Over the years I have had handfuls friends and family ask me the question “What exactly do you do at Aprimo?”  When I was still pretty new I would just reply “I do marketing for a marketing software company”.  This usually led to either confusion or laughter because marketing a marketing software sounded funny when you would repeat it out loud.  I too would laugh, but deep down it was bothersome because I wasn’t getting the correct message across about my job or the company’s product.

As time passed I became more familiarized with our solutions and began creating scenarios or situations to explain to those same individuals how our software was used in organizations today.  However, I quickly was put in my place when trying to describe our Email Marketing solution.  I started off explaining how our software can be used to create an email template, allows you to create the email content, gives you the ability to send that email, track if it was opened, automatically send another email in response to what links were opened or not opened, and then “score” that person on their actions for future marketing campaigns or messaging, but unfortunately my friend just replied “so you are the one sending me spam!”.  I had failed at getting the right message across and in return I was placed in a category that no marketing person or organization wants to be referred to.

So as I read the article “Ten Steps to Effective Email Marketing”, I can’t help but to remember those times and the struggles I originally had getting my message across.  I encourage you to download this free white paper and see if you can gather some additional tips and techniques in your own messaging and email marketing efforts. 
 

 Not Your Parent’s Old Company Newsletter

At the same time, Aprimo recently reintroduced eNewsletters to our customers, partners and prospects. Why? Anyone who receives information from Aprimo marketing knows we strive to provide useful tools to make marketer’s jobs more strategic and productive. Yet, in our internal marketing meetings, we always came back to a need for an interactive channel that tied all of our nurturing campaigns, thought leadership papers, resources, tools in best practices in a summarized, hyperlinked and easy-to-digest resource. We also wanted to turn up the dial on our listening meter.

What’s at the heart of a successful social media marketing campaign? Are there certain attributes that make one company’s efforts sparkle a little more brightly than others do?

According to ClickZ’s Liana Evans, Ford Motor Co. is a great example of a company that has fine-tuned its social media marketing to a point where it can serve as a robust case study in how to do it right, and in her recent blog post, “5 Reasons Why Ford Continues to Kick Butt,” she outlines the key points that make the automaker’s approach “shine.”

“For a few years now, Scott Monty has headed up the social media marketing efforts at Ford with resounding success,” Evans writes. “Monty and his team do more than just "pimp" Ford's products in social media communities; they continually provide valuable content about Ford to engage enthusiastic fans of the brand.”

More specifically, she distills the company’s approach down to five main points. Ford:
1. Understands its audience.
2. Learns from past campaigns.
3. Sets goals and measures.
4. Integrates.
5. Looks forward.

I particularly like that Evans  recognizes Ford’s integrated digital approach, one that includes a variety of platforms, such as Facebook (Did you see the 2011 Ford Explorer reveal?), PPC ads, YouTube videos, e-mail and Twitter –all of which, of course, work together with more traditional campaigns on tv, radio and print. This type of integration points back to the first point and shows, again, how Ford understands its audience and is ready, willing and able to reach out to them and encourage engagement.

Is there a particular social media marketing approach that you have seen work well? Which components are essential to your strategy?
 

I'm not tethered to my laptop, but I certainly couldn't say that of my iPhone and iPad.  Our new mobile app makes this more true than ever.  Here's my story...

If you're a marketer like me, you are always "on."  I mean you think a lot about marketing even when you're not at work.  Like you, as a consumer and business professional, I am  (as is my immediate family) bombarded constantly by off- and on-line messages, which never fail to get me thinking about the strategy and tactics behind a commercial message that is highly relevant.  I am particularly curious about the communications that completely miss the mark!    I'll also admit that I am a weekend peeker -- on my own marketing initiatives.  I like to know how marketing campaigns are progressing as well as the status of creative reviews, etc.  Don't get me wrong, I do have a life.   And, it just got better with our mobile app!

