Archive for the ‘Marketing Automation’ Category

Originally posted on the Marcom Factory blog
We’re seeing a rising demand for QR codes coming from our customers. And rightly so, given the ever growing numbers of smartphone users, even in this country with overpriced mobile data plans. And since we offer automated solutions for PURLs (personalized URL’s) and QR that demand is quite logical. But that does not mean adding a QR code is always a good idea.

Late last week, one of our customers made an urgent request for a QR code to be added on a publication. The URL to be encoded was their public website. So after generating it, I checked whether it would scan easily and resolve quickly (that’s just one of the technical hurdles one can encounter with QR). It did, but to my demise, it took me to their standard homepage, not to a mobile optimized site.

So I recommended to redirect to another page, or at least to add information near the QR so that the user would at least know where the QR was taking him/her before scanning it. Today our account manager showed me the proof of the publication, with information that was related to a specific promotion, followed by the QR. My first thought was: ok, our customer understood what we meant and adapted his content accordingly. But unfortunately the QR would still direct me to their same general website.

What could I do except reiterate our first advice… And wisely enough, their marketing manager decided to leave out the QR code completely. Which, given the timeframe for the publication, was the right thing to do.

QR can definitely and effectively make a ‘bridge’ between print and mobile web, if used correctly. But just like with any new or existing medium or communication technique, think about what you want to achieve and make sure it contributes to a better user experience. Especially in these ‘always on-always connected’ times where failure to deliver can result in instant punishment with #fail hashtags on twitter or other social media sites.

If you want to read a good article about what works and what doesn’t with QR, check out this post by Eric Anderson published on iMedia

The July issue of the Journal of Marketing published by the American Marketing Association publishes a detailed and interesting study on multichannel communication. The case is about a large car dealership communicating to customers about service plans etc, but the learnings can be applied to other service-oriented industries as well.

You can download it from one of the authors webpage in PDF. Reading it brought me right back to my statistics courses in university (not the fondest of memories I must admit). If predictor variables, multicollinearity and the like is not your cup of tea, skip that part but I do recommend reading the results (starting on page 102)

The results of the study give an interesting insight on how customers react to a combination of direct communication channels (phone/email/direct mail) applied in a relational marketing program to drive return purchases, or “repurchase spending”. Both phone and email contacts show a inverted U-shape pattern, meaning that increasing the contact frequency (more than 5 in the study) results in irritation and has an adverse effect on the return purchases.

Personalized direct mail however has a significantly higher positive impact on the return purchases.It would take more than 10 direct mail messages over the same time frame to reach the ’tilting’ point where increasing the contact frequency would decrease its positive impact. On top of that, direct mail drives repurchases of a monetary value which is 4 or 5 times higher. How’s that for ROI?

The results continue to show the effects of combining the channels and how one should be very careful in monitoring the contact frequency across channels to avoid irritation. Here again, the figures show direct mail by itself outperforms email and phone and how adding  too many emails can actually slash the repurchase spending.

My take away: this is empirical proof of the effectiveness of print media. Use it to challenge assumptions about the ideal communication mix for your brand!

I recently read an article on techtarget.com on how to make the business case for marketing automation. It was published in their CRM section, but actually their arguments are valid for the marketing automation solutions we provide as well.

You can read the full article here. I’ve highlighted two key points below.

About the business case:

The article quotes a Gartner VP : “It’s an easy sell for components like marketing resource management (MRM), where you can point out how much cost you can cut out, what level of productivity and throughput you can increase with it. That can be put into a fairly straightforward business case”.

Faster time to market

If a marketing team can reduce the time to deployment and put a solution to work faster, it can sometimes help spur executive approval. In this way, Software as a Service (SaaS) solutions can reduce the initial capital outlay and let an organization ease in with specific campaigns or efforts that may be able to show value more quickly than large-scale, big-bang rollouts.

Applying this to our Marcom Factory suite

Whether you’re looking into digital asset management, automated publishing or web-to-print for distributed marketing, our solutions deliver a faster time-to-market and an excellent return on marketing investment. We actually see these solutions paying back their investment within a year. And since we’ve been building these solutions since 2001, we have a growing number of  examples we can share to help building your business case.

