The Event-Driven Marketing Handbook

A few months back now I caught up with an ex-colleague of mine from Procter and Gamble when I was working in FMCG marketing in Europe.

I was keen to hear what Ed had been doing the last couple of years and was pleased to hear that he had continued to improve his skills as a very successful CRM Consultant and Direct Marketer. In fact, Ed had been very busy indeed with a new venture Failsafe and had also recently completed an epic task of writing what we think will be a key marketing text for direct marketers for the next decade.

Ed Sander has teamed up with Egbert Jan Van Bel and Alan Weber to deliver a great discourse about the evolving world of one to one marketing through to CRM and now the holy grail of Event Driven Marketing. The book came as no surprise to myself after working with Ed at Procter & Gamble. Ed was instrumental in creating a direct marketing program that was years ahead of its time and delivered incredible results.

We’re Inspired by Follow That Customer!

We’re still happily reading the handbook on Event-Driven Marketing or Follow That Customer! but what we have read to date is inspiring. Reason being, is that the structure of the text further demonstrates a rational approach to understanding customer engagement and through good process and practiced marketing experience and nous.

What is commonly forgotten in the modern world is the idea that ‘we’ are rational all the time (Marketers and Customers). Humans, we think are both rational and irrational, particularly when it comes to marketing. As marketing practitioners we have to ensure that we create frame works that create continuity and leverage technology to remove some of our irrational moments and mistakes that can happen.

With Follow That Customer! the text lays out a logical and practical way to structure Event Driven Marketing best practice and some sound advice and case studies.

Permeable Segments and the right moment

What we really like is the idea of ‘permeable segments’ (Ch. 1 pp. 11-12) and in fact the idea that as your Event Driven Marketing matures that segmentation becomes less relevant and that it is all about “the right moment in time”. Indeed these ideas are important as we move into a more dynamic web and Social Media which is instantaneous allows for great customer understanding and engagement. Being able to ‘know’ the right moment will become all the more attainable with the right Event Driven Marketing strategy.

The upcoming interview

We are well on our way to finishing the book and we will be interviewing Ed Sander with some questions about the book and what he sees as important for direct marketing in the next ten years. We would also like to wish Ed all the best for his year away from the Netherlands as he heads off to Xi’an China to work with the VSO (an NGO) to help them with of course their marketing as a Marketing Advisor!

We will have the post in a few weeks with the interview from Ed and the team.

You can have a look at some of the reviews for the book here and also the homepage for the book is here as well so you can Follow That Customer!

By the way… we’re also hoping to obtain a copy or two to give away to a readers here and we have been told by Ed that there may be a download of the 1st Chapter available soon.

We will up-date you with the next post about Follow That Customer.

PadiCode is a company that can and 2011 will be a big year for PadiCode!

We have been following the developments at PadiCode for quite sometime and we like what we see.

The PadiCode team are a truly interesting bunch being an international team of experts in Web Analytics, Coding and Web Design. They have an approach which is open and humble and we love there company’s choice in name coming from a Malay proverb which is…

Padi means “rice plant” in Malay language. We adopt the name because we embrace the philosophy of rice plant in South East Asia that says “The taller the rice plant grows, the lower it bends“… to keep humble and modest in getting knowledge and pursuit of excellence.

The team here have been using and recommending the PadiCode’s services for a while now as we know they work. What we also know is that their service is exceptional and really helpful. We have had their assistance with questions that can be simple or complex and all managed really well with their implementation of Zen Desk.

The reason we can see big things happening for PadiCode this year is that late in 2010 they released a new customer engagement tool for site owners.

This new tool is all about asking people, prospects, visitors, potential buyers, however you choose to classify people visiting your site to leave a business card and say they stopped by.

Not a new idea but done much better by PadiCode!

The idea of having either a page for users to subscribe to your e-Newsletter or to have a dynamic pop-up is not new.

But having a service provided that integrates with the top 3 email providers world wide (MailChimp, Campaign Monitor, Constant Contact) so that your email marketing list is updated and then also integrates into Google Analytics with the sensible use of Event Tracking is pure joy.

And the new service is… PadiAct.

We have been lucky enough to start using the paid version of PadiAct and we’re working with the team at PadiCode with our live implementation. The thing is early results have been seriously impressive. We won’t share the numbers with you yet as we will have a detailed post about PadiAct soon but we can tell you that the year on year number of growth is subscribers is well into the hundreds of percent.

This service works – no argument. That is why we’re letting you know now before we have a couple of months data in the bag as the trend is so strong in the right direction that we have to share this with you. Also, you may be interested to know we have not been paid to post this, we do know the guys at PadiCode but that was just through our use of PadiTrack. Which we love as well, and we posted about here.

We will share with you very soon the results we have experienced by using PadiAct and the growth to our email marketing list which has been incredible. We already have started to get our Clients to use PadiAct as well as part of their prospect engagement strategy for their sites.

We know that if you give PadiAct a trial you will not be disappointed. We will provide you with the guide to get set-up and away along with our results in the PadiAct post. (You can try PadiAct here for FREE)

Also, we would like to thank the team at PadiCode, for their brilliant support and great service and awesome commitment to customer service. Their a great bunch of people dedicated to making the web a better experience for all and for your business. So thank you Claudiu and the team at PadiCode.

Free conversion funnel tracking with Google Analytics data for your site.

We have a great new FREE service to share with you, it is called PadiTrack a new product from the company PadiCode.

