WhiteNoise

Win Back Programs: Smart Marketing or Failure of Strategy?

dbaker@whitenoiseinc.com (David Baker) — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 16:44:00 GMT

From the Email Experience Council

Building programs to re-engage dormant leads is a necessity for many email marketers, particularly those that have not had buttoned-up strategy for segmentation and targeted communications in the past. List re-engagement and “win-back” program strategy was the open forum discussion topic at the February meeting of the Email Experience Council’s List Growth and Engagement Roundtable.

“If you need to do re-engagement after a long period of subscriber inactivity, that is a failure of strategy,” suggested Stephanie Miller, VP, Return Path and Vice Chair of the eec. “Marketers who are trying to catch up have a steep road. Rather, win-backs should be a consistent part of your segmentation strategy.”

Bottom line, Stephanie pointed out, effective email marketers reach out early in the cycle and “shouldn’t have a situation in which someone hasn’t responded in a long time.”

Ultimately, the question of glass half-empty or half-full regarding re-engagement may boil down to the buyer. In BtoB, noted Bulldog Solutions’ Amy Bills, list re-engagement can be an effective way to generate more ROI from an existing database. “A lot of time and money has probably been spent putting together that list. Marketers are looking at making the most of it.”

Yael Penn of i360 Marketing reframed the concept of re-engagement as an ongoing effort. “In BtoB we’re always thinking about reengagement strategies. We’re planning re-engagement from the start. BtoB purchases are more complex and the sales cycle is much longer. Sometimes a company is only doing the research now and they are not ready to make the purchase decision for six months. In BtoC, the reason to buy is impulse; in BtoB, because the sales cycle is different, re-engagement can be more effective."

On the BtoC side, ExactTarget’s Nate Romance said, “There is risk to carrying a lot of dead weight. We’re hearing re-engagement as a drumbeat in reputation management and deliverability. If you’re beating on 60% of your list that is not responding, it’s costing you something.” (Some more on low engagement concerns here.)
A discussion of specific re-engagement strategies included:

Ideas for engagement tactics including changing the subject line format, adding interactive elements like polls or surveys, featuring a high-value offer and highlighting exclusive information. Sometimes just asking straight out can work, too. “We hate spam, too. Let us know if you want to stay on the file,” can be an effective approach, Stephanie noted.
Nate described test findings regarding language used to confirm a prospect’s interest and willingness to stay on a list. “We did some testing and found that inclusion of the 'No' option caused more 'Yes' responses,” he said.
The preference center tactic—asking people to “update their information” had not been found by the group to be a compelling re-engagement tool. “With a true re-engagement we typically encourage a strong call to action,” Nate said. “Not enough people do a good job of explaining what’s in it for the recipient to fill out preferences. It’s perceived by subscribers as the marketer’s tool, having little value to them, he said.

We hear a lot about engagement being effective and necessary – but the pressing need for re-engagement is a reminder that engagement must be earned with every message sent, Stephanie suggested. Nate agreed, “If you want to optimize the value of your email marketing asset, you must keep the file engaged and fresh. That is more than a one-time win back campaign, but an imperative for your content strategy.”

Place your comments below to tell us what you are doing to engage – and re-engage; we’d love to feature your efforts in a future blog post or as part of the Roundtable's discussions. Also, check out the List Growth & Engagement Roundtable’s 2010 Benchmark Guide to see how your list growth efforts stack up.
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http://emailexperience.org/blog/2010/03/win-back-programs-smart-marketing-or-failure-of-strategy

The Future Of Email, 2010 Edition

dbaker@whitenoiseinc.com (David Baker) — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 01:22:00 GMT

I thought I'd resurrect a column from the past and see how accurate my predictions were. Roll your calendars back to July, 2006, when I wrote a column on "The Future of Email." I quoted from an article by Paul Gillin, "New Technology, New Media and New Paradigm," that had just appeared in BtoB magazine:

"We hear a lot about blogs, but blogs aren't important. What's important is personal publishing, or the ability to communicate a message to a global audience almost instantaneously. Personal publishing will permeate electronic media, providing counterpoint to mainstream sources and adding depth and color to the conversation.

"We hear a lot about podcasts, but podcasts aren't important. What's important is time-shifted media. The phenomenon that started with TiVo has spread to digital audio and will soon capture portable video. Information consumers will no longer be beholden to program schedules or even their living rooms. Our TV shows will travel with us.

"We hear a lot about RSS, but RSS isn't important. What's important is the ability to subscribe to information that really interests us. RSS is mainly used to subscribe to blog posts and podcasts. But in the future, they will use it to subscribe to ideas."

Then I continued: "So, as someone who aspires to effect a change in the paradigm of digital communications and consumer behavior, I put my spin on the future of email using this same logic. I conclude that we hear a lot about email, but email isn't important. What's important is our ability to communicate in a synchronous and asynchronous fashion in a mixed media world. Email will be our notification agent, alarm clock, Post-it Note, pager, cell phone, fax machine, instant messenger, and document management system all combined. It will be supported on any device via many different sources."

I was suggesting that email will evolve and people will develop their own digital signature, voice, personalities, behaviors and preferences, all of which will lead to the customization of the devices and communication patterns. There will be a blur as to what e-mail, RSS and mobile messaging are to the consumer.

Roll forward the calendar and it's 2010. It seems the challenges we had in making email more effective as a marketing tool are virtually the same: SPAM, deliverability, email's viability as a channel, technology and data challenges. So, what's changed -- and where will it go in the future?

The thing that has changed the most in our space is awareness: while email alone gets only a small piece of the pie, organizations have readily admitted that email is critical to customer engagement. Then there's governance. While not many organizations have faced the wrath of the Federal Trade Commission or state governments, there is much more awareness of consumer rights to privacy and respect for permission. There is a much stronger governance in the use of email and database marketing.

I see amazing progress in the next five years, specifically the speed at which data is made available to fulfill the many needs of a marketing and sales organization. I see real-time modeling trumping sequenced messaging. I see dynamic ad presentation that shifts with real-time buying patterns, self-learning models and in-market advertising.

I also see the inbox morphing to be a simpler thing to manage all in one interface. This will allow all the functional values of email to survive. I see the allure of "social" as a cheap viral tool, changing how we build containers for our message. I see our view of customer value changing to accommodate direct and indirect, synchronous and asynchronous. I still see email as a critical spoke in your time management hub and spoke system. and the business will not move away fast enough to trump.

As the history of communication began with simple flashes of information, email will become more of a communication tool, as it was designed to be initially, and less of an information tool. Watch out, publishers, this will put increased demand on how you evolve your reader bases, how you monetize your lists and how engaged consumers will be in the inbox with reading anything but 400-character chunks. There is brilliance in the concept of Twitter and microblogging, and I see email returning to the core of this communication chain, at least from a personal prospective.

While the hub may not be your laptop or desktop in 5 years, it will be a super portable device, with amazing memory and connections to your community tools. Hang tight, all major technological advances in mankind have an impact on "time" and "space" -- so our next generation of email may be so convenient it's not even called email.

Google Buzz: Why Gmail Puts It Into The Game

dbaker@whitenoiseinc.com (David Baker) — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 21:33:00 GMT

Great article by Loren McDonald in the Email Insider: Google Buzz

http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=122321

What's the Buzz? It's Google's effort to weld social networking and content sharing onto its Gmail email service. It also poses the latest challenge for marketers to stay relevant and visible in the inbox.

Buzz, which Google is rolling out now to Gmail inboxes, incorporates status updates and shared content such as photos, video and links from people on the user's contact list into the inbox.

Buzz: Game-Changer or the Next Wave?

