Javari’s wasted birthright

Disappointment is... when I buy something from an online store that’s got brilliant products and brilliant service, a fantastic website and a sign-up form that asks me loads of questions - but which then sends me generic emails I have no interest in whatsoever. I mean, I bought some Merrell trainers from this place, Javari, and now they bombard me with stuff about how kitten heels are the next big thing.

Javari is owned by Amazon, world leaders in relevant recoomendations. But Amazon has clearly kept Javari on a very tight budget. The email marketing programme is so, like, yesterday - I couldn’t believe it when such high regard generated by the shopping experience have been so let down by the customer retention programme.

So what should they be doing? Well, for a start, I’m a bloke, buying (what I hope are) cool walking shoes, and I looked at every single Merrell shoe on the site before making my choice. That must tell them something. At least it tells them to relegate the kitten heels to emails I get at weekends or to second place in the content in case I’m the sort who of man who buys shoes for his partner (either way). I wear the same size shoes as I always have, so that might inform tactical sales of remaindered stock and so on. Perhaps they should be sending me news of every new Merrell shoe they get in – Merrell does.

The days of blanket emails to Mr/Mrs AB Sample surely have gone the way of the door drop. Javari ticked all the boxes – indeed, I was looking forward to the emails when I opted in, wondering which agency was doing them. I am so, so disappointed. And that means that although by some miracle I might remember they were cheap and go back if I’m actively shopping, there won’t be any mid-cycle visits to their site, nor serendipitous nudge-driven sneaky sneaker purchases.

Yet we know from long experience that just by maintaining relevant contact using segmented emails, and observing how each segment responds, we can increase ROI by between 25% and 90% straight away and average purchase frequency by 7% in the first year. So why, Javari, why have you ignored your genetic birthright of great customer engagement, and prompted a critique like this? The first you’ve heard of it you say? That’s because you can’t: you’re not listening.

Parlaying custom into advocacy – why brands should be more pushy with their social media

It’s very rare that I get excited about a brand I become a customer of. I’m one of those people who really doesn’t engage with marketing. I’m probably not alone. And yet this is my territory, my metier – I work very hard to create engagement strategies for clients that can be demonstrated to work. I am, as it were, my own worst enemy!

So how do you, as a brand, engage me, as a disengaged person with what I’d consider to be better things to do with my social time than talk about your brand? I’ve been thinking about this in the context of two recent occasions where I have actually felt like praising a brand in public. The first occasion: on the way to a meeting I spilled coffee on my shirt. I was in the city, and I spotted a TM Lewin. I went in, bought a shirt, explained my predicament, and the manager arranged for the shirt to be pressed, in the shop, there and then. I went for a walk for five minutes and hey presto, new, unwrinkled shirt.

I tweeted about it when I got back from my meeting. TM Lewin’s tweetie person followed me and retweeted (quite rightly) my happiness with their service. Fab. The second occasion, this morning, my wife asked me if these were the shoes I normally wear with my suits. I told her they were from Loake, and that I can wak for miles in them – the very first pair of truly comfortable work shoes I’ve had. It crossed my mind to tweet that I love my Loakes, then I remembered I’m not that kind of person (so I wrote this instead).

Both are brands I’d of course love to work with. Both are brands that have built solid reputations for service and product quality. Did Loake sell me these shoes? I think actually I got them from Next, so which of those companies should be the one to do the customer engagement? And why?

One of the striking things about the TM Lewin experience is that very clearly several people from TM Lewin now follow me on Twitter (no idea what they get out of it, but feel free – twitter.com/felixvelarde), but nobody’s ever been in touch. I am clearly, or at least I was once, a brand advocate. I spread the word, in a credible, completely unprompted way. But no-one has since asked me if I’d like to join a loyalty club, or corresponded with me on Twitter or otherwise to find out how to make sure I continue to be an advocate. It’s unpushy, which is nice, but it misses an opportunity. TM Lewin’s social media strategy needs a tweak or two.

