Retargeting, also called remarketing, begins by dropping a
cookie on site visitors. This enables marketers to follow them as they search,
do social networking or flit from site to site. A person coming to your site
can then be discretely followed by ads reflecting the content they viewed or reflecting
their psycho-demographic profile.
This tactic is particularly powerful because 90 percent of
retail site visits don’t yield a sale. But consumers
exposed to remarketing messages are 70 percent more likely to convert than
those who are not exposed. And consumers who convert after retargeting
generally spend 50 percent more than those who convert initially. So, marketers,
who take a second or a third bite of the apple, by using retargeting, succeed
better. And CPMs are much lower than banner advertising while the yield can be
dramatic, as high as a 37%
conversion rate.
This has to be done carefully and with discretion and
considered timing. Since many consumers find this very creepy and quickly
abandon the brand retargeting them. If this feels like the Tom
Cruise movie, AI, you are getting the point.
Marketers can follow prospects as they search Bing or Google,
socialize in networks or as they surf the Web. The mechanics of retargeting are
done through third party networks. And there are a bunch of them including Google’s
Display Network, the Facebook
Exchange,AdMeld,Pubmatic and Rubicon.
The newest entrant in the DSP fray is Pinpoint, from Blue Fountain Media. Pinpoint claims
to offer retargeting based on search history, demographics, geography and
recency (within 24 hours), which, according to Gabe Shaoolian, is a proxy for
consumer intent.
“Pinpoint captures expressed
interest and intent. It enables a brand to target a 40-year old upscale Mom on
Long Island who wants a specific ring setting, with a specific gemstone, “
Gabe opines. “Because Pinpoint tracks online
behavior and marries it to aggregated data, marketers get much more precision in
terms of reaching interested consumers, identifying consumer intent and
capitalizing on timing. It’s a retargeting trifecta.”
Pinpoint clams to be “a new frontier in
advertising.” It was beta tested with
Oppenheimer Funds who found “better than expected
results” that compared favorably to other DSP platforms they
tried. Shaoolian is positioning this
tool as a “big data play for medium and small marketers”
than will provide “real-time bidding at the best
prices.”
There is no question that retargeting is effective. There is
evidence that third party networks can provide the right inventory and that
various tools can plan, buy, optimize and report on retargeting buys. What’s
yet to be determined is who will survive the coming shakeout and what will be
the emergent best practices.
Mobility will turn us into direct, relationship and database
marketers.That’s the cornerstone message from two new studies -- Forrester’s
“2013 Mobile Trends for Marketers” and Urbanairship’s “Connect
with the Connected.” The keys to successfully making this transformation
will be surrendering control to consumers while continuously creating relevant
and resonant content.
Let’s start with a few key facts.
Mobile is here.
By the end of the year half of all Americans will have smartphones.Most brand and marketers know this but haven’t put either
strategy or infrastructure in-place. Mobility changes almost everything.
Smartphones have
replaced PCs, watches, rolodexes, maps, cameras, game devices, remote
controls, landlines, books, boarding passes, coupons and loyalty cards. And
they are closing in on wallets. People spend as much time with their phones as
they do with TV.
Smartphones are an
appendage for younger consumers. They are their phones, which are very
personal, heavily customized and in constant use. Don’t be surprised if Levi’s
or Lees creates jeans with a special quick-draw phone pocket, which also
prevents inadvertent butt dialing.
Apps are “hit” driven.
There are millions of them. They rise into and fall out of fashion as quickly
as the Top 40. The average person has 40 on their phone but only really uses
8-10. Getting onto a consumer’s phone is tough. Staying on is even tougher. A
successful app must either provide instant utility or repeatable entertainment.
Open beats closed
systems.Android is ascendant and will continue to be because it’s becoming
ubiquitous. Apple may have a few tricks up its sleeve, but bet on Android, and
many variations of Android, across devices and geographies to ultimately
dominate.
Soon apps and native phone technologies will work together
and talk to each other. Think about how interoperability might impact your
business.
