Co-Stealth Marketing Tactics? Mine's a half!

As defined by wikipedia includes the phrase

a marketing company might pay an actor or socially adept person to use a certain product visibly and convincingly in locations where target consumers congregate

Now read this article I came across in the Yorkshire Post

Pub-surgery MP gets beer drenching

Published Date: 10 March 2010
A YORKSHIRE MP was left drenched in beer after an angry constituent poured a drink over her during one of her regular surgeries at a local pub.
Anne McIntosh, the Conservative MP for the Vale of York and one of David Cameron's shadow environment ministers, was left ruing her decision to hold meetings with constituents at The Three Tuns in Thirsk after a half-pint of John Smith's Extra Smooth bitter was poured over her following a disagreement with a local voter.

I'm still trying to decide who wins here, the Tory MR, the Pub or John Smiths!! Or are we seeing the beginning of a new shared channel?

Cheers!!

Full Article can be seen here

Testing Testing 1 2 3

I came across this piece on the 'Three Vital Elements of Email to Test' this morning.

A tidy little piece which again highlights the importance of audience selection in any for of direct marketing, or indeed marketing in general.

The audience is primary when considering any form of testing as it more often than not actually provides you with the biggest uplift in response.

My 1,2,3 revolve around these areas

1 : Keep it simple or lose the ability to see the wood for the trees
2 : Counting to 10 before changing anything
3 : Lest we forget what we learnt last time

These are expanded upon in an article I wrote a while back on cuzziol.com

Video in email saves on data segmentation?

One of the big email success stories for 2009 and for this year, will be the continued use of videos within email.

According to a recent survey by GetResponse, over 80% of SMBs intend to use video in 2010 for applications such as training, product demos etc.

This is not surprising as 65% of responders believed the use of video had a positive impact on conversion rates.

But as with any other application, proper segmentation of the audience is needed to maximise conversion.( A segmentation best practice checklist can be found on e-Circle's website).

Hence my surprise when I saw this release from PRWeb, who claim that use of video ''Saves time in campaign creation by reducing need for list segmentation''

Hmm...me thinks they should stick to PR.

Email Marketing - What's your ROI?

I came across an amazing statistic this morning about the ROI organisations are getting from their email marketing.

Although a year old now, the Adestra Email Marketing Census highlighted how few organisations actually know what their ROI is.According to this census,the majority of respondents being in the UK, a staggering 42% of organisations have no idea what their ROI is!!

And yet, 78% of these organisations believed that as a channel , email was 'excellent' or 'good' for ROI, and yet Direct Marketing was only regarded 'excellent' or 'good' by 6%. I find this confusing as I always thought email was a direct channel ?

I know that often email marketing is seen as being a pretty cheap channel, but that doesn't excuse organisations doing the fundamentals of getting a grip its effectiveness. I was once given these wise words: 'If emails cost as much as direct mail, a lot more thought would be put into how many are sent out'

This is very true in particular when you begin to look at the negative impact too many emails can have on open rates, and even on getting them into the recipients inbox now that the like of Hotmail monitor email open activity as part of their junk email filtering

I can only hope that the 1 in 3 organisations in the survey that say that Measurement & Evaluation is a focus are all in that group that say they have no idea what their ROI is!