Manhattan Marketing Maven

An Email Marketing "Best Practices" Checklist

E-mail is the go-to device for everyone attempting to deal with these tough economic times. For retailers, each e-mail blast is a predictable ka-ching; one that gets addictive quickly when sales at the cash-wrap desk, the 800 number or through the catalog fall off. E-mail response, like postal mail, degrades with repetitive re-mails which also prompt predictable numbers of opt-outs and complaints. To use e-mail for optimum effect, marketers need to factor in strategic and tactical considerations and link these directly to the business objectives of each campaign.

 

Strategic Elements

 

Scope the Program. Everything starts with the end result. What do you want the recipients of your e-mail to feel, think or do?  If this is a one-off effort it will need to work differently than if its part of a newsletter, club or continuity program. If this is going to a specific segment or a house list, it will be received differently than if it’s a wide scale mass acquisition effort. If it’s a new product or service launch versus a special offer on a well known brand, response will vary greatly. The scope will reflect the goals – who, what, when, how often and what needs to be accomplished and measured. Clarity on the front end will make measurement and analysis much easier on the back end.

 

Build/Align the Channels. An e-mail is the front end of a multi-dimensional response system. Before you blast out e-mails you must decide where you will direct the response, usually expressed as clicks or calls, and what experience the responder will have immediately after making a click or a call. This involves designing landing pages, embedding additional links, video, audio, PDFs, PowerPoint presentations, 800 numbers and measurement tools. It also demands that you anticipate the most likely emotional and rational responses to your message and prepare the requisite answers and materials.

 

An e-mail starts a hoped-for chain reaction. At the outset of a program, you must anticipate each step in that chain and marshal the creative, technical and analytic resources necessary to capitalize on those clicks.  If you mail before these are in-place and tested you squander the effort. If you do this smartly, you are rewarded with the results you desire.

 

Work on the List.  Who you address directly influences what happens. Every list is flawed. Assume that 20-30 percent of the names on any list you buy will bounce. And assume that most house lists, even those carefully maintained, will lose 3-5 percent of address after each mailing. The provenance of the lists is also a key indicator for response. Names carefully opted-in by brand loyalists will perform much better than random names gathered by lead generation sites or list compilers. Smart players, and virtually all bulk e-mail programs and services, offer list cleaning, merge/purge and integrity tools that everybody should use. In this market, negotiate a “net name” deal which will give you credit for the names you buy that can’t be delivered.  

 

Craft a Compelling Offer. We have trained everyone to expect a deal in an e-mail. Your offer has to speak directly to your target audience and present something that they have to do right now. Limited quantities, discount prices or time limitations drive some urgency but most of us can discern a real value from a passing promo offer in a nanosecond. So think long and hard about what you are offering. How sensible is it your customers and how can you make it feel like something they must have right away? Also think about how the offer will impact subsequent brand perceptions. Will the offer cement your relationship with customers or could it signal that the brand is slipping in quality or customer focus?

 

Embed Tests. There are no fixed success formulas for e-mail marketing. We test everything by splitting the list and trying different tactics against different customer or prospect sets. Ideally we test one element at a time so that we can get a clean read on the relationship between any single element and response.

 

The e-mail game rests on getting the e-mail delivered to a valid inbox and getting it opened If its not opened and read … game over … you tilt out the campaign. Three key factors determine open rates. First is the technical dimension. Is your e-mail sufficiently short, formatted properly, free of words, images or embedded elements that will trigger spam filters or send the e-mail immediately to the “junk” box?

 

The second key dimension is the “To” line. Is the e-mail coming from a real, credible and known source? They might not know you personally, but if they’ve never heard of you, your brand or your company name; don’t expect much action. The third factor is the subject line. The best results come from a short phrase that instantly conveys user benefit. Subtlety is lost in subject lines and teasers usually fall flat. Words that direct action work well. You must communicate the idea that opening equals something immediately good for you.

 

Subject lines are the most frequently tested element in e-mail marketing. Smart players always test at least 2 simultaneous subject lines. The smartest players frequently test a small batch of names, get results in 48 hours then incorporate the results in a larger roll-out mailing or campaign, which also includes a follow-on test cell. Test-and-learn is the e-mail marketers mantra.  