For example, the accelerometer notices you are walking funny
and double checks with the pedometer. The GPS pipes up and says you’re off
course on your way home. The med app then quickly checks your heart rate and
blood pressure, and then signals the Walgreen’s app to reorder your meds.
Context Matters.
Where you are (location) and what you’re doing (attention) determine your mood
and your openness to brands. “ Your customer is not the same person when they
wake up as when they are working mid-day – each persona has different needs and
desires.”
Americans are putting computers in their pockets and
expecting them to work and add value on-demand. Brands have to ask themselves,
“ Are you interrupting them or making life a little better?” To the extent that consumers use your app, you
have an always-on virtual private network (VPN) connection to them. You have to
respect this, insure privacy and use it sparingly.
There is great opportunity for first movers to claim mind
and heart space and an equal opportunity to frustrate, annoy and alienate. When
you’re in, you’re in till you blow it. When you’re out; you’re out for good.
The implications of these facts are staggering and
challenging, especially for brands used to dominating their category, setting
the product or sales agenda or deciding the communications cadence to their
customers.
In order to harness mobility, brands must master these 5 moves.
Think Differently.
Forrester put it this way. “In 2013, the
ultra-connected consumer base will continue to grow at a staggering pace,
destabilizing marketing as you’ve come to know it. These customers demand
personalized, relevant attention, designed around their needs and wants rather
than around your marketing channels. If you don’t change the way you think
about engaging these customers, you will quickly lose relevance.”
Surrender Control.
Interested and loyal customers prefer to drive the relationship. Enable them to
set preferences for all aspects of their interactions with the brand. Let them
tell you how often they want to hear from, what channels they prefer and which products
or services they care about most. Ask permission to use location, purchase
history and other data to customize their experiences.
The guys at Urbanairship
point out the marketing paradox. “When customers have the control to customize
and limit a brand’s messages, they become more engaged. Less is more. Brands
that focus on relevance over reach and value over frequency build enduring
relationships and outpace the competition.”
Target Context.
Think about lifestyles, life stages, time of day and the customer journey with
a UX and a service-oriented mindset. Smartphones and tablets are used to do
distinct tasks – check an account, make a payment, find directions, grab a
coupon, research a restaurant, compare prices, look up a word or a trivia fact
or check product specifications. Figure out what your best customers do, when
and where they do it and then map your brand to their lives.
Most of us are creatures of habit. We have predictable likes
and dislikes and identifiable routines and patterns that can cue marketers about
what we want.Where can you make things easier, simpler, faster, cheaper
or more fun? Then craft content and messaging to deliver them at these critical
inflection points.
Marketers need to collect, aggregate and process data to
enable your brand to push relevant messages at relevant times or locations to your
customers. Well designed “push” messages deliver increased app usage and brand
preference over time.
Don’t Sell.
Smartphones and tablets are personalized tools. Overt selling, especially
offers without opt-ins are strictly verboten. Brands can deepen the
relationship by providing, utility, value and content, which, if done right,
pre-sells products and services and engenders significantly more awareness,
consideration and preference than traditional advertising.
This requires nerves of steel and a bit of faith, especially
if you’re on the hook for increased revenue or margins. But we are seeing the
limits of and a backlash to SMS ads, in-app ads and social ads today.
Selling is not so much about buying a product or service.
It’s about buying into the gestalt, ecosystem, values and personality of a
brand. These intangibles are best nurtured with personalized, relevant and
useful content as much as deals, offers and coupons. There’s no happier customer
than one who gets a pointed, personal message from a brand they love, at the
time and through the channel they’ve chosen, with an offer about something they
want.
Make it Easy.
People get frustrated with technology in a nanosecond. Invest in user
experience and responsive design. Make sure that your brand assets render and
display properly on all devices and that accessing your content, offers and
products is easy, intuitive and quick. People on the move have ridiculously
high expectations for instant gratification. When you meet them, you gain a
special, but fleeting, moment of love. If you frustrate them; you are over and
out.
Making it easy also will require substantial investments in
database software, CRM tools and other IT resources that can interact with
consumers in real time and in the moment. IT and marketing must be joined and
aligned at the hip. Increasingly brands will be judged by their ability to
deliver what an individual wants on demand. Given where most of us are today,
it’s a tall order.
