According to the latest study from Exact Target, an Indianapolis-based cross platform marketing solution provider, email is still the most effective channel to drive purchase behavior.  ET’s 2012 Channel Preference Study surveyed over 1,400 respondents of all ages to determine which marketing channels are preferred, comparing social media to email and other forms of communication.

The study identified six key factors that determine which channel is preferred to receive a particular message. They include:

•  Content– Is this message a marketing message from a company I have done business with or is it of personal nature?
• Immediacy – is this information that I need right away or can I hold it for later consumption?
•  Accessibility – will I need to access this message at a future time?  (Email is very flexible in this regard)
•  Privacy – do I want to share this message with the whole world or just with a specific contact?
• Formality – do I need to convey a level of professionalism with this message?
• Initiation – how did this conversation originate?

How your message stacks up against these six factors will help you determine if email is the right channel. Based on my experience and the results of this study, email and even direct mail are more likely the best channels to use, rather than social channels, if you are a business trying to reach prospective customers. Despite all the hype regarding social media, consumers are not very open to marketing messages via those channels unless it is for customer service issues.  So how do you get your email to drive more purchases?

Like most communications, the key to achieving a greater open rate and and a higher response is relevancy. Email from marketers must provide some type of useful information that would make a recipient want to read it and then be compelled to act. It should also be as customized as possible based on the data that you have regarding the recipient. If the average open rate of an email is in the mid-20% range, then marketers need to wake up and fine tune their messages before they get tuned out. Consider adding creative content, such as video or other downloadable information, that makes recipients want to sign up to learn more from your company.

Additionally, marketers have to understand that one email is likely not enough to deliver the message thoroughly. Email nurturing takes time and requires a focused message depending upon the previous behavior of the recipient or where they are in the conversion funnel. There is no need to blast out the same message multiple times. You risk alienating your customer or prospect. Segment your list based on behaviors such as who has opened previous emails but has not clicked through to your site. Improve your offer for those stubborn recipients and get a better conversion.

If you are in need of help to improve your email communications, feel free to contact me at (317)632-6501 to find out how we can help you improve your email results and your bottom line.

Trade shows are a viable tactic in the marketing mix because they allow personal interaction with your most valued audience. However, measuring these engagements can often be a challenge. With social media in the mix, you can extend the conversation and get the added benefit of tracking success measures.

Defining social media’s role in reaching your trade show objectives is an essential first step. Do you want to increase brand awareness? Increase booth traffic? Gain press/media coverage? Once you define objectives for social media at the show, take a look at how those stack up against some of the trade show goals like generating pre-show buzz, lead generation, or extending the conversation after the show.

Now that you know what you want to achieve by using social media during the show, it’s time for the fun part – figuring out which of the available tools and channels to use. Here are some approaches worthy of sharing:

Keep customers in your booth with Facebook – Sharing photos is one of the most common uses of Facebook. Take advantage of this by giving visitors a reason to have their picture taken in your booth.  You can take the picture or allow them to take it with their own personal smartphone.  Combining this with inbooth celebrity/guest speaker activity or taking pictures by a standalone branded banner are both simple ways to integrate this into your plan.

Generate pre-show buzz with Twitter – Send short and sweet hints about all the upcoming events that will be taking place in your booth. Are you having any contests, guest speakers, special offers? Let people know ahead of time so they can make it a point to visit your booth. The activities are often planned well in advance and so can be your tweets. Use a service like HootSuite to pre-load and pre-schedule your tweets.

Continue the conversation with Media Sharing – Did a brand advocate or a thought-leader present something new in your booth? Take advantage of sites like SlideShare to distribute the content to booth visitors and to those who couldn’t make the show.

Your existing social media plans may influence your strategy as well.  Already engaged in social conversation with customers? Try out a Tweetup at your next show.  Not yet joined the social network? Set up your business accounts a few months before the show and promote your new presence live and among your biggest fans.

Whatever direction you choose, there are lots of opportunities to use your trade show not only to show but also to tell.

It’s not enough to be a good journalist anymore. Now the best journalists are also marketing their stories — tweeting, Facebooking and answering comment posts from readers on issues and stories.  It’s not about just covering a story. It’s about learning what audiences think about a particular story or topic and how they respond to it.

This interaction stems from the growth of social media, which allows anyone to break a story or share news quickly. Here’s an example:

When news of singer Whitney Houston’s death broke in February, it wasn’t the Associated Press or CNN that broke the news.  The story exploded on Twitter.  In fact, one Twitter user confirmed the news of the singer’s death 27 minutes before mainstream media reported it. Within the first hour of the breaking story, there were about 2.5 million tweets and retweets about it.

Social media is a hub of conversations all happening at the same time, and all those discussions reflect people’s general concerns. It’s a great place to get feedback from people, find salient surveys and data and determine what people want to know.

