Aaron Smith, writing for MediaPosts’s Email Insider, provided an interesting sumary of the most common misconceptions about email marketing.  Aaron is a founder and principal at Smith-Harmon, a design agency focused on email marketing.  (Visit the Smith-Harmon site.)

In these tough economic times, more and more businesses are turning to low-cost marketing tactics that offer potentially high rewards – tactics like email marketing.

The problem, as Aaron points out, is that this potential for a high return on the marketing investment can lead executives to make incorrect assumptions and uninformed business decisions that can have significant (and negative) consequences over time.

Email marketing isn’t exactly like other forms of marketing and common practices for medias like newspaper or television (like increasing impressions by increasing frequency) can backfire.  Aaron outlines the three most common mistakes below:

1. You can increase revenue by increasing frequency with little or no negative consequences. This may be the biggest myth of all. While increasing the number of mailings may result in short-term revenue gains, many program managers are finding out the hard way that sustained increases in frequency result in a number of negative consequences, including:

-          Lower long-term revenue as recipients become less engaged

-          Higher cost of list maintenance and subscriber acquisition as unsubs increase

-          Deliverablity issues as a result of higher spam complaints

-          And worst of all, damage to brand equity

In “View from the Inbox 2008,” a report jointly produced by Merkle and Harris Interactive, 32% of consumers said they stopped doing business with at least one company as a result of poor email practices.

2. Good email creative isn’t different from direct mail or banner ads. While there are certain universal marketing tactics that can be applied equally to email, print and television channels,  consumers engage with email in very specific and measurable ways. It’s possible that taking a print flyer and sending it out as an image-heavy email message may be better than not sending a message at all, but truly effective email creative takes into account factors that make the channel unique. Understanding the limitations of email and the inbox environment like preview panes, disabled images and the nuances of various email readers such as Outlook 2007, is critical to successful messaging.

3. It only takes an hour to prepare and send an email campaign – AKA “how hard can it be?” Yes, and the Tooth Fairy and Santa Claus are real. From a marketing perspective, one of the most attractive things about the email channel is the ability to react quickly to shifting marketing goals and turn around campaigns in a short amount of time. And while I have seen truly miraculous turnaround times, effective email campaigns still require strategic and tactical planning, copywriting, designing and coding. Writing effective copy, designing for the inbox environment and coding with an understanding of the many email readers out there are all tasks requiring a high degree of skill and specialized knowledge that only comes with experience. Theoretically you can prep and send a message to your subscribers in under an hour, but odds are it won’t be worth the cost of sending the mailing.

In summary, it’s important to take some time to learn as much as you can about email marketing best practices and consumer preferences (they continue to change) in order to be a “good” client and make smart decisions.  The resulting customer activity and consumer loyalty to your brand could pay dividends for years to come.

After posting my piece on Consumer 2.0, I received a Tweet from one of my friends on Twitter.

@BrandCentral – Consumers need to make companies stop taking us for granted.  We are your source of income – respect us, dangnabbit!

Not only did I find the Tweet to be interesting because I hadn’t seen “dangnabbit” spelled out in a while, but the sentiment of the post was indicative of a larger problem I see brewing for marketers in the future.  ”Engagement” is a big word circulating through the marketing universe at this time, but in reality, engagement requires two-way interactions between parties. Real interaction is built on a foundation of mutual respect.

And according to my informal survey of one and a just-released study of the nation’s political climate conducted by BIGresearch, Americans are feeling a little disrespected on all levels.

According to BIGresearch (via the American Pulse(TM) Survey), 57.6% of Americans say they don’t have a voice anymore in what’s coming out of Washington.  In a release from BIGresearch:

In a government with a Democratic stronghold, it’s surprising that 42.8% of people who consider themselves of the Democratic Party don’t think they are being heard on Capitol Hill. 74.5% of Republicans and 63.8% of Independents feel the same.

31.6% of Americans believe the U.S. Government controls their financial future and congressional leaders may want to hear this, because 43.4% of respondents feel they have lost control of their personal monetary prospects. 46.8% of Americans say they hold the key to their own financial future.

