Category: Direct Marketing

So, you are communicating with your best customers using email. And, your strategic business objective is to append more of your customer file with email addresses, and increase the number of opt-in addresses you email. Because, of course, email is much cheaper than marketing using other channels, it presents opportunities to better target, and personalize, and improve relevancy.

But do your customers see it the way you do? Do your customers sense the value you have for their business as a result of your email communications?

Arguably, email does not enhance the emotional connections you want your best customers to have with your brand. Email doesn’t say “thank you” or “we appreciate your business” or “you’re special” very well. Certainly email allows you to cost-effectively increase the frequency of contact with your customers. But your customers know how cheap email is to send: that’s why they get so much of it!

Consider an Information Week report that came out today, regarding a study from Symantec. Spam is on the rise, and as of July, 2010, spam comprises 92% of all e-mail messages. This is the context of your best customer email marketing communications: a sea of spam.

Think about the most meaningful messages you’ve received from companies. Remember the hand-written postcard from the Nordstrom sales associate after your big purchase? Remember how the head chef in a fine restaurant you frequent came out to the table to greet you (and your friends), thank you, and buy that bottle of wine? Remember when your Zappos order came, including ’surprise’ free overnight shipping? Remember your stay at the Ritz-Carlton and how the Ritz-Carlton motto — “We are ladies and gentlemen serving ladies and gentlemen” – was put into action in the most basic and yet surprising ways? Remember the birthday card from a store you like, and the special thank you gift inside? Remember the genuine and highly personal contacts you have experienced that actually do engender loyalty, and repeat purchasing? Most of these experiences that stand out occur in the offline world, the real world.

Yes, email is part of the marketing mix, and an excellent channel and effective means of communicating with customers. Yes, you have objectives to retain customers, up-sell and cross-sell other products and services, increase the lifetime value of your customers, and generate more sales – and email helps you get there.

But, your best customers are your greatest asset. The 80/20 rule probably applies in your business, suggesting that 20% of your customers (your best customers) drive 80% of the revenue, and likely, most of your profit.

Customers want to know their business is valued. With so much competition, and commoditization, it’s easier and easier for customers to go elsewhere to buy product X or service Y. In a world of homogenized email, faceless companies, and other options just a click away, it’s more important than ever to stand out, deliver quality experiences for your best customers, be truly personal, and add meaning to the transaction.

People don’t want to be numbers, or treated like everybody else. People want recognition, and “surprise and delight” experiences that reinforce their brand choice. For your best customers, spend more, deploy direct and highly personal initiatives that go way beyond email, and let them know you care.

Social media marketing is a mystery to most business people today. Most marketers think they should be doing something, but where, or how? Here are 12 video tutorials that advise business people on some of the important and most basic functions of social media marketing. Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook… How to best use Twitter for your business? How to automatically update your LinkedIn status from Twitter? How to give and get recommendations on LinkedIn? How to create a basic Facebook fan page also known as a Facebook business page. How to create a Facebook ad campaign? Yes, these are just the basics, but there’s no faster way to understand them than here.

Exponential increases in computer storage, processing power, graphics, networks, the web and now, the cloud, are stimulating changes at the interface level, too. The future of UI design is becoming less and less machine dependent, and more aligned with the body and the mind.

Minority Report science adviser and inventor John Underkoffler calls the future of UI design “the spatial operating environment.” Your hand replaces the mouse. The display is the room. Navigation in 3D, and so on.

Underkoffler demonstrates the future of the computer interface. Is this how tomorrow’s computers will be controlled? Take a look.

These advances in technology reflect design integrated with people and peoples’ needs. And this goes way beyond ergonomics, and fitting humans; rather, these advances help make the machine disappear.

We, as marketers, intent on selling goods and services on behalf of our clients, must consider this future. Will the OS as envisioned by Underkoffler be delivered with computers in just 5 years, and into consumers’ hands? Imagine the product demonstrations, interactions of whatever ‘social media’ will be called in this space, and other experiential marketing techniques to come. The biggest casualty may be the physical store. The biggest opportunity may be where the intersection of consumer behavioral data, and digital and direct marketing converge. Think about it.

