The Disruption Tour - Run To Survive A Social Media Revolution

Increase Conversion with ShoppeSimple's Shopping Cart Social tools...

Cheetahmail, the email marketing services company conducted a study of more than 40,000 messages in March 2010 and discovered that, overall, almost half of transactions and about three-quarters of opens and clicks happen within a day of receiving a marketing email. So good results will often come fast.

One of the fastest ways to get email recipients to open and click on messages is to send notices of abandoned carts. As Cheetahmail shared with eMarketer, recipients of such messages are already thinking about the items in their cart, and that they are in the market for those products will spur them toward quick response.

So using ShoppeSimple's Shopping Basket Social tool will not only allow you to boost conversion from abandoned carts trigger based emails but you'll have the ability to target highly relevant and targeting offers that consumers have preselected themselves to receive.

For more information contact us at info@rsscheck.com or 612-349-2740

Email Click Trough Rates...are your ready to try an new online media channel?

E-mail click through rate in Q1 '09 was 6.1% however lower for apparel (4.1%) and specialty retail (3.1%) and declining.

Full report:

http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?R=1007192

With email penetration stats as poor as the above doesn't it just make sense to explore a new online marketing channel? TransactionalRSS can help you build deeper relationships with your customers, send the product information that is wanted and therefore opened by top tier customers, generate higher lifetime value site visits and close more business both from your current customers and convert new buyers from email and your site visits.

For more information check out RSSCheck.com

If you go back to 1994 when I began marketing in email with Text and then with HTML email the road we as marketers have followed in the email marketing channel has been paved in GOLD. In fact, email is so ubiquitous today that a merchant would be foolish not to use email as a marketing tool. It is one of the most profitable in their arsenal. Now if you follow the email GOLD road and apply it to where the world is today with TransactionalRSS(tm) (TRSS) and where we all see TRSS going in the next 15 years shouldn't you be jumping into this marketing channel? Shouldn't you be making TRSS part of your strategic plans for 2009/2010? Look at the following TRSS metrics....

General Mill/Pillsbury launched a TRSS feed for Recipes 6 months sooner then Kraft and they already have nearly 10 times the TRSS feed subscribers with their first move strategy. Pillsbury now has 98,000 RSS subs to only 9,000 for Kraft. Source:Google.

More to the point...Where will you be if your competitor moves into TransactionalRSS before your company does?

Intuit now has 20% of its visitors coming to its site from its TRSS marketing efforts Source: Experian

"Now this blog post hit my desk yesterday and it provides some solid metrics on email marketing nearly 18 years from where it began in 1994. Here are some key metrics about your e-mail customers." from Kevin Hilstrom Minethedata.com.

Once you read the bullets think about how this applies to TransactionalRSS (TRSS) and why you need to get into the know about TransactionalRSS. To learn more...why not give the team at RSSCheck/ShoppeSimple a ring or click. For details checkout RSSCheck.com.

• Half of all customers who purchased in the past twelve months subscribe to e-mail campaigns.
• E-mail buyers have a 77% annual repurchase rate, among the most loyal of any channel.
• Only 25% of your e-mail file bothers to click on at least one e-mail campaign, per year. The remaining 75% are inactive.
• Only 5% of your e-mail file buy something from your e-mail campaigns, on an annual basis.
• E-mail is what I call a "transition channel". It is the channel that your customers migrate to as they begin to rely upon catalog marketing less. After the customer buys from an e-mail campaign, the customer is likely to buy from your website, without attribution to any other marketing campaign.
• 80% of your e-mail purchasers buy merchandise on sale, or buy when free shipping is offered. As a result, your e-mail buyer file is over-populated with discount shoppers.
• When you offer full price merchandise via e-mail, you generate $0.05 per e-mail campaign.
• When you offer sale merchandise, or you offer free shipping, you generate $0.25 per e-mail campaign.
• Over time, you optimized e-mail performance based on the metrics you had available to you ... open rates, click-through rates, conversion rates. As a result, your optimization best practices resulted in a program that sale/promo customers love. Your customers are no longer interested in e-mail marketing unless there is a marketing promotion.

