How to optimize your marketing communications: A Growth Marketer's Guide

Growth marketers use behavioral data to better understand customers and deliver targeted campaigns. This article explores how to use an analytics platform to organize customer data and use it to optimize marketing messages.

Growth marketers use behavioral data to better understand customers and deliver targeted campaigns.

In this guide, we will explore how to use an analytics platform to organize customer data, and thereby use it to optimize marketing messages.

Content produced in association with Iterable.

What is growth marketing?

Growth marketing is typically defined as using behavioral data to run personalized marketing campaigns and achieve a better understanding of one’s customers.

Because users’ preferences, lifetime value and other defining characteristics are not set in stone, growth marketers must maintain a commitment to self-improvement around the tools and tactics that drive their marketing strategy.

One core tenet of this approach is prioritizing customer engagement over acquisition: focusing on retaining existing users instead of just acquiring new ones. Studies show that a 5% increase in retention can result in a 25-95% increase in profit.

What channels do growth marketers use?

Content marketing

Investing in high-quality content such as blog posts, infographics and videos can be an effective growth strategy. These digital assets can easily be pushed out on multiple marketing channels, simultaneously building brand awareness and driving users back to your business.

Combined with a robust email marketing strategy, these channels can help drive growth from beginning to end: from early-stage brand building, to boosting conversion rates, to re-engagement and loyalty. Enhanced with the right data, this low-cost approach can deliver astronomical value for money.

SMS

More than 1 in 10 SMS exchanges in the U.S. are with businesses – used for everything from confirmations and verifications to coupons and customer service. It’s a channel consumers are guaranteed to see, with 82% of respondents in one survey saying they open every text message they receive (with a skew towards a younger, digitally-native demographic).

Customers’ affinity for the channel makes SMS marketing extremely relevant for businesses looking for a fast, direct and effective way of getting in front of a large audience.

Mobile push

Push notifications are effective attention-grabbers for mobile users – with some industries seeing engagement rates as high as 40%. Mobile browser push notifications can help drive conversion once users opt in.

Research has also shown that personalizing push notifications can increase open rates by up to 800%.

How to use data to inform your marketing messages

Of course, the first step in any growth marketing strategy is to establish the essence of your strategy: your core messages. Long meetings and lofty speculation have their place in the process, but your strategy should ultimately be data-driven.

Three things are required to craft a data-driven marketing message:

  • Data: information collected from your marketing channels – such as emails, social media, and your website.
  • Technology: a robust platform that can both collect the right data and build, deploy and manage multi-channel campaigns.
  • Strategy: knowing how to use this data to inform your marketing messages, ultimately helping to achieve greater ROI.

Once you have all three of these, you can embark upon the four key stages of the growth marketing cycle.

1. Unify

Pull all your customer data into one platform. Data from websites, apps, advertising platforms and customer support tickets can be combined with data from an analytics platform like Segment, giving a highly granular view of customers and how they are interacting with your business all in one place.

2. Message

The next challenge is to build relevant messaging across multiple channels using the insights from your analytics platform. First, draw together data from disparate sources to create a detailed user profile. Then segment your users based on profile data and  behavioral data of previous interactions with campaigns.

The next step is to set up systems to deliver this messaging to the right audience automatically. Typically, growth marketing platforms like Iterable will let you create workflows using a variety of filters, delays, channels and triggers to help optimize their delivery.

Finally, its time to create templates so teams can adapt past campaigns to future ones and make optimization more efficient.

3. Analyze

Track campaign performance from the platform by A/B testing messages to establish which is the most effective. Advanced platforms allow a large number of variations simultaneously, auto-implementing the best-performing solution.

This step is essential to completing the feedback loop and ensuring your messages are as targeted and effective as possible.

4. Optimize

Use campaign data to inform your future strategy, refine your messaging and optimize details like send time and audience segments.

One key challenge is attribution: understanding exactly how your marketing efforts are impacting higher-order business metrics like conversion rate, average order value, and customer lifetime value.

Combining growth marketing techniques with an advanced platform and a data-driven strategy is the key to achieving strong growth. To learn more about growth marketing, register for our latest webinar, produced in association with Iterable.

 

Content produced in association with IterableClick here to read our collaborative content guidelines. Views and opinions expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of ClickZ.

Subscribe to get your daily business insights

Whitepapers

US Mobile Streaming Behavior

Whitepaper | Mobile US Mobile Streaming Behavior

5y

US Mobile Streaming Behavior

Streaming has become a staple of US media-viewing habits. Streaming video, however, still comes with a variety of pesky frustrations that viewers are ...

View resource
Winning the Data Game: Digital Analytics Tactics for Media Groups

Whitepaper | Analyzing Customer Data Winning the Data Game: Digital Analytics Tactics for Media Groups

5y

Winning the Data Game: Digital Analytics Tactics f...

Data is the lifeblood of so many companies today. You need more of it, all of which at higher quality, and all the meanwhile being compliant with data...

View resource
Learning to win the talent war: how digital marketing can develop its people

Whitepaper | Digital Marketing Learning to win the talent war: how digital marketing can develop its people

2y

Learning to win the talent war: how digital market...

This report documents the findings of a Fireside chat held by ClickZ in the first quarter of 2022. It provides expert insight on how companies can ret...

View resource
Engagement To Empowerment - Winning in Today's Experience Economy

Report | Digital Transformation Engagement To Empowerment - Winning in Today's Experience Economy

4w

Engagement To Empowerment - Winning in Today's Exp...

Customers decide fast, influenced by only 2.5 touchpoints – globally! Make sure your brand shines in those critical moments. Read More...

View resource