When I purchased my iPad, I said goodbye and closed my work laptop on Friday evening and used my iPad for everything digital, including managing my work and personal email boxes.  I couldn't, however, fulfill my desire to know the progress or status of some marketing activities or check the numbers on a campaign report, etc.   Sooooo... on occasion I'd boot up my laptop to access our integrated marketing software solution. (More than you think!)  

As of this Monday when we released our mobile app, I can stay with almost 100% confidence that I can power down my laptop on Friday for the whole weekend and still remain informed about my projects.  I am particularly excited about the ability to use my iPad and/or iPhone on workdays that take me away from my desk.   For starters, I plan to take my iPad instead of my laptop to certain industry events for note taking.  It's much more portable and easier to carry, and importantly, I have as much access to any of the marketing information I need -- email marketing reports, post campaign analyses, digital assets, etc.  And when the opportunity arises -- as it often does -- I can pull up a solution brochure and send it to an interested prospect on the spot.  Isn't being mobile with marketing automation awesome?

Check it out --

I had the pleasure of meeting with a former boss today to talk about the ins-and-outs of B2B data management, including off- and on-line information.  I've never met another person quite like Mike (I'll call him Mike here) who gets really giddy about addresses, or more specifically, the processes used to improve their accuracy and quality:

• convert and parse
• standardize components
• correct
• enhance
• update

The improvements in the address data, in turn, lead to improvements in merge-purge - that dedupe process that consolidates all the sources of information about an individual to produce a 360-degree customer (or prospect view) for marketing.  

Maybe you're thinking... but most B2B marketing is online, why do I need address processing anymore?Yes, the majority of B2B communications are digital, but without address information you will struggle to:

• append firmographic information from industry files
• match to industry master lists to tie parent and child records together
• link individuals at the same company site
• match to industry data assets to standardize company name
• assign Sales reps by geography (unless you require Zip Code at the time of registration) 
• link revenue to marketing efforts

Most importantly, however, is the importance of quality address data to create the single customer and/or customer view, which remains a huge challenge for many B2B marketers.  And the challenge is only getting bigger with the continued expansion of data available for use.  Everything B2B marketers do is better when the data are accurate -- campaign segmentations, interactive email dialogs, lead management and results analysis.

It's been a while since I've been in the B2C and B2B data management trenches like Mike, and they've made some real strides in helping B2B organizations improve the quality of their marketing data.  

Here's another little advancement:  Linking home address to work address.  It's not out of reach!  With home address, the data available to you about the individual grows exponentially.  Isn't it an exciting time to be in B2B marketing!? 

Let me know what your biggest data management challenges are.  I guess I get a little giddy about address data, too.  I learned from the best.  (Thanks, Mike.)

cg

Have you been keeping up with the mobile ad wars between Google and Apple? The wars started back in November 2009 when Google announced plans to buy the AdMob network. Apple responded by launching its new iAd network, which sends ads to iPhone users.  

• According to SNL Kagan, virtually 100 percent of Americans will have mobile devices by the year 2013.
• Punchkick Interactive & Mobile Marketing Watch claims there are twice as many “texters” as email users worldwide.
• Forrester Research estimates that this half-billion dollar industry will surpass $1.25 billion in 2014.

Good luck – and I hope to see you on my iPhone soon.

I was looking for some stats on email deliverability recently, and turned to MarketingSherpa's 2010 Email Marketing Benchmark Report.  As I paged through some of the charts and read through some of the theories (for the results), I found one particularly interesting -- The Actions Marketers take to Improve Email Deliverability.  Thought I would share this with other marketers who like numbers and an opportunity to look for implications:

For all companies responding, regardless of size or marketing focus (B2B or B2C):

• 70% cited changing their email marketing template
• 32% switched from a shared IP to a dedicated one
• 30% said they changed email service providers 

Obviously multiple answers were permitted.  When I looked at the numbers when they broke them down by company size (L = +1000 employees; M = 100 to 1000; and S = <100), it seemed that the medium sized companies outpaced their large and small counterparts to implement delivery service monitoring.  Small companies actually switched email service providers at a significantly higher rate than large and medium companies.  I figured that result may be correlated to the fact that they also had the highest incidence of an in-house solution.  Perhaps they realize that they are not in the email delivery business and should leave that to the experts.

