Building and exploiting your GDPR-compliant data

Building and exploiting your GDPR-compliant data is often one of the weak points of SMEs. Indeed, SMEs frequently do not have an updated database to create marketing campaigns. This is what we are going to look at in this post. The presentation originally comes from a webinar in Spanish by the Valencian Chamber of Commerce. I hope you will find its translation helpful.

Building and exploiting data

In this blog post, we will go through the following agenda points:

  • Key aspects
  • GDPR
  • How to build a database
  • How to exploit a database with campaign examples
  • Programmes: CRM, email, and automation.

1. Key Aspects Building and exploiting data: key aspects

2. General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)

As you probably know, you can’t store data nor use data that is unnecessary for the purpose of your campaign. For example, if you are a children’s clothes shop, you will need to target parents who have children and their children’s ages. You should only ask for these two pieces of information, and nothing more.

If you would like to know a bit more about data privacy law rules in the EU, UK, and the USA, I recommend you to read this blog.

Privacy policy

You must communicate your privacy policy to your customers, which should be the answers to the questions below:

  • Which information to collect about your clients and users
  • Which people have access to the information
  • Who is responsible for the data processing
  • The period during which you are going to store data and the users’ possibility to exercise the ARCO rights (Access, Rectification, Cancellation, and Opposition).

Building and exploiting data: privacy policy

A) Example of a promotion registration form

Building and exploiting data: Promotion registration form

B) Plugin GDPR

Building and exploiting data: GDPR plugin for WordPress

3. How to build a database

Building a database - how to build it

A) IN-PERSON RAFFLE TO GET A DATA BITE

Building a database: raffle

B) GOOGLE FORMS

You can use Google Forms to create questionnaires. Google Forms will create a link to the form, which can be used for webinars and newsletters.

Building a database: Google Forms

C) easy promos

Building a database: easy promos

D) FACEBOOK PROSPECTS REGISTRATION FORM

The purpose of social media advertising is to generate revenue through selling your products and getting prospects to sign up for your newsletter. To entice them to do so, it is recommended to offer discounts and a have call-to-action button such as ‘sign up’.

Building a database: Facebook Ad

 

E) WEB REGISTRATION FORMS

Building a database: web registration forms

F) WhatsApp

Building a database: whatsapp

4. How to exploit a database with campaign examples

All marketing campaigns must be measurable. For example, when it comes to email campaigns, you should check the opening rate of emails.

A) WhatsApp CAMPAIGNS

Mailing-list in WhatsApp: Only the contacts that have your phone number saved in their contacts will receive your broadcast messages.

B) SMS CAMPAIGNS

Exploiting a database: Bulk SMS service

C) SOCIAL MEDIA AD CAMPAIGNS

Exploiting a database: Facebook campaign ad manager

C) EMAIL CAMPAIGNS

Exploiting a database: mailchimp Exploiting a database: mailchimp step 1 Exploiting a database: mailchimp step 2 Exploiting a database: mailchimp step 3 Exploiting a database: mailchimp step 4 Exploiting a database: mailchimp step 5

5. CRM PROGRAMMES –  AUTOMATION

The automation purpose is to retrieve purchases, lost shopping carts.

a) LOYALTY CARD

CRM Automation: Loyalty Card

B) CRM -ERP

CRM ERP Automation: Odoo

C) AUTOMATION PROCESS

Automation process step 1 Automation process step 2

D) AUTOMATION SOFTWARE

Automation software: Active Campaign

Automation software: Hubspot

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How to digitalise your market research in 2020-2021?

The company Up Biz – Commercial Agitated Pack gives you commercial training on how to digitalise your market research in 2020-2021.

In this webinar, they  talk about :

  • What is market research?
  • What’s the meaning of it?
  • Which tools can you use?

Although door-to-door selling still works, depending on what you do, what you sell, and who you are visiting. However, in times of the corona crisis, digital market research has the upper-hand.

1- DIGITAL MARKET RESEARCH

When we talk about digital market research, we mean :

Digital market research: Inbound and Outbound Marketing

a) INBOUND MARKETING (ENTRANT)

Digital Marketing, also called Inbound Marketing (in French: prospection entrante).

