‘Mediocre marketers think in terms of campaigns. Great marketers think in terms of Growth Frameworks’
Do you know who said this? Well, the answer is at the very end of this blog.
If you’re already on to growth frameworks, you can give yourself a pat on the back and skip straight to the bottom to find out who said this… and call it a day.
But, if you’re not, I say you stay with me and we pause & reflect on this for a moment. Could this quote be true about you even a little bit? – Have you ever wondered if your marketing was getting synonymous with just ‘campaigns’?
Then read on.
I’m talking here about things that enable us digital marketers RISE from this mediocrity & leave it behind… towards a sharp ROI-driven approach. It is the only way to truly qualify as a digital marketer in practice. This is an industry standard and even if you think that you’re a little late to the party, it’s fine so long as you’re here all dressed up and ready to participate.
Because, Smartech is that platform which is ready to let you show off your particular talents & skills as a modern marketer; do your own dance. Tell your story in your own special way. Our Updates for the current quarter are fast becoming operational and here’s how you can make use of each one of these:
1) More firepower to your App Push Notifications with Content & Channel Optimisation: As a mobile or app marketer, it seriously is time you warmed up to App Push Notifications (APNs). APNs are hailed as a hero feature in today’s increasingly mobile marketing world and for good reasons.
- Now you can run spilt A/B tests on your App Push Notifications:
Let’s first talk about Split A/B testing on email campaigns for clarity: Here you craft two emails where one of the elements – either subject line or body text or testimonials – is different. So, email campaigns A and B differ only with respect to one particular element.
Not so with APN. Here, you have complete freedom to optimise your content: text, pictures, format, whatever. And all at the same time.
Cool, right? That’s what I thought.
Try it. You’ll love it. So will your audience. And, you’ll be able to find out which one was more effective for what kind of message. It’s an insight you can use for all kinds of campaigns in the future.
In the course of the split A/B campaign, you can program the system to wait for a specific time period, for instance 1 to 3 days in a campaign on discount offers. After 3 days, the system declares the winner – the campaign that is more successful with your target audience based on the metrics obtained.
Then, going by the declaration you have already given, the system automatically actions this ‘winner’ on the rest of your Target audience for even greater success.
Simple? Yes. No more getting confused or spending lengths of time over campaign success metrics. It’s all on your dashboard.
- Split campaign testing for APNs: Split campaign is different from Split A/B testing in one crucial way: The Split A/B Test will start with 3 campaigns and will identify a winner along the way, which will then be used for further engagement. The Split campaign allows you to create up to three distinct campaigns and there is no such thing as a winner here. You as a marketer track the performance in the dashboard.
It also helps you test deliverability. Let’s take a small example of a campaign you wish to carry out during the festive season when there is a total clutter of marketing messages all around. As a marketer, you want to know if your message should include emojis or not because at times when APNs exceed 3MB size, their deliverability is seriously hit. Split campaign will test this out for you. Deliverability has a direct impact on performance.
While running this test, you can also further step up your understanding of the effectiveness of the channel by adding a conversion tracking parameter to get insights on the ROI.
While we are here talking engagement, you will surely find someone who’ll tell you that email open rates and page views and such are *just* vanity metrics with no direct impact on revenue. If you do, do read:
Vanity metrics, really?!: A word on those who dismiss email open rates and page views and such as vanity metrics, a term given by the lean startup guru Eric Ries, to distinguish metrics that do not directly correlate to revenue: Yes, Ries is right and it’s important to keep your eye on active users, actual conversions but only looking at these makes you blind to an entire ecosystem of registered users, visitors, etc. who may one day become your users.
You can’t ignore them. Right? So vanity or not, anyone who’s paying attention to your content is worth your attention. You never know when you might get the right hook to convert them. Instead, take these vanity metrics for a general assessment of your scope and try converting into actionable metrics such as engagement rate, bounce rate, Click-Through Rates, active product users and such.
2) Track your conversions through SMS & APNs: There is no better way to delight an ROI-driven modern marketer than conversion tracking. It helps you track where exactly your conversions are coming from: did your user buy your product after you triggered an SMS or did s/he decide to complete the purchase upon your cart abandonment push notification? It’s all in there.
Now, Smartech’s conversion tracker helps you attribute your conversions to the right channel so as to help you understand exactly how effective a particular channel is for you with regard to these solid actionable metrics. Besides, as a digital marketer, it is important for you to justify your Return on Advertising Spend (ROAS) from time to time. Here too, the conversion tracker comes in handy.
After all, says Amrita Sahasrabudhe, VP Marketing at FastMed, “Take a risk and keep testing because what works today won’t work tomorrow and what worked yesterday may work again.”
And, this is conversion tracking with zero manual intervention, which means: calculating ROI in real time.
3) Run Control Group Tests to know if In-app messages are the right channel for you:
“Why do you need to use this channel? Have you run a feasibility test or something” – I’m sure you get asked this question from time to time. Next time, tell them yes. That something is called running control group tests.
Smartech now allows you to perform control group testing on in-app messages. You just pick a certain percentage of your users at random – this becomes your control group – and define a common goal for the campaign. You send the communication to the users, excepting the control group. And then see how this impacts your revenue.
Randomisation means picking a group without any prejudice whatsoever and this is important to demonstrate the usefulness of a particular channel, in this case in-app messages. So before you try out any particularly elaborate campaign, you’d probably like to start with gauging if the channel will work out for you at all.
These next two features, Engineers are gonna love them.
4) Auto discovery of events: Because this feature makes using Smartech way more efficient than before. Let’s see how:
Now no need to create any activity on Smartech panel to get activity ID before tracking it. Just pass on the activity with payload parameters and we will recognize if it is the new activity or an old one and update the data accordingly.
What does this mean? Less efforts, maximum output. Enough said, right?
But there’s more: You started passing an activity and want to add more payload parameters, just pass on and we will detect it seamlessly. You discovered a new activity that could be tracked to make your campaigns efficient, just pass it without asking your developer to come on the Smartech panel and creating that activity.
5) Array in Payload: The array helps you handle multiple items in one dispatch call. This was not possible earlier, which led to loss of data.
What’s a dispatch call? – It’s the call made by one API (Websites, apps, etc) to another in order to exchange information, which refers to your payload.
So what’s a payload? Payload is the actual data or information that is encapsulated in some type of a frame such as internet protocols.
If as a user you have placed 3 items in your cart, the system will need to make only 1 dispatch call which will capture the entire payload for all three products rather than using 3 different dispatch calls under the same user ID, like it used to happen until now.
As a marketer, this data can help you to:
Personalise your content with these 3 products – make more relevant recommendations
Segment the users based on these product purchased – Understand the end user better
Other areas where this can be used are –
- Add multiple songs in playlist
- Book multiple tickets in same order
- Download multiple videos/songs/pdfs
Which, brings me back to who said: ‘Mediocre marketers think in terms of campaigns. Great marketers think in terms of Growth Frameworks’
It’s Neil Patel, of course.
Now go solidify your growth framework. Let Smartech do the heavy lifting.
Thanks to Pawan Pandurangi, Growth Marketer & Product Evangelist for collaborating on this blog.