I spoke at the DM Seminar for retailers organized by the Belgian Post and WDM. I got a lot of good reactions on this presentation on local marketing platforms.
Since we started with our marcom factory suite, some major brands have selected us to build a communication platform for their retail network.
Some examples are outlined in this presentation.
Looking forward to your feedback!

The anniversary edition of the Marketing day promises to be a great succes!

For starters : it is completely sold out! More than 1.200 marketing professionals will meet in Square Brussels for a intensive and interactive day.

www.marketingday.be

The theme is ‘Trust is contagious’ and we came up with an mobile marketing add-on that expands on that theme.

Starting from the registration data, we generated more than 1.200  2D barcodes through the Microsoft Tag API. And that crowd will discover mobile codes as soon as they open their personalized agenda.

Once the app available through http://gettag.mobi is loaded on their smartphone they’ll be able to scan each others codes to exchange vCards. The Artoos booth will feature other codes to allow them to discover how this technology can be used to direct consumers to landing pages & websites or to dial a predefined number.

Looking forward to the reports, to find out who gets the most ’scans’ for his vCard.

To try this at home, you can scan this code. It will direct you to our facebook Fanpage on climate neutral printing.

leads you to our facebook fanpage

I wrote a previous blog post on 2D mobile codes. It was my first take at the subject. It’s in Dutch and you can read it here. Maybe Google translate can even help you understand what I wrote  ;-). Since then, we’ve been researching possible applications and tools. In March, we’ll be doing a first large scale application for a major direct marketing event. (+1000 attendees)

One of the  main questions was : QR or Microsoft Tag?

QR is definitely a standard and the apps to scan these codes with your smartphone are multiplying. The Microsoft technology is still in Beta and there is no certainty about its future.

Still, we chose to work with tags for the event. Why? The main reason is user-related. Our tests show that time and time again the tags scan and resolve immediately. Getting your phone near the tag, even from an angle, is enough for it to be recognized. With QR it’s a different story. We tested a number of different code reader apps but could not come to a “winning combination”. Often we would succeed in scanning the code, but every time we found ourselves “fiddling around” to align the phone correctly.

That’s not the only advantage of tags though. The fact that you can edit  and update the content behind the tag after creating it is a neat feature. And in its present form, Microsoft tags come with an API for integration and with basic but usefull stats about which codes have been scanned and when. On a final note: if you’re ‘into’ Twitter : the team behind Microsoft Tag gives great support. You can follow them on http://twitter.com/microsofttag

To be continued in March… for the first results of our clickable print case. You can read about it here or on twitter

Gisteren was het “Technology Day” bij het BDMA. Op zich best een goede formule : een kleine 20 sprekers krijgen elk 15 minuten om hun nieuwe technieken of technologieën te presenteren. Artoos tekende present met onze Marcom Factory oplossing, speciaal dan voor de presentatie van de “campaign manager” onze nieuwe webapplicatie voor beheer van lokale direct marketingcampagnes voor merken met een uitgebreid retail- of verkoopskanaal. Op zich heeft die oplossing wel genoeg “features” om zich te onderscheiden van andere vergelijkbare oplossingen, maar het wordt best moeilijk als je als vierde spreker van een bijna vergelijkbare oplossing wordt… Ik vraag me af of de toehoorders door het bos de bomen nog wel zien.

Ik heb in elk geval de bevestiging gekregen dat ons concept goed zit. Onze open oplossing, waarbij we stroomopaarts en stroomafwaarts integreren met oplossingen van derden inzake CRM, emailmarketing, telemarketing is zeker onderscheidend. En er zijn ook steeds meer sectoren waarvoor dit campagneplatform de kracht van gepersonaliseerde direct marketing kan bieden aan het lokale winkelpunt, de agent of de makelaar.

