Barclaycard and its Social Media Credit Card

Barclaycard Ring MasterCard is the real first venture into a Social Media based Credit Card.

Driven by its community of card members, it promises ro be shaped by its card holders. The community is a forum where exchange of ideas takes place as well as knowledge share to make Barclaycard Ring whatever its members want it to be.




Judging by the (to put it politely) inconsistent approach to Social Media use by Barclays in the UK, this is not likely to happen here in the near future.

Darth Vader : The Hero of the Story

We are often told that the days of TV Campaigns are over.

Politely I would say 'balderdash' to that. TV Campaigns still have a place in the marketing mix, especially where they create an opportunity to create a conversation. Creating shareable content is one form of conversation. Last I looked, this commercial had been viewed over 44 million times on YouTube alone. This is a great example of creating a conversation piece that spans the Paid- Owned-Earned opportunities.

Why does this commercial work? Because it's a story where really the centerpiece of the story is the little boy in the Darth Vader suit..although you could argue that the hero of the story is the dad with the remote. The car is just an enabler.

I'm a CRM type through and through, but with fantastic creative like this I'm all for keeping these conversation pieces alive.

May the Force be with you

Content Marketing Manifesto

by the lovely guys @idioplatform...who also do a fine breakfast

You Can Lead a Horse to Water....

I'll playback pretty much the conversation I had this morning when I answered my mobile phone to someone from T-Mobile

Me : Hello

T-Mobile :  Hi, this is xx from T-Mobile, how are you?

Me : I'm thanks you?

T-Mobile : I'm well thank you for asking. I'm ringing to let you know about some offers you are eligible for as a T-Mobile customer

Me : Err..I cancelled my T-Mobile contract about 2 weeks ago, in fact my final bill just arrived this morning

T-Mobile : Oh yes I can see that here. Can I ask why you left T-Mobile?

I assumed that was a rhetorical question

DMA Email Event - Key Takes Outs

Luckily in the audience during my presentation at the DMA Email Winback Event was Email Marketing Expert, Kath Pay from Plan to Engage.

These were her key takes outs as Tweeted during the session

Thanks Kath!

@iamgfc device - use media queries to determine which device they're reading your emails on so as to deliver the correct version #dmaemail


@iamgfc in the real world you can read body language to see if they're interested in what your saying - apply this logic to email #dmaemail


@iamgfc timing - understand latency for your brand/product - maximize key moments of truth#dmaemail @dmaemail


@iamgfc nothing lasts forever - understand the Lifecycle of your consumer. Consider timing content context and device #dmaemail @dmaemail


@iamgfc they never got your email - ask for re-entering your address- preferable to dbl opt in for list growth purposes #dmaemail @dmaemail


@iamgfc never active - I.e. competition subscribers. Value of these subscribers are different to your regular subscriber - think of ROI.


@iamgfc defining inactive - they were never active, never got your email, they never last forever#dmaemail @dmaemail


@iamgfc defining inactives will differ if you're a client, an ESP or an ISP. Very true. #dmaemail@dmaemail


@iamgfc don't underestimate the power of a thank you email, that arrives in your inbox immediately#dmaemail @dmaemail


@iamgfc important to meet expectations during subscribe process. Ask what other channels they'd like to hear from you #dmaemail @dmaemail


@iamgfc understand what your consumers are doing on a day 2 day basis so you can ensure your content is relevant @dmaemail #dmaemail


the conversation engineer @iamgfc is up now - how to keep the flame burning @dmaemail #dmaemail


You can follow Kath via @kathpay

Oh, and I'm @iamgfc by the way.

Keeping the Flame Alive

So how do we keep email subscribers engaged?

My view is that we can't really focus on the business as usual aspects of our email programmes, but look at the whole subscriber experience.

So we are talking about

Lighting that Flame
Keeping the Flame Alive
Last Minute Relighting

Lighting the Flame - The Sign Up

It always pays to start as you mean to go on. The sign up provides the launch pad for the rest of the programmes. It's important to manage customers expectations from here on on.

Key tips include
 1.Make It Easy to find and do 

2.Provide one newsletter subscription page including information about all  newsletters

3.Clearly state when users have navigated to the newsletter sign-up process

4.Don’t pre-select any newsletters for users

5.In multi-step processes, let users know how many steps remain

6.Explain the ‘value proposition’ – what’s in it for me?

7.Manage expectations – what will I get when and how often?

8.Have a clear privacy policy

9.Use incentives - but  be transparent

10.Send a confirmation email, or maybe even the last newsletter

I think this is also a real opportunity to get some information from subscribers as to what other channels they might like to receive information through. And don't just stop at Social channels. I've been working recently with clients where mobile and direct mail are still playing a strong part in the mix for certain segments


Keeping the Flame Alive - Relevance

When we talk about 'inactives'. We need to be careful as to what the definition is we are using. This definition will vary from Client to ESP to ISP. Reminding me of the old adage

''there are lies, damned lies , and email metrics''

Some of the key take outs included

 - They were never ever going to be active. Beware email addresses that were acquired as a result of a competition or a prize draw.

