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| Jesse Sandqvist talks about multichannel marketing | ||||
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In this issue: 1. Jesse Sandqvist talks about multichannel marketing 2. The watercooler: stories of note in the past week 3. NEW! Search Engine Optimization (SEO) - Best Practice Guide 4. UPDATED! Internet Stats Compendium April 2006 5. JOBS: Internet marketing and other new media jobs 6. Top forum post: Sitemap Generator 7. Top forum post: E-marketing Essentials - April 2006 |
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| 1. Jesse Sandqvist talks about multichannel marketing | ||||||
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Jesse Sandqvist is COO of Responsewave, a multichannel marketing ASP. He is responsible for client and partner operations in the UK and Scandinavia. He has been involved in creating innovative interactive marketing campaigns and concepts for a large number of organisations all over Europe. Before joining Responsewave Jesse worked at Deloitte Consulting and Hewlett Packard as CRM and Business Intelligence expert. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- A multichannel approach to marketing is recommended practice for organisations but many people don’t know where to start. What are the fundamentals you need before you can begin? One of the most confusing things is the actual definition of multichannel marketing. It seems to be one of those buzzwords along the likes of CRM that mean very different things to different people. To me, multichannel marketing is all about delivering customer experiences. We are all bombarded with commercial messages every day when marketers try to reach us. Only few of those attempts actually turn into profitable relationships from the marketer’s perspective. The fundamental idea in building experiences, or, as I prefer to call them, customer journeys, is that you need to use your customers’ preferred channels to a) reach your customers, b) deliver a consistent message, and c) encourage them to interact with you, and be able to act on their interaction. - Reach. Getting a compelling message out to your target audience and generating interest for your offer. (Outbound) - Interact. Allowing the target audience to act on the offer by enabling them to interact with your company (Inbound). - Fulfill. Complete customer dialogue by acting on interaction data. (Outbound) - Interact (again). The customer journey continues with another dialogue and interaction… (Inbound or Outbound) ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Can you walk us through an example? Sure. The key challenge is to make reach, interaction, and fulfillment channels seamlessly integrated to be able to deliver a consistent dialogue on one-to-one basis without asking every time “who am I talking to?” So imagine a scenario where you sign up for a newsletter for a shoe store on the internet (Interact). A week later you receive a special offer to get 15 % off you next purchase (Reach). All you have to do is to claim your discount voucher on the web (Interact). The voucher is automatically sent to your mobile as a personalized MMS barcode voucher (Fulfill). When you visit an outlet the next weekend, you show the voucher on your phone and get the discount (Interact). The outlet submits information back to the main office that you have redeemed your voucher and the next time you receive the newsletter (Reach) you have a special offer from your local store on your preferred channel. They store might even slip a personalised code in your shopping bag for another campaign because you have now been qualified as a buying customer, rather than simply a name on the mailing list (Reach). This is best practice multichannel marketing. Its about consolidating customer interaction from all channels, to know who they are at all times, and to build up a great customer journey regardless of the channel that is used. Many large multi-national marketers have already announced that they are cutting their mass marketing budgets to find new ways to engage their customers. Experience marketing and building one-to-one customer journeys have definitely been recognized as the new marketing best practice. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Which channels are best for interaction? How do you think interaction affects conversion and retention rates? As the volume of inbound requests increases the most efficient interaction channels are the ones that can automatically handle masses of inbound customer requests, while keeping the one-to-one dialogue alive. Self-service applications and campaigns that require no human interface can handle millions of interactions in seconds, while still acting on the customer data on a one-to-one basis. The most obvious channels that can do this are the Web, Inbound SMS, computerised telephony, traditional direct marketing and digital TV. All these channels can be programmed to “listen” for customer input and to act accordingly based on predefined rules and reply templates. The more difficult part is making your interaction channels to keep the customer journey alive from your other channels. In many cases planting a simple cookie to track customers between systems is a very fragile setup and does not contribute into the front-end dialogue. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- And what are the main opportunities in using multiple channels to acquire (and retain) new customers? What are the challenges? Adopting a multichannel approach will first of all enable companies to “think channels”. Many companies we have worked with have actually only just realised that they have a lot of unused channels in-house. Virtually every customer interface a company controls can be used as a channel. In my view however, one of the main advantages of adopting a ‘multichannel mindset’ is the process-driven approach to marketing. Structuring your marketing campaigns by sequencing outbound and interaction channels allows you to think beyond the boundaries of your IT system limitations, to figure out what you really want to achieve with your budget. You can extract more return on investment by using multiple channels. Consider a standalone outbound email campaign. These are typically – and crudely – judged by monitoring open rates and, in particular, clickthrough rates. If a campaign generates above-average CTR, then it might be judged as a success. But email is just another outbound channel to inform the customer of a relevant offer and to motivate them to interact. Which is why building campaign microsites is such a good idea, since they are a natural interaction channel for outbound email. The success of the email campaign should be thus measured based on the orders on the campaign microsite, rather than on ‘clicks’. The main challenges are unfortunately usually internal. IT departments are many times as inflexible as the IT systems that they maintain. Marketers need flexible and innovative marketing systems that accommodate their needs. The need for flexibility has brought out a new breed of hosted marketing solutions that seem to be the way for the future. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Capturing – and acting upon - the right data is a big factor in keeping old customers happy, and acquiring new ones. What tips and tricks can you suggest to help marketers increase satisfaction / loyalty / customer acquisition? As a permission marketer I know that customers will stay with you and keep coming back if they trust you. Your privacy policy is the key to attaining a trusted relationship with your customers. It needs to clearly state how you are going to use and act upon the customer’s data. If the customer perceives the benefits of giving you his data larger than the sacrifice of giving it up, he will most likely hand over his information. Permissions are also channel dependent. If you have a permission to send a customer emails it does not mean that you can send them SMS messages as well. It is your task to sell the benefits for each outbound channel that you are going to use. Even better is to let your customers to choose which channel you can use in your outbound interactions.
How you use and handle customer data on each channel should be 100% transparent to your customers and stated unambiguously in your privacy policy. The privacy policy is a contract between you and your customer that you bilaterally agree to honour to form a trusted relationship. There is no point in hiding your privacy policy or misleading your customers in any way. It takes time to build a trusted relationship, but most importantly it takes only one mistake or breach of trust to loose the customer forever. Customer loyalty and satisfactions is a long term strategy. Once you have satisfied customers, they will recommend you to their friends. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Comprehensive measurement and integrating the data must be key to success over the long term, right? Absolutely. Any marketing campaign should be constructed so that each part of the process or the conversation can be measured. Every outbound channel metric must be understood in the context of the inbound metrics. For example every email sent out should be measured against conversions on the microsite. The customer’s subsequent actions must be seamlessly integrated, to understand the key motivational drivers for that customer, and to segment / personalize future campaigns. The great thing about data is that if you make sense of it you’ll have a chance to learn. Measuring results systematically alongside customer conversations will enable you to understand the customer journey, from the initial interest all the way to the desired action. Having transparency of the whole process (rather than just fragments of it) allows you to understand more, to gain insight into why some campaigns do better than others. A ‘process view’ will enable you to pinpoint the bottlenecks in your processes, enabling you to focus your resources on improving any problem areas. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- So is it worthwhile spending more to automate the personalisation of marketing campaigns, to make the experience more relevant to prospective customers / respondents? It certainly is. Personalisation is one of the most powerful marketing tools and will make your marketing campaigns more effective. But personalisation is not simply about greeting your customers with their name in an email address. It is about building one-to-one conversations with your customers and thus keeping the customer journey alive across channels. The digitalization of channels online and offline has made it now possible to personalize the interaction at almost any individual consumer touchpoint, with little or no extra costs. Personalisation represents quality in marketing. The cost-effectiveness of new digital channels has unfortunately caused more people to focus on the quantity rather than the quality. It is more appealing for people to send out masses and masses rather unpersonalised marketing using digital channels. They should really be working out how to make their marketing more relevant to their target audience, by implementing personalizing and segmentation techniques. Personalisation can be used also to make things easier for your customers, such as pre-filling web forms or offering relevant information and offers. Especially this is relevant when moving from a system to another, it is the personalization that conserves the customer’s experience of interaction. The Responsewave tool is interesting in that it seems to track viral / network activity, yet it isn’t a standalone viral marketing tool. How does it work? What marketing channels does it support? We focus on making campaign templates out of best customer journeys we have seen. The campaigns can be hooked up to almost any third-party marketing tool (eg banner ads, Search Engine Marketing, email, SMS, Print) to maintain the one-to-one dialogue with the customer inbound or outbound. All of our campaign templates track and monitor the customer journey and campaign performance on individual basis and across all the channels that we support. One of our best predefined journeys is the best practice viral marketing process that can be customized in just days using our wizard based builder interface. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Should you be treating customer evangelists differently, once you know who they are? The leading authority on customer loyalty, Frederick Reichheld, previously published an article in Harvard Business Review that your customers’ willingness to talk up a company or product to friends, family, and colleagues is one of the best indicators of loyalty. Customer evangelists are the consumers that do the most for your brand. In the viral or word-of-mouth context these are the individuals who not only spread the message the widest, but are also the ones who can influence their friends to make the decisions you want to drive your campaign. When customers act as evangelists, they do more than indicate they've received good economic value from a company; they put their own reputations on the line. The findings point to a new, simpler approach to customer research, one directly linked to a company's results. If you know who your evangelists are, you must threat them differently. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- What are the privacy implications of forward-to-a-friend / recommend a friend? There always seems to be some controversy in the air regarding peer-to-peer communication. I believe that this is because before no-one really gave it too much thought, but then somebody actually realized the power that resides in social networks. I believe in transparency and of course conforming to the data privacy laws and industry best practices. We require our customers to make their intentions 100% transparent to all involved parties in their word-of-mouth campaigns. We have seen that there is no shame in letting people know about your commercial motives in your campaign. Best practices are needed only when there is commercial interest. No one can limit communication between a friend to another if it is not commercially motivated. Also, the Word-Of-Mouth marketing industry (yes there is one) seems to have woken up to these challenges. The word-of-mouth marketing association WOMMA has published best practice guidelines that address critical issues of word-of-mouth transparency and ethics. This is a welcome move for us because hopefully it will weed out many companies that engage in bad or even unlawful marketing practice. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I know your service is useful for customer acquisition, but shouldn’t internet marketers be focusing on reducing customer churn? Word-of-Mouth is extremely powerful acquisition tool. You are however absolutely right that there are another types of journeys for different customer life-cycle stages. We accommodate these situations by building other best practice campaign templates. The word-of-Mouth campaign is a great way to boost for example your prospect base and start working on them towards high customer life time value. Word-of-Mouth does not work if you do not have satisfied customers. No-one will recommend your product or service if they are not happy with your company. Running a word-of-mouth campaign will give you a great snapshot of your customer base and their willingness to tell about you to their friends. That is why we think it is a great way to start new experience marketing initiatives. Also Word-of-mouth marketing also acquires on average extremely good quality customers with expectedly higher average life time value than customers acquired from other sources. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Jesse talked to Chris Lake, editor (chris@e-consultancy.com). Talk about multichannel marketing techniques on the E-consultancy forum. |
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| 2. The watercooler: stories of note in the past week | ||||||
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PayPal launches credit card (Guardian)
MySpace recruits to increase user safety (NY Times) Skype whips out wallet, buys VOIP companies (The Register) Web 2.0 startup fever (MIT) Showcase of lovely CSS websites (CSS Remix) Why knowing your users can be a good thing (A List Apart) AJAX powered colour tool (Sharewonders.com) Rocking Wordpress drag'n'drop page builder (no.oneslistening) Disney hardcodes ads into free digital programmes (NY Times) Google patents 'voice search' (artstechnica) |
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| 3. NEW! Search Engine Optimization (SEO) - Best Practice Guide | ||||||
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This is pure gold! A comprehensive 208-page Best Practice Guide to SEO, aimed at marketers working in client teams and agencies alike. We think it contains everything you need to know about search engine optimisation. What more is there to say, other than go get it?!
View White Paper / Report » |
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| 4. UPDATED! Internet Stats Compendium April 2006 | ||||||
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Jam-packed with glorious facts and figures from E-consultancy and a range of other sources, this is surely the definitive guide to internet statistics. Very hand for that pitch or proposal, or just for convincing the boss...
View White Paper / Report » |
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| 6. Top forum post: Sitemap Generator | ||||||
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Andrew Allfrey has flagged up an interesting Sitemap Generator tool that works in a similiar way to the Google Sitemap but is usable by all the search engines and not just Google. Go see...
View Forum Message » |
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| 7. Top forum post: E-marketing Essentials - April 2006 | ||||||
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Dave Chaffey's monthly round-up of those must-read articles for anybody working in internet marketing. This month subjects include PAS 78, email strategy and Amazon's approach to personalisation...
View Forum Message » |
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