Tag Archives: Ideas
Make a Moment: Valentine’s Day Restaurant Promotion Ideas
Posted by Christa Fletcher, contributor for Underground Group
Most restaurant owners know Valentine’s Day is one of the busiest nights of the year, but did you know it’s the second most popular day for Americans to dine out? Thirty-four percent of Americans will eat at a restaurant on Valentine’s Day, according to Entrepreneur. Since the holiday is a $ 19.7 billion industry, it is a sweet spot for marketing and increasing guest counts.
Valentine’s Day is a great opportunity to showcase your restaurant and generate buzz to draw in new guests. While many consumers will try to book reservations close to the actual day, you can begin promoting your festive Valentine’s Day events prior.
As Brady Thomason, solutions manager in restaurant and hospitality for NetSuite, pointed out: “If the holiday falls in the middle of the week, you can use it as a marketing opportunity to have promotions the week before and after Valentine’s Day. So instead of one day, you’re getting a full week of opportunities.”
The best way to capture the hearts of new guests is to promote your restaurant the way you would woo a date on Valentine’s Day.
Make it special.
Think about what is unique about the cuisine at your restaurant and use that to market a Valentine’s Day promotion. Are you known for exceptional steak? Thomason suggested offering a steak-for-two special or shared meals to your menu. Make sure you let guests know about these Valentine’s Day deals by advertising it ahead of time on your website, a sign in your window or flyers in your regular menu.
Make it memorable.
Find ways to make your restaurant stand out, whether it’s through special decorations, a catchy theme or wordplay around your restaurant’s name, a signature dessert or cocktail or live music only offered on Valentine’s Day. By making your promotion more memorable, guests are more likely to want to experience the holiday at your restaurant and remember where to go for it.
Make it photo-worthy.
If we’ve learned anything from the social media age, it’s that everyone loves a good selfie photo-op. So make it easier for diners to take their selfie game up a notch with a photo wall. Find a space inside or right outside your restaurant, and create a themed backdrop for guests to have their photos taken. You could even hire someone, or dedicated an employee, to be in charge of pictures and videos for special moments like proposals.
Make it friendly.
Even though it’s billed as a holiday for couples, Valentine’s Day has also become a celebration amongst friends, coworkers and family members. So, they’re probably going to go out to eat, too! Cater to crowds with group promotions, trivia games or love-songs karaoke.
Make it magical.
We all love a surprise, especially when it’s something that makes us feel loved or special. Find a way to make a magical moment at your restaurant. Hide raffle tickets under chairs and give away a prize. You can also randomly select a table to win a free meal because they are your 14th reservation or guest of the night. Other ideas range from hosting a surprise musical guest to handing out sparklers and having everyone sing a romantic song together.
By adding something unexpected for your guests, each year you can build a reputation as a unique and special place to return to for Valentine’s Day or any day where guests want a happy place to dine.
by NetSuite filed under
Non-Promotional Holiday Email Ideas To Transition Into The New Year
The holidays are here, and we’re in the homestretch before everyone turns their full attention on 2019. You’ve probably been pushing holiday promotions and seasonal offerings in some form for every stage of the customer journey, but these marketing campaigns are coming to a close and it’s time to think forward. Before jumping right into 2019 nurture programs and messaging, let your business press pause on the promotions, offers, and value-packed opportunities to simply recognize and appreciate this holiday season. It’s a way of staying top-of-mind with your customers while smoothly transitioning from holiday-centric content to gearing up for an exciting new year.
Wrap and put a bow on your holiday messaging during this next week with a non-promotional email to your customers. It’s a way of letting them you know you’re thinking of them during the holidays, and that you recognize and appreciate the opportunity to celebrate this special time of year together – even if it’s just in the form of an email.
7 Non-Promotional Holiday Email Ideas
1. A sincere letter from the executive team or CEO. Your business wouldn’t be where it is today without your customers and they’ll appreciate hearing it on a personal level from the top.
