• The best returns come from integrating the use of traditional and digital channels, "in the same way that customers do, switching between them as appropriate."

• You need to determine what kind of response rate and ROI you should be achieving across all channels by benchmarking your campaigns.

• Never look your online metrics in isolation as you need to determine whether an online customer is a new one or one that just switched over from shopping over the phone or through your catalog. 

• Carve your data into meaningful chunks - "the Web page is the basic unit of measurement, and customer behavior is analyzed by department, product or product category."

• Use online analytics to enhance, enrich and verify the data you already have from other channels by asking voluntary questions when users log in.
  

• Mobile Marketing Fantasy Vs. Reality - The article provides nuggets of reality (customers love mobile games, convenience works, the iPhone changed everything, the mobile ecosystem is evolving rapidly, and standards are needed) while debunking ideas that are more in the realm of fantasy (people will never use their phones to buy stuff, texting/SMS isn't effective, it's getting easier to run mobile marketing programs and "there is one killer application".)
  
  
• Avoid the Pitfalls of Mobile Marketing - As with any emerging marketing medium, advertisers should try to learn from some of the key lessons of those who were willing to blaze the online trail before us, in hopes of not making the same mistakes. The article makes these main points - give consumers what they want...when they want it, let consumers show you the way, advertising isn't a one-size-fits-all solution, and find success metrics.
  
  
• Understanding the Mobile Marketing Ecosystem - To successfully navigate the mobile marketing ecosystem you need to have enough information and understanding about all the players. The first step is to understand the roles of the six interconnected entities in this ecosystem - advertisers (and agencies), aggregators (or mobile enablers), content providers (media companies), carriers (four large ones + lots of little ones in the US), industry organizations (MMA, CTIA, IAB and others) and consumers.
  
  
• Banner Ads for Mobile Screens - A mobile banner ad needs to work really hard despite its diminutive size. Like its beefier counterpart on a standard HTML site, the mobile ad needs to quickly distract the visitor away from the rest of the screen, create a user-ad connection, enumerate the features and benefits, per-qualify the viewers, describe the action and the call to action itself. Bottom-line: "Keep it simple, make the benefit and action clear, and you'll be enjoying those double-digit CTRs every time."
  
  
• How to Build a Mobile Ad Campaign - 18.6% of marketers have already allocated resources for this year’s mobile efforts so how can you create a mobile ad program? According to this article the most important thing to do if you want to create effective mobile ads is to ensure that your strategic plan includes four basic elements - value, relevancy, simplicity and honesty - as an integral part of the campaign.
  

• Five Things You Don't Know About Baby Boomers (The Boomer Project/BIGresearch) - Marketers and retailers are too often guilty of treating baby boomers as a homogeneous group with uniform attitudes and purchasing behaviors. Ironically, what they end up with is a pitch that is as generic – and disposable – as a plain brown bag. As a group, one quarter of the US population, is much too large and diverse to share a single lifestyle, life stage, purchasing proclivity or political agenda. And most of them are too wealthy to be ignored by marketers and retailers obsessed by youth. “Boomers still dominate the U.S. retail marketplace.”
  
  
• 'Generation Buy' Fickle Yet Free Spending (TV Land/OTX) - Baby Boomers not only are at the peak of their earning potential but also are making the majority of buying decisions for themselves, small children and their elderly parents, according to a recent branding survey. Not only are they spending more on themselves per month than Millennials and Gen Xers but, more interestingly, they are spending twice as much as their younger cohorts on others in their lives. With so many people to shop for, Boomers are “making several multi-generational purchase decisions at once and—contrary to common assumptions — they are far less brand loyal than Millennials and Gen Xers.”
  
  
• Boomer Shoppers to Become Pragmatic with Age (FH Boom/the National Marketing Institute) - 86% of Baby Boomers plan to be more practical and pragmatic in their purchases when they reach the age of 70, and much less concerned about trendiness and indulgences. This turn to the pragmatic is highly correlated to the fact that only 41% of Boomers state they have a secure, financially sound plan for retirement. After paying their basic living expenses, Boomers anticipated that they will have on average 22% of their income left to spend on discretionary purchases. But the buying pragmatism may also reflect Boomers re-adapting more hippie-like values held in their younger days.
  
