My summer internship comes to a close today. It has been a tumultuous and exciting past 10 weeks, and I couldn’t be more grateful to Aprimo for giving me the opportunity to glean information from them as I progress in my studies.  I want to take a few minutes to share with everyone 5 or 6 lessons I’ve learned this summer.  Through the travesties and victories, from the impersonal to the personal, my hope is that at least one my points will serve as forewarnings and expectations for future neophytes.

1) After 10 weeks, I’m still a neophyte.  What’s between my ears is considered a brain, but what I truly know is infinitesimally small compared to everyone else.  Nonetheless, I hope my hunger for knowledge will never be satiated.  I will always be a neophyte.

2) Thank God for Aprimo software.  Proving ROI and breaking down silos within marketing is much, much, much harder than I ever imagined.  Our leaders and our software programmers deserve flowers.

3) Marketing is much more than the 4P theory of price, product, promotion, and place. 

4) Marketing is not much more than some hard work, common sense, and creative ideas.

5) Prediction number 1: I bet I could make a lot of money if I copywrite the phrase “Spam SMS Text Messaging”.  Mobile marketing will become the next big thing in the marketing space.

6) Prediction number 2: Customers will love Spam SMS Text Messaging.  It’s not considered spam if the message is personal, directed, and relevant, which is exactly what mobile marketing delivers.  

While the summer does to come to a close, my internship has been extended part-time through December.  Thus, for all my avid fans who anxiously await my new pieces, I will continue to entertain (or bore) at least through December.  I will be on vacation next week, but stay tuned.  In the words of Arnold, “I’ll be back”.  To all my Aprimo friends and other strangers I have met on this summer journey, thank you.  It has been a splendid summer stint, and I cannot wait to continue the marketing revolution with you.
 

My aunt is an extremely successful business person, and has worked her way up to a high-level corporate position for a very large company.  I usually go to her for career and business advice if I ever find myself in a scenario I’m unfamiliar with, which is often.  She was in town last week and as usual, we started talking about my career, where I’m going, what I want to do, etc.  Obviously, I’m interested in marketing and hence the subject of marketing was brought up in conversation.  During our discourse, she casually said, “anyone can do marketing, and that marketing is the first one to go when companies begin their layoffs.”  I should point out that she received her start in Operations, so she does have a bias, but nonetheless, her comments got me thinking…

I want to start with the second point of her statement.  “Marketing is the first one to go when companies begin their layoffs.”  This statement validates the very core of Aprimo’s messaging.  As part of our new marketing initiatives, we are honing in on the point that marketers must prove their ROI.  If marketers can prove their worth, then suddenly, they’re off the chopping block.  On the flipside, her statement is telling me that we’re not doing enough.  Our message must continue to be pushed out.  So, please join our revolution and help us spread the message and the value of marketing.

Now for the first part of her statement, “anyone can do marketing.”  I’ve never thought of marketing as that truly anyone can do it.  However, I am unable to prove her wrong.  After all, we spend our lives marketing ourselves and trying to look better in the eyes of our friends, coworkers, spouses, children, and acquaintances.  Resumes are simply a whitepaper on yourself.  Interviews are a product demo.  Your social media pages represent your brand.  Every minute of every day, we spend marketing ourselves.  Looking at marketing in this light, I suppose anyone can do marketing.  However, I’m looking for some disagreements.  What are everyone else’s thoughts?   
 

At the Aprimo Marketing Summit in February of this year, we gathered a group of our customers, partners, and thought leaders together for the spark that has now become a crowd-sourced effort to define the Imperatives of the Marketing Revolution.  The group defined some of the initial imperatives which have since grown to a list of ten.  We are publishing articles on each imperative over time with input coming from those initial discussions and further research and conversations we are having with marketers across the globe.  The first two have been published - "Marketing Must Be Accountable" and "The CMO Must Be the Change Agent." 

I thought it would be good to blog some about these imperatives through a B2B Marketing lens.  I'll focus on the first imperative and then catch up to our publishing schedule and blog on this as we release the furture imperative articles.

Marketing Must Be Accountable -
So what does this mean?  Accountable implies we are responsible for the results - good or bad.  I think in general marketers are willing to admit when something works and when it doesn't.  I don't know that marketing inherently shys away from responsibility for what they do.  The real issue here is knowing what worked and what didn't.  There have been multiple studies on the average tenure of a CMO giving visibility to the fact that CMOs seem to be the shortest tenure on Executive Teams overall.  Why is that?  The simple answer is that revenue didn't increase under that CMO...however, the Sales Exec, the CEO and other Business Unit leaders would fall victim to this same issue and they have longer average tenures.  No...the real reason is the CMO's ability to answer the obvious question about revenue shortfalls...."Why did this happen?"  CMOs in the past have not been able to answer this fundamental question.  We still live in the shadow of John Wanamaker's lament over knowing which half of his marketing was effective.

