Customer value management: the industry’s new buzzphrase

Written by Juan Ageitos, Senior Marketing Manager at mGage

What could be a better way to end the month and prepare for the next, than with a new buzzphrase? Customer Value Management (CVM), the industry’s new buzzphrase and a current trend in the market, represents a focus on optimising the value of the customer.

Alternatively, or perhaps better, described as Customer Value Maximisation, CVM can be described as the ‘upgraded’ version of loyalty, taking the traditional notion of loyalty one step further. Rather than simply rewarding its faithful customers, CVM focuses on how to maximise the value of every customer, at their every interaction with the company – and covers the entire end to end customer journey.

Why end the relationship prematurely?

It would seem banal to not (attempt to) gather data from your customers, in order to increase your knowledge of your customer-base and the market in which you operate. In the same way, it is increasingly unusual to treat the purchase of a product or service as the end of the interaction with a customer.

To end this connection so abruptly would be to cut a potentially life long relationship very short; a huge faux pas. Rather, this should be seen as the beginning of the relationship. That first transaction may have come to an end but, if given the opportunity, it could be the first of many.

How to maximise customer value

Mobile plays a key part in helping businesses to maximise the value from their customers. Using SMS engagement technologies businesses can track and re-target customers sending personalised, relevant offers and products based on buying history. To use the example that Nick Fletcher, Director of Service Strategy at Rakuten Marketing Europe, gave: “If a shopper bought flights as a… present, a retailer could follow up with hotel offers for that destination.”

A simple yet effective technique, targeting and communicating with customers in this way will not only benefit the business financially in the short-term, but will improve both the customer’s perception of said business, and therefore its reputation, as well as its relationship with the customer. This will bring invaluable reward to the business in the long term.

Case study: Homebase

The immediate rewards of SMS communications can be seen through our work with Homebase:

Late last year Homebase embarked on its first SMS broadcast campaign to support its DM activity with promotional offers redeemable in store, or online.  In short, the results saw an uplift of 20% in incremental sales from SMS alone and 26.5% incremental sales driven by customers who received both email & SMS.  Email supported by SMS was the best performing communication channel in terms of ROI.  A clear success, Homebase will be trialling this channel further to help drive footfall and incremental sales.

This is only the tip of the iceberg; SMS can be easily adoptable for any sector. Whilst the gambling sector is currently the most focussed on CVM, businesses in every sector would do well to re-work their priority list for 2015 to include this. Adopt a long term mind-set and your efforts will pay off as you find yourself with a growing, increasingly loyal and increasingly profitable, client base.

Written by:

Juan Ageitos,

Senior Marketing Manager,

mGage

Why Publishers Need to Grab Back the Programmatic Power Pendulum

Written by Simon Birkenhead, CEO of Axonix

Publishers are getting screwed. The exponential growth in mobile usage has created an explosion of ad volumes that has pushed down prices and revenues. This can’t continue. If they want to survive, publishers need to find a way to pull the power pendulum back from advertisers.

In the early days of the ad tech industry (around five to ten years ago), innovation was driven by the supply-side of the marketing value chain – i.e. the publishers. The first ad tech platforms were ad servers, from the likes of DoubleClick, which helped publishers to optimise their ad inventory. Their internal media sales teams then brought in demand and set the prices.

However, with the shift to programmatic and real-time buying (RTB) over the last five years, this power pendulum has firmly swung across to the demand-side.

First we had ad exchanges, which allowed advertisers to buy inventory through real-time auctions. Now they could buy only the ads they really wanted, on an impression-by-impression basis. This revealed that the true market price of some supposedly ‘premium’ ad inventory was actually much lower than publishers had been charging – whipping the market power away from publishers.

Then demand-side platforms (DSPs) were created, which enabled advertisers to run campaigns across multiple exchanges at the same time. Recently, we’ve even started to see ‘Super DSPs’ emerge, which allow agencies to optimise campaigns across multiple DSPs. With valuable consumer data being shared across all these technologies, advertisers can now find their audiences wherever they are on the internet, on any device. And that might not be on the traditional ‘premium’ publisher sites of yesteryear.

Beyond pre-roll

Written by Stephen Upstone, CEO & Founder of LoopMe

Mention mobile video advertising and most of us will think pre-roll. It’s true that the format has a natural place at the top of the digital marketing funnel, helping brands raise awareness and drive website traffic.

But I think we have become fixated on pre-roll. As the IAB has pointed out, pre-roll is just one part of digital video ad effectiveness. And let’s face it, pre-roll can become irritating when you just want to watch something.

There are so many more exciting formats coming down the pike. I think mobile video is going to find its way further down the funnel, grabbing people’s attention and persuading them, through the art and science of advertising, to convert.

Principal among these I see as native video ads. Unlike pre-roll, native ads are less intrusive and make for a better overall user experience. When they’re in-app they also tend to stay on-screen and are therefore better for viewability (another hot topic doing the rounds currently). This all makes for greater awareness: for example, IPG Media Labs recently conducted an eye tracking study showing that consumers looked at native ads 53% more frequently than banners.

It’s not all rosy for native – yet. There is limited inventory that can actually support native mobile video in-stream. This is where the onus is on us as an industry to enable publishers to embrace this format, by providing clear, concise and up-to-date SDKs.

Maximising the Unique Capabilities of Mobile Search

Written by Matt Brocklehurst, Product Marketing at Google

Successful mobile search depends on a respect for variations in user context. To create useful, meaningful mobile campaigns, marketers must keep four contexts in mind.

• Local intent: Uniquely bridging the consumer and the physical world, mobile search helps consumers find nearby places, opening hours and directions.
• Task-oriented activity: Compared to desktop or tablet, mobile searches are less about browsing and more about achieving key tasks, such as locating a store or checking prices.
• Deep, direct connections: People consume video and social content on mobiles throughout the day, and when they download an app they’re effectively carrying a brand in their pockets. Mobile’s rich, personal experiences facilitate engagement.
• Time-poor users: Mobile searchers are often in transit, impatient and close to the end of their buying journey, providing marketers an ideal opportunity to give consumers what they need when they need it.

Making things easier with mobile ad extensions

To effectively cater to these contexts, mobile search ads need to offer a user experience that’s quick, intuitive and seamless – mobile ad extensions can help.

• Location extensions show an address, phone number, map marker with ad text and a link with directions to a business. On average, these boost click-through rates by 10%.
• Call extensions help consumers contact a business by showing a phone number and clickable call button with the ad. They typically increase click-through rates by 6 to 8%.
• App extensions encourage downloads by showing an app icon and a link to the app on Google Play and iTunes. Businesses can deep-link to a specific page inside the app right from the ad.

 How to improve mobile performance of ads in three key steps

1. Offer a mobile-optimised site using one of three approaches. (1) Build a separate site specifically for mobile. (2) Use responsive web design so all devices view the same site but pages adapt to suit the layout of each device. (3) Employ dynamic serving to detect the user’s device and display custom pages accordingly
2. Aim to calculate the impact of cross-device conversions where users start their journeys on one device and complete on another. AdWords uses aggregated data from users signed into Google to provide an anonymous approximation of cross-device conversions.
3. By measuring everything that mobile ads contribute to (including in-store or on phone purchases and non-transactional conversions like app downloads), build an attribution model that highlights the full value of mobile.

Understanding user contexts, using ad extensions and grasping mobile’s true nature and value are critical steps to developing a multi-screen strategy that successfully engages your customers. For more insights visit Think with Google.

Written by:

Matt Brocklehurst

Product Marketing,

Google