cross-channel-marketing

Why have CDPs caught the fancy of Indian Mutual Fund Marketers?

Being a Marketer for a Mutual Fund or an Asset Management company can be complicated. It’s easy to get into a panic state with ever-changing regulations and constant policing by compliance teams. In short, the life of Mutual Funds Marketers is not as easy and liberated as their peers from Retail or CPG. However, the evolution of Marketing technology has come to the rescue of such Marketers. Be it Data Privacy compliance OR be it the Monthly Recurring Fund update, Technology has taken care of it and brought in some relief. Interested to know which Technology are we referring to?? This new technology on the block that is making news is nothing but a Customer Data Platform. It is enabling Marketers to automate recurring compliance-led campaigns and tons of other things that they are unable to otherwise do with their existing Campaign tool. What is a Customer Data Platform? How different is it from a Marketing Automation Platform? Is it the same as CRM or a DMP? What is the strategic importance of a Customer Data Platform to a Mutual Fund Marketer? It is very natural for you to have these questions if you are new to Customer Data Platforms and thus we have answered all these queries in our blog here. Customer Data Platform as defined by CDP Institute is packaged software that creates a persistent, unified customer database that is accessible to other systems. In simpler words, a Customer Data Platform(also known as CDP) helps enterprises achieve a Single Customer View by ingesting every customer interaction that takes place in any form and on any channel. Be it a voice call dialed to a Customer Care, transaction done in a physical store, or a comment on a social media post, all interactions are ingested by CDPs to arrive at Single Customer View. And this Single Customer View helps the brand to know more about the customer and thus engage better with more relevance. Well, the story doesn’t end here… While most of the CDPs conclude their offerings at Customer Unification, there is a full-stack or a comprehensive CDP like FirstHive that enables Marketers with much more than a Single Customer View. And one of those differentiating features of FirstHive is efficient campaign execution capabilities. What would be your reaction if someone comes and tells you that we will reduce your campaign execution time and effort by 90%?? would you be Happy? Sad? or Excited?… Come, let us introduce you to Hyper-Personalization, a technology that is not just another buzzword but a rescue engine for Marketers. What is Hyper-Personalization? Hyper-Personalization is an advanced technology that enables Marketers to personalize campaigns beyond the general ‘Name’ personalization and can also factor in aspects like preferred content (Not just text but also images…Yes, images, you heard it right), preferred time, and preferred channel. And the reason why Hyper-Personalization is way more critical to Mutual Fund marketers as compared to their peers is because of the potential it carries to reduce their time and effort by 90% which otherwise they would have invested or rather wasted in the execution of recurring campaigns that are more compliance-driven than marketing-driven. And yes, this definitely means that you will be left with more time and resources in hand to think about ways to upsell, cross-sell, acquire customers, retain customers, and everything that would satisfy the marketer in you. How does Hyper-Personalization reduce the time and effort of a Mutual Fund Marketer? There are various use cases of Hyper-Personalization for Mutual Fund companies however let us list them in the order of criticality, starting from the most critical one. Let us understand each one of them in detail. Sending FactSheet to all customers every month Upselling or Cross-selling basis Fund performance Personalized experience to customers on other channels Reduce Time to Value via Partner Engagement model Sending FactSheet to all customers every month Let’s say you have 12 different funds. Today, are you sending 12 campaigns every month or is it just one?? If you are still sending 12 campaigns, then it is a perfect opportunity for you to learn about how FirstHive CDP can reduce that number to one campaign. FirstHive allows you to set conditions for content display that too for content in all forms – Be it Text, Numbers, Alphanumeric, Date, Images, or even URL. This process also called ‘Content Mapping’ is a very simple process of setting conditions offline in an Excel format which you then upload in one campaign so that the system derives 12 content drafts from one email draft thereby reducing your effort in creating another 11 drafts of emails. In short, by executing one campaign, you would be delivering 12 different content email campaigns. Woah!! What are you waiting for?? Upselling or Cross-selling basis Fund performance As per law, you do send a FactSheet to every customer but in that same email, basis the fund performance, do you communicate something more… For example: If the fund has done well, ask the customer to top-up his investment or if the fund has not done well, showcase other performing funds and widen the customer’s portfolio. FirstHive enables you to set rules in the content mapping section in a way that different content is pushed to the customer basis the fund performance. This ensures that the customer won’t just receive the Fund Performance details every month but also enough guidance on what to do next. And as you can imagine, this slight change in approach can bring dual benefits to the brand – One is that the Customer will feel BETTER engaged and not OVER engaged, and the second is that the sales will increase as a result of razor-sharp targeting. I mean, along with sharing the factsheet and telling me that my fund has done great if you are also pushing me to click on a button and invest more, there are higher chances of me clicking that button because the premise is that I would be in a happy state of mind. Wait…isn’t this ‘Marketing in Moments’ as stated by Forrester Analyst Joe Stanhope. Well, not bragging… but it is 🙂 Personalized experience to customers on other channels CTA of a mutual fund campaign typically is a Click that takes the user to the website or a landing page. But thereon, does the website or landing page show personalized content to every user of that campaign, or does the entire audience of one campaign land on a webpage that showcases the same content to everyone. Hoping it’s not the latter. In case it is, it is.. i.e; all users of one campaign see the same content on the landing page, it’s high time you start practicing Hyper-Personalization. In this era of Netflix where you as well as your customers have got used to seeing personalized recommendations, showing all of them the same content on the page is quite a passe. I bet, you will agree. Reduce Time to Value via Intermediary/ Partner Engagement Most of the Mutual Fund companies work around a Distributor model wherein Mutual Funds are sold via IFAs. These IFAs obviously have a strong network of investors, they maintain a good hold on their investments and play a big role in their buying/ selling decisions. Then why not target these investors via IFAs. This is exactly what Partner Engagement is… i.e; communicating in the line of Mutual Fund-Distributor-Investor. In simple words, it is a method in which you are targeting end investors of IFAs via IFAs but without letting the control go out of your hands. By control, we mean, the control from Marketing’s perspective i.e; Branding, content, time of execution. FirstHive’s Partner Engagement model lets you design the campaign in a manner that the Campaign would be delivered to the end investor via IFA’s branding as well as via the IFA’s email id in a manner that your brand aesthetics are maintained and the content is personalized. Wait, not just this… the icing on the cake is that the IFA would get real-time access to his investor’s response to the campaign. And the response would not be just another generic response like Clicked or Opened but it would be something as crisp as – “Eric John went to the website and explored the XYZ fund that we recommended”. Yes yes, you are reading it right…This means that the Mutual Fund house will share high intent data with the IFA which will not just increase their Sales but also strengthen their bond with the IFA. And that’s precious. Isn’t it?? So here we come to an end with all Hyper-Personalization use cases we thought would be relevant to you as a Mutual Fund marketer. If you are excited about what you just read and are keen to see this in real, please Click Here. Lastly, an important point to note is that FirstHive is a resilient product backed by Amazon Web Services (AWS) to strengthen its architecture. Besides Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) that offers highly scalable infrastructure, FirstHive also uses Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) that stores billions of row of data with an above industry uptime, AWS Transcribe service to convert voice data of customer interactions into searchable & analyzable digital content and Amazon Sagemaker platform to train machine learning models & generate the intelligent inferences. The Hyper-personalization functions run on Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) that is capable of elastically auto-scaling based on the varying business needs, while image recognition capability of Amazon Rekognition is leveraged in different types of sentiment analysis. P.S: And yes, do read our blog Unmasking differences between Customer Data Platform and Marketing Automation Platform and DMP Vs CDP Vs CRM

