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Virtual events: The ultimate marketers’ guide

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Virtual events: The ultimate marketers’ guide

Virtual events weren’t born of COVID-19, but their development and evolution were dramatically accelerated by the pandemic.

It’s indisputable that virtual events are as varied in format as their physical world counterparts. In purpose, composition, duration, presentation technology, virtual events are as wide-ranging as the organizations who are pioneering this medium.

This guide is for marketers who are looking to build their sales pipelines, acquire customers and retain existing customers with virtual events. Here’s what’s inside:

Estimated reading time: 17 minutes

What is a “virtual event”?

The definition of “virtual events” is evolving rapidly. For this guide, we’ve defined them as live and/or recorded presentations, typically organized by topic or subject. This guide focuses on virtual events produced for business purposes, including building sales pipelines, acquiring customers and retaining existing customers

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Content may be presented live or may be recorded. Often it is available for live on-demand after it premieres live or recorded. Virtual events typically require attendees to either pay for access or provide their personal information in lieu of payment.

Most virtual events feature more than one presentation. Webinars, which have been produced since the 1990s, are one variety of virtual event. Typically they feature one presentation.

In addition, 1-to-1 meetings arranged between vendors and participants may be offered as a component of virtual events or may be the entirety of the programming.

Virtual events also typically feature networking opportunities for attendees and participating exhibitors/sponsors. These activities include audience polling, chat, Q&A, along with elements intended to entertain the audience like group yoga, bartending, DJ/music events, and virtual swag and meals delivered to the attendee’s location. Much more on networking is here.

Virtual event history

The development of virtual events began in the mid-1990s with several software applications that enable users to share their screens.

PictureTel introduced LiveShare Plus software, an application that provided users with remote access to another computer. In 1996, Microsoft introduced NetMeeting, which enabled users to communicate and exchange data in real-time.

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Xerox released the first webinar software, PlaceWare, later that year. PlaceWare allowed users to create presentations that many others could attend. PlaceWare also included several features that are staples of webinars today, including audience polling, private chat, and the ability to elevate a webinar attendee to a presenter.

Webinar platforms proliferated at the end of the 1990s. Notable platforms debuting then included Cisco’s WebEx Meeting Center, GoToMeeting and On24.

For more on the history of virtual events, visit this page.

COVID, changes in customer behavior accelerated virtual event development

COVID accelerated the pace of virtual event development as prospective attendees sought alternative professional development opportunities and ways to stay connected with their professional community. Solutions providers, precluded from participating in live events, sought alternative ways to identify prospects.

Virtual event/webinar platform provider On24, which is publicly traded, illustrates the growth COVID-19 spurred. The company added nearly 600 customers in 2020, compared to just 150 in 2019. Its revenue grew 76% in 2020, compared to just 8% in 2019.


On24 Growth, 2018 to 2020

2020 2019 2018
Customers 1994 1401 1241
Sales ($ millions) $156.90 $89.10 $67.80

Source: Martech analysis of On24 earnings reports

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Changes in the sales dynamic, particularly the B2B environment, also accelerated the adoption of virtual events.

Customers are educating themselves before contacting company salespeople. That means offering access to information about products and services online is essential in this environment.

In addition, virtual event platforms and technology stacks cost-effectively facilitate customer engagement at scale, engaging large numbers of prospective customers and customers.

The cost of participating in virtual events, in addition to producing them, is typically a fraction of the cost of participating in an in-person event.

Virtual events are a viable alternative to in-person and popular with attendees

Interest in virtual events is likely to remain high, as the timeline for a return to in-person events remains uncertain. Marketers are reluctant to attend large gatherings. Nearly 50% said they won’t attend an in-person event through the first half of 2022, according to MarTech’s Event Participation Index, which measures marketers’ attitudes toward attending in-person and virtual events.

Half of Marketers Expect to Attend an In-person Event in 2021

Virtual events The ultimate marketers guide
Source: MarTech Event Participation Index

Meanwhile, virtual event participation — and satisfaction with them — is high. Eighty-one percent of marketers responding to the Event Participation Index survey said they attended a virtual event in the last three months, and three-quarters said they were satisfied with the experience. (Editor’s note: Respondents were marketers who self-selected to participate in this survey. Results for other industries and populations may be different.)

Marketers attend/are satisfied with virtual events

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Source: MarTech’s Event Participation Index

Three in four marketers said they were satisfied with the virtual event experience. Factors contributing to the high degree of satisfaction included:

  • Risk of infection is not a concern
  • Most virtual events are free or relatively inexpensive, compared to in-person events, to attend
  • Travel — and the associated expense and investment in time — is not required
  • Participants can engage with virtual event content at their own pace, provided live sessions are available on-demand

While 100% satisfaction will remain an aspiration, there’s room for improvement rooted in the disconnect between what the medium is able to deliver and what attendees expect.

Virtual events are NOT physical events

Virtual events provide an experience that’s different from physical events — for attendees and exhibitors/sponsors alike. The experience is so different, it’s unfortunate the “event” analogy and terminology was adopted to describe virtual events at all.

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For attendees, perhaps no online experience can replicate the energy of a packed ballroom of people anticipating an inspirational keynote, the electricity of an expo hall humming with engagement, a chance meeting with a like-minded peer, or reconnecting with colleagues or friends.

For exhibitors/sponsors and speakers, the tactile satisfaction of being face-to-face with customers has not translated well.

Attempts to replicate the expo hall experience for exhibitors have fallen particularly flat. The Second Life-like representations of virtual booths don’t effectively connect buyers and sellers. Meaningful engagements haven’t occurred in volume adequate to justify creating and staffing a virtual booth.

