Meltwater, a global leader in media intelligence and data analytics, today announced the availability of Meltwater Enterprise Intelligence Suite, a comprehensive offering that promises vital insights and transformative impact to enterprise clients.
In response to the growing number of breaches, SecurityHQ released their latest white paper to highlight analyst predictions for threats and vulnerabilities in H2 2023.
Microsoft introduced Microsoft 365 Copilot earlier this year, which will bring powerful new generative AI capabilities to apps millions of people use every day like Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Microsoft Teams and more.
DigiCert released the results of a global study at its annual Trust Summit conference, exploring how organizations are addressing the post-quantum computing (PQC) threat and preparing for a safe post-quantum computing future.
Vigilance is urged during this 2023 Black Friday and Cyber Monday, as “AI generated scams enhance the threat to this year’s festive shoppers, as it’s revealed over 7 in 10 British people worry that AI will make it easier for criminals to commit online fraud” – NCSC.
But while AI scams like voice cloning, romance scams, and language mimicking are on the rise, “93% of the biggest spenders, millennials aged 24-35, plan to shop during this coming weekend. And they spend an average of $419.52 per person.” But with cyber security threats at an all-time high, how can shoppers and businesses stay cyber safe?
Here are our top tips for staying safe online, and the preventative measures that can be taken while shopping for your latest bargain.
Be Aware of Phishing & Quishing Attacks
SecurityHQ analysts have recently observed a significant increase in Business Email Compromise (BEC), regarding phishing attacks containing QR code (Quishing) and captchas for credentials harvesting. Quishing attacks usually occur via the scanning of a QR code. This technique involves tricking users into scanning a QR code using a mobile phone. The QR code then redirects the user to a phishing or fake website that aims to steal their credentials.
Read more about Quishing, and how to spot QR Code vulnerabilities, here.
Read the Small Print
If something seems too good to be true, it probably is. While Black Friday deals can offer huge discounts that are genuine, people still need to make money. Anything ridiculously cheap is a red flag.
What to look for:
It is worth checking the reputation score of retailers to determine if that retailer can be trusted.
A website with no company address, descriptions or specifications on items are all red flags. Look for the details. And do not base purchases solely off star ratings, as these can be fake.
Pop-ups that offer free electronics are obvious scams, containing malicious phishing links, and should be avoided at all costs.
Read the small print. Often cons are perfectly visible if you know what to look for. Like seeing a picture of a laptop being advertised, going to buy said laptop for a reduced rate without reading the small print, and receiving a literal picture of a laptop in the post. The devil is in the detail.
Use Reputable Websites/Companies
Tried and Tested – Using websites that are globally known is a good way to avoid any nasty surprises. Even if it is a couple of pounds more, it is worth knowing where your money is going and that your purchase will be tracked and delivered.
Use Antivirus Software that will warn you of potentially dangerous sites in search results as well.
Look For Suspicious Emails, as well as suspicious calls and text messages. Never click on a link you are unsure of, and never provide personal information over the phone. Read more on email security, here.
Stop, Look, Check, Pay
Secure Sockets Layers (SSL) are used to ensure data is encrypted before being transmitted across the web. It is also an indication that an organization has been verified. Keep an eye out for HTTPS in the address bar rather than HTTP, as this highlights a site uses SSL.
Make Sure the Website That You Intend to Shop on is Not a Copy of a legitimate one. Verify that the date and name of the organization are consistent with the site you are visiting. And look for typos in the URL. Your best bet it to go directly to the website yourself, and do not access it through links on other sites/emails.
When using public Wi-Fi, use a VPN as the most effective way to stay safe and so that hackers do not steal your personal data while you are on an unsecure network.
Check Your Bank Account
Use a credit card or payment method which offers protection (i.e., PayPal).
Check your accounts regularly for fraudulent activity.
Only provide enough details to complete your purchase (no extra details required)
Keep Your Passwords Safe & Don’t Use Default Credentials
Default credentials used by applications and appliances are often published on the internet. This can be a big problem. An attacker will typically first scan your network to see where they can move next. If an attacker was lucky enough to identify applications or appliances with default credentials enabled, it won’t take them long to hunt on the internet for these published credentials. Read how to detect default credentials, here.
Finally, keep your passwords safe. Read this blog on password protocols to learn more. Don’t let cyber scams ruin your festive fun this winter!
At its annual Think conference, IBM announced IBM watsonx, a new AI and data platform, planned to be released in July 2023, that will enable enterprises to scale and accelerate the impact of the most advanced AI with trusted data.
