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How marketers can succeed without tracking third-party cookies

June 9, 2022 by Staff Reporter

Many business models today rely on the collection and sale of customer data. However, as high-profile privacy breaches increase in severity and regularity. Now more consumers feel like they’re losing control over their most precious asset.

Millions of websites contain cookies – small data files that automatically and subtly collect, store and sell user data. This includes personal details, shopping habits and purchasing histories. In fact, cookies are used by 39.7 percent of all websites including popular sites such as YouTube and Netflix. We know it happens, but we have little control to stop it. It’s creating mistrust, but it doesn’t have to be this way.

Policymakers are beginning to crack down, discussing new policies that would see hefty penalties and fines for breaches. We’ve long believed that consumers should never compromise, or lose control over their data and businesses can, and should, build relationships without relying on cookies. Preparing for the possibility of a cookie-less future is a reality for marketers today and it starts with building better relationships with existing customers to extend customer lifetime value. By understanding the behaviour, preferences, and motivations of customers, marketers can design an informed, sustainable marketing strategy fit for a new era of privacy.

So how can marketers build strong ecosystems that attract and support new and existing customers, without using third-party cookies, and potentially without cookies at all?

Incentivise customer advocacy

There are many ways to incentivise existing customers to bring in new buyers without using trackers, including discounts, early access to new products and custom experiences or offerings. However, marketers can’t incentivise a customer they don’t understand and who they’ve had no contact with. This is where third-party data often comes into play, it provides context for these consumers. But, so does outreach and engagement – by talking to them.

For a strong relationship built on trust, marketers can derive segmentation, loyalty, and sentiment data to help them target new business while strengthening the service and engagement of existing customers. Ultimately, businesses that deliver great customer experiences, without leveraging third-party data, will be the ones who create strong relationships with customers and see greater ROI on their marketing campaigns.

Unifying marketing, sales, support and success through technology

All organisations and departments, regardless of their size, should be leveraging technology that is unified and not siloed. This is because many departments within businesses work across different functions. Take marketers, for example, they’re responsible for many different functions ranging from demand generation, lead nurturing, and upselling. Unified tech platforms allow marketers to consolidate data, organise activities, and enable collaboration between multiple stakeholders – which is invaluable to a business. Without alignment between departments, engagement in the customer journey only gives marketers a superficial understanding of their target audience, leading to less fruitful campaigns.

Better customer engagement leads to more precise data, which leads to actionable insights and eventually, successful marketing output. However, none of this is possible without the right technology. Recently, marketers have adopted marketing platforms, not individual applications, that integrate with third-party systems and databases, to gain adoption and market share, especially with third-party data harvesting on its way out.

Diversifying product offerings to stay front-of-mind

There are many products that we buy few and far between. Many of these manufacturers don’t offer products that invite repeat business and customer engagement. Take car sales, for example, the average Australian buys a new car every six years, so regular engagement between the car dealership and customer is limited. Today, dealerships, with the support of marketing, have diversified their offering from a single automobile, purchased on average every six years, to a range of products including extended warranties, car meet-up events, merchandise and more.

Product diversification is the foundation of any successful sales and marketing strategy – regardless of the industry, organisation size, or market share. Marketers will always face challenges, such as being limited to the scope and longevity of the products their marketing. However, making the most of product diversification can increase customer demand and engagement beyond the lifecycle of a single product.

Successfully relocate marketing funds

With dwindling budgets across many functions in organisations today, marketers have to work smarter, not harder. Rather than over-investing in a fragile and costly data-driven targeting strategy, business leaders can allocate funds and encourage their marketers to staff up and adopt new technology systems that serve customers, build relationships, and create brand champions who can shoulder much of the marketing department’s work. In an increasingly cookie-less digital environment, this is the recipe for marketing-driven and long-term business growth.

As we prepare for the possibility of a cookie-less future, organisations today have started moving their sales and marketing strategies away from third-party tracking and are now focusing more on first-party data. This can be achieved by information collected directly from consumers who are interacting with your brand, whether they’re website visitors, existing customers, or viewers of digital advertisements.

As consumers become increasingly aware and conscious of data privacy, marketers need to remain transparent about collecting first-party information and show how it can benefit a customer throughout their journey. If a truly cookie-less future becomes our reality, personalisation will have to come from an open and consented dialog between businesses and their customers, and not consumers and their data.

Vijay Sundaram is the chief strategy officer at Zoho.

Originally Appeared Here

Uggs Parent Company Deckers Is Betting Its Boots On First-Party Data

June 6, 2022 by Staff Reporter

Return on ad spend (ROAS) isn’t as valuable of a performance metric as many marketers believe.

Richard Russell, VP of omnichannel marketing at Deckers Brands, has been on a mission to “wean people off of using return on ad spend as the end-all be-all metric.”

“When you get too excited about ROAS, you start to funnel too many marketing dollars against people who are already going to buy your brand and not against people who may or may not buy your brand,” said Russell, a 10-year veteran at Deckers, which is the parent company of multiple shoe brands, including Teva, Hoka and Ugg (unofficial footwear of early-2000s-era female celebrities and college students everywhere).

Take branded search, for example. Branded search queries often get credit for driving sales, although a lot of those sales aren’t incremental. Which makes sense, since those people are showing they already know the product.

“Fact is,” Russell said, “many of the standard media metrics are fool’s gold.”

Walking the walk

Decker’s response has been to reorient its marketing strategy to focus on first-party data as a more effective way to prospect new customers.

It’s been a journey, though.

Although they’re making a comeback this year – Cher has a pair – the popularity of Ugg boots waned in the 2010s after trending mightily during the aughts, followed by a sales plateau.

“Oprah loved Ugg, and there was huge demand – they basically sold themselves – but then customers stopped coming to our business like they used to,” Russell said. “We realized that we had to relook at everything we were doing.”

Circa 2015, Deckers worked with multiple agencies, each of which ran its own display campaigns and used its own ad tech. There were different DMPs in the mix, multiple DSPs – it was messy.

“All of them were optimizing towards the people most likely to buy a pair of Uggs or Hoka shoes using return on ad spend as the gauge,” Russell said. “But these were all people that had bought before or look-alike audiences that weren’t bringing in new people.”

Around five years ago, long before Google set an expiration date for third-party cookies in Chrome, Deckers found its feet and started to invest in a strategy to connect its customer data across touch points for Ugg and the other brands in its portfolio by centralizing on Google’s marketing stack and partnering with Jellyfish, a programmatic-focused agency and Google Cloud partner.

Deckers now uses Google Analytics 360 to monitor how visitors engage with its websites, create audiences and run automated Smart Shopping campaigns (soon to be replaced by Performance Max).

