51. Some Personal News

Marketing Cloud is vast overkill for most: refine your approach to automation before withering on the MarTech vine

Happy Sunday. To those I spoke to this week or spent time with in-person - thank you. A very warm welcome to all the new subscribers. I’m thrilled to have you as readers and truly appreciate your feedback and support.

Topics covered today:

• A renewed focus on productivity

• How and where to insert automation into the donor lifecycle

• Simple and Complex automation ideas to test

As with every edition of SPN please reach out with any questions or comments. I respond to every single one.

Let’s dig in!

Core Offerings and Opportunities

Two topics this month came up a handful of times in conversations that I’ve found particularly helpful to spend a little more time on. Interestingly they both track toward a renewed focus on productivity.

Concentrating on core offerings. Innovation doesn’t always mean branching out into new channels or adopting new tools. Often, focusing on improving your Org’s core offerings - messaging with greater clarity, slimming down your content pillars, narrowing your focus - can provide significant returns.

Take a page from Meta's book: a company in crisis went back to basics to deliver a viral hit. They focused on their key offering - Threads - and delivered it from scratch in under 7 months with 20 people.

Takeaway: Analyze your current offerings or program narratives, determine which are most valuable to your donors and which have the potential for growth or improvement. Time-bound the effort. Double down.

Turning challenges into opportunities. Adversity often forces innovation. The first half of this year was a challenging environment for fundraising. The advantage though is being forced to streamline operations, reassess goals and align budgets.

A proactive response to 1H challenges can lead to significant operational efficiencies and open new avenues for success in this second half of the year.

Takeaway: Can you turn whatever setbacks experienced in Jan-June into a roadmap of assumptions to test and experiments to run this second half? Everyone’s go-to-market strategy benefits from a little reinvigoration, whether forced upon us or not.

Automation: Value vs Buzzword

Marketing automation is about delivering targeted, relevant messages to the right people. It’s also intimidating. Complex decision tree-like diagrams in Salesforce Marketing Cloud or even database SQL rules come to mind. I find them hard to grasp and maintain, let alone optimize.

“Marketing automation” entered the pantheon of buzzwords in recent years. That and “data-driven marketing,” “Customer Data Platform,” and “Artificial Intelligence”. While some approaches add value to your Org, a lot simply waste time and usually cost a boat load of money.

Rather than go through a painful MarTech implementation project that drags on for three years instead of the promised one just to send an email, I challenge you to understand what you’re trying to solve for. Why not first test a handful of practical and proven Automation approaches, and measure the incremental gains?

Assuming you’re game, I’ve grouped some approaches by category and separated them into “Simple” and “Complex”. Each of them have helped me truly move the needle and they were executed without any wallet draining wizardry from the biggest names in the MarTech biz.

1. Media: Retargeting By Current Donor State

Simple: Regular readers of SPN will have seen this image before. It helps inform my thinking around Donor Lifecycle:

Deliver topic-based remarketing - in this case to First Website Visitors - showing creative that’s aligned with the donation cause – or other topics, like the “About” page that they’ve visited while on the website. This applies to all channels but is most useful in your Display and Email campaigns, and RLSA’s in Search. 

Complex: Implement “sequential” remarketing by aligning creative not with what was seen on the website but with what people of the same demographic and psychographic characteristics browsed in the next stage of the Lifecycle. This is more complex and requires structuring your audiences in a two-fold approach, separating between Donor Lifecycle Stage and personal characteristics, and then overlapping those with an “and” rule for targeting.

Sounds complex – BUT it can be easily done with just Google Analytics and Google Ads at your disposal. How? Leverage GA4 and use Events for donor journey tracking. I explained it in this edition of SPN. For Demo and Psychographic characteristics, basic in-market and affinity audiences will be enough as well. 

2. Website: Donation Forms

Simple: Inform the donation amount options on your donation form based on prospective donor’s household income (HHI). This can be implemented without too much extra technology – if you have web development teams in-house, they should be able to do it themselves. Otherwise the most basic version of Optimizely will get you going.

Google Analytics has HHI data (estimated) available for every session. By grouping that data into three categories of low income, middle, and high income (ultra-net high income is also available if that’s an important category for your Org) you can implement a set of rules on your donation form to vary the suggested donation amounts.

Test starting with no more than 30% difference between low- and high-income options. This approach should significantly increase your average donation value.

