Archive for 2010

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What is your New Year’s “email” resolution?

Tuesday, December 21st, 2010

As we come to the end of another year it is a time to reflect on the successes but more importantly it is also time to set some objectives for the year ahead.

Firstly – what a year 2010 has been for email marketers – email isn’t dead, quite the opposite. In a recent survey conducted by Marketing Sherpa, it was estimated that 42% of organisations’ budget for email will increase in 2011. So my question to you is this: Where are you allocating your email spend for 2011, and what is your New Year’s “email” resolution?

Considering that 2010 brought us the Hotmail sweep feature, Gmail’s Priority Inbox and Facebook’s new messaging service – all features designed to give ownership and control back to the recipient – it has never been so important to listen, learn and engage with your audience on an individual basis.

With this in mind, here’s my top 5 tips for 2011:

1) Adopt lifecycle based messaging – Create engaging, automated and efficient communications, such as welcome email, behavior-based messages and re-engagement messages.

2) Implement dynamic content into your campaigns – Listen, test and refine. Don’t be predictable when it comes to dynamic content and remember that every customer is different (Regardless of age, gender, etc.). Many retailers use the obvious male and female splits when it comes to dynamic content, but this is fairly short-sighted as customers often buy things for their family, friends and colleagues from the same retailers. Instead, use actual data insight and behaviour to drive relevant content, as opposed to a one-size-fits-all approach.

3) Leverage transactional emails – “The average retailer can generate an extra 3% in additional revenue by adding cross and up-sell promotions to transactional email.” – Jupiter Research. In addition, facilitating transactional emails through your email service provider brings with it increased visibility of delivery and tracking.

4) Use analytics to define an email strategy that allows you to engage – As we know, there has been a fundamental shift in email marketing over the last 12 months, and it is now customer engagement that contributes most to success. Customer engagement = email delivery = email ROI.

5) Remove inactive subscribers and implement a re-engagement program for lapsed customers – With the emphasis now on customer-level engagement metrics, such as opens and clicks, it is important that you remove any inactive addresses from your data to ensure you retain a good reputation and optimize your delivery. For lapsed customers, implement a re-engagement program which specifically looks at ways to get this audience back engaged.

Quite ironically, it appears email has come full circle as its aim now is communicating with the individual as opposed to the larger audience.

What are your thoughts, predictions and recommendations for 2011?

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Posted in Email Marketing | 1 Comment »

Customer Centricity – a holistic view of the customer

Thursday, December 16th, 2010

In an increasingly competitive marketplace, with limited resources and more demanding customers, thought leaders in organizations strive to increase profitability and reduce churn by becoming more customer-centric. But amazingly, very few companies, even those with a good understanding of their customers, really know how this can be achieved.

This shift requires some fundamental changes. Firstly, organizations must move away from product or business line structures, or they will lack a holistic view of the customer and communicate from multiple silos. Secondly, companies should progress from promoting their brand and move toward listening to the customer, learning which channels and creative content are the most relevant, and understanding and refining messaging so they have personalised, one-to-one dialogues in order to speak in the right tone of voice.

Marketing Automation provides businesses with a closed-loop system that goes beyond traditional direct channels, such as direct mail, outbound telephony and email. For brand consistency, organizations need to consider how to capture vital information, required to personalize these channels. Often, if delivered via disparate technology point solutions, this is not easily achievable. 

For true customer engagement you need to build out the blue print of the customer, effectively “fill-in-the-blanks” on the information you hold, and collect and utilise to engage in relevant dialogues with them. Furthermore, only by coordinating cross-channel marketing communications through collaborative departmental planning and sound integrated technology investment, can this information be collected as actionable data and customer-centricity truly realized, and leveraged.

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Posted in Campaign Management and Analytics | 1 Comment »

Alterian’s social media monitoring predicted the X Factor result.

Monday, December 13th, 2010

We listened, did you? On Friday we gave our well-informed judgement call on the outcome of this year’s X Factor final. We stated that based on our analysis of the conversations on the web over the first 8 weeks of the live performance shows that Matt Cardle would win this year’s X Factor.

