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86 percent of marketers say they will own the end-to-end customer experience by 2020. To accomplish this, the report found that marketing leaders must have a single view of the customer that allows them to engage in two-way, personalized conversations across technologies, locations, and physical objects.

Marketing complexity is growing: More than half of respondents believe the accelerating pace of technological change, mobile lifestyles, and an explosion of potential marketing channels via the Internet of Things (IoT) will change the field the most by 2020. This is driven by the billions of possible interactions these channels will create between a company and its customers.

The top marketing channels are those that can be personalized: The top channels to the customer in 2020 will be social media (63% of respondents), the World Wide Web (53%), mobile apps (47%), and mobile web (46%).

As more consumers turn to social media to solve customer service issues, their expectations are also rising, according to the survey. More than two-thirds of customers said they felt a telecommunications company should respond to questions on Twitter within three hours.

According to the research, nearly a third of consumers said they would consider switching providers if their customer support requests through social media went unanswered. 

he potential for a disgruntled customer to do major damage to the brand is exacerbated by the speed at which social media can spread the word of a bad brand experience worldwide.”

80 percent of companies believe they deliver superior customer service, only 8 percent of customers agree,

If a consumer contacts a business with a question or complaint, they typically expect a response within the hour. However, a Social Media Marketing University (SMMU) survey conducted in February shows that only 17 percent of businesses respond to customer complaints via social media within that hour time period and a surprising 21 percent of businesses never respond at all,

11 percent of brands have lost revenue, 15 percent have lost customers, and 26 percent have tarnished reputations, all because of negative comments on social media.

Katie Hooper, managing director and vice president of strategy at HZDG, agreed: "As soon as you say you're changing your loyalty program, an instant skepticism emerges. When you make the reward harder to realize, it feels like something that's just helping the companies improve their revenue streams. We recommend telling customers how this is going to improve their daily life. Before, Starbucks was doing it really well by rewarding them based on frequency. It said they valued the customer no matter what."

Changes such as these actually could make your loyal customers less loyal, said Susan Cantor, president of Red Peak Branding: "It erodes good will. If you make a change, it needs to be more in line with previous customer expectations."

The primary reason we’ve seen our best open rate climb ever upwards has been an ever-increasing focus on list hygiene.

It’s natural that curiosity-based subject lines would become more powerful as the inbox gets more crowded.

Scarcity, on the other hand, is a powerful tool but is best used conservatively as its impact diminishes the more it’s put into play. And while scarcity is a great driver of sales, it is often less effective at driving your overall open rate up.

Facebook Connections Targeting, NOW the ONLY way to forensically slice audience psychographics. The good news is FB users who engage can be easily studied using free FB tools in Audience Insights, the API and subtractive campaign reach. Get a FB user to become a connection, like your page, use your app, engage with an event and/or any advanced combinations thereof.  THEN and only then can they easily be studied.

In the old days we didn’t have Custom Audiences, let alone the ability to study them. Still, we made major psychographic marketing strides. Remember the magic: Drive traffic from social psychographic targeting to your website. Keep track of that targeting and creative through UTM tags. Set Google, FB and any first-party cookies on your site. Because traffic came from very specific targeting, we KNOW what the audience is. No analysis required.

"Four out of five U.S. adults are involved in a social network," Band adds. The result: Businesses are increasingly trying to follow their customers' social networking updates. It's a logical extension of CRM, which is designed to help businesses broaden their understanding of customers' interests, needs, and concerns. Many business relationships today begin on the Internet, as customers increasingly find businesses from Google searches, Facebook fan pages, and Website visits, adds Brent Leary, a CRM and small-business technology analyst. So it makes perfect sense to track and build those relationships using cloud CRM services, especially if they offer social network monitoring.

• Highrise is a cloud CRM system that many small businesses like. Along with its CRM features, the system provides various third-party customer service applications, such as MailChimp, an e-mail marketing campaign service. Highrise offers a free plan for two users with up to 250 contacts. Beyond that ceiling, monthly plans start at $24 for up to six users.

snag your free template to put together a complete crisis communication strategy. Use this post as a guide to complete it.