Virtual events excel at identifying prospects and their intent to purchase, and bestowing thought leadership

Disciples of the marketing funnel analogy are likely to categorize virtual events as top-to-mid funnel opportunities. They are highly effective in attracting attendees, gathering intent data from those who register, and enabling exhibitors/sponsors to demonstrate authority and thought leadership.

Virtual events are capable of attracting more registrants and participants than their physical counterparts. They eliminate barriers that limit in-person event attendance including travel/entertainment costs and scheduling conflicts.

Data gathered from virtual events can also signal that certain individuals are likely to be interested in hearing from exhibitors and sponsors. Intent data can be a byproduct of participating in the event. (Did a given individual register, attend or participate?) Or it can be solicited and provided by participants in questions asked during registration or via applications like polling that solicit responses to questions.

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Thought leadership opportunities are unlimited since the time and space limitations of physical events don’t apply; the amount of inventory and the time available to present depend on the amount of content there is to present. The attention of the audience is the only aspect of a virtual event that is finite.

Virtual event “networking”

Creating rewarding and scalable networking opportunities that serve all constituencies is the trickiest aspect of executing virtual events. It’s also been the least satisfying aspect for attendees, exhibitors and other event participants.

“Networking” is an ill-defined activity. Even at in-person events, it means different things to different participants, depending upon if networking is attendee-to-attendee, exhibitor-to-attendee, speaker-to-attendee, exhibitor-to-exhibitor, press-to-exhibitor, etc.

For exhibitors, networking typically means meeting potential prospects, business partners, press/analysts and investors. Exhibitors often use “engagement”, “interaction” and “networking” interchangeably to describe these activities.

Meanwhile, attendee expectations of “networking” may be vastly different, depending on the type of event they are attending. The motivation for attending trade shows may be principally commercial, e.g. attendees go to buy things for their stores and businesses. The commercial opportunities are front and center, while training and networking play supporting roles.

“Conferences,” on the other hand, are predominantly educational sessions and keynotes. Commercial activities are often limited to cocktail hours, coffee breaks, and meals. Conference attendees may define networking as meeting like-minded professionals during meals or after-hours activities, being able to ask questions of presenters during/after sessions or arranged meetings via “birds of a feather” tables, speed networking or meeting apps like Braindate or Brella.

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With the diversity and potential mismatch of exhibitor/attendee expectations, it is not surprising that producers of online events have struggled to fulfill the expectations of networking. Fifty percent of producers surveyed in the Virtual Event Tech Guide said their top frustration with virtual events was matching the level of engagement provided by in-person events.

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Source: The Virtual Event Tech Guide 2021 from EventMB

It’s just not like being there

The rewards of attending an in-person event have kept participation high because physically being with others in-person with similar interests and sharing a common experience, when properly orchestrated by the event producer, is satisfying. (Interested in learning more about the psychology of events? Check out The Power of Moments: Why Certain Experiences Have Extraordinary Impact by Chip and Dan Heath.)

Unfortunately, the tactile pleasures of in-person gatherings are absent in virtual environments. For each person, the experience is mediated by the device they’re accessing the event on, the software they’re using and the bandwidth they have.

In addition, the environments they chose for viewing — coffee shops, living rooms, offices or conference rooms — influence the experience greatly and are beyond the control of the organizer.

Overcoming the mediated nature of virtual events is not possible, at least today. Organizers have no choice but to work within the capabilities of the medium and do their best to overcome the limitations.

Making the exhibitor-attendee connection with virtual events

Like other lead generation tactics, connecting with virtual event attendees is often based on an exchange of value. Exhibitors offer something of value to attendees in exchange for their attention and agreement to share their personal information.

Valuable content is the most commonly used tactic to get attention. Compelling and successfully promoted sessions are the typical drivers of attendance.

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Once an attendee accesses a presentation, the opportunities to engage begin to unfold: real-time chat and Q&A, book a demo, ask a question and polling are just a few of the on-screen presentation connections that can be accomplished.

Supplemental experiences can be promoted while you have the attendee’s attention, such as small-group video chats, one-on-one meetings with speakers and invitations to visit a virtual booth.

Offering incentives (a version of gamification) is another way to encourage attendee engagement and maintain attention. Gift cards, goodie packages and food/drink/swag giveaways are all tactics exhibitors are using to achieve these goals. Registration data, whether provided pre-event or used post-event to invite attendees to a supplemental activity, is key to ensuring the success of these incentives.

Allocating resources to making connections

Exhibitors need to be mindful of whether these opportunities to network are “live” or asynchronous and plan resources accordingly.

If the activity is truly live, as is the case with Q&A, group chat and virtual booths, those apps can’t be left unattended during “show hours”; staff must be present and able to respond to requests from all attendees who might want to engage. Asynchronous alternatives must be available when staff isn’t available to respond.

Asynchronous engagement applications don’t require 24/7 staffing but are integral to the virtual event experience. Since space and time don’t apply to virtual events (at least not to on-demand presentations), exhibitors need to be able to communicate with prospects whenever they choose to engage.

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Enabling access to applications typically available on the exhibitor’s website — “request a demo,” contact us or even chatbots — are effective ways to be responsive in an on-demand environment.

Regardless of how you connect, be mindful of attendees’ willingness to engage: Just because someone has given permission to be contacted, participated in a virtual session, attended a networking event or visited a virtual booth does not mean that they are a buyer. As in the physical world, they should be qualified before they are sold.

Making connections in the virtual world is going to be an issue that producers and exhibitors struggle to overcome in the coming months and years.

