In today’s data-driven marketing landscape, building a closed-loop marketing infrastructure is crucial for businesses seeking to optimize their creative assets and maintain ownership of consumer data throughout the marketing funnel. This approach not only enhances performance marketing effectiveness but also provides valuable insights for continuous improvement. Let’s dive into the key components and strategies for implementing a robust closed-loop marketing system.

What is Closed-Loop Marketing?

Closed-loop marketing is an approach that allows marketers to track and analyze the entire customer journey, from the first point of contact to the final conversion and beyond. By closing the loop, marketers can attribute success to specific marketing efforts and gather data at every touchpoint, enabling them to refine their strategies continually. There are five components to keep in mind: 

1. Data Collection and Integration

The foundation of any closed-loop marketing system is comprehensive data collection. This involves:

• Implementing tracking pixels and cookies on your website
• Utilizing customer relationship management (CRM) systems
• Integrating analytics tools across all marketing channels
• Employing customer data platforms (CDPs) to unify data from various sources

2. Identity Resolution

To truly own consumer data at every touchpoint, you need to be able to identify and track individual users across devices and channels. This involves:

• Implementing a robust user authentication system
• Utilizing cross-device tracking technologies
• Employing probabilistic and deterministic matching techniques

3. Marketing Automation

Automation is key to efficiently managing and acting on the data you collect. This includes:

• Setting up triggered email campaigns based on user behavior
• Implementing personalized content recommendations
• Automating ad bidding and placement across channels

4. Analytics and Reporting

To optimize your creative assets and marketing strategies, you need powerful analytics capabilities:

• Implementing multi-touch attribution models
• Utilizing predictive analytics to forecast campaign performance
• Creating dashboards for real-time performance monitoring

5. Content Management System (CMS)

A flexible CMS is crucial for managing and optimizing your creative assets:

• Implementing a centralized asset management system
• Utilizing A/B testing capabilities for content optimization
• Enabling dynamic content personalization based on user data

Strategies for Optimizing Creative Assets

With a closed-loop marketing infrastructure in place, you can employ several strategies to optimize your creative assets:

1. Data-Driven Creative Development: Use insights from your closed-loop system to inform the creation of new marketing assets.
2. Personalization at Scale: Leverage user data to create personalized experiences across all touchpoints.
3. Continuous A/B Testing: Regularly test different versions of your creative assets to identify top performers.
4. AI-Powered Optimization: Employ machine learning algorithms to automatically optimize creative elements based on performance data.
5. Cross-Channel Consistency: Ensure your creative assets maintain a consistent brand message across all marketing channels.

Owning Consumer Data at Every Touchpoint

Here’s how to truly own consumer data throughout the marketing funnel:

1. First-Party Data Collection: Focus on collecting data directly from your audience through owned channels.
2. Data Privacy Compliance: Ensure your data collection and usage practices comply with regulations like GDPR and CCPA.
3. Transparent Data Policies: Clearly communicate your data practices to build trust with your audience.
4. Data Activation: Use the collected data to create more relevant and engaging marketing experiences.
5. Regular Data Audits: Continuously review and clean your data to maintain its quality and relevance.

Challenges and Considerations

While building a closed-loop marketing infrastructure offers numerous benefits, it’s not without challenges:

• Integration Complexity: Bringing together various tools and platforms can be technically challenging.
• Data Quality: Ensuring the accuracy and consistency of data across systems is crucial.
• Privacy Concerns: Balancing personalization with user privacy requires careful consideration.
• Skill Gap: Your team may need additional training to effectively utilize the new infrastructure.

Building a closed-loop marketing infrastructure is a significant undertaking, but the benefits are substantial. By optimizing your creative assets and owning consumer data at every touchpoint, you’ll be able to create more effective, personalized marketing campaigns that drive better results.

As you implement this approach, remember that it’s an ongoing process of refinement and optimization. Stay agile, keep learning from your data, and continually adapt your strategies to meet the evolving needs of your audience. 

Ready to get started? MuteSix has the team in place to build this infrastructure for you – let’s talk. 

First, have a conversation with your agency partner. They know your brand and the market well and can tell you if AI aligns with your goals. Not working with an agency? Reach out to us to see if AI is right for you. 

Second, make sure your brand identity and key assets are rock solid. The more detailed you can be about your business, your audience, and your platforms, the more AI will turn around better branded content.

With that in mind, I think the true magic starts when you link AI to your performance metrics. It can version, optimize, and iterate assets—

Some of my favorite AI tools include Meta’s Advantage+, TikTok’s AI helper, and Instagram’s new AI Studio. 

The Force of Meta AI

Advertising has come a long way in the last ten years. With Meta AI, you can improve targeting and personalization, making ads more relevant to users. Even then, it’s important to note that AI is a tool that complements human creativity, not replaces it. 

