This really hit home for me when I was summoned for jury duty earlier this month. If you have experienced jury duty before, you know the drill: show up early and wait. Laptops, cell phones, iPods and Kindles are all confiscated upon arrival. There is a plethora of well-read, outdated magazines to choose from, and if you’re lucky, a television.

The scenario brought me back to the marketing of old, when there were limited ways to reach your customers. For a prospective juror like me, ancient periodicals in the waiting room and a movie from 1980 to inform me of the serving process didn’t resonate. Doesn’t the court know that we live in a digital world now? Our lives are connected… we must be connected.

When we were released for lunch, I promptly fetched my BlackBerry to check email, make phone calls and essentially get my digital “fix.” After lunch, I headed to the coffee break room and noticed that a television was on.  Soon, several folks came in and plopped down. I looked around and thought, “Wow they look as disconnected as I feel.” It occurred to me how lost we were without the technology that keeps our lives ticking all day long. We have acclimated to a multi-channel life in which we can engage as often, and in as many ways, as we want.

So I decided to just blurt out, “Hey, is everyone as lost without their BlackBerry and laptop as I am?” That was the right message for my audience; they craved connection and it facilitated conversation.

As the afternoon progressed, we laughed, told stories and even engaged in conversations about books, yoga and General Hospital. The court clerk commented on what a happy, loud group we were and said, “I wish all my jurors had this much fun.” We could have sat there silently all day, disconnected. Instead, a relevant interaction sparked a conversation about topics that would have otherwise gone undiscovered.

The truth of the matter is that today we are connected to a digital device most of the time and despite my group’s lively offline conversation, that’s ok.  My day at jury duty reminded me that, as marketers, we need to take every opportunity to learn about and engage customers in meaningful ways that resonate with them at the time.

If you are interested in learning how to get the conversation started, check out the 2012 Digital Marketer.

Fast Track Couples consist of young couples and families already on the road to upward mobility. Although 90% are under the age of 35, most are married, work at good jobs and own their homes. About one-third of Fast Track Couples have already started families, and others might look to start one soon. Other key characteristics that describe this segment include the following:

• Nearly all have at least some college education, which has helped them obtain decent-paying jobs in sales, white-collar professions and technology. More than half of these households have dual workers in the labor force.
• These young couples live comfortably in homes valued close to the national average, though they have yet to sink deep roots. Most have lived at the same address for fewer than three years.
• Fast Track Couples are informed customers, not impulse shoppers. They’re acutely aware of demands on their budgets, and they want to make sure they get good value for any purchase.
• Fast Track Couples are focused on their careers. A significant number are entrepreneurial and dream about starting their own business.
• They are mostly novices when it comes to financial investments and have not saved much money nor invested in many stocks, mutual funds or bonds. A high percentage have 401(k) accounts, and those with young children have started 529 College Savings Plans. Their balances, however, are still relatively modest.
• Many members are comfortable with debt. They’re still paying off student loans and have added auto loans and first mortgages to their liabilities.
• Fast Track Couples lead socially active lifestyles. They enjoy going to bars, movies, comedy clubs and rock concerts.
• They prefer their vacations to be filled with heart-pounding sports, including skiing, scuba diving, water skiing and backpacking.
• Self-described early adopters, they like filling their homes with the latest customer electronics and technology.

The best channel to reach Fast Track Couples is the Internet. They are highly receptive to digital advertising via online search and sponsored links. Few segments spend more time in cyberspace. They are enthusiastic Internet users, going online to simplify their lives. They use the Internet to manage their financial affairs, make travel arrangements and check out new job, car and home listings. They also use the Internet as their chief form of entertainment, downloading music, listening to Internet-only radio stations, watching videos and sharing digital photographs. In addition, they’re comfortable telecommuting and shopping online. Having grown up with communication on demand, they don’t care how they get their Internet access. They bounce seamlessly between cell phone, laptop and wireless connections. Although they dislike email ads, they respond to sponsored Websites and links — especially when doing product comparisons. They like shopping for games and software to improve their online experience. In a list of popular Websites, it’s difficult to find any that they don’t visit, opening up many possible touchpoints for marketers looking to engage this segment.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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!

The best way for marketers to reach Fast Track Couples is through the Internet, as few demographic segments spend more time in cyberspace. Fast Track Couples:

• Are highly receptive to digital advertising via online search and sponsored links
• Use the internet to manage their financial affairs, make travel arrangements and check out new job, car and home listings
• Use the internet as their chief form of entertainment, downloading music, listening to internet-only radio stations, watching videos and sharing digital photographs
• Are very comfortable telecommuting and shopping online

Having grown up with communication on demand, Fast Track Couples bounce seamlessly between cell  phone, laptop and wireless connections. Although they don’t really like email ads, they do respond to sponsored websites and links — especially when doing product comparisons. They like shopping for games and software to improve their online experience, and in a list of popular websites, it’s difficult to find any that Fast Track Couples don’t visit, including Facebook, YouTube, Wikipedia, Best Buy and eBay.

Get more facts about Fast Track Couples and all of the “New American Consumer” Mosaic^® USA segments in our 2012 Digital Marketing Report.