Marketing with Technology and More

Personalization in more detail

The other day I posted about the personalization index.  I realized that it was the perfect subject for one of our Email Marketing Minutes.  Et Voila.

Are you getting too Personal?

About ten years ago I came across a very useful formula that has worked very well in most situations when SubscriberMail clients building forms to gather data as part of their email campaigns.  I do not remembe r the original source of this formula (and it may even come from traditional direct response world).  However, if you follow it, it will serve you well.

Many marketers who come to the world of email  start building data collection forms and easily fall into the trap of turning the form into a marketing survey.  The result, a reduced number of subscribers, subscriber irritation, and potentially negative brand impression.  The key questions to ask is how are you going to use the data you collect in an email  interaction.  If you can't explain how you are going to use it to segment or personalize the message in someway, don't ask for it. 

But still, you may have the urge to ask those questions, so here is the Personalization Index to empirically determine are you asking for too much.  Take the number of data items you use in a customer interactions and divide them by the total number of data elements you are gathering.  If the total is .3 or less, you are gathering too much information.  A "PI" of .3 means that for every 3 elements you gather, you are only using one (which is still probably a bit on the high side, but you may have planned uses for the others in the future).

Marketing Prof's Digital Mixer - A perfect mix

 

Just returned from Phoenix after attending Marketing Prof’s Digital Mixer.  It was an outstanding event.  I have been to their events in the past, but this one was the best by far.  In trying to put my finger on what made this event great,  I thought back to other events I have attended that had a similar feel. 

The first, was a conference organized by Peter Senge in the early 90’s at Bretton Woods.  The second was a gathering Tom Peters organized in 2002 and invited a few of his “cool friends” to (I had the honor of joining that list after the publication of my first book, Aha) along with some major corporate leaders.  The third happens every year when I attend the TED Conference. 

The feeling at each of these events comes from the participants, not from the content.  Sure the content is important, most of us would never go if the content did not draw us in (or we were not invited to deliver some of it).  The people and the dialogue that go on in the halls, at dinner (or in this case in the casino) are where new connections are made and ideas launched.  At each of these events in the past, there were incredible individuals that I connected with, some who have become life-long friends, others mere acquaintances, but none-the-less, the conversations were life changing for me and many of the participants. 

At Bretton Woods, I met many of the influential leaders of the then very hot Learning Organization community.  I formed a loose partnership with one of them, and we worked together for several years in a variety of interesting ways that led me to the publication of my creativity book, and built a great management development business. 

In Vermont, I connected with many influentials of the digital world who were starting to change the way we viewed the web.  Seth Godin, Dan Pink, Marti Barletta, Robyn Waters, David Weinberger and many more.  I had started SubscriberMail at that time, and the ideas and feedback that came out of that gathering helped shape the vision for our organization.

TED every year is simply TED.  It defies description beyond the fact that it is the single event that I attend that requires I take a vacation afterwards to process the input.  You can certainly read more about TED on this blog, but you can experience some of the content at the TED website.

Now I come to this event, which I have fondly just started to refer to as #mpdm .  For those of you who Twitter, you will understand the reference, the rest of you, will soon.  From my perspective, this event fell into the same basket with the ones I have named above because of the participants.  There were many of the people I know from the email world, along with some of the SEO world.  The catalyst at this event however were the Social Media participants.   They verified for me that this is indeed and exciting marketing element, and in my mind they were the “who’s who” of this new space. 

I am sure that many of the participants formed relationships that are going to fuel new business ventures, create great new concepts and build new marketing ideas.  Many of the connections I made are people I plan to stay connected with and hope to get to know better in the years to come.  I think we will all be on this new marketing road together, and boy does it look cool.  Sure the economy is glum, but with opportunity like this, why worry?  As one of the keynote speakers Gary Vaynerchuk (future owner of the NY Jets) stated so eloquently, in the down economy, the first thing big companies will drop is their funding and focus on new marketing initiatives (like social media).   This creates fantastic opportunities for everyone currently in the space and willing to invest work, time and money.

