Email Driving Cross Channel Integration

Thursday, Jan. 24, 2013

According to the Experian Marketing Services market survey addressing email acquisition and engagement tactics, 44% of total opens occur on mobile devices; 52% of marketers have used animated gifs in their email campaigns; marketers are seeing strong survey completion rates, regardless of offer; email is a strong performer as a generator of both website traffic and revenue; email marketers are testing subject lines and creative more than any other factors; 78% of brands use sales associates to collect email addresses.
Email marketing continues to be the hub and a driving force in cross-channel integration, says the report, as marketers’ email strategies act as connectors to Website, mobile, social and in-store channels. The study surveyed email marketers across eight verticals about their email-marketing initiatives.
Peter DeNunzio, general manager at Experian Marketing Services CheetahMail, says, “... more email marketers (are) testing new engagement strategies to expand their reach into other marketing channels... (as) a spearhead... towards true cross-channel optimization...”
The continued efficacy of email marketing makes email address acquisition a prime tactic for high return on investment (ROI). Today’s email marketers are using multiple channels to acquire new subscribers. Key findings show that:

• 22% of brands utilize pop-up windows on their Websites; nearly one in four Websites
• 36 % of brands collect email addresses on paper, exposing brands to a higher potential for bad addresses and input errors
• More marketers are implementing e-receipts to provide marketers and customers with benefits, including up-sell and engagement opportunities
• 30% of marketers make no fields in a registration form mandatory, focusing first on acquiring an email address and then using other tactics, such as preference centers and surveys, for acquiring more information about customers later

Marketers can no longer blast their list with irrelevant messaging without experiencing negative consequences, both from customers and ISPs, says the report. Email marketers are adopting more tactics to track behaviors and acquire subscribers’ preferences and interests in order to market to them more effectively:

• Regardless of the offer, marketers are seeing strong survey completion rates
• Email is still a strong performer as a generator of both Website traffic and revenue
• Email marketers are testing subject lines and creative more than any other factors
• 52% of marketers have used animated gifs in their email campaigns
• While 98% of marketers promote their Facebook page in emails, only 32% promote Pinterest
• More than 50% of email marketers currently optimize or plan to optimize emails for mobile viewers

In 2012, Experian Marketing Services recognized new trends and tactics in three channels of email address acquisition: point of sale, Website and sweepstakes.
Subscriber acquisition practices at point of sale of email marketers whose brands operate brick-and-mortar locations:

• 78% of brands use sales associates to collect email addresses
• 36% of brands collect email addresses on paper
• 73% of marketers source and track email addresses acquired at point of sale differently than other addresses
• 33% of marketers report that more than 25% of their customers are willing to provide their email address at point of sale

The extensive report concludes by noting that “whether you are looking to grow your list through organic subscriber acquisition, or create more engaging campaigns that produce higher ROI, the study findings provide a benchmark to help gauge which programs would work best for your business.

Using tools for better community management

Jon Paget

January 22, 2013. 

Community management is not an easy job. Anyone responsible for an active Facebook and/or Twitter profile will tell you that. The skill set has evolved quickly and was summed up well in Get Satisfaction’s recent Community Manager infographic.

Despite this skill set emerging there are a number of challenges that community managers face. Facebook and Twitter users want near real-time answers to a wide range of questions which can be on any topic from sales enquiries to specific customer support issues.  At TUI, I’ve believed for a long time that sales questions on Facebook or Twitter should be answered by our sales team, customer complaints should be looked after by our customer services team and so on.

Content feedback within the Social Bakers dashboard

An increasing challenge for brands is how to deal with this customer engagement at scale whilst maintaining detailed responses in a time frame suitable to the customer, and communicating them effectively and in the tone of voice of the brand in question.

A few months ago I went in search of a tool that would allow us to manage our communities more effectively (currently for 4 different brands) and which would enable the rest of the business to be more directly involved, whilst maintaining control of what was communicated to our customers.

Introducing Social Bakers

If you’ve heard of Social Bakers it’s likely to be for their social media analytics; they publish all sorts of Facebook and Twitter stats which they take from their proprietary social analytics platform. I won’t go into detail here (that’s for another day and another post), but will focus on their new social media content management system. It’s called Builder Pro and we’ve been testing it in beta for a couple of months now. This is what we’ve learnt.

What does it do?