Choosing the right virtual event marketing technology: platform or stack?

The debate continues to rage in marketing technology circles whether deploying an all-in-one platform or assembling a “stack” of best-of-breed applications yields the best results.

See examples of martech stacks here.

That’s the choice facing virtual event producers now, and the benefits and pitfalls of each approach apply to virtual event production as well.

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Define the objectives and requirements upfront

As with any marketing tech choice, the answer to the question, “To platform or stack?” depends on what you are trying to accomplish. Start by defining your objectives. Are you producing a tradeshow with lots of sponsors, and therefore attendee/sponsor interaction is the goal? Is it a training course, where learning is the key benefit? Or is attendee-to-attendee networking the root of the value that will provide? Answering these questions (and many others) will guide the decisions you make.

If, for example, you are planning for a large event, with thousands of attendees and presentations, being mindful of scale is important because you’ll need a high-performance platform that can handle a large number of participants simultaneously. If, on the other hand, your event will have limited attendance and features pre-recorded content, or it’s a mixed scenario with live and on-demand content, you face a completely different set of challenges.

The implications of your business model or desired event experience can’t be overstated. There is no one-size-fits-all solution. You’ll have to dig in to find the right solution. Start with the three “Ds”:

  • Document the required features;
  • Define use cases for key stakeholders;
  • Determine the budget.

In addition to the objectives, you need to define requirements, a list of features you expect to have for attendees, sponsors and your team. Making a detailed list will get you started on the right path and save you a ton of time in the long run. You’ll avoid pointless conversations with the hundreds of vendors now vying for your virtual event business.

Your requirements should start with ideas about what kind of experience your attendees expect, including an easy registration form that is mobile-friendly. Will you be charging for registration? If so, how does the registration system handle payments (and refunds)? Are there multiple ticket types? Will the event be live, pre-recorded, or a mix of both? How will attendees connect? What benefits do sponsors get? How will you measure activity, engagement, and ultimately the success of the event?

Make certain your requirements take into account the business model of your event. For example, if your event is free for attendees, and sponsors will pay the freight, you’ll skew your requirements to sponsor needs such as branding, reporting, and support. Likewise, if your event model relies on matchmaking or 1:1 meetings, you’ll need to flesh out your meeting requirements. Whenever possible, involve key constituents — attendees, sponsors and your team — in decisions. You’ll earn much-needed buy-in during the process, which is vital for the success of any martech project.

All-in-one virtual event platforms provide a standard set of features. You’ll love some of them, loathe some of them, and ignore others.

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Depending upon the capabilities of your team, choosing an all-in-one platform may be wise to impose structure, particularly in workflow. You’ll inherit a defined way of doing things and the support of the vendor’s client services team including onboarding and training.

The alternative to an all-in-one platform is an event “stack.” A stack will consist of tools that deliver the same or more functionality as a platform, but with the benefit of allowing you to swap out or add in elements as needed.

An event stack approach gives you the flexibility to integrate cutting-edge technologies and features and is generally less expensive than using an all-in-one platform.

So, what are the drawbacks of a stack? You’ll be sourcing elements from different vendors and will need to connect them all to provide a seamless experience for users and aggregate data for sponsors and your use. You’ll also be on your own; stacks don’t come with client success organizations to support your efforts.

1642696571 40 Virtual events The ultimate marketers guide

Avengers (er, stack), assemble!

Assembling your own event stack means taking ownership over things such as managing disparate registration and content management systems and landing pages, video hosting, and other widgets and tools. You’ll want to lean heavily on your requirements document and stick to what matters. Do you need surveys and polls, or are those just things that feel good to have but that you don’t use in your event? Do you have a lot of sponsors or no sponsors? That will impact your reporting needs. Is there live Q&A during sessions, or will that happen in a Slack channel, or in a private Facebook group?

Assembling a virtual event stack offers flexibility and is potentially less expensive. But assembly comes with its own set of drawbacks and caveats. For example, if you don’t have a technically capable or curious team, it can be overwhelming to try to connect all the dots between different solutions. A well-designed event stack will have more moving pieces than an all-in-one event platform. You’ll have to manage multiple vendors and won’t have a single source of support.

While the idea of having everything in an all-in-one solution sounds comforting, it can also be extremely limiting. In this virtual, digital environment, where innovation is happening as quickly as customer expectations, locking yourself into a single platform contract could have some significant drawbacks in terms of your ability to be agile and flexible and to create the ideal experience for your customers.

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If you intend to explore the event stack route, we recommend you get clear on your core requirements and match them directly to your business model. Identify who on your team can handle integrations and prepare everyone so they understand the benefits of building a stack, and how it changes everything from the front-end user experience to the way they manage events.

So, what’s the better approach: all-in-one or stack? It depends. You can only answer the question by taking the time to understand your requirements, budget, and the experience you want to deliver.

The future of events: “Always on,” physical and virtual

Looking to the future, many analysts and industry participants expect a hybrid future where events include both physical and virtual components, which may include online marketplaces. The trade show industry has long paid lip service to this concept, but few of its leading players have fully embraced the idea.

In their book “Reinventing Live,” Denzil Rankine and Marco Giberti predict marketers expect live events to return, but won’t abandon virtual events. “We’re going to have a mix,” Rankine said. “We’re going to find that some versions of events are working very well online; businesses are having an impact, making money, and so on. And certain models — for example, one-to-one meetings work that way.”