Deckers also uses BigQuery, which is a part of Google Cloud, to get a more unified view of purchase behavior and to spot consumer trends. For example, Deckers has been able to grow its nascent apparel business in part by analyzing event data from its website to learn more about multi-purchase customers.

“All of this gives us the best chance of tracking consumers across devices and multiple media channels so we can nurture them,” Russell said. “If we know, for example, that someone watched an ad on YouTube all the way through, we know they’re interested and can reach them again in the middle of the funnel to bring them through to a conversion.”

But Deckers is also mindful about using its first-party data in a privacy-conscious way. Anything it does, from SMS and email to ad targeting online, is on an opt-in basis, Russell said.

“Consumers tell us loud and clear what they want from us and what they don’t want from us,” he said. “If you send someone a message they want to see, they’re way more likely to accept it.”

A brand’s ability to unlock the potential of first-party data is directly related to the quality of the relationships it builds with its customers, said David Temkin, senior director of product management for ads privacy and user trust at Google.

“At key moments along the customer journey, whether it’s a purchase, an account creation or a subscription signup, people share information about themselves and trust that the other party will protect it and use it responsibly,” Temkin said. “Over time, as people engage regularly with their preferred providers, those businesses learn more about their customers or audiences and can use those insights to serve them better.”

The pandemic pivot

Consumer trust has always been important, but proved to be even more so during the tumultuous COVID-19 pandemic.

In March 2020, stores closed and Deckers was forced to shut its ecommerce distribution center in California.

“We basically had no income coming in and so we started to conserve cash,” Russell said. “But then, very quickly, we saw that there was a demand for slippers, since everybody was stuck at home.”

Because Deckers already had its first-party data house in order, it was able to adapt quickly and spot the new opportunity to grab market share. And the company’s leadership didn’t hesitate to start spending and stop conserving, Russell said.

“It’s something we wouldn’t have been able to do if the people in our C-suite didn’t trust that our investments would have a positive result,” he said. “And it’s why we were able to make this big push.”

Building a sustainable first-party data strategy is as much about a company’s culture as it is about engineering and implementation.

“It requires that the whole organization understands what you’re doing and how you’re going to do it,” Russell said. “That’s a big part of any digital transformation.”

Originally Appeared Here

How to Adapt Your Marketing Mix

May 28, 2022 by Staff Reporter

For years, marketers have relied on cookies, or little data files that contain personal identifiers, for user targeting and marketing measurement.

Increasing consumer demand for privacy and data protection are rendering many traditional digital marketing strategies useless. Luckily, you have some extra time to adapt your strategic mix for cookieless marketing since Google pushed its third-party (3P) cookie phaseout to mid-2023.

However, if you don’t act soon, you’ll face a measurement blackout or the inability to gauge the effectiveness of your campaigns. that makes it nearly impossible to prove marketing’s contribution to revenue.

But take heart. Once you’ve learned how to market effectively in a cookieless world, you’ll discover that many of the hyper-targeted, 3P cookie-based approaches you paid AdTech platforms handsomely for weren’t very effective after all.

So let’s talk about getting your mix right for the cookieless future. But first, let’s do a quick 3P cookie review.

What is a third-party cookie?

Third-party cookies are set by a third party, AdTech and publisher platforms for example, via code placed on the web domain by the domain owner. Any website that loads the third-party server’s code can access the cookies’ data, including users’ browsing history and personal data like age, location, gender, and more.

Marketers and advertisers use this information to deliver ads relevant to the user. An example is a timely Facebook ad for a product you’ve been researching during browsing sessions.

Going “cookieless” refers to a marketing approach that is less reliant on third-party cookies and uses other more transparent, privacy-centric tactics to target customers instead.

How does going cookieless impact user experience?

Whenever you visit a website, it will store at least one first-party cookie on your browser to remember your basic activity. That isn’t going to change unless you explicitly reject all cookies during your first visit.

Third-party cookies follow you around the web for retargeting purposes, helping brands lure you back to their sites to make a purchase. For example, if you visit a travel site that has ads from multiple hotels and attractions, each could create its own third-party cookies. The platforms behind these ads can track your activities across the web and ensure their ads appear on other sites you visit.

While retargeting ads like a well-timed, hyper-relevant Facebook ad can be unnerving, you might like the personalization and that extra reminder to make a purchase. But once cookieless digital marketing becomes the norm, you won’t have the timely, customized user experience you’re accustomed to. Instead, your experience will depend entirely on how the site owner has adapted to a cookieless world.

How do data-driven marketers thrive without cookies?

There are some concerning statistics and assumptions about what’s in store for publishers who have relied on 3P cookies. For instance, Google ran an experiment projecting the average publisher’s revenue would plummet by 52%.

That doesn’t necessarily spell trouble for everyone; it presents an opportunity to explore tactics that don’t rely on third-party cookies.

Those who succeed in a post-cookie world will prioritize first-party data collection and data stewardship, while promoting transparency through consent-based marketing.

In other words, marketers will return to basics as the message and creative take center stage once again. They’ll learn about their audience through the information they collect themselves and optimize channels with the broadest appeal.

What happens if you do not embrace cookieless marketing?

It’s understandable if you’ve relied on third-party data to explain consumer behavior across the different channels and elements that make up your marketing strategy — 83% of marketers still do.

But if you don’t embrace cookieless marketing, you’ll be in the dark when third-party cookies are disabled. You won’t know what your prospective customers want or what they’ll respond to, and you’ll be stuck serving up the same content to everyone, no matter where they are in the customer journey.

This predicament is known as measurement blackout or the inability to quantify the impact of your marketing efforts. Marketing measurement is crucial for marketing ROI and determining which campaigns are worth reinvesting in.

How to prep for cookieless marketing

Unfortunately, adopting cookieless marketing isn’t as simple as flipping a switch. Instead, it demands creative innovation, new technology, and maybe a whole new organizational approach to data management.

Tracking and measuring without cookies

Once cookies are deprecated, the granular measurements you’re used to will shift to broader tactics to support holistic, multichannel measurement strategies that respect consumer privacy.

Walled gardens

Companies like Google, Amazon, and Facebook operate within highly monetized “walled” gardens. So, naturally, the more you leverage these platforms, the less you understand your customers and their journey.

While it’s important to advertise in these spaces, they aren’t the only game in town. A balanced and healthy marketing mix that provides more transparency is the better approach.

Data standards and metadata management

You’re going to be collecting more one-party data to compensate for the loss of third-party cookies. Therefore, data standards and metadata management are vital for maximizing its value and gaining insight into your customers’ journey.

A common set of data standards will ensure everyone speaks one data language and uses a shared approach to storing, sharing, and interpreting data. In addition, metadata management will organize your growing data stores, making information discoverable for analytics-based decisions and marketing measurement.

