Sourced from CNBC
Andres Sutt, Estonia’s minister of entrepreneurship and information technology, says governments should work together to make sure the internet is a safe place.
AI that discriminates against people is a big problem, but Beena Ammanath, executive director of the Global Deloitte AI Institute and head of Trustworthy AI and Ethical Tech, says AI ethics is about a lot more than bias.
You won’t see many people with my background talking about ethics,” said Beena Ammanath, executive director of the Global Deloitte AI Institute and head of Trustworthy AI and Ethical Tech at the global consulting company.
A computer scientist who worked as a database and SQL developer and held data science and AI-related technology roles at Bank of America, GE and Hewlett Packard before joining Deloitte in 2019, Ammanath wasn’t always gung-ho to talk AI ethics. Then she decided to write a book about it.
“There has arguably never been a more exciting time in AI,” she wrote in her book, “Trustworthy AI.” “Alongside the arrival of so much promise and potential, however, the attention placed on AI ethics has been relatively slight. What passes for public scrutiny is too often just seductive, click bait headlines that fret over AI bias and point to a discrete use case. There’s a lot of noise on AI ethics and trust, and it does not move us closer to clarity or consensus on how we keep trust in AI commensurate with its power.”
Ammanath calls the book, which attempts to move beyond hand wringing over AI’s problems toward practical ways to develop AI with ethical considerations in mind, “a synthesis of especially the last 10 years of my professional experience.”
Protocol spoke with Ammanath about why ethical AI practices should be part of every employee’s training, the limitations of providing internal guidance inside a sprawling consultancy and why she finally gave in and joined the AI ethics conversation.
This interview has been edited for clarity.
There’s no shortage of guidance, advice and lists of principles for ensuring AI is ethical or responsible. Why did you want to join the fray?
I really didn’t want to.
You really didn’t want to?
I didn’t want to, but it reached a point — just like I didn’t want to join the ethics and bias conversation four years ago, but I got pulled into all these discussions.
By training, I’m a computer scientist. In my prior lives, I built AI products, then [took them to] market. A lot of work at GE and HP. So, I have very much been focused on all the cool things and the value AI can bring to humans.
I realized that a lot of what was getting out was just one side of the story. When you think about AI ethics, the first thing that comes to mind is fairness and bias. And, yes, those are important, but that’s not the only thing. Fairness and bias doesn’t even apply in every possible scenario. Some of the work that I’ve done in the past was very much around predicting jet engine failure, or predicting how much power will a wind turbine generate, optimizing your IT servers and doing document management. And those are scenarios where it’s not so much about fairness and bias, but it is more about, say, reliability — the robustness, the safety and security aspect of it.
Do you think that some of this ethics conversation is steering people to think AI is just inherently bad and they should just avoid it altogether and be scared of it?
That’s the message that’s going across: that it’s a terrible thing for humanity. And I don’t think it’s all bad; either is it all good. There are risks with it, and we need to address it. I want to bring more of that balanced perspective, a pragmatic, optimistic perspective.
I’ve talked to companies that do deep learning for detecting defects in manufacturing, for example. Those are some really practical things.
We hear about bias in the context of health care a lot, right? Just think of two scenarios where AI is used. One is in patient diagnosis — AI being used to predict health and diagnose a disease earlier. In that scenario, bias is a terrible, terrible thing. But if you’re using AI to predict when an MRI machine might fail, or X-ray machine might fail, so that you can proactively send an engineer to go fix it, then, bias? Not so much. So anywhere where there is no human data being used, usually, bias doesn’t come into play.
The other one you hear a lot about is facial recognition. If it’s biased in a law enforcement scenario, where you’re flagging people as criminals, bias is a terrible thing. We want it to be absolutely fair. But if you’re using facial recognition [in] traffic lights to identify potential human trafficking victims, in that scenario, do we still want to use it because it’s 60% better than just humans trying to do it by themselves, even though it is biased? It’s more weighted, and it’s more nuanced. It is not a one-size-fits-all.
Some companies that create AI technologies, especially if they are controversial, promote “AI for good” — pro bono donations of data or tech for COVID, cancer or climate research, for example. It can be seen as a red herring, like, “Look, we’re doing good work, don’t pay attention to the fact that we are working on controversial AI or have military contracts.” What are your thoughts about that kind of approach?
I think of AI at companies or organizations at the high level [as] two categories. There are the ones who are building the AI tools, Big Tech. They are building AI tools, they’re pushing the levels on it, building those core capabilities. And then there are a lot more companies that are just using those tools in their specific context — the facial recognition example. The company that uses it in law enforcement is probably different than the company that uses it for human trafficking with identification.
We tend to think it is just a Big Tech problem. It’s just a problem of the company that’s building the tool. But the companies that are using it are equally responsible, and there are things they can do and consider and weigh, because at the end of the day, the tool and its ethical implications, the risks, are going to depend on how it’s used.