In its first few days, Buzz has generated plenty of, well, buzz, ranging from game-changer predictions to jaded shrugs.

It won't change the email game immediately, the way Gmail itself did since its 2004 launch. But it could have Gmail-like growth, grabbing market share slowly and surely, giving it a huge base of regular users in three to four years. (Gmail email addresses now likely account for about 10% to 15% of a typical B-to-C list and up to 25% for newer lists.)

Buzz likely has greater adoption potential than other Google initiatives such as Wave, which generated a lot of initial buzz but limited adoption. Among Buzz's plusses:

It leverages existing features, including your Gmail contact list and inbox. Buzz auto-follows your closest contacts to give you an immediate follow list and delivers fresh content alerts to your message inbox.
Users can toggle links to move between the message and Buzz content lists.
Buzz connects other Google properties, such as Picasa, Google Reader and YouTube, to the Google profiles of people you follow, and to your Twitter stream if you opt to connect. (No Facebook Connect function yet.)
Users don't have to learn a new protocol of interaction, because Buzz incorporates familiar features of other social-networking platforms: like/unlike, share via email, comment on other posts and "at" replies.
It aggressively filters content so that "less-valuable" posts ("me too" or "nite peeps" posts) get collapsed at the bottom of the viewing window, leaving more room for theoretically meatier posts.
Lastly, one of the more interesting aspects of Buzz is that many of your Gmail contacts are likely "true" friends and relatives, many of whom you may not be connected to in other networks.

Rising to the Challenge of Inboxes Gone Social

Although it's too early in the game to predict how Google Buzz will affect Gmail use, this broader encroachment of social conversations into the email stream is clearly the future, with the following implications for email marketers:

Email inbox interfaces are getting busier. Besides Gmail, email clients including Xobni and Outlook, and Webmail services such as Yahoo have expanded inbox functionality. Yahoo recently added inline chat, a beefed-up calendar and links to Flickr and PayPal. These functions are designed to integrate with and complement email, but they can also distract the user from reading email.

The inbox itself will be more crowded. Buzz will send alerts whenever friends post fresh content. If your recipient is an exceptionally busy social networker, these alerts will push your email-marketing messages farther away from the fresh-content sweet spot.

How to respond to the Buzz factor:

1. Work harder to get your sending email address added to recipients' contact lists or address books.

2. Brand your "from" and subject lines. This helps your messages stand out from the onslaught of Buzz message alerts.

3. One-to-one messaging must replace one-to-many broadcasts. Personalization that reflects preferences and buying history, triggered emails and value-added transactional emails will compete better with Buzz's highly relevant message alerts.

Wrapping Up

It's your turn now. Do you think Buzz is more likely to gain traction than Wave because it leverages an existing inbox, contact list and Google services that millions of consumers already know about?

Until next time, take it up a notch!

3 Keys to Creating Actionable Insights

dbaker@whitenoiseinc.com (David Baker) — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 16:24:00 GMT

Three numbers: 90/10/0. 90 is the percent of time that email marketers spend on the tactics of getting an email campaign out the door. 10 is the percent of time that is spent in reporting and analysis. 0 is the amount of time most marketers spend figuring out how to optimize a program. The key to optimization is understanding what is maneuverable and weighing this with the expected return. If the return is too small, you’ll never build continuity over time. If the effort is far too complex or time consuming, it will compete with the day-to-day operations and ultimately drive your business down.

The keys to creating actionable insights is best described through these metaphors:

Simplify the Cockpit Instruments. If you’ve ever looked inside an aircraft cockpit, it is in many cases synonymous to business process and analytics; confusing if you try to take it all in at once. While the marketer, much like the pilot, may know all the panels and instruments and the outputs of each, it becomes increasingly difficult to marketers to know which instruments to monitor, which to tweak, and in what order. To simply the instruments, you have to strip it down by what insights each variable or output informs. Think RFM. While it’s directional in theory, I do want to index high frequency purchase segments and keep a pulse on these campaign over campaign, program over program. I want to know the high cart value transactors and index them to understand timing and how offers/pricing impacts these behaviors. I want to understand how these segments interact with my site and model this against other front of the funnel behaviors. All in all, I want an instrument panel that helps me understand transactional behaviors and how this channel influences this.
Shake the Magic “8 Ball.” As I’ve said many times, marketing and business is a process of hedging bets on what you think will work. In the eCRM space, the tactics have been done over and over again for years, so there really isn’t some magic bullet that works for everyone. I think you should create your own “Magic 8 Ball” for marketing decisions. Just ask a question, shake the 8-Ball and the following options will come forth: “Go with your first instinct.” “Ask your best engineer.” “Reference your benchmark guide.” “Do what you did last year.” “Ask someone that knows nothing about email.” And “Shake it again.” The magic of great marketing is making decisions faster than someone else, so you can maximize in-market. You can’t do this, unless you have strong hypotheses about the outcomes. The problem with many is we wait for data before we make decisions. This only works if you are a really fluid organization. If your reports take two weeks to produce, then your data supply chain or outputs are too complex and need to be revisited. But that shouldn’t preclude you from making in-market decisions. Just shake the “8-Ball” when in doubt.
Become a Finance and Risk Manager for a day. In finance, actionable analytics are a vital forensic and forecasting tool which helps assess the implications of past performance and model future implications. Take a day per month and run analysis of performance, costs, process assessment, and vendor analysis and pull these variables together. By removing your marketing hat, you can take a clear picture of the finances of your business unit and the marketing function and assess which attributes are most important. What is your real cost to send an email? What would happen if you wanted to modify the conversion process on your site, what is the potential risk? What if you wanted to hold out a group for testing? What is the impact of that hold-out ? What costs would apply putting some of your hypothesis in action? What is the cost /benefit of outsourcing some of these activities?

Actionable insights can be realized but only if you understand the gaps in your data supply change, you are willing to take “action” on your hypothesis, you have a financial foundation to support your logic and you have an understanding of the risk involved.

Frightened, clueless or uninformed?

dbaker@whitenoiseinc.com (David Baker) — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 16:23:00 GMT

From Seth's Blog by Seth Godin

In the face of significant change and opportunity, people are often one of the three. If you're going to be of assistance, it helps to know which one.

Uninformed people need information and insight in order to figure out what to do next. They are approaching the problem with optimism and calm, but they need to be taught. Uninformed is not a pejorative term, it's a temporary state.

Clueless people don't know what to do and they don't know that they don't know what to do. They don't know the right questions to ask. Giving them instructions is insufficient. First, they need to be sold on what the platform even looks like.

And frightened people will resist any help you can give them, and they will blame you for the stress the change is causing. Scared people like to shoot the messenger. Duck.

The worst kind of frightened person is one with power. Someone in a mob of other frightened people, someone with a gun, someone who is the CEO. When confronted with a scared CEO, time to run. Before someone can change, they have to learn, and before they learn, they have to cease being scared.

One reason so many big ideas come from small organizations is that there is far less fear of change at the top. One mistake board members and shareholders make is that they reward the scared but hyper-confident CEO, instead of calling him on the carpet as he rages at change.

When I first encountered surfing, I was scared of it. It looks cool, but an old guy like me can get hurt. A patient instructor allayed my fears until I was willing to get started. When you first start out, the things you think are important are actually irrelevant, and it's the stuff you don't know is important that gets you thrown into the ocean. Finally, and only then, was I smart enough to actually learn.

I'm bad at surfing now, but at least I know why.

Comfort the frightened, coach the clueless and teach the uninformed.

