Data Dreamin’:

16 Ways to Harness Data to Better Engage Contacts and Drive Revenue

Email and Marketing Automation that’s complete. Not complex.

To be successful in the new age of marketing, marketers will need a database that can act as a repository for almost any kind of information, reaching beyond “traditional” data such as profiles and email clicks and capturing online and offline behaviors from virtually every corner of the marketing world. Before diving in to the data acquisition process, it may be necessary to conduct a little housekeeping to make sure you’ve got a solid foundation to build on.

If you look back at the last few decades, there have been a lot of changes in marketing. Once upon a time it was all about shouting your message at an audience of customers, a phenomenon known as mass marketing. Then, communication became a bit more sophisticated, with direct marketing addressing customers as many little audiences. Now, the landscape has shifted again, with customers and prospects gaining more control and marketers becoming the audience. For savvy marketers looking to transition from talking to listening and better engage their audience in this new landscape, the answer is simple: data.

So, why the increased emphasis on data—and in particular, behavioral data that reflects actual actions your customers and prospects have taken? As clutter continues filling up inboxes, distributing marketing messages becomes a lot more effective if you’re taking steps to carefully “listen” to your customers and prospects. And this means collecting information via various avenues: inviting your customers and prospects to tell you more about themselves, paying close attention to their behaviors, and removing any barriers to communication.

With the powerful database that results, you’ll be able to send highly targeted messages that increase engagement throughout the buying cycle, leading to increased conversions and customer loyalty.

Preparing for the “data revolution” requires cleaning up your existing data and aligning your systems, building a robust database by collecting information through a variety of means and across a range of platforms, and using marketing automation to put this data to use by sending highly relevant messages that change depending on recipient actions and preferences.

By creating campaigns that foster dialogue with each and every customer on their terms and their timing, marketers can grow beyond audience-like thinking and achieve Bto1 marketing—real 1:1 dialogues with individual customers. Here, then, are 16 ways to help prepare for and thrive in the new database-driven age of marketing.

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Data Dreamin’: 16 Ways to Harness Data to Better Engage Contacts and Drive Revenue

GET READYPHASE 1

1) Clean your data. There once was a time when keeping data clean and up to date was something that companies could ignore – kind of like a closet—just shove everything in there and close the door. Today, data cleansing is no longer a choice, and turning your back on it may result in poor campaign results, leaving your company languishing while your competitors leapfrog ahead. To help whip your data into shape, follow these three steps:

•Standardize it: Often there are issues of data inconsistencies or multiple values for the same answer within a field. For example a “Yes/No” field might have responses of “Yes,” “yes,” “Y,” or “y” or a Gender field might have “Female,” “female,” or “F.” Having various responses for the same answer prevents accurate reporting and complicates targeting efforts.

Depending on your marketing technology platform, you can run a report to show you all the values in a certain field. Once the report has run, just decide what you want the primary answer to be and set correct values for all the responses that don’t match (e.g., changing “Y” to “Yes”). Once you’ve cleaned up the existing field, you can prevent future freeform answers that muddle the data by locking the available answers in your forms by changing field types to selection lists or drop-down boxes.

•Refine it with surveys: Sometimes, the data in a field may be too varied or cryptic to standardize yourself. In this case, reach out to your customers or prospects with an email that links to a short survey in which you can collect the necessary data. For example, let’s say an airline wanted to start geotargeting, but its geo-specific data was a mess. It could put together a simple survey to send to customers to gather more information on their whereabouts and append it back to the list, asking questions such as :

•What state do you reside in? (drop-down answers)•What’s your preferred airport? (leverage branching to display only the relevant

airports for that state)•Do you have a secondary airport you also use? (again, leverage branching)

For more on using surveys to collect data, see page 6.

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Intertops, one of the globe’s largest sites

for sports betting, casino, poker and games,

had a database containing hundreds of

thousands of email addresses—but some of

its contact information was more than

10 years old. It partnered

with Silverpop to clean

up its database and

implement a successful

whitelisting program. After reaching out

to its entire list and removing inaccurate

and unsubscribed email addresses,

the company reduced its list size by

more than 75 percent. It now frequently

communicates with a smaller number of

more active customers—both open and

conversion rates have increased—and its

deliverability rates have doubled.