Organizations in Singapore are increasing their reliance on the cloud. Nearly nine in ten organizations in the country are using cloud services, with about 70% taking a hybrid cloud approach.
HUMAN Security, Inc., a cybersecurity company that protects organizations by disrupting digital fraud and abuse, just announced the release of its 2023 Enterprise Bot Fraud Benchmark Report. The annual report provides insights into automated attack trends across enterprise use cases, including account takeover, brute forcing, carding, credential stuffing, inventory hoarding, scalping and web scraping.
IBM announced plans to expand its relationship with Amazon Web Services to help more mutual clients operationalize and derive value from generative artificial intelligence.
Three prominent digital services companies in Asia – Digile Technologies, Reveron Consulting, and Innopia Global – have merged to create a digital services powerhouse with a formidable presence in the Asian region.
A 2023 Emotional Intelligence Market study citing “heavy growth” of $49.93 billion USD by 2027 exemplifies the extent to which mastering “EQ” versus IQ is taking brands to exciting new levels of success … and why not embracing EQ can result in extreme opportunity loss or, far worse, be an outright brand buster. This as today’s highly discriminating and demanding marketplace is seemingly rife with substitutable solutions. Whether the B2B or B2C sector, more often than not today’s consumers have alternate options—and they know it.
Dalet, a leading technology and service provider for media-rich organizations, announced the release of Dalet Cut, the cloud-native, real-time, lightning-fast multimedia and multiplatform editor fully integrated within the Dalet ecosystem.
At its Experience ‘24 conference, Medallia, Inc. announced four ground-breaking innovations that will fundamentally alter the way organizations can personalize customer and employee experience
New research commissioned by IBM found that about 42% of enterprise-scale organizations (over 1,000 employees) surveyed have AI actively in use in their businesses. Early adopters are leading the way,
Zendesk, Inc. today released its annual Customer Experience(CX) Trends Report, the findings of which signal a rapid transition towards intelligent CX. In this era, the shift to AI-driven service will
Cryptocurrencies can be notoriously volatile. With prices fluctuating rapidly and without warning, a single tweet can shift a token price by 40%, only to see the price plummet in a matter of hours. Wh
October marks Cybersecurity Awareness Month and with online safety being top of mind, Google has launched new products and features to help people everywhere. These releases include in-built features
Whether you’re new to email marketing or have years of experience under your belt, keeping up with the latest best practices and integrating them into your email marketing programs can have a profound effect on their ultimate success.
Tip 1: KEEP THE LINES OF COMMUNICATION OPEN The power of email lies in its inherent effectiveness as a relationship channel. Consequently, email is one of the best ways to encourage and grow solid relationships with your subscriber base. Because relationships are built on two-way communication, setting your email reply-to address as donotreply@company.com or including copy that asks your customers not to respond is extremely counter-productive. Such behavior indicates that you want to be able to talk with them, but you do not want to hear what they have to say in return – and that’s never a good way to start a relationship. Instead, you should make sure your reply-to address is monitored by real people who are empowered to respond to comments directly – not by an auto-responder. You may find that some of the most honest, relevant and interesting feedback you get will come directly to that reply-to address. Facilitate it; don’t dissuade it.
Tip 2: DEFINE YOUR OWN BENCHMARKS Leveraging industry benchmarks for email program performance is pretty commonplace for marketers today – but doing it can often be a great disservice to you and your program. What does it really mean that the average open rate is 30 percent? How engaged are those audiences? How long have they been subscribers? Is the content being sent relevant? How much content do the marketers send? There are too many unknown variables for benchmarks to be an effective means of evaluating program performance. Rather than rely on industry benchmarks, consider defining your own based on your audience profile, email sending behaviors and past and present program performance. By doing this, you gain a relevant measure of how your strategies and tactics are moving the performance needle – your performance needle!
Tip 3: TEST SUBJECT LINES – IN REAL TIME Subject line testing is one of those things that we all talk about and many of us do – but the method behind the madness is often ineffective. There are a number of things that affect the performance of a subject line and many of those outside contributors have more to do with things completely out of our control than anything else. This is why you should test your subject line for every email you send. Rather than take your learnings and automatically apply them to all of your email subject lines – leverage testing in real time to determine what the right subject line is for one specific message at a given moment in time. Deriving long-term methodologies out of a single subject line test is a dangerous course of action. Are you forever going to include your company name at the front of your subject lines? It may work for the time being, but it will likely age quickly and the effectiveness will diminish. Test in real time – it’s the way to go.
