Category: Consumer Strategy

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.

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.”

Email remains one of the most effective and inexpensive ways to engage, educate, and compel customers to act. Today, getting results means staying on top of the latest industry trends and building on what you know about your customers. We have it down to a science.

Timing is everything
Customer relationships are a lot like dating. Once you’re introduced, you need to strike that careful balance of staying in touch without coming on too strong. Here are three rules of thumb to progressively get more involved in your customers’ lives: 

• Start out friendly. Send a welcome email within minutes of registration. To optimize delivery rates, be sure the email asks customers to add you to their address books. Offer incentives to first-time buyers.
• Be responsive but not needy. Use event-triggered emails to confirm an activity and upsell products or services.
• Stay top-of-mind. Maintain regular touchpoints that correspond to your promotional calendar. Some suggest weekly and others, bimonthly. Map out specific drive periods, develop the messaging plan (and offers), and tie back, if you can, to the appropriate customer group.

Out with the old
Thanks to iPhone and other mobile devices, customers have less time for your message, and less space in which to see it. Your design needs to render well regardless of where and how it’s viewed: images on or off, preview pane or full screen, cell phone or desktop. And you need to work harder to grab the customer’s attention while they’re on the go. The new rules:
 
• Remember 50 character subject lines? Today it’s better to bring them down to 45 or less. Be sure to make your first three words count.
• Put your most important message top left for immediate viewing in most preview panes. Provide a clear, simple, and compelling call-to-action right at the top.
• Image-based emails are fabulous for conveying a premium brand image. But unless you’re selling luxury products or vacations, it’s better to use HTML text and colors for your layout. Most email applications disable images by default, and if your text is embedded in an image, your customers may not see it at all.
• We used to think using ALT text behind images was enough. While it’s still a best practice, you can’t count on it to deliver your message. Some browsers will display only 20 characters or less of ALT text, and others won’t display it at all.
• Be where your customers are online, and ask them to connect with you. Highlight forums, social networks, blogs, and mobile apps to maximize brand engagement.

One size does NOT fit all
Content is king now more than ever. If you come across as a bore, you’ll kill your open rates, so use your data to get to know what appeals to different segments of your customer base. Then use those insights to tailor compelling, actionable creative offers and messages to each audience.  Consider developing unique email streams that are based on specific customer segments. Your offers and tone should be different for new users, loyal customers, and those who haven’t engaged with you in more than 90 days.

Aggressively target and profile
Continually gather data throughout the customer lifetime to keep content relevant and fresh. For example, look at purchases and behavioral data. One of the best ways to find out what your customers want is to simply ask:

• Collect data during registration. Make it simple, and ask questions that will help you understand what types of messages the customer prefers and how often they’d like to hear from you.
• Direct customers to preference centers for progressive profiling.
• Periodically conduct surveys and short polls.

Always look at the big picture, and refine your touches. By striking a balance with your content and number of emails delivered, you’ll keep customers from getting overwhelmed by email and effectively build long-term loyalty.

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/]

A project manager is a combination client manager, strategist, team lead, qa lead, and more–and plays an integral role in the successful delivery of digital projects. An earlier blog post, The Art of Project Management, explored the role of the project manager in a digital environment and what it takes to be a project manager. 

Many great tools exist to support those who want to learn the trade, including courses and certification through the Project Management Institute, software, seminars, workshops, and books. Each of these tools helps supply project managers with a solid foundation with which to perfect their craft. At SolutionSet, we recommend reading three books which complement these tools and are designed to help with the mindset of a project manager and to teach them how to think. Our recommended reading includes:

The Art of War

Sun Tzu’s classic dissertation on warfare is not solely about the craft of war. It also has many lessons to teach us about managing situations and conflicts. 

Each chapter is dedicated to specific lessons about conflicts from strategy and planning, through initiative, reaction and resolution. These lessons serve to provide a context for approaching a situation and provide a valuable point-of-view for reflection. Not every lesson translates and is applicable, but many are:

 “Those who are first on the battlefield and await the opponents are at ease; those who are last on the battlefield and head into battle get worn out.”

