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Author: Franz Malten Buemann
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An Interview with 2020’s Top CX Stars Professional, Amanda Riches
During all the excitement of this year’s CX Stars, I had the pleasure of chatting to last year’s winner, and long-time friend of CXM, Amanda Riches. Amanda leads CX Consulting for experience management software firm Medallia’s Professional Services division in the EMEA region. Amanda was kind enough to take time out of her birthday week…
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CXChronicles
Checkout our CX weekly podcast featuring customer focused business leaders and CX’ers — you can find The CXChronicles Podcast on your favorite podcast player to listen and learn from some of the world’s best. Plus we’re always happy to help new CX’ers navigate the jungle of the ever-evolving CX world, we work with our clients in order to find the areas ripe for customer experience optimization & get to work within their business. We provide CX Managed Services including CX bootcamps, Analytics bootcamps, customer feedback reporting (NPS, CSAT, CES), employee feedback reporting (eNPS), living playbooks, customer journey maps, voice of customer roadmap and we are partnered with all of the leader CX SaaS solutions. Check out our CXC website below https://cxchronicles.com/
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Panes of glass
We have windowpanes because glass used to be really expensive. Panes allowed us to use smaller sheets, with the added bonus that if one broke, you could simply replace part of the window.
Today, big sheets of glass are much cheaper, and many windows feature fake panes of glass–a process that uses one big sheet with moldings crisscrossed over it. Of course, this actually costs more to create than a simple window would. We’re overpaying to reproduce the effect that we originally put into place to save money.
If you look around, you’ll realize that we make choices like this all the time when new technologies arise. Cruft is a comfort. -
Cloud Call Center Reporting and Monitoring |Ameyo|
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The Winners of CX Stars Will be Announced Soon!
The CXM team has been hard at work ratifying the results. In order to ensure a free and fair judging process, we employed the skills and experience of a panel of global CX industry leaders in order to ratify the weighting and voting. The information provided by the nominated CX Star, combined with their votes has…
The post The Winners of CX Stars Will be Announced Soon! appeared first on Customer Experience Magazine. -
What’s your opinion on automating social media behavior?
There’s tons of automation software for LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, etc that is promising to automate the behavior of a user by connecting and generating leads through “random human behavior.” I’m very vary of those softwares as the danger getting banned is real. But company heads are asking me for the service and insisting that it’s the way to go. What do you think fellow automation specialists?
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Using AI to optimize Media Mix Modeling
Hi, We have been working lately on an AI tool to optimize Budget Allocation for our clients ad campaigns. We use machine learning to analyze historical ad campaign data and predict cost and revenue curves for campaigns with multiple channels and geos. The tool allows us to provide insights on the optimal budget allocation for each media, for a target spend level, or a target CPA. Here we wrote more about this use of AI. https://www.winclap.com/how-ai-is-impacting-budget-allocation-decisions/ Are you using any tool to optimize your media mix modeling? How do you allocate budget at multiple media sources/geos?
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Interview with Hunain Shahid, Head of Innovation and Partnerships at Elixir Group
Recently CXM had a pleasure of speaking with to Hunain Shahid, Head of Innovation and Partnerships at Elixir Group. After working in roles around Private Equity, Project & Corporate Banking, Hunain Shahid joined Elixir Group as a leveraged finance expert and have progressed to head Strategy & Partnerships. Read below about Hunain’s expectations of the…
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Can Facebook Ads Influence Integration Adoption? Here’s What We Found.
This post is a part of Made @ HubSpot, an internal thought leadership series through which we extract lessons from experiments conducted by our very own HubSpotters.
Platforms are embedded in our daily lives — whether we realize it or not.
Have you recently … ordered food from a service like GrubHub or made a reservation using OpenTable? Booked a ride using Lyft? Used your phone to check your email? All of these seamless interactions require systems to talk to each other via open platforms.
What about at work? How many tools do you use to do your job? Do you spend a lot of time updating disparate systems, or do you use a connected stack of technologies to keep things up-to-date? If it’s the latter, you have a platform to thank for your saved time.A platform makes it possible to connect tools, teams, data, and processes under one digital roof. It’s the nucleus of all systems and allows you to connect all your favorite tools seamlessly using integrations. An integration allows disparate systems to talk to each other. By joining tools via integrations, a change made in System A automatically carries through to System B.
Leveraging platforms and integrations hasn’t always been commonplace. A couple of years ago, HubSpot Research found that 82% of salespeople and marketers lost up to an hour per day managing siloed tools — a costly mistake.
Today, employees recognize that integrating technologies to do their jobs isn’t an option but a requirement. Individual employees are opting to connect their tools and, on average, leverage eight apps to do their job.