Data Cleansing Success Story: Intertops

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Re-engage inactives. Analyze your database to determine which apparent inactive subscribers could come out of hibernation, going back at least two years and considering online and offline behaviors such as email opens and clicks, purchases/conversions, profile changes, Web browsing history, print catalog requests, event attendance, etc. Then, take inactives you classify as good candidates for re-engagement and place them into their own messaging track. (Improve results with our four-step action plan for dealing with inactives.)

Moving forward, you’ll want to engage contacts before they become inactive by automatically placing new leads or subscribers into a multistep welcome campaign. In addition, consider initiating an early warning system that uses reporting and scoring to identify inactive contacts within the first four to eight weeks of engaging them, and then moving these contacts into their own email or nurture programs designed to bring them back into the fold.

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Markco Media, a global Web-based

marketing and advertising company that

operates the U.K.’s No. 1 voucher and deals

network (myvouchercodes.co.uk), wanted

to win back inactive subscribers,

so it decided to target customers

who hadn’t taken a specific

action—in this case, opening an email—in

the last three months. For its re-engagement

program, it targeted these dormant

subscribers with personalized content using

Silverpop’s dynamic content functionality. As

a result of the campaign, it reactivated 20

percent of its inactive subscribers.

Reactivation Success Story: Markco Media

2) Automate and integrate your systems. There are millions of consumer records and thousands of B2B records in companies’ databases today, and those databases are constantly growing, their records constantly changing. To keep up with the pace of information that needs continual updating—and put yourself in position to reach more people with more targeted messages, more often and more quickly than ever—companies must look for opportunities to streamline the workflow through automated processes that create a seamless passing back and forth of data. Ironically, to get more personal, you need to become more automated. For starters, that means you should:

•MakesureyourmarketingdatabaseisintegratedwithaWebanalyticssystemthat enables you to connect individuals with how they interacted with your companyviaemailandtheWeb.

•Checktoseeifyoursystemissetuptonativelycapturesocialbehaviors,location-based check-ins and offline interactions (if applicable) and integrate them with every part of your automation engine.

• Ifapplicable,syncupyourmarketingplatformandCRMsoyoucanpassdataback and forth in both directions more efficiently, better optimize content and improve communications between sales and marketing.

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Cloudwords, a cloud-based Translation

Management Platform, wanted to enable its

sales team to view each contact’s interactions.

It integrated Silverpop Engage and Salesforce.

com to streamline the lead-

generation process and

allow its team to get a better

feel for prospect and customer engagement.

The Contact Insight module available within

Salesforce.com allows Cloudwords’ Demand

Generation team to view each contact’s

interactions, including his or her site visits, Web-

page views, form submittals, file downloads,

email sends and Share-to-Social activity.

“Contact Insight gives our salespeople the

real-time insight they need when talking to a

prospect or customer, and every morning it’s

the first thing they review inside Salesforce.

com before they begin their day,” says

Cloudwords CEO Michael Meinhardt. “Our

Demand Generation team loves the quick

view the Contact Insight module provides,

as well as the understanding of where the

user has landed on our website and from

which campaign. Having this information

available at its fingertips allows our Demand

Generation team to have relevant content for

every conversation.”

Data Integration Success Story: Cloudwords

COLLECT INVALUABLE INSIGHTSPHASE 2

As competition within the inbox grows increasingly fierce, the companies that rise to the top will be those whose customers and prospects actually anticipate and look forward to receiving their messages. This process starts with listening to your customers and prospects. And that means being where your contacts are, inviting them to tell you more about themselves and paying close attention to their behaviors across emails, websites and social networks—and even offline.

With the powerful database that results, you’ll be able to send highly targeted messages that increase engagement throughout the buying cycle, leading to increased conversions and customer loyalty. Here are a few strategies and tactics to help you collect the most relevant data, from the self-reported to the behavioral.

1) Use preference centers to increase relevance and engagement. Avoid being tuned out and send your subscribers what they want by using a strong preference center that allows them to update and provide new information about their interests and how they would like you to communicate with them. This shows that you want to be helpful while also making your messages stand out from the rest.

Your preference center should allow contacts to easily change their personal interests and list preferences and provide a simple way to change their email address. In addition, it should enable them to alter the channels through which you talk to them (e.g. email, SMS, Twitter, etc.) and the frequency with which you communicate with them (e.g. monthly, weekly or daily). And speaking of frequency, your preference center should give contacts the option of temporarily pausing their subscription rather than opting out entirely. (Download our Webinar on developing a world-class preference center.)