This lesson is very much about preparation and organization. Being prepared for your meeting/project/etc. and being on time, allows you to manage your work and to achieve success. Being late and not prepared sets you up for failure.

Internalizing these lessons allows us to think through situations and react in logical manners to the situations at hand, and this increases the odds of success.

A tried and true maxim about baseball is that you cannot teach running, but you can teach the rest of the skills necessary to play. However, if you cannot run, you will not be a good player. It is similar for project managers: you cannot teach analytical thinking, but you can teach the skills of project management. If you can think through situations calmly and objectively, then you are more apt to succeed.

A project manager is above else the project leader and knowing how to think through the situations at hand and how to plan for issues before they happen is an invaluable tool. The Art of War is a valuable tool for learning how to think.

Flawless Consulting

Flawless Consulting may seem to be a relic of an earlier age (I read the original version, not the updated copy) and a prime example of 1970’s pop-psychology. However, to dismiss it as simplistic pop-psychology would be a mistake. It offers us unique insights into how to read and interact with people and overall how to act like a consultant. 

We often focus on the tasks that make up the project when we are project managers, but it is the people involved: clients, staff and management which are the true challenges. Flawless Consulting teaches us to look at look at how we interact with the people involved in the process, how to understand their motivations, their verbal and non-verbal communications.  These skills are vital to the success of the project.

“Too often, we take the easy road and ignore the underlying issues.”

By taking the time to understand the people involved in the project, allows us to understand how to manage the situation.  It enables us to change the way we behave and communicate to make sure we are heard and achieve our goals. 

An important point we often discuss in our internal project management meetings is how to balance our goals and our efforts to ensure we meet our goals. A question I often ask: “Is it more important to achieve your goals, or to achieve them in the manner you wish to?” Flawless Consulting teaches us to understand our audiences and how to communicate with them in manners which ensures the outcome we envision. Being a consultant is a mindset and it is useful to know how to act like one no matter what our professional role. 

Making Things Happen: Master Project Management (formerly The Art of Project Management)

This is the updated edition of the bestselling O’Reilly book by former Microsoft Program Manager Scott Berkun. Written in down-to-earth plain language, the book offers an examination of the real world trade-offs and decision making tools for getting things done. Berkun excels at explaining both the social aspects of having multiple stakeholders, as well as technical topics of handling deadlines and constraints. The focus is on software and internet development, yet maintains a readable conversational style, and avoids geeky lectures.

Each of these books offers us valuable insights into mastering our craft.

Having a mobile strategy and presence does not need to be a difficult proposition. Sometimes the simplest tools can add big benefit. In a recent article on the website Mobile Marketer, Dan Butcher identifies the six trends affecting mobile marketing and commerce.

The trends are:

• increased Smartphone sales and usage
• dramatic increase in mobile Web usage
• mobile commerce adoption grows
• mobile search becomes essential
• multichannel marketing mix expands
• market fragmentation continue

To anyone who has an iPhone or other Smartphones, these trends seem obvious as we reflect on our own behavior and map them back to consumers at large. 

Mobile strategies are multifold and depend on your business, marketing, and revenue goals. But as marketers, we must understand the need to respond to these trends and to use the platform to meet our objectives. This will not always involve the development of a ground-breaking strategy or the launch of an iPhone app that is featured in the store, but can be as simple as enabling our current sites to be useful and readable in a Smartphone’s form factor.

Strategies will evolve as we understand user behavior and must take into account how, when, and where consumers interact with their devices. Much as TV marketing strategies are different from online/web/pc-based strategies, mobile device users have different goals and must be communicated in a unique way.

Apps are a key element of mobile marketing, but are still very nascent as marketers understand how to interact with consumers.  For now, utility is the name of the game. Top apps (as is true with websites) make it easier for consumers to do something, not just to be entertained. 