So what connection can be made between the feelings of Americans as consumers and as members of the greater, political/social fabric?  Here are a few things to consider:

1. Americans are undergoing a significant change in stature on the global economic stage.  During the consumption-crazed 80’s, 90’s and early 2000’s; Americans were pretty convinced we were unasailable.  With preeminence comes hubris and the eventual fall from grace is bound to hurt – whether it’s egos or economies.
2. Any crash hurts more when it occurs at high speeds.  We have technology to thank for an over-heightened sensativity to minutiea that might otherwise go by un-noticed.  Add to that the fact that all the noise created by our various media now chokes out the possibilities of creating national concensus through just a few, commonly-held forums.
3. Businesses, operating under a 19th century economic paradigm that you could call almost imperialistic, have focused so much on growth and scale that their leadership doesn’t always see a problem with taking billions of dollars in bail-out money with one hand while paying out millions in bonuses to executives with the other.
4. And probably most important, at least from my perspective.  As we’ve all become more consumed with managing all the new information, opportunities and demands on our time, we’ve seemed to drop the ball on civility, mutual respect and compassion.  The result has been the development of an “iPod Culture” where we’re all too busy listening to our own playlist to really talk with each other any more.

In short, we’ve lost respect for each other.

The good news, though, is that with the possiblity of change amped up on terrabytes of information and energy drinks they way it is, we can make things better.  It’s that fundamentally “American” value of hopefullness that has driven generations before and will continue to drive us forward.

It’s behind why some people voted for Barack Obama and others participated in Tea Parties.  It’s why there are still thousands of us who are still Cubs fans.

And as long as we have hope, there’s always a chance we’ll find respect again and share it.

The Apple iPhone has been a tremendous marketing success.  This week (today, in fact), Apple’s iTunes Apps Store just distributed its one billionth application for the iPhone.  This last quarter, Apple shipped over three and a half million iPhones.  Profits are up and things are looking good.

Well, except for that one misguided iPhone app debuting this week.  The “Baby Shaker” app.

“This application was deeply offensive and should not have been approved for distribution on the App Store,” said Natalie Kerris, an Apple spokesperson.  ”When we learned of this mistake, the app was removed immediately.  We sincerely apologize for this mistake and thank our customers for bringing this to our attention.”

Amid all great news, someone always seems to have to spoil the party, don’t they.

Fortunately, Apple not only did the right thing by removing the app, they promptly apologized and, more importantly, they acknowledged the role Apple customers had in making the recall possible.  Whatever the lingering lifespan this app is likely to have in the ether that is the Internet, it’s unlikely Apple will be tainted as a result. 

The Apple brand has its loyal advocates and acolytes.  They received the recognition they were do and, no doubt, see themselves as part of the Apple tribe responsible for keeping the brand pure as a result of this action and public recognition.  

All in all, it’s a great example of positive brand reinforcement with your key audiences.  Kudo’s to Apple.

And for those of you really interested in learning more about the state of Apple’s iPhone apps, I strongly suggest your read Nicholas Kolakowski’s story in eWeek.  Very interesting and informative.

by Mike Bawden
President & CEO; Brand Central Station

These are indeed interesting times in which we all live. The pace of life has picked up so dramatically in the last ten years, I question our society’s combined ability to adapt without some kind of major cultural meltdown occuring during the process. But still, I have faith.

With rapid change comes great opportunity, as well as terrible risk.

From society as a whole, there comes a desperate cry for sanity and creativity. For compassion and stewardship. For accountability and self-discipline.

As marketers, I think we all owe it to our customers, clients, communities, employees and partners to do the best we can with what we have. To make a positive difference in the world. And to encourage everyone – whether they’re our kids or our customers – to be smart and discriminating consumers of everything we’re told to believe.

In the past fifteen years, the Internet has evolved from a loose connection of crude email servers into an interactive, social network that connects us globally. For the most part, we’ve recognized that and call it Web 2.0.

Well folks, maybe it’s time we come up with Customer 2.0. They need to be better informed and capable of handling the ever-increasing flow of information, images and noise that comes their way.

As marketers, it’s our responsibility.