In the beginning there were web pages. Brands staked their
claims on the newly invented World Wide Web. Web 1.0 met consumer expectations
that every brand would have an 800 number and a web page as points of contact.
Web 2.0 was about
finding, developing and embracing interactive technologies to engage customers,
prospects and other constituencies. It was about Flash, bells and whistles and
keeping up with the Joneses. Having a cool website mattered.
Web 3.0 was about business
results. It was a phase of encyclopedic websites. Governance was split
between marketing and IT. The Holy Grail was a fully realized multi-dimensional
interactive relationship between a brand and its customer base nurtured by using
the latest and greatest tools to achieve predictable business results. Metrics,
rather than showbiz, began to be important.
In the Web 4.0 era,
brands broke out of the corporate mold and sidestepped corporate rules to
create countless mini-sites. Experimenting with one-off efforts to slip away
from IT and corporate design and functionality restrictions, it was a re-run of
2.0 with more internal conflict and a much broader experimentation with
designs, content and functionality. Video, photo carousels, animation and games
were deployed. Social sharing was introduced. Brands began to orchestrate
messaging, traffic and content between branded sites and Facebook.
Today’s Web 5.0 is
about the surgical use of sites to achieve specific marketing objectives in an
era of near total mobility. Sites are no longer all things to all consumers.
They are built to specifically and immediately achieve discrete business goals.
They assume that context and mobility married to established best design, SEO
and functionality practices will achieve results effectively and efficiently.
And while everyone thinks they know how to create a 5.0 website, it is
hardly the case. That’s why Gabe Shaoolian, founder of Blue Fountain Media is emerging as a Web 5.0 guru based on the sheer volume of sites he’s
built and his UX-driven insights.
Here are his six
Web 5.0 imperatives.
Start at the End. Determine what you want to the site to do. Then use user experience design
techniques to direct visitors to make the desired action. Be rigorous.
Eliminate anything that will distract or impede users. Put the most important
stuff up front. Avoid too much scrolling. Pre-plan the page pathways. Then map
them to business objectives.
Use Responsive Design. The Internet has gone mobile. Build sites that automatically stretch to
fit the screens they’re viewed on. Given the high rate of smartphone turnover
and tablet adoption, responsive design is much easier and efficient than
creating separate versions for each operating system and its variants. It will
take a bit longer and cost a bit more. But the payoff, in terms of user
experience and SEO, will be well worth it.
Write for Scanners. Strive for clear concise messaging. Forget about intro pages. Anticipate
FAQs. Proactively answer them. Avoid dense copy blocks and use lots of white
space. Viewers, especially mobile users, scan. They don’t read. Design
headlines and subheads to call out key messages. Use bullets and numbered lists
to highlight content. And place big colored buttons to focus attention on your
call to action.
Forget Flash. The days of dazzle are over. Use video, animation and gaming techniques
to engage visitors and sustain attention and page views. Don’t use music. Be
careful when using copyrighted images, video, music or memes. Be wary of image
carousels because rarely does a single viewer see all the images.
Accelerate Sharing. Put social media buttons and sharing tools across the site. Create
content with search and sharing in mind. Make it as easy as possible for
visitors to help you earn added impressions. This is especially important for
images, videos and games, which lend themselves to sharing.
Make Navigation Simple. Put navigation across the top of the sight so users have a clear line
of sight. Left navigation bars, especially on interior or sub pages are
distracting and give visitors too many choices. Give users navigational control
by using forward and backward breadcrumbs or numbers. The goal is to offer
clear sign posts and reduce any friction or confusion.
Web 5.0 promises
to be the most productive era so far. Implementing these ideas will yield a
site that improves your chances for customer engagement, commerce and loyalty.
Marketers have been manufacturing consumer loyalty through rewards and loyalty
programs since the 1970s. The average American belongs to seven programs
and 7 out of 10 are willing to join more programs.