I agree.  Email marketing is clearly the dominant communication vehicle used by B2B marketers, and Return Path's research shows that B2B inboxes are still the most difficult to reach.  Marketers know delivery requires the right mix of technology, services and relationships (between the physical mail sender and ISPs) to maximize inbox placement rates -- i.e., get delivered. 

I'd love to hear some more discussion about what everyone thinks of the 70% that changed their template.  Tell me your experiences!

I was reading the results of a study that challenged B2B marketers long-held belief that human emotions were only a factor in personal purchases, but not commercial ones.  Even without the research, I never believed emotions weren't a factor.  I mean did every human being leave their emotions behind when they arrived at the office?  Quite the contrary, they combined it with the other colleagues on the purchase team. 

Creating relevant email marketing messages and offers takes more than just understanding the organization's business challenges and how you can solve them.  It's about addressing the single key emotion of the buyers -- fear.  In consumer marketing there is an emotional play on Risk and Reward, which does not exist in B2B marketing.  The individual doesn't achieve a personal "reward" for the purchase, which leaves Risk uncountered.  Hence, today's buyer's goal is not to make the best decision, but to avoid exposure to risk.

I think today's marketing automation software aptly equips B2B marketers to adopt relevant B2C tactics, one of which is personalized promotional communications that appeal to the emotional aspects of the purchase.  Use inbound forms to foster 2-way dialogs that result in information capture that reveals something about the individual's thoughts about purchasing solutions for their company.  Face it, it feels more personal when ask about them, not the business.  Use these data, combined with their role and other data to drive dynamic content in your email messages.

You'll still need to focus on the business challenges, but start thinking of your prospects as individuals with human emotions, one of which greatly influences their purchase decisions -- fear. 

My colleague/boss (when you’re a neophyte, everyone is your boss), Jeff Chamberlain, will be posting a blog soon on mobile marketing.  Mobile marketing is a new term for me, and I find the topic intriguing.  As such, I wanted to share a few of my own thoughts:

There have been multiple marketing fashions in the past 15 years.  Email, Internet, and Social Media marketing each ruled the world at one point, and still do in many ways.  Their value to marketers and consumers alike remains formidable, yet at the same time, I believe the world is changing.  A new force is entering the world; and it’s stronger and shows more potential than any other marketing tool.  This force is mobile marketing and it could become the king of communication.  So, move over LeBron James.  Other Kings deserve a chance in the spotlight.

Here’s why I think it’ll happen.  Unlike television, internet, email, social media, and other sources of mass communication, mobile phones are literally everywhere.  Cell phones outnumber computers 20:1 in sub-saharan Africa. I imagine that the same statistic would probably hold true for parts of Asia, Eastern Europe, Middle East, and South America.  Mobile phones have infiltrated every region and street corner in the world.   Toilet paper hasn’t even been able to accomplish that feat, yet.

With the prevalence of mobile phones, we have the potential to reach consumers that we previously thought unattainable, and we have the ability to increase brand awareness in more parts of the world that we could not reach before.  In essence, the mobile phone creates a new market of consumers.  No other media has been able to create a new market; they simply have allowed easier and better access to existing markets.  Being able to create a new market surely warrants a ‘King’ title, doesn’t it? 

When I worked for Oracle Corporation and was leading the charge globally to market CRM – I used to joke onstage that I didn’t know where my inbox was in the mailroom. It was more than a joke, it was true. That physical inbox has been replaced with my multiple, digital email inboxes. When I scan the subject headings, I often wish the companies sending the emails didn’t know where my inbox is –and, I’ve opted in for many of these messages.

More than half of the marketing e-mails sent to consumers would be opened and read if marketers designed them to reflect the consumers’ personal preferences and interests, according to a new report from e-Dialog.

