Marketing Productivity Blog

IN-line Marketing, that is.

Sitting here at the junction of Technology and Marketing as I do is frankly a weird place to be.  I often feel it’s a lonely place because it seems like neither side really understands what is at the center, how the Corpus Callosum works, if you know what I mean.  

And how to optimize this junction.

I have been writing about these topics in discussion groups since 1999 and on my web site since 2000, based on the (admittedly rare) experience of Optimizing an Interactive Television Network over a 10 year span.  Here’s what we learned, in a nutshell: Interactive means Behavior; without Behavior, there is no Interaction, by definition.

So it follows that the single most important thing you can do as a Marketer is understand Behavior - or often more importantly, the lack of Behavior.  Not demographics, not impressions, not any of the traditional Marketing stuff. 

Behavior.  It’s the key to everything Interactive.

Web analytics folks for the most part get this idea now, in terms of the straight-up applications of it: It’s about Reducing Friction.  How Usability affects the success of Interactive Marketing, for example.  Optimizing Landing pages,  Etc.  The importance of Customer Experience in reducing downstream Friction, which magnifies the natural ”Pull” of Interactive.

The challenge has been the Marketing side has stuck to many of the offline “Push” traditions, which don’t take into account the two-way nature of an Interactive Relationship.  The idea that people who are Interacting are trying to get something done.  The whole “Lean Forward versus Lean Back” argument, as we first talked about it back in the “old days”.

Relevance, which is forecast by Behavior.

Could it be the times are ‘a changing?  Could it be that the Marketers are coming around to the idea that the most important concept in Interactive Marketing is an “IN-line Experience” - an experience that facilitates or helps the visitor Accomplish Goals?  Like Search Marketing does, for example?

Check out these recent articles -  in an Advertising trade pub - to hear Marketers say this in their own words:

Form + Function (AdWeek)

Application Economics (AdWeek)

Want more?  Some related material:

What’s Next in Marketing + Advertising (slide show, a fast read)

The Great Leap Forward (blog)

Value Is the New Currency (ClickZ)

What do you think? 

Are we finally ready to move forward from the offline Push Marketing model into specialized approaches for Interactive?

On the heels of the Desirability Series we have two related articles:

1.  This first piece is by Lester Wunderman, one of the “fathers” of Direct Marketing (so many fathers, so little time).  To me, it’s significant Mr. Wunderman would feel the need to come out and provide us with his definition of Engagement, at least as it relates to Advertising.  If he didn’t see Engagement as an important idea thrashing around looking for clarity, why bother?

His statements are necessarily broad I think, because he’s coming at it from the top level, the Strategic Layer, and in doing so has to cover a very wide range of industries and media.  Nonetheless, if you take the time to really read what he’s saying and think about it, he’s setting up a new kind of approach to Advertising similar to what I defined here.

Here’s the article link:
Engagement — A New Information-Based Form of Advertising

2.  In contrast, I’m not sure whether Roy Young is the “father” of anything but he is the President of MarketingProfs.com and coauthor of Marketing Champions: Practical Strategies for Improving Marketing’s Power, Influence and Business Impact - something I talk about a lot.

His topic?  Silo Busting, which is so critical to really driving a customer-centric Strategy.  Roy provides 5 solid tips on how to get started if you want to Take Action on Desirability.

Here’s the article link:
Five Tactics for Busting Silos in Your Company

If you are interested in some of the broader Marketing issues that have come up in this romp through Display Advertising in Social Media, the Wharton School recently published a couple of pieces.

This first one talks about the Engagement Value of snail mail versus e-mail.  Some of the interesting quotes:

“In marketing [terms], email is transactional; paper is relational.”

“It seems like a person sending a written note vs. a person sending email is investing more of himself or herself in that communication. It takes more effort to write a letter, and people often equate effort with how much a person cares.” 

In other words, an electronic relationship requires very little investment on either side, so the level of Emotional Impact it creates versus print is lower.  I have seen this in action, for example, using post cards to re-activate (sorry, re-Engage) lapsed online customers. 

Here’s a link to the article: ‘Dead Tree’ Medium No Longer: For Many Marketers, Print Outperforms Digital

Related to my examples of Social Media that Works, and especially the Moms Tampa Bay project, we have an article on mixing and balancing professional with amateur content and the Trust issues there. 

