Land Ho!

A little while back my life turned upside down…again. This time it wasn’t a worldwide pandemic or a new software suite; this time it was my family. I’m always amazed by those priority-shifting events in life. They can come up slow or sudden, but they surprise me every time nonetheless.

Kindergarten was the obstacle we were having trouble navigating, and it was all-hands on deck to keep the ship upright during this storm. As the seas settled, we regrouped and set a new course. A course where I became a full-time family manager. It was a tough transition for me. It still is tough, but I’ve learned and grown so much. The rough seas are now mostly calm, although storms do still rumble up now and again.

In this new world, I began to shift my omnichannel marketing focus to learn more about small-scale tools and strategies. I joined my local Elementary school’s Parent-Teacher Organization (PTO) and quickly learned that small-scale, volunteer-run organizations are very different from the enterprise marketing teams I have worked with in the past. New software to learn, new types of teams to get to know, and new objectives to understand. I’ll tell you more about this soon.

I do love new challenges. This is going to be fun!

Billie-O-T Sea Shanty, our family theme song:

Perfect Your Email Frequency

How often should you send an email to your customers? More than you might think.

Email frequency is a hotly debated topic with lots of considerations. Most of us have inboxes overflowing with messages, and we all complain about getting too many emails. But the thing is, sometimes we really appreciate getting those emails. We stay subscribed. We read them every once in a while. We find a deal. We buy. So how do you figure out how often a brand should send emails?

Keep these five considerations in mind to determine your perfect email frequency:

How often do your customers repurchase?

You want to be sending at least one strong Buy Now call to action within a repurchase cycle – this the minimum frequency to message your customer. If the repurchase frequency is highly variable, I recommend a few communications timed at common repurchase durations. If the repurchase cycle is a year or longer, make sure you’re messaging at least quarterly but consider calls to action that focus on adoption or advocacy.

How often is your inventory changing?

New inventory or close-outs are great reasons to reach out to your customers via email. Focus on targeting segments of your distribution list and do consider alternate channels like social, digital ads, and direct mail. Targeting based on product affinity or past purchases is a fabulous way to keep these messages relevant.

Are you posting new content?

New content, especially content with an educational twist, can be a great reason to reach out by email. Highlighting old content that is still relevant is valuable, too. These messages work really well with an omnichannel approach – perhaps social channels are a play-by-play of each new content piece, but email is a newsletter-style compilation of highlights. Content messages give you a lot of room to personalize and target – have fun with these.

Are there cross-sell or upsell offers?

Try for at least one or two cross-sell or upsell messages within a repurchase cycle. These can be offers from your brand or partners. For these messages, you want to provide additional value to your customers while staying top of mind.

Do your customers need a reminder?

Customers love it when you keep track of things for them. Offering helpful reminders is pure gold. Did they leave something in their cart? Is there a milestone to celebrate? Is it time for maintenance? Is there something else that might trigger a need for your product? Remind them!

You now have at least five reasons to reach out via email. This is the minimum you should send. If you have shorter sales cycles or are avid content marketers, reach out more. For some brands, especially those that curate a lot of content, multiple times a week can be fine. Keep your eye on engagement and remember you can always suppress unengaged recipients to give them a break.

Remember to consider your sales cycle and message value when picking your perfect send frequency. Happy messaging!

Data Janitor – the Unsung Hero

Data Janitors are the most underappreciated marketing role, in my humble opinion. These are the marketers who are often introverted, shy, detail-oriented, and technology wizzes. They make it look easy and you might not even realize the value of what they do. Data Janitors make sure your prospect and customer data flows into and across your technology systems in a useful way.  This is the dirty work that makes it possible to glean marketing insights and automate marketing tactics.

You might have heard of this role under a different title – Marketing Analyst, Data Analyst, Data Custodian, Data Steward, Data Scientist… I like the term Data Janitor. Here’s why:

  1. They are always tidying and cleaning. Data Janitors sift through mountains of data to find the broken patterns, normalize it, and then repeat.
  2. They can navigate through the back hallways and side entrances. Data Janitors know how all the systems connect across marketing, operations, and analytics.
  3. They get little recognition. Data Janitors regularly monitor and maintain data flows, and it’s only in failure that their work gets noticed.

As the marketing industry shifts to more restrictive privacy regulations, managing your first party data becomes a much higher priority. Technology teams have been managing big data sets for a while, and they offer some great guidance on roles and data governance. This Data Janitor is one such role. But before you post a job, take a good look at who might be doing that work already. You might be surprised.

Do you have a Data Janitor in disguise?

For more information on Marketing Data and Data Janitors, check out these resources and stories:

Me, a Leader?!

How I transformed from a shy girl into a Leader. Part 1 of 2: the foundational years.

