[White Paper] Digital Marketing Forecast 2015 – 2016

Age of the Consumer
Studies consistently show that consumers turn to digital and social
channels and engage with peers for product, service and other
recommendations when making purchasing decisions. This shift has
caused consumers’ relationship with brands to evolve, with consumers
now controlling the lion’s share of the conversation. With more than
two billion active users on digital and social channels, the power of
consumers to influence entire markets is unprecedented (Adweek).
Today’s consumers are more informed, involved, and influential
than ever before. They are always connected, spending more time
consuming, engaging with and creating digital content than any other
demographic in history. This transformation in behavior is being led
by Generation X- and Y-ers, a tremendous buying force that is projected to
make up 52% of the U.S. population by 2020 (source: Kantar Retail and PwC).
But, you already know this. The challenge for marketers is what to
do with this information. How are brands and marketers responding to
these changes? What are the critical areas that will help brands thrive?
Successfully launch new products to market? Increase sales? Differentiate
in a crowded market? Defend their brand loyalty in a competitive
economy? Increase customer lifetime value?
With these sweeping changes afoot in the market, marketers must adapt
their strategies and tactics to grow their market and mind share. These
changes present an imminent opportunity for brands willing to engage
the connected consumer. Two critical areas for modern marketers will
be continuing to build relationships with current and potential customers,
and extracting the data and insights from consumer engagement to drive
integrated, personalized marketing strategies that drive measurable results.
This white paper will walk you through the next wave of customer
engagement marketing and the critical data assets that marketers need
to collect and act on. Based on the latest consumer research, best
practices from leading brands and developments in digital marketing
technology, this report will equip you to sharpen your digital marketing
programs for 2015 and beyond.
1 | © 2015 Offerpop, Inc.
“Once, technology favored companies; now,
it empowers customers.”
- Forrester Research, Inc
“Empowered customers are disrupting every industry.
In this age of the customer, the only sustainable
competitive advantage is knowledge of and
engagement with customers.”
- Forrester Research, Inc
(Source: Kantar Retail and PwC)
DIGITAL MARKETING FORECAST 2015-2016:
Accelerate Your Marketing Strategy with Customer Engagement & Data

Whitepaper: Digital Marketing Forecast 2015-2016
Customer Engagement Marketing in
2015 and Beyond
Customer Engagement:
1. Customers interacting, sharing, or communicating with a
company, brand, or other like-minded consumers through
online or offline interactions.
Brands must facilitate, participate in, and encourage these engagements.
Consumers are less influenced by broadcast marketing and more influenced
by information and reviews from fellow consumers, meaning that marketers
have to find ways to participate in the conversation and help channel their
brand advocates’ support in ways that reach other potential customers.
Two primary challenges arise for the marketer. Customer engagement is
now cross channel in nature – from social interaction, to visiting a website, to
engaging in a brand’s mobile app, to responding to a hashtag call-to-action
on a TV ad or in-store. It is also inclusive of all touch points throughout
a customer’s journey – from initial awareness and discovery, to eventual
purchase. Additionally, the blurring lines between traditional and digital
marketing mean that marketers must create a bridge between offline and
online marketing programs to reach these audiences.
Leading brands are tackling
changing shopper dynamics head
on. Warehouse, a UK fashion
retailer, offers an instructive
example. It launched a campaign
uniting mobile and social sharing
with hashtags together with an
in-store promotion that drove an
ecommerce initiative. Warehouse
asked its fans to share their best
#MirrorMirror photos, posting
these hashtags throughout
its stores – on mirrors, on
clothing hangers and on print promotions – encouraging shoppers to try on
their favorite pieces and share the images. Shoppers got a chance to win a
shopping spree, and Warehouse re-purposed the pictures in a photo gallery
on their website. It enabled website visitors to shop their favorite looks
directly from consumers’ images. This integrated approach ties back neatly to
consumer shopping and mobile sharing habits, giving Warehouse an effective
way to bridge in-store and mobile behaviors to drive ecommerce.
Brands have the opportunity to gain more visibility early in a customer’s
journey (mid or upper funnel, in traditional sales funnel terms), enabling
them to improve overall marketing performance. In order to benefit from
this advantage, brands will need to figure out how to (1) convert unknown
to known identities among consumers across channels and engagements,
building unified identity profiles for each individual, including email, social
IDs and mobile ID, (2) enrich those profiles with engagement data —
social, behavioral, affinity and conversion data, and (3) introduce new
engagement marketing metrics to measure and optimize performance
further up the funnel or use as leading indicators to influence your
marketing strategy.
Historically, brands have had very little visibility to engage and understand
consumers. TV and other traditional media are anonymous and have
limited ability to track, while traditional digital advertising provides
coverage of mostly anonymous audiences with some ability to track. This is
changing. While media is fragmenting, it is also becoming more interactive
and less anonymous across digital channels as brands seek to integrate
their marketing programs.
Brands must adapt to the new realities influencing consumer purchase
decisions and integrate them into their marketing programs in a way that
aligns with their business objectives. The key is to identify the core business
objective, and create an integrated marketing framework that ties together
core marketing metrics, including digital, acquisition, ad, social and email
performance (to name a few) with key overall business objectives such as
sales, customer lifetime value and more.
SCOUT Bags, a fashion retailer specializing in handbags, is a prime example
of a brand that created a strategic, unified, ongoing marketing campaign
to drive product sales. SCOUT launched a campaign to aggregate its
customer photos featuring SCOUT products into an Instagram-like gallery
on its ecommerce site by sharing their #SCOUTbags style across different
social networks. SCOUT tagged each approved photo, video or tweet with
the product and featured direct click-to-buy capabilities. This alternate
path to purchase is a creative way of tapping into a happy, engaged
customer base and harnessing social sharing trends to expand market
reach in a way that drove measurable sales.
To help bridge the gap between different marketing tactics, SCOUT
leveraged its email database, social media accounts, and print inserts in
product bags to encourage customers to share their photos. By using
the data it gathered from clicks and shares on individual content pieces,
SCOUT optimized its visual marketing strategies across additional channels.
This cross-channel strategy, which included embedding user-generated
content (UGC) directly into its email marketing, helped SCOUT increase
its CTR to 26%, well above
the industry average of 15%.
In addition, consumers spent
9x more time on the website
with the gallery, resulting in
a 68% increase in sales from
consumer engagement versus
last year. Finally, SCOUT drove
thousands of dollars in sales
and positive ROI within four
months through this program
on its ecommerce site.
Customers seek experiences
that are easy, effective, and
emotionally engaging.
“
Warehouse #MirrorMirror campaign
SCOUT mailer creative

