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For years, placing cookies on a visitor’s computer gave companies an easy way to not only customize a visitor’s website experience but also deliver highly targeted ads on third-party websites. 2022 will start to bring big changes to this paradigm. Responding to increased regulation and privacy concerns, Google plans to start phasing out third-party cookie support for Chrome. With Chrome’s 67% of the global browser market, that will dramatically impact advertising.

Not everything will change. Companies will still own their website audiences. Our SharpSpring and HubSpot users will continue to be able to capture page visits and click-throughs on the individual level. This provides a great way to segment audiences, creating lists for email campaigns and to customize your website with dynamic content.

With the sunset of individual third-party cookies, companies won’t be able to target at the customer level; targeting will be at an aggregated group level. Google has announced a two-stage plan, starting in late 2022. According to Google “During Stage 1, publishers and the advertising industry will have time to migrate their services. We expect this stage to last for nine months, and we will monitor adoption and feedback carefully before moving to stage 2. Stage 2 (Starting mid-2023): Chrome will phase out support for third-party cookies over a three month period finishing in late 2023.”

SharpSpring retargeting users will continue to be able to segment audiences based on customer profiles (including fields like application and product interest) and online behaviors (clicks and page visits) and to serve ads on specific websites (including nature.com and researchgate.net) extending well into 2023. At that time, third-party cookies will be phased out and an API-based approach to targeting using cohorts will be phased in. As details are announced by Google, we’ll let you know how that impacts ads and how we’ll respond.

Cellerynt now offers ad retargeting through SharpSpring Retargeting Ads. Previous visitors to your website can now be targeted for ads on third-party websites. Display ads are served up specifically to these visitors on sites like nature.com and researchgate.com, as well as various news and aggregator sites such as yahoo.com. This gives additional exposure to people that have expressed interest in your company, even if you don’t have their contact details.

Perfect Audience’s reporting lets you see the top domains on which your ads are served and how those ads performed there. With this information you can create “blacklists” and “whitelists” to customize and level up your campaigns to achieve truly outstanding ROI. If you prefer, specific domains can be excluded as well. SharpSpring Retargeting Ads is available as a stand-alone platform or integrated with the SharpSpring Marketing Automation and CRM platform. Contact us for details.

With all of the time and resources that go into preparing webinar content, you’ll want to ensure maximum engagement with customers. That’s why marketing automation should be tightly integrated with promotion, registration and post-presentation activities. Cellerynt’s webinar promotion service can send targeted pre- and post event emails, provide seamless registration with GoTo Webinar, Zoom and Webex and promote your meeting across multiple channels. Through the use of marketing automation cookies, different ads can be served to contacts before- and after registration. Post-event analytics include contact behaviors during the webinar as well as website pages visited and other engagement metrics. We can even provide support in recording and editing your webinars, contact us today.

The California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), gives the state’s residents the right to learn what data companies collect about them. It also lets Californians ask companies to delete their data and not to sell it.

The law is often compared to the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), currently the benchmark for online privacy.

Here’s what you need to know about CCPA and how it will affect you and your marketing automation program.

Does this affect my company?

The CCPA applies to “any business that earns $25 million in revenue per year, sells 50,000 consumer records per year, or derives 50% of its annual revenue from selling personal information.” This includes businesses that collect or sell personal information from consumers in California, regardless of where the company itself is located.

What personal data does this cover?

CCPA covers all the data you might expect: your name, username, password, phone number and physical address. It also includes information used by companies to track your online behavior, such as IP addresses and device identifiers and browsing history. This is where your marketing automation system comes into play. Every contact that has clicked on a marketing email link or filled out a website form has a cookie placed on their computer that tracks their behavior in marketing emails and on your website.

How is this different from that other big privacy law, the GDPR?

GDPR applies to companies with contacts in the European Union, and it regulates how companies can collect the same kind of personal information as CCPA does. However, the European law puts some stricter controls on how companies must approach collecting user data.

First, GDPR requires companies to get consent to collect data or to have some other valid reason for collecting user information. Secondly, it requires companies to minimize the data collected. CCPA doesn’t require companies to go through these steps to collect personal information, so any limits on data collection will be imposed by individual users who make requests to delete and opt out.

What should we do?

Even if your company doesn’t fall under the CCPA requirements, you may want to set up a basic data privacy system now. Having a Privacy Policy in place for your users demonstrates that you value their privacy and will reinforce confidence in your company. From a legal perspective, the state of California is often at the forefront of new forms of legislation. Once California passes a law, other states tend to consider following suit. California is the country’s largest market with nearly 40 million residents, and carries a lot of weight. Already, nine other states are considering similar laws, and Maine and Nevada have already passed narrower versions of privacy legislation. Of course, if you market to EU residents, you’ll want to comply with the GDPR as well.

We recommend that you post a privacy statement on your website and have some basic consent mechanisms in place. Read this blog article for more information on Cellerynt’s recommendations.

As a marketeer, you probably spend a lot of time developing your promotional emails. You’ve carefully considered every word of the body copy. You’ve crafted a thought-provoking subject line and included a compelling call to action. After all of that work, you naturally want to send it to everyone in your database.

Stop!

There is a cost to repeatedly sending to all of your email recipients and it’s measured in declining open rates. ISPs are now filtering less on email content and more on engagement metrics, which means recipients who stop opening emails influence your deliverability and increase the chance for email to land in a secondary email folder. These folders have different names; Gmail calls it “Promotions”. In Office 365, it’s “Clutter”. To you, these folders might as well be called “Spam” since they remove your email from the recipient’s primary inbox – even for those that have opted-in to your email.

