Three consumer spending trends for the 2024 holiday season

Tapad’s TV analytics solutions now include premium national cable inventory– Travelocity asserts industry need, praises partnership — NEW YORK, February 28, 2017 — Tapad, a part of Experian, has announced its partnership with clypd, the leading audience-based sales platform for television advertising. By integrating clypd’s national cable network inventory, the partnership will expand Tapad’s extensive supply of TV inventory to include premium national cable inventory. Tapad is the leading provider of privacy-safe, cross-screen marketing technology solutions and was first-to-market with a device graph. Clypd’s robust sell-side advertising platform was one of the first built exclusively for the television industry, empowering media owners with solutions that deliver workflow automation, data-enhanced decisioning and, overall, maximize TV campaign performance. Through this partnership, Tapad’s Device Graph-powered TV tools will work in tandem with clypd’s sales platform to enable more precise audience engagement for TV ad buys. This will enable marketers to integrate their customer data or third-party digital segments into Tapad’s TV platform and use them to precisely engage their audience across clypd’s industry-leading footprint of national TV inventory. Campaigns are then optimized using Tapad’s graph-powered TV attribution, ensuring ads are aligned with the best context for each brand’s message. “Clypd is a pioneer in building TV marketplaces,” says Marshall Wong, SVP of TV market development at Tapad. “They were quick to recognize the benefits a device graph could bring to TV so that advertisers can activate linear inventory curated for any digital audience.” “Tapad’s TV activation platform increases the efficiency in which marketers can reach their intended audience on traditional linear TV,” says Doug Hurd, co-founder and EVP of business development at clypd. “Their customized, data-driven campaigns launch with precision and really increase the value marketers can extract from linear TV inventory.” "At Travelocity, we are always looking for ways to more efficiently reach our target audiences,” says Ashley Parker, head of brand marketing at Travelocity. “The combination of traditional linear TV and solutions like this offering from Tapad and clypd are bringing both the tools and the supply to make this vision a reality." Contact us today!

By now you’ve all seen the headlines about the burgeoning success of eCommerce compared to the relatively drastic decline in transactions for brick-and-mortar stores during the holiday season. ComScore data showed desktop online sales in the last two months of 2016 rose 12%, and are expected to rise to 16-19% once the mobile commerce numbers are tallied. This steady downward trend for brick-and-mortars has been caused by a variety of factors. Amazon has carved out a desire for free, fast shipping and one-stop shopping. The rise of “fast-fashion” pushes consumers to buy mass-produced and cheap clothing that is easiest to replicate online, and the wide-spread usability of eCommerce and mCommerce sites make the experience of online shopping hassle free. Many organizations have relied on the in-store experience to garner loyalty, so now the question is how to achieve that same experience in the digital realm as foot traffic to stores falls to all-time lows.  The answer lies in understanding your users and tailoring content, not just products, within your communications. Experian Cross-Channel Marketing’s studies have shown that by incorporating editorial content into email, overall audience engagement can rise by up to 28% over audiences that don't receive content-driven messages. That’s an increase of over 20% in opens, clicks, and transaction rates! Now to be clear, this is content that is NOT focused on the sale, but rather, how the products, services, or organization can better the user’s life. Let’s dive into this a bit more deeply by talking about the types of content you can weave into your communication strategy: Product Tutorials This is the easiest to execute for those wanting to digress from the discount epidemic plaguing us all. Instead of flaunting a low price, highlight product versatility, create a video showing ease of use or wow the audience by demonstrating transformative effects with before and after photos. Bring the experience to them virtually rather than relying on a showroom to demonstrate the value. The more you draw your users into this experience, the more likely they are to remember your brand. Social Highlights + Celebrity Bloggers Many organizations spend a great amount of time and energy developing a solid social strategy, but fail to bridge the gap between social, email, the website, and even in-store experience. Pull favorite items, the highest rated products, or user-generated content into email to add a personal, more relevant touch to your brand. Also consider bringing any celebrity or blogger content to the forefront of your eNewsletters to achieve the same goal. After Your Purchase Experian has found that Welcome Emails containing a “Thank You” message for those that purchased produced 20x the revenue per email than promotional welcomes.  These users are primed to purchase again as they have already shown interest in your organization, so why not incentivize another transaction immediately when appropriate? However, don't forget that the user journey doesn’t stop at the transaction. A huge part of customer satisfaction comes after the credit card has been swiped. Send communications to ensure the user knows how to care for their product, prepare for their service, or simply send a survey after their journey is complete. Including additional options to purchase should be secondary to making sure you get THIS transaction right. How It’s Made Is your product made in America, handcrafted, or come with special care that makes your brand stand out? Are your services or designers top rated for good reason? Give your customers a behind the scenes look to entice them and peak their interest in your brand. A Bigger Purpose Does your brand have a mission that will resonate in the hearts of your consumers? Is there a give-back program you think your audience will care about? If so, bring that bigger purpose to the spotlight and give your consumers a reason to be a part of your community. As your content strategy becomes more advanced, consider profiling your audience to understand their messaging preferences, and then test your content across these cohorts. Not all content will resonate with all customers, but finding the right content marketing mix will surely help your online presence stand out in a time where the digital experience is more important than ever.

Email marketing remains a marketer’s most powerful tool. It not only produces an impressively high ROI, it’s also highly measurable. It’s not uncommon to hear people boast about high deliverability as one of these metrics. However what does that statistic ‘deliverability’ actually mean? Statistics suggest that 1 in every 5 emails fail to land in the inbox [1] which means 20% of opportunities to connect with customers are being missed. Having great deliverability is what every marketer strives for but it is something that has been difficult for people to define. Now it’s not uncommon for words to have different meanings in different countries, the most obvious example being football. Deliverability, like football, has many different meanings No wonder Googling the term “deliverability” leaves you more confused than when you started. Metrics and people’s interpretation of their meaning is one of the biggest reasons for confusion around the topic of deliverability and many marketers mistakenly feel secure in their ability to reach subscribers if they have a high delivery rate. This however, isn’t necessarily the case… Delivered vs ‘accepted’ Often what marketers believe to be a measurement of their deliverability is in reality the proportion of emails that were ‘accepted.’ An email is considered to be delivered if it does not bounce or doesn’t get returned to the mail server stating it was unable to be delivered for a specific reason. Delivery rate is a calculation of mail sent minus the volume that bounced. Deliverability is making sure you are doing what you can to put yourself in the best position to be actually seen by your email subscribers. Not stuck in spam or ignored. Inbox placement is an ongoing battle for email marketers and is effected by many factors such as CAN-SPAM, PECR, CASL compliance, sender reputation, list hygiene, authentication and blacklisting. The number of active subscribers, open and click-through rates also can influence reputation with certain ISPs such as Hotmail or Gmail. Successful deliverability depends on a combination of best practices, including authentication and email reputation. The rules of deliverability go through perpetual change and proven techniques can prevent failures. Many people believe there is a silver bullet or a guarantee that a supplier can provide 99% deliverability rates, in reality sending mail to those who want it is the only truly proven way to get great deliverability. Deliverability is a critical element of email marketing and something that all marketers should be considering. Want to learn more about deliverability?  Check out our ebook "You’ve got mail! Spotlight on email deliverability," where we offer a proactive strategy for building brand loyality and improving ROI through email deliverability and optimized email marketing programs. Read related posts about email marketing and deliverability here. [1] Return path Deliverability Benchmark Report http://returnpath.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/2015-Deliverability-Benchmark-Report.pdf Tom Corbett is an expert on Email Deliverability