Building on Engagement: Harness
Consumer Engagement Data for
Business Growth
Engagement Marketing Data:
1. Combination of unified consumer identities/profiles plus
social data, affinity data, behavioral data and conversion data
Customer engagement is not new. Neither is data about consumer
preferences. But the convergence of mobile, social, and digital
technology gives brands an unprecedented ability to derive critical
insights from consumer engagement. By identifying preferences
at both the individual and collective level earlier in the customer
journey (top/mid funnel), marketers have the unique ability to deliver
more targeted, personalized messaging across marketing channels
and programs earlier in the customer lifecycle that result in higher
conversions and increased marketing ROI.
In particular, digital interactions are trackable and measurable. When
a person shares (or views) a photo or video, participates in an online
quiz, or discusses a product, brand, or preference, their demographic,
psychographic, purchasing preferences and more can be collected,
aggregated, and tied to unique social IDs or email addresses. To be
successful, identity matching – building a unified view of customer
identity, including email, social, and mobile IDs – is critical. This enables
a marketer to build a database of profiles that are progressively
enriched with engagement data (affinity and otherwise). The ability to
collect and analyze this engagement marketing data enables marketers
to better target potential customers in the future, ensuring the bulk of
their marketing spend reaches the right consumers at the right time.
As a practical proof point of the power of data, Facebook has
built its multi-billion dollar empire on the value of engagement
and affinity data that can help marketers run targeted promotions
aimed at website conversions, offer claims, app installs and more.
Facebook understands that clear insight into consumers’ preferences,
demographics, and psychographics equips marketers to more
accurately and effectively target potential consumers.
That said, brands are engaging consumers across all types of
channels – on social media, on their website, via email and blogs,
mobile apps, digital and traditional advertising, in-store, at events and
more. Leading brands are integrating social and mobile engagement
techniques into all of their marketing programs and across all of their
key channels, giving them the ability to:
• Build a profile database of unified consumer identities based on first
party data
• Progressively enrich those profiles with engagement marketing data
• Leverage that data to shape and measure the performance of
engagement across all channels, activate and reach new audiences,
and optimize marketing spend
An owned database gives marketers the flexibility needed to tie
together data from different sources, including purchase data, to make
more informed decisions. As marketers increasingly rely on this data to
inform their business decisions, the ability to collect and process their
own customer engagement data across all social and digital networks
will become necessary to allow for more robust data analysis.
Significant opportunity lies in the data uncovered through these
interactions. As marketers build first party data sets, they can better
optimize their marketing spend and achieve better results. Specifically,
marketers can acquire email addresses, unique social IDs, demographic,
affinity, influence data and purchase intent. Marketers can analyze this
data to better segment and target their customers with customized
campaigns for email, mobile, social, in-store, advertising and more.
Specifically, few core use cases for engagement
marketing data include the ability to:
1. Enhance email marketing with targeted, timely,
personalized messaging to increase conversions
2. Improve performance of advertising programs with
targeted segments and lookalike models based on engaged
consumer preferences
3. Better understand your audiences’ preferences and
interests to supplement your existing consumer data with
actionable insights
STA Travel is a great
example of a brand
that used customer
engagement to
collect affinity data
to improve its email
marketing strategy to
drive measurable sales.
This worldwide travel
company recognizes
that no two travelers
are alike. Some are
looking for adventure,
while others may be
looking for peace and
relaxation. In order to
better target their potential customers, the UK branch of STA Travel
launched a multipart engagement campaign across social, digital,
advertising and in-store promotions, asking people to participate
in a fun, travel-themed quiz. The answers uncovered in this quiz
identified which ‘travel tribe’ the participant belonged to and delivered
customized trip recommendations based on their preferences.
STA Travel Quiz using the Offerpop Platform