And the fact the brand doesn’t have an eCRM programme is quite surprising – all of its customers are repeat customers, we have to buy similar products regularly, we have preferences... TM Lewin could take a leaf out of Pink’s book and keep our sizes on a database, offer us things they already know we want. And so on. The opportunity to create an engaging, relevant and pretty much self-managed eCRM programme should be too good to pass up. And by creating engagement they’ll be parlaying an initial positive first impression into serious loyalty and further opportunities for advocacy.

Someone like me, who doesn’t actively engage, who almost never spontaneously advocates a brand to his friends and acquaintances, might be driven to do so more often. Certainly, I could become a very loyal customer. Since my experience I’ve bought shirts from TM Lewin, though I also buy from Pink, Hackett and others. I could be engaged more, to their exclusion. The next time I think about shoes, I will probably be thinking about buying some Loakes, though because I’m not in their eCRM programme either I have no idea where to start. Perhaps I’ll start with Next. I really can’t remember if it was Next - if not then Loake might lose the sale while I’m wending my (possibly easily distracted) way to their brand – so again, here’s an opportunity.

Brands must – must! – engage with their customers. The best brands, the ones that provide fantastic service, or fantastic products, are the ones that must do so even more – they have an opoprtunity to cement their customers after the first great experience in a way that only becomes more dilute as time goes by. It’s an opportunity that must not be missed.

Follow me on Twitter: twitter.com/felixvelarde

The premature announcement of the death of the web

Wired, The Wall and the Huffington Post have all pronounced the web on its last legs. Wired appears to believe that because there's a popular new way of interfacing with the internet – apps – the web has had its last hurrah. Huff's Josh Silver bases his pronouncement on the news that Google and Verizon have done a deal that may make it possible to have a privileged access scheme for content providers disseminating video to customers.

This latter is the one I think has least relevance. Why? Well, although this time round it is different inasmuch as the faster access is paid for by the content provider rather than the content consumer, there's little difference in practical terms between the tiered access dictated by bandwidth, ISP quality and client technology and the tiered access posited by the new deal. Silver's argument that Google's universal access volte-face signals some kind of tipping point, one that will see content delivered only to the wealthier subscriber, to me seems no different to the gradient we've always suffered. My first forays onto the internet were hampered by the fact that no-one made modem software for Macs at the time. Did it destroy the web or limit its potential for democratised information? Clearly not.

Perhaps we won't see the web become a public access TV channel after all as a result. But then, to the extent that it could it already has. YouTube is gargantuan. Will Hollywood or Bollywood stop making feature films for free distribution on the web? Did anyone really expect them ever to really do that? The web is a medium, a set of protocols, and people all over the world will use it freely to do what they always wanted to do with it. Capitalists will find ways to make money from it. Anti-capitalists will use it to subvert. People will continue to use it to grow this unfettered global conversation

And coming back to apps, they are simply an abbreviated interface to the internet, just as the web is. Perhaps one day there will be a better interface that comes along that is so revolutionary that the whole idea of HTML and hyperlinks is relegated to history, as happened to the revolutionary precursor protocols that saw us Gophering before the web took off (though Gopher's demise was hastened when its owner started charging for it, something that no-one is suggesting can or will ever happen to the web). Apps are cute, cool, capitalist by design, and ephemeral.

Actually the best apps seem to be built in HTML. The web is alive and well and only just coming of age. Long live the web.

That ol’ email technology

Email marketing is awesome. It’s one of those things that has relied on a confluence of circumstances, shifts in attitudes, and technology to flower, but now it has. Just in time, in fact, for brands like Ben & Jerry’s to declare it dead and hop on to social media.

Some years ago a few people in the digital marketing world decided to see if by applying brand marketing principles to email, we might have the medium for proving that online had real, measurable commercial value. Spammers clearly thought the same, and could demonstrate it worked. But around ten years ago spam started being effectively controlled by technology solutions built into our email applications. Brands that wanted to send email to their customers had to get emails white-listed. Branded emails became credible.

