I confess… I’m a nut for performance cars. And, I’ve been following a car line from an international manufacturer for some time, awaiting its arrival in the U.S. I have watched the introduction at the Los Angeles auto show on YouTube over and over, not to mention the Super Bowl commercial about the car. Of course, I am a fan on Facebook too. I ordered my own car on the very first possible order date for the U.S. release. And now, I am breathlessly awaiting its arrival in 14 days.

So as you can imagine, I was delighted to get an email, which I assumed was part of a special communication, congratulating me on my purchase and welcoming me to the car manufacturer’s community of discerning drivers. But instead the email was actually an invitation to participate in a sweepstakes to win a day at the track for a competition among five teams—you just had to pick the winning team to enter. So, as a former Skip Barbour driving school graduate, I was thrilled. That is, I was thrilled until the link didn’t work. It didn’t work even after four tries and I got no response from the numerous emails that I sent to the manufacturer.

And worst of all, the team I had picked won.

I certainly don’t feel special now. This manufacturer is a great auto maker and I know that I will love my car, but a car that good deserves a better social media campaign! 

The lessons:

• The primary objective of a retailer is to acquire, SATISFY and retain customers, profitably
• Marketers MUST link their customers to their prospect lists so that they can treat their customers uniquely and ALWAYS recognize them
• A great offer REQUIRES superior execution
• Marketers must communicate with their customers in a SEAMLESS, consistent way that earns trust, is relevant and drives trips to the stores, website, call center, etc.

A wonderful product’s aura can be tarnished by not paying attention to the basics. Today sophisticated technologies let you link your customers and prospects by email across social media, and ensure you always have the basics covered. 

Quite simply, missing and incomplete customer identity data diminishes response and the ability to drive customer relationships. Solutions exist today that enable marketers to identify a customer with a single piece of personally identifiable information (PII), such as an email address, and then match it to the person’s physical address, alternate emails, social, mobile and even cookie data. This cross-channel identity resolution helps marketers to better understand customer preferences, as well as gain a better understanding of the efficacy of their marketing budget. Layer this on a solid loyalty program, and marketers will ensure they know all available touch points for a customer and can leverage those touch points to communicate the right message at the right time.

For more information about cross-channel identity resolution, download a copy of The 2012 Digital Marketer Report.

I’m struck by how much earlier retailers are starting their back-to-school campaigns this year. We polled a cross-section of marketers during one of our recent webinars and found that 27% of attendees were starting their marketing activities in May and 22% in June. Having said that, most email marketers wait until August to unleash campaigns, with 70% going out that month in 2011 – a hefty 25% increase of August 2010.

 It seems those marketers are on to something – we’re seeing that mailings in the first half of August garner the most revenue. Why the first half of August? Success could be related to a number of factors, including:

• When the first day of school is after Labor Day, families may choose to get their shopping done before their end-of-summer vacations.
• When school starts in August, shopping may be driven by peer-group influence – children see what peers are wearing and ask their parents for similar items.

This information can be used to drive your messages and offers.   

There are 55 million school kids out there and even more parents with wallets at the ready.

There are 55 million school kids out there and even more parents with wallets at the ready. We’ve been thinking about how to reach these plumb shoppers and will cover a variety of marketing strategies and tactics during a webinar on Tuesday, May 15 at 1:00 p.m. EST. Here are a few of the questions our subject matter experts will answer:

• Who are my key targets and how can I differentiate my marketing message?
• How should my marketing budget be allocated across multiple online and offline channels?
• What can I do to make my message stand out above the crowd?
• What variety of offers and promotions will enable me to capture a significant share of back-to-school expenditures?

 
Visit the Back-to-School Homeroom to register and to download an email-focused white paper.

An Experian Simmons analysis of nearly 1,000 television programs reveals which shows have the highest concentrations of viewers from the left, right and middle of the political spectrum. These trends can help advertisers, media owners, agencies and politicians target, reach and persuade American voters this election season. Watch the video below to see who is more likely to watch NBC’s The Bachelor, or Showtime’s Nurse Jackie.

Download The 2012 Digital Marketer report for more on the behaviors and habits of American voters.

As smartphones replace feature phones in the pockets and purses of Americans, functions that have nothing to do with making a phone call become increasingly commonplace. In fact, a majority of smartphone owners now access the Internet from their phone. Who knows, you may even be reading this post on your mobile. If you’re like the 17% of cell phone owners today and 28% of smartphone owners, you also watch videos on your phone. So take a look at this video highlighting some of the mobile trends we’ve been spotting.

Check out The 2012 Digital Marketer report for even more information about the behaviors and trends of today’s mobile consumers.

My brother and I have been planning a 50th anniversary party for our parents. Little did I know when we started that it would turn into a multi-channel marketing challenge.

The most important ingredients of a party are the guests: no guests, not much of a party. Over a long and fulfilling lifetime you make a lot of friends, so the key to planning this party was contacting our parent’s friends who now live in multiple cities.

