Non-Line Blogging

Here are a few definitions from Wikipedia to get the blog rolling:

Serendipity is the effect by which one accidentally stumbles upon something fortunate, especially while looking for something entirely unrelated

Behavioral targeting uses information collected on an individual's web-browsing behavior, such as the pages they have visited or the searches they have made, to select which advertisements to display to that individual

Stalking is a term commonly used to refer to unwanted attention by individuals (and sometimes groups of people) to others.

We’re not short of data in digital marketing.  In fact, we’ve too much of the stuff.  Let’s take the marketing of expensive holidays:  Every couple of years in the Hughes household wanderlust overcomes us and a couple of weeks in delightful West Wales will not quite tick all the R&R boxes.  So, sensing this restlessness, I venture onto a few travel web sites and see what destinations like Thailand may offer us that Wales can’t.  (Sunshine seems to be the short answer).

20 years ago I went on a Kuoni holiday with my parents and, as it was a great success, I thought I’d check out the delights of Kuoni once again, so Googled the brand and went to their site.  I say this to demonstrate that key drivers to branded search could well be deeply emotional , not just seeing a Kuoni banner a few days ago – oh! the perils of attribution modelling.  Anyhow, I now left a rich stream of data across the Kuoni website and was maybe a couple steps nearer to knowing what I wanted.

Meanwhile in a distant galaxy far, far away...some analysts were piecing together this trail of data. 

• Total pages in session – check. 
• Depth of content viewed  - check.  
• Total time on site – check. 

We have engagement!

Cue the scary music. 

A few days later I am on the Autotrader website looking to replace my recently-written off Fiat Punto (that’s a long story), and what appears before me – a display ad for Kuoni.  But this is not any old banner – it has behavioural targeting under the bonnet:

“Thank you for visiting the Kuoni website” whispers the disembodied voice of the banner.

And then it gets a little more scary.  A couple of page loads later, my stalker says

“Thank you for your interest in Thailand”

Now at this point some people may be looking over their shoulder to see if some Peeping Tom is behind all this.  For hairy old digital marketers like me it’s not a problem – good luck to Kuoni for using all this data in a positive way.  But I can’t help feeling that some customers out there will be a little spooked by all this, which leads onto my real point here...

The medium is the message.

I often use an Amazon email as an example of “as good as it gets” in digital marketing.  A few months ago my TomTom SatNav died and I wandered on to Amazon to check out prices of a new one.   24 hours later I got this delightful email with the wonderful copy...  

I’m a little more comfortable with this “email stalking” because the terms of engagement are different to display advertising:  I leave myself logged in on Amazon because I can do useful things like “buy now with 1 click” and  I expect Amazon not to shout general email offers at me...I am delighted when they notice things that could be worth re-visiting.  Similarly, I like it when they say on the web site

“Hello David Hughes.  We have recommendations for you”

They remind you of things you may have been looking at and fire up the old “collaborative filtering” engine to make things even more relevant for me.   Virgin Atlantic  have a delightful personalisation box in the “My Booking” area that reminds you how long it is until the next time we meet.  They could probably serve that up to me as a banner when I’m on Autotrader, but just wouldn’t be right and proper, would it?

Less is more.

I may wish to keep myself anonymous in certain media, but expect/demand more personal touches at other times.  I do not always expect to be singled out for personal treatment and when strangers start talking to me like long, lost friends I begin to feel uncomfortable.  I’m talking here about a slight shift in creative tone that would have the same relevance but in a less threatening way...

“Latest ideas and greatest offers for Thailand Holidays”

...could have been equally powerful from Kuoni but with far less emotional damage! People like it when they "accidently" stumble upon something fortunate, especially when looking for something else unrelated!  Maybe Amazon has mastered the science of "dynamic serendipity", where people think that stumbling upon relevant things is pure luck!  After all, Amazon don't say:

Last night between 7.21pm and 7.28pm you viewed the Garmin Nuvi 225 pages for 4 minutes, the Navman S30 for 2 minutes and then you had a quick look at the Tom Tom ONE v4.  Here are some special offers.

That would be stalking.

But, Behavioural Targeting is wonderful! 

