Nick Martin's Marketing Pages

Marketing in the cloud

Marketers should have their heads in the cloud.

If you haven't read The Big Switch by Nicholas Carr yet, you need to add it to your list. Cloud computing — that is, computing infrastructure that is based somewhere out on the Internet, rather than installed on hardware locked in your company's IT center — is becoming real. Fast.

Combined with the maturity of web-based software-as-a-service offerings, the strong gravitational pull of social media sites where marketers now work beyond the borders of their company's sandbox, and the widespread proliferation of web services and mash-up APIs, the cloud has become marketing's new IT platform.

For marketers, this is a terrific opportunity (a) to re-calibrate the relationship between marketing and technology and (b) to expand your capabilities in the "new marketing" environment, where the pace of innovation in online marketing channels and methods continues to accelerate.

I think of "computing in the cloud" for marketing in fairly broad terms — more broadly than the technical definition of cloud computing — and divide it into four buckets:

1. Web sites where you are a participant or sponsor, particularly social media communities. These are sites such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Xing, MySpace, Yahoo! Groups, Digg, del.icio.us, Twine, etc. This isn't what most tech people think of when they talk about cloud computing, but from a marketer's perspective, these are important services out on the Internet that you must plug into to do your job. Your audience is in the cloud, and you have to go in there after them. The IT aspects, however, reside outside of your control.

2. Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications. These are applications that you access through your web browser, are hosted on a server farm by a third-party, for which you have zero operational involvement. Some are free, such as Google Analytics, but many are provided on a subscription basis, such as Salesforce.com. Pay only for as much as you need for as long as you need. There are a plethora of SaaS applications for marketers available today, with more coming online every month — if you have a favorite that I've missed in my "for instance" below, please add it in the comments:

• customer relationship management (ex: Salesforce.com);
• landing page management (ex: LiveBall — disclaimer, my firm);
• surveys and questionnaires (ex: SurveyMonkey);
• email marketing management (ex: ExactTarget);
• web site analytics (ex: Google Analytics);
• marketing resource management (ex: MarketingCentral);
• blogging platforms (ex: Typepad);
• lead nurturing (ex: Marketo);
• digital asset management (ex: Celum Imagine);
• search marketing management (ex: SearchIgnite);
• project management (ex: AtTask);
• web conferencing and webinars (ex: WebEx);

Click here to read the rest of this excellent piece from Scott Brinker's Chief Marketing Technologist blog.

via www.chiefmartec.com

Nick Martin: A truly great introduction to Marketing in The Cloud from Scott Brinker...or the future of marketing services. He's quite brilliant!

One significant challenge remains how to glue together several marketing components, which is why Salesforce's apps exchange is so compelling, acting as it does like an apps bus/ backbone for a myriad of third party Software as a Service (SaaS) applications. Nonetheless, as long as database integrity is far from ideally managed - and so often seriously compromised - there will remain questions around the feasibility of integrating web components into a Cloud based set of marketing processes. That's where marketing utilities come in, to glue bespoke solutions together made up of numerous application components around database integrity, quality and real time customer information management. More thoughts on this coming soon...

Email marketing on a wing and a prayer

Email marketing is poised for strong growth this year at the further expense of traditional offline channels. 

Having recently completed the survey analysis and report for FEDMA, here are some key excerpts. You can purchase the full report from FEDMA here.

In FEDMA’s first European Email Marketing Benchmark report published in April 2010, 19% of the respondent Email Service Provider (ESP) base expected their clients to increase volume of email marketing between a quarter and a half year on year; a continuation of the shift from offline to digital channels.

Hardly surprising when you consider the results of the Ipsos Mori poll for the Chartered Institute of Marketing’s report,The Shape of Digital to Come?. The question was asked which activities delivered the best return on investment. Top of the charts came CRM by some margin, followed by online advertising (12%) and email marketing (11%). Those activities considered to deliver the worst return were direct mail, sponsorship, and internal marketing, mirroring the evident shift in spend.

Econsultancy’s Email Marketing Census 2010 also predicts a net increase in email marketing over the course of the year, with the greater proportion coming from retention marketing, where 71% expect to ramp up their activities in this area, and only 1% expect to reduce activity on email marketing activity to their customer base. This reflects a growing recognition that email marketing is the perfect medium for customer management and development, and a key component within integrated multi-channel consumer engagement.

To that end, newsletter and related customer management activity is likely to be a key growth area over the next 12 months. This is reflected in the difference in click through rates reported in FEDMA’s Email Marketing Benchmark Report 2010 between newsletter and sales or product/service information campaigns, which average 17% higher. 

Practitioners need to plan use of email marketing more strategically to gain greater payback from ongoing customer engagement and the up and cross sell opportunities arising.  For example, 53% of respondents to FEDMA’s report do not use email marketing for customer or product (development) surveys. Where they do, they experience excellent results.

The majority of companies do not use email marketing for win-back campaigns following the loss of customers. The minority of respondents who do use email for win back see conversion to sale or action of between 2% and 5%. Nor do they systematically use transactional emails for cross and up selling.

In both cases here are clearly opportunities missed, which once again suggests that email marketing is deployed typically as a series of standalone activities, in some cases integrated with online and other channels, but generally not implemented as an end-to-end programme or integrated with other customer channels.

Whilst end users overwhelmingly believe email marketing to be strategically important, that belief is yet to translate into a rigorous approach around execution.

  Poor visibility of conversions to sale and conversions to action, and the lack of testing around aspects such as creative templates and frequency suggests there is much more critical measurement and insight needed. Practitioners would do well to test more rigorously each element of an email campaign, beyond the generally adopted focus on subject lines, sender name, time of day and week, and spam filter scoring. 

Continued growth may well be anticipated and planned for by the majority of respondents, but it should not be assumed at any cost. The future growth – and health – of email marketing will depend on some key factors:

 

• Better targeting, measurement and the use of properly permissioned and managed customer information databases and lists; the relevancy of campaigns and careful application of local/ EU laws.
• Careful stewardship of customer information, and developing its use further into the consumer/ buyer engagement process. The impetus to increase volume and activity can only be successfully achieved where it remains engaging.
• Delivery to inbox, which will be increasingly seen as a barrier to overcome, especially in B2C.

Whilst Deliverability rates are optimistically expected to improve or remain the same, this raises a key question of how deliverability is measured.

Most practitioners will determine deliverability as delivery to Internet or to mail server as the primary measure, but delivery to inbox or Inbox Placement Rate (IPR) is being seen as an increasingly key metric. 

IPR is tied in with reputation. If reputation is poor, acquired through issues like indiscriminate use or poor targeting, large groups of consumers belonging to the same ISP domain, for example, such as GMail or Hotmail will not receive bulk email from that source into their inbox. It is estimated as a much as 7% of email marketing campaigns go missing, which historically has not been accounted for. 

Marketers need to understand what their reputation is, and much in the same way they work to improve their click through rates, they need to monitor, manage and improve their reputation. If ISPs migrate from identifying sender by IP range to identifying the sender by their domain name, as some commentators believe may have already started to happen, this issue could become even more significant.