 

Tighten Content   Short directive copy works best. Many e-mails are read without fully opening the browser frame and increasingly read partially and quickly on mobile devices, so there is a big premium in loading the core idea and the crux of the offer into the opening paragraph. Graphics should be used sparingly since they tend to complicate the underlying technology and/or trigger spam filters. Customers or prospects should be given a limited number of response choices, never more than three, which generally are --buy now, sign-up for future communications, or get more product or service information. The more choices you offer, the less response you get. Similarly on landing pages, the more navigational options, the smaller and more diffuse the response.

 

The objective is to imagine what you want recipients to feel and do and then offer clear, well-marked ways to do it. Don’t be afraid to make clickable or colorful links bigger or float them between paragraphs in plenty of white space. Use big colorful buttons centered in white space to cue customers what to do. Look at the page and ask yourself, what elements need to pop out to direct someone reading or scanning this quickly?

 

Also remember that people focus on their own names first. If you personalize, you’ve got to get the names and the form of address right. Remember that people buy from people, so a credible and real name “signing” the e-mail gives customers and prospects another reason to believe.

 

Be CAN SPAM compliant. Every legit e-mail has to show the recipients who it came from, including a postal address, and offer an opt-out mechanism. This has become an easy, automatic and expected practice. Most vendors can walk you through the steps. There is absolutely nothing worse that being a spammer, not too mention regulatory scrutiny is increasing consistently.    

 

Measure & Tweak. The 4 most important things you want to know about an e-mail campaign are: 1) did the mail get to target recipients, 2) how many opened the e-mail, 3) how many took the desired action and 4) did we achieve the desired business result? These four numbers are commonly considered in making return on investment (ROI) calculations. These are the critical effectiveness measures.

 

Everything else speaks to the efficiency of the e-mail marketing process, which can be improved over time, assuming the campaign did well enough to justify going again. There are a surprisingly large number of things that can be counted and measured to optimize the time, energy and cash spent in e-mail marketing. Examine the measurement factors that have the most relevance to your business goals. Just because we have a number doesn’t make it necessarily meaningful. 

 

Tactical Concerns

To optimize e-mail marketing, in this environment, you need to stand out from the loud, growing and frequent crowd and take concerted action to get attention for your brand and your message. Try these tactics:

1. Create a distinctive look or feel. Experiment with subject lines and with Personal URL's in the subject line. Use the same template or color palette and be sure it instantly cues brand recognition.

2. Build a Consistent Delivery Schedule. Train your customers to expect certain messages at certain times (Tuesday = Bargain day). Consider a value-oriented TO address to re-inforce the content or the value implicit in a consistent series of offers.

3. Segment and Target Customers. Test the criteria that suit your marketing objective. Communicate the criteria in the subject line. Be sure the value-add is apparent in the subject line.

4. Send Less Better. Rather than do one blast of a million names, do 5 blasts of 200,000 names. Make each segment a different offer or relate the offer to something you know about the behavior of customers in that segment. Focus on behavior it’s the only reliable predictor of future action. Forget demographics or psychographics, they won't help you target anything other than brand awareness; a task much better suited to other channels.

5. RFM Rules. Peg e-mail blasts to frequency of action. People who take a desired action are much more likely to do it again and much sooner than someone who blithely signed up and rarely responds.   

 

 

 

 

Retail Email: How Much is Too Much?

Retailers love the instant stimulus-ka-ching of e-mail marketing. You blast out an e-mail and cash flows in.That's why 54 percent of retailers say e-mail performs better or much better than other marketing programs. And that's why they'll send 158 billion marketing e-mails this year according to forecasts by Forrester Research reported in the current issue of Internet Retailer.

But when 77 percent of customers complain they get too much e-mail, marketers have to ask themselves; "how much is too much?"

Consider the case of Fashion Outlet, analyzed by Arthur Middleton Hughes, in the same issue. These guys fell so much in love with the blast-bucks cycle that they tripled their marketing e-mail frequency from 5 per month to 15 per month. Working with a list of 500,000 double opt-in customers they were generating gross revenues of $6.5 million which after deducting COGS, the cost of e-mail creative and blasting and the cost for churning names yielded $1.2 million in profit or a nice margin of 19.1%

Looking to do even better, they figured some percentage of their list was always up for shopping so the discounter presented more opportunities to more customers assuming many would would shop. By cranking up the number and frequency of outbound campaigns, the revenue doubled to $14 million along with orders and the number of unique buyers.

