Email Marketing Strategy from Silverpop CEO Bill Nussey

"Mine" Offers Digital Personalization in Print Form

For print magazines struggling to stay relevant in an online world, one publisher may have found a way.

Major media house Time Inc. has created a print magazine in which the content and advertisements are tailored to each individual subscriber. In an experimental five-issue run, Mine magazine allows readers to select titles from eight Time Warner/American Express Co. magazines that are then combined into a personalized magazine. Lexus car ads, paid for by the magazine�s sole ad sponsor, Toyota Motor Corp., are also customizable, and are individually targeted based on subscribers' responses to an online survey when they sign up. You can read more about it here.

Mine appears to have been well received by subscribers. According to Slate writer Farhad Manjoo, the publishers still have some kinks to work out—there�s some lag between issues, some of articles are a few months old, and the ads can go overboard on the personalization—but overall the idea is a success. Readers enjoy the benefits of personalized content and the portability and durability of a real-life magazine.

Personalizing printed content is an idea that has been tried before, but Time has huge brand recognition and a lot of content to choose from. It�ll be interesting to see if the idea catches hold.

Is Outlook Broken?

In a completely new twist on the interactions between email and social media, email service provider, Campaign Monitor is using social media to try and pressure Microsoft to improve its HTML interoperability in Outlook. It's not quite like challenging the Iranian election results, but it has collected more than 20,000 Twitter comments to try and get its concerns on Microsoft's agenda.

The good news is that Microsoft took notice and responded. The bad news is that I don't think the response is what Campaign Monitor was looking for.

Check it all out on its very clever Web site.

Shopping Cart Abandon: How Long Should You Wait?

I recently read an interesting �Times Wire� column about a start-up company that focuses specifically on shopping cart abandonment. The company, SeeWhy, is releasing a new service that will alert subscribers when a visitor on their Web site abandons a shopping cart, and then immediately follow up with an email designed to encourage the person to go back and complete the transaction.

The writer, Randall Stross, questions whether this tactic could alienate site visitors by making them feel like they can�t even visit a Web site without being hounded to make a purchase. And indeed, to avoid seeming like they�re watching site visitors too closely, many permission marketers wait a day or more before sending an email or otherwise nudging visitors about items left in their carts. But SeeWhy says waiting is a mistake. The company says there is a way to ask nicely, and contends that immediate remarketing produces a follow-up sale three times as often as sending a reminder a day later.

But you don�t have to take anyone�s word for it. To find the best timing for your list, my recommendation as always is to test. In this case, you could maintain a control group, or random sample of your list that is excluded from the change you are testing. This enables you to compare the behavior of the test group vs. the control group to determine the precise effect of your change. The control group would get your usual cart abandonment follow-up, against which you would test your new follow-up tactic. To find out whether remarketing immediately would be profitable over the long-term, or whether it ultimately damages your customer relationships, you can compare the response of your test group vs. the control group over a period of months to get your answer.

Web 7.0 on Twitter

Apparently, Twitter is leaping us into the future today. No, it's not a new form of marketing (sorry, readers). It's not a new feature. And, no, it's not even a revolution in social communities. It's even more important... Yes, it's Robot Pick-Up Lines.

Today, the world of Twitter is overflowing with people sharing their favorite robot pick-up lines. Don�t take my word for it. Send your favorite lovelorn robot to this URL for thousands of ideas on how to find the love of its life.

My favorite so far: AFG85: RT @badastronomer your lips say 0 but your eyes say 1

Thanks to TechCrunch for alerting me to this amazing new innovation with 'bots and social networks <grin>. Have a great weekend.

Social Networking and B2B Go Together

This recent blog post from Forrester shares some very interesting research conducted by the analyst firm on the widespread usage of social networking among business people. I've been a strong believer that social networking matters as much in business as it does in personal relationships, but seeing the numbers laid out so starkly really drove it home.

Among the findings: When it comes to making buying decisions overall, 91 percent of business people surveyed said they consume social content including blogs, user generated video, podcasts, forums or reviews—and 69 percent said they do so for business purposes.

Riding the Google Wave

Every once in a while you see something that�s really cool—that has the potential to shift your habits and thinking. That "something," more often than not these days, comes from Google.

Google's latest big idea, Google Wave, does not disappoint.

Its Wave is such a new and big idea, it''s difficult to describe. Akin to email meets Twitter, meets instant messaging, and shared documents, and so on, the magic, as far as I can tell from the video demo and in my reading, is that it actually comes together. And more like a Phoenix than a Frankenstein.

The implications for marketers are profound. B2B marketers will have a few years to get ready because most businesses run on Microsoft Office, and I doubt Microsoft will be embracing Wave (even though it's said to be open-source) anytime soon. B2C marketers, on the other hand, need to get ready—and fast. Their customers, especially the online-savvy ones, will be looking to use Google Wave with the same kind of tech lust that has been the sole domain of the iPhone.