But like most media property-driven market research, it ignores a significant pool of resources that often go untapped by most b-to-b marketers and the media.  I understand why.  For a magazine or other media outlet to try and identify how much money and human resource is dedicated to internal communications, training and organizational behavior, they would have to step waaaaaay out of their comfort zone.

It’s kind of like asking an amateur astronomer to find Dark Matter in the universe using his existing, backyard telescope.  They may have an idea where to point the telescope, but they can’t really see what they’re looking at.

Instead, I’d point you to this most excellent post by John Jantsch of Duct Tape Marketing.  In it, he explains how everyone in a company has a marketing responsibility.  “Here’s a little flash – anyone associated with your business that comes into contact with a prospect or customer is performing a marketing function.”

John advocates the idea of businesses provide marketing training for everyone in the business – including administrative and finance people.  A quarterly “all hands” brand meeting would cover a variety of topics including:

Why you named your company what we did – attach this to your personal story

What colors, images, fonts are official and why – create a simple style manual of standards

Your core marketing message – and why – help everyone connect their position to the message

The way you want the brand to be thought of in the market – your goal, your one word of association

Benefits of your products and services – demo them and present them just like you would to a customer

Description of your ideal customer – use photos and success stories of real customers

Your current lead generation activities – show off ads, run radio spots – sell them on the campaign

Your lead conversion process – everyone should know the next step when a prospect calls

Key marketing metrics – sales generated, leads generated, referrals generated, PR generated

Your marketing calendar – show everyone you have a plan for the future

(Read the entire post here.)

So, why mention this along side the Hearst study?  Because one of the things that I think is missing from John’s suggestion is the idea of bringing in outside information on the market, trends and competitors.  Magazines currently reeling from advertising cutbacks have a tremendous wealth of untapped and under-reported information that could be leveraged to supplement internal communications sessions like these.

Realistically, this could be a significant revenue opportunity for trade journals that could be nearly “uncontested” with regard to competing publications, trade shows or online programs.

From a business owner/manager’s point of view, there are few marketing spends that produce a faster and greater return on investment than internal team building and training.  There is real power behind the idea of getting everyone on the “same song sheet”  when it comes to dealing with customers, suppliers and one another.

Any agency (advertising or PR) reading this post should see this as a significant opportunity to tap budgets outside of their client’s marketing department.  You can be very creative and very, very effective.  Broker the relationship between media properties and client and produce the “event” – you could make everyone happy and successful as a result.

Nope.  Probably not.

Fun parody, though.

If you’re interested in becoming a contributing author to Brand Central Station, check out the information we’ve posted about being a contributor to our site or drop us a line.  Contributors should provide posts that range between 150 and 500 words in length.  All content submitted to BCS is subject to review and editing – and will be published at our discretion.

For decades, advertising agencies and the media have operated under a shared myth about what they do. The canard runs something like this: “Create brilliant advertising that gets people’s attention, run it in enough places the consumers can’t get away from it and eventually you’ll see your share of market increase as a result.”

When it came to generating measurable performance, agencies and the media gave lip-service to “Return on Marketing Investment” and other things that sounded very measurable and analytical; but the hard truth of the matter was that advertising has always been a fairly imprecise endeavor – and everybody was fine with the smoke and mirrors of it all.

That was until the Internet and attendant technologies made measurement of every customer interaction with a commercial message a measurable event. Clients, sitting along side their agencies and the media reps who sold them the space, could see exactly what was working and what wasn’t.

And not much was.

Not all of the conventional marketing and advertising wisdom had to be thrown out the window – but a lot of things had to change in order to make sense of the new realities of an interactive and completely measurable medium. The marketing profession – both on the client side and on the agency/media side – has been scrambling to find ways to produce results from online campaigns that meet reasonable expectations of management.

Traditional display advertising, like print ads in newspapers and magazines, seem to take up plenty of real estate on the web page, but no matter how many impressions the web site is able to guarantee, there has not been a reliable methodology in place for associating the media inventory purchased with the customer transactions that result.

PR efforts – attempts to tell the client’s story in the form of editorial content – are helpful in forming opinion but usually lack a significant or engaging call to action. Consumers may be educated, but the ability to act on that education is an issue.

