The Pure360 Weekly Email and Digital Roundup : Algorithms, Project Loon and emotional lottery Published October 29, 2015 It can be tricky to keep an eye on what’s happening in the fast-paced world of email and digital marketing, so to save you time we’ve provided you with a quick round-up of the latest and greatest digital developments of the week that we think will be useful to power your campaigns and future planning. We’re nice like that. Algorithms: friend or foe? Algorithms in marketing afford us better insight into customer demographics, choices and behaviours, and can be a useful tool for better targeting and improved real-time interaction with consumers. They allow us to track customers, cross-sell, promote products and suggest new ones. This latest post by the Direct Marketing Association has highlighted where a successfully implemented algorithm could spell the difference between a campaign hit or a misfire. Don’t rule out the human element yet, it’s still required to forge the emotional bridge our campaigns need in order to make a true connection with our customers. Don’t do all the work yourself! You’re not alone if you struggle to generate content, luckily this video from Marketing Sherpa might just be the answer to your prayers. Hear how World Kitchen successfully implemented user-generated content into their digital marketing strategy, neatly avoiding having to produce any original content of their own. How could this work for you? Start investigating how you could integrate Vine videos, Instagram posts or even linking Pinterest with your next campaign and let your users produce the content for you! Project Loon No, we haven’t gone bananas, we’re talking about Google’s Project Loon, a network of balloons designed to provide internet to people in rural and remote areas. This week, three of Indonesia’s mobile networks announced that they intend to start testing Project Loon’s transmissions in 2016. What does this mean for us? For those of us who supply our products globally, it means we will have more data, a better representation of our demographic, and a wider network of customers. It will also open up the market to products that utilise this rural connectivity, so you’d be wise to keep a close watch on this one! An emotional lottery This will be a new one for you… Have you ever considered offering entry into official nationally run lotteries as your promotional gift? No? Well, some have. As more and more customers want an ‘experience’ as they shop, this low cost initiative that drives traffic to your site, improves customer experience and fosters an emotional connection to your brand could pave the way for an altogether new and innovative form of marketing tool. As a promotional platform, it’s a novel way to engage customers and give them something truly exciting, and we guarantee your competitors haven’t thought of it yet! We’ll be keeping an eye on this to see how well it takes off. Speak your mind Is verbal communication the next big marketing channel? Siri and Cortana are household names, Google have launched ‘Meet the Google App’ and even Amazon now have Amazon Echo. It seems that simply speaking our mind is the new typing-into-a-search-box (although it’s worth noting that this technology is not without its flaws). The main difference between voice-based discovery and text searching is that voice search provides answers, not options. As brands, we therefore need to establish what are the most common questions our customers might have about our products or services, and then determine how we can create an answer or response that is applicable and relevant to that consumer. Learn from the brands that already use this functionality and be prepared for when voice-based discovery truly takes off. My book of the week Have you ever wondered what makes brands like Nike, Apple & Starbucks household names? What are the guiding principles that these brands adhere to that make them so successful? What Great Brands Do by Denise Lee Yohn seeks to answer these questions using her seven brand building principles that separate the best from the rest. This is a book not only for marketers but for any business leader. However, the lessons learned in this book play very neatly into the routes to digital marketing success. Principles such as avoiding selling products and instead selling emotions helps to set you apart from competitors. People buy based on how something makes them feel, not based on features and functionalities. Another principle that can be directly interpreted for the email marketing world is the avoidance of everything to everybody. Finding target audiences and the value that is particularly relevant to them will resonate and compel action over a batch and blast. So for those who still find it hard to convince other business stakeholders of the importance of targeting and relevance, read this book then pass it on! We’re sure this has given you some food for thought when it comes to creating your next campaigns. See you next week, folks! Komal Komal Helyer Head of Marketing Stay in the digital loop: Follow Komal on Twitter p.s. – Don’t forget to download our recent guide to the Maturity Model. Discover your email effectiveness and together we can make the steps to improve