Email marketing, paid search marketing and online display advertising were the three most successful tactics of the 2011 holiday season, as reported by those who used them. Fifty-four percent, 49% and 35% respectively, reported extremely or very successful campaigns.

Based on these successes it makes sense that when we look at investment, email marketing leads the pack with 96% of marketers planning to invest this year. Paid search marketing and online display advertising also show increased adoption rates for the upcoming holiday.

What a difference a year makes for Pinterest boards. Despite the lowest success rates last year, they are the biggest mover in our survey. Thirty percent reported using the emerging channel last year and 71% plan to use it in 2012. This isn’t surprising, since at the end of last year Pinterest emerged as the third most visited social networking site behind Facebook and Twitter. Marketers see the value of this traffic and want to put the site to work for them this holiday. They’ve also had a year to test what’s working and what’s not, so hopefully they’ll see higher success rates next year.

Other tactics on the move: mobile. More marketers in our survey reported that they will adopt mobile-related marketing tactics this holiday season. Last year 57% of marketers used mobile-optimized Websites, 50% used mobile advertising and 49% used mobile/tablet apps. This year adoption rates for those tactics are expected to be 80-83%. Rounding out the top five biggest movers this holiday is another mobile tactic, SMS text marketing. Thirty-seven percent used it in 2011 and 60% plan to in 2012. This is a smart move for digitally-savvy marketers because 23% of smartphone owners send a text message to a business or organization for more information in a given month – it’s the number one mobile shopping activity reported by consumers.

We hope this data gives you some ideas for the investments and campaigns you’re running this holiday season and beyond. For more tips watch our holiday webcast featuring marketing insights you can use right away. And be sure to keep your eye on this blog, where throughout the season we’re releasing holiday data as we get it.

According to a new study by Experian Marketing Services, niche social networks significantly increased their market share of all visits to social sites, with Instgram and Pinterest leading the pack.

The following graph illustrates the global growth between July 2011 and July 2012, based on share of visits to all sites by country:

Other niche social networks that have experienced significant gain include Stock Twits in the US, Redidt in Australia, and FanPop in the UK.

According to Bill Tancer, head of Global Research at Experian Marketing Services, the growth of Instagram and Pinterest over the past year has been successful because they haven’t tried to be ‘another Facebook.’ Both networks are image based – something people love and relate to better than just words. For retail brands, sites like Pinterest present a great opportunity to promote products in a compelling and organized way to a wide group of people, globally.

Deeper functionally, combined with a lower technical barrier to entry, will result in new leaders in social media being created, accepted and used within a matter of days – compared to the rate of adoption happening now over the course of weeks and months.

Also included in the study for July 2011 to July 2012:

What social networks do you use most frequently? Do the results of this study surprise you at all? Feel free to share your thoughts with our readers in the comments section below.

The Benchmark study’s findings on email volume give great insight into the extent to which the marketers are using the email channel. This quarter’s study shows that marketers are increasing usage of email to promote their brand, products and services – a trend that has been consistent for the past several years.

The study also highlights the email and social media connection where marketers are seeing email as a smart way to build a social media fan base, and fans are now being seen as a vibrant segment for targeted email campaigns and offers.

Other highlights from Experian CheetahMail’s Benchmark Study include:

• Email volume rose 10% in Q2 2012 compared to Q2 2011
• 70% more brands are now sending ‘Like us’, ‘Follow us’ or ‘Pin us’ email campaigns ‘Pin us’ mailings are generating unique click rates that are almost 25% higher than other mailings
• Coupons had over 50% higher click rates and double the revenue per email than campaigns without offers

Download Experian CheetahMail’s full Q2 2012 Benchmark Study

While digital channels (i.e., email, mobile, social, search and display ads) naturally enable the sharing of customer information in order to facilitate a transaction, brick and mortar stores generally capture less information during a sale. Capture rates also vary wildly by retail vertical, from boutique to big box. Even within the same retail segments, techniques and strategies can differ greatly across companies. Legislative challenges and the increased skepticism among customers regarding sharing their contact information have made it harder to understand customer identity, which is central to multi-channel marketing programs.