2. If they currently have products with your business that are great to use during this hectic time of year, it’s worth a friendly reminder! A financial institution, for instance, may want to let its cardholders know that this month’s cash-back rewards are in categories that pertain to their needs around the holidays, like groceries (a reminder just before Christmas dinner shopping) or department stores (for last-minute gifts). It’s not promotional if they already have the product, and serves as a reminder of how it can best benefit your customers this time of year.
3. A message on how to stay safe during this holiday season, especially as it relates to your industry. This can be in the form of a list, infographic, or even a short video. Insurance firms are a great example with how they can share safety tips around the home for large gatherings and incremental weather. Not in the business of much safety hazard during this time of year? Give it a cheeky spin with how to unplug from our devices and even work to enjoy the holiday.
4. Share how your business gave back to its community this holiday season. Perhaps your local offices, branches, or agencies hosted a food drive, volunteered as a team, made a charitable donation, or contributed to families in need – your customers want to know that they’re supporting businesses that give back to their communities. Briefly recap with a few photos why you chose this type of charitable work, the experience, and the outcome. Be humble and appreciative to your customers for helping make this happen; help them feel part of how the business gave back.
5. Reflect on the past year for the business, community, and customers. This is a great opportunity to share your 2018 successes and, what’s more, extend those successes to your customers. Keep the reflections somewhat high-level and light; now’s not the time to crunch numbers and create charts. What do your customers care to hear about, and how did they help you achieve it? What accomplishments instill trust in your brand?
6. Shine light on a customer who has made an impact on their community. It’s not about how successful they’ve been since implementing your product or service; this is all about celebrating their positive contribution and sharing the holiday spirit. (Remember to make sure they’re okay with you sharing!)
7. Create a list of top content in your industry from this past year. Is there a particularly great thought leadership article, value-packed report, or several books that your professional network will love? Again, we’re keeping this light and non-promotional as we wrap up the holiday season, but this informational round-up serves as a good transition from 2018 to 2019.
At the end of the day, never underestimate the power of a personal note that expresses appreciation. It’s the gesture more than anything, and a reminder in their inbox that you’re thinking of them (and not their wallets).
Data helps bring creative ideas to the table
In the field of creativity and ideas, a data strategy may seem like a burden to cultivate. Especially when the knowledge and resources to support a comprehensive data strategy may seem out of reach, too difficult, and too expensive to build. But what if we told you it wasn’t as difficult to deploy as you think. And the results? Well, you can release a flood of new ideas to support and enhance your creative cycle.
Imagine being able to see and understand how your audience interacts with all your online content (your “digital assets”): see which articles and whitepapers are getting the most traction, which videos are shared the most, and which pieces of content are duds. Sound like a dream world? It can be a reality! Learn more about Digital Asset Management and how to get the most out of your data in an exciting Bynder’s webinar with special guest, me!
Webinar: Measure the Performance of Your Content with DAM Analytics on September 6, 2018 at 11 a.m. Eastern
What does it take to share insights?
You may already see the value in adding data to your marketing efforts but where do you even begin? DAM and other data analytics initiatives can help creatives better understand the impact their content is having and how to make it even better (and stop wasting time on content that goes nowhere).
Here are a few common characteristics for successful adoption of analytics for marketing and content teams:
1. Strong, simple tools
If you’re going to dig into your content, simpler is better. Look for a product that gives you deep insights into the metrics that matter most to you (number of views, time on page, number of shares, etc.) without putting a bunch of complex steps between you and the data you need. Marketing people and creatives are expected to know and understand the data behind their pieces, but most aren’t skilled in database languages and the use of advanced analytical software. If you’re a creative looking to dig into your own numbers, make sure your tool is user-friendly enough to use without calling IT every five minutes.