The report, Manifesto for E-mail Marketers: Consumers Demand Relevance, is based on a survey of about 2,000 consumers in the United States and the United Kingdom, and it shows that a large segment of consumers across all vertical industries want marketers to exhibit intimate knowledge of their preferences, interests and purchase history. Specifically, consumers want marketers to demonstrate that they know:

• The types of products or services they like – 64 percent
• The types of offers they like – 61 percent
• Whether they are a new or returning customer – 54 percent
• Their communications preferences – 47 percent
• Their shopping habits (e.g., online searching, in-store visits, catalog purchases, etc) – 36 percent

But, will making the effort to cater your message to particular preferences like these really pay off? The data suggests it will.

For starters, the report found that e-mail use remains high, with a whopping 78 percent of consumers in the U.S. and U.K. using e-mail several times a day. But, e-Dialog also found that e-mail users are selective. Nearly 60 percent of those surveyed said they dismiss marketing e-mails that are irrelevant and too frequent.

To me, that’s a clear indication that the “one-to-many” model of e-mail marketing is broken, and that if you want to improve your results, you need to start engaging in strategies that are more personal, conversational and interactive.  According to e-Dialog, successful e-mail campaigns now depend on preference capture and improved contact management, using strategies such as site registration, frequency metering, testing and behavior analysis.

The 10-page report is available for download here (registration required), and if you’re interested in e-mail marketing, it’s well worth a few minutes of your time. In the report, e-Dialog examines key findings on what consumers want included in the messages they receive, such as highly tailored product recommendations and task-oriented notices, and even more importantly, how marketers can achieve greater relevance in their e-mail programs. 

If you want some quick tips on email marketing, Aprimo has a whitepaper on this topic that you can download here:

Aprimo’s Ten Steps to Effective Email Marketing

If you're an interactive marketing professional who uses email marketing software and email deliverability solutions or you work with clients that do, there's a good chance that you've either asked yourself or have been asked:

 What are the email marketing best practices for:

• Subject Line Length
• Day to Send
• Time of Day to Send
• Copy/Creative Length

First, let's get on the same page with the definition of a best practice.  Wikipedia defines a best practice as a technique, method, process, activity, incentive, or reward that is believed to be more effective at delivering a particular outcome than any other technique, method, process, etc. when applied to a particular condition or circumstance.  

If you're like me, you know that best practices are those tips, benchmark comparisons and guideposts for which marketers must pay.  No one gives it away free.  And those that you find free in the public domain would suffer from oversimplification bias.  That is, it would likely be simplified from the detail so it "applies" to all or most marketers.  The problem is that going too far to simplify the information distorts the original information.   That's industry research reports cost money. The researchers use representative industry samples for their research.  And the reports often show results by B2C versus B2B, by large companies versus small companies, by organization type (client-side versus service provider) and sometimes by industry.  The details matter.

All is not lost, as the beauty of 1:1 marketing is testing.  Test your subject line length.  Test to determine if action words drive incremental opens, click-throughs and conversions.  If you have a marketing automation solution like Aprimo, you can pre-test on a small random sample and then quickly move to production with the winner(s).  I love data-driven marketing, and in particular, the digital channel for the ability to conduct tests in near real-time.  It's a wonderful thing when a marketer has access to actionable data.   So use your experience and talent and answer those questions for yourself.  They're sure to be applicable to your business without caveat.

• Subject lines. Send your control email to one group, but swap in a different subject line on your challenger email.
• Headlines. Leave everything the same between control and challenger, except for the text of the headline.
• Body copy. Here’s where you put your copywriter to work. If your control has long copy, test shorter copy in your challenger (and vice versa). Or, if your control takes a gentle approach, test a punchy, in-your-face challenger.
• Calls-to-action. Reword your call-to-action in your challenger. Note that this does not mean you change the offer itself—only the way you drive people towards it.
• Single design elements. Let your graphic team get creative. Swap in a new banner, Download button, link color, or sidebar. Again—make only one change at a time!

