Barclays Personalised Lending Video

Getting email marketing right has been my key mission over the past few weeks. Creating email campaigns that resonate with the recipient and cut above the noise for the target audience is a tough challenge for any marketer.
Dynamic, personalised emails are becoming increasingly common, with tailored offers, copy, imagery and links based on specific customer data. We can now send a customer who hasn't purchased in the past 3 months 20% off vs a regular customer 10% off. Brands are also experimenting with the endless possibilities to use the increasing amounts of data we hold on customers.
A brand who absolutely smashed data-driven personalised targeting through email is Barclays. In the video below you can see how they use extremely specific customer data to explain their offering, proposition and price and deliver the campaign in a fun and engaging way.

The videos appear to be bespoke (in reality there were over 500 names recorded), giving the customer a complete surprise as it feels as thought the video has been filmed especially for them. 

The overall campaign aims to make it clear to customers that Barclays can give you a good estimate of the value of a potential loan before you apply, therefore eliminating the fear of rejection. They also focused clearly on three reasons why customers may want to take out a loan i.e. home improvements, for a car or to consolidate debt. This made the proposition entirely clear for the consumer and provided visual reminders the entire way through of their own potential loan amount. It's almost like dangling a carrot in front of a donkey, but without the fear of having this taken away once applying.

The video was then embedded in to multi-device optimised emails, which were shown to have 106% uplift in open rates in comparison to Barclay's usual email campaigns. They also delivered 1100% uplift in click-through rates, so overall an all-round success.

Delivering these emails to a carefully selected data set, with highly personal and targeted offers, meant that Barclays were able to track and monitor how likely each customer was to convert, based on their past banking habits. Data really is giving marketers the power to shape campaigns like never before. Barclays were even able to address different customers in certain ways, for example over 50s were addressed with their title and surname, whereas under 50s were just addressed by their first name.

Emails are easy to track, fairly cost-effective and are direct channels which marketers can really take advantage of in order to deliver customer-centric communications. Don't let your email campaigns sink in with all the untargeted junk we receive on a daily basis!

Well done Barclays!

Rival brands: friendly competition or battle that neither can ever win?

I have to agree with the age old phrase "competition drives innovation". The worlds best-marketed brands all seem to have one strong rival with each brand constantly trying to out-market the other. It  is these brands which I find fascinating and it is even more interesting to consider whether brands in fact, benefit from these huge rivalries.

Directly targeting or responding to the competition is highly common in marketing efforts, I have seen it in my own industry, telecoms, with ads such as these:

3 hit out at Vodafone customers with this banned ad

Vodafone's ad promising a Fixed Price for your entire contract

However, there are far more famous and controversial rivalries:

1. McDonalds vs Burger King

As I mentioned, innovation is key in beating your rivals and due to the fact that McDonalds and Burger King's value propositions are fairly homogeneous, there is a lot of mimicking from both sides. Big Mac, Whopper... are there really many differences? Both brands have sued each other for copyright infringement on a number of occasions. 

Burger King actually made a peace offering for just one day in this story, which was swiftly rejected by McDonalds!  However, what a great bit of PR for BK anyway, making them look like the soft, underdog!

2. Pepsi vs Coca-Cola

Perhaps one of the most historic rivalries, dating back to the early 1900s, and the creativity behind the rival campaigns is fantastic.

Pepsi are definitely more aggressive in their competitive attitude through advertising, but unfortunately Coke have held on to the top spot. Coke has become a name to replace the cola industry as a whole- who goes in to a bar and says "Can I have a vodka and Pepsi?". Coca-cola tend to stick to their traditional roots in terms of branding whereas Pepsi go modernistic, proving that being true to your roots pays off. Coke markets happiness with their 'Share a coke' campaign or their new slogan 'Taste the feeling', whereas Pepsi go for a 'cool' vibe with collaborations with NFL and David Beckham.

