How to prosper with marketing campaigns after GDPR

Juliana Soto von Arnim
Junior Digital Creative

“So, what do I do now?”...That’s the question that you as a marketer might be asking yourself after the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) came into force across Europe and the UK in May. The law that aims to give citizens more control over their data and to create a uniformity of rules to enforce across the continent, is set to cause a huge storm in the future: post-GDPR campaigns aren’t going to collect as much data as before, or it might be better to stop running lead generation campaigns because no one is going to submit their email after needing to agree with all those required policies.

But there’s no need to panic, this regulation isn’t as severe as it sounds.

Marketers need to only worry about data permission, data access and data focus on their campaigns:
 

1.   Data Permission

With GDPR you need to make sure that your audience wants to stay in contact with you. Don’t make the mistake of assuming that by filling out a form that says, “By signing up, you agree to our Terms and have read our privacy policy”, they want to stay connected. Ask them to specifically opt-in using easy-to-understand text, to your newsletters and emails by ticking the boxes. Check the examples below:

Not Compliant

GDPR Compliant

2.   Data Access

Part of the control of this new law is allowing individuals to access or remove their personal data collected by companies. As a marketer, you need to make sure that your users can easily access and request copies of their personal information, as well as an opt-out for its use.
 

3.   Data Focus

This is where you, as a marketer, need to ask yourself, “What data do I really need?”. GDPR requires you to legally justify what data you are storing on your users and why, as well as how you are using it. So, if you want to avoid unnecessary justifications, focus only on the data that you really need.
 

Without a doubt, GDPR will impact B2C marketing strategies. The good news is that this legislation is a great opportunity to build stronger relationships with the people engaging with your brand.

Gain insights about your audience

When creating lead generation strategies, instead of implementing a simple yes or no tick box, you can provide a range of options to find out what your audience is interested in. Through consent, you can collect insights that not only help you share information with them about topics that really interest them, but also segment your audience into focused communication groups.

Here's an example from Waitrose, part of the John Lewis Partnership, when registering for an account. While the user consents to receive updates from Waitrose, John Lewis or John Lewis Financial Services, the company identifies what their audience is interested in receiving.

More effective email marketing

The unsubscribe link within an email allows your audience to manage their email preferences. Giving them the freedom to turn communications on or off, helps you keep what’s relevant to them up to date, and allows you to target them with more specific or relevant campaigns.

In this case, Amazon notifies their audience about purchases, shipments, and delivery delays by email, text message, or the app.

Build brand loyalty and trust

GDPR no longer allows you to contact your audience for marketing purposes unless you have their permission to do so. Be open, honest and transparent. Give them a reason to share their personal information with you. Building brand loyalty and trust comes through projecting transparency about who you are and what you’re doing with their data.

How can Whichit help build a loyal customer base?
 

Whichit gives you the perfect tool to create a successful marketing campaign that appeals to your customers while protecting their data. At the same time, you as a marketer, get to build a strong loyal customer base.

Whichit interactive ad units help you generate new customers and strengthen existing relationships by analysing actual user behaviour and intent, as well as perception and attitude towards your brand, to inform your current and future marketing strategies:

Collect valuable information, not personal information

Whichit collects user preferences and behaviour without asking for Personal Identifiable Information (PII).

Transparency and Clarity

Whichit captures only the PII the user has agreed to share after opting into required consent forms, such as email addresses.
 

Give the power to the user

All users can request copies of the data stored within the Whichit for Advertisers platform and have the right to be forgotten i.e. remove all data entries upon request, which will increase trust and create more valuable connections with the brand.

Request More Information

I want to learn more about Whichit Data Privacy

References

MacDonald, S (2018, June 4).  GDPR for Marketing: The Definitive Guide for 2018

Gravicus (2018, March 2). A Marketers Guide for GDPR

Why Multi-channel Marketing is essential for an e-commerce Business

Alexandra Radugina
Senior Marketing Manager

Multi-channel Marketing is a tendency for e-commerce businesses. According to Gartner research, marketing campaigns that integrate four or more digital channels will outperform single or dual-channel programs by 300%. However, 90% of marketers still struggle to seamlessly connect more than three channels at a time, making consistent messaging and coordination a major challenge.

Nowadays, direct marketing (email marketing, webinars, catalogues) and indirect marketing (inbound marketing) channels should work together as a single ecosystem. Every day people browse the web, check emails, use social networks, and look for relevant information and services/products. Therefore, the foremost thing digital marketers should consider is to make sure that customers are able to see information about their business effortlessly; this determines the success of the business. Multi-Channel Marketing is indeed a one-stop solution for all the marketers out there.

Before you head out, you should make a list of all the different methods available for multi-channel distribution. This will help you pursue a couple of distribution channels on the top of the list and can even help you consider the best mixture of channels for your future campaigns. As you move ahead, you may even find that some methods are synergistic to each other and can be linked together.

1. Multiple sales channels

Using multi-channels allows e-commerce marketers to list their inventory on different channels like eBay, Shopify, Amazon, Facebook, etc. The tracking information and other needs are communicated from sales channels to the ultimate buyer.