The new experience for advertisers and publishers

The cookieless future isn’t all bad for advertisers and publishers — so long as they evolve and leverage other data types and cookieless tactics.

For instance, they can use weather, context, and location to deliver relevant ads to consumers, or they can apply predictive analytics to determine how likely a consumer is to take action. And with artificial intelligence constantly improving, AdTech platforms can fill in the gaps once filled by cookies.

The leading marketing alternatives to third-party cookies

Cookieless digital marketing doesn’t mean you have to fly blind or revert to Mad Men-era tactics, but it does involve a broader, less granular approach to marketing. Thankfully, you have plenty of viable options to display relevant ads.

First-party data and cookies

First-party data is firsthand information about your prospects and customers, such as email addresses, purchase history, demographics, and more. It’s highly accurate because you collect it yourself.

First-party cookies are automatically stored on users’ devices by the websites they visit. While recognizing returning users and their preferences is their primary function, they also help site owners perform analytics and build digital advertising campaigns.

The importance of first-party data in a post-cookie world cannot be overstated — your success depends on it. If you leverage it effectively, you can correlate touchpoints with confidence and generate a 360-degree view of your target audience.

User consent for first-party cookies

However, you can’t just store or access information on users’ devices without consent. You’ll need to display a cookie banner (also known as a cookie notice) on the user’s first visit, set up a cookie policy, and give the option to opt-in.

Make it clear that accepting certain cookies allows you to retain information like login credentials, settings, and favorites and provide a more seamless checkout experience.

Zero-party data

While zero-party data is arguably the most valuable of all data types, it’s also the hardest to obtain. There are many ways to collect it, but it is entirely up to the user to provide it.

Whether you ask questions during a registration process, ask for preferences for email marketing, or conduct social media polls, zero-party data helps you provide a more personalized experience to fuel long-term customer relationships.

Contextual advertising

Contextual advertising places ads based on the page content through keyword- and topic-based targeting instead of tracking the user. For example, if a user searches for a pumpkin pie recipe, you could show your ad for whipped cream dynamically.

This creates personalization without infringing on privacy and ensures brand safety by giving you control over the content you’ll appear alongside.

Cohort marketing

Cohort marketing involves segmenting your audience into smaller groups (cohorts) with similar characteristics, experiences, and propensities. Cohort analysis improves your marketing performance by identifying what unites users who take similar actions and then designing your campaigns accordingly.

Data clean rooms

Data clean rooms are secure software platforms that allow parties to share and match user-level data without revealing raw data or personally identifiable information (PII). They enable advertisers and brands to analyze performance and run attribution for targeted, privacy-friendly advertising campaigns.

Browser APIs

Browser APIs like Google’s proposed Topics API offer cookie-like insights by identifying topics of interest based on users’ browsing habits. Websites that opt-in to Google Topics can display personalized ads based on what Chrome identifies as a user’s top interests over three weeks.

For instance, if a user’s browsing activity during Week 1 was dominated by visits to sites that sell ski equipment, their topic might be “Outdoor Recreation.” Likewise, different topics such as “Live Music” and “Books & Literature” might be chosen for weeks 2 and 3, assuming that reflected their browsing habits.

While browser APIs enable you to leverage interest-based marketing, your success depends on willing users as they’ll have control over their topics, including the ability to turn them off altogether.

Universal IDs

Universal IDs (UID) are single identifiers that recognize a user across advertising platforms allowing publishers to display relevant ads without cookie synching. Some options have a third-party component and will need to adapt to using first-party data (i.e., CRM) and offline data once cookies are deprecated. There are several promising UIDs to consider depending on your needs, including Unified 2.0, ID5, Panorama ID, and more.

Marketing mix modeling

Marketing mix modeling (MMM) uses past performance data to provide insights into marketing techniques and allows you to understand trends such as holidays, seasonality, brand equity, and more. When granular details about the buyer’s journey aren’t available, MMM provides a broader picture and a way to answer simple questions, such as: What happens to sales if I increase my Facebook ad spend by a certain percentage?

Cookieless marketing success hinges on unifying all your marketing data

Finding the optimal mix of cookieless marketing tactics to reach your audience isn’t going to be easy or quick. But to compete in a cookie-free world, you must get it right.

Those who excel at cookieless marketing will have something important in common: they’ll have processes, procedures, and tools firmly in place to unify and manage their data across their marketing ecosystem. In addition, by making data a strategic priority, they’ll be able to understand marketing effectiveness and ensure their Marketing operations tech stack is efficient, profitable, and cookieless-future proof.

Want to learn more about a strategy that doesn’t involve third-party cookies? Check out our quick guide on contextual targeting.

Originally Appeared Here

How to Create a Lead-Scoring System

May 18, 2022 by Staff Reporter

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“Optimization” has become a massive buzzword across all industries; marketers, in particular, continue to strive for it. However, optimization is not a goal; it’s a pathway to achieving a goal. What is being optimized and what it will achieve are the major considerations.

Marketers optimize for easily identifiable metrics within dashboards, such as lower cost per click and higher volume of leads. The results may look decent for some campaigns, but if those metrics aren’t tied to business outcomes, such as revenue, they beg more effort toward optimization.

Quality is an added data point that affects not only campaigns but also the quality of leads, collaboration between sales and marketing teams, and customer experience. Scoring is a solution marketers can use that optimizes quality over traditional, simple metrics.

What Exactly Is Scoring?

Fundamentally, scoring is the process of taking qualitative attributes and remolding them into something quantitative to make better, more streamlined decisions about data sets. As marketers retrieve more data, finding patterns and opportunities within a flurry of information becomes more challenging. Scoring categorizes audiences based on solid data generation, making decision-making more methodical and precise.

Scoring, also referenced as “lead-scoring,” ranks prospects and activities to transfer a lead from Marketing to Sales. It answers the question, “Is this lead ready to take the next steps with Sales?”

Scoring assists in determining the next steps on the customer journey, whether the prospect is ready to buy or needs additional time or more information. Simple indicators and metrics such as conversation history or email subscription rates are supplemental in determining high-quality leads. Scoring also adds value to internal processes by helping to govern and improve decision-making.

Savvy marketers know that a traditional inbound lead funnel isn’t the only place where scoring affects performance. Effective new marketing strategies such as conversational marketing, omnichannel communications, and account-based marketing use scoring to move several facets of the customer journey.

In a typical martech stack, there are plenty of opportunities to implement and engage a variety of tools, including chat, customer relationship management and automation functions, marketing attribution, and customer success.

Applying scoring through multiple marketing strategies gives an edge to your marketing operations.

Building the Foundation of Your Scoring System

To establish a scoring system, follow what makes marketing so effective: knowing the core audience and setting goals. That will complement all your current marketing efforts.

