There has been so many changes for marketers to deal with related to email marketing in particular. For the final installment of our three-part B2B marketing-focused Business Chat discussion, Tony Romero from the Experian product team shares tips marketers can employ to improve email performance. In today’s chat, we focus on ways marketers can improve campaign performance by incorporating analytics and models.
Be sure to register to attend Tony’s 15-Minute Sip and Solve talk “Increasing Email Campaign Performance With Analytics”, he will go into greater depth and offer actionable tips to you execute successful B2B campaigns.
Watch Our Interview
What follows is a lightly edited transcription of our talk.
[Gary Stockton]: Tony, can you share some examples of models marketers can use to segment and target prospects?
[Tony Romero]: It’s very important for a marketing manager or CMO to take a deep dive into their marketing plan. What are the objectives? What are they trying to do? You know, it could be a variety of things. One is that they could try to grow their existing market space with the same type of customers they already have, or they could be trying to penetrate new markets or try to go after a specific type of company or consumers. So, depending on the marketing plan, it’s important then to do deep dive analytics to provide the right type of target audience for that marketing plan.
[Tony Romero]: So what custom modeling can do is identify what attributes constitute the ideal customer. Again, whether that ideal customer is an existing type of customer or penetrating a new market, it could be using SIC or NAICS codes to identify those new market spaces or looking at specific attributes on demographics or credit data. It could be numerous things. And so Experian Data Sciences scientists can create custom modeling to clearly define those types of businesses and individuals to promote them effectively.
[Gary Stockton]: Excellent. Now let’s talk a bit about metrics because some metrics are no longer helpful, such as open rate with the iOS update. What other metrics should marketing departments focus on now with all of these changes?
[Tony Romero]: Open rates are not going to be significant anymore because Apple has set up a proxy server to take in emails coming in from a service provider. The provider opens them up in a proxy server first before it reaches the actual individual who’s opening that email. And the purpose of that is to disassociate the IP address so that the consumer has privacy. So open rates are no longer a valid KPI for marketers to use. You’ll see very, very high open rates, but what you can do to effectively email marketing to consumers is, first of all, ensure that your deliverability is high. And again, that’s where data hygiene comes in. You want to make sure you have the most current and correct email address possible. You want to ensure they’re not part of the don’t email list. So again, deliverability is one of your key KPIs now to focus on. The second one to focus on is your clicks, making sure that your content is as effective as possible so that your audience is actually going to click on that call to action. And again, that’s where segmentation, as we discussed, is very important. So your message is hitting the mark. It’s resonating with your audience. And then finally landing on the site. So once the user clicks on that and lands on your site, ensure that that individual is then taken to the right place to be given the information they need. So making sure all of that is effective throughout their journey is going to be critical.
[Gary Stockton]: Yeah, because with the Apple changes, you know, open rate, that used to be quite important. But now the proxy server will look like everything’s opened, and you can’t always trust that. So you do have to be looking at other metrics. But the other thing I hear about is intent-based campaigns where people have implied interest or shown an intent to buy. Can you talk a little bit about how those campaigns work?
[Tony Romero]: Intent data is excellent information. Basically, when a consumer is on a website, they’re clicking on particular things. For example, they may be downloading a white paper, or they may be asking for more information or having a salesperson contact them. Those are very specific triggers that can be used to identify that a consumer has intent on purchasing, and all of that can be pulled together to create a score to provide a marketer with information about how much intent a consumer has. So intent data is very valuable, and here too, Experian can provide intent data to marketers to be able to use that to promote and do effective campaigns. Now, one other thing too about intent data is, again, third-party cookies can track it. It can be tracked by first-party cookies, or it could be tracked by tracking pixels. And as Gary had mentioned, you know, third-party cookies are going away, but that doesn’t mean that intent data is going away. There are still plenty of other ways to track intent.
[Gary Stockton]: Yes, also for account-based campaigns too, you can use that intent-based data to show you which accounts have got that market problem that if you’re listening to those signals solutions like 6 Sense, a lot of B2B sites are using things like that. So, on the analytics front, any final thoughts on how marketers can improve campaign performance?
[Tony Romero]: On the analytics side? Again, I think the main thing is focus on your target segments and be able to define your objectives; how can you really focus in hyper-focus on who that target audience is so that your message will resonate. Also, one other thing I would say with analytics is to measure your KPIs. You know, after a completed campaign, look at your KPIs and say what went right? What went wrong? or what needs to be changed? And then being able to then either assess, pivot, or refine whatever your next campaign will be, is a very critical thing to do.
[Gary Stockton]: Assess, pivot, excellent stuff. It’s been great to get your perspectives on marketing here Tony, I’ve learned a great deal in these chats, and ladies and gentlemen, if you would like to get a level deeper on this, don’t miss Tony’s upcoming marketing analytics, Sip and Solve webinar. He’s going to be talking in much greater detail about this element of optimizing marketing campaigns. And you can find a link to that session in the description of this video and our blog posts, or remember to like this video and subscribe to our channel.
