Wi-Fi is the critical foundation of the Connected Home but also a common source of customer frustration. This is an issue that service providers need to tackle head on if they are to grow revenues, reduce churn and prepare themselves for enormous opportunities that lie ahead.

‘Digital challengers’ are looking to extend their reach at the expense of traditional high street banks, according to leading banking industry experts.

GlobalData’s Retail Banker International asked leading industry figures for their views on the coming year, and digital banking was high on the agenda.

Worldwide almost one-third of digital media budgets are programmatically invested. While these numbers may sound promising, let me ask you: “How do you really know if your programmatic ad campaign is successful?” Yes, the answer is “with attribution models”, that show you on which channels your campaigns are most successful.

The new IDC 2019 Future SMB Pulse survey shows that 84% of SMBs in Asia Pacific (excl. Japan) recognize the need to use digital technologies to make significant changes in their companies' processes and operations to become more competitive. While 39% of those have already started their journey and are at different stages of digital maturity, 42% are just planning to start. The survey reveals further that the top priorities of SMBs in the next 18 months include improving revenue growth, increasing efficiency/productivity, and reducing costs/expenses.

The key to a personalized and targeted customer approach is a good understanding of your customers. Sounds simple, but what exactly should you know about your customers?

Read on to find out our top 7 recommendations for better understanding your customers:

1. Who are my top customers? Top customers are the proportion of customers who regularly generate high sales. These can be identified by the so-called RFM analysis. To do this, ask the following questions:

• Recency: How long since their last purchase?
• Frequency: How often do they buy?
• Monetary: How much revenue was generated?

The top customers can then be determined from the intersection of these three groups.

2. Where are my customers located? The geographical location of customers can be important for marketers, as it can have a decisive influence on customers’ preferences if their purchases are geographically based – for example, which airport to book flights from, or which venue to attend a live event at. Geo-analysis uses spatial information such as postcodes for visualizations and selections. This enables new perspectives on market penetration, the identification of new market potential and the dispatch of regional offers and/or teams.

3. What do my customers buy? Which customer bought which product? This is a fairly important question. Not only does it inform you about your current customers, but it also allows you to identify customers with a similar profile who have not yet purchased this product. This enables the realization of untapped potential. Customer profiles can be defined based on demographic, psychographic, geographic or behavioral characteristics.

4. What turnover do my customers generate? Knowing which customer group generates what turnover is crucial for the distribution of your marketing budget. For example, customers can be identified in order to receive loyalty rewards or higher quality communications. Often referred to as Customer Lifetime Value (CLT), this metric represents the total revenue that a customer generates during a company's life cycle.

5. When and how often do my customers buy? When and how often customers buy is essential information, especially in retail, in order to optimize orders and inventory accordingly. In addition, this information can be used to identify the best possible time for advertising or campaign contact, and customers at risk of churn. The prerequisite for this is the transaction history of the customers. This can be mapped, for example, in a CRM system.

6. How many customers do I lose per year? Even though your number of customers may have remained constant over a longer period of time, it’s possible that some customers have churned, and this effect has been offset by new customers. In order to increase the customer base in the long term, however, it’s important to know how many customers churn each year, identify possible causes for this and take appropriate countermeasures. Precisely which customers have churned can be determined by the last transaction date using a CRM system.

7. How many new customers do I gain each year? Based on the number of new customers you can see which marketing communications have been particularly effective to date. This helps to plan your sales forecasts for the coming year and determine which marketing measures should be given more focus. New customers within one year can be recognized in the CRM system based on the creation date of the data master record.

By Apteco

For years we have heard that in terms of flexibility, the online shop can hardly be beaten and for many reasons there is no alternative. But now an increasing share of the trading volume worldwide comes from platforms such as eBay, Amazon Marketplace and Co. In fact, there are not only situations in the beginning of the business in which your own web shop is only the second-best alternative. Platforms simply bring additional trading volume and reach.

CastingAsia, an influencer marketing technology solutions provider and part of AnyMind Group, announced the launch of cost-per-acquisition (CPA) and cost-per-click (CPC) capabilities on the CastingAsia platform, in a bid to provide a way for marketers to better address the impact that influencer marketing can have on a business.

Grabyo, a leading cloud-based video production, editing and distribution platform, just announced its latest updates to Grabyo Producer, its live cloud-production platform, with the addition of frame-accurate video switching and remote camera synchronization. Grabyo’s cloud-based live video production suite now enables broadcasters and publishers to produce a seamless multi-camera, multi-source live broadcast from anywhere through a laptop, web browser and an internet connection.

For some time already, programmatic is seen as a savior of online marketing, which is why we decided to highlight the opportunities and limitations of programmatic display in an article. In particular because many marketing executives still do not seem to understand clearly what programmatic advertising can and what it can’t do. This is understandable, given the technical complexity, misleading terminology, and sometimes unrealistic expectations.

Measuring and optimization are the nuts and bolts in digital marketing since precision and deep understanding of how to compare and synchronize different data sources are key to the quality of the results and the success of campaigns. If marketers work consistently on a data-driven basis and align all measurements with the needs of the customers, more turnover with the same budget or budget savings can be most certainly achieved while maintaining the same turnover.  Considering the following prerequisites definitely helps:

According to Dynamic Spectrum Alliance (DSA) President Martha Suárez, competitive access to spectrum resources will result in a thriving fixed and mobile marketplace that can deliver new, innovative services. During a TV White Space (TVWS) workshop in Buenos Aires, she highlighted that harnessing spectrum sharing technologies like TVWS is key to enabling rural broadband.

Maximizing the advertising impact with innovative campaigns to stand out from the competition with the least possible cost is the goal of every advertiser, isn’t it? However, the measurement of the effectiveness of digital media activities, in spite of all high-tech tools in the market, still remains a key challenge - beyond the established planning and market research approaches. There are no uniform measurement models yet that allow real-time control of campaigns for the advertising impact.

Although all AR headsets currently on the market are well-suited for trading and market data analysis, the financial community is waiting for new developments that are closer to normal eyewear in terms of design and comfort, allowing longer time of gestation.

Porsche is intensifying its collaboration with Israeli technology company Tactile Mobility. The company is one of the leading suppliers of “tactile data” and is based in Haifa, Israel.