From the start of your relationship with customers and prospects, outline the benefits of your preference center, highlighting it in any welcome messages you send. Subsequently, keep your preference center’s visibility high by linking to it in every email message and putting it in a standard location. If your company has a Facebook page, consider adding a link to your preference center there as well to further increase its visibility.

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Fabric.com, the world’s leading online fabric

store selling customer-measured fabric,

wanted to help ensure customers only received

engaging content in their emails. It developed a

robust preference center

that enables subscribers

to indicate the types of

emails they would like to receive, the types of

sewing preferred and their sewing expertise

level. Understanding the preferences of its

customers at a detailed level has helped

the company send consistently relevant

messages, and as a result, Fabric.com has

halved the number of email opt-outs.

Preference Center Success Story: Fabric.com

2) Survey prospects and customers about their likes, dislikes, needs and desires. This old-school tactic has gained renewed power thanks to technology that enables you to create more sophisticated surveys that incorporate branching and advanced logic options. This allows marketers to set up surveys that move respondents through different question paths based on their answers to previous questions—tailoring the questions to the specific buyer.

The benefits? Marketers have to ask respondents fewer questions to get the same amount of information, resulting in higher levels of survey completions. Plus, you can set up countless different branching scenarios that enable you to get very specific in the data and preferences you collect, which you can then use to send highly targeted communications. You could branch based on product, product line or business unit. Or you could do so based on industry.

Regardless of how you use these more sophisticated surveys, you’ll generate valuable customer data that will enable you to dialogue more effectively with contacts. To make the process more inviting and less intimidating, consider offering an incentive such as free shipping or a free download in exchange for answering your questions.

To gain deeper insights into its customer

preferences, King Arthur Flour utilizes

Silverpop Survey in conjunction with Engage

to gather data from survey responses to

send targeted messages based on

subscriber preferences. For example,

King Arthur will send subscribers

an email that links to a survey with

questions such as, “For which

holidays do you like to bake?” With this

data, King Arthur Flour targets customers with

follow-up messages, such as a personalized

Halloween recipe email to subscribers that

expressed interest in receiving recipes for that

holiday. “Our goal was to send more targeted

emails to our customers,” said Halley Silver,

director of online marketing, King Arthur Flour.

“This approach is clearly resonating with our

subscriber base, as we had a 150 percent

increase in ROI.”

Survey Success Story: King Arthur Flour

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3) Using progressive profiling to gradually collect data. Imagine being in a conversation with a person in which he or she starts asking you question after question about your personal life. It can be annoying. And that’s exactly how your customers and prospects likely feel when you ask for their entire life history when they register on your site, subscribe to your email newsletter or download your Webinar.

Doing so can overwhelm contacts, leading to a dissatisfying experience and even form desertion. Instead, use progressive profiling to ask a few questions each time a contact fills out a form, gradually collecting data as you build the relationship.

Make sure to prepopulate any progressive Web form fields with information you’ve already gathered, and ask the most important questions—the ones you’ll need to deliver relevant content—first. In general, asking a few questions at a time will strike a happy medium between collecting critical information and asking contacts to fill out a long, tedious form, risking abandonment before the transaction is complete. (Watch our video on progressive Web forms.)

4) Offer social sign-in options to help build your database. Your customers and prospects are frequently interacting with their social networks—from checking out a friend’s latest vacation photos to getting a sense of a company’s customer service response times via Twitter timelines. Combine this usage with the fact that three out of four people are too frustrated by online registration processes to create a user account1, and marketers have a golden opportunity. By offering website visitors the option of registering for online content and promotions by signing in with their existing social login (e.g. Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn) instead of creating a new account at your site, the process is simplified, increasing conversions. Marketers can then connect users to their social profiles, providing them with valuable information.

5) Collect data on the go. In today’s multichannel world, marketers must be where their customers are—both online and offline. In-person interactions at trade shows or in retail stores provide an additional opportunity to collect information about customers and potential customers. Use new technologies like iPad applications to collect data in real time and in person. As an alternative, you might encourage event attendees or customers waiting in line at checkout to opt in via text message, then use progressive forms later on in the relationship to collect more information. And for the millions now accessing information via mobile applications, companies might consider using the app download process (if applicable) as an opportunity to collect email opt-ins.

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6) Monitor social conversations. Of all the data being captured today, social sentiment is the newest type, but also one of the most important. Status updates, questions posted on social networks and forums focused on a particular industry subset can be deep resources for finding out about a marketer’s space. It’s helpful to monitor whether the sentiment is positive or negative, and whether the person speaking is a customer or an outsider simply making a comment.