Most of us sign up for rewards from airlines, credit cards,
grocery stores, gas stations, favorite retailers and a hotel chain or car
rental firm. A third of most programs have members who have defected in-place
without formally cancelling. Forty seven percent of respondents stopped
participating in one of their programs in the last year.
And yet in spite of competition and attrition, fifty-seven
percent of respondents say they modify when and where they buy to maximize
loyalty benefits. Forty-six percent say their choice of brands is a function of
optimizing reward value. Loyalty marketing is personal, fickle, schizophrenic
and well worth doing.
Building and sustaining loyalty is tricky. Its part
stimulus-and-response conditioning, part value exchange and part emotion or experience
driven brand love. The dynamic mix of these rational and irrational elements in
the context of larger macro economic factors, like a recession, or micro
factors, like an awful experience with a store clerk, can change quickly.
What looks valuable today; is piddling tomorrow. Too often
the experience of trying to redeem points or miles is so frustrating,
infuriating or just plain unfair that it destroys the rationale for collecting
them. On the other hand a free trip, automatically applied coupons or discounts
that yield free groceries or a first class upgrade can be sublime.
They surveyed more than 6000 people in 30 national loyalty
programs across six industry sectors.
Here are the 4 key drivers of loyalty program satisfaction
they discovered.
Relevant
Communication is Critical. Duh! While more than 9 out of 10 members want to
hear from their loyalty programs only half (53%) see the communications are
relevant. Fifty-seven percent of members read everything they get from their
rewards programs while just 12% say it’s too much. Everybody wants to know the
rules, the news and what’s in it for me.
Duplicate Channels.
Almost all participants (96%) want communication and almost half (46%) want it
in at least three channels. Seventy-three percent want their mobile device to
interact with their loyalty programs. But only a third (37%) see mobile as
their primary loyalty channel. These are the people most likely to download
loyalty apps. Loyalty loyalists want their communications on their terms and they want a
choice of access points that they direct.
Finesse the
Cool-to-Creepy Spectrum. Sixty nine percent like and want personalized
offers based on purchasing habits. These are the “do it for me” people.
Sixty-two percent prefer to drive themselves. They want offers based on
preferences that they manage. Both groups want rewards earned and applied to the stuff their care about most.
Some consumers feel understood and appreciated when offers
are based on their attitudes or behaviors. Others are entirely creeped out by
the experience. Loyalty marketers need to segment participants to find the
right balance and test the information-for-value exchange to determine consumers
tolerances.
More than a quarter (29%) of participants think programs
require or acquire too much information prompting privacy concerns. There’s a built-in paradox here. If program
satisfaction is a function of relevance and data collection drives relevance;
without data you are doomed.
If you don’t collect and use the data, you risk developing
programs and content that nobody cares about. That’s probably why in spite of
generalized privacy concerns a majority of Americans still trade personal
information for relevant offers.
Don’t Discount
Values. On some level, loyalty is about brand awareness, preference and
advocacy. Don’t let CRM tactics fool you. There is a strong link between
personal values and brand values. Forty percent of those surveyed see their
favorite brand’s values as “the same as mine.” People who see themselves in
alignment with a brand’s values are much more satisfied with loyalty programs.
This is classic branding strategy. Successful brands mirror
image the personality, values, voice and tonality of their best customers.
Loyalty marketing needs to focus much more on content and messaging to resonate
with program participants. Its probably time to let consumers into the tent and
ask them to co-create content and tactics that reflect who they are and what
they believe in.
In a plugged-in, on-the-go, ADD society, loyalty is a
constantly shifting bogey. Yet this new data offers some insights, approaches
and tactics that can create, capture and apply the longing for connection, recognition,
reward and love in each person.
After reading a number of case studies describing how brands
have used social influencers to drive commercial success, I get the feeling
that bloggers are like Congressmen; they can be easily bought and paid for.
And while FTC rules demand full disclosure, it seems that
the journalistic ethics of early bloggers has succumbed to the easy baksheesh
offered by brands, and their PR or social marketing firms, eager to marshal
what appears to be consumer endorsements or momentum.