When is it time to launch a digital coupon program?

Certainly if you wait around like the newspaper of the past did your business could be facing the same daunting challenges as the article mentions below. Now if you fire up an RSSCheck Feed with a printable Digital Coupon, or deliver a digital Transactional RSS Feed coupon to your browser enabled mobile phone you are not on the bleeding edge but right on the cusp of breakout technology. A technology that will not only differentiate your business but increase your sales at a time when you need it.

Why not checkout a demo of this technology by contacting a sales consultant at RSSCheck.com

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

By Ron Shuttleworth

http://seekingalpha.com/article/126776-is-the-newspapers-shift-in-focus-to-the-web-too-late

There has been a spate of recent announcements regarding the disappearance of traditional print newspapers and here is the latest from Hearst. The market is not surprised, and there is little sentimentality towards the demise of the industry.

According to the Newspaper Association of America [NAA], print advertising revenue has been in decline since 2005. The category has been in free fall since the end of 2007 with Market Research reporting a 16.4% decline in revenues for 2008. Since peaking at $47.4B during 2005, U.S. newspaper advertising expenditures have declined by 67% over a three year period to $28.4B.

The outlook for 2009 may be even more bleak with JP Morgan predicting a 20% decline in advertising revenues to approximately $23.7B. This prediction infers a 50% decline in revenue for the industry in only 4 years. Put into historical perspective, the last time that the newspaper industry generated less than $24B in revenue was when Ronald Reagan was finishing his first term...1984.

The major media companies are obviously suffering. It was reported on March 9 that McClatchy (MNI) cut 1600 jobs as it struggles to service $2 billion of debt. Gannett (GCI), Hearst and New York Times Co (NYT) are also attempting to sell assets and shed jobs in order to cope with the cratering of the ad business. Some, like Tribune Co., have already declared bankruptcy.

Management at these operations have not been completely blindsided by the sudden emergence of the big bad Internet. Although there has been a lot of hand-wringing, spurious plans, ego-coddling, and various other forms of executional doddling, newspapers have been shifting focus onto the web for the past few years. However, this shift may have come too late to effectively compensate for eye-popping declines in print advertising sales.

As late as 2007, online advertising still only represented 7.5% of total revenues according to the NAA, and the industry organization didn't even start calculating online revenue until 2003, a full decade after the commercialization of the Internet. Instead of viewing online publishing as a complementary source of revenue streams, most newspapers initially viewed the Internet as a threat, or worse, a fad. This lack of initial recognition is the root of the damage being wrought on the industry now.

This industry has missed so much opportunity to transform. Here is the laundry list of already missed billion dollar opportunities: search, RSS, ad networks, video, blogsphere, social networking, social broadcasting...uh...the point is made. To be fair to the much maligned buggy whip manufacturers, they only failed to recognize the threat / opportunity of one new innovation.

Just as newspaper publishers have begun to really press forward on the potential of monetizing the Internet, a significant recession has impaired the migration online. The only area of growth remaining appears to be paid search advertising, a category dominated by Google (GOOG). Online display advertising is expected to show a decline in revenues by up to 5% during H1 2009 before recovering. Newspapers were hiding, and now they have nowhere to hide.

They must forge ahead...but with what?

A really valuable data asset that newspapers retain via editorial systems is... context. One could even extend this value to historical narrative. Unlike social networks where history is a mere 3 years at best, and content portals where history is at most 10 years, newspapers have the potential ability to seamlessly link today's breaking events to literally millions of local and historical events, opinions, and commentary that are decades deep.