Create a Social Media Crisis Scale Convince and Convert devised a great solution to this problem. They built a customer response flowchart that matches the severity of an issue, to the right course of action.

Crisis Level 1: Isolated customer complaints and questions. Crisis Level 2: Angry customers, broken links, posts directing to the wrong page, factual inaccuracies, major misspellings on social posts. Crisis Level 3: High volume of angry customers, service outages, lack of product availability. Crisis Level 4: Product recalls, defective services or products, widespread negative press coverage, layoffs. Crisis Level 5: Lawsuits, serious accidents resulting in injury, illegal employee conduct.

Facebook will focus on improving visual features in Messenger. In his post, Marcus says “people will expect a super fast and intuitive camera, video, images, GIFs, and stickers with almost every conversation.”

Messenger bet big on bots in 2017. Last year the company worked with small businesses and global brands to create more than 200,000 bots for Messenger. Marcus writes, “Look for investment in rich messaging experiences not only from global brands, but small businesses who need to be creative and nimble to stay competitive.” Since many of these bots provide very rudimentary features, we would expect to see improvements in overall user experience this year. We also expect larger brands to follow the lead of brands like Apple Music and Lego in creating marketing solutions made for the Messenger platform. 

Expect to see more businesses transitioning at least some of their customer service resources to Messenger. A recent study, commissioned by Facebook found that “56 percent of people surveyed would rather message a business than call customer service, and 67 percent expect to message businesses even more over the next two years.”

"The thing I've tried to do with any client opening up its customer service channels -- you have to have a crisis communications plan mixed with a customer service plan," he said.  "You have to anticipate what will happen. ... Companies that dive in without a plan of attack for those situations are finding it difficult."

"You have to have a lawyer on staff who can be on call and help your social media team craft communications in crisis situations," he said. "When you have a big publicity problem, you have your legal team working hand-in-hand with PR. Why wouldn't you do the same thing in the social media world?"

"Any industry that's heavily regulated will always have a layer of legal and compliance teams that have to be trained, and have to buy in," he said. "It can be done with the right legal team. But if you have a team that constantly says ‘no,’ it'll never work."

it is no longer relying solely on what Facebook users reveal about themselves. Instead, it is tapping into outside sources of data to learn even more about them — and to sell ads that are more finely targeted to them.

The push to refine targeted advertising reflects the company’s need to increase its revenue. Its shares are worth far less than its ambitious initial public offering price of $38 a share last May, and Wall Street wants to see it take concrete steps to prove to advertisers that it can show the right promotions to the right users and turn them into customers.

Last fall, it invited potential advertisers to provide the e-mail addresses of their customers; Facebook then found those customers among its users and showed them ads on behalf of the brands.

Arising primarily from social media, they represent snippets—not streams—of information and can help companies to figure out what customers want and to spot looming industry and market disruptions before competitors do. Sometimes, companies notice them during data-analytics number-crunching exercises.

potting weak signals is more likely when companies can marshal dispersed networks of people who have a deep understanding of the business and act as listening posts

Nordstrom, for example, took an early interest in the possibilities of Pinterest, the digital-scrapbooking site where users “pin” images they like on virtual boards and share them with a larger community. Displayed on Pinterest, the retailer’s products generate significant interest: the company currently has more than four million followers on the site.

Most of your content is getting lost in the shuffle. Recycle it! Let the customer’s social activity tell you what they prefer. Engagement in social is good, but not if that’s all you get. Some top brands have made the transition to acting like publishers with dedicated internal and external teams cranking out content.

Top tactics used by savvy publishing brands are: Storytelling – high quality engaging content on an going basis Infographic Creation – relevant lists and how to’s Visual Content Marketing – compelling visuals eBook Creation – great for lead generation eMailer Personalization – targeting with relevance and being the information / education source Content Curation within an Industry – keep people coming to you because you find what’s hot and important to your customers, making it easy for them to keep current Webinars / Pod Casts / Google Hangouts – establishes authority Slide Share Presos – extends your corporate social graph and thought leadership Case Studies – SEO value and high share currency Videos to Motion Infographics – video is growing

Brands have a need for smart content routing and unique displays which enable them to maximize customer engagement and experience at every touch point, increasing site participation, and garnering higher social share just begs to get fracked.