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Fully automated: Marketo’s Cheryl Chavez on re-targeting, customer journeys and focusing on the right numbers

Through a content partnership between Marketo and StopPress, we look at how technology is being used to automate marketing processes and what this means for industry. In the latest edition of the Fully Automate series, we chat to Marketo’s vice president of product Cheryl Chavez about how automation is making it easier for marketers to roll out and track campaigns.   

On personalised re-marketing

Re-marketing is all about those ads that follow you as you move around the web. We take it a step further and we’ve now introduced personalised re-marketing. Personalisation can be for both anonymous as well as known visitors and it can also include industries. So, if I come from a healthcare industry, an appropriate message can show up for me in that space.

On heightened personalisation

We’re really deep into personalisation. Over the last two years, it has really shifted from campaigns targeted at mass segments to creating a personalised conversation with somebody. Through personalisation, predictative analytics and better segmentation tools, we’re able to really hone in who we are having the conversation with and understanding consumer behaviour. It’s not just about who they are, but also about where they spend and what they’ve done. This really helps to form a picture to have a very relevant conversation with the customer.

On customer journeys

Measurement goes well beyond the click-through rate. It’s about understanding what they do once they click through. We can get a full picture of a customer’s journey and find out where they’re interacting and how many different pieces of content they’re interacting with. From a marketer’s perspective, they’re actually able to give attribution across multiple programmes. Marketers often measure the success of a programme by what the consumer engaged with first and where this led and they will then give full attribution to that piece of content. However, the reality is that it’s not necessarily true that that programme is what actually made that person convert, because if you look at a longer buying cycle then there may be other content pieces, programmes or events that may be touching that person along the way. Being able to see the picture of everything a person has interacted with, and then how you’re attributing success across all those programmes has become extremely important to marketers.

On our over-obsession with numbers

I think there’s an over-obsession with numbers that aren’t useful. For example, I see an obsession with how many people open an email, and that’s not a very useful metric at all. You really need to focus on how people are interacting with your marketing and how your marketing is helping to move people through the funnel – those are the numbers that they should be looking at, because those are the numbers that can help guide where the investment should be going. It’s about looking at the right numbers.

On how brands can benefit from marketing tech

Mobile is an incredibly important channel for the marketer, so we’re continuing to innovate in the work we do there. One example of this would our customer My Fitness Pal, which is currently using mobile to reach its customers through push notifications as well as through email. My Fitness Pal is a healthy lifestyle app that allows you to track your calories. It integrates with some of the popular fitness trackers like Fitbit. 

It’s essentially a tool that lets you know how your day is going from a calorie perspective. So, they reach their audience through email to invite them back in or through push notifications that congratulate them. They have an interesting multi-channel mix to keep their users engaged and keep them coming back to the app. Their ultimate goal is to keep people in the app in the hopes that you’ll upgrade at a later stage to one of their paid options.

On educating marketers

We look at ourselves as the thought leaders in this space in terms of helping marketers understand what they should be looking at. There are all kinds of new technologies that we will be looking at to help give marketers information on what is and isn’t working. It’s about guiding marketers to look at the right set of numbers.

On the future

We’re working on some exciting things at the moment around human and predictive analytics. Human analytics refers to continuing to enhance analytics and providing the right set of analytics to marketers. There are two sides to this. The one is helping the marketer to understand what’s going well and what’s not going well, enabling them to have a broader picture across all their marketing programmes—which can be hard sometimes for a marketer in a busy world. The second piece is continuing predicative content to further the personalisation message. So how do we recommend the right set of content for an email or for an ad or for whatever it might be, using predictive algorithms to make sure we’ve got the right piece of content at the right time for that person.

  • Click here to read more stories written as part of the content partnership between Marketo and StopPress. 

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