In the beginning stages of implementation, build a plan that accounts for every channel and aligns with your team’s overarching goals.

For example, if there are established sales goals around a specified revenue amount, the marketing team can bolster those plans with scoring. Along the scoring system journey, marketing teams can also deliver high-quality leads for Sales to reach objectives while simultaneously focusing efforts and maximizing team resources.

Developing an ideal customer profile or detailed buyer attributes within the scoring system strategy will ensure lead closure success. Once profiles are compiled, collect all necessary information and data possible. Consider what similarities and differences in characteristics your customers have. Likewise, determine the profile of previously unsuccessful leads and the commonalities they share.

Assemble data from all target sources within your means and bandwidth. Essential insights can be extracted from surveying and interviewing your customers. Work closely with the sales team members and identify patterns they experience—from prospective leads they’ve closed to those lost to competition, or leads that did not closely align.

Verify assumptions from call recordings and closely listen to the needs of customers and prospective customers. After verifying customer and prospect wants and needs, the team can fine-tune marketing engagement and ongoing conversations.

Along with boosted engagement, teams can assess customer success using metrics such as tracking form fills, email open rates, and patterns in geographic locations.

* * *

Forging a foundation for lead-scoring does not happen overnight. But gathering the necessary insight and data can make high-quality lead-scoring the centerpiece of fostering active customer engagement.

More Resources on Lead-Scoring

Your Lead Data Is Bad, Fix It With Predictive Lead Scoring

A Guide to Effectively Qualifying B2B Leads [Infographic]

Lead-Scoring Accuracy Checklist: How Do You Rate?

Originally Appeared Here

How a focus on employees has helped NRMA improve its CX scores

May 9, 2022 by Staff Reporter

Customer experience transformation is not just about the customer, it’s about how your employees come together cross-functionality and with agility to solve customer problems, says NRMA’s Tina Morell.

The insurance and roadside assistance’s GM of customer strategy and experience design took to the stage at today’s Forrester CX APAC event in Sydney to detail how keeping the customer at the centre of an organisation is not just achieved by a focus on memorable experiences, but also through concerted efforts to change the way employees work.

For Morell, CX is driven by a healthy balance of three core elements: Meeting a customer’s needs, making it easy, and leaving them feeling good about the experience received. As an example, she highlighted NRMA’s mobile app offering enabling customers to purchase and have a car battery installed on their terms in three clicks.

But in achieving these ends, it’s critical to shift focus as an organisation to what’s going on with employees.

“It’s not just about customers, we also need to think about what is going on with employees and how they drive a good experience,” Morrell told attendees. “How a customer experiences our brand reflects how well our organisation is working. Do we have it together? Are we able to deliver that great experience? This is critical to getting it right – how we work as an organisation.”

NRMA boasts of a CX playbook, the first component of which is ‘we will walk in your shoes’. “We want all employees to walk in the shoes of our customer,” Morrell said. “That’s empathy. The most critical component for us was how to shift staff to be closer to the customer, listen to feedback and then collaborate and come together to solve problems.”

The route to solving customer problems

To do this, NRMA initially went to its voice of customer (VoC) tracking survey data and text analytics tools to understand how it could shift CX firmly up a gear by identifying positive and negative aspects of the experience. Three areas were identified: Renewals, digital and loyalty.

“If we could turn these drivers around, we could lift NPS further,” Morrell said. From there, NRMA introduced agile squads based on these areas. These cross-functional squads consisted of product owners, marketing, research and insights, technology, frontline or subject matter experts, data analytics, digital and CX design.

Morrell explained discovery as the first aspect of each sprint. In NRMA’s case, whole teams read customer feedback and delved into verbatims in order to ensure a consistent understanding of problems.

“This was the first step in getting closer to the customer as employees: Spending time to understand if the problem we are solving is the right one,” she said.

The next sprints were about investigating possible solutions, followed by building solutions. Some sprints generated quick wins, such as missing a payment method on one of statements supplied to customers.

“That was very simple and we were able to solve that within the sprints,” Morell said. “Others highlighted areas requiring further investment, such as reimagining the login experience or improving credit card payments. That took longer, but the sprints determined what the solution was so we could get it into roadmap to solve for.”

Working in this agile way was transformational for employees in working differently. Morell said it stopped silos and got people to agree on what the problem is “because the customer is telling us what problem is”. The work has been undertaken as part of BAU.

To get staff to buy-in, Morell stressed the importance of thinking about how to get people together and rallying teams. NRMA used town halls and all hands meetings, taking employees through an NPS deep dive to show what customers were telling the organisation.

Read more The steps REA Group is taking to build an organisation-wide CX strategy

“Some were mortified we hadn’t got it right… it’s also a new, fun way of working,” she said. “When people saw how they could deliver and make a difference, more people wanted to get involved. When you see that what you do make the difference, it transform how everyone is working.”

Agile squads have since extended their scope of impact into digital and product proof of concepts and prototypes. One of the recent examples Morrell pointed to was reimagining how NRMA members will use electric vehicles. This includes designing new packages if customers are broken down, as well as helping customers make buying decisions. As part of this process, NRMA has pushed a pretotype online to test if people are interested.

NRMA has also launched a live chat POC. “That again was a team coming together to solve for that as we needed another channel for people to communicate with us,” Morrell said. “We have had incredible results and we’re now looking to launch.”

A more substantial change which took almost a year to solve was transforming NRMA roadside packages. Again, squads highlighted customer pain points and how to solve for them. Off the back of this, Morrell cited a +2 lift in related NPS, which had been flat for some time.

“This demonstrated we have made a difference and gave teams something to celebrate,” she added.

NRMA already had a bigger CX framework for larger pieces of work. What this new way of working has done is impact the day-to-day too. NRMA is now up to 12 squads, many of which have sprouted up organically.

“Squads see problem, surface it through VOC platform or social or complaints team and use this process to not only drive significant new change, but also work faster and iterate and drive great autonomy within staff,” Morrell said.

Read more How CX leaders can broaden their scope of impact

“It’s united the teams and empowered them, and it’s engaged our people. People haven’t asked for permission, they’ve gone on and determined there is a problem and area where we can do better, formed a squad and generated a new way of working. This is critical.

“Our staff need to be able to create connections with each other, with the customer to drive change, have purpose and we also know.”

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Originally Appeared Here

Fully Personalized And Self-Directed Email Experiences

May 3, 2022 by Staff Reporter

Third-party Cookies

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If you want to stay privacy-conscious and respectful of your customers, you have to champion transparency, which creates trust. It’s critical that marketing teams begin prioritizing first-party data as a long-term customer strategy for targeting — and personalizing — their advertising.

