The curious incident of the flashing Blackberry in the Night Time
Filed under: Agency, Customer Engagement, Customer Relationship Management, Social Media
I love email. I really do. I find it fascinating. If you stand back and look at what it’s become to the modern world it’s fairly staggering. It’s ingrained itself into cultures and societies the world over. It’s shaped how we talk to one another and share information. It’s developed its own unique code of conduct and etiquette – one that is multi layered, intricate and laced with nuance. The lure of the flashing ‘you’ve got new mail’ LED light on the Blackberry can break the hardiest, most resilient of people at 3 in the morning when you catch a glimpse of the phone on the bedside cabinet. The golden envelope in the system tray can be the single most disruptive thing on the day you have to get that document written. It’s powerful stuff.
For example, I had an internal debate that lasted the best part of 30 minutes the other week over the fact that someone had omitted the ‘kind’ from the ‘regards’ in a sign off to me. You might think it’s not that weird, millions of people opt for the colder, more abrupt signoff however in this instance it was from a person who always, always signs off with a ‘kind’ in front of the regards. Therefore I was left paralysed in front of my laptop, mind reeling, desperately trying to understand the true meaning of this omission. “Are they angry with me?” “Is this the sign that the relationship is coming to an end?”. Once the fear and paranoia subsided I started to become more rational and entertain less dramatic theories i.e. the sender could have just been having a bad day and everyone was getting the same treatment or they were suffering from a dose of fat fingers and deleted the ‘kind’ by accident. Now, I might be slightly over-dramatising for the purposes of this blog posting but my point is to demonstrate the emotional and psychological clout email has as a communications vehicle. We’ve all re-read emails 10 times or more desperately seeking to understand the true meaning of the email, isolating then analysing individual phrases or sentences as we search for enlightenment. This power, when harnessed and channelled correctly can deliver a huge amount of value to marketing campaigns and strategies.
Brands still neglect the use of email. Still send out generic, one size fits all communications to all and sundry. Why? Well, I’ve seen cases where email campaigning has such inertia that it’s become a communications juggernaut bulldozing its way through a yearly comms plan. In these instances it can be a difficult beast to tame. But tamed it must be. To state the obvious email is a vehicle to take a highly personal, relevant, 1-2-1 conversation to the customer/prospect/employee/etc. It can be subtle and deft in the way in which it engages and influences behaviour and action. It can be hard hitting and blunt. It can be what you need it to be you but it requires careful thought and an understanding of the medium. And don’t forget you can test, test, test – don’t burn your data in one hit because you’ve ‘got to get it out of the door’. Plan ahead. Think ahead. Get yourself seen. In the dark make it light.
We all know that email has been around for a fair old while now. It is a founding member of the digital age and has well and truly earned its stripes. It has pretty much guaranteed itself a seat at the table of most modern day marketers when grand plans are hatched. Developments and new technologies in the digital space have eroded its potency but in the same breath augmented its all round usefulness. Take mobile for instance, smart phones have meant that email is consumed everywhere (quite literally) but in the same breath advancements around ‘push’ technologies omits email from the communications loop. Give and take. Social media platforms report every interaction with triggered emails ensuring the ‘yo-yo’ effect hauls you back in. So, all in all email is alive, healthy and evolving. This is especially impressive when you consider the technology hasn’t really evolved in the last few years but the application and use of it has.
Has it got the staying power to still be around in 10 years time? Undoubtedly yes but in what guise and to what degree I’m not quite sure. Anyway, must dash, need to check the old inbox.
A great web experience begins with YOU!
Filed under: Agency, Customer Engagement, Customer Relationship Management, Design/Creative, Marketing Strategy
For most organisations – the question is no longer ‘Do you have a website?’ but ‘What kind of website do you have?’. The quality of an organisations online presence is now the defining business metric – where a small, agile organisation can outperform the largest brands through well considered, cleverly constructed campaigns which drive potential customers to specific content within their well designed, user-centric websites.
An organisation that underestimates the importance of its online brand value is one that risks its entire future.
A well designed website has the ability to transform any business or organisation
So where does great web design start? Great web design is more than great graphics, it’s more than sharp design, it’s more than interactivity. It’s the entire recipe that creates the succulent, moist cake that we call a great user experience.