• Aprimo Marketing Studio has campaign management tools to randomly split your groups for A/B testing of outbound messages. In addition you can use criteria to dynamically serve up different content in emails and microsites and monitor results through your dashboard to focus on the best results and learn for future efforts.
• Google Website Optimizer is a free Google service that lets you present different content and design options to your visitors. Google tracks the conversion results.
• SiteSpect lets you run not only A/B testing, but also multivariate testing in which you test many changes at the same time.
• Omniture Test&Target is an interface for designing and executing your tests.
• Webtrends Optimize provides a unified testing and targeting platform.
• Vertster speeds up the process of performing multivariate testing, when you’re ready to go there.

Got a gut feeling about what works and what doesn’t? Use testing to check those hunches and back them up with measurable results. You can be sure your top competitors are already doing it. So, move A/B testing to your front burner today—and make it an ongoing part of your efforts.

So, put these steps into action on your next email marketing campaign. Making even one small change can increase your delivery rates and make a noticeable difference in your marketing ROI.

It’s one of our biggest issues as email marketers. It's a 2-pronged problem - Email Marketing. First, we worry about whether or not the email will even reach the target. (Wrong addresses, SPAM-triggering subject lines, filters, etc.) But second, we must take measures to protect our reputation. Junk mail doesn’t simply sit in a bulk folder anymore. It gets reported back to your ISP where they compile a list of your damaging deeds.  Not only that, but some ISPs are starting to grade the relevance of your email and reflect that in your ability to deliver.

So how do you, an email marketer, protect yourself AND reach your audience? First you must ask your provider or your in-house resource these 7 questions:

1. What is our opt-in policy? 
Double opt-in is a best practice required by many ISPs in order to be considered for white listing. To do this, you send a unique link to someone when they request information. Before adding the person to your list they must click that unique link verifying that they are indeed the same person that owns the email address and requested a subscription.  Yes, you will get a smaller list as some people will miss the confirm or change their mind…but you will have a good solid opt-in list that is more engaged.

2. Who handles our email marketing white listing and responses to black listing?
Some large providers such as AOL and Yahoo! have specific white listing programs and postmaster website areas to ensure your email is delivered as long as you meet their policies in handling your opt-in list. You should apply to these white list services and review any materials provided to make your email compliant. You also need to monitor blacklists and make sure you are not being put on the “bad” list.  Blacklists make it difficult (if not impossible) to contact them and make changes.  However, monitoring them will alert you to the fact that you are doing something wrong so you will look into it and make changes.

3. Do we take advantage of SPF and DKIM?
SPF is Sender Policy Framework and is one of the fundamentals of email marketing best practices. It allows administrators to specify which hosts are allowed to send e-mail. DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) allows an organization to take responsibility for a message in a way that can be validated by a recipient.  Both of these are alphabet soup for “things ISPs check to make sure you are a legitimate email marketing”.  It’s one more thing to separate you from the spammers.

4. What is our policy for list cleanup of old addresses?
Be sure to remove all hard bounces that come back as undeliverable. Repeatedly sending to an invalid email will set off red flags with most ISPs. And remove inactive subscribers – they’re most likely to mark your email as junk.  ISPs maintain spam trap email addresses.  If they see you repeatedly sending to bad emails instead of cleansing your list, this will eventually put you on a spam list.

5. How do we handle throttling of big sends?
Send in spurts: Some ISPs have limits as to how many emails you can send in a given period of time. If you’re having trouble sending email to a particular ISP, see if they give you the ability to stage the email over a longer period of time.

6. To avoid being marked as spam, what are some subject line best practices?
Avoid “spammy” words like guarantee, credit card, sex, etc.; (The jury is still out on the word “free.” Some people swear by it, others say it’s a sure-fire filter trigger.) Avoid using all caps as well as excessive punctuation. Always match your subject line to your email content.

7. What is the message mix that works best for HTML vs Image?
Avoid creating messages that are entirely images. Use images sparingly, if possible. If sending HTML, it is important to always send a plain text alternative message, also called text/HTML multi-part mime format. 

