Midwestern discount retailer Gordmans Stores is among the brands leveraging an engagement marketing platform that enables marketers to rank users in their community based on their influence and activity on social media, mobile and email, resulting in more successful targeting efforts.

The Tagga Engagement Marketing Platform is designed to drive brand messaging to connect with consumers on all online and offline channels in real-time, using tracking data from social networking sites, mobile coupons and email campaigns. Gordmans Stores was able to pinpoint ideal brand influencers by sending consumers a coupon for money off a future purchase, and then tracking redemption rates alongside social media shares of the promotion.

“Tagga ran cross-channel campaigns against loyalty and non-loyalty databases and was able to track and append engagement behavior to individual consumers (guests), build unified profiles of Gordmans Guests, and identify high value and low value segments of Gordmans guests within loyalty and non-loyalty,” said Amielle Lake, chief revenue officer and founder of Tagga Media Inc., Vancouver, Canada.

Responsive campaign pages
Tagga advises brands to leverage responsive campaign landing pages so that marketers can create microsites for cross-channel campaigns. Tagga’s platform implements tracking technologies to propel data into its Community Dashboard and user ranking system.

The Community Dashboard, which has been used by Red Bull and Gordmans, offers marketers insight into the inner workings of their community, referring to the amount of users that have opted in to marketing offers via mobile loyalty programs, email campaigns or social media promotions.

Brands can use the dashboard to follow how a campaign interacted with consumers online and offline, but also highlight a specific individual’s brand engagement across all communication channels.

Users that are actively involved with the brand’s marketing efforts are then deemed to be “brand influencers.” Targeting these customers with special deals and invitations to share promotions on social media is a tactic that will likely experience success.

“Our experience has proven that before taking to social media, brands need to gain a deeper understanding of their customers and how they interact with social media,” Ms. Lake said. “By running campaigns to identify social activity, we can develop campaigns to best connect with the consumer leveraging the most effective communication channel.

“In the example of Gordmans, we found Facebook (a social channel they were using prior to engagement with Tagga) was not the most engaged audience.”

Pinpointing brand advocates
Brands seeking to make a splash on social media and drive shares of mobile coupons must be pinpointing users that interact with them most frequently and complete the highest amounts of transactions. Consumers as brand advocates are able to leverage the distance between a marketer and a shopper with real-life insight.

Gordmans Stores was able to use the Tagga Tout Score system to rank shoppers in their community based on their engagement with the retailer and transactional behavior. Essentially a form of progressing profiling, brands are finding the Tout Score program to yield valuable results for driving sales.

The platform analyzes combinations of implied and opt-in data, including impressions, conversions and clicks, to better target users with relevant advertisements. The program can tell if a shopper clicked on a Web site campaign to enter a contest and then shared it on social media or redeemed an offer.

An algorithm then assigns the individual in the brand’s community, defined by Tagga as an email database or company Facebook page, a score from one to 100.

Gordmans Stores was able to send consumers with a score of 45 a different email blasts than ones that ranked in at 50.

While Tagga was not able to name some of its other big-brand clients, some of the brands were able to see a coupon redemption rate of up to 80 percent after six months, proving that sending the right message to the right user is still the cardinal rule of marketing.

“By obtaining a rich, holistic view of each individual customer brands can help enable advanced personalization of campaigns,” Ms. Lake said. ‘This personalization will allow them to gain impressive returns on their marketing investment.”

Final Take
Alex Samuely is an editorial assistant on Mobile Commerce Daily, New York