We set up our social media monitoring tool, SM2, to monitor the online conversations people were having about each contestant during the live shows.   Over the 8 weeks we looked at the volume of conversations but beyond that, we looked a little deeper and studied the sentiment of the conversations around each finalist. Merely looking at  the positive sentiment would only give us half the picture, because it was the size of negative value trading off against the positive that would show us the true sentiment and allow us to choose Matt Cardle over One Direction, Rebecca Ferguson and the rest. Had we just looked at the volume of conversations alone, Wagner would be the runaway leader, followed by Cher and then One Direction at Week 3 and what a terrible thing that would have been!

Indeed, some other monitoring products had called ‘One Direction’ as the dead-cert winners and that made for an interesting weekend of waiting to see who would make it through from the Saturday show. Then there was the nervous Sunday to see who would come out victorious having sung their heart(s) out and made the sincere puppy-eyes plea for votes straight down the camera.

Whilst this makes for good banter between social media monitoring tool providers, the real impact is delivered when applying this data to business insights, in terms of product market share and credibility of social media sentiment. Adding the efficiency savings of working with freely available data of this volume, in this case running to many hundreds of thousands, to the credibility of the data, proves social media data is valuable to many businesses.

By looking beyond just volumes, we were able to gain insight and make an informed decision. Sure we weren’t conducting a scientific study to look at the predisposition of Matt or One Direction fans to pick up the phone and actually make their vote count, and neither did we email ALL staff to ‘Vote Matt’!

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Posted in General Marketing, Social Media Marketing | 7 Comments »

A Christmas marketing campaign is for life (not just for, you know…Christmas)

Tuesday, December 7th, 2010

It is seemingly inescapable that Christmas has become the bed-fellow of commercial activity; I’m not assuming a moral standpoint on this but merely looking at the nature of the beast. It is also apparent that the window of opportunity for Christmas commercial activity has extended also. In the UK, the seasonal aisle(s) of the larger supermarkets have been stocking Christmas wares since they threw out the World Cup chintz. And dear reader, there is a chocolate egg to the first person that tweets me a photo of Easter edibles in shops not a day after New Year’s.

There are some great opportunities to run Christmas marketing campaigns and to spread a bit of goodwill along the way, but why not think beyond that? Are you capturing email addresses of entrants and any other critical data? Are there any hoops to jump through before the existing customer or prospective customer can get something from you? The easier you make it for a consumer to get something delightful from you, the easier the exchange of goodwill and that all important e-mail address or demographic statistic that allows you to further segment your prospects for more targeted and sensitive communications in 2011.

Is there a long-term aim to your current Christmas campaign, or is it just a caffeine boost to add to a tired mailing list? Have you mapped out your bigger picture based on listening to what your customer wants, knowing exactly when they want ‘it’?

I realize this post offers more questions than answers and that is not ideal, but this Christmas we are monitoring a globally recognizable campaign to see how Starbucks’ Red Cups are working with their community of loyal syrup shot coffee drinkers and the community that has grown around their offering. Do join us to see the results.

We can see from the online conversations of Christmas past and present that real business decisions have been taken (Where for art thou Dark Cherry Mocha of yester year in the UK?), and of course there are sensitivities to cultural differences in global territories. For example, in Australia the Red Cups take on a chilled Frappuccino role because who wants a steaming Coffee at Christmas on the beach? 

Opportunity awaits, so capture the spirit and the emotive pull of the semantics of the seasons, but don’t run your campaign in isolation. Use the data that you generate from your Christmas marketing campaign, use it well, and use it well into the future.

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Posted in General Marketing, Social Media Marketing | 1 Comment »

Time to revisit how media is planned

Monday, December 6th, 2010

It has been fascinating to watch how the area of Media Planning has developed over the past few years, as the sheer variety of media available to buy has increased. What used to be seen as relatively straightforward decisions about media buying, i.e. TV and Press for awareness, direct mail for 1-to-1 communications, is now so much more complex – particularly with the rise of the digital world of email, web and search. With each additional media channel, it becomes increasingly difficult to monitor, measure and understand the inter-linkages between each medium.