Assuming Google Wave makes it easy to interact with regular email, it'll be easy for marketers to bridge into the new paradigm it represents. Once in the Wave world, marketers, particularly (maybe exclusively) permission marketers, will enjoy one of the richest mechanisms ever for holding high-quality, two-way conversations with customers. In fact, I might go so far as to say Google Wave represents a potentially game-changing platform for marketers seeking to truly engage with customers.

If Google Wave succeeds, here are a few of the interesting behavioral shifts it could drive and that might affect marketers:

We may see the first shift away from email as a paradigm since it was invented 40 years ago. This is a good thing because Google Wave appears to be so much more.
The richness and relevance of Wave's discussion model will open up vast new ways for businesses and their customers to build permission relationships. In particular, assuming marketers handle the privacy question appropriately, the instantaneous, real-time nature of Wave's dialogues will give marketers more information than ever about their customers' interests.
Advertisers may find it hard to enter into the dialogues of a Wave-dominated world; Wave's roots in instant messaging will make it harder to initiate uninvited conversations.

Google's Wave appears to be a truly innovative leap in how people communicate and collaborate. It's quite possible that it will have a much larger impact on marketing than social networking and, perhaps, even email itself. The future looks bright. Way to go Google.

The Next Generation of Campaign Automation

For marketers, the online world has changed everything. Unlike traditional media such as newspapers and television, which deliver the same message at the same time to everyone, digital media and engagement marketing technologies make it possible to deliver a truly unique message (or stream of messages) to each person, one at a time.

But despite the opportunity, most marketers still treat online marketing like a mass medium—mostly because it is simply too much work to manually create a unique dialogue with each person.

Marketing automation can address this need. By letting marketers set up sophisticated campaigns that automatically respond to customer/prospect past behaviors, profile information and other criteria, these automated campaigns take the load off marketers while still allowing each customer to experience a unique series of customized communications.

Although marketing automation may be available through their vendors, many email and lead management marketers don�t use it because the features are technical and can invite human error. Visual-design tools have always been a "holy grail" in developing campaign automation systems; but the technology is complex, especially when delivered over the Web, and few vendors have figured out how to do it well, if at all.

A few years ago, my colleagues and I decided that Silverpop would be among the first companies to do this right. It became a "Manhattan Project" of sorts. We looked at a range of approaches, consulted with experts and tested various concepts with customers and friends. In the end, I believe we have created a breakthrough approach that will open up true campaign automation to every marketer in the world.

In short, we took the best of the "Visio-like" flow diagrams and married it to the single-most-common graphical paradigm for editing complex flows: consumer video-editing software. The combination is visually intuitive—both during campaign creation, and for review and maintenance of existing campaigns. And, just to be clear, one of the coolest aspects of this capability is that it�s drag-and-drop for creating as well as reviewing.

In other words, marketers can now create incredibly complex automated campaigns by dragging and dropping boxes and decision points into a timeline-based, visual layout tool. Most people probably don't get as excited as I do about technology, but this stuff is incredibly cool and worth taking a look:

Our new "Got GUI?" video on YouTube shares our thoughts on traditional flow diagrams vs. Silverpop's hybrid timeline approach, and actually shows off the new capability to some very cool music written by one of the execs who oversaw this project.

This technology is now on our Engage B2B platform. We initially released it to our Client Summit attendees in May and are releasing it to all our B2B customers as I write this.

This project has been underway for a long time, and I am incredibly excited to see it come to fruition. Kudos to all my colleagues who have worked on this during the last year.

The Birth of Engagement Marketing

A graduate student recently contacted me to ask some questions for his dissertation on engagement marketing. I enjoyed the opportunity to reflect on the origin of the term here at Silverpop, as well as its evolution in the world of marketing. I thought you might find some of the excerpts from our dialogue worthwhile as well.

For us at Silverpop, "engagement marketing" is a term that was born about 15 months ago as we tried to define the essence of what we are truly passionate about. It�s not really synonymous with anything that exists today. It has a lot in common with relationship marketing because it�s hard to engage with customers and prospects if you don�t already have a relationship of some sort. However, relationship marketing implies "existing customers" more than I believe engagement marketing does.

The need for a new term in the world of marketing stems mostly from the dramatic shift that is taking place as both consumer and business buyers gain increasing knowledge and power in the buying cycle. Fifty years ago, marketers could run a series of ads and an audience would literally make purchases as a result.

While this tight loop still exists in some forms today, it has been largely replaced by a more involved, two-way, learning-centric buying process. For example, when was the last time you or anyone you know visited a restaurant without first checking it out, reading about it online and/or asking some friends—let alone buying a house or a car? In the new world, the old way of marketing has merit, but it can only hope to initiate the buying cycle—it cannot influence it to complete.

In the new world, marketers have a much larger and more involved role to play than just introducing themselves. They can truly influence customers in the journey toward a buying decision. This new world is what we call engagement marketing, and it is slowly changing how we as marketers will do everything.

