Making data memorable with storytelling

Making data memorable with storytelling

by Emma Warrillow Comment Closed
Marketing analysts work hard to gather and analyze data, to generate insights, and to find a variety of impactful ways to present their findings to their audience with impressive data visualizations. But, if analysts want to capture their audience’s attention and to truly resonate with them––and for their audience to actually use their findings in business decisions––they’ll need to use storytelling to make the data more memorable.   In Chip and Dan Heath’s book ‘Made to Stick - Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die’ they demonstrate that stories are far more memorable than statistics. The Heath brothers reference a test they conducted where they asked students to give one-minute speeches.  In the average one-minute speech, the average student used 2.5 statistics, and only one in ten used storytelling. On the other hand, when the audience was asked to recall the aforementioned speeches, only 5% remembered any individual statistic from the speeches but an impressive 63% remembered the stories. Data-driven stories not only...
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Are you sending too much email?

Are you sending too much email?

by Trendline Interactive Comment Closed
Marketers shape their email strategy by asking questions. Many companies ask if they send too many emails—and often assume that they do. This is most likely based on a slew of reports and research studies asking questions along the lines of “Why do you unsubscribe from email?” It’s a fair question and, through our experience, we’ve found that people almost always cite frequency as one of their main reasons for unsubscribing.  With that information in hand, email marketers tend to assume they do send too many emails. But this survey question is extremely generic, lacks context, and therefore can be misleading. For all we know, the respondents could be referring to the average email from the average company. However, ask the same exact users which companies do the best job communicating with them through email, and they're likely to list a company that sends them more than one email per week. In fact, we find that companies who send subscribers emails multiple times...
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Reactivate Your Inactive Subscribers Fast

Reactivate Your Inactive Subscribers Fast

by Colleen Preisner Comment Closed
Do you have a higher number of inactive subscribers than active subscribers? If your inactive list is overflowing, it represents opportunities you can leverage for improving your email marketing results. Read on to find out why not all is lost when your subscribers become inactive. Fact: It’s not uncommon for brands of any size or industry to have email subscribers who aren’t engaging. However, it’s our job as marketers to not only grow your database and engage active users but to also leverage reactivation campaigns in order to engage those who have become inactive. “It’s Not You; It’s Me” Why are the users inactive? There are several potential reasons: Change in email address/dormant email address Lack of interest from subscriber/engaged by a different brand Desire different service/product due to change in the customer lifecycle Inability to receive your email (soft or hard bounce–check your delivery rates, too!) Overwhelming amount of email in their inbox Signed up for one reason in particular but began...
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Better Target Your Customers Using Behaviour-Based Insights

Better Target Your Customers Using Behaviour-Based Insights

by Colleen Preisner Comment Closed
Understanding human behaviour and what drives consumers to engage with a brand is a goal all marketers share. However, according to a 2016 survey conducted by Econsultancy, while 76% of marketers were implementing basic segmentation, only 15% of marketers were using behavioural targeting. (This data is based on web activity.) This suggests that the majority of marketers have a ways to go before they are optimally targeting their customers. Defining Behavioural Targeting While the majority of marketers limit their segmentation to customer demographic data such as gender, age, and geography, leading marketers are taking it a step further and demand a more comprehensive, psychographic profile of their customers. Behavioural targeting advances a marketer’s scope by providing data segmentation based on customer behaviours, giving marketers the ability to organize customers based on variables and preferences related to their previous online activities. Marketers can leverage this data and establish specific steps of action for different customers. Essentially, data enables marketers to build digital profiles to reach...
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Personalization Is Not A Strategy

Personalization Is Not A Strategy

by Alex WilliamsNo Comments
Why True Personalization Takes People, Process & Platform A Partner Post from Cordial We all know the drill: Every year, an analyst proclaims that email is dead. But even after almost four decades, email remains an essential revenue driver for businesses. In fact, email continues to maintain a median ROI of 122% — over four times higher than other marketing formats including social media, direct mail, and paid search according to the DMA and Demand Metric. While email definitely isn’t dead, the conventional way of sending email is. For years, marketers have assembled their audiences, built, and sent messages using a “batch and blast” strategy. Batch and blast email is the workhorse of the modern marketing stack. To this day, it represents the vast majority of email campaigns sent each year. Batch emails are relatively inexpensive to produce and allow marketers to communicate with large groups of people very quickly. The caveat is that consumers are now exposed to so much media that they...
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74 Segments Gets You To The Back Of The Email Bus

74 Segments Gets You To The Back Of The Email Bus

by Andrew KordekNo Comments
74 Segments Gets You To The Back Of The Email Bus When I was young, the cool kids sat at the back of the bus.  They would do all sorts of cool things according to us kids who were not invited back there.  In fact, we all thought that they were better than us and they were reaping some rewards that we could never get.  Truth of the matter is, they got to school at the same time, technically were the last to get off the bus, and 35+ years later it doesn’t really matter anymore. Last week during a conversation with a colleague of mine, we started to discuss segmentation. After several rounds of posturing, she ended up spilling the beans that her program has 74 segments which included customers and non-customers (along with all of the email engagement tiers). After I cracked some smart ass joke about the sheer number of segments, I asked her “why so many?”  Her answer...
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