E-mail the Direct-Marketing Rock Star in Recession
Looks like the current recession is helping push email into full maturity as a full fledged, reliable and valuable direct marketing channel. Email has been proven to help increase brand loyalty and retention, and increase the value of a customer over the long term. That, of course, is on top of its cost effectiveness and its traceability (when executed correctly). AdAge reports on this story.
“The economy has energized this channel,” said Ryan Deutsch, VP-strategic services and market development at StrongMail. “It’s become the rock star of direct marketing in a lot of these retail organizations because it’s the most cost-effective and most trackable.”
Thanks to its cost-effectiveness and retailers’ recession-era emphasis on retention — Shop.org says that the number of companies focused on retention has nearly doubled in the past year — experts say few cuts are being made to e-mail budgets, while areas including paid search, affiliate marketing and social marketing are coming under scrutiny.
And I thought being an email marketer made me “sexier”…but I guess not.
“It’s not sexy, but it delivers results, and it’s focusing on existing customers,” said Scott Silverman, executive director of Shop.org. “E-mail technology continues to advance and allows retailers to be smarter. It’s not about sending more e-mail; it’s about more-targeted and more-relevant e-mail.”
I’m glad to see someone is saying, “It’s not about sending more e-mail…”. I hope more marketers get that message, “…it’s about more-targeted and more-relevant e-mail.”
It’s all about the results.
How can offline marketing support online marketing and vice versa
I came across a great question in LinkedIn Answers and I think I’ll share it here. The question from Ann Lacres was, “How can offline marketing support online marketing and vice versa?”
Here is my 2 cents:
Online marketing can serve as another way to better segment your marketing dollars. So, while you can do “email reminders” to reinforce direct mail drops, you can also allow customers to choose how you communicate with them, giving them more control over how they interact with your company. This will allow you to increase the relevance and the effectiveness of each channel.Another approach is to use offline marketing to drive customers to an online “funnel” where you can identify the customer and serve-up targeted offers or content. The value of offline is that you can do mass-communication reaching millions, but the weakness is that it’s not interactive–the customer can’t respond to your offer on-the-spot. So, use offline marketing to drive to a micro site where you can provide more depth, as well as breadth, of information–and customer-unique targeted offer.
I’ll ad to my initial answer that another power of using online as a response tool for offline marketing is that by using an “opt-in” mechanism, you can actually measure your promo costs ahead of time and get more “intelligence” out of the whole campaign. At my current employer, we do opt-in promotions tied to a customer’s spending habits, so we are able to track ahead of time what the total max cost of the promo is going to be months ahead of when the rewards are delivered.
A couple other LinkedIn members had some good ideas, including this one from Ms. Jennifer Woodard:
If you have an brick and mortar store, your online marketing can support your offline marketing my including your address to your store and hours on your website. You can offer specials on your website that have to be presented in the store to be taken advantage of. You can offer in your store places to sign up for your company newsletter, refrigerator magnets with your company information and website address, etc.
I think the key here is to let the customer choose his/her preferred “channel” to shop, rather than having pre-conceived notions about what customers want. Otherwise, you won’t see the response rates you are hoping for.
Closer look at alternate-reality games
Earlier, I wrote about a mystery movie trailer I saw before the Transformers movie. It turns out it may be a part of a complex game-based buzz-marketing technique called Alternative Reality Games.
The trailer reveals it’s for a 2008 Paramount film from wunderkind producer J.J. Abrams (“Felicity,” “Alias,” “Lost”), and virtually no other details, so we’re left wondering: What’s the name of the movie? Who’s the villain? What freedom-hating beast(s) — HulkGodzillaKong? the Cthulhu? Taliban evildoers? — would decapitate Lady Liberty?
Joshua Zumbrun writes about the mystery movie teaser that has gamers looking for Alternate Reality games.
Alternate-reality games, for those unfamiliar with the genre, are perhaps best illustrated with an actual example: Imagine you find a Web site. The owner says it’s been hacked and she asks the online world for help. People search the site and find corrupted data files, and a countdown to the year 2552. The site is like many small sites that run into tech problems and need help.
Except the site is fake. The woman is fake. Stay with us here: Her entire world is a fictional creation, a web of fake sites and fake blogs, with more and more mysteries slowly unraveling, as online participants decrypt codes in the corrupted data files. As it happens, 2552 is the year that an alien horde invades Earth in the Xbox video game series Halo. Indeed, the entire fictional world was part of an alternate-reality game called I Love Bees — promoting the 2004 launch of Halo 2 and deepening the mythology of the Halo world — created by a firm, 42 Entertainment, devoted exclusively to the creation of “immersive entertainment.”