AI is still relatively new, and consumers may spot the difference—there is value in true human connection. Plus, ethical considerations and transparency in AI creative are key. I always take the time to review and edit AIs’ work to meet brand guidelines, audience expectations, and goals.

This is what makes Meta’s Advantage+ suite so exciting. It integrates curation, optimization, and iteration into one platform. AI’s ability to quickly version and sharpen creative assets is impressive, but it’s still in its early stages, and human oversight is needed. 

High Tides of AI Creative 

AI is reshaping, not replacing, the creative process. These tools are made to free up creative teams so they can focus on strategic and creative directions rather than getting bogged down in technical tasks.

 It allows my team to produce more personalized and effective content that’s also data-driven and informed, that way we get to be creative and our clients see results. 

Sailing Forward

AI is here to stay and only getting better. So, I always stay up to date with the latest advancements to use it effectively. Knowing how to use AI correctly will one day be as crucial as learning how to use email or video, and those who don’t embrace it may find themselves at a disadvantage.

In all, why not? AI offers a pretty powerful tool for optimizing ads. Sure, it requires careful planning and strategic use, but with the right approach, brands can better navigate creativity and targeting for results. 

No, this isn’t a joke. 

We know—it’s only July, and Black Friday isn’t until November 29. 

But you can laugh all the way to the bank, if you prepare for shopping’s biggest day correctly. 

Craving a slice of the $10 billion dollar pie? Yep—$10 billion. With a “b.” That’s how much shoppers are estimated to spend on Black Friday in 2024, up from $9.8 billion in 2023. And while it might not taste as good as a warm, gooey pecan pie, there’s no way anyone would turn down a piece of that. 

So, pull up a chair, get cozy, and let our Head of Lifecycle Marketing, Jessica Levinson, walk you through how you can prepare to win BFCM by leveraging email and SMS as part of your multi-channel marketing strategy. 

3 Months Before:

• Lock In Your Promotion: Black Friday is not the time to wing it. Review past performance, recent top-selling products, and your business goals to align your best possible offer, then confirm your website and supply chain are prepared to take on the task.
  
  Stress test your site to ensure it can handle some TikTok star shouting out your promo, and ensure it’s optimized for speed and performance, so you can get folks from your PDP to purchase with as few clicks and in as little time as possible. There will be no shortage of deals from your competitors, so you want to make sure you don’t lose out on sales if prospects run out of patience.
  
  Ensure you have enough of your most popular products in stock to fulfill a high volume quickly, and have a contingency plan in place if you sell out before you intend to. Email and SMS can be crucial pieces of this strategy due to the real-time communication they offer. Be sure to set up a Low Inventory automation to really layer on the urgency, or leverage a Back-In-Stock flow for any products that sell out ahead of or during BFCM. 

• Drive List Growth: Savvy shoppers know that Black Friday and Cyber Monday are on the horizon—not just businesses. Given this, it’s not uncommon to see softness in Q3 as shoppers wait for those big deals in Q4. But laying the groundwork now can pay off big time in just a few short weeks.

Stay ahead of rising CPMs on social media—thanks to both Black Friday and Election Day—and grow your list early with a little help from your paid and organic marketing channels. Then leverage email and SMS to retarget those subscribers when your deals go live. 

Use your email or SMS platform to create a landing page and trade opt-ins for email and SMS marketing for exclusive early access to your Black Friday sale or another juicy incentive, like an exclusive promotion just for your subscribers. 

• Don’t Freak Out: Overwhelmed already? It’s a good thing this is what we do (and we do it really well—like multiple-award-winning, millions-upon-millions-in-revenue well). If you need some help ahead of Black Friday, we can make it happen. Get in touch and let’s get to work. 

2 Months Before:

• Audit Your Email & SMS Programs: When you’re close to a brand, it’s hard to envision how things look from the outside. When’s the last time you put yourself in your customer’s shoes? Create a burner email address, open an incognito browser, and head to your site. Sign up for email and SMS and see what happens next. 

What does that journey look like? How quickly are your Welcome automations firing? Were they received? Did the content match the offer on-site? If you come back to the site in a day or two and add something to your cart then leave the site, are you retargeted? What if you just view products and leave? Does the journey look different during November than it does during a period of time when you’re not offering your biggest deal of the year? 

Deep dive into your email and SMS automations and ensure core flows are in place, firing correctly, and landing in your inbox. Look at your campaign cadence and how that overlaps with your automations, too. Are you communicating too much? Not enough? Is the messaging correct for the goals you’re trying to achieve? Better yet, does the content as a whole meet the needs of your subscribers? Are people even getting your emails?

Aim to optimize absolutely everything—your segmentation, your sending cadence across your campaigns and automations, your creative—ahead of Black Friday to provide the most beneficial experience for your subscribers, and to keep your email deliverability and sender reputation in good standing ahead of the most critical time of the year.