Could I be a leader? Me? I considered myself a community organizer, an enthusiastic participant, a builder, a facilitator, a contingency planner… but a leader?!

At work, we have been sharing out our individual leadership journeys. I usually love presentations, but somehow this one was different. It was personal, it was messy, and I wasn’t even sure I was a leader. But I had a presentation to write, so I embarked on a personal journey through my memories to redefine myself as a Leader. It took me to good memories and bad, I re-experienced the exuberance of my successes and the burning shame of my missteps. It’s been a flood of emotions. And now I’m sharing it with you.

 I’ve split my journey into two phases: the first phase is about my experiences with leadership during my educational years; the second phase is about my professional journey with leadership. Turns out I’m getting old and have taken a windy path to get where I am today, so this is a rather long leadership journey. It’s my current interpretation, always subject to change and evolve. Thanks for your interest and open mind.

Part 1 – The Foundational Years

My leadership training began at a very young age and blossomed throughout my primary schooling. I have been so blessed with fabulous parents, teachers, and community leaders that have helped me to learn and grow. And special thanks to my Mom and Dad: you helped me to experience the world!

Sister Abel, my Suzuki violin teacher, was an influential coach whom I met at the young age of 5. She taught me how to play the violin (both a real violin and one made from a Kleenex box and paint stick) and to do it with utmost passion. I joined all the other Suzuki students in weekly group practice, standing to participate in songs whenever I knew any of the notes. Music was an important part of my life; I may have been shy, but I could always communicate through music. Violin, flute, French horn – 3 instruments, three first chairs. As I look back, I am in awe at my orchestra and band conductors who were able to successfully coordinate large groups to play (mostly) the right notes at the right time and to keep on playing to the end. That community of music will forever be a source of leadership inspiration.

I had the privilege of being part of many outstanding groups and organizations, each with its own unique take on leadership. These groups taught me different ways of being in a community, of working towards goals, of realizing success. Troop leaders, camp counselors, sports coaches, not-for-profit program organizers, teachers: everywhere I went, there were leaders showing how to work together for the greater good. My standout experiences were Space Camp, the French Voyager camp at Concordia Language Villages, my horse stable manager and coach, Deanna Landwehr, our community Meals on Wheels coordinator Jackie Zoellner, and all my public school teachers.

One of my more unique experiences in high school was a business co-op. While I originally had plans to focus on veterinary medicine, brain surgery, or astronomy, I decided the math and memorization weren’t aligned well to my skills. I floundered a bit to find my next passion, but when I joined my high school business co-op I knew I had path forward. I started an internship my senior year at Prince Corporation, a wholesale distributor and manufacturer, working in their marketing department. When I started, my hair color matched the company logo – royal blue. It was a hit at the tradeshows.

As college approached, I got scared. Scared of committing to one path, scared that I hadn’t experienced enough, scared that I was conforming instead of blazing my own trail. The summer before college, I ran away. I was 18. I tend to look back at this next phase of my life with some regret and embarrassment, but it was a critically important learning experience for me.

Living on my own taught me hard lessons, exposed me to a different way of life, and connected me to new types people. I am extremely grateful for this experience and have unending love for all those I met on the way. I am sorry, though, for the turmoil it put my family through. During my solo time, I learned what it’s like to rack up credit card debt and dodge bill collectors, to visit friends in jail, to fail at waitressing, financial planning, and business. I learned what it’s like to rely on strangers, to find community in unexpected places, and to appreciate life in the moment. After almost a year, I came to the realization I needed more help and education to live my best life.

That next fall I made it to college. My parents had deferred my enrollment when I up and left the previous fall; it was their support that helped me climb out of my emotional low and reorient into a growth mindset. I started school with some trepidation, but four years later I graduated from Washington University in St. Louis with a double major in Marketing and Entrepreneurship. WashU had a fabulous community of teachers, students, and community mentors. I stayed active with music as the hospitality lead for the campus concert venue. I helped found a new sorority on campus, although left the group a year and a half later – too many meetings for me.  I met inspiring local entrepreneurs and marketers through my study and extracurricular activities. The future was bright, the possibilities endless.

These foundational years were full of so many great experiences and people. My heart swells with love thinking about my teachers, mentors, leaders, and friends. I might not have had a lot of official leadership roles, but I was always an enthusiastic participant and keen observer.

Stay tuned for Part 2: The Professional Years.

Spam Me Not

Curating an engaged email list is one of the fine arts of email marketing. It’s tempting to sell sell sell to the largest group possible, but that is a short term game that that isn’t going to maximize your revenue year over year.

Email clients like gmail, icloud, yahoo, outlook, etc. rely on compelling content to keep users logging back in to check their inbox, just like social media feeds. The most engaging content gets featured, the least engaging gets hidden away or rejected outright.