10 Ways Marketers are Using Technology to Improve Customer Experience

Marketing Technology as a sector is growing at a break neck pace and gaining traction, even among traditional markets. With CMOs becoming big spenders on technology, the lines between the CMO and the CIO organisations is quickly becoming blurred w.r.t. who wields the decision-making ability regarding such spends. While we will see the CMOs and CIOs working closely to identify and deploy marketing solutions, the below list attempts to list a few important areas where MarTech spends are expected over the coming months. Geofencing Geofencing is essentially creating a geographic demarcation such that shoppers within a specific area receive special coupons or offers that can be redeemed at a retail outlet. This can thus be used for either driving walk ins to a store or persuade the customers to spend more in-store. E.g. Walmart’s app has a store mode that responds to geofencing around stores and delivers coupons and special offers intended to drive walk ins. Starbucks was also planning to launch an ‘order ahead’ service wherein customers can order while on the move in the vicinity of a store, and just come in to pick up their order. With the Internet of Things gaining traction as well, there are companies experimenting with smart devices that perform some action depending on your location trigger w.r.t. the device, e.g. your refrigerator ordering foodstuff when you are home and then sending a text reminder, to ensure you are available to take the delivery. Beacons In theory, some may argue that Beacons are a subset of geofencing solutions itself, wherein several large retailers like Macy’s, Starbucks, American Outfitters are setting up bluetooth based text communication with the shoppers who walk in the store, the reason it is called out separately is the increasing role of Beacons in the space of mobile and proximity payments. This opens up a whole new experience for the shoppers which transcends traditional commerce mechanisms. In addition, shoppers can also choose to tag certain products through a website or social page, and get a custom notification sent to them when they walk into a store. Beacons are also increasingly used in events for calling out the various streams and discussions underway across the venue. Marketing Automation Tools Marketing Automation is one of the simplest and potent marketing tools in your arsenal. Simply put, marketing automation is the automation of all repetitive tasks that make up your marketing and sales process. For example, wishing your customers on their anniversaries or birthdays, sending seasons’ greetings, or even cross-channel communication of updates based on certain preconfigured triggers. Traditionally used by SMEs with limited Capex spend appetite, or struggling with lack of IT resources to configure specific database triggers for the business, marketing automation is increasingly penetrating even traditional, non-digital savvy sectors While there exist many marketing automation tools in the market, marketers are looking for platforms that enable cross-channel automation based on either preset triggers, or responses on a campaign sent through a particular channel. Multi Channel engagement tools Your customer today does not interact with you on a single channel alone. 81% of shoppers search online before making a buying decision. A vast majority ask for the opinions of their friends or family. Many customers also prefer making multiple visits to the store before they finally make a buying decision, more so for a high involvement category or expensive product. As a brand, you would also have laid out multiple other touch points which can be used by your customer to interact with you. White data (like white noise) that gets generated across all the channels and touchpoint can be leverage for some interesting behavioural insights if captured and analysed, else learnings are lost forever. Marketers need to invest in customer engagement platform which is capable of multi-channel engagement while providing actionable insights. Social Listening In the time it takes you to read this post, tens of millions of shoppers across the globe would be talking about brands and products across social media. As a channel, social is perhaps the most potent in terms of ‘propensity to engage’, as well as one which provides real-time feedback. Recognising the power of the medium, shoppers also tend to place their trust in brands which are active across social channels like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest, among others, since it offers them a non-obtrusive communication channel, unlike the traditional customer support channels that they are exposed to. This becomes all the more important for B2C companies who deal with a large number of shoppers, who demand personal attention and acknowledgement. It helps if you have the tools to measure the sentiment of a conversation while responding, to ensure that you are able to give your brand a human face. Social listening is also a great source for you to gauge your competition and gain insights that can prove invaluable for your brand to win that elusive incremental market share. CRM and opportunity management tools In most B2B companies, 80% – 85% of leads are never converted to sales. A major reason for the low conversions is typically unstructured follow-up, in the absence of a structured toolset to qualify marketing leads. Marketing and Sales automation increase the lead throughput, increase the quality of leads in the funnel, improve sales effective and productivity while providing a clear, unambiguous view of the funnel health. Single Window view of the customer While customers today interact with you across various channels, their personas are different across the channels. It is pertinent for your brand to initiate and maintain a meaningful dialogue across channels to be able to map the said personas and conversations across channels to a unique