Other predictions and observations Rankine made in Reinventing Live and an interview MarTech conducted with him:

  • In-person events will return, but there will be fewer of them, and attendance is likely to be reduced. Some of the digital-only events are going to continue. All face-to-face events will be supported by digital tools.
  • Some event organizers will only produce in-person events. “Some people only like to read newspapers on paper; they’ve got ink in their blood. And you’ve got that in the events industry too,” he said
  • “In a few years’ time, we won’t even be talking about virtual or hybrid. We’ll just be talking about events; it’s a given that you’ve got all these digital extensions.”
  • In addition to the negative environmental impact associated with unnecessary air travel, the people at brands who hold the purse-strings — and perhaps don’t attend events themselves — will be highly conscious that businesses continued to function last year without the need to expense flights and hotel stays.

Virtual events: a catalyst for always-on events?

Innovative event producers and their customers have long dreamed of creating an “always on” event. Such an “event” would connect buyers and sellers 24-7-365, the way that Amazon and Walmart serve consumers.

“365 is ambitious and tricky,” Rankine conceded. Where there’s a 365-day workflow, however, it may become a realistic goal. B2B customers routinely use ten or more channels to interact with suppliers, according to a recent McKinsey & Company study. The potential for virtual events to participate in that ecosystem is high.

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Marketing work management: A snapshot

What it is: Marketing work management platforms help marketing leaders and their teams structure their day-to-day work to meet their goals on deadline and within budget constraints, all while managing resources and facilitating communication and collaboration. Functions may include task assignments, time tracking, budgeting, team communication and file sharing, among others.

Why it’s important today. Work environments have changed drastically due to the COVID-19 pandemic. This has heightened the need for work management tools that help marketers navigate these new workflows.

Marketers have been at work developing processes that allow them to work with those outside their own offices since marketing projects—campaigns, websites, white papers, or webinars—frequently involve working with outside sources.

Also, with marketers required to design interfaces, write content, and create engaging visual assets today, more marketers are adopting agile workflow practices, which often have features to support agile practices.

What the tools do. All of these changes have heightened the need for marketing work management software, which optimizes and documents the projects undertaken by digital marketers. They often integrate with other systems like digital asset management platforms and creative suites. But most importantly, these systems improve process clarity, transparency, and accountability, helping marketers keep work on track.

Read next: What is marketing work management and how do these platforms support agile marketing

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About The Author

1641251657 859 What is marketing operations and who are MOPs professionals

Chris is a founding partner and CEO of Third Door Media, the publisher of MarTech and Search Engine Land, and producer of the MarTech Conference and Search Marketing Expo – SMX. TDM accelerates customer acquisition for its clients by providing trusted content and targeted marketing programs that deliver qualified prospects. You can reach Chris at chris[at]thirddoormedia.com.


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MARKETING

Unlocking Hidden Revenue: The Inbox Retargeting Methodology

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Unlocking Hidden Revenue: The Inbox Retargeting Methodology

Page conversion rates have ALWAYS been a problem. The simple fact is most people don’t convert even on the most optimized pages. 

What’s why traditional retargeting on ad networks has been so dang powerful. While retargeted leads come cheap, they still aren’t free. Worse, you’re back competing against your competition in the ol’ ad auction system.

For the last 6 years, I’ve been using a tactic called Inbox Retargeting to identify who lands on my key pages and directly reach out to them in their inbox.

No more ads. No more auctions. Just a targeted contact that showed they were interested, but didn’t quite take the leap yet.

Before I dive into the “What’s” and “How’s”, this tactic can only be used in the good ol’ US of A. If you aren’t in the states or don’t have clients in the states, you’re out of luck. Sorry!

How It Works

Inbox retargeting doesn’t take a lot of heavy lifting. I’ll share the strategy next but I wanted to start with some of the logistics.

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DISCLAIMER: I am not a lawyer or coder, so keep that in mind if technical or legal questions pop up.

If you have a website, you have tracking scripts, e.g.,  GA4, the Facebook Pixel, Heatmap software, etc…

To get started with Inbox retargeting, you just need to be able to copy and paste two scripts on your site:

  • A collection script: This fires and tries to identify the visitor

A suppression script: You’d fire this on your conversion confirmation pages, you don’t want people who converted to land in your Inbox Retargeting campaigns.

1710795438 253 Unlocking Hidden Revenue The Inbox Retargeting Methodology

The tech works off of a database of contacts in the United States that are eligible for emails, so it’s completely above board with your ESP. However, you’ll want to do a few things before you start treating them like a regular member of your email list.

We initially tested this on one of our paid media campaigns. We already had a really strong campaign that we wanted to squeeze more leads out of…and boy did we.

We were driving traffic from Meta (Facebook for the OGs) to this landing page:

1710795438 272 Unlocking Hidden Revenue The Inbox Retargeting Methodology

This page converts at 58%. Yeah, that’s a humble brag…deal with it.

Even with a 58% conversion rate, we’re still missing out on 42% of the traffic we’ve already paid for. That’s kind of a bummer.

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After we added the collection script to the page, they were able to capture a lot more leads. The conversion rate jumped from 58% to a very sweet 87% – that’s a 50% increase!

That was the impact on a single page, that’s when we knew it was time to go bigger.

The Strategy

Most of the tools out there, whether it’s Retention.com or Customers.ai, are going to charge based on the number of contacts. So it can get pretty easy to burn through contact credits if you run the script on every page you manage, your site and your clients’ sites included.

That’s why you’ll want to make sure to select pages that capture intent versus targeting all of your traffic.

