Transform Your CPG Marketing Strategy: Use Cases with Videos!

Using an omnichannel strategy for marketing consumer products comes with some unique challenges. Big challenge, obviously, is that there isn't always direct sale to get those consumer insights and make predictions. I always say if we can build an audience, we can send a message. Marketing across channels will always come back to a couple of things: what data do we have, and what are your goals? At SAP Emarsys, what we do together with brands is take signals from consumers, whatever those signals are, and we digest them, we put them into practice, probably starting with a welcome series, but then we can build from there. It's all about using your channels, whether it's web, email, social, putting things out there to gauge interest, and then listening to your consumers and adjusting your strategies.

Once someone hits your site, whether you went and found them on social media or drove them from a campaign, what do you do with them? With the Emarsys web channel product, you're able to run embedded ribbon and overlay campaigns to not only acquire new subscribers or interest on those subscribers, but we can also run dynamic content based on segments that we have already established inside of the Emarsys platform. Do you want to be able to dynamically change the website based on where they came from? Do you want to acquire new information about them? Permission them on a new channel? You can even just ask what they're doing and what they're looking for from your brand as you start to communicate with them in your digital strategy. When inquiring information about your consumers, it's important to have use cases in mind for how you're going to be leveraging that information. As you build dynamic, personalized experiences for your consumers, start thinking about how to put these use cases together. After you do your welcome series, what's the next stage? Maybe that's a birthday campaign. Maybe that's a campaign to try to figure out more of their interests. Ultimately, at the end of the day, what I'm talking about here is that as we're progressively profiling our consumers, we need to make sure that the data that we're collecting is actually being used in our strategies. As we think about tying our web channel experiences into email, we really need to think about what's going to happen after someone clicks our email. If the goal is to just get to a click, typically we're going to have challenges once we get on the website because we don't have direction on where we want them to go. If we have the website in mind as we build out our email campaigns, typically we can start to build consistency and continuity between our channels so that our consumers feel like they have kind of an all in one experience as they go from email into our website. We need to think about each experience as a connected, holistic journey. When you listen to your consumers, you can adapt your conversation based on what they are asking for and what they're interacting with you on. That's when you start to create a true consumer journey that you can make really meaningful and personalized. Long story short, we need to be thinking about things more than just collecting email clicks.

While traditional web tracking tools like Google Analytics are great for seeing how sites are performing in the aggregate, there's an opportunity to be able to build segments and real-time triggers based on this information using a tool like Emarsys web extension tracking scripts. So let's say you have a consumer on a page on your website regarding cleaning and maintenance for one of your products. We would be able to take that information, build a real-time re-targeting program to be able to pull them into an automation and re-target them on social media. Trigger an email campaign to show them more information about this, but also build historical segmentation on this so that we can start to create additional newsletters based on the content that your team is creating. At Emarsys we're able to take in all sorts of little signals that might be happening around your digital ecosystem. It could be a subscriber clicking on a particular link in an email, could be an app user using a particular feature of your app. It could also be segments based on web behavior, channel engagement, app engagement. All these signals are all coming into the system in real time to allow you to do real-time triggers and also historical segmentation lookups. Making the most out of these features in Emarsys usually comes from a mix of being proactive about what we should be asking and tracking on our consumers, putting them into practice, and then analyzing and iterating over these as we build out more automated, personalized web experiences. With the Emarsys block-based editor, we make it easy to build dynamic content into a single campaign. For example, with our blocks, you have the ability to do block targeting based on segment criteria. For example, I can decide based on a segment that we were defining earlier in the demo to show or hide content based on that segment. So in this case, I want to show if someone qualifies for that segment. And in this block, I want to hide this content if they qualify for that same segment. Additionally, Emarsys supports a fully omnichannel personalization service to allow you to push live text into your campaigns based on a number of different data points. It could be data that's stored on your contact profile, it could be external data that's coming through an API, could be data that's stored in additional databases, or it could be data that you're fetching off of one of your internal APIs. Additionally, we support fully multi-language distribution inside of our campaigns, so you have the ability to store preferred languages on your consumer profiles, and the system will actually automatically distribute these based on their preferred language. When we get into real personalization, it's so much more than just inserting a first name. It's making content relevant and really appealing.

When you can't measure direct sales, what do you measure? How do you know that your marketing is even successful? You still have to be able to prove that value. SAP Emarsys isn't going to tell you that there's one right way to do your reporting, because there really isn't. That's why IT groups are usually so interested in our Open Data product, that's a data warehouse built off of all the engagement data that Emarsys is collecting on your behalf. This data is available in real time and can be married up to all of your other business reports. However, if you're looking for some helpful dashboards available right at your fingertips, Emarsys does have a number of different reports that we can offer based on the information that we've been collecting. For example, we have a campaign analytics report that brings all of the different channels into a single place and allows you to check any segment that you've defined inside the tool and running it against whatever channels you'd like to check at an aggregate level. While all of our channels come with individual campaign reporting and channel specific reporting, we also have a number of aggregate reports for both cohort analysis and overall aggregate reporting on those channels. Additionally, any of the events that are being sent into this system can also be leveraged for additional custom reporting. In this case, maybe I want to check to see if anyone has completed the 'Fit Finder' survey on my website. Using the events that we can track in real-time from the website, I'm able to bring in and build a report to show me the conversion rates of these events, as they attributed back to activity that we've been orchestrating out of the tool. Additionally, I can see how many of these events have been tracked in total, and I can also get a high level overview of what programs and campaigns have been influencing these events.