Padgett cited a recent McKinsey report that projected genAI will contribute up to $4.4 trillion in annual global productivity. Furthermore, Sales and Marketing, combined, was flagged as one of four functional groups likely to deliver 75% of that value.

“That means, every time we engage with our customer and they’re engaging with our brand, it’s an opportunity for us to get better and to blow the customer’s mind,” said Padgett.

Where to infuse genAI in customer experience

Here are five stages across the marketing funnel where genAI can be used:

Understanding the customer

Ideating and strategizing

Campaign creation and deployment

Customer personalization and engagement

Campaign monitoring and performance analytics

“Generative AI can help [marketers] at all five stages,” said Padget. “And you can have other stages, but that’s how I think about it.”

Furthermore, the ways marketers can infuse genAI at these stages fall into three main marketing goals for Padgett. The technology can be used to generate more leads, increase revenue and drive repeat business or loyalty.

Generating more leads with genAI

Marketers should adopt an experimental attitude toward new AI tools. When content production is increased to produce many variations, that allows brands to speak to customer segments in more customized ways. And these interactions create more data that helps marketers understand what works and what doesn’t. And these insights can bring in more leads.

Understanding the customer. Marketers can use natural language processing (NLP) to ask questions about existing customer data. One company Padgett is familiar with uses AI to build synthetic personas from composite data pulled from various datasets, including survey data and CRM, to learn more about their prospects and why they aren’t converting.

Strategy. GenAI tools like Bing Chat can be used to conduct competitive analysis and find out how competitors are reaching their audiences.

Campaign creation and deployment. Use genAI chatbots to create text and images for campaigns to improve engagement with prospects.

Customer personalization and engagement. Personalize the chatbot experience using demographic or behavioral data to make engagement with customers more relevant and speedy.

Campaign monitoring and performance analytics. Deploy a next-best-action engine with NLP that allows marketers and the data science team to ask questions about how best to optimize the customer experience and drive the very best actions.

“As long as a customer is finding value, the company is getting better engagement and you’re saving steps, that is a win for everyone,” said Padgett.

Using genAI to generate revenue

Chatbots and genAI tools increase the capability to create more personalized experiences and content rapidly. Marketers experimenting with these tools not only will be able to produce more variations, they’ll be able to test and validate what works. Winning combinations can be used more frequently, improving customer success.

Understanding the customer. Decrease abandon rate and increase order value by segmenting customers based on landing page referrals and tailoring the landing page experience according to these segments.

Strategy. Use genAI to create images of new products and features to rapidly test them on customers. These insights can be turned around quickly to build product roadmaps. Including your customers in this process can also get them enthusiastic about the brand and closer to purchase.

Campaign creation and deployment. Create new, even more relevant calls-to-action at scale that are inserted in genAI-produced ads and emails. When doing this, Padget recommended including a disclaimer — “content produced with AI — to signal to customers that they should expect some changes in product recommendations and format.

Customer personalization and engagement. Integrate genAI into a chatbot tool to provide personalized responses.

Campaign monitoring and performance analytics. Consider automating and consolidating campaign monitoring tools and layering NLP over it so members across the team can ask questions about performance. This makes monitoring more inclusive, and more hands will be on deck to tweak campaigns and bring in more sales.

Driving up repeat sales and loyalty with genAI

Organizations that use genAI to ramp up content production and messaging can execute targeted campaigns to more specific customer segments. That means that messaging is more personalized and aimed at specific friction points in the customer experience. Over time, a better customer experience will encourage retention and strengthen loyalty.

Understanding the customer. With the ability to scale up content production with genAI, marketers can test variations in creative on sub-segments and validate what works. “These are different ways in which you can build upon things that exist, but be very specific for your customer,” said Padgett.

Strategy. Create “act-like” messages aimed at customer segments facing specific friction points in the customer experience. When you speak to these frustrations, you will gain customers’ trust and loyalty.

Campaign creation and deployment. Anticipate friction points and proactively solve them with tailored messaging, experiences and chatbots.

Customer personalization and engagement. Use genAI to help create and launch a re-engagement campaign aimed at lapsed customers.

Campaign monitoring and performance analytics. Use historical data to discover frequent pain points and identify risks to losing customers. Create a campaign aimed at these risks so customers continue to be engaged.

“The difference with generative AI is you don’t have to be a developer or a data scientist to really leverage its powers,” said Padgett.

Go here to see the entire presentation. Registration is free.