How are you applying some of the concepts that you discuss in your book in a concrete way at Deloitte?
The first step you can do, which we’re doing at Deloitte, [is] training — making sure every employee in the organization understands the ethical principles that the company believes. Every company has integrity training, day one. So just add an extension to it on what are AI ethics principles. That does assume that the key stakeholders, the C-suite, board members, have agreed upon the principles.
The next step is making sure every employee — not just your IT team, not just the data scientists, [but] every employee … should know what questions to ask and whom to call if he or she is not getting the right answers. It is that intern in your marketing department who’s evaluating an AI tool for recruiting. So every employee should be empowered, because in some form or the other, they’re using AI in their daily work.
Every project I’ve worked on, there’s always a column or section which talks about the ROI. What’s the value this project is going to bring, whether it’s cost savings or new revenue. Add just one additional step which says, what are the ways this could go wrong? Who is it going to leave behind? What are the vulnerabilities?
In today’s world, there is no thinking of the bad things that can happen. I’m an engineer by trade. Trust me, I like to focus on all the cool things technology can do. It’s not in my DNA to think of, what are the ways this could go wrong? That’s the bare minimum you can do.
Deloitte got a $106 million contract with the U.S. Defense Information Systems Agency in 2020 to build the Pentagon’s AI development platform. Are there Pentagon projects that you’re working on in any capacity? Is “what could go wrong?” a question that is asked in those kinds of environments?
I don’t do client work. What I’m doing is internal transformation, so that team serving a client would reach out to me. In fact, I think I have one in my mailbox about another government client [asking] what are the ways that the team should be thinking about [these issues] and what should we be asking our client. The other one is making sure we are including an element of thinking about the ethical implications, the risks, the ways it could go wrong as part of the project.
I have to wonder if that actually gets translated. Sure, they’re asking you, but do they actually bring that to the customer — especially when the customer is the U.S. government or the Pentagon? What’s the real impact?
I know the conversation is happening. The team is offering scenarios that could go wrong. They can inform the client that we are going to be putting in the guardrails. It’s not a single playbook. It really depends on the exact scenario, the solution that you’re building. So even for me, it becomes very hard to be just very prescriptive. It’s more initiating that conversation, putting that in the back of your mind and proposing that and weaving in as much as you can.
Feature Image Credit: Beena Ammanath wasn’t always gung-ho to talk AI ethics. Then she decided to write a book about it. | Photo: Deloitte
By Kate Kaye
Kate Kaye is an award-winning multimedia reporter digging deep and telling print, digital and audio stories. She covers AI and data for Protocol. Her reporting on AI and tech ethics issues has been published in OneZero, Fast Company, MIT Technology Review, CityLab, Ad Age and Digiday and heard on NPR. Kate is the creator of RedTailMedia.org and is the author of “Campaign ’08: A Turning Point for Digital Media,” a book about how the 2008 presidential campaigns used digital media and data.
Sourced from protocol
By Joe Martin
Many businesses are not taking advantage of technology that can improve marketing results. With marketing automation systems, they can send thoughtful communications at the right time to nurture leads and convert them.
Marketing automation is one of the best ways to run your business. It allows you to:
- Create a definition to send personalized emails to your leads and customers.
- Choose from thousands of templates for the one that works for your business.
- Follow up with your prospects automatically and nurture them until they become customers.
- Manage your entire list of subscribers from one place with ease.
The key is to start using it today and avoid most marketers’ mistakes. Here are 12 tips to get you going.
1. Develop a Marketing Automation Strategy
Marketing automation has many benefits, but you can’t jump in without thinking. Don’t try to automate every part of your business — not all your processes are ripe for automation right away.
Plan ahead. Make sure you have a strategy in place. Ask yourself questions like:
- How will I measure the effectiveness of my marketing automation?
- What metrics will I use to determine success?
- What do I want to achieve with marketing automation?
Take some time and write out your goals and objectives. Then, consider what activities you need to automate, the tools available to you, and how you want to start.
2. Implement Marketing Automation Gradually
Getting started with marketing automation can be intimidating for any company, especially those that are unfamiliar with the technology. While some companies dive into marketing automation at full speed and send out dozens of emails or publish countless social media posts immediately, it can be best to take a slower approach to the process.
Deciding how — and how quickly — to integrate marketing automation depends on your company’s size, available resources, and the type of tools you’re using.
The first step is to understand how you and your colleagues spend your time. Next, identify tasks that take the most time but don’t necessarily move prospects through the sales cycle. Marketing automation can take care of many of these tasks, freeing you up to focus on working with your best prospects and closing deals.
3. Start With Email Marketing
Email marketing is one of the most essential business processes to automate. It’s also one of the easiest to implement, so you should think about starting here. For example, sending emails regularly to your newsletter subscribers can be time-consuming. By automating instead, you could schedule emails to go out in advance and have them sent at the specified time without touching them again.