As well as the range of media available, the actions you want to measure are also increasingly complex, involving not just enquiries and sales, but also hits on your website, dwell time on the site, the level of interaction, as well as the buzz in the social media space.

With such a wealth of information to interpret, the challenge for media planners and agencies will be to review the platforms they use to manage this data asset. Planners need to pose themselves three questions:

  • Does my existing tool of choice (very often, complex Excel spread sheets) struggle to cope with the sheer volume of data that is now available?
  • Do I spend too much time pulling together pieces of data, and not enough time interpreting key patterns and trends?
  • Is the process of manually pulling together data prone to human error?

During the past few months, we’ve found many media planning teams who answer “yes” to each of these questions. Some of them are now switching to new tools and changing their way of working, and they are already starting to reap the benefits, having more time to interpret rather than manipulate the data. In one of these cases, the loading of media used to take hours to do, yet it now happens automatically in less than two minutes. As a result, they now have much more time to interpret media trends and understand the best mix of engagement strategies.

Are you happy with the way you plan media at the moment – or the way media is planned on your behalf? Or, do you think it makes sense to re-evaluate your current approach to see if there are opportunities for improvement? Are there any major hurdles which are preventing you changing? We’d love to hear your opinions.

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Posted in Campaign Management and Analytics | 1 Comment »

Top marketers share their thoughts on measurement, value and ROI

Friday, December 3rd, 2010

Or rather is it Return On Customer?, find out in this video blog. Don Peppers explains the principles of Return on Customer and that one has to maximise value around the customer as it is the customers who are the scare resource these days.

Stan Rapp then picks up on that theme talking about what a “friend” of the brand is worth, what is their lifetime value? He then reminds us that traditional advertising is dying because it cannot be accurately measured as it cannot ask for a response. He suggests that marketers switch some of that advertising budget to the new ‘idirect’ marketing as he calls it, where it can be personal, one can learn from testing and measure everything.

Finally Mike Fisher reminds us that Social Media Data is a whole new source of data that is influencing everything that marketing is doing today and the way that brands measure.

The video certainly gives a strong flavour for massive changes marketer’s need to make in 2011 to listen to and be centred around, the customer.

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Posted in General Marketing | 2 Comments »

The Importance of List Growth

Tuesday, November 30th, 2010

Guest blog post by David Daniels, CEO, The Relevancy Group LLC

Earlier this year in April, The Relevancy Group fielded a survey and asked 674 email marketers in the US and the UK about their greatest challenges when conducting email marketing. The top response was subscriber/list churn, cited by 32% of the survey respondents. Having done this survey for over a decade, I was not surprised to see at the top of the list again, as subscriber churn remains a perennial challenge for us as marketers. This simple, painful reality underscores the importance of acquisition and list growth.

Recently, Alterian released an eBook on the topic that I wrote entitled “Creating Engaging Email – Driving Subscriber Acquisition.” It is an excellent resource on proven tactics to advance the growth of your email marketing list.

The eBook starts with details on how to leverage your search engine traffic and covert these anonymous visitors to known email subscribers. Then we move into proving 7 prescriptive tactics on how to build a robust preference center. Some of the most important information in this eBook begins on page 12 with the notion of a Connected Company. That is, an organization that is working across departments and silos to ensure that the goal of driving email subscriber growth is a universal concept. In this section, the eBook lays out 6 different strategies on how to drive subscriber acquisition across channels and throughout the organization, including the use of emerging mobile and social tactics. From there, the eBook provides details on how to set up a welcome campaign that has three major new relationship components – Welcome, Nudge and Nourish. The eBook wraps up with strategies on how to leverage web analytics and testing tactics to better improve the email acquisition funnel online.

Clearly it is a paper chock full of resources, and it is yours for free with registration. This is the first in a series of five eBooks. The upcoming eBook topics on Creating Engaging Email include Segmentation and Targeting, Harnessing Social and Mobile Marketing, Measuring Email Performance and finally, Leveraging Web Analytics.

As we continue to build this content, I’d love to hear your feedback on the first one. Please feel free to reach out to me on twitter.