• Re-engage Dormant Subscribers: Not everyone who is on your email or SMS list is going to engage with your brand forever—or stay on those lists forever either. However, it’s common knowledge that it costs less to retain a customer than it does to acquire a new one. So, if there was ever a time to get them to come back and engage, it’s ahead of Black Friday and your best promotion of the year. 

Given how inundated with messaging they’ll be on the day itself, it’s best to reach out a bit further in advance and attempt to win them back, so you’re not just another unread message being sent to their Trash folder on 11/29. 

Look to your email and SMS platforms and the zero- and first-party data available within them to identify high-value targets to re-engage using RFM analysis—recency, frequency, and monetization metrics. Then, use a multi-channel approach to retarget these subscribers across email and SMS—and even paid media, if you have room in your budget. 

PS: This is also a great time to clean your list of low-value subscribers, like those who have hard bounced or have never engaged with your emails or SMS messages—or those who don’t re-engage during this winback period. It’ll not only help with your list health, but it can help keep your costs down, too, on some ESPs and SMS platforms. 

1 Month Before:

• Confirm Your Calendar & Targeting: This is where the fun really begins.
  
  Dig into your performance data from last Black Friday and identify what worked and what didn’t, then pair that with your recent peak times for opens, clicks, and conversions across your lifecycle and retention marketing channels to inform how often and when you should be communicating with your subscribers on email and SMS.
  
  Keep in mind that different subscribers can and will tolerate different frequencies. Look at each subscriber’s level of engagement, preferred marketing channel, purchase history, CLTV, and more to identify levels of intent and craft corresponding personas and targeting strategies accordingly.
  
  You don’t want to over-communicate with a low-intent subscriber or under-communicate with a high-intent one, and you certainly don’t want to speak to both the same, or at the same frequency.
  
  
• Launch Your (Early!) Sale: Shoppers can’t wait for the big day and if they’re on your email or SMS list, they shouldn’t have to. With more and more retailers beginning their Black Friday promotions right after Halloween, it’s not uncommon to see “Black Friday Preview” or “Early Black Friday” splashed across e-commerce websites and social media.
  
  If going wide with launching that early doesn’t feel right for your brand, you can still get in on the action with email and SMS. Roll out the red carpet and make your subscribers feel like VIPs with early access to your sale with an exclusive code, or layer in several smaller promotions, like single-item discounts or gifts with purchase ahead of the big day.
  
  If someone is giving you their email address and phone number and all of the high-value data that comes with it, you should look to reward them appropriately for doing so, and there’s no better time than during BFCM, when they’re already keen to shop.
  

Week of Black Friday:

• Check Your Work, Then Check It Again: Before the “Turkey 5” kicks off and you toss your bird in the oven, ensure everything is set and scheduled—then check it again.
  
  Check your popups and other opt-in sources and ensure they’re feeding into your email and SMS platforms correctly. Run through your email and SMS automations from start to finish and ensure timing delays, filters, and triggers are set and working correctly. Check the segmentation in your campaigns, your campaign content, and send times—and, most importantly, don’t forget to hit “Schedule.”
  
  Then, as things start to roll out, check in on your deliverability, engagement, and conversion metrics across email and SMS. Quick pivots might be needed, and a backup plan should be at the ready (hint, hint: see the Low Inventory and Back-In-Stock automation callout above and the “Be Ready for Anything” section below).
  
  
• Be Ready for Anything: One of the best things about email and SMS is how quickly you can use the platforms to pivot.
  
  Is there a site glitch happening? Not hitting your sales numbers and don’t have a fully designed email at the ready to layer in urgency at the end of your sale? Want to extend your sale on a whim?
  
  You can leverage plain-text email campaigns or SMS campaigns, if and when you need a little extra push. They come together in minutes, not hours or days, and can be hugely impactful for driving conversions and getting your subscribers the information they need at a moment’s notice. 

Day of Black Friday:

• Panic: Just kidding. 
• Cash In: Not kidding. 

Ready to craft your winning BFCM strategy on Email and SMS? This is just the beginning. Let’s talk. 

For too long, this exclusive Euro event has become a playground for the advertising elite – with sales folks and c-suiters schmoozing each other and flitting to events mapped over the very craft ceremonies they flew around the world to celebrate. 

That being said, I’ll be the first to admit I’ve been lucky enough to win a few shiny bits over the years. And don’t get me wrong, I really like awards, I like award shows – it’s good for our clients, it’s great for agency reputation and it’s awesome for attracting and retaining talent. And I fully believe there’s real value in coming together as an industry to appreciate the art and craft of what we do. I’m not here to yuck anyone’s yum and I sincerely wish everyone the best of luck in the south of France. . .

HOWEVER

Cannes needs to evolve to represent a more inclusive, egalitarian future-proofed vision of our industry. One that welcomes diverse perspectives and has substantive conversations, about where we’re going as a business and not just industry self promotion and personal aggrandizement. The event’s focus needs to shift to recognizing that for advertising to succeed as a go forward business that it needs to take on an attention economy growth mindset not a brand maintenance model –  to survive we have to fuse creativity and data-driven strategy to drive measurable success for the brands that have been entrusted to us.

