MarketingSherpa Blog

Marketing has a language all its own. This is our latest in a series of posts aimed at helping new marketers learn that language. What term do you find yourself explaining most often to new hires during onboarding? Let us know.

Recently we moved our corporate office to a new location. We are in the process of updating our address on our web sites, online business listings, social profiles, templates, etc. When I checked our email templates, I realized that we had neglected to place a variable tag in our email footers. Because of this oversight, we had to manually change the address for several hundred templates. If we had used this handy tag to begin with, it would have saved us a lot of time. Variable tags have several uses and benefits in email automation, but before I explain further, let’s define the term for those who are new to email marketing.

What is a variable tag?

A variable tag, in an email context, is a bit of code that you can add to a template that will personalize customer information by pulling content from their personal records in your automated email program. The personalization possibilities can be endless, depending upon the degree of information you have gathered over time about your customers.

Automated email programs have different names for personalization tags. We use Pardot, which refers to them as variable tags. But Hubspot calls them personalization tokens. Mailchimp refers to them as merge tags. Constant Contact just calls them tags.

Probably the most common personalization tag used today is the greeting tag. It enables bulk emails being sent out to address each recipient by name rather than “Dear valued customer” or something else generic. Since customers are more likely to engage with your messaging when it’s personalized, it’s a good idea to use this tag. Even if the only information you have about a prospect is their name and email address, it is enough to insert this tag and begin greeting them personally. You can even personalize the subject line with a tag that pulls their name. Studies show this increases open rates.

You can also use variable tags to add contact information into your email templates, like your company name and address. Here’s just a sampling of the most common ones.

In Pardot, you can add a variable tag in the body of an email by placing your cursor where you want it and then clicking on the variable tag option. It will open a window with a list of default variable tags to choose from, as well as any custom ones.

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I want to be a good person. Chances are, you do too. So sometimes it bothers me when people stigmatize marketers as spammers and manipulators for money. (This happened to one of my colleagues here at MarketingSherpa, Daniel Burstein, recently.)

But marketing is a neutral term. It is simply the way we speak to customers. How we use marketing is up to us. We can be ethical, or not. We can influence people for good, or bad. We can choose to appeal to the best in us or instead, appeal to the beast in us. Actually, when you think of it, marketers wield a lot of power.

It’s true that there are marketers who choose to sell a product by appealing to our baser instincts of greed, selfishness, pride and lust, but you and I don’t have to, and we can still be successful. We can understand our customers as people and tap into their emotions, become a part of the story they want for their lives, not just pushing the goals we have for our business.

That’s why I was really encouraged when I listened to some major insights gleaned from the databank of The Institute of Practitioners in Advertising UK. IPA has nearly 1,400 case studies showcasing the most successful advertising campaigns across 30 years, and discovered the most successful marketing campaigns were utilizing emotional marketing that brings out the best in people as opposed to those that simply focus on the surface-level, material desires we may have.

What really drives consumer decisions

The IPA is one of the world’s pre-eminent trade bodies for marketing communications agencies. Marie Oldham, Chief Strategy Officer, Havas Media, stated that the evidence suggests deeper, meaningful need states are driving consumer decisions.

The strongest ones [campaigns] were the ones [that] fully understood how the world has changed since 2008 and the whole credit crunch, how it destroyed some of the things that we thought were the dominant things in life, having a bigger car, getting a bigger job, getting on in life … [instead, customers said] ‘time spent with families and friends or reconnecting with our passions in our communities is really important.’ 

The winning entry for 2012 and also for 2016 IPA effectiveness awards was a TV ad from John Lewis. This chain of high-end department stores has repeatedly created extremely successful advertising campaigns.

The company traditionally used product-focused advertising but decided to shift to an emotional strategy, focusing on the consumers’ higher motivations for buying. It’s not about furnishing a house but building a home. It’s about creating a safe, inspiring and stimulating environment for their children; it’s about realizing their dreams for their family, their health and wealth. It’s not about getting rich, but about living a richer life.

