Data Archives - Creative Agency Secrets

Unsubscribing and deleting databases

23 February, 2022/1 Comment/in Data, Direct Marketing /by Rebecca Caroe

Have you checked you whether your CRM allows users to completely remove themselves from your records?

I find this a frustrating issue as a marketer.

I want to know that you once had a relationship with us; but I respect your choices (and privacy legislation).

A Pleasant Surprise

When I received a notification that “You haven’t logged i for a while, would you re-verify your email address?”.

I hastened to click through and was delighted to find the option to completely delete my profile from their site.

Does your CRM allow customers to delete their profile?

CRM advantages for Marketers

Despite the irritation this causes me (I have a genuine desire at all times to know the “universe” of possible customers for my business) the outcome has its advantages.

I am now focused on real prospects in my CRM database
I’m not paying for server space for disinterested customers
And the tidying up feels good
Plus I can do some profiling for prospects who resemble those who delete themselves

So check for yourself, can customers self-serve and remove their profiles from your site? Have you planned regular database cleaning to keep your CRM up to date?

Resources and additional reading

Should I delete or unsubscribe from the mailing list?

privacy act 2020, NZ marketing association, B2B marketing,

Direct Marketing Best Practice Guidelines

1 November, 2021/0 Comments/in Data /by Rebecca Caroe

Published by the Marketing Association (New Zealand). Download the full Direct Marketing Best Practice Guidelines.

Good advice here for:

Legal collection of personal information (13 Principles)
Storage and security of data
Access and disclosure
Maintenance of data
Removal / suppression of names from databases
Data selection tips (list brokers)
Data warranty register

2021 Marketing Trends

23 June, 2021/0 Comments/in B2B, Data, Marketing, Strategy /by Rebecca Caroe

Yes I hate that headline too… but I can’t work out the best way of listing three helpful things which I’m working on without it becoming a silly list headline. Live with it.

The year data became grown up

If you aren’t working with competent amounts of data insights and analytics yet, this is your year to get going and to go deep-dive.

For the beginners – the new Google Analytics GA 4 is a level above earlier versions. Get it installed (new header code on your website) and find a competent expert to guide you though its features. Well worth while.

After that, update dashboards, check the CRM integrations and get a whole lot smarter in your tracking.

Single customer view got easier

Nobody has got this wholly right, easy or fully connected (if you have you are probably a micro-organisation or a startup). Enter the Customer Data Platform. This is the software you need to bridge above (think umbrella) over all your data silos so that you can move towards customer nirvana.

I’m not being totally rose-tinted-glasses on this – there are serious players who can help build the plumbing which will help you understand and integrate customer data. Go learn about CDP.

Behavioural economics for marketers

If you haven’t heard about “nudges” you need to get on board fast. The new-ish science of behavioural economics is all about how we can get people to do things. A nudge is a way of changing behaviour – like leaving your gym kit by the bed at night as a way to encourage you to do a workout in the morning. Marketers love this.

And the smart folks at Ogilvy UK hosted a whole day event – Nudgestock – to talk about and showcase a lot of real case studies of effective marketing action based on behavioural economics. They called it

a full day of top quality BS (*Behavioural Science) from around the world

Watch it on YouTube. I particularly liked Abigail Dalton’s talk about Nudging to end world poverty.

That’s enough for now. Each of these is worthy of a deep dive research and learning day. Plan it for yourself.

I write and coach B2B marketing – each of these could be used by your business – get in touch.

Are business cards still relevant to marketing?

2 November, 2020/0 Comments/in Data /by Rebecca Caroe

As a child I was fascinated by business cards.

Rebecca’s discarded business card storage boxes

My curiosity was piqued when I was earning some holiday money in my father’s office doing admin and filing. His business partner, David, had a corner office with a deep windowsill. It had a tiled surface and every couple of feet was a small stack of business cards. I had never seen anything like this before and while he was not looking I picked up a pile and started to leaf through the stack reading each one.

When he came back from lunch I asked him what they were and he explained that this was how business people exchange their contact details. I asked him if I could have some and he was surprised.

It was a curious thing for a 12-year-old to be interested in. He kindly sorted through a pile and gave me a dozen. “There” he said “now you can be a collector of business cards”.

I thought this was a supercool hobby and was sure that none of my friends was doing anything even remotely as interesting.

I collect business cards

Fast forward a few years and of course I’m now a marketing specialist and business to business marketing hangs off databases and your ability to stay in touch with your customers. Business cards are no longer a thing of the past but they certainly are an element of off-line marketing that has not transferred smoothly into the online world.

I vividly remember an early app called bump when you could tap knuckles with another person and exchange business cards through your mobile phones. It was one of those great SXSW digital innovations that really never meet reached the mainstream.

There was another app which I sorely miss which was CardMunch, it scanned your business card via the camera and automatically sent a LinkedIn connection request. Of course it got bought by LinkedIn and they shut it down. Sad days.

But what about business databases?