There are a lot of possible solutions out there. And one of them debuted on Monday (April 20th) at ad:Tech in San Francisco. Hydra, one of the largest CPA ad services in the country announced its partnership with OnDialog, Inc. Leveraging the combined resources of OnDialog (and its partnership with landing page optimization company, Site Tuners), Hydra now claims an ability to increase conversion rates of online ad campaigns by as much as 80%.

But first, a little background on Hydra. Hydra is the largest and fastest-growing, pure performance-based, CPA affiliate network. For those of you not familiar with Internet ad-speak, that means that Hydra produces and manages online ad campaigns for clients and gets paid only when a customer is captured by the campaign. This is the same premise as the old “per inquiry” television ads that allowed television stations running the ads (usually late at night) to receive a fee for each sale made as a result of the broadcast of the ad.  Similar campaigns in magazines required the advertiser paid the magazine a percentage of the orders received using the order form from the magazine.

As a performance-based, CPA network, it’s in Hydra’s best interest to make sure the landing pages customers click-through to are effective and hard-working.

Enter OnDialog/Site Tuners.

The Site Tuners engine allows OnDialog to create customized landing pages from a set of variable elements. As customers click and interact with the landing pages, OnDialog learns what elements perform the best and serve the most effective content accordingly. At any given point in a campaign, the OnDialog/Site Tuners system can test up to 10,000 different combinations of elements sewn together in various combinations to create a myriad of landing pages.

As time goes on, the effectiveness of the landing pages continues to improve and additional customer data is fed back to the creative team for the on-going development of more and more effective page elements. For a company like Hydra, shortening the “learning curve” of what makes a landing page effective is paramount. The partnership with OnDialog/Site Tuners does that in a big way.

In my conversation with Mason Wiley, SVP of Marketing at Hydra, he explained why the OnDialog/Site Tuners relationship is so important to Hydra:

“We have a lot of entrepreneurial clients who need to make sure every dollar they spend online is working as hard as possible for them. Our model offers clients an opportunity to run a high-impact, online campaign with no upfront expense because clients pay on the back-end.”

“Only the biggest companies could run campaigns like this before – now anybody can. Our CPA model helps make things accessible.”

The technology can also be used in the creation of display ads to be placed in web sites as part of a larger campaign. Those ads, like the landing pages, can be built on the fly from a database of elements hosted by OnDialog/Site Tuners and placed via Hydra. The more successful ads (and elements) are then used and enhanced for future placements over the duration of the campaign.

Hydra’s partnership with OnDialog positions the ad network as one of the first adopters of this kind of technology. “We’re thrilled to be working with OnDialog as this partnership further builds on Hydra’s suite of services for maximizing campaign performance,” said Zac Brandenberg, CEO of Hydra.

So, what does all this mean for marketers? Well, it looks like it could be a significant breakthrough in the world of online advertising. The ability to test literally thousands of variations of your landing pages and ads and then review the data and make creative decisions as a result is significant. The thought that this kind of service would be offered on a “use it first, pay us when we perform” basis is outstanding.

One word of caution, though. Companies that provide marketing services on a “per inquiry” basis don’t do it out of the goodness of their heart. They’re experts at what it takes to make things work and they expect to be compensated appropriately for it. This caveat is issued in two, primary areas:

• Creative ownership of campaigns and landing pages is too often given to people who don’t understand how or why things work in the world of advertising or web development. Hydra, for example, has their own creative team who understand how to get customers to engage, where links and buttons should go, etc. Let them do their job!
• From a cost standpoint, remember that nothing is ever, really free. The back-end fees for a CPA campaign like this may appear large when compared to other ad options – but remember, you’re paying for results here. Be prepared to provide some money into an escrow account (in some cases) to reassure the service provider (no matter who it is) that you have the funds to make payment in the event of success.
• Also, I’ve run “per inquiry” campaigns where a “minimum fee” was expected in the event the campaign under-performed. Realize that there are fixed costs to any campaign and some providers may require it.