  
• Baby Boomers Revealed (AARP/Focalyst) - “Contrary to many common assumptions, Boomers are making retirement obsolete, are very savvy about advertising and are experimenting with new products.” Only 11% of Boomer respondents say they will stop working entirely when they reach the retirement age of 62.  Two-thirds of Boomers surveyed said that ads have become more crude in recent years and 67% said they are less likely to purchase a product if they find the advertising offensive. More than 60% of Boomers agreed with the statement, “In today’s marketplace, it doesn’t pay to be loyal to one brand.”
  
  
• Rich Baby Boomers are Buying Online (The Media Audit) - It seems to happen every generation: while advertisers and marketers focus relentlessly on young consumers, someone realizes that older consumers actually have more money to spend. The number of US consumers 50 and older with annual incomes of $50,000 or more increased to 22.3 million in 2007 and more than 60% had incomes of $75,000 or more. Since 2004 the percentage of 'graying and affluent' households has increased from 13.1% to 15.7% of all households in the markets and this group is very rapidly embracing the Internet as a shopping medium.
  
  
• Baby Boomers and Social Networking (JWT BOOM/Third Age) - While less than 25% of US Internet users ages 40 and over use social networking Web sites, 93% read an article about a Web site in print and later visited the site, 83% visited a Web site after seeing an ad for the site in a newspaper or print magazine, over three-quarters received promotional e-mails about products and services and then clicked through to the site being promoted, and more than 55% purchased a product or service promoted in an e-mail. The reasons include privacy, time and just not seeing the point and, although each of these barriers can be addressed, marketers might also consider that social networks are just not yet the best way to reach boomers.
  
  
• Targeting the 50-Plus Audience Online (quotes a variety of surveys) - Within their online activities, boomers like financial planning, healthcare and games but only recently do they seem to be warming to social networking. They are savvy buyers, but they've been fooled enough times in their lives that they are very cautious about advertising. Blinking ads that say "you've won a free PC" don't get clicked because boomers aren't that gullible. Marketing to boomers must be accomplished by embedding ads into content and as a part of the content; it shouldn't look or sound like an ad.
  

• More than 9 million U.S. mobile subscribers (3.6% of the total) used their mobile phones to make a purchase of some kind in Q1 2008.
• About 50% of those who surf the Web over their handsets expect to use them to buy goods or services in the future.
• Men are slightly more likely to have pursued mobile commerce than women (4.5% vs 3%).
• The 25-34 age segment is the most active - 5.4% vs 4.5% of those 13-17, 3.6% of the 18-24 group, and 3% of those 35-54.
• The 13-17 age group is the most active in using text messaging to buy - 3.7% vs 2.5% of total subscribers and 3% in the 18-24 and 25-34 groups.
• Barriers include security worries (41%), airtime/data charges (23%) and lack of trust in the completion of mobile transactions (21%).
  

The Chief Marketer article also provides some case studies. Moosejaw Mountaineering, for example, has seen a positive response to the mobile channel. It both allows customers to purchase via their smartphones and uses text messaging to foster loyalty (for one text message, they got a 51% response rate!) 1-800-Flowers.com created a younger group of buyers by allowing Facebook and MySpace users to send virtual flowers to their friends' phones.

• 71% were aware their online activities were being tracked for the purposes of advertising
  
• 57% were not comfortable with providing their browsing history in exchange for better ads, even if no personal information was given
• 42% would sign up to an online registry to prevent any of their online behavior from being tracked
• 72% find irrelevant ads intrusive and annoying
• 55% would take an anonymous survey in order to limit ads to the products, services or brands they use
• 37% would be willing to provide personal contact information with a survey
• 54% erase cookies two to three times a month

Posted by Universal Ad

* Get retailers and manufacturers to embrace the idea of joint planning.
* Set a date to evaluate the program in advance.
* Integrate consumer insights in your work (joint focus groups or research to validate those findings.)
* Use a common language that retailers and manufacturers, alike, can understand to achieve your goal.
* Find a common strategy for your objectives.
* Plan ahead (15 to 18 months out).
* Make a commitment and share the work equally.    

