marketing-technology

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

The Power of CDP-Powered Predictive Analytics in Marketing: A How-To Guide

In today’s fast-paced digital world, marketers are constantly seeking ways to gain a competitive edge and drive success. One powerful tool that has emerged in recent years is predictive analytics. By harnessing the power of data and advanced algorithms, predictive analytics enables marketers to make informed decisions, optimize campaigns, and drive better results. In this tutorial, we will explore the world of predictive analytics in marketing and how it can revolutionize your approach to data-driven marketing campaigns. What is a Customer Data Platform (CDP)? A Customer Data Platform (CDP) is a sophisticated data management system that collects, integrates, and unifies customer data from multiple sources into a single, centralized database. This unified customer view allows businesses to better understand and engage with their customers. Key features of a CDP include: Data Integration: Combines data from various sources such as CRM systems, social media, websites, and offline sources. Customer Profiling: Creates comprehensive profiles for each customer by merging data points. Data Activation: Enables the use of unified data for marketing campaigns, analytics, and customer engagement. What is Predictive Analytics? Predictive analytics uses historical data, machine learning, and statistical algorithms to predict future outcomes. In marketing, it helps businesses forecast customer behavior, preferences, and potential actions. Key principles of predictive analytics include: Data Mining: Extracting patterns from large datasets. Modeling: Creating algorithms to predict future trends based on historical data. Forecasting: Using models to make predictions about future customer behaviors Key Components and Techniques Predictive analytics relies on several key components and techniques to deliver accurate insights. These include data collection, data cleaning, data modeling, and data validation. Data collection involves identifying the right sources of data, such as customer interactions, purchase history, and demographic information. Data cleaning ensures that the collected data is accurate, complete, and free from errors. Data modeling involves selecting the appropriate predictive modeling techniques, such as regression analysis, decision trees, or neural networks. Finally, data validation is crucial to ensure that the predictive models are accurate and reliable. The Impact of CDP-Powered Predictive Analytics: Enhanced Customer Insights: Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) play a pivotal role in consolidating data from various sources, providing marketers with comprehensive insights into customer preferences, behaviors, and lifecycle stages. Hyper-Personalized Campaigns: Predictive analytics leverages patterns and trends within the data to facilitate the creation of hyper-personalized marketing campaigns tailored to the unique preferences and behaviors of individual customers. Optimized Marketing Spend: Through predictive analytics, marketers can allocate their budgets more efficiently by identifying high-value prospects and predicting the effectiveness of different marketing channels, ensuring maximum ROI from their marketing investments. By analyzing customer data, marketers can identify the characteristics and behaviors of their most valuable customers and use this information to target similar individuals. This leads to more effective and personalized marketing campaigns, resulting in higher conversion rates and increased ROI. Key Strategies for Implementation: Setting Up Your CDP for Predictive Analytics Choosing the Right CDP Selecting a CDP that fits your business needs is crucial. Look for features such as: Data Integration Capabilities: Ability to seamlessly integrate with your existing systems. Scalability: Can handle growing amounts of data and increasing complexity. User-Friendly Interface: Easy to use for both technical and non-technical users. Examples of Popular CDPs: FirstHive, Treasure Data, ActionIQ, Amperity. Integrating Data Sources To maximize the effectiveness of your CDP, integrate data from all relevant sources: CRM Systems: Capture customer interactions and purchase history. Social Media: Monitor engagement and sentiment. Web Analytics: Track website behavior and conversions. Offline Sources: Include in-store purchases and customer service interactions. Building Comprehensive Customer Profiles Comprehensive profiles are the foundation of effective predictive analytics. Ensure data accuracy and consistency through: Data Enrichment: Augment profiles with additional data points from external sources. Data Cleaning: Regularly update and cleanse data to maintain accuracy. Data Consistency: Standardize data formats and values. Implementing Predictive Analytics in Your Marketing Strategy Data Integration and Quality Assurance: Integrating diverse data sources into the CDP is paramount, as it serves as the centralized repository for customer data. Ensuring data quality is essential to derive accurate predictions and insights. The CDP acts as the linchpin, harmonizing data from various touchpoints such as CRM systems, social media platforms, and transactional records, ensuring a comprehensive view of the customer journey. Building Predictive Models: Developing robust predictive models within the CDP involves a systematic approach. This includes thorough data preparation, where raw data is cleansed, transformed, and standardized to enhance its quality and usability. Feature selection is then employed to identify the most relevant variables that contribute to predictive accuracy. Subsequently, model training and validation processes are conducted, leveraging advanced algorithms within the CDP to create predictive models that effectively forecast customer behaviors and trends. Continuous Iteration and Optimization: Predictive analytics is inherently iterative, and the CDP facilitates this process seamlessly. By continuously refining models based on real-time data inputs, marketers can ensure the relevance and effectiveness of their predictive insights. The CDP’s agility enables quick adaptation to changing market dynamics and evolving customer preferences, empowering marketing teams to stay ahead of the curve and drive impactful campaigns with precision and agility. Measuring the Impact of Predictive Analytics Monitor the effectiveness of your predictive analytics efforts with key metrics: Customer Engagement Metrics: Track email open rates, click-through rates, and social media engagement. Conversion Rates: Measure the percentage of customers who complete desired actions. ROI: Calculate the return on investment for your predictive analytics initiatives. Analyzing and Interpreting Results Use analytical tools to assess the performance of your predictive models: Comparative Analysis: Compare predicted outcomes with actual results. Refinement: Adjust models and strategies based on performance data. Continuous Improvement: Regularly update models to incorporate new data and improve accuracy. Overcoming Challenges and Pitfalls Implementing predictive analytics in marketing is not without its challenges. Common challenges include data quality and privacy issues. However, FirstHive’s CDP addresses these challenges by providing robust data management and privacy features. Marketers can ensure data quality by using FirstHive’s data cleaning and validation tools. Additionally, FirstHive’s CDP ensures compliance with data privacy regulations, giving marketers peace of mind. Companies across various industries have achieved significant improvements in their marketing ROI by using FirstHive’s CDP. You can learn more about how FirstHive created succes for it’s customers here. Conclusion Predictive analytics is a game-changer in the world of marketing. By harnessing the power of data and advanced algorithms, marketers can make informed decisions, optimize campaigns, and drive better results. FirstHive’s CDP offers marketers a comprehensive solution for predictive analytics, enabling them to target the right audience, personalize marketing campaigns, and optimize marketing strategies. By implementing predictive analytics with FirstHive’s CDP, marketers can unlock the full potential of data-driven marketing and achieve unprecedented success. So, why wait? Start harnessing the power of predictive analytics with FirstHive’s CDP and take your marketing to new heights.