These are just the basic email marketing best practices and there are plenty of additional articles providing tips and information. Being a reputable digital citizen takes a great deal of stewardship and maintenance. Making sure you have a person dedicated to the task is a good place to start.

If you have the data, there’s tremendous value in segmenting. In fact, a recent JupiterResearch study found that engaging your audiences in more relevant communications increases net profits by an average of 18 times more than broadcast mailings. Any bit of segmenting from your data will help. You may have gleaned customer information directly from online forms; or you’re collecting behavioral data from PPC search activity or through your website analytics platform by visiting trending data. Whatever the case, it’s invaluable to the success of your communications – whether it’s your monthly newsletter or an on-going nurture campaign.

Start by making each email count by implementing email marketing best practices. Here are 3 primary steps you can take to increase your email’s ROI:

1.  Be relevant and personal. The basics here are tried and true: Talk to your customers the way they want to be talked to; know their purchase history and timing. 1 to 1 Media’s 2009 Direct Marketing Survey found that Relevancy improved click-thrus by 53%. And for Pete’s sake, don’t annoy by over-emailing.
2.  Try advanced segmentation. While the basics help a lot, try something beyond your comfort zone to see if you can score major lifts. Things to try: gender, location, hobbies, type of company (for b2b). Keep splitting your lists. There are plenty of tools out there to help with this.
3.  Engage new customers. Sounds obvious but many marketers miss this crucial step. You have a very small window of opportunity with new visitors; make sure you give them your best, and most welcoming, shot. Find something that new visitors value – research, analyst reports, intriguing white papers, case studies with real data for example.

Once you’ve started, take segmentation as far as your data allows.  One motorcycle company used segmentation to create new lists based on riding styles, then further divided those segments into lists based on purchase history and email behaviors. Their new, highly targeted email campaign achieved DOUBLE the open rates (38.6%, up from 18.5%), and TRIPLE the clickthroughs. (20.6% from 6.2%.)

Not only does segmentation allow you to drive a more personalized message that leads to higher performance, by segmenting on previous response history you can reduce your actual email sending costs simply by sending to the smaller, more qualified list.

 A customer who is communicated to in just the right way earns your trust. And that’s the ultimate success. So start being smart about using your data to really relate to your customer. As an added bonus, you’re sure to reduce your costs and increase your ROI.
 

Like many other terms, Marketing Optimization (MO) can hold different meanings for different marketers.  For online marketers, it means developing marketing campaigns that do A/B testing on emails and microsite pages to see which one’s generate the most opens, click-thrus, conversions, etc.  Those emails and web pages that underperform are eliminated in favor of the best performers.  For other marketers, MO means optimizing your communication strategy across campaigns and marketing channels to improve response, customer loyalty and profit.  It is the later meaning that this article will focus on.

Initially, optimization was used as a way to mathematically determine the optimal allocation of scarce resources. The concept has been borrowed by business analysts to aid decision-making.  Optimization has been used in the areas of the manufacturing supply chain, airline revenue yields, and financial investment risk assessment. More recently, the concept is being adopted by marketing.

Every day, marketers face realities like competing business goals, campaigns, channels, budget constraints, and product managers with myopic views, to name a few.   Large companies are often faced with campaign calendars that may not represent an ideal communication plan with its customers.  The below diagram illustrates this phenomenon for an electronics retailer.



As you can see, campaigns and customers associated with these campaigns can easily overlap.  If you are a prospect in each of these campaigns, will you feel overwhelmed by the number of contacts?  If you are a marketer with limited budget, how should your prioritize your spend across campaigns to generate desired response rates or ROI?  With multi-LOB companies with many products and services, it makes great sense to employ some degree of intelligence into the marketing equation to ensure a win-win outcome for companies, LOB’s, and last of all but not least, customers.

