Non-Line Blogging

I was asked this week to share some "inspirational" digital marketing experiences by Ian Jindal, and came up with a couple of sites that "did it for me", as it were....more of those in a moment.  But a while ago I blogged about the way that in some marketplaces all companies were migrating to similar web site design characteristics.  It seems that on-line retailing is heading the same way as Financial Services was a couple of years ago.  As somebody who likes un-cluttered web design I'm finding it delightful and I'd like to share what we can all learn from it.  But first - the fun bit.

I love the way that Hema, a Dutch retailer have decided not to take themselves too seriously and a couple of yeas ago pulled together a fantastic home page experience.  It relies on people waiting for the page to load and for them to wait a couple of seconds before whirring into life but it is worth it to enjoy the chaotic exuberance of the web experience!

http://producten.hema.nl

On an altogether more serious note, I recently heard a presentation from the web team at Finnish ceramics and homeware company Iittala.  They have spoken a couple of times on the Certificate in Digital Marketing course that I run on behalf of the Internet Advertising Bureau Finland and the Institute of Direct Marketing.  I think its time the site shared a wider audience because it is so elegant.

It is everything that some of the lifestyle e-commerce players in the UK are trying to be, except this does it with even more elegance...IMHO.  They even drop a bit of the old social stuff on the home page.  And they carry it through with some great “non-line” integration and will soon have a single customer view via the MyIittala concept. And they tell stories...is the return of the “narrative structure” the next big thing in web marketing?

Specifically the site ticks all the right design boxes because: 

• Brand personality is strong
• Consistent, classy fonts across the whole site
• Bleeding the Capital "L" on the home page into the border oozes typographic confidence (!)
• "Navigation" pages built for 1024 x 768 browser
• Breathtakingly elegant photography
• Beautiful product shots
• Confident, approachable, conversational tone of voice – sometimes hard for non-UK countries.

And they are even taking on Howies.co.uk with the "we're a retailer and we really care" angle:

And they use excellent copy to build the story - and the experience

So, from the cheeky fun of Hema or the classy sophistication of Iittala it appears that we can build strong brand experiences through web site design.  And with sites like John Lewis and Marks and Spencer setting the pace for clear, un-cluttered web experiences in mainstream markets will the messy ones with multiple fonts and poor design suffer as the bar is raised ever higher?

I’ve been involved in email marketing for over 12 years now, as a client, for a technology vendor, as a trainer and as a consultant.  It’s been really exciting helping to shape a channel that continues to deliver the highest ROI of any direct marketing channel ever ever ever.  I have a particular (un-healthy?) fascination with the way that marketers have adapted to the changing legislative environment, specifically in the emotionally charged area of un-subscribing.

In the bad old days of email, we made the un-subscribe process the very opposite of usability best practice: 

• The opt-out link was hard to find - not quite ”white text on a white background”, but not far off!
• The landing page demanded a 20 character alpha-numeric password that had cunningly been asked for at sign-up.
• The un-subscribe would take 10 days to come into effect, during which time the recipient would be spammed to within an inch of their life. 

Then in 2003 it all changed (for the better, I may add).  In Europe the “Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations” ensured that every marketing message carried a “free and simple mechanism” by which people could un-subscribe, and in the USA the “Can Spam” act did pretty much the same thing.  The bar was raised a few inches and the less reputable email marketers who had been blasting away at their base had nowhere to hide.

Fast forward to 2009 and we are seeing some really creative, and wholly appropriate, approaches to un-subscribe management.  The first thing to stress is that we have moved on from a binary world of “opt in or out for everything” to a place where people can “tune” their relationship with an organisation.  If you’re not doing this through “permission centres” then you’re missing a trick to engage at an appropriate level with potential and existing customers.  But of more interest is “what happens when they smack the un-subscribe link”?

Legally, under a 2009 amendment to the “Can Spam” laws in the USA, you must not force people to log into a system in order to un-subscribe:  The link should take them to a landing page where they should be able to opt-out of the email programme.  Nothing wrong with that, you may say.  Indeed Seth Godin in Permission Marketing written 10 years ago suggested that you should let people unsubscribe easily...I would add the phrase “with grace and dignity”.  But how far can we raise the emotional temperature?  What can we say to people to make them change their mind?  And how do we get our great ideas past the stuffy old legal team covered with dust in the basement?!

Un-subscribing is a critical moment in a long-term relationship.  Left in the hands of the legal team it will end up as a dull, rude, clinical process with only one outcome – they’ll un-subscribe.  But legally, the game is not lost.  We can take them to a landing page that simply asks them “are you sure?”.  We want to remind them of how it all began, the good times we’ve had together and the wonderful future we can enjoy together if only they don’t click that “confirm” button...”

So, here’s a little exercise for you...

Firstly, do you know the value of an email address for your organisation?  If not, add up the money you generate from campaigns, look at the cost savings of not having to mail/phone people, and calculate the incremental revenue you can get from all email campaigns over a 2 year period.  If you’re an e-commerce company, the figure may well be near 200 (Dollars, Pounds, Euros...they’re all worth the same these days anyway!)

Secondly, look at the current un-subscribe rate from click to “gone”.  What if you could halve that un-heathily high conversion rate?  How much revenue would that save/make over 2 years?

Thirdly, think about how you could make people change their mind.  Do you re-sell the benefits of a hard-won email relationship?  Can you bribe them, or can you make them feel guilty?. 