  As a special note – I did not discuss either of these financial points with the folks from Hydra, so please don’t misconstrue my observations as a reflection of their policies or practices.
   

• And finally, if you’re considering using a service like Hydra or any other kind of “per inquiry” marketing program, it’s vitally important you understand what the “lifetime value” is of a customer relationship.

Do you know what a customer is really worth to you?

If you don’t know how to figure that out then it looks like I’ve got more blogging to do, doesn’t it. We’ll cover that later on next week.

When it comes to advertising creative, it doesn’t always have to come down to an “all or nothing” proposition, does it?  For small and mid-sized businesses especially, the hard reality is that many times the design, content and sometimes finished production of a  piece needs to be done in-house or it won’t get done at all.  Some agencies look the other way, some get all “high and mighty” about it.

Here’s the reality: it’s gonna happen, get over it. 

I lay part of the blame for this conflict on old-line agency thinking (that died off in the early 80’s, although nobody quite realized it then).  Contrary to that particular group-think, the agency/client relationship IS NOT like a marriage.  In fact, it’s not anything like a marriage.

It’s a business relationship – and it’s built on pragmatic, self-interest.

S.A. Habib, writing in the Brand Tracks blog, opined on the dangers of a client taking its creative work inside.  The post made some good points, among them:

[F]or every dollar saved by doing in-house creative, you’re losing five in the erosion of your brand. … I’m not saying that all in-house creative departments are inept. On the contrary, many companies, including some of our own clients, employ talented designers and writers.

The problem is something far more serious — tunnel vision.

Whether it’s a CEO, sales guy or in-house creative person, when people look at the product through the eyes of the company, they’re not thinking about the customer. Over time — and not much time — your brand stops communicating with your customer. Your competitors’ smart ads and creative communications steal your market share, and your marketing director is left trying to explain why sales are down.

But all this good thinking aside, it ignores a financial reality that most small and mid-sized businesses face: sometimes, there just isn’t enough money to use “the experts” on every assignment.

So how should an agency, consultant or hired gun do?  The answer is simple: focus on the big picture.  Make sure the strategy is sound and position yourself to be there if and when the wheels come off.  In S.A.’s defense, he does advocate a collaborative approach between agency and client to make sure the client becomes involved in the process.

From a professional marketer’s perspective, this is about more than just keeping the production work and making the account profitable, though.

At our PR firm, my partner and I concentrate on helping clients define strategy, market position and key messages.  We do a lot of planning and then hand parts of those plans off to other agencies to implement. (Hey, there are only two of us and we don’t want to add a lot of staff.)

But even though it looks like we’re giving away a lot to third parties, we maintain the high ground with the client and help maintain an objectivity that can only be provided by an outsider.

Concentrate on providing the value that can only be provided from outside the four walls of the client and you’ll find plenty of productive (and profitable) middle ground on which to work.

(Company Press Release)

BOSTON – Innoveer Solutions, an award-winning customer strategy and solutions consultancy, today announced the availability of its most recent white paper, “The Pursuit of Partner Relationship Management,” which details how companies can expand their reach, reduce costs, and minimize risks by sharing more sales-related responsibilities with their business partners during uncertain economic times. The paper is now available in the white paper library on Innoveer’s website.

This timely white paper discusses the challenges to achieving a successful and mature Partner Relationship Management (PRM ) program, and outlines the five best practices companies should pursue to overcome these challenges:

• Revising existing business practices
• Creating clear PRM rules
• Selecting the right technology, then integrating it
• Enticing partners to participate
• Identifying the best business partners

“PRM is to business partners what CRM is to customers: strategies, processes and software tools that enable companies to organize and optimize their partner relations,” explains Steve Noone, Vice President, U.S. Operations at Innoveer Solutions. “As with CRM, technology alone will not ensure a successful program. Achieving PRM success starts with revisiting fundamental business assumptions, including current sales and marketing practices, and the degree to which they directly support external operations. With this type of investment, organizations are able to identify which partners will eliminate costs, and help increase market share and revenue.”

The paper also discusses the risks and benefits of PRM strategies and how to identify the partners that will have a direct effect on an organization’s bottom line.