What wasn't obvious were the attendant costs, especially the costs of replacing about half of the opt-in list who bailed under the weight of every-other-day e-mails. In the end while the top line grew, profits fell 8 times down to 2.6% under the weight of the added cost factors. And this doesn't measure or monetize brand preference, which had to suffer if half the list defected!

Fashion Outlet went to extremes. What if they increased frequency from 5 to 7 or 8? And what if they were smarter about segmenting the list and instituting a contact strategy limiting the frequency of outbound e-mail per customer per month?

As it turns out 44.8 percent of e-mail markets don't segment their lists. Not even the basics like -- geography, responders versus non-responders, products bought or order value. These simple sorts can make an enormous impact in campaign reception, response and profitability. So can A/B testing which carves out a small number of names to measure the relative pulling power of different SUBJECT lines, copy or graphics before a campaign is transmitted to the list.

Nervous retailers, especially those facing predictions of holiday doom, can probably increase their e-mail frequency slightly without alienating customers, provoking significant opt-outs or reducing profits. But the key to making additional campaigns more palatable to customers is pre-testing and basic segmentation.      

Quickly Boosting E-Mail Productivity

iPost figures marketers need to get more bang from their e-mail campaigns. So they've formulated and bottled the classic, proven direct marketing tactic known as RFM (recency,frequency, monetary value) into an automated tool called AutoTarget that works withtheir platform and soon can be added-on to any ISP solution.

Since 96% of marketers use e-mail as a marketing channel, according to Forrester, VP Marketing Craig Kerr thinks, " Marketers don't need any more data. Most mid-tier companies don't have the time or the people to process all the data they already have. They need fast, easy and intuitive tools to help them use the data they have to get better results and bigger ROI from the e-mail campaigns they're running."

Its a simple premise aimed at kick-starting the use of metrics and analytics in a medium considered to be cheap, fast and somewhat effective. Take the most valuable DM concept -- the first, best cut at the data. Bake it into a tool that e-mail marketers can easily access. Upload purchase histories and e-mail lists. Spit out segments graphically. Get the most lift with the least effort.

And while AutoTarget will not be a substitute for a CRM system, a BI package or a stand-in for insightful thinking about segments, offers or creative, it will take the purchase histories of names on an e-mail list and in 24 hours parse them into 125 cells based on recency of purchase, frequency of purchase and cash value of purchases. Ranked from 111 for one-time low value buyers to 555 for frequent high margin customers, the data is displayed in punchy bar graphs to help marketing and executive types to quickly see patterns in the business which will drive decisions about where to apply their finite time and money for maximum incremental effect.

E-mail marketers get better results faster by abandoning the practice of blasting often and hoping for the best. Looking at the segments will give even novice marketers a quick feeling for which customers are most engaged  and which can yield the most incremental sales. Knowing this can lead to decisions about who to address, what to offer and how often to contact them -- basically a metrics-driven mindset in a box. The data will also help marketers make the case for the business value of the e-mail channel, which is often undercut by its low cost and frequent use.

The E-Mail Blizzard Will Continue and Intensify: How Will Your Brand Stand Out?

Everybody loves e-mail because its cheap, its fast and it works. That's the conclusion of a survey done among 2000 online marketers by Datran Media.

More than 80 percent of those surveyed are ratcheting up their e-mail efforts because it works better than other online media and has the best return on investment. 80% send newsletters, 78% use it to drive direct sales and 70% say it enhances customer relationships. The same 80% target e-mail. The targeting criteria are based on demographics or geography, actions, or psychographics and stated interests (in that order). Twenty percent don't target. They carpet bomb using e-mail and this doesn't include the spammers who carpet bomb as well.

Most think that e-mail works best in-tandem with search engine marketing and direct marketing. Half think it complements display ads and very few think it works well with broadcast or cable TV. Almost 25% think e-mail and mobile media might work as a messaging double play. Two-thirds of those surveyed are pretty sure that e-mail also drives sales in other channels and 3/4s plan to do some kind of A/B split or optimization testing.

The survey validates our conventional wisdom. It acknowledges that when something works (think retail circulars) it really works. And for e-mail, like those annoying circulars, consumers are willing to cope with blizzards of them because they serve a useful purpose. and because so many of them end up in harmless junk boxes.