Wherever I have seen it used, behavioural targeting generally drives up opens, clicks, conversions, average order values and drives down costs per outcome.   It may well be that Kuoni have tested the “less” versus “more” intrusive copy and the ones I didn’t like pushed up sales...so there, they would say.  But for many consumers this “stalking copy” can create the wrong feeling, a sense that something sinister is happening on the interweb.  It's a question of using the right tone and not relying too much on the data to drive the conversation.  The whole BT industry nearly came clattering down in Europe a couple of years ago with Phorm and British Telecom’s sneaky attempts to get it in under consumers’ privacy radars.  Let’s hope that over-friendly creative techniques don’t have a similar impact on people’s goodwill.

American author Will Rogers is attributed with this rather caustic one-liner from the 1930’s.

"When the Okies left Oklahoma and went to California, the average intelligence of both states went up."

It has since been used by many people, including  Robert Muldoon, the former New Zealand Prime Minister, about his countrymen migrating to Australia.  I’m proud to say that I am personally responsible for improving the average health of many cancer patients – another example of the “Will Rogers Phenomenon”.  A while ago I was at the un-healthy end of the “Stage 2” cancer segment, but after a couple of scans and no change in my overall condition I was popped into the “Stage 4” cancer segment along with some really ill people.  In that single action I had improved  the “average health” of both segments . How barmy is that?      

These examples show us that averages can be misleading and confusing. So, what do we get when we open up our web analytics reports or our email campaign dashboard?  Averages!  I’d like you to stay awake long enough to convince you that averages are a bad, bad thing in digital marketing and here’s why...

“Utterly Useless Average Metric” Number 1 – Site Conversion Rate

Let’s take an “average” site conversion rate.  It’s probably 3%.  That’s average.  But just a couple of simple steps gets us to a better place – how about conversion rate between new and repeat visitors, or conversion rate by source of traffic? A couple of clicks and you’re somewhere exciting.  As Avinash Kaushik would say “BAM!! Context, Baby!”  You find that repeat visitors are probably 3 times more likely to convert than first-timers, or that people coming from your Facebook invitation-only group convert 10 times better than people clicking on banners.  So get into some pretty basic segmentation to give some meaning to what you’re doing.  Here’s how Matthew Tod of Logan Tod demonstrates it.

See, conversions from banners are much worse than “average” and conversions from previous customers is much higher than “average”.  In short, it looks like people don’t buy on their first visit from any source, but will probably buy if they are returning visitors or past customers.  We could drill further and find out what products drove highest re-purchase rates, or what creative/media gave the best conversion rate....there may be some winners lost among the “average”.  More segmentation; more context; more correct actions taken!

“Utterly Useless Action” to improve average site conversion rates? Turn off your marketing.

I’d like to thank Matthew Tod for this one, too.  Promotional activity will drive prospects to your site and they are unlikely to buy...but some of them will.  Trouble is, they drag down the average conversion rate.  So switch off all your campaigns and watch those averages soar. The only people who will come to the site will be your family, close friends and past customers - and they love you.  Average conversion much better, sales volumes plummeting. 

Be careful what you wish for.

“Utterly Useless Average Metric” Number 2 – Email Click-through rate

Here is a list of average metrics from Mailchimp. 

Email marketers feel a sense of “market sector envy” creeping in as they look jealously at how big the averages are elsewhere.  Art has a 26% click-through rate and Arts_Music has a feeble 5%.  And what about Education getting a whopping 181% click-through rate?  Does the average relate to how good they are compared to other sectors, and if you have a low average are you a bad, bad marketer? 

The trouble here is that we are worrying about “soft” outcomes – even if we do improve our average open and click rates we will not necessarily improve our revenue, or net yield. 

If you want to improve your click-through rate you could probably make everything you wanted people to know about on a web page.

"Find out how many points you earned last month - click here"

Bingo!  A quick and easy way to improve average click-through rates, and here's another...

“Utterly Useless Action” to improve Average Click-Through rates?  Don’t mail non-openers.

So let’s really improve the average click-through rate.  Below is a graph showing what happens when you mail lots of "emotionally un-subscribed".  If the number of customers (who love you) is low, then the average click through rate will be, well, average!