The following advertisement was an immediate success going viral throughout television and social media platforms and catapulting their business forward as a leader in their industry in the UK.

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Marketing has a language all its own. This is our latest in a series of posts aimed at helping new marketers learn that language. What term do you find yourself explaining most often to new hires during onboarding? Let us know.

In the early 2000s when social media networks like My Space and Facebook first came out, many of us thought they were just a passing fad. We were wrong.

These social networks have been so successful because people are hardwired to be social. And they want to share on social platforms.

Then businesses began to realize that customers were reacting more positively toward this gentler inbound strategy as opposed to the traditional, more aggressive outbound methods. Today, social media marketing is a vital part of most companies.

Yes, social media marketing is here to stay, and statistics show that it reigns as king of the mountain in the business world, being one of the most widely used lead gen tactics.

Most Widely Used Lead Gen Tactics

If you have been trying to avoid learning hashtag lingo, retweet etiquette and analytics, then chances are your business won’t last long among its many competitors. Because THEY most certainly are utilizing social platforms to their advantage. You, on the other hand, are trying to execute your business strategy blindfolded.

Some benefits of social listening

Even if your business doesn’t have the budget for a dedicated social media analyst or the latest and greatest social monitoring tools, you can still go ahead and set up some accounts. Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn are some of the most popular ones but you should conduct some sleuthing to determine which social media platforms are the best fit for your ideal customer.

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Whenever I’m looking for an original, handcrafted gift, I go to Etsy.com. In case you aren’t in the loop yet, it’s a worldwide digital marketplace for artisan entrepreneurs. Recently, I’ve spent a lot of time there because my daughter is getting married, and I need to find some unique gifts for the wedding party.

But it’s also a laboratory of capitalism that any marketers — especially small businesses, entrepreneurs, and startups — can learn from. Smaller companies might not have the giant budgets for media, perfect photography and SEO, but they can find an advantage with more human customer service and customer interactions in general.

I’ve found that each seller has their own communication style and shop policies. Some of these artisans are wildly successful with thousands of sales and loyal customers.

And some, well, not so much.

It’s clear that many of the top-grossing ones stand out because they not only have a great product, but also excellent customer service. No, not even that. Their service is A-M-A-Z-I-N-G. They’ve obviously learned a thing or two about customer-first marketing.

Here are just a few of their practices that can help other marketers who are trying to succeed in an already saturated marketplace.

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The happy path is a quick, linear path to the purchase of a product or service where the customer doesn’t get sidetracked, either by their own distracted actions or by a company’s poorly designed process or because the customer has a more complex use case. Let’s take a closer look at why this is important and how it might look.

The Value Exchange Happy Path

Often, companies require users to fit within certain criteria to be eligible for the simplest outcome.

An example of a happy path that MECLABS optimized with one of our Fortune 20 Research Partners would be the “Happy Path Upgrade Funnel.” The happy path would be what is experienced by a customer who chose to start the upgrade process with the following conditions:

• Fully paid off their old device
• Was upgrade eligible based on the rules of their phone plan
• Had no account problems they had to resolve in order to upgrade today

This would allow them to complete the upgrade funnel in the shortest, simplest number of steps possible and with the least amount of cost experienced as part of the value exchange.

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I had three hours to kill before my next flight to Dallas departed. While sitting in an airport café warming my hands around a mocha, I overheard snippets of an intense conversation in the booth behind me.

“It’s all about your big rocks. They are the most important. What are your big rocks?” 

At the time, I hadn’t heard of Stephen Covey’s analogy, so I had no idea what these two young marketers were discussing. Later, I was enlightened.

In brief, effective people prioritize their goals beginning with the most important (the rocks) and moving on to those of lesser importance (sand). Because when you think about it, if you try to fill a jar with sand before filling it with rocks, you will have troubles fitting the rocks in. Begin with the rocks and fill in the spaces with sand. It’s good advice and can be applied not only to marketing but our personal lives as well.

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