Now B2B CMOs have advantages and disadvantages that are unique.  On the advantage side, there are not as many B2B marketers that are heavily invested in TV, Radio, Print and general outdoor advertising that is, quite frankly, harder to measure.  A larger majority of B2B marketing happens online which is clearly easier to track.  On the other side, it is much harder to attribute one marketing action to a result in B2B marketing.  The sales cycles are long and there are a number of touches that happen during the buying cycle.  This makes it harder to pull out the things that are working. It becomes a portfolio analysis to see what combination of touches led to revenue and find the common elements.  You also need to look at your marketing aligned to the buying cycle and see what content is being successful at moving prospects to the next stage.  The term "content marketing" is starting to show up around this issue.

Aprimo addresses this at the fundamental data level.  Aprimo makes it very easy to associate multiple attributes and multiple touches to a specific individual within a specific company.  This provides a portion of the picture required to start to tackle this problem.  For example, purchase history, browsing history and marketing touches can easily be associated with an individual in the Aprimo database.  This can come from multiple data sources including the integration to your SFA tool of choice where this contact is tracked as a lead to an opportunity to a closed deal via lead management and synchronization with the sales funnel in the SFA.  The reporting engine in Aprimo then allows you to get at this data to explore the marketing aspects that are working. In addition, you can easily export data for analysis in a Business Intelligence tool.  When you combine this with the ability to track the true marketing spend of your programs and activities, you can track true Marketing ROI.

So, the CMO Must Be Accountable.  To get to this point, they need to be a Change Agent...but that gets to the next imperative...which will be covered in the next blog.

Don’t count on it. ROI in advertising and marketing was even a concept back in the 1960’s – the period that AMC’s hit series Mad Men takes place.

It’s a popular show because Mad Men strikes a chord with viewers for being factually correct with bad manners prevalent for the period: womanizing, especially by Sterling Cooper’s Don Draper; desk side chain smoking; lunch cocktails and office parties; and, the agency’s struggle with how to harness the power of the newest marketing channel: color television.

My CMO, Lisa Arthur, has asked me to read a series of articles written by Dr. John A. Quelch, a professor at Harvard’s business school.  His words are quite enlightening and I encourage everyone to peruse through some of his works.  In one of his articles, “Bringing Customers into the Boardroom,” he demonstrates the revolution that marketing is experiencing.

Quelch argues that for the majority of companies, the marketing strategies and activities are not in line with the corporate strategy.  He continues to argue that boardrooms and CEOs are more concerned with “governance and financial purity…mergers and acquisitions, executive incentive packages, and succession planning” than they are about meeting the customers’ needs.  As a result of the misalignment, three main consequences occur which all result in the destruction of shareholder value.  First, marketing departments are not held financially responsible for their actions.  Second, brand equity is no longer a concern of the boardrooms.  Third, companies have failed to keep pace with the recent, rapid change in the fundamental nature of marketing.

Quelch’s solution to the conundrum is to create a dashboard with various metrics that marketing can present to the board.  I believe it is a call for all marketers to begin proving their worth.  Or, as High School musical says, “Get Your Head in the Game!”  (I know that song because I have a 14 year-old sister.  Not because I enjoy the show.)  So, this is a call to all CMOs, Marketing Managers, Marketers, and Neophytes the world around, please, please, please for the love of ROI, “Get Your Head in the Game!”  Prove to the world that you can play with the big boys. 
 

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.

All dietary preferences aside, what I’m talking about here is planting, nurturing and tending your relationships rather than going for the quick kill. And that’s crucial in order to be taken seriously in the new “trust economy”.

People are bombarded with social media content and social media advertising these days.  From celebrities and sports stars to companies and organizations, having a Facebook page is de rigueur, tweeting the latest activity standard operating procedure.  Your audience has very tiny slivers of attention available for what you have to say, so you’d better make it count. Make it relevant and personal, and worthwhile, too, or you’re dead in the cyberwater.

You can start by being a real person. You’re not your product or service. You’re a living, breathing human being with real interests and opinions to share. Let them be known, and let yourself come through as a person. People can spot a marketing pitch a mile away, and they will block you out as fast as you can say ROI.

People turn to others whose opinions they trust when it comes time to consider a product or service. So you need to learn the skill of identifying the influencers, and develop those relationships. As Chris Brogan and Julien Smith say in Trust Economies: Investigations into the New ROI of the Web:

“The goal isn’t to roam around on social networks handpicking friends. Instead, get involved with communities of interest, and grow these experiences and relationships BEFORE you need them.”

