Shirley Zhao

After running email campaigns, performance metrics start flowing in. There is a gratifying feeling in seeing open rates and click-through engagement. But there are other metrics that indicate the success, or even lack of success, of your email campaigns; yes, I am talking about bounce rates. High bounce rates are the bane of any email marketer’s existence, but they are very common.

So, how you can reduce bounce backs and see better ROI from your email marketing campaigns? The answer may be simpler than you think.

Think of classic combinations: peanut butter and jelly, summer and beach days, mornings and coffee. Though the components that comprise these pairings do just fine on their own, they are somewhat incomplete without the other. That’s how you should think of data governance and data quality. 

Data is truly at the heart of every organization. We use it to back up business proposals and initiatives, prepare forecasts and projections, pinpoint areas for improvement, and substantiate cases we try to build. We can’t rely solely on instinct and gut feeling because they are intangible, and with the amount of information collected in today’s data-driven society, most businesses have come to expect the credibility that data brings and are investing in that power.

In the digital marketing world, the term “big data” is thrown around a lot. By definition, big data is extremely large data sets that may be analyzed computationally to reveal patterns, trends, and associations, especially relating to human behavior and interactions.

As a small business, your data may not be classified as “big,” but it’s incredibly important to the growth of your business. Contact data, in particular, is something that small businesses need to focus on.

In this post, we've partnered up with JustUno, a conversion optimization platform, to take a look the value in collecting lead and customer contact data, and see why ensuring the quality of contact data is critical for small businesses.

This title is a quote—and what a quote, huh? I nabbed it from a video about Google’s exploration into virtual reality. But it resonated with me because it was new; it was unique, and it was such a refreshing change to the same things I hear over and over again.

And so, this post is a tribute to the original, to the ideas that I hadn’t read a million times over. These are 9 of the most memorable quotes I heard from the speakers at Content Marketing World 2016 and why I think they’re worth sharing.

The hype around Pokémon Go has shown us one thing extremely clearly: that marketers can now start thinking about augmented reality (AR) as the next step in reaching out to consumers and monetizing a channel.

What started as an April Fool’s joke back in 2014 has turned into the most downloaded app in Apple’s App Store and the biggest mobile game in U.S. history. Well done Niantic, so well done.

No one should dispute the importance of mobile in today’s shopping journey. But what may be disputed is whether the focus should be on mobile apps or mobile browsers. I’m here to tell you why, before you go all out in developing a mobile app, you should consider optimizing your mobile browsing experience first.

It may go against what a lot of your peers are saying, but the mobile browsing experience is paramount to the mobile app experience. Your mobile apps house your most loyal customers; they’ll come back to you no matter what (unless, of course, you miss spectacularly on their expectations). If you want to continue growing your customer base, however, making sure new shoppers have a good experience all around means investing in a better mobile browsing experience. Let’s find out how to go about that, shall we?

Technology is making consumers’ lives easier, sure, but retailers have to continually play catch-up to match their own technology with consumer expectations. Some retailers are doing it well; others, not so much. Legacy systems have been in place for decades in some instances, and while they may have worked in the past, those systems can’t keep up with the demands for today.

As Dunkin Brand’s president of global marketing and innovation has quite bluntly stated, “If you’re doing business today like you did last week, the competition is gaining on you, and if you’re doing business like you did last year, you may soon be out of business.”

Ouch. But, it’s the truth. That’s why Melanie Clark, our Retail Partner Manager, and I have come together to discuss how today’s leading retailers are simplifying the purchase process, making mobile shopping frictionless, and why ‘showrooming’ and the ‘endless aisle’ should all become the new standards of retail.

I think it’s safe to say that there are at least two thousand fifty-four point seven initiatives that retailers are planning and budgeting for. But there are a few that stand out: 1) Micro-moments, aka what everyone knew about already but Google coined into one phrase, 2) Mobile payments, or trying to reduce that forsaken cart abandonment rate, and 3) a 360° customer view, or making sure Jon, John, and Juan are just one Jon who’s interested in your suits.

Ray Wright, our Director of Demand Generation, and I teamed up to discuss what we thought should be the top priorities for retailers in the near future through the lens of those three focuses listed above. And of course, we brought it back to data quality because that’s what we do best.

If you’ve ever wandered around our blog and landed yourself onto my blog bio, you’ll know that I am a marketer. My handle on industry insight is pretty good (if I do say so myself), but it’s not the same as getting out there and getting feedback from customers themselves—that’s where our sales reps enter the scene.

I chatted with three of our most senior retail sales reps—with Ecommerce platform, software integration, and enterprise-level retailer experience—and recorded their insights to share with you. In this blog post, you’ll learn:

• How frequently you should cleanse your data
• What retailers are currently doing to manage customer data
• What technologies retailers are investing in