MO across campaigns and channels typically relies on the development of business rules, the utilization of sophisticated mathematical algorithms, or both.  Most software applications that use mathematical algorithms typically use linear or non-linear algorithms that attempt to maximize an objective function (e.g., response rates, profit), while imposing constraints.  Constraints may include: budgets, minimum/maximum number of offers per customer and/or campaign, channel capacities, etc.  While very powerful, optimization algorithms are problematic to use.  They require statisticians that build customer response and valuation models, as well as profitability models.  This takes time and money.  Then there is the issue of ensuring the algorithms actually find the global minimum (cost) or maximum (response rate) as desired.  The image below helps to visualize this issue.



It’s possible for algorithms to find “local” minimum/maximums that lead to sub-optimal marketing outcomes.  That being said, in the hands of the right practitioners, mathematical optimization can create significant marketing ROI.  So, short of the required expertise and/or budget, what are marketers to do?

More recently, software vendors have tackled this issue via the development of business rules that marketers can build.  Business rules can work within and across campaigns to optimize your communication plan.  Examples of business rules include:

• No more than 2 weekly communications via any channel to a customer, to minimize fatigue
   
• Make the best of multiple potential offers based on profit, revenue, or likelihood to purchase, as examples.
   
• If a customer may be touched by multiple campaigns in the next month, only communicate with them about the two campaigns with the highest priority.

These types of rules can easily be developed using a point-and-click interface like that found in Aprimo’s Contact Optimization module. 

So, business rules are easy to create and use -- there must be a downside, right?  Yes, there are tradeoffs associated with simplicity and ease-of-use.  Some of those include:

• We are really not optimizing an outcome from a mathematical point of view.
   
• Business rules support “subtraction”, i.e., supporting the imposition of a maximum number of touches, offers, etc.  Linear and non-linear algorithms can do that, but they can also impose minimums like, the number of offers or contacts per campaign.

Keep a look out for my next article that will continue this discussion and provide some real-life case studies.

 

• Transaction data - For every sale, you at least need to know the product and the amount and date of the purchase.
   
• Past campaign response data - For every campaign you've run, you need to identify who responded and who didn't.  You may need to use direct and indirect response attribution.
   
• Geo-demographic data - This is optional, but you may want to append your customer file/database with consumer overlay data from companies like Acxiom.
   
• Lifestyle data - This is also an optional append of indicators of socio-economic lifestyle that are developed by companies like Claritas.

• Missing data analysis. What fields have missing values? Should you fill in the missing values? If so, what values do you use? Should the field be used at all?
   
• Outlier detection. Is “33 children in a household” extreme? Probably — and consequently this value should be adjusted to perhaps the average or maximum number of children in your customer’s households.
   
• Transformations and standardizations. When various fields have vastly different ranges (e.g., number of children per household and income), it’s often helpful to standardize or normalize your data to get better results. It’s also useful to transform data to get better predictive relationships. For instance, it’s common to transform monetary variables by using their natural logs.
   
• Binning Data. Binning continuous variables is an approach that can help with noisy data. It is also required by some data mining algorithms.

I'd love to hear your questions or comments if you have a few moments over the Holidays. 

My best to you and your family!
Jim

Forrester's recently published study on Interactive Marketing (email, social, dialog, banner, etc.) reveals 68% of survey respondents expect to achieve increased email marketing effectiveness over the next three years.  Furthermore, survey respondents also indicated they would increase interactive marketing budgets by 60% by shifting funding away from traditional channels: direct mail (40%), Newspapers (35%) and Magazines (28%).  The picture that is emerging here is one where marketers have high expectations on interactive marketing and expect to focus less on traditional channels.  A lot will be riding on this reallocation of marketing budget -- so what will marketers have to do right to fulfill their hopes and expectations?  This particular blog will address best practices that must be followed by email marketers.  Future blogs will address social and dialog marketing in detail.