3. Apple vs Samsung

Samsung are definitely the Pepsi of the mobile technology world. Their dig at Apple (and Apple customers) below, indicates their willingness to take on the rivalry first hand:

You are often asked; are you an Apple or a Samsung person and it's rare that people switch between the two. I am an Apple user but of course since working at Vodafone my eyes have been opened to the world of Android and how much Android devices can really do. However, if you compare Samsung and Apple's marketing spend vs market share, the true stats really become clear:
Samsung: £8.4bn of marketing spend 19.9% of smartphone market share 15% of total operating income of smartphone makers Apple: £1bn of marketing spend 14.6% of smartphone market share 92% of total operating income of smartphone makers
Whilst Samsung make phones to suit lots of markets, providing lower-range cheap smartphones as well as your S6 Edge's to a premium market, the numbers really do show that Apple's smaller range, however highly targeted to those who expect more from their phones, really does pay off. 

Hope you enjoyed this post, let me know your favourite brand rivalries, tweet me at @stefclarkx

What is a Product Manager?

I'm currently in Placement Two of my Graduate Programme at Vodafone which is a Product Manager role within the Innovation team. Now, when people ask my role, they often mishear my title and thing I say Project Manager! However, the role of Product Manager is distinctly different. If you're a recent graduate, student, interested in marketing roles or have even just heard of Product Managers within your organisation and wondered what the hell it is- let me fill you in on a Day in the Life of a Product Manager.

Product Managers are not a million miles away from Brand Managers, however this depends on the type of organisation. A firm with an umbrella brand and lots of sub-brands e.g. Unilever, Coca-Cola, Mars, Nestle etc. will probably have a lot more Brand Managers than an organisation which feeds from the strength one core brand e.g. Apple, McDonalds, Amazon, Samsung and my company, Vodafone, who primarily employ Product Managers. However, effectively the two roles are pretty similar.

On a very high level, Product Managers oversee everything which concerns a certain product. They try and drive usage/ sales/ downloads/ customer satisfaction/ whatever other KPIs marketers pluck out of their objectives and make sure the product is performing. This effectively means you have to make the maximum revenue from your product and ensure your product is doing exactly what it should be doing for the business. This of course, means you must align your product to fit in with the wider business strategy and listen to the needs of the business before you decide exactly how to market your product.

You must also be very close to and focused on the customer. Understand their every need and get feedback on the user experience, which includes a lot of testing, testing and more testing! As a Product Manager, there is also a technical understanding of your product/s needed on a higher level, to know exactly how they work, what is possible and how to develop them.

As all products go through a life cycle, it is important to understand the different times within product managing, right through from launch, growth, maturity, decline and then either rejuvenation or closing/ discontinuing a product. You as Product Manager will oversee all of these stages and
literally be the expert on this product for its entire life!

Launch

Before you can launch a product you need a need that this problem solves for the customer, backed up by a bunch of research! With a deep understanding of the market and your target audience, as well as a real passion for the product, as you are going to have to be the salesperson to every single person inside and outside of the business.

Growth

You then continually plan roadmaps for your product to understand exactly where you want it to go and how you are going to get it there. This might be working super closely with developers, marketing communications activity or user experience improvements. You have to have super attention to detail as you pick out every little nit-picky error or problem with your product and put it right! There are always problems along the way which need solving.

Maturity

This is where you can look at your product and gather enough data about it to understand exactly what customers like and dislike about it. Do you need to make a price change, completely change the product's features or invest heavily in marketing to keep your numbers up?

Decline

Upon the product's decline you can consider two options, closing the product or revitalising it entirely. The businesses' goals may have changed, the market may have changed or the product may simply be too costly to make a profit anymore. This is where you can consider targeting a new audience, changing the structure of the product or redesigning it.

My Role

My role within Product Management is of course within a mobile technology brand and I manage a number of apps. Day-to-day I may be speaking to app developers to improve our user experience on the apps, speaking to various functions within the business such as Brand to get one of our images in the app approved, Digital to get a webpage which mentions my app changed, CVM to promote our app through an email or SMS campaign, Customer Services to make sure the agents know exactly what to say if a customer asks a question about my product or even liaising with Market Research teams to understand how much customers are enjoying my apps!

The role is super varied and means you can really put your passions and energy in to one or two products and they are your entire responsibility- which can be a good OR bad thing, depending on how well your product is doing!

If you have any questions or are interested in a Product Management role, please tweet me at @stefclark

I'll do my next role profile within Placement 2!

Stephanie