This must become a festival for everyone – for the unsung creatives in Culver City, for the aspiring teams in Bangkok, for every set of hands that has pioneered new tools sets, ways of working and at the same time poured their soul into a strategy, a media plan and an idea that drives results for clients. That’s what advertising should be about – not just rosé-fueled networking, but a working-class craft of persuasion, nudging consumer behavior through the powerful blend of creativity, technology, and human insights. 

Let’s reclaim Cannes as a true celebration of our craft – judged not by popularity contests and arbitrary metrics, but by clearly understood and articulated hard numbers with real-world impacts. A festival for all makers, storytellers, and innovators striving to create campaigns that resonate, persuade, and ultimately move the needle. It’s time to refocus on what truly matters: using our abilities to solve problems and produce quantifiable results for clients. Cannes should be a vibrant masterclass in merging art and science and a global get together where we honor the true prize: quantifiable results that move culture forward and the bottom line up.

Okay I’ll sit down now, put on a Francoise Hardy record (R.I.P.) and chug some rosé in my backyard. 

CD

Over the last 18 months, MuteSix has experienced a genuine transformation, building strong momentum for the future.

The digital performance agency that once put itself on the map for its best-in-class paid social and search solutions has evolved into an omnichannel performance agency skilled at addressing both brand and demand. 

To know where we’re going, it’s equally as important to consider the driving forces behind this transformation.

New Consumer Realities

Consumer behavior is changing faster than ever before, and businesses are unable to keep up with the pace of change.

I joined MuteSix as President in 2022 — three years after we were acquired by dentsu. They inherited MuteSix’s successful track record of driving revenue growth and performance-marketing metrics for smaller DTC brands, but our agency wasn’t quite ready yet to address new market realities.

Unlike the pandemic days, store doors are open again, and hybrid buying behaviors are the new normal. Brands need a strategy for the current omni-realities. They need a unified vision and an agency who can elevate beyond lower-funnel performance tactics.

So, I decided MuteSix would make changes to propel us and our clients into the next chapter of growth.

Our performance-marketing DNA is now supported by best-in-class analytics and measurement solutions, and full-funnel creative capabilities alongside network-leading adoption of AI-powered tools across performance channels. This further reinforces MuteSix’s readiness to help brands navigate the new consumer and market realities.

Business Transformation

To bring new value to our clients and meaningful, sustainable growth, we transformed MuteSix into an end-to-end 360° solutions organization, identifying the root cause of business problems and attacking them head-on. It’s an agile business model that delivers results, ultimately taking brands to new heights.

Our growth revolves around these key points:

• Divest from short-term collaborations to building lasting, long-term partnerships with brands.

• Media in isolation does not perform over time and is only part of the solution.

• Creative is the performance multiplier — a fact that’s unquestionably true and empirically proven.

• We lead Meta and Google with automated, AI-powered solutions and the belief that Media is commoditized.

• “Set it and forget it” strategies often fail. Instead, our Growth Strategists focus on real-time growth strategies that are tested and continuously rewritten.

• Consumers are multifaceted and can’t be fully captured by static personas, profiles, or datasets.

• Continuous creative testing into consumers’ drivers and motivators doesn’t have to be expensive or time-consuming.

• The continuous removal of third-party cookies may also make it harder to measure the effectiveness of advertising and accurately attribute conversions. Our Data Scientists have built reliable data tools to track users across channels and touchpoints and navigate in a cookieless world. 

Culture Transformation

We just opened the chapter of MuteSix’s new working culture: renewed organizational energy, a wider aperture, and de-siloed teams operating fluidly. Our newly defined core values lay out the direction ahead:

Shared Accountability. There’s collaboration in every corner. Our teams work together fluidly to identify the root cause of problems and get to alignment quickly on solutions and outcomes.

Collaborative Innovation. The aperture is wider than a single channel. Perspectives across the entire agency and at all levels are welcomed, heard, and appreciated, leading to greater communication and creativity. 

Impactful Elevation. We work to empower and lift each other up as a team in a kind and respectful way. This is non-negotiable.

New Beginnings

Leading MuteSix through this transformation journey has arguably been the hardest and most important work in my career. It drove my professional growth as a business leader while simultaneously stretching my personal growth as a human being.

Thoughts I reflect on at the end of each day: rewards take time, grit, and understanding, and transformational work isn’t for the faint of heart. Restoring a business brick by brick takes time and patience, and I have so much respect for my team at MuteSix who have helped drive this change forward.

J

Last-Click ROAS is Dead. Long Live MER.

Josh Ma is MuteSix’s VP of Growth Strategy. In this role, he has helped to evolve the agency’s strategy and internal capabilities in support of end-to-end growth across omnichannel media solutions for disruptor brands. Beyond infrastructure oversight, Josh collaborates with brand leaders to provide strategic analysis and recommendations for accelerating sustainable growth. 