There are a lot of things that a business could be doing with customer data but I find that few firms actually take advantage of the information they already have let alone the information they could obtain.

Let’s run a quick checklist.

Where do you keep customer data in your business?
Where or other places where data is kept for example in your account system.
Can you pull these into a single place?
How often do you message your customers?
If someone is on your mailing list and that email bounces what happens?
What are you doing to add new names to your database each month and to refine the existing subscribers so that people who do not open your messages are removed or message less frequently?

Get answers to these questions by “mystery shopping” your own firm.

Having good data discipline is a really strong underpinning to a robust business to business marketing plan.

Your job for today

Think back to me as the young kid who thought collecting business cards was cool. Take a look at where your business could collect customer data and what actually happens when you do.

I hazard a guess that there are a lot of opportunities which are extremely low cost, could lead to valuable customer relationships and more sales.

Go get them.

Data – you need to understand it

4 August, 2020/0 Comments/in Data /by Rebecca Caroe

Data – love it or loathe it, we get it served up everywhere we look. But do you know enough to judge and make up your mind? What is factual, what is relevant, where are devious presenters hiding the truth?

The answers to all these questions requires modern marketers to educate themselves.

Calling Bullshit: The Art of Scepticism in a Data-Driven World. By Carl Bergstrom and Jevin T West

The The Economist called this book “Dodgy Data – the sum of all fears” and opened its article with an expose of the State of Georgia’s Covid19 count – which I tweeted on 18 July. See if you can spot the deliberate mis-information as presented in their map illustration below.

State of georgia, covid 19 cases, dodgy data

July 2 on left July 18 on right. Covid 19 cases growth.

I think this book will be as influential as Ben Goldacre’s Bad Science was in 2010 – exposing what is and is not a scientific process and a robust outcome.

I’m buying this book (pre publication) if you’d like a copy pm me and I’ll add it to my order. If you’re in Auckland – I’ll hand deliver….. saving you the postage.

Oh, I’ve also reached out to one of the authors….. we will see what happens.

Sales and marketing CRM alignment

4 February, 2020/0 Comments/in B2B, Data, Sales /by Rebecca Caroe

The old chestnut about “sales-ready leads” versus “marketing qualified leads” never ends – it just mutates like a virus.

I went to a presentation of a sales research project last week and their survey and report were interesting.

If you work in marketing or new business development and are starting to use ABM, take a read – the link is at the bottom.

Results of 2020 sales leader survey

Key 2020 Sales takeaways

Three quarters of survey respondents use a CRM
39% of sales teams are using a different CRM from the rest of the firm
35% monitor website engagement
One thing the sales team thinks they can do better – Business Development

My interpretation of this is:

Absolutely stunning. Why are firms not using a CRM? FFS it’s 2020 folks! Even small firms can afford one.
Why is a CRM not deployed? Are you expecting the sales team to initiate this tech project – because they won’t.
Using a different CRM from the rest of the firm is astonishing. Do the IT department not check why the firm and the sales team are using different software? Siloed data is a giant challenge and this creates and reinforces this problem.
Glad that a third of sales people realise customers go to websites FIRST before contacting sales.
The “wait and see” for disruptive technology reinforces my view of the static nature of sales compared to marketing.
Take the lead, marketing folks, and draw the sales function along with you for the ride to integrating your work.
Business development is the interface between sales and marketing. If this is ONE thing your firm can do better – marketers initiate the project. Sales are gagging for it.
CRM and website marketing are not “disruptive technologies” any more. They are BAU. Get used to it.

Here’s the report – it is on page 10.

Is B2B marketing yielding good returns?

11 December, 2019/0 Comments/in B2B, Data, Lead Generation, Marketing ideas, Public Speaking, Strategy /by Rebecca Caroe

Is the marketing you are doing giving you the yield you seek?

I am asking this question a LOT at the moment. I ask it to myself, for my own businesses, I ask clients, I ask prospects.

One answer came from a professional services marketer. It serves as a good example for in-house marketers to challenge their thinking, to up-skill and to get insight from beyond the internal team in the business.

This is what she wrote to answer

Hmmm… It’s hard to tell. I cannot know if a speaking engagement got someone interested enough to ask their consultant to investigate our solutions and eventually get in touch with us and 2 years later… we have a deal signed. It is a complex process to sell our service.

Is a long sales cycle a B2B marketing problem?

Yes, it certainly is. Tracking and managing a diverse set of marketing tactics and campaigns over time takes discipline and forethought.

But where I felt this marketing manager was failing her business colleagues was around integrating the content creation, the speech-giving with marketing analytics and tracking data.

I challenge the assertion that you “cannot know” if a speaking engagement has any effect.

How to track conference speeches for marketing impact

Let me make some suggestions:

Every conference – offer a free download of something valuable. Create a trackable URL. Cookie the browsers visiting that site.
ALSO offer the visitor something even more valuable (not a sales pitch) if they sign up to your database

Both of these create trackable events which (even if 2 years passes) can enable you to demonstrate results.