In most cases e-mail serves as a stimulant for customer networks. Rarely does the merchandise in a particular -mail message fly off the shelves. More likely an e-mail prompts or reminds customers to buy the item they've been thinking about or mulling over or cues them to something happening with a brand they relate to or care about.

But if you hope to optimize e-mail for marketing, in this environment, you need to stand out from the crowd and take concerted action to get attention for your brand and your message. Try these tactics:

1. Create a distinctive look or feel. Experiment with subject lines and with Personal URL's in the subject line. Use the same template and be sure it instantly cues brand recognition.

2. Build a Consistent Delivery Schedule. Train your customers to expect certain messages at certain times (Tuesday = Bargain day). Consider a value-oriented TO address to re-inforce the content or the value implicit in a consistent series of offers.

3. Segment and Target Customers. Test the criteria that suit your marketing objective. Communicate the criteria in the subject line. Be sure the value-add is apparent in the subject line.

4. Send Less Better. Rather than do one blast of a million names, do 5 blasts of 200,000 names. Make each segment a different offer or relate the offer to something you know about the behavior of customers in that segment. Focus on behavior its the only reliable predictor of future action. Forget demographics or psychographics, they won't help you target anything other than brand awareness; a task much better suited to other advertising channels.

5. Remember RFM Rules. Peg e-mail basts to frequency of action. People who take a desired action are much more likely to do it again and much sooner than someone who blithely signed up to get on your list.   

How To Use E-Mail Marketing to Kill Off Your Customers

I live in Army/cargo pants.So the 10% Thanksgiving sale offer from Gr8gear really resonated. Until I tried to make a discounted purchase.

I got the e-mail, noted the times when the coupon was valid, pre-shopped for my pants and waited 24 hours. I get to the site, click in my stuff and quickly rack-up more than $50 dollars in goods to qualify for the discount deal. I put in my info and the shopping cart won't take the data. I try again and again. No deal.

Then I notice a red sentence peeping out of the black background that reads -- "Coupon code cannot be used on specials or closeouts."

I check the cart. Both sets of pants we're marked down from 29.99 to 22.99, I check the offer e-mail. Not a peep. The right nav bar tells me my pants are to sellers -- not closeouts. I'm stunned. I'm shocked. I'm really pissed off. I've now invested 20 minutes to buy stuff I crave and my warm feelings have turned to anger and resentment.I've gone from repeat customer to angry antagonist with zero sympathy for the marketer that didn't do his/her job right.

Wanna kill off your repeat buyers? Send them e-mail offers that they can't cash in on !   

When Frequency Becomes SPAM

Ziff Davis either loves me or hates me. I can't decide which. They sent me 5 promotional e-mails today.

I guess because I subscribe to a punch of their publications, sites and conferences that I must be among their favorite campers.But this isn't feeling like love. Its feeling like SPAM. It's also feeling like they really don't have their marketing together. Carpet bombing reveals several problem areas.

1. Data Systems Don't Talk.  Evidently these ZD guys either don't know much about merge/purge or don't have the systems to implement it. And since they all came within a 3 hour window on a Friday afternoon, should I assume that they batch blast this stuff or that there's only one guy who knows how to work the e-mail machine and he never read any research about how people mentally and physically check out early on Friday afternoons during summer.

2. No Governing Contact Strategy. They also seem to be down a quart on contact strategy since nobody I know would allow a single customer, even a cash cow customer, to be hit five times in one day.

3. No Brand Portfolio View. If somebody was watching the master brand, they'd figure that bombing a poor slob like me signals either that they are desperate, disorganized or don't really care if they annoy me. I'm not sure a brand can afford any of these perceptions much less all three,

4. Limited CRM. I'm a management and Marketing guy. I state that clearly on all those bingo forms and online subscription forms. So why I'm I being pitched About Remote Support, Training Programs for Windows and other technical stuff that I have absolutely no interest in. They haven't thought about asking for my preference nor have they inferred it from either my data set or my online behavior.

So remind me again why I should believe Ziff Davis offers me, as a marketer, valuable resources for targeting, parsing and sequencing marketing campaigns?

