Things you should know about Google Analytics 4

Google Analytics 4 (GA4) is the latest version of Google's analytics platform. It was released in October 2020 and is a significant upgrade from the previous version, Universal Analytics (UA). GA4 is designed to be more flexible, scalable, and privacy-focused.

Here are some of the key differences between GA4 and UA:

• Data model: GA4 uses an event-based data model, while UA uses a session-based data model. This means that GA4 tracks individual events, such as page views, button clicks, and form submissions, while UA tracks sessions, which are groups of related events that occur within a certain time period.
• Attribution modeling: GA4 offers a variety of attribution models, while UA only offers a few. This means that GA4 can give you a more accurate picture of how your marketing efforts are driving conversions.
• Privacy: GA4 is designed to be more privacy-focused than UA. This means that GA4 collects less data about users and makes it easier for users to control their privacy settings.

Persona Marketing vs Account-Based Marketing

Thanks to the rise of Marketo and its plethora of early adopters, the company has pushed the concept of why to switch (from Pardot, Eloqua, etc.) with Account-Based Marketing. The content language of which speaks to the many pain points of commonly used marketing automation tools. The fact of the matter is that both concepts require a lot of content to be created just to make a decent waterfall or drip marketing campaign.

Persona-based marketing really looks at data segmentation as its main focus for generating content for different decision makers and influencers in customer lifecycle management. For example. when targeting K-12 institutions as a software developer of an educational platform, your buyer personas may include superintendents, edtech buying consortiums (NY does this, for instance), principals; and the influencers may include teachers, students, and perhaps even PTA groups, if they are involved with new technology purchases or adoptions within a school district. It's also used by electronics manufacturers as well that sell direct or through distributors into businesses. With persona-based marketing, not every persona that is targeted with marketing content is a viable buyer. Most are information seekers and will eat up valuable production time creating digital content assets for their insatiable appetites. But, it is all good in the long run because these people are very vocal within their own organizations if they really like what you have to offer.

With both styles, your market strategy for reaching out to customers is based on a few firmographic segmentations to start: industry/vertical markets, revenue, location

Marketing Automation : AutoResponders

In this weekend's newsletter browsing, I scanned through a few headlines from Retail Dive and found that our local Powell's Books announced they were discontinuing use of Amazon.com for distribution of books. If you're a small business, Fulfillment by Amazon is probably not the way you want to go. The fees will eat up any profit you're hoping to gain for each item you list and advertise on the Amazon platform. But, this post isn't about FBA or supporting local retailers.

As part of the ad interstitials on Retail Dive, Validity offered a guide titled "Email Marketing for Retailers: The Complete Guide to Maximizing Your Email ROI". Looks intriguing, so I clicked. Got the guide and two autoresponder messages. The first had a subject line of "Your requested content: Email Marketing for Retailers". This is fine and expected. The email does everything right. It acknowledges that a request was made, includes a link for the PDF guide, and has other helpful information about the company's publicly available digital resources.

However, what immediately followed was a second auto-responder with the subject line of "Your Sender Score is step one." with content about welcoming and thanking me for checking my sender score.. which I did not do at all. Let this be a reminder to you about copying existing campaigns to repurpose for future campaigns, whether you use Pardot, Salesforce Marketing Cloud (aka ExactTarget), HubSpot, or other marketing automation tool. I can tell by the subdomain of the email content that Validity uses Pardot. Anyhow. Just a note of caution.

The execution looked flawless ... until I received that second irrelevant email.

I can also imagine that the second email was part of an engagement drip campaign, intended to start as soon as any content was downloaded by a prospect. So that is entirely possible as well.

If you want your own retail emails to keep their momentum and mindshare, don't make simple mistakes like this. Don't just assume that someone wants to hear of your other offerings right after they downloaded unrelated content from your website or marketing campaigns.

It's kind of rude. Heck, I haven't even finished reading the guide.