123 eGuides

1 Minute Advice: An Update on Email Marketing

Remember when direct mail used to be a dependable standby for marketers, year after year? Well now, it seems, the same is true of email. Marketers may have moved on to all sorts of other media to reach prospects and customers, but email remains effective and responsive and shouldn't be overlooked.

Natasha D. Smith, Senior Editor of Direct Marketing News, collects several significant facts about email usage in her recent article, "Why Marketers Should Keep Sending Emails." Among them:

"The volume of email marketing rose by 15.5% in Q1 2015 compared to Q1 2014," according to Experian Marketing Services.

"Seventy percent of people say they always open emails from their favorite companies," according to Exact Target.

"Email is nearly 40 times better than Facebook and Twitter at acquiring customers," according to McKinsey & Company.

Still, using email for marketing requires a careful balance. An extensive email study by Return Path shows that emailing too little results in such problems as lost revenue because customers aren't kept informed about products, reduced brand awareness, and lists that are prone to inaccuracies and spamming. On the other hand, emailing too much can lead to an increase in the mailer's opt-out rate, more total complaints, and customers ignoring emails.

Then the question becomes, how do you achieve the best mailing frequency? According to the study, "frequency optimization depends on engagement." In other words, a marketer's most valuable email subscribers are those who are "the most active and engaged," and they are also the "most likely to complain." These email contacts should be handled very carefully.

Segmenting an email list into varying levels of contacts (most active, active, average, and inactive, for example) will help a mailer understand how different contacts react and respond to email. For frequency to be optimized, says the study, a mailer must use an ongoing strategy of "testing new send frequencies, collecting the right data, drawing the correct conclusions, and creating frequency recommendations for future campaigns."

1 Minute Advice: Is the Buying Power of Boomers Being Overlooked?

You've seen it for yourself in the media, both in news and advertising: A whole lot of attention is paid to Millennials while Boomers are downplayed if not neglected. Several studies suggest that marketers do so at their own risk.

According to Marketing Charts, the Baby Boomer generation is on track to soon account for 70 percent of Americans' disposable income. Forrester Research reminds us that "the most promising demographic" is, in fact, older shoppers.

So if you believe targeting Boomers makes good sense, which media should you use? A study done by Marketing Charts indicates that "fewer Boomers attributed purchase influence to a number of traditional media types, including TV and print ads. But search ads bucked that trend, with strong year-over-year growth in stated influence."

The medium that has the most surprising strength among Boomers, though, may be that "old" standby: direct mail. According to Marketing Charts, "more than 3 in 10 survey respondents report[ed] that direct mail had influenced them to purchase a product or service during the prior 6 months. Interestingly, that was the most commonly-cited purchase influencer of 16 identified, ahead of word-of-mouth and online consumer reviews."

1 Minute Advice: Are Marketers Mixing It Up Correctly?

As digital and traditional media continue to jockey for position, marketers often find themselves in a quandary when it comes to the correct media mix. In fact, three-quarters of marketers aren't confident about it. Only 25 percent of brand marketers think they have the optimal media mix, according to a recent Millward Brown Digital study, as reported by eMarketer.

While over two-thirds of marketers said they had created integrated media strategies, less than half (43 percent) said they were confident of their integration of digital into their marketing strategies.

According to eMarketer, "When asked about the 'best-in-class' media allocation, brand marketers polled by Millward Brown allocated the largest share to website and content development, followed by traditional advertising, with each grabbing just under one-fifth of the total. Digital advertising landed in third, at 14% of time and effort. Social, mobile advertising and apps, and search each grabbed just over 10% share."

1 Minute Advice: This is the Era of Experiences

Marketing continues to evolve; the most recent era, relationship marketing, began in the 1990s and culminated in CRM, or Customer Relationship Marketing. The newest era, according to Robert Rose, is upon us, and it's all about experiences. Rose, co-author of the book, Experiences: The 7th Era of Marketing, tells Michael Stelzner of Social Media Examiner, "Developing delightful, informative, useful experiences from marketing's lens is really the new way to formulate a marketing strategy going forward."

Creating experiences set a marketer's product or service apart, but it requires a different mindset from traditional marketing. Stelzner writes, "As this era progressed, and social media within it, relationship development between a brand and its consumers became more complex. These days, digital more broadly disrupts how we relate to consumers, since we now have to establish a relationship from that first meeting and beyond.

"That expansion of marketing’s responsibility for the full life cycle of the consumer, and the complexity brought on by all of the different channels, are creating a real evolution of marketing. We need to develop more compelling experiences to be able to delight those customers at various stages of their journey.

"Marketers are trained to think medium first (an ad campaign, a TV campaign, a radio campaign, a website, a blog) and then story. Instead, decide what experience to create and then determine how it best expresses itself: a blog, a print magazine, a webinar series or all of the above."

Read more from Stezlner's interview with Robert Rose, or listen to his podcast here.