Employees and businesses alike run on connected applications. Okta found that it’s small-mid sized customers (defined as companies with less than 2,000 employees) average 73 apps — up 38% from last year. While larger customers (companies with over 2,000 employees) leverage closer to 130 apps — up 68% from the past year.
From personal life to work, platforms have become a staple in our day-to-day. These platforms are well-oiled machines that initiate seamless connections between technologies. Today, the consumer not only anticipates but also expects their systems to connect — raising the bar for companies to make it possible.
But more tools shouldn’t mean more friction. At HubSpot, we want to help our customers connect their tools on our platform to reduce friction and grow better. Customers should have tools and solutions to solve their needs, regardless of if HubSpot built them. Connecting tools allows for uniform data, processes, and experiences. This year, we’re experimenting with ways to expose integrations to our customers to increase adoption.
However, as a platform scales, it becomes increasingly tricky for customers to navigate exhaustive lists of integrations and identify what’s relevant to them. We recognized this at HubSpot and began experimenting with paid ads to see if this could be a valuable distribution channel to our customers.
Our Experiment on Paid Integration Ads
At the end of Q4, the Platform Marketing team decided to use some leftover budget to try a channel we hadn’t yet proven viable for integration adoption — paid ads.
We hypothesized that we could influence the adoption of an integration through paid ads. To test our hypothesis, we ran a retargeting campaign for three integrations on Facebook. The ads were surfaced to HubSpot’s retargetable audience.
These ads featured three HubSpot-built integrations: Slack, WordPress, and Eventbrite. We selected these integrations because they are natively built (built by HubSpot) and structured in a way that allowed us to measure multi-touch attribution.
By leveraging Google Tag Manager on the in-app integration directory, custom UTM parameters, and funnel reports, we were able to measure all steps from viewing the ad to installing the integration. Before launching the campaign, we tested our Google Analytics custom funnel reports by completing all actions — including installing the integrations to make sure they worked as designed.
Before running the campaign, we made the conscious decision to split our budget evenly across all three integration ads — regardless if one ad outperformed the others. We did this to minimize variables for the experiment.
Because we ran ads through November and December, we decreased spending from $130 dollars a day to $5 a day on and around holidays. We did this to “pause” the campaign on days where the ads would get lost in the noise, as this data could skew overall results.
Lastly, we determined our success metrics. Because we didn’t have apples-to-apples benchmark data for integration paid ads, we worked with our paid team to establish reasonably similar benchmark data. While it wasn’t a direct comparison, we were curious to see how ads could influence multi-step actions. We evaluated our performance based on click-through rates (CTR), cost per click (CPC), and cost per acquisition.
Experiment Results
The integration ads surpassed our benchmark data for click-through rate (CTR), cost per click (CPC), and cost per acquisition at the 7-, 30-, and 44-day marks — supporting our initial hypothesis and prediction.
The 30-day CTR for our integration ads was higher than the 7-day and 30-day CTR for the benchmark data, which is surprising as we expected the audience to become more fatigued over time.
Fatigue can be measured by the frequency a user views the same ad. For example, at HubSpot, we look at if a viewer has seen the same ad over 2.5 times within 30 days, which we consider high. Additionally, we kept an eye out for an increasing cost per acquisition.
Paid ads for these integrations was attractive to our retargetable audience and a legitimate acquisition point for HubSpot. It helped us influence adoption of integrations — resulting in hundreds of installs in the featured technologies. It also provided us with a data point we’ve been curious to see — the cost of an install.
When considering the value and acquisition cost of an install, it’s helpful to understand the impact on the business. At HubSpot, our customers with integrated stacks of technologies tend to be more successful — and they stick around.
This makes sense — as the more apps installed, the higher the likelihood someone will stick around. This is a common finding among platform companies.
On a recent trip to San Francisco HubSpot’s VP of Platform Ecosystem Scott Brinker found that “a common pattern on platforms is that the more apps a customer integrates into their system, the higher their retention rate will be — for both the platform and the apps integrated into it.”
Connecting their tools allows customers to access all their data in one core system while staying flexible and adaptable to their needs as they grow.
Since HubSpot doesn’t currently charge integrators to be part of our ecosystem, spending money to drive a net new install may seem counterintuitive. When weighing the long-term benefits of an install for customer value and retention, we are able to determine what is a reasonable cost per install. The experiment cost was worth the insight, as it allowed us to gain a baseline understanding of the cost per acquisition of an integration install.
Ultimately you can determine if the long-term value outweighs the upfront cost. (While directional value is a good baseline, you’d ideally look to lifetime value [LTV] to establish actual value.)
What This Means for HubSpot — and For You
Our experiment with paid ads outperformed our expectations and helped us reach a larger audience than we anticipated. It became clear that this was and is a viable channel for us to increase adoption of integrations and better understand the cost per integration install.
