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Matching email content to customer needs

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Matching email content to customer needs

A personalized email will rise above the noise and engage the reader’s attention. That seems like a no-brainer. “To this day, no-one has really cracked the code,” John Hendricks told us. “You talk about personalization and it’s ‘Dear Kim’ or ‘Happy Wednesday.’”

Hendricks is the founder and CEO of Ergo, a content automation platform for email that is trying to solve the puzzle of how to personalize at scale. He has a long career in email. He co-founded Bigfoot, one of the first ESPs at the end of the 1990s (it was acquired by Epsilon). “My DNA has always been with email,” he said. “When I started this company it was to help advanced email marketers get a little deeper into doing cooler things.” That turned out to be a long, evolving process.

Containers, not content

“One of the big gaps we noticed, especially during the advent of marketing automation, is that everybody really shifted their focus to the containers — when you were going to send something out — and a lot of engineering, data, technology, operational resources and marketing bandwidth went into that, and the content wasn’t relevant.”

The results indicated that this was a misbalance. “You have this over-engineered infrastructure and your opt-outs are going up, people are tuning out, they’re giving ghost email addresses,” said Hendricks. “The blinding flash of the obvious to us was that no one was paying attention to what goes inside those containers. That’s really the essence of what we do.”

Enterprise-level brands have hundreds of thousand or millions of customers, thousands or tens of thousands of content modules. Matching them at scale is the challenge.

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“When you start to look at content automation you have people that are either putting logic around the content or logic around the customer,” said Hendricks. “The epiphany for us was how those two things interplay with one another.


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Content modules and customer profiles

Ergo Content Automation Services, said Hendricks, can ingest any piece of clients’ information through CSV files, APIs, or just html, and render it as a piece of content. It will take the data and turn it into a content module. “Those modules sit in a customer-level, pretty vast library, that then gets targeted based on anything that we or the client notices about the customer. We get signals, they get modeled, and that becomes targeting logic, and that becomes a very virtuous cycle.” Machine learning means that the more the algorithms do this, the smarter they get. “The algorithms typically are optimized for click engagement,” said Hendricks.

Is this really operating at an individual, one-to-one level? “It’s all really around the notion of next-best-message, next-best-content,” Hendricks explained. “For a given piece of content you may have five cohorts or life-stages for a customer and let’s say, maybe, seven competing topics you want to talk to them about. Of all the things we could say, what is the customer most primed for?”

Email marketing expert Ryan Phelan emphasized the enormous challenges in what Ergo is seeking to do. “I have to tell the algorithm what it means to browse a page or show intent. This process is incredibly intensive and particular to a company and their target market and customer archetype.” He also queried whether optimizing for clicks is enough, suggesting that identifying item- or category-specific intent for purchase would be more valuable.

Read next: Don’t let innovation overcome email common sense

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The modern newsletter

While Ergo Content Automation is agnostic to type of email, Hendricks told us that its main focus is on email newsletters. “We do everything but we’re really trying to zero in on the idea of a modern newsletter,” he said. “This works well for any recurring program — you wouldn’t do it for a one-off, but you shouldn’t be doing a one-off email in the 21st century anyway. Either fixed deployment, like a newsletter that goes out every Monday, or every first day of the month, or any structured cadence, it works.”

Ergo recently announced the launch of Content Automation Services on the Salesforce AppExchange. “Salesforce does many things well and they’re the gold standard,” Hendricks said. “But Forrester, in their most recent wave, cited them for not having the most robust dynamic content; that was a shortfall for advanced marketers. We saw a pretty big opportunity to bring something to their world.”

At the end of the day, brands are going to say something to their customers via email. “What we’re saying is, bubble up the most relevant content that you can conceive of, and that’s what you should be talking to them about.”