At the same time consumer use of email became pretty much universal. As an elective medium it genuinely had power – it’s only there when you open your email programme. But if you’d given your favourite brands, or simply the place you bought your stuff from, permission to say hello, it had legitimacy. The email newsletter suddenly had currency.

In 2003 a few people decided to see if there was room to apply Direct Marketing principles to email. I was so keen I went on a three month hunt for an email bureau that could run segmented campaigns. Finding none (or at least none I could afford) my agency built its own system. To be honest, it was great in theory, but we could never quite get it to work properly. Live re-segmentation based on recipient behaviour was laudable as an aim, but every time we fixed a bug in the technology we tickled another and everything fell over.

Slowly along came fantastic, robust technology providers - the kind that love to fix broadcast problems at two o’clock in the morning - and we were saved. Email marketing became eCRM, everything got segmented, and we started to play with behaviour-based targeting. Fantastic. So fantastic in fact that last year The Sun’s Dream Team Fantasy Football saw a 93% rise in revenues from digital - in three months!

What we’ve learned from all this emailing is that you can track people from start to finish. You can find out how their attitudes change over time, both through inference based on observing their behaviour, and through outbound validation using email and online surveys. We can, as we did with FMCG giant McCain Foods, cross-validate against the real world, benchmarking brand consideration and watching how it changed over six months of precision emailing (up 11% as it happens).

Then a brand like Ben & Jerry’s (whose product I love but at my age can no longer scoff until it’s empty) goes and abandons email for social. I’m sure social is another link in the customer tracking that needs to be incorporated into the strategy. And in fact until recently that was the one thing you couldn’t do. Yes, buzz tracking posited sentiment, but you couldn’t keep your eye on a person, or a segment.

Well, technology is changing. Now there’s the desire to complete the journey outside of email and into social, following people around their digital lifestyle as it were, we finally have the technological capability to do so. We’re incorporating social into eCRM strategies, and we can audit the journey from first contact to sales revenue. It’s a hit. ECRM is no longer confined to email, SMS and landing pages. Technology has set us free.

Ad:tech seminars in September

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I’m going to be speaking at Ad:tech again this year. The first session is at 10.30–11am on Tuesday 21st September:

How to create a profitable eCRM programme
With brand consideration up 11%, eCRM has revolutionised marketing for FMCG giant McCain Foods. As a result, sales to customers within the brand's database went up 38%. This talk will show you clearly and concisely how an eCRM programme to sharply increase brand engagement, brand consideration and sales revenues.

The second will be at 11.50–12.20 in the IDM Academy:

ECRM strategy made simple

• Using FMCG and retail case studies to show the practical steps to a successful eCRM campaign
• Ten Top Tips for successful revenue generation

You can plan your visit to this fantastic event here. I hope to see you there.

Why my love of Ben & Jerry's isn't over just yet

Over the past couple of weeks there's been quite a bit of buzz about Ben & Jerry's dropping email in favour of social media. It stemmed from an email sent by their UK people to email subscribers, letting them know the monthly moosletter was being canned and asking recipients to fan them on Facebook. It's not quite switching off email (they'll use it still for special promotions) but it's pretty close. According to the quite rightly other-side-of-the-story article, Ben & Jerry's in Vermont isn't following this particular herd, and will carry on regardless.

I commented on the story as originally reported when it broke. My view is that a move to drop an entire marketing channel seems insane for a brand that appeals to people who like ice cream - kids, hippies, adults, old folk, squares alike. We all love Ben & Jerry's. Almost everyone out of their teens uses email. Indeed some kids and teens still use it (though the XML channels r00l increasingly). For instantaneous interaction between a brand and an audience there's nothing quite like social media. For longer-term, planned engagement based on deep understanding of behaviour/demographic/motivation-based segmentation, there's nothing (yet) quite like email.