Razorfish Hires John Zell to Senior CRM Position

dbaker@whitenoiseinc.com (David Baker) — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 22:50:00 GMT

Industry Veteran to focus on CRM Technology and Innovation

John Zell brings to Razorfish a senior-level perspective on technology that will support our growth as a digital CRM agency. With his extensive experience and thought leadership in the CRM space, John will be a key leader in developing the next evolution of products and solutions for our clients.

Our CRM business is thriving in today's market. Businesses are burdened with a very complex mix of technology platforms, data sets and coordinated cross-channel customer engagement. John will be a tremendous influence integrating traditional CRM solutions with Social Relationship Marketing (SRM).

San Francisco, CA -- February 3, 2010 -- Razorfish, one of the world's largest digital agencies, has hired John Zell, a 20-year marketing and technology industry veteran, as vice president of Customer Relationship Technology Solutions. He joins the Razorfish national CRM practice and will help drive the growth of CRM platform and data solutions throughout the Razorfish client base.

Zell, based in the Razorfish San Francisco office, will lead CRM technology innovation and the development of integrated data solutions.

Zell joins Razorfish from Protocol Inc., where he was senior vice president and chief technology officer of Integrated Marketing Services. Prior to Protocol, he was senior vice president of Marketing Services at Harte-Hanks for 10 years, where he was instrumental in building enterprise data solutions and business intelligence for hundreds of large organizations.

David Baker, Razorfish vice president of CRM Solutions, said, "John brings to Razorfish a senior-level perspective on technology that will support our growth as a digital CRM agency. With his extensive experience and thought leadership in the CRM space, John will be a key leader in developing the next evolution of products and solutions for our clients."

The Razorfish CRM practice is a centralized, cross-functional team of experts who support the innovation, and delivery of enterprise CRM programs. Baker said, "Our CRM business is thriving in today's market. Businesses are burdened with a very complex mix of technology platforms, data sets and coordinated cross-channel customer engagement. John will be a tremendous influence integrating traditional CRM solutions with Social Relationship Marketing (SRM)."

Zell joined Razorfish February 1. His role is national in scope, spanning nine U.S. offices.

About Razorfish
Razorfish creates experiences that build businesses. As one of the largest interactive marketing and technology companies in the world, Razorfish helps its clients build better brands by delivering business results through customer experiences. Razorfish combines the best thought leadership of the consulting world with the leading capabilities of the marketing services industry to support our clients' business needs, such as launching new products, repositioning a brand or participating in the social world. With a demonstrated commitment to innovation, Razorfish continues to cultivate our expertise in Social Influence Marketing, emerging media, creative design, analytics, technology and user experience. Razorfish has offices in markets across the United States, and in Australia, China, France, Germany, Japan, Spain and the United Kingdom. Clients include Carnival Cruise Lines, MillerCoors, Levi Strauss & Co., McDonald's and Starwood Hotels. Razorfish is part of the Publicis Groupe (Euronext Paris: FR0000130577) VivaKi organization. Visit www.razorfish.com for more information. Follow Razorfish on Twitter at @razorfish.

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Hierarchy of Optimization

dbaker@whitenoiseinc.com (David Baker) — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 18:03:00 GMT

As Abraham Lincoln said, "I walk slowly, but I don't walk backwards." We've made amazing strides in the email and marketing automation space with regard to our strategic thinking, technology advances and how we link disparate technologies to solve problems -- but have organizations followed our lead? Looking back over the years, I find there is a natural progression to how people use email and the relative complexity of implementing ideas and the costs/risks and ROI of these activities.

I've used this sliding scale for years to illustrate where a company is today, what they hope to achieve so we don't get lost in some high-level-growth goal associated with "creating 1:1 dialogues" that are very hard to attain. The hierarchy of optimization is best illustrated by the following areas, beginning with the bottom and migrating upwards with increasing levels of investment to optimize, with potentially higher return on the activities.

1. Acquisition: historic list growth, customer touch-points, file aging and list cross-over activities usually fill this area of optimization, all associated with better understanding the value of a new customer/lead and how we interact at the front-end of the funnel..

2. Deliverability: All the basic elements we do day in and day out: domain analysis, ISP relations, list hygiene. With the maturation of the lists we have in play today and the increasing discrepancies of the ISPs' practices, this has increasingly become a mission-critical area we don't talk about enough, test enough or have enough resources to support. Most companies could use a good "review" by a deliverability expert once a year.

3. Interest Generation: Today we could call this "engagement." It includes offer selection, creative/copy testing, frequency, subject line testing, and preference center design -- anything that supports understanding customers' intent and how to reach them.

4. Personalization and targeting: We speak a lot about this, but most think it's the infusion of personalization in a subject line or body copy. It's not! Personalization is both an email and company-wide initiative that is far more complex than an email. It includes data integration, geo/demo overlays, triggered messaging behavioral messaging, site/email and messaging - and, of course, integration of share components.

5. Segmentation: The farther we get into segmentation, the more complicated and intertwined it becomes. Behavioral segmentation, attitudinal overlays, MVC analysis, RFM strategy, longitudinal response, and cross-channel testing all present challenges for companies to optimize in channel and cross channel.

6. Conversion Efficiency: Places more pressure on your ability to measure to conversion and control some of the variables responsible for supporting a sale - for example, offer targeting, timing, sequenced messaging, and remarketing, path to conversion

7. Cross-Sell - Upsell: This presents the finest opportunity. It means you have intelligence on what and why customer buy, and some predictive measures in place to assess risk to market to certain segments and the potential outcomes associated with the market. These activities include: list overlap analysis, cross-product affinities, customer lifecycle, predictive modeling, campaign decision trees -- all of which support "decisions" and "migration."

While every company has a slightly different view and classification, by looking at this through an evolutionary view you can assess where you fit on this scale and what you hope to evolve to over time. In large companies, it can be difficult to organize around this progression. In small companies, it can be difficult to grasp the scale of return on some. But remember this: the vehicle you're riding in (train/car) may be going 60 MPH, but are you sitting still during this ride?

Your Customer Is More Than an @ Sign

dbaker@whitenoiseinc.com (David Baker) — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 17:57:00 GMT

A dialog is a conversational exchange between two or more people. Communication in the rawest form requires information to be packaged and imparted by the sender to a receiver via some medium. The receiver must decode the message and give the sender feedback. Communication requires that all parties have an area of communicative commonality.

When I go with the flow and throw out the proverbial "we want to develop a dialog with the customer," is it really a dialog I mean? Are we really communicating with the customer -- or just throwing spaghetti against the wall and hoping it sticks?

Aside from in-person connections and synchronous exchanges, we really don't communicate with the customer. We interpret response to stimuli! As poorly as most online surveys are constructed, I'd question whether that is really a form of communication.

In the marketing and digital world we change the definition of both dialog and communication to some degree. For instance, an online poll is a way of gathering feedback on a particular single or cumulative experience. But is it a dialog? Is a welcome email series a dialog?

Think about the brands you are most loyal to. It may be Starbucks, because you are the nut, like me, that spends far too much on $4 lattes twice a day. It may be the dry cleaner to whom you trust your third most important asset: clothes. House and cars usually precede this. It may be the Lexus or BMW. It may be the chain restaurant like Macaroni Grill where there is no denying the consistency you'll receive each time you visit. Or better yet, if you are a traveler like me, the airline, hotel or car rental company where you live 30% of your life.

When was the last BMW ad you recall on a Web site? Or email you've opened from your local dealership? How many direct connections can you recall with your most engaged brands? Loyalty is a funny thing, driven by habits. In order to replace loyalty to a brand, you must break a habit and form a new habit. It doesn't happen overnight, unless there is a great deal of motivation driving this change. And brand dialogs connect these experiences with these core values.

