Disruption Tour --- Run To Survive

5 New Strategies in Loyalty Marketing

More of the article here
http://tmt.targetmarketingmag.com/story/story.php?sid=113957&var=story
From Target Marketing

In our uncertain economic climate, loyalty programs play an increasingly important role for direct marketers. Customer loyalty programs have been around for nearly 30 years in most developed countries in the world, including the U.S. and most of Europe. As a result, it’s a saturated market.

COLLOQUY, which comprises a collection of resources devoted to the global loyalty-marketing industry, conducted research last year that showed the average U.S. household was a member of 12 loyalty programs. “That seems unlikely, but it’s because a lot of folks will sign up for the initial offer but then not re-engage with it again,” explains Rick Ferguson, COLLOQUY’s editorial director. He says that in terms of programs that customers actually pay attention to and participate with, that number falls to about four. “That presents a challenge for loyalty marketers. If you’re not one of those four, then you’ve got problems—you’ve got a lot of disengaged members.”

The trick, of course, is getting your program to stand out. “The way you do that is to understand your customers, your community better than your competitor does,” states Ferguson. Here’s how to do all of that better.

1. Take a Good Look at Your Customer
Any customer loyalty program provides a lot of information about the customer, and that’s the reason to run it in the first place. “You’re giving value to customers, and in exchange for that value, they’re allowing you to track their behaviors,” comments Ferguson.

Whether we’re talking about a retail loyalty program, a credit card with a reward program or a frequent flier program, the operators of these programs should pay attention to customer behavior: what’s bought, how much is bought, the channels via which the purchases are made, survey participation, requests for information and so on. “Most program operators are sitting on a mountain of information. But, for the most part, we haven’t done as good a job as we should using that information,” says Ferguson

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5 ways to avoid common email blunders

David Wertheimer is director of strategy at Alexander Interactive.

Don't be tempted by gimmicks for boosting email deliveries. Here's what to do -- and what to avoid -- when reaching out to your customers.

As consumer spending slows, online marketers are eager to retain traffic and minimize customer acquisition costs. As a result, they are taking steps to reach users who fit their target profiles. One of the quick answers -- easy to organize, inexpensive to deploy and fully trackable -- is to boost the frequency and reach of email marketing.

The logic is sound: In an ever-widening retail landscape, why not talk to the most people in the most direct manner possible, as frequently as is tolerable? More than 90 percent of online retailers email in-house lists, so leaning on those lists is a potential easy win.

Pushing the envelope
In recent months, more and more companies have been testing the limits of their lists. Monthly emails have become biweekly; weekly newsletters send midweek alerts. Companies also have become more brazen in their targeting. For example, some sites automatically add customer email addresses to lists without requesting permission. Others reinstate old, dormant emails.

Despite the hardships retailers face, these tactics are not always good for business. In the short-term, they may improve total opens and clickthroughs, but irritating users can create long-term brand damage, and ultimately hurt sales.

As with all online best practices, there are "right" and "wrong" ways to conduct opt-in email correspondence. A good email marketer is doing at least two of the following things right -- and mirroring as few of the accompanying anecdotes as possible.

1. Ask permission before sending email. This is an obvious, necessary component of successful email marketing, but many sites find it easiest just to add every address they receive to their lists. In the past six months, several ecommerce companies opted me into their programs simply because I completed a transaction on their sites. A few days or weeks after the usual order confirmations, each sent an unexpected piece of email marketing. One website even culled my email from an abandoned shopping cart. (The same site has emailed me every single weekday since. I haven't unsubscribed, mostly out of incredulity.)

A slowing economy does not undo the basic need for sites to empower their users. Inviting users to opt into emails ensures that in-house lists are populated with active, interested readers. Sacrificing this for volume only frustrates those who didn't want to subscribe.

2. Be transparent. Changed email frequency? Switched providers or functions? Re-launched an email that hasn't been sent in a while? Let users know, so they're not caught off guard, and so they don't react by hitting the unsubscribe button.

Some sites have refreshed their email lists in recent months, bringing former and lapsed recipients back into their marketing databases. But they don't tell their "new" subscribers; they just add them to the ranks.

I currently receive email from a major bookseller and a major credit card issuer, neither of which emailed me in 2007. This is less frustrating than blind opt-ins, but the messages have an air of desperation to them: a brand nightmare.

