Nick Martin's Marketing Pages

Email marketing maturity profile?

The latest research from Marketing Sherpa, looking at the most commonly utilised performance metrics by maturity phase of the email marketing enduser, provides some interesting insights into how deeply practitioners systematically measure. 

Of particular interest is seeing the proportion of endusers who do not measure things, even at the mature, strategic, end of the scale. Take a look at the following graph:

So, 40% of mature users don't analyse the different link click-throughs; 56% don't look at the performance of different data segments; and 38% don't or can't analyse post click conversion rates.

This fresh-to-release  study, conducted a few months after the European benchmark survey I authored for FEDMA last year, reminded me of some of the key conclusions of that earlier report. Strikingly, users who had considered themselves strategic email marketing practitioners hadn't projected that sense of savvy when it came to campaign performance practise. Those who saw email marketing as strategically important for their organisations nonetheless often had poor visibility of metrics such as conversion to sale and conversion to action.

With just 16% of campaigns entirely data driven, and 38% of campaigns driven by some data, it is apparent that there is a way to go before the critical insight and testing necessary for optimising the email marketing channel is systematically practised.

Even when metrics are in widespread use, such as delivery rate, are practitioners really measuring in full awareness and knowledge? Most practitioners will determine deliverability as delivery to Internet or to mail server as the primary measure (i.e. less the hard and soft bounce codes), but delivery to inbox or Inbox Placement Rate (IPR) is a far better measure. Why? Because around 18% of email never ends up in the Inbox, or even in a Spam folder; nor  is it accounted for in the bounce data. It simply disappears, into a virtual Bermuda Triangle. The worse your reputation, the greater the problem. 

Much in the same way practitioners focus on improving their click through rates, they must also monitor, manage and take steps to continually improve their reputation to improve IPR, campaign performance and user engagement.

What this evident gap in email practise perception and reality truly highlights, is that whilst we tend to view email as a mature marketing channel, there is still a way to go to master it. Whilst email may have been around as a viable marketing channel for more than a decade, we are far from the point where outstanding direct marketing disciplines are routinely applied to it, and where the nuances of the medium are yet globally understood and managed.

Questionable ethics of data collection

Who is collecting data on behalf of 'The British Consumer' using offshore call centres? Despite being on the UK's Do Not Call List, The Telephone Preference Service (TPS) for 3 years, I'm getting duplicate calls from an offshore call centre requesting permission to undertake a 'survey' on behalf of this dubious entity.

Various tactics are being employed, from a request to verify address and telephone details before launching into a lifestyle questionnaire - and including one that promises to ensure that your details are taken off our list before then saying we'd just like to verify the details we hold about you and your household.

Either no record is maintained of previous contact or they just aren't bothering. All part of a truly low-cost, low-ethics exercise...

One can easily see how hundreds of thousands of consumers are surely being duped by these approaches, that seriously misrepresent, flout TPS regulations by calling under the guise of research when what they are doing is data gathering (but clearly not market research), and damage consumer confidence.

When I pushed representatives to disclose which legal entity they were calling on behalf of, the phones were put down. So they might be naive enough to call repeatedly in spite of several bruising encounters, but not that naive! 

Here's the thing; if data collection goes down an ethical slippery slope in pursuit of the lowest cost collection, campaign performance will follow. Not only that, execution comes with hidden costs arising from higher than average complaint rates. All of which feeds into a negative cycle of brand perception, at a time when reputation and trust is more important than ever.

Among other parameters, being able to provide a simple audit trail to complainants in respect of their personal information when asked, helps allay concerns and restores trust. Transparency is more important than ever, and practitioners using poorly acquired and badly permissioned data run greater reputational risks than ever before.

Dutch Require Consumer Consent to Put Cookies on PC - WSJ.com

The Dutch Parliament passed a law Wednesday that forces websites to get explicit consumer consent before they place small text files known as cookies on a computer. The new law was opposed by the online-advertising industry, which fears the legislation will pave the way for similar moves across Europe.

EU officials have said they probably won't challenge the Dutch law, indicating it is unlikely to be overturned and suggesting that industry may have a bigger fight on its hands than it feared.

In November 2010, the EU passed a directive requiring online advertisers to get "informed consent" from users before placing cookies on their computers. Under EU treaty law, countries then had until May to write that rule into their national legislation, but there has been some confusion about exactly how the language had to be interpreted.

"The Dutch law is an important case study because it's such a big market," said Kimon Zorbas, vice president of the Interactive Advertising Bureau Europe, which represents online advertisers. "We would expect companies from our sector to either move their operations to neighboring countries or lose their clients to companies located elsewhere in Europe."