With these expanded challenges, it may be tempting to consider walking away from even attempting customer identification techniques in-store. At the same time, consumers are demanding more relevant and targeted communications in all channels, so making the effort is worth it.

The good news is that technological advancements in customer linkage have made it easier to combine the customer information that you may already have across channels to resolve a customer’s identity. Even if you don’t ask or capture full customer information at the in-store point of purchase, any pieces of information that the customer willingly offers may be useful in understanding and linking them to your customer database. Your customer information is what enables targeted and relevant communications, so every little bit that you capture helps.

For example, if a customer opts into your mobile program for text message incentives, that contact information can be linked to the data the customer provided to you from a website purchase. Cross-channel identity resolution techniques then help bridge the offline and online worlds to understand that customer. Once you have completed the linkage of your own data, reputable data partners can help you to fill in any information gaps. The added benefit of working with an external data expert lies with compliance. The compliance rules surrounding proper use of personally identifiable information are complex and the risk of misuse can be detrimental to a business and a brand.

When people think of customer linkage, they often think in terms of digital channels. Remember, that linkage can cross over into other retail channels as well. What this means is that any information customers willingly provide in the retail store can be used to link them to your digital customer information enabling a consistent customer view across all channels – and the ability to communicate with that customer and provide the relevant and targeted communications they expect.

As noted above, to be successful, marketers must become more and more sophisticated in terms of their marketing capabilities. Understanding how a customer interacts with your brand in only one channel just isn’t good enough for most retailers these days. Retailers must become more effective in personally interacting with their customers via cross-channel optimization and linking all disparate data is essential to enable that level of marketing sophistication.

Key take-aways:
Facebook is the top social network displayed or promoted in email, followed by Twitter, YouTube and Pinterest respectively.

On average, emails promoting Pinterest get 24.7% more unique clicks than other non-social-promotion emails. The new kid on the block creates a lot of buzz in email. Check out this case study for specifics on how Ballard Designs boosts engagement with Pinterest.

Unique open rates for Twitter “follow-us” mailings are 9.5% higher than those for other mailings.

60% of brands that sent emails with “Facebook” in the subject line averaged a 27% increase in traffic to their website from Facebook the week following deployment.

First, it is imperative to determine what lies in the “social silo” that will impact other channels. For example, data-driven profiles, plus segmentation and models of highly engaged high value Facebook fans, can be used in all channels. We know that all fans are not high value, but high value customers are often fans — and socially active. So it’s important to be able to leverage social intelligence in customer marketing strategy and plans, thereby making the intelligence actionable for improved program results.

So what’s the best way to do this?

Let’s look at a Facebook roadmap for social intelligence:

Leverage Open Graph in Facebook with offers to encourage fans and customers to connect, not just to increase the number of fans, but to gather opt-in data. Make a compelling offer in customer emails, on your website or on your Facebook page. (Make sure the privacy policy and the permissions you display cover as much data as possible.)

Once you collect this valuable information don’t just file it somewhere. Treat it as a valuable feed of customer information. Using email or other collected data, link the Facebook information to your customer, compiled demographics, attitudinal, and behavioral data.

• Flag this insight within your customer database so that you have a more complete view of your customers.
• Understand which social connectors are prospects, leads or existing customers.

Create profiles and add to models and segmentation frameworks.

This roadmap allows you to use social intelligence anywhere in your marketing programs across all channels for activities like:

• Developing marketing tactics for prospects, leads and customers.
• Targeting high-value social customers with tailored offers and messaging.
• Creating campaigns in the social space targeted to higher value fans.
• Adjusting campaign messaging in all channels.

Since social activity is very dynamic, you’ll want to manage the Open Graph opportunity on an ongoing basis, rotating offers and placement. And remember you can offer a discount, for example, but a sweepstakes or other offer aligned with your brand can also be extremely effective. The data you gather gives you a dynamic portrait of your most engaged customers. You can use it for more refined and effective marketing investments. You might also want to leverage a marketing services partner with linkage, quality data and analytic expertise to get started.