In addition, some savvy marketers are using social sites to start a dialogue. If you dip your toes in these waters, make sure to engage in a way that’s appropriate for each social network and the discussions taking place there rather than just dumping in promotional content. If you act as a resource and provide helpful information, you may eventually be able to move the user from a more general conversation in that social channel to a more specific conversation that you have more control of—and where you can potentially gather information about that person and his or her behaviors.

7) Capture pre-opt-in behaviors and tie them to new subscribers. Prospective customers might visit your website numerous times before completing a Web form or subscribing to your email program. But just because you don’t know who every site visitor is doesn’t mean you can’t pay attention to what they care about. By using Web tracking technology, you can analyze a site visitor’s anonymous behavior, and then connect new subscribers to actions they took on your site before they opted in. Putting the subscriber’s interests in their inbox at the beginning of your relationship will get the relationship off on the right foot, increasing engagement levels, conversions and revenue. (Watch our video on Web tracking.)

8) Monitor email behavior.Measure email metrics such as opens and click-throughs, but not just to gauge campaign effectiveness—you can use this information to bulk up your behavioral database and send more relevant messages, either via dynamic content or by creating different messaging streams based on how recipients interact with your emails.

9) Capture purchase data. Use Web analytics, ecommerce systems, catalogs and in-store POS to pull in this important information, which you can use to send more engaging cross-sell and upsell emails, as well as a host of other relevant post-purchase messages (see page 10 for more on this).

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PUT THAT DATA TO USEPHASE 3

With recipient tolerance for generic, irrelevant content at an all-time low, cutting through the clutter by speaking to customers and prospects on a 1:1 level has become more important than ever. Fortunately, sophisticated marketing automation platforms provide a way for marketers to harness the detailed customer and prospect data you’ve collected and use it to respond with timely, relevant, personalized content driven by these behaviors. And today’s marketing technology also provides more robust reporting data that enables you to gain more insights than ever on how your emails, campaigns and programs are performing. Here are a few ways to put your hard-earned data to use:

1) Work triggered messages into your marketing mix. To be successful today, marketers must move away from an exclusive “batch-and-blast” approach and toward using triggers to determine when someone should receive an email and what it should say. If you’re looking to connect with a perfectly timed message, following up after contacts take a specific action online—or fail to complete the process of doing something—is highly relevant because it relates directly to a purchase they made, a document they downloaded, etc. From review requests to upsell recommendations to purchase anniversary emails, triggered messages typically deliver high ROI despite their relatively low volume. Here are two versions of this powerful automated email you should consider adding to your arsenal:

•Pre-purchase/download/form triggered messages: Did a contact abandon a shopping cart, leave a page on your website, desert a form or otherwise fail to complete an action you were hoping he or she would take? Following up with a service-oriented message that’s sent within an hour of abandonment—or at the latest 24 hours later—inviting them to complete the action can help incent many contacts to return and convert. Remember to monitor click-throughs, conversions and unsubscribes to ensure you’ve nailed the optimum timing.

Education supplier DEMCO wanted to better

reach the 30 percent of customers who

were abandoning their shopping carts, so it

initiated a cart recovery program. To enable

this campaign, DEMCO

integrated Omniture

SiteCatalyst and Silverpop,

then utilized SiteCatalyst

online analytics data to identify customers

that have abandoned their shopping cart on

DEMCO’s website. Via Silverpop Engage,

DEMCO then sent a series of three cart

abandonment emails at one-, three- and

five-day intervals encouraging abandoners to

return to their cart to finalize their purchase.

“Integrating our Omniture data with Silverpop

Engage allowed us to target those customers

that had left an item in a cart and encourage

them to return,” said Lisa Moling, eMarketing

Planner, DEMCO. “Our results show that our

series of cart abandonment emails delivers

97 times the revenue (per thousand) than our

promotional emails.”

Pre-Purchase Triggered Email Success Story: DEMCO

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VIE at Home, an award-winning skin care,

makeup, and bath and body products retailer,

uses post-purchase messages to drive

revenue and enhance customer experience.

For instance, immediately following a

purchase of one its top 10 items, it sends

an email educating the customer

about the particular item he or she

just bought. A week later, it sends

an automated message inviting the

customer to review the product. A few

months after that, VIE at Home sends

a humorous product-refill reminder. For every

£1 VIE at Home spends on its refill reminder

emails, it gets back £190 in sales.