FirstHive in The Marketing Technology Landscape 2016

It’s one feeling to work day in and day out to build a beautiful piece of marketing software, and it’s another feeling to see our work gets recognized. Oh, wait! It’s the same feeling.. Or maybe an ‘cause and effect’ feeling.. Well, whatever, it feels great! Yay! FirstHive gets highlighted in the Marketing Technology Landscape 2016, under ‘Advocacy, Loyalty and Referral’ category. Okay.. let’s break this news down a bit. What is this landscape about? Scott Brinker, the editor of Chief Marketing Technologist blog – chiefmartec.com, compiles this amazing list of major players in the world of marketing technology every year. We can only imagine the amount of hard work goes behind putting together a big list of marketing technology solutions, categorically. It serves as a great resource for the marketers around the world. Is it a big deal? This mention is a big deal to us, for a couple of obvious reasons. This is the first formal FirstHive mention in an independent analyst’s blogpost. Also, we are building a software which is only good if marketers across industries know about it. This landscape-mention puts us on the map. What category are we in? FirstHive has been featured under “Advocacy, Loyalty, and Referral” category which is amazing since generating a good word-of-mouth is the primary goal of all marketing strategies and software. If we have been recognized for that category, we must be doing something right. Also, as Scott mentions in his blog, “I know, most of these categories are extremely broad… My goal with this landscape is to give you the 50,000-foot overview of the entire space — which forced a trade-off with granularity.” To make the category granular for FirstHive, we also fall into the Marketing automation and campaign/lead management category, email marketing category, social media marketing category and even business/customer intelligence and data science category. Why should you care? FirstHive mention in the ‘supergraphic’ qualifies our solution to be the next-gen marketing software, made for modern-day marketers. The ability of the application to perform cross-channel marketing and consolidate useful customer data from across channels helps marketers to strategize marketing campaigns in a way that generates more customer engagement. One major way to gain this is through reading a particular customer’s data, and create a personalized message for her, increasing the chances of word-of-mouth promotions. The landscape correctly identifies this ability of FirstHive by highlighting us under ‘Advocacy, loyalty and referral’ category. Marketing technology is a fascinating space and it’s a big responsibility to be a part of this. We seek to empower marketers around the globe with latest innovative marketing technologies. The Marketing Technology Landscape 2016 was our first official recognition, first of many to come. Still, our customers will be our greatest driving force, always!