shopper. If I have been a consumer of your brand for the last couple of years, would your messaging to me still be “Hey, I am a great product”, or would it rather be a “Welcome back”. Most brands, however, are still struggling to create this single view of the customer that maps all his interactions and transactions with the brand, across multiple touchpoints. Virtual Reality Marketers are also increasingly looking at Virtual Reality to instigate customers to engage with their brand. By definition, these experiences need to be realistic so as to provide the customer with a glimpse into what he is missing. This typically works great for any experiential category like travel, real estate, etc. Mariott, in fact, rolled out a ‘Travel brilliantly’ campaign that gave its prospects a virtual version of travel to London and Hawaii. This obviously inspired travellers to book their travel to such locations, while also helping the brand connect with young, tech-savvy consumers. Red Bull offers immersive VY experience for its audiences by allowing the audiences at its extreme flying races, enabling fans to experience being on the plane, and not just watch it fly by. Brands are also looking at virtual reality platforms to set up inexpensive test layouts of new retail outlets and observing customer browsing patterns trough such platforms. Wearable Tech Wearables allow a hyper personalised marketing approach towards your customers and evolved marketers are busy experimenting their plans on this platform. A major advantage of wearables will be the new chunk of data that is released from this platform, and how a marketer can best leverage the same. However, this data flow will need to be 2 way for creating a meaningful experience. A prime example would be the Nike ‘Our Year’ campaign wherein Nike created personalised animated films for users showcasing their athletic prowess over the year, and challenging them to outdo themselves the next year. Data privacy concerns may still play spoilsport here but with space still evolving, some marketers are hoping to gain the early mover advantage on this platform. Analytics What cannot be measured, cannot be improved – Peter Drucker With a multitude of data sources permeating the value chain, the customer today generates white data across touchpoint, which marketers are trying to capture in order to gauge insights. However, while tools like Google Analytics and MixPanel can give you your web analytics, it is for the marketer to effectively evaluate the business metrics like ROI, channel performance, engagement, and propensity to buy or respond, using these or similar tools. With a clear distinction drawn between marketing analytics and web analytics here, the smart marketer is aware of the key drivers and triggers of his business, and is increasingly investing in new tools to help him measure, track, and optimise the same.

FirstHive Cross-Channel Marketing Platform is now Live!

The way consumers and brands interact with each other is evolving. While a large brand would try and achieve the capability to track and analyse the data generated across the multitude of touchpoints, smaller brands and businesses struggle with far more basic concerns. The SMEs are not typically involved in tracking millions of consumer transactions but are more involved in how to have a more meaningful engagement with the set of prospects or customer leads that they possess. Optimising their Marketing ROI is of prime focus while higher conversions and retentions are obviously the goal. This is where a platform like FirstHive DIY comes into play. While this technology was currently exclusive to the domain of very large global brands, with the launch of the Beta of the FirstHive DIY product, the same technology is now available for SMEs globally. This means that a small or medium business owner or marketer, be it across retail, hospitality, or professional services, can utilize this product. The marketers can now leverage the power of cross-channel marketing to improve their customer experience, and in turn, improve their top and bottom lines. What does this mean for Email marketing? Remember the time that you would send out bulk mails to your entire prospect list and pray for a conversion. This was independent of whether the prospect was interested in your product, whether the prospect had ever engaged with you on this channel, when was the best time to send someone a mail, or thinking about if there was a better way to nudge this user towards your business objective. FirstHive enables actionable dashboards and intelligence pulled out across channels to enable you to get the optimal target list to send a campaign. The built-in segmentation tool ensures that you send out the communication only to the relevant recipients, who may have a higher propensity to convert as compared to others. What does this mean for SMS marketing? In a nutshell, it implies that a global reseller sitting in Jakarta can engage with his customers using multiple local long codes and still ensure complete control over the communication going out to his customers, while receiving comprehensive dashboards and reports. Or that a UK-based travel business will coordinate with all their US partners, using a local US long code, while viewing all interactions in a consolidated dashboard. SMS marketing has never been simpler. What does this mean for social media channels management? Simple, single interface management of all your social conversations – this is what FirstHive means for social channel management. Use FirstHive for engaging with your customers and followers across Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, while maintaining a unified dashboard view to help you gauge the most effective channel, depending on your objectives. We have just unveiled the first curtain of many. The woods are lovely, dark and deep,. But we have promises to keep, and miles to go before we sleep. So, have you thought about setting up your FirstHive?