2. Access to all of your data
Depending on the size of your company and marketing departments, you may find yourself saddled with an array of tools measuring different metrics. While having lots of data is great, that data is usually siloed. In order to get a holistic view of your marketing efforts, it’s important to be able to mashup data from your email automation tools, CRM, advertising platforms, social media management tool, and more. Connecting this data (along with the insights from a simple, easy-to-use DAM system) will give you a clearer picture of how people are interacting with your assets and allow for insights to drive creative ideas to improve these interactions.
3. Different people, different data
Each role in your marketing organization makes decisions based on different data. For directors, it might be important to understand where the team stacks up against important key performance indicators (KPIs)—like conversions and leads. For a marketing manager, it’s important to see how often and how long their audience is interacting with their assets (pageviews, time on page, shares, etc.). For branding and creatives, the most relevant insights might revolve around A/B tests on color and visual choice. Whatever DAM and data analytics tools you’re using, make sure you’re getting the level of detail you need for the KPIs that matter most to you.
Every person on your marketing team should have a single place to go in order to gain the insights they need. When you have one tool that can pull in all of the relevant data and present what’s needed in a tailored dashboard for each person, you’re in business.
4. Choose the right KPIs
Dashboards are wonderful tools but if they don’t provide information on the right KPIs, your team will find them irrelevant and adoption will go down the tubes. So, what should you be measuring? As we mentioned above, it will depend on the person you’re creating the dashboard for so the most important thing to do is sit down with your end users and understand exactly what they want and need.
What’s next?
Quantifying your creative operations is never an easy task but analytics can help make it easier. Join our combined webinar with Bynder. We’ll demonstrate that having a comprehensive data strategy is not as expensive, difficult, or resource intensive to deploy as you may think.
Register for our webinar with Bynder, “Measure the Performance of Your Content with DAM Analytics,” to learn more about what you should be measuring, how to identify your key content metrics, the right framework for measuring ROI, and dashboard examples tailored for different stakeholders.
Data Governance: 5 Big Ideas for 2018
It’s 2018, and the data governance strategy that worked for you in the past may no longer be up to par. Fortunately, you can improve it. Here are five strategies for making your data governance strategy even better.
As companies grow, new technologies emerge and new types of data-related challenges appear, the strategy you use to govern your data may need to be updated.
New compliance frameworks may impact your business. You might be collecting data from more sources. And you are probably dealing with more data, because the volume of data that organizations collect tends to increase steadily over time.
As you assess whether your data governance strategy is still sufficient for your needs, consider the following opportunities for improving it.
Create Citizen Data Scientists
In a world where data is everywhere, data management is not the responsibility of data engineers alone — or at least, it should not be.
You can streamline your data management processes, while also helping everyone in your organization appreciate the value of data, by striving to turn all of your employees into “citizen data scientists.”
This doesn’t mean that everyone has to become a data engineering expert; instead, it requires educating your employees in the fundamentals of data collection and processing, teaching them why data quality is important and so on.
Consider a Multi-Cloud Data Strategy
Multi-cloud computing, which means using multiple public or private clouds at once as part of your IT infrastructure, is a hot topic in the IT world today.
Although multi-cloud computing can apply to any type of workload, consider whether it might help you improve your data management processes in particular. Would spreading your data across multiple clouds help you to increase availability or lower data-management costs? Could it help you improve portability and avoid vendor lock-in?
Prepare for New Compliance Challenges
Compliance rules tend to become more complicated and challenging over time. For this reason, it’s a best practice to step back periodically and assess whether your data governance strategy still keeps you safely within the guidelines set by whichever regulatory frameworks apply to you.
Today, this may mean assessing your readiness to meet the data privacy and availability requirements set by the GDPR. And keep in mind that, yes, the GDPR probably matters for your business even if you are not based in the European Union, which created the framework.
Strive for Scale
Again, the volume of data that you need to accommodate is very likely to increase steadily over time. That means that it is critical to build scalability into your data governance strategy — and to add more scalability whenever you can.