The most impressive brands make connections through many forms of stimuli and reinforce experiences through many media, email included. I now receive an email communication from my dry cleaner asking me if I was satisfied with their service after they drop off my clothes each week. It doesn't include a coupon. (Yes, I pay $6 to starch and press a shirt in California.)

I receive continual communications from BMW from all points, including the dealership asking me to assess my experience when I bring in my car for service. Ironically, they do this as a performance assessment for their service agents, usually preceded with a call from the agent asking me to give him/her a high ranking as her bonus is dependent on this rating. But I also receive local promotions and test drive events. Since my lease is up for renewal in a few months, I've seen a dramatic increase in communications from BMW marketing and my local dealer/salesperson.

The key to these connections, my loyalty and purchase persistence is: each brand provides continuity to the experience through many channels. While I might survive on just the dining experience at a hotel and the value of the 900,000 miles I have with American Airlines, it's digital communications that keep me close to the brands I most covet.

Now, look in your inbox -- and more importantly, at the products and services you buy -- and assess how you are using digital dialogs to build continuity with your customers. Do you regularly check their pulse? Do you use key experiences to trigger a reason to communicate? Do you reinforce buying experiences? Do you choose lifestage and other critical consumer events to stay in front of the customer? Is your brand goal and customer experience symmetrical?

As I've said many times, email will inform, educate and inspire. It will help you build social connections through brands and experiences, it will entice consumers to buy something -- possibly more often than they normally would have without this stimuli.

Key to great dialogs is a commitment to the small things without losing sight of the customer. Far too many times, we, as marketers, lose sight of this connection and the value we bring through asynchronous channels like email. Your customer isn't an "@" sign.

Simple Email, Simple Results

dbaker@whitenoiseinc.com (David Baker) — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 16:33:00 GMT

As I’ve said for years, “if you shoot for the stars, you’ll land on the barn; if you shoot for the barn, you’ll land in the pig pile.” Are we shooting high enough when building, planning and executing our eCRM programs? Do we get enough recognition for the contributions of our email program? Are we doing enough to drive excitement for our contributions? Let’s think about this. Most businesses will project a modest growth in revenue and profit and with that comes a modest increase in marketing spend. Yet that distribution doesn’t always funnel down to the email channel. How many of you had growth for years as a business, but your budgets for email were cut or remained stagnant?

I believe there are three reasons why we’ll remain an under-funded channel for 2010.

Most programs need to improve basic executions and operations and that’s not sexy. Email is 80% operational and 20% strategic thinking. An incremental improvement in operational elements will go a long way in opening the door to doing more complex implementations. Some of this could be related to technology, some related to your production model (in-source vs. outsource) and some related to where you reside on the “urgency scale.” Do you operate in red-lined mode all the time? If you do, you are likely woefully inefficient and no technology will change that. You have to show operational responsibility, how you are growing with what you have, and how you plan to scale that over time. Some of it is simply looking closely at your operations with an efficiency mind, not a direct response mind.

Email is an enterprise communication channel with bad PR. No longer is email viewed in the same manner as Search and Media in the front of the funnel. It is still not really seen as a relationship builder in the bottom of the funnel. While we like to speak of email as a relationship marketing tool, that is all it is – a tool – and it doesn’t work alone. It is a support mechanism and a service to the customer. Let’s not forget the fundamental value of why businesses use email – it is more cost-effective than a phone call or ad. Unfortunately, we all consume email, so we all have our own perspective as a consumer of commercial email, and consumer perception of email usually trumps the marketer’s view. So, it will always skewed by our personal perceptions of the value, and budgeting will be affected. Even though CMOs recognize the value of email, don’t ever forget they likely have a very negative perception of it as a relationship-building vehicle. It’s a cheap convenience to a business for staying in touch and top of mind with a consumer. This perception must change and better stories of consumer experiences and consumer feedback must accompany the culture. Look at Daily Candy: their entire business was predicated on email and great stories of local connections. How many of your businesses or clients can say the same and see a real personal connection with your customers through email?

Think small, live small. You have to develop BEHAGs (Big, Enormous, Hairy, Audacious, Goals). These are the ones that will change the world and the fabric of your business. They should be lofty, should gain attention and you should be bold enough to resonate with all levels. If you continue to think small, think channel alone and not contribute to the vision and changing of the world or better yet your business, you’ll always be relegated to limited budgets and share of voice. No one cares about response rates, (except you) and no one is impressed with modest list growth numbers, but you will get attention if you project to “Own the Point of Intermediation.” Own the connections, the digital experiences and dialogs at the beginning and end of the funnel. Be the connection between Advertising and Brand Experiences.

Email is simple! As I’ve said many times before, we aren’t doing anything today that we didn’t do ten years ago. The visibility of the channel has risen amongst senior executives. Now we need to shift their view of the real contributions it makes to a business, and simple, in this case, isn’t the best way to do that.

Motivation for 2010

dbaker@whitenoiseinc.com (David Baker) — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 16:31:00 GMT

Welcome to 2010! It's the beginning of the year, and I don't feel complete without laying out some lofty predictions. 2009 has been an interesting year on many levels: the economy, financial systems, jobs, wars, a new president. From an online marketing perspective, it was a nice end to the year. Online sales were up this holiday season, and consumers seem to be a little more positive about spending.

Our industry has had an interesting time this year, as well. Email has a great ROI and budgets for email are increasing slightly. How would I grade 2009?

Technology and Innovation: Grade: B- I didn't see any dramatic innovation in the email channel in 2009, nor did I see companies invest that heavily in email platforms. While many platforms have evolved and are certainly more sophisticated today, I wasn't that impressed with any major product launches in 2010 that stretched our use of the channel or capabilities. There was some innovation within marketing automation players, but none was earth shattering. It was more a process of reaching parity with some of the long-time ESPs.

Investment: Grade: C+. Aside from ExactTarget's rounds of funding, it's been a rather slow year, with only a few small acquisitions. No major moves in the space. There's been talk of a few ESPs and IPOs, but little movement in the M&A area and little investment in these companies. Best described as a year of survival.

Integration of Email with other channels: Grade: B. This wasn't the year of mobile. We are still talking about mobile in the same context as 2008. This was a year of social! While technology innovation and data integration with social efforts is still in its infancy, more agencies are pressing the platforms and organizations to combine social marketing with relationship marketing and email. Yet aside from share to social, no major strides in combining measurement platforms with email.

I do think 2010 has a lot of potential for this channel. We have survived the times. The strong companies are still around, and the small companies are still surviving. I predict the following:

Social relationship marketing -- I'm a firm believer that social behavioral data will be as valuable to us as cookie-level data is to targeting and site side personalization. The major data providers will combine this view with household level data and contextual sharing to offer marketers a broader view of the consumer and how they interact through their networks. Along with a long-tail view of the consumer and growing databases, it will force marketers and service providers to innovate and take some risks in this area.

Predicting the Consumer: We've been doing the same things for 10+ years. Same strategies, same approaches and seem to be recycling things. The next generation must develop some predictive nature to our programs. Who is likely to be a long-time subscriber? What triggers will help predict engagement through the email channel? What triggers in early lifecycle will predict higher engagement value? What is the threshold to discounting and price elasticity and how does the email channel influence this? What cross channels are best to build the most valuable experience and relationship?

We will hear more about predictive targeting and communication planning, rather than mass personalization and dynamic content this year. Those are means of doing things, but we need more thinking in "what if" scenarios to really add more value through the channel.

CPM Commoditization: We are already seeing the price of sending email shrinking. I believe we'll see more of this in 2010. The platforms can mostly do whatever you need to do -- and the service level support from the ESPs will be an expectation, not a value add. Thus, CPMs will decline and in some forms become a commodity that is highly negotiated. Consider that 30% of companies will switch ESPs in the next year; this will create a natural competitive flow to this pricing.