The post Leveraging generative AI to improve customer experience and increase revenue: The MarTech Conference keynote appeared first on MarTech.

Make sure that all potential internal users are on the demo call, and pay attention to the following:

How easy is the platform to use, especially when it comes to design, previewing and collaboration?

Does the vendor seem to understand our business and our marketing needs?

Are they showing us our “must-have” features?

Is the reporting actionable, and are we able to extract insights from the data with the human resources we have available?

Here are some other questions to ask each vendor:

What is your approach to list management and hygiene?

How do you validate the accuracy of your data appends and matches?

How do you comply with privacy regulations and consumer choice?

How robust and flexible are your reporting options?

Can reports be customized and automatically delivered to different users and types of users in their preferred formats?

Where are the actionable reports?

Are there workflows built in that allow for coordination between marketing, content and design teams, as well as brand and regulatory compliance?

Can we work with franchisees in local markets, or internal operations in different geographies within the platform to ensure consistency and compliance?

How does the platform integrate with martech platforms (i.e., CRMs, DSPs, CDPs)?

Does the platform feature any built-in data activation capabilities beyond email sending (i.e., SMS, display ad campaigns or social media marketing)?

What reporting do you provide that will document the ROI from our efforts?

What does the onboarding process entail and how long will it take?

What are the training options, i.e., is it online only…or will you send people to our location to train us on site?

What kind of customer support is included? Can we pick up the phone to report problems?

Will we have a dedicated account manager and technical support?

Do you offer a proof-of-concept to measure potential performance and scale?

What kind of professional services are available? And how much do they cost?

How does the company handle requests for product modifications?

What new features are you considering? If they involve generative AI, how are they better

than general models?

What’s the long-term roadmap and when are features expected to launch?

If the vendor answers your questions and the platform seems to meet your needs, it’s time to start checking references, speaking with existing customers, and negotiating the contract.

Read more on email marketing 

Email Marketing: What is it?

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Email marketing experts list

Email marketing helps organizations acquire and retain customers, build businesses and make more money. Explore the platforms essential to email marketing in the latest edition of this MarTech Intelligence Report.

Click here to download!

The post Questions to ask email marketing platform vendors appeared first on MarTech.

“It doesn’t matter if you’re selling a cup of coffee at Starbucks, an iPad at Apple, or an electric supercar at Lucid Motors, there’s a common ingredient for success and growth that spans products, that spans industries — and that’s customer experience.”

That’s the most important lesson Len Devanna, VP strategy at Cortico-X, has taken from more than two decades of experience digital strategy, CX and transformative leadership, and it’s the message he delivered on the second morning of The MarTech Conference.

Defining experience

“Everything starts with the human,” said Devanna. “The importance of this cannot be overstated. We’re not selling to robots. Yet. We are selling to each other and sometimes that gets lost in the fray.”

Through the lens of the human, it doesn’t matter whether you’re buying a phone or a car; there’s a journey to be undertaken. At a very high level, the journey ideally moves through stages of discovery, consideration, transaction or conversion and advocacy.

That journey can involve hundreds or even thousands of touchpoints, and the sum of those touchpoints is, for Devanna, the experience. The better the experience, the better the business outcome.

It’s time to reflect, he said, on whether your business is providing customers an optimized, seamless experience or a series of disjointed experiences, placing the onus for navigating the journey on the customer.

Having an exceptional product is no longer enough

Customer expectations of interactions with brands have steadily grown, so that it is no longer enough to offer an exceptional product; exceptional experiences are required too. Eighty-four percent of customers say the experience is as important as the product or service itself.

That means brands need to be on a journey, from wherever they find themselves today to a plateau of what Devanna calls “CX mastery.”

The first step on the journey is breaking down silos. Customers don’t care whether they’re dealing with marketing, sales or service; they’re experience is with the brand. Progress here mandates reaching out across departmental boundaries and having transparent conversations about positives and negatives in the experience itself, not just about the performance of specific teams.

“We are smarter together,” Devanna insists, “and fostering this conversation, bringing people together from across the organization, is a solid step in breaking down these silos and igniting new levels of collaboration.”

Car-buying nirvana

Devanna’s prime example of positive CX comes from the car-buying experience (he served as head of customer experience at Lucid Motors).

The traditional model

Discovery. Bombardment with marketing materials from a range of sources.

Consideration. Consultations with, on average, 2.8 dealers (looking for the best price).

Transact. Dealing with various possible sources of finance.