Multi-channel Data Intelligence to Connect with your Customers in Real Time

Marketing is evolving from campaigns to customer experiences The customer is evolving and so is marketing and marketing tools. Marketing is rapidly approaching to what marketers have often dreamt about: real-time customer engagement. The entire customer experience is being optimized across channels, by messages and offers, social posts and by time. In the last decade, marketing environment has seen major technological shifts and developments. Marketers are getting experimental with different marketing tools and strategies to get the maximum share from the customers and drive engagement. But, we still see companies investing in traditional marketing mediums – which though is not bad, but probably means companies missing out on a massive market! FirstHive as a complete marketing automation system Multi channel data intelligence The fundamental driver of real time marketing is data and determining what data is effective and how you view the data to drive insights. This requires data driven marketing technologies to enable brands to map their complete customer life cycle across channels. FirstHive brings this multichannel data intelligence and real time customer engagement to the industry. This is Software as a Service (SaaS) deployment that enables value proposition using cloud computing. Online and offline data integration FirstHive marketing automation platform captures your offline and online customer interaction history, including unstructured data. Not many marketing automation systems are capable of doing that. As a result, these systems cannot create a complete customer profile that cannot be leveraged by marketing managers to track the customer journey. Relevant, Targeted campaigns FirstHive marketing platform enables you to go much deeper on segmentation while publishing to multiple channels. Customer intelligence by FirsHive makes the part of your closed loop sales and marketing system, enabling B2B and B2C marketers to sift through huge amounts of complex customer data to identify relevant data, creating buying opportunities in real-time at different phases of the customer journey. Real Time Social Dashboards Social media management by FirstHive is the key to being monetized through real-time cross-channel marketing. Real time cross-channel marketing takes these conversations and customer interactions, through a marketing platform with listening capabilities, and makes them part of customer profiles that can then be contextualized in campaigns to drive the right offer in real-time. Innovative Solutions and Functionalities by FirstHive Support of structured and unstructured data from live data sources and offline data loading Capability to listen to customer interactions through all digital channels, regardless of the type of data and interaction Segmentation of online data using system defined tags and offline data through user defined tags for optimized and targeted campaign designing and launch in multichannel SaaS based platform Supports real-time optimization that includes the processing, analytics, and optimized preferences of customer engagement data in real-time Real-time Customer Engagement using Big data and data sciences integration Insights that includes basic segmentation, data visualization process, complementing marketing strategy and execution A marketing automation/ cross channel campaign management platform that enables marketers to build audiences and publish once across many channels, simultaneously based on transactional, behavioral and lifecycle conditions. A representation of the customer journey and the choices she has.

Your Favorite Marketing Platform Just Got More Powerful!

“You don’t have to be a fantastic hero to do certain things – to compete. You can be just an ordinary chap, sufficiently motivated to reach challenging goals.” — Edmund Hillary Every achiever, who sets on a voyage, sets a goal for herself. Our goal, at FirstHive, is to immensely empower all the marketers in the world, making them superheroes in customer engagement. And we are inching towards that goal one step at a time by working hard and adding new, relevant features in our product every week. If you’re still reading, you know that this blog is going to be a bit of self-boasting 🙂 But it’s all for you. As somebody once said – “If YOU look good, WE look good”. So if our marketing platform gets more and more powerful, your job gets easier and easier. Let’s get into the real stuff now — What have we added this week that makes our application stronger and deserves to be highlighted for you! Integration with Zoho CRM: Today, your marketing and sales team work in silos. Yet, they target the same customer and maybe with a different brand promise and delivery. It’s only logical that these two customer-facing groups come into contact and share data with each other. If your sales rep can read your customer insights from marketing campaigns, or if you can know about your customer’s activities in the sales process, you both will be able to align your messages and create a personalized targeting for that particular customer. That increases chances of the customer coming on board. This week, we’ve enabled that feature for you. We’ve integrated our product, FirstHive, with Zoho CRM, an online customer relationship management tool, that will bring your marketing and sales activities in alignment with each other. The sync between two applications will allow you to maintain a single, up-to-date version of contact and lead management. To know more about the functions and applications of this integration, request a free, personal demo here. Pull contacts from Outlook & Hotmail: Together with Google, FirstHive now also enables you to pull in your contact’s data from Outlook and Hotmail into the marketing application. This feature comes in handy if you have a professional contact base in Outlook or Hotmail, which you can import into FirstHive and create a target customer database. You may then use this database to execute your email marketing campaigns, and subsequently, keep track of your campaign metrics in real-time. Optimize SMS with Bitly: FirstHive’s another very meaningful integration this week was with Bitly, a URL shortener and link management platform. Bitly will help SMS campaign creators to shorten links and provide space for more brand-centric message accommodation in the text. This will make sure that you don’t miss out on any important pitch due to character limits. Pull data from Facebook, Twitter: When you manage your social media accounts in FirstHive, you now get this option of fetching your Twitter followers and Facebook fans into the application. The data will be stored as a respective customer database. Now, when you trigger a campaign targeting them, you will be able to track their behavior in real-time. Email re-marketing: What is your follow-up activity after email marketing? You analyze your campaign data, see click-open rates and wait for conversions. What if you want to boost conversions by emailing again but only to those who are interested and opened your mail? How do you do that? Well, with FirstHive, that’s not a problem anymore. You can now create a specific data list of customers on particular metrics like – ‘Open rate’ & ‘Click rate’. This will strengthen your follow-up activity and ensure more conversions. With more intelligence we are incorporating into our e-mail marketing, SMS marketing, and social media marketing in FirstHive, more focused and targeted our modern-age marketing is becoming. Industry analysis shows that most of the marketing efforts go in vain just because the marketer is not able to identify its target customer. At FirstHive, we believe in helping you identify and collect your target customers. A major part of our efforts goes behind creating powerful customer insights for you to take better decisions. We’ll keep on inching towards the goal we mentioned in the beginning of this blog. Till then, take a look at what we have built, and how it can help you streamline your marketing activities. Take a 14-day free trial, test the application, design and execute few campaigns and you’ll know how simple and incredible a marketing software can be. If you have any comments, feel free to leave them in the section below. Also, if you know a fellow marketer who could use a multi-channel marketing tool, spread the word 🙂