Data Privacy: We, as consumers, will completely freak out when we realize what information is available about us for anyone that wants to buy it. While I see great value in this data from a marketing side, there will be consumer backlash in controls of online social data that will be the buzz in the last half of 2010.

Using Pay-For-Performance To Retain Customers

dbaker@whitenoiseinc.com (David Baker) — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 16:29:00 GMT

Why is it you only hear about pay per performance (PPP) when it comes to online advertising and customer acquisition? This concept grew out of the online advertising world. In the past you'd just spend and hope your ad units drove customer sales. It was all about the big idea and reach. We've since evolved into a world of performance models in acquisition. We pay for clicks, we pay for impressions, we pay for leads and we pay for conversions. We do it in search, we do it with email, we do it with media and exchanges, yet that models stops once you get that first purchase.

Why can't we apply the same principles of performance marketing to retention marketing? Why is it that you spend so much to acquire a customer, but you still have half of your customer file of non-buying customers, dormant customers or non-responsive customers?

The principles of performance marketing don't lie. You should have some control over reach and governance over the amount of exposure to your audience. You should have a solid method of reconciliation and attribution (who really gets credit for a sale?). You should have the technical, creative and strategic means to optimize, test, learn and re-optimize without fatiguing your audience. You want empirical evidence that something drove a sale or behavior and are willing to pay for it.

Are open rates important? Why wouldn't you think in terms of eCPM? This calculation has gained tracking in the advertising world for years to provide a better performance metric that aligns to financial and reach goals. (Total Earnings/Impressions X 1000 = eCPM).

In my experience over the years, I haven't found one client or partner that has it all together to run programs like this for non-acquisition programs. I believe the market will dictate that change. But what stops most from attempting it?

Sensitivity to Control. There is sensitivity to the perception of losing control in retention marketing. CRM is about knowing the customer and optimizing the experience. A performance model could potentially introduce a less controlled experience that may not be aligned with customer loyalty goals. I also blame this issue on the vendor landscape. There are too many grey areas to acquisition and PPP models, and many traditional marketers don't trust this model with their most valuable customers. But PPP doesn't mean you have to lose control over offers, discounting, promotions and cadence.

Pay-Out Model. You'd think it would be simple. You drive incremental business and you pay a %. But retention marketing budgets work differently and they aren't as variable and fluid as acquisition, media and search budgets when it comes to performance and pay-outs.

Lack of good attribution. If you don't trust or have clear insight into what drove the sale, you'll never run a PPP program. Most companies lack the reporting, the science behind attribution and the discipline to run a program like this. In the online advertising and search space, the heavy lifting of pay-outs relies on the vendor. If you don't report and reconcile, you don't get paid. If you think you do it now, try it out for a few months. Hold back your employees' paychecks if they don't perform, and I bet the reporting will become far more detailed and accurate.

Little appetite for risk. PPP is a risk-to-reward model. It requires some calculated risk and a bit of trust in your partners. You can't expect to run these programs alone. You shouldn't try to absorb all the risk. Many don't have the infrastructure or capabilities to run these models alone, nor should they try.

No Bandwidth. That's the excuse for not getting it done, but really that translates to mean you just haven't prioritized PPP or don't trust that it will drive the highest results. But in the age when customer attrition is over 35% a year, you'd better find a way to get more out of your spend. You can't rely on commoditized CPM costs to increase your capabilities.

PPP isn't an easy type of program to negotiate with your agencies and partners. But it's something you should begin to discuss in your planning; you should find ways to weave it into your strategy and budgets. Just as you should be thinking about it from a marketer perspective, your agencies and partners should be thinking of creative ways to model PPP to future budgets.

"There is no such thing as coulda, woulda and shoulda. If you shoulda and coulda, you woulda done it." -- Pat Riley (Basketball Coach)

Summit: Maybe Less Focus On Social Topics? More Case Studies?

dbaker@whitenoiseinc.com (David Baker) — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 16:28:00 GMT

We had a blast on the mountain in Deer Valley last week at the Email Insider Summit, aside from a bit of altitude sickness. I was really impressed with the output from many of the speakers, the roundtables and networking events, yet I left with a few nuggets to improve the content for the next summit.

Trying to figure out what to do with social media strategy as it relates to CRM still seems to be an exercise in guesswork. One of the panels attempted to focus on the type of data that the social world produces: number of fans, number of connections, feedback, comments; essentially social graph data.

The first audience response was "Oh my gosh, businesses really can see all these things I post online?" -- followed by "What do I do with this data?" There was a lot of discussion about what the larger data aggregators (Experian, Acxiom etc.) were doing with social data and how companies were accessing this data. But there was very little substance about pure integrated social campaigns, innovative technologies or how companies are using this data for targeting, segmentation and intelligent marketing.

While the common response to various social media campaigns presented in roundtable settings was "cool!" I could see that most were curious, yet still had a hard time seeing where it fit into their business world. Social marketing is something we'll all have to embrace over the next few years as it gets ingrained into how we build Web and consumer experiences. Many retention marketers struggle with how to measure influence and how their marketing activities integrate with social. But there's no mistaking it, this is a subject that will be so core to marketing in the coming years that email marketers can't afford to get behind the game. One marketer said, and I had heard this quote some time ago, "Social marketing is like sex as a teenager! You get really excited about it, you talk about it a lot, but you're not very good at it."

We offered a few other topics that were very consumer-focused to help round out the Summit, with panels from Microsoft on the Hotmail inbox, as well as a stellar presentation by Loyalty Labs on consumer loyalty programs.

One of the big winners was the "Building an Email Database" roundtable run by Mike Fitzgerald of AdKnowledge. While there was a lot of talk about acquisition, there were heated discussions on the value of email append services. I was a bit surprised at some of the conservative comments from acquisition-oriented companies, but it netted out that email append is alive and well. Most of the larger brands do it persistently as a list hygiene process, and you shouldn't discount it when applied properly.

What was missing from this summit, I thought, was discussion of pure deliverability, and more case studies. The feedback was clear: People wanted to hear about deliverability, more about privacy and essentially "what are the challenges getting into the inbox." We've deviated from this technical and tactical view of deliverability in the past, giving way to more topical discussion around trends, but you could tell there was a void. As programming chair, I will definitely work to ensure we integrate deliverability back into the main stage sessions in April.

This event is always a mix of service providers and industry people, along with representatives from consumer and B2B brands. As is common with brand marketers, they clamor for case studies and examples of what others have done. Personally, I find these contextually irrelevant in many cases, unless you find that pearl of a study with a great presenter. But there is no denying that the audience wanted more "meat" on these topics. You can never get away from the value of case studies and the intimacy of program details that usually comes forth.

So, the next summit will definitely feature a blend of case work and foundational topics (deliverability). Too, I bet by then we'll find some great examples of Social CRM.

If you have great ideas for topics, case studies or great speakers for the April Email Insider Summit, shoot me a note (david.baker@razorfish.com). I'm always a sucker for great content, creative speakers and topics that are "out there."

Live From The Email Insider Summit

dbaker@whitenoiseinc.com (David Baker) — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 16:25:00 GMT

The altitude is 8,000+ feet, it's full of snow, and 140+ have descended on Park City, Utah for the biannual Email Insider Summit hosted by MediaPost. I've been involved in this event as an advisor, speaker, moderator, roundtable lead and programming chair since we began putting these on in 2005. I continue to marvel at what a great event this is, for several simple reasons: networking, networking, networking. After all, why do we go to industry events in the first place?

