AI Wrote This Article Title

TodayInDigital is a daily podcast showcasing the latest in marketing trends and updates. Today, Tod touches on:

• Now that the American election day is behind us, did California adopt that bill that would restrict how digital marketing is done?
• How can artificial intelligence drive more conversions for your email campaigns?
• Instagram is working on a big change — but — social media community manager — you’re actually going to love this one.

Below is the transcription from this episode

IT’S Wed, November 4, 2020.

Happy National Unity DAY - Italy.

I’m Tod Maffin from engageQ digital. And here is what you missed, Today in Digital Marketing.

California Voting

While all eyes were focused on the main races in yesterday’s U.S. election, savvy digital marketers were keeping a close watch on California’s Proposition 24. As I told you yesterday, that proposed bill would essentially create a stronger CCPA — the privacy legislation that restricts marketing tactics when targeting Californians.

The votes are in, and Prop 24 has passed.

So, what does that mean for you and your campaigns?

First, this won’t take effect for a while — not until January 1 of 2023 — so, more than two years from now. When it does come in, it will do a bunch of stuff.

First, it will limit the use of what the bill calls “sensitive personal information,” — that will include precise location, race, religion, sexual orientation, social security information, specified health information and other stuff. It also bans you from holding onto that personal data for longer than necessary, and it will create a new Agency to enforce it.

And remember. This doesn’t apply to California advertisers. It applies to ANY advertisers who want to reach California residents.

Quoting MarketingLand: “The impact on digital marketing may be significant. The concept of information “sharing” is much broader in scope than selling; however, this would appear to still permit sharing of data with agencies and marketing vendors.”

And, to be clear, this will be an opt-out process, so consumers would need to manually flag they want their data handled this way. Truth is, not many consumers do that when offered the opportunity. And most analysts say there are bigger issues on the horizon affecting digital campaigns, like the elimination of third-party cookies.

That said, if your brand is risk-averse then it might be worth having a look at the newly passed Prop 24.

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One other Proposition that passed in California — prop 22. That has relieved gig economy companies like Uber and Lyft of any obligation to treat their workers as employees.

The effort to pass that was backed by a $200 million dollar ad campaign - the most spent on a ballot measure in California's history.

Instagram Story Reactions

A change to the way Instagram handles reactions on Stories will be VERY welcome news indeed to social media community managers, or anyone whose job includes monitoring Instagram DMs.

Right now, when someone uses a reaction on your brand’s Story — you know, a like or sad or laugh — Instagram turns that into a Direct Message back to the brand.

A DM that, because of the way the API is currently, can only be viewed on the mobile app. And if your brand does a lot of Stories and gets a lot of reactions, then I probably don’t have to tell you that your DM box is full of hundreds of messages that contain a single emoji reaction.

Honestly, it’s kind of ridiculous at scale — but it appears that Instagram will be fixing that soon.

A Computer Science student found some code in the app suggesting that, and leaked screenshots of it on Twitter.

You would still be able to get Reactions, of course… but they will sit on the Story and not trigger a separate DM each time.

Last month, Instagram released an updated API that lets third-party tools finally be able to see and reply to Instagram DMs. Those platforms are currently building that functionality into their apps.

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Email and AI

There’s a great piece today in MarketingProfs about the impact of artificial intelligence on email marketing. It notes that email campaigns do have problems — big bounce rates, engagement that doesn’t translate into conversion.

And this piece details four ways AI can help.

First, Augmented Audience Research Using Predictive Analytics. The piece talks about an experiment a brand did that created virtual user personas. Campaigns were then tested on those virtual personas so that they could have a better sense of which groups would be more likely to convert.

Second, using Natural Language AI to Generate the Copy. Quoting their piece: “Natural language generation enables you to create email subject lines and body copy without going through a copywriter's dozen iterations. And since it runs on an AI engine, you won't have issues with scalability or consistency.”

Third — Testing Email Content at a Larger Scale. Again, quoting MarketingProf’s piece here: “The old-school technique was to conduct A/B testing. You track two copies of an email, and the one that gets better traction is used as the decisive copy. Though the A/B technique has served marketers and ad agencies for years, it is not as efficient for large-scale email campaigns. The longer the email, the more extensive your tests have to be. To perform accurate email tests at a scale, you can use bandit testing. Its name derived from "bandits" in casinos who use several slot machines to maximize their probability of winning. Bandit testing does more than A/B by testing several copies of an email at once.”

And fourth User-Segmentation and Behavioural Forecasting to Drive Retargeting Campaigns.

The piece notes that some of this tech is already in place — Mailchimp can retarget people who abandon their carts. But AI can bolster that with a deep-learning system that can aggregate all the data points into a structured format, then segment the pool based on behavioral tendencies.

Anyway, it’s a great piece — it IS behind a wall, but it’s a free paywall. They just want your email address. Again, it’s at MarketingProfs.com you’re looking for the article called Four Ways to Empower Your Email Marketing Strategy With AI.

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That’s it — just three things today… I guess the news cycle was dominated by the American elections.

Remember, If you’ve got a marketing position you’re trying to fill… or maybe you’re LOOKING for that next great gig… consider a Classified Ad right here. It’s just $20 and you can book it online. Link in this episode’s description.

I’m Tod Maffin, Hang in there, America.

Talk to you tomorrow.

Credit to Tod Maffin and the Today In Digital Marketing podcast, Produced by engageQ.com.