Adam Sarner
Research Director
13 years at Gartner
19 years IT industry
Adam Sarner works with marketers to help them assess and take advantage of innovative and emerging marketing and multichannel marketing technologies and put them to digital marketing business use for competitive advantage. His expertise includes social CRM, multichannel campaign management ... Read Full Bio
by Adam Sarner | May 8, 2013 | Comments Off
Marketers have been shifting investments from mass-marketed, one-channel, one-way, company-driven campaigns to multichannel, two-way, interaction-driven campaigns that are more dialogue driven, more measurable, and that are able to achieve higher response and conversion rates.
To do this, marketers are increasingly extending multichannel marketing from purely outbound campaigns to include inbound marketing in the form of offer management, real-time decision making and event-triggered marketing, giving marketers targeted interaction when the customer is reaching out.
However, many vendors are offering inbound capabilities that are not integrated; therefore, creating another interaction silo. Expect half the multichannel campaign management market to provide true inbound/outbound fusion by YE2013.
There are five major benefits for multichannel inbound/outbound fusion:
1. Ability to Measure: Multichannel inbound/outbound fusion promises marketing access to a single view of campaign effectiveness. Top questions for marketing accountability include: What is going on in the campaign management pipeline? What is the return on investment (ROI) for campaigns? How should budget be allocated in the future for which campaign, offers or channels? An integrated inbound/outbound environment will provide more data to start answering these questions.
2. Lower TCO: Financial benefits will come from several sources. Besides the negotiating leverage of single sourcing (which would accrue whether the solutions were truly integrated or not), the organization can benefit in two primary ways:
Integration (such as single sign-on, a unified graphical user interface [GUI], and a common data source) will lower deployment, training and additional support costs.
A unified predictive analysis and a single-offer library and shared segmentation will make more-effective use of marketing time, with higher productivity without adding staff.
3. Increased Revenue: Inbound/outbound fusion provides access to customer data from more channels for segmenting and targeting the customer base. Taking advantage of functionality such as unified propensity modeling and universal preference management techniques means better targeting and higher conversion rates as well as information to align with the rest of the organization (for example, a connection to sales to help convert revenue).
4. Increased Responsiveness: A goal for marketing is to execute better campaigns more frequently. Multichannel inbound/outbound fusion capabilities, including one GUI, one inbound/outbound-capable dialogue, a common set of analytical tools and a signal-administration for sign-on, can significantly provide effectiveness and efficiency. Reduction in time for campaign creation, execution and reporting along with combining inbound and outbound customer data can allow marketers to make necessary changes to ongoing campaigns based on the real-time response and feedback of customers en route.
5. Consistent Customer Experience: Knowing which marketing campaigns are going to whom, what is being offered as an outbound campaign, what is being communicated as an inbound offer and how to reconcile the two for consistency will be a key benefit for inbound/outbound fusion. Capabilities (such as a common data source, access to an online/offline shared offer and segment library) and connected inbound/outbound-capable dialogue will have a substantial impact on a consistent experience. The ability to extend a relevant, planned offer during a spontaneous customer interaction has shown response rates approaching 15 times that of non-targeted outbound campaigns.
See our upcoming note on Inbound/Outbound Fusion Checklist for Multichannel Marketing where we we separate hype from the reality, and we outline and define the eight technology conditions for true two-way, inbound/outbound fusion.
Category: digital marketing Marketing Strategy Uncategorized Tags: digital marketing
by Adam Sarner | April 24, 2013 | Comments Off
Marketing departments are the largest adopters of social among any department, including IT. In fact our recent social marketing survey shows only 12% of social marketers give their IT organization a major role in social marketing, including sourcing technology. As marketers are quickly moving from experimentation towards identified business benefits, Gartner has identified five most common use cases (with just a few examples) for marketing:
1. Idea Management: Involves engaging a community to share, capture and vote on ideas to create or improve products, service pricing, packaging, distribution channels and other issues. Scandinavian Airlines (SAS) used Facebook to gather ideas for a limited-time summer route from Oslo. SAS Summer Flight, 2012 received more than 4,000 votes in one week, and the top vote opened a route from Oslo to Alanya in Turkey.
