Send more, do less. How retailers can use existing content to automate revenue-generating marketing s EXPERTS IN PERFORMANCE

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1 Send more, do less How retailers can use existing content to automate revenue-generating marketing s

2 It s a common theme in the marketing industry, but lack of time is difficult to overcome. Introduction If you re an online retailer, you ll no-doubt be well aware that marketing is a serious generator of income. Most marketers agree, it s one of if not the best marketing channel for generating ROI. And, for retailers, that means one thing: The more s you send, the more money you will make. So why not send more s? There s probably one of two things stopping you: 1. Fear of increasing unsubscribes 2. Lack of time The first challenge is easily overcome. Subscriber lifecycles generally follow a similar pattern. It s rare that unsubscribes come from highly-engaged, regular openers; instead, they come from unengaged, irregular openers. That means you can send more s to engaged subscribers without putting your unsubscribe rate at any real risk. If subscribers begin to feel uneasy with a newly-increased send volume, they first begin to open less regularly. That s when you can allow them to fall back to your regular send volume Communicator s behavioural filtering allows marketers to do this everyday. Alternatively, you could schedule timely follow up s to openers/clickers that didn t convert in a recent campaign. Easy. It s the second challenge lack of time that s more difficult to overcome. It s a common theme in the marketing industry, but there is a solution: Reuse and rotate existing content through automation. Getting started So you want to send more s to subscribers without any further day-to-day effort. What do you need to be able to achieve this? All you need is a website with content that you routinely update. It can be content of any kind; thanks to ever-changing product inventories and content marketing, there s always heaps of fresh content available to retailers. That s all content waiting to be automatically fed into an . By doing this, you can schedule more recurring s to your most-engaged subscribers every day, week or month. The more regularly you update your site, the more frequently you can send these additional automated s to your subscribers. With the right technology, achieving this is far easier than you think. This guide will show you how to do just that. Now all you need is an introduction to the technology that allows you to automatically bring this content to your s.

3 The technology How do you feed existing content to an , without doing anything? You ve actually got a number of options: data imports, RSS feeds and website mirroring. For a number of reasons, the data import process requires a lot of thought. Although certainly achievable this way, most marketers are put off with the amount of set up this requires in the backend. How it works Live at the time of open Let s say, for example, you wanted to take the first three items from your new in section of your website and mirror them to place in your next . To be able to use this on a recurring basis for automation, the mirrored screenshots we host need to update from your website on a regular basis. Otherwise, there wouldn t be any fresh content in your s. Armed with nothing but the web address of that page, you can place them in your within minutes. RSS feeds are great for blogs and can be used to pull through imagery, titles and descriptions, as well as attaching landing page links behind them. That s common functionality for ESP systems, Communicator has had RSS integration for years. Sadly, RSS isn t much use for other types of content and a blog alone probably doesn t provide enough fresh content for retailers to be able to send further automated s that will generate additional revenue. Input the URL and select the areas you d like to mirror you can use either a simple pixel crop tool or an advanced CSS selector and the system will clip the areas of your website to give you screenshots, hosted on our servers. As they re hosted, you can embed these mirrored screenshots within your s through HTML; the system gives you a simple.img HTML tag to paste in a placeholder. So it updates regularly. But that doesn t happen at the time of send. It s done at the time of open, updating every 15 minutes. What about the links? It s not just the imagery that s mirrored either, the links are too. Using the CSS selector, the system also detects and mirrors the landing page link behind each specific Magic mirrorgiving a joined up customer journey for product, Still following? Good, because that s not even the your clicking-subscribers. best part. Until recently, that was the only option for marketers which is why automation is often talked about but not actually practiced anywhere near as much as marketers would hope. That was until we launched our new website mirroring tool. The concept is so simple, you wonder how it s taken this long for it to take off. The technology behind the scenes, however, is a little more complicated. Automation is often talked about but not practiced anywhere near as much as marketers would hope Mirror Mirror content from your website to an with ease.

