The evolution of digital marketing has forever changed the way marketers have to think about how to build and manage a brand. No longer a “behind the scenes” function, marketers are now one of the most critical and visible functions of a successful organization. With responsibility for both traditional and digital marketing channels, an effective marketer must be a strategist, writer, online guru, relationship builder, executer and more.
But many communicators are struggling to find the most efficient and effective way to connect traditional marketing tactics and digital marketing tactics.
When connected effectively, traditional and digital marketing tactics offer immense opportunities to build market recognition, increase brand awareness and provide the foundation for strong and sustainable growth. To do so, successful marketers must turn to the “Multi-Touch” approach.
The “Multi-Touch” approach combines traditional marketing (advertising, public relations, events, etc.), which offers opportunities to reach the masses, with digital marketing (social networking, SEO, etc), which offers a more personalized, one-on-one communication opportunity. This integration allows marketers to offer consistent messaging that resonates to as many of the ‘right’ customers as possible, through all the proper channels.
The integrated marketing campaign that is created through the “Multi-Touch” approach provides marketers to use existing assets from traditional marketing for search and social media marketing efforts, and vice versa. Utilized by smart marketers, the “Multi-Touch” approach and integrated marketing campaigns can generate the measurable results needed to build your business quickly and effectively.
Forrester Wave Report Names Email Marketing Service Provider Leaders
As part of its Wave report on Email Marketing Service providers (ESPs), Forrester reviewed 15 vendors against 69 criteria and ranked Responsys and ExactTarget at the top of the pack. All eight Leaders were narrowly separated and achieved Leader status through innovation and a commitment to advancing client education and sophistication.
Forrester’s March 2009 US Interactive Marketing Forecast Online Survey found that 92% of respondents are currently using email marketing and spending is expected to balloon to $2 billion dollars by 2014.
When Forrester surveyed 218 clients of the vendors in this wave on how the current economic situation is altering their email programs, very few marketers cited budget cuts. Instead, clients are more demanding of their email service providers because marketers are increasing the relevance of their programs. Email marketing frequency is growing and marketers look to ESPs to offset staffing losses, according to Forrester. The full report included vendor and executive surveys as well as executive interviews.
The report found among the leaders best aligned for large enterprise deployments, Responsys was noted for its comprehensive offerings and functionality, as well as its client satisfaction with its innovation.
ExactTarget was noted for its ability to cater to any market segment. Forrester referenced the company’s “highly usable self-service application and growing services organization that offers the ability for its personnel to be deployed at the client location. With high satisfaction scores and online community, ExactTarget can successfully meet marketers’ complex business needs.”
Another vendors singled out in the report was e-Dialog for its comprehensive application functionality, the ability to quickly segment and query large amounts of data and automate the testing process. Acxiom was acknowledged for quick integration with mobile and social functionality to meet the growing needs of the email marketer. Acxiom is well equipped to manage large global enterprises particularly in a full-service manner.
Yesmail’s variety of self-service and collaborative self-service was called out for its ability to serve a vast selection of market segments. Forrester cited the vendor’s robust tool for managing all aspects of email campaign deployment, including visual tools, a marketing calendar, and OLAP analytics for campaign analysis.
Experian Marketing Services’ platform was credited for excellent production services capabilities as well as a comprehensive self-service application (Experian CheetahMail) that caters to the 40% of its clients that work with the vendor in that fashion. It earned a perfect customer satisfaction score and has a long history of complex data integrations as well as a global footprint.
Epsilon’s DREAM messaging platform was noted for its comprehensive offering all of the necessary functionality to manage and execute mailings. According to the Forrester report, 70% of Epsilon’s clients engage with them in a full or collaborative service manner. Overall, 60% of their clients are full-service, and most are satisfied with the overall account service.
4 Steps to Successful Email List Rental & Email Display Advertising
Note: This post is NOT written for list owners and publishers. It’s written for advertisers that rent emails lists or advertise in email newsletters. If you’re an advertiser who has, or is planning, to include 3rd-party email into your marketing mix it will help to use the channel more successfully and get a better ROI, with smaller budgets. In the end, it will help list owners, too. After all a happy advertiser is a repeat advertiser.
Throughout my years in email marketing both on the agency and list side, I’ve had a few conversations like this, and I paraphrase, “I’m cancelling my campaigns because I’m not getting enough [clicks, leads, sales, or other tangible results].” The advertiser then pulls the campaign and leaves disappointed with the performance of the email list.
But there have also been instances when, before the advertiser (or their agency or list broker) pulled the campaign, they were willing make a few small adjustments and retest. And for those who once felt disappointed then saw an immediate improvement in campaign performance. I shared with them one tried-and-true secret to successful email advertising, which is:
“Match your creative and success criteria to your campaign objective.”