Couple of quotes:

“Some things that look amateur are professional and vice versa. You never really know what’s going on. And it’s hard to track these things down without cross checking. The digital environment is putting an enormous responsibility on the consumer.”

“It’s amusing that two of the examples the Newsweek article cites as examples of the ‘revenge of the experts’ — Mahalo and About.com — are what I would call amateur sites. They don’t use professional journalists or researchers; they use knowledgeable enthusiasts to serve as human filters. The fact that those human filters get paid doesn’t change anything. What makes someone an amateur isn’t the absence of money; it’s the absence of traditional credentials.”

Here’s a link to the article: Experts versus Amateurs: A Tug of War over the Future of Media

Have a good weekend!

PM Update:

See also User Generated Magazines and The Future of Advertising for additional thoughts in these areas.

P.S.  Speaking of offline verus online Relationships, Engagement, and Trust, if you’re going to the Toronto eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit, I’ll be teaching the WAA BaseCamp session Monday and speaking on Tuesday - see ya there.

Cisco’s passage to the new world of customer-driven marketing

I tried to explain the importance of measuring dis-Engagement from the Analytical side and from the Marketing side.  Didn’t seem to get much traction with all of you.

So now I think I will let somebody else explain it - Cisco.

From Target Marketing Magazine, we have this article about how Cisco is measuring and using Engagement to drive higher close rates on leads.  There are some really interesting phrases spoken by the marketing folks in this article you should pay attention to:

In the old world, a campaign was temporal in nature.  In the new metaphor, the campaign is always on 

need to shift from disruptive model to an engagement model

moving from a monologue, where we just send e-mails to people and they respond when they can, to a wave, where we are actually creating a dialogue with that customer

customers will self-propel through the buying cycle

self-serve themselves into the buying experience as they need to

be more responsive to customers when they’re leaning forward

listening to your customers is an ‘old world’ phrase, and it means something different in the ‘new world’

empowering a customer to move through the sales process on his own

new type of evangelist to do marketing this way versus doing marketing in the disruptive manner

All sounds pretty familiar, if you read my last post.  This is the way you optimize Interactivity, the Strategy of Relationship Marketing.  “Interactive” means continuous two-way exchange, right? 

Not outbound sledgehammer to the head every week?

It’s a story of using the LifeCycle, of measuring Engagement and dis-Engagement, in action.  When the customer is Engaged, you leave them alone.  When they start to dis-Engage, you open a dialogue .  It is really as simple as that.  It’s a dialogue based on behavior.

This marketing team took Cisco’s lead quality from 13% of leads expected to close to 75% expected to close.  “Expected” here means so darn likely these leads get added to the sales forecast.  That’s my kind of “expected” - 90% actually close.

Gotta be some smiling folks in that Sales department.  And those kinds of numbers are common with Relationship Marketing, in both B2B and B2C.  It’s just a better model.

Here’s another link to the article: A Paradigm Shift

So a question for you: Have we forgotten the essential premise of the web - Interactivity?  What’s the word “Interactive” mean to you? 

Speaking of the role Marketing should play in Operations, here’s the first article I have ever seen in a Marketing context about optimizing a VRU / IVR.  This challenge is really very similar to optimizing a web site.  You have path, and traffic down branches of path.  You have bounce rates and exits.  You have the same “choices with correct context” issue that is the heart of designing good navigation and inline link text.  You have usability.

Fact is, a VRU / IVR is a technical interface to humans, just like a web site is.  And just like many web sites, it was probably built and programmed by some engineers without a lot of direction from Marketing or Customer Service.  There’s really no reason at all why the folks optimizing the web site should not also optimize the phone system too - especially if they do a good job with the web site!

I optimized my first VRU in 1991 at HSN.  This was very new technology back then, and our customers were kind of shocked by it.  Nobody used it.  When I finally found an engineer who could print out a “path map” and I went through all the branches, I understood why nobody used it - confusing choices, unclear language.  Sound familiar?  Only 2% of customer orders were being processed through the VRU.  And besides, customers like talking to live reps.

A real Marketing through Operations problem.