This event has gradually changed its format and we've tried to infuse other digital elements that impact our channel. We try to explore deeper views into consumer behaviors, and of course include great marketing activities that we can learn from. The Summit is different from some other industry events because it doesn't focus heavily on deliverability and privacy, which some argue are the critical elements of the email channel. Our focus has evolved at the request of the participants and advisory boards. The jewels of the meeting are the roundtables and networking events. This is the place for specific discussions about the practice of email marketing.

I anticipate hot discussions on several topics:

Consumers and their behaviors: we have the Microsoft Live team, who will share recent research on what consumers are doing in their inboxes. Who's talking about travel, dating, financial matters? How effective are marketing-related emails in Hotmail?

We'll extend this discussion with a great panel on social data, learning how to take advantage of the behavioral data available, what the privacy implications are and how marketers are making this actionable.

We have also put together a consumer panel. While in the past we've hosted college students and digital moms to better understand their perceptions and use of email, we've targeted a different group of consumers for this event. We felt there was a finite shift in behavior that happens when someone graduates from college and enters the workforce. As such, we've recruited recent college grads who have done so, to better understand the shifts in their use of email and social when they enter a professional environment and have more disposable income.

The event will feature great speakers on loyalty marketing, creative optimization, mobile marketing, managing multichannel programs, and cross-channel measurement.

What's In Your Inbox Today?

dbaker@whitenoiseinc.com (David Baker) — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 22:00:00 GMT

Happy Cyber Monday, folks! It's that day of the year online retailers look forward to, especially given 2008's miserable numbers. This year, the National Retail Federation is projecting a nice growth over 2008. Black Friday is usually a precursor to Cyber Monday and if that is any indication, then we should expect more people hitting the sites and buying less. That's right: average order value will be down, but more people buying in a tight economy should = more sales revenue.

The NRF reported that 49.4% of shoppers went to department stores during the weekend, a 13 % increase from 2008, while 43.2 % went to discount stores and 7.8% headed to outlet stores. Specialty electronic, clothing and grocery stores were also counted among the popular shopping destinations, while NRF noted that 28.5% of shoppers hit Web sites.

ComScore reported an 11% rise in online sales to $595 million on Black Friday, compared to 2008. While Black Friday is typically known for the brick and mortar push -- get up at 5 a.m. and hit Target or Macy's for great sales -- it was also a day for amazing online sales, marking the second highest online sales day of the holiday season.

All of this bodes well for retailers Check your inbox this morning and see what Cyber Monday delivered to you: likely one of the highest volume email days of the year. As a marketer, do you have a chance amidst all the noise of the inbox today?

Amazingly, with the everyone going to back to work after the long weekend, and the rapid growth of the mobile device and smart phone in the workplace, we are able to process more email, sifting through our personal email in a multitasking manner. You can do true triage on your mobile, focus on the laptop and buy during your down time. Does this sound like you and those in your office?

As a practitioner, there are several things you can trend and watch for today, depending on how deep your monitoring program is:

Watch the subject lines. This is a great time to evaluate "urgency"-driven tactics, which are most effective during heavy volume days.
While I usually don't like to lead with discounts, this is the holiday known for discounting, so it's OK to lead with it. Look at the creativity in approaches to discounting and how it's communicated.
Look at the social mentions. Everyone has a Twitter link, a Facebook link, so you should check out how some are proliferating discounts and promotions on those fan pages and sites.
While many use free shipping as a means of triggering a buyer, is it really effective? Most are conditioned to free shipping online, so is it enough these days?
Creative is amazingly simple on days like this: fewer Hero images, more PRICE TAG metaphors to easily communicate the point. Does this mean less targeting? Likely, yes!
While Black Friday is brick and mortar, today's the day for the ONLINE ONLY sales. Try to assess how well companies targeted and communicated this to you. Simple vs. advanced approaches?

I love this time of year, not just as a marketing practitioner, but as a consumer who's aware of the tactics and approaches by marketers. I appreciate good marketing and creative approaches. And while I like discounts, I believe with so much email hitting our inboxes today, those marketers who provide quality marketing along with quality discounts and rewards will be rewarded. Email attribution will climb today..

How much will you buy today?

Next-Generation Email Marketers

dbaker@whitenoiseinc.com (David Baker) — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 21:57:00 GMT

We know several things really well in the email marketing space. It is a challenge to train and grow people into this role. Given the short tenure of an email marketing manager (two to three years), it's not surprising that this role is hard to staff and hard to retain; it's difficult to keep savvy marketers in that role. I've always considered it to be a burn-out job in some ways: rapid turnarounds, the constant pressure of deadlines, no forgiveness for mistakes; and a need for high ROI with minimal respect for what actually goes into managing the channel well.

Email is not the coolest channel in the marketing kit. It needs a PR agent. It's in every strategy in some form, but as I've said many times, email is managed in a vacuum in some respects. Since everyone has a personal mindset about email (we all get it and we all send it), it's often underappreciated, So, how do you motivate and grow an organization to be really good at it?

I wrote an article over a year ago on a similar thread, which I felt was important enough to revisit. But I don't want to write about how to staff the role or a tongue-in-cheek view of the role, but how you can support the growth of this role so it's not a burn-out.

Marketing organizations, write this down: Develop a career path for your email group, even if it's only made up of two people.

Don't expect them to immediately understand operational marketing, much less operational email marketing. There is a lot to learn, a lot to fail at, and it's difficult to think ahead when you are trying to QC 40 versions of an email and making sure all the links and typography match approved specs.

Making email a career path will force you to isolate the skills being acquired and put a premium on specialized and managerial skills. It also helps you recognize that by throwing someone into the pool, you won't develop a butterfly specialist, a backstroke specialist or even a good swim team.

In email there are several hierarchies to learning the trade (and I'm oversimplifying intentionally):

What goes into the email? (content formation),

How does it go out and did it get there?(delivery)

The List and who we should and are we sending to? (segmentation, communication strategy)

We sent it, now what did we really accomplish? (Measurement, Optimization)

What happens when we mix other channels? (Stacking Effect - direct mail, social, retail)

Career paths aren't just about the skills, they are about providing real paths so people can develop in an organization. Paths can have several different focuses: specialist roles that are technology- and operations-driven, market managers that aspire to be intimate with the business and market dynamics, channel experts that focus and integrate emerging channels. The choices are broader than you think, even if you have a small department.

Customer Segmentation

dbaker@whitenoiseinc.com (David Baker) — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 22:58:00 GMT

This is a subject we often talk about in apologetic terms when it comes to email marketing: Segmentation.  It’s a really time-consuming commitment for an organization to do great segmentation. While traditional monetary based segmentation (Recency Frequency Monetary-RFM) and demographic segmentation drive most programs, what is the value of behavioral segmentation or better yet attitudinal segmentation? There’s obviously value in all forms, yet I find the challenge is balancing the right segmentation methodology with that or an organizations ability to work within those guides.

For email marketing, we love the term relevance, but is it really relevance we are striving for?   What most people don’t realize in email marketing is segmentation is not about defining all your customers and how to treat them, it’s about helping you make decisions and doing so at a very granular level. If you are too high-level with your approach it is useless in day-to-day email marketing. If you are too granular in your definitions, you’ll struggle to get programs out the door. While you may have a very clear view of your highest valued customers, should you focus on those or should you work harder at gaining a more granular picture of the less valued, yet less defined segments.

I’ve seen great uses of various types of segmentation. I’ve seen demographic segments work really well for businesses that need baseline qualifiers to assess the degree of promotion, incentive and interaction with the brand, yet household income, age, gender, presence of kids, education and geo-targeting are only part of the way to this elusive stage of “relevance” we seek. Using approaches like Personicx and Prizm Clusters will help you in the targeting, they are less effective at helping you understand motivations, those beliefs that drive behaviors (frequency of visit, spend, and potential cross product interests). This approach can be amazingly expensive to keep updated, but again there are economies of scale if you set up your approach to data collection well in the first place.