Another great way to automate your business processes is by setting up autoresponders for new leads and customers. For example, this will let you send automated messages to people who sign up for your mailing list.
4. Streamline Your Social Media Presence
Social media is a highly effective marketing channel, but you have to invest time and effort into it to get results. Luckily, automation can help you streamline many of the everyday tasks that marketers perform on these platforms, letting you work more efficiently and get better results for your efforts.
The key is to focus on the tasks that can be automated so your time can be spent on the ones that require a human touch. For instance:
- Posting Content: You can schedule your posts in advance with almost every social platform. In addition, many offer native scheduling capabilities built right into their interface.
- Monitoring Channels: Marketing automation can help you track key metrics like follower growth over time.
- Link Tracking: Using unique links for each piece of content you create, you can track where your leads come from and how they interact with your site.
There are plenty of social media management tools that let you schedule posts in advance across multiple accounts at once. This means you can spend a few hours at the beginning of the week (or even just one session) creating all of your posts for the next several days or weeks.
5. Build Your List
A list is a powerful tool that can help you reach your audience and drive business growth. Marketing automation can help you grow your list organically without actually being too pushy about it.
Specifically, automation allows you to send emails with the right content and messaging at the right time. In addition, you can schedule emails for times when your audience is most likely to be receptive, allowing them to decide at their own pace.
6. Automate the Right Content for Your Market
The more relevant your content is, the higher the chance people will interact with it. And if they interact with it, it means they’re interested in what you have to say — and that translates into increased leads and conversions.
Marketing automation can track how people engage with your content, including how many times they click on a link, open an email, or fill out a form. You can then use this data to improve future communications.
The data you receive from automated tracking can also form part of your real-time web analytics. This enables you to see which parts of your website perform well and which ones need improvement.
7. Nurture Sales Leads
It’s possible to nurture sales leads with specific content, helping guide prospects through the sales funnel and move them closer to a sale. Marketing automation allows you to use the power of your content, landing pages, and social media to nurture your leads into customers.
Marketing automation is what will allow you to grow your business without adding more people or hours to your sales and marketing teams. And it’s one of the few tools that you can use for both inbound and outbound marketing, so it gives you the flexibility you need.
8. Personalize the Customer Experience
Personalization is a crucial aspect of any customer-facing business. It needs to be a focal point of your customer experience. Consumers are more likely to respond positively to brands with a strong understanding of their needs, preferences, and interests. However, while it is highly desirable in theory, it can also be challenging to execute on your own.
Marketing automation helps you cater to the customer experience by automatically collecting and managing data at scale. This creates better experiences for your customers, making it easier to retain and keep them happy.
9. Follow Up With Customers After Purchases
Retaining customers is one of the most critical factors in growing a sustainable business, and the best way to keep them coming back is to provide excellent service. But, are you following up after they make purchases? If not, you could be missing out on a significant opportunity to grow your business.
It turns out that one of the best ways to do this is through marketing automation. With it, you can set up campaigns that check-in with those who have bought from your business. These post-purchase emails allow you to send personalized messages at precisely the right time to increase revenue and build stronger relationships.
10. Generate Reports on Marketing Campaigns and Website Traffic
Analytics are critical to any company that wants to improve the performance of its marketing and sales teams. One of the best ways to collect data about your customers is with a comprehensive marketing automation platform that can track their activity across all channels.
These platforms can potentially let you automatically generate reports on website traffic, sales leads, and conversions from downloads as well as social media posts. You can also use analytics to track the effectiveness of your sales emails.
11. Don’t Make It Obvious That You’re Using Automation
Automation is an incredibly powerful tool for marketers, but it can also be dangerous and can reduce engagement if you aren’t careful. It’s important to remember that your subscribers are real people with real emotions. You have to speak to them as people would.
If you make it obvious you’re using automation; you run the risk of alienating your subscribers. They might not feel like you’re treating them as individuals, and they’re less likely to engage with your campaigns or buy from you again at that point. On the other hand, personalized subject lines can go a long way toward improving open rates or click-through rates (CTR).
12. Align Automation With Your Overall Business Goals
To achieve maximum return on investment (ROI), you need to align automation with your overall business goals. This means you need to outline what your business does and what it wants to achieve as a whole, then break that down for each department. Once you have, you can start designing your automation strategy to deliver your desired results.
This is not a silver bullet that will solve all of your marketing and sales problems. But when implemented correctly, it will help you streamline processes, generate more leads, and drive more revenue.
Hopefully, we’ve given you some ideas on how you might use marketing automation to your advantage. Avoid the mistake of thinking that it’s a one-size-fits-all solution, because it isn’t. Instead, by looking at what marketing automation can do for you and your needs, you can figure out how to fit it in and make the most of your ROI.
Image Credit: MART PRODUCTION; Pexels; Thank you!