How Technology is Helping Marketers Improve Customer Experience?

Last Sunday, I booked an Uber to visit my friend, who lives 8 km away. As soon as I got down from the cab, I received a message from Uber thanking me for the ride and offering me a discount coupon for a beer pub which was fairly near to my drop location. I was surprised since that was my intention for the evening anyway. So, I grabbed my friend, checked into the pub and enjoyed the evening beer-y well (sorry for the pun). When I retrospect, I wonder how did Uber hit the bulls-eye with a pub coupon? How come they offer me discount at one of my favorite pubs? How are they able to do such an efficient marketing where they got a customer with just one SMS? Well, the fact is, they are studying my behavior and predicting my actions. Pardon my jargons, but they are enhancing ‘customer experience’ by doing a good job at ‘customer analysis’. Okay, to be honest, I made the whole Uber story up. Nothing like that happened. You may take a moment here to curse the crap out of me!! 😛 But, seriously, imagine that that did happen, which is not at all surprising, is it? For a moment, you sat there and thought – “Why didn’t I ever got such message from Uber!” LOL. Such marketing strategies are very practical today and this is the kind of customer experience businesses are working towards. It is no more about how many customer you reach out to, or how many customers engaged with your message. Today all that matter is how well your customer has enjoyed the experience of interacting with your brand. Because a great customer experience brings great advocacy and thus, greater sales. Let’s dig deeper in today’s marketers mind-map: They have a customer who is active on almost all the digital channels like email, facebook, twitter etc. They need to collect customer behavior data from across all these channels to understand her better. With such intelligent consolidated data, marketers can come up with a personalized message for her that increases the chances of customer interaction by at least 14%. According to Aberdeen group, personalized emails improve click-through rates (CTR) by 14% and conversion rates by 10%. Allow me to get back to my Uber (made up) story again, for a moment. What will it take for the Uber marketer to pull such a stunt on me? Well, there’s a twist in the tale. Uber did nothing. It was the pub’s marketer the whole time. He has a record of my feedback from my last visit. Since then, I’ve been on their subscriber’s list and they are tracking me on social media. Now, through integrated data from across channels, they find out that I visit my friends neighborhood quite often but visited their pub just once. Like me, they do have more one-time customers who check-in to nearby pubs. What they will do is to get into a partnership with Uber, where Uber triggers a discount coupon for the pub and pub pays Uber for that. This is modern-day marketing. A joint business effort to enhance customer experience. More and more small-medium businesses like that pub, are adapting cross-channel marketing, starting with email and social media. And since they see a very high rate of conversions, they are ready to pump up their digital marketing budget. As per Entrepreneur Inc. study, companies are expected to spend $10 billion more on digital marketing in 2016 than they did in 2015. So, if you are a marketer working towards improving your customer’s experience with your brand, you need a better understanding of your customer through integrated data from across different channels. This is a challenge, though. You are not expected to spend hours on filtering out critical customer insights from big data. You are a marketer, not a data scientist. You need the most important data to be served to you instantly, and in simple and comprehensive form, so you do what you do best – take better marketing decisions. To address this pain point, we have applications like FirstHive that works as your marketing sidekick as well as your data scientist. With FirstHive, you can create and trigger multi-channel marketing campaigns and track integrated customer data in real-time. In 2016, whether you are spending more on marketing, or adding more channels for your campaigns, or adapting cross-channel marketing, just keep a note that whatever you do, everything boils down to the customer experience.

Evolution of Marketing: Are you keeping up with the pace?