Any pass-on of URLs to second parties like consultants or colleagues is tracked too.

I use Google Campaign URL builder and also short link services like Bit.ly for this.

Upskill your internal marketing team

When did you last go and get training and invest in your internal marketing team? I fear many in-house teams do not get the attention they deserve. Hiring an agency or consultant is not necessarily going to improve the team skills – it delegates marketing activity to outsiders.

What could you do to invest better, to improve your team’s ability to run the strategy as well as the execution, to better understand what the agency / consultant is doing for you, so that they can brief better, to guide the marketing plan better, to adapt and adjust the marketing budget for new tech, for new market conditions (recession?) and above all, to stay in front of the competition?

So challenge yourself, is the marketing you are doing giving you the yield you seek?

Tracking Dark Social for B2B sharing

30 September, 2019/0 Comments/in B2B, Data, Social Media /by Rebecca Caroe

Dark social is a term used to explain web traffic whose source attribution is unclear – the true origin you can’t find or don’t know. Typically this traffic shows up as “Direct” in analytics because it comes from a copy/paste URL which you do not know where the user acquired it, nor do you know what was said about the link – the visitor just appears on the site.

Dark Social icons Image Credit: Kendesk Digital

There are two distinct parts – the analytics direct traffic – and also the more commonly used direct messaging for social sharing. This can be tracked by brands if the messaging app is part of the social site e.g. Facebook and Facebook Messenger. The source can be tracked even if you do not know the message or its context (because it was a private message).

Sharing apps are often encouraged by site owners – this site still has a share button and I’m sure yours does too.

If your reader chooses SMS, email or WhatsApp share then you have no way of tracking it.

Frustratingly, I have also fallen foul of this – when with a prospective client, I show them a web page on my phone, hit the share button and invite them to put their own email or phone number and to send themselves. I thought I would be able to later save their phone or email to my contacts. Wrong. It’s gone.

Jay Baer checked his own site and found his B2B website got a lot of dark social shares.

We also looked at the lead figures for a recent webinar. Five percent were attributed to direct by Google Analytics, even though the sign-up page was not accessible anywhere on the website. That means it’s not possible that these people landed on the page directly, and our analysis wasn’t entirely accurate.

Improve your ability to view dark social shares

ShareThis is a much-used social sharing plugin and they have adjusted their code so that they can track dark social shares. The tool is free to install and offers all the popular sites as pre-created.

You can also create custom share buttons which can be designed into your site colourways, have unique, trackable attributes which you define. This allows a “share count” to be generated and logged for your site.

Creating your own custom short URLs (bit.ly or similar) and using UTM markers can help you to track these shares, so that your “direct” traffic is further reduced, tracked and defined.

Resources about Dark Social

How Brands can get Dark Social Right
ShareThis dark social sharing white paper from 2017
Create custom ShareThis buttons
Install the ShareThis plugin
What is dark social?
Google Analytics campaign URL builder tool

Apple Podcast analytics beta

17 July, 2019/0 Comments/in Data, Metrics, Podcast /by Rebecca Caroe

Apple has launched a beta service to analyse listenership of your podcast episodes on Apple devices and via Apple services.

I took a quick look – log in to iTunes Connect and select the drop-down next to the header. [Note the URL – since podcasts are being split off from iTunes, it’s now got its own URL podcastsconnect.apple.com]

The service obviously only works on Apple devices and so this will in all likelihood be a small segment of your audience. But the data has all the normal data points [#devices, #total time listened, time listened per device] defaulting to a past 60 days view.

The most interesting data point for me is the percentage “Average Consumption” measure defined as

The average percentage of the episode that was played across all devices. Playback duration is compared against the episode duration as reported in the podcast feed. If a device plays the duration time of an episode more than once, the consumption from that device will be greater than 100%
Apple podcast analytics beta

Trends, episodes and overview

Neatly summarising most of what you’ll want to see – the Apple Podcasts Analytics beta has a nice dashboard showing Total time listened, a country analysis and split of subscribers and ‘not subscribed’. This is neat as I’ve always wondered about the proportion of my listeners who are not subscribers but do listen.

Partial audience analysis

In the analytics help documentation I noted the following:

Podcast Analytics begins gathering data as soon as users play content in the Podcasts app (iOS 11 or later), in iTunes 12.7 or later (macOS and Windows), or on HomePod. [NOTE only recent app versions]
Apple only displays data from users who agreed to share their diagnostics and usage information with providers. [NOTE Reduces total audience size]
To collect data, the duration of a play event must be at least five seconds. [NOTE fair enough]
To display data, more than five unique devices must play the show or episode content. [NOTE fair enough]

Final thoughts

Get on to Apple and take a look at your stats. Compare it to other analytics services [I use Podtrac] and compare the data points and your absolute numbers.

My Apple numbers and Podtrac numbers are not directly comparable as one is included in the other. But for me the average consumption metric is pretty neat and will be something I add in my media pack for advertisers.

The images below show the respective analytics for 7 recent episodes.