In practice, scalability means things like ensuring that your storage infrastructure can grow quickly. If you are currently dependent on on-premise storage servers, you might consider moving data to the cloud (if your budget, regulatory needs and other factors allow it) because the cloud offers virtually unlimited storage.
Similarly, think about your data teams and their ability to scale. Can your engineers continue to handle workloads as they grow larger? How might citizen data scientists (see above) help to improve your data-management scalability?
Plan for Next-Generation Technologies
Today, your IT workloads may run on bare-metal servers or virtual machines. Or maybe you have adopted containers, a newer type of infrastructure technology. Meanwhile, maybe you also have some data that is still stored on tapes, because legacy infrastructure is a fact of life. And it’s anyone’s guess as to which infrastructure technologies might roll out tomorrow.
An effective data governance strategy should be able to accommodate existing data management technologies while also supporting those that will appear in the future. Avoiding strict dependency on certain vendors or types of infrastructure is one way to achieve this flexibility.
You also, of course, want to ensure that at least some members of your IT team are paying attention to what’s on the horizon technology-wise, and experimenting with it early so that you are in a position to take advantage of it when the time comes.
Download our white paper to find out more about the keys to data governance success.
Ideas, Insights, Innovation at DataWorks 2018 – Advances in Leveraging Hadoop and the Cloud
The 2018 DataWorks in San Jose had 2100 attendees from 32 countries and showed some innovation in its format by showcasing product demos in the newly conceived Expo Theater and Demopalooza sessions.
John Kreisa, VP of Marketing at Hortonworks, kicked off the DataWorks conference by getting into the spirit of the WorldCup and reciting some great statistics from the last World Cup: 3.2 billion TV viewers in 2014 and 32.1 million tweets in the final match.
We heard about the innovations in Hadoop 3.0, which will be released as part of HDP 3.0 later in the year. The improved scaling, scheduling, usability, deployment and resource utilization are discussed in some detail in the Hortonworks blog series titled Data Lake 3.0.
Demopalooza featured exciting demos of the new DataPlane services Data Steward Studio, Data Analytics Studio, Cloudbreak and the announcement of Streams Messaging Manager. SMM will be a Kafka management tool, which will ‘cure Kafka blindness’ by exposing details on producers, consumer groups, topics, and how they all relate.
Ideas, Insights, and Innovation
Aligning with the Ideas, Insights, Innovation theme at DataWorks, there were many good discussions on how artificial intelligence and machine learning are transforming the way we do business. Rob Bearden, CEO of Hortonworks argued that this is the biggest business model transformation since the Industrial Revolution.
Kevin Slavin from The Shed argued in his keynote speech that the best intelligence may be a ‘human in the loop’ approach to extend human intelligence with machine intelligence.
Praveen Kankariya, CEO of Impetus, made the point that algorithms can be bought. Your data typically cannot. According to him, the number of mainstream firms fearing competition from data-driven upstarts went from 47% to 79% in the past year.
Brian Hopkins, VP and Principal Analyst at Forrester shared some interesting thoughts. He argued that innovations such as social media have put the customer in charge. Insights-driven firms are growing at 27% a year, compared to our 3.5% annual GDP growth. He also estimated that the pace of business is now 2 to 3 times faster than it was 5 years ago.
The Cloud
Leveraging the Cloud is a crucial step in this journey. Brian Hopkins and Arun Murthy, co-founder and CPO of Hortonworks, talked about evolving the Data Lake into a Data Fabric with shared metadata, governance, and security policies.
Kevin Bates, VP of Enterprise Execution at Fannie Mae, presented a session at DataWorks on their reasons for moving to the cloud. He talked about the fact that artificial intelligence and machine learning are empowering new ideas. Using the cloud allowed him to give the team a wide choice of tools, without increasing the complexity of managing the internal IT. Brian Hopkins had called this ‘going from DevOps to NoOps’ by letting someone else operate the infrastructure. The cloud also provided Fannie Mae with opportunities to share data among projects that needed the same information processed in a similar way. This reduced redundancies, drove efficiency, and enabled them to create a well-organized data lake on the cloud that was fully governed.