We started by designing the invitation and, since most guests were born before Facebook’s inventors, we stuck with more conventional sharing and gave them the option of letting us know by email (on my domain) or phone (my brother’s house). This was the start of our “RSVP integration” nightmare.

Cards went out and, not surprisingly, we had a few deliverability issues including an invitation to Frank, one of my dad’s best work friends from years ago. Yes, he worked in an era when the Company was a place you worked for life, and relationships with co-workers and friends were like adjoining backyards without a fence.  Frank’s invitation came back to my brother’s house undelivered, so my dad called Frank to invite him directly. Frank later confirmed by email.

Meanwhile we received more phone calls and emails, which my brother and I traded back and forth. This is where things got really hard to track. Was the lady nicknamed “Mona,” who left a voicemail, the same household as the email from a “Mr. Bose?” The conflicting names and channels meant that when my mom called I didn’t have a simple answer to her question, “So how many people are confirmed so I can let the caterer know the count?” Well, our aggregations are probably wrong because our data quality is poor due to our inability to integrate across phone and email, “170, I think.”

A party is like a product that you market to your guests. As the marketer, you must contact your customers, engage them and end with a call to action (an RSVP in our case). Since you will hear back on multiple channels, you’d better be prepared to capture, integrate and aggregate the response from your customers across multiple channels. A marketer’s challenge is to do this for millions of customers. All marketers get anxious about a call from the “CMO,” but in my case, that means the Chief Mommy Officer.

Learn more about multi-channel marketing strategies for data quality, audience creation and response attribution tips and trends in Experian Marketing Services’ recently released 2012 Digital Marketer Report.

As marketers get better at targeting and engaging their customers, it’s important for them to remember that targeting and relevancy are not the same thing. With targeting, it’s easy enough to figure out that a certain group of people (say, Boston Celtics fans) should be included in a certain campaign, but which item to promote (Rajon Rondo game jersey? Kevin Garnett t-shirt?) should be tied to past purchase history.

The opportunity for marketers here, however, isn’t just about product recommendations. This approach can be easily applied to an email subject line, a salutation on a mailed piece, a display media placement or virtually any other form of communication. The more relevant, the more engagement.

What has prevented wide-spread success using certain approaches to targeting and relevancy has been a lack of data and analytics. Folks started dabbling with algorithmic black boxes in the late 1990s, but were stymied by computing-power ability to process large sets of data in required response times. Today, however, these problems have been addressed. In the age of Big Data and massively scalable distributed computing (Hadoop), the power of the data can finally be unleashed. Over the next two years this area will be a key point of innovation. The masses are clamoring for relevant communications, and technology will be central to delivering it.

Tip: Personalization is the behavior of a service changing based on personal information. Here are three rules for “good behaviors” that will banish those eerie feelings of being followed:

• Relationships — Personalization doesn’t work well with strangers. However, if a site or a service establishes a relationship in the form of registration or an opt-in, then it is perceived positively.
• Transparency — Make it clear why the customer is seeing the specific action or recommendation. Don’t be mysterious.
• Customer control — Allow customers to modify “presumed” attributes. Maybe things have changed, or maybe someone else last used their computer or maybe they are buying for someone else. If personalization is done right, more people will be willing to take off the mask of anonymity and share a bit of themselves in order to get a more relevant, valuable online experience. 

There’s a lot of data and insight around this topic and other marketing areas in our newly released 2012 Digital Marketer Report. Please download a copy and enjoy. Would also love to hear your thoughts on the topic of targeting and relevancy in the comment box below.

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Comparing Back-to-School campaigns with and without offers in the subject line, we found that those with an offer outperformed those without one. For more insights, download Experian CheetahMail’s new white paper: Back-to-School countdown: Smart strategies for email marketing. Also please join our webinar on May 15 where our resident data experts Bill Schneider and Heather Dougherty will review data, emerging trends and opportunities that exist for marketers during the 2012 Back-to-School season.

As marketers continue to strive for cross-channel campaign integration, it’s critical to keep the customer at the center of the marketing strategy. Simply put, companies need to focus on how to connect, engage and empower their customers at each stage of the path to purchase. In this video Experian CheetahMail’s Regina Gray provides three tips to help marketers engage customers via email, while leveraging data from other channels.

Get a more in depth look at these and other email marketing tactics in The 2012 Digital Marketer report.

Savvy marketers know that the world is a lot different today than it was five years ago. What was thought to be true from a marketing perspective even last year may no longer be applicable or effective. Today’s marketers need to shift focus from a technology or channel to a deeper understanding of the customer, including how they live and consume information, in order to empower meaningful connections and actively engage them.

Check out our latest infographic for a few of the stats and trends we’re seeing that provide insight into your customers’ digital habits. For a deeper dive, download The 2012 Digital Marketer report.

As always, if you like what you see, please share it!