Inbound marketing is how your leads (French : prospects) know you and how you draw them to you to get contact opportunities.

The basis for marketing is your website, which you will connect to Google. Google is the motorway, where everyone researches information. Your website must be well indexed on Google to allow good visibility but also be connected to the existing social networks (eg LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram).

In Marketing, we use 3 foundations :

  • SEO : Search Engine Optimisation (in French: référencement naturel). This is how you will write relevant web content to be ranked on Google when someone is looking for your company.
  • SEA : Search Engine Ads (in French: référencement payant). It refers to Google ads on the Internet. When people will look for you, you will be in the first results shown called “ad”. This allows you to be visible.

Both SEO and SEA are important. Be careful, however, one takes longer to get results than the other one. SEO takes between 6 and 12 months to be effective by following a real content strategy.

SEA is much quicker. In general, you pay Google and you are visible within the next following days. So, it allows you to generate quickly website traffic and convert this traffic into leads.

Both are complementary. SEO is a long-term time investment but doesn’t cost anything, whereas SEA works in the short-term since once you stop paying Google, it’s finished for you. It is recommended to mix both.

  • SMO : Social Media Optimisation –(in French : Optimisation des Réseaux Sociaux) allows you to create a community to get your website known what you sell (products or services), in order to generate traffic to your website, convert it into leads or even customers.

Contrarily to what some digital agencies will tell you, the Inbound marketing isn’t a one-solution-fits-all-situations. Outbound marketing (in French : prospection sortante) is still necessary. You will have to market research hard. Outbound marketing still has a big weight.

B) OUTBOUND MARKETING (SORTANT)

When one talks about outbound marketing (in French: prospection sortante), they mean contacting leads either by phone or by email. Although these are more traditional/classic market research techniques, if you do not carry them out, you will cut yourself out of a big market research part. Outbound marketing allows you to connect straight away what you sell to your target market. Furthermore, it’s not because it’s a traditional market research technique, that you will do it the old-fashioned way. Today, we use many digital products to create qualitative research. It is on this that I’m going to delve into and introduce you to different digital products I use.

Note as well that in 2019, 80% of companies in France achieved more than 80 % of their turnover thanks to outbound marketing.

2- GOAL: CREATION OF QUALITY DATABASE

You must create a good database that stands up.

Digital market research: Sales Navigator and Phantom Buster

You can do in-depth research on your ideal client profiles with LinkedIn Sales Navigator. Sales Navigator is a paying tool but it does better-targeted research than LinkedIn premium. LinkedIn Premium doesn’t allow a huge amount of data scraping. You can use filters such as :

  • Job position
  • Job field
  • Years of experience
  • Turnover
  • Workforce
  • Comments/Post shares…

You can also scrape data from LinkedIn and automate this process through Phantom Buster.

Phantom Buster will pretend to be You with your LinkedIn profile. To do this, you will need to copy and paste the link to your Sales Navigator/LinkedIn research. It will scrape data from each lead profile and convert it into an Excel spreadsheet table.

Digital market research: Phantom Buster tool case example

Then, you can also use other tools to find the phone numbers and email addresses of your leads. There are many options. Zoho is a free tool, but the downside is that it’s not interacting with any other tools.

Other tools they recommend you use:

  • Dropcontact
  • Hunter.

Digital market research: Dropcontact and HunterThese tools allow you to find the information you require and qualify your prospects while respecting the current General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

There is also ProspectIn, but you can’t export the data. Everything is integrated into the tool.

Anyway, what you need to remember is that these tools allow you to sort out market research information.

3- DATABASE CONSOLIDATION AND PROCESSING

Once you have this data, you will need to populate it in a tool, that will allow you to capitalise on the information you just gathered.

The unavoidable tool to do that is the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) database. Without a CRM, a salesperson is nothing today! The CRM will allow you to keep in touch with your clients and keep track of all actions done or required. In other terms, it will allow you to follow-up with your leads or clients.