With the fast-and-furious degradation of pixel-based attribution models accelerated by Apple’s privacy-first iOS 14 rollouts, the rising popularity of ad blockers, and the demise of third-party cookies, brands looking to last-click ROAS have been struggling to make sense of falling performance.

Given how saturated and competitive most shopping verticals have become amidst economic headwinds, growth-minded brands must divert their attention away from last-click ROAS, toward a tried-and-true metric known as Marketing Efficiency Ratio or MER.

Hear us out. 

But, First. What Is Last-Click ROAS? 

In the ever-shifting world of digital advertising, ROAS, also known as last-click ROAS, has consistently  been the golden measure of performance.

But, we’re going to let you in on a secret: The days of last-click ROAS as a dependable measure of campaign efficacy are long gone. 

And, if we’re really honest: they have been long gone for a while. 

Why? Because It is a flawed measurement, made for simplicity.

What Makes Last-Click ROAS Flawed?

From a business perspective, last-click ROAS offers a digestible way to attribute dollars spent to dollars made by individual efforts. Whether in-platform, Google Analytics, or a Multi-touch Attribution tool, the purpose of last-click ROAS has been to gauge each channel’s contribution to a sale. It does this by looking at the last touchpoint a consumer interacted with before making a purchase.

However, this one-dimensional measure can actually hinder your efforts to scale tangible revenue growth, mainly because while it shows where demand was eventually captured, it does not show where that demand was created. This creates a bottleneck given many ad-driven purchases occur long after an initial advertisement is seen.

The attribution-based online marketing world that marketers have known for the past two decades is rapidly disappearing, mainly because it:

1. Creates short-sighted bias. It leads many decision-makers to over-invest in tactics like Brand Search, where last-click ROAS is high, rather than investing in upper- and mid-funnel tactics to truly drive new customer demand (aka, new incremental revenue). The result is a false sense of growth as you maintain a high last-click ROAS, while your gross revenue remains stagnant.

2. Relies on pixel-based attribution. Starting with the iOS 14 updates, brands and platforms have less data for audience targeting and less visibility into individual media behaviors for tracking and reporting. Whether in-platform, through Google Analytics, or with other pixel-based reporting solutions, decision makers no longer get a complete data set of consumer behavior because attribution has been growing increasingly inadequate.

3. Ignores the importance of LTV. Achieving high LTV should always be the goal for brands looking to grow their business for the long-haul, and doing so requires an empathic understanding of what matters most to your customers. Without building trust and celebrating your key value props before and after acquisition, brands will have to fight an uphill battle against diminishing returns as their pool of “low-hanging fruit” dwindles to nothing.

4. Fails to look at the full picture. Marketing channels do not live in vacuums, and last-click ROAS completely ignores the complexities and synergies of customer journeys, cross-media behaviors, and actual growth drivers. Optimizing campaigns and budgets based on last-click ROAS prevents brands from considering the impact that paid media have on both paid and organic channels. 

For an accurate snapshot of your marketing program’s holistic health, brands need to look elsewhere–and that elsewhere is MER.

Marketing Efficiency Ratio (MER) to the Rescue

MER provides a view of total dollars spent to dollars made (gross revenue). It is a performance measure of the totality of your marketing efforts with a simple equation:

Total gross revenue / total ad spend 

From a business perspective, we’re simply looking at dollars out, dollars in. 

At MuteSix, we laud it as the most reliable and robust metric, as it shows what your revenue multiplier is on marketing costs. It’s important to note, however, that it is not meant to guide media investment decisions at the campaign or ad level.

Very few will try to argue that individual marketing efforts result in one-dimensional results. For instance, your Facebook ads aren’t impacting just your Facebook-attributed sales. They also have an impact on your organic search, Paid Search, direct traffic, and other marketing efforts. 

For that reason, brands need to look to MER for a more holistic snapshot of the efficacy of their paid media investments. 

The Myriad Benefits of MER

Marketers have been trying to identify more effective top-line metrics so as to see through the fog of multi-touch attribution. While better measurement solutions have popped up, even those have become ineffective since Apple’s iOS 14 signal loss. 

With MER, marketers take a holistic view of campaign efforts in order to better understand their efficacy as well as the health of the business as a whole. 

What’s more, MER enables brands to gauge the trajectory of their revenue growth because it:

1. Takes into account the total revenue generated–not just revenue generated by the last click. This provides a more comprehensive understanding of the overall effectiveness of a marketing program in terms of scale (sales volume) and efficiency (revenue multiplier). 

2. Shifts media KPIs to be secondary to business KPIs. This empowers marketing teams to set up their initiatives to directionally improve on tactic metrics across the customer journey, consider the halo effect on lower-funnel KPIs, and measure success based on actual top-line revenue growth. Equally important, this creates alignment between marketing and finance as we plan for growth.