Duane Reade’s “Show Us Some Leg” campaign outlined in the
May edition of Internet
Retailer , got me thinking about this. Working with a firm called Collective Bias, they identified likely
bloggers using social listening tools. Then paid selected bloggers to go to the
store, buy the products and crow about both experiences early and often. Duane
Reade claims that over the 6-week campaign hosiery sales increased 28
percent. Though they aren’t really
willing to attribute the sales spike solely to suborned bloggers. They paid up but
they aren’t sure what they got in return.
Zach
Reiss-Davis of Forrester Research points out that it’s a cheap way to rally
peer-to-peer reviews and to present what appear to be brand endorsements from
fellow consumers. Marketers looking to efficiently buy word-of-mouth advertising
can get some blog love to “bend a conversation in your direction.”
As a long-term independent blogger, there’s something skeevy
in this. Maybe I’m old fashioned. Or maybe I’m getting cranky in my old age. But
if you’re a paid endorser, taking products and talking points from a brand, you
absolutely have to disclose. It’s not only the law; it’s the right thing to
do. Otherwise you’re just a covert whore. Similarly, agencies and firms
organizing fake groundswells of social conversation ought to be held accountable,
exposed, embarrassed and fined by the FTC.
Brands can buy ads, pay endorsers, hire spokespeople, deploy
affiliate programs and run all kinds of interactive events and experiences.
Consumers understand the deal. They know who is talking to them and why.
The great thing about social media is that it can be a real
unvarnished conversation among people who share ideas and interests. Undercover
advocates pollute and skew the genuine organic interaction between people that honest
bloggers and credible social networks have worked hard to create. Fakers and liars should be rooted and hooted
out.
The cool kids have abandoned Facebook and headed to Tumblr.
Twenty-nine million unique visitors signed in four days each week to
gain access to 44 billion posts on 102 million blogs. The average user
logged-in for 154 minutes and looked at 30 pages per visit. One in eight used a
mobile device to tumble.
Tumblr users skew male, young (18-34), single, childless and
rich (1/3 have household income greater than $100K). One in five is Hispanic
and one in six is in the Pacific Time zone.
Now that they’ve drawn a crowd, Tumblr is trying to figure
out how to make a buck. They have a “Radar” feature, which highlights curated
posts and is supposedly seen by everyone, although I can’t figure out which
posts in my feed are the “Radar” ones. I checked my dashboard and couldn’t find
an ad even though they sell access at a minimum of $25,000 a pop. Supposedly, a
bunch of well known brands have used
the platform. But I’ve never seen hide nor hare of them, nor do I follow any of
them. Maybe they appear in the 50-odd content categories that range from
Actors, Cute and Gaming to Poetry, Street Style, and TV.
They’ve also rolled out a mobile ad unit, initially embraced
by GE, Warner Brothers and ABC, that is served four times each day in their iOS
and Android app. And they insist that ads appear as posts rather than as ads. I’ve
never seen one of these puppies either.
Buying Tumblr for brands is a challenge. Blog content is highly visual and
idiosyncratic. Like Facebook users only see content from those they follow.
Unlike Facebook you can follow anyone without his or her blessing. So brands
will have to develop significant followings to get substantial reach and or frequency
against desirable segments.
The content categories aren’t channels per se just
convenient ways to find blogs to follow. And they don’t reflect anything by a
tiny selection of the 102 million blogs. Brands can’t frame up appropriate
messaging because there is no common experience. Each of the 29 million users follows
a different set of bloggers for 29 million different reasons and nobody has
crunched the numbers to determine what the patterns and affinities might be.
The other consideration, beyond advertising competition from
Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, is an undefined user experience and customer
expectation set. Brands need to know why people use Tumblr and how either the
people and their moods and behaviors differ from the other social networks. And
we haven’t even started to talk about qualifying the audience or determining
product and service use. It’s hard to imagine running contests, begging for
Likes or distributing coupons to this crowd on this platform. So what’s a brand
to do?