Did you know that today 78% of consumers trust peer recommendations and only 14% trust advertisements? These facts are included in the recently updated and even more awesome video by Erik Qualman here. These facts are according to the latest Nielsen Global Online Consumer Survey of over 25,000 Internet consumers from 50 countries, and Larry Weber in “Marketing to the Social Web,” respectively.

These facts also support the claim that social media isn’t a fad; rather, that it reflects fundamental shifts in the way people communicate. And the way marketing initiatives must be deployed. It used to be that marketers delivered advertising messages to consumers and tried to persuade them to buy. This was the top-down approach. Then the consumer became empowered (by the leveling and disintermediation of the internet) and s/he began to actively search online to learn about products and services before choosing what to purchase, and from whom to purchase the desired goods and services. The influences along the path to purchase multiplied. Marketers started to lose control.

Qualman goes further and suggests “we will no longer search for products and services, they will find us via social media.” The marketer’s goal is no longer to control the conversation, but instead to “enable, inspire, influence and engage” with consumers. Martha Kagan’s slideshow, “What The F**K is Social Media?” makes this point in no uncertain terms. Forrester has certified the idea, and is talking about the “customer engagement agency” that is displacing the old guard. The rise of social media reflects the decline of hegemony, and the old guard in advertising may be the last to know. Still wondering about the ROI of social media? As Qualman sums it up, “The ROI of social media is that your business will still exist in 5 years.”

A recent McKinsey quarterly report by David Edelman goes further than most in paying off on the proposition to get more out of your digital marketing initiatives. McKinsey has found that “the most successful digital marketers focus on managing four core sources of value as they increase the percentage of marketing and channel spending that is directed to digital activities. First, they coordinate their activities to engage the consumer throughout an increasingly digital purchase journey. Second, they harness interest in their brands by syndicating content that empowers the consumer to build his or her own marketing identity and, in the process, to serve as a brand ambassador. Third, they recognize the need to think like a large-scale multimedia publisher as they manage a staggering increase in the content they create to support products, segments, channels, and promotions. Finally, these marketers strategically plot how to gather and use the plethora of digital data now available.”

While in summary form here these four sources of value may seem more like platitudes, but they are in fact excellent signposts for marketers on the road to realizing the promise of the digital revolution unfolding around us. And once again, we are reminded that our best approach is bottom-up (from the customer’s perspective) rather than top-down (from the marketer’s perspective). Taken together, these changes force companies to step back from tactical, day-to-day execution and take a more strategic view of where to invest and make changes. Reading the 7-page report is worthwhile and free but requires registration here.

During the past 24 months marketing budgets have shifted more and more into interactive channels, fundamentally because of measurability. While this broad shift was happening before the recession, business pressures have caused it to accelerate. Agencies are re-organizing and breaking down walls in order to facilitate integration and nurture collaboration. Clients, too, are seeing the light, and bringing “channel” based organizations together under strategic leadership. Finally, our industry is beginning to catch up and map marketing initiatives to the ways consumers want to transact.

The proverbial purchase funnel model — beginning with generating awareness at the top, and driving down through interest to desire and effecting action — is outmoded and outdated. Bill Kanarick, chief strategy and marketing officer of interactive agency SapientNitro, says, “Today, the rapid rise of social media and multitasking of consumers [means] a customer can view an ad on TV, purchase from a website and speak with someone in sales or services all in a few minutes. If you’re an agency that can handle that, the sky’s the limit. Without those skills, it might be a real struggle.” We couldn’t agree more. Read all about it! [http://www.dmnews.com/agencies-position-for-the-rebound/article/169240/]

Snow, sleet, rain, and hail…your mail gets delivered through it all (at discounted postal rates)—if you have the right address information. When building your mail list, we look at these three factors:

1. Does the address really exist?

2. Does the person it’s addressed to live there?

3. What’s the absolute minimum amount of postage necessary?

We flag addresses that don’t have a ZIP4 as well as addresses thought to be multifamily dwellings but missing an apartment or suite number. Then we compare those addresses to our direct mail response database and fill in the blanks. This isn’t a generic resident list or aggregated list of self-reported addresses. It’s a record of confirmed mail order buyers who have a proven propensity to respond to direct mail offers. Results vary from list to list, but on average we’re able to enhance between 15% and 20% of the records that would otherwise not receive a ZIP4, improving deliverability and giving us the ability to gather change of address information.