Branding through Behind the Scenes Video
I was uploading some behind the scenes video of a Republican presidential candidate, and was amazed at how a un-scripted casual video can make a huge positive difference in image building. Up to this point, I have not seen this particular candidate in a positive light. My impression has been that he is a typical beltway insider who has been in DC for much to long.
Watching short clips of his interactions with voters all around the country, I found myself laughing and enjoying his sense of humor and his friendly personality. Now, I realize that video editors have a lot of control over the message of a video, no matter how “unscripted” it may appear. Nevertheless, the lesson is clear — put down your guard, and let your stakeholders see more of the real you. Behind the scenes video go a long way to humanize your business or organization, and strengthen your relationship with your constituents or customers.
You can check out Townhall’s news, technology, politics and other videos right here.
Email Opt-In: Opportunity to engage and commit
Email Opt-In is not just about legal compliance; its about getting your subscriber to commit to your organization. I had the opportunity to record this short clip at this year’s Politics Online conference here in DC.
Magazines: no profit in shift to Internet
This is interesting comments coming from industry executives gathered at a two-day Magazine Media 2.0 conference in Hannover last week.
After spending millions of dollars to buy digital media companies, online advertising firms and search engines, only a few of the 350 magazine and newspaper companies represented at the conference said, in a show of hands, that they were making more than 3 percent of their sales online.
And only one company, Meredith Corporation, the U.S. publisher of 26 magazines including Better Homes and Gardens, Family Circle and Ladies’ Home Journal, said it was making a profit.
Even then, the “significant” profit Meredith is making from its 32 Web sites, according to its chairman, William Kerr, is coming mainly from Web advertising and subscription referrals, not from the digital sale of what is typically a publishing company’s biggest product — text.
“I would also emphasize that the profit from our online operations at Meredith is also driven in no small part by the 80 years of established branding of some of our titles,” Kerr said. “This is not something we did overnight.”
From my own experience working for a radio company, sometimes it is hard and nearly impossible to teach an old dog a new trick. Sometimes, you have a dog, when what you might need is a cat.
So You Want to Build a Web Team: What You Need to Know Before you Begin
We’re just about ready for the second morning plenary. My boss, Chuck DeFeo is one of the presenters, so it should be interesting. I’m hoping he’ll say my name and give me my 30 seconds of fame.
11:23 – Introductions. How to build a web team, and what are the right ways to do it. The only other guy I know up on the panel is Patrick Ruffini, who is working on the Rudy Giuliani campaign.
Q: What kind of people are you hiring.
Ruffini: Seven categories. The online campaign has to be completely integrated with your traditional campaign. Your web team needs to speak the campaign language. You need to have someone who knows what the people in the field need. Integration is key.
Joe Trippi: There shouldn’t be a wall between the online strategy guys (web team) and the traditional campaign teams. Field is offline AND online.
Chuck DeFeo: Campaigns are broken down into 3 areas: Communication, Finance, and Political. Over all of those there is a strategy (like Joe in the Dean campaign). Your eCampaign has to reflect how you are organizing for your strategy. “It’s integrated with all three of those.”
11:36 — They are getting deep into political campaigns strategy, and discussing how online strategy implementation is different. I’m not a political science guy, so some of this stuff isn’t all that interesting, but some of the concepts could be related to any communications strategy.
A key point is that to execute effective online strategy, you have to have buy-in all the way from the top. The implementation of an online strategy has to be in focus with the organizational goals. This is challenging when you have higher-ups who don’t get it when it comes to technology, and “tie the hands” of their web guys.
Jerome Armstrong is talking about he got Mark Warner to let him use Second Life for his campaign. It was not well received in the political world, but it was very well received by the technical world — the bloggers, among others.
How to deal with negative viral crisis: Flood the zone. Makaca was a problem because the campaign did not respond to the video. Another example is Romney. Someone posted a negative video, and Romney responded by taping a phone call with a conservative blogger responding to the negative video. He overtook the story, and drove the message.
They are talking about political campaigns in today’s YouTube world. They all agree each candidate should have a videographer follow the candidate 24/7 and post daily video journals. Of course, you still do the more traditional “tracker.” You can also use viral “citizen” videographers to send in videos, reducing your costs.
12:10PM – We are going to Q&A, but here is a video clip of some thoughts on YouTube.
Also there, David All, Patrick Ruffini, and Matt Lewis (with whom I shared the video), and Robert Bluey. Check out their comments as well.