Transactional based approaches are much more empirical in terms of identifying past purchase histories, and variables that influence increased purchase, purchase value and category base spend and predictors. Certain categories of business are no-brainers for this model, yet it becomes a really daunting task to manage your email programs with this approach without a very refined approach to modeling that continually updates itself. You can spend years trying to do predictive modeling and if your products turn over quickly or you have thousands of SKUs it can be impossible to manage iteratively outside of simple targeting or high/low transactional periods. While this approach is used in email most frequently for personalization and promotional strategies and is deemed “relevant”, unlike other marketing forms email marketers still have to deal with the entire database and it comes down to resources to execute against this consistently that makes it a challenge.

What about taking it a step further with behavioral data? It’s sometimes considered the same as RFM type approaches. A segment is generated based on some behavior; A purchase, An Interaction or Event.   This is what the online space has been struggling with for years as the customer journey is so much more fragmented between the web, store, call center and outbound channels. Behavioral segmentation is an operations persons’ nightmare. But mainly due to lack of agreement on how targeting decisions are made in companies and a lack of understanding of the customer experience and even harder to execute at the channel level (who drove the sale?).

Attitudinal segmentation is the coolest form in my opinion, but also the hardest to operationalize. Now you know who your customers are and you know how to target them and you may even have some idea of the types of motivations that drive types of promotions, categories of interest and emotional drivers to purchase.   The challenge with this approach is twofold. One, it’s expensive to commit to do this. I’ve seen many companies do this and it just sits there for the annual meeting. I’ve seen others try to operationalize this and didn’t have the commitment, funding, resources or technology to extend this past the Business Intelligence groups.   It makes decisions that much harder and if you don’t have a clear understanding of the values your business or service delivers and competitive considerations it can be a fruitless cause done in a vacuum.

Great Thought Leadership Is ...

dbaker@whitenoiseinc.com (David Baker) — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 20:43:00 GMT

I read a lot of posts about email marketing, yet I find we tend to simply repackage ideas, tips and thought leadership that have been discussed already. Think about the topics you hear about -- mail strategy, personalization, segmentation, frequency, permission, rich media -- and how many different ways these topics have been spun. I have written this column for four years on a weekly basis, and I struggle at times to craft unique views of the space while not getting too far away from it.

The nice thing about learning is that different people learn differently. Some learn through instructional series because they have the patience to follow things logically and in a linear fashion.

Some learn through exploration: trial and learn. They need ideas and thought starters, but thrive on testing these things and formulating their own ideas.

Some learn through mimicking and optimization. It's OK to copy someone's idea. We do it all the time in marketing, and it's the foundation of some of the most famous campaigns ever. Not all inspiration comes from a blank slate. Some people thrive on case studies that are contextual to their business, but have a unique ability to mimic programs in a way that makes them their own.

There are those who need several forms of information to develop. They need Webinars to hear problems laid out and how someone crafted a solution to the problem. They need stats to support their left-brain thinking or justification for change. They may need to see samples to support the right-brain approach that stimulates creative thinking.

Where should thought leadership support these styles?

The Email Insider columns that get the most feedback are those that are tactical and very simply articulated. How to do this? Tips for that? Case in point: Loren McDonald's article on gender personalization was very well-crafted to engage the reader -- and obviously, there are a few who see the poor assumptions marketers make with gender personalization. Lots of comments in the blog about this, and I believe it accomplished what the author intended. Bring a very basic subject, personalize it, and lay it out into a "shared" experience that elicits feedback.

There is too much to consume in so many venues to make sense of it all, so I'll leave you with a couple of tactical ideas for structuring thought leadership, using the channels to really evolve your thinking and ideas.

Compartmentalize your reading. Think carefully about what you subscribe to and scan with a purpose. If you are the type who needs case studies, there are many. If you need stats, there are more of those. If you need strategy or challenges to your approaches, scan them all, but pull out the ones that really help you learn. Compartmentalizing doesn't mean a topical listing (e.g. deliverability), it means assign meaning to the things that help you learn and spend time absorbing those and scanning the others.

Share what you learn. Most don't learn through memorization or reading. We learn through sharing what we've learned. If you forward articles with a note saying "this is a good read" without some written opinion about it, you've wasted an opportunity to recompartmentalize the information. If you've never taken an idea and challenged it in public or with your peers, you are missing the boat.

Archive good learning. I have research reports from 1999 and good articles from 1997. Great thoughts never go out of date, and a great archive is so valuable when you are thinking "transformation."

Lastly, thought leadership isn't something you do in a vacuum. It's also not reserved for those who have the luxury of a publishing venue. In 2000, we didn't have blogs to share opinion or develop our own. Not everyone has the time or energy to do this, but if you are truly trying to evolve yourself, you need an outlet to share and expand your view and gain confidence in your ideas. The best marketers I know have developed a knack for all these things and invest heavily in themselves.

Inspirations from the week

dbaker@whitenoiseinc.com (David Baker) — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 17:47:00 GMT

It was a great week of travels across the country. I felt like a pigeon. Fly in, drop a bit of inspiration and then fly out. I had the luxury of participating in several ESP user conferences this week. I take in as many sessions as I can, rarely staying for an entire session as there are so many topics I want to get bits and pieces from. It gives me great insight into where we are as an industry, what my fellow thought leaders are thinking and how we’re organizing these messages. It’s also a great time to catch up with the traveling band of “insiders” that tend to hit most events.

Here are a few inspirations from this week and a few ideas we hope to explore at the Email Insider Conference in December.

The Social Experiment – It’s not an experiment any longer. It has arrived. While some scoff at the value and return on social efforts, no one denies that it enhances a customer experience and businesses must address it. Every session that included the words “social strategies” was standing room only. At one conference there were over 400 people in the session, and there was no room to even sit on the floor. It was the same at OMMA. While people are becoming bored with the concept of creating a Facebook fan page, more of the discussion is shifting to connecting experiences across channels and how social relationship marketing is evolving.

People are questioning measurement and how to take very unstructured feedback data (the new buzz word is “sentiment analysis”) and new forms of behavioral data and apply it within their marketing approaches. It doesn’t always fit. While no one can really tell you how many Fans is enough, they are beginning to address the reach and quantity of feedback in general market research terms. Does it represent a proper sampling to project across a subset of my market?

I’m so excited about this movement related to social marketing. It’s not just the uber Word of Mouth (WOM) we’ve tried to harness, it’s evolving to support connected experiences that are very episodic. In simple terms, people will interact with your brand through social environments but it will be intermittent and restricted to the programs and times during which this program is run – an episode that will bring context to the feedback, reach, and sentiment, and validate your targeting efforts. This is the only way to bring context to unstructured, ad hoc feedback and engagement. If you expect a general company effort to sustain engagement and only review it in mass, you will not be satisfied with the results and will always struggle to make sense of the engagement value. I believe we will evolve to look at the value of social efforts through a period of time and contextualize the engagement based on the types of campaigns we run to the types of audiences we target. Taking this to the next level, you’ll have contextual sharing that can be used to help target types of content, timing, and audiences. Sounds very much like marketing!

