The One about Aristotle, Personalisation, Trust, ROI and the Infographic

Today’s world is increasingly being inhabited with Connected Consumers. 

These consumers use multiple channels, touch-points and devices to communicate with brands and with each other at warp speed, 24/7. The number of marketing messages that consumers see is often quoted in the thousands. Whatever the number, it’s a lot!

For brands, providing communications that quickly create engagement with these consumers requires that message to resonate and so personalisation is a key plank of any organisation’s eCRM Strategy.

Personalisation

I often have a quote in my presentations about lazy marketers creating email newsletters. Now of course, having offended a large proportion of the audience, I explain later on by actually talking about lazy marketers creating one size fits all email newsletters. This is based on the principle that if I put enough ‘stuff’ in front of you, something will take your fancy. Today’s consumer doesn’t have the time or patience to trawl through a mass of content to find something they need

Now of course we mustn’t mistake personalisation for salutation. ‘Dear Gianfranco’ doesn’t really cut the mustard in terms of personalisation these days. Even Cicero, the Roman philosopher, a few thousand years ago talked about remembering and using someone’s name to have a successful conversation with them. We need more than that if we are to persuade our audience to takes us along with them on their journey

Aristotle

My old Greek friend Aristotle ( don’t worry, there are no more philosophers in this piece) talks about Pathos, Ethos and Logos in the art of persuasion. In plain English that roughly equates to Emotion, Credibility and Logic.

The emotion (Pathos) of a brand can open up an email inbox for example but only positive and relevant experiences will keep it open. And I believe that Credibility and Logic have the use of data at the heart.

In today’s data rich marketing world, logic in the form of personalisation in eCRM can be based on 3 key information areas

Profile – What I’ve told a brand about myself in terms of age, sex and interests

Behaviour – What a brand can infer are my likes, interests from my interaction with them

Transactional – What do my purchases both on and offline tell you about my current and future needs?

Used correctly, combining these starts to create relevance and context to our messages in particular if we can overlay location as part of all this as well an understanding of what device and or app they are reading the message on. As a result, the messages and the brand gain credibility

But of course this new eCRM only works when the context and relevance that you are engaging with me with has my Permission. But it also stops working if you abuse my Privacy by ignoring the Permission I have given you. That permission is about engaging me on particular topics, at certain times using my preferred media.  Nothing more.

Trust

Of course before you can convince an audience, using Aristotle’s Ethos, they have to accept you as being credible. And credibility also has Trust as a cornerstone.

As a consumer I want the recommendations and relevancy that personalisation brings, but don’t want you to abuse that trust.

And if you do, as a connected consumer in today’s world using connected networks, your lack of ethos will be quickly shared.

ROI and the Infographic

An A to Z of eCRM - R

R is for ROI 

At the end of the day engagement and conversation are important, but essentially it does boil down to it all being about the conversion so measurement and evaluation are key.

Return on Investment is a key cornerstone of direct, digital and data.

But what should we measure? Many marketers stop after the first few steps. Opens, clicks, shares, reviews, recommendations are key metrics but we must not stop there. But what we need to understand is how these initial consumer indicators ultimately translate  into Return

I ask again, what's your email ROI?

I wrote a few words in March last year on the ROI that organisations get from their email marketing - click here for the old post.

At that point the Adestra / eConsultancy report highlighted that 42% of organisations had no idea what their email ROI was!

Well a year on the Email Marketing Industry Census 2010 shows that figure to be still an amazing 39%.

To be honest, at the time of the original post I hadn't spent that much time working closely with clients on their email programmes to make a valued judgement on that number's veracity. So I read the figures and just went with them. But now I realise it is true and it's not because Marketers cant be bothered. They actually face some real challenges in getting the resource to follow through with their metrics ' after the click'.

Email is often used in isolation within the overall marketing mix and because it can be seen as a relatively cheap part of the mix, there often isn't the justification for that extra resource or budget to measure it properly.

Of course, if you don't measure a channels impact, you can't really begin to start to optimise it - well apart from optimising opens and clicks, but then that is just like getting prospects to look through your shop window, maybe come into the shop but not take any interest in if they buy or not!!

I've worked with clients who have assumed that because the sales focussed email goes out on a Tuesday and there is a spike in sales for the next 24 hours then that's good enough for them. Others have stated that because it would actually cost them money to optimise their email programmes they wont bother, so why measure?

I say to email marketers who stop at the click that when they next need to justify their email budget, the Finance Director won't stop at the click. In fact he won't even care what it is.

He will say 'Show me the money!! - cue Tom Cruise again

Show me the ROI !!!

It is Friday after all!

Customers

Don't make them think..it stops them doing !

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!