About The Author

Are you using no code tools
Kim Davis is the Editorial Director of MarTech. Born in London, but a New Yorker for over two 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. Prior to working in tech journalism, 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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MARKETING

Trends in Content Localization – Moz

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Trends in Content Localization - Moz

Multinational fast food chains are one of the best-known examples of recognizing that product menus may sometimes have to change significantly to serve distinct audiences. The above video is just a short run-through of the same business selling smokehouse burgers, kofta, paneer, and rice bowls in an effort to appeal to people in a variety of places. I can’t personally judge the validity of these representations, but what I can see is that, in such cases, you don’t merely localize your content but the products on which your content is founded.

Sometimes, even the branding of businesses is different around the world; what we call Burger King in America is Hungry Jack’s in Australia, Lays potato chips here are Sabritas in Mexico, and DiGiorno frozen pizza is familiar in the US, but Canada knows it as Delissio.

Tales of product tailoring failures often become famous, likely because some of them may seem humorous from a distance, but cultural sensitivity should always be taken seriously. If a brand you are marketing is on its way to becoming a large global seller, the best insurance against reputation damage and revenue loss as a result of cultural insensitivity is to employ regional and cultural experts whose first-hand and lived experiences can steward the organization in acting with awareness and respect.

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How AI Is Redefining Startup GTM Strategy

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How AI Is Redefining Startup GTM Strategy

AI and startups? It just makes sense.

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More promotions and more layoffs

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More promotions and more layoffs

For martech professionals salaries are good and promotions are coming faster, unfortunately, layoffs are coming faster, too. That’s according to the just-released 2024 Martech Salary and Career Survey. Another very unfortunate finding: The median salary of women below the C-suite level is 35% less than what men earn.

The last year saw many different economic trends, some at odds with each other. Although unemployment remained very low overall and the economy grew, some businesses — especially those in technology and media — cut both jobs and spending. Reasons cited for the cuts include during the early years of the pandemic, higher interest rates and corporate greed.

Dig deeper: How to overcome marketing budget cuts and hiring freezes

Be that as it may, for the employed it remains a good time to be a martech professional. Salaries remain lucrative compared to many other professions, with an overall median salary of $128,643. 

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Here are the median salaries by role:

  • Senior management $199,653
  • Director $157,776
  • Manager $99,510
  • Staff $89,126

Senior managers make more than twice what staff make. Directors and up had a $163,395 median salary compared to manager/staff roles, where the median was $94,818.

One-third of those surveyed said they were promoted in the last 12 months, a finding that was nearly equal among director+ (32%) and managers and staff (30%). 

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Extend the time frame to two years, and nearly three-quarters of director+ respondents say they received a promotion, while the same can be said for two-thirds of manager and staff respondents.

Dig deeper: Skills-based hiring for modern marketing teams

Employee turnover 

In 2023, we asked survey respondents if they noticed an increase in employee churn and whether they would classify that churn as a “moderate” or “significant” increase. For 2024, given the attention on cost reductions and layoffs, we asked if the churn they witnessed was “voluntary” (e.g., people leaving for another role) or “involuntary” (e.g., a layoff or dismissal). More than half of the marketing technology professionals said churn increased in the last year. Nearly one-third classified most of the churn as “involuntary.”

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Men and Women

Screenshot 2024 03 21 124540Screenshot 2024 03 21 124540

This year, instead of using average salary figures, we used the median figures to lessen the impact of outliers in the salary data. As a result, the gap between salaries for men and women is even more glaring than it was previously.

In last year’s report, men earned an average of 24% more than women. This year the median salary of men is 35% more than the median salary of women. That is until you get to the upper echelons. Women at director and up earned 5% more than men.

Methodology

The 2024 MarTech Salary and Career Survey is a joint project of MarTech.org and chiefmartec.com. We surveyed 305 marketers between December 2023 and February 2024; 297 of those provided salary information. Nearly 63% (191) of respondents live in North America; 16% (50) live in Western Europe. The conclusions in this report are limited to responses from those individuals only. Other regions were excluded due to the limited number of respondents. 

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Download your copy of the 2024 MarTech Salary and Career Survey here. No registration is required.

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