By Joe Martin
VP of Marketing
Sourced from readwrite
Is your brand ready for the metaverse? It can be a complex question — for one thing; the answer depends on what “the metaverse” refers to for you as a business owner. For another, it can depend on the type of business that you run. But, ultimately, brand owners want their companies to be ready for anything — and active growth is often top on the list.
What Is The Metaverse?
The answer to this question depends on who you ask, but a simple definition is “a collection of technologies that allows us to interact in a virtual universe.” Most commonly, those technologies involve augmented or virtual reality and video.
Technically, our ability to interact with AI or with avatar representations of others on social media is an offshoot of what the metaverse is intended to be. The function of the metaverse is to meld the physical and the virtual into one.
As technology advances, experts and innovators predict that we’ll spend more time in this digital universe than we do now — and maybe more time in our virtual world than we do in the real one. With the heightened focus on digital communications and ecommerce during the past two years, this doesn’t come as a surprise. Statistics already show the rise in interest — in 2020, almost 84 million people were using AR/VR regularly in the United States alone, with that number projected to rise to 110 million next year.
There’s endless scope for the imagination with the metaverse concept — not to mention endless scope for business growth. Big companies like Microsoft and Epic have already invested in the metaverse, aiming to stake a claim on their virtual brand. As a result, the market for augmented reality, virtual reality, and mixed reality are projected to reach 300 billion dollars yearly by 2024.
There’s no doubt about it — the metaverse is the next significant shift in the digital world, and it’s best to be ready to take advantage of it!
Here are the top three ways to build your business brand in the new digital movement known as the metaverse.
Unified Branding
Branding is always one of the top keys to building a business. Branding not only identifies who your company is but connects it with core values, products and services on offer, and even your audience.
“Just make sure you have a brand” isn’t really the best advice, though, because inconsistent branding can actually be detrimental to your overall brand. Inconsistency can cost — 90% of consumers expect to have a consistent experience with a brand regardless of the platform, and consistent brands are more likely to have strong visibility, whereas if consumers are less aware of a brand and have less of an impression of it as a whole, they’re less likely to notice the company — and therefore less likely to engage or invest. Neglecting your colour scheme or making a logo design mistake can have serious consequences.
Along with consistency, specific elements can help with solid branding. For example, using a signature colour can boost a brand’s recognizability by up to 80%. That means that customers would be 80% more likely to recognize and interact with your brand in the metaverse if they see your signature colour.
Leitmotifs, or sonic branding, are also valuable to a complete branding package. Some statistics suggest that using audio — think jingles or recurring notes, like with MacDonald’s ba-da-ba-ba-ba — as part of your branding can increase recognition by up to 46%.
In the end, the numbers show the importance of keeping your branding steady as you move into the metaverse with your brand. Unified branding across all platforms, including print, storefront, social media, and website, has been shown to increase revenue by up to 23%. That’s significant growth, especially for a small business.
Virtual Experiences
The metaverse is all about virtual reality, and adding virtual experiences into what you offer your customers is an excellent way to get them ready for the metaverse even now. In addition, you may be able to leverage the rising sales of VR headsets, which is one of the most popular ways to explore the metaverse concept. From just under five million sets sold in the US in 2020, sales are projected to reach more than 14 million yearly in the US by 2024.
But VR headsets aren’t the only way to craft a virtual experience to share with your customers and attract them to your business. Build a digital storefront that mimics your brick-and-mortar store. Create digital tours of your products. Ikea is an excellent big-name pioneer of this, already demonstrating how to use the metaverse concept to grow a particular aspect of a brand. With virtual room design, Ikea customers can see what furniture and features will fit, how the colour scheme will turn out, and how frustrated they may get while figuring out how to put it all together.
Okay, that last part isn’t actually a feature of Ikea’s virtual experience. But it’s only a matter of time.
Video Production
A final and significant way to build your business brand in the metaverse is to incorporate videos in your marketing, website, and social media posts.
The importance of video isn’t anything new. Approximately 85% of marketers already leverage video use as an essential part of their strategy, with 92% of that number labelling it as essential to their work going forward. Video nets the most engagement on social media, especially Instagram. More than 90% of businesses point to social media videos as a key that has garnered new customers and directly caused conversion.
But with the metaverse being focused on virtual/augmented reality and video, video production is even more of a recommendation for brands that are looking to grow. Not just for marketing purposes, either — other popular kinds of videos include how-to or explainer videos and social media videos, both of which puts the focus on entertainment and education.
The more value you can provide, the more likely you will attract new interest. And with new interest, your brand is sure to grow.
To the Metaverse and Beyond
It’s challenging to get a consensus on just what the metaverse means and how far it will take us. But one thing is for sure — we’ve been spending more time in the virtual world than ever in the past few years, and it’s almost guaranteed that the trend will continue.
With essential brand-building methods, your brand will be ready to grow in the metaverse and whatever comes next.