Are you an Oscar-winning Marketer?

Why cross channel marketing is a necessity for winners? By nature, marketers are proactive. They need to understand market first and then create relevant messages, delivering brand promise. But it is ambiguous. Let’s break this down a bit. If you’re a marketer and you ‘think’ what your users like, and force your messages on them- you’re not a proactive marketer, no matter how much you brag about your marketing genius. You’re just being ignorant. Okay, now if you say that you study your marketing reports, and understand your customers, you’re taking right steps towards enlightenment. And if you do it on the basis of one marketing campaign you conducted once upon a time, you’ve a long way to go. And now, if you say that you regularly push out email campaigns and study customer behavior, and plan your activities, you’re good but still not the best modern-day marketer. Where is the problem now, you ask? Well, pushing email campaigns and studying customer insights only show a part of the picture. You need to see how the same customer reacted to your social media posts and mobile marketing stunts simultaneously. That’s cross-channel marketing. Today, customers engage with your brand through multiple channels. They read your emails, follow your social feeds, and even checks out any SMSs you’ve sent to them. But do you think as a marketer, all your activities are in sync? Let’s take an example. John is a crazy football fan and he always wanted to watch his local team in action live in the stadium. He couldn’t make last year because the ticket prices were too high. This year, too, doesn’t look good with the ticket prices. You’re an event ticket seller. You noticed that John has subscription with your newsletter and has always opened your mails, but not bought any tickets. You also noticed that John answered to your twitter poll and commented on your facebook post about the match. As a marketer, John looks like a very hot lead. But why is John not buying the ticket? What can you do to make that happen? If you understood John’s behavior, you know that he is very much interested in this match. He lives in the same city but yet he hasn’t bought the ticket yet. There maybe quite a few reasons for that, like he might not be in town that day, he might be busy with some personal work or ticket prices are just too high for him. As a marketer, you can create personalized message for John and see how he reacts. So, the next email which you sent him, you attached a discount coupon of 20% which solves the monetary issue of John and he finally buys the ticket. Not only you made a sale, but also you made a die-hard fan happy. All you did here is understand a customer’s cross channel behavior to talk to him in a personalized manner. That is what modern age marketing is all about. It’s pretty simple. If you’re talking to your customers through different mediums, understand their activities across mediums. Don’t judge your customers based on one marketing channel. So, if you’re looking to get an “Oscar for Best Marketer”, start with the followings: Integrate your channels: Make your cross-promotional efforts work with integrated marketing in which different mediums compliment each other. Set-up multiple touch points: One of the benefits of multi-channel marketing is the ability to create multiple number of touch points, which then provide additional customer data that can help you design future marketing activities. Study the holy customer insights, religiously: Without a proper customer insight readings, John would never had bought the tickets. In cross channel marketing, you have to follow your customer insights regularly, study how they are reacting to your campaigns across channels. This will open a Pandora-box-of-personalized-targeting-opportunities for you. wooh! Prepare your speech: Once you align your marketing activities across channels, you would start to know your customers better. This will convert into more leads and subsequently more revenue for your business. Surely, your boss is going to give you big appreciation. Prepare your acceptance speech but don’t take that night for granted 😉 Throughout this read, if you were wondering how to integrate your cross channel marketing efforts, we have this awesome solution for you – FirstHive. It’s a cross channel marketing platform that enables marketers to create and execute email marketing, SMS marketing and social media marketing campaigns, and, at the same time, to keep track of their cross channel activities from a single dashboard. Sign-up for 30-days and try for yourself. Psst! It’s free.