To put this technology to work for you. Email business@solutionset.com and ask about I-Quality. We’re happy to help.

Dan Ariely, behavioral economist and author of Predictably Irrational, made a highly enlightening and entertaining presentation on the flawed nature of the human decision making process. Using examples ranging from magazine subscriptions to organ donor registration forms, Ariely shows how the wording, selection, and arrangement of choices can have a massive influence on the outcome:

With unemployment rates reported at 8.5% in March (the highest it’s been since 1983), it’s a sobering time for business and a back-to-basics time for marketing. Everywhere I turn, experts are touting a return to simplicity in order to weather the recession-storm.

Several months ago, when some of us may have still somewhat been in denial about whether we were even actually in a recession, I came across a great banner ad for JELL-O on a consumer magazine website. The ad messaging made no bones about times being tough:

Even when you’re on a budget
You can still feel rich
and chocolatey too.

While consumers are watching their food budgets and heading back to basics (NPR reports that cooking lessons are on the rise, with more people trying to prepare meals at home), businesses also need to spend smarter by focusing on fundamentals like ROI. And there’s no better way to watch the numbers than to focus marketing dollars on digital, where click-throughs, test pages, and conversions are clearly quantifiable.

It’s true that necessity breeds ingenuity, and SolutionSet has the right blend of digital marketing experience and creative design to do a lot with a little. It’s what the Haggin Marketing family calls “BrandActional.”

One of our clients wanted to update their site in an effort to drive more conversions, but needed to justify the cost of making site enhancements. We engaged with them and installed user tracking software (ClickTale) to be able to quickly (and at low-cost to the client) track and understand how users were interacting with their site. This exploration coupled with reviewing and analyzing their site analytics allowed us to come forth with recommendations that were based on data and user behavior, making it easy for our client to prove the need for these optimizations. The end result was that we were able to suggest straightforward site enhancements that would lead to the client’s end goal of more conversions and ultimately positively impacting the bottom line.

[Thanks to Paige Kobert for providing the above ClickTale success story.]

In the last few months, I’ve been reminded (several times) that bringing brand and technology together sometimes means creating marketing materials that funnel people to the web sites and interactive tools we spend so much of our time and energy creating.

More often than not, that means conceptualizing, designing, and building banner advertisements that drive people to these web experiences that we’ve shed blood, sweat, and tears over.

Oftentimes, our banners need to compete with a ton of visual distractions. Capturing an Internet user’s attention has become a big challenge. Thus, you need to incorporate the best-possible banner ad designs to make your ads attractive enough to compete for your target audience’s attention.

Obviously, creativity plays a big role in successful banner advertising. Developing that catchy headline, or just the right balance of colors and photography can go a long way towards effectively reaching your target audience.

But, before you can do any of that, it’s important to remember some of fundamental banner design guidelines.

Things to remember:

1. What is the objective? Are the banner ads an exercise in Branding or Conversion?
2. Where are the media placements?
3. What are the site-specific specifications (e.g. unit size, file size (k-size), frames per second (FPS), and maximum animation length)?
4. When in doubt, the Interactive Advertising Bureau (iab.net) is a good place to start.

Tips: 

1. Ask for an action.
2. Know your audience.
3. Keep it simple.
4. Emphasis the benefits, not the features.
5. Optimize source files in native applications.
6. Use words that attract or capture an emotion.

Before you know it, you’ll have created very interesting and effective ads that will drive millions of people to interact and experience the web sites that you’ve poured hours of your time and thinking into.