As the Holidays Approach, It's a Good Time To Ask: What’s Next in Email Deliverability?

As the Holidays Approach, It's a Good Time To Ask: What’s Next in Email Deliverability?


As the Holidays Approach, It's a Good Time To Ask: What’s Next in Email Deliverability?

Posted: 28 Oct 2016 06:00 AM PDT

What’s next? That’s a question that is asked often on my favorite television show of all time, The West Wing. The President of the United States, Jed Bartlet who was played by Martin Sheen, often ends conversations by asking “What’s next?” This is a good question to ask in general and I think it’s coming at a very appropriate time for email marketing, and especially and more personally for me on the deliverability side of the house.

As we approach the holiday season once again, I fear that not enough people are asking what’s next in an actionable way. Most marketers haven’t even realized how far deliverability has come. They are still trying to find a single reputation score that magically encompasses everything they need to know about deliverability in a single glance, or they may be a little more advanced and be thinking about engagement as an important deliverability factor.

We’re still talking to those senders who think there is a magic pathway to the inbox, where you don’t have to do any special work beyond signing up for a service. There’s still no shortcut to the inbox, if you were wondering. Inbox placement isn’t for sale, you can’t add it to your domain name system (DNS), and there isn’t anyone who is so connected that they can make a call, and make all your troubles vanish.

Ssshhh… It’s a secret.

There is a little secret that those of us in the know have been aware of for some time. I am excited to see that a lot of you out there also see what’s happening. We’re in one of those transitional periods in deliverability that we see every few years. The surprise is this time, the secret to great inbox placement isn’t some new deliverability concept. Good marketing leads to good inbox placement.

That’s the secret.

I know it isn’t that exciting to say, except for the fact that it actually is very exciting. Good marketers are winning the day, and we see it more and more each day. You want to see the inbox in Gmail? The way to get there is to do some amazing marketing. That’s what puts you in that position, not tricks and shortcuts.

That’s why this is an exciting time for us in the deliverability space. We know how to configure our systems to give you the best opportunity to get to the inbox. We know how to throttle, how to authenticate, which metrics to watch, and what time of day to send. All of that is already in place for you, the missing piece is the connection between you and your customer. Don’t forget that as you plan for the holidays.

Appetite Recognition

It isn’t about how many times you can touch a customer per week, it isn’t about meeting a send quota for the quarter. Smart and successful marketers this holiday season will be the ones who recognize their customer’s appetites for their products. It’s just fine to send some great promotional deals, but it has to be mixed in with content that people want to read.

Next time, I am going to talk about how those same smart marketers are using new tools to not only understand how they are performing, but they are borrowing ideas about what does and does not work. All the information that you need to be successful is there for you today, and as always it isn’t activated by a magic wand. The information is there for you if you want to see it. 

As always, we are here to answer your questions and provide you with the path to those solutions.

You're not alone. We understand how critical (and even daunting) of a task it is to get email into an inbox. With these challenges in mind, we are giving you the opportunity to learn from our experience. Download the Email Deliverability: Guide for Modern Marketers to achieve email deliverability that really matters.

 Email Deliverability: Guide for Modern Marketers

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Learn to Create, Curate, and Distribute Your Brand’s Story from the Latest Content Pros Podcasts

Posted: 27 Oct 2016 10:00 AM PDT

Have you been wondering who to follow in content marketing? With so many so-called experts and influencers in this industry, it can be a daunting task to find the best advice from people with real experience. Randy Frisch and I have gathered the best of the best in one place, just for you. They have real stories, lessons learned, and advice to help other marketers like you. This month, we’ve had the pleasure of adding Matthew Grant, David Fortino, Rick Wion, and Dan Levy to our archive of interviews with the best Content Pros around.

Join us over on the Content Pros Podcast to gain insights from these and other experts on strategies for successful conversion, reasons to prioritize content distribution, how to ask customers the right questions, and structuring your staff for the best results.

How Third-Party Content Converts Fans Into Customers

Many B2B marketers use content to move prospects through the sales funnel. However, rarely do marketers speak to customers, let alone know what a prospective buyer is looking for at any particular point in their journey. Too often content curation stems from speculation on the part of the content marketer, leading to trial-and-error marketing.

Matthew Grant, Director of Content Strategy for the Aberdeen Group, has experience with several tools that remove the guesswork from content. With a combination of third-party content, surveys, and old-fashioned detective work, any B2B content marketer can turn their campaigns into conversion machines.

Listen to Matt and learn more about these tips:

  • Why finding out what your customers consider valuable is easy yet rarely done
  • How content more often leads to identifying where a buyer is in their journey instead of pushing them along the funnel
  • Why convincing content means sourcing it from outside your company
Why Content Distribution Matters More Than Curation

Many content marketers focus on the quality of their content and rest easy knowing that their audience will find, appreciate, and consume these high-quality posts.