It allows community managers to manage their social media pages and profiles from one dashboard. The current list extends to just Facebook and Twitter but Google+ is on the roadmap for 2013. Users log in via Facebook, accessing a dashboard tailored to the brands that they work on. There are four columns in the dashboard as can be seen below. One tracks competitor’s activity, there’s one for your brand’s published content, one for incoming questions to your Facebook and Twitter profiles and finally, a column called outbox for any scheduled content yet to be published.

Below is a screenshot of my dashboard (click to enlarge):

This dashboard brings everything into one place. I can, at a glance, see what’s scheduled for the coming week across all platforms and all brands. I can also see how our content is performing (counters for likes, shares and comments updated in real time), view entire threads in a pop up window (see below for an example) or access specific posts on Facebook or Twitter directly. I can also see the questions our customers are asking and the responses our community managers have made.

Assigning questions across the business

Apart from making it very easy to see what’s going on, where and with whom, one of the true USPs is the ability to assign posts from the ‘incoming’ stream to any user that’s been set up in Builder Pro. For example, if one of our brand pages receives a sales enquiry, the community manager can assign it to the member of staff best placed to respond.

In the example below this question would be assigned to our after sales support team to provide an answer, which would come back to the community manager for approval before going live.

Assigning a question

Flexibility

The flexibility of the tool means that different users can have different permissions. For example, a customer service team member will have different requirements to a product team member or, more obviously, with that of a community manager.

We have a number of different user groups set up with different permissions but critically, all responses go via the community manager before going live.

When it comes to scheduling content, permissions can be set to allow a user rights to publish social media updates. This goes to a community manager before being published and, if needed, can be easily and quickly edited (unlike Facebook’s scheduling tool), without resetting any of the scheduling or geo-targeting settings which have been set up.

What are the benefits?

Introducing a tool like Social Bakers has a number of obvious benefits. It’s allowed us to turn around customer enquiries more quickly, many key people across the business are now more directly involved and, crucially, the process is scalable.

I should point out that whilst there aren’t many tools like Social Bakers Builder Pro currently set up, Wildfire (recently taken over by Google), offer an alternative.

Whilst still in beta, my experiences to date lead me to think this type of solution has a big future; whether for brands with large scale social media activity or for companies / agencies with multiple brands.

Social Bakers’ client list currently includes other TUI Travel brands, the BBC and Nokia to name a few. 2013 may well be the year for tools like this bringing far greater organisation to community management. We shall see.

5 Marketing Predictions for 2013

WHAT'S THIS?

Seth Fiegerman 

Jan 6, 2013

There was certainly no shortage of big developments in the marketing world throughout 2012. Facebook created a massive mobile advertising business in less than year, Red Bull literally financed a trip into the stratosphere to create powerful branded content, and a YouTube video finally hit 1 billion views, showing the potential reach for online videos.

So what might 2013 bring for marketers? We contacted several advertising experts and reviewed recent studies and business trends to come up with five marketing predictions for the coming year.

Advertisers Pursue Mobile-First Strategy

Image courtesy of Flickr, BuzzFarmers

Mobile advertising exploded in 2012, with eMarketer projecting in December that U.S. mobile ad spend would nearly triple to $4 billion for the year. Much of this growth is due to Facebook and Google, both experiencing huge growth in revenue from their mobile ad products in 2012. Facebook, in particular, announced its first mobile ad product — Sponsored Stories in mobile News Feeds — in February, and now generates more than $3 million per day from mobile ads.

As these platforms continue to improve their ad formats for marketers this year — and consumers continue to spend more time and money on mobile devices — advertising spend on mobile will only continue to skyrocket. In fact, eMarketer expects mobile ads to increasingly become the top priority for advertisers on digital, rather than desktop.

"For many years, you had marketers emphasizing a build-for-the-desktop-first approach, and similarly you had a lot of advertising publishers and platforms that developed their products for the desktop," said Clark Fredricksen, VP of communications for eMarketer. "Now we are seeing more people build for mobile first with the desktop as the second priority."

Brands and Publishers Re-Think Banner Ads

Image courtesy of espn.go.com

Banner ads are easy to hate: they have lousy click-through rates and typically don't translate well from desktop to mobile. Several people we spoke with in the advertising industry predicted that marketers will be devoting less and less of their budgets on these display ads, but even they admit that the banner ad isn't going away for good anytime soon. In the interim, some brands and publishers are trying to come up with new and creative ways to innovate on banner ads, rather than just write them off.