Here are my 3 tips to make it to the inbox:

1 Use a mix of message types to keep audiences engaged. There’s way more to your story than a buy now call to action. I’ve found that dividing your content into the following categories creates more diverse emails that grow engagement without sacrificing revenue.

  • Promotional: Highlight products and special offers
  • Behavioral Prompts: Remind at the right intervals – repurchase reminders, event reminders, product enhancements, key deadlines
  • Storytelling: Engage in a conversational style about a mutually beneficial topic.

2 Limit the number of unengaged recipients to about 20%-25% of the total list. Use your best judgement on what “unengaged” means, as it can vary based on list size and messaging frequency. A general definition is 3-6 months without an open or click. It’s ok to run occasional re-engagement campaigns with a larger percentage of unengaged, but sandwich those sends between two high engagement campaigns to counter balance your sender score. Inboxing and engagement go hand in hand, so cater to engagement.

3 Consistency is key. Keep a similar cadence and send size month over month. Reach out quarterly at the absolute minimum. Depending upon your industry and audience, you might be able to reach out multiple times a day! Inbox readers want to know they can find your latest offer, quickly contact you, or follow that link to exactly where they need to go. Don’t be afraid to resend those high-engagement emails to those who didn’t engage, maybe the timing just wasn’t right. Keep that email conversation going.

Follow these three guidelines and you’ll reap the rewards of a robust email marketing program.

For more information on deliverability, here’s a few of my favorite resources:

Do you have other great resources or tips you can recommend? Tell me about them in the comments below!

Happy sending, my friends 😊

Ode to AMPscript

Marketing personalization is hard, but Salesforce AMPscript makes it easier.

In my last post, I cautioned about the workload from exponential personalization. In this post, I’m going to celebrate an approach that Salesforce Marketing Cloud has developed that helps reduce that workload – AMPscript! The exponential personalization warning still stands, but…we’re marketers, and it’s so cool to personalize to the individual level. My team runs campaigns with hundreds of variations, and AMPScript is our newest, most important tool in our toolbelt.

What is AMPscript? According to Trailhead: “AMPscript is Marketing Cloud’s proprietary scripting language for advanced dynamic content in emails, landing pages, SMS, and push messages.” I won’t go into the nitty gritty of how to use AMPscript here, but I will sing it’s praises. At the end of this article, I highlight some of my favorite AMPscript resources that can help you use AMPscript like a pro.

My team supports insurance communications, and there are a lot of variations in our messages to personalize and advise on next best actions. Customer data is the backbone of these variations. Traditionally, we work very closely with our data engineers to transform and flatten data into discrete data fields with values that our marketing systems can easily reference. With AMPscript, we are able to transform data ourselves! That’s a HUGE win for us!

There are a lot of ways to use AMPscript in your messages, and we’ve experimented with most of them. We typically divide our team into two camps:

  1. General Marketers that use personalization and inline AMPscript
  2. Marketing Technologists that use AMPscript blocks and tags

For these camps, job title doesn’t matter. We have marketing managers, communication specialists, and developers we consider Marketing Technologists. The camps are based on knowledge and skill. Anyone can become proficient with AMPscript!

Building out email variations can be challenging, and proofing those can be just as challenging. This is where I really appreciate the ability of Salesforce Marketing Cloud to reference Test Data Extensions for bulk test sends, and for Gmail to allow multiple task-specific aliases in one inbox. A quick and easy way to generate all test variations in one place to proof! Someone still needs to verify the information in each of those messages…but at least it’s easy to generate tests!

If you’re ready to try AMPscript, here are some of my favorite resources:

Do you have other favorite AMPscript guides? Has AMPscript been helpful for your campaigns? Share your experience in the comments below!

Exponential Personalization

Personalization is amazing… but how much is too much?

I love reading about campaigns with hundreds of variations. I think “What masterful marketers, what personalized content, I want to do that too!” But producing, monitoring, and analyzing all those variations isn’t quite as glamorous as it might seem. Each additional variation creates exponential work, like a hockey stick curve to unlimited customization. At some point, it’s not humanly possible to manage all the variations, and AI must step up to orchestrate the show.

When I work with marketers on versioning, I like to keep tabs on the total variation count. For example, let’s say we start with one custom block with three possible variations: product 1, 2, or 3. Next, we add another custom block that also has 3 different variations: promotion A, B, or C. We’re now at 9 variations (3×3). This means that someone needs to build and review all 9 variations, and that someone needs to tag and track those 9 variations. 9 variations is doable, right? Sure! No sweat. But next thing we know, we’re being asked to add one more custom block with 3 more variations. That puts us now at 27 variations (3x3x3). From 3 to 9 to 27, ouch. 27 feels a bit overwhelming. At what point does the effort outweigh the value?