2. Market Research, New Products and Test Launch: Collecting feedback before and after a launch, from communities. The Four Seasons makes use of social media by creating communities for help in the planning of each new local property. By understanding the needs of the local base, Four Seasons can develop locales that meet the needs of those communities, even before the destination is built.
3. Social Media Engagement: Social media monitoring and response tools to promote, develop, strengthen or defend a product or company brand on social sites. GE highlights its products on Pinterest : “#Pinning things that inspire us to build, power, move and cure the world,” GE covers everything from photos of aircraft engines to science facts that will “blow your mind.” Contests and invitations to share themed pin boards invite consumer engagement in unconventional categories.
4. Advanced Social Analytics: Using social analytics to identify influencers, prospects and trends; profile customers; evaluate campaigns; and classify social content by subject/topic, sentiment and intent. Guess Engagement and M-Commerce App uses social analytics which integrates Guess’ loyalty/CRM data with Facebook data to create personalized content, offers and perks to targeted customer segments.
5. Social Campaigns: Social campaigns offer capabilities for tracking, monitoring and utilizing community and the strength of relationships to target different segments of a community (such as influencers) in a campaign. Social campaigns can enable marketers to make real-time adjustments to campaigns, rather than making changes after the fact. Vail Resorts provides destination based stay and travel and provides visitors multiple social destinations to upload pictures and video of their ski trips. Vail uses Facebook and Twitter for real-time messages about what’s going on at the resorts such as latest offers and packages to snow reports and events.
Gartner clients have full access to our Social Marketing research here
Category: digital marketing Marketing Strategy Uncategorized Tags: digitalmarketing
by Adam Sarner | April 10, 2013 | 1 Comment
Gartner for Marketing Leaders has recently published Get Ready Digital Marketers; Here Comes The Internet of Everything (subscription only). Still years off from full potential, we already see underpinnings of something massive in impact, not only for the world, but specifically for digital marketers where innovative use cases are already forming.
What is the internet of Everything?
Almost anything can have an IP address so it can connect to anything else with an IP address. Today, it costs a few cents to provide self-powered chips that can perform communications and small processing tasks. The spread of connections beyond the traditional Internet (think website) has created a number of new “Internets”. The Internet of Everything starts to combine:
- The internet of information (the traditional web)
- The internet of people (social networks)
- The internet of places(buildings, bridges) and things
- Virtual assistants with quasi-autonomous decision making (think Google Now or Siri armed with access to the above).
Each of these Internets produces value in isolation and they produce the greatest value, innovation and potential when connected.
Today, there are already examples of how some of these connections are being made and what value they are bringing. There are more examples in the note, but look no further than two of my favorite examples, one available, one developing:
Red Tomato Pizza, located in Dubai, offers a “very important pizza lovers fridge magnet” for its loyal customers. When pressed, the magnet’s built-in Bluetooth chip connects to your mobile phone and transmits a pre-programmed pizza order back to the Red Tomato Pizza restaurant. You get a SMS confirmation and the delivery.
MyMagic+ Being tested at Disney, these bracelets will track guest behavior in minute detail (see “At Disney Parks, a Bracelet Meant to Build Loyalty [and Sales]“): Guests wearing the band can pay for everything in the park, including the hotels and restaurants, put them on a fast pass for rides, and may even have an animatronic character recognize them and their family year over year. If guests use MyMagic+ to its full potential, Disney will refine its offerings and customize its marketing messages tailored to you.
By 2020, most interactions on the Internet will involve activity streams from things, places and systems (such as location, temperature or sensor data). Digital Marketers must start planning scenarios around the uses of the Internet of Everything within marketing and the business units, IT, and the senior executives. What new services can you create? How can you use the Internet of Everything to engage customers, help them through a buying decision process and create loyally and lock in? The Internet of Everything is almost here.
