates (don’t put this off, you’ll thank us later!).
Also, don’t hesitate to declutter your digital marketing set-up with Marie Kondo-style precision, to unlock new joy and boost your overall marketing success.
Here are 5 Quick and Powerful Spring-Cleaning Tactics to Boost Your Digital Marketing:
Any way you slice it, email marketing remains a powerful arrow in the marketing quiver. As of today, 80% of retail professionals still consider email marketing their greatest driver of customer retention. And with the upcoming extinction of third-party cookies, owned email lists are valuable assets.
Treat email lists accordingly and use springtime for thorough housecleaning. Get rid of bounced emails, which will ultimately land you in trouble, aka spam traps. Check for unresponsive, no-click recipients, and perform an audit to ensure all addresses are 100% opted into marketing.
Take a long, hard look at your deliverability stats – the Selligent platform has built-in tools for that – and check whether sender addresses have been blacklisted. It’s also a great opportunity to try something new (see 4.) to build recipient lists, like a website pop-in to nudge sign-up in return for discounts.
Again, a healthy email audience will boost your overall marketing success; also because subscribers are three times more likely to share your social content.
Data makes the (marketing) world go round. Ideally, marketers need free-flowing, real-time data as the foundation for personalized marketing engagement. For this reason, Marigold Engage is built with an open architecture to integrate data from all channels, online and in real life (IRL).
But in the everyday hustle, there’s sometimes little time to keep things running clean. So data silos and lags are a main cause for wasted time and resources in marketing. That’s why data scientists spend between 50-80% of their time cleaning up and wrangling down unruly data sets.
One particular hot button issue lies with customer care center integration. When insights from customer service interactions flow into consumer profiles, individual journeys and messaging can be adjusted accordingly. If not, marketers are at risk of missing the mark and serving irrelevant, intrusive messages – like sending follow-up marketing for a returned, unwanted product. Just one reason why keeping those data pipes clean – in springtime and throughout the year – is a priority.
It’s a mobile-centric world out there, we just get to market in it. Smartphones are the #1 connection to consumers on their omnichannel journeys. They’re also the source of tremendous revenue, as 59 percent of adults now prefer to shop via mobile phone.
Spring is a great time to walk in your customers’ shoes and test-drive all mobile touchpoints for speed and frictionless interactivity. Start by making sure that all your engagement is optimized for mobile devices:
Spring is also a great time to start over. For instance, by reviewing your presence on social networks to see what actually moves the needle in terms of engagement, and what can be let go. If you haven’t actively posted on Twitter in months – or worse, only send generic auto-tweets for every blog post – just hit delete.
Instead, use your uncluttered marketing structure as a blank slate for something new – like adopting marketing-specific AI. Marigold Recommendations is an out-of-the-box platform feature that helps clients achieve up to 20% uplift in conversion rates.
Adoption rates for marketing AI have climbed from only 29% of marketers in 2018 to more than 84% in 2020. And that’s for a good reason: Marketing AI transforms data from consumer profiles into personalized engagement, thanks to features like Smart Content, Smart Audiences, and Send Time Optimization, to hit the right moment for each consumer.
Also don’t forget your inbound marketing when it comes to spring cleaning. After all, every single piece of your marketing content is crawled, tracked, and ranked by search engines these days. So owning a top spot on SERPs is key to success in 2021.
On that note, search rank is in for a major disruption as Google Core Web Vitals become ranking signals later this year. Basically, Core Web Vitals are a set of metrics that measure positive user experiences, especially on mobile (see 3.), and rank websites accordingly. Get your house in shape with these quick SEO strategies:
Voila! These are some low-hanging fruits that can seriously raise your marketing success moving forward.
If you want more than quick spring-cleaning tips for your marketing, but a full makeover, powered by state-of-the art marketing technologies, why not book a demo with our Marigold Engage experts? We’d love to show you how our marketer-friendly technology can do more than just “clean up” your programs, but take them to a whole new level.
Ready to keep optimizing your marketing? The new reality of the pandemic has emphasized the need for flexible and situation-aware marketing. Some of these learnings are distilled in our Selligent white paper, Adaptive Marketing Techniques for Post-Pandemic Messaging, which you can download easily using the box below.
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