FirstHive @ PNGrowth2016

‘Omwana ni wa bhone’ – a famous African proverb meaning: “ Regardless of a child’s biological parents, its upbringing belongs to the community” A cold November morning, we drove down to Devanhalli on the outskirts of Bangalore, having blocked three days to be a part of PNGrowth2016. Reading about the previous version of PNGrowth & the regular updates coming in from Avinash, we could not wait to be there. We were hungry to learn from the journeys of other Indian products that traversed the same path successfully. We reached the venue around 9 am and it could not have been a better start – a cup of hot tea, networking with the other founders from across the sub continent and some french cricket to break the ice (more so when we won our match! :)). The formal sessions kicked off with Shankar / Aneesh / Pallav / Shekhar / Girish setting up the context and inspiring to see the passion from Sharad for achieving iSpirit’s vision. It was already clear what mammoth effort must have gone into bringing together such stellar leaders from the the Indian Product startup space in a single room. I realised that while our asses might get kicked in these three days by this group, we were definitely going back with actionable learnings to help us grow 10X! FirstHive was part of the Global SMB cohort with 12 other founders. With Girish (FreshDesk) and Suresh (KissFlow) as our coaches, we could not have asked for anyone better! Shankar and Aneesh took us through this session by filling in the framework for their business with generous inputs from Girish. “Bullshit!” – this word resonated many a times in the conference room that first session in various cohorts but it was accompanied by sharp inputs & perspective by the respective cohort mentors! I loved this concept so much, we are using it @FirstHive in our meetings 🙂 (hopefully we will slowly not have to use it that often!). The frameworks given to succinctly define our value prop stumped many of us, led to much introspection among most founders. As we got past the critical “Who Am I?” question, Girish and Aneesh took to the stage and walked us through what does 10X scale look like. They challenged us to imagine and define this for our respective products. Metrics and mistakes shared with respect to their growth stories made this session very relatable and actionable. The insights on the Top of the Funnel drops (TOFU), Middle of Funnel leakages (MOFU), and closure challenges, including delving into sales challenges, team structures, compensation best practices were invaluable. For us at FirstHive, this session could not have come at a better time as our internal goal was to scale 3X in 2017! Manav and Shekhar sessions following this on sizing your market was interesting, because it gave us two different ways to look at the market, product expansion, TAM and how success can be achieved. The impact of market size on the size of your business was a recurring lesson and the important of defensibility forced us to evaluate the ‘hard to replicate’ levers for our business. There was also the quintessential point on timing that Shekhar went into and how different companies dealt with this. The learnings from Aneesh on how he created his sales plan and achieved success in new markets with Capillary, Girish speaking of the challenges faced in scaling Freshdesk, and Suresh sharing the sales process that worked for him at KissFlow, Shekhar walking us through how a VC potentially looks at businesses or sectors, Pallav walking us through everything including factors that aid the result oriented culture at FusionCharts were invaluable. Nags (24/7) and Raghu (Taxi4Sure) walked us through their respective successes and a good glimpse into what rapid scaling could mean. Phani (RedBus) spoke to culture, defensibility of a low margin business, speaking of how and his team travelled in buses (to ensure they eat their own dog food at RedBus) and Sanjay Anandram’s story of passion to coming back to India to ignite the nascent startup industry and Sanjay Deshpande’s journey in deep tech were inspirational. Mohit’s story of how Carwale happened and culture was absolutely amazing and how important culture was to building an organisation from an idea. Pallav helped our cohort with his examples of product / market choices and culture and we found comfort in his point that sometimes good choices are retrospectively self-evident. But most founders were probably in a similar state as us – optimistic, a little confused but above all, very hungry to succeed that led to innovation & jugaad. The whole event was wrapped up with each of the founders presenting a curated pitch to their respective cohorts which was followed by a peer review. Some of us including FirstHive were given the opportunity to present in front of all the cohorts which helped us get some more feedback. But my note will be incomplete without a mention of the fantastic after event party where everyone hung out, loads of informal interaction & some collaboration opportunities were identified. It also would not have been easy for everyone to take three days off from their businesses & families to spend time grooming potential future success stories like FirstHive and for this we shall remain indebted to them. Growth Hacking after PNgrowth We left the venue very very tired (less than 8 hours of sleep in 3 days) but our hearts were pounding & our minds were brimming with ideas – thanks to a wealth of new information, learnings that we had to internalise and apply to our business. We had to put together a 45 day GrowthHack plan for FirstHive incorporating as many ideas as we could from PNGrowth! So we set out three days of sessions with our leadership – our VP Engineering, VP Products and our VP Sales. We did similar exercises, used the frameworks, shouted out BullShit many times and eventually got to a plan for FirstHive! We are now pursuing a master list of 8 initiatives across the company: Our singular goal – get ready for 3X growth in 2017! iSPIRT’s mission is to transform India into a nation where the best of breed global products will germinate from and with PNGrowth they have truly provided us at FirstHive and all the others who were there, with the tools to go ahead & take “ pandas in the global marketplace. We hope to say our thanks by making FirstHive a leader in the B2C Cross Channel Marketing space. If there is one thing that was exceptional about PNGrowth, to me it was True learning – No halos, no facades, no bullshit! Honest dialogues with real examples from folks who traversed the same path which were are on today. The willingness of these founders to openly share their internal growth numbers and metrics that can help us benchmark our business, sharing with us mistakes made to ensure that we do not repeat those – this was truly ‘Omwana ni wa bhone’ in practice.