But stop mailing people who have not opened for over a year as part of the same campaign.  Drop them into a different programme and the composition of the file will change.  You will have fewer non-clickers and your average click through rate will shoot up like this:

I have been banging on for years about “open” and “click” rates being “soft metrics” and I’m sure I’ll blog about that again soon.  In the meantime let’s all just agree that improving “average” click through rates is an utterly meaningless objective. Getting the “emotionally un-subscribed” to click on something is good, but judge yourself by what “outcomes” you deliver and then you’ll be adding value to your marketing activity.

We really need to segment out the non-openers and treat them differently (test From fields, Subject Lines, Preview Panes, time of day, day of week, text only messages etc etc) and you will be able to improve the open rate for non-openers.  Just don't mix them up with your best customers or you'll never be able to be relevant and engaging to all of them.

So there you are.  If your company's "bean counters" want you to improve averages, tell them that it may not be what they really want.  Increased clicks, sales, order values by all means.  But not averages, please. 

And how about this for one final silly average...Twitter users have more than the average number of ears.  That’s because nobody has 3 ears (apart from Davy Crockett with his “wild front ear”), but a few people will have only one or no ears.  So dividing the total number of ears by the total number of users we have a figure of 1.99 something, so most people have more than the average number of ears.  

As I said, Barmy, isn't it?

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!

Here are a few thoughts about "Non-Line Marketing" that I pulled together with Chris Combemale, my Co-Founder of The Email Academy... 

As these difficult trading conditions continue many organisations are looking at ways to reduce their direct marketing costs without adversely affecting sales. One quick win has been trying to migrate customers from expensive off-line channels to cheaper on-line ones; speaking to people through email, at about half a pence a message, is a more attractive than saying the same thing through direct mail at maybe fifty pence a message. This cost-differential (email is 100 times cheaper than direct mail) means that email is a much more forgiving medium - your conversion rates could be half as good through email but still be 50 times better off in terms of cost per sale!

However, there is a business risk involved in this channel migration. If you ask people to “tune out” of nasty, expensive, un-green direct mail then you put pressure on your email marketing to perform. In my experience over the past decade across Europe there are very few client companies that have optimised their email marketing strategy and execution to make this risky channel migration pay. So I was delighted to read a case study from Marketing Sherpa today that suggests some steps all companies can take to reduce risk AND increase sales.

To summarise, an independent travel agent encouraged people to opt into their email programme to reduce the costs of servicing customers – all good so far! But in order to stimulate sales they decided to run a multi-channel campaign. With some simple data appending on their prospect file (adding life-stage and income variables is easy if you have a post-code), they selected the most affluent prospects for the campaign, as well as targeting all existing customers. They then used a combination of direct mail and email to promote personalised offers, with a range of on and off-line calls to action.

Here is the personalised post-card, with a "reminder" of the previous transaction in the heading.

And here is the email message, with the same "reminder" of previously-enjoyed holidays... 

 
Now here’s the good stuff...

“The team noticed that those who received both the print and email communications were twice as likely to visit their personalized web pages.

- 6% of those who received only email visited their webpage
- 12% of those who received both email and direct mail visited their webpage

That doubling in response also translated to twice the conversion rate and twice the revenue from customers who received both communications, as opposed to customers who only received one communication.”

http://www.marketingsherpa.com/article.php?ident=31299

The conclusion for me is clear. Our customers live in a multi-channel world and as marketers we need to embrace “non-line marketing”...using channel-neutral planning to harness all direct channels to engage with people. Humble direct mail can be used to re-enforce on-line messages and drive prospects to web sites in much the same way that email can be used to drive footfall to physical stores. And when we use both these channels in well-planned, targeted campaigns we enjoy conversion rates far beyond that which each channel achieves on its own. That’s heartening news for the direct marketing industry!

By way of validating my thoughts about email working brilliantly, here's proof that it can make you shedloads of money in a recession...

I emailed a link to my blog to the lovely people at Howies asking them if they could share any feedback on the success of their email.  Without giving away too many trade secrets here is what their marketing man, Ruben said...

We literally made the decision to go to sale on the Thursday morning, and by Friday lunchtime, it looked like we were on for the biggest single day in Howies history!

Way to go, Howies.

And if you really want to know, this is the jumper I bought that helped make a little bit of retail history in Cardigan Bay.