As a focus group of one, for me Tumblr is a diversion; a
time waster filled with startling images of people, places and things that I
don’t see on Facebook. The 111 people I follow (fewer than the 133 average
number of Facebook fans per user) post historical documents, travel shots,
photography, cartoons, landscapes, portraits and very little copy. Posting
short essays, I’m generally in the minority. And unlike Facebook, I don’t
follow any brands and I don’t know or care how many followers I have. It’s a
semi-private, self-constructed universe, where intrusive ads would be
unwelcome.
Tumblr faces the classic social media paradox. They’ve
developed a sizeable audience but they can’t yet package it and sell it to
advertisers. And if they do, will Tumblrs hang around and take in the ads or
will they defect and be off to the next cool thing?
If you watch Mad Men regularly and filter out all the
illegal and non-PC stuff, it becomes pretty clear that not much has changed in
Adland in sixty years. Agencies are run pretty much the way they are depicted
on TV. Evidently the great management and technology revolutions sidestepped
Madison Avenue.
If you doubt me ask how many Six Sigma black belts work in
your agency or describe which consultants re-engineered your studio or
production departments. And while there has been significant increases in financial
controls and cutbacks, ad agencies are notorious for lack of predictable and
consistent business processes, spotty project management and the inability to
forecast and deliver profit and productivity gains reliably.
Never ones to miss a fad, agency executives have embraced a
number of new concepts in an attempt to demonstrate to prospective clients and
employees how forward thinking and innovative they really are. These “innovations”
are comfortable and convenient illusions that help agency managers sleep at
night. But they’ve had little or no impact on
either the chronically broken agency business model or the productivity,
creativity or profitability of agencies. The dream makers need their own
illusions, too.
Consider these 3 concepts that have gained widespread conversation
and adoption if not, business traction among ad agencies.
Creative Technologists. Like unicorns, these mythic hard-to-find creatures
are part creative, part techie and part wizard. Having one suggests that an
agency is able to generate breakthrough tech savvy ideas that become global
memes, give traditional campaigns smart digital executions or enable agencies
to make applets, apps, widgets and viral or video memes that are as cool and shareable
as those created by Google or Intel.
What isn’t clear is how these new hybrid
players are accepted (or not) by traditionally run and managed agencies who
barely understand the need for interaction and engagement much less complex,
two-way digital, mobile or social technologies. Frequently embedded in creative
departments with the idea that they will form a triad with copywriters and art
directors, most practitioners are frustrated by the lack of baseline technical
knowledge, among their peers and co-workers, the reluctance to give a pure digital
guy a seat at the ideation table or the inability to prioritize digital
thinking and organically connect digital assets to core creative concepts.
In the last few years, agencies have acquired people with
these titles to keep up with first movers and to demonstrate their technology
prowess in credentials meetings. The breakout creative executions that have
resulted across the industry are concentrated in a handful of agencies and can
be counted on one hand.
Project Management.
For decades account guys managed client relationships and projects. As the
digital era dawned and technical production became more complicated, agencies
added project managers charged with managing timelines, budgets and project QA.
Unfortunately while many agencies embraced the position in the hope to better
control timelines and budgets, results have been mixed. There is no consensus
on the job description, the tool set, the degree of authority or responsibility
granted or the technical competences required.
People were recruited fresh out of school, from traffic
departments, and among failed account guys. Some nag and pester creatives.
Others hide behind endless revisions of Excel spreadsheets, hot lists or MS
Project Gantt charts. Still others send out the invitations for and attend
every meeting but contribute only carbon monoxide. To a great extent, agencies
faked themselves out.
PMs add a layer of expense and friction, lengthen the
production process and gain very little either in terms of quality assurance or
staff productivity. Now everybody can claim to have project management as a
core agency discipline. But very few agencies can quantify their impact on
process improvements, staff efficiency or in added margins.
Digital Integration.
Fifteen years ago when digital agencies emerged from primordial bits and bytes,
technology was new and alien. It had to be carefully scrutinized and considered
before being bolted onto agencies. As the Web grew many people in shops of many
sizes and configurations mastered web technologies. Agencies allied with and
acquired digital capabilities to reduce competitive pressure, defend brand
stewardship, while grabbing a bigger slice of client retainers and provide
through the line media neutral communications in service to client commercial
goals.
