A Quick Update On Multiple-Device Users, Cross-Domain Tracking, Tag Management

Measurability is a key difference between digital and traditional marketing.

The possibilities for gaining insights from digital analytics are boundless and ever-expanding—that’s the good and the bad news. There’s a lot to keep up with.

For a quick tune-up this week, I sat in on a Digital Marketing Depot Webinar, “Digital Analytics Checkup: How to evaluate the impact of your web analytics data.” The title was promising but it was the inclusion of Jim Sterne, founder of the Digital Analytics Association and eMetrics Summit, as a co-presenter that most appealed. I’ve heard Sterne speak before and it's always worthwhile. The co-presenter was Jenny Elliott, senior manager of digital analytics for CrossView, a cross-channel commerce solutions provider.

If you’re lucky enough to be a dedicated Web analyst employed by a mutual fund or exchange-traded fund (ETF) firm, you may be on top of all of this. But if analytics are only part of what you do or if the analytics function reports to you, I recommend that you invest an hour and listen to the full presentation on-demand.

My takeaways follow.

What The 'Insights Consumer' Needs

Sterne set the scene with some comments on the art of analysis. “It’s about asking really good questions. If your job is cranking out reports, you’re doing it wrong,” he said.

“The insights consumer," according to Sterne, "wants an answer to one of these three questions: How do we make more? How do we spend less? How do we increase customer satisfaction?”

He offered this advice for analysts communicating with business managers: “Don’t come to me with data, come to me with stories. If you come to me with numbers, you make me responsible for the numbers and I’m going to ask you questions about how did you get these numbers. But if you come to me with an impression based on the numbers, I can trust you to know the numbers.”

The business manager doesn’t want a report, he or she wants an opinion, Sterne said. “Your informed opinion based on the data is your contribution. That’s why we hire analysts.”

De-duping Visitors

While enabling the collection of more and more data, technology is resulting in a fragmented view of the visitor, Elliott noted.

Specifically, she discussed three issues: 

• Multiple-device users can confuse things. 

Elliott quoted a Cisco forecast that a single business user will be accessing the Internet via an average of five connected devices (e.g., desktop, smartphone, smart watches, smart TVs, Google glasses) by 2018.

Analyses that focus on session growth alone fail to take into account the effect of visitors visiting from multiple devices. And, Elliott touched upon a few analytics solutions including device mapping, universal visitor cookies and device metrics stored in CRMs, all of which enable an analyst to link views to a single viewer.

Unique visitor metrics will be more important than the session-based metrics that we have come to rely on, according to Elliott.

• Cross-domain tracking—relevant for even the smallest asset management firms that have a site and blog on separate domains or maintain multiple microsites—is another issue that analysts are gradually returning to. The technology supporting early attempts to track traffic across domains was, as Elliott says, “scary” and complex.

Some analytics tool providers have made significant investments in the last year to enable users to de-dupe visitors. While solutions that include multi-site roll-ups and tracking methods to pass cookies across domains are not yet “a walk in the park,” the technology is not as daunting as it was just two years ago, Elliott said.

“Think about the power you can give your marketing organization if you can give them insights into visitor behavior on not just one domain but on all domains,” she said. “They’d have so much more context to figure out how to market, how to provide good personalized content, all because they have a much more cohesive view.”

• Finally, Elliott discussed tag management tools, which manage the variety of analytics, ad-serving, affiliate relationship tags that are typically added on an ad hoc basis to Websites. 

Tag management solutions are more simple to use and can shift the responsibility from IT resources to Marketing, which should improve responsiveness. If you’ve ever waited for IT to add code that you needed on the site yesterday, you understand the value of being able to control tags.

Several efficiencies can be gained from tag management. A universal tag will reduce a site’s page load time, especially critical to mobile device users (see Will Google Deem Your Mutual Fund, ETF Website Fast Enough For Mobile Users?). Since all data is formatted in the same way, it will result in clean data that can be analyzed on a more timely basis. Once implemented, tag management can help provide a complete picture of visitors across an ecosystem. This, Elliott noted, can enable powerful segmentation opportunities. 

(For an introduction to Google’s approach to tag management, here’s a video from 2012.)

On another matter: At the Morningstar Investment Conference in June, I was interviewed by Stephanie Sammons for her new Wired Advisor podcast series. Steph made the 20-minute podcast available last week. You might want to check out the entire line-up out to hear the thoughts of a few people—including financial advisor/thought leaders Michael Kitces and Roger Wohler—prominent in the investment space and whom I’ve mentioned on this blog.

