It's the Art of Perfectly Timed Marketing

Guest blogger – Jen Talbot, Senior Account Manager

Responsible for the day-to-day account management of some of Underwired's clients including ESPN and Regus worldwide, Jen advises on digital best practice and marketing strategy, and coordinates planning workshops for customer journey mapping.

Jen joined Underwired in July 2013 bringing with her experience from previous roles at Havas EHS in account management and project planning for both digital and integrated campaigns for brands in the financial, utilities and leisure sectors including Barclays Wealth, CPA Global and E.ON.

In an age of connectivity, where everything has become instantaneous, the sense of meaningful communication has been lost in the constant noise of notifications and reminders. So, with this being today's reality, what does this mean for the modern day marketer?

When you see a stunning rainbow or a great piece of street art, what do you do? Instagram it, Vine it, Tweet it, Facebook it? When you're out for the day how many times do you respond to texts, WhatsApp messages, emails or tweets?

Media theorist, Douglas Rushkoff, has outlined our obsession for trying to capture the moment, but never quite living in it, in his new book 'Present Shock'. He makes the point that, "The only kind of people that used to be contacted this frequently and this incessantly, were 911 operators - and they would only do it for two or three hours during the day. And then they would be medicated in order to be able to live that way".

Kronos vs Kairos 
Taking inspiration from Ancient Greek, today's marketers have two differing methods to select from, when looking to determine the 'right moment in time' for customer communication. Definitions of 'Kronos' and 'Kairos' - both Ancient Greek words for 'Time' - distinguish these methods:

1.Kronos 
Kronos means chronological or clock-driven. A marketer's version of Kronos is: "I know that by sending my newsletter on Thursday at 1pm I will get a better response than at any other time". Or "I know that by sending an email every week I will get more repeat purchases".

2.Kairos 
Kairos is the alternative sense of time, succinctly put by John Pulakos, in his 1983 article 'toward a Sophistic Definition of Rhetoric': "In short, Kairos dictates that what is said must be said at the right time." In marketing, we can interpret this as both the readiness or 'openness' for conversation, and the choice of selecting the appropriate moment.

The age of bombardment 
According to Microsoft, the average person has 184 emails in their inbox and receives at least another 28 emails each day. According to Ofcom, 49% of people regularly 'media mesh' - using devices for completely unrelated activities whilst watching TV - and an average of 500 million tweets are sent everyday.

With all this noise and irrelevance, companies are forever looking to achieve efficiencies using the Kronos method, a chronological approach to sending marketing communications. By doing a simple Google search of 'best time to send email' 1,550,000,000 results are produced. But how many companies implement this approach without looking further into their audience motivations?

When IS the right moment? 
One source suggests potential reasoning for the most successful time frames for each sector and industry. For example, the 'post work peak' (between 5pm and 7pm) is considered to be the best time to send marketing emails, in terms of open rates.

When Gmail announced the implementation of 'tabs' to its inbox, companies were concerned that response rates would go down. In fact, within the first few weeks of the update, the opposite was true and the open and transaction rates actually increased. Although rates are approaching the average again now, this uplift highlights the affect of taking the Kairos approach and the importance of having an audience that is 'ready' to view marketing emails. This 'readiness' essentially means that recipients are in more of an open mind to click through to the email and transact where relevant.

Kairos in CRM 
Readiness, or indeed Kairos, is absolutely key to CRM, as it ensures marketers are carefully considering when the audience is 'ready' to hear from your company. In so many cases, communication programmes are run on a periodic or silo basis - onboarding, newsletters, loyalty programmes, retention - all overlapping and clamouring for attention.

Let's think now about how many times a company has said 'thank you' to you for being a customer. Now let's think about how many times a company has said 'thank you' only to use this as an opportunity to cross-sell? Some might see this second option as an efficiency that their customers would appreciate. But by having a 'dual-purpose' communication you actually weaken both messages. There should be a time and a place for everything. The acceptance and desire for tools, such as the Gmail 'tabs' or Outlook's 'advanced rules', show the increasing importance for customers to control when they are ready to be spoken to. So with this in mind, a thank you should just be that; 'thank you'.

Kairos in practice 
Confused.com is a good example of using Kairos in practice. Having used the insurance search engine for a quote comparison in March, a month later - when I'd nearly forgotten about it - they sent me a birthday email. There was no sales message, just a humorous email from the brand mascot, Brian the Robot. The email immediately put me in a great mood and brought Confused.com to the front of my mind. It made me want to show my friends and it generally made me feel pretty good to be a customer. A couple of months then passed by and they nudged me again, this time about a new app that was available.

