Tag: marketing

For years, brands lacked the means to create highly relevant and meaningful interactions with their customers. Today, that has changed--and the demand has never been greater. According to Experian Marketing Services’ State of Cross-Channel Marketing Report, marketers from around the world are adopting more customer-centric engagement strategies. With cross-channel marketing technology and predictive analytical tools becoming smarter and more accessible to marketers, they have the ability to help brands manage data, understand the preferences of their customers and most importantly, turn that intelligence into action across every channel at scale.

Balancing holiday marketing efforts with fraud prevention requires a coordinated approach according to survey findings from 41st Parameter, a part of Experian. The survey results from 250 marketers released today, looks at the relationship between omnichannel retailing, fraud prevention and the holiday shopping season. The findings show that few marketers understand the full benefit of fraud-prevention systems on their activities as 60 percent of marketers were unsure of the cost of fraud to their organization. The survey also indicated that 40 percent of marketers said their organization had been targeted by hackers or cybercriminals. Download the Holiday Marketing Fraud Survey: http://snip.ly/JoyF With holiday shopping in full stride, 35 percent of businesses said they planned to increase their digital spend for the 2014 holiday season. Furthermore, Experian Marketing Services reported that during 2014, 80 percent of marketers planned on running cross-channel marketing campaigns. As marketers integrate more channels into their campaigns, new challenges emerge for fraud-risk managers who face continuous pressure to adopt new approaches. Here are three steps to help marketers and risk managers maintain a frictionless experience for customers: Marketers should communicate their plans early to the fraud-risk team, especially if they are planning to target a new or unexpected audience. Making this part of the process will reduce the chances that risk management will stop or inhibit customers. Ensure that marketers understand what the risk-management department is doing with respect to fraud detection. Chances are risk managers are waiting to tell you. Marketers shouldn’t assume that fraud won’t affect their business and talk to their risk-management division to learn how much fraud truly costs their company. Then they can understand what they need to do to make sure that their marketing efforts are not thwarted. “Marketers spend a great deal of time and money bringing in new customers and increasing sales, especially this time of year, and in too many cases, those efforts are negated in the name of fraud prevention,” said David Britton, vice president of industry solutions, 41st Parameter. “Marketers can help an organization’s bottom line by working with their fraud-risk department to prevent bad transactions from occurring while maintaining a seamless customer experience. Reducing fraud is important and protecting the customer experience is a necessity.” Few marketers understand the resulting impact of declined transactions because of suspected fraud and this is even more pronounced among small businesses, with 70 percent saying they were unsure of fraud’s impact. Fifty percent of mid-sized business marketers and 67 percent of large-enterprise marketers were unsure of the impact of fraud as well. An uncoordinated approach to new customer acquisition can result in lost revenue affecting the entire organization. For example, the industry average for card-not-present declines is 15 percent. However, one to three percent of those declined transactions turn out to be valid transactions, equating to $1.2 billion in lost revenue annually. Wrongfully declined transactions can be costly as the growth of cross-channel marketing increases and a push towards omnichannel retailing pressures marketers to find new customers. “Many businesses loosen their fraud detection measures during high peak time because they don’t have the tools to review potentially risky orders manually during the higher-volume holiday shopping period,” said Britton. “Criminals look to capitalize on this and exploit these gaps in any way possible, taking an omnifraud approach to maximizing their chances of success. Striking the right balance between sales enablement and fraud prevention is the key to maximizing growth for any business at all times of the year.” Download Experian’s fraud prevention report to learn more about how businesses can address these new marketing challenges.  

Experian Data Quality, a part of Experian Marketing Services and a leading provider of data quality software and services, today published a new report on the prevalence of personalization and analytics required to support new marketing efforts. The study found that while almost half of companies personalize messages across more than one channel, organizations struggle to gain insight quickly and maintain an accurate data source.