12 E-Mail Copywriting Tips

The Marketing Experiments Journal released a two-part series of test results on what determines effective E-mail marketing copy. Effective e-mail marketing is when the recipients take the desired action. Here is the take-away as I understand it:

1. Body copy drives action. It is among the factors with the greatest impact.

2. An appeal to trust beats an appeal to greed. Establish your credibility first.

3. Familiarity and tone build trust and establish credibility. Knowing you, feeling comfortable with you and believing you are not a crook or a spammer is crucial. Without it you are dead.

4. Different targets get different messages. In mailings to the house list, assume they know you and put the offer first. In mailings to prospects the sequence should be credibility/familiarity language first, offer second.

5. Specificity increases credibility. If you can refer to previous order numbers or other personalized data, the recipient will instinctively understand that you are not a spammer and be more inclined to act.

6. Shorter is always better. Eliminate every extra or stray word, link or graphic you can.

7. Police your identity. If you market using a brand name use that name consistently. Don't mix brand or product names with corporate names or business unit names because it confuses and scares people. Recipients don't care about your company structure or politics. Present yourself as something they know and stick with a single identity (name, logo, tag line) throughout the messaging in the initial e-mail, on the landing page and in the follow-up e-mails.

8. Urgency drives behavior. People only act if they have to. You can establish this sense artificially (e.g. 25% discount ends at midnight) or naturally (e.g. The Webinar is tomorrow). Both work equally well. But inertia rules. If people don't have to act, they won't.

9. People read the PS. Its true in direct mail and its true in e-mail. Reprise your offer in the PS. And it doesn't hurt to add an 800 number in the PS to give prospects a second channel for response.

10. Timing counts. Response is a function of frequency. Its always better if customers or prospects indicate their preferred frequency and channel. a steady stream of messages will yield a steady stream of results. Keep your expectations low, if they only hear from you once in a blue moon.

11. Use plain standard typefaces in 10 point type or larger for older audiences. Reversed type is almost always a mistake. Default to plain vanilla. Don't get cute.

12. The SUBJECT line must communicate why you are mailing and what the recipient can hope to win by interacting with you. 

    

Top 5 Ways to Improve E-Mail Effectiveness

Retailers are amassing lists and bombing customers with e-mail. But their embrace of the bread-and-butter marketing medium has not been as effective as it could be according to a recent survey conducted for Internet Retailer.

Two-thirds (64.7%) are conducting more campaigns than a year ago, Sixty percent run one to three campaigns per month and 32.8% run 4 to 15 campaigns per month. Yet less than 5% convert more than 10% to sales. A sixth (18%) don't know their open rates.Half (52.5%) have click thru rates of 10% or less. And a third (29.5%) can't measure what happens as a result of these willy-nilly campaigns.

E-mail has become the new Roto for retailers -- cheap, frequent, ubiquitous.and done by rote..

Since almost half (47.8%) see increasing web sales as the primary objective of e-mail marketing,consider these Top 5 ways to make this medium dramatically more effective:

1. Romance the Subject Line. Put the offer in the subject line. Convey instant value to recipients and identify your brand. You must communicate familiarity and real value in a nanosecond to prompt opens. 22.5% of those surveyed have an open rate from their house list of less than 10%, Another 22,5% only get 10-20% opens from the people who signed up and are eager to hear from them.

2. Segment the list. 43.4% of survey respondents don't. Key sorting factors should be purchase history and frequency. E-mail marketers should embrace the direct marketing RFM concept which predicts repeat behavior much more effectively than psycho-demographic variables.

3. Focus the Message. Limit copy to 150 words or less. Limit links to 3 or less. Think of e-mails like enhanced billboards. They are glanced at and skimmed not read or perused.

4. Limit the Offer. Give each segment a carefully chosen merchandise set. Remember most people are stymied by too many choices. More short offers work better than encyclopedic collections and catalogs.

5. Make Buying Easy. Structure the process so anything can be bought with 3 clicks. Put buttons above the fold. Limit width to less than 600 pixels. Stifle the desire to cross-sell or up-sell everything. Only use light graphics. Don't embed video unless it drives product desire.   

FYI. This post is part of a global group writing project initiated by ProBlogger.net.

   

Not-So-Automatic Automated E-Mail Marketing

A gushy story in last Monday's Wall Street Journal makes automated e-mail marketing seem so "push-button" easy for any business that you'd be an idiot not to buy one of the featured tools and start madly blasting out e-mail campaigns. What the writer didn't write is that many of these tools litter the offices and balance sheets of companies who aren't ready to use them.