The payoff…

For the social team:

• A clear, data-driven picture of your brand’s most engaged fans, leading to smarter social display ads and campaigns.
• A way to communicate clearly to marketing colleagues about the social customer ¾ beyond likes, posts and sentiments.

For the CMO:

• An understanding of the types of customers invested in social media helps calibrate marketing spend.
• A sound way to evaluate social media investment.
• A more complete picture of customer behavior.

For other marketing teams:

• A valuable customer attribute that can be used to help refine segmentation and targeting strategies.
• Clear understanding of how to target customer segments and which channels are likely to be most effective.

Knocking down the “social silo” is necessary to gather compelling data that’s useful in every marketing channel AND to be able to improve the customer experience. Building social intelligence is a key activity to keep in step with today’s dynamic customer, and to make sure your marketing is relevant and timely.

This is a common scenario for retailers because they do not have a 360° view of their customers across all digital channels, and therefore, are lacking an understanding of their customers’ behaviors. If the retailer was able to identify who my friend was across all channels and recognize that he had already made the appliance purchase, wouldn’t it have made more sense to send him an offer for something else — or at the very least, not show him a discounted price on the item he’d just purchased? What if that retailer was able to connect his purchase (he gave them his name, terrestrial address and email address when he bought the appliance) to their customer database and make the distinction before the discounted email went out?  An email thanking him for his purchase would have made much more sense, and he might have appreciated an offer for an accessory that he hadn’t initially purchased.

Marketers today face unprecedented challenges when it comes to creating and maintaining a holistic view of their customers across their marketing ecosystem. It seems that customer interaction points, particularly in the digital world, continue to multiply on a daily basis. Add in the pressure of customers expecting highly relevant communications when and where they want them, and the business goals of increasing the lifetime value (LTV), and it equates to an increasingly difficult environment in which marketers must work. Finding, consolidating and analyzing data to achieve optimal customer interaction has never been further from us — and yet has never been so close.

With a plethora of tools available, marketers can reach their customers through emails, online profiles, loyalty programs, social network profiles and more. What hasn’t been readily available is the ability to link these digital profiles together, reducing duplication in marketing databases, giving marketers a clear understanding of active and inactive customers, plus who is buying from them, where they are shopping and how they want to be interacted with.

On the surface, this kind of customer information integration seems like a fairly simple task. Underneath however, there are several nuances within customer identity resolution that make this a profoundly difficult task. This isn’t about appending data; it’s about using the data a company already has, housed in multiple databases, and linking it all together through sophisticated matching algorithms that leverage a rich repository of referential data.

To make an integrated marketing strategy work, you need to be able to:

1. Validate contact data in real time, as it is entered online, in-store and over the phone

2. Create linkage of disparate identities and data sets, using merely a single piece of personally identifiable information for any customer

3. Enhance your data with a 360-degree view of your customers

4. Cleanse your data to remove duplicates or inaccurate information

5. Profile your best customers and understand how they want to be reached: mobile, email, catalog, social and more

6. Identify more customers like your best customers

Organizations can build this infrastructure in-house, however the process necessitates a large investment in technology and resources. In addition, the ability to resolve identities would be limited to the pieces of information collected by the organization. By working with an experienced partner who can resolve your customer and prospect identities across mediums, marketers create consistent and coordinated messaging strategies, understand the optimal path to purchase activities, maximize return on marketing investment and create memorable experiences for their customers.

Team Great Britain’s fan page has grown rapidly from less than 100,000 fans on the eve of the games to almost three quarters of a million fans (705,000) in little over a week. Meanwhile, the longer established US Olympic Team page has grown only two per cent from 2.2 million since the games began.

Whilst a handful of athletes such as Tom Daley (600K+ fans), Jessica Ennis (330K+ fans) and Andy Murray (700K+ fans) have their own highly engaged fan bases, many other GB athletes don’t have any or a sizeable fan base – and so Team GB has picked up much of the conversation space.