ID Key Pages

Here are some of the pages you should consider adding the collection script:

  1. Campaign Landing Pages – If you’re paying to send someone to a page, the referring source piqued their interest. If they didn’t convert, you’d definitely want to follow up.
  2. Product Pages – If someone is viewing this page they’re evaluating a particular product they were interested in.
  3. High Intent/Value Content Pages – This could be your pillar content on your blog pages, podcast pages, or your top level service pages.
  4. Registration Pages – This is a subset of a landing page, but if someone got all the way to a registration or sigh up page, they’re a prime candidate for outreach.
  5. Cart Pages – People abandon carts all the time. If you weren’t able to catch their details during checkout, this is an ideal opportunity.

Effectively it’s any page where you’re pushing a specific action. While the above pages are the pages to choose from, a homepage is acceptable but will require a little more finesse when you follow up.

Map to Email Campaigns

Now that you’ve identified where you’re going to identify leads, you’ll need to map it to your automation tool.

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Unlocking Hidden Revenue The Inbox Retargeting MethodologyUnlocking Hidden Revenue The Inbox Retargeting Methodology

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Most tools have a direct integration with your email service provider, but worst case scenario you may have to pass the data through a no code integration tool like Zapier.

Once you’ve worked out the digital plumbing, you’ll want to follow up based on the page the contact was collected on. Here’s how you should approach follow up:

  1. For Campaign Landing Pages – Give them the specific asset. They were interested in it, you’ve got their contact information, just hand over the goods. This builds good will at the start of the relationship.
  2. Product Pages – Send over the details of the product or product category they were viewing. This could be as simple as a reminder or you could build goodwill with a special offer or coupon.
  3. High Intent/Value Content Pages – Send over some of your best content or freebies that move people to the next phase of the Customer Value Journey.
  4. Registration Pages – Treat these like an “abandoned cart” type of email and get them to take that next step.
  5. Cart Pages – Same as “Registration Pages” but it’s, you know, an actual abandoned cart reminder. Similar to the product pages you could entice them to come back with a deal or coupon.
  6. Homepages – If you do run these on the homepage, you’ll need to do more of a reintroduction then transition to showcasing your best stuff.

Email Structure

The initial message you send needs to have a very specific flow. There are four critical things that need to happen when they open up your Inbox Retargeting message.

First, remind them about who you are and how they know you. This can be as simple as a, “Hey, thanks for stopping by…” message. Have some fun with it.

Next, you need to provide highly specific value based on their browsing intent. If you get this wrong, they’re just going to file your message under SPAM.

After that, you’ve got to set expectations with what they’re getting and now you’ll be communicating with them moving forward.

And Finally, you need to give them an EASY OUT. These campaigns have our highest unsubscribe rate, but that’s because we outright ask people to unsubscribe if they don’t want any additional contact.

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Once you’e gone through this, you treat them like one of your regular subscribers with all your fancy ascension automations, content emails, and promotional emails.

Here are the email stats from one of our PPC Campaigns:

1710795439 568 Unlocking Hidden Revenue The Inbox Retargeting Methodology

With an average open rate of 53.87%, we know there’s a base line interest in the deliverable. The click rate is DANG good for messaging visitors who didn’t convert.

Sure the unsubscribe rate is a little high for this campaign, but that is intentional. We push them to opt-out in the first email so we don’t get dinged later with complaints.

The Payoff: An Additional 109k Last Year

I mean, who doesn’t want another cool 100 grand for adding a script to your website and writing a couple of emails? Here’s how the numbers work out:

Last year, we identified 3,714 leads using this method. IMPORTANT: When I was pulling these numbers, I realized we installed the code wrong on some pages and missed out on about another 2k leads…oops!

Our average lead cost was ~$7, so the leads themself were a $26,000 additional value. This alone would be a reason to use the tech.

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BUT JUSTIN, did they convert?!

Yes!

We closed $36,000 in IPPC business from this lead source. For what we spent on those leads we’re looking at a 750% ROAS. Not too shabby.

The rest of the money we made was by selling this service to our clients. Since we run paid ads for clients, this method is a complete no brainer. We ran a pilot program and only offered this to a handful of clients last year, we averaged about 4k/month in sales.

We sold clients the leads at ~$2/lead for some of the niches we work in, that’s a steal. 

If you decide to sell this you need to make sure the client knows these are lower intent leads and will require longer term nurtures. If you follow the email strategy I shared above, you’ll be good to go!

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Protip: Charge for building the follow up sequence! 

So that’s it! If you’re running your own business or are an agency owner, you’ve got to consider Inbox Retargeting. Though, I do have some bad news…

Not to be “Chicken Little” but this is starting to get way more attention, there are services popping out of the woodwork so this will become a table stakes method. So get ahead of this today.

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MARKETING

What’s Media Mix Modeling? [Marketer’s Guide with Examples]

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What’s Media Mix Modeling? [Marketer’s Guide with Examples]

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By Emily Sullivan

Have you ever felt in the dark when it comes to understanding the real impact your marketing dollars are having across multiple channels? 

Determining where and how conversions are occurring is crucial in optimizing your budget to drive the most impact with your marketing budget. Media mix modeling (MMM) is an analytical approach used to gauge the effectiveness of various marketing channels in driving sales and conversions. This method allows us to decipher the true influence of advertising spend across diverse platforms by accounting for a myriad of factors, both within their control (like media channel spend, promotional strategies) and outside their control (such as economic conditions, competitor actions, and seasonal influences).

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One of the key strengths of media mix modeling is its ability to incorporate long-term brand building effects alongside immediate sales impacts, offering a comprehensive view of marketing effectiveness. It helps in identifying which channels are most efficient, how different channels influence each other, and how external factors affect marketing performance.

Media mix modeling is a powerful tool for marketers seeking to optimize their marketing investments. By providing a holistic view of how various factors contribute to sales and conversions, MMM enables data-driven decisions that enhance marketing efficiency and business growth.