In order to make effective use of the evolving set of e-mail software and services on the market, you need to have a clean target list, a database to house and keep track of the list and some baseline sensibility and skill at direct marketing. Generally you need to understand how lists are compiled, who are your most-likely-to-buy prospects, how e-mail gets transmitted, where responders will land and what actions you will direct them to take when they get there. Then you need to be able to track who responded, who didn't, figure out how to follow-up with and qualify each segment and make some generalizations about what happened and why. It helps to have an interest in testing different creative and targeting tactics and to count and measure everything that happens. This usually requires a skilled individual dedicated to the project, if not the process. 

And while e-mail is fast and cheap to create and transmit and, when targeted properly, is still remarkably effective in provoking a quick response not everyone can get these results instantly. These tools and services do NOT do the basic thinking, collecting and counting for you. At even at affordable prices, it only makes sense if you have scale and a commitment to the medium.They automate and expedite a well-conceived campaign plan and in some cases can track responses over time to divergent locations.

But they are far from an automatic silver bullet. Several of my clients have bought these products only to find that they weren't ready to use them, couldn't get plans, processes or content together or didn't have the bodies necessary to use shiny new toy. There is a marketing maturity quotient that drives the real value of marketing resource management tools.

   

 

E-mail Marketing Ain't Easy

Two recent studies indicate that neither B2C or B2B marketers are using e-mail marketing effectively in spite of its massive quantities and inherent qualities. Forrester found 62 of 63 campaigns lacking and E-Mail Data Source found a boat load of issues with 355 retailers they studied.

E-mail marketing is much easier said than done.

Forrester created a 10 criteria methodology to score e-mail marketing programs from more than 60 companies in 6 categories: business services,consumer goods, financial services, media retail and travel. E-mail Data Source looked at 10 retail segments from office supplies, apparel and electronics to HBA and supermarkets. Both assumed that marketers use e-mail to engage and possibly convert prospects and customers from passive interest to action. Both posit a direct causative correlation between e-mail campaigns and website traffic. 

Both analysts are strutting their stuff -- Forrester's crack analysts and E-mail Data Source's E-mail Analyst Database. Neither have spiffed me. But both identified a series of common problems which they reckon degrade the ability of e-mail marketing campaigns to accomplish marketers' primary objectives.

The Common Faults

1. Not in the Game.

27 of the campaigns in the Forrester set and 30% of the retailers did not capture e-mail addresses in the most obvious spot, the upper reaches of their website home pages. So roughly a third either missed their chance to play or consciously passed on the opportunity to engage customers and prospects.

2. Questionable Credibility

Many of the campaigns did not have physical addresses, were not CAN SPAM compliant, had no opt-out mechanism or links to set or adjust e-mail preferences. Many had no explicit privacy statements or links to privacy policy. Among retailers less than 5% used double opt-in techniques to validate addresses and subscriptions. Urgency, cheapness and a devil-may-care attitude characterizes companies who flout the established conventions.

Frequently these guys underestimate the impact of their sloppiness or greed on customers who have come to expect certain privacy guarantees and some baseline courtesies of identification and choice. The credible and responsible use of the medium directly reflects on the credibility of the sender and his value proposition. If you act like a SPAMMER you deserve to be treated like one.

3. Doubtful Messaging

More than half of the Forrester subject lines did NOT hint at the value to the user. And in only 11 of the 63 cases could you just scan the e-mail and pick up the basic message. Is it any surprise why opens and click-thrus are generally so low or sell-through is so difficult? Similarly a clear statement of purpose and benefit separated the successful retail e-mailers from the also-rans who found no reason to explain what they were doing, why or how it benefits customers to participate. As if customer confusion was a stated goal, 33% of retailers didn't send anything in the first 30 days of signing up for e-mail and 21% never sent a welcome message.

What's the point of sending out something if the recipient can't instantly understand what it is and why its great? There are no points awarded for anything but customer satisfaction and delight. Clarity is hard to acheive but well worth the investment to get there. If you can't be clear and make a compelling offer don't bother meeting the campaign schedule.

Its clear that any idiot can blast out e-mail or collect e-mail addresses. What's less clear is how to use a ubiquitous, fast, responsive medium responsibly for optimum effect in generating customer awareness, attention and repeated action.