The future of digital marketing is bright. The global retail brand's consumer has evolved with the advent of new technology and channels, and these channels demand a new type of marketer. With more marketing metrics and tactics than ever before, modern marketers must look at the current trends to prepare their strategies for the future.
- Purchase Journeys Evolution: In the future, the retail customer's purchase journey will likely put more stock in online reviews and social recommendations. Just take a look at the current state of a customer lifecycle to get an idea of how the purchase process...
There’s no question about it:
email is the foundation of successful B2B marketing strategies.
It was
no suprise to us that Australians are leading the world in their
adoption of technology, and in partiular how they connect with
brands on mobile devices. The unparalleled adoption of smartphones
in Australia (49% of us own one!) means that today’s always-on,
hyper-connected consumer is placing demands on marketers that can
often seem bewildering. What was once seen as the "multi-channel
opportunity" is now a "cross-channel imperative" as our audiences
continue to adopt technology that opens up an increasing array of
brand engagement mechanisms.
There’s
no doubt that today’s consumers are mobile. They’re constantly
on-the-go, sending and receiving communications of all types, and
they’ve come to expect that information be (literally) in-hand at
all times. Consumers are no longer sitting at their computers
searching for information—instead, they expect information to be
available all around them. At the same time, they expect that
information to be relevant to their lives.
This
week I encountered something that I didn't think was possible: I
met someone who does not own a mobile phone. You can pick your jaw
up off the floor now. 
Email is
the foundation of online communication—after all, 94% of online
consumers are subscribers. When we look holistically at purchase
behaviors as they relate to marketing channels, we see that 45% of
German consumers have made a purchase as a direct result of a
marketing message they received via email. This statistic alone may
be enough to convince you of the importance of using email to drive
engagement and conversion. When analyzing the success of this
channel, however, there are a number of other factors to
consider.
Each Thursday
at 11am EST, marketers from around the world join the ExactTarget
user community on Twitter for a conversation about trends and
campaign ideas across the interactive marketing industry. We
call the virtual coffee chat the Nexus Café.
Are
you using the “Triangle Offense” of email, mobile and social media
as part of your B2B tactical program? If not, perhaps it’s time to
reboot your B2B marketing strategy.
Each
week, marketers from around the world join the 
Websites have evolved so much since the inception of
the World Wide Web. I recall first receiving a book on HTML for my
13th birthday and being incredibly excited to begin making my first
Web pages. (Note: for those asking why I was coding HTML at age 13,
I often ask myself the same question.) Back then, you had your
website published on something like Geocities, Angelfire, or some
other free provider who was willing to take on the expense of
hosting while displaying horrific ads to monetise their business
model. Only if you were serious did you have a domain!