Kevin Bates also pointed out that this strategy is new and evolving. His advice for the audience at DataWorks was to bring in partners who can think end to end. At Syncsort we’ve also seen the importance of planning ahead in our customer deployments. During her interview on theCUBE, Syncsort CTO, Dr. Tendü Yoğurtçu, PhD talked about the value Syncsort brings to enterprises by optimizing existing infrastructure, assuring data security and availability, and advancing the data by integrating it into next-generation analytics platforms. As we see our customers embark on their cloud journeys, future-proofing their applications is a big concern.
Syncsort CTO on theCUBE talks about data-driven trends including cloud, data governance, AI and machine learning.
A Real World Challenge
A good example was a money-laundering use case presented in a DataWorks session by Dr. Yoğurtçu. A global bank wanted to leverage machine learning to create a high performing, scalable solution to comply with anti-money laundering regulations. The solution needed to be cloud-ready since the bank plans to go to a hybrid system.
One of the challenges was consolidating scattered and difficult to access datasets, including Mainframe data. Syncsort’s DMX-h™ made it easy to ingest data in bulk, and was unobtrusive on the data source systems. Any required conversions were performed during the ingestion. Ian Downard from MapR pointed out in his session that there is a high turnover rate for data scientists and machine learning specialists. Part of their frustration is having to spend time preparing data. To delight them, you need to have a good strategy for data preparation.
Another challenge faced by the bank was around cleansing the data. If the training algorithms were using bad data, the models would make incorrect predictions. Syncsort’s Trillium™ Quality for Big Data leveraged the Hadoop cluster to perform data cleansing at scale.
Entity resolution and customer identification are crucial for detecting attempts to obfuscate fraudulent transactions. This was accomplished with the sophisticated multi-field matching algorithms in Trillium Quality for Big Data.
Fraud detection needs to happen in real-time. Syncsort’s resilient Change Data Capture capabilities made sure that all data was kept fresh, regardless of whether the data was persisted in Hive, or streaming through Kafka.
Lineage was the last piece of the puzzle. Syncsort publishes lineage to Apache Atlas, Cloudera Navigator, and also makes it available through REST APIs. This allowed the bank to track the provenance of the data used in the models.
By using Syncsort’s high-performing capabilities, the bank was able to develop a solution that was future- proof and highly scalable. The data flow was developed once and can be deployed anywhere: on premise or in the cloud. ETL and quality operations can run on Spark or MapReduce, with no changes required. There was also no need for any coding. As Arun Murthy highlighted in his keynotes, there is great value in having identical deployments on premise and in the cloud.
Fore more, make sure to check out our webcast from Dr. Tendü Yoğurtçu on Data Quality and Lineage.
5 Ideas for Using Personalization in Emails with Dynamics 365
is no longer a one-size-fits-all initiative. Consumers now expect customized communications from the organizations they do business with. And when businesses meet those expectations, they reap the benefits. Research from Experian reveals that emails with personalized subject lines are 26 percent more likely to be opened. And according to Aberdeen Group, personalized emails improve click-through rates by 14 percent and conversion rates by 10 percent.
So, what can you personalize in an email? You are really only limited by the information that you have available in Microsoft Dynamics 365. While that’s great news in terms of the flexibility you have for customizing campaigns, it can also be a little daunting to figure out where to start. To help you get started with personalization and take your emails to the next level, here are five ideas for how to use personalization in your emails:
1. Name. Using a lead or contact’s name in an email is likely the most common use of email personalization, and rightly so. It’s a simple and effective way to show your recipients that you know who they are, and it helps create a connection with recipients immediately. You can use names in an email subject line or preheader, as seen here:
Or choose to greet your customers or leads by name in the content of the email:
2. Important dates. Our lives are filled with dates worth remembering and recognizing, both professionally and personally. So, what better way to endear yourself to your customers or prospects than to acknowledge these important dates too? An anniversary as it relates to your organization is a popular pick for a date to recognize. In the example email below, you can see how a professional association incorporated a date to recognize how long an individual had been a member of the association.