Advocacy. Nobody really owns the experience, so where’s the loyalty?

The D2C model

Brands like Lucid Motors, Rivian and Tesla are able to dominate from a CX perspective. No more inter-dealer haggling; the brand owns the end-to-end experience and that, said Devanna, is a game changer.

The auto industry, Devanna says, is in urgent need of an experience overhaul.

Be an experience activist

“I am here to selfishly recruit you,” said Devanna. As experience activists, the task is to convince the world just how important experience really is. “Your mission, should you decide to accept it, is to become an experience activist alongside us.”

Go here to see the entire presentation. Registration is free.

The post It’s time to unleash your CX activists: The MarTech Conference day two keynote appeared first on MarTech.

SEO is hard, it is complicated, and it has a lot of different paths that one can take to reach desired outcomes. It also involves a lot of trial and error.

The fact that it has the word “optimization” in it is sometimes lost on those who want a linear path – and maybe pitch or assume that there is one – to get to the results they are seeking.

While there are many widely accepted SEO “best practices” and things that you should do to reach your goals, SEO is much more than just doing a checklist of things.

I want to call out some specific aspects to make sure you aren’t someone who gets less return on investment (ROI) than what you expect when it comes to investing your own time, your team’s time, or any level of investment in time and money with an agency.

SEO is a discipline and marketing channel that can take quite a bit of time to see results.

I believe there are seven things that you need to focus on to avoid a checklist mentality and most wisely spend your investment of time, money, and effort.

Full disclosure: I own an SEO agency. I have friends who lead SEO teams and many amazing agencies take a strategic, high-quality approach to SEO for each of their clients. I’m not writing this article to bash anyone or put anyone down.

1. Set SEO Goals

Sometimes, it is tempting to just jump into “doing” SEO.

Admittedly, it can take time and requires short-term investments of time, resources, and focus to get to the longer-term payoff of reaching your goals.

Goals are important whether you’ve been doing SEO so long that you can’t remember when you started, you’ve just started in the past year, or you’re considering including it in your marketing mix.

No matter where you fall on that spectrum, take time to revisit or work through goal setting for the first time.

Do the research to know what your opportunities are to reach your target audience and what the investment might look like to get there.

Without defined goals, you run the risk of just “doing” SEO and hoping for an outcome.

Even if you have a baseline, start somewhere so that you don’t get to a point down the road where you revisit ROI and find that you didn’t have accountability in the process or that you spent a lot of time with little to show for it.

One of the biggest reasons I see for SEO not working is that there are misaligned expectations driven by inconsistencies in approach due to the lack of proper and objective goals being set.

2. Build A Specific SEO Strategy

Going hand-in-hand with having clearly defined goals is having a defined strategy. I often talk about the challenge of putting tactics ahead of strategy.

I had a client come to me a few years ago who worked with an agency, and each month in their calls, I wondered what the strategy was and who was driving it.

They would go into the meeting, look at keywords and targeting focuses, and bring up things that seemed basic but were “new” ideas that the search marketer would then take and implement in the coming month.

That is a red flag and validation that there was a checklist of sorts and not a bigger-picture strategy in place.

And, no, the strategy can’t be the checklist and the checklist isn’t the strategy.

Yes, a common approach or methodology of working through the range of technical, on-page, and off-page aspects of SEO should be expected.

But how we work with the website tech, shape the content, and build authority and trust is much more robust.

Doing your initial research, making an informed investment with an expectation of return and knowing how it will allow you to reach your goals is important.

If you can’t articulate the strategy, it is probably too complicated or poorly defined. That’s the litmus test that I use.

3. Define & Acquire Resources You Need

Whether you’re a one-person team, have a broader in-house team tasked with SEO, or hire out aspects to freelancers or agencies, you need consistent and defined roles for the resources you need to implement your strategy and reach goals.

That includes covering all of the SEO-specific aspects of technical SEO, content-based SEO aspects, links, local, reporting, and more.

Beyond that – unless you are a unicorn or have one on your team – it will require some other disciplines and subject matter expertise to come to the table with you.

That can include UX designers, writers, web developers, product managers, sales team members, and more.

Getting all resources aligned around your goals, in the know about your strategy, and all working together to implement the SEO strategy is important.

You don’t want to spend half of your desired ROI timeline waiting for others to help or having to iterate on their work more than you planned based on a lack of prioritization or understanding on their end.

4. Build & Document A Plan

I’m a big proponent of planning.