3. Accept limitations. As with site design, email marketing must account for variations in user access. Not every user checks email in Microsoft Outlook with images enabled. Be sure to account for the different ways users may read, subscribe to and unsubscribe from mailing lists, and make each function as easy as possible to achieve. Also check that email is not getting stuck in spam filters -- a sure sign that marketing messages aren't well formulated.

My bank recently prompted me to provide a new email address, stating that my current one was not working. This was inaccurate: I simply read its email messages in plain text form, and I hadn't clicked on a link in a few months. I resented the bank's impatience and am now even less likely to read its marketing pieces.

4. Let 'em out, not just in. With so many options, users will be quick to dismiss sites that abuse the privilege of direct contact. This includes opt-outs for email marketing, online and on-site.

A great new site I found started sending twice-weekly updates I didn't need. The email format is garbled and I can't find the unsubscribe link. Whether this is clever or erroneous, the effect is the same: These emails now go straight to my spam folder.

5. Be the good guy. The end result will be a more satisfied user who recommends and reuses your site and its services. The short-term effects of a larger mailing list are alluring, but the risk of alienating the users who don't bite is real.

How well is your company handling the email needs of customers? If this list looks foreign to you, it may be time to tweak-or overhaul-your email marketing strategy.

PLAN YOUR RSS FEEDS

MarketingStudies.net

Planning your RSS feeds might be the most important thing you do about RSS. You most certainly need an RSS feed for your e-zine, your news section, your articles etc.

But how you will package these, what others you might want to offer and other important issues, are much more complex than we can cover in this space. A precise overview of all of the opportunities is available in the "Unleash the Marketing and Publishing Power of RSS" e-book at http://rss.marketingstudies.net/book/

You might also want to do follow-up (autoresponder) RSS feeds, feeds for your affiliates, feeds for your employees or business partners, feeds for the media, and so on.

CREATE A LIST OF RSS MARKETING/PUBLISHING REQUIREMENTS

Then create a list of requirements for the RSS marketing/publishing solution you will be getting to publish your feeds. The list should answer the basic questions, such as:

a) Do you want to integrate RSS publishing with your existing content management system?

b) What RSS metrics you'll want to watch? For example, are you satisfied with just a rough idea of how many people are reading your RSS feed, or are you interested in more precise subscriber counts, clicks and even individual content item popularity?

c) Do you need feed personalization, such as personalizing your RSS content with the receipient's name and other details?

d) Do you want to provide your subscribers with the ability to precisely select the content they want to receive in your RSS feed (customization), such as by content topic, keywords, authors and so on?

e) Do you want the RSS feeds to be hosted on your own server?

f) Do you need the ability to target promotional messages or other content to your individual RSS feed subscribers, for example based on their previous clicks and reading habits, or even their subscription data?

g) What's your budget?

Top Ten Reasons You NEED a RSS Feed & Blog (I feel like David Letterman)

Dillon Dao
www.rssmarketingtips.com

1. It costs nothing- and delivers great results
2. A Blog makes you an authority in your niche
3. Readers return to your site to read your blog
4. Your blog info is put on your subscribers' desktop- instant
communication via RSS
5. Your site content pages grow with every post (search engines love
this)
6. Blog pages get ranked higher by the search engines
7. RSS directories get you listed & deliver traffic at no cost.
8. Your blog and feed make it easy for other websites to link to you
9. You can monetize your blog and RSS Feed and make additional
revenue streams
10. Your competition will do it eventually. Do it now and be the
leader and build your audience now, before your competition does!
11. This is the new future of online marketing.
12. RSS Feeds are indexed by the search engines almost immediately.

Hard RSS Results

from marketingstudies.net

As promised, we'll be taking a look at some hard numbers from the RSS marketing world, to see just how strong RSS really is as a marketing channel. If nothing else, these alone should show you that it's worth investing some time in to understanding RSS marketing.

Here are some of the latest numbers ...

a] CLICK-THROUGH RATES
According to the latest statistics from Pheedo, one of the most well-known RSS advertising networks, RSS feed click-through rations range from 7 to 11%. And according to DoubleClick, the average e-mail CTR is only 8.3%, showing that RSS is already outperforming e-mail.

How about the numbers from specific publishers? Lockergnome.com is one of the most popular tech sites on the internet, and also a great example of what can be achieved with RSS.

