Are your messages decaying?

Are your messages decaying?

Are less and less of your database engaging with your emails? Are you receiving fewer social media engagement? Are your SMS's ignored? You may be suffering from message decay.

What is message decay?

Over time, your audiences may become numb or, worse, have a negative response to your messaging. If you experience this, it's probably because you've become competitive. You've confused repetition with consistency, or you've put so much effort into automating your marketing messages, you've forgotten you're dealing with people. People are emotional. They have short attention spans. What worked for them today probably won't work for them tomorrow. 

How do you avoid message decay?

When people stop listening, it's time to change your messaging. Changing your messaging doesn't necessarily mean making wholesale changes. Sometimes change can be as simple as using a different image or changing the language or phrasing. You can say the same thing over and over again but in different ways. This type of incremental change allows your brand messaging to remain consistent while allowing your target audience to build a more multi-dimensional view of your brand.

Is A/B testing a way to avoid message decay?

The answer is not really. Creating an optional headline or landing page is not enough. This is where traditional marketing automation platforms fail dreadfully. They allow to test variations and automate flows of, say, email campaigns based on engagement. The problem with this model is that it passes itself off as something akin to smart. It's not. It's lazy, and consumers see through it. The reality is that there is one way to ensure your message remains fresh and relevant, and that's with agile marketing.

What is agile marketing?

Agile marketing is a way of using previous campaigns' results to inform future campaigns. It's different from marketing automation because it uses technology as part of the solution, not the solution itself. Agile Marketers know that their data is part of the story, and when you combine it with human intelligence and creativity, you get the best outcomes.

The secret to agile marketing

If there's one phrase that defines the era we live in, it's 'fail fast, fail often.' It's a mantra that's been adopted by most of the world's most successful brands over the past 20 years, and it's a mantra that should drive your agile marketing strategy. 20 years ago, marketers created a campaign and rolled it out over a year or longer. Sure, they may have added a few tactical components, but that was all. It was a practical approach as production was slow and publishing slower. Nowadays, production costs are lower, content can be repurposed, and all brands have access to free and fast marketing channels. That's why it's important to get your marketing messages to market faster and see what works…and what doesn't. Agile marketing is all about speed to market. Also, with agile marketing, failed ideas are never failures. They cost little (or nothing), and they provide you invaluable insights into what you can do to fine-tune your strategies. 

More is definitely more

Most marketers interpret the fact that the more emails they send, the lower the response rate as 'our audience wants to hear less from us.' Nothing could be further from the truth. The optimum of posts across Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn a month is about 600. With email, the highest response rates are yielded with between 4 to 10 emails a month. The key to more successful engagement and conversion is better targeting through improved database segmentation, content selection, and personalization.

More campaigns faster

The industry average for a 5 channel (e.g., Email, SMS, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn) digital campaign is about 90 minutes. If you have 10 database segments and want to do 10 campaigns a month, that's 150 hours. XL.Today™ can help you create the same amount of campaigns in as little as 50 minutes. Agile Marketing is all about speed and accuracy, and that's where XL.Today™ has no real competitors. With XL.Today™, you can select images, make database segments, pick email templates, create messaging optimized for each channel, and even research and choose hashtags in a single campaign workflow that can take as little as 5 minutes.

XL.Today™ is the smartest, most straightforward way to avoid message decay. It's also the most practical way to implement an agile marketing strategy and allow your people to perform at their very best. XL.Today™ takes the risk out of experimentation, ensuring your brand and message stay fresh and relevant.