In fact, I might be wearing people out with my obsession with the topic.

Every digital marketing effort needs a well-defined, objective, documented plan.

There are so many shiny objects and distractions. All of the changes to search engines (which have always been a distraction but necessary thing to keep up with) as well as the emergence of AI.

We can’t ignore the changes and new things. We must test them and leverage them.

We also can’t ignore them and fall behind.

Having a defined plan is key to that.

And, no, I’m not contradicting myself here. A plan is different from a checklist.

The plan should restate and detail the goals, articulate the strategy, and include tactics and the measurement plan (more on that later).

Another big area where I see SEO getting off the rails is when there’s no defined plan that is objective.

When it isn’t documented, it can be easy to put off SEO when things get busy. Or, it can be too focused on the checklist and not be connected with strategy. Or, it can even be too rigid without built-in agility and room to test.

5. Measure SEO Results

With all of my focus on goals and ROI, measurement is critical to SEO. I’m going to assume that in your goal setting, you have defined goals that impact your business overall.

While SEO is often defined by rankings, impressions, and website visits, it drives, in most cases, the key metric or most important KPI is conversions.

Whether a conversion is a lead, ecommerce sale, or some other valuable activity for your business or organization, it can be deeper than where some SEO pros are comfortable going.

I admit that early in my career, I was focused on SEO metrics and not as much on the things that I felt I couldn’t control or got messy when talking about that conversion and how it got all the way through to actual revenue for a business.

Being clear on what you’re measuring and how it connects with the goals and knowing in real-time what the performance indicators are will guide good SEO and the level of agility and optimization that you need.

6. Maintain Agility In Processes

Balance is probably a great word to use at this point as I talk about having definitions and plans, and also maintaining agility.

I’m a big believer in phased-out optimization and processes that allow understanding of what actions and variables we implement impact performance.

I’d rather implement something each week than work for six months on a large initiative so I can see how things perform (or don’t).

The nature of optimization is that it never ends. There’s no such thing as a “perfect” site for the search engines or our visitors.

Whether you’re optimizing technical aspects or content, you’re working on making things better.

Better is always relative, and you have to have planned out room for optimization whether you’re doing best practices, strategic items, or leveraging new things like AI.

7. Integrate SEO Efforts With Marketing

SEO performs better when it isn’t siloed and is part of a broader digital marketing mix.

Aside from the broader need for subject matter expertise outside of just SEO talent (noted regarding resources earlier), SEO can greatly benefit from shared insights and integration with paid search, social media, PR, influencer, and other marketing channels.

If you’re in a service-based company and have thought leadership content, that can be leveraged efficiently by multiple channels, including SEO, as either a leader in defining it or being part of the team when it comes to sourcing it.

Making sure SEO is as tightly integrated into the business and marketing goals and efforts as possible will help create efficiencies with resources and level of investment – and ultimately get people on the same page to properly value it and what it can do to drive meaningful ROI for the business or organization.

Conclusion

My hope is that you don’t waste time or money on SEO efforts that are doing “good” things but aren’t ultimately delivering for you.

If you’re in a position where you feel performance isn’t meeting your expectations, I would challenge you to consider if any of the aspects that I detailed are misaligned in your current investment.

I’ll be the first to say that you must have a process and plan to avoid an inconsistent or chaotic approach, but that you should expect to see strategy instead of just tactics.

A checklist could and probably should be included in how things are managed.

However, a checklist or the implementation of SEO best practices by itself will not necessarily get you to the ultimate results you want.

More resources:

Featured Image: Stockbakery/Shutterstock

But before you start to question and reinvent your email marketing strategy – you need to look at how well your deliverability is performing.

Deliverability has become a hot topic now that inbox providers like Gmail and Yahoo are beginning to enforce stricter policies for deliverability.

Visit Digital Marketing Depot to download the 2024 Guide to Email Deliverability and learn why your emails might not be making it to your customers inboxes and what you can do about it. This guide also includes a handy email campaign check list and a glossary of industry jargon that demystifies terms like bounce, DNS, SPF, and more.

The post The 2024 guide to email deliverability appeared first on MarTech.

SAVE UP TO $170: Amazon’s Big Spring Sale is taking up to 38% off WiFi routers, mesh systems, and other home networking equipment for a limited time.

If you’ve been combing through Amazon’s Big Spring deals at a snail’s pace this week, consider adding some faster, more reliable internet to your cart before checkout. The retail giant’s new seasonal savings event (which runs through Monday, March 25) is packed with deals on home networking gear, with discounts racking up as high as 38%.