Category: digital marketing Marketing Strategy Uncategorized Tags: digital marketing
by Adam Sarner | April 1, 2013 | 2 Comments
Gartner for Marketing Leaders has just published its Social Marketing survey for 2013 and is available for clients here. We interviewed marketers in 50 large U.S.-based companies (average revenue $5.1 billion) in seven industries (financial services and insurance, high-tech, manufacturing, consumer products, media, retail, and healthcare) to understand their future social marketing plans.
What we found was that although there are social marketing activities yet to be fully explored, digital marketers have already rolled up their sleeves and are focused on consistently generating valuable and engaging content, generating leads, and coordinating in-house and external resources. Oh and by the way, IT need not always apply.
Some of our findings include:
Content is King: Content creation is the top role for almost 50% of the social marketing team and a third of respondents report that great content and authentic engagement make a company a great social marketing leader. See Gartner’s 2013 Social Marketing Survey Finding: Content Creation Fuels Social Marketing, available to all.
The Holy Grail: 38% of respondents say social marketing results in leads. Fan and follower counts, engagement rates, and implied increases in reach and awareness are good, but bottom line results speak volumes and keep your social programs funded. See my blog post on Social Marketing in 2013.
Help Wanted: 36% of respondents outsource content development and management to counter a skills gap. We suggest using in-house skills as the foundation, augmented by service provider relationships, to help you scale.
Thanks IT, But No Thanks?: Only 12% of respondents give their IT organization a major role in social marketing. With interview responses like “They don’t know anything about it” or “They aren’t involved in anything, and we have our own set of rules in marketing”, IT will need to up their game in innovation and thought leadership to be relevant. We recommend sourcing from your IT organization if they are willing and able, build your own technical team or outsource it. Don’t skimp on architecture, design, and operations as you scale.
Clients can download our Social Marketing Survey findings and our recommendations here.
Category: digital marketing Marketing Strategy Uncategorized Tags: digital marketing
by Adam Sarner | March 13, 2013 | 1 Comment
Gartner has published its 2013 Digital Marketing Spending Survey. Our findings for 2013 show that the top areas of digital marketing investments will be in e-commerce experiences, social marketing, content creation and mobile marketing. The No. 1 response was investment in the commerce experience.
In the survey, we specifically asked about digital commerce for which marketing was responsible, as opposed to all digital commerce in which respondents’ companies engage and marketing supports. This is a deliberate question, as we see that marketing leaders are increasingly taking responsibility for certain digital commerce channels. Another question in the survey confirmed this, when we asked, “Does your marketing organization have its own profit and loss (P&L) to capture revenue from sales that are made through digital channels for which marketing is responsible?” two-third of respondents said marketing currently has a P&L, and another 12% plan to have one within the next 12 months.
This suggests that marketers are becoming increasing responsible for their businesses’ commerce experience and are trying to keep up with changing buyer behaviors for researching and buying products and services online. E-commerce continues to grow double digits, year over year. As an example, the U.S. Department of Commerce estimated total e-commerce sales for 2012 of $225.5 billion, an increase of 16% from 2011.
Download all of our Digital Marketing Spending Survey findings here
Category: digital marketing Marketing Strategy Uncategorized Tags: digital marketing
by Adam Sarner | March 7, 2013 | 2 Comments
Every year Gartner releases the Multichannel Campaign Management Magic Quadrant in May. Gartner clients can find last year’s here. In the last three years, the market has shown campaign management’s trek towards digital marketing’s strange new world.
Without exception, every vendor on the magic quadrant leads with a digital channel story. In fact, references from marketers who have purchased a multichannel campaign management offering cite e-mail and the web as their top channels and use (direct mail was third in our 2012 findings; social, mobile, and search are quickly rising up the charts each year). However, the traditional campaign management vendors have not fully addressed the digital marketing ecosystem, leaving vendors from other markets, such as e-mail marketing, web content management, and social marketing vendors to formulate their own multi-channel campaign management strategies. Are these multiple markets all competing for the digital marketing space? Well, yes, yes they are.