Marketers started planning for this change years ago, and they have continued adjusting their approaches to align with data privacy regulations. It’s a balancing act but one likely to pay off for those brands able to find meaningful, intentional ways to treat people as individuals while also delivering a mutually beneficial, tailored experience.

Buyers across all industries expect fully personalized, self-directed experiences. Achieving this goal requires zero- and first-party data plus qualitative insights derived from channels — like email — that successfully convert leads.

I spoke recently with Litmus senior vice-president of marketing Cynthia Price about the current challenges marketers face with prioritizing personalization and data capture as new privacy measures take effect.

Gary Drenik: How will marketing change with the eventual loss of third-party cookies and other data privacy measures?

Cynthia Price: In The Dark Knight Rises, Bane was “born in and molded by the dark,” whereas Batman “merely adopted the dark.” Successful marketers born in the dark (a world of zero- and first-party data) have not just adapted to today’s changing privacy landscape — they have thrived. Because they have always used these data and optimized structures, they are not scrambling to adapt in the wake of privacy changes.

Meanwhile, marketers who embraced “bad” or siloed data as an ally merely lost trust among their customers. Now they find themselves racing to adopt new personalization trends meant to mitigate privacy changes, such as Apple Mail Privacy Protection or the loss of third-party cookies.

An Epsilon survey found that about 80% of marketers depend on third-party cookies. When they do disappear in 2023, key components of digital marketing will face serious disruption. A/B testing and frequency capping could become more challenging. With analytics and attribution based on third-party cookies, performance marketing could become less effective. Marketers dependent on third-party cookies to collect behavioral and browsing data could struggle to personalize outreach.

Regardless of generation, consumers don’t like when social media sites, search engines and mobile apps collect personal, online, and mobile location data, allowing access to marketers who use it for targeted advertising campaigns. According to a recent Prosper Insights & Analytics survey, nearly 52% of Gen-Z, 49% of Millennials, almost 63% of Gen-Xers, and over 78% of Baby Boomers don’t approve of personal data collection without their permission.

Prosper – Advertisers Who Access Your Personal Data

Prosper Insights & Analytics

Drenik: What should marketers be doing to start creating more personalized experiences for customers?

Price: According to our 2021 State of Email report, 71% of consumers expressed frustration with impersonal experiences, but 42% of marketers cited a lack of resources, including time, people, and money, as barriers to achieving personalization goals.

Marketers need a more transparent approach to collecting the information required to deliver personalized experiences consumers expect. By encouraging website visitors to authenticate and consent to specific data collection, marketers create trust between brands and consumers.

Readily available data — demographic, firmographic, behavioral, or contextual data, for example — can inform personalization strategies, including sending emails.

Email is one of the most effective channels for personalization, starting with a tailored subject line. Use the data in your CRM to personalize by adding someone’s name, incorporating timed content to drive a sense of urgency, or adding an image or call to action (CTA). You can also suggest content or products similar to what you know customers like based on what they have purchased or engaged with in the past, too.

Drenik: Does this newfound focus on data privacy have a larger impact on B2B or B2C marketing? And why?

Price: This focus on data privacy has impacted both B2B and B2C marketing. Customer-centric data privacy policies — like the General Data Protection Regulation — apply to both markets.

The companies leveraging third-party data across multiple websites, like digital identities collected by third parties, cross-platform ad targeting, and reporting and attribution, will see the most significant impact.

Data privacy regulations give more control over their data to the users. Customers decide where, when and in what capacity to share their information. Businesses establishing trust are more likely to gain the information they seek from current and potential customers.

There is a similarity between personal and enterprise data. We expect B2B organizations to handle enterprise data responsibly, just as we expect B2C companies to be responsible stewards of personal data. But because of enterprise data ecosystems’ complexity and storage of personal information, customers remain leery about sharing information. The same Prosper Insights & Analytics survey, found that an average of 40% of people have turned on private browsing, 32% have turned off mobile trackers, and over 47% of people have denied permission for mobile apps to track them.

Prosper – Protecting Digital & Online Privacy

Prosper Insights & Analytics

With data privacy, consent remains the most crucial line of defense. Companies should tell their customers what data they want to collect and how they will use it. Transparency is the foundation of building trust. Greater trust leads to higher brand value. Because of its heterogeneous nature, enterprise data requires more aggregation, analysis, and processing than B2C data. While the impact permeates both, B2B organizations have more legwork and must think creatively about what data to collect and how.

Drenik: What are some of the biggest challenges marketers face when trying to collect and leverage zero- and first-party data?

Price: Merkle’s 2021 Customer Engagement Report found more than 50% of marketers use digital experiences and strategies to collect first-party data. But they do face challenges.

Third-party cookies offer a limitless scale that can collect significant amounts of data but sacrifice at least some accuracy. While first-party data is more limited in scale, transactional data or double opt-ins verify it at the source. However, marketers cannot target more customers than those from whom they have already collected information, limiting both scale and reach.

Marketers aren’t working with an even playing field when attempting to collect first-party data. For some organizations, capturing information is relatively straightforward. Companies might collect data via authenticated logins, subscription information or website analytics.

But those on the buy-side, like advertisers, may find it more challenging to gather consent-granted data. Some companies, because they don’t directly engage with their consumers or employ their own ecommerce channels, may struggle to collect first-party data for use in their marketing campaigns.

It is also challenging to store and aggregate first-party data from multiple sources, whether from data collected offline from in-store purchases, website visits or email opens. Businesses can ameliorate this situation by consolidating data into a single silo, facilitating access to the data to inform marketers’ campaigns.

Drenik: How has email, specifically, been impacted by Apple Mail Privacy Protection? Should marketers still view it as a critical component of a marketing program?

Price: Apple launched its Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) initiative in September 2021 to hide receivers’ IP addresses, prevent senders from identifying locations or linking to other online activities, and keep senders from seeing if and when they have opened their email.

For companies relying on open rates as a measure of email performance, MPP raised concerns about marketers’ ability to accurately measure email marketing campaigns’ success. However, email marketing metrics hold little value unless they are tied to specific business goals. Otherwise, those open rates are just a vanity metric.

Has MPP affected email marketing? Yes — but not necessarily negatively. If anything, marketers must understand email’s contribution to each sector and shift their focus away from tracking click rates, click-to-open rates, and isolated open rates, which can hinder strategic opportunities.

Email absolutely has a place in marketing programs. When integrated appropriately, email yields a wealth of valuable metrics for marketers to optimize campaigns, tailoring content, and customer touchpoints throughout the journey.

Other email marketing tools and approaches include using filtering for reporting to help exclude MPP opens and instead rely on “real opens” which more accurately measure overall email engagement. For example, real-time personalization tools can include collecting a subscriber zip code in lieu of an IP address. To measure engagement, AI platforms are shifting to evaluate and analyze a host of hybrid performance metrics, like clicks, opens, and conversions.