STA Travel’s UK campaign drew 40,000+ participants and uncovered
the buying preferences of each participant, which helped STA Travel
more accurately target these potential customers with the most
appropriate travel packages, enhancing email performance and
increasing sales of travel packages. This rich and meaningful data didn’t
come from expensive, third-party data providers. It was created and
captured through the brand’s personalized engagement campaign that
was later adapted for different geographic markets.
From an architecture standpoint, marketers will increasingly have
to evaluate their framework to ensure their program is integrated,
delivering measurable results across channels and programs.
Data-driven rigor:
Marketers will seek to own consumer data and unite data sets related
to consumer demographics, preferences, engagement, affinity and
purchase behavior, in order to optimize spend and achieve better
results. These assets will increase in value as marketers continuously
update, add and enrich their data sets over time.
Updated customer lifecycle:
Digital marketing technology is making it easier to surface individual
level profiles at the top of the marketing funnel through engagement,
converting previously unknown ‘consumers’ into known people
with identified preferences. The ability to measure and optimize
top-of-funnel marketing performance creates a significant revenue
opportunity due to the size of the audience.
Offerpop is a consumer engagement marketing software-as-a-service platform transforming how global
brands connect, engage and convert today’s mobile and social consumers. Leading enterprises and agencies
use Offerpop’s integrated platform to power campaigns, user-generated content and commerce, and provide
marketers with rich consumer data for smarter marketing decisions. The company is headquartered in New
York, with offices in London and San Francisco.
offerpop.com | 646.380.4609
360 Park Avenue South,20th
Floor
NewYork,NY10010
facebook.com/Offerpop @Offerpop
• Integrated systems
Marketing teams will configure their technology stacks to suit
their unique business objectives. As you evolve your programs
over time, it’s critical to think through the integration of your
existing systems with a focus on consumer data to fuel and
adjust your programs on a continuous basis. Standalone tools
that address specific pain points or objectives are sometimes
appropriate, though a system of disconnected apps and
programs will have diminishing returns over time. It’s imperative
to weave together an integrated set of tools and systems to
support your top-level business goals.
• Uniting data-driven rigor with brand creativity
As marketers adjust to evolving consumer behaviors, knowledge
of and engagement with consumers is critical, meaning that
integrated consumer profiles blending demographic, affinity,
purchase behavior and more will inform the creation of
marketing programs in increasingly challenging markets. Creative
and brand-focused programs will capture the attention of your
audience, and a sound marketing infrastructure focused on
data will ensure that you can measure and refine your strategic
choices on an ongoing basis.
Next Steps & Key Trends
An integrated approach to customer engagement sets the foundation
for marketers to build value over time. These programs can continuously
build upon and refine the engagement strategies and data insights
marketers use to achieve their core business objectives. As marketers think
through the key data sets that inform their decisions, and the engagement
programs that fuel useful data, a few key characteristics will define a
marketer’s strategy:
Personalized marketing:
Increased knowledge of customers at an individual level drives greater
loyalty and lifetime value.
Two key areas of focus:
STA Travel Quiz creative

[White Paper] Digital Marketing Forecast 2015 – 2016

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[White Paper] Digital Marketing Forecast 2015 – 2016