The 2013 Multichannel Campaign Management MQ will be published in May. So far, there are four preliminary findings I’d like to share.
1. E-mail, e-mail, e-mail: Multichannel campaign management providers are seeing e-mail as their foot in the door for new deals. E-mail is still a “budget approvable” first step for marketing departments in virtually every industry. Campaign management’s added value will be e-mail as an integrated channel in which more emphasis will be placed on the “what to send” instead of just the “how to send”. It will include how e-mail is orchestrated with other channels like the web, social and mobile.
2. Social Marketing Campaigns Version 1: While some of the vendors still are partnering with others or even taking a wait and see approach to social marketing, others have taken the first step with functionality such as tweeting or posting trackable campaign content on social networks. Most of this is still version 1 type efforts.
3. Attribution metrics is still on the “roadmap” for many vendors: Pushed by customer demand, all vendors have noted the need for comprehensive attribution metric capability, for both online and offline campaigns. This is a holy grail for marketing. However, many vendors are still in development, in pre-development, or have pushed original plans out.
4. Content Marketing Gap: Mobile offers, trending user-generated social content, product catalogs, video, whitepapers, direct mail, e-mail – Multichannel Campaign Management is by definition, the ability to orchestrate and manage all this for marketing. Fully orchestrated online, offline content management has yet to be realized for this market as a whole.
Please expect to see the full report and findings in the published Multichannel Campaign Management MQ in two months time.
Category: digital marketing Marketing Strategy Uncategorized Tags: digital marketing
by Adam Sarner | February 27, 2013 | 2 Comments
Mobile Marketing is a big opportunity for digital marketers to influence store transactions but many consumers are not yet putting mobile transactions themselves on their shopping list.
In a Gartner survey done in the beginning of last year, U.S consumers were asked which shopping activities they expected to do using their mobile phones within the six-month period following the survey.
Here are the top shopping activities U.S consumers expected to do with a mobile phone:
1. Find store location.
2. Check to see if the product is in stock.
3. Check competitive prices before going to/and while in the store.
4. Browse a retailer’s website.
5. Check product reviews.
What is apparent each year this study is done is that paying for things using a mobile phone is actually pretty low on their priority list. Only 18% (ranked 15 out of 19 activities) indicated that they would use their mobile phones to conduct or make a payment in a physical store.
However, Digital marketers take note. These five activities they want to do on a smartphone before and after the transaction will significantly influence and lead to a transaction itself: the goal of marketing.
What our survey indicates to me is that retail store purchases can involve the mobile marketing in multiple decision making activities leading the consumer to a purchase even though the actual transaction step is not the priority.
For now, it just might not be that difficult to pull out a wallet and swipe a credit card at the counter. What can be more difficult is gathering information about directions to the store, determining the pricing of a competitor while in the store, checking what others have experienced with the product, etc. This is especially true when the consumer is en route or in a store. These purchasing steps are all digital marketing opportunities to influence a transaction.
I personally think it’s just a matter of time before the mobile wallet will prove to be both more convenient and provide value for most consumers such as triggering digital receipts, adding and redeeming loyalty points or gift cards, automatically pulling and digitally storing content such as a manual and warranty information, rebates, coupons, etc. Digital marketers can use these techniques to help consumers in the post purchase stage of their buying process giving consumer reasons to buy again. I think if digital marketers conveyed just these time saving use cases as an incentive to actually transact on mobile phones, consumers would add transactions to their mobile shopping priorities.
This week, Gartner for Marketing Leaders focuses on Setting Your Mobile Marketing Strategy (clients only) and shows how leading practitioners are thinking and utilizing mobile marketing.
Category: digital marketing Marketing Strategy Uncategorized Tags: digital marketing, mobile marketing
by Adam Sarner | February 8, 2013 | Comments Off
Customers are not your BFFs, and most are not your “fans”. So- what should be the social marketing purpose between a customer and a company anyway?