Digital market research: HubSpot and Pipedrive

You have several options for CRM software like:

  • HubSpot (free of charge)
  • Pipedrive (€12 per month).

In your CRM tool, you can add tasks such as dates for follow-up calls. You can also add details on the follow-up call results such as:

  • Not interested in – do not call back.
  • Follow-up call in X days…

If a lead answers you that they are not interested in, you can just answer; ‘I take into account…I am available…’. Most importantly, do not re-contact someone who replied they didn’t want to hear back from you.

You can also use Buffer to schedule your social media post, which will also allow you to do a follow-up.

Email campaign: Lemlist

Afraid of cold calling? And why not start by cold emailing? Before start sending any emails, of course, do your research to find out the best approach to use to tailor your emails to your leads. For your research, you need to answer questions such as :

  • What are the issues your leads are facing?
  • Why?
  • Is it relevant to exchange on the topic? (it is also a question you can ask your lead)
  • What do they post, talk about?

For cold emailing, they recommend you to use Lemlist, in order to create campaigns.

Lemlist will tell you the success of your campaign by giving you data like :

  • Open rate
  • Answers
  • Clicks
  • Bouncebacks…

Lemlist tool case example

You can also add your email pictures.

Before starting reaching out, make sure to find out what problems your target market is facing, in order to customise better your campaign. Then, schedule on a monthly basis follow-up calls with a targeted lead list. If there are customers that aren’t online in your target market, you can connect with them through business networks and associations.

Finally, they recommend you to dedicate 1 to 2 hours to market research every day and count roughly €100-160 per month for all comprehensive market research tools, as these will replace a good few of your car trips to visit customers.

If you wish to get in touch with the UP BIZ, you can contact David Julien by email at david.julien@upbiz.fr. He is based in Rouen, Normandy in France.

Digital Trends 2019 – Data is key to creating greater customer experiences

This presentation from Sean Donnelly and Jamie Brighton will focus on the most significant digital trends in 2019 that are driving marketing and customer experience strategy.

Digital Trends 2019 – Data is the key to creating greater customer experiences

Hi, my name is Sean Donnelly. I’m a consultant and senior analyst at e-consultancy, where independent providers of research train in best practices. I am here to introduce you to a topic that is on the minds of all marketers.

Presently, I am going to talk to you about technology and marketing trends.

We have been working very closely with Adobe to reach out to the marketing community, in order to:

  • ask them what kind of things they identify as opportunities,
  • what they see as challenges and so on.

This gives us a very unique perspective to identify the operational reality in terms of marketers’ findings.

So, we have done a survey of 12 500 marketers, techies, and so on. It’s actually the largest global survey of its kind. We also accompany that with a series of qualitative interviews to draw additional insights.

Agenda:

  • State of customer experience strategy

  • Importance of customer data

  • Control of customer data: compliance and walled gardens

  • State of Artificial Intelligence (AI)

PRESENTATION N°1: Sean Donnelly

Just for clarification, we will define customer experience as being the sum of all the interactions a customer has with a brand, and their emotional reactions to those interactions.

1. The accelerated loyalty journey

Importantly, first-class personalised customer experience is really important for sustainability.

So, marketers might remember the 4 ‘P’s: Product, Price, Place, and Promotion. But this old model changed. Somewhere along the lines, marketing became very much just about promotion. Promotion isn’t good enough. We need to think about the wider customer experience journey across Google, Social Media…

the accelerated loyalty journey

Clearly, this really expands the role of marketing beyond driving intention to purchase. If you can get a customer to advocate for your brand online, you may be able to deliver him to this loyalty loop for ongoing relations with you.

Now, customer service is increasingly focused and accompanied by technology and data.

Therefore, evaluate if your marketing technology infrastructure is fit for purpose. The technology platform is viewed as the engine room that drives customer experiences and marketing activities. Whereas, the data is the oil that lubricates and empowers this increasingly sophisticated machinery.

2. Data is the new everything

Likewise, a big part of marketing is the ability to understand and utilise data. As such, data skills are becoming increasingly integral. Marketing continues to transition from being an analogue activity to a digital activity with real-time data analysis.

a) Data and measurement

We can see that data serves 3 primary functions:

  • Customer insight
  • Tactic evaluation
  • Demonstrate the value of marketing activities.