The lowest hanging fruit is to launch a mobile-enabled version of your site or elements of your site. With the proliferation of Smartphones, more consumers are using their mobile devices to visit websites for commerce and information. Thus, it should be an integral part of all marketing efforts to have a web presence which allows consumers to interact with the brand in a manner specific to the smaller real-estate available on the browser. 

A great example of this is the mobile version of the VW site. This site simplifies those tasks which a mobile user would be most interested in: reviewing car models, finding a dealer, and contacting road-side assistance. This is all designed for the form-factor of the phone and offers a very unique and valuable experience to the consumer, which is a different from the experience of going to the main VW website from a Smartphone.

The trends will only continue as the adoption of mobile is ramping faster than desktop internet did and will be bigger than we think. 

Would you pay $193.50 for a small figurine of the Russian saint of extremely fast dancing? The Significant Objects Project proves that “narrative transforms the insignificant into the significant” and people pay big bucks for tall tales.

NY Times contributor Rob Walker and author Josh Glenn challenged a group of writers to find random objects and create fictional stories that added a certain je ne sais quoi to them. Between July and November of last year, $128.74 worth of these dust collectors sold for $3,612.51 through eBay auctions.

(It should be noted that the founders said they “did not set out to hoax eBay customers” and that they took care to avoid the impression that the stories were in any way true. A second phase of the project is underway that focuses on charitable fundraising.)

Whether you’re selling an HDTV or a sea captain pipe rest, just know that engaging narrative helps move merchandise.

French fries. Gnocchi. Kugel. Pierogi. Europeans love them some potato. But it wasn’t long ago when this Peruvian import was viewed as hog feed that caused leprosy in humans.

This all changed thanks to research and savvy marketing by the French scientist Antoine-Augustin Parmentier. It was the mid-18th century and Parmentier was serving as an army pharmacist in the Seven Years’ War. The Prussians captured the big thinker and forced him to eat potatoes. He survived (with all limbs and digits intact) and returned to France determined to promote the potato as a viable food source.

Parmentier conducted experiments that proved potatoes were nourishing and helped cure dysenteric patients. He was showered with praises and awards from the scientific community. The French Parliament even lifted the national ban on potato cultivation. Yet his countrymen couldn’t seem to shake the hog feed stigma and continued in their non-potato eating ways.

When support from the government and academia failed his efforts, Parmentier turned to marketing. He hosted dinners for dignitaries (including Benjamin Franklin) with potato dishes proudly served. He delivered beautiful bouquets of potato blossoms to the King and Queen. But perhaps his most ingenious tactic was placing guards around his potato patch with explicit instructions to accept all bribes and look the other way when people tried to steal the crop.

Parmentier understood the basic human condition and marketed against our weaknesses. He sought celebrity endorsements, influenced the influencers, and created a high perceived value among consumers. After the potato saved France from famine in 1785 and 1795, the hearty tuber officially made the jump from feared to revered.

So the next time you order steak frites, take a moment to thank Monsieur Parmentier.

[Source: Wikipedia]

Free operating systems. Free content. Free apps. Free email. Free hosting. In an article published on Fast Company, author Farhad Manjoo questions the merits of the business model that dominates the web:

Why? Because free costs too much, weighed down with hassles that you’ll happily pay a little to do without. That’s why people buy bottled water and cable TV. That’s also the model that The Wall Street Journal uses to goad people into paying for news online. Anyone can read its stories for free through Google or a news-aggregation site like Digg, but people who want the full newspaper experience pay $103 a year for the privilege. More than a million subscribers consider that a good deal.

Manjoo notes customers understand that responsibility for product quality is only truly passed when money changes hands. If a free iPhone app is busted, you’re not too terribly surprised and will just delete it. If a $4.99 app is busted, you’re ready to write an angry letter. It’s all about expectations. If you can justify a cost with a promise of quality and support, then why mingle with the businesses in the free pool that can’t? Read the full article.