Tip 4: SOCIALIZE YOUR EMAIL Incorporating social components into your email communications provides a mechanism for easily and effectively expanding the reach of your email program beyond your email subscribers. But in order to achieve that incremental reach, it is necessary to have a plan – a real strategy. Some marketers choose to include SWYN (share with your network) links in their emails – almost as a glorified forward-to-a-friend. While some have seen minimal success with this approach, especially at the on-set when it was pretty new, others are finding that performance has started to normalize and isn’t as impactful as it once was. But all is not lost. Leveraging social media in your email campaigns can be very successful if you include content that is compelling and viral in nature. In brief, making content shareable is not enough – you need to make it share-worthy. And that will take some testing on your part to determine the right approach, content and/or offer for you audience. Leveraging social media in your email campaigns can be very successful if you include content that is compelling and viral in nature.
Tip 5: DON’T SAY SO MUCH The amount of time one of your recipients spends viewing your email is nearly as minimal as blowing past a billboard on the express way. You have approximately seven seconds to convey your message to a recipient, at which point they either decide to conclude the engagement or read on. Messages that are very copy heavy can be daunting – especially if your content is being rendered on a hand-held device. For promotional email messages, be sure your headlines are obvious and succinct, and limit your body copy to no more than four or five lines. Sometimes less really is more. For newsletters, the rules of thumb are a little less clear – but testing the presentation of content and how much is included in the newsletter will go a long way in getting the type of engagement with your messages that you seek.
TIP 6: BEING RELEVANT IS STILL RELEVANT Social media may have emerged as the new hot topic, sending marketers clamoring to figure out the best application for their business, but that doesn’t mean you get a free pass on the basics of email marketing. Getting the right message to the right person at the right time should always be the end goal. Create relevant experiences for your subscribers with your email program by leveraging all the tools at your disposal: data, imagery, content, call-to-action and timing. Holistically looking at how you can achieve relevance with the information readily available is the best and only way to go. Relevance does take some work, but the effort will pay for itself many times over in terms of improved response rates and customer satisfaction. Failure to send content that addresses the needs, desires and expectations of your subscribers will not only reduce response rates, it can lead to higher complaint rates and unsubscribes.
TIP 7: PAY ATTENTION TO SUBSCRIBER ENGAGEMENT Recipients all engage with email differently. There are some who open most of your email and click through pretty consistently, while others may save your email and only open it to identify offers or programs that are relevant as they look to do business with you. Regardless of what that behavior is, you need to know it. Having a clear picture of how your recipients use and interact with your email is a great indicator for programmatic planning, messaging cadence, content direction and planning. It also lets you understand just how much of your audience is not engaged with your program at all. Having this information helps to determine what your contact strategy is for that audience, how long you want to continue targeting that audience and what your plan for reengaging them is. If you don’t know, you can’t plan. TIP 8: DO SOME LEVEL OF LIFECYCLE MESSAGING When experts start talking about lifecycle messaging, many immediately begin to think of the data implications of running a full-blown lifecycle program. But no one said you had to jump right in the deep end. There are plenty of data points available to drive a basic lifecycle program. The most frequently used milestones often include new customer on-boarding, birthday/anniversary messaging and reengagement programs. If you want to get a little more involved with it, consider looking at what your customer lifecycle really is with your product or service. Product/service renewals, as well as the months leading up to them, are a great opportunity to plug back in with the recipient to remind them why they are doing business with you in the first place – customer referral programs and product review programs are other strong components to leverage in building out your lifecycle messaging.
TIP 9: BE GRACIOUS, SAY WELCOME Email subscribers are valuable. These are individuals who have willingly provided their email address and given you permission to mail to them (we hope). But what are you doing upon receipt of that information? If you are not yet, you need to be sending a welcome message. A welcome message is the perfect way to say thank you to the new subscriber for trusting you with a prized possession – their email address. The welcome message is also an ideal time to set expectations for the recipient, including:
When they can expect their first communication
How often the messages will arrive
What the message is going to look like
Add-to-address-book details
Setting expectations appropriately – and then delivering on those promises – is imperative to providing a relevant experience for the recipient and to realizing a successful email program for you.
TIP 10: REMIND SUBSCRIBERS OF YOUR VALUE Don’t assume that just because your subscribers provided permission 18 months ago means that they remember why they decided to join your program in the first place. You need to make your unique value proposition apparent, always. This doesn’t mean that you blatantly tell them why or when they started engaging with you, but you should not lose sight of the importance of making it clear. Your subscribers have real lives outside of their inbox and are often too busy to remember what it was that drew them to you in the first place. Don’t be too proud to remind them why they love you – every once in a while. TIP 11: DON’T LOSE SIGHT OF THE CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE Sometimes email marketers get a little bit of tunnel vision when it comes to the customer experience. Often times, we focus on what our goals and objectives are and how our performance is being measured – and the customer experience becomes less than ideal. Make note, we are talking about a customer experience, not just a subscriber experience. Consumers do not discern between the experiences they have with your email versus your front line staff versus your call center team. All of those interactions are a reflection of your brand and impact their impression of you. Taking a step back and looking at how email fits in to that overall experience is paramount to long-term program success and customer satisfaction.