On Friday, ESPN.com debuted an interactive banner ad (seen above) that prompts visitors to vote on which of two teams will win an upcoming college football game. The ESPN ad then changes color depending on which team is leading in the polls. ESPN isn't the first to tweak the traditional banner ad. IKEA launched a clever promotion in April that squeezed all 2,800 of the store's products into a tiny 300X250 pixel banner ad and let users scroll over and zoom in on different items. More recently, Gucci experimented with banner ads that could be pinned directly to Pinterest.

This isn't likely to stop the overall shift away from banner ads, but these efforts show there is still room for innovation. Or, as IAB president and CEO Randall Rothenberg put it in an interview withMashable, "People look at shitty banner ads and think the problem is the banner ads. The problem is shitty advertising."

Native Advertising Starts to Replace Traditional Display Ads

Image courtesy of Mashable

Native advertising has turned into an amorphous buzz word that means different things to different people, but at the most basic level, this phrase simply refers to ads that are delivered in-stream and integrated as seamlessly as possible into the core user experience. These ads took off in 2012 and will increasingly become the preferred form of display advertising in the coming year.

"If 2012 proved anything in mobile, it proved that the ad publishers using so-called native formats are able to deliver much more effectively with mobile devices and in essence are able to overcome the historical disadvantages of display advertising on a small screen," Fredricksen said. "We are seeing a dramatic upswing and we expect that to continue."

Facebook and Twitter applied this formula with great success in 2012 by inserting sponsored posts into their respective streams on mobile devices. Many publishers, including Mashable, have expanded their own native advertising options for mobile and the web by letting advertisers create ad units that appear in the stream of content published on the website. In fact, a recent survey found that a third of publishers are "likely or very likely" to add a native advertising option to their websites.

Looking Beyond The Total Number of Likes

Image courtesy of Facebook, Coca Cola

Having more fans or followers on social networks doesn't necessarily mean having greater engagement; in fact some recent studies suggest that the opposite is often the case.

Napkin Labs, a Facebook app developer, analyzed the pages for 50 brands with between 200,000-1 million likes each, and found that just 6% of fans engaged with their Facebook Pages on average. What's more, those pages with at least 900,000 fans actually had 60% less engagement than those pages with 500,000-600,000 fans. Likewise, Sling Digital, a Twitter ad optimization service, analyzed accounts for all Fortune 100 companies active on the social network, and found that engagement tended to drop off for brands with more followers.

That doesn't mean brands can't and shouldn't aspire to accumulating a strong following, but it does mean more brands will have to re-focus their emphasis on engagement metrics beyond the number of likes and followers.

"Every business has to measure what they do and make sure that it is effective," Riley Gibson, the co-founder and CEO of Napkin Labs, told Mashable in a previous interview. "Likes can be part of that measurement, but we need to start looking beyond that a bit, and start looking in more depth at what fans are actually doing."

Relying More on Big Data As A Marketing Tool

Image courtesy of Flickr, Images_of_Money

One of the biggest lessons for marketers from the presidential election in November is just how powerful a tool big data can be.

Several companies have launched in recent years to offer tools to help provide data analysis to brands and marketers, including BloomReach which provides brands with big data to help with SEO and Swipe.ly which helps retailers analyze their sales and social data to understand trends with their business. These and other tools will change the way companies think about marketing and running their business.

"Big data is really emerging as a key currency in marketing," Fredricksen said. "Increasingly, we are seeing more companies use big data and analytics to drive customer insights, create their budgets and to manage operations, the supply chain, customer support, product strategy and pricing."

Starbucks Orders Double Shot of Square

Coffee giant grows partnership with Jack Dorsey's startup By Christopher Heine

• January 03 2013
• Technology

Photo: Paul J. Richards/AFP/Getty Images

Starbucks is selling Square's mobile card readers for $10 in the coffee retail giant's7,000 locations nationwide, extending the companies' budding partnership. The readers let users accept credit and debit card payments from individuals and are free after rebate.

"We have a lot of small business owners who do business in our stores. So we wanted to offer them the reader for their business needs. And it just seemed like a good natural next step in our relationship with Square," a Starbucks spokesperson told Adweek. 

Indeed, the development comes just two months after Starbucks implemented the tech startup's mobile app-based payment system dubbed Square Wallet in its stores around the country. The iPhone/Android app lets the coffee-drinking patrons make payments by simply saying their name. They can forego using their physical credit card with the app, which bills the person's stored credit card account during a purchase.