While organizations across industries cite ROI from social projects as one of their top inhibitors, the other one is an unclear business case or purpose. I see many marketing organizations still struggle with a clearly defined value proposition, a clear purpose as to why they are doing something social.
Every successful social marketing project will need a mutual purpose, from the customer side (their motivation to participate) and from the company side (a measurable business need). If clear benefits cannot be identified for both parties, or if those benefits are unbalanced, then the project is doomed to failure. Some CEO blogging about how super excited he or she is about some press release that no one would be truly excited about, including the CEO, is not balanced. There will be no motive for customers to participate. Spending time, money, people and infrastructure on a message board for people to have a good time chatting away to themselves and not producing company benefits (like an actual sale) doesn’t work either.
Fortunately, there is a meeting of the minds here. In general, people want to buy things and companies want to sell things. It’s a good relationship starter. People are looking for buying decision help, and marketers can provide it. Good social marketers figure this out. First, they start with mutual purpose versus the usual single focused mind of the avid brand manager. They ask: “What’s in it for them and what’s in it for us?”.
This means marketing organizations must staff, build and structure to participate in social environments with the underpinnings this of mutual purpose in mind.
The week of February 11th, we feature our research on Setting Up Your Organization to Be Social Marketing Ready (clients only). We discuss topics around building a social marketing organization, what new social science skills are needed, how to plan and staff and budget for social and how we see social marketing within organizations evolve.
Category: digital marketing Marketing Strategy Uncategorized Tags: digital marketing
by Adam Sarner | February 5, 2013 | 5 Comments
Event-triggered marketing identifies and executes campaigns based on events that affect a customer relationship. Marketers that do this right (less than 20% of marketing organizations today) will see their marketing messages receive, at minimum, five times the response rate of non-targeted push messages. Event-triggered marketing addresses the appropriate context of engagement and offers from the customer’s perspective, rather than just the company’s perspective. It should be applied to all multichannel marketing techniques, such as social marketing, mobile marketing, inbound call conversions, lead management and direct mail and e-mail marketing. Event-triggered marketing enables relevant offers to customers rather than traditional outbound blast campaigns, which causes major customer contact fatigue.
The challenge for event triggered marketing is following all five steps. Many marketers start with step one without prioritizing and go straight to step five, blasting out offers at their choosing. Marketers will need all five steps to determine the “where, when, what, why and how” of execution.
Five steps for successful event-triggered marketing:
1. Identify and Prioritize Meaningful Events: The first step is to understand relevant events in the customer/company relationship and to formally identify those specific events. Transactions, contract signings, App downloads, store visits, inbound calls, social engagement and change in deposits are examples of events that occur between a company and its customer. Events can also include external events, such as economic changes, types of weather, or government legislation. There are many potential events, but it will be more important to prioritize with a handful of events that are truly meaningful to both you and the customer (typically five to seven) and get those right than have too many without the means to scale process or execution.
2. Categorize Events into Fixed and Variable Triggers: Fixed event triggers have relatively predictable time components, such as a yearly contract renewal period, a birthday or a welcome letter for new customers (“onboarding”). Fixed events can be frequent, such as a biweekly deposit, or long-term, such as a five- or 10-year lease. Variable event triggers are less predictable and can be more difficult to react to. A change in address, a transfer of funds or a poor score on a customer satisfaction survey are examples. Begin with fixed predictable events to learn how to react to them then move on to less-predictable and, therefore, more-complex variable events.
3. Monitor Event Triggers: Marketers need to put in place detection mechanisms to monitor events that have been identified then categorized in the second stage. This is where the type of trigger matters, because it will be used to determine how to monitor and what data will be utilized. For instance, companies will use a type of rule-based system of customer events, such as triggering an action when passing a threshold, while others use a “change in state” based type mechanism that triggers an action when there is a change in a defined state. The idea is to have the means by which a company can monitor and detect whether a defined event has actually taken place. Begin to monitor a channel such as e-mail, get that right, and then start to add others.