Until then, all the best
David Daniels, CEO
The Relevancy Group

According to Direct Magazine, David Daniels is “one of the most influential experts in email marketing, if not the most influential.” Until January 2010 he served as Vice President and Principal Analyst with Forrester Research and JupiterResearch. David is co-author of the book “Email Marketing An Hour A Day” and has been a contributor to the Weekend Today Show on NBC. David has held senior level positions at Apple Computer, Urban Outfitters/Anthropologie, Micro/MacWarehouse, ProTeam and CDA Computer Sales.

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Posted in Email Marketing | No Comments »

A new perspective on Web Content Management – the ACM7 release

Thursday, November 25th, 2010

Exciting days at Alterian! For my line of business, Web Content Management, we’re announcing a major new release today: Alterian Content Manager v7. It’s part of a bigger story though: Alterian Alchemy™, which puts it in the context of a framework for Customer Engagement. This framework is about listening to your customers, learning from them, then creating relevant messages for them and delivering that message to them in the right context via the right channel, ultimately building engagement (that is, if you do it well).

What makes the launch of ACM v7 special, in my opinion, is the changing role that Web Content Management systems will play in the future. No longer is it just about managing your websites; content needs to be managed for many more channels these days, but the technology to do so is diverse and fragmented. If you don’t have a proper strategy, you might end up with many content silos based on the channel that you need to communicate to. Not easy to manage or to enforce compliance, I’d say. Hopefully, we all agree we don’t want to go there.

With ACM v7, we deliver an excellent best of breed WCM system with many great enhancements in terms of user interface, Microsoft Office integration, extensibility/customization and much more (kudos to all the teams involved in making that happen!). But moreover, we are making big steps in terms of putting Alterian Content Manager at the hub of your engagement strategy, by allowing you to manage content for web, social media and email, all from within the same environment. This allows you to apply workflow, access rights, content tagging/categorization and much more at the content for all your customer engagements, without the need to duplicate content or store it in disparate systems.

We already see companies seeking for such solutions, like a car manufacturing brand that recently came to us, asking if we could help them manage the content creation and approval process for their 20+ Facebook pages centrally. I’m sure more companies face similar challenges. Luckily, with ACM v7, we can empower these marketers and make their life a lot easier. But as always, with more power comes more responsibility, so keep in mind what you’re trying to achieve: engagement, building trust and a long term relationship. And that is not just about having the right technology, but also about applying it in a sensible way.

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Technology does not drive customer insight, part 2

Tuesday, November 23rd, 2010

This post is second in a two-part series. Below, Graham discusses steps an organization can take in developing its data-driven marketing strategy.

Raising confidence in the marketing department:

In a recent engagement, it was demonstrated to a client that 50% of the proposed capital investment would deliver 70% of the project’s outcome. Board level approval was forthcoming for the entire project, quite simply because the marketing team was seen to have demonstrated a real risk and reward analysis, and a robust and measurable definition of success was provided. The initial investment delivered a higher return in a greatly reduced time scale. Having provided such clarity, the board felt more inclined to invest in the riskier or more innovative ideas promoted by the marketing department.

Seeing the wood for the trees:

The process of linking data to profitability also provides an insight to those small amounts of data that provide a disproportionally high impact on business. Identifying these high value data sources and improving their rate of collection, interpretation and speed of action results in a vastly improved bottom line performance, providing relevance to those elements of campaign measurement that contribute to campaign analysis and customer insight.

Subsequent automation ensures continued performance and generates the time required to identify the next data mother lode.

Alterian Customer Engagement Solutions are used by more than 2,500 marketing organizations around the world. The technology is supported by one of the most comprehensive range of partners, enabling client organizations to focus on their key competencies whilst meeting the developing needs of customers and supporting technologies.

If you believe that you or your organization is struggling with an excess of data and technology, start by identifying the following:

1. The key elements of data essential for success

2. The processes required to acquire and interpret

3 The skills required to turn the insight into bottom line measurable performance

Is your organization taking the necessary steps to determine the above and develop a data-driven marketing strategy?

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