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

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.

By having a detailed understanding of key voter segments, including in-depth demographics, responsiveness to various media platforms, and attitudes and opinions on important political issues and social trends, marketers can do a better job bringing home the vote this November.

To learn more about the PoliticalPersonas segments, download The 2012 Digital Marketer report.

We hope you’ll join our webinar this Thursday at 1:00 p.m. EST to hear what every digital marketer needs to know about channels, benchmarks and trends, and what we call the New American Consumer – check out the tidbits below from page 11 of the report. Insights like these will be put into perspective and practical advice for how to leverage these insights will be dispensed!

• Twenty-eight percent of marketers noted that creating effective targeting profiles was one of their biggest marketing challenges last year.
• An increasing percentage of college graduates are returning home to live with their parents.
• Households that contain adults and children from multiple generations are a mega-trend.
• A study by the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) found that in 2006, one out of 12 first births was to women age 35 and older.

Register for The 2012 Digital Marketer webinar: Powerful insight for today’s digital-savvy marketer.

One of the trends we’ve seen is that the Baby Boomer population has had to adapt to accommodate boomerang children.

Watch as Rick Erwin, President of the Data and Analytics Division of Experian Marketing Services, provides details about the Boomers and Boomerang consumer segment.

To learn about the other demographic shifts and sociological trends we’ve found, as well as the unique market segments they’ve formulated, download The 2012 Digital Marketer report and register for our free webinar Thursday, April 19^th at 1pm EST.

Here are several stats from the report that I find especially compelling; many more are contained in the report:

• 91% of today’s online adults use social media regularly
• Revenue per email averages 2x higher for ‘Friends and Family’ campaigns
• 28% of smartphone owners watch video on their phone in a typical month
• Pinterest is now the 3rd most popular social networking site behind Facebook and Twitter

I hope you’ll sign up for The 2012 Digital Marketer Webinar being held on Thursday, April 19th at 1:00 PM EST. Two of our resident data experts, Bill Tancer (best-selling author of Click) and John Fetto, will explore the latest insight, trends and tips to keep you marketing forward throughout 2012 and beyond.

Keep an eye on this blog for more updates from The 2012 Digital Marketer report, including informative videos from Experian Marketing Services subject matter experts.