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.”
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.
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?
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.”
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.
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.
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.
E-mail the Direct-Marketing Rock Star in Recession
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