3. Considers revenue drivers across the entire customer journey. By looking at overall MER and segmenting revenue by customer type (i.e., first-time customers vs. repeat shoppers or subscribers), brands can identify bottlenecks and make long-term strategic decisions on growth opportunities at scale. 

For instance, segmenting MER enables brands to determine if the biggest opportunity to scale is by focusing more efforts on FTCs, optimizing CAC, or nurturing higher LTV. 

4. Disassociates itself from attribution models. Instead of relying on pixels to attribute customer sales to a specific channel (a data set that we previously mentioned is increasingly less available), we take a look at the trajectory of media spend directly on incremental sales. 

The Key to Success When Using MER

The best way to continue testing the impact of various channels, tactics, and messaging on revenue is to pair MER with incrementality testing and statistical-based approaches like Marketing Mix Modeling (MMM).

MMM is a highly resilient, data-driven statistical analysis that quantifies the incremental sales impact and ROI of marketing activities. A holistic model, it is used to understand how to allocate a marketing budget across marketing channels and can help forecast the impact of future campaigns.

MMM can accurately track the performance of campaigns to accelerate profitable, long-term growth. 

Meet M6’s MMM

In fact, well aware of its power to better measure performance in a privacy-first world, MuteSix pioneered its own MMM solution, unlike any of its kind. Here’s why:

For brands that have the budget, historical data, and appetite to test & learn for the sake of breaking business goals, MuteSix’s MMM could be just the measurement solution for you.

A Final Word: It’s Time to Ditch Last-Click ROAS

Brands that rely on last-click ROAS will continue to experience stagnation with their marketing results–no matter how strategic and aggressive their marketing efforts. 

To remain competitive, brands need to focus instead on direct business outcomes, leverage full-funnel media KPIs as directional guides addressing clear objectives, and prioritize their resources on customer-centric efforts that actually drive incremental revenue growth. 

At MuteSix, our data-driven marketing strategies and measurement solutions go beyond ROAS to deliver higher-quality customers for greater lifetime value. 

If you’re a brand looking for more reliable, real-time measurement solutions to accelerate record-breaking success, reach out to our team of Marketing Science and Growth Strategy experts today. 

This holiday season has been a huge success for brands. Take a look at these numbers for a YoY comparison. Looking for vertical specific data? Please refer to the bottom of this blog!

To help our clients finish the year strong and to set up 2023 for further success, the Growth Strategy department here at MuteSix would like to gift the following thought-starters for your consideration:

Strengthen Loyalty:

• One way to show your appreciation with existing customers is to host a Customer Appreciation Sale. This gives you an opportunity to re-engage your best customers and give your sales a little kick before year’s end. We recommend utilizing your lifecycle marketing channels for this effort.

Test Out of Diminishing Returns:

• With post-iOS 14 privacy changes negatively impacting the advertising industry’s ability to access audience data for targeting and attribution, brands need to move towards a full(er) funnel media approach in order to efficiently win net new customers. With recent wins with clients taking this approach during BFCM (for instance, one brand saw a 44% increase in net revenue from FTCs with 23% less media spend YoY), the audience scale and qualifying that a full funnel media approach provides is also the strategic play that will ensure sustainable long-term growth.

Focus on net new customers, not immediate net sales:

• Covid, supply chain issues, and the growing concern around inflation all had a major impact on consumer preferences. This has left a number of businesses with excess inventory whether due to changing consumer demand or price sensitivities. To move more inventory and to set yourself up for more success, companies with customers that have strong repeat purchase behaviors should consider an end of year sale of specific items to drive new customer acquisition. Instead of focusing on immediate revenue, brands need to understand that the name of the game in e-commerce is customer lifetime value. By encouraging more first-time experiences with your brand, brands will have a larger pool of customers to re-engage with upsells and cross-sales through lifecycle marketing channels in the new year.

New Year, Better/Refreshed Me:

• For the same reasons that businesses may have excess inventory, the past few years have seen a disruption to the daily routines and habits of people everywhere. This disruption is an opportunity for brands to win new customers by showcasing how products/services enable specific routines and habits while addressing the new realities around cost-of-living pressures. Areas of creative messaging opportunities:
  • Self-care: How can brands empower routines that help people take care of themselves (physically, mentally, emotionally)?
  • Self-confidence: How can brands help people become more sure about themselves and their choices?
  • Self-identity: How can brands enable people to unapologetically be who they are?
  • Self-discovery: How can brands contribute to your customers’ personal journey?

Measuring Success in 2023:

• As previously mentioned, post-iOS 14 changes to consumer privacy have reduced the ability to track/see people’s behaviors on their iPhones. That represents 50% of the US population, or 150 million people whose data is no longer available within platforms. This will only grow over time. This is why channel attribution is no longer possible and measurement companies that still provide this offering are sharing an inaccurate view of paid media contribution to revenue.  
• Brands that are looking to succeed moving forward need to acknowledge the new realities and become familiar with solutions that do not depend on pixels. Marketers who are setting up their businesses for success are now looking to statistical modeling-based solutions such as Marketing Mix Modeling (MMM) to plan and make data driven investment decisions.  To learn more about MMM, please reach out to your Client Success Manager to get connected with our Marketing Data Science capabilities. 