 -  They never got your emails in the first place. Data hygiene is an issue. Use of double entry of email addresses and some data tidying behind the scenes can pay high dividends. As can looking at Inbox Delivery. Return Path believe that only 81% of permissionable actually hit the inbox.

- Nothing lasts forever. There will always be subscribers who out grow what you have to offer. People move on and in true old school marketing speak you will need to pour more subscribers in the top end to cope with the leaky bucket. Of course you can minimize those losses by keeping relevance up by understanding the value of delivering

a - the right content
b - at the right time
c - optimised messages for the relevant device
d - context specific messages


 Last Minute Re-lighting - The Unsubscribe

The time to say goodbye will come - but that doesn't mean giving up without something up your sleeve

Some tips include

1.Provide a way to unsubscribe directly via the website

2.On the un-subscribe page, list the user’s email address and current newsletters, 

3.And a simple way to unsubscribe from any or all newsletters.

4.Provide a separate process for unsubscribing.

5.Offer users an option to change frequency as an alternative to unsubscribing

6.Provide a confirmation screen verifying unsubscription

7.On the confirmation page, list other ways to receive updates eg: through social or a blog

8.Ask for feedback about why they are unsubscribing

9.Send only one email confirmation to users after they unsubscribe

10.Unsubscribe users immediately.

But a good point to bear in mind is that if deliverability isn't an issue with you and neither is CPM - do you really need to take these subscribers off the list?

-----

In the words of someone famous

“  we didn’t improve one thing by one hundred percent 

we improved one hundred things by one per cent.”

There is no magic bullet. As with most eCRM, it's all about improving step by step.

Content is a summary of my presentation at the DMA Email Event on Winback in November 2011

N.dulge in a Conversation

N.dulge is the name of the Space NK rewards scheme.

For the unitiated Space NK is a retailer ( both off and online) who offer a carefully edited selection of high quality and original  beauty products from innovators and specialists around the world. They are a favourite of mine even though there isn't one near me.


This morning I bought a Tom Ford fragrance ( now you know what I smell like) from their Harrogate store and was tempted to sign up for N.dulge ( love the name by the way). 1 point for every £ spent and the promise of special privileges like exclusive invitations, new product previews and birthday treats.


I signed up at the till, no forms to fill out, the sales advisor entering my details directly into the POS system. I got my temporary card number with the promise of a card in the post. This was at 11-45am


Now of course with most of the schemes I sign up for that would be it until my card arrived . But no. Look what arrived in my inbox at exactly 11-45am

In this world of 'real time' CRM, Space NK had continued the conversation with me straight away by sending me a welcome email immediately encouraging me to go to the N.dulge website to complete my registration. They got the essentials from me in the store without wasting too much of my time using the email to try and get more information from me. Hats off to the CRM / Membership team.


Of course it's not perfect. They had not used my name which would have been a nice touch, and the whole email is an image so actually I didn't see any of this until I unblocked content. My details page online didn't know that I was male, but I think it's a good start. 


I'm looking forward to seeing what else I get my way an in particular if my offers and in particular my Birthday present is tailored to me being male.


By the way, the Tom Ford Grey Vetiver makes even me smell lovely

Twitter and the Art of Storytelling

I recently had the pleasure of meeting John Sadowsky again at an event run by the DMA and Emailvision.

For those of you who don't know John, he is a great exponent of the importance of Stories and Storytelling for both Leaders and Brands.

At the recent event, he highlighted how the Hero of the Story is often the key difference between a Brand Story that is successful and one that is not. He cited the Facebook pages of Dunkin Donuts and Starbucks. The former having fewer fans than Starbucks but more highly engaged ones.

And the main difference was Hero of the stories being told. In Starbucks' case it was the brand, while with Dunkin Donuts it was the Customer. This makes sense doesn't it? I am more likely to share a story that has me at the centre of it than a Brand.

So this brings me to Twitter. Now you might say that a story can't be told in 140 characters or less. True But what Twitter have done very cleverly by launching Twitter Stories, is to talk about the Stories behind the Tweets.

Here's how Aaron Durand saved his mom's bookstore with a Tweet.

Aaron Durand’s mother was in trouble. She had run an independent bookstore for nearly two decades when an economic downturn hit that threatened to close the shop. Aaron wanted to help his mom, but wasn’t sure what he could do. He wrote about his mom’s plight on his blog then tweeted it out, adding at the last second an offer to buy a burrito for anyone who bought $50 worth of books during the holidays at his mom’s shop.

The story took hold. The Tweet was passed along from person to person across Portland’s art and design community. It was retweeted and retweeted until hundreds of people had read the story.

Overnight, new customers started to arrive and business began to pick up. The story continued to snowball on Twitter. The bookstore went on to have its best holiday season ever, and has continued to thrive each season since.

 Twitter is not the story. Brands are not the story. People are the story

What's your Twitter Story?

From Crowd Sourcing to Crowd Tapping

A new way for Brands to connect with and reward consumers
Essentially it allows rewarding of actions like completing surveys, voting polls, participating in a live-online discussions or sharing brand-related content with a few friends via social media and the Crowdtap platform. The reward points  can be redeemed for things like  Amazon gift cards, or  donations to a charity. 