First of all, they are seeing a ration of 5:1 in favor of the number of RSS subscribers against e-mail subscribers, and even more interesting, a 500% better clickthrough ratio with RSS than with e-mail.

b] SEARCH ENGINE VISIBILITY

The BTI Group is a smaller VoIP provider and, through their high ranking blogsite [http://blog.btigroup.com/], the proof that RSS works for search engine positioning.

Here are just some of their achievements, as a result of their RSS marketing activities …

The Failure Of The Catalog/Multichannel Marketing Model

"The internet is the wild west. I keep advertising, only to send my customers out into the wild west. And they never return." Catalog Merchandising Executive, 2007.

When we conduct the post mortem on the failed experiment known as multichannel marketing, we'll look at this quote as being a key piece of the puzzle.

Back in 2001, it was a good idea to be "multichannel". We sent catalogs to customers, like we always have. Our analytics suggested that customers used our catalogs to shop on our e-commerce enabled websites. Woo-hoo!

And then Google took command of e-commerce. Ever since then, we've been leaking customers and prospects.

This manifests itself in the phrase I hear nearly every day ... "catalog customer acquisition performance continues to get worse".

Many smart people correctly point out that catalog marketing "creates demand". In other words, many customers do not intend to buy anything, but will buy something if advertised to. The catalog creates demand for an item. Paid search, in general, does not create demand --- it simply intercepts demand that is looking for a home.

Our industry mistakenly went down the multichannel path, believing that this form of demand creation was good. And in a pre-Google world, it was really good!

Today, demand creation is usurped by demand interception.

Go to Quantcast, and view the profile for Orvis. Notice that customers who interact with Orvis also interact with companies like RiverBum. To my knowledge, RiverBum does not have a catalog or stores.

So here you have the good folks at Orvis, doing the multichannel thing, sending paper out into the catalog ecosystem. They do a good job of creating demand for dry attractors.

But the customer isn't 100% sold on buying dry attractors on the Orvis website. He goes to Google and conducts the following search: Dry Attractors. Lo and behold, look who comes up #1 ... RiverBum!

Orvis creates demand for dry attractors. Google intercepts the demand, and funnels it to RiverBum. The customer places the order at RiverBum. The circulation manager at Orvis looks at the metrics, noticing that response continues to decrease.

Catalog marketing still works ... especially for the folks at RiverBum, folks who are not executing multichannel marketing the way the pundits told Orvis to execute it.

Sure, you can criticize Orvis for failing to capitalize on an obvious search opportunity (they don't appear in the top ten for the term dry attractors and did not appear in paid results either). But that criticism misses the point entirely.

The point is that traditional multichannel marketing, executed via catalogs and stores and websites, is a leaky bucket that can never be fixed in a world dominated by Google. No matter how effective you are at catalog marketing, no matter how hard you work to optimize page counts and stimulate demand via enticing copy and manage trim size and use recycled paper and send remails and remails of remails, you will constantly send customers to Google. And Google will send customers to your competition.

E-mail marketers ... you're in the same boat.

This is the grand failure of the catalog/multichannel marketing model, a failure nobody in our industry wants to talk about. When we get away from over-thinking catalog productivity, when we focus on executing the nuts and bolts of online marketing, we begin to view the world differently. And maybe, we can stabilize the leaky bucket problem we face.

When Being Too Good Becomes Bad

Brandautopsy.com

 Let’s pretend … you live in a small town, population 1,200. You operate a BBQ joint open only on Saturdays in this small town. The townsfolk describe your brisket as “transcendent meat.” By the early afternoon you’ve sold all 300 pounds of the meats you smoked. Your day is done and your customers are happy. Business is manageable, profitable, and more important, enjoyable. Then all of a sudden your unknown BBQ joint gets praised as BEST BBQ IN THE STATE. People now drive hours from all over the state to taste your BBQ and by 10am, all the meat you smoked has been sold. Then you start smoking 1,000 pounds of meat instead of your regular 300 pounds, but still sell out by mid-morning.