Feature Image Credit: Julien Tromeur; Unsplash
By Zaheer Dodhia
Sourced from readwrite
By Todd Tran
In preparation for the cookieless future, publishers have made strong improvements to their business models. Some are focusing on higher-quality content, while others are collecting first-party data from users who log into their sites. At the same time, advertising and buy-side platforms are attempting to develop solutions for the cookieless world.
While these developments are no doubt encouraging, they’re not a panacea.
If publishers want to ensure they’re set up to succeed by the end of next year, they need to take their fate into their own hands right now – and that means offering users true value.
Two steps to cookieless success
To prepare for the future, some organizations are congregating around unified IDs, which are anonymous IDs that track users across the web.
Personally, I do hope more publishers sign on to the unified ID initiative. In my opinion, it’s a really good solution. But it’s an incredibly hard solution, too.
To be able to achieve workable scale with unified IDs, publishers will need to create a strong value exchange to persuade their users to log in, which can take years. What’s more, unified ID initiatives will need to get to a point where a large volume of publishers have opted in. Not to mention there are several competing solutions that are currently not interoperable.
While I believe unified IDs will have a place in our ecosystem in some form, if you’re relying solely on them to rescue you in the cookieless world, you’re out of luck.
Still, the arrival of the cookieless world is an opportunity for publishers to win business from competitors that aren’t ready. And it just takes two steps to effectively prepare for the inevitable.
1. Provide true value
While having logged-in users isn’t the only way to leverage first-party data, it provides a greater depth of information. But, like unified IDs, it’s an uphill battle to get users to register. To get the sign-ups they desperately need, publishers must develop a content and monetization strategy based on a strong value exchange. Users need a strong reason to register and log in. There are plenty of successful examples of this value exchange already on the market, such as The Independent, which offers subscribers “limited access to premium articles, exclusive newsletters, commenting, and virtual events with our leading journalists.”
2. Account for anonymous users
Since most publishers won’t have enough logged-in users to scale to the same level they had using third-party cookies, they need to use technology that enables them to gain insight into anonymous user behavior, too. Primarily, this includes solutions that anonymously track movements on a publisher’s site, but not anywhere outside of it. Contextual signals and AI or predictive audiences can help, too.
By prioritizing these two steps, publishers are giving advertisers the best possible opportunity to buy sustainable media that delivers real business outcomes.
Prepare for the cookieless future today
As cookie deprecation nears, publishers need to prioritize user identification and targeting. And they need to do so today. Failure to adjust business models ahead of time will almost certainly have an adverse impact on the bottom line.
On the flip side, the faster publishers tackle the problem head-on, the sooner they’ll be in control of their own destinies and gain a competitive advantage. Where there is danger, there is most certainly opportunity.
By Todd Tran
Chief strategy officer, Teads.
Sourced from ad exchanger
By Tomer Hen
How can brands leverage Amazon to grow DTC sales? Let’s dive right into it.
In the past two years, brands like Supply, Beardbrand, and Ranch Road Boots joined the likes of Nike and Ikea to exit Amazon. While this shift in strategy does pique the interest of DTC brands, it is one that removes its presence from the biggest shopping site in the world. This begs the question: How can brands leverage Amazon to grow DTC sales? Let’s dive right into it.
As the largest product search engine in the world, Amazon offers key benefits that work to the seller’s advantage and also appeal to consumers. Specifically, consumers trust the platform. Further, added incentives, such as Amazon’s single-day delivery, an accessible catalogue of diverse products and the brand’s buying power, add to the platform’s assets.
The downside? High fees, huge competition over price and keywords, non-unique product pages, prioritization of sponsored listings and, of course, the uncertainty of having your listings pulled at any time.
While this does make the benefits of switching to a single DTC sales channel shimmer a little brighter, it comes with its own fair share of drawbacks. The complete control over the content, absence of market fees and building long-term customers are offset by the heavy lifting to attract customers, investment in site maintenance and building trust with customers.
Sellers who also sell on DTC channels are afraid that having both sales channels will make Amazon cannibalize their DTC sales and undermine their high-cost DTC marketing efforts. All this, while also paying Amazon with high selling fees.
Here’s how brands can leverage Amazon to grow direct customer relationships:
Strategically perceive Amazon as a doorway for relationships
When a customer discovers and buys your product on Amazon, they are still an Amazon customer. They made the choice to search for a solution to their problem on Amazon. Despite choosing your product, they trusted Amazon first to display the products and brands.
Think of an exhibition or a multi-artist gallery. Brands who wish to grow direct relationships with customers through Amazon perceive it as the “gallery” that provides them with the opportunity to make a great first impression on the consumer. Although, this might not make the desired profits right off the first interaction.
This is just like how an artist would use a gallery to showcase their talent and provide visitors with an experience that would leave them wanting more. This could be deployed in several practical ways we will discuss further. But this mindset is crucial to succeeding in using Amazon to grow direct customer relationships.
