Page 16 - index

RESEARCH, ANALYSIS & TRENDS

Silverpop’s Key

Marketing Trends

for 2015:

What’s the next big

evolution in marketing?

According to Silverpop’s predictions, customers and and that it is more important to understand how to de-
prospects will be shopping online and engaging with liver the right value and the right message to drive that
businesses through mobile and social media more than conversion right when customers are interacting with
ever in 2015, whereby email will still be the preferred marketers on their smartphone.
method for receiving content from companies. People
expect this content to be engaging and personalized — 2. Mobile apps 2.0 shift the way companies market
nearly 60% say they will not even open an email if they to on-the-go customers
think it is irrelevant to them – not to mention the fact Many businesses have looked at mobile apps as a nec-
that enhancing the customer experience at every touch essary evil, something they can contract out to a third
point is most crucial. party, check off their mobile marketing checklist, and
then forget about as they return to their regularly
For most CMOs enhancing customer loyalty and en-
couraging satisfied customers to advocate their brands scheduled marketing plan. Maybe that’s why 20% of
has top priority. Likewise, more than half of CIOs plan apps are used only once and about 60% are opened
to focus more heavily on improving the customer expe- less than 10 times? With recent technological advance-
rience and getting closer to customers in the year ments in geofences and beacon capabilities, though,
ahead. Hence, behavioral marketing automation to cre- there might come changes.
ate content strategically and deliver the right message 3. Emails become skeletal frameworks for deliver-
at the exact time will celebrate a triumph this year, es- ing relevant, timely content based on database val-
pecially since marketing technologies have grown in ues
sophistication and buying patterns have continued to
evolve, providing exciting new opportunities to engage “In 2015, more digital marketers will transition to be-
with customers coming strong data-based email marketers”, predicts
Ellen Valentine, Product Strategist, Silverpop.
Silverpop forecasts the following key digital marketing “Specifically, savvy marketers will increasingly use data
trends in 2015: to customize what images and text are used in emails”,
she adds.
1. Stored payments change the way people shop as
reducing friction becomes a priority Of course, using dynamic content has been an email
best practice for years, but the difference now is that
“Mobile email and website interaction has risen steadily
in recent years, but the increased smartphone usage more sophisticated marketing platforms and integra-
has created a challenge for marketers, since the majori- tions are enabling leading practitioners to personalize a
ty of conversions have continued to take place on desk- larger portion of their emails by leveraging all kinds of
top/laptop computers or tablets”, Silverpop explains. real-time, implicit and explicit data from internal sys-
tems and external feeds.
However, the emergence of stored payments, particu-
larly Apple Pay, is poised to change that in 2015 and In a world in which emails become skeletal frameworks,
beyond. Instead of primary email calls-to-action routing the way marketers think about and create these mes-
to a website where customers can complete their pur- sages will shift. Email marketers will first set up the
chase, they’ll increasingly link to an app. Within the app, basic design framework of the email, which will include
customers will simply need to push their thumb to the things like the header, footer and content areas, and
screen, at which point payment will instantly transfer then build dynamic rules for virtually all of the content
from the credit card on file to the retailer. The difference areas in the email. Shifting to data-driven email frame-
between forcing customers to key in their 16-digit credit works will help marketers to increase the relevance of
card number on a small screen — often while on the their messages, which in turn can improve overall suc-
move — versus simply requiring them to enter an email cess metrics. Besides that, the increased use of mobile
address and/or click a button or two, could have mas- and advances in location marketing have opened up
sive implications on where and when sales occur. even more opportunities for adding relevance, such as
delivering content based on whether someone crossed
For marketers this means that the entire buying cycle a geo-fence or how they interacted with your mobile

will need to be even more aggressively compressed app.
16 Asian eMarketing January 2015 - Digital Marketing Trends & Predictions