Confused.com is playing the long game as it clearly understands that it will be a year before I make another decision about my insurance. We both know that I'm not in the market right now, but in the meantime I'm being made to feel appreciated - and entertained - therefore enhancing the chances of a repeat purchase. And before I return to the website, to potentially make a purchase, I have been providing my word of mouth recommendations to colleagues and friends about the company and its great customer service.

Conclusion 
So after all this talk of Ancient Greek, where do we as marketers stand? Well, hopefully with a realisation that when juggling existing communications plans, business goals, stakeholder opinions and a disorganised or legacy database, the thought of "What does the customer want from my company?" can often fall by the wayside. But, this question should hold equal if not a greater importance than the thought of "What do I (the business) want to tell my customer?" This is because it can inform and give greater value to everything from data segmentation to communications content.

When a communication becomes supportive and not 'shouty', useful but not needy, and timely yet not thoughtless, we start to see appreciation in the form of response. Through this approach, we regain the value of meaningful communications and become able to cut through the chaos of a 'Present Shock' inbox.

Do One Thing Well

Marketing is a collection of lots of activities, all working or acting together, sometimes in concert, to fulfil several roles. These include brand awareness, prospecting, engagement, conversion, retention, generating advocacy and so on. Often we want all our marketing to do all of these things. But the reality is, great communication is about being single-minded.

This singularity of purpose is obvious when it comes to a TV advert because you've only got thirty seconds to make a point. For instance,doing an advert which first makes the consumer think "ooh, cute puppy", then offers a discount, then states how many sheets there are on a toilet roll and then finally a message to visit the website to sign-up for points, alongside the obligatory Facebook, Twitter and Snapchat logos, would of course be ridiculous. It’s the same with a magazine display advert. For each one it either needs to be about the brand or a single call to action. Simple.

So, why do we not treat email like this too?

There are two dimensions to this way of thinking. The first is really, really simple: the more stuff you ask the email recipient to read, evaluate and discern their choice of call-to-action response, the less they will be able to respond. This is because there is more choice, more confusion, and more time is required.

Inevitably, in these instances, people will either choose the middle option (basic Goldilocks psychology) – which tells you nothing about their real values or propensities – or they will defer the decision altogether (which in sales terms is a 'no'). So you should make the choice simple: do, or don't do. Or: pick this one or that one (that's the assumptive version).

Email marketing should therefore be short, to the point and present only one or two choices. This will maximise impact and increase response rate. You will also be seen to be efficient, clean, straightforward and direct; the simple choice compared to your competitors. Think of the emails you get from Apple (if you're a customer), which are single-minded and clear to the point of asceticism; which is ironic really given how much an iPad costs.

I mentioned a second dimension. We’ve already talked about how any given email needs to have a single purpose and therefore simple, easy to parse content. However, now we need to consider the role of an email in a long-term email-driven relationship. This adds ‘time’ into the mix.

This is where we dive into the principles of customer engagement strategy or ‘CRM’, where each email is designed to move the relationship on from where it is, using knowledge gathered from where it was, to where you want it to go next. In other words, we know that to build a logical customer relationship takes a series of incremental steps, and CRM-oriented email campaigns can do this really efficiently. But, because each of these steps is discrete and purposeful, it is imperative that each step is delivered as effectively as possible.  Each message must be single-minded in its purpose of preparing the customer for the next contact. For instance, the sole purpose of one email may be to make the customer think you're nice. This might be by saying, "thank you" after a purchase. This is a good tactic, because if the customer thinks you're nice, they're more likely to read your next email.

So, single-mindedness must be an attribute and quality of every email you send. Each email can do many things and have many messages in it, but none will be effective. By doing one thing well, you will get the best response to an email, and ultimately the best possible result for your email marketing campaign.

What’s our story?

We’ve been doing a brand vision exercise within the wider plc my company belongs to. Someone asked me if I could contribute something that would tell the Underwired story. This, I think, illustrates what we do quite well.

McCain Foods asked us to tell them if digital can engage customers with a brand as well as TV can. We told them we’d prove it one way or the other.

We took over their eCRM programme. We optimised their segmentation, and created a comms strategy to engage brand resistors and deepen the relationship with brand engagers. We devised creative for a monthly, segmented email campaign. Finally, we created a regular survey to match the brand tracking being done by Hall & Partners on TV audiences.

In the first ten months, engagement with brand resistors went from 14% to 63%.

Brand consideration rose 11% compared with the Hall & Partners benchmark.

In six months, average transaction value went up 3%. The core segment grew 29% in volume. And sales revenue went up by a whopping 38%.

Focus has switched from proof to growth. Underwired’s now building a web-based eCRM hub to replace the brand’s website. We’re running highly targeted acquisition campaigns to build the most valuable segments. And our client, too, is thoroughly engaged.

This is what we do. I just thought I’d share it with you.