The most popular UK posts are those that report on medal wins – especially the gold medals. Team GB’s poster girl Jessica Ennis’ heptathlon gold tops the UK charts with close to a quarter of a million Likes on the team page. Posts on Ennis’ own page also got close to 200,000 Likes following her win. After Ennis it was Mo Farah’s win in the 10,000 metres, shock wins for Helen Glover and Heather Stanning in the rowing and Greg Rutherford in the long jump that really captured GB fans’ attention.

By comparison, posts about those missing out on medals drove much less activity. Tom Daley and Peter Waterfield’s disappointment in the diving earned Team GB only 16,000 Likes. By contrast, Tom Daley’s apology to his fans on his own page pulled in a flurry of support with over 14,000 comments from his fans and over 125,000 Likes, considerably more than on either Team GB or Team USA fan pages.

Winning is definitely driving fans to Like on these Facebook team pages. Social media is allowing people to really be part of the Games and share in the overall excitement, and it will be interesting to see how brands tap into athletes’ new found popularity.

The table below shows the top 30 most popular posts (based on likes and comments) on the official TeamGB and US Olympic Team Facebook pages.

Big hitters aside how are the rest of the Olympic athletes doing in harnessing Facebook to increase fan engagement and build excitement during the games? The chart below shows how 400+ pages associated with Olympic athletes, teams and sports are performing (these are pages listed on Facebook’s own Olympic page – facebook.com/pages/olympics). We have plotted the number of fans each page has against the level of engagement for the page over the last week (using Facebook’s ‘People Talking About This’ metric – which provides a measure of number of new fans and people engaging with the page in the past week).

The tables below show the top 30 most popular posts (based on likes and comments) on the official TeamGB and US Olympic Team Facebook pages.

In the left hand chart we show all of these pages, and the true giants dominate the picture with many more millions of fans and hundreds of thousands more people engaging with them than the vast majority of other athletes and Olympic pages. Track athletics take second place to football stars such as Beckham (20 million fans) and Neymar Jr (6 million fans), US NBA basketball players (Kobe Bryant, LeBron James, Pau Gassol), and Tennis pros (Roger Federer, Rafa Nadal) who rank as the biggest players on Facebook. Usain Bolt has more fans than any other track athletics star (7 million fans), with swimmer Michael Phelps running a close second (5 million fans). By showing page size against the level of engagement (People Talking About This) one can immediately see where pages are receiving a disproportionate amount of engagement and excitement given the size of their fan base (i.e. those that are further up and to the left in the chart). Team GB and the US Olympic Team fan pages are both successfully creating engagement at levels above what you would normally expect for a page of their size. As we drill into the smaller pages (see the scatter chart on the right – which shows the detail for smaller pages), we also see that both the Japanese and Australian Olympic Teams – whilst smaller, are also driving engagement levels above other Fan pages of similar sizes. These national team pages appear to be hubs of conversation for fans in each country – perhaps not surprising given the number of athletes and events who do not have acitve pages themselves, or may have several, including unofficial pages which can cause confusion for even the most ardent supporter. Furthermore, most athletes have locked down the ability for fans to post stories on their pages, and instead fans interact by liking or commenting what Usain and others have to say in their posts – whereas on the Team pages, fans can generate their own posts and kick off new stories and conversations with their network. Team GB posts 15-25 times a day – and so far the double gold for rowers Helen Glover and Heather Stanning have been the most popular with 80 thousand likes per post. In contrast, the Team US posts more sparingly between 2 and 4 times per day focusing on their medal wins – with posts about Phelps’s 4x200m freestyle, which made him the most decorated Olympian of all time grabbing almost 200 thousand likes.