Use (and A/B test) product inserts to start direct relationships with Amazon customers
Think of Amazon as a sales driver, not a customer acquisition channel. With no data or opportunity to re-engage with the customer, you mostly make sales on Amazon but do not acquire customers.
Despite strict restrictions on the content of your product inserts, there are several ways you can engage with your customers outside of Amazon without breaking the rules.
The most effective ways to interact with customers are through email and text messaging. Think of an added value you can provide the customer that would prove incentive enough to give you consent to interact with them after their Amazon purchase. For example, register their lifetime warranty, sign up to an exclusive content club or even free products. Direct them to sign up via a special link (QR code or a very short URL works best) to your list.
A/B test the offer to see which one resonates best with your audience and gets you the most engaged customers. From this point on, it’s up to you to deliver great value for their consent and engagement with your brand through this channel.
Pro Tip: This is not just a lead list — these are customers who have received your product, paid money and attention to your brand and now expect to get more value from your brand. The more value you provide, the higher your chances are to convert them into paying customers directly with your brand. It’s all about the “trust meter” that will make them buy directly from you the next time around.
Use Amazon as a review showcase
Being the largest product search engine in the world, consumers may search for your product or brand on Amazon even if they’ve seen your ads outside of Amazon. Consumers trust the Amazon review system. While many sellers are angry about them removing reviews, some are taking advantage of that consumer-trusted system to increase credibility and sales outside of Amazon.
One of the strategies we use for brands we work with is to push their product on Amazon to make as many sales as possible. We push to get as many positive reviews and showcase these reviews outside of Amazon — in ads, email marketing and social media.
We then provide a coupon for consumers to incentivize them to purchase the product directly from the brand’s website. This way, the brand enjoys the credibility of the Amazon platform and acquires customers directly on their site.
Be ready to break even or even lose money on Amazon sales to win long-term on DTC
To drive sales and beat the high competition on the Amazon marketplace, brands must think of Amazon as a marketing channel rather than a profit centre.
When done right, brands can acquire high-quality customers from Amazon who will buy and engage directly with the brand. This spares the high marketplace fees and constant need to adapt to new Amazon regulations and rising competition.
Further, this allows the brand the freedom to showcase its products and brand the way they desire. It also provides brands the chance to learn more about their customers’ preferences and innovate new ways in which they can serve them better.
Given the tremendous value brands get from acquiring direct customers and the high cost of acquiring them outside of Amazon, it’s sometimes worth looking into spending more advertising on Amazon. Alternatively, brands can lower prices on specific products inside Amazon and gain traction on initial sales for the chance to convert more of these sales into long-term customers.
This is similar to the strategy employed by accessory manufacturers when selling in Apple stores. Though sometimes they break even or lose money on the front-end products sold within Apple stores, they gain long-term customers. When done right, this also helps increase brand recognition and word-of-mouth marketing.
If the strategies I presented to you today were beneficial to you, or if you plan to employ them in your sales activities, I’d be excited to hear from you! Or, if you would like to talk more about how brands can use the changing landscape as an opportunity to grow, please feel free to drop me a note!
By Tomer Hen
Sourced from Entrepreneur
Should you email inactive subscribers who haven’t opened or clicked any of your promotional emails in a long time? That seemingly simple question is actually fraught with nuance and complexity. But it’s critical to have a clear answer because maintaining your email engagement levels is probably the biggest factor determining your email deliverability.
Let’s decode that question by discussing five truths about inactive email subscribers.
Truth #1: ‘Inactive Subscriber’ Does Not Have a Standard Industry Definition
Every brand has its own unique definition of what an inactive subscriber is. Brands guide that definition largely by the negative effect that emailing these subscribers has on their deliverability.
However, many brands use a series of terms to describe various degrees of inactivity, almost always for the purposes of treating each of these groups differently. Typically, “inactive” is a point somewhere in the middle of the inactivity spectrum. When a brand seems a subscriber inactive, it often means that the brand emails them less frequently. For example, brands may only send the week’s most important campaign. They may also send a re-engagement campaign series to these subscribers, too.
Prior to a subscriber becoming inactive, many brands define a period where they’re disengaged or lapsed. Often, these subscribers aren’t mailed any less often, but the emails might include targeted subject lines or body copy that’s designed to spur engagement. Sometimes these subscribers actually receive more messages, including triggered re-engagement campaigns, in an attempt to generate engagement before the problem gets worse.
After a subscriber is inactive for a while and re-engagement efforts have been unsuccessful, these subscribers become long-term or chronically inactive. Sometimes they’re colourfully referred to as zombies. Brands generally send these subscribers a re-permission campaign to try to get them to explicitly reaffirm their interest in receiving your emails. If they don’t re-confirm their permission, they’re suppressed from all future mailings.
