Email Marketing – Keeping Customer's Profile Current

Email marketing has multiple objectives like every other business initiative. For example, email campaign may focus on encouraging customers to make transactions that are profitable and also, ensuring that the same set of customers come back again for their next shopping trip. However, today’s profit cannot be the only objective, ensuring customers return in the future is probably equally important.


What is the trade-off between the two? In my last post, I emphasized on how customer segmentation improves RoI of an email marketing campaign or engagement strategy. If a particular email is only focused on current set of deals on offer without ensuring that customer keeps the profile information current (email address, mobile number, location, preferences, like or dislikes), targeting of offers will sooner or later, start missing the direction.

As a marketer, you will miss the current likes and the current interests that have changed since the customer first shared them with you. With limited and probably incorrect information, message will lose relevance. Customer may start marking your emails as spam or simply delete them or unsubscribe.

What percentage of your customers come back through email? Is it less than 2%, or as high as 50%? Do customers lose interest over time and if yes, what is the rate of decay in the level of interest? It depends entirely on your product category.  Travel gets maximum response in and around holiday season or long weekends. Ecommerce is driven by seasons and in category like jobs, interest level dips over time with annual revival during appraisal time.  If a significant percentage of customers come back, can you slowdown the process of customers losing interest? Or by making them update their profiles, bring them back to the active pool.

Should an email marketing campaign necessarily contain information that urges the customer to update the preferences and the interests that you have. Probably yes…

Or can you do one better? Include this only for customers who have not updated their profile information for some time. For customers who have recently updated the profile information, they continue to get mailers focused on maximizing transactions.

Big Data and Analytics

Data Analytics is as old as the data itself. Extracting information from data is as ancient as one can think of. However, there is a major hype around Big Data, Web Analytics in the recent past. What has changed–

(a)   Most businesses across the globe have implemented some form of ERP and transaction automation solutions. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solutions have been in existence for more than a decade and a large number of organizations have crossed the bridge in terms of integrating different systems across the organization. It is now practically feasible to understand a customer in terms of her journey across the organization from a lead, to sales pitch, to customer, service/product delivery and fulfillment.

(b)   Transactional data is large in volume, often captures the demographic information and behavioral information in terms of likes (products purchased represent a Like behavior). Large volume of data naturally can be used to identify patterns and patterns can be used to characterize customers. For example, a customer purchasing lot of sugar free items is possibly health conscious or may be diabetic. Customer buying lot of sports goods is obviously interested in sports.

(c)    Analyzing Retail transaction data and interpreting basis the purchase history was subject of intense analysis in Research in the Nineties. Since then Ecommerce has provided additional input from data analysis perspective. Ecommerce companies can track the browsing behavior of customers on their site. Which products they looked at, compared and what did they finally purchase.  Now this is enough to characterize customers as price conscious, style conscious etc. While transactional data can be used to derive similar inferences, click data is more definitive as it captures the customer’s exploration of products prior to making a decision. In the end, objective of all analysis to drive business decisions which can help the customer as well as the business.

(d)   It’s been more than a decade of big data and analytics in the Western world and Indian companies are now catching up. ERP which was big in early part of the last decade is now commonplace. Consultants are now keen on selling Analytical Tools and making a pitch of analytics. In the end, transactional automation solutions were also sold with the promise of data analytics. Customers are also demanding results from the same vendors.

The hype around big data and analytics is probably here to stay, unlikely to go away in a hurry. If a business analyzes several projects it undertakes, it does not take too long to realize than RoI from analytics projects is probably the highest.  As one of my friends once said “If you did not find the patterns in data that you were looking for, you did not look hard enough”. Data always throws patterns, patterns drive understanding of customer behavior, and hence, better decision making.

Customer Segmentation in Email Marketing

Email marketing is as old as the internet. It is probably the lowest cost customer acquisition and engagement tool.  Variables of interest for an email marketing campaign

1.       #emails opened – No tool today provides that with certainty. Most vendors provide a pixel open method of identifying how many emails were opened and how many were not. #Emails opened is equivalent of #Impressions in marketing parlance.

2.       #clicks – This is most obvious and probably the most important data that measures the success of any campaign.

3.       Actions on the landing page – Every email marketing campaign needs to have a landing page which will trigger a further sequence of actions to deliver the business benefits to the marketer. If you are running a Facebook Like campaign, the #likes you get is the goal. For an ecommerce company or a deals site sending out deals, Add to Shopping Cart is the goal of the landing page.

While the above metrics are most commonly used to track performance of a campaign, a smart marketer only begins with these. She can go to the next level …..

1.       Identify the customer segments you sending mails to.

2.       Repurpose the content before the mail is sent to meet the aspirations of the segment audience.  For example, subject lines for new buyers can be customized basis what they have recently bought and offers can include related products. That is, a customer who recently bought a Tablet from your electronics store is more likely to open an email with subject “Buy a matching leather case for your tablet”.

3.       As you repurpose the content of the mail, you can also provide custom landing pages for each customer segment. An existing customer will land on a page which is customized with previous profile information. If we know that she also owns a phone of the same brand, cross selling another product that goes along with that, might be a good idea.