 


www.crowdtap.it

Phygital* - Will The Real QR Code Please Stand Up

A read an interesting piece from Adam Hutchinson the Lead UX Architect at EHS4D ( in fact there he is sat 10 feet away from me), on the value of QR codes.

Adam argued quite legitamately that 'for all their wizardry, they are currently being used in exactly the same way as URLs. That is, to link to a web address'


And indeed in the majority of cases that's right. eConsultancy did show, however, some really clever uses in a recent article, my favourite being the one below





The jury is still out in particular as QR codes penetration is still quite low although recent experiments by broadcasters such as the BBC could very well increase awareness. The BBC One TV Program ''The Good Cook'' now has QR codes on screen to allow you to access recipes from the show.




Danny Cohen, Controller, BBC One, says: “I want BBC One to lead the way with interactivity and technological innovation so that we can keep engaging audiences in new ways. I hope viewers will find this experiment with QR codes to be a simple but useful tool to help them re-create the recipes they see on screen.”

But of course as soon as one technology is in the consumers hand, another one takes another large step forward. Why stop at black and white boxes when actually the object itself ,once plastered with a QR code, becomes the tag itself. Check out the video


>
<

*Phyigital belongs to those clever people at Momentum

Reading the Signs

I came across the FIAT Street Evo app recently and was impressed by the numbers claimed at the end of the clip.

1. 1 million signs spotted
2. Great feedback
3. The most viewed Fiat brochure in history!

I think the use of technology, location , gamification make the campaign truly engaging.

Let's hope the conversations turned into conversions.

Ok..So if Email is Dead ...

Why are Google trying so hard to get people to ditch their Hotmail and Yahoo etc. accounts and move over to GMail ?

They are promoting Email Interventions  to get you to convince your wayward friends to convert.

Here is there YouTube video explaining how you can help your friends from the embarrassment of outdated email addresses

There must be a reason to put this effort in.

Yahoo and Hotmail are more popular as web destinations as well being more popular as email clients ( see campaign monitor stats here)  and Google want to change this. Google realise that the email address is still the key to this.

I wrote a post on this last year on Email being the key to multi-channel marketing where I referred to an article that stated '' The integration of social, mobile and e-mail has already begun to settle inside the inbox'' 


And to win that battle it's going to be easier on your own soil !... in particular if you already have Google+ and mobile options.


You could always send me any comments at gcuzziol@gmail.com..and I didn't need an intervention

Where Physical Meets Digital

Or indeed where Physical Meets Data

Personalisation for the Connected Consumer

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.

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

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.

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.

My Most Used Hashtags #

#ecrm, #b2beu, #email, #emailmarketing, #fusionmex

Courtesy of www.tweetstats.com 

My Interview for Social Media Citizens

I had the pleasure of being interviewed by Giedrius Ivanauskas for Social Media Citizens earlier this month.


G: How would you define a social media “influencer”?

GC: I define influence as being able to change other people’s behaviour or thoughts. Influencers in Social Media need not have thousands upon thousands of followers or fans, but should be able to use their connections to change behaviour and create conversations with them. Real influence also means that these actions are spread onwards to stimulate conversations in the wider community.

And of course brands can be influenced themselves, not by single powerful influencers but by many influencers speaking as one in the ‘crowd’. Look at how companies like Starbucks use consumers to influence products and services via mystarbucksidea 

G: How do you measure the influence?

GC: Funnily enough I look at the whole spread of a person’s footprint.

The rest of the interview can be read here

Who I RT

Stats Courtesy of Tweetstats

Timing is Everything..No Matter How Beautiful the Creative

My Life as a Second Hand Car Salesman

Ok so that sounds like an unusual title for a post on a blog that generally talks about eCRM  - so bear with me a while

As part of my introduction at the Dutch Dialogue Marketing Associations Sexy Email Event, I gave brief history of how I ended up in eCRM. And naturally my previous incarnations as an Astrophysicist and Second Hand Car Salesman were mentioned

Although my first degree in Astrophysics wasn't exactly the best spring board into the world of marketing it actually has some synergies. It involved actually applying Physics and Data to the study of the universe. And in my eyes eCRM has data at it's core, but more importantly the application of that data to a better understanding of the customer.

Anyway, I digress.

Many moons ago a role in commerce with such a bizarre choice in degree was not that easy. So, looking to make some money I landed a role as a car salesman with Datsun, the predecessor to Nissan

Now it actually turns out that what I used to do in terms of identifying warm prospects and clinching the deal has some resonance with todays smarter use of behaviour based marketing

One of the key skills of any good car salesman the ability to spot a warm prospect and not just a tyre kicker. This was by no means a simple exercise and one that was not really developed without experience ( and in all fairness one skill that I never mastered even if only because I didn't last long in that role)

With time, the really good salesmen could spot the buying signals that the individual on the car lot would display by the amount of time they might spend round a particular model and the questions they would ask to gain more information. Sound like how we might use web data to understand a prospect on