Other features like using QR codes for products your customer might search for can also help you out considerably when selling your products. You must be able to use the right promotional tools to enhance the quality of the marketing campaigns for your business. This is the main aspect of multi-channel e-commerce.

2. Planning Ahead

When you want to plan a holiday special and offer great discounts, you should promote them across different direct and indirect channels. Then the execution should be in a disciplined manner. Plan and make sure that your business makes a great impact on people’s minds.

3. Paid Advertisement

You can ramp up sales by customising your product catalogues and advertising your products to potential buyers via AdWords, Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, etc.  Your product’s nature plays a very important role in the market determining what kind of platform will be suitable for it and whether the platform gives you the opportunity to target your audience based on their behaviour online, interests, or demographics. You can increase sales by listing your products on high-demand blogs and in magazines. Today you can advertise your products on famous sites like Cosmopolitan, GQ, Instagram and many others. Consider building white lists of publishers that are related to your e-commerce business. This will help to reach more customers due to popularity and a positive inclination in the sales growth.

4. Email list

You can easily carry out a market campaign through email marketing. Spreading the word is much easier when you have the required email addresses with you. This is the most powerful tool in marketing campaigns and provides a direct way to reach the customer. This tip can improve your Multi-channel e-commerce progress and can be very useful for your bricks and mortar business. Today, some of the email marketing platforms, like MailChimp, allow you to also run a retargeting campaign on your website, to increase results for your email campaign.

5. Social Media

Being present on social media and being interactive with your clients helps you maintain a strong relationship with them. You can post promotional content, discount offers, and more on social media to attract your consumers to your stores and the website. Social media is the most powerful tool used in all multi-channel e-commerce strategies. It helps to develop a positive brand image for your consumers.

6. Influencer marketing

With the rise of microblogging, social media – influencer marketing becomes a new tool to reach your target audience. There are many marketing platforms that can help you shout out your special offer or product release to millions of customers via industry influencers. You can reach influencers directly or via influencers marketing platforms such as Famebit, Grapevine and others.

7. Content Marketing

Blogs, eBooks, reports, video and interactive commercial content assist customers who are trying to understand more about your e-commerce business. Also, content marketing can help generate new leads and understand prospects’ intent, while also helping you generate coverage within your niche and improve your SEO.

Click the example to see how great Interactive Commercial Content really is! >>>

Test your knowledge: What is an example of Interactive Content?

8. Native Advertising

Native advertising is a type of paid media that doesn’t destroy users experience. It appears to be part of a website’s content, much like a magazine advertorial. According to figures from NewBayMedia, native ads are viewed 53% more than banner ads, the purchase intent is 53% higher, and they generate 82% more brand lift.

In a perfectly built marketing promotion, a multichannel campaign would reach the target audience across all the possible touch points. You can run your campaigns in parallel, or one followed by another to move your customers down the sales funnel. Therefore, it can be fairly concluded that Multi-channel marketing is certainly a big deal for an e-commerce business as it helps them benefit from utilising the virtual space available to them.

Interactive Commercial Content – Content Marketing Trends

Phuong Huyen Linh Le
Business Development Intern

Customers receive thousands of messages, on average 285 social posts per day along with 27 million content pieces are created. The content of any brand’s message could easily be ignored by consumers and even blocked.

So, what should businesses do not to miss or forever lose the opportunity to reach their target customers?

Keeping up to date with the latest trends in Content Marketing is one of the best solutions that any business owner or marketer should focus on.
Interactive Content is one of the top five Content Marketing trends in 2017 that businesses should take advantage of in order to make their businesses’ content win the hearts of their customers.  According to Ceros, 93% of marketers agree interactive content is effective in educating buyers.

How can you attract users to interact with your ‘Interactive Content’?

Interactive content allows users to personalise and participate in the content presented to them. By helping consumers see themselves in the brand’s experience, the technique offers the potential to deepen engagement and drive greater satisfaction.

There are countless ways for marketers to ‘pull’ users to interact with their brand. We listed below five effective ways and current 2017 trends in Interactive Content Marketing:

1. Questionnaires

Polls, Surveys and Quizzes are one of the basic forms of interactive content. Use them to test your audience’s knowledge or opinions on a relevant topic and then generate a shareable report card so they can compare their results with their friends.

Demand for interactive content has been increasing, but most content marketers should consider how they can create interactive questionnaires that hold an audience's attention.

What's your favourite colour?

If you were looking for a way to make your advertising alluring for your audience, Whichit offers an innovative tool that helps you naturally pull your audience into your brand’s world:
Whichit’s flagship product is a highly engaging Interactive Commercial ad unit:  a fun and addictive image-based poll, revealing a customised commercial offer based on the poll’s outcome. By using Whichit, advertisers and marketers can create rich, commercially driven interactive content, delivering a new and enhanced experience for their audience and providing your audience the perfect call-to-action at just the right moment. See the example.

2. Contests

Contest or competitions are another great way to create an interactive marketing campaign, both have the potential to go viral and pull a lot of participants and new potential customers in.

COMPETITION! What's your favourite Summer destination?