Birthdays are another important milestone to recognize. Other important dates to recognize could be the birth of a child or a wedding date. Again, you are really only limited by the data you have available in Dynamics 365.
3. Location. Consider these two subject lines: “Check out these hot new restaurants” versus “Check out these hot new Atlanta restaurants.” If you’re a foodie, you might be inclined to open the email either way, but the subject line that references the city you live in is more attention-grabbing because you know that the content is localized to you and very relevant. Localization also works well in the body of an email, as seen in the example below for a real estate brokerage, which references the city where the recipient wants to buy a new home and displays a few homes available in that location.
4. Dollar amounts. As seen in the example below, nonprofits in particular can use dollar amounts as an effective way to personalize their emails. This personalization allows the organization to recognize a donor’s specific contribution rather than just a general reference to an unspecified donation amount. Other examples of this personalization in action could be retailers with loyalty programs using dollar amount personalization to thank a customer for spending a certain amount or a financial institution could employ this type of personalization to show how much a customer has saved using a round-up on purchases savings account.
5. How you met. Sometimes people need a little reminder of how they met your organization, and they also like seeing that you remember too. This is particularly true for new leads who are having their first few interactions with your business. Did they visit your website? Make a purchase from your store? Attend an event? For example, a college wanted to send an email blast to prospective students that their representatives had spoken with at a series of college fairs. Using personalization, they were able to incorporate the name of the specific event each prospective student attended, providing a more customized email experience.
These are just a few examples of email personalization you can try in your communications. As you gather data in CRM, think of other opportunities for personalization that would suit your business and audience.
This post was contributed by .
“His Interest Is In Interesting People And Interesting Ideas”
I wondered yesterdayhow many members of Edge.org know about Jeffrey Epstein’s apparent continued participation in the ideas think tank, assuming many of them would be uncomfortable about keeping such company.Lawrence KraussandSteven Pinkerwould seemingly not be among the troubled.
The photo above of the two scientists with Epstein was posted in 2014 and appears to be of that vintage. In a 2015 Guardianarticle, Krauss refused to distance himself from the registered sex offender, feigning ignorance about his patron’s criminal behavior with children:
Well before Epstein went to jail, he saw philanthropy as a way to bring together people from different walks of life in settings ranging from his own mansions to academic conferences, friends said.
“His interest is in interesting people and interesting ideas,” said Arizona State University physicist Lawrence Krauss, who directs a program on the origins of life that Epstein has supported. He said he would feel cowardly if he turned away from Epstein because of accusations Krauss knew nothing about.•
Marketing Ideas for Businesses on a Budget
We sometimes talk about marketing tips like we have an endless budget. For most businesses, that’s simply not the case. And for some, marketing doesn’t have a large budget at all. Below, we’ll discuss some budget-friendly marketing initiatives any business, no matter big or small can start implementing today.
Develop your website
In terms of your business’s overall marketing strategy, your website needs to be pretty high up there. A well-built website can bring in strong leads and inform your prospects and customers about the information they otherwise might not know of.
We can’t talk about websites without talking about SEO, or search engine optimization. SEO describes various tactics businesses frequently use to improve how their website shows up on search engines, like Google and Bing. Some examples of strong SEO practices include using focused keywords in your content, creating unique content related to your products and services, and ensuring your website is up-to-code in terms of its crawl-ability by search engines.
Establish a blog and update it consistently
Once you’ve established your company’s website and it’s got all the bells and whistles you need, it’s time to start writing. Creating a blog is a simple way to help with your SEO efforts, and all it takes is a little time and effort. The key is being consistent. If you’re going to start a blog on your company website, it has to have a purpose. Don’t just share content once every 6 months and expect any results—create a consistent content calendar and you’ll be on your way to success.