But as David Fortino, Senior VP of Audience and Product at the NetLine Corporation, explains, it’s actually up to you as the content marketer to get your content in front of the customer. Without a solid plan to disseminate your material to a targeted audience, that excellently written, perfectly tagged, fascinatingly relevant post will go nowhere fast.

David’s approach to content curation, dissemination, and personalization will help any content marketer get their material in front of the right audience at the right time.

Join our conversation to hear David share:

  • Why the quality of lead gen no longer means acquiring appropriate contact information

  • How to move beyond personas and take your content to the next level of personalization

  • How to better position your brand through content that’s shaped by data and client insights

Reputation Management Through Digital and Social Storytelling

From a background in journalism, to Social Media Director at McDonald’s, to his current position as the Senior Director of Consumer Engagement with The Kellogg Company, Rick Wion has been writing and developing content since age 17. Over time, Rick has learned the positive effect of conducting qualitative research to discover what kind of content your audience wants to hear, as well as the value in producing that content through a variety of storytelling methods.

He maintains a relationship with consumers by giving them an opportunity to ask the questions they want to know, then turning those questions and their answers into content. From there, Wion keeps the conversation going by polling his audience to make sure his content is consistently relevant, impactful, and new.

Rick has shared the following three insights:

  • How to manage your brand’s reputation based on the quantitative research of what your audience wants
  • The variety of approaches you can take to tell amazing stories
  • Key differences in audience reach between a microsite and social media platforms
How Agile Content Marketing Powers Up Your Sales Funnel

One of the biggest challenges for modern marketers is how to structure your staff and set them up for success. It’s difficult to know where to start and how to focus your departments for maximum impact.

Dan Levy, Content Director at Unbounce, starts with distributing the workforce throughout a series of interdisciplinary squads working toward a common goal. Implementing this structure has given him unique insight into the pros and cons of existing setups, meaning he always knows when it’s time for a change. This knowledge will be incredibly valuable for any marketing manager looking to revolutionize their approach to content.

Here are three topics to look forward to in this episode:

  • The importance of super-groups in cross-team communication
  • How the traditional marketing channel structure leads to bumping against each other and wasted resources
  • How cross-functional teams lead to a deeper dive into understanding the buyer’s journey

This monthly round-up of the weekly Content Pros podcast shares some takeaways from recent episodes. If you like what you've read (and heard), please subscribe to the show on iTunes or wherever fine podcasts are downloaded.

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Oracle Data Management Platform: Empowering True Identity Management

Posted: 25 Oct 2016 06:00 AM PDT

As consumers increasingly interact with brands across a range of different devices and channels, the challenge of identity management for a marketer becomes paramount. We know that consumers don’t have a linear journey when engaging with a brand, they jump around between mobile apps, mobile web, desktop browsers, email, etc. leaving a trail of unique IDs along the way. Often times a consumer may do research on their mobile phone but ultimately transact on their desktop or laptop. In fact, according to Criteo’s State of Mobile Commerce Report, cross-device transactions accounted for 37% of all transactions, indicating that shoppers are browsing and buying on multiple devices.

Marketers need better control around the management of consumer IDs. To empower Oracle customers to quickly and efficiently manage these multiple ID spaces, Oracle has released major enhancements to the Audience Builder user interface within the Oracle Data Management Platform (DMP).These enhancements to the Audience Builder user interface make it easier for customers to manage and select ID types in order to identify, build, plan and analyze audiences based on the device or platform within which the ID was originally created.

The new Audience Builder UI gives Oracle Data Management Platform customers hands-on access to leverage the Oracle ID Graph to visualize linkages and build audiences across ID spaces. This means clients can narrow down which users to include in their audiences based on their IDs. For example, you can select only users linked to mobile web IDs, or you can further pinpoint your audience to only users linked to a specific mobile app ID (Apple IDFA or Google AdID).

With this release, the Oracle Data Management Platform becomes truly ID space agnostic. On average now, consumers own well over three devices, and each of these platforms operate with their own ID space. It can be with a login ID or a cookie ID or a device ID but with all of these major players in the industry, and the need for marketers to manage all of these different ID spaces, it becomes more important than ever to have “device agnostic” identity management baked into your DMP platform.

The new and improved Oracle DMP Audience Builder enables marketers to plan audiences for their campaigns using a combination of their own data and third-party data sources. Through the new and improved Audience Builders users are able to:

  • Enhance Audience Segmentation and Engagement: Understand audience composition by device and environment to increase the effectiveness of engagements.
  • Optimize Media Buys: By identifying the devices driving conversions, marketers can modify campaign strategies to focus the conversion points and eliminate wasted impressions.
  • Increase Campaign Effectiveness: By managing advertising dollars based on targeting environment, customers can personalize campaigns against the source ID for relevant retargeting and prospecting.
  • Improve Mobile App Targeting at Scale: Enables marketers to activate 1st and 3rd-party audiences on channels against their mobile ad IDs based on behaviors like mobile app installs.

Read more about this in our press release.

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