“Prithibi bodle gache, jaa dekhi notun laage Tumi, aami, aik hi aachi, du jon e ja chilam aage” This is an old Bengali song, which could also be translated to mean: “The world has changed, whatever I see, seems new to me You and I, however, are the same, what we were earlier” This seems so true in the current marketing context. The age-old roles of a “Marketer” and “Consumer” do remain the same, but the world around them has changed. Whatever, either see, seems new to them. Technology evolution has brought about a sea change in the entire way Marketers and Consumers interact with each other. The memories of the days when it was all a simpler, linear story – A Marketer developing a product, it’s messaging and communicating the same to a Defined Audience, seems to have such a delicious, nostalgic aura around them. In today’s day and age, everything seems to be about “co-creation”, “collaboration”, everything is so tuned towards working and evolving together, it seems that, sooner rather than later, the Marketers goal should soon be “cohabitation” with their Consumers, albeit in a professional, product space. Look at the way the world has evolved around us – from the days of a single TV channel, a single landline (both of which we had to apply for and were ecstatic when we were allocated one after a few months wait), a single national radio channel to today’s Always ON environment. Enough and more has been written about how the digital revolution has changed our lives – The new generation is always “ON”, they have never seen an offline world, We currently are using more than 2 screens at any given period of time, Media consumption patterns have changed, Peer to peer feedback is increasingly sought for and given more credit than Paid for communication, People are increasingly open to sharing personal experience with the expectation that it will lead to them receiving more customised, relevant information etc. There is an information overload; the needle has swung from Consumers trying to gather more information to wanting to filter out information so that they are exposed to only relevant stuff. What this scenario necessarily means, although understood by many, however, is not being acted upon by most. Consumer expectations are evolving at a fast clip. Their understanding of products and services and their expectations from them have changed drastically and continue to evolve with every passing day. This is aided to a large extent by the technology evolution which one is witnessing. 2G to 3G and now 4G – What this essentially means is an ever increasing speed and volume of data thru put across multiple channels. The entire Path to Purchase cycle has become increasingly complex. At every stage along the path, the Consumer is interacting with the brand and with other Consumers using multiple channels. Their channel of content consumption and their channel of feedback need not necessarily be the same. Their expectation is that the Brand tracks and analyses their interactions across all these multiple channels and customises the messaging accordingly to them. Brand to Consumer, a one on one interaction, has become a de rigueur expectation by the Consumers. Companies and Brands, most of them, anyway, have understood this seismic change and are taking steps towards this. The vast majority, of them, however, still largely stick to traditional approaches. Mere lip service is paid towards supposedly new age ventures. Those, that do adapt will emerge stronger in the days to come. For those that don’t adapt, I can only remember an old saying “Sometimes things have to fall apart to make way for better things”.

Marketing Agency’s Search for Tech Partner Ends with Us!

For a modern multi-tasking marketing agency, the advancement in marketing technology is something that keeps them strong in the competitive world. They need the right technology to execute their multiple client’s various marketing activities. But to get there, they need a right technology partner with whom they can align their goals. Searching a right technology partner is like going on a blind date. You are very excited but nervous at the same time, since you don’t know what awaits you. What if your partner doesn’t understand what you think? What if he/she don’t agree with your ambitions? Or most importantly, what if he/she is boring? Choosing a technology partner too, you need to see if they fit in the journey of your agency’s future plans, understand your requirements and, as said before, should be fun to work with. Thankfully, your search for perfect date ends with FirstHive. FirstHive, today, introduced the Agency program that is so flexible that it will fit with your organization so seamlessly as it was meant to be. Since client’s requirements varies every day, FirstHive will always be ready for whatever may come. With FirstHive, perform email marketing with advanced automation capabilities, manage SMS or Text Message Marketing, and even stay on top of your social media- all from one single platform. The flagship feature of FirstHive, that our clients absolutely love, is the customer profile dashboard. The application collects customer data from marketing campaigns conducted across channels and consolidates into one single dashboard. You can click on a particular customer name, and view her activities on all the communication you’ve sent to her. This helps in developing a personalized message, just for her. We welcome you to test drive FirstHive today. Trigger campaigns and enjoy the thrill of watching it perform in real-time. Share the user control with the client and let them have the view too.

Customer Seeks Attention? Marketing Automation Can Help!

Let’s call spade a spade. Customers are pure divas. They need constant attention which is only logical today when 20 other competitors are trying to woo them for their wallet share. And God, how we love to provide them the royal treatment they deserve! We, at FirstHive, have noticed every possible way customers can try to get in touch with the brand. After thorough market research (and our own experience with our customers), we have crafted a smart automation function, built in to our FirstHive application, that helps brands to keep the customers feel welcomed across touch-points, automatically. Follow up with them when they subscribe to your newsletters. Prepare a proper on-boarding series of mailers when you get a new sign-up. Send a reminder communication when they are away for specific period of time. Notify them of their wishlist or pending items in the shopping cart. Ping them when they are near to their subscription renewal date. Wish them on their special days. Surprise them with offers based on their activities. All automated. FirstHive brings you a powerful marketing communication tool, topped with an excellent marketing automation module. You can build advance communication flow with simple drag and drop flow builder, set number of rules and conditions and set specific campaigns for specific scenarios. You can also add lead scoring based on your lead’s behaviour and visualize the lead funnel based on the scoring. The most interesting part of this entire exercise is that with FirstHive, you can go across multiple channels to reach out to your leads with automated communication. Let me cite an example. You can automate an ‘Introduction’ email to the people who have liked your page on Facebook. You can again set up a “discount offer” SMS text after a week to those who did not respond to your email. You see, how the chances of customer engagement has sharply risen just because you have an option of covering multiple channels in your marketing automation. All this happening in the backend while you’re sipping Blue Hawaii in Hawaii. Following our same old goal of making a marketer’s life easy, we are constantly updating our platform with exciting features. We welcome you to try out a hand on FirstHive.com and see if it goes in line with your marketing objectives. Send us your feedback or request a demo at sales@firsthive.com. We are excited with what we have developed. Hope you will be too.