In addition to Starbucks, Square Wallet can be utilized by consumers in locations for Walmart, Apple, Target, Walgreens, FedEx Office, AT&T, Best Buy, Staples and Radio Shack. All in all, the San Francisco-based tech firm says it's in 30,000 retail locations.

Also during November 2012, Starbucks disclosed it plans to invest some $25 million in Square—the brainchild of Twitter founder and chairman Jack Dorsey.

Meanwhile, today's news seems to be another notable notch in the belt for Square, positioning itself against increasing "digital wallet" competition from American Express,LevelUp, Google Wallet and others. The companies look to capture a mobile audience by streamlining payments between on-the-go consumers and retailers.

6 Easy Ways to Make Your Website Tablet-Friendly

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WHAT'S THIS?

John Meyer

 for UX Magazine 11 hours ago

There are nearly 70 million tablet users in the U.S. alone, a figure that has doubled from the year before. This means that nearly 30% of the country's Internet users are browsing on a tablet device.

Tablet traffic to e-commerce sites grew by 348% from 2011 to 2012, overtaking smartphone traffic for the first time. With the tablet market as young as it is, its footprint is only going to expand.

This trend sends a strong message: If you haven't already, now is the time to prioritize your website's design considerations for tablet functionality. Ignoring this could negatively impact your website's overall conversion rate, return visits, sales and more.

What Is Tappiness?

When a website exhibits "tappiness," it's easy -- or even delightful -- to use on a mobile or tablet device. Tappiness encompasses smart use of space, text that is easy to read, logical interaction clues and large touch targets that allow visitors to navigate with confidence.

The large font sizes and wide touch targets in this design offer a positive experience, even when reduced in scale on a tablet.

The opposite experience exists when text is too small to read and navigation links are so close together that unintended navigation occurs. This adds time, complexity and frustration to the navigation experience, which will quickly drive away your visitors.

Small font sizes and narrow touch targets in this design prove to be much more difficult to read and use on a tablet.

While it may be ideal to redesign your website with a responsive layout for all devices, time and cost may inhibit you from a complete overhaul. But you do have other options. Here are some tips to help you improve the way tablet users experience your website, with just a few simple changes that you can make today.

How to Improve Your Site's Tappiness

Just a few subtle adjustments to your CSS can greatly improve legibility and navigation dexterity on a tablet.

1. Increase the size and margin for buttons and calls-to-action. The average width of the index finger for most adults translates to about 45-57 pixels. Why make your visitor work harder to find and tap the "Buy" button?

2. Ensure links and calls-to-action look tap-able without hover states. Hover states do not exist on a tablet. Style your text links to use a clear, contrasting color. And don't be afraid to use underlines for the default link state.

3. Increase font sizes for legibility. Bumping up your font sizes by a couple pixels or partial em's can make a difference. A little goes a long way.

4. Increase padding around navigation menu items. Try increasing padding by 5-10 pixels to start -- or more, if your design allows.

5. Increase margins on pages and content blocks. This improvement supports overall legibility and reduces visual complexity. Increased "white space" can result in the impression that your website's content is easier to consume, as compared to a website with crowded content.

6. Increase form field size and spacing. Make it easier for your visitors to tap and enter information into form fields. Improvements to your forms may make the greatest impact to your conversion rate.

As an added bonus, these simple CSS changes will likely benefit your desktop visitors as well. But, as always, be sure to run QA on your changes for all platforms and browsers before committing to them.

Great Examples of Tablet-Friendly Websites

Below are a few websites that exemplify tappiness. Try these out on your tablet as well as your desktop. Notice these sites don't employ separate layouts or versions for tablets. Yet the same site looks good and works well on both platforms.

Fitbit uses a healthy amount of white space coupled with large text and generously-sized touch targets.

Comcast's website offers large text and spacing. You'll also notice clearly indicated links, well-spaced navigation and sub-navigation and large, easy-to-use form fields.

While Skillshare could bump up the size of their body text a bit more, they do offer large, easy-to-use buttons for navigation and calls-to-action. There is also plenty of space surrounding content blocks.

It's no surprise that Apple's website has tappiness (after all, they did pioneer the design for hand-held touch screens.

Does your site provide tappiness? Check it out on a tablet device and see for yourself. Your website may be losing visitors, conversions, and money by creating an unpleasant experience for tablet users.

The good news is that you don't need to spend a lot of time or money to make tiny, incremental changes that will vastly improve your user experience on tablet devices. For many of you, that means money in the bank.

Share a website that brings you tappiness in comments below.