by David Baker , Monday, March 3, 2008
THE PERFECT EMAIL IS ONE that is relevant to the consumer. Right? It's timely, in context, well-rendered and provides some sort of value. We don't often think of mass mailings as the perfect email. Even with dynamic content and segmentation, this relevance is hard to achieve.
For 10 years-plus, most resort to what we love to call triggered messaging. You get a response from the Web site when you sign up, purchase something, change your status, refer content to another. Today, with the rise of social networks, trigger messaging takes on a new breed. You are deluged with email from your social-networking site "in times of need." That can be in the form of notices from friends looking for jobs, new business opportunities, updated profiles, new content, new music, new events -- the list is endless.
The basis for it is flawless behaviorally driven communications. If you are like most professionals, belong to many feeds, several personal and professional social networking sites and have been reading the bloglines about digital marketing, you hear it and see it first hand and feel it everyday. Effective communications is a challenge. We've abused the phone and email. For marketers, it's a challenge to have less control over syndication. It wasn't too long ago that most organizations challenged the concept of viral content, since they would lose control of the "message," "frequency" and potentially relevance. Today, it's about syndication rather than control, and it's getting a bit out of hand.
Still, there are things marketers can control in this frenzy of communications: triggered email messages. Loren McDonald says I don't like to talk about email 101 very often, so let's take a step back into the basics of what and why a triggered message works.
1. The first step is to identify the potential behavioral events that you'd like to trigger. If you have a lead generation process, a commerce site or simply a functional content site, you have site, sales and customer events. All have many opportunities to deliver a message to your customer.
2. Once you've identified the "events," develop the business rules. This includes audience, the rules that govern this communication, including content and potentially frequency rules.
3. Develop a measurement instrument and hypothesis for the value of each message. Do you want to measure it? If so, how will you measure the impact? There are many gaps in technologies in trying to roll up reporting for triggered messaging. It's not as simple to look at response metrics as it is traditional email campaigns if set up improperly. One company I know has 450 event triggers. Imagine trying to roll up that report on a regular basis.
4. Develop a design system that brings continuity to your message and builds on the experience, creatively. If you are an image rich company and rely on text only triggered messages, reconsider your approach. Should your design system match that of your site, brand, product, stage?
5. Put values on each trigger event in terms of value to the consumer and objective based requirements. There are some messages that have to go out, and some that are optional. So ranking the triggers by priority is critical.
6. Develop a touch-point map to visually see how many touch points you have through email today. This will help you decide which triggers take priority, which you can measure, which can be used to help you understand the positive interactions with your company.
7. Understand your technical limitations. Some systems won't allow you to do anything advanced with content, targeting etc. Some are managed through several systems, so the ranking is important. It lets you know which messages bring the most value and any limitations in delivering the type of message you want.
8. Implement a few and wait. Measure the impact of those new triggers before trying to take on the 30 of so you may have on your touch-point map.
The analysis can take on new life, but since triggered messaging affords the highest response rates for email, it's the best place to begin to do response modeling. And it doesn't take a fully staffed team of analysts to do it.
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David Baker is vice president of email solutions at Avenue A/Razorfish. Visit his blog at http://whitenoiseinc.com
It's impossible to underestimate the impact that SOA, or service-oriented architectures, has had on enterprises and business integration. Whether or not a business has implemented a full-fledged SOA platform, there is still a very good chance that a large portion of their business and partner integration is based on core SOA technologies such as XML.
If social network marketing is a puzzle, agencies might not be equipped to help clients see the big picture.
TNS Media Intelligence/Cymfony polled more than 60 marketers in North America, France and the U.K. to gauge how they are faring navigating the world of social media. It asked them for feedback on their agencies' abilities to help. TNS found, in its words, "Agencies don't get it."
Clients complained that their agencies -- creative, media, public relations, design and others -- typically treat social channels like blogs as traditional media. In other cases, their ideas are not backed up by practical skills in the area. What's more, one client pointed out that his agencies have little of their own experience using social networks or video-sharing sites for themselves.
"I think traditional ad agencies have very little contribution to make," Bryan Simkins, a marketing specialist at FedEx, told TNS. "They are mostly driven by their compensation models which are made for closed media. Those models don't apply in open media."
The increase in social media has led other analysts to highlight the dearth of skills at agencies to help clients navigate the social landscape. Forrester Research, for instance, published a report last month that found agencies are poorly structured to help clients leverage opportunities with communities of shared interests.
"The existing marketing partners do not understand the ins and outs of the social media space," David Harris, e-business manager at Suzuki, told TNS. "They can do more harm than good if they apply old models."
Jim Nail, chief marketing and strategy officer at TNS Media Intelligence/Cymfony, said frustration from clients surveyed, only some of which was published, was across the board.
"You get the sense that agencies talk a good game," he said. "They put up a good presentation about what social media is, but when you get to implementing campaigns, the day-to-day management skills are not meeting the marketers' expectations."
That could haunt agencies as more clients make social media a top priority.
Nearly 50 percent of marketers said social-media efforts needed to be handled at an executive level with "significant" resources. Another 30 percent agreed social media is a "revolutionary opportunity."
In his comments, Intuit's Scott Wilder called it a "Pandora's box" of consumers relying on word of mouth to evaluate companies and products.
"One of the big barriers right now is people are struggling with where this lives and how it is incorporated into their organizations," Nail said, pointing out that social media cuts across marketing, public relations and customer service.
The perceived lack of social media competence at agencies will present opportunities for new providers, Nail predicted, as too many agencies hew narrowly to their niche, whether it's media, creative or PR -- something backed up by client feedback.
"I really think that agencies need to focus heavily on how they can build excitement within the live space of the Internet," Carolyn Holliday, e-marketing manager at Fila USA, told TNS. "Outside of just placing ads, they need to start dialogues with existing and potential customers."
