Posted December 10th, 2008 at 3:17 pm by David Goetzl
Email marketers Wednesday continued to wrestle with how aggressively to use text messaging — either as a way to obtain email addresses or as part of an integrated campaign.
SMS offers huge potential in that people have their cell phones with them most of the time. But marketers suggested it’s a very private arena and they run the risk of appearing overly intrusive when they use it.
On a panel, Chip House, vice president of marketing services at ExactTarget, endorsed using SMS as “another tool” to build an email list, and “not as a promotional device.”
He cited an example of artists asking fans at concerts to text their email addresses and then using the contact information for future communications — perhaps to provide updates on a tour schedule.
Marketers that sat on the panel and those in the audience mostly agreed that SMS programs should have consumers opting-in.
Those in the audience expressed varying opinions on what directions to go with SMS. One suggested messages functioning essentially as advertising can work, citing texts sent by Borders that persuade a family member to visit the store.
But another email marketer said the space calls for moving slowly and delicately. “If you view it as another promotional channel, you’re going to burn out your customers right away,” he said.
There appeared to be a consensus that messages delivered from marketers must have a vastly different tone than the emails they normally send; in other words, SMS is a medium that commands its own creative tactics (even if email, SMS and other mediums are used in an integrated effort).
Audience member Jay Stevens, vice president of international online marketing at MySpace, said the social network doesn’t employ text messaging much in the U.S., but uses it frequently in overseas markets, particularly Asia. In fact, in some markets, people prefer to receive notifications via SMS, he said.
Hotels.com’s Brad Nash summarized much of marketers’ mixed feelings on SMS at a gathering to open the Summit on Sunday evening. “It’s such a private thing,” he said. “If you do it wrong, you can greatly tarnish your brand. You have to tread lightly.”
Nonetheless, he said there’s a need to stay on top of how the space evolves: “As young people get older and older, how do we adapt to them?”
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Posted December 10th, 2008 at 2:10 pm by Stephanie Miller
In our panel “A Call to Action” this morning with Jack Hogan of LifeScript and Brad Bacon of Weather Channel Interactive, we asked attendees here at the Summit to commit with us, as an industry and as individual practitioners to a number of best practices.
The first and perhaps the hardest is to commit to taking the long view. We are all under pressure to deliver short term results, while balancing the need for long term best practices around subscriber experience. Jack gave a few examples of hard decisions that he’s had to make to preserve the subscriber experience and increase the lifetime value of each subscriber. One is to add a “Hassle Free Unsubscribe” button to the top of every email message. It seems counter intuitive to encourage an unsubscribe, but better to have those folks off the file than complaining to the ISPs by clicking the Report Spam button. Another is to highlight the high number of messages each subscriber receives each week in the confirmation/welcome message and preference center. When you send 14-21 messages a week on average for each subscriber, it seems scary to call that out – the risk is that subscribers will freak out or immediately unsubscribe without experiencing the content. But Jack takes the long view – and being clear about the frequency helps ensure that subscribers welcome the messages.
One that we struggled over is commitment #4, where we ask marketers to commit to making at least 30% of their messages lifecycle based. This doesn’t get us totally away from batch & blast, but it does move all of us further down the road toward true inbox relevancy. The fact that this is a challenge at 30% and not 90% is perhaps a failure of our industry – not enough time, resources or automated technology to make it happen. Brad has a double opt in program and sends nearly all lifecycle-based messages, as each is custom to the weather and your location. However, Weather Channel does send marketing messages that are generic and promotional, and not surprisingly these messages earn lower response. Ways that marketers can fulfill this commitment is to offer choices both at sign up and in a preference center, to add customized content, offer series content that allows interested subscribers to receive deeper information, and sending occasional thank-you notes or other “just because” messages.
We’ve collected a dozen or so commitments, and plan to remind each of these marketers in 60 days of their promise. We’ll be sure to share back the results with the Mediapost audience. Email me (or comment here) if you want a list of the commitments.
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Posted December 10th, 2008 at 1:19 pm by David Goetzl
Lifecycle Creative Awards are being handed out in five categories:
As a treat, each category has a celebrity nominated in addition to two retailers. Then again, celebs pretty much are retailers these days …
Categories, Nominees and Winners follow:
-ACQUISITION (includes preference centers, email sign-up marketing)
Nominees:
Tommy Bahama
Anthopologie
Brad Pitt
Winner: Tommy Bahama
-CONVERSION (includes welcome series and shopping cart abandon functionality)
Nominees:
REI
Amazon
Angelina Jolie
Winner: REI
-GROWTH (includes newsletters and enhanced transactional messaging)
Nominees:
Verizon
Pottery Barn Kids
Johnny Depp
Winner: Verizon
-RETENTION (includes loyalty and surveys)
Nominees:
Sephora
Macy’s
Reese Witherspoon
Winner: Sephora
-REACTIVATION (what to do when a customer is no longer interested in the emails and how to win them back)
Nominees:
Williams-Sonoma
American Eagle
Will Smith
Winner: Will Smith (It was not revealed whether that was for “Pursuit of Happyness” or “Men in Black II.”)
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Posted December 10th, 2008 at 12:37 pm by David Goetzl
Return Path’s Stephanie Miller has asked email marketers to make a series of commitments.
Among the seven is: “I will ensure that subscribers who opt out of my email messages will not receive another email they don’t want. Period.”
The last one? “I will never place a hyphen in the word ‘email.’”
Some commentary from the two panelists:
“It’s an internal debate with the editor-in-chief and myself,” said Jack Hogan, COO of Lifescript. “It is in the dictionary without the hyphen, so we as an industry should make sure that’s cemented.”