How do you enhance personalization without burning out your marketing team?

Marketing vs Software

How do you translate “marketing speak” into “software speak”?

Marketing requirements can be tricky to pin down. One of my favorite ways to approach requirements is to first create a general description of the campaign or audience, then distill that down to determine what data, logic, and timing is needed to segment, personalize, and make decisions. I prefer to do this through an interview process with the marketer. For example, a campaign requirements conversation usually goes like this:

—–

Me: Tell me about this marketing effort.

Marketer: We’re targeting people who have purchased product XYZ in the past, but not recently. We’re offering a promo code!

Me: Nice! Who do you want to include in this marketing effort?

Marketer: I want to include anyone who purchased XYZ product previously, is over 25 years old, and who is opted in for marking

Me: (writes down): Purchased XYZ, opt in status, current age (over 25)

Me: So you would need to know who purchased XYZ, what their opt in status is, and what there current age is, right?

Marketer: Yep! And I want to exclude anyone who purchased recently.

Me: Okay. Anyone who purchased XYZ product, or purchased anything? And how recently?

Marketer: Hmm, purchased anything in that product category within the last 6 months.

Me: (writes down): Last purchase date for product category, product category of XYZ

Marketer: Yes, that looks right.

Me: Thanks, let me see if I have this right – Identify everyone who is opted in that has purchased XYZ product but has not purchased that product category in the last 6 months.

Marketer: Yep!

Me: Great! Next, once you start marketing, how do you know when to stop? What is considered a success, what is considered an exit, what is considered engagement?

Marketer: Ooh, great questions. When they purchase in that product category, or really if they purchase anything using the coupon code, that would be the success. If they opt out, that would be an exit. Engagement would be a trip to the website to browse.

Me: (writes down) Success = purchase date in product category, use of coupon code. Exit = opt out, Engagement = website visit

Me: Is there anything you would need to know to personalize their marketing experience?

Marketer: I’d like to show a picture of product XYZ, include a coupon code, and know which channel they prefer.

Me: (writes down): Product XYZ image, coupon code, preferred channel

Me: Thanks! This gives us a great start to figure out data to support this effort.

Me: (Compiles whiteboard data into a summary):

Include anyone who is opted in, is under 25 years old, has purchased product XYZ previously but has not    purchased in that product category in the last 6 months. Exclude anyone in this audience that purchases or opts out. The success of this campaign will be determined by the number of recipients who purchased using the coupon code or a tracking source.

—

Oftentimes I see the marketer coming up with the requirements themselves. This can work, but I don’t recommend it. Here’s why: when the marketer is focused on logical thinking (specific data points, timing), the customer experience can easily get forgotten. By asking a marketer to describe the audience and the experience, a good marketing technologist can elicit data and logic requirements without requiring the marketer to have data and logic expertise.

Today’s marketing automation platforms are designed for marketers to use with limited development skills – low-code or no-code systems. While a marketer doesn’t need to know how to code, they still need to translate “marketing speak” into “software speak.”

What do you think? Do most marketers need a translator? What are some of your favorite questions to elicit requirements? Tell me about your approach in the comments below.

Unicorns and Cotton Candy

Tell me your wants…the unicorn and cotton candy ideas that you dream of when you finally find that moment to pause. What would your marketing look like if all your dreams came true?

When we started our Salesforce Marketing Cloud implementation, we had a saying: bring your Unicorn and Cotton Candy wishes. It got our marketing team to think creatively about the new possibilities that we could enable with technology.

So what did we dream of? A simple data set that told us who to talk to, about what, when, on which channel. A relational database that could support our intricate customer characteristics across brands. A drag and drop email design system where we could control the base code. A way to hyper-personalize our messaging. These were our unicorn and cotton candy wishes.

It’s been a year and a half plus a pandemic (so…a lifetime?), and our omnichannel marketing platform is implemented. I’d say we got at least a horse – and I think I see a unicorn horn starting to grow.

What’s your unicorn and cotton candy vision for marketing?

Implementation + Pandemic: Challenge Accepted

My team and I embarked on a Salesforce Marketing Cloud implementation at the same time the Worldwide Pandemic of 2020 started. The Sunday night before our first kickoff meeting we got the call that we were transitioning to a fully remote format, as the Salesforce team was being called home. My team shortly thereafter moved into our home offices as well. But did that stop us? No! We pushed forward, adjusted our approach, and rallied together. Lila Turner, our Salesforce Business Architect, and Kelly Freitas, our VP of Marketing Shared Services at VSP Global, kept our teams moving forward and celebrating the wins throughout the entire implementation, and I will be forever grateful. Thanks Lila and Kelly 😊