Drenik: Thanks, Cynthia, for taking the time. It will be interesting to see how marketing changes in both the B2B and B2C spaces due to privacy changes and an increase in the usage of zero- and first-party data.

Originally Appeared Here

12 Tips for Marketing Automation in 2022

April 25, 2022 by Staff Reporter

Many businesses are not taking advantage of technology that can improve marketing results. With marketing automation systems, they can send thoughtful communications at the right time to nurture leads and convert them.

Marketing automation is one of the best ways to run your business. It allows you to:

Create a definition to send personalized emails to your leads and customers.
Choose from thousands of templates for the one that works for your business.
Follow up with your prospects automatically and nurture them until they become customers.
Manage your entire list of subscribers from one place with ease.

The key is to start using it today and avoid most marketers’ mistakes. Here are 12 tips to get you going.

1. Develop a Marketing Automation Strategy

Marketing automation has many benefits, but you can’t jump in without thinking. Don’t try to automate every part of your business — not all your processes are ripe for automation right away.

Plan ahead. Make sure you have a strategy in place. Ask yourself questions like:

How will I measure the effectiveness of my marketing automation?
What metrics will I use to determine success?
What do I want to achieve with marketing automation?

Take some time and write out your goals and objectives. Then, consider what activities you need to automate, the tools available to you, and how you want to start.

2. Implement Marketing Automation Gradually

Getting started with marketing automation can be intimidating for any company, especially those that are unfamiliar with the technology. While some companies dive into marketing automation at full speed and send out dozens of emails or publish countless social media posts immediately, it can be best to take a slower approach to the process.

Deciding how — and how quickly — to integrate marketing automation depends on your company’s size, available resources, and the type of tools you’re using.

The first step is to understand how you and your colleagues spend your time. Next, identify tasks that take the most time but don’t necessarily move prospects through the sales cycle. Marketing automation can take care of many of these tasks, freeing you up to focus on working with your best prospects and closing deals.

3. Start With Email Marketing

Email marketing is one of the most essential business processes to automate. It’s also one of the easiest to implement, so you should think about starting here. For example, sending emails regularly to your newsletter subscribers can be time-consuming. By automating instead, you could schedule emails to go out in advance and have them sent at the specified time without touching them again.

Another great way to automate your business processes is by setting up autoresponders for new leads and customers. For example, this will let you send automated messages to people who sign up for your mailing list.

4. Streamline Your Social Media Presence

Social media is a highly effective marketing channel, but you have to invest time and effort into it to get results. Luckily, automation can help you streamline many of the everyday tasks that marketers perform on these platforms, letting you work more efficiently and get better results for your efforts.

The key is to focus on the tasks that can be automated so your time can be spent on the ones that require a human touch. For instance:

Posting Content: You can schedule your posts in advance with almost every social platform. In addition, many offer native scheduling capabilities built right into their interface.
Monitoring Channels: Marketing automation can help you track key metrics like follower growth over time.
Link Tracking: Using unique links for each piece of content you create, you can track where your leads come from and how they interact with your site.

There are plenty of social media management tools that let you schedule posts in advance across multiple accounts at once. This means you can spend a few hours at the beginning of the week (or even just one session) creating all of your posts for the next several days or weeks.

5. Build Your List

A list is a powerful tool that can help you reach your audience and drive business growth. Marketing automation can help you grow your list organically without actually being too pushy about it.

Specifically, automation allows you to send emails with the right content and messaging at the right time. In addition, you can schedule emails for times when your audience is most likely to be receptive, allowing them to decide at their own pace.

6. Automate the Right Content for Your Market

The more relevant your content is, the higher the chance people will interact with it. And if they interact with it, it means they’re interested in what you have to say — and that translates into increased leads and conversions.

Marketing automation can track how people engage with your content, including how many times they click on a link, open an email, or fill out a form. You can then use this data to improve future communications.

The data you receive from automated tracking can also form part of your real-time web analytics. This enables you to see which parts of your website perform well and which ones need improvement.

7. Nurture Sales Leads

It’s possible to nurture sales leads with specific content, helping guide prospects through the sales funnel and move them closer to a sale. Marketing automation allows you to use the power of your content, landing pages, and social media to nurture your leads into customers.

Marketing automation is what will allow you to grow your business without adding more people or hours to your sales and marketing teams. And it’s one of the few tools that you can use for both inbound and outbound marketing, so it gives you the flexibility you need.

8. Personalize the Customer Experience

Personalization is a crucial aspect of any customer-facing business. It needs to be a focal point of your customer experience. Consumers are more likely to respond positively to brands with a strong understanding of their needs, preferences, and interests. However, while it is highly desirable in theory, it can also be challenging to execute on your own.

Marketing automation helps you cater to the customer experience by automatically collecting and managing data at scale. This creates better experiences for your customers, making it easier to retain and keep them happy.

9. Follow Up With Customers After Purchases

Retaining customers is one of the most critical factors in growing a sustainable business, and the best way to keep them coming back is to provide excellent service. But, are you following up after they make purchases? If not, you could be missing out on a significant opportunity to grow your business.

It turns out that one of the best ways to do this is through marketing automation. With it, you can set up campaigns that check-in with those who have bought from your business. These post-purchase emails allow you to send personalized messages at precisely the right time to increase revenue and build stronger relationships.

10. Generate Reports on Marketing Campaigns and Website Traffic

Analytics are critical to any company that wants to improve the performance of its marketing and sales teams. One of the best ways to collect data about your customers is with a comprehensive marketing automation platform that can track their activity across all channels.

These platforms can potentially let you automatically generate reports on website traffic, sales leads, and conversions from downloads as well as social media posts. You can also use analytics to track the effectiveness of your sales emails.

11. Don’t Make It Obvious That You’re Using Automation

Automation is an incredibly powerful tool for marketers, but it can also be dangerous and can reduce engagement if you aren’t careful. It’s important to remember that your subscribers are real people with real emotions. You have to speak to them as people would.

If you make it obvious you’re using automation; you run the risk of alienating your subscribers. They might not feel like you’re treating them as individuals, and they’re less likely to engage with your campaigns or buy from you again at that point. On the other hand, personalized subject lines can go a long way toward improving open rates or click-through rates (CTR).

12. Align Automation With Your Overall Business Goals

To achieve maximum return on investment (ROI), you need to align automation with your overall business goals. This means you need to outline what your business does and what it wants to achieve as a whole, then break that down for each department. Once you have, you can start designing your automation strategy to deliver your desired results.

This is not a silver bullet that will solve all of your marketing and sales problems. But when implemented correctly, it will help you streamline processes, generate more leads, and drive more revenue.

