Understanding the Digital Consumer
Heather FletcherWhile the Internet is the most important digital channel to adult consumers and e-mail is the way they prefer receiving messages, direct marketers may find more refined insight into their preferences quite useful.
That's the aim of "The 2010 Digital Marketer: Benchmark and Trend Report" put out in February by Experian Marketing Services, a marketing services provider based in Costa Mesa, Calif.
Among the findings are:
- Younger audiences, 18 to 34, prefer instant messaging, text messaging, mobile calls and social networking as their sources of entertainment and information.
- Young consumers use all messaging channels, with text messaging being the most popular.
- More than 60 percent of consumers 25 to 49 years old report that the Internet has changed the way they get information on products.
- More mature consumers, 50 and older, like e-mail messages more than all other digital message options.
- Those 50 and up opt for the Internet over cellular contact. On the Web, they tend to research financial and medical matters.
- Consumers aged 25 to 49 spend their time online "managing their daily lives" by banking and reading news, for instance.
- When seeking health, automotive and travel information, the Web is the first stop for most consumers.
- Focusing on search engine optimization, comparison shopping sites and banner advertisements to help consumers perform research before they buy.
- Realizing that the electronic media are powerful, but traditional media still play "a significant role, making it increasingly important for marketers to integrate their online and offline messaging and offers."
- Using advanced segmentation techniques.
Rice University Research Tallies Facebook Fan Page Results
Heather FletcherFacebook already provides its own advertising case studies. But one about fan pages, researched by Rice University's Jones Graduate School of Business, is getting a good deal of attention.
David Ruth, a university spokesman, says he's gotten a lot of calls from marketers requesting the full study from Utpal Dholakia, an associate professor of management.
Dholakia says the full study, titled "How Effective Is Facebook Marketing?" is due out at the end of May. He'll be its primary author, but there'll be input from others who have helped him with the research. One of the secondary authors will be Emily Durham, a university alumna and founder of Houston-based restaurant consultancy Restaurant Connections.
In the meantime, Durham and Dholakia co-authored a sneak peek at a snippet of the research: an article in the March issue of the Harvard Business Review titled "One Cafe Chain's Facebook Experiment."
While a few of the findings are brand-related, some of the already reported information also applies to direct marketers. At the beginning of a customer research effort, 689 customers responded to a survey e-mailed to 13,270 customers of Dessert Gallery, a Houston-based bakery and cafe chain. Three months later, 1,067 of those on Dessert Gallery's Facebook fan page answered the survey.
Here's what the 1,756-respondent survey found about the impact of Dessert Gallery's Facebook fan page, which contained weekly updates about menu items, contests and promotions, links to reviews, and introductions to employees:
- Fans made 36 percent more visits to the stores each month than did regular customers, spending 45 percent more of their eating out dollars there and 33 percent more than regular customers did.
- About 5 percent of Dessert Gallery's customers became fans, which Dholakia says may indicate that fan pages work best as niche marketing tools.
- The e-mail list yielded 283 fan page sign-ups in three months, or 2.1 percent of those on Dessert Gallery's 13,270-customer e-mail database.
Video Adds Power to Milwaukee Electric Tool’s E-mail Marketing
Hallie MummertBy definition, a tool is something designed to be used. What better way to demonstrate that utility than with video? That's the driving force behind the show-and-tell approach Milwaukee Electric Tool takes to its online marketing.
To reach its audience of tradesmen—such as professional contractors, plumbers and electricians—the Brookfield, Wis.-based manufacturer and marketer of professional, heavy-duty power tools and accessories offers prospects and customers membership in its Heavy Duty Club. Members receive information on new products, rebates and promotions, testimonials, and other content via solo e-mails and e-newsletters.
"With the promotion of our products, two things dovetail together ... or actually, three things now," says Vicki Chiappetti, Milwaukee Tool's e-marketing project manager. "We have the e-mail marketing piece; we have the social piece; and then we have great content, which we enhance with videos."
For the past year or so, the B-to-B marketer has been building demand for its distributor-sold products by incorporating product and product testimonial videos into its online marketing program, specifically its e-mail marketing campaigns. With the help of e-mail and one-to-one marketing services provider ExactTarget, Milwaukee Tool developed an e-mail template that draws on the branding elements of the marketer's video channel on YouTube, called Milwaukee Tool TV. In the e-mails, a laptop graphic serves as the video window with a "click to play" arrow on it; near this graphic is an image of whichever Milwaukee Tool product is being promoted. When recipients click on the product image, it takes them to the product detail landing page, which provides features, technical specifications, application photos and videos, cross-sell/upsell offers, etc. If they click on the video screen shot in the e-mail, it directs them to the video on YouTube that also links back to the product detail page.
Why provide an indirect route to the video? "I've been doing e-mail marketing since, I don't know, 2002, and I just know what kind of bandwidth a server will take when you have, let's say, a thousand of your closest friends hitting it at the same time," Chiappetti explains. With the Milwaukee Tool TV channel on YouTube, "it can handle any kind of rush hour traffic that a campaign provides for us. The user experience is then seamless. And we can have [the videos] in HD."
For a related reason, Milwaukee Tool—and most other marketers using video in e-mails—does not embed the entire video into its e-newsletters. "That would be, I think, painful for some [subscribers] who don't have the bandwidth," she says.
The videos themselves, outsourced to a production company in St. Louis, run about a minute, and Chiappetti's analytics tell her that viewers stick around on average for the entire time for most products. She uses Coremetrics for Web analytics, which lets her know which videos get watched, in what format (videos are in .flv format for viewing and .avi for downloading) and for how long. "Then YouTube, they make it so easy for people to see where, what, how, who, how old, gender ... And [these data points do] complement what's on the [Milwaukee Tool] site. I like being a data geek, that I can show those kinds of synergies between the social sites, the Web site. And then, just because we're extra special, we also have that integrated into ExactTarget so we can also see the performance in a full-circle view," Chiappetti explains.