TIP 12: IF YOU COLLECT IT, USE IT Data is the key to creating a relevant experience for your subscribers. Most marketers are data-dorks by nature – you thrive on what you can discern from the information and then find a way to creatively market against those data points. You may not want to admit it, but it’s true. In the quest to get your hands on as much data as possible, sometimes information goes by the way-side and the recipient can become frustrated. If you are going to collect information at the point of subscription, be prepared to use it as an apparent piece of information in your email campaigns. If you ask about preferences, messaging frequency, language preference, etc. – be sure to use it within your email campaigns. Asking subscribers what they want and then not honoring it will damage the trust you’ve built.
TIP 13: DON’T BE CREEPY WITH BEHAVIORAL TARGETING Leveraging site-side behavior can provide you with very powerful insights into how your customers or prospects interact with your brand, what information they are interested in and at what point they bounced from your site. But you need to be mindful about how you leverage that information within your email program. For example, abandon cart messaging can often appear as if you are chasing someone down to buy your product. Instead of using language that says, “You forgot this,” it might be more effective to send a promotional-type message that features a discount, sale or offer for the very product they were just looking at yesterday. Your message will more likely be seen as relevant instead of pushy or desperate. TIP 14: INCLUDE EMAIL SAMPLES AT REGISTRATION Giving your potential subscribers a glimpse of what they can expect before they subscribe is still important – and not many marketers do it. Think about all the free trials and money-back guarantees out there, all geared towards providing the best experience for customers who want to do business with you. Your email programs should be no different. You want subscribers that “want” your email – and what better way to ensure that then to give them a little taste of what they can expect. Not only does providing a sample help to increase the engagement level of your subscribers, it can also help to minimize unsubscribes and complaints – all of which have a positive impact on your email sending reputation. Not too shabby!
TIP 15: ALLOW RECIPI ENTS TO DICTATE FREQUENCY Frequency is one of those situations where you really do need to be prepared to deliver – but more and more marketers are finding success in allowing the recipient to tell you how often they want to receive your email. There are two common ways to approach this – the first is to collect this preference point at the time of subscription. The challenge here is that the recipient hasn’t yet had an opportunity to really engage with your program, so they can’t definitively tell you that “weekly” is going to be the right frequency. The second way is typically offered at the point of unsubscribe. As part of the unsubscribe process, the recipient is given the opportunity to reduce messaging frequency instead of abandoning the program all together – but at that point it may be too late. Consider, instead, reaching out to your new subscribers as part of your welcome or on-boarding process weeks into the relationship to quickly survey their satisfaction with the program, including specific language around the desire to change communication frequency. You will find that this can go a long way to deepen the relationship you have with your subscribers.
TIP 16: USE AN EMAIL MINI-SERIES You should try your hardest to make all of your content relevant to every recipient for every mailing – but let’s face it, that’s just not always realistic. People’s interests vary from one person to the next, one day to the next. But you can isolate and address a very specific topic for a short period of time. All of your email marketing programs don’t have to continue indefinitely. Try launching a mini program that’s main goal is to address a topic specific to a moment in time, and structure the subscription to coincide with that defined moment. Some marketers have introduced the “email mini-series” during the holidays: 12 days of Christmas, Shopping Tips Countdown or even the 12 days of Holiday Baking Tips. Ultimately, the email mini-series offers the following benefits:
Enables a limited subscription on a concentrated topic
Simply conveys the content relevance
Sets expectations on frequency of the messaging
Establishes an end in sight for the subscription option
Leverages top-of-mind mind customer interaction with less potential for attrition
There is no end to the “email mini-series” possibilities – just your imagination (and maybe your bandwidth).