4. Optimize Event Triggers: The key to optimizing event-triggered marketing is to identify the best marketing offer based on many triggers and other types of offers. Optimization for event-triggered marketing is similar to any other optimization exercise where conditions, constraints, rules for change and objectives are considered to identify action plans that will provide the best balance in meeting business objectives. Budget allocation, profitability analysis of segments and treatments, time, availability of channel, contact limitation rules and propensity to churn are just a few of the many variables that could be considered for optimizing the best offer.
5. Execution of Event Triggers: Having identified the right trigger, but having no execution process defined and implemented, will lead to null results and zero ROI. Marketers can eventually have hundreds of relevant events that can be acted on. The key processes for scale. Examples include scripting processes for the call center, automated online dialogue for a Web site, a multistep campaign process for a branch agent, and augmenting content of a trigger within a lead management process to support sales. This step is likely to be the most challenging of the five, and the most important. Finding skill sets, the creation of many processes and how well your organization has developed steps 1-4, will ultimately determine success in event-triggered marketing execution.
Category: digital marketing Marketing Strategy Uncategorized Tags: digital marketing
by Adam Sarner | January 29, 2013 | 1 Comment
Smart digital marketers will not chase the elusive dream of one-to-one. I can count with one hand how many true “one-to-one relationships” I really want with a company. Good morning Krispy Kreme! In reality, most customers’ needs can be categorized into a finite set of segments with specific treatments, and that is more than appropriate for a relationship with them. Marketers must learn to match these finite customer preferences to segments and deliver interactions that communicate an appropriate personalized level of “intimacy”. The true value of one-to-one to the customer is in his or her perception of that intimacy.
For years, one-to-one marketing has been touted as a critical strategy toward a successful customer relationship. Technologies for collecting and analyzing customer data, coupled with rich sources of that data (e.g., the web, third-party databases and now the promise of social) have offered marketers to build huge detailed profiles of their customers on an individual basis.
In theory, these detailed profiles can be used to drive personalization strategies to enable the creation of customized interaction strategies on an individual basis. However, the ability to create a personalized interaction does not automatically translate into relevance or value to the customer, and has led to disappointing results in many personalization attempts. At best, marketing using these techniques often achieve trivial levels of true personalization and have found it difficult to develop relevant tailored interactions on a one-to-one level.
It is relevant context that leads to value to the customer. What is the customer trying to achieve and how can we help them achieve it? An offer or message that addresses a true customer need at the right time and the right place is much more valuable than a web page that says, “Welcome back, Bob.”
True one-to-one personalization is, in essence, segmentation to a segment of one. However, in application, this level of segmentation is not necessarily practical or desirable. The number of variables that might be relevant to both the company and a customer is finite, even though the total number of all possible variables is not. The key to a successful personalization effort is learning to identify and use variables that are truly relevant.
By limiting the number of variables by which it segments, marketers can achieve the balance between maintaining a manageable number of segments (as they help define strategic value) and retaining a level of specific treatments (as it provides relevance to the customer). As a starting point, some typical segmentation and treatment variables might include the following:
Segmentation Variables
Customer Value: What is the profitability of the customer? This should be considered against current profitability, as well as estimated lifetime value.
Life Stages: Is this a brand-new customer, one that is developing or an established relationship?
Treatment Variables
Touch Preferences: How does the customer prefer to interact with the company (e.g., via the Web, by telephone, social networks or in person)?
Context: What do you know about the customer in the context of his or her relationship with your business? How can your interaction be relevant with his or her prior and current activities?
Timing: Tightly coupled with context above, the timeliness of interactions is critical. Context deals with the “what,” timing deals with the “when.” For example, although analysis may show that a customer would respond favorably to a cross-sell offer, it would not be appropriate to deliver that offer if the customer is in the midst of resolving a customer service problem. While all other variables might be in line, be sure the timing is appropriate as well.
Category: digital marketing Marketing Strategy Uncategorized Tags: digital marketing