The Weather Channel Interactive’s Brad Bacon followed tongue-in-cheek: “Think the time each one of you in this room could save not typing the hyphen.”
Posted in Email Insider Summit | 5 Comments »
Posted December 10th, 2008 at 12:25 pm by David Goetzl
On the panel about “How You Can Truly Move the Needle on Email,” Brad Bacon, the distribution director at the Weather Channel Interactive, warned Summit attendees to avoid focusing too much on the advertiser with email programs.
“We’ve made the mistake before,” he said. “Several years back, we kind of took an advertiser-focused approach to building out an email program that we could monetize.”
He added: “We have two customers we serve: the consumer through any and all channels and the advertiser.
“Beware of focusing your efforts solely on the advertiser because you’re really not going to make your consumes happy that way.”
Return Path’s Stephanie Miller, the panel moderator, added that if consumers are happy, advertisers will be too.
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Posted December 10th, 2008 at 12:15 pm by David Goetzl
Stephanie Miller, a vice president at Return Path, is moderating a panel and focusing on the importance of ensuring email campaigns offer relevant info to consumers. Marketers often overlook the preferences of their target, giving them what they believe they should want, not what they prefer.
“We’re giving them broccoli, when what they really want is pizza,” Miller said.
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Posted December 10th, 2008 at 12:04 pm by David Goetzl
While many at the Summit are pondering how best to take advantage of new opportunities with text messaging as a complement to email campaigns, Montavo Inc. said Wednesday it has a deal with SinglePoint to facilitate that.
Montavo said the SingleBrand Ad Marketplace will allow it to use messaging inventory and weave branded messages into SMS/MMS text messaging that are linked with TV programs carried on networks such as Bravo, MTV and the CW. The SinglePoint inventory will be added to the Montavo mobile mDeal-Finder.
Montavo CEO Brook Lang said: “Mobile devices are fast becoming the dominant marketer-consumer touch point. Due to the personal and interactive relationship consumers have with their mobile devices, studies have shown that the response rates to mobile advertisements are higher than traditional advertising media. We are thrilled to work with SinglePoint to add their mobile ad inventory to the Montavo mobile mDeal-Finder solution”.
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Posted December 10th, 2008 at 11:35 am by David Goetzl
Even as the Email Insider Summit moved into its final day, attendees were still buzzing about the opening keynote by Stephen Geer, the head of the Obama campaign’s email marketing efforts, and mulling over detailed issues he raised.
One that piqued the interest of Fred Tabsharani, vice president of marketing at Port25 Solutions, and others was which commercial MTA (message transfer agent) — an outbound message gateway that delivers outbound messaging as well as providing detail on inbound messages — the Obama campaign used for its emailing efforts.
Tabsharani wrote about Geer’s talk: “What an opportunity for the Summit to congregate and listen to the strategies employed by the Obama campaign in detail. Geer spoke of ‘unbridled segmentation’ and unheard-of frequency models to achieve fundraising goals. However, when it came to deliverability, Stephen said that there were challenges based on the sheer volume of emails deployed … but he seemingly shied away from answering detailed questions about deliverability.”
Tabsharani said he asked Geer which commercial MTA product the campaign used, but Geer said he couldn’t answer based on sensitivity issues.
Tabsharani asked that if anyone has any thoughts on why the issue may be proprietary and/or about which MTA was indeed used, please email him at ftabsharani@port25.com — or offer a comment on this post.
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Posted December 9th, 2008 at 7:31 pm by Michael Bloxham
The answer may be when it comes to privacy.
Listening to the final session of the morning today at the Email Insider Summit there was much talk of the abiity to take and leverage data based on the behavior of individuals - obviously a boon from a targeting perspective, but to some at least, potentially contentious on the privacy front.
While there is no doubt that the means of harvesting data from multiple sources will continue to proliferate and inform how messages are targeted across different media will continue to proliferate, questions from the audience (and the responses they were met with) led me to ponder what may be an interesting anomaly.
While just about every cornmer of the marketing industry is keen to leverage data on individuals, when it comes to privacy the conventional mindset seems to be stuck in the old-style “stick-them-in-their-demographically-defined-boxes” mentality. Reference was made to how people under 25 thrive on making every detail of their lives public knowledge through social netwroks, whereas people over 25 do not.
While there is an element of truth to this in that the behaviors amy be more prevalent in one demographic than another, the statements nonetheless represent a massive simplification. Working on a campus, I could introduce you to students who put everything of themselves online and others who definitely do not (indeed, Ball State students on the panel at the EIS in May covered this spectrum of behavior and there were only three of them).
Similarly, for evidence of how those over 25 don’t comply with the generalization above, look no further than your own Facebook / Twitter / etc. networks.
Yet still, the issue of privacy is still often approached in the simplistic way. It may not be quite “one size fits all”, but it is clearly “one size fits large numbers of demographically homogenous people”. Sadly, life isn’t this simple and ultimately it will come back and haunt us unless we approach it differently.
Surely, if we can develop the means of capturing, mining and using data at the individual level we can also find a way to manage the issue of approaching privacy at the individual level too. We’d still find that the vast majoriy of people will fall into a relatively small number of categories of consent and permission states.
The reality is that if the industry wants to leverage data at the individual level to the fullest extent, it will have to meet the individual (not to mention consumer advocacy groups and regulators) part-way. Otherwise someone else will write the rules.
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Posted December 9th, 2008 at 5:14 pm by David Goetzl
Jim Sterne, the founder and president of the Web Analytics Association, delivered the keynote address Tuesday. Asked later in an email exchange to list three points email marketers should take to heart, he responded succinctly:
1. Test and measure continuously.
2. Know the value of acquiring an email address so you know how much to spend.
3. Convince your management by showing them that which matters to them, not to you.
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