A recent study by ForeSee Results shows that social media is a still maturing marketing medium, and that traditional marketing, including email marketing, are preferred.

According to the report, “social media interactions are a main influence for only 5 percent of visitors to retail websites” and “more traditional marketing tactics like promotional emails (19%), search engine results (8%), and Internet advertising (7%), influence more visits to retail websites.”

The report also concludes that traditional marketing techniques like promotional emails influence not only more traffic; they also deliver better-quality traffic. Some of the most satisfied site visitors arrived at a site because of previous familiarity with a brand, receipt of promotional emails, word-of-mouth, and visits to product review websites.

Only 8% of online shoppers said that’s social media was their preferred way to interact with a retailer. A majority want to engage with retailers, but but prefer to do so via email or on retail websites, rather than on social sites. Another key finding is that people are more satisfied with a retailers’ presence on Facebook than they are with Facebook itself.

Visit ForeSeeResults.com for more information or to download the full report.

The CancerLens conference marketing campaign was very successful and the reasons for that success can be uniquely articulated in the statement – we didn’t do anything different, we just did things differently.

This simple statement is an important distillation of the campaigns key success factors. It also effectively communicates our unique approach and the virtues of our practices and methodologies. What came out in our interview for the MarketingSherpa Case Study was that every client and marketer knows about, and purports the importance of customer centricity and allowing the customer to drive the communications experience. But rarely do campaigns appear that do this effectively.

Here is a summary of the approach we use to get superior results from our campaigns. Try them.

• Be customer focused. Yeah, yeah, I know you’ve heard this before. But the ability to translate client requirements into a compelling customer experience is the core value we bring to every campaign we create. If you don’t have this skill in-house, hire it.
• Know the target audience. A campaign has to address multiple audiences effectively. Segment and address each audience uniquely.
• Define clear success metrics. A campaign must deliver ROI. Defining clear success metrics requires careful consideration of potential benefits beyond the campaigns focus. ROI is typically measured in quantitative terms, but qualitative measures are important, add value, and contribute greatly to improving the experiential aspects of a campaign.
• Don’t Sell, Tell! Nobody cares about what you are selling. They care about meeting a need they have. Great campaigns communicate how what you offer meets that need best, and make it easy for them to get it.
• Use talented and professional design and writing. Ultimately, what you say, how you say it, and when make all the difference. View and use design and writing as core strategic disciplines, not simply “creative” endeavors.

Check out the MarketingSherpa case study on our conference campaign for the American Cancer Society. It highlights how we segmented the target audiences and details the tactics that created a compelling experience and delivered amazing results. And contact me if I can help you achieve better customer connections with your next campaign.

Engagement
A professional campaign includes the creation of specific web pages and triggered autoresponder emails that provide relevant and current information on the subject matter, as well as the producers, partners, and stakeholders. This is important, as it delivers a turn-key experience that effectively promotes the subject matter, the parties involved, and heightened recipient engagement (ie: registration for updates, RSVP to events, etc.).

Measurable Results
Professional email campaigns make detailed performance metrics accessible including read/open rates, link click rates, and conversion rates. They also create databases of qualified opt-in recipients interested in the subject matter and the offerings of producers, partners, and stakeholders.

Use of professional email marketing practices is often avoided based on three criteria, 1) time requirements, 2) skill requirements and 3) cost. These factors make using a ‘Send Only’ approach the most often used, and is enabled by services like Constant Contact and MailerMailer.

The ‘Send Only’ approach is used most often and is based on the agreement that simply getting a message or promotion viewed is sufficient. This approach fails to consider the impact of the recipients responses when they want more (information, capability, interaction, etc.), but can’t get it.

I hope this helps highlight the value-proposition to using professional email marketing practices as a core tool in your marketing and promotions initiatives. The time and resources required for professional campaign development are time and resources that are well spent.

But let’s digress for a moment, I am defining marketing as “the activities that a business undertakes to prompt customers and prospects to take a desired action.” That action might be to make a purchase or attend an event. Whatever, the point of any marketing effort is to get people to do something you want them to do.

So if the aim of an email campaign is to prompt people to attend an event, for example, then does it meet the marketing objective to know how many people opened or clicked links in a particular email? More to the point, a marketing campaign would enable you to see who came to the event based on their receiving an email. In this context, email campaign services like Constant Contact, MailerMailer, and Vertical Response (to name but a few…) by themselves do not fulfill the most basic marketing objective.

They sell themselves in a similar way that weight loss products are sold. It is common knowledge that safe and effective weight loss is achieved by a combination of diet and exercise regimen being enacted in concert with one another. That requires commitment and concerted effort. But a galaxy of so-called weight loss products are sold by the millions promising to shed pounds without changing your current diet or exercise habits. Just strap on or mount the gadget and spend as little as five minutes a day. Well we know these things do not work. It’s the same with email marketing.

Email marketing services provide access to powerful systems that can do amazing things like send autoresponder or triggered email that’s customized and personalized based on any data in the system. But, what they don’t tell you is A) you have to know what to do with toe tools to make them work; and B) you have to design and implement other offline data collection systems to track the results properly.

Not to mention the following core skills are required to effectively and efficiently use any email marketing system:
- Database Design & Administration: To know what lists and fields to create.
- HTML Programming: To create email that gets through SPAM filters and displays as intended in the recipients email client.
- Professional Marketing Knowledge: At a minimum to know what to send, when, how often, and to whom.

So using the event attendance example, you pay $25 a month (that’s $300 a year) to send email to 2,000 people. About 17% (that’s 340) people actually read your email, and 2% (or 6.8) people actually clicked a link. Let’s say you do this 1 time each month, or 12 times a year. You spend $300 to reach 4,080 people ($0.07 per person), of whom 81.6 people actually clicked a link ($3.68 per person who clicked a link). Bottom line, you spend total of $3.75 for each person who clicks a link, and you have no idea if any of them came to the event.

Today Constant Contact has more than 3 million users paying a minimum of$15 each month, and none of them are actually “marketing.” What a business! If you want more from your marketing, contact me and tell me about what you’re presently doing. I’ll be happy to show you how with a little professional input you can market more effectively and efficiently right from where you are.

Better Customer Connections.™

1. Track Conversions
Design and implement conversion tracking processes for your campaigns. If your objective is to attract attendees to an event then be sure to require people to check-in so you can know who came and which of them participated in your email campaigns. If the goal is sales then devise a way to know if the sale came from one of your campaigns.

2. Follow-Up Consistently
Do do you remember the the last place you shopped that sent you a timely and relevant email thanking you for your business and/or extending you an offer? Thought so. So be sure to put all that wondrous email marketing technology to work enabling you to send relevant follow-up communications consistently. And take care to follow-up based on each persons interests and preferences, not generically. See item 3 for more on personalization and segmentation.

3. Personalize and Segment
At a minimum capture the name and email address of anyone in your mail lists. Then personalize all emails with the persons name appropriately. And don’t send the same email to everyone. Segment your list. Group list members by different products or services you offer and by characteristics that make them most and least likely to buy what you offer. This most often means collecting more data. Do that.