Kristen House

I love a compelling story. So much so, I majored in English as an undergraduate…and I’m also a member of two book clubs.

When I went back to school for my master’s in business, I realized that these professors cared about stories just as much as my English professors did – they just called it by another name: the customer journey. Traditionally, marketing experts depicted the customer journey in a linear framework, from awareness to advocacy.

In the early 2000s, McKinsey & Co. revolutionized the notion of customer journeys, unveiling a new non-linear shape. Customers, they said, inhabit a journey “loop,” with four discrete stages: […]

A cornerstone of email marketing is testing. Perhaps it’s the day of the week that you send the message, or even the imagery and text inside the message. Arguably the
most prevalent element marketers test is the subject line. The appeal of doing so is clear: You have approximately two seconds to get the reader’s attention in their inbox as their finger hovers over the delete button. Optimizing those seconds is mission critical. Search for “subject line testing” on Google and you’ll be consumed by over 6.4 million results. The majority of that content will tell you that the “winning” subject line hinges on one key metric: the message’s open rate.

One of our clients, Pinkberry, performed an A/B subject line test. With an open rate that was 12 percent higher than subject line A, subject line B outperformed its counterpart. Based on conventional wisdom, Pinkberry should have gauged subject line B as the clear winner, right? Wrong. Most email marketers […]

The 2016 Paytronix User Experience was full of valuable insights – we reviewed program structure, hot promotions, and, most importantly, heard from you, our clients about how you leverage our software to take your program to the next echelon.

During the conference, it was my privilege to present tactics our clients can use to amp up their campaigns. I was joined by Data Insights strategist and resident loyalty powerhouse Christina Hurley. Together, we dissected campaigns, addressed relevancy drivers, and unveiled our 9 Gold Standard Campaigns that repeatedly drive material value for our client base.
A dissected campaign is comprised of three factors: segmentation, message, and reward. Any single campaign can include one or more combinations of these. For example, a typical “Birthday” reward has the following components: […]