Category: Marketing Analytics

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.

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.

We’re firm believers in the power of utilizing behavioral data to solve business problems. With the availability of reliable quantitative data, goals like marketing optimization and efficiency become a reality. Under the old database marketing paradigm, life was straightforward: Every marketing dollar was tracked against resulting customer-specific, transactional metrics. Inquiries, registrations, purchases, and profit could all be tied to addressable prospects and customers, and the cost of soliciting those actions could be calculated with precision. What we learned about consumer behavior informed our efforts, and the outcome was, in most cases, measurable improvement in our marketing efficiency over time.

But recently, the avalanche of new online data has threatened to derail us, cluttering our minds and our marketing dashboards with an ever-expanding array of disparate tables and graphs. A significant amount of time and effort is invested in compiling and reporting on these new metrics. But are all of them really advancing us toward our goal? Impressions, clicks, page views—where did the customers and sales go?

Author and business consultant Eric Ries wrote a post for the Harvard Business Review titled Entrepreneurs Beware of Vanity Metrics that really gets to the heart of the matter.  In it, he presents a discussion about Actionable metrics and their nemesis: Vanity metrics.  Whether you are a Start-up or Big Company, we think his observations apply to the multichannel marketing arena.  We agree with him that metrics should be:

Actionable—If you don’t believe it or you can’t repeat it, you can’t be confident in your decisions.
Accessible—To support effective business decision-making, reports must be understandable, available, and timely.
Auditable—Metrics must be credible, with no loss of integrity between the individual customers and atomic activities that roll up into summary numbers that appear in reports.

The Web brings us a lot of instant gratification and a mountain of data. As Mr. Ries accurately points out, people have a tendency to believe (and take credit for) positive metrics while they excuse (and deflect responsibility for) negative ones.  The most successful organizations will be those with the objectivity to discriminate between the actionable and the feel-good data. In other words, let’s be picky about what we measure and separate metrics that capture the essence of consumer behavior from metrics that reflect our own marketing department’s output.  If we maintain our focus and believe in our metrics—positive and negative—our business decision-making will be cheaper, clearer, and better.

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.

Natalie Zmuda of AdAge wrote an article today about the big winners in retail over the last year. The grocery giant Kroger was ranked among them, thanks to gas discounts, free groceries earned through loyalty cards and 10% off all purchases made with tax rebate checks. Kroger also gives credit to their highly targeted and personalized direct marketing campaigns. From the source:

“We understand and appreciate that no two customers are alike,” said David Dillon, Kroger’s chairman-CEO. “Some may live in the same city, some in the same neighborhood and even on the same street, but we know that they don’t have the same shopping habits. This level of personalization is a direct link to our customers [that] no other U.S. grocery retailer can replicate.”

We love your approach Mr. Dillon. Why send canned beet coupons to an entire ZIP when you know that only 317 loyalty card members have bought them in the past month?

Even in these slash-and-burn times, rays of hope exist in this business. AdAge wrote an article today that took an optimistic look at online coupons, marketing analytics, mobile, and more. A patchwork from the source:

Online Coupons According to ComScore, coupon sites were the fastest-growing online category in November by traffic, up 32% from October to 35.6 million. Coupons.com got about a quarter of that, or 8.5 million visitors, up from 8 million in October and 6.5 million a year ago. The company has seen its redemption rates increase 1% to 17% in the last year. (A newspaper coupon’s average redemption rate hovers around 1%.)

Marketing Analytics Speaking to analysts in November, Nielsen CEO David Calhoun said he still can’t hire enough analysts to keep up with demand, which is increasing, thanks to the economy. “There is a lot of attention being paid to market-share shifts, pricing analytics, the kinds of things that can sort of keep everybody’s heads above water during this tumultuous time,” he said.

Mobile Location-based advertising (Loopt in partnership with CBS will launch its advertising platform this year), in-game mobile advertising and mobile-video services are examples of emerging areas…According to estimates, mobile marketing will grow from $708 million in overall revenue this year to $2.2 billion in 2012—a compound annual growth rate of 26%.

Coupons. Analytics. Mobile. Three of our very favorite subjects. Good to know we’re onto something.

The rules are changing for brand and direct marketers, mainly that they now share the expectation of delivering a measurable ROI. But along with this accountability comes the responsibility to remain true to the brand. In an op-ed I wrote for DMNews, I touch on how marketers need to maintain a consistent look and feel across all channels, all the while pushing the consumer towards the transaction. A brief excerpt:

Marketers now need to simultaneously establish a strong brand and achieve measur­able sales results, uniting branding brain and transactional brawn. But we should under­stand the key drivers to successfully teaming up these once-separate marketing forces.

Maintain consistent brand delivery across online and offline channels, and across brand and direct marketing messages. Consumers now encounter all brands offline and online and across the spectrum of brand and direct communications. Only absolute consistency articulating the brand will reach consumers with the full impact of all communications.

How have you seen the demand for accountability rise in the past 10 years? Is qualitative research destined for the trash heap, especially with the tracking power of the Internet?

While the campaign of President-elect Barack Obama is crediting an array of factors for his victory, behind closed doors they would surely give a big nod to the skillful use of data mining.

Fast Company rounded up a few political strategists to talk about their segmentation and data mining techniques. There’s a couple of interesting findings for us marketers in the article—like don’t shy away from data that paints a human picture of your target. Michael Meyers, President of Target Point Consulting, had this to say:

We’re always looking for a better mousetrap. We’ve come up with about 30 major DNA strands within the electorate, such as soccer moms, Nascar dads, evangelical earth stewards, country-club Republicans, married-to-their-mortgage families. Then we say, ‘These people need war-on-terror messages, these people need education messages, these people need tax messages.

As marketers, we work on this all of the time—identifying targets, crafting meaningful messages, and motivating specific actions. And consumers, much like the electorate, continue to carry on mostly unaware of these efforts.

Much has been made of effectiveness of Barack Obama (and Democrats more generally) in leveraging  the Internet to further their cause.  By every meaningful metric (fundraising, traffic, volunteers,  etc.) Obama’s advantage ranges from significant to enormous.  If Obama was Roadhouse’s Dalton, then McCain’s web team was like the streettoughs at the Double Deuce.

As someone who has worked in both Internet and politics, I wanted to offer a non-partisan explanation for the gap.

1) DEMOGRAPHICS
The Internet audience demographics slant towards young voting populations… and younger voters are much more frequently Democrats than Republicans.

2) TECHNICAL SOPHISTICATION
Beyond the advantage in audience size, younger internet users are much more sophisticated and active than older internet users as measured by blog readership, social networking, etc.

3) OFFLINE VS. ONLINE
Republicans have been more effective in leveraging offline vehicles (e.g. organizing through churches, communication through direct mail and talk radio, fundraising through big dollar donor events,etc.)  As such, when the Internet emerged, Democrats had more pent up demand for a vehicle through which to organize, communicate, and fundraise.  It turns out, not surprisingly, that the Internet is simply more synergistic and effective than the offline channels.

4) INSURGENCY
The vast majority of the fast growth years for the Internet have coincided with Bush’s tenure in office.  Organization happens faster around opposition which has benefited the “out-of-office” Democrats.  If Obama wins the election, expect significant gains from the Republicans online.

These 4 factors are currently working in combination to heavily benefit Democratic candidates.  Is it sustainable… I’m not sure.  But it will be interesting to watch.