First we worked with the engineers to redo the branching and change the language so the VRU was smooth and easy to use.  We pushed high frequency paths to the top of the stucture and sunk the low frequency stuff, eliminating steps for most transactions.  Sound familar?  I also felt the close on the transaction was ambiguous, so we built in a clear “confirmation” the order had been placed correctly.  Sound familiar?  How long did it take online carts to include a confirmation e-mail?

But then the Marketing problem.  Lots of people had used the VRU and thought it sucked.  How do we get them to give the new unit a chance?  How do we get them to actually like using it?

Next, we gave the VRU more personality.  We named it Tootie and had it toot a horn at the end of the order placing process - just like the hosts did (back then) on the live TV show.  An “audio confirmation” if you will.  So now the VRU does something the live reps can’t do - give customers a “Toot”.  That helps address the “liking to use” issue.

But we still have the problem of trial - how do we get people to try the revamped interface out?

Fashion programming is what the core customer eventually migrated to; we knew this from previous hard analysis (not surveys or gut feel).  If we could get these high order frequency customers to use the VRU, we’d get a significant jump in usage.  Fashion shows were very high velocity and because sizes and colors are frequently involved, certain SKU’s can sell out quickly.  So we had the hosts in those shows talk on air about how if customers used the VRU they would beat out everybody else ordering through a live rep.

In other words, “If you really want this product, you better use Tootie” - the “persona” we created for the VRU.  Hard customer benefit.

Within a very short time, we had 20% of customer orders coming through the VRU, on it’s way to 80%.  Saved the company an absolute boatload of money - and made customers happy in the process!

How did we know they were happy?  Hard analysis (% best customers using VRU, % of their orders placed by VRU) and surveys of course, but we had a better indicator than these metrics - the number of Christmas Cards Tootie received each year. 

That’s right, customers sent holiday greetings to the VRU.

How many greeting cards did your VRU / IVR receive last year?

Seriously though - what other customer-facing, technology-driven business processes can you optimize?  You already know how to do this from the web site experience.  Let’s create a list.

And here’s another link to that article - Listen Up!

Here’s an article giving quite a few examples of companies taking the route I covered in the CMO: Strategic Seat is CCO post.  Interesting that the majority are direct marketing companies and at one, customer service reports to Marketing.  This Marketing department views their job as “service to the customer”.  Now that’s a Marketing department I would feel at home in.

Marketing is indeed a much greater force to be reckoned with when it is strategically and operationally integrated into the brand promise and product offerings and not just a Meatball Sundae.  But somebody has to think that through and make it happen. 

How about you?

Here’s the link:  Where Are Your Brand Manners?

Information Week gives us this article: Step Up - or Step Back.  Before the Marketers in the audience click Back, I think you should read this article. 

Lead Data: From the annual meeting last month of the Society for Information Management, the percentage of CIOs and other top IT executives reporting directly to CEOs had fallen dramatically from the year-earlier survey, SIM revealed.

The premise is basically this: the “Command and Control” CIO is on the way out; these are the folks that are dropping in rank and no longer reporting to the CEO.  At the same time, we find CIO’s that are business oriented and advocates for process improvement are moving up and more of them are reporting to the CEO.

Makes sense to me.

There seems to be a lot parallels between what is going on with CIO’s and CMO’s; both are looking for a seat at the strategic table.  And both need to become more business-oriented to do it.  I think “business oriented” here is probably just a code word for “more accountable for what you contribute”.  In the case of CMO’s, this includes reaching out into the operational side of the business and finding out how operations affects the success of Marketing.

To go a step further, wanna-be CIO’s and CMO’s not afraid of an accountable orientation would do themselves a huge favor by reaching out to each other; otherwise both or either may be “absorbed into the Network“. 

This pattern playing out over in CIO-land has some lessons for those (mostly analytical) Marketers who aspire to the CMO seat.  If you do aspire to be CMO, read about the CIO’s who do report to the CEO and the business attitude that got them there - the same attitude you need.

Here’s that article link again: Step Up - or Step Back

Circling back to the idea of Faulty Segmentation Logic as the root cause of “so much data, too little insight”, here’s a recent article from MyCustomer.com outlining 7 common segmentation mistakes:

Article: The seven perils of segmentation

In my experience, #1, 5, 6, and 7 are the ones that really create a lack of faith and lead to that “drowning in data” feeling.  #5 - 7 share an important commonality: the segmentation was done outside the database to be acted on, resulting in no way to tie the segmentation to the database.  This is more common than you think, and often happens when people get “survey happy”.