So think long term here, people. If you’re building relationships strictly for business, they will be short-lived. But if you have a genuine interest in ongoing relationships with people, the customer part will follow. Find those people that have something to do with your product and ask them about their own interests – their projects, problems and challenges. And paramount here, you must be honest. If they have something negative to say about your product, respond and take measures to improve it. That’s establishing trust, rather than fishing around for good comments about what you’re selling. They are looking for better ways to do things...not marketing automation.  Start the relationship by listening and learning.

Everyone’s filters are on high alert these days, and it takes time and careful tending to grow your trust base. Don’t squander this opportunity to have it flourish by pressing your marketing agenda.  Get your overalls on and start farming.

A recent Gartner report ventured that marketing budgets at many larger companies may have been cut by 20% or more in 2009. While the economy was certainly tightening at that time, one of the drivers of that reduction is the difficulty in measuring marketing effectiveness. It’s a high spend category with little clear proof of ROI, so that’s why marketing budgets get slashed, especially when times get a little tough. The danger here is that without accurate measurement, organizations don’t know where to trim and may end up cutting valuable programs. The right Marketing Operations solution can help by:

Giving you a complete marketing picture.
Get an end-to-end picture of precisely what is taking place in the marketing lifecycle, from origination through to fulfillment. In this way, bottlenecks can be quickly and efficiently identified and removed.

Protecting your brand.
Manage artwork and approvals using a structured system that ensures marketing and brand managers see and approve new marketing collateral before it goes to print or is released via online channels.

Providing better organization for your creative assets.
Assets can be organized by campaign, project, job number or any other reference and stored in a permanent web-based archive. And they can be quickly found by staff for revision or reuse, long after a marketing campaign has ended.

Improving team communication.
Marketing Operations programs have built-in options to notify managers as key events occur, such as the approval of artwork, or delivery of collateral to channel partners.

Accelerating delivery times.
Flexible workflows make it far easier for staff and suppliers, from one or many regions collaborating on a campaign or project, to share information and speed approvals.

Allowing you to refine marketing operations as you go.
Marketing Operations programs give managers the tools to analyze, revise and benchmark improvements to the marketing lifecycle in hours - not weeks, months or years.

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. There are dozens of Marketing Operations solutions out there with hundreds of features, and you need to do your research to find the one that will optimize your own marketing efforts. Start with this report from Gartner (they call Marketing Ops MRM or Marketing Resource Management), “Magic Quadrant for Marketing Resource Management.” It describes the strengths and attributes of today’s leading Marketing Operations software providers. Good luck!
 

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.

 

Technology now sits at the core of every Brand’s marketing activities.

Point solutions prevail for those brands that are still finding their way in the digital world (Microsite Software, Search Marketing Software, Marketing Communication Software etc).

As the level of sophistication grows, however, marketers find it increasingly difficult to hold all the moving parts together. At this stage, marketers are faced with 3 options:

1.       Work longer hours

2.       Grow the team

3.       Find a smarter way of working

Work smarter, not harder – Coordinate your efforts!

If your marketing sophistication is in the ascendancy and you’re wondering when you’ll find time to sleep in your efforts to stay on top of the complexity that this generates, you need a platform that pulls it all together (Marketing Professional Software).

If you can link your Capture, Engage and Convert activities in one place, you can not only streamline your processes (Marketing Workflow), you will also surface the crucial Marketing ROI that CFOs now rightly demand to justify budgets. Clear collaboration with Sales (B2B & B2C) and open visibility of Marketing's contribution to the bottom line shouldn't be aspirational - they are pre-requisites.

If your day revolves around making things happen at the last minute, juggling all the moving pieces and shouting as you go, there'll never be time to think.  

Know where you are, how you got there, what’s working (and what isn’t) and – crucially – ensure you have enough time to apply your marketing genius to the rapidly changing environment. 

Marketing platforms like Aprimo Marketing Studio enable Marketers to shine.

I recently had the pleasure of reviewing my daughter's mid-year report card for her sophomore year.  A pleasure because it was all A's, even with AP classes that will earn her college credits.  Yes, I am boastful, but can you blame me?  With these A’s in mind, I got to thinking about where else an array of A’s makes me happy. It’s in 1:1 marketing...  [yep, no kidding!]

As a seasoned marketing practitioner who's been in the trenches for years, using marketing automation solutions to plan, execute, and measure my multi-channel campaigns, I can appreciate the value of at least 5 A's -- i.e., Audience, Activity, Account, Asset, and Analysis.  Each offers a unique benefit to the marketer, with a whole that is even greater than the sum of its parts.  The A’s, and importantly, the marketer’s ability to record, document and associate them with specific marketing initiative(s) is critical to a marketer’s success! Here’s a couple of big reasons you should demand the A’s from your multi-channel campaign management solution:

·         Accountability (I’m sticking with A’s!) – Marketers can focus on the present (i.e., flawless marketing campaign execution) with applications that automate and/or support the creation of campaign information like audience contact history, funding account, brand assets used, post-campaign analyses, etc. that are "must-haves" to calculate ROI.   