Hopefully, we’ve given you some ideas on how you might use marketing automation to your advantage. Avoid the mistake of thinking that it’s a one-size-fits-all solution, because it isn’t. Instead, by looking at what marketing automation can do for you and your needs, you can figure out how to fit it in and make the most of your ROI.

Image Credit: MART PRODUCTION; Pexels; Thank you!

Joe Martin

VP of Marketing

Joe Martin is currently the VP of marketing at Scorpion, a leading provider of technology and marketing to help small businesses grow. Formerly he was CloudApp’s GM and CMO and a Head of Marketing at Adobe. With over 15 years of experience in the industry and tech that makes it run, he provides strategic guidance on how to build and use the right stack and marketing for businesses to grow. Joe believes marketers need smart training and leadership to scale company growth. Connect with Joe on LinkedIn and follow him on Twitter @joeDmarti.

Originally Appeared Here

Strategy vs Tactics in Marketing 2022

April 24, 2022 by Staff Reporter

Marketing is one of the most important aspects of running a small business—you must get your company name and product or service information in front of potential customers, or else risk losing them to your competitors. To accomplish this, you need a marketing approach that includes both marketing strategies and tactics.

The terms marketing strategy and marketing tactic are often incorrectly used interchangeably, but they are actually two different things. Understanding each one and the distinction between the two will help you develop a better marketing plan.

Jump to:

Marketing strategies vs marketing tactics

Marketing strategies are your overall game plan for how you will accomplish a specific marketing goal. Marketing tactics are specific actions that you will take to carry out your strategy and achieve your marketing goals. Tactics focus on the implementation of your strategy and often employ specific digital marketing tools. In essence, a marketing goal is a broad outcome you want to achieve, a marketing strategy is a road map for how you plan to achieve it, and marketing tactics are the specific action items that will get you across the finish line.

Related: What is Strategic Marketing?

Examples of marketing goals, strategies, and tactics

Your business’s marketing goals, strategies, and tactics all work together to help you accomplish a desired outcome. Below are two examples that will help you better understand what role each one plays and how they all work together.

Example 1: Product marketing

The example below illustrates a comprehensive marketing plan for a business that wants to promote the launch of a new product.

Marketing goal: Generate awareness for an upcoming product launch

Marketing strategy: Leverage an omnichannel marketing approach to reach the defined target customers

Marketing tactics:

Launch paid social ads to reach the new product’s target audience.
Use an email marketing software tool to send an announcement with key product information and pre-sale or launch dates.
Research and work with micro-influencers whose core audience matches the new product’s target audience.

Example 2: Lead generation

Another core function of most digital marketing is lead generation. In the example below, the marketing goal, strategy, and tactics work together to lay out a detailed plan for growing inbound leads from digital marketing channels.

Marketing Goal: Increase the number of inbound leads referred from marketing channels by 25% over the next 6 months.

Marketing Strategy: Drive traffic to the lead collection page on the website.

Marketing Tactics:

Launch an SEO-optimized blog that includes links to the lead collection page.
Use specific calls-to-action (CTAs) in all social posts, blog posts, and emails
Increase the frequency of organic and paid social media posts by scheduling and tracking content with a social media management tool

Why is it important to identify marketing strategies and tactics?

Each piece of the marketing puzzle works together to solve a problem or achieve a goal. Without clear goals, strong marketing strategies, and specific marketing tactics, it will be difficult to achieve your desired results.

Some small business owners try to skip straight to the marketing tactics after setting goals, but this also typically produces poor outcomes. Without marketing strategies, the tactics are often disorganized, unstrategic, and disconnected from the primary goal. Taking the time to craft a marketing plan that includes both strategies and tactics helps ensure your long-term success.

Read next: Creating a Strategic Marketing Plan

Originally Appeared Here

Sales + E-Commerce Admin – Pedestrian Jobs

April 22, 2022 by Staff Reporter

Purchasing / Inventory management

Creating purchase orders, receiving stock, allocating payments.
New product upload + management through DEAR Systems.
Reporting & updating units sold data, and ordering jewellery based from this
Assisting in ordering new products based off reporting from online & inventory system
Keeping an eye on stock levels for online & shop (jewellery + branded)
Maintaining sales tracking for wholesale & online
QC for shipments

Wholesale

Contacting current wholesale customers for reorders & fulfilling
Management relationship with KK with major customers
Sourcing suitable quality new retailers
Creating invoices, chasing payment
Creating monthly EDMS with new styles, best selling styles to promote SOH orders
Picking, Packing, Shipping Wholesale orders (with the support of the warehouse assistant)
Liaising with US agents
Returns + damaged items

Web

Ensuring website is up to date aesthetically & user friendly using Shopify.
Removing sold out styles
Daily management
Updating pop up imagery
Finalising new products once pushed through from DEAR System & making live
Photoshopping & resizing imagery for web
Continually working on strategies to improve customer journey on web

Product development + range planning

Maintaining product range plans, costings, margins & all style details
Assisting in ordering new products & design suggestions based off reporting
Working closely with Marketing Co-ordinator to maximise sales with current best sellers/slower sellers & new product coming in for social media & advertising.

Office Admin

Re ordering supplies + packaging
Assisting retail team in store if demand arises

Must be proficient in:

Shopify
Inventory management system – DEAR or previous use of Cin7, trade gecko or similar.
Klaviyo or Mailchimp
Microsoft office
Basic photoshop is a bonus

Candidate must have:

Meticulous attention to detail with excellent verbal + written communication
Previous 3+ year experience in a similar role
Customer service experience
Knowledge of market + industry is a bonus

Originally Appeared Here

5 Easy Ways to Say Goodbye to Email Overwhelm and Burnout

April 21, 2022 by Staff Reporter

We are in the midst of the Great Resignation, with employees leaving their jobs in record numbers.

More than 24 million people quit their jobs in the second half of 2021; about 4.3 million people in December alone.

And one of the main drivers of this mass work exodus?

Burnout!

Employees are tired of feeling overwhelmed with their work. So if you want to keep top talent at your company, it’s important to do everything you can to help your team avoid this overwhelm – including managing their email.

But how exactly do you do that? Let’s look at five tips to help your team get their inboxes under control, keep burnout at bay, and improve employee retention at your organization.

Why is beating email overwhelm so important?

First things first. Before we jump into how you can help your team beat email overwhelm, let’s quickly touch on what email overwhelm is and why it’s an absolute must to help your team avoid it.

As the name suggests, email overwhelm is the experience of being completely overpowered by your inbox. When you can no longer control email flow in your inbox, far more emails arrive every day than you could ever sort through and respond to. Over time, the number of unread, unsorted, and unanswered emails keeps growing until the number is so great that you feel stressed every time you open your inbox.