Where email, and its grown-up cousin eCRM, comes in at its best is in shifting brand perception. A well-paced, well-segmented eCRM campaign over eight months can be persuasive in a way that an ad campaign cannot. You can make a case through demonstrating an experience and involving people in a journey that you cannot do by being interactive or sociable. I think social media channels are brilliant for maintaining and reinforcing a brand's positioning, adding a layer of openness for instance. And I think eCRM is exceptional for changing behaviours through understanding motivation and basing communications on that understanding. Email, SMS and the web can be segmented in a way that is invisible to users. The same cannot yet be said of the Facebook experience.

I am sad that ben & Jerry's has decided to focus entirely on the ephemeral in the UK, at the cost of a long-term brand engagement strategy. It's all gone a bit tactical. And when Facebook fades they'll have to jump on the next big thing. I think it's shortsighted. Customers are, or at least should be, forever. I'll be a Ben & Jerry's customer for as long as I remember its well-meaning roots. But as I'll never be a fan on Facebook it's going to be tricky for them to keep reminding me why I love their brand.

Email unbound

Everyone thinks of email as being more or less a broadcast medium. Email agencies and bureaux send millions of emails as newsletters every month to addresses lodged in databases. Some send them daily. Noone expects a reply.

But email has a richer use. With apologies for the reminder, but email was the way you had a conversation without picking up the phone. You send a message to your mate, and when they’re ready to answer they do. You can have conversations in real time, or with a delay for timezones, research or holidays. Email involves your counterpart in the decisions about how the conversation is paced, where it leads to, when it changes venue, when you meet up.

We appear to have lost sight of the dialogue. It’s easy to do so: if you’ve got 20,000 address on your database or 800,000, managing dialogue can be a daunting prospect. And notice I said addresses, not customers. More often than not the email broadcasts marketers manage go blind to everyone they can reach. So email gets a bad reputation, and newsletters have dwindling response rates. Where once it thrashed Direct Mail, now response rates are in the lowest single figures.

We all know what the solution is though. Segmentation makes response rates leap.

Imagine you’re sending an email to ten thousand people with three unbeatable holiday offers in it, one for families at the top, one for retired people in the middle, and one for singles at the bottom. And let’s assume that everyone reads the first offer, two thirds read down to the second and a third scroll down to the third. If the audience is equally split between the three target groups, the maximum possible response rate is 6,666.

If we could divide the audience into three segments, and send one email with one offer to each, the maximum possible response rate is ten thousand. That’s a huge difference in effectiveness. If you started with this three-part email, and it really is an unbeatable offer, just by segmenting it you increase your sales by 50%.

So that’s segmentation. Segmentation is a science – one which we practice and improve all the time. It can be really simple like the example above, or it can get very complex. We can segment by, for example, behaviour (what media they consume, do they request a brochure before making a decision, which wines do they prefer), or by demographics (where they live, how many there are in the family, what they earn), or by motivation (whether they are interested in their kids’ health, or the environment, or what their neighbours think). When we start working with a client this is what we address first, by looking at what data is available either in the client’s hands or commercially, because this will give us insights into what messaging might work to drive increased response.

Segmented email marketing is incredibly powerful, but it’s nothing to do with technology, and the technology vendors will always work with specialist eCRM partners with long experience in segmentation strategy to devise the campaigns they deliver for you.

ECRM adds something really special to all this. ECRM is channel-agnostic, in other words it’s concerned with reaching the customer wherever they are - email, SMS, social media or websites. A great eCRM strategy uses every touchpoint available to deliver the right messages for the right moment in the decision-making cycle to the right person. ECRM leverages segmentation through email, but creates a relationship through observing how customers behave and what they find most motivating by  tracking across every digital venue, mobile to landing pages to social media, and that’s when email marketing becomes something different, something which transforms businesses through radical changes in revenue.