In this article, we explore how media mix modeling works, and how businesses can use analytics to drive smarter ad spend decisions.

What Is Media Mix Modeling?

Media mix modeling (MMM) is a type of analysis that measures the impact of media buys across multiple channels, showing the role various elements play in achieving a desired outcome—often a conversion or revenue KPI. With this information, marketing stakeholders are able to make specific adjustments to campaign spend to improve their progress toward reaching a given goal.

Media mix modeling can be used to address common brand marketing questions and pain points, including:

  • Which of our marketing efforts are having the biggest impact on reaching our goals—or, more simply—what’s working?
  • How big of an impact does seasonality have on our marketing performance?
  • How closely is our performance tied to promotional efforts? 
  • Are shifting consumer trends negatively or positively impacting outcomes?
  • Which specific mix of spend allocation drives the highest ROI?
  • How will these channels likely perform in the future based on their optimized spend allocation?

“Media mix modeling is a top-down , privacy resilient approach that evaluates how historical media activity, promotions, pricing, seasonality, and uncontrollable factors—such as economic activity—impact key business outcomes such as sales revenue. MMM is a scientific approach to attribution in the sense that it applies statistical methods to analyze and interpret marketing data, providing a systematic understanding of how different marketing channels contribute to overall business goals in the broader context of the market. The quality of insights derived from MMM heavily depends on the quality and granularity of the data used.”

— Annica Nesty, Group Director of Marketing Science at Tinuiti

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MMM leverages aggregate data, and can measure both online (digital) and offline (traditional) advertising channel performance, including (but not limited to): paid media channels such as social media channels, traditional print advertising, linear TV advertising, and other performance marketing efforts, organic media, operational factors like promotions, external factors like seasonality, economic conditions, outcome KPIs such as sales revenue, new customers, and conversions. 

How Does Media Mix Modeling Work?

The MMM framework is a type of statistical analysis that uses statistical methods and econometric models such as a regression analysis. This econometric model helps analysts determine the strength of relationships between a single dependent variable and an array of independent variables.

Media mix modeling analysis measures the impact of your media spend today, and is also helpful in predicting the future outcome of your marketing investments on a given variable.

Example:

Let’s assume a scenario where our target metric, or dependent variable, is revenue, a critical indicator of business success. We aim to dissect the influence of various marketing initiatives on this revenue. These initiatives, our independent variables, encompass a diverse array of digital advertising campaigns, including those run on TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, as well as broader Display and Streaming platforms.

The number of independent variables under scrutiny does not dilute our core objective. The mission is to measure the relationship between the marketing endeavors and the revenue they generate. This involves not only identifying the direct contributions of each campaign to revenue but also understanding the nuanced interplay between them by observing how changing aspects of those independent variables impacts the chosen business outcome

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What can MMM Measure?

When using MMM to assess campaign success, marketers should leverage statistical methods and econometric models to get the most accurate picture possible. Data quality is essential in achieving an accurate media mix analysis, so take any needed time to clean your data before using it in your analysis. 

Key elements an MMM equation can measure include:

  • Base and incremental sales volume impact
  • Channel effectiveness and return on investment
  • Marketing spend saturation

Media Mix Modeling vs. Data-Driven Attribution Modeling

Like media mix modeling, attribution modeling also studies the efficiency of marketing strategies — but there are important differences.

Attribution modeling is a general term that refers to tracking engagement to better understand how specific tactics drive action at the user level. This modeling works well for analyzing specific customer touchpoints, focusing on elements like how a consumer converted, which creative on which channel led to that conversion, and what the expected ROI could be if more ad budget were shifted to that channel. 

Media mix modeling takes a higher-level, more comprehensive picture. This modeling isn’t designed to measure user-level engagement like impressions and clicks, rather its primary function is measuring the impact of an entire touchpoint on specific marketing objectives. 

Data-driven attribution modeling and MMM each have their own set of strengths. It’s not a matter of one being better than the other, rather one being better-suited to different types of marketing analysis. 

For example:

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  • The precision of the data-driven attribution: Let’s assume you want to invest more spend in a social ad campaign during the holiday season. While MMM is an option for determining where to allocate those dollars, data-driven attribution excels in dissecting the intricate customer journey, offering a microscopic view of user interactions. For instance, if you’re keen on understanding the exact value of a single click from your social media campaign, Data-Driven Attribution can illuminate the path. 
  • The holistic perspective of the media mix modeling:  Media mix modeling, can consider the impact of offline actions and initiatives. Unlike the more narrowly focused attribution models, which might overemphasize the first or last touchpoint, MMM assesses the collective impact of all channels over time. This makes it an indispensable tool for strategic planning and long-term investment decisions in your marketing portfolio.

“Attribution modeling is based on a bottom-up approach while media mix modeling takes a top-down approach. Media mix modeling provides a long-term view of the marketing ROI of media activity, while attribution modeling evaluates individual-level activity to provide a short term view of marketing ROI.” 

— Annica Nesty, Group Director of Marketing Science at Tinuiti

Why Does MMM Make Sense for a Post-cookie/Post-IDFA World?

In the post-cookie and post-IDFA landscape, where privacy concerns and regulatory changes limit access to individual user-level data, media mix modeling has become a pivotal analytical tool. MMM’s emphasis on overall marketing spend allocation and its proficiency in establishing cause-and-effect models, address the challenges posed by the diminishing availability of explicit conversion information, providing marketers with a privacy-respecting and insightful approach to navigate the evolving digital advertising ecosystem.