With intense competition to be the first to break a story, journalists are fighting harder than ever to stay relevant and be the number one news source. This provides a valuable lesson for media relations professionals, watching conversations on social media hubs to make sure who covers what kinds of stories and what their audiences think about them. It’s a way to keep a pulse on what really matters to a particular target audience. Staying informed on what is buzzing in the social media sphere provides a golden opportunity for media relations people to pitch a story idea to the right person at the right time.

Recently, UK-based McVitie’s Jaffa Cakes teamed up with Engine, a communications firm in London, to create the first elevator covered in lickable cake dot wallpaper. Apparently, the objective is to provide Engine employees with some delicious stress relief – after all, isn’t “stressed” just “dessert” spelled backwards? – and to have fun doing it. Clearly, the objective was not to create the most hygienic elevator ever, although a spokesperson for the company does say that an elevator attendant is on duty to remove already-licked cake dots. Do with that information what you will.

Regardless of how you feel about cake, or germs, or sharing an elevator with people who like to lick walls, this type of out-of-the-box (setting aside that it’s in an elevator, which is actually a box) thinking is inspiring. I can think of at least 2 key reasons:

1. It gets – and keeps – a consumer’s attention, which is incredibly difficult these days. We’re assaulted with so much information, and so quickly, that creating a campaign or experience that is memorable and cuts through the clutter is a real challenge – and not one that all marketers or brands rise to gracefully or successfully.
2. And, it’s buzzworthy and shareworthy. What started as the brainchild of an artist and a chef for a specific art installation has now been written about in a leading online magazine, and shared thousands of times across multiple networks. Aside from sharing it on Facebook, Twitter, and this blog, I’ve told at least 4 people I’ve encountered in my daily life. And now that I’ve told you, don’t you want to go tell someone else, if for no other reason than to laugh about how profoundly strange it might be to walk into an elevator and see someone trying to lick the ceiling?

What brands have you seen do something like this – shareworthy, or inspiring, or out-of-the-box, or better yet, all 3 – lately? Or, do you have favorite brands that you would like to see rise to the occasion, and raise the bar for all the rest? Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments below. Best answer wins a ride in the lickable cake elevator.*

* Not really. But be honest: wouldn’t it be fun to see, even if you and everyone else kept their taste buds where they belonged?

Those of us who recall the world before the internet, and whose first cell phones included pull-up antennas, may find this “remember when” game entertaining to play. But it speaks to a larger point about just how much – and how quickly – the technology and media landscape changes, and how important it is keep tabs on where we’ve been and where we’re going. Especially for those of us who are trying to reach customers through these ever-changing channels.

For 20 years, Arbitron and Edison Research have been conducting a national survey around media usage. They just released the results of the 2012 study, which has page after page of interesting statistics, such as:

• 88% of the population owns a cell phone. Smartphone ownership has tripled during the past 2 years, and now half of all cell phone owners have a smartphone. And 60% of them say it’s always within arm’s reach! (Myself included!)
• Nearly half of consumers say that of the options – TV, radio, newspaper, internet – the internet is the most important to their lives. That’s up from just 20% 10 years ago.
• Over half of all Americans have at least one profile on a social networking site – perhaps not surprisingly, Facebook was the most popular.

The piece of information I found most interesting – and most important for marketers – though? When all of the data was looked at holistically, Arbitron and Edison Research noticed that usage of one medium does not necessarily preclude usage of others. And especially among heavy users of these platforms: heavy TV users still use radio and internet frequently, heavy internet users still use radio and TV frequently, and so on.

This is an important thing to keep in mind, when trying to communicate to your target audience – using all the channels that your customer has access to will allow you to have a broad and effective reach. This doesn’t mean that you simply say the same thing over and over again on TV, radio, and the internet. Rather, you should tailor your message in a way that’s appropriate for each channel – maybe design an engaging mobile app that supports the traditional advertising campaign, and then have a shareable social media component as well.

After all, as long as your audience is using all of these channels, shouldn’t we as marketers be as well?

By now, you’ve probably heard of Pinterest, the new-ish social media darling that recently surpassed 10 million unique monthly users.

If you’re not familiar, Pinterest allows users to “pin” content they find on the web onto various boards representing their interests – everything from food to fashion to home decor to craft ideas to parenting tips and even politics. In the old days, maybe you’d rip pages out of magazines or newspapers with articles you wanted to save, recipes you wanted to try, or inspirational photos of home improvement ideas; now, you can organize all of those things – and share them – with Pinterest.

Not surprisingly, savvy marketers have jumped on the Pinterest bandwagon. Conveniently, Pinterest users tend to be young (25-34), upper-middle class (almost 1/3 have a household income of $100,000 or more) and female (nearly 70%) – exactly the demographic that most brands would love to tap into.

But as with all social media, brands can’t simply talk about themselves and their products on Pinterest. It has to be balanced with the kind of useful and inspirational content that Pinterest users love to share.