According to Experian Marketing Services, a global provider of integrated consumer insights, targeting, data quality and cross-channel marketing, abandoned cart emails have significantly higher revenue per email than promotional mailings. Featuring results from a new email remarketing best practices analysis, as part of its Q1 2014 Email Benchmark Report, Experian Marketing Services found that personalized abandoned cart emails that show the actual customer cart had 25 percent higher transaction rates than abandoned cart emails that just linked back to the brand’s Website. Further, personalized subject lines had 12 percent higher unique open rates than mailings without personalization. A complimentary download of the full report is available here: http://ex.pn/1l4VlrS. Additional findings from the email remarketing best practices analysis confirm: • Abandoned cart emails should be delivered in a three-part series. Brands that send second abandoned cart reminders had a 50 percent increase in abandoned cart revenue compared to just their first abandoned cart mailing. Those sending three mailings saw a 56 percent increase in revenue compared to just sending the initial abandoned cart email. • Test including an offer. Including an offer in the first abandoned cart mailing boosted transaction rates by 54 percent. The highest transaction rates for offers were for dollar-off offers (2.05 percent), followed by free shipping (1.87 percent) and percent off (1.15 percent) offers. “Mastering email remarketing through a series of personalized content can have a real and direct impact on a brand’s bottom line,” said Peter DeNunzio, general manager for cross-channel marketing at Experian Marketing Services. “We’re seeing that brands that are able to ‘test and learn’ their way to personalization are particularly successful as they embrace cross-channel programs. By understanding the impact of timing, creative messaging and personalization – and adopting a continuous improvement mindset – brands are incorporating cross-channel tactics more seamlessly in their remarketing strategies.” Industry performance analysis The Q1 2014 Email Benchmark Report details overall email marketing trends for the first quarter of 2014 as well as the key performance indicators (KPIs) that shaped the success of email programs over the past two years across seven major verticals: business products and services, catalogers, consumer products and services, media and entertainment, multichannel retailers, publishers, and travel. Total email volume increased by 15.6 percent in Q1 2014 compared to Q1 2013 but volume declined in Q1 as compared to the previous holiday quarter (Q4 2013). Additional findings from specific industries include: • Catalogers had the highest gain in volume as 100 percent of brands increased mailings in Q1 2014. • More than half of the multichannel retail brands had statistically significant year-over-year increases in total and unique open rates in Q1 2014. • Fifty percent of total email opens are occurring on mobile devices. However, this varies by vertical. While 63 percent of emails from multichannel retailers are opened on a mobile device, mobile opens account for only 22 percent of email opens for business products and services. Increasing bounce rates highlight deliverability and data quality challenges According to a recent Experian Data Quality study, 66 percent of companies have experienced email deliverability issues in the last 12 months. Similarly, the Q1 2014 Email Benchmark Report highlights a 14.3 percent year-over-year increase in email bounce rates, with large percentage increases across several of the industries. Compared to bounce rates for the past two years, 2014 Q1 business products and services rates were constant, while catalogers and multichannel retailers experienced much larger increases in bounce rates year-over-year. The dramatic increase in bounce rates is due to the new practices of Internet Service Providers who are now shutting down inactive accounts more frequently to keep their own performance healthy. “It is vital companies adopt more effective targeting, list cleaning and data quality practices to improve the deliverability of their emails and the health of their cross-channel marketing programs,” said DeNunzio. Experian Marketing Services’ Q1 2014 Email Benchmark Report is available to download: http://ex.pn/1l4VlrS.

World Cup fans will be watching the 2014 games across multiple devices, often simultaneously, according to an analysis from Experian Marketing Services, a global provider of integrated consumer insight, targeting, data quality and cross-channel marketing. Specifically, World Cup fans are 31 percent more likely than average to watch online video across multiple devices, with 64 percent of adult fans watching online video during a typical week, compared with 49 percent of all adults. This is according to Experian Marketing Services’ National Consumer Survey, a nationally representative, continuously fielded survey of approximately 25,000 U.S. adults, including both English and Spanish speakers.

Experian Marketing Services showed that email volume has increased 10 percent in Q2 2012 versus Q2 2011 according to the Experian® CheetahMail® 2012 Q2 email benchmark report. Experian CheetahMail also found that total open rates increased 1.5 percent in Q2 2012 versus Q2 2011.

Experian Marketing Services is hosting its annual Digital Summit (today through Friday) at the Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas. This premier digital marketing event, with the theme, “Customer Obsession: Empowering Meaningful Relationships,” features highly engaging and inspiring learning sessions, providing marketers with key insights and best practices for keeping their customers at the heart and center of everything they do.