Future looking, we could alter who we target to see how it impacts CTR. We could leverage enrichment software like Datanyze or Clearbit to see if users have tools and cross-reference install data to create a list of folks using tools we integrate with but have yet to connect to. Alternatively, we could leverage this data to target a group of users going through onboarding to encourage them to connect existing tools to HubSpot.
Additionally, we could look through the required steps to connect an integration and consider how we could reduce them to simplify the process for our users and potentially increase our CTR.
Not a platform company? No problem. This retargeting campaigns can be leveraged to evaluate other valuable actions for your users, such as sign-ups, free trials, or event registration. -
Vimeo’s 4 Tips for Generating Leads from Video
As a marketer, you’re often tasked with accomplishing two main goals: making beautiful content that builds your brand recognition and tells your story … and generating qualified leads that will help you grow your business.
Traditional marketing ethos may consider those to be two different streams of work — crafting impactful video ads, and digging up lower-funnel users — but it doesn’t have to be that way. If you’re not using video as part of your lead generation tactics, you’re missing out on a serious opportunity to create impactful content that directly translates to more leads for your business.
Megha Muchhala, Product Marketing Manager at Vimeo, shares some key insights on how to integrate your video efforts with your lead generation tactics.Vimeo’s Tips for Generating Leads Straight from Video
We all know how useful including video on a landing page or an email campaign can be in boosting your conversion rates, but there are also optimizations you can make to your videos themselves that will give you a marketing edge.
1. Add customizable contact forms.
Rather than simply relying on CTAs to boost your follows or website traffic, marketers should utilize in-video contact forms to capture specific information from leads. This can be as simple as gathering their email, or more detailed to capture demographic information, short answers to collect personal insight, or other actionable data.
Include these forms on videos embedded throughout your digital ecosystem across your website, landing pages, and even blogs to passively build qualified leads, fast.
2. Use a multi-step format.
While you’ve probably heard of multi-step forms before, it’s possible you have yet to use one. That’s a shame, because it’s a format that’s been shown to increase form conversion by up to 52.9%.
A multi-step form is one that breaks a longer contact form up into a more digestible series of questions, which should boost user experience and, in turn, increase conversions.
Using a multi-step form reduces friction and helps you wait to ask for more user guarded information (like an email address) until the user is already a few steps into the process.
3. Optimize it for any platform.
You always want your user experience to stay tip-top no matter how they’re viewing your video content. We know you take the care to create videos in different formats and aspect ratios depending on your hosting plans, and your contact forms should be no different. Utilize a contact form that displays on mobile and desktop to ensure you’re capturing all potential leads.
4. Get creative with your placement.
There are pros and cons to dropping contact forms at any point throughout your video, and the right choice generally depends on what kind of content you’re sharing.
If you’re offering premium or long-form content, gating your video with a contact form right up front is a great way to boost leads. If you’re telling a shorter form story, placing a contact form in the middle or just before a climax can be incredibly effective in terms of incentivizing information sharing.
And while placing your contact form at the end of the video can be risky (considering 50% of viewers stop watching a video after one minute), it can also generate the most qualified leads: those who’ve watched all the way to the end are the most likely to be engaged with your brand or story anyway. Whatever you choose, we recommend setting up a few A/B tests to determine the best placement. A little testing can go a long way!
And speaking of placement, consider your video distribution when deciding your form messaging and placement. Audiences watching a video on your blog are likely far more invested (and thus likely to share some honest info and opinions) than those catching a video on your homepage. Alter your messaging accordingly!
Some Final Tips
Now that you know about the joys of in-video lead capture, let’s review some final tips to make the most of your tactics.
1. Don’t ask for too much too early.
Make sure to consider the sales funnel when optimizing your contact forms. If you know video is your main acquisition tool (meaning, the first piece of your brand consumers see before becoming fans), know that they might not be so willing to share lots of information with you upfront.
Customize your asks as they relate to steps in the funnel: users who are brand loyalists are a lot quicker to give up info than those who’ve just spotted you via a sponsored ad.
2. Remember to nurture your leads.
Leads are great, but if you don’t engage them, they’re pretty much useless. When capturing leads via contact forms, sync them to your email service provider to make it easy to nurture them. (Just so you know: Vimeo users can automatically sync their leads directly into their HubSpot account, making it simpler than ever to connect with your prospective customers.)Then, keep them engaged! Develop follow-up email campaigns around specific prominent demographics and use your gleaned data to make them even more engaging. Even better, further increase your click-through by embedding GIFs of your videos in your follow-up email campaigns to stand out and get noticed by leads.
3. Always keep SEO in-mind.
Your ability to generate leads in your video doesn’t mean a whole lot if no one watches your content. SEO can be a massively helpful organic discovery tool to send users to your business. Take the extra time to optimize your website, landing page, and video itself for maximum discoverability.