An Example of Media Mix Modeling

With the right media mix model, a business can measure their past marketing performance to improve future ROI by optimizing the allocation of the media budget by channel and/or tactic, including: traditional and digital media channels, promotions, pricing, competitor spend, economic conditions, weather, and more.

Example:

An international ecommerce brand wanted to forecast their second-half of the year and create an optimal media mix to make their marketing dollars work smarter. A combination of client data, marketing data, and machine learning were required to create a powerful, custom media mix model. 

To build the model, the business used 2+ years of digital marketing and revenue data, analyzing it by market, tactic, and day. The data was then used to create model to assess future spend showing how changes in investment across channels could impact revenue and sales.

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media mix modeling

The full digital media mix model gave the ecommerce brand a detailed analysis of where to optimize their spend across all digital marketing channels. 

One recommendation was to shift dollars away from social—which historically had been at or near 30%—to paid search. This recommendation came with another layer of insight: The brand realized they were overinvesting in awareness campaigns, and needed to invest more heavily in capturing current demand during the 2nd half of the year.

Results: Working with a robust media mix model, the brand was able to break down how much media spend was needed by each channel in order to achieve the 30% YoY revenue goal they targeted. 

The Benefits & Challenges of Media Mix Modeling

MMM helps you accurately connect all the dots, leveraging (ideally) a wealth of provided data, to understand how disparate aspects of marketing campaigns work together in helping you reach your business goals. 

Benefits of Media Mix Modeling

The benefits of MMM are multifaceted, offering marketers a strategic edge in navigating the intricacies of their advertising efforts. Let’s dive into each benefit in detail… 

Omnichannel Campaigns: MMM excels in providing insights for omnichannel campaigns, allowing marketers to understand and optimize the impact of their initiatives across various channels. This capability is crucial in today’s interconnected digital landscape, where consumers engage with brands through diverse platforms.

Improved Oversight Over Media Spend Impact: MMM provides a comprehensive view of the impact of media spend, enabling marketers to assess the effectiveness of their investments. This improved oversight ensures a clearer understanding of how each component of the media mix contributes to overall campaign success.

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Media Spend Optimization: With MMM, marketers can optimize their media spend by identifying the most impactful channels and touchpoints. This data-driven approach allows for strategic adjustments in budget allocation, ensuring that resources are directed towards the avenues that yield the highest return on ad spend.

Effective Targeting of Audiences: MMM’s analysis helps in refining audience targeting strategies. By understanding which elements of the marketing mix resonate most with specific demographics, marketers can tailor their campaigns to effectively reach and engage their target audience segments.

Forecasting with Certainty: One of MMM’s strengths lies in its ability to forecast results with a high degree of certainty. This forecasting capability empowers marketers to make informed decisions based on predictive analytics, aiding in long-term planning and goal setting.

Reduced Reliance on Personally Identifiable Information (PII): MMM minimizes the reliance on personally identifiable information for analysis. This is especially crucial in an era where privacy concerns are more important than ever. 

Media mix modeling is a comprehensive and powerful tool, offering a range of benefits that contribute to a more effective, data-driven, and privacy-conscious approach to marketing strategy and decision-making. While there are many benefits to MMM, there are challenges as well. Let’s look into common challenges of MMM in our next section.

Challenges of Media Mix Modeling

MMM grows increasingly complex as the media landscape becomes more fragmented, and the customer journey more personalized. Whereas in the past, advertisers may have wanted to measure something as simple as the impact of a print ad in a Cleveland newspaper, today’s consumers are exposed to brands in a wide variety of locations and formats, from a subway transit poster to a Sponsored post on Instagram.

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Working with high-quality data is important in any measurement initiative, but for MMM to work effectively, it also needs a lot of data to build a reliable model. For example, if you wanted your model to consider the performance impact of seasonality, it would ideally need at least three full seasons (three years) of data to consider in its analysis.

This makes media mix modeling a ‘long game’ initiative with infrequent reporting by its nature. Brands and advertisers who are more accustomed to daily or weekly updates may struggle with ‘waiting out’ the analysis.

Because it’s not designed to make considerations based on user-level data, instead providing aggregate insights, media mix modeling offers limited insights on brand impact, personalized targeting, and customer experience. However, advanced models are available that can provide highly granular insights, but traditional MMM provides aggregate insights.

Common Misconceptions About Media Mix Modeling

Media mix modeling, like many other analytics solutions, has also become a marketing buzzword that has generated its fair share of misconceptions.

Here are a few of the most common misconceptions around media mix modeling.

Media Mix Models Are Not Transparent

With large datasets and statistical analysis involved in media mix modeling, the methods behind the technique have been critiqued for their obscurity. If there is no perceived transparency in the process, how does a brand know if its media mix model is really accurate?

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Any organization specializing in media mix modeling should provide a transparent approach, with deliverables such as outlines, milestones, and performance reports. Additionally, you may want to consider partnering with an agency that truly understands how media mix modeling aligns with your needs and expectations. Every business is unique and each media mix model is based on multiple factors.

Media Mix Models Do Not Provide Real-time Data

Today, results are often measured by the timeliness of their delivery, with the current digital marketplace allowing for almost instantaneous real-time data. Media mix models do actually provide compelling real-time marketing insights, perfect for evaluating new campaigns, new competitors, and assessing pricing actions or changes in promotional strategies. 

A powerful partner in media mix modeling will provide sophisticated tools and real-time approaches to satisfy your business performance assessments. Your partner should also be able to provide forecasting, simulation, or AI- and machine-learning-integrated models to suggest future movements. 

