The most important person in 21st-century business is the customer. Companies recognize that putting the customer at the center of their thinking delivers better engagement, higher retention, and greater customer lifetime value, resulting in improved sales and better ROI. The number of channels and touchpoints like Email, Social Messengers, Digital App, Websites, etc., is ever-increasing that enterprise marketers can leverage to reach the customers.  But leveraging the full potential of multi-channel touchpoints can be challenging. Brands must meet their customer in the channels the customers choose. The need for an Omnichannel Marketing Strategy has become existential for enterprise marketers to engage with their customers seamlessly across touchpoints. Twenty-first-century marketing is omnichannel, with companies being required out of necessity to be hyper-personalized in real-time. So what are those 5 things that you can do to create a successful marketing strategy? Let’s find out. 1.  Building a Strong Omnichannel Strategy 43% of the automobile companies advanced their conversion rates over 2x just by attaining omnichannel marketing maturity. Only 6% of Financial services can deliver fully integrated real-time Omnichannel experiences. 50% in the Energy Manufacturing sector have started to work on integrated experience for their customers. Retailers with strong omnichannel customer engagement see a 9.5% rise in annual revenue. Tech Companies that adopt omnichannel engagement have achieved 89% customer retention. Today’s marketing landscape is an omnichannel one. Businesses and clients interact across a myriad of touchpoints, whether they are buying a product for the first time, seeking to resolve a problem, or renewing a service. Having strong omnichannel capabilities enables the customers or clients to easily navigate between the website, social media, and physical store, providing the experience of keeping them hooked to your product or service. Strong omnichannel customer engagement sees a 9.5% rise in annual revenue for the retail industry. 2. Refocusing...

email marketing automation: 7 tips for increasing email open rates

The number of resources, tools, channels, and platforms currently available to a marketer is nothing short of incredible. But there is one category that consistently performs well: email marketing. Emails are incredibly powerful and have attained a permanent space in our daily conversations. With the evolution of all social media marketing strategies, people tend to think that email marketing is dead. The truth is, email marketing is the highest ROI generator for marketers. No matter which social media or E-commerce platform you log in to, you are bound to enter your email address. It’s like email is the heart of the web. Worldwide, the number of email users is estimated to be at 4.1 Billion users by the end of 2021. So how do you create a better email strategy that can successfully help your email campaigns convert buyers into leads? By following the best practices. Know your audience Knowing your audience will help you understand aspects like - Preferred Channel where they would like to be contacted, the preferred time when they actually check the emails, what type of actions or activities distinguish them from the general population. Considering such aspects will help you strategize and plan better how you can keep your customer invested in your brand. Once you know them, you can make them feel special on special occasions, by offering them discounts or giving them freebies. Your email offers them something they can’t get in a store. Have a clear purpose Once you have a known audience, it's time to associate a goal with your email campaigns. The key is not to broadcast to a crowd but to always ask yourself what's in it for your audience, what is the value of your message so that they can relate to the content you are providing; it's...

Many moons ago, when I first started in Marketing (at the tender age of about 5, I might add), optimization was all about which Product Silo gets the most high-value customers for their Campaign targets. In those days, Campaign targets were all about the number of people being contacted, rather than responding.   The concept of contact fatigue was unclear and was mainly managed by Campaign prioritization. Let’s say, the mortgages have key sales targets this month, and they get all the best customers. However, Credit Cards are also behind on their sales, so they need them. The arguments about who gets the best customers could go on during the planning phase. But someone had to step in and manage the overall customer to stop them from opting out of Marketing altogether. As marketing evolved into targeted communications, the optimization issue got more complicated. With a much smaller number of people to contact, how do you choose who should get your offers, where, and when?  You still have the key sales targets for each product silo, but now you better understand the customers that are likely to respond.  So you start to analyse the results of offers. This gives insights into who is more likely to respond to a particular offer and when. We can then start to choose the best set of customers to receive each offer at the best time. However, as Marketing teams gained experience and became more savvy, other constraints came into the mix. Which channel do the customers want to be contacted on? How do I improve my ROI? My team only has a budget of $50,000. What email should I send to my customer who has just purchased from the website? My customer received 3 emails last week, and they are likely to ask me...

Whats the state of Martech in 2020? HCL Unica and Econsultancy collaborated and surveyed marketers across the globle to find answers.

​The new HCL TechConnect week is here. For those who are new to our events, here is a quick look at what you may have missed out... ​ What we captured in last TechConnect and what can you learn in the upcoming sessions? ​​ Back in February, on the first Monday of IBM Think 2019, a group of 35 Marketing Software users gathered for the 1st  HCL TechConnect kick-starting the engagement with our product experts and marketing peers, for what we envision, will become the platform of choice for partners and customers. This first session was a huge success with industry leaders from Banking, Insurance, Telecom, Retail and other verticals sharing their feedback on our marketing suite (Campaign, Interact, Marketing Operation, Contact Optimization and all the add-ons). With this feedback, we formally started the ideation process with a new design thinking approach. We decided this would be the baseline for our road-map and the next release of the Marketing software suite. “It is beginning to feel like Unica again but much better and more transparent”. We wanted to establish that our vision at HCL is to engage Marketing Software users early on in our road-map design cycle to ensure the products and features we deliver have more relevance to their marketing needs. This aspect of our hyper care strategy is already producing great results. Our support team has reached a satisfaction score of 9/10 in addressing your requests. Moreover, the last V.11.1 release covered more than 50 of your requests for enhancements; making it the largest release since Unica was acquired by IBM. ​ ​Therefore, it was heartening to see that so many of you appreciate that transparency has been restored and you can openly raise requests in our community. We want to hear and respond to the conversations our users are having on...