Additionally, marketers can go beyond the campaign-centric use of the A’s to look across campaign, across time – i.e., longitudinal tracking and measurement. Marketers can easily assess aggregate-level spend and ROI, or other meaningful metrics (e.g., retention versus acquisition spend, Brand A versus Brand B marketing ROI comparisons, etc.)

·         Advancement (no comment on the A…) Marketing is indeed a mix of science and art. Science gives us the data, i.e., the facts that we transform into information and insight, which then fuels the “art” of marketing.  Marketers infuse a bit of art by adding their experience and creativity [to insights] to produce implications that convert into meaningful marketing actions and decisions. Without the A’s marketers cannot generate the learnings they need to refine and advance future marketing initiatives for greater ROI nor can they advance their individual experience and expertise in the practice of 1:1 marketing.
 

I hope that I have accomplished two things with this post: 1) redeemed myself by showing that my report card intro was not so "far fetched;" and 2) imparted some valuable information about why marketers need a multi-channel campaign management solution that easily supports our marketing A's.  Let me know if I did either! :o)

• 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.

Customers have “contact rights!” Unfortunately, not all marketers respect them, let alone optimize them for mutual benefit to brand and individual. Why not? I’m glad you asked, and I’ll start my answer with a very light definition of contact optimization.

Contact Optimization: A 1:1 marketer’s use of industry software to centralize business rules, constraints, and priorities and customer preferences that they can apply during a campaign segmentation to ensure the final target audience comprises only the individuals for whom that campaign represents the optimal mix of message, offer, time, and channel to meet current business objectives.

Answer: As optimized campaigns typically produce better results, I am somewhat perplexed as to why   we still have industry colleagues who do not use these tools in concert with their campaign management solutions. Here’s my thoughts about why I think they should use contact optimization solutions -- for reasons that benefit the professional, the company, the customer as well as industry peers:

•       Relevance: Show you know and listen to your customers, or you may pay the price. Yesterday’s overlooked marketing messages are today’s annoyance, as consumer apathy turns to anger and hostility.   Emerging communication venues like social networks can turn a “private” matter public in just a few minutes, weaving and leaving a wrath of brand bashing that will need to be silenced and reversed.

•       Accountability: Unwanted messages are, simply put, marketing resource waste. With increasing pressure to cut cost and grow revenue for maximum ROI, we have our marching orders. Management’s accountability mandate gives us license to optimize and an opportunity to move away from defending spend to championing and promoting its value. 

•       Responsibility: Keep the industry self-regulated.   We have had only a handful of regulations and restrictions imposed on us over the many decades of 1:1 marketing.   Key to a future with marketing freedom that mirrors our past is an ability to pro-actively adjust and align marketing strategies and tactics for mutual relationship benefit, as the customer perceives it. 

•       Reach: Prevent the creation of an email “postage stamp.” The big expense associated with off-line marketing tactics like direct mail and the complexities of a multi-channel marketing may have heavily influenced historical optimization solution use.   As more of us have shifted our emphasis to online communications, a low cost channel, we may not see the “benefits.” This couldn’t be further from the truth, as the email glut continually causes ISPs to develop new ways to filter and block emails. Perhaps they may even begin charging “postage” to reach the inbox.

•       B2B marketers are in need, too. As more B2B marketing organizations build marketing automation solutions with field enablement functionality, these firms will need to centralize contact rules and priorities to ensure that Sales and Marketing teams with access to the same pool of prospect and leads are aligned in their messages, offers, and treatments. With their focus on the integration of their demand generation and lead nurturing solution with their SFA tool, most B2B firms overlook the importance of establishing and automating contact management processes.

We have the means to not only respect customers’ marketing “rights,” but we have the duty to do so!  I can incorporate easily and efficiently the customers’ “rights” in my marketing strategies and tactics without compromising business performance. So can you! 

• According to research conducted by the Direct Marketing Association, email marketing generated an ROI of $48.34 for every dollar spent on it in 2007. The expected figure for 2008 is $45.06, and the prediction for 2009 is $43.52. As such, it outperforms all the other direct marketing channels examined.
• The Ad Effectiveness Survey commissioned by Forbes Media in Feb/March 2009 revealed that email and e-newsletter marketing are considered the second-most effective tool for generating conversions, just behind SEO.

• The top three tips for marketing process management to drive revenue through enhanced customer communication.
• The top three tips for marketing process management to improve operational efficiency, reduce costs, and eliminate waste.
• How can companies assess technologies and derive value from marketing process management?