A Shop.org/Forrester report (covered by AdAge, the Center for Media Research, StorefrontBacktalk and On Media) suggests that as the online channel matures and in order to stay viable during the difficult months ahead, retailers need to examine their strategic and tactical plans in order to make sure they support the most cost-effective ways of generating sales.

Specific suggestions include focusing on customer retention by mining data analytics for a deeper understanding of their customers, addressing shopping obstacles such as shipping fees (for example, by shifting funds from customer acquisition efforts to offset free shipping offers), adjusting SEM programs (for example, by tweaking landing page copy) and reconsidering the move to social networks (which may be effective for brand-building but less so at driving revenue or conversions.)

Currently, 53% of online retailers' marketing budgets are spent on customer acquisition compared to 21% spent on retention, 15% on non-online channels and 11% on brand awareness. The top acquisition tactic is paid search (53%), followed by organic web traffic (18%), affiliate programs (7%) and e-mail (7%).Overall, though, e-mail to house files is the top online marketing tactic with 92% of online retailers using it. Additional tactics include free shipping with conditions (85%), percent-off promotions (82%), dollar-off promotions (69%), gift with purchase (68%), and print catalogs (nearly 50%).

• The New Conversion Tool: Triggered E-Mails - Triggered messages can help turn people who sign up for your e-mails into customers by engaging prospects with your brand, enticing them with offers and addressing the risks they face when placing an order. The article describes how to start a triggered conversion series.
  
  
• How to Use Triggers in E-mail Marketing - Triggered event-based e-mail is a powerful marketing tool that can drive higher click-through and conversion rates. It puts the direction of the contact strategy design and content in the hands of the consumer. While this may sound scary at first, it is actually quite simple and very easy to execute. There are several types of trigger-based e-mail contacts that you can start with and many already may be happening.
  
  
• Seal the Deal with Triggered E-mails - You send triggered e-mails to customers who experience a lifestyle change, but do you also send them when the person has abandoned a shopping cart or placed an order? The point in both cases is to capitalize on an event that is unique to the customer at a given moment. But many marketers ignore everyday activities—and that’s a mistake.
  
  
• The If and Then of Automated E-Mail - If your customer does this… then you send that. The basic "If … then …" conditional statement we see in contracts and computer programming can be applied effectively to your benefit in triggered e-mail. The root of this idea is to identify actions your customers take and respond by presenting relevant offers that complement or support the first action they took. The key here is understanding your customer's mindset.
  
  
• Adopt Automated E-mail Tactics for Follow-up Orders - Why not leverage your database and automated e-mail tactics to encourage new customers to make that second purchase right away? Your efforts can be a simple approach for getting a second sales or a more complicated effort tailored to each specific customers buying pattern. However in each case the idea is to use the inexpensive cost and programmability of automated e-mail to get in front of your customer at the right point in time with the right offer.
  

• Personalizing the Shopping Experience - Instead of a one-size fits all approach to web visitors, online merchants can benefit by using personalization techniques that deliver information based on user behavior, product relevance, product popularity and merchandising strategies. For example, if there is a promotion for a sweater on a web site’s home page and a shopper leaves and returns from a bicycle site, the home page offer could be changed to a bicycle-related product to increase the chances of piquing the shopper’s interest.
  
  
• Telling Customers What They Really Want - Personalization is one way e-tailers hope to bolster their cross-selling and upselling efforts and increase customer loyalty. Online consumers are embracing the idea of having tailored suggestions served to them during various stages of their shopping experience.
  
  
• Enthroning the E-Shoppers - Building brand loyalty has become a struggle for retailers; however, personalization has the potential to help them to enhance customer allegiance and differentiate their products in highly competitive markets. Though in an early stage of evolution at the moment, customized shopping experiences are expected to become more common as the e-commerce market's ongoing maturation continues.
  
  

“We are in the Post-Advertising Age where brands that tell the best stories win - and not just any stories, but stories that tie in to the brand's authority to publish." Other brands such as Stella Artois, Dove and Sprint are also moving towards creating "compelling, story-form content, reminiscent more of media companies than product-pitchers."

Posted by Universal Ad