It’s been a pleasure partnering with you in 2022 and we’re excited to help you strive for even more success in 2023. Growth Strategy has been behind-the-scenes with your teams future-proofing your media investment strategies. If you’d like to learn about additional capabilities, please contact us.

CEOs, business leaders and celebrities alike can’t seem to stop talking about Clubhouse, the buzzy, invite-only audio chat app that launched in April 2020. The new social media platform started to infiltrate the tech community late last year and is now valued at a reported $1 billion with millions of users. Industries spanning beauty, food and fashion are now flocking to the app, and Facebook is already rumored to be working on a competitor. 

Clubhouse has given thought leaders and experts a space to connect in a setting that is arguably more casual and interactive than LinkedIn. Its format of “rooms” allows individuals to join, host and listen in on discussions. I like to think of it as a cross between a webinar and a podcast. 

As with any emerging social platform, savvy brands will be the first to capitalize on an untapped marketplace. However, what sets Clubhouse apart is the lack of opportunity for the visual content (whether paid or organic) that performs so well on apps like Facebook and TikTok. 

Through this post, I’ll outline why it’s essential to develop a Clubhouse strategy now while explaining how to utilize this voice-chatting app as a successful marketing tool.

There is no paid advertising on Clubhouse, but advertisers can still reap the benefits. 

While Clubhouse is composed of individual users versus company profiles, the app is brimming with opportunities for brands to connect with consumers more intimately. Advertisers can view rooms as audiences, and instead of pushing a product in a branded ad, an executive or founder can become the value prop as the room’s host.

Studies have shown that consumers are loyal to brands they follow on social media because they feel a personal connection. Clubhouse allows companies to go a step further and simulate that same sentiment using a human “face” (or, in this case, a voice), providing a vertical for brands and consumers to connect as if they are friendly acquaintances.

Clubhouse users can provide valuable feedback for brands. 

Joining a room on Clubhouse can feel a lot like hitting “play” on your favorite podcast — only in this scenario, you have the option to contribute to the conversation. This direct and open communication line can be as valuable to brands as customer reviews and satisfaction surveys. 

Brands should lean in and listen to what consumers are talking about, interested in and engaging with. Businesses could tap into user insights to influence advertising strategy, product development, brand initiatives, CSR programs and much more. 

While this two-way conversation model may seem simple enough to approach, I would advise companies to proceed with caution and ensure their spokesperson is as authentic as possible when interacting with consumers. As we’ve seen in the past, misusing a platform like TikTok or Snapchat, or not understanding what consumers want to see from brands, can lead to a PR nightmare, so it’s best to tread lightly. It’s crucial to take users’ expectations into account and engage with them in a way that does not come across as ingenuine.

The takeaway: Brands should consider Clubhouse as an essential part of their 2021 marketing strategy. 

It’s too soon to see the full impact that Clubhouse will have on the social media and performance marketing landscape, and there is no playbook yet for brands that want to build their presence on the app. But brands can and should be paying attention to the buzz. 

To get started, CEOs and brand leaders should be hosting rooms, joining conversations, networking, and connecting with consumers openly and honestly. Without any boundary between your company’s thought leaders and potential customers, there is a real possibility to form a meaningful connection that may have previously been unattainable. 

My prediction is that Clubhouse will remain free of advertising for the foreseeable future. We won’t see a “Clubhouse for Business” tool launch anytime soon, but channels do not always need to be directly profitable to be an impactful part of a larger, holistic marketing strategy.

For months now, Apple and Facebook have been very publicly battling over the impending rollout of a data privacy feature in iOS 14. The update will likely be a major blow for the performance marketing industry; from what I’ve seen, Facebook advertisers specifically are preparing for a stark difference in the way they target audiences. 

While Apple has leaned into messaging that it is simply in favor of user privacy, it’s essential to understand that these changes will probably have a significant impact beyond the advertising industry and could negatively affect small and medium-sized businesses.

The news has been unsettling and somewhat confusing. Here are the details and what I think businesses and marketers alike should know about the expected data loss.

Apple hasn’t released all the facts, but advertisers can expect to lose some historically relied-upon signals for personalized ads. 

Based on the information available, it appears that Apple will roll out its AppTrackingTransparency (ATT) sometime in the next few weeks. 

Users who have installed the iOS 14 update will start to receive pop-up notifications asking them to specifically opt in and authorize apps to access their data. While we can’t predict exactly how many users will choose to opt out, we expect the percentage to be high. This could make it extremely difficult for brands to understand who is seeing their ads and take away many reporting capabilities that typically ensure successful campaigns. 