We have asked marketers to draw out what they are interested in and what they see as important.

b) The most exciting opportunities in 2019

  • Data-driven marketing that focuses on the individual
  • Optimising the customer experience
  • Creating compelling content for digital experiences.

3. Customer journey management holds the key to personalisation

a) Top digital priorities in 2019

Top digital trends 2019

There are 4 top priorities which are as follow:

  • Customer Journey Management: a key requirement for data-informed customer experiences
  • Targeting and Personalisation: right message, right place, right time
  • Content Marketing: continuing importance of creativity and design
  • Customer Data Management (CMS): convert data into knowledge.

Now, achieving all this requires a highly integrated technology stack. So, the key is to have a more unified approach to marketing channels.

Example: Unilever increases investment in marketers as it shifts from ‘big ad campaigns’ to smaller real-time campaigns. This results in the:

  • creation of digital hubs in about 20 countries.
  • recruitment of marketers with data capabilities
  • investment in cloud-based tools, in order to be able to centralise and surface data from more than 150 different data points.

Unilever example

3. DATA COMPLIANCE AND WALLED GARDENS

data compilation and walled gardens

As you can imagine, data management and data control are becoming more and more intertwined. So, here are some factors to consider:

  • Security: marketers and developers need to be responsible for the users’ data security
  • Privacy: GDPR is the beginning of an era where marketers need to be very careful about how they use customer data
  • Integration: continued efforts to centralise online and offline touchpoints (by marrying transactional data, sentiment data, social media data)
  • Machine Learning: turning data into insights (google analytics) and personalising customer experience.

Please let me provide you with a few examples:

Lloyds bank identified GDPR as an opportunity to educate its email subscribers about the parameters and requirements around GDPR. They did this through an email campaign and helpful pages using laymen’s language under their website. Following this re-direct of emails (bank statements and so on), customers have been very appreciative of this action. This is a kind of boost of customer trust and loyalty.

L’Occitane did research into the abandoned shopping cart on their site. Essentially, they fired up a layer onto the screen. This led to an increase of 2.65 % of the conversion rate per visitor. It had a major impact on the bottom line.

Lloyd's bank revenue uplift

4. Top marketing challenges

Yet, what are the top marketing challenges organisations face?

Top marketing challenges in 2019

Here are the main identified challenges:

  • Lack of internal resources
  • Inconsistent experiences throughout the customer lifecycle
  • Difficulty in tracking marketing effectiveness and media/ad spend
  • Difficulty getting a holistic view of customers across all interactions.

Ultimately, marketers need to think about the flow of information through the entire partner ecosystem.

Withal, interviewees for this report identified issues with walled gardens, principally Facebook and Google. Marketers must determine whether the long-term commercial objectives are best served by operating in these closed platforms. Inarguably, these platforms offer only a bridged insight into customer data. This theme brought increased attention to data retention of sharing practices of Facebook and Google.

5. Increased uptake of Artificial Intelligence (AI)

We can review on a broad spectrum and split it into two classifications:

  • Human-styled artificial intelligence
  • Task-oriented artificial intelligence.

How is the Artificial Intelligence (AI) being applied?

It’s been mostly used to analyse data. That’s because humans can’t analyse large amounts of data. Inasmuch as AI can mine huge amount of structured and unstructured data generated by campaigns and user interactions. This freezes up time for marketers to deliver higher value tasks.

In terms of analysing data, AI and marketing can be used to:

  • create unique customer profiles (personalisation)
  • provide relevant experiences such as delivering dynamic website content, based on personal behavioural data
  • generate content well to increase engagement rates
  • optimise intelligent digital advertising, based on buying history and interactions.