I don't know about you, but I'm not sure I can handle more emails coming into my professional and personal inboxes.  I get so many from the same companies that I don't even open them -- not even when they come from companies I opted into.  Companies that email too frequently create so much "white-noise" that it affects their open rates as well as the open rates for other companies.   In addition to white-noise emails, I also get many others that made me think -- "why did I even get this?...I don't smoke, so why am i offered a smart smoker trial?"..."I have only rented mystery and adventure movies from you, so why are you telling me about The Lion King release?"  You experience the same things and feel the same way too.  So, what can email marketers do to ensure success and rise above the noise and mediocrity we see everyday?  It takes only three things -- relevancy, segmentation and testing.  These three tactics are the key building blocks to optimizing your email marketing efforts.

Relevancy - A blog I posted a couple of weeks ago spoke to email relevancy -- that it's about personalizing the email, segmenting your audience and testing your content (copy, images, subject lines, etc).

Segmentation - Your audience will differ by demographics, personality, shopping habits, geography, etc.  Simple segmentations where different messages are sent to each segment can deliver huge marketing ROI.  A recent Marketing Experiments webinar offered a case study on American Greetings.com (AG).  AG's goal for their email campaign was to increase individual Ecard purchases as well as Annual Subscriptions.  They created two segments -- Segment A contained customers that purchased humorous Ecards in the past, while Segment B contained customers that purchased traditional Ecards.  Each segment got an email that spoke to their interests based on this past purchase behavior.  This simple use of segmentation resulted in a 70% improvement in conversion rates when compared to a control group -- that's HUGE!   Just imagine what more sophisticated segmentation schemes might produce!

Frequency - Ok, so I have a real issue with this particular topic.  I  can't begin to tell you how much junk I get in my inbox.  I don't even open emails from some marketers and yet I still get an email every day from them -- please do some analysis on open rates and realize, I'm just not into Chocolate Covered Strawberries -- OK?!  Oh yes, back to the informational part of my message...  The same webinar by Marketing Experiments (I suggest you Google them!) provided another case study on a very large anonymous Ecommerce company.  They segmented their customers into seven segments.  Each segment got a different number of emails over a 60 day period.  At the extremes, one segment got an email every other day, while the other got an email every 15 days.  During the webinar, the audience was polled to see what they thought the optimal number of emails would be.  They chose 3-4 per month based on their own experiences and readings.  Well, the actual results were quite surprising.  Their test showed that customers that received emails every two days produced 3X the revenue of the segments that got 2-4 emails per month.  In fact, there was a significant positive correlation across all segments based on the number of emails they received (see below graph).



You would think this is illogical.  Most email marketers believe we face the tradeoff shown below -- that there will be an increase in revenues at first, but then we'll experience more unsubscribes or non-opens as the frequency increases.



So, what is the disparity between the experience of the webinar audience and the results of this study?  Well, we are simply seeing that each company has a unique customer base and a unique relationship with them.  You can't just assume your optimal frequency should be what is best "on average" or for a specific company they read about.  It means that every company must do segmentation and testing to determine the right frequency for their unique audience.

Caveats? -- there is always one or more:

1) Tell your ESP that you'll be doing experiments and they may see greater volume than normal.  After all, you don't want to be blacklisted.

2) Also look at open rates and unsubscribes during your testing.  The anonymous email marketer in the 2nd case study saw no correlation between frequency, and open rates or unsubscribes per email sent.  But your experience may be different.  Remember, an unsubscribe doesn't just effect revenue from a given campaign, but it also erases expected/future customer lifetime value.

Marketers on the street often come up to me and ask, "How many times can I contact my customers and prospects?"  Actually, marketers do not come up to me and ask me this question, but they should be asking someone this question.  Actually, I decided to write this blog because I am surprised how many organizations do not manage the number of time  customer and prospect communications much at all.  In some cases customers and prospects are being barraged with marketing communication to the point that the communication is becoming less and less effective.

Opt-Outs First
There are customers and prospects that you should not be contacting at all.  These are individuals that have asked to be removed (opted-out) from your marketing communication.  If someone asks to no longer receive your marketing messages by all channels, or by a specific marketing channel of email, mail, or call, then they are probably not interested in your messages or in receiving your offers via that specific channel.  The customer or prospect by providing you this information has just saved you money, increased your response rate, and has provided you a preference. So, you should use that information.