No matter how good the design, a website may fail if it doesn’t deliver a great user experience. The process we follow is to get inside the mind of your consumer(s).
- How do they know your brand or organisation? Customer? Prospective Customer? Or just unknown to you?
- How are they finding you - search engine? Online advertising? E-marketing? Social media recommendations?
- What do they want from you? Product Information? Corporate information? Or simply where they can buy?
- What do we know about them ? Browser, search term, screen resolution, mobile device, IP address, time of search.
All this can be used to understand and define the likely user requirements and therefore the way in which we present information to them – through design, through interactivity, through engagement – and ultimately through a successful sale.
The three best tips for success?
1. Be your End User
Understand the requirements of your end users – regardless of what you sell. Undertake internal research, external focus groups & market research. Create user personas and use them to map the user journey.
2. Be your Competitor
Analyse your competitors activity – learn from their mistakes and benefit from their successes
3. Differentiate through Usability
Different users have different goals from your website. Present different but relevant information to users according to their browser, access method ( mobile or static) and search terminology.
Dirty, dirty Data – necessary evil or the Fountain of Eternal Marketing youth?
Data seems to be coming to the fore again. In every context data forms the central part of every direct marketing campaign- be it off or online. In the ‘old days’ you had a very good reason to keep data clean and current – at the very least you saved the postage and production cost of your direct mail piece! With the advent of digital technology, have we as marketeers got lazy in our data hygience? It’s tempting to say yes, as many Organisations see online marketing as cheap, inpersonal and simply a cheap media choice. Yet those Companies that keep data clean, update email & postal addresses, capture interests, integrate with transactional knowledge ( who bought what & when) open the door to ‘Holy Grail’ marketing – the ability to create dynamic, personal and RELEVANT campaigns to every customer & prospect, every time. Little surprise that we see such high response and conversion rates for Clients where data is clean and the commuication is personally relevant. A check list of what you can do to keep data clean :
- Remove ‘unsubscribes’ from your data ( if you are one of our Clients this happens automatically)
- Download ’soft’ bounces and get them checked
- Capture all referrals and add them to your CRM data ( we frequently profile Organisations using this technique – it is amazingly powerful)
- Run an annual ‘cleansing’ – de-duplication, merging and updating data for incomplete,incorrect or missing fields, PAF files and against SIC code. This is a cheap service we provide but it repays the investment many times over.
- Integrate your web analytics with your CRM
New Business Generation – Has Digital & E-marketing had its day?
With marketing budgets getting tighter ( is that even possible?), unsurprisingly Marketeers must validate and account for every £ or $ they spend. The need to create, qualify and groom new business leads for Sales is the ‘de-facto’ measure for the performance of every marketeer. The Finance Directors challenge of ‘Prove your value to me’ is heard in Boardrooms throughout the land. So as Marketing Management, how do we decide to allocate our budget across the myriad of choices? Clearly the logical place to start is by using those media choices that deliver the most tangible, qualified results. Now no-one ever claimed that solus TV can create sales – more reasonably it can launch and support sales activity, even moving market share points through concerted effort. What TV can never achieve is a 2 way, on-going communication with a Customer, much less a prospect. Anyone remember Radion Automatic?? Launched in a blaze of TV and POS glory, the brand quickly died once TV and retail support was reduced to maintenance levels. When it comes to e-marketing, it’s hard to benchmark your own campaigns against industry norms. It’s even harder to then turn that into real metrics for evaluation of absolute value.
Sometimes the product, offering, target market or even price isn’t right. What is important is that the Client (through Purestone) can see this, react to it, craft different messages & strategies and respond to the results immediately. What other media choice allows you to change and tweak your creative, or copy, or call to action as the campaign goes out? I genuinely believe that e-marketing can make a difference to the business generation capabilities of any organisation. Those that treat e-marketing as a truly strategic media choice through which they make highly personalised, 1 to 1 campaigns can expect to achieve great results. Those that treat e-marketing as ‘blast, forget and hope something sticks’ – well, they still form an unenlightened majority of marketers. Treat your prospects as people, personalise your messaging to distinct groups and, surprise surprise, your results will rapidly improve.