Email Success Secrets when Images are set to off

Send out an effective email marketing message is not as easy as it used to be.  At SubscriberMail we have just completed a survey of executives and 63% of them have images turned off as the default on their email clients.  What this means for marketers is that despite all the effort you go to in order to make the message look great in the inbox, it is often lost when it arrives.

The SubscriberMail team has learned many great ways to optimize your messages, and today we released a new whitepaper titled The Great Suppression: Five Strategies to engage audience members when images are Suppressed by Mail Clients.  You are welcome to download a complimentary copy.  As a matter of fact, you may want to check out our entire White Paper Library, filled with great email content.

The Web - Instant Market Research

I love the power of the web for feedback.  I had a community project I was involved in, and as part of that project I needed to conduct a simple survey.   Before the web, undertaking this task would have been daunting.  I would have had to print up surveys send them out (if I could afford the postage).  Then wait until the surveys were returned and then tabulate them.  If I wanted to get more details, I could get really fancy and run cross tabs. The cost of doing this kind of research was out of the scope of most community organizations (and many marketers).

Tonight, I sat down at my computer, used Zoomerang to put together a very simple survey.  I used our SubscriberMail system to send a message to the community (who had opted in to hear from us).  Literally five minutes after I launched the survey, the data started to pour in.  I can easily run cross tabs, and I can automatically send a follow-up email to anyone who has not clicked through to the survey.

As a marketer...what is not to love.

DMNews Article on Email Marketing in a Down Economy

When the economy goes South as it unfortunately appears to be doing, marketers need to scramble to get better ROI from fewer marketing investments.  I recently wrote an article for DMNews that discusses the steps smart marketers are taking now to use email marketing as a great tool as the economy tightens.  You can read the article titled "Email Marketing - A Bright Star in a Down Economy" here.

Order Takers and Realtors - Seth says Quit!

Everyone in marketing knows that Seth Godin is the father or permission marketing.  His post today takes his discussion of permission one step further.  He was speaking to a group of Realtors.  Knowing Realtor’s, I’m sure he really got there attention when he told them to “quit now.”  He’s right on the money however.  His point is that a massive swath of the Realtor world (and other worlds too) are nothing more than order takers who pass out business cards with their picture on them and wait for the phone to ring.

It is interesting when you look at markets how few Realtors ever stand out beyond the standard Real Estate magazine advert, or open house sign.  I’ve vacationed often in Maui, where Realtors are as abundant as tourists.  It is difficult for anyone to stand out above the fray, yet over the past couple of years, there is a pair of Realtors there that have caught my attention because of their outstanding use of digital marketing. 

Tom Muldoon and Sean Crowley are like everyone else on the island trying to sell a little piece of Paradise to the visitors to the 50th state.  However, they have become the property experts in an area know as Wailea.  Instead of just sending out listing, they produce full-color, digital reports with detailed market statistics, area information and resale information.  They have a blog that talka about more than how great they are with new listings.

A friend of mine owns a condo on the island, and when they decided to put it on the market, they selected Tom and Sean.  They have created a fantastic web site for the property, and are using 37Signal’s Base Camp to communicate with the owner.  Tom and Sean are definitely not Realtors that are going to be impacted by a downturn in real-estate sales like others in the market.  All they need is a SubscriberMail newsletter, and their marketing will be perfect.

Going back to Seth for a moment, he points to Daily Candy as a great model to follow if you are looking to “talk about what matters” to your audience.  See my posting about Daily Candy’s CEO Pete Sheinbaum at the EEC on how they do this.

We Can't Always Be Right

Everyone makes mistakes, it is how you handle them that is important.  One company I dealt with today did a really stellar job.  You can be the best marketer in the world, but how your company handles a problem or mistake delivers more marketing clout than anything you and the world’s best agency could put together.