4 Styling options One-time set up How? That s all well and good, but all of the above might be useless unless the styling of your website is well suited to . The technology might sound complicated, and it is, but it s very simply implemented. Yet even if you don t believe that, remember this: You ll only ever have to set it up once. Well, all of the screenshot and modification trickery happens outside of the , and consequently outside of the s HTML. All an client will ever see is the final image it calls from our servers when a subscriber opens. Happily, we ve thought of an answer for that too. Our system grabs CSS code from your site and separately renders this to be able to screenshot it without fault for your s. If the system does this, it wouldn t be too difficult for us to inject some additional CSS to stylise any mirrored imagery so again, that s what it allows. And as it s CSS you re editing, you can modify pretty much anything! Change font styles, sizing, backgrounds and even add/remove particular elements. All before it gets captured and mirrored to your s. So it s a mirror that makes things look a bit nicer (Who doesn t want one of those?!). You could even play around with the styling to optimise your campaigns. Once set up, you can use it again and again. And for as many s as you like, too recurring or not. Compatibility It s time to talk about the elephant in the room: compatibility. Or rather, lack of accommodated Elephantidae. Due to client limitations, innovations in the marketing world are usually followed with a long list of caveats; usually something along the lines of it not working at all in Outlook, Gmail being dodgy and it only working perfectly on ios devices. With the right workarounds and fallbacks in place, that s usually okay. But one of the reasons why we re so excited about our new website mirroring tool is that it works across all clients and devices. Magic mirror Modify mirrored website content, before it hits your . So as long as images are shown, your website mirroring will display 100%. We re so happy with our new tech, we d happily show it off to anyone. For more information, get in touch with your Account Manager or request a demo. +44 (0) Now all that s left to do is decided what content to use. As long as images are shown, your website mirroring will display 100%

5 Content Although discussed as an example above, it s not just the new in section of a site that can be mirrored. You can do this in two ways: Set up tracking tags on your site to mirror recently browsed products or pages, or if you have enough content combine with subscriber preference data to tailor mirrored content dynamically. Just as you would with dynamic content in any . Truly personalised and truly automated. Welcome You can do it with any content on your site. to the next stage of marketing! Product inventory, blog articles, news, usergenerated content, current offers; if it s on your Magic mirror site, and if it updates, you can bring it through to your new automated program. And another thing To further get your creative juices flowing, consider this: A sports brand could use it for score updates, a publisher could use it for live news, a travel company could use it for weather or traffic updates. As long as it updates regularly, you can use it to automate your s. Your options are endless! The next level Your mirrored content is relevant because it s timely. To take things a step further, you have the option to personalise the content you re pulling through making it even more relevant to your subscribers. You don t have to stop with your own website s content. As long as the content is freely available, you can put anything from anywhere in your s. That means you can bring social feeds to your new automated s live at the time of open, not send. Brand feeds from Facebook, Twitter and Instagram can all be mirrored to your s. If you re promoting a particular hashtag and are confident enough in pushing user-generated content you could even pull through posts including a specific tag. Mirror Mirror Mirror content from external sites including social feeds It s fresh content and a brilliant way to cross-promote your other channels. Big on product reviews? Whether hosted on your site or a third party site if you ve got the permission, you could even pull through reviews automatically. Interested in using third party reviews but don t have the permission? We can help you get the permission you need. +44 (0) And remember: Once set up, you can use it all again and again with ease.

6 Next steps Interested in sending more, yet doing less? Even if you just want to automate some of what you already send, our website mirroring tool makes it easier for marketers to achieve what they want to achieve. It s a new product and not available within the Communicator platform at the moment, so speak to your Account Manager to get started. Or, if you re not yet a Communicator customer, request a demo to discuss the key benefits and how they can be useful for you. info@communicatorcorp.com communicatorcorp.com +44 (0)