In summary, I would like to leave a few with the following recommendations:

  • Educate your organisation about the potential of Artificial Intelligence and machine learning
  • Strive for integrated customer experience, marketing technology and advertising technology
  • Activate customer data on prescriptive and predictive meaningful analytics insights. This requires the right tools to compile first, second and third-party data, in order to enable that timely and personalised interactions. This can also improve attribution capabilities as well as leading to a better optimisation of the media mix.
  • Cherish your data as a marketing asset to the wider business. Be wary of walled gardens. By combining data from various touchpoints, you can create that personalised experience and a ‘single customer view’. Data must be fully harnessed and companies need to be able to access it without restrictions.
  • Keep pushing the customer-first agenda within your organization. It might also mean educating your customer facing colleagues about their own value proposition. You need to help them understand their role in the customer experience strategy, by empowering them to make decisions.

And now, I’m handing back over to Jamie Brighton.

PRESENTATION N°2: JAMIE BRIGHTON

At this point, we’d like to think what you can take advantage of in the digital trends. Now, I highlighted at the start of the presentation that we’ve seen things like Social Media Management, Video Advertising coming up as focuses.

1. Platform for Personalisation

a) 3 areas of focus for 2019

Digital Trends 2019 – Data is the key to creating greater customer experiences

Needless to say, Personalisation has come out as a key area of digital focus for marketers over the last 9 years of consultancy research.

However, I think it’s probably no surprise to see that Personalisation is again part of 2019’s priorities.  ‘Digital Transformation’, ‘Personalisation’ and ‘Having the right platform in place’ are key areas I’d like to concentrate on.

Let me give you an example. Harvard Business Review shows us that people organisations focusing on Personalisation have successfully:

  • reduced costs by 50%
  • increased revenues by up to 15%
  • improved their marketing capabilities overall within the business.

Personalisation marketing strategy

Often, marketers don’t know where to start due to lack of knowledge. Unfortunately, this is holding organisations back.

However, Personalisation really needs to start with people and process and technology. I’m stating the obvious but it’s really important to remember.

We, at Adobe, believe that there are 3 fundamental pillars to getting ‘Personalisation’ right.

b) 3 Key building blocks to success

building blocks to success

  • Data and Audiences: you need a data platform to understand who your customers are. Then, you need to segment those audiences and communicate with them via your Personalisation strategy.
  • Content: Once you understand your audience, you obviously need to communicate with them and give them the right content. So, having content and data together in the same platform becomes critical.
  • Strategy: When you have those things together, you’ll need to know:
    • where to personalise
    • how to personalise
    • what’s the right time within the customer lifecycle to put a message in front of your customers or prospects.

So, I’d like to spend a bit of time thinking about these key requirements.

2. Key requirements

a) Content Foundation

Content Foundation

Any platforms that you invest in should enable you and your teams to offer content in an intuitive way. The interface/environment should make sense to them to use and re-use core components out of the box (your sites, your apps, your general interfaces).

This means you can get time to add value, instead of investing in re-building, or re-inventing the wheel. Also, content you produce in your team’s build must not be locked up in the Content Management System (CMS) or HTML system (that can only be rendered in a web page).

Intuitive authoring, Reusable content, Content anywhere

We need to be able to:

  • syndicate content, whether it’s to affiliates’ social sites
  • understand how that content is going to be displayed
  • make sure it complies with all the guidelines for your brand
  • get content out to whatever channel/device your customers use to engage with you.

b) Insights

Insights

Insight manifests itself in a number of ways. Fundamentally, we should be able to understand how that content is being consumed. This will allow people who are building that content, to have all the data they need. This will result in informed and intelligent decisions about the next iteration of that content or the next campaign that they want to set up.

Besides, this also means that they need to be able to visualise where customers/prospects are engaging with that content through things like Heatmaps, Clickactivity maps.

Moreover, if you have already the data in a platform like this, you should start leveraging Artificial Intelligence, in order to detect abnormalities in the data.

This means alerting you to how customer behaviour is changing, in order to present potential opportunities.

This might be:

  • spiking customers’ visits
  • dropping conversation rates.

Then, you can adjust in real-time the experience for your customers, to make sure you are not missing out.

c) Personalisation

Personalisation

So, it should be very straightforward for you to create a page and an element of content.