Complex: Use low- or no-code web development to build a donation form informed by your testing. Forms could include multiple elements – one long screen with scrollers versus multiple screens, payment options (credit card, Apple Pay, AliPay, WeChat Pay, GrabPay…), geo-tagged personalizations, connecting your gift catalogue, iphone vs android vs desktop, adding an option for covering CC processing fees or switching donations to monthly… there’s an almost endless list to test and some elements will vastly affect your CVR and average donation value.

Optimizing the donation flow will easily increase overall revenue - with no extra dime in marketing spend. Doing it properly requires a lot of effort between heat map analytics and A/B testing, human and capital resources, and a c-level sponsor because this route takes time.

For quick results, there are vendors that can get you started with their version of optimized donation forms. Just know if you want Control with a capital “c” (custom data layers, end to end funnel visibility) you’ll outgrow their black-box models at some point.

3. Channels: Monthly “Upsell”

Simple. Pair up the channels. There’s much to be gained by increasing cross-channel frequency instead of one-channel. Too many Org’s focus on Email as the channel to convert from first donation to monthly. Then they increase the frequency of emails over time before abruptly cutting them when a donor is deemed “lapsed.” Instead of doing that, I’ve seen great results in aligning Email efforts with Display, Paid Social, and SEM.

Google, Meta, and other platforms all have elements of an “audience upload” functionality. Rather than send three emails to each person on the list, separate 50% of your audience and send one email + serve three paid social ad impressions + three display impressions to them for roughly the same cost per touch, and compare the results.

Complex. The number of possibilities here is vast. The best-performing idea I’ve tested was dynamic, persona-level creative for these donors – and AI now allows us to take it to the next level.

Since these people are your donors already, they have accepted your privacy policy – and more importantly, they want to hear from your organization and know the impact of their donation.

How? There are multiple Generative AI vendors to leverage here - even Google now offer basic but dynamic Ad template functionality. What any of this allows you to do is feed your donors’ exact donation value into the creative and show their personalized impact, increasing the CVR for monthly conversion at least double-digit. 

Bonus Topics – Process Automation

The key to successful experimentation with acquisition is not just “launching” tests but iterating quickly and launching a lot of tests. Automation of not only the Donor Lifecycle but processes in the Marketing Team is key to making it successful.

I’ve found a similar rule-based iteration applicable to how my team works. Let me show you an example of how this can be done with the technology available to you – without the big-talk Agile / Scrum processes: 

•  Use the “Alerts” functionality in Google Analytics to help manage your myriad of experiments. For the test campaigns you’re running, set up corresponding alerts both for when it over-delivers on expectations – and when it goes under. When those alerts go off, either double the daily budget for the respective campaign or turn it off. 

• Pre-plan the test cadence in advance – triggering a new one bi-weekly. Similar to the Donor Lifecycle, marketing teams work on a cycle – and while mapping out the next three months of testing activities for the Donors, you should also map out the order of tests. The alert triggers above are the ones that will initiate the change, ensuring your Org’s focus remains on the results rather than the timeline. 

Wrapping Up

Automation is a beast. Some organizations truly can justify investing months of time and millions of dollars into a full-blown Marketing Cloud (I explained how to do it most effectively in this edition). For most it’s vast overkill.

Leaning into simpler versions of automated workflows allow similar results at a fraction of the cost. Money is far better invested into your donor experience. Get the math right and your LTV will sky rocket. 

Interesting Reads

Attention’s the problem, creativity’s the answer – as ever.

An NGO used Apple AirTags to track recycled clothes shipped from Europe to Africa. 

A very detailed and excellent analysis of user flows in Meta’s Threads.

The workers behind AI rarely see it’s rewards: this Indian startup wants to fix that.

How the Chinese Great Firewall handles encrypted traffic.

A good feature from the FT (no paywall) on the Transformer models behind generative AI, and the eight Google researchers who pioneered this and then, all of them, left Google. Also a good case study of the advantages of working in the office.

How to Optimize Your Marketing Budget with Modern Market Mix Modeling - a helpful follow on from SPN Edition 49 and written by someone who really gets measurement.

TikTok launched an ad library (currently only for ads running in Europe), where you can check out ad creatives, targeting, and the number of unique users who’ve seen them. Like Meta’s ad library, it’s a useful tool for competitor research and campaign inspiration. 

Good podcast from futurist Tracey Follows “Future of You - identity audiences and avatars.”

GroupM are bullish on Audio - with a new report on Programmatic Audio produced in partnership with the IAB Europe.

Let’s All Start Leaving Voicemails Again!

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How can I help you? I use my experience, expertise and network to help mission-driven organizations solve interesting problems and grow.