Marketing Technology: 2016 in Review and what to focus on in 2017

It’s that time of year again when brands and marketers dust off their crystal balls and try to predict the coming year. Yes, this is one such blog too. But we have a different methodology: we are not putting out our opinion but our customer’s data to back our claims. We spoke to our customers to find out their area of focus in marketing technology in the year of 2017. And the results were interesting, to say the least. First, let me give you the profile of our customers. They belong to Small and Medium sized business category, having employee strength of around 500-3500 and having annual revenues between $25 Mn – $500 Mn. Most of them are located in United States, Australia, Canada and UK. We spoke to 452 such businesses to find out what was the concern when they started the new year and what will they focus on going into 2017, with respect to marketing technology, of course. Here is a quick snapshot of their two answers: When SMB marketers started 2016, they were pretty focused on exploring mobile platform to reach out to their customers and be heard. In one of our blogs earlier this year, we have mentioned that a person checks his phone 85 times a day, on average. That is what was most intriguing for the marketers. The second area of focus was to use technology in automating marketing for their customers. This is interesting as we have seen our customers getting surprising results in winning new customers as well as gaining repeat customers, just by personalizing messages and sending them at the right time. Marketing automation offers tremendous opportunities when done right, maybe that is why it is the most focused area for marketers for the coming new year. Let’s check out their shift in focus for the new year: Customer experience and personalization are the two most important focus points with all the marketers. That was redundant to be given as an option choice. Rather, we asked them what technologies are they focusing on to design amazing personalized experience for their customers. Here is a snapshot of the survey result: Marketing Automation: Learned from the past, good marketing automation can create seamless and personalized customer experience by letting a platform deal with new and returning visitors. If you set your rules right, there’s no loopholes and your customers are entertained individually, one-to-one (which is the best experience your customers are looking for). So, the marketing automation technology will the primary focus of marketers going into 2017. Mobile Marketing: Although slipped to the second spot as their focus, marketers just cannot put the mobile phones away. Well, who can? There’s a lot lot of opportunities for a marketers to reach its audience over the small screen device. Beside the traditional text SMS (which is still the most profitable way), they are taking on social media. Even social media companies are constantly updating their apps with new features that creates a good advertising platform. Did you think ‘Live’ feature on Facebook was introduced for the muggles like you and me? Big Data: Isn’t it odd that we are still talking about big data in 2017? I guess, no. Still there’s a need to shake and filter customer’s behavior data to squeeze out most critical and actionable information. Marketers don’t want to lose out on any vital information about their customer that might cost them a deal. So, they turn to technology. Applications like FirstHive collect customer data and present most relevant information so that marketers can talk to customers with a right message at a right time. Content Marketing: Marketers are ready to take content marketing more seriously in the coming year. As one of them said, “Just content cannot be the king, but a content in right context is the new king”, they know how important it is to create relevant content and share it with the prospects. Also, the form in which the content is served is important. Like going forward, videos will be the major form of content consumption. Videos have worked extremely well in the past for our customer, mainly because it’s more engaging, explanatory, fast and easy to consume. Internet of Things: Imagine a world where everything in your view is connected to a single network. You will have single point of command over your stuffs. But that’s not the point. IoT brings tremendous marketing opportunity. If you are milk seller, and your customer’s refrigerator notifies you every time that they are running out of milk, won’t you love that. IoT, of course, is the next big thing, but still very nascent today. I expect marketers put more focus on this amazing technology next year. AI and Chatbots: Very similar to marketing automation, artificial intelligence is gaining the limelight slowly. AI has a huge potential in terms of creating real-time customer experience. Take chatbots for example. Chatbots can talk to your customers as a real person and address to their queries quite fine. Again, Facebook messenger has this feature to provide you AI power. I can’t resist mentioning the Jarvis, the AI personal assistant, developed by Mark Zuckerberg, which takes the AI technology to another level and will be in the mainstream in next couple of years. Feels like Tony Stark already? Search Engine Optimization: Talking about future, let’s not leave the past behind. SEO is still in the focus list of marketers and the fight to rank first continues. Getting visitors organically is good, both cost-wise and quality-wise. So, SEO thingy is not going to get off the list pretty soon. In 2017, try to keep your content relevant and use keywords which you think your customers use. Don’t flood your website with keywords and irrelevant content. That’s counter-productive since the search engines are getting smarter. Do you agree with the views or have something else as your focus point in marketing? Let us know in the comments below.

CDP VS DMP, What Should I use?

CDP VS DMP, what should I use? A question all Marketers ask. With CDP evolving, Marketers using DMP are not sure whether they now need a CDP and if CDP is any different than DMP. We get this questions a lot and we hope by the end of this read you will be able to make that wise decision Note: This is a very generalized view of DMP and CDP (from FirstHive perspective). Since not all DMPs are created equal, if you have specific questions about a particular DMP, we can go deeper based on our clients’ experiences.

Connecting the dots between B to C. Tackling B2C customer segmentation challenges.