Truth #2: Lots of Brands Make Exceptions Around Inactives
Businesses are constantly under pressure to expand the reach of their messages by expanding their audience. In a pitch, that often means temporarily changing their rules around inactives.
For example, during the heart of the holiday season around Black Friday and Cyber Monday, retailers risk potential deliverability problems. Why? Because in exchange for boosting short-term sales, they email more campaigns to more inactives. Often that gamble pays off, but not always.
Beyond seasonal exceptions, some brands also make exceptions for individual subscribers. For example, some brands resist suppressing chronically inactive subscribers who are also high-value active customers. They take that risk because of our next truth.
Truth #3: Brands Have Increasingly Flawed Visibility Into Email Engagement
Traditionally, email engagement has been measured in terms of opens and clicks. You needed clicks because some subscribers and some inboxes would block images, making it so that open tracking pixels wouldn’t fire off. Tracking clicks in the absence of opens, of course, is far from a perfect fallback, as only about one in eight opens result in a click.
That gap in email engagement tracking has become a chasm thanks to Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection (MPP), which buries real opens in a haystack of fake opens. The impact of MPP is so high that most large B2C brands will have to fundamentally change how they define active email marketing audiences by overlaying non-email behaviours. But even with those difficulties, there’s no escaping the next truth.
Truth #4: Eventually, Every Brand Stops Emailing Their Inactives
That’s because — individual exceptions aside — if you endlessly email subscribers who aren’t engaging, you’ll eventually suffer escalating levels of blocking and junking by inbox providers. At that point, you compromise your ability to reach your active ones that drive the vast majority of your email marketing engagement and revenue. No one wants to do that.
Now, the exact amount of inactivity a brand tolerates before it has to start suppressing its chronically inactive subscribers varies greatly and depends on many factors. This includes their overall engagement rate, email frequency and list size. But generally, it’s around the six-month mark for high-frequency senders and around the 18-month mark for low-frequency senders.
Even if you’re able to safely stretch beyond 18 months, it’s wise to treat 24 months as a hard cut-off. One reason is because some mailbox providers declare email accounts abandoned after two years of no logins. They convert some of those accounts into recycled spam traps. So, the deliverability dangers ramp up significantly after that point. But there’s another reason to respect the two-year limit that’s related to the final truth.
Truth #5: Respecting Inactivity Is Also About Respecting Permission
It’s incumbent on brands to recognize that if a subscriber stops engaging with their emails, at a certain point it means that they’ve withdrawn permission. That’s why mailbox providers have made engagement so pivotal to their spam filtering algorithms.
Anti-spam laws have also validated that line of reasoning. For example, Canada’s Anti-Spam Law (CASL) and GDPR both stipulate that brands have to stop emailing subscribers and customers after 24 months of inactivity.
In summary, use these five truths about inactive email subscribers to craft a strategy for managing all the nuances of inactivity. This way, your brand can maximize your email marketing opportunities while minimizing your deliverability and legal risks.
Feature Image Credit: Kevin Daugherty
By Chad S. White
Chad S. White is the author of Email Marketing Rules and Head of Research for Oracle Marketing Consulting, a global full-service digital marketing agency inside of Oracle.
Sourced from CMS Wire
Sourced from NEWSY
Social media platforms are making much of their revenue off of advertising. So is there anything you can do to avoid seeing these ads?
If you go on social media these days, the second you get to scrolling you’re bombarded with ads. Then when you go to another site, you see the same ones.
Survey Monkey found that even though ads perform well on social platforms — with nearly half of social media users buying something from those ads — 74% of people think there are just too many.
But, that wasn’t always the case.
The first digital ad was an AT&T banner on hotwired.com, now known as Wired, which made its debut in 1994. For over four months, a whopping 44% of people clicked on it, which is definitely not something we’d see today. It was part of AT&T’s larger “You Will” campaign.
It featured futuristic commercials, where people were doing things like using a GPS or video calling, and their predictions actually came true.
It was something that hadn’t been seen before. People were even sharing the link to the ad with friends.
Facebook, now Meta, got its start in 2004, but it didn’t make its first ad deal until 2006 in a partnership with JP Morgan Chase to advertise credit cards. YouTube soon followed, launching ads on their platform in 2007. They first used transparent ads that covered the bottom of the video.
In 2010, Twitter introduced ads. By then, it was already a lot more common to see ads on social media. Instagram and Pinterest would do the same in 2013 and Snapchat in 2014.
Today, digital ads are nearly impossible to avoid.
According to a 2020 study, Facebook and Instagram show more ads on average than any other major social media platform.
For both apps, more than 20% of the posts users see on their feed each time are ads. For Instagram, that roughly breaks down to an ad every four posts or so.
So, is there anything you can do to stop seeing this influx of ads every time you open up your social media?
Reporting them is definitely not the way to go — one study found users who report ads see about 5% more ads than users who don’t.