“There’s no doubt that our triggered email

campaigns have been a big success for

VIE at Home,” says Andrew Steward, CRM

manager, VIE at Home. “Given that we’re

seeing open and click-through rates that

are heads and tails above those for our

promotional emails, it’s evident that clients are

seeing the value of these relevant messages.”

Post-Purchase Triggered Email Success Story: VIE at Home

•Post-purchase/download/event triggered messages: Follow up a purchase, download or event attendance with a related message—or better yet, multiple automated messages—that increase subscriber engagement, encourage future purchases and/or move contacts through the buying cycle. For example, satisfaction surveys can give you valuable feedback, review requests can provide critical peer content for you to use in future messages, and cross-sell emails can boost revenue and nurture prospective customers. Test timing and incentives where applicable to determine the best approach.

(Get more tips for tapping the power of triggered emails in Silverpop’s benchmark survey.)

2) Use dynamic content to make messages more relevant. Today’s marketplace demands that you speak directly to individual prospects and customers, rather than sending the same generic message to everyone in your database or segmenting them into a handful of groups. One of the most effective ways you can do this is by incorporating dynamic content.

Dynamic content enables you to automatically replace entire sections of your messages based on each recipient’s unique requirements, interests and needs. It works in conjunction with triggered emails and allows marketers to send more relevant messages, which ultimately leads to better responses as well as improved customer relationships, loyalty and lifetime value. And not only does dynamic content increase relevance, but it’s also highly automated, producing substantial cost savings.

For example, a CPG company might send recipes and baking tips that incorporate a recipient’s favorite products, a software company could send a promotional email with offers based on the Web pages that contact has visited in the past, and a football news site might send articles aligning with a recipient’s favorite teams. Another approach would be to populate personalized emails with reviews, recommendations, testimonials and case studies that closely match each recipient’s interests or purchase history.

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Using Silverpop Engage, Air New Zealand

sends personalized pre-flight emails to

passengers utilizing Silverpop’s dynamic

content functionality. Its pre-flight email

includes imagery tailored

around the upcoming

destination, such as shots

of local cultural events or

popular delicacies, a weather

update, and flight details along with the

ability to share information with friends via

Facebook and Twitter. Air New Zealand’s

brand personality also shines through, with

each message showcasing a photo of a flight

crew member who will be on the recipient’s

specific flight. The pre-flight emails have an

average unique open rate of 69 percent and

an average unique click rate of 38 percent—

well above industry averages. In addition,

passenger reaction has been incredibly

positive, from thousands of active Facebook

comments to some customers even printing

out the emails and showing them to the

featured flight crew member while on board.

Dynamic Content Success Story: Air New Zealand

3) Build programs and campaigns with if-then messaging tracks based on behaviors. Within each phase of their relationship with you, there are countless ways your contacts may interact with you. Creating campaigns and programs that are reactive to these actions can drive customer and prospect engagement to higher levels. (Watch our video on programs.) For example, consider the following subscribers and how they interacted with an event invite series of emails they received:

•Contact No. 1: Doesn’t open or click on any of the emails

•Contact No. 2: Opens or clicks on at least one email but doesn’t register for the event/Webinar

•Contact No. 3: Opens/clicks and registers for the event

While all three of the above contacts might fall into the “engaged subscriber” category, each might have a different definition of what constitutes “the right message at the right time” as it relates to the event in question, so communicating with them differently would likely build each relationship more effectively.

One way to give them what they want is to use your campaign builder to send subscribers down different paths based on their behaviors. For instance, establishing rule sets to move subscribers into specific messaging tracks based on their actions might result in the following communications:

•Contact No. 1: Sent a “sorry you missed our event” note with a survey requesting more information about his or her interests

•Contact No. 2: Sent a “one more chance to register” email

• If the contact still doesn’t register, he or she is sent a post-event message with a link to the recorded Webinar or slideshare presentation.

• If the contact does register, he or she is automatically routed to the same messaging track as Contact No. 3 (see below).

•Contact No. 3: Sent messages with event details, directions and/or last-minute reminders

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Kalmbach Publishing, a special-interest

publisher of 16 hobby-related magazines,

200-plus books in print and 30 websites,

wanted to engage recipients immediately

and drive magazine subscriptions. It created

a five-step campaign for its Bead&Button

publication that’s packed

with valuable content,

special offers and

information about what to

expect from Kalmbach’s email program, as

well as invitations to subscribe to its print

publication. Depending on how recipients

interact with various messages, they move

onto different communication tracks. For

example, the third correspondence in

Kalmbach’s series is a “Get Free Access to

BeadAndButton.com” email promoting site

registration for the next level of membership,

with subscribers receiving different

subsequent messages based on

their response:

• If the subscriber doesn’t register, he or

she remains in the newsletter track.

