Your customers are trying to reach you: Thursday’s Daily Brief

News from Epsilon, Google and Narrative.

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MarTech’s daily brief features daily insights, news, tips, and essential bits of wisdom for today’s digital marketing leader. If you would like to read this before the rest of the internet does, sign up here to get it delivered to your inbox daily.

Good morning, Marketers, your customers are trying to reach you.

And the capabilities to message your customers back are expanding. They’re coming to mid-market businesses with the introduction of solutions like Messaging Essentials from Epsilon. The bar is being raised regardless of how big your organization is.

Customer success comes not just from the tools you use, but by the skills your team develops. Further down, we take another look at our Email Marketing Periodic Table and break down the elements of your audience.

We also examine how data collaborations are happening through tech enablers like Narrative through its newly announced partnership with mobile data provider Complementics.

Chris Wood,

Editor

Epsilon brings multi-channel messaging to the midmarket  

Customer engagement platform Epsilon has announced that it is extending its messaging capabilities by offering Epsilon People Cloud Messaging Essentials. Linked to Epsilon’s Core ID identity graph, Messaging Essentials will allow midmarket companies to deliver individualized messaging to customers via email, mobile push, SMS and other channels.

Epsilon already offers Epsilon People Cloud Messaging for the enterprise. Messaging Essentials will similarly allow identities to be resolved and messages delivered across channels and in real-time. This reflects Epsilon’s explicit strategy of making technology developed for the enterprise available to smaller brands and follows the release of CDP Essentials and Loyalty Essentials.

Messaging Essentials is packaged as quick-to-market, easy to use, scalable, and requires no long-term commitment. 

Why we care. Digital discovery and consumption is an opportunity for small and midmarket businesses to compete with the big names — as long as they can adopt affordable technology which doesn’t need to be implemented and managed by teams of consultants and engineers.

On its face, Messaging Essentials is built on two established enterprise solutions, Messaging and Core ID, so this release holds out the promise of powerful tech without heavy initial investment.

Elements of audience: Email Marketing Periodic Table breakdown  

Building a positive relationship with your audience is an important component of email marketing; these relationships are critical for reaching your subscribers’ Inbox (I). A valid email address (E) is one of the most valuable pieces of information you can receive from your customers. Email addresses are typically uploaded by marketers as Lists (L) in the email service provider or database.

From here, you should be employing Segmentation (Sg) based on each subscriber’s level of Engagement (Eg). This includes Opens (O) and Clicks (Ck) on specific links within your email. Understanding what this data means about your audience will help drive strategic decisions in your email marketing program.

For example, knowing what inbox providers your audience members are using will give you insight into how they view and interact with your messages and what tactics work best to help you meet your email marketing goals.

Read more here.

Download the full periodic table today.

In its first application, Google’s MUM identified 800 variations of vaccine names across 50 languages in seconds

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Google gave us a glimpse of its Multitask Unified Model (MUM) technology at its I/O event just six weeks ago, and on Tuesday, the company revealed its first application: identifying over 800 variations of vaccine names in over 50 languages. And, “MUM was able to do a job that should take weeks in just seconds,” the company wrote in a blog post.

Why we care. This announcement provides us with a better idea of real-world use cases for MUM. However, one of MUM’s most touted capabilities was understanding multiple modalities (understanding text, images and video), which we’ve yet to hear more about — if Google can deliver on this the way it was advertised at I/O, it may enable users to search in ways that they previously thought were too complex for search engines to understand. Even if it doesn’t have as splashy an impact, the efficiency displayed here (i.e., doing “weeks” worth of work in seconds) will still provide Google with another advantage over competitors.

Read more here.

Narrative announces partnership with mobile data provider Complementics  

Data streaming platform Narrative announces a new partnership with mobile data provider Complementics that enables marketers and other users to gain access to data or monetize their own. Narrative’s technology, which includes tools to support regulatory compliance, allows users to stream data directly from its origin rather than purchase it from data brokers. With consumers spending more and more time on digital channels, data streaming has picked up especially in the streaming adtech supply chain.

While Narrative has other mobile data sources that it partners with, including Bridge, Cross Pixel and blog comment solution Disqus, the new partnership is significant and has already gained interest from partners, especially on the buy side, said Nick Jordan, CEO of Narrative.

More data needed. With increased privacy regulations in recent years, as well as Apple iOS updates and Google’s cookie deprecation plans, all kinds of organizations are scrambling for data. “When GDPR came out, predictably there was a drop in supply and interest in buying more data. With the Apple changes we see a similar drop in supply.”

Buy or sell? With data seemingly more precious than ever, big brands are teaming up with Narrative as a tech solution to buy as well as to sell their data. Complementics, for instance, provides mobile audience data solutions for U.S. and international audiences, such as geofencing and location analytics.

Data drives experience. “A common thing that comes up is that a buyer will say, my CRM has a bunch of fields not filled out for their customers,” said Jordan. “They want to fill in the gaps of the CRM and then do an email marketing campaign with a better brand experience. You’re knowing your customer better, and improving your customer acquisition strategy after that.”

Why we care. During the pandemic, we all saw marketing budgets tighten. In order to deliver successful campaigns, the data has to be accurate. Monetizing data will also be a revenue stream organizations of all kinds will be tapping into. In order to do so, they will need to seek out a responsible third-party solution.

Quote of the day

“I’m convinced every marketing team should have someone 100% focused on repurposing their content.” Jason Bradwell, senior director, product marketing and communications, Deltatre 


About the author

Kim Davis
Staff
Kim Davis is currently editor at large at MarTech. Born in London, but a New Yorker for almost three decades, Kim started covering enterprise software ten years ago. His experience encompasses SaaS for the enterprise, digital- ad data-driven urban planning, and applications of SaaS, digital technology, and data in the marketing space. He first wrote about marketing technology as editor of Haymarket’s The Hub, a dedicated marketing tech website, which subsequently became a channel on the established direct marketing brand DMN. Kim joined DMN proper in 2016, as a senior editor, becoming Executive Editor, then Editor-in-Chief a position he held until January 2020. Shortly thereafter he joined Third Door Media as Editorial Director at MarTech.

Kim was Associate Editor at a New York Times hyper-local news site, The Local: East Village, and has previously worked as an editor of an academic publication, and as a music journalist. He has written hundreds of New York restaurant reviews for a personal blog, and has been an occasional guest contributor to Eater.

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