4.       Tracking the response by customer segment, number of actions items in the email and landing page gives immense insight in customer behavior. Learn and improve the email content, landing page further…. It’s a virtuous cycle.

RoI from customer segmentation in email marketing can easily exceed 100% depending on richness of data you have on the customer. Better targeting is not only good for the marketer, but also for the consumer. It is a win-win situation.

iPad 3 and Decline of TV

As expected, iPad new version is faster with a new quad core graphics process, resolution of screen is better than just HD, battery life is same at 10 hours despite high resolution and faster processor, supports 4G connections, better camera and comes with the new version of iOS, same as iPhone 4S. Moore's law of compute power is getting played again with better power efficiency of processors and innovations in battery life.

Tablets are the new devices for gaming, browsing and home entertainment. PC continues loses mindshare, and  entertainment PC segment loses ground almost permanantly. No points for guessing the losers in this game - Microsoft, Intel and among the smaller players Adobe.

Mobile phones have almost eaten away the digital camera category, with sony, canon struggling. The next category to hit is obviously the TV industry. When screens turn touch friendly, it is hard to imagine how TV industry can remain unaffected. Power of touch and high resolution screens are likely to rock this industry. Fighting over which channel to play is common across households. TV is no longer a family entertainment device and in personal entertainment, there is no better element of interactivity than touch.  What can happen? A few guesses.....
1. Online voting on current affairs programs, chat shows is very likely.
2. Movie makers will start experimenting with multiple storylines and tracks which audience can chose at run time.
3. In fact, fight sequences can merge with games to decide the outcome and next sequence in the movie can be based the outcome of the game. Audience can be an active participant in deciding the movie outcome. There comes the convergence between games and movies.
4. Online singing/dancing competition with automatic selection and winners from shortlisted candidates through votes within hours is possible.

And this is probably only a few years away.
What do you think? Do share your opinion.

Native App vs Wrapper on HTML5 site

Games need great interactivity, rich images, speed and performance, which only a client app can provide. Flash based games over the web also work, for non serious gamers. In general, serious gaming needs app on the client device.

On the other hand, for a content site which serves content basis the search context, personalized recommendations and user profile, client app provides little advantage. News requires retrieval in real time,and freshness and relevance of content is important.  Yet a client app has several benefits, it can be customized to device specific user interface, has access to local storage or caching of content items, and can access mobile device hardware/apps for alerts and notifications, that can help in engaging with users on more regular basis.

Local storage and caching with browser based cookies may not help if the data size for caching is large or users regularly clear out browser cache for privacy and security considerations. However, if a powerful browser exists and has access to some of the unique interaction elements on the device, a browser based HTML site may match the native app in user experience.

A combination of app and HTML5 site is also possible where the app reserves the content area for server based content that is pulled in runtime and rendered using the installed browser on the device. It saves costly maintenance across platforms and yet benefits from the rights available to the client app.

What are the risks with this approach? I welcome your comments.

Protecting Your Privacy

Google has changed its privacy policies, which should enable it to access information more freely across 60 services that are part of the Google network. That means, list of contacts on gmail and connections in Google+, will they become available to Youtube and Google search? That is, location co-ordinates on Google maps and Latitude, apps downloaded on the Android phone, search queries, profile on Google+ all can be correlated to gather a 360degree view of the user. This information when collected over time will provide immense source of information about any individual. When a website uses Google network to serve ads and user is logged in to Google+, Google may use the profile information to personalize. That will mean better targeting and more revenue for both Google and the publisher site. Already, retargeting of ads is considered vaulable by the advertisers in attracting customers.

Google is not alone in seeking access to personal profile, behavior and interests information, Facebook is also collecting enormous amount of information through specific widgets like login with facebook, social media plugin used by several blogs and websites to allow Facebook authentication for two way communication. Facebook now knows which site i visited and when, besides everything i do on facebook.

While the ability to gathering information shows great promise for personalization, privacy concerns are natural. That said, users are still in partial control of their information. That may or may not be enough.

How can i protect myself?

1. Remember to logout from Facebook/gmail/youtube/google+, the moment you logout, no information can be correlated. Dynamic ip addresses provide sufficient level of anonymity even though all acts can be traced uniquely to a device.
2. Creating multiple identities for different services of Google network is probably the easiest possible solution. Don't use gmail for the account which is used for youtube or google+. While google may create correlation between devices, browsers and applications used in association with time of use, it will still create sufficient doubt to protect your privacy.  Several users share devices, two or more identities used from the same device may actually correspond to multiple users.
3. Change your service provider to another supplier, even though it appears feasible, it reduces your choice to possibly sub optimal offerings. Therefore, i prefer chosing a different browser and a new account to access these services.

Privacy is and will remain important, frauds are common, in both real and virtual world. Protecting personal information is a must and creating slices of information that cannot be correlated is probably the only possible solution.

What do you think? Will this work?

Reviving this blog

I have not posted on this blog for a while, having moved to Twitter, I have liked the short format.
That said, it is probably time for me to revive this blog.
Thanks for those visited the blog in the meantime.

regards
Vivek Jain