Audience tracking notably helps small and medium-sized businesses raise awareness and ultimately grow and scale their brands. The Ads Manager tools on Facebook and Instagram have traditionally allowed companies to interact with their existing and prospective customers with exceptional accuracy. Those capabilities will likely be significantly scaled back once ATT is rolled out. 

Data privacy may not mean fewer ads for Apple users; it will probably prompt fewer ads from small businesses and more ads from large chains and franchises. 

The advertising industry globally appears to be shifting toward a heavier focus on privacy protections for consumers, and the iOS 14 update happens to be another major step. In my view, it appears that Apple wants the public to feel like they shouldn’t be sharing their data, but in reality, sharing their data benefits consumers and businesses equally. 

Reaching the right people means brands can connect with customers who are genuinely interested in their products and align with their ethos. More data privacy probably won’t equate to fewer ads; instead, users will likely receive the same amount of ads, only they’ll be for brands and products that may not be relevant. 

A strategic, targeted approach to advertising helps people connect with and discover brands they love; it allows entrepreneurs and small business owners to not only exist but also to compete successfully alongside big-box retailers and large corporations. 

Brands can prepare now by implementing a holistic omnichannel performance marketing strategy. 

While we can’t stop Apple from forging ahead with ATT, I encourage brands to explore a diversified performance marketing strategy and consider tapping into channels like text messaging, connected TV, podcasts and influencer marketing. These platforms do not require quick data feedback to be impactful. 

As marketers continue to learn more and understand how Apple’s data changes will affect businesses over the next few months, it’s important for brands and agencies alike to be flexible and ready to pivot.

This past year, when the pandemic mostly kept us apart from friends and family, we maintained those relationships via social media, video calls and, probably most often, texts. The average American adult spent more than three hours per day on a smartphone in 2020. 

While people have been notably surprised by their screen time reports, they’re not putting their phones down as a result. Consumers are making more mobile purchases than ever, with shopping apps reaching 14.4 million downloads in the U.S. between March and April 2020. 

Tapping into SMS — Short Message Service, or simply texting — provides brands the opportunity to meet customers where they are spending the most time. It’s the fastest and most logical way to interact with shoppers. Here’s why SMS is the marketing tool of the future and how to leverage it now. 

Consumers engage with SMS faster than any other marketing channel. 

It takes approximately 90 seconds for someone to answer a text message. Compare that to the 90 minutes it takes, on average, to respond to an email. SMS has proven efficiency when it comes to abandoned carts, customer service inquiries and promoting new product launches and seasonal sales. It is one of the most effective ways to recover lost revenue. 

The channel’s early success means it will likely continue to progress before reaching its full potential as an independent e-commerce platform. 

Consumers are hungry for convenience and often don’t want to be bothered with steps like re-entering credit card information at checkout. As many as 97% of shoppers have abandoned a purchase because the checkout process was not seamless enough. 

In the future, I predict we’ll see texting become its own distribution channel where users can complete their entire purchase journey quickly via SMS, stored card details included. 

Texting is uniquely personal, making it an ideal channel for DTC (direct-to-consumer) brands. 

As inboxes and social media feeds become increasingly inundated with ads and branded content from department stores and big-box retailers, SMS is a more personalized method for companies to engage with their audience. That said, to do it at scale with automated text messaging it’s hard to do it in a very personalized manner.

DTC brands are frequently the first adopters of new marketing channels. Many are already capturing phone numbers through their checkout flows on Shopify. They then segment users based on their prior behavior and use that data to send them targeted messages. 

In general, digitally native brands lack the advantages of a heavy brick-and-mortar presence, such as face-to-face customer service and hospitality. SMS provides a moment to level the playing field and facilitate a two-way conversation between the brand and the consumer. 

The SMS marketing model’s simplicity also means it’s incredibly cost-efficient for small businesses — there’s minimal need for creative and management tools.

To see tangible results and prolonged engagement, a thoughtful strategy is essential. 

While the concept of SMS seems reasonably straightforward, marketers should view it in the same manner as any other performance marketing strategy and take a thoughtful approach. 

It’s crucial to personalize messages based on real customer data and behavior and make those messages conversational. Texts from brands shouldn’t feel starkly different from friends or colleagues. 

Companies can use pop-ups to offer perks for opting into receiving SMS messages, and then take it a step further and continue giving incentives to avoid losing subscribers. The real opportunity with SMS lies in prolonged engagement and a chance to create lifelong customers. 

The takeaway: SMS is the next phase of e-commerce. 

As e-commerce grows at an impressive rate and Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) rises, companies have to nurture their customer relationships to succeed in a crowded space. 

SMS will continue to evolve and has the power to become an entirely shoppable experience; everything a customer can do on a Shopify site will be achievable via text. Live, timely, person-to-person messaging will become the norm as we get further into 2021, and it’s in a brand’s best interest to get started now.