Beach Reading For The Mutual Fund, ETF Marketer

Who cares if the pages get a little soggy? 

Life is good for the mutual fund or exchange-traded fund (ETF) digital marketer who finally gets some time on the beach this summer (or on a gently rocking boat) to catch up on the latest ebooks. For your reading pleasure, here’s a guide to the best of what I’ve been downloading lately.

Go Mobile Or Stand Still

While the take-no-prisoners tone of We Are Social’s Social Brands: The Future of Marketing amuses throughout, this ebook is especially strong and relevant on the subject of mobile. 

It elaborates on five suggestions for “better mobile marketing:” 

1. Deliver value: utility, entertainment, or social interaction.
2. Harness mobile context: tailor experiences to the different situations in which people engage.
3. Streamline the experience: adapt content for a range of different devices and connection speeds.
4. Make it portable: enable people to continue their experience across devices, especially when sharing things.
5. Offer varying depths of immersion: e.g., for people with a 30-second work break or with a 30-minute commute. 

Yes, there's a lot more to be done for mobile users by brands, including by asset management firms.

Heavily illustrated, these 127 pages are a fast, provocative read.

Hey Now, No Need To Choke Any Throats

The Marketer: “The site is too slow.”

The IT Guy: “It’s not that the site is slow...but we do have a performance issue.”

Grrr.

If you as a marketer are stumped about what to say next when the conversation heads in this direction, then Limelight Networks’ 103-page “Optimizing The Digital Experience” is for you.

The ebook itself says it’s written for IT staff and leaders, of whom expectations have evolved as more of business has become digital. While IT’s previous job may have consisted of building, managing and integrating content and Web tools, IT is increasingly expected to focus on user experience, this paper says.

“Because digital is becoming such an important part of the business, IT managers are required to think about the end user experience like never before. So when it breaks, you fix it," according to the ebook.

"But is being a firefighter putting focus on performance? Is fixing things when they break a strategy?”

Spoiler alert: No, the break/fix model is not a strategy for managing a technology ecosystem with both external-facing (e.g., Websites) and internal-facing (CRM) digital elements.

While some of the ebook will be of greater value to your IT partners, a chunk of it is a must-read for the digital marketer who realizes he or she needs to be more conversant. You will get a lot out of the first three chapters, which describe the elements of digital performance and the importance of establishing key performance indicators (KPIs). Check out the list of performance testing tools on page 47.

Bored At Work? You Won't Be For Long

KMPG’s Investing in the Future is a sweeping forecast of how the whole of the asset management industry will transform by 2030.

You can see the implications for marketers in just this statement alone: “The industry will have to capture new customers far earlier and keep them longer, by offering products tailored to a younger, less affluent and potentially less financially literate market.”

Oh and then there’s this line, too: “The industry will need to radically change its value proposition to remain relevant in 2030.”

Demographics, technology, environmental consciousness and social values, behavior and ethics all will conspire to shake things up in the coming years, according to KMPG. It takes 80 pages to make its case, and concludes with the top 10 questions for firms to consider.

A beverage with an umbrella might help the medicine go down.

Sales & Marketing 2014

Unlike some of the other ebooks, revenue + associates’ Modern Sales and Marketing Best Practices isn’t going to dazzle you with its layout and graphics. It takes an editorial approach to presenting 10 conversations with leaders including people you likely recognize: HubSpot’s Mike Volpe, MarketingProfs’ Ann Handley and ion interactive’s Scott Brinker.

It’s all relevant and useful, thanks to good questions from Louis Gudema, revenue + associates’ president.

This ebook is freshest on the subject of Sales, specifically social selling, in the interviews with Zorian Rotenberg, Jill Rowley and Nigel Edelshain. They get into some interesting detail.

How To Succeed On LinkedIn

The LinkedIn ebook factory has produced quite a few documents this year. Here are two that you don’t want to miss.

1. The 2014 Professional Content Consumption Report, which LinkedIn bills as “a deep dive into the top content-consuming members on LinkedIn and how marketers can connect with them.” Production of this piece comes at a time when LinkedIn is pedal to the metal on building out its content publishing platform. 

One factoid to bear in mind as you’re preparing your LinkedIn company page updates: The content needs to be mobile-friendly. In Q1 2014, an average of 43% of unique visiting LinkedIn members came through mobile.

2. Way back in March, LinkedIn presented the idea of a content marketing score as a means of providing companies insight into the impact of content shared or otherwise interacted with on LinkedIn. A ranking of trending content also was introduced, and the content marketing score + trending content became the inspiration for The Dynamic Duo ebook.