Speaking of performance, she reports that the e-mail marketing program is finishing three points ahead of standard industry levels. Furthermore, Web site traffic has increased 30 percent and video traffic by 118 percent between 2008 and 2009. And perhaps the most satisfying stat is one that holds the most promise for continued success: Milwaukee Tool's e-mail subscriber file has grown to six figures since it started deploying e-mail-to-video landing pages in 2008.
Going into 2010, the B-to-B marketer is picking up steam with 10 new videos launched in late February. Chiappetti emphasizes the importance of the quality of the application videos, noting how well done and on point the content and execution are. "They make you want to buy a tool, and that's what it's all about. So the videos really illustrate what the brand is all about—the heavy duty-ness, the superiority in construction and then obviously the application in which you can use [the tools]," she says.
Clearly, video and e-mail are two indispensable devices in Milwaukee Tool's toolbox.
5 Ways to Optimize the E-mail Preview Pane
Heather FletcherRoseanne Roseannadanna perhaps says it best: "It just goes to show you, it's always something." Like the legendary character on NBC's "Saturday Night Live," e-mail marketers are accustomed to change. Most of it proves challenging, but some of it can be good. Two such developments appear to be coinciding. The new ubiquity of preview panes may help direct marketers retain customers, despite the looming deadline of altered algorithms that may keep senders of regularly unopened messages out of opt-in recipients' inboxes.
United Kingdom-based InterContinental Hotels Group took a proactive approach to these occurrences. Because the hotel group was already revamping much of its e-mail strategy during the recent consolidation of its e-mail service providers, IHG took a top-to-bottom look at its strategy. It was time to polish what its new ESP terms the "golden rectangle" or the "sweet spot"—that two-inch to three-inch deep message preview pane.
"I know a lot of the research out there, plus even our own research, is something to the tune of 80 [percent to] 90 percent of people use a preview pane," says Kevin Hickey, IHG's global manager of lifecycle and e-mail marketing. "And 60 [percent to] 70 percent of them say they frequently or always use it."
So shortly after starting work on the consolidation in November with its new ESP, Redwood City, Calif.-based e-mail marketing software and services provider StrongMail Systems, IHG tasked Seattle-based e-mail marketing strategy and creative services agency Smith-Harmon, a Responsys company, with redesigning all of IHG's templates to comply with the hotel group's revised e-mail strategy.
"Even if the e-mail's coming from a reputable sender, but nobody's opening up the messages, [the ISPs are] going to start considering, 'Well, people don't like getting messages from this company, and, therefore, we're going to deliver less of it,' " says Aaron Smith, Smith-Harmon's director of creative technologies. "What it's really forcing e-mail marketers to do is make sure that what they send to their subscribers is something that they care about ... They're tweaking the algorithms, but [the ISPs basing e-mail delivery on open rates] really will be going into effect this year."
To that end, here are five tactics for getting recipients to engage with e-mails in their preview panes.
1. Keep preheaders short, in terms of height. The first major lesson IHG learned after having its e-mail templates redesigned was that it was time to take a new look at its preheaders, Hickey says.
This text, often hyperlinked, is directly below the subject line. The preheaders should be considered an extension of the subject line and should only be one or two lines long, says Chris Lovejoy, senior e-mail strategist at StrongMail. "So it would again reinforce that content within your message that you're saying to the recipient is most important," he says. The text also can be a call to action and should be words rather than images due to image suppression defaults.
"It's the first thing that shows up in the e-mail, and it actually has a big impact on mobile platforms, as well," Smith says. "Because for [BlackBerry devices] and some of the older readers that don't render HTML, they'll still see that text right there at the top of the message and the link will be there so they can direct people to the Web site."
2. Use HTML wherever possible, as opposed to graphics. Because of spam blocking systems, image suppression still dominates as the first way recipients see messages, Smith says.
3. Ensure the logo is above the "fold." Smith says the most important elements of an e-mail should remain in the top-left corner. "You've got like 350 pixels wide by 200 pixels tall of space ... that's your primary real estate," he says. While some have their preview panes set vertically, most have them set horizontally, Smith says.
In IHG's case, the templates take into account the different brands—Candlewood Suites, Crowne Plaza, Holiday Inn, Holiday Inn Express, Hotel Indigo, InterContinental and Staybridge Suites. But at the same time, Smith says IHG also needs to maintain a core base "from a global marketing perspective." So a common template has different messaging and nuances, based on input from the different property brand managers, he says.
This takes into account the necessary differentiated, relevant editorial aspect of customer interaction, says Smith, who adds that he favors newsletter formats. "There's the need for romance involved," he says. "Don't just hit people over the head with a promotional message."
4. Place the most important message content above the fold. So the preheader, logo and navigation (probably in the preheader) are already placed. Hickey says the "view mobile" prompt helps drive a lot of traffic to the hotel sites.
Now consider the main message content.
If it's a newsletter, consider placing the table of contents above the fold, Smith says. If there's a primary message or a call to action, that should be up top, he adds.
5. Move extraneous information out of the preview pane. "It's really a balancing act of not putting [in] too much content that would, in fact, force the main body of your message further down, or your entire call to action would be suppressed," Lovejoy says.
If all people can see when they click on the message to render it in the preview pane is a tall header, recipients may begin skipping over that sender's messages.
Lovejoy says: "Anything that you can do to get as much information on top of your message will basically help you get ... your message clicked on and read and [taken] out of the preview pane."