Great contests have proven to tempt consumers and inspire engagement. Competitions not only attract public participation and interest, but also help the brand building its ‘LoveMarks’. In addition, contests require some form of application, which is when marketers can collect valuable consumer data.

Whichit is an easy and effective way to create beautiful, fun contests in minutes that allows advertisers to collect information from customers in return for their participation in a competition. See the example.
 

 

3. Viral Videos

Viewers love a good viral video - video content that is so entertaining they readily share it across their social network feeds. Hardly a week goes by that you aren't shown a viral video from a friend, or are showing one to a friend yourself.

Sharing became a valued and premium metric, one very difficult to drive, because it’s completely voluntary; the decision of an individual to share content can’t be bought. Other than ‘a purchase’, there’s no more intimate and influential metric than a social share.

These days, many brands use Viral Videos for their marketing campaigns. The brands currently doing it know how to tailor it to their overall business objectives, have the people, budget and data to pull it off.
Whichit has recently launched their SnapchatXWhichit campaigns, allowing advertisers to create short, 100% full-screen branded videos for Snapchatters followed by Whichit’s unique ad unit with a commercial call-to-action. These campaigns generate 5X more Click-through-rate than other social media advertising, placing the videos as a top interactive marketing tool and a brand closer to their audience’s mind and heart.

Read more about the innovative Snapchat X Whichit campaigns

4. Live Stream

Live Stream allows customers to directly interact with customers, by answering questions directly under the customers’ comments in real-time and even afterwards. This new form has emerged from the end of 2016 and will continue to explode in 2017.

5. KOL - Key Opinion Leaders (Influencer Marketing)

According to a study by Dinesen, influencers can increase advertising campaigns' ROI by 11x compared to the average. KOLs are the trend makers helping to educate the market, and they have many fans and followers. A brand can use KOLs through live stream campaigns, social posts or through PR articles in print and web publications.

How can Whichit help you create ‘Interactive Commercial Content’ campaigns?

Before purchasing a product, customers tend to check and ask for others’ opinion about that product. By using Whichit, after answering fun interactive polls or quizzes, the audience will reveal the shareable ‘Engage Card’ – Engage Cards are the commercial actionable Call-To-Action layer that redirects users to bespoke content, based on their votes. They achieve up to 95% engagement rate per campaign and allow customers to compare their results with those who also answer that question. Whichit Engage Cards are your way to convert traffic into revenue, based on your campaign goals.
By using Whichit, advertisers can easily create ‘Interactive Commercial Content’ in minutes, wrap it into a campaign and share it on the brand's social media channels, embed it on their website or even as display advertising with paid traffic, targeting a specific audience.

Want to learn more? Contact us to get more information or simply register for FREE and create your first Interactive Content Campaign:

LIMITED OFFER: Register for FREE & Get $50 Advertising Budget using code: WelcomeHP-50

British Technology Entrepreneurs Reception at 10 Downing Street

Whichit was cordially invited to 10 Downing Street by the Prime Minister, David Cameron, to join like-minded technology entrepreneurs at the British Technology Entrepreneurs Reception.

Heading the VIP guest list was Jack Ma, founder and Executive Chairman of Alibaba Group. Other distinguished guests included Rohan Silva, former Senior Policy Advisor to David Cameron turned entrepreneur and Eileen Burbidge, one of London’s most influential venture capitalists. Other successful entrepreneurs who created some of the UK’s most successful technology companies such as Moshi Monsters, Graze, CityMapper and CarThrottle attended the reception too.

Jack Ma, the business magnate and philanthropist, announced that he joined a panel of business figures advising Mr David Cameron on business matters. The announcement of his new position, came the day before a four-day state visit to Britain by Chinese President Xi Jinping.

Our founder and CEO, Jonathan Gan had the honour of meeting Mr Ma and speaking to him briefly, showcasing Whichit to the founder of China’s own Google, Amazon and eBay rolled into one, getting some sound business advice in the process.

This is not the first time Whichit has been invited to Downing Street, in fact is the third time that we´ve had the honor and hopefully we will be returning there again soon.

Business Leaders Reception At 10 Downing Street

Whichit’s CEO, Jonathan Gan, was invited as a representative of the technology and startup sector for a Business Leaders Reception at 10 Downing Street, with the honour of being hosted by the UK Prime Minister Mr. David Cameron. There were representatives from different aspects of the UK private sector – from entrepreneurs to investors and CEOs as well as from the media and government.

The PM spoke about the importance of business development and the government’s support for this, and expressed his gratitude for the role those in attendance had played in this initiative.

During the event, Jonathan spoke to business leaders such as Brent Hoberman and Steven Cohen as well as the Prime Minister himself. They discussed Whichit’s move from Israel to Great Britain and Jonathan took the opportunity to personally thank the Prime Minister for the Sirius Program and all the support Whichit has received from UK Trade & Investment.

Overall it was a great evening that once again demonstrated the impact high growth companies such as Whichit, have on the UK economy. We’ve demonstrated our significant contribution to the business sector while thriving in a great ecosystem provided by the Innovation Warehouse and Accelerator Academy. It was heartwarming to view the level of attention and support the government places on strengthening the technology sector and an honour to Whichit to be part of it.