Voor het BDMA heb ik dan ook deze suggestie : bij een volgende editie maak je er gewoon een panelgesprek van, waarbij de concullega’s in een tegensprekelijk debat dan maar  hun best moeten doen om te tonen hoe ze het verschil maken. Ik teken in dat geval present en zal graag in discussie gaan met Johan, Frans en de anderen…

When talking to customers and prospects in marketing departments about possible configurations for their Digital Asset Management (DAM) I often find a situation where a global company, operating in several areas of the globe, has different solutions in place to serve the distinct needs of the markets they cover.

To take an example we often encounter here in Europe : a multinational company with headquarters in the US and EMEA operations in Brussels. Whether they operate in a B2C market or in highly specialized technical B2B environment makes little difference. Each time, having up-to-date and validated digital assets available in a variety of formats for advertisement and colateral production is a key element in their marketing operations. Since this is recognized as an essential contributor to an efficient go-to-market strategy, you would think the company would have organized their operational marketing function to enable this, right?

Well … yes, sometimes. But very often we see ‘one size fits all’ DAM systems being implemented and forced down the marketing pipeline with little or no difference being made to adapt to the specifics of a region or market. And so, after a few attempts to adapt the global solution, the regional marketing function starts to organize their digital assets in a way that is better suited to the needs of their own customers and users. Eventually, by responding to their user’s needs, they’ll find themselves coping with a recurring workload to convert and distribute their digital assets. So in turn, they might turn to a solution or SaaS provider in the DAM marketplace to help them.

Our SaaS marketing operations suite is often a good intermediary in those situations. With a limited investment, the regional function sets up a download portal to serve their local users. The sales team, the channel partners, the country teams access regionalized collections of digital assets for usage in their local marketing actions.

The resulting configuration : multiple DAM solutions in place within one global organisation. Is this really a problem? There is duplication of effort of course : you need to maintain several databases, you duplicate digital assets, etc. But on the other hand, your regional marketing needs are serviced by a solution that can be fully localized, both in content, in operating hours of the hotline etc. And there is nothing to stop you from evolving to a centralized platform with distributed databases in the future.  Migrating assets and metadata, especially from one XMP-enabled DAM to another should not be the hurdle.

Best of both worlds? Our  Global DAM customers within the EMEA region seem to think so. What’s your opinion?

I read a news article about a SaaS provider going out of business by the end of june. If you’re interested, here’s the article http://bit.ly/2OkwU

So who owns your data when your SaaS provider stops providing? Do you have a recent backup so you can migrate with little pain? What does the SLA have to say on this matter?

It’s a subject we cover regularly when discussing pros & cons of SaaS solutions for marketing automation. The answer should not be all that hard.

Yes, you remain the owner of your data and your SaaS provider should always be able to retrieve it from its system to hand it back to you. If you have a SaaS solution in place, check the fine print to make sure your assets remain yours in all circumstances.

What about the custom-developped code you asked them to write to adapt their solution to your marketing processes? Here, the ownership and copyright will most probably remain on the side of the provider. What you can do to add some peace of mind to your SaaS-contract is to set up an escrow-agreement so the source code is safeguarded by a neutral third party. That way, if the SaaS solution of your choice suddenly drops out of the cloud, you improve your chances of finding another SaaS provider to help you.

One of our large DAM customers called me last week about how to manage the rights on photographs. The problem at hand : images of applications are used for commercial purposes by their subsidiaries worldwide. Sometimes the “owners” of the application have given limited rights to use this imagery. Before XMP, an open standard sponsored by Adobe, this would have implied maintaining and synchronizing this information in multiple locations and databases. This exercise in digital rights management can be simplified by adhering to the XMP standard.

To implement XMP to the present DAM system, which is basically an entry-level application of our Marcom Factory SaaS suite, we do two things :

1. append XMP metadata to the present collection of images. This is achieved by importing a simple text or comma-separated file containing that information and linking it to the assets. From then onwards, every file ordered in the DAM will be downloaded with its metadata envelope.
2. write a small how-to guide so the creators, managers and approvers of new images can enter the metadata in their CMS system.

What remains to be done is educating your users on rights-managed images and how to use them within the agreed limitations in time and territory. Which is something you would have to do anyway.