Here are 2 landing pages that I’m sure will reduce the number of “un-successful outcomes” (un-subscribes).  The first is a lovely BtoC example in keeping with the brand personality of a photo-sharing site that makes you think “how could I be so mean?”.  The second is  a BtoB example where you’re being “bribed” to stay registered in exchange for an “exponential gift” that needs me to use a racy Password (ICY-HOT, if you please) to get $97 worth of value.  Saddest of all things is...I fell for it!

Easy to set up.  Easy to test.  Easy to deliver some really big wins in your email strategy.  This is one of the few times in digital marketing where we can judge success by the number of people who DON’T do something!  

 Here is a great "are you sure" landing page in keeping with a digital photography client.  Maybe it could build on the "think of all the wonderful stuff you're missing" but as an emotional response, we don't weant to upset the baby! (Many thanks to Avinash Kaushik for spotting that one)

This is a really in-your-face challenge to un-subscribing.  It may sound a bit cheezy and even desperate, but I fell for it!  You'll need tune the tone of voice to suit your own organisation, but keep the passion for maintaining an email dialogue.

We've come a long way with on-line analytics in a short period of time.  A couple of years ago we were all relatively happy with the "last click wins" referrer model and merrily shovelled money into Google's bank account.  Today we are more likely to obsess about attributing a fair percentage of a sale to the efforts of a number of digital activities;  as we always knew, somebody may have seen a banner and clicked on an affiliate link BEFORE using a search engine to find your site, so we'd better juggle our advertising spend accordingly.  But how far should we go down this attribution path, and if you give up too soon what effect will this have on how we judge success? 

Let's walk through the process.  Using a simple analytics funnel we can see what source generates a "successful outcome" - could be a sales lead for a BtoB organisation or a booking for a holiday company.  I've not included any time scales in these examples as the period from trigger to successful outcome will vary from one product to the next.

As I've already mentioned, we've probably come to terms with the over-simple view of the "last click wins" attribution model.  We may even be able to link together all our on-line advertising activity and identify dates of key events like "viewing one of our display ads on-line" or "clicking on an advert on a partner site".  We can then get a feel for the on-line customer journey (as we feel we have influenced it)

Most marketers seem to be at this point and we can get really excited about deciding what is a fair way to atribute the relative importance of all this channel activity.  However, let's not forget the importance of social media at this point - does somebody who goes to a LinkedIn discussion forum or plays with a Facebook widget mean we should give them some credit?  If we're not careful we overlook some of the digital experiences people may have, simply because we may not have tracked them in the past.

One that is relatively easy to track is the presence of email in the overall journey, but as this is often not included as part of the "advertising tools" we may under-represent the role email plays.  It does not usually sit with the "acquisition tool" family and is often overlooked when implementing multi-source tracking like DoubleClick's Floodlight or the newer offering from TagMan.   Matching an email file to a list of "successful outcome" email addresses may yield this multi-channel impact, but this is a manual, somewhat "clunky" production process. 

However, the big problem with our lovely "closed" view of our customers' mind is that it is frequently polluted by mucky, grubby off-line advertising.  Maybe it was a print ad that stimulated the click on a banner, or perhaps a direct mail pack thumping onto somebody's door mat that promped a branded search, as we can see below..

So the conclusion is a bit worrying.  No matter how much we obsess about our digital customer journey and no matter how clever we get with our attribution algorithm, we may have got the "demand generator" completely wrong.  As there is no way to isolate all off-line noise from our customers' minds, and whilst it is still rare (but not impossible!) to track off-to-on-line conversions we are happy to pretend that we have got a really accurate fix on how we get our sales.  Maybe we are not making as many strides in the world of attribution analytics as we think, and are happy to stumble on with our tracking tags.

And if you think I'm being a bit harsh, ask yourself this question:  

If one of your prospects is on the cusp of becoming a customer, will sending them a direct mail pack or making an out-bound phone call help to nudge them towards a branded search on Google?  

If your answer is, at worst, a reluctant "probably", maybe we need to re-think how much value single-channel attribution modeling really delivers and worry less about divvying up our on-line budget between a few suppliers.  Perhaps we should even be trying to invest more in reaching people off-line at the right stage of the digital process? So there.

A few years ago the email marketing community was trembling with fear at the arrival of RSS feeds. Outlook 2007 was built to make their subscription, rendering and filing smooth and efficient; RSS readers like Newsgator and GoogleReader circumvented spam filtering of any kind; and distribution was even cheaper than email – completely free!

Today email and RSS live in peace and harmony. Content-driven organisations have developed elegent RSS capabilites to link new articles with interested readers, whilst email continues to be the workhorse of marketing departments – delivering “successful outcomes” across the acquisition, conversion and retention cycle.  There is no suggestion of dropping one for the other - they do slightly different things. 

So with trepidation we hear that once again email is under threat, this time from the shiny, fluffy world of Social Media. Web users are flocking to the tweeting of Stephen Fry and the poking of Facebook groups. But once again, reports of the death of email are grealy exaggerated. 

Its itonic that social media sites are some of the most prolific email marketers – using the channel to inform people of changes to site status and getting people to a page in a simple click. At The Email Academy we are already seeing clients asking us how we can integrate their email retention programmes into their social media activity. Welcome programmes for new subscribers to a Facebok Product Group? Progressive registration via a web form link to learn more about Twitter followers? Aggregating forum discussions from LinkedIn into weekly newsletters? 

For experienced email marketers all these social media interactions give us a new layer of clickstream data to interrogate and respond to with even more relevant, engaging communications. Social Media? Bring it on!