🎛️ Contact tracking tech helps brands reconnect with customers

You may have great clients, loyal to your product or service, but how do you stay in touch with them when they switch jobs? That was the dilemma faced by Ellie von Reyn, Director of Demand Generation at SEO and content platform Conductor. “Our customers love our technology and our service team. We’ve got thousands of customers, but marketers switch companies every couple of years. We wanted to reach out to this loyal user base, but we didn’t have an easy way to do that.” Von Reyn saw an opportunity to connect with Conductor’s past users as they moved to new companies, but she also knew their approach for doing this was not ideal: her team looked for former contacts on LinkedIn or reached out on a one-to-one basis — a time consuming and manual process. She began researching tools that could help automate this process and ultimately found a solution.

“We found UserGems, a tool that essentially does the heavy lifting for us,” said von Reyn. “The technology identifies when contacts from our existing customers move to a new company. We’re now able to automate email campaigns that get in front of previous users — we call them our past-user campaigns.”

Von Reyn and her team are extremely happy with the success of the past-user campaigns. Specific success metrics include:

They’ve closed 10 deals that were directly attributed to the past-user campaigns; They’ve seen a 30X ROI for past-user campaigns versus other media campaigns; and past-user email campaigns have 3X higher conversion rates versus other email campaigns.

Read more here.

With a 98% open rate vs email’s average open rate of 18%, it’s obvious that mobile continues to change our expectations and how we want to interact with businesses. To learn just how critical text messaging has become, join Podium for this webinar as they unveil findings from more than 1,000 consumers who shared their sentiment and familiarity with texting, and how ripe the opportunity is for those businesses who leverage it. You’ll learn how messaging has evolved over the last decade and how promotional text messages can be an effective marketing channel.

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TransUnion has agreed to acquire identity resolution company Neustar for $3.1 billion. Neustar’s OneID resolution platform will expand the capabilities of TransUnion’s identity solutions, especially in the adtech space.

Over the course of the last two to three years, TransUnion has been focused on assembling a portfolio of solutions to serve digital marketers. Most recently, they launched a suite of identity products including the TruAudience Data Marketplace and TruAudience Platform.

“TransUnion’s acquisition of Neustar makes sense because it nicely complements Tru Optik’s assets and it gives Neustar access to a huge offline data source,” said Hugo Loriot, Partner at You & Mr Jones data company, fifty-five. “TransUnion already struck deals with media agencies to power identity solutions in the past but it was lagging behind Experian in the audience addressability space.”

Why we care. The TransUnion release suggests that eventually, the Neustar acquisition will eventually scale globally, but not immediately. For marketers, the trend to leverage the vast consumer data resources of TransUnion or Experian means that advertising can still be relevant and addressable through streaming and other digital channels.

Hugo Loriot will be giving a presentation on “Understanding identity resolution as a cornerstone of modern marketing” at MarTech at 1pm ET today. Free registration is here.

Read more here.

Grab your FREE virtual MarTech pass now and get ready to discover 50+ marketing technology solutions — and the actionable tactics you need to leverage them to overcome critical data challenges. Available live — today and Wednesday, September 14-15 — AND on-demand, so you can explore, learn, and train when it fits your schedule.

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This week’s Marketoon examines the classic metric, share of voice.

Fishburne’s take: Share of voice (SOV) became a marketing staple decades ago. In theory, share of voice is a simple way to compare a brand’s media spending against the total media spending of the category. The metric was bolstered by research from Peter Field and Les Binet that showed a link between share of voice and share of market. They found that if a brand increased their share of voice beyond that equilibrium (creating an “excess share of voice”), it could result in market share growth.

The rise of digital muddied the waters. Share of voice is much harder to calculate in digital channels. This has led to renewed attention and debate around additional or alternative metrics. Les Binet has been researching the value of share of search (SOS), which some like Mark Ritson advocate as a potential replacement and others like Shann Biglione at Zenith see as a different tool altogether.

Why we care: An overall share of voice might be difficult to measure across all digital channels, but that’s not the point of a digital channel. Instead, marketers should be using them for performance-based metrics that tie impressions and engagement to real revenue.