TIP 17: DON’T SAY BLAST – PLEASE, WE IMPLORE YOU Let’s keep “blast” in the past and move into a new, more intelligent era of email communication where we refer to our email communications as “launches,” “distributions,” or “deployments.” As professional email marketers, we are mindful about message content that contains email problematic phrases like “free” or “limited time offer.” The same consideration needs to be given to how we as marketers refer to what we do on a daily basis. We need to “walk the walk” by removing the word “blast” from our daily vernacular. This will also help educate those internal customers that have a stake in your email marketing. TIP 18: GET PERMISSION! You don’t have to talk to very many email marketers about permission practices before you come across one that defines permission as anyone who has done business with them in the past. When pressed for an explanation, they will often times cite the spam legislation requirement of a pre-existing business relationship – the easy way out. But put yourself in the shoes of the consumer. Just because you’ve done business with a particular company once or thirty times doesn’t necessarily mean that you want to hear from them all the time. While you want to believe that your product or service is different, it may not be different enough. When subscribing recipients to your email communications, you should always seek clear and obvious permission. Playing the pre-existing business relationship card is a dangerous move that will lower your response rates while sending your complaint rates soaring. Playing the pre-existing business relationship card is a dangerous move that will lower your response rates while sending your complaint rates soaring.
TIP 19: DON’T SEND EMAIL FROM PEOPLE AT YOUR COMPANY Your email subscribers are expecting to receive email from your company – not necessarily from an individual at your company. While you may feel that this approach personalizes your message, it will always get lost in the “sort by sender” world some of us live in to deal with overburden inboxes – and if the “From” name is not a household name, it may get overlooked entirely. Plus, what happens should that person leave your company? Using a company name ensures that you maintain a consistent communication with your subscribers. So unless you are a B2B marketer that sends email from your sales team (and that sales team has relationships with your customers or prospects) or you are Oprah or Martha Stewart, you should make sure you’re sending email from your company.
TIP 20: HOLD A CONTROL GROUP Email marketers seem to be the most reluctant to hold control groups when testing, and it isn’t clear why. Ultimately, we are trying to determine if the variate or variates we are testing are driving some sort of incremental lift over what the recipient previously received. There really isn’t much more explanation necessary. Hold control groups when testing anything.
TIP 21: ALLOW FOR SUBSCRIP TION MANAGEMENT If you send more than one communication type, be sure to offer subscribers the opportunity to opt out of specific topics. For example, if you send partner messages, you may want to manage this as a separate topic for subscription to protect your core database from attrition due to lack of interest in specific partner messaging. You recipient controls the relationship with you as a brand and should be given the flexibility to decide what email programs they would like to receive. TIP 22: DON’T JUST REDESIGN – OPTIMIZE CREATIVE Too many marketers redesign their templates and put them immediately into practice. Beauty is still in the eye of the beholder, but functionality is completely up to the numbers. You may prefer one color combination or another for your call-to-action button, but what your recipients actually click on is another story entirely. Be sure to test each creative component for optimal interaction with your subscribers – but don’t forget to hold a control (see Tip 20), you may find that even though you are bored with your creative – your recipients actually prefer it.
Conclusion Investing time and attention in best practices can dramatically improve your email programs; however, keep in mind that email best practices are constantly evolving along with email marketing itself. As such, it’s extremely important to make the effort to stay current with this dynamic channel. Condensed from the StrongMail Whitepaper entitled “22 Quick Tips for Better Email Marketing. For more information, please visit: http://www.strongmail.com
Category: Apr–June 2023 - Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Marketing
Appier announces that it has integrated Generative AI (GenAI) technology into three major marketing capabilities across its product lines. By connecting its advanced GenAI algorithms with OpenAI's ChatGPT language model, Appier can leverage the power of pioneering technology to help businesses increase productivity through advertising keywords and targeting parameters generation; intelligent conversational chatbot creation; and marketing copywriting and automatic content generation.
Category: Apr–June 2023 - Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Marketing
The marketing data and analytics company, Kantar, revealed the winners of the 2023 Creative Effectiveness Awards in Southeast Asia, recognizing the most impactful ads of last year.
Category: Apr–June 2023 - Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Marketing
F5's latest Curve of Convenience 2023 report shows data security taking a back seat with APAC consumers, with an increased willingness to save and share personal payment data on multiple platforms.
Category: Apr–June 2023 - Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Marketing
At its annual Think conference, IBM announced IBM watsonx, a new AI and data platform, planned to be released in July 2023, that will enable enterprises to scale and accelerate the impact of the most advanced AI with trusted data.
MediaBUZZ is the first ‘pure’ digital publisher in the region, making an impact in Asia Pacific since 2004. Designed to empower marketers in the vibrant, ever-changing electronic marketing environment, its publication Asian eMarketing covers the digital age and zooms in on the most valuable and indispensable tools of today’s marketers. Circulated weekly to more than 60,000 top management and marketing decision-makers, the useful and informative articles support e-marketers in finding a sound marketing strategy, vital for their growing business success.