Newspapers could be the gateway to context for online users, however they interact with information, or each other. And the technology is there. Nstein [EIN.V; NNLFF.PK] has some advanced web content management solutions that can help newspapers create context on the fly. It has the ability to extract and index meaning from any article, advertisement, or caption. The system can then connect the meaning of multiple articles to deliver narrative and insight on-the-fly. This is pretty powerful stuff, and could represent some value-add that only a newspaper editorial system could deliver. Hearst became one of Nstein's biggest clients last year as it got serious about re-inventing itself.

In order to be relevant and make money, already leveraged media companies will need to find ways to continue to invest in the federation of proprietary data sources. Clearly, there is a lot of ongoing investment required in infrastructure, storage, middleware, and at the application layer. Besides Nstein, which is a micro-cap with limited liquidity, Open Text (OTEX) should still be considered a good bet to benefit from the continued need for advanced content management solutions.

For newspapers, the geographic monopoly is long gone. the primacy of context, the "why" things happen has been deeply eroded. The print production and distribution techniques that were once barriers to empires are largely irrelevant. It took the leadership at once seemingly invincible newspaper empires a decade too long to recognize and then act upon the threats and opportunities posed by digital media. It may have been Mark Twain who said that history does not repeat itself, but it sure does rhyme. Newspaper = buggy whip.

Those media enterprises that are reacting now are investing as aggressively as possible into enabling technologies. Not all of the ideas will work, not all of the transforming media companies will succeed, however the technology companies that provide content management, storage, and data solutions should continue to benefit from this mad scramble for the next 4 to 6 quarters

The Overbrook Foundation vs. Direct Mail and Catalogs

http://thecatalogchroniclesblog.com/2008/05/03/the-overbrook-foundation-vs-direct-mail-and-catalogs/

So, for two days now my ears perked up when “brought to you by The Overbrook Foundation, sponsors of Catalog Choice …” was in the trailer on two different NPR programs. So I thought, well sir, let’s check this out. 

The Overbrook Foundation, located in New York City, is a family foundation established in 1948 by Frank and Helen Altschul. The Foundation took its name from Overbrook Farm, the Altschul family home in Stamford, Connecticut. Its mission is to improve the lives of people by supporting projects that protect human and civil rights, advance the self-sufficiency and well being of individuals and their communities, and conserve the natural environment.

Cool, I thought, that’s green and cozy, very politically correct, but let’s follow the money. So what’s the specific connection with Catalog Choice? I learned that Overbrook has provided $285,000 in grants directly or indirectly to “correct” the catalog and direct mail industry’s ways as follows.

ForestEthics http://www.forestethics.org/

Founded in 1994, ForestEthics is a nonprofit environmental organization with staff in Canada, the United States and Chile. The mission is to protect Endangered Forests, and to achieve that goal they have created a revolutionary new approach.

Contributions from the Overbrook Foundation in 2007 were $105,000 for Catalog Campaign and Corporate Action Program ($65,000) and the Do Not Mail Campaign ($40,000)

To learn more about these programs designed to inform and educate the catalog industry how to be environmentally friendly, visit http://forestethics.org//article.php?list=type&type=15

Overbrook also provided indirectly to Catalog Choice a $20,000 grant to Ecology Center http://www.ecologycenter.org/ for the Catalog Choice Website Development and Operations along with a grant of $160,000 in 2007 to the National Wildlife Federation. (Catalog Choice: Improving the Environmental Performance and Reducing the Carbon Footprint of the North American Direct-Mail Catalog Industry).

Direct Mail Kills Trees, Many Believe

From eMarketer.com

Nearly half of the respondents surveyed by DM News and Pitney Bowes guessed that advertising mail from US households counted for more than half of the country's municipal waste. More than one-third said it counted for slightly more than one-third of that waste.

DM News cited the Environmental Protection Agency as saying that advertising mail was responsible for just 2% of all municipal waste in the United States.

More than two-thirds of respondents said they would have a higher opinion of direct mailers if they used recycled paper and cardboard.

Another half said they would think more highly of unsolicited mail if they knew there was an agency seal of approval or "green mail" label awarded by the industry itself.

DM News and Pitney Bowes surveyed 1,000 US adults.