I had an enlightening chat with David Daniels (Jupiter/Forrester). He’s a staunch believer that there are flaws in email measurement. I liken this to the media and search worlds. Measurement can be quite sophisticated and literally mean nothing in the end, except that people spend a lot more in those channels. For 10 years, we’ve measured the same thing in email and for 10 years we’ve always struggled with applying real actionable meaning outside of tactical interpretations (open = interest, click = intent to buy, delivery = accuracy). Measurement is too integrated for many. There were some interesting views that I’m sure we’ll see more of in 2010, that will focus on cross-channel measurement, using other channels to inform email and vice versa. Does email have an impact on search? Is there any evidence of channel shift amongst certain customer segments? How does media influence a retention audience? And then making a final connection of level of engagement that will soon be defined by channel efficiency (why buy media targeted at your highest value customers if it doesn’t have an impact on RFM?).

Keep your ears open. You’ll hear more and more about Monitoring Solutions and Social Data Solutions. The new tools will give you deeper views into how we consume email, how this relates to the specific lists we manage and how social data will extend our view of the consumer and how they have built and managed their social networks.

Study: Social Media Increases Email Usage

dbaker@whitenoiseinc.com (David Baker) — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 20:17:00 GMT

Do I need to say it again? Social Media increases the use and value of email at the consumer level.

http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=114515

by Gavin O'Malley, Tuesday, September 29, 2009, 5:14 PM

If social networks are truly transforming how consumers communicate, shouldn't they be affecting the Web's original killer app: email?

Not at all, according to preliminary data from Nielsen. To the contrary: "It actually appears that social media use makes people consume email more, not less, as we had originally assumed -- particularly for the highest social media users," says Jon Gibs, VP of media analytics at Nielsen.

Why? Well, social media sites like Facebook send messages to users' inboxes every time someone comments on their posting, or something they have participated in -- and depending on their settings, can send updates on almost every activity.

Also, according to Gibs, "it's perfectly logical that as people make connections though social media, they maintain those connections outside of the specific platform and may extend those connections to email, a phone conversation or even in-person meetings."

For the study, Nielsen broke the online population into four groups: three "terciles" of social media consumption in minutes, along with a group that doesn't use social media at all. It then looked at each segment's time of Web-based email consumption over the course of a year, then subtracted the email consumption of those who do not use social media from those who do -- to show a lift over possible external forces.

"Clearly, there are more robust approaches that could be taken (controlling for factors other than consumption for example) but for the sake of this simple experiment, we tried to keep it straightforward," said Gibs.

For marketers, email remains an extremely powerful tool. Indeed, the Direct Marketing Association just projected that email marketing will generate an ROI of $43.52 in 2009 -- twice the return earned by search and other marketing channels.

The next step for Nielsen, according to Gibs, is to take a more robust approach to develop correlations between platforms to understand whether this relationship is different across specific demographics and behavioral groups -- rather than by levels of consumption.

Minimizing Measurement

dbaker@whitenoiseinc.com (David Baker) — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 16:30:00 GMT

Love this article by Mike Bloxham on Panel Measurement and the future.

http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=113721

The nanopossibilities of onboarding

It’s integral to human nature that we ask questions. Similarly, it's pretty much always the case that once an answer is supplied, it spawns yet more questions. It's part of the human condition.

The advent of new technologies and media capabilities has extended this craving for information to the point that ever-more complex and intricate media research processes are required in an attempt to keep up with what an outsider might consider an almost pathological pursuit of data.

How, then, will we manage to gather data consistently and to a quality standard that meets the demands of an ever-voracious industry in a future that will inevitably be characterized by even more media and audience fragmentation, a wider range of devices and functionalities, increased media mobility and interoperability, and so on?

Just as technology has increasingly driven innovations in content distribution, platform development, and functional enhancements, so will it similarly continue to drive much of the development in media measurement. The result will be technologies capable of capturing information that crosses the device-defined silos of the media industry - kind of like the PPM on steroids.

We can expect to see many of today’s measurement technologies and techniques turbocharged to the point where what we do now will seem as arcane and antiquated as the Telex machine(for younger readers, the Telex was a once-exciting innovation that pre-dated the fax).

But as the scale and scope of what we measure continually gets bigger and more layered, the means by which we measure much of it will get exponentially smaller. Obviously, this has already begun to happen. But when I say small, I don't mean tiny. I meannanoscale: the kind of engineering that is quite literally out of sight; the sort of fantastical futuristic advances that, if combined with cloning, really would enable you to drive a herd of camels through the eye of a needle, with room to spare.

Fantastical though this may seem, the reality is that nanotechnology is already with us in various forms. The Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies has identified more than 800 consumer products worldwide that incorporate some sort of nanotech - and apparently the list is not complete. These range from LG's F2300 Antibacterial Cell Phone (featuring an antibacterial coating for those concerned about germs) to a host of screen display applications to Samsung's 16GB memory chip. Beyond media and electronics, there is nanotech to be found in cosmetics, automotive, toys and games, sporting goods, and even food.

Much of what has been developed to date has been in the area of coatings and polymers, transistors and amplifiers, processors and batteries. However, combine the developing science behind these advances with the growing demand for real-time cross-media measurement, and the application of nanotechnology to the research business begins to take shape.

Imagine, if you will, what a Nielsen panelist may be called upon to do in 2034(or a Goolsen panelist, as by then the company will have been sold to Google so the latter can combine resources into a data gathering-mining powerhouse). No more push-button meter by the TV or anything so primitive as "active participation."

Instead, these panelists wear the means of monitoring their media exposure in a way so discreet it will make a mobile phone seem about as unobtrusive as a filing cabinet attached to your hip. They sport sensors in the
form of tiny polymer-based temporary tattoos. Barely visible to the eye and placed discreetly on the body, these sensors run off built-in batteries that use body heat as a back-up power source. That same body heat and the rhythm of the pulse tells the sensor it is still attached to the panelist even when no data is being sent back via the cloud for analysis.

The sensors themselves detect inaudible audio signals encoded in TV programming and ads, radio content, and anything on the Web, much as now but with more sophistication. By this time, all screens are produced to emit unique audio codes for content as it appears, whether or not the speakers are on.

Print media (yes, it still exists) has also gotten in on the act, using ink compatible with the sensors to produce encoded signals for each page of a publication. The few billboards that have not transitioned to some sort of video or interactive interface will use similar inks for part of their surface area.

In this way, the sensors will capture granular detail that shows which media and which content panelists are exposed to for how long, and in which combinations at different times of the day.

Through a built-in GPS 4.0 capability, panelists' locations will be tracked, and motion sensors will record whether someone is lying down, sitting, standing, or walking. Similarly, artificial intelligence capable of analyzing sound will determine whether voices are part of panelist conversations or extraneous noise. Such a capacity will also indicate when media consumption is happening alone or in a more social context. It will recognize sounds consistent with car journeys, train journeys, time spent in airports, etc.

So much for what panelists are exposed to. How do we identify the content they actually look at and engage with?

This is where visual coding of content comes in. Each panelist also wears a minute coating on his cornea equipped to recognize codes - pixels concealed within images on screens and printed surfaces. Undetectable to the naked eye, these formations deliver similar data concerning content, duration, and so on, which is then correlated to location, time of day, and the audio codes picked up by the panelist's tattoo.

All data is transmitted in real time for dynamic analysis by bots, some programmed for specific ongoing analyses, others looking for deeper insights and emerging trends of potential interest.

Much of the groundwork for this scenario is already done; the devices described are either possible to engineer now or will be soon. They simply haven’t been applied in this area yet. The cost of manufacture will need to come down first, and - just as important - nothing will happen until the public and the research industry get used to the concept, which is only likely after other applications of the technology become more familiar.

In short, the science, the economics, and the panelists will ultimately get there. Perhaps the biggest hurdle to be surmounted will be the approval and endorsement of the industry itself - the research buyers and methodologists who will ultimately pay for it.