The Beginnings of Location-based Marketing?

Google recently announced a new service called Latitude, which zeroes in on the geographic location of mobile phones to let your friends know where you are, and vice-versa. (You can read more about it here.) Other companies like BrightKite and Loopt have been doing this for a while, but Google's entrance into the arena shines a new spotlight on the functionality and the privacy issues it raises.

One big question on the minds of privacy advocates is whether consumers will be comfortable having their locations tracked as they go about their daily lives.

I cannot imagine any consumer being comfortable with the major mobile providers like Verizon or AT&T selling their location to the highest bidder. However, applications like Latitude allow location tracking to be done in a *somewhat* more benign way. Privacy advocates will still want to know how Google and others plan to treat geographic tracking information they collect—and ensure that consumers understand how their information is being utilized. But moving forward, my bet is that the social networking track-your-friend applications will be the initial platform for location-based marketing.

You heard it here first, but the idea that really excites me is combining location-based tracking with the Facebook-like idea of "friending" a company you like to create a privacy-acceptable location-based marketing solution.

Imagine you love McDonald�s (and McDonalds loves you). So you "friend" them in Latitude or a similar application. Whenever you turn on the application, it alerts your friends to your location, and—assuming you�ve provided permission—it also tells McDonald�s. McDonald�s can determine whether you�re nearby any of its restaurants and offer you promotions and specials that suit your tastes. Or, even more interesting, it may have made a few more Quarter Pounders than it needs, so it can offer a discount of that specific product to customers in the area and sell down the inventory before it goes bad. The marketing (and privacy) implications are staggering.

This may well be the ultimate in engagement marketing.

The Best Protection Against Spam

There are a lot of ways to avoid spam, but our new president may have figured out the best approach of all: Never give out your email address.

Seriously, this New York Times article provides an interesting (non-marketing) view into how email has invaded the halls of power.

The Death of Voice Mail

This doesn't really apply to what we all do, but I found this recent article appearing in The New York Times very interesting, and demonstrative of the fundamental shifts taking place in how people communicate.

According to the story, the once-indispensable tool for busy offices and households, voicemail, appears to be going the way of the dodo. Compared to text messaging, which has increased more than tenfold over the last three years, voice mail is slow and cumbersome. As a result, fewer people are using it, and when they do, they are taking longer to check their messages.

Because people generally read at least twice as quickly as they can speak, and text messages require no log-ins or waiting, it's estimated that text messaging is about 15-20 times faster than voice mail for recipients. Text messages also tend to be more efficient because the people sending them get to the point more quickly.

So, ultimately, text messaging does a better job of respecting people's time. Something to think about.

The Rules of Engagement Marketing

With the rise of Web 2.0 and online social networking, an exciting new age in marketing has arrived in which interacting and building relationships with customers is key to delivering unprecedented return on investment. For a brief introduction, and advice on adjusting your marketing approach in this new era of engagement, check out my recent article appearing in iMedia Connection. It features a brief introduction to concept of engagement marketing, the benefits of a two-way dialogue with customers, and a look at what it will take for marketers to be successful going forward.

Recent Interview on the State of Email Marketing

I recently spent some time with the folks at eMarketer, who interviewed me about my thoughts on email marketing. They just published a sizable excerpt from the interview, and I think it does a nice job of capturing the state of email marketing at a high level. It also provides advice on how marketers can protect deliverability and successfully compete for recipients' limited attention in the inbox. Have a look.

Recession Email�Too Much of a Good Thing?

I read an interesting article in eMarketer about the popularity of email among retailers during this past holiday season. Advertising agency Smith-Harmon found that retail email marketers accelerated their email campaigns beginning in October, and on average sent customers more than 14.6 emails in December alone.

"Retailers ratcheted up their email marketing campaigns to aggressively compete for consumers' dwindling spending dollars," said Jeffrey Grau, a senior analyst for eMarketer.

Incidentally, Jeffrey interviewed me in January for a report he has just written on the continued strength of retail email marketing despite the economic downturn. He was kind enough to send me a copy recently. You�ll have to purchase the report to get the in-depth analysis, but in a nutshell, email marketing is thriving in the recession because of its comparative low cost, high ROI and focus on customer retention.

Although these factors illustrate why email is an ideal marketing channel during a recession, the other side of the coin�and one we must be ever mindful of�is that a good thing can be taken too far. If marketers aren�t careful, they risk undermining the value of the inbox.

In fact, in a recent meeting with one of our consumer-packaged-goods clients, one of its executives jokingly asked me if we could tell our retail customers to lower their volumes a bit. "The inbox is getting a little crowded these days," he said.

A Great Overview of the Social Universe

My colleague Loren McDonald recently presented a session to a group of our executives, and I was struck by one of the graphics he shared. It's a great visualization of the multifaceted and rich social world created by blogger, author and public-relations guru Brian Solis.