As is strangely worded in the video above at 0:11, LinkedIn recognizes that “there may be questions about your content marketing. Questions surrounding your content marketing and how to make it most effective could be causing shadows over your strategy...”

The two enhancements should help brand marketers tune their efforts—or, as the video says, "eradicate uncertainty."

I’d be more enthusiastic if these analytics were made available to every company that took the time to contribute content that enriches LinkedIn’s platform. Unfortunately, both resources are available for customers with a LinkedIn account representative (advertisers with at least $25,000 to spend per quarter, in other words).

Have you downloaded any ebooks you recommend? Before you head to the beach or boat, please suggest them below.

How Soon Will Asset Managers Be Texting Advisors?

If financial advisors are planning to communicate with their clients via text in the next five years—as reported in recent InvestmentNews research—will they also be expecting to text with fund companies?

Here’s the survey data that prompts the question. InvestmentNews also reports that 20% of surveyed investors under the age of 45 expect to be communicating with their advisors via text in five years. 

Note that direct, personal communicating via text is practically swapping places with communicating via U.S. postal mail.

In a May post, BlueLeaf made the argument for the convenience of advisor/client texting:  

“You have a very busy day on the road, but need to contact your client about something quick. You don’t want to call and leave a voicemail in the chance that they won’t listen to it in time (or at all). Email’s no good either, as they could potentially miss important information about your upcoming meeting. You need a tool that will help you to make immediate contact to leave your brief message.”

All of the above could apply to wholesaler-to-financial advisor communicating. Texting provides for a direct, time-sensitive communication that other means don't.

And, I dare say (and the reason for the mention of SMS messaging here), Marketing might well tiptoe into permission-based texting.

But in five years? Five years in this industry is like tomorrow in others. Is it on your firms’ roadmap?

I’m aware of firms that offer text messaging capability related to: 

• Shareholder accounts (see T. Rowe Price)
• Retirement accounts (see Vanguard)
• Retirement account enrollment via text (see The Principal)
• The availability of market and economic commentary (see Northern Trust)
• A whole host of commentary and reports and fund event options (see Fidelity) 

This is almost the same list of automated content pushes that I offered in my 2012 blog post on the topic. I haven’t heard a peep yet about firms adding SMS to their call center support, enabling wholesaler-to-advisor texting or organizing for opt-in marketing communications by text.

Not A Regulatory Concern

Evidently, texting does not break new regulatory ground.

“We haven't talked about text messaging in a while,” says Theresa Hamacher, president of NICSA. “It doesn't seem to present any new areas of concern from a regulatory standpoint. My sense is that texts and emails are lumped together and handled similarly. Social media is a much bigger issue, since it's more public and harder to capture.”

How would a regulated enterprise support one-to-one (as opposed to automated) texting? I found this 2011 video about a SalesForce app that will help you visualize how a CRM might enable the communication, in the same way that a CRM supports Sales' emails. This is just for illustration, note. I know nothing about SMS Magic and have no idea whether this developer's storage of the outgoing and incoming text messages would meet FINRA recordkeeping requirements.

For Wholesalers' Best Clients

In fact, wholesalers today are using text but “only for their best clients with whom they have a relationship,” according to Rob Shore, founder of Wholesaler Masterminds.

"The great wholesaler understands the various methods of effectively communicating with their advisors and, today, texting is one of those options. That said, if wholesalers launch into a texting dialogue without knowing that this form of outreach is welcomed by the advisor it will backfire. Spam texts are more invasive than spam emails," Shore says.

True that, Rob.

(I appreciated being able to create the images above on iPhoneTextGenerator.com, but future asset manager texting will almost certainly take place on 4G-plus devices.)  

Cross-Functional And Complex

Mutual fund and exchange-traded fund (ETF) marketers are well aware of 1)the high reliance of advisors and investors on their phones and 2)the immediacy and impact that text messages have. In fact, these SMS messaging stats have been cited so frequently that the date and the source have long since been shed: Reportedly, 98% of text messages are read and responded to within 1.5 minutes versus 2.5 days for email.

Texting offers the potential to improve the relevance, timeliness and even usefulness of what's being communicated. At the same time, preparations for texting will need to be cross-functional and will be complex. My assumption is that these are in the works at least a few firms.

Do you work for the rare firm that has established an SMS capability already? If so, please let us all know below. Others' thoughts are welcome, too.

The Added Significance Of Multiple Email Opens

How are you measuring the effectiveness of your email marketing? You’re looking at open and click-through rates (CTRs), no doubt. But recent research suggests that multiple email opens may have added significance. 