Media Mix Modeling is Biased to Offline Channels

Though media mix strategies do integrate and consider offline channels in their approaches, media mix modeling also considers all digital channels — including display, email, paid search, social, and more. Remember—it’s considering your media mix. If that includes ten different channels and you provide enough high-quality data for each, they will all be considered in your marketing mix analysis. 

In fact, as customers have become more intertwined with digital channels, media marketing models have adapted to go even deeper into the analyses provided by those channels’ respective insights to support better budgeting choices and customer segmentation reports. 

Conclusion: MMM Closes the Loop on Marketing Performance

In an ever-evolving digital landscape, MMM’s adaptability to the post-cookie/post-IDFA world positions it as an essential tool for marketers. As businesses seek to connect the dots, leverage data, and make strategic decisions, MMM is a crucial ally in the dynamic realm of mixed media advertising.

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“At Tinuiti, we leverage measurement best practices such as MMM and incrementality to understand media effectiveness, predict future outcomes, create deeper insights, analyzing what-if scenarios to provide recommendations that optimize media performance. This helps brands understand what channels they should be investing in, how they should shift budgets (media mix), creating a high-level view of what channels are driving overall sales and ROI. Our goal here is to deliver growth for our clients by maximizing the return on investment through best in class measurement”

— Annica Nesty, Group Director of Marketing Science at Tinuiti

At Tinuiti, we know, embrace, and utilize MMM. Our Rapid Media Mix Modeling sets a new standard in the market with its exceptional speed, precision, and transparency. 

Our proprietary measurement technology, Bliss Point by Tinuiti, allows us to measure what marketers have previously struggled to measure – the optimal level of investment to maximize impact and efficiency.  But this measurement is not just to go back and validate that we’ve done the right things. This measurement is real-time informing what needs to happen next.

Curious about how we can tailor strategies to hit your unique marketing bliss point, including Rapid Media Mix Modeling? We’re eager to chat. Contact us today for details.

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Email Ready to Send? Make Sure to Tick These Things off First!

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Email Ready to Send? Make Sure to Tick These Things off First!

Designing and developing an email campaign is a complex mechanism; a few things will inevitably escape your attention during the process. So, before you hit that send button, you must draw up a foolproof checklist to ensure every single component in your campaign is in its rightful place. Wondering what an ideal pre-flight checklist looks like? We’ve carefully compiled everything necessary in this blog. Read on to find out!

Subject Line and Pre-header Text

A subject line can make or break your emails. It’s the first thing about your email that reaches the audience, and if it fails to hit the right notes, you’ll have a tough time convincing your subscribers to engage with your emails.

What makes a subject line tick, you ask? Let’s take a look!

  • Your subject line should prioritize an economy of words; this will help you on two accounts- firstly, a crisp and to-the-point subject line increases your probability of catching the reader’s attention. Secondly, longer subject lines run the risk of being clipped on mobile devices, thereby spoiling the subscriber’s user experience. By keeping your subject lines concise, you eliminate this possibility.
  • Ensure your subject line clearly explains what readers can expect upon opening the email. The more guesswork your subject line demands of readers, the less likely they are to open your email.
  • Steer clear of using words that might be considered spammy. With email filters becoming more and more sophisticated, usage of any sort of contentious term in your subject line will result in ISPs flagging your email as spam.
  • Personalize your subject line. In a climate of increasingly crowded email boxes, personalization is one technique you simply can’t afford to overlook.

Besides fine-tuning your subject line, you also need to pay attention to your pre-header text. Building upon the context provided by your subject line, pre-header texts give readers an additional nudge to open their emails. Two crucial things that you must keep in mind while curating your pre-header texts are:

  1. It must exist only as an extension of your subject line; it must not try to introduce any new ideas on its own.
  2. It must be mobile-optimized.

Broken Links

Given that the links embedded in your email eventually facilitate a conversion, it is imperative that you thoroughly evaluate their health prior to delivering your emails. Broken links aren’t just bad for business; they also spoil a subscriber’s user experience.

Here are a few things you must check after embedding a link in your email:

  • This might sound trivial, but do check if the link you have inserted is the one you intended to or not; the only thing perhaps worse than having a broken link is having an irrelevant one.
  • Check that the link is redirecting the user to the desirable destination.
  • If the download of a resource is supposed to be triggered by clicking the link, check if that’s functioning properly; you wouldn’t want subscribers clicking umpteen times on your link only for it to return nothing.

Accessibility

Apart from acing your content and design, you must also work towards making your email campaigns accessible; people making use of assistive technologies must be able to engage with and comprehend your emails in an absolutely hassle-free manner.

Given below are a few measures that will help you make your campaigns accessible to all:

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  • Organize your email content. Break down long paragraphs into small sections of 2-3 lines. Use bullets and subheadings wherever necessary. This will make it easy for assistive technologies such as screen readers to parse through your content.
  • Write descriptive alt texts for the images you’re including. Besides improving accessibility, alt texts also enable search engines to crawl your page more efficiently, thereby boosting your SEO.
  • Use semantic markup; this will help screen readers navigate your emails in a smooth fashion.
  • Try to stick to a single-column layout while designing your email template.

This email from AllTrails is an ideal example of an accessible template.

Inbox Preview

Different email clients render emails differently, even if only slightly. Hence, before sending out your emails, you must preview them across different environments and clients to check if they appear as desired. If you are designing your email for dark mode, too, it becomes that much more important to preview it before delivering.

Wrapping It Up

For your email campaigns to be able to drive maximum impact, they must be free of blemishes of all kinds. We hope the pre-flight checklist we shared above proves to be of help to you when you sit down to create your next campaign.

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