The most efficient way to deliver high fidelity personalization in your daily email, and drive over 11x return on spend (works seamlessly with your existing email service provider).
Infinitely expand your brands photography with Curator™ AI. Generate new product photography that’s indistinguishable from the originals, and combines multiple products together.
Create, manage, deploy, and target an unlimited number of personalized messages. Deliver any of the messages from your pool through a single image URL and link embedded within email, SMS, mobile, or on your website.
Zembula connects with any enterprise data source. If you don’t see a specific data source here or have a custom data source, we will always connect it for free.
The most efficient way to deliver high fidelity personalization in your daily email, and drive over 11x return on spend (works seamlessly with your existing email service provider).
Infinitely expand your brands photography with Curator™ AI. Generate new product photography that’s indistinguishable from the originals, and combines multiple products together.
Create, manage, deploy, and target an unlimited number of personalized messages. Deliver any of the messages from your pool through a single image URL and link embedded within email, SMS, mobile, or on your website.
Integrations
Connect with 100+ integrations
Zembula connects with any enterprise data source. If you don’t see a specific data source here or have a custom data source, we will always connect it for free.
When you think of eating Chinese food, what comes to mind? Maybe your favorite dish or that one spicy sauce pops into your head. There’s at least one other thing we’re willing to bet you associate with Chinese food – The fortune cookie!
The fortune cookie is such a prime example of real-world interactive marketing that it’s invention is widely contested, with many creators claiming ownership. There was even a mock trial held in San Francisco to determine the true patent holder! So why are people so eager to claim the fortune cookie? For one reason: this highly popular treat is a brilliant piece of interactive marketing that builds the customer’s curiosity and creates the opportunity for operant conditioning of the consumer.
What truly makes the fortune cookie so effective is the message contained within. By concealing a message inside the cookie, the customer is encouraged to interact with the food, breaking apart the cookie to satiate their curiosity and reveal the paper within. This is such an effective method of conveying information because humans are naturally curious. What’s even better is that studies have proven that areas of the brain related to memory are activated when curiosity is satiated. That means whatever message you serve up at the end of a campaign that utilized curiosity will be remembered by the consumer.
While the fortune cookie is a great example of this marketing principle in the real world, the same idea can be transferred to a digital campaign as well. Interactive platforms like Zembula can help you create reveal marketing messages based on interactive content that function on the same principles as the fortune cookie to help boost conversions!
How else does the fortune cookie exemplify good marketing? Well, it utilizes another key marketing principle that furthers its viral popularity. Fortune cookies contain messages that are highly shareable. How many times have you seen a photo of a friends fortune cookie on Instagram, or watched them open one on Snapchat? Crafting marketing messages and experiences that encourage your user to share their interaction on social media gains you an organic audience through the consumer’s social network.
You can keep this principle in mind when designing your next campaign, whether it’s a real world or digital campaign. Social media shares help create brand loyalty and improve brand recognition by fostering a reciprocal relationship with the customer on their news feed.
Finally, fortune cookies are so successful because they rely on yet another marketing tactic for their effectivity – operant conditioning. Now when you hear those words you probably think something more along the lines of Pavlov’s dogs and less in the terms of fortune cookies, but operant conditioning is actually most effective when positive reinforcements are used. Fortune cookies train the consumer to expect a message once the cookie is opened. They also serve as a tradition of eating Chinese food and therefore establish a memory connection for the hungry customer. Both of these positive effects train the consumer to interact with the fortune cookie again and again in order to achieve the desired results.
Online campaigns can take a leaf from the fortune cookies book and use consistent triggers and rewards to create campaign loyalty in their customers. A successful operant conditioning campaign will encourage the user to interact with your other materials in the future, expecting an amazing reward for doing so. When you come up with your next digital campaign, don’t forget to include principles of real-world interactive marketing in order to ensure the boost to conversions and brand loyalty you’re looking for. Check out the other articles in our series on real-world interactivity to learn more about scratch and sniffs, lottery tickets, and album covers.
nicolecordier
Nicole Cordier is a Marketing Intern at Zembula. A Journalism graduate from the University of Oregon, she is a Portland native who loves coloring, dogs and all things outdoors.
Real World Interactivity Part 3: Interactive Album Covers
Music is one of the most powerful memory-makers on Earth. Take a moment to think back to your favorite record. Imagine the album cover art and the way the record felt in your hands. Remember what it sounded like to hear the music played aloud on a record player. The slight scratch of the needle on the vinyl.
What record did you think about? Was it an iconic album, like the zipper-front Rolling Stones cover? Or a lesser known band? Today, we’re continuing our Real World Interactivity series by discussing the top 10 interactive album covers. Read on below to see what fun albums made the cut.