Failure to understand multiple email opens could result in an under-assessment of the appeal of your emails. This is particularly germane for those of you who pay advertising partners for email blasts.

We’ll get into it below but fair warning: This delves into a fuzzy area of email campaign performance measurement.

Finserv Content Isn’t So Easily Dealt With

For the last few years, data has shown that mobile devices are being increasingly used to read emails. And, email marketers have made design, layout, content and even functional (e.g., click to call) adjustments to drive opens and click-throughs on smartphones and tablets.

Mobile devices are an efficient way of using stolen moments on the go to stay on top of an Inbox. But not every email—and I’m thinking of investment management offers of whitepapers or videos here—can be dealt with so quickly or easily while on a phone.

In fact, YesMail last year reported some interesting data on financial services emails in general (probably not asset manager emails sent to financial advisors) accessed on mobile devices. While financial services email subscribers topped the list of industry email subscribers who preferred to view emails on mobile, it was at the very bottom of the list of those who clicked to open on mobile.

A 'New Standard' Of Engagement

In this latest report, email provider Campaign Monitor is highlighting a new email consumption habit it refers to as “triaging”—aka flagging the good ones to be read later, possibly on a different device. A triaged email was opened, not clicked through then and there, but possibly saved to be read again later.

“The shift to mobile has made it more difficult to get readers to engage with your content...The new standard in successful email marketing is not only capturing a subscriber’s attention but holding it long enough to get them to return and engage with your content,” says Campaign Monitor in its Email Marketing Trends report.

As email opens shift to mobile devices, there’s been a correlating decrease in click-throughs—a 10% decline from 2012 to 2013 alone, according to Campaign Monitor.

Unique Opens Vs. Total Opens

Of course, your reporting is duly tracking click-throughs. But if all you’re tracking is opens and CTRs, you may be missing something.

Here’s where it gets frustrating. Data that reports on email open activity is routinely accompanied with a few qualifiers that seek to explain why open data may be both under- and over-counting.

Email open tracking depends upon the downloading of an invisible 1×1 pixel gif image as embedded by the email provider.

As the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) warns, “some opens may not be detected when, for example, the user has images disabled, is on a mobile device, or has elected to receive text-only emails.” That would lead to under-counting.

And, as Campaign Monitor acknowledges in its study, “Apple devices display images by default—thereby automatically registering an open—whereas many Android email clients don’t.” This could result in overrepresentation of Apple users in your data.

On the other hand, the IAB explains, “the metric may also falsely indicate some impressions when the message is briefly loaded into the preview pane but may not be actually viewed by the recipient.” Some email clients render HTML within the preview pane—every time the user scrolls through the Inbox and passes your message, it will count as an open.

Ugh!

The industry’s answer to this has been to focus email senders on Unique opens, a metric that eliminates the duplicates included in Total opens.

But the Campaign Monitor research raises a possibility that makes sense, especially for investment firms that are heavy users of emails to communicate with mobile-reliant financial intermediaries. It stands to reason that the multiple opens number includes some opens that indicate your content’s ability to prompt a second look.

A second look isn’t a click-through but it’s something. It’s more than an open and out. And, at a time when click-through rates are falling at a rate of 10% per year, multiple opens seem to be worth spending some time to better track and understand over time.

I would try to get my hands on your firm's Total Opens and Unique Opens data, including from media partners whose lists you use. Data that enables you to segment email response by device and email client would also be valuable to add to your reporting.

Your Best Prospects Are On A Non-Mobile Device

Mobile complicates an already complicated reporting dimension. Ready for more? Here are some additional findings included in the Campaign Monitor report based on its analysis of data for more than 1.8 billion opens from almost 6 million 2013 campaigns: 

• The first battle is to win the mobile open: As has been well documented, an increasing percentage—41% according to Campaign Monitor—of email is being read on mobile devices. The most common time to click on an email is when it’s initially opened. 87% of clicks will happen then.

And yet, the fewest clicks happen the first time an email is opened on a mobile device. Only 78% of clicks on mobile devices happen on the first open.

• Multiple opens more common than click-throughs: If users open an email on a mobile device, they are more likely to open it a second time than they are to click from their phone or tablet. Overall, 8% of people who opened an email on mobile clicked right away, while 23% opened it again later. (This would be a very broad benchmark to measure your own multiple opens/total open rate against.)
• A second device optimizes the second chance: If a mobile reader opens an email again from a different device, more clicks happen. Mobile readers who open emails a second time from their computer are 65% more likely to click through. The Campaign Monitor Web page has a flowchart that visualizes this.