If it sounds stressful, that’s because it is. And when your team struggles with email overload, it can have a variety of adverse effects, including:

Decreased productivity. Dealing with email overwhelm takes time and energy that your team can spend on more critical tasks. This can lead to reduced productivity overall.
Missing important emails. When your team deals with hundreds (or even thousands!) of emails, important messages can easily get lost in the clutter, or they can have a hard time tracking down an important email when needed. This can lead to many negative business outcomes, such as losing a key customer or missing an important meeting.
Higher risk of burnout. It’s not called email overwhelm for no reason. Email overwhelm is overwhelming. And when your team is in a constant state of overwhelm, they’re at greater risk of burnout, and you’re at greater risk of losing them to a hostile work environment.

Letting emails get out of hand can seriously impact your team. But if you support your team properly and help them manage their emails, it can have many positive effects, including:

Increased productivity. When your team isn’t worried about the mess in their inboxes, they can better focus on the work that matters. This increases both individual and team productivity.
More time and less risk of burnout. Dealing with a cluttered inbox is time-consuming. By eliminating email overwhelm, you give your team that time back, helping them feel less overwhelmed (and less likely to burn out) overall.
Greater ability to log off at the end of the day. For many people, simply knowing how to sort through and reply to hundreds of emails can make it difficult to relax outside of business hours. Allowing your team to shut down after working hours makes it easier to disconnect, which is key to work-life balance.

5 tips to avoid email overwhelm

If you want to create a productive, supportive work environment and retain top talent at your company, helping your team avoid email overload is non-negotiable. But how do you do that?

1. Set clear parameters for how and when to use email

Inboxes can quickly spiral out of control when employees don’t understand how and when to use email. Without clear parameters, employees can easily send too many emails, send emails too frequently, and send emails to the wrong contact. You get the picture.

Without clear email parameters, you may find employees:

Sending multiple emails when they should be reaching out through your company’s messaging platform
Hitting “reply all” on emails with multiple cc’s
Emailing outside of office hours
Sending multiple emails back and forth instead of leveraging available technology (for example, sending several emails to schedule a meeting when your company uses scheduling software that eliminates the need for emails)

Luckily, there’s a simple, straightforward solution: setting clear policies and procedures around how and when to use email and then getting everyone on your team (and, ideally, within your organization) on board with those policies and procedures.

Having clear parameters for email usage prevents your team from having to sort through unnecessary, excessive, or redundant emails. This is key to controlling email overwhelm. So think about how you want your team to use (and not use!) email. Then develop guidelines for your team around these best practices.

While the “right” way to use email varies by team and organization when designing your policies and procedures, consider the following:

Appropriate and inappropriate use cases for email
Hours of email operation. Is it ok to send an email outside of business hours, or should someone wait until the next day?
Expected response times
Appropriate follow-up email cadence. How long should team members wait before sending a follow-up email?
Guidelines for cc’ing colleagues
Categorizing or labeling urgent emails like out-of-office emails with a specific subject line

Be specific. The clearer you are on how email should and shouldn’t be used, the better you can help your team beat email overwhelm.

2. Make organization a priority

When you open your inbox, see 1000s of unread emails, and have no idea which emails need a reply (non-urgent requests or marketing emails), it can be overwhelming for even the best employee.

So, if you want to help your team avoid email overwhelm, help them organize their inboxes.

Ask them what they find to be their biggest challenges with their inboxes. Then invest in email management tools to help them overcome these challenges and control their inboxes better.

For example:

If your team is frustrated with constantly missing important or relevant emails, invest in a tool that prioritizes urgent emails and keeps them at the top of the inbox.
If your team members feel stressed because their inboxes are messy and disorganized, invest in a tool that automatically filters emails into different folders based on category, sender, and urgency.
If they’re drowning in an inbox of unnecessary or unwanted emails, use a tool that unsubscribes them from unwanted marketing or phishing emails.

The more organized your teams’ inboxes are, the better they can manage them, and the less likely they’ll experience email overwhelm.

3. Block out time for emails

If employees check their email every five minutes or feel like they need to check their email now and then, they struggle to get their work done.

Rather than creating an expectation of constant connectivity and instant email replies, help your team develop better email boundaries by setting specific times to block during the workday to manage their inboxes.

For example, instead of having your team check their email constantly throughout the day, have them block three 30-minute blocks a day for different activities.

Giving your team dedicated time and space to manage their email prevents email from spilling over into the rest of the day. This can help increase focus and productivity and keep email overwhelm in check.

Tip: Some urgent emails need immediate attention. So, you should set up a backup system for such situations. For example, you can ask team members to set an out-of-office reply. If someone has an urgent request that can’t wait until the next email block, they can follow the specified instructions in the automated email response.

4. Create email templates

Another factor that contributes to email overwhelm is writing and sending the same email over and over again throughout the day.

But the good news? If this groundhog-type email is causing your team to become inundated, there’s a simple solution: email template builder.

Creating email templates for the types of emails your team sends and receives most often can save time and energy. Instead of starting from scratch and writing a new email each time (which can be multiple times a day or even multiple times an hour depending on the email), your team just needs to copy and paste the template and customize it with the recipient’s name or other relevant details and press submit. Email customization is faster, easier, less tedious, and can help your team better manage their email.

Some helpful email templates you can use:

Product
Sales
Welcome
Customer support
Confirmation
Scheduling
Follow-up email
Reminder
Introduction
Invoicing

Bottom line? Your team sends tons of emails every day, many of which are virtually identical. Creating templates that help them send nearly identical emails more efficiently helps increase productivity and reduce burnout and frustration.

5. Lead by example

Teams turn to their leaders to learn how they work and what behaviors are acceptable within the company culture. So, if you’re constantly fretting over your 10,000 unanswered emails or cc your entire team on every email (relevant or not), they’ll follow suit. In other words, you can’t help your team avoid email overwhelm if you’re overwhelmed yourself.

To allow your team to manage their email better, set a good example. Model the behavior you want them to adopt. Show them how to engage with emails, manage inboxes, and stay organized.

If you want them to shut down completely at the end of the workday, don’t shoot down emails at 10 pm. If you want your employees to organize and manage their inboxes, organize your own inbox, then walk them through your process. If you want your employees to use email templates to save time, use them yourself, then share the time-saving benefits with your team.

You can’t tell your employees to do one thing and then do something completely different. When looking to help your team breakthrough email overload, you must first conquer it yourself.

Avoid email overload while enabling the best work

Your team can’t do their best work when they’re feeling overwhelmed. Email management makes it difficult to focus, get things done, and switch off. All of this leads to less productivity, less engagement, and an overall negative experience at work.

So what do you do to make it right? Try the above tips to stay focused and stay organized.

Is most of your time spent reaching out to customers? Learn what email automation is and how you can use it to your advantage.

Originally Appeared Here