This iconic interactive album cover is instantly recognizable. With a large banana on the front cover, at first glance, this album looks simply like an Andy Warhol painting (surprise, it is!). However, an added layer of interactivity brings the fun and makes this album stand out. Peel back the banana sticker on the cover to reveal the fleshy fruit underneath and ensure you can’t forget The Velvet Underground.
A more recent interactive album cover comes from alternative rock legend, Muse. The packaging for their album ‘The Second Law’ came complete with thermo-sensitive packaging that changes color as the temperature rises. Not only is it beautiful to look at, but it’s clever too, tying the interactivity in with the albums name. (For those who skipped science in high school, the 2nd Law covers thermodynamics!)
Unlike the other album covers on our list, this one brought an interactive album cover to the digital space. By choosing a moving GIF as his album cover art, Donald Glover ensured his personal brand was staying up to date with his internet-obsessed fans.
Much like the Muse album covered above, this EP cleverly makes use of interactivity that ties in with the album’s name. Graff Orrlack’s Boombox EP comes in packaging reminiscent of origami. Follow the instructions and fold out the album cover into a working boombox, allowing you to crank up the tunes!
Another iconic folding interactive album cover comes to us this time from Explosions in the Sky. Their ‘Take Care, Take Care, Take Care’ album art can be folded out into a shadow box house. The vinyl inside even matches the theme, with a wood grain print that matches perfectly with the floor of the fold-out cabin.
If you’ve learned one thing about interactive content from reading our blog, it should be that sweepstakes can pay off big time! Golden Boots brought that marketing model to their album cover by featuring a paint by numbers image and stocking each album with watercolor paints. They invited fans to send in photos of their finished artwork for a chance to win a prize.
We all know that the Rolling Stones’ ‘Sticky Fingers’ album is iconic for many reasons, not the least of which is the cutting edge album art design. With a working pull down zipper, the album cover invites participation and the matching underwear-clad vinyl inside only continues the theme.
Are you really a Bob Marley fan if you don’t own a Zippo lighter? According to the ‘Catch a Fire’ album, the answer is no! This fun cover art turned the album packaging into a model of the ubiquitous Zippo lighter. The only thing missing is the flame!
Led Zeppelin paved the way for interactive album covers with their ‘III’ album. The spinning circles allow for interaction and keep some messages of the album cover hidden until the viewer performs the required action (spinning the wheel to the correct spot.)
They certainly weren’t the first, but the Talking Heads took a leaf from Led Zeppelin’s book with their ‘Speaking in Tongues’ album art. The cover featured three spinning circles, one cyan, one magenta and one yellow. Spin the three wheels to the correct spots and a clear image comes into view. Leave them slightly off kilter and all you see is a jumble of color and imagery.
These album covers are a great demonstration of how interactivity in design intersects with nearly any industry! Incorporate these kinds of principles in your next piece of downloadable content for a digital interactive experience your audience is sure to love!
Nicole Cordier is a Marketing Intern at Zembula. A Journalism graduate from the University of Oregon, she is a Portland native who loves coloring, dogs and all things outdoors.
Real World Interactivity Part 2: Lottery Scratch-Off Tickets
If you’ve been following along you’ll know that we’re running a series of posts discussing real-world interactivity and how it converts to digital marketing campaigns. You can catch the last installment, on scratch and sniffs, on our blog.
Today, we want to talk about another form of a scratch card, a lottery ticket or scratch-off. We all know the lottery can be thrilling to play. It’s how you find yourself adding on that extra lottery ticket when checking out for soda at the gas station. There’s something inherently exciting about scratch-off lottery tickets. The lottery has been around since near the beginning of recorded history. No matter the form, people seem to like games of chance. So when did scratch-off tickets become the go-to form of lottery game?The first scratch-off lottery ticket was invented in 1970 by a group of computer engineers. Little did they know the marketing power scratch-off technology would bring. In fact, by 1987 most states were offering some form of lottery scratch-off ticket. Today, physical scratch-offs remain the standard for many lottery games, but we’ve also seen a rise of digital scratch-its that replicate the experience using touch technology.
Why did this form of lottery become so popular? Well, there are a few principles of marketing psychology that might explain the lure of the lottery, and especially of scratch-off tickets.
First, let’s discuss the draw of the lottery or chance in the first place. There’s a marketing psychology principle called the Near Miss Theory that helps explain why the lottery and gambling are so rewarding. According to this principle, the brain is conditioned to respond positively to near-miss events. In the hunter-gatherer days, this might have meant a spear that narrowly missed your prey. Positive reinforcement in your brain chemistry assures you that you’re on the right track. In today’s digital world, Near Miss Theory explains why your basketball bracket is so enticing. It also explains why humans are drawn to games of chance.