This momentum has continually built up year after year. As
consumer behavior shifts toward a digitally centric lifestyle no agency wants
to be left out or appear to be a dinosaur.
To compensate many traditional agencies hired marquee Chief Digital
Officers away from digital-only shops and put them out on the conference
circuit and on countless pitch teams in search of street cred and new business.
What they didn’t count on was the
culture clash. Ad agencies with their longstanding Mad Men ways are the polar
opposite of digital shops which tend to be younger, flatter, leaner and meaner
operating on start-up hours, sensibilities and business models. Imagine how many
of these well-paid digital evangelists found themselves surrounded by entrenched
senior managers who talk the talk but had no genuine appetite to walk the walk.
And even those who do have difficulty framing up and selling-in digital
communications either to their own account and creative leadership or to
clients still heavily reliant on TV and print.
The digital revolution is far from over. The lion’s
share of media dollars and creative assets still go TV in spite of massive
shifts in media usage and Facebook’s 1 billion members. The
next battleground will be mobile and social. And true to form agencies are
figuring out how to buy or rent these capabilities to remain credible and
competitive in the market even while the people who actually know how to do
these things are terminally frustrated and defecting from advertising agencies
to specialty shops and start-ups in a re-run of the late 1990s.
Mobility has transformed e-mail. Unfortunately too many
brands haven’t kept pace. As a result, they
squander the power and impact of the most ubiquitous and most effective digital
communications channel because messages don’t render properly or links
drive users to pages that can’t be read or properly interacted
with.
Ninety percent of e-mail subscribers access the same e-mail account
on multiple devices. Between 15 and 65 percent of e-mails are opened on these
devices, according to the guys at emailmonday,
often at different locations and with expectations than before. Savvy marketers
are using “sniffers” to identify the universe
of devices and/or turning to responsive design to automatically adapt and
resize e-mail creative and technology for maximum impact.
Everybody has to factor in basic changes. Mobile screens
have different dimensions, usually smaller and narrower. You have to put the
most important thing up top. Mobile users are on the go. They scan. They spend
less time per e-mail so they need to get to the point faster and need different
response mechanisms. You are getting partial attention and the flick of a thumb
rather than a full screen, two focused eyes and ten fingers or a mouse for response
agility.
Your call to action must be clear and BIG. Increase the
point size of text so it can be seen in any light and from any angle. Buttons,
links and other response mechanisms need to be presented early and enlarged to
account for fat fingers and finger faults. Put a link to your mobile website in
the pre-header to offer an option to read the e-mail in the browser.
Be sure that any destination is equally mobile friendly.
Think about the entire experience from transmission/reception to interaction to
destination/desired action. If you break any part of the chain, you essentially
dump your customer or prospect. Too many e-mails opened on mobile devices take
customers to pages that don’t work or look awful when they
get there. Just kiss off those customers.
The expectation of frictionless mobility combined with an
in-the-moment intensity of interest amplifies the emotional reaction to your
message. When it works its pure brand mojo. When it doesn’t
your brand takes a bigger hit than if your e-mail doesn’t
work right on a desktop or laptop. The good news is that simple planning and
fixes allow you to maximize customer satisfaction.
CPG brands have had an off-and-on relationship with CRM and
loyalty marketing over the years. Every brand attracts loyalists. Most brands
fantasize about identifying, motivating and rewarding them since they buy more,
buy more often and tell everyone they know about the brands they love. Every so
often CRM becomes the flavor of the year in CPGland.
But CPG brands haven’t succeeded in CRM for
three fundamental reasons.
Customer Ownership. Classically
retailers built relationships with brand advocates and CPG firms paid the bills.
They sort of cooperated with each other to reach and engage customers. For many
retailers, CPG is the cash cow behind their shopper marketing activities and
many retail chains make a huge effort to optimize CPG contributions often by
including brands in promotions, circulars and loyalty card reward efforts. But CPGs
and retail partners don’t always have the same priorities
or marketing objectives. Retailers prefer to set the marketing agenda and
choose the tactics that CPGs subsidize. Retailers rarely, and then only selectively,
share customer data with CPG partners..