The company is ProFlowers.  I started dealing with them after I received some flowers sent to me by my friend and business colleague Zane Safrit at Conference Calls Unlimited.  The flowers were so nice and well delivered that I asked him about them.  He sang the praises of their support and quality.  So I gave them a try, and have been pleased with their work. 

Last week I sent some flowers to a colleague as a thank you for something.  They were scheduled to arrive on the 19th.  Today I received an email from the company that stated:

We're writing to let you know that, due to quality control issues, the Star Struck Beauty you ordered will not be arriving on the date you requested and will instead arrive on 2/20/2008.
         
We are terribly sorry for this change. This shouldn't have happened, but it did and we take full responsibility.
               
Please let us make this right for you. Call us today at 1-800-ProFlowers (800-776-3569) or email us at wecare@proflowers.com and let us know what we can do. We will do everything in our power to make sure you're happy with your entire ProFlowers experience.
         
I want to personally assure you on behalf of the entire team here at ProFlowers that we're working to get to the root cause of these problems you experienced—and any problem that stops us from meeting your expectations.
            
When mistakes happen, it's disheartening for all of us, because it means we've let you down. And our whole goal, our entire purpose, is to serve you and help you make the special people in your life feel all the more special.
         
If you have already spoken with a customer service representative about this, disregard this email and—more importantly—rest assured that progress is already being made.
         
If there’s anything else we can do for you, please call us at 1-800-ProFlowers (800-776-3569) or email us at wecare@proflowersc.om and let us know.

Wow.  What a way to handle a problem.  Step forward, admit it and see how you can make it right.  They are only off by a day, and in this case it doesn’t matter, but if this was a birthday or something, it would be a big deal, and they let me know in time to make a change.  Great customer service…great marketing.

A World Without Email Connections

Once and a while something really strikes you about how far we have come in s short time in the web world.  Today I was doing some general cleaning and stumbled across a cache of old articles I had written.  In the early days of the web I wrote for a wide variety of national magazines (Inc. for example) to an eclectic mix of trade publications (I mean how many of you have a subscription from the National Lubricating and Grease Institute).

As I thumbed through the pile, my eyes came across an article I wrote in the summer of 1996.  I had surveyed a group of mid-sized CEO’s for a speech that I was going to give, and found that fully 72 percent of them had implemented an email system that allowed employees to communicate with each other internally.  However, only 36 percent of those systems were connected to the outside world so that email could be sent from company to company. 

For those of us who deal in the business of sending email, it is impossible to comprehend that a world existed just over a decade ago where our products would not have been able to reach a majority of the business population at work.  Does anyone remember the days when a company would have a single e-mail address (usually an AOL one), and any incoming mail would be printed out by an administrative assistant and distributed to the proper department.

Thank goodness for progress…I have to go check my email now.

A No-Tan-Line Bikini and 70 Passionate Women

What would valentines day be without some candy, but this candy is a bit different. I had an opportunity to hear Pete Sheinbaum, the CEO of Daily Candy speak at the EEC conference yesterday. For those of you not familiar with it, Daily Candy is an email newsletter that is a must-read for women (and some men) who want to be in-the-know about fashion and trends in leading cities. What makes the newsletter unique is the amazing subscriber growth and success it has experienced.

Pete gave a wonderful presentation. He shared how the newsletter got started when one of the founders heard about a no-tan-line bikini that was very cool, and sent it out to the initial 70 subscribers. In almost no time, the subscriber base grew to 35,000. There was one key to growth. Find really cool stuff, and write about it. Whether it was fashion, restaurants or food, if it was great, and you told your audience about it, they were bound to pass it along to friends, and a community formed. Not an online one, but a thriving, vibrant, real community. One where the retort, “did you read about X in Daily Candy,” is as common as “Hello.”

It is very easy to try too hard to sell online, and not realize that online media can sometimes be used much more effectively to fuel passion (and the community can then do the selling). While this is no small task, sometimes with the right combination of smarts and luck, someone really hits a home run. Daily Candy did.