Marketing 101right? But I cannot tell you how often I have seen that the objective, creative, and measures of success are completely misaligned. And when they are, the campaign is nowhere near as successful as it could be. For reasons unknown this misalignment happens more often with email.
The good news is that it’s an easy fix that can quickly invert the ROI of email marketing. When looking at an email-centric campaign, start by asking yourself these four questions:
1. What is my goal for this campaign?
2. Does my creative and landing page align with that goal?
3. Does my offer, creative and landing page make sense to my audience and not just to me?
4. How will I measure the success of the campaign, and does it align with the goal?
What are you trying to achieve? Branding? Registrations? A sales inquiry? An immediate purchase? Whatever your goal is, make sure that your creative, landing page, and measurements all align with the goal and make sense from the perspective of your audience (which is often different than yours).
Is your goal branding? Email effectively achieves key branding goals: awareness, message association, favorability, purchase intent, etc. I’ve found that most advertisers, especially when using e-newsletter advertisements, have great success with branding ads in the email channel. Their creatives are engaging, their brand is prominent, and they reinforce messages that they want the viewer to associate with their brands. But the disconnect, when there is one, comes when the advertiser measures the campaign by clicks or some other metric when the creative was never intended to elicit that kind of response. Brand is measured by the impact that viewing (i.e., an impression) the ad has on the perception and intent of the viewer, not by an immediate response. Instead use open-rates as your barometer.
Want visits to your website or new registrations? Great! Make sure to design your creative to elicit that kind of response. If your ad’s message is, “WidgetTown: The best widgets around. Click here for more.” you may have impacted the prospects’ brand perceptions, but you are unlikely to get them to click. Why should they? They have all the information they need, and down the road, if they need a widget, they are more likely to call you. But they’re not going to click right now or they, by virtual of impeccable timing, have an immediate need. If your goal is registrations, give the viewer a reason to click. Give them something that’s truly valuable (to them).
Is your goal lead generation? The incentive and landing page is now a critical part of your campaign. Does the creative tie in to the landing page? Is the incentive promoted in the creative clearly and prominently shown on the landing page? Is it clear on the landing page what the viewer must do next, and is the incentive reinforced? Are there distractions (navigation, social network links, etc.) that would derail the prospect from completing the task? Any of these can reduce the effectiveness of a lead-generation campaign and reduce the number of leads you generate.
Maybe your goal is online sales. Is it a product that someone would buy on impulse or should your campaigns be centered on events, such as holidays? Have you gone through the entire checkout process? Is it clean and simple, or convoluted and cryptic? Are you tracking cart abandonment so you can see where the problem spots are? Does your email service provider (ESP) or internal email solution support cart abandonment triggers? Are you placing a cookie in the visitors’ browsers so if they come back in a couple days and buy that product, you can credit the ad that generated the leads?
By the way, don’t try to achieve multiple goals with one campaign. It will be like a futon—it doesn’t make a very good sofa or a very good bed.
These are just of few of the basic but ever-present factors that can affect desired actions and thus your evaluation of the ROI of your 3rd party email campaigns. Just remember, the line between and email marketing success and relative failure in a fine one. Use these steps to ensure that your messages and objectives are inline and you can instantly sway the ROI-meter to your favor.
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Scott Hardigree is CEO at Indiemark, a full-service email marketing agency and consultancy based in Orlando FL.
Having collected or gained access to a thousands, or even just a few, of potential clients is one sure way to get business moving. Direct marketing, both online and offline, has been seen as one of the best tools to generate real results. However, the question is, once you have your email addresses, what do you do with them?
Rather than creating your own excel files that require upkeep or trying to draft your own html emails (or worse send basic text emails), an email management system is definitely the way to go. We here at The Web Uncovered are crazy about one in particular, Constant Contact, as it has the most value-added systems for its cost.
Not only can you import and export your email lists through Constant Contact, but you also are html email templates that you can customize for your campaigns, such as name-addressing, adding your logo, and more. Also they have a feature to add polls, which is a good way to create user interaction.
Takeaway: Now this is a paid service, so you need to evaluate how much time you think you will save, and how much you think you will use it. For me personally, the feature that put me over the edge was the analytics feature, where you can see who clicked on links in your email. Not only does it give you great feedback on your campaign overall, but I have used this to create personal follow-up emails that closed deals. All-in-all, this is a technology that is unappreciated and may become a make more vital part to online marketing in the year to come.
The evolution of digital marketing has forever changed the way marketers have to think about how to build and manage a brand. No longer a “behind the scenes” function, marketers are now one of the most critical and visible functions of a successful organization. With responsibility for both traditional and digital marketing channels, an effective marketer must be a strategist, writer, online guru, relationship builder, executer and more.
