Original Source: https://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2020/04/email-personalization-your-secret-to-better-engagement/

One of the struggles that marketers face is how to send the right message at exactly the right time to target people in a way that will appeal to them. To solve the problem, businesses need to get themselves acquainted with new technologies and the power of personalization.

In the past few years, digital marketing as we know it has undergone numerous changes, distinguishing itself from the traditional marketing of the past.

With new technologies on the rise, marketing has become easier and smarter, enabling businesses to achieve more than they did. More specifically, the use of AI and machine learning has allowed businesses to refine their marketing campaigns, placing the customer at the center of their operations.

As a channel, email has proven itself…to have the best ROI

However, how can you capture a customer’s attention without being physically there to engage with them and show them that your business is the right place to spend their time and money? One of your best allies to show consumers that you aren’t a faceless brand is none other than email marketing.

As a channel, email has proven itself not only to be convenient for modern consumers, but also to have the best ROI; $55 for every $1 you spend on it.

Your mail campaigns are indeed efficient lead nurturing tools, but everything will be in vain if you don’t target your audience with highly personalized messages.

Why Do Businesses Need Personalization?

Modern consumers receive hundreds of promotional emails on a daily basis. However, some of them end up in their trash without being read. Why?

Well, with the rise of scams, the majority of consumers have trained themselves to identify fake messages and fraudulent content.

As a result, emails that look spammy, impersonal and irrelevant — even if that wasn’t your intention — will eventually end up in users’ trash folders.

This will harm your email deliverability and give you a bad send reputation that will prevent you from reaching your subscribers’ inbox.

To ensure that your email campaigns get the desired open and click-through rates, you have to make sure that your messages are tailored to your subscribers’ needs. That’s where personalization comes in.

Personalized content will show your recipients that your message is unique and not part of a one-size-fits-all email campaign.

Of course, you can’t send every single campaign manually. To save time, marketing automation has enabled businesses to automate the process and deliver numerous campaigns automatically without cutting down on personalization.

To do so, you need a platform to provide you with valuable, real-time insights and powerful personalization tools. If you still haven’t chosen one, you can try one of the available free email marketing services to get an idea of how email personalization works.

Personalization will help your audience see the value of your message, primarily because it will be addressed to them.

Consequently, tailored content will help you get more engagement, build a loyal audience who will anticipate your content, and turn them from subscribers into satisfied customers. As email marketing statistics show, personalization is so powerful that it can increase your open rate even by 29%.

What About Hyper-Personalization?

A simple first name in your emails might be effective, but as marketing evolves, it won’t be enough to attract your subscribers’ attention.

For that, businesses have tried to discover new ways to get their audience to click on their incentives and promote their business development. According to a survey by SmarterHQ 72% of consumers say they now only engage with marketing tailored to their interests.

72% of consumers say they now only engage with marketing tailored to their interests

This consumer tendency has created a new form of personalization called hyper-personalization.

Hyper-personalization leverages data to provide more personalized suggestions and messages that will be tailored to each customer’s needs.

Through this advanced form of personalization, you can improve customer experience and drive your prospects and leads a step further down your marketing and sales funnels.

To make hyper-personalization possible, you need to leverage the power of AI and data. But before you do that, you need to know how to collect customer data and then leverage it through AI and machine learning.

Collecting Customer Data

Your first step to personalizing your marketing is to decide what kind of data you need to collect, and why you need it. Especially after GDPR regulations came to existence and consumers’ rising concerns about data privacy.

Here’s an example from Bulgari’s website, informing visitors about their privacy policy in a fully transparent manner:

This cookie policy is right there, complete with everything one would need to know when viewing a brand’s website, even before signing up.

It will make your prospects feel safe right off the bat since the website not only acknowledges its use of cookies but also gives the prospect an opportunity to review why this happens.

There is, of course, no set of rules regarding the data you may need from a prospect. It could be anything.

Now that you’ve made your privacy policy clear it’s time to start collecting your visitors’ information. In this case, Bulgari has created an efficient form to capture its visitors’ emails and at the same time collect valuable information that will improve their newsletter open and click rate:

Segmenting Your Subscribers

Adding the right input fields into your forms will give your new subscribers an idea of what you’ll do with their information.

Bulgari’s form is a great example that includes all the right fields to collect insight into its audience’s preferences.

After your prospects click on your CTA and join your mailing list, you can start segmenting each subscriber based on their interests and preferences.

Segmentation is one of the most efficient practices to personalize your email content and deliver tailored content that will convert your audience into loyal customers.

For instance, demographic segmentation will help you come up with unique campaigns for your female and male subscribers. Then, you can use their individual data to further personalize the email content based on their interests.

Segmenting your audience, though, is only the beginning to achieve hyper-personalization.

Leveraging the power of AI will help you deliver personalized product recommendations in the form of amazing email campaigns that will convince your audience to click-through and buy more.

How To Use Customer Data The Right Way

The first thing you need to know is how AI enables hyper-personalization. Essentially, it’s how you can fully leverage data to improve your marketing activities.

Machines learn in the same way humans do. By feeding data into the machine and adding more and more scenarios, you’re teaching the platform to distinguish between scenarios and find patterns in a quicker and more accurate manner.

More importantly, the machine is taught to connect past “purchases” and come up with suggestions for a marketing team.

Essentially, the more data the machine can go through, the more scenarios it can come up with and the more prospects it can connect to. This will lead to the creation of a unique buyer persona that will be more accurate than the traditional buyer personas created by marketers.

In the end, the personas you create through AI will be able to provide tailor-made solutions and appeal to the general sentiment of each segment of your audience.