As of March 20, Amazon’s spring sale selection covers a slew of TP-Link WiFi routers and mesh systems, including a WiFi 7 router for future-proofers. We’ve also spotted one sub-$50 Amazon eero option for bargain hunters. Here’s an overview of the best WiFi and mesh router deals up for grabs.

Mashable Deals

WiFi router deals
Why we like it

The Archer AXE75 is a tri-band Wi-Fi 6E router that offers speeds of up to 5400Mbps, built-in security features, and simple setup. It usually gets even cheaper in November and December — it’s hit $159.99 around then the past two years, according to the Amazon price tracker camelcamelcamel — but this is its best price outside of the holidays.

More WiFi router dealsMesh router and system dealsWiFi extender deals

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom developers had a problem: The land of Hyrule kept falling apart.

Anyone who has played Tears of the Kingdom might be able to guess why. Some of the game’s big advances—Link’s Ultrahand and Fuse abilities, which allow players to create any tool they’re clever enough to stick together—required a lot of new and intricate development. Nintendo wanted to build something bigger and better with its Breath of the Wild sequel, but as the team worked on the game, the tools that would allow players to make all those shield skateboards and log bridges broke it. A lot. It was, programmer Takahiro Takayama says, “chaos.”

During development, Takayama would often hear devs exclaim, “It broke!” or “It went flying,” Takayama said Wednesday at the Game Developers Conference. “And I would respond, ‘I know. We’ll deal with it later.’”

The problem was the physics of it all. “We realized removing all non-physics-driven objects and making everything physics-driven will lead us to the solution we were looking at,” Takayama said.

The second fix was to create a system that allowed for unique interactions between objects, without any specific additional needs. That meant that players who wanted to make a vehicle, for example, could tinker with different tools instead of being restricted to something basic like a wheel and a board.

All that hardcore programming paid off. Ultrahand and Fuse are now fan-favorite tools, something players use to create flamethrowing penises and hacks used in speedruns. No matter how hard they tried, Hyrule never broke.

Those tools also meant players could solve puzzles in a variety of ways. “Regardless of what the player does, we had a world free from self-destruction,” Takayama said.

The connection between Snoopy and Omega is long established, and it’s likely this iteration of the wildly successful Swatch collaboration will be its most popular model, especially as it is a proper new iteration and not a version of the Moonshine Gold MoonSwatches. “There seems to be an increasingly sonorous groan echoing throughout the enthusiast space with each new, and somewhat gimmicky, release,” watch site Time+Tide wrote upon the release of one timepiece that arrived to coincide with National Swiss Day. No such criticisms can be made concerning the Mission to Moonphase.

This also means, however, that anyone waiting for a budget Swatch Snoopy Speedmaster will need to be prepared to, once again, stand in line at selected Swatch stores, because like the other models this won’t be available to buy online.

Initially, the MoonSwatch was considered for online sales, and even Nick Hayek Jr., chief executive of Swatch Group, refused to rule out the possibility post-launch. “Ask me in four months if ecommerce can play a role,” he told WIRED in July 2022. “Perhaps. I don’t know.” Nearly two years later, no MoonSwatch has been sold new online, nor does it look likely they ever will be.

The Omega and Snoopy space connection stems from NASA’s Silver Snoopy award, a silver lapel pin first awarded in 1968 for outstanding achievements related to flight safety or mission success. Omega was awarded the Silver Snoopy in 1970 after the Speedmaster played a vital role during Apollo 13, serving as backup to the broken instruments during the mission, with Jack Swigert using his to time the critical 14-second rocket engine burn, allowing a safe return to Earth.

However, it wasn’t until 2003 that Omega created what was to be the first in a series of Snoopy Speedmasters to commemorate the brand’s spacefaring heritage.

Speaking to WIRED in January, when news of the Snoopy MoonSwatch first broke, watch specialist and WIRED contributor Tim Barber said such a model was inevitable. “Bringing in Snoopy was only ever a matter of time,” Barber said. “In fact, it’s remarkable there wasn’t a Snoopy version the first time around, which would of course have been the absolute must-have MoonSwatch.”

The MoonSwatch Mission to Moonphase is available beginning March 26, in selected Swatch stores. And, as with the whole MoonSwatch Collection, apparently only one watch can be purchased per person, per day, and per Swatch store.