“I wanted to begin somewhere. So, I grabbed a paper, doodled some shapes with connecting arrows. To someone who didn’t understand my gameplan, it would look like Egyptian symbols. Being a Brand Manager, this is the best way I could vomit my hypothesis in print. My hunch tells me, this will work because I remember my data team has information that supports my hypothesis. I just need my marketing campaign manager to send those few computations to validate this.” Just like this, data keeps moving in circles around your organization. Despite huge data-crunching technologies, information is stranded among inaccessible data teams, often too far from your reach. Security of such data is equally compromised as it is circling in the mailbox, excel files, data tables, disintegrated data gathering tools or the CRM. The disadvantage falls back onto the marketer. You need something more than a CRM. Especially, B2C marketers work with large data sets and doodling will not come to rescue. B2B marketers have a stated advantage to personalize content and push it out in the market when compared to the B2C segment. Customer segmentation and audience mapping for B2B marketers is a lot more visible, digestible, perceivable, and coherent than for B2C marketers. Which is why, in this article, we focus on articulating ardent challenges of a B2C marketer, instances that can transform these challenges into opportunities, and a technology solution that can help you optimize on these opportunities. B2C Customer Segmentation Challenges For B2C marketers, Individualized Personalization is an ideal scenario and a dream project. But, with limited resources, complex market conditions, and media mix constraints a marketer from personalizing customer experiences. Also, the large numbers, fragmented characteristics, and scattered places make individualization an almost impossible process. Limited resources, complex market conditions, and media mix constraints a marketer from personalizing customer experiences. In most scenarios, this compels a marketer to segment customers based on mere demographic parameters. While, in reality, a marketer is capable and can be equipped to segment customers also based on geographic, behavioral, psychographic, social, cultural and customer-lifetime value grouping-characteristics. Even better, FirstHive sees that a marketer can gain intelligence with further granular segmentation. These help in establishing contexts and identifying intents while sending out a communication or designing a campaign. So, here we are presenting a few instances of how B2C businesses can master the art of customer segmentation, tackling the existing challenges, and how you can use more than demographics to get closer to customers. Before, that here is a quick overview of different dimensions that you could use to segment your customers. Different Parameters that Provide Opportunities for Customer Segmentation Geographic Segmentation: The micro-parameters used to create customer segments by geography are continent, country, region, state, district, city, and relevant time zones. Some marketers also choose to use language, cultural preferences by each parameter, if the campaigns are multi-lingual and/ or based on the customer’s cultural needs. Business Value: If you have past data of the business value contributed by each customer, then you could grade customers based on their potential to purchase a product or respond to a marketing campaign. You may want to pay more attention to those customers who carry high average values. Purchase behavior & Product Preferences: Seasons and festivities influence purchase behavior. These not only indicate physical weather, but also the trends that concern your customers. Among them, you may also want to use family demographics or other similar data to segment customers based on product preferences. Product usage, loyalty, interests, awareness, spending patterns, mode of payment, knowledge, and demands help in defining segments based on behavior. Channel behavior: Each cohort can be also segmented based on how they respond to content on different channels that they engage with. It also provides information about the probability of conversion of the customers that you want to interact with on respective channels. Psychographic segmentation: Social class, lifestyle, personality, values, digital media exposure and social presence determine psychographic segmentation. Device Usage: Customers respond to brand communication in different ways on mobile phones, tablets, desktops, television, radio, cinema screens, kiosks or any other device that they are exposed to. Also, the nature of the information that they leave back is different when the customer has logged into the mobile app or is experiencing the product via a desktop login. Data Beyond Visibility: Apart from the above-mentioned parameters, there is a lot of unstructured and dark data that marketers try and decipher. These also provide valuable insights into customer segmentation. However, the challenge still remains in creating more intelligent and integrated customer segments that are based on marketing objectives, which could be plugged into each marketing campaign. In fact, a marketer is more keen on creating customer identities using each parameter mentioned above rather than creating mere segments. This helps a marketer to enrich each customer segment and identity based on the response to preceding marketing campaigns and behavior. Customer Segmentation in the B2C scenario A consumer interacts with your brand during different contexts with various intents. Mapping such unpredictable and haphazard journey to a single customer segment is not just daunting, but non-profitable. Integrating journeys and individual customer segments to marketing campaigns is what makes a richer customer experience. For instance, a bank’s customer representative reaches out to a customer via a phone call to educate and sell about a product based on the data provided. But, your automated email campaign may also blast out an email cadence using email marketing data, which ignores the CRM call data. This creates confusion among your internal marketing systems with regard to the stage of a customer in relation to the success of a product’s sale. Similarly, using your customer segments, a customer is informed about an in-store offer via an SMS to your customer. But, you could also be running a conflicting offer that is generalized to all potential customers. Sometimes, a customer may receive a repeated offer after the purchase completion. Your retargeting criteria may continue to reach out to the same customer for having viewed the product in your online store before the offline purchase. These details are often revealed better when the segmentation in linked to customer data of enriched profiles, supported by auto-segmentation. A mere CRM does not serve the purpose, here. Mass marketing in the absence of customer segmentation is easy to execute, but it would be an inefficient process with futile results. On the contrary, a well-articulated customer segmentation strategy would provide marketing efficiency, better brand strategy, improve distribution strategies, customer retention, and determine new market opportunities. This strategy should also include a consideration to use technology that can be better than an existing CRM. Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) that gather data from across all sources of information and transaction, integrate with multiple data systems to constantly rectify the data quality, and uses AI to enrich cohort segmentation provides assured promise to deliver more than a CRM. This is the linchpin to eliminate B2C customer segmentation challenges. A Customer Data Platform is the Linchpin to eliminate B2C Customer Segmentation Challenges. FirstHive, as a Customer Data Platform using artificial intelligence and machine learning to automate customer segmentation and provide cohort recommendations. Feel free to reach out to us to discuss your customer segmentation queries.

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