How to create landing pages that convert visitors into leads? 10 simple tips.

Landing pages are an important tool in the marketer’s arsenal. They help warm up a customer, nudge a specific action, generate leads, have a quick turnaround, and in most instances do not need the involvement of the IT team. No wonder most marketers are actively utilizing this resource to enhance their funnels. There are typically two types of landing pages you would come across: Click through Landing pages Lead generation Landing pages Click through Landing pages are typically used to ‘warm up’ the customer and provide additional information that they might need to be informed of your product or brand. Lead generation Landing pages are more action oriented and push the customer to providing some personal information, in exchange of a privilege or benefit. Typical benefits or value exchange may include registration for a webinar, download of a case study or white paper, request for brand to contact the customer, a free trial, a discount coupon, or notifications of launch of the product or new feature. So what makes a great landing page? Clear Headline Ensure your headline clearly communicates the purpose of the page and is compelling enough to induce the user to scroll ahead and read the rest of the content. A verbose or convoluted headline is not the best way to go about this. Strong Call to Action Have a clear goal in mind when you are designing your landing page. What is it exactly that you would want the user to do on your page. Create a clear and concise Call to Action (CTA) for your page and ensure the same is visible above the fold. Above the fold design On the topic of ‘Above the Fold’ design, there is a old saying in my country – people only buy what they see. In the limited time and mind space that you have managed to get of your customer, ensure you are providing content that is relevant to them. Ideally, if the customer/ user has landed on your landing page following an ad, the copy on the page should be in sync with the ad to ensure consistency and higher Click Through Rates (CTRs) Grammar matters Remember in school when your teacher would chide you for an inaccurate use of a punctuation or sentence framing? Thank her today if you are able to design better landing pages, ensuring that you are dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s. Might seem basic, but you would be surprised at the number of landing pages out there with poorly written copy, which obviously reflects poorly on the brand. You are effectively asking your customer to trust your brand, and first impressions matter. Verifiability Ensure that the information on your landing page is clear and verifiable. While technically it may not be the case, the users would perceive the landing page to be an extension of your brand’s website and hence it is pertinent that the information provided in the new landing page is consistent with your brand messaging. Focused messaging Landing page is not your website, it is not a place for you or your marketing team to create tomes of information to share with your customers. Ensure that the messaging on your landing page is focused to your audience. With multiple tools and platforms at your disposal to create beautiful landing pages that convert, encourage your teams to create segment or messaging specific landing pages to ensure clear, targeted communication. Less is indeed more in some cases. Use trust indicators Existing client testimonials, verifiable recommendations from relevant 3rd part sites (e.g. TripAdvisor), coverage by large publications, all aid credibility of your brand. So feel free to use it on your landing pages to push your customers ahead in the funnel. But be careful that you do not overdo it. Multimedia content Do not rely on pure copy to make your case for you. Adding relevant videos in landing pages can boost your conversions by over 80%. Use relevant images, brand videos, basically any content form that speaks to your target audience. Ensure the buttons and call to actions stand out clearly from rest of the content. But ensure that the aids used are relevant to the topic and page. Design and color choices Your landing page is not part of your website. So this gives you the flexibility to pick a theme and color that may aid conversions, specific to your goals. Different colors induce different sentiments, create different mood personas in your viewers, so ensure the theme is consistent with your brand image. Test, Test, and repeat At the end of the day, there is no magic formula, no magic pill to create landings pages that convert. Keep testing and trying out various permutations of your landing pages, keeping an eye on the defined conversion metrics. Find the sweet spot that works for your brand. Any tips we have missed? Feel free to share in your comments below.

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.

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