Recently in Multichannel Messaging Category

Interactive marketing will near $77 billion by 2016 - that's as much as is spent on television advertising today.

Recently Shar VanBoskirk, Vice President Principal Analyst of Forrester Research, presented on how relationship marketers can take advantage of the growth in mobile, social, and display media. This webcast features Forrester Research's latest forecast of interactive marketing spend, and how your organization can take advantage of the increase in interactive investment. Specific questions addressed:

• What is the future of interactive marketing
• What trends are driving interactive relationship marketing growth?
• How can relationship marketers begin to leverage high growth opportunities like mobile, social, and display media?

This information is essential for all marketers, and will shape the way you think about your current marketing roadmap.

You can download the webcast here.

With display advertising spend estimated to almost triple in the US over the next five years from $10 billion to $27 billion, almost every marketer is allocating substantial money and time to this area.  However, most display advertising efforts have been focused on branding and anonymous acquisition efforts, not CRM.  But why is that?   Many factors are in play, but the simple answer is that there has been no easy way to achieve the personalized one-on-one type of communication achieved with permission based email with display ads.

Mostly, the challenges have been around how to find a company's customers among the hundreds of millions of anonymous users on the Web, and how to serve ads to just those users instead of buying large anonymous user segments in hopes that they contain some of the target customers.  Other issues for marketers have been how to coordinate display ads with other marketing messages, and responsibly manage user privacy in an age of data-driven marketing where both users and regulators are highly sensitive to how marketers use customer data. 

In September, Responsys rolled out its new display offering called Relationship Retargeting, which enables marketers to reach customers with display ads as part of their relationship marketing programs. It provides relationship marketers with vast new opportunities to improve reach and frequency of touch, while augmenting the value of messages from existing channels such as email and mobile.     

By tightly integrating marketers' CRM data, user cookies, ad servers and ad exchanges, Responsys has opened up a powerful new channel for relationship marketers.  However, it also took significant evolution and maturation of the industry to make this happen. Display advertising technology has evolved rapidly in the last three to five years, making one-to-one marketing not only possible, but a highly effective way to reach customers and known users. We worked hard to make this happen, but to be fair, we were also the beneficiary of a market that is finally ready for this type of marketing. Some of the key industry evolutions include: 

Emergence of Real-Time Bidding (RTB):  The availability of real-time bidding on the ad exchanges allow marketers to target and bid for impressions at the user-level.  With over five billion daily impressions available via RTB, marketers can now reach their customers at an individual level without buying millions of other unknown users in the process.

Making 1^st party customer data available for targeting:   Most marketers have rich customer data from both online and offline interactions that drive their email and direct mail marketing programs.  However, marketers increasingly see this data as a scalable asset that should be leveraged across other channels, including social, mobile and display.  Working with their email service provider or data management platform, marketers have undertaken efforts to make this data actionable for other online channels and make every customer interaction, whatever the channel, intelligently data-driven.

Standardizing and self-regulating use of cookies and Personal Identifiable Information (PII) :   Cookie'ing users is easy, and tying that cookie to rich user data is far more manageable than it was just a few years ago.  However, communicating with users based on what marketers know about them require the marketer to responsibly manage and protect the user data.   The Network Advertising Initiative and the Digital Advertising Alliance have done a great job implementing industry-wide self-regulation that provides data transparency and the opportunity for users to opt-out. 

This is a great time to be a relationship marketer, as the advances with display are exciting and quickly evolving.  However, there are also lots of issues to understand and consider when it comes to display, and this will be the first of many blog posts that examine what display means for relationship marketing and how to best take advantage of this new power channel.  

In the meantime, I suggest you check it out for yourself....

http://www.responsys.com/suite/display.php

• The sender: Zipcar's email was sent by Zipcar vs. Virgin's email was sent by a 3rd party, which feels slightly off-putting to me. I know, trust and respect Virgin as a brand, but previously knew nothing about Decipher Research... and the email was signed off by "Hall & Partners, research partner of Virgin America". Again, I don't know them. (For the record, I am a huge fan of Virgin's regular email program)
  
• The subject lines: Zipcar Satisfaction Survey vs. Virgin America invites you... Zipcar's is short and very to the point. Virgin's is longer than it needs to be, and by using the the word "invites", I got my hopes up that there might be some sort of offer or incentive. Also the REMINDER in all caps for the second send bothered me... Don't shout at me! Why didn't you take the hint I don't want to complete your survey the first time?!
  
• The greeting: Dear Customer vs, Hi Lyla. I appreciate the personal greeting from Zipcar. 
• The general tone and content: all business for Virgin vs. casual and friendly for Zipcar. Again, the bolding and underlining in the Virgin email seems overly strong.
  

Subject Line: Stop MoneyTrashing!
Date: Wednesday, June 29, 2011

Props go out to CVS for sending an email that converted me from a crumple-and-runner to an avid store receipt saver. With an irresistible subject line, scan-friendly copy and a bold call-to-action, I was destined for the click-through right out of the gate. The witty video on the customized landing page led me to Facebook. And from there it was all over. People providing feedback, sharing experiences, giving advice. I was involved, I was reading and I was caring. Without that initial email nudge I know I never would have explored the world of the ExtraBucks® Rewards program, and without the thoughtful cross-channel support I never would have learned how to stop my MoneyTrashing ways.

Facebook has continued to roll out its New Messages platform to its 500+ million users. As many already know, users are provided an option of creating a Facebook (@facebook.com) email address that combines SMS, chat and email into one easily accessible location.

While there most likely won't be an immediate influx of customers opting into commercial email streams with their new address, it's something for marketers to be thoughtful of in the long term. Below is a list of considerations and potential impacts for B2C email marketers.

Speak to Your Audience

• If customer's opt-in to receive your emails with their new Facebook email address, consider analyzing their demographic and customer behavior. Based on the results, messaging can be catered to this specific group and potentially provide more relevant content.

Create Facebook Specific Emails

• With New Messages, your promotional emails will be received in a text format without subject lines. The HTML creative is not displayed unless the customer "expands" the email. If your list contains a fair amount of Facebook email addresses, it could be worth your time to create a Facebook friendly email message, similar to a text version. There are articles out there that provide tips on formatting to achieve the best result.
  
  Article Example: http://tinyurl.com/3wdkhg5

Move Me to the Messages Folder!

• Emails from bulk senders, groups, or commercial senders go directly to the Other folder. In "Facebook Land", the Other folder is viewed as a junk folder. In order for your emails to be received in the main Messages folder, the customer needs to move you there. One solution for combating the Other folder placement is to include verbiage in your HTML creative that encourages your customers to move your email to their Messages folder.

Consider a Confirmation Email Program

• If you have Facebook email addresses in your master list, there is a high possibility these are up-to-date email addresses.  However, it could also mean these customers are in your list twice (once with their new address and once with their old). Overtime, customers may favor one address over the other making one of their addresses obsolete. If your email list sees a spike in Facebook email addresses, consider implementing a confirmation email program and/or doing extra list scrubbing to ensure non-engaged customers are removed from the list.

These are just few things to consider if New Messages increases in popularity and your customers begin to opt-in to your email streams with Facebook email addresses. While the platform provides a hub of sorts for one's text, chat and email needs, the current email functionality is not on par with the current ISP's. Customers may not run away from their personal email address at this time, but it's always good to stay ahead of the game and consider the possibility.