How are ISPs determining deliverability? For those that use engagement data, here are the key positive metrics:

• Message clicked through
• Message opened
• Message replied to
• Message marked as “not spam”
• Message moved to other folders or tagged
• Message images enabled
• Message forwarded
• Sender/domain added to address book

And the dreaded negative metrics:

• Unsubscribed
• Messages marked as “spam” or a reported as a phishing attempt
• Message deleted without opening

Not all of the above metrics are available to marketers but even tracking a few will help to estimate engagement.

Getting a Handle on Engagement

Most marketing automation systems and some email services report the following metrics: click through, open, unsubscribe and spam. Start by tracking overall engagement and scoring individual email recipients. This can be refined by including return visits to your website as well as off-website lead activities such as exhibition visits. Additional deliverability insights are available from third party email optimization vendors such as Mail Monitor and Return Path.

Easy Ways to Increase Engagement

Once you’ve established your current level of engagement, there are some easy ways to improve it independent of changing content.

• Optimize for mobile.

55% of all emails are now read on mobile devices, so your click-through rates will suffer if you are not phone-friendly.

• Send your broad email blasts in three batches based on decreasing engagement levels.

For ISPs that filter email based on previous engagement rates, sending to your most engaged recipients this may improve the deliverability of less engaged recipients. This is especially important if you’re sending from a new IP address (such as when you use a new marketing automation provider).

• Develop email nurture campaigns

By sending follow-on emails on the same subject to only those recipients that have opened your previous emails will quickly enrich your list. Try this with product and event-focused emails.

Driving Engagement with Subscriptions

One of the most effective ways to maintain a high engagement level is to develop and maintain a well-curated email subscription list. . With our clients, creating a permission-based list using an email opt-in checkbox as part of the collateral download process has been highly effective. If your current subscription list has dormant members, try a re-permission campaign to ask recipient to opt-in to future emails. A re-permission campaign is also a great opportunity to ask subscribers for their desired email frequency.

Make sure your great email content gets the audience it deserves. Understand your current level of engagement and increase it through responsive email design, list segmentation and permission-based subscriptions.

You’re ready for a marketing automation system to replace simple email blasts for your life science product company. You’re excited to get started with a system. Before diving in, determine how you’ll use it and what resources you’ll need to get the most out of your investment – before starting the subscription. Adopting marketing automation is more than a tool change; it takes a mind shift. Without changing your business process, your MA system will be underutilized. Fortunately, by avoiding a few common mistakes you can maximize the potential of marketing automation.

1) Not developing your company narrative in advance.

MA is most effective if used to deliver a serialized story about your company and products. Each email contributes to the narrative, helping to build credibility and eventually persuading the reader to take action. Develop a set of narratives for your company and individual products. Elements of these narratives can be mapped to individual emails in a campaign. The number and timing of your emails should take into consideration the length of the typical sales cycle. A simple drip-based email campaign may share the same content but differ in timing and complexity compared to a behavior-based nurture campaign. Remember the widely repeated marketing adage that a prospect needs to see a message seven times before responding to it.

 2) Not having enough content.

Remember producing your first newsletter? If your company was like most, the first couple of editions were easy to fill with great articles, but it got more difficult with time. Your blog may have had the same issue, with progressively more time between posts. MA takes the time out of sending emails, but it doesn’t automate content generation. Those emails need persuasive content to engage readers and compel them to take action.

Create a flow chart of your email campaigns and the kind of content and collateral needed to convey the narrative. Inventory your collateral currently available and under development with special attention to top-of-funnel collateral such as white papers that you’ll need immediately when you start your campaigns. Don’t forget content that can be derived from customer-authored journal articles and conference presentations. Your most credible advocates are your customers and their most credible statements are in peer-reviewed journals.

3) Under-resourcing your marketing automation initiative.

It’s easy to imagine that MA will free up time for your marketing organization; it actually does the opposite. Developing software expertise as well as building, testing and deploying the workflows and tasks within a MA system takes time. Integration with your CRM system takes time. As mentioned earlier, MA devours content, which takes more time to write.

Identify in-house or consulting resources to manage the system and make sure that enough time and budget are allocated.

For complex, high-value life science products, marketing automation is an essential tool to help nurture prospects over long sales cycles. With planning, you can make the most of your investment in marketing automation.

Marketing automation systems collect information from individuals that open your emails or visit your website and therefore companies that implement systems such as HubSpot, Pardot and SharpSpring should be aware of consumer privacy regulations such as CalOPPA, CCPA and GDPR. A central part of complying with these regulations is implementing a  Privacy Policy.

Even if your company doesn’t fall under some of these regulations, having a Privacy Policy in place for your users demonstrates that you value their privacy. Consumer confidence is woven into many laws that require you to write your Privacy Policy in simple terms the typical site visitor can understand, as well as to make your Privacy Policy easy to find on your website.

A well-written and legally compliant Privacy Policy provides your users with important information to educate them about their privacy rights and your use of their personal data.

• Include a Privacy Statement on your website. This should cover the core tenets of consent, access and data erasure.
• Provide consent mechanisms. We recommend implementing a pop-up cookie notification system on the website for European visitors. It will notify them that information is being collected and direct them to the Privacy Statement. The Privacy Statement page should have links to: (1) unsubscribe from marketing emails, (2) request a copy of personal data held in your marketing automation system, (3) request erasure of personal data in your marketing automation system.
• Enable access to personal data upon request. Set up a simple request mechanism for email and website contacts to request access to the data collected by your marketing automation system.  The mechanism can simply be a form or dedicated email address to send data requests.
• Enable erasure of personal data upon request. As with enabling access, a simple mechanism for contacts to request erasure from your system should be implemented.