Digital, social and mobile media allow brands to side step
retail relationships and develop independent relationships with their fans. New
technologies can disrupt, circumvent or compliment existing retail loyalty or
CRM programs. But CPG marketers haven’t figured out how to work
with or work around retail partners and are reluctant to compete with or
alienate them.
Data Ownership. The
pendulum, both in terms of customer sensibilities and CPG budget allocations,
seems to be swinging toward building and sustaining direct consumer
relationships. P&G, Nestle, Unilever, Kimberly-Clark, L’Oreal
and Kellogg’s have all initiated large scale data mart projects
aimed at centralizing efficient data collection in service to relationship
building and marketing or loyalty programs. With little or no data sharing from
retailers, these firms are starting fresh, although they have the budgets to
buy or rent big data to get started.
These initiatives, which tend to provoke internal turf
battles, turn on the ability to motivate consumers to opt-in and create cost
efficient mechanisms to capture data and trigger personalized communications. Gaining
access to consumers is easy. Convincing them to part with data, preferences,
purchase history and/or real time behavior is a serious challenge. So is figuring
out what to do with the data they collect and getting multiple brands within a
portfolio to play nicely together.
Relationship.
Perspective CPG marketers see CRM as a cheaper channel to activate sales.
These programs start with the premise that by communicating and couponing, they
can inexpensively move more products faster. Control is a key factor. Nobody
wonders about the kind, texture or frequency of relationship consumers want to
have with their favorite brand.
So what kind of relationship do consumers want with their
favorite peanut butter, sour cream, hair gel or breakfast cereal?
The evidence from social media suggests that strong brand
relationships give consumers not marketers control. Consumers
express preferences for channel, content and frequency of contact. Loyalists
want insider information, early warning or access to new products and as many
offers, deals and freebies as they can get. In many cases, marketers see this
as unfavorably subsidizing sales they would ordinarily get anyway.
If CPG marketers expect to eventually succeed at building
genuine consumer loyalty programs, they need to commitment to a relationship
building program over time, develop the infrastructure to support both
corporate and brand level one-to-one communication and surrender control to
their best customers. Anything short of these monumental changes will just be
another failed experiment.
Reach, credibility and influence are the ultimate objectives
of social media marketing. Reaching the right audience in ways that resonate,
prompt viral distribution and drive action are the reason we get out of bed in
the morning.
In the scramble for attention, credibility and ad dollars
the social channels jockey to make their cases. One has volume and global scale.
Another has real-time immediacy; a third touts its influence and opinion leadership.
A fourth is the playground of the too-cool-for-school crowd.
Enter Technorati, who replaced the annual state of the
blogosphere study, with a new report titled “The
2013 Digital Influence Report” based on data drawn
from its blog network with a reach of 130 million unique users per month and a
survey that included 6000 influencers, 1200 random consumers and 150 marketers.
Evidently 75 percent of digital ad dollars are flowing to
display, search and video but attention and influence are being accumulated by influential
bloggers who get a measly 11 percent of the pie. “Where brands are spending
is not fully aligned with how and where consumers are seeing value being
influenced,” the report concludes.
Recognizing the practical difficulties of creating,
measuring and buying blog networks, the report claims that “when
making overall purchase decisions for consumers blogs trail only behind retail
and brand sites.”
Furthermore “blogs were found to be the
fifth-most trustworthy source overall for information on the Internet”
trailing news sites, Facebook, retail sites and YouTube.
Self interest aside, nobody disputes the role of blogs or
their potential influence on consumers. The question is how to separate signals
from noise and how to assess genuine influence from hyperbole.
Consider ten criteria to assess the potential value of influential
bloggers.
What is a blogger’s base audience day-in
and day-out?
Do they routinely generate significant buzz and
virality?
Is the buzz about what they think and say or
about the blogger as a personality/guru/speaker?
Can you immediately identify their insight or
expertise?
Do they generate original content or endlessly
re-tweet others’?
Have they written a book, done a TED talk or
produced significant data?
Are they independent or part of a group?
Are they overtly or clandestinely supported or
sponsored by someone?
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