Yet, within a couple of clicks, test that content and work out whether it resonates better with different segments of your audience.

Or even, use AI through Adobe Sensei to target individual customers within your customer base with the most relevant experience within their customer journey.

3. Unlocking the value in data

a) Move faster and smarter with an integrated DMP and Analytics

Well, I’d like to get a little bit tactical here. Often, organisations want to marry together their analytics platform with their Data Management Platform (DMP).

Unlocking the value in data: move faster and smarter with an integrated DMP and Analytics

b) How it works

This effectively means bringing together:

  • the first-party data (your owned customers’ data)
  • analytics tool
  • with the second and third-party data (available from the Customer/Data Management System).

As a result, you can get a little grainier about the reports/segmentation you are running on your customers.

How it works

c) Quantify value of 2nd and 3rd-party data insights

Next, let me give you a few examples on how it’s going to help you. Having these two platforms/pieces technology together means you can have a much better understanding about who your customers are and how they are behaving.

Quantify value of 2nd and 3rd-party data insights

Increasingly, organisations invest in second-party data, where there is a trusted relationship between the two brands and an overlapping of their customer base. They share the customer profiles within their organisations. Thus, they can provide a better experience for the customer in the long run, through better targeting of content and advertising.

That also means a better understanding of how your campaigns are performing.

d) Calculate media campaign effectiveness

It also enables to think about how we can use information from on-site behaviour to be more targeted off-site. These first, second and third-party data enable the use of online customer data and information, to drive more advanced targeting of off-site advertising. By using that information and surfacing it in the DMP, we can make more informed decisions about what advertising to serve to customers or prospects, based on that site’s behaviour.

Calculate media campaign effectiveness

Another idea is to consolidate online and offline data.

e) Consolidate reporting across online and offline assets

Through analytics platforms, there is the ability to import purchase history and behaviour in physical points of retail, for example. By tying these together, we can understand the impact of digital behaviour, digital experience on the in-store or offline experience, and vice-versa.

I’ll just call out an example here. A travel company is able to:

  • overlay destination preferences with purchase behaviour
  • see which audiences have a high propensity to book with this particular travel organisation.

That can be used to re-target individuals off-site. It could be somebody who has abandoned half-way through the booking process. That information can be used to do a much more targeted serve. This will get them to come back later and complete that transaction on the site.

Consolidate reporting across online and offline assets

f) Audience Analytics: Real World Success

Consequently, organisations are starting to take advantage of this type of capability.

Audience Analytics: Real World Success

4. How we can win a digital transformation?

McKenzie’s research shows they are some challenges to getting digital transformation right.

What is blocking your digital transformation?

The organisation fails when it is not making sure that organisational culture is actually on-board for the change they are trying to bring about.

a)The Adobe digital marketing capability maturity model

First and foremost, we, Adobe, believe that one of the best way to understand this, are to:

  • benchmark your own organisation and its competition
  • understand where you fit within a maturity scale.

The Adobe digital marketing capability maturity model

The Adobe digital marketing capability maturity model (continues)

b) Prioritise areas of improvement with your stakeholders

Indeed, Adobe can help you focus on recommended actions for each pillar and dimension via a workshop with an Adobe representative.

Any output of the process is a very detailed report, which shows you:

  • your current score for each of those 7 dimensions
  • any gaps between where you are and where you would like to be.
  • a set of recommendations on how to bridge that gap
  • where you can have the biggest impact with the most effective spend.

Prioritise areas of improvement with your stakeholders

c) Re-evaluate priorities based on resources, complexity and reward size

Furthemore, you can also apply a standard cost/benefit analysis to understand where are the gaps compared with how the spend is going to be. This wil make a difference to your particular business.

Re-evaluate priorities based on resources, complexity and reward size

Additionally, that helps with building a case within your organisation.

d) Build the case beyond Return On Investment (ROI) and cost-saving

Build the case beyond Return On Investment (ROI) and cost-saving

So, to wrap up, a maturity assessment will give you an understanding of where your strengths and weaknesses are. They identify as well the key opportunities you can embrace when it comes to people processing technology.

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