• If the subscriber decides to register

for additional resources, he or she is

asked for additional details, including

address and permission to be opted

in to notifications regarding email

subscriptions. These subscribers

continue down a track promoting the

print publication of Bead&Button.

“Our five-step campaign has been an

excellent tool for engaging recipients and has

driven a 15 percent increase in magazine

subscriptions,” says Rob Oberheide, online

marketing manager, Kalmbach Publishing.

Behavior Marketing Success Story: Kalmbach Publishing

4) Look beyond the basic metrics. Marketing metrics help you quantify the performance of your initiatives. They also enable you to act on your insights and make adjustments to your strategy as needed. Yet many email marketers monitor only the most rudimentary metrics, such as opens and click-through rates.

Your primary focus should be on delivering against “metrics that matter” for your business. By measuring response to your online marketing program, you can:

•Improve your understanding of customers and prospects. When you understand the reasons behind marketing response, you can send more timely and relevant messages, cultivating powerful relationships and increasing ROI.

•Tighten the efficiency of your marketing program. Metrics and analytics—which uncover the underlying drivers behind response rates—act as a lens for focusing massive volumes of raw data into relevant, simple and actionable information.

•Defend your budget and your worth. Accountability has become a marketing watchword. Metrics help you to make the case for your initiatives by proving the ROI of your efforts. They also help you hone your efforts, enabling you to deliver maximum effect at minimal cost.

As a savvy marketer, you need to monitor and analyze metrics to help drive increased relevance and customer engagement, which lead to achieving your company’s business and marketing goals. That means looking at both “process metrics” and “output metrics”:

•Process metrics are diagnostic tools tracked over time to determine how individual elements of your campaigns are contributing to overall success. Examples include opens, delivery rate, click-throughs, unsubscribes and bounces.

•Output metrics measure your email program’s performance against your company’s strategic marketing and business goals. Examples include revenue, cost savings, share of wallet, customer retention and leads generated.

Many marketers make the mistake of focusing solely (or at least primarily) on “process metrics,” but monitoring both is key to running a successful marketing program.

5) Measure and evaluate social data.For years, one of the complaints about social was that you couldn’t measure its impact. With social becoming an increasingly important aspect of purchasing decisions—whether your buyer is looking for a new laptop for her home office or a software solution for his 75 office coworkers—it’s become imperative to find ways to benchmark your efforts. Fortunately, with the right technology and process in place, there are several areas you can—and should—be monitoring:

•Social sharing: Which emails and offers are being shared most frequently, and to what social networks? Monitoring the performance of your initiatives in these terms over time provides key insights that enable you to tweak messaging to maximize sharing. Discover what content is inspiring your contacts to share with their networks—and what isn’t—and adjust to ensure you’re delivering the most engaging info and promotions. Also, consider building campaigns focused around whatever social network is most popular with your customers, based on number of shares, conversions and, if applicable, number of social sign-ins.

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As marketers today, you have more opportunities at your fingertips than ever for reaching and engaging prospects and turning them into loyal customers. But before you can do so, you need to do some legwork to prepare your company to take advantage of these opportunities.

From automating your systems to building a remarkably comprehensive database and using it to deliver dynamic, triggered messaging to viewing the results in a single holistic analytical reporting structure, this powerful transformation is requiring marketers to think differently about planning, strategy and tactics.

For savvy marketers, the time is now to bring all the silos and channels together to gain a singular view of each customer and prospect that has never been possible. By doing so, contacts can be treated as individuals and not a faceless segment. And marketers can achieve higher levels of engagement and ROI than ever.

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•Social influencers and advocates: These persuaders can have a huge impact, so treat your most active social sharers well by directly and regularly engaging with them. As an alternative to just blasting your entire database with share call-to-actions, consider using dynamic content to deliver special offers and highly shareworthy content specifically aimed at these social influencers. You’ll boost loyalty and encourage them to share even more.

•Social conversions: How many purchases and leads are coming from social networks? Particularly in the B2B world, companies have struggled to gather this information. But by using URL parameters to dynamically set the source value in the hidden field on your Web form, you can easily see how many leads social drove last month or how many came from Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn.

Footnotes1-Blue Research/JanRain, Consumer Survey, Dec. ‘10