Global Digital Marketing & Retail by Alex 19
Inspiration from across the world for retail enthusiasts, e-commerce professionals, marketing lovers and technology fans.
🛎️Attention product owners: user story inspiration at Temu
In an earlier post, I wrote about Temu, and that we can learn a lot of its features and flows. This is such a feature. They make it so much easier to write a review by scrolling through snippets of other reviews. Just click on it and you start writing your review. It benefits the user and potential future customers.
🧑💻Server-side tracking and data warehousing
As I wrote in the previous newsletter, I had a very enjoyable experience at Tomahawk Digital Marketing Agency. They organized an inspirational afternoon on international digital marketing. One item was server-side tracking and how this is set up.
First-party data is getting much more important, also in advertising. A configuration like this helps a lot in achieving better results. Basically, you have a giant data lake with all kinds of data, that you can then use to feed advertising platforms. This can go even up to (in lead generation) to for example teach the algorithm which customer is a high quality lead or a low quality lead.
Also, it is now possible to feed advertising platforms with margin data, allowing you to optimize your ad strategy much better.
What about data analysis? Good question, Alex. Of course, such a data warehouse also helps in analyzing data and finding patterns you might not have found yourself.
Interesting side note the speaker mentioned they use this configuration also for improvement in internal communication, it is possible to push a message (f.e. via WhatsApp) if a product is (almost) sold out for example.
Whether you are a small or large business, this configuration is future-proof and I suggest diving into it.
🚫 Facebook ad account “audit sheet”
I found this sheet below online. A “Facebook ad account audit sheet”. I think worth sharing and can come in useful. I do not have the original Google Sheets or Excel file, but you can easily copy it or even upload it to ChatGPT or Google Bard and ask it to replicate it.
🧱 Brick-and-mortar retail is back: moving beyond entertainment
I love brick-and-mortar shops when they have “something special”. I always visit these stores when I am abroad, just to experience it.
FastCompany now has an article on brick-and-mortar retail trends. How we moved on from “Instagrammable spots in a store” to really add value.
When you visit a Boll & Branch store to pick a new set of sheets, the staff will ask if you would like them to come to your house to make your bed for you. And they’re perfectly serious.
At outdoor retailer Orvis, you can take a free fly-fishing class in local waters, so you can learn how to use your new fishing gear. At Converse’s holiday pop-up, you can have your sneakers embroidered with your initials.
Boll & Branch has found that customers who shop in store tend to spend more with the brand and keep coming back in the future. “It’s something we’ve known all along in business, but somehow we’ve forgotten in the digital age,” Tannen says. “Great service is what creates loyal customers.”
https://www.fastcompany.com/90999854/brick-and-mortar-retail-is-back-but-without-the-gimmicks
https://www.abaar.net/2023/04/retail-and-e-commerce-in-thailand.html
🪧Advertisements around the world: China and the United States
I would like to share two advertisements or campaigns:
The ‘Cup of Respect’ campaign by Nescafé” is the first one. I share this one because it is important to understand the capabilities of WeChat and the way advertising will inevitably also change in the West. Whether you like the purpose or not of this ad, the concept is very well done.
They created an interactive mini-program game within its brand hub to educate customers about its sustainability efforts. Customers redeemed credits earned inside the game for coupons and converted them into real-world trees, planted by Nescafé. This gamification, bolstered by films, posters, articles, and influencer partnerships, accomplished millions of impressions and engagements in just one month.
The second one is from Adobe Firefly on TikTok. It’s distributed as a paid partnership, so maybe it’s not directly from Adobe, I am not sure about that. But I share this one because it looks more like a movie before you realize it is an advertisement. And yes, I also have the comment, “Why not simply AI the Astronaut in it”, as we barely recognize the father in the suit. But the post does its job, lots of comments, likes, and views.
📪DPD's AI Bot Goes Rogue, Calls Customer Service the Worst Delivery Service!
This is funny. More and more companies are using custom-trained language models for their customer service. It means you train an LLM model on a specific “walled” data set.
Now look at this GPT from DPD, the parcel carrier 🤣
Now how to prevent this? Of course by thorough testing, but also during training or testing you can use so-called: reinforcement learning. With this, the bot gets a reward or punishment for its actions. This method sometimes is purely digital, but also humans can be involved, in that case it is called: human-in-the-loop reinforcement learning. This method is used a lot in LLM training and I recommend understanding this principle.
An additional way is to train the bot on a dataset that is free of profanity. That must be difficult for a company like DPD, as I guess these bots and the customer service contacts will consist of lots of swearing.
Next to that, implement filters to block certain words.
Think about that when you set up an AI chatbot. You can test locally by creating an LLM yourself, for example with the tool: LM studio, I tested this before and still using it to learn more on LLM models
That’s it for this newsletter,
Thank you for reading,
Alex