When it comes to marketing, you can use the Near Miss Theory to encourage your customer to continue interacting your brand or product. Digital Scratch-its are unbeatable at raising your customer’s value determination of your brand. By calling on a familiar format like the Scratch-it that activates Near Miss Theory, your customers are more likely to build brand loyalty and continue interacting with your messages. The second secret to the lottery tickets success is the scratch feature. Hiding a portion of your message from the reader until they’ve completed an action is called reveal marketing. It’s a specialized form of interactive content that invites your reader to participate by swiping, scratching or otherwise interacting with their smartphone or computer. Reveal marketing is proven to increase brand loyalty and ROI. In fact, reveal marketing campaigns can more than double your conversions.
So how do you bring the lottery ticket scratch-off to the digital world? Luckily, there are a host of options for creating digital scratch-off experiences. Here at Zembula, we’re proud to offer a reveal marketing solution that is highly customizable. You can create Scratch-its to share trivia or offer a discount. You can even create a sweepstakes campaign to capture the full experience of a lottery scratch-off on your reader’s screen. Scratch-off gambling cards have remained a popular format for the lottery for almost 50 years. That longevity can be attributed to the psychological effects of the scratch-off mechanism. With the high demand for digital experiences in today’s world, this form of real-life content translates effortlessly into a piece of stand-alone digital interactive content your customers can’t wait to interact with.
nicolecordier
Nicole Cordier is a Marketing Intern at Zembula. A Journalism graduate from the University of Oregon, she is a Portland native who loves coloring, dogs and all things outdoors.
Any marketer worth their weight knows that digital interactivity is the latest craze in driving engagement and conversion rates, but why is interactive content in the digital realm so successful?
In order to examine the efficacy of digital interactivity, we decided to first take a look at its predecessor… real-world interactive campaigns. In this series, we examine real-life examples of interactivity and what makes them work, as well as translating those strategies to the digital world.
In the first installment of this series, we wanted to look at one of the most ubiquitous forms of real-world interactivity – scratch and sniff campaigns.
You don’t have to look far for proof that scents hold a powerful sway over human behavior. Not only is our ability to smell one of our most primal senses, but research shows it’s also closely tied to memory production. If you can get your customer to associate a certain scent with your products, their brand loyalty will grow exponentially.
One of the most famous examples of scent marketing comes from the adolescent clothing brand Abercrombie and Fitch. By pumping their signature perfumes and colognes through the ventilation systems of their physical stores, the create a memory link between their scents and your in-store experience. As a double whammy, the brand also uses their scents on the actual clothing itself, meaning when you leave the store, you take that smell (and memory) with you!
So why do scents create memories? Well, odorants (or things that smell) stimulate receptor cells located within the olfactory bulb of our noses. These receptor cells converge into the olfactory tract. Most of the scents that enter your olfactory tract end up in the piriform cortex of your brain, but some also terminate in two other destinations: the medial amygdala (involved in pairing events with emotion) and the entorhinal cortex (implicated in memory).
To put it in simple terms – When you smell something, the parts of your brain related to emotion and memory are triggered by that scent. That’s why when you think about Grandma’s house you might smell cookies while reminiscing about the dentist’s office brings the smell of rubber gloves and fluoride to your nose.
Not only to scratch and sniffs harness the power of scent to boost brand recognition, but they also add a layer of interactivity that is psychologically proven to help customers invest more. When you ask someone to put forth work to obtain a message, they automatically assign more value to that message than if they had received that information passively. This phenomenon is known as The Ikea Effect, and it explains why you value your cheap Ikea furniture that you built yourself more than your fancy pre-assembled pieces.
The act of requiring your customer to scratch the advertisement in order to release the scent invites their participation, therefore increasing the value of your message.
So now that we’ve established physical scratch and sniffs can help in memory creation and brand recognition, how does that translate to the digital interactive world? Since your smartphone can’t emit scents (yet), how does smell play into digital marketing?
Well first, the Ikea effect remains relevant, even when discussing digital effort that your customer must put forth to access your marketing materials. Interactive experiences like Zembula’s Scratch-it allow you to simulate the act of scratching a customer might perform. Just due to interactivity, the customer will automatically value your message more.
Next, digital interactivity is built upon many of the same principles as real-world interactive advertising. That means there are digital strategies you can use to boot memory production too, no scents required! One of the most effective methods of ensuring your reader remembers your marketing campaign is to utilize the psychological principle of curiosity. It’s proven that when a reader’s curiosity is satiated, the same areas of the brain related to memory production become activated. That means if you can utilize interactivity and Scratch-it technology to pique your reader’s curiosity, they’re more likely to remember whatever information you serve up at the end of your campaign.
We might not be able to make a digital scratch and sniff yet, but you can achieve the same memory-creating results by pairing marketing psychology with interactive digital experiences like those offered by Zembula!
nicolecordier
Nicole Cordier is a Marketing Intern at Zembula. A Journalism graduate from the University of Oregon, she is a Portland native who loves coloring, dogs and all things outdoors.