There’s nothing wrong with gathering survey data, but I strongly urge people to know specifically who they are surveying from a behavioral perspective (new customer, best customer, recent visitor / buyer, lapsed visitor / buyer, etc.) so you can go back and apply your new survey knowledge against specific segments.  Plus, this approach allows you to determine if people act the way they say they will act in the survey - a critical piece of insight.

Quote from peril #7: “I’ve often seen situations where firms end up with customers neatly grouped into segments… and then the marketers ask ‘now what???’”  This is the what to do with “People” as opposed to “Reach and Frequency” Marketing challenge mentioned in the previous post.

Most Marketers got their start looking at their tasks through a demographic lens via buying media, and to be fair, changing that mindset to a more behavioral or people-based view is difficult.  But the outcome is very much in synch with the current trend towards Relevance, Respect, and Relationships that so many folks are clamoring about in all the subcultures of Customer Marketing and Social Media. 

A behavior-based messaging approach can be the glue that binds all of these ideas together if you match the marketing approach with your segmentation. 

For a web analytics oriented / process view of segmentation, see Judah’s post.  The unique thing about segmentation on the web is you are often analyzing the behavior of non-customers, something many off-liners are not familiar with and presents some unique challenges.  But the same behavioral marketing concepts of Relevance, Respect, and Relationships apply. 

More on this concept and a simple model you can use to help with Marketing execution against behavior-based segmentation to come.

Great article on what’s happening with the more advanced e-mail marketing programs out there courtesy of Direct Magazine.

Here’s the link: E-mail Delivers

Particular ideas of note:

1.  Behavioral Targeting / LifeCycle Management is starting to happen.  Not the so-called Behavioral Targeting they use for display advertising online; I mean real BT based on customer behavior. 

“Blasting” e-mail is starting to be recognized for what it really is - a waste of customer value and an opportunity cost.  This specific topic is what I covered in my eMetrics and DMA presentations last month.  Start using Lifecycle-based segmentation in your e-mail programs and you will see what I mean!

No resources? Please just try something!  For example, divide the list into those who have purchased / opened / clicked (your choice) in the past 90 days and all others.  Compare per e-mail stats from the drop by these 2 segments - deliverability, opens, clicks, whatever you like. 

Now, can you tell me you should be saying the same thing to / speaking in the same voice to these two groups?  Trust me, if your boss is unclear on why ”measuring engagement” matters, the stats from the simple test above should start a conversation!

If you have the chops / tools, do the same thing only break it by 30-day groups: < 30 days, 31 - 60 days, 61 - 90 days, etc.  You will see the Customer Lifecycle play out right in front of your eyes.  Honestly, this should be standard reporting for e-mail; the powerful behavioral details that lead to higher ROI messaging are being hidden by lack of proper behavioral segmentation.  If e-mail is a retention device, then this standard retention reporting approach should be applied.

2.  List purging is becoming mandatory because it improves e-mail deliverability.  This was a main takeaway of mine from the eMetrics Summit based on several presentations.

How about your e-mail program?  Getting any traction with the more advanced behavioral techniques?  Or can’t get the support to try?  Or not your job to improve Marketing Productivity?  

Or just don’t care (and tell us Why)?

Check out the article here: E-mail Delivers

Looks like 1-to-1 Magazine has decided to unlock some of their archives, maybe releasing them to search after the next issue is published?  Who knows, but there was an important article on Failure published last month that is worth a read.

One of the major challenges the Analytical Culture faces is Fear of Failure; it’s just so uncool to fail in many companies today.  Yet some of the most spectacular wins often come after spectacular failures, and we have to teach managers that without Failure, there is no Learning Process.  Do it like they do at 3M and IBM, using the real stories of how failure went unpunished and was ultimately rewarded. 

You want the Analytics to free people, not have them seek out least common denominator “safe harbors” that have (perceived) immunity from failure.  I’m not sure many folks get how important this cultural issue is; if you don’t address it, the Analytics can actually make you worse off as people avoid risk by satisficing.

Check out the article here, more from me on this topic here.