Joining the Bandwagon: Weather Channel in Second Life
While it has potential for branding, I just don’t see the revenue model as some of these companies keep joining and setting up shop in Second Life.
THE WEATHER CHANNEL HAS BECOME the latest marketer to jump on the Second Life bandwagon by launching a virtual headquarters in the 3D online universe. Known as “WeatherIsland,” it will offer an extreme sports park, in line with the theme of new show “Epic Conditions.” It will also serve as an avenue to debut show episodes and other footage.
It has theoretical potential, but I keep reading about Second Life events with well-known LOW attendance. So, if a company brands in Second Life, but nobody shows up, is it really branding?
“With Second Life, we’re hopeful we can expose our brand in an originaland meaningful way,” says Debora Wilson, president, The Weather Channel Companies. “We also see Second Life as a potential advertising platform for brands currently partnering with us.”
technorati tags:Second, Life, Weather, Channel, Epic, Conditions, News
Email and Communication: On My Radar for Today
Here are some things that came through my RSS feeds that I’m going to read today. You might find them valuable too.
4 Ways to Pick the Wrong Email Partner
As a frequent participant on the receiving end of email agencysearches, I’ve seen many approaches, some that worked well for clientand agency and others that most emphatically did not. So today, I’llfocus on how you can improve this process by highlighting four mistakesyou should avoid if possible:
How to Influence the Influencers
To find success with WOM marketing, one must reach and motivate the most influential 10 percent of the population.
Five tips to communicate effectively using email
From political consultant David All:
“Here are five pointers to help you get beyond my junk email inbox by improving our permission-based relationship”
Google Testing TV Ads in California
The WSJis reporting (behind paywall) that Google is conducting a small scaletest of television advertisements in the Northern California town ofConcord (east of San Francsicso), and there are additional rumorsthat Google is close to signing a deal with Dish Network, a satellitetelevision provider, to supply advertising to its televisionsubscribers.
technorati tags:Email, marketing, news, Google, David, All, josuesierra.net
The Changing Media Landscape
As a follow up to my previous post, I found a very interesting article today by Republican online strategist, Patrick Ruffini, on the evolving landscape of media consumption. (Full Disclosure: Ruffini is a columnist and contributor for Townhall.com, my employer.)
His key point provides some valuable catalyst for corporations needing to re-think how they reach their target market. Remember, its not just print newspapers that are being rendered obsolete. Everything is being transformed right before your eyes–watch for it, or you just might miss it!
Slowly but surely, the marketplace is coming to be dominated by a rising generation unaccustomed to the touch of newsprint at their fingerprints. It’s not just that everything is moving to the Web. It’s that the notion of broadcasting to the masses is dying. The audience used to passively consume content; now they’re information hunter-gatherers, cobbling together a customized diet of information from the Web and their TiVo. To succeed in this environment, your media has to be interesting every time out or the viewer will time-shift to something else. That’s different than the days when your name had to be Dan, Peter, or Tom, and the 6:30 time slot was your megaphone. (Emphasis mine)
My wife and I, for example, don’t even own a television. How, you ask, does a new-media profesional and journalist like me live without a TV? I do with the internet (to be fair, I do have a TV on a news network at the office so I know whats in the news cycle). I consume all my entertainment media whenever I am good-and-ready to consume it. I have a blockbuster online subscription, so I watch my TV shows without commercials and whenever I want (I’m willing to wait a season or two for control of my own schedule). I also enjoy watching current shows through the network’s online video streams (Ugly Betty and Lost are two of our favorites right now…).
It’s easy to say that the Internet is revolutionizing everything. But its progress is uneven and interesting to observe. Camera shops are going the way of the dodo bird thanks to digital photography. Used book stores have unexpectedly gone in the other direction, thanks to a new surge in nationwide net-driven business. Craigslist has revolutionized the classifieds. iTunes may not represent a majority of music sales, but even a small drop in music industry revenue has the major record labels running scared. No industry will be spared, and the advent of ventures like the Politico likely means that traditional newspapers are (finally) next.
It’s a new and exciting world with a lot of possibilities and opportunities for profit. The question for every business in America today is “How are you going to adapt, adjust, and keep up with the changing media landscape?” If you don’t know the answer, find someone who can help you figure it out. Not a web-geek. Not a programer.
You need someone who speaks multiple media-languages AND understand’s the ever-changing technology landscape. Someone like me.
technorati tags:Business, Media, PR, Marketing, Advertising, web, online, strategy, Ruffini, Patrick