Whilst the US Olympic team’s page (2.3 million fans) is far bigger than Team GB’s (373 thousand fans) – Team GB has been the most successful with these games so far (again not surprisingly being on home soil) – growing almost five fold since the beginning of July (and over three times in just the past week), and the US Olympic Team’s page has grown by 8%. As we can see in the chart below, whilst GB still have a fair way to go to catch up in terms of fans, in terms of engagement (People Talking About), the GB and US team pages are neck and neck with almost quarter of a million people engaging with each page in the past week. Traffic to the official Team GB site also increased by 150 per cent in the last week

Teams aside, many athletes do manage to leverage Facebook to create and share in the excitement of their fans, and although many of the most prominent ones are outside of the track or pool – Bolt and Phelps are worldwide sensations with many millions of Facebook fans, and it will be interesting to see whether the games generate a million more fans with new audiences or whether they have reached saturation. In Great Britain, until the eve of the games Tom Daley and Jessica Ennis – two much more local stars had similarly sized fan bases of about 100 thousand fans. Tom’s page has since soared to close to half a million fans, growing by almost 3 times in the past week, and the level of engagement is greater than many of the biggest athletes on Facebook.

Tom regularly updates his Facebook status via his mobile in the run up to and following events – posting every day during July. When Daley and teammate Pete Waterfield missed out on their synchronised medal, he quickly posted to Facebook as to being “#gutted so sorry to everyone” – generating 120 thousand likes and 10 thousand comments from fans – mostly expressing their pride and wishing him luck for his individual event (see word cloud below of top words in the comments appearing on that post). His strong fan base also rallied with 170 thousand likes when he posted back in May for a fundraising night in memory of his late father. When we cut this with Experian Hitwise data we see that during the past weekend Tom Daley was the most searched for athlete by the UK internet population and searches for him tripled between Sunday and Monday. On Monday in particular Tom Daley featured in 1 in every 300 UK internet searches with 7% of searches including the word ‘twitter’. Finally 1 in every 17 searches for Twitter included the words ‘tom daley’.

In contrast, the history making Phelps has a much more laid back approach to Facebook, posting every couple of days in the run up to the games – he hasn’t yet updated his profile since the opening weekend of the games – presumably too busy on Twitter and competing – when he posted a congratulations to Ryan Lochte on his performance and was self deprecating about his own performance, garnering a good but by no means legendary 100+ thousand likes. UK online searches did increase by 467% for Phelps at the back end of last week.

We will be watching how engagement on Facebook evolves over the coming weeks and whether national team and sports pages and others manage to retain engagement once the games are over.

NOTE ON DATA IN CHARTS: There are some variations between data presented in the charts due to variations in timing of when Facebook data is available for different metrics – and in some cases we have updated live data from pages to provide the most up to date view.

86% of U.S. online adults are taking part in at least some form of social interaction

None of the marketers in the room were surprised to hear Rob say that social media has become increasingly mainstream, though it was interesting to learn that according to Forrester, 86% of U.S. online adults are taking part in at least some form of social interaction.

This was good news for the marketers in attendance, many of whom are in the retail and travel industries, and all of whom are increasingly turning to social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest to promote their brands.

Also not surprising was Rob’s breakdown of challenges that marketers face, the biggest of which is creating a single view of customers across channels – picked by 50% of respondents in a recent Forrester survey. Not surprisingly, according to Rob, organizational silos contribute heavily to creating this challenge.

Measuring results was chosen by 45% of respondents, 39% cited improving expertise in new channels (i.e., social and mobile), 37% picked capturing customer insight to drive decision-making and 33% said managing data quality.

Smart cross-channel campaign management is critical to solving all of the above challenges and Rob had these thoughts on the topic:

• Campaign management applications are needed to enable more customer-centric approaches, but core CCCM capabilities are now quite mature
• Integrations, customizations and licenses are expensive and this sometimes prevent firms from incorporating campaign management applications
• Marketers need more support in social, mobile and local, but often native social listening, mobile push notifications and location-based communications are poorly supported or absent from the mix
• Marketers are asking for more help from their vendors as they often have the right vision and an interesting perspective. The vendors’ biggest challenge is simply a matter of moving fast enough to satisfy clients’ needs

Ultimately, Rob’s advice to marketers for getting to optimized cross-channel campaign management was this:

• Map your customer’s journey across key touch points
• Look for opportunities to integrate data and automate operations
• Create a 3-5 year technology strategy and implementation roadmap
• Prove ROI in high-value interactions – quick wins make it easier to get funding