Online advertisers are up in arms. An increasing number of ad campaigns are dependent on cookies, which store data on users and their viewing habits, and the business model could be crippled, they say. "Fifty percent of campaigns in euro volumes might be shut down," said Stephan Noller, chief executive of nugg.ad, an online-advertising consulting company.

In the Netherlands, publishing companies lobbied furiously against the bill, arguing the law exceeds the EU mandate because it includes a provision that websites must prove they have received permission from users to place cookies on their machines. One news portal called nu.nl said it might disappear entirely.

EU regulators will now "carefully assess the Dutch legislation to verify its compliance with the e-privacy directive," said Jonathan Todd, a spokesman for Neelie Kroes, the EU's commissioner for the digital agenda. EU officials in Ms. Kroes's cabinet say they believe the Dutch law is in the spirit of the EU requirement for "informed consent."

That could be bad news for the online-ad industry, because the EU is committed to harmonizing rules. "We all stand to lose from fragmented rules," said Ms. Kroes, speaking Wednesday afternoon in Brussels at a conference on online legal issues.

via online.wsj.com

With the highest broadband penetration in Europe, marketing practise and spend that has migrated substantially online, this news reported today in WSJ, threatens online behavioural advertising in the Netherlands, and might prove to be a key case point of influence for Eastern and Southern EU States in their own local interpretations of the EU Directive, whilst expanding the market opportunity for competing marketing methods that can target and personalise in real-time. Today the Country of Origin principles that exist within the EU permit multinational organisations to move their operations when local laws are not to their taste; but what happens if and when this basic principle is changed to require conformance to Country of Destination laws?

Radian6 highlights shift in Social from defence to value creation

Salesforce.com certainly splashed the cash on Radian6 - to the tune of $340M - because they believe that Social will profoundly change sales and marketing, and want to connect market conversations with marketing and sales.

As SF's PR put it:

Radian6’s unique technology captures hundreds of millions of conversations every day across Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, blogs and online communities. The intelligence gained from these conversations has become critical in helping companies better market and sell to prospects, serve customers and understand what’s being said about their brands, products and competitors. With Radian6, salesforce.com will add the ability to monitor and join in these public conversations across its products, bringing the heart of the public social web to customers’ business.

In other words, from SF's perspective, Radian6 will bridge the conversations happening on public social networks, such as Facebook and Twitter, and Salesforce.com’s private corporate social network, Chatter. 

To date social media monitoring has been used a bit like Talk Radio - defensively. Brands have learned that they can no longer smother isolated unhappy customers with broadcast market messaging, and need to nip destructive conversations in the bud - which have an unpredicatable tendency of catching like wildfires.

 

Now brands are trying to work out how to integrate social into their marketing and relationship management strategy. 

Where are we likely to go from here? How about leveraging social networks through recommendations from trusted sources? It's like adding a whole new dimension to targeting, just as the traditional push marketing model is flagging.

World class prospecting and market development is as much about trust as it is about cut through, and solutions that simplify that challenge and make it easy to deploy authoritative acquisition and development programmes will help solve one of marketing and sales' great current challenges.

Image courtesy of Brian Solis

 

CRM 3.0 - where do we go from here?

I'm increasingly firming up the view that the desire of marketing services providers to sell meta systems to large enterprises is not shared by those target organisations, nor, significantly, the big 4 Consultancies. These are the guys with the ear of the Boardroom, and their views matter - to an ever-increasing extent trumping the Advisory firms.

Having invested and reinvested over the last decade in core platforms for creating a single customer view, relationship management et al, there is no desire to do it all over again.

Multichannel marketing is perhaps better approched by thinking about the extent to which your customers have a propensity to be channel agnostic (Forrester). I've set out my stall that trying to deploy integrated, do-it-all multichannel CRM platforms is wrong headed. Far better to have fit-for-purpose specialised execution platforms, with the activity, history and response data looping into the single customer view.

Organisations want to see a return on their investments to date, and are looking for components that can leverage their previous investments. 

• To that end, one overlooked area is marketing resource management, and the speed of deployment benefits to an organisation by alignment of DAMs with customer databases and segmentation. 
• Another emerging channel looks like being on-site assistance, with high predictability and personalisation assured through integrating knowledge bases, scripting, and embedding objects/ web services to determine which experience to serve to different consumer profiles common trigger-based events such as Next Best Offer.

Both of these areas help improve the customer experience, a rising discipline within global enterprises. Why, these guys even have their own thriving industry association! This growing area will, in turn, drive the use of analytics to support marketing and customer relationship based decisions. Expect to see the use of analytics shift from a typically modelled, theoretical basis to more sensitive analysis of real behavioural data.