Your thoughts? 

Mobile Adoption In Financial Services: Lack Of Awareness, Skepticism, Impatience

Typically, banks get all the attention in reports on mobile adoption in financial services. That’s as it should be, since mobile apps and banking transactions on the go are a perfect match. The investment management and insurance industries tend to bring up the rear. However, a Webinar this week presented research that included some interesting, segregated findings and consumer insights about each of the segments.

You can listen to “Deloitte’s Mobile Strategies in Financial Services: Barriers and Opportunities” in its entirety on demand, and download the slides. Also, there’s a related blog post by Jim Eckenrode, Executive Director, Deloitte Center for Financial Services, that provides this succinct summary of the findings: “Our research has found that mobile adoption across financial services has been a crazy quilt of equal parts unawareness, skepticism and impatience with financial services providers.” 

Below I’ve cherry-picked some of the more interesting statements about investment management and mobile. The findings are based on a survey that was conducted during the first two weeks of January and had a total sample of 2,193 respondents, about 22% of whom were from households with income above $100,000 per year. The sample was weighted to represent the broader U.S. smartphone population.

Calling The Call Center From A Smartphone

The consensus of the presenters and the Webinar attendees, as expressed in their response to a polling question, was that financial services has not leveraged the mobile device to any great extent.

While there’s a range of mobile services that banks can support, and insurance companies can offer account servicing and claim filing and tracking, the specifics in the presentation on what investment management firms offer via mobile was a bit light.

In fact, most non-brokerage investment apps today do little more than deliver content, replicating what can be found on the thought leadership sections of Websites, and product data, most of which can be found on any number of finance sites.

A throwaway comment—that 58% of call center interactions came from a smartphone—piqued my interest. Those of you who have this data from your own mutual fund or exchange-traded fund (ETF) operation may be well ahead of me.

Is device-appropriate client service where investment management mobile development could more meaningfully focus? Not to the exclusion of making content available but in addition to?

Any financial advisor or shareholder calling Client Services for help today on a smartphone as opposed to while in front of a desktop is likely having a subpar experience.

And yet Deloitte says mobile technology (including smartphones but also wearable technology and the Internet of things) has the potential to dramatically reshape customer engagement. It's possible to deliver a better experience to mobile users, taking advantage of the unique attributes of the channel.

As Eckenrode comments in his post, new technologies “are being added to the mobile platform that take advantage of its ability to know where it is, see what is around it, communicate with other local devices and connect with information sources that have yet to be deployed.” 

Today smartphones have onboard sensors that include accelerometers, compasses, cameras, microphones, pedometers, GPS, proximity and ambient light detectors, and gyroscopes. Future developments will likely include the ability to detect temperature, pressure, eye movement and gestures, location and magnetic fields, Eckenrode predicts.

Location-aware, Context-Specific

The Webinar discussion expanded on the importance of location-aware and context-specific experiences for mobile users.

I took a quick spin around some of investment firm mobile apps and note that just a few apps today (the screenshots show USAA, an exception) offer click-to-call capabilities. Actually, some Websites still lack clickable phone numbers for mobile visitors to use.

It’s apparent that we in this industry have a distance to travel to be in a position to offer smartphone-using advisors or others the video call support or mobile ad-hoc networks mentioned in the Webinar, for example. If you’re not making big plans already, this discussion will broaden your perspective on the mobile app and “mobility” in general.

The Status Quo

The Deloitte data provides a look at where we are today: Almost half of the survey respondents aren’t even sure whether their principal asset manager offers a mobile app.

In October 2013, the last time I took a comprehensive look at asset manager apps, I thought I detected a certain malaise regarding apps and app updates. Awareness, the presenters noted, is a prerequisite to adoption, user experience and ultimately engagement. We might tack on availability to the front of that list.

Also noteworthy from the research: 

• Only 23% of respondents said the ability to deal with their investment firm on a mobile device was extremely or very important. An advisor-only survey to advisors would produce different results. And, still, respondents would be reacting to just what they think might be delivered via mobile. Marketers could imagine and ultimately deliver more.
• More than half (54%) of investment management clients have concerns about data security over mobile devices. That’s less than bank clients (64%) but more than insurance clients (45%).  
• Survey respondents and the Webinar attendees agree that the creation of a more secure wifi or mobile network was the most appealing way to provide customers security reassurances. Eight out of 10 respondents also thought that a system that would automatically disable a stolen device would be reassuring as well.