This new service PadiTrack, is a free tool, which allows any Google Analytics (GA) User to set up and track their current and historical GA data into visual conversion funnels and goals.

The way this works is brilliant, in that PadiTrack is an approved Google Application, so all you need to do is agree that Google and PadiTrack can ‘handshake’ and share data on your behalf. No need for more java snippets or code! This makes PadiTrack even more accessible and really easy to implement.

What is really great is that you can now look at your data specifically focusing on conversion only.

Whilst Google Analytics does do this on their dashboard PadiTrack makes the set-up much much easier. In fact, we found that using the specific links in Google Analytics is the best way to validate the pages you want to use in your conversion funnel.

What we did was:

1. Choose what we wanted to measure – Which is our Get in Touch requests to Integrati Marketing. So this will be our conversion funnel.

2. Then we fired up the PadiTrack site logged in and started a new Funnel via “Define new Funnel”

3. Next we started to build the conversion funnel the best way we found to do this was also to be logged into your Google Analytics account and grab the URL from the page you are after by searching in the section Google Analytics Dashboard > Content > Top Content and the search box with the page you are looking for like the example below

So for us the URL we needed was number 9. on our report from Top Content for Contact-Us/Get-In-Touch/ (this is a link in GA which you click on to take you to that page in GA)

4. Next we click on the page so we can copy the exact link rather than typing it and making a typo… which err happens a lot with my typing skills Then you copy the link.

5. After you have copied the exact URL from your Google Analytics dashboard you need to go back to your new funnel you are setting up in PadiTrack and enter the URL here:

6. Then test the new URL you have copied by clicking on “Validate step” sometimes this takes a second as there are a few ‘hops’ between PadiTrack and Google Analytics to make this happen so be patient. You should then see that the URL has been validated. Like this one below:

7. After we validated Step 2 (of course you have to validate all steps but this is our example!) we then added in our Confirmation Page which only appears for a prospect customer after they have submitted a Contact Request to Us. This is the last step in the funnel we created using the “Add one more step” to add the Confirmation Page.

8. Then we ran the funnel conversion report by selecting this from our Dashboard on PadiTrack and here is our visual funnel of the conversion funnel.

9. There it is, the visualised PadiTrack report for you site.

You can now run this report on-demand and create and save as many as you like.

They also have even more cool stuff which we haven’t covered with Segmentation and further insight to improve your conversion rates.

Learn more

PadiTrack has also been featured on Google Analytics Apps Gallery. You can have a look at the review here.

We think that PadiTrack is a great tool that will help any Small Medium Business and Enterprise understand what is going on with their conversion on their site.

It is free and this type of reporting can cost thousands, it is well worth an hour of your time setting it up and gaining some valuable insight about how your website is performing right now and in the past with historical Google Analytics data.

How can it help you?

Still not sure how it can help you?

well… in their words!

“If you are an online store, you get to know where people drop of during the purchase process. If you are an web app, you get to know how many people sign up and how many people use your product or service. If you are looking for leads, well, you got it… you get to know how many you get and how many you loose.”

In one sentence, PadiTrack reports on your conversion rate. Not only that, but:

* it reports the abandonment rate on the steps that your visitors need to go through for converting.
* it reports segmented per traffic source, be it referrers or keywords

Let’s talk! live, here and now on your own site with Zopim.

We’re trialing!

We have just started our trial of Zopim after being referred to Zopim by a highly respected Partner of ours Genroe, thank you Adam!

Well it is early days yet but the dashboard and the information which Zopim provides is very insightful to say the least. Even better as we run the WordPress CMS we were able to use the Zopim plugin which we hope integrates in a more optimised manner than adding in the Java snippets.

Well we will see how it travels, if your reading this and want to chat, feel free to try it out we’re always happy to talk Marketing with you and be part of our trial!

About Zopim

Zopim Live Chat is a web-based application that lets businesses monitor and engage website visitors in real time. Designed with small medium businesses in mind, it is easy to use, affordable and powerful.

Screen shots

Zopim was the first to introduce live chat widgets that’s built right into your website. This gives your customers a more seamless and pleasant chatting experience while surfing your site. No more annoying pop-up chat windows!

Log in to Zopim’s web-based dashboard to get a wealth of information about your visitors in real-time. With an intuitive interface and features, you’ll become an expert in customer service within minutes.

Key Benefits

1. Unparalleled Freedom: Users have a choice of replying via a web browser, favorite IM client (Gtalk, Yahoo! Messenger, AIM or MSN), or their mobile phone.
2. Seamless User Experience: The user interface is designed to be pleasing and intuitive for online businesses as well as their visitors. Chats are also blazing fast so chats sent are received almost instantaneously. Chat widget designs are versatile.
3. Powerful Features:
   • Get access to real-time analytics and information about your visitors.
   • Use our Intelligent Trigger System to automatically engage high-value visitors.
   • Get suggestions to frequently asked questions.
   • And many more powerful features that makes customer engagement a breeze

Languages

Zopim has been translated to more than 20 languages by their avid users. Chances are your native language is already supported, otherwise volunteer to translate and do yourself and the community a favor.

Plugins

Do you use a CMS or web publishing platform to maintain your website? Zopim’s plugins allow you to deploy and customize the chat widget. The following plugins are currently available:

• WordPress
• Shopify

Like to learn more?

You can register for Zopim here and trial the service like we are here