Blog

The lab journal for some smart pandas.

    Diversity and Inclusion by Design

     1024 466 Cheryl Myers
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    Early last week, Starbucks shut its stores to conduct an inclusion class for employees. The following day, the ABC network canceled its hit sitcom “Roseanne” due to racist twitter remarks by its star. It’s 2018—why are we as a society still struggling with diversity, inclusion, and race? And what can we do about it? I recently attended the Design Management Institute’s first Design Leadership Conference on Innovative Thinking on Diversity & Inclusion, a two-day event in Cincinnati, Ohio. Industry leaders from Procter & Gamble,…

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    Content Edits with GTM? Just Say No.

     1024 466 Ravi Chandramouli
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    Google Tag Manager (GTM) makes it easy for marketers to add and update website tags with just a few clicks, and without needing to edit website code. We’ve touted its virtues previously on this blog, including the ease by which it can be learned and launched, and of course, the fact that it’s free. In some cases, however, the easiest path is the wrong one. The urge to make SEO changes using GTM, for example, is a trend I don’t…

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    Homer Simpson D'oh!

    5 Components to an Email Apology

     531 323 Alex Corzo
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    Don’t worry, it’s happened to the best of us. You sent a marketing email too soon and left placeholder copy in the subject line—you know, the dreaded “Subject Line Goes Here.” Your invitations had the wrong date on them. Your team sent a members-only promotion—to non-members. Your automation went haywire and sent seven simultaneous, identical emails to everyone on your list (yes, it’s happened). The deals you sent your subscribers expired last week. Every single email was addressed to “Dear…

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    10 Tips for Website “Redesigns” in 2018

     1024 693 Shamir Duverseau
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    It’s the start of a new year, which means everyone is making their resolutions—and already breaking them, too. To be honest, I am not a fan of resolutions. While I applaud the intent to set goals and meet them, the data shows that making one-time resolutions, for most of us, doesn’t work. As a digital marketer, you and your team might also have resolutions for your company. The first quarter is a busy time for implementing new strategies, and for…

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    Feeling Outnumbered? Try the Major System

     862 277 Jessica Porges
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    Have a long list of data to present to your boss or a client? Or maybe you just want to remember your parking spot number at the mall for once in your life. While this may not be a typical Smart Panda Labs post, we can’t resist sharing a fun and memorable (literally) takeaway from Opticon17, Optimizely’s annual conference. As an analyst, I’m inundated with numbers. I’ve always strived to recall data on the spot for clients and colleagues, like…

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    What We Learned from Opticon ’17 — and Office Space

     800 485 Shamir Duverseau
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    My colleagues and I recently returned from Optimizely’s annual conference, Opticon 2017, in Las Vegas. The focus of this year’s event was on building and scaling a culture of experimentation across teams, channels, products and device. The three-day conference was attended by more than 1200 executives, product managers, marketers, testing novices, experimentation gurus and developers. As well as four smart pandas. Experimentation—from simple A/B tests to rigorous analysis—is at the core of everything we do at Smart Panda Labs, and it’s…

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    What Digital Marketers Can Learn from Amazon’s Purchase of Whole Foods Market

     840 460 Jessica Porges
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    My kids are back in school, and Amazon just closed their deal to buy Whole Foods Market. What do these events have to do with one another, you ask? A lot. As with all things Amazon, their focus is on me—the customer—and my experience. The more they know about me, the more relevant my experience with them becomes. To that end, enter Whole Foods Market. The tech giant’s $13.7 billion purchase of Whole Foods has sent shock waves through the…

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    4 Methods for Improving Conversion Rates

     752 470 Shamir Duverseau
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    Conversion rate optimization— it’s a mouthful. It’s also a science and an art … and frankly, a lot of work. But few aspects of your digital marketing strategy are more important than this cumbersome term. Our crowd of friends at Wikipedia define conversion rate optimization (CRO) as, “a system for increasing the percentage of visitors to a website that convert into customers, or more generally, take any desired action on a webpage.”  If you just totally zoned out, or assumed this was…

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    The Future of Email is Interactive

     752 470 Charlene Hixon
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    It’s been 46 years since Ray Tomlinson sent the first ever email. The history of email itself is a fascinating evolution, and the progress in email marketing, especially of late, has been exponential. As a CRM + database marketing expert at Smart Panda Labs, it’s my job to keep up with these rapid changes. With that goal in mind, earlier this month I attended the Experian Marketing Services Client Summit in Las Vegas, themed “Rev’17” (Revive, Reveal, Revolutionize). This was my first…

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