Now that you’ve created your personas and know which segment of your list is interested in which of your products, you can use your promotional content more effectively.

Here’s an example from Matalan that uses a customer’s previous purchase data to come up with a personalized cross-sell email:

With a hyper-personalized email, you’ll be able to target your audience with more accuracy.

The use of data will help you craft more messages that will be personalized and tailor-made. So, when you apply them to the AI-generated user persona you will step up your customer lifecycle marketing efforts effectively.

Takeaway

If you use AI and data correctly, you’ll be able to provide one-on-one content down the line, seeing as AI is able to track and trace the kind of content individuals are most interested in, through social media data, engagement data, and so on.

This will help marketers to create amazing content that will be both valuable and engaging for your new prospects.

What’s more, personalization will enable marketing teams to create something that will feel natural, incentivizing your audience to click on your CTAs and move a step further down your marketing funnel.

Source

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Original Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/tympanus/~3/q0npnTzJuU0/

The other day I revisited this awesome demo of a gooey countdown using SVG filters. The demo by Graham Pyne shows a morphing text effect where one number morphs into another. I wanted to integrate this in a menu and see how variations on the filter would look like for a hover effect.

Combining the morphing with some filter adjustments and other animations (like on translations), make this a playground for endless possibilities. I’m sharing three simple ideas with you, hope these give you a starting point for your own experiments!

If you want to understand the underlying gooey filter effect, Lucas Bebber explains it really well in this article. He also made a fantastic set of demos a couple of years ago that show how this gooey effect can be used in several scenarios.

Let me know what you come up with and ping me @codrops or @crnacura!

Morphing Gooey Text Hover Effect was written by Mary Lou and published on Codrops.

Original Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/abduzeedo/~3/TN65q28FR7w/inside-look-original-applewatch-development

An inside look at the original #AppleWatch development

AoiroStudioApr 26, 2020

Back on April 24, 2015 the world was introduced to the original Apple Watch that literally changed the ‘watch industry’ forever. Happy 5th Birthday Apple Watch! For the occasion, one of the designers that worked on the first Apple Watch team shared a few fun facts that we took the liberty to embed it below. I am really thankful for Imran Chaudhri for sharing such an insightful series of facts that went into the development. We get to read stories and see the ‘original sketch’ for the home screen. How cool is that? I will let you discover the next few slides but it’s so amazing to get such insight and learn from the pioneers of ‘user interface and experience. Enjoy!

digital touch was originally called E.T. for electronic touch. i called it that for its potential as a new form of emotional connection.

the drawing “ink” was inspired by my graffiti days. the ephemera was designed to communicate transmission while making it guilt free. pic.twitter.com/FadGhf8ho9

— Imran Chaudhri (@imranchaudhri) April 24, 2020

i‘ve always loved straps that were uncomplicated, the mechanism for the loop watchband was an evolution of velcro speedmaster straps worn by apollo astronauts. pic.twitter.com/8FLSRC1NrV

— Imran Chaudhri (@imranchaudhri) April 24, 2020

i created the solar watch face as a way for muslims observing ramadan to quickly see the position of the sun and for all to understand the sun’s relationship to time. #RamadanMubarak pic.twitter.com/4mcmIknqjm

— Imran Chaudhri (@imranchaudhri) April 24, 2020

Original Source: https://www.sitepoint.com/15-figma-plugins-to-help-you-design-better/?utm_source=rss

Figma, the second most-used tool for designing user interfaces (and the first most-used tool when counting only Windows OS), has really taken the digital design industry by storm lately, with even Adobe XD shipping their own version of Figma’s multiplayer feature (naming it “coediting”).

However, the hot topic at Figma right now is the release of plugins — extensions that Figma users can install on Figma to allow for extra functionality or to improve their design workflow.

Let’s take a look at some of the best Figma plugins so far.

1. Arrow Auto (create user flows)

Arrow Auto adds flowchart functionality to Figma, which is useful for creating user flow maps. Select any two objects on the canvas and Arrow Auto will enable you to draw a connector between them. You can also hide and show the flows on demand.

Autoflow is a decent (and maybe nicer looking) alternative, but Arrow Auto has more features, including the ability to switch connector directions and also move connected objects around while keeping connectors intact.

2. Angle (utilize device mockups)

Angle allows you to display your screens (i.e. artboards) from within a number of realistic or matte-effect device frames that each come with a variety of angle options and shadow styles.

Impressively, they’re 100% vector as well.

Artboard Studio isn’t quite the same thing, as it allows for inserting a whole bunch of random 3D objects onto the canvas (like a kiwi, for example). If you only care about device mockups, I’d install Angle. Vectory 3D is similar to Artboard Studio, but it outputs actual 3D assets.

3. Master (manage components more easily)

Master offers a better way to manage components, such as the ability to turn multiple identical objects into a component, duplicate components into other Figma files, and much more.

4. Clean Document (auto-clean documents)

Clean Document, well … cleans your document! It deletes hidden layers, sorts them intelligently, renames them according to your liking, ungroups single-layer groups, and even rounds dimensions to the nearest pixel. A terrific tool for obsessive neat freaks!

5. Similayer (select similar layers)

Quite simply, Similayer allows you to select layers based on their similarity to the layer that’s currently selected. Let’s say that you wanted to change a shadow style that’s being used on a number of different elements: Similayer could do that.

You could also use it to batch-reassign multiple components.

6. Viewports (change the viewport)

Find out the correct market share of all viewport dimensions, then apply them to frames. It’s insane how useful this is!

Viewport data is live-sourced from StatCounter.

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15+ Figma Plugins to Help You Design Better
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