Start building your email list
Whether you’re looking for a free email management service or something for a small fee, you’ve got email marketing options. But in order to start your email marketing efforts as a business, you need to build a contact list. Have an opt-in section on your website, ask your prospects and customers via email if they’d be interested in being on your email list, etc. Once you’ve established a list, it’s time to start designing high-quality emails that generate leads and responses.
Focus on local search listings
No matter the size of your business, local prospects and customers are incredibly valuable. So why not make it easier on yourself to be found by them? This is where local search sites come into play.
First, we’d recommend ensuring you’re listed accurately on Google My Business. This is Google’s version of a local search listing. Once that’s established and claimed, you can begin looking into other local search niches, such as Yelp. These sites provide your business with a broader local presence and the opportunity for your customers to review your products/services.
Go social
Love it or hate it, social is here to stay, and there’s simply no denying the possibilities it can provide. Have a strong presence on the social media channels that make the most sense to your business. If you’re B2B, LinkedIn might be the most powerful tool, while Pinterest might not fit your industry’s niche.
Once you’ve established your channels, it’s time to start posting. If you’re blogging consistently on your website, consider publishing those pieces of content socially. Encourage your employees to spread the word, and you might pick up some decent website traffic.
Use demographics and psychographics
Do you know your target audiences? The people you’re desperately trying to turn into customers? If not, it’s time to define them in concrete detail. Creating target personas and utilizing demographic and psychographic information can prove extremely useful when you’re starting to market your business. Once you’ve established your key target audiences, you’ll have a much easier time catering your marketing tactics (think email marketing in particular) to your top prospects.
5 Ideas for Marketing List Segmentation in Dynamics 365
When it comes to , success can often be more dependent on your lists than the message itself. After all, how well will your email perform if it doesn’t reach your intended recipients?
If you have worked hard to – great! But now what? How do you maximize the potential of your marketing lists so you can increase your email marketing effectiveness? Marketing list segmentation is one of the first tactics that comes to mind.
Segmenting marketing lists is an incredibly powerful way to send your emails to the right people at the right time. List segmentation allows you to match your content with your customers’ interests, which will increase interaction with your email and drive conversions.
The possibilities for segmenting marketing lists are unlimited. Depending on the information you collect and maintain in your organization’s instance of Dynamics 365, you can create lists that are specific to a variety of different audiences. To get you started, here are five ideas for list segmentation:
1. Geography. Geographical segmentation is one of the easiest and most effective ways to customize emails to a specific audience. Sort by country, zip code, state/province or other geographic boundaries. Customize your email to cater to the local area. For example, a sporting goods store could advertise snow boards to customers in Colorado while promoting surf boards to buyers in California.
2. Verticals. Segment your marketing list by type (corporation, government, non-profit), industry or company size to target specific audiences. A software company, for example, could segment by company size to promote a small business software to one list and an enterprise-level solution to another.
3. Demographics. Demographic data like age, gender, whether an individual has children, household income and more can be a very effective way to better target your email messages to your audiences. For example, a hotel chain could promote kid-friendly packages to one segmented list and couples-only packages to another. Or a financial institution could create a segmented list of individuals nearing retirement age to connect with them regarding retirement financial planning services.
4. Interest. Using in ClickDimensions, you can segment your list by how interested a contact or lead is in your company. Send one email to contacts that have a high and a different email to customers that have a low score. The low-score email could attempt to reignite interest in your products or services, while the high-score email could entice interested customers with a special offer.
5. Behavior. With the feature in ClickDimensions, you can add and remove contacts to marketing lists based on their interactions with your emails. For example, if a recipient does not open one or more of your emails, they can be put on a “cold” list while an individual who clicks on a link in your email could be added to a “warm” marketing list. You could then use these lists for future segmented email marketing initiatives.
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