This isn’t pretend, this is real. Snow’s BBQ in Lexington, TX was anointed by Texas Monthly as the best BBQ joint in Texas. Since being lauded, Snow’s BBQ has been swamped with out-of-towners. The first Saturday after being featured in Texas Monthly magazine, I made the trip out to Lexington, TX to taste the ”transcendent meat” at Snow’s. No go. All gone. I was too late, even though I arrived at 10:45am. As Snow BBQ’s pit master, Tootsie Tomanetz, says, all this attention has “blowed our business out of proportion.” When faced with a similar situation where demand outstrips supply, most businesses would welcome the opportunity to blow their business out of proportion and simply expand to better meet demand. Expansion is the easy answer. The more difficult answer is to not expand. Snow’s BBQ doesn’t want to expand because its owner, Kerry Bexley, worries that his and Tootsie’s passion for their Saturday BBQ gig will dry up under all the demands that come with being a bigger business. These are perplexing times for Bexley and Snow’s BBQ. Sure, business is booming and the attention is good for the ego. However, is being too good actually bad for business? More out-of-town customers mean fewer folks in Lexington can enjoy the meats at their hometown BBQ spot. Tootsie is having to dramatically ramp up her early morning meat smoking duties, which adds intense pressure for everyone involved. It’s not uncommon for Snow’s BBQ to sell out of their meats by 9am which means loads of customers arriving after 9am leave disappointed. Again, is being too good actually bad for business? Kerry Bexley told the Austin American-Statesman he’ll consider shutting down the business if it becomes just that … a business. “My concern,” says Bexley “is we don’t get so big that she [Tootsie] doesn’t enjoy it. But when it does, well, we’ll quit.” Wow, that’s a refreshing take ... a business that puts passion and enjoyment before profit and growth.

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10 Activation-Ready Social Media Strategies and Tactics

John Burg Furturevisions.com

1. Set up Google Alerts for your brand.  Make sure that at least a junior associate is skimming as much as possible and providing basic reports around brand health.  If you don't know you're active constituency, you aren't going to correctly position your offering.  Simple insights and active exploration can net amazing results - as well as an appreciation for the channel overall.
2. Set up an open communications channel with Legal.  If Legal doesn't appreciate the social dynamic, they aren't going to give you the clearance you're looking for.  Nothing happens without legal approval.  Such is life in a corporation.  Get over it, so you can get to work.
3. Listen to the conversation.  Actively listening is a channel activity.  The world's largest focus group sits at your fingertips.  Listen to it.  Poke and prod.  Explore.  If you aren't ready to do this in house, outsource it.  A good vendor can provide you with cost efficient, timely brand health updates, as well as actionable insights into where you can be optimizing your marketing and messaging.  If you are in need of a few such vendors, please feel free to email me.
4. Share your insights.  Any half decent listening vendor will have lots of great insights into your brand.  The more you share these insights, the more your clients will appreciate your foresite in bringing these solutions to the table.
5. Enable indirect response to social media.  Not all brands are ready to participate in all conversations.  More often than not, your insights will directly impact multiple facets of your business.  If an issue arises around your product, and you're not equipped for direct response, at least alter your creative copy, brand positioning, search buys etc. - to reflect your corporate point of view.
6. Get someone from Corporate Communications on Twitter.  Introduce them to friends on Twitter.  Make sure that they become active members of the conversation.  They will soon appreciate both the power and social dynamic of this environment.  Make sure that you have legal clearance for minimal public participation, with lots of wiggle room for more private communications.  This will open up the lines of communication with early adopters today, while building a use-case for future channel usage.
   
7. Set up a disaster plan.  The biggest issue with disasters is that noone sees them coming.  Don't wait.  Set up a threshold for defining "disaster" and a plan of action in such an occurance.  It will only take a few hours.  But the potential payoff is tremendous.
8. Register your domain name, everywhere.  Plurk, Twitter, BriteKite, Ning, AIM, OpenID, Google ID... the list goes on.  There's nothing like buying back your domain name from a squater with more foresite than your entire organization.  Don't be lazy.  At the very least, assign this responsibility to a mindless drone (for now), and prepare for future activation in the days to come.
9. License as much as possible under a Creative Commons License.  With a shrinking proportionate amount of CC Licensed data and imagery available, open up your doors to the public.  Become a much needed resource for the most vocal part of the community - the content creators.  Limit your watermarking and branding whenever possible.  Make your presence known without trying to own the creative experience.  You don't need to KNOW all the influencers in order to speak to them.  It is often enough to simply create a presence in content discovery channels (see below).
10. Disaggregate your creative.  Make as much of your content available to as broad an audience as possible.  Optimize your for discovery - both via SEO and proper licensing and insertion into popular social channels (YouTube, Flickr, Google Image Search, SlideShare).  Put a "share this" button wherever appropriate.  Create TinyUrl's for Twitter sharing of your content.  Embrace the new dynamic.  Encourage virality.  Embrace the new dynamic.