Here are a few examples of brands using Pinterest in some pretty cool ways:

• Whole Foods: Whole Foods came early to the Pinterest party, and as a result, have a robust following (nearly 50,000 follow their dinner ideas board alone) and a wide selection of boards. Sure, they cover the obvious stuff like recipes and tips for preparing veggies, but they have expanded well beyond that into gardening tips and ideas, kitchen design and cooking gadgets.
• Calypso St. Barth: This brand is all about vacation fashion; to bring that to life, they hired a prolific and influential pinner to go along on their latest tropical shoot and document her experiences via Pinterest. She pinned details on the outfits she packed (Calypso St. Barth, of course); the activities she did; and the beautiful scenery she saw throughout her trip.
• Kotex: In honor of Women’s Inspiration Day, Kotex launched a campaign in Israel in which they identified 50 inspirational women on Pinterest. They sent each woman a virtual gift, and if the recipient repinned the gift, Kotex followed up with an actual gift that reflected something she’d pinned about.

Of course, this is just the tip of the iceberg. Other ways brands can take advantage of Pinterest include posting coupons exclusively for Pinterest users, and holding contests on Pinterest – for example, asking “foodies” to post recipes using a specific product or ingredient. Behind the scenes, Pinterest can also reveal a lot about the people who like your brand. Mine the boards of your Pinterest followers to see what they’re posting: what they’re inspired by, what they like, and what they are doing with their time.

Pinterest is still an invitation-only site; feel free to shoot me an email
(cyingling [at] cvrindy [dot] com) if you’d like an invitation to join the fun.

Tiger Woods at Augusta National

Every aspect of your visit has been planned — from the number of tickets that are sold each day to where I can buy my Master’s memorabilia. By the way, this is the only place you can get anything with the Masters logo. It is not online or sold through any other retailer. And, of course, they have UPS on site to ship it home so I do not have to carry anything on the course or on the plane. It is the ultimate experience.

Marketers should take a page from the Masters’ playbook on creating a memorable experience. What are the things your brand is doing when you are face to face with customers that they cannot get anywhere else?  What will your customers remembers about their experience?  Is it valuable enough that they would want to buy items with your brand’s logo to remember the occasion or to brag to their friends about where they have been?  Regardless of the category you are in, from restaurants and hotels, to retail shops or sporting events, you have to find the emotional triggers that will turn your customers into fans. It has to be special. In this day of online shopping and experience, what can you give your visitors that they cannot get online?  Or can you integrate the online and offline experience to make it even more enjoyable? I think sports teams are really missing the boat on using social media during a game and inside the stadium. Many facilities don’t even have a great signal inside the building.

So, if you have time to watch a little TV this weekend, tune in to the Masters.  Watch the expressions on the faces of the fans who have been sitting in their chairs all day to get a view of some of the great golfers taking on the legendary course.  The story is as much about the course as it is about the golfers. So as you watch, think about how your brand could do the same thing.  How can you turn your visitors into raving fans?

Then, a few weeks ago, an envelope arrived from Loyola University in Maryland. My daughter opened it to find a newspaper-like mailer that grabbed her attention. The design was unique and the copy was written just for her. Unlike the other mailers, it spoke to her in her own language. For instance, one page read, “If someone asks you describe yourself in one sentence on an application, tell them you can’t.” Another page said it is okay to “not know what you want to be when you grow up. You have time to decide.” To our surprise, we received another edition of this newspaper two weeks later. This is a school we have never heard of or considered, but these mailings quickly put Loyola in the consideration set.

It tells me a few things. Direct mail is not dead – if it is good. The other is you must stand out from the competition if you want to break through the clutter. You could have the best copy in the world, but if the format of your marketing does not stand out, it won’t get noticed. Marketers should always consider what the competition is doing, and then do something better. There is not a more competitive category than marketing colleges and universities. Students have many choices and the purchase decision can be between $30,000 and $200,000 for a four-year institution. I see many schools utilizing billboards to get the word out about their offerings, but I wonder if that is truly an effective medium when families are building a consideration set for schools? I do know one thing. Loyola University in Maryland has the right formula for success in marketing to prospective students.

Sanders Candy, a 136-year-old, Michigan-based chocolatier, sought out CVR to bring their brand to life, starting with a website redesign.  The newly launched site utilizes a Sanders logo from the 1930s and reflects the company’s positioning as a classic American confectioner using old world recipes to connect with artisanal chocolate lovers from around the world.  We simplified the site navigation and order process, increased appetite appeal by showcasing the product instead of the packaging, and enhanced the overall customer journey – all to improve the browsing and purchase experience, and to encourage loyal and new customers to share favorite recipes and memories of visiting Sanders’ chocolate and ice cream parlors.

Following the web site relaunch, CVR also redesigned Sanders’ promotion and newsletter emails, and initiated a PR campaign to select food and regional bloggers. Within a month of SandersCandy.com being live, multiple food blogs and Detroit media outlets were beginning to share the news – and the gourmet chocolate.

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When the client asked us to redesign their consumer website, we re-imagined it from the point-of-view of the homeowner. The result is a simple design and navigation that puts the user’s needs first. Now, people can browse products, download information and find a dealer without ever feeling like they’ve left the home page.

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