But cutting down on some of the time you spend on these apps could help a bit. Instagram actually shows more ads to people who spend more time on their app.
Unfortunately, you can’t just turn them off; a lot of these social media sites rely on ad dollars to keep their business running.
In 2020, 97% of Facebook’s global revenue came from advertising.
A lot of companies prefer advertising on these platforms because it’s cheaper, and it works for them.
In a recent report, market research company Million Insights found the global social media advertising market was valued at $103 billion in 2020 and is expected to see an annual growth rate of 12.4% between 2021 and 2028.
Sourced from NEWSY
By Jeff Steen,
Insights from Myers-Briggs indicate that self-described introverts actually want some in-office time. But the bigger lesson is one of inclusivity.
As masks come down and Covid restrictions ease, offices are opening their doors to employees again — for some as an option, others as a requirement. There’s been a lot of ink spent on the pros and cons of these hybrid work policies, much of which touches on three key considerations: safety, productivity, and employee preference.
That last one is a sticky wicket. The convenience of remote work has been a boon for many employees, happy to ditch long commutes and spend more time with kids and family at home. But there’s another piece of the puzzle: The natural inclinations of introverted employees versus extroverts.
At first blush, you’d expect the extroverts to be clamouring for in-office, in-person work. That’s not what Myers-Briggs discovered in a recent study detailed in The Wall Street Journal. In fact, they found something quite different: 82 percent of extroverted workers would prefer a hybrid work model, with 15 percent actually preferring full-time remote work. Self-described introverts, on the other hand — a whopping 74 percent of them — said they wanted to be in the office at least part-time.
CEOs and people leaders who are navigating our new normal should see a lesson here, namely that employee preferences aren’t as black and white as management would like.
As one introverted employee, quoted in the article, noted: “At the end of the day, I want to be home by myself, but it doesn’t mean you can’t crave other people’s company.” Indeed, as Myers-Briggs’s head of thought leadership, John Hackston, noted, the takeaway here is that new work models shouldn’t be all or none — or even as highly regulated as some managers would want. The control should land with employees.
The study is instructive on another level. Beyond the formal in-office/at-home work policies now being drafted and implemented, companies creating culture from the ground up should understand that inclusivity includes those of varying introverted and extroverted tendencies — and that each employee’s comfort level for engagement can be mapped on a scale, not bucketed into either/or categories.
At the end of the work day, culture — in many ways being reborn as companies reconfigure in our ongoing digital transformation — must be organic, not forced. Much as a CEO or leader may want meaningful relationship-building on an ongoing basis (both internally and with outside communities and partners), the way there cannot be forced. The better tack is to model healthy relationship-building at the top, to live the values that champion team members and community, and to share personal vision for growth and engagement.
Forcing introverts to engage in a specific way or extroverts to back off is a no-go. Leave room for those on the social engagement scale to find their own cultural fit as you model inclusivity in whatever working model best fits with your business needs.
Feature Image Credit: Getty Images
By Jeff Steen,
Content marketer and author@in_the_write
Sourced from Inc.
Stay at home and spend. That might as well have been the unofficial mantra of 2021 as consumers found themselves with record savings to splurge online
New research revealed digital advertisers were a big winner from the phenomenon. US digital ad revenues rose 35% to $189 billion last year as marketers sought out the record number of consumer eyeballs glued to their screens, according to a report by the Interactive Advertising Bureau and PricewaterhouseCoopers. It was the highest growth since 2006.
Three Kings
US e-commerce sales last year totalled $870 billion, more than the GDP of Switzerland and a 14% increase from 2020, according to the Department of Commerce. Besides Amazon, firms with direct B2C digital relationships — such as CVS, DoorDash, and Walmart — are letting advertisers buy ads on their websites or in their apps.
As a result, e-commerce growth has injected massive capital into the digital ad business. The catch is that growth is more heavily concentrated than Minute Maid’s frozen orange juice:
- In 2021, 10 digital platforms and publishers pulled in 78% of digital ad revenues, according to the IAB and PwC.
- While the report doesn’t identify those top firms, analysts at Insider Intelligence predicted Google (26%), Meta (24%), and Amazon (14%) would account for 64% of US digital ad revenue in 2021.
So far, this year’s success may be a tad muted. “The macro winds of uncertainty — in particular around Europe and Russia — continue to swirl,” said Morgan Stanley analyst Brian Nowak, in a note advising that the bank trim estimates for online advertising revenues by 1% to 2% this year.
Can I Sell You a Mattress? Advertising on digital audio, including podcasts and music streaming, was the fastest-growing digital ad category last year, rising 58% to reach $4.9 billion. But it’s just a 2.6% slice of the digital ad market pie.
Tik That: TikTok’s advertisement revenue will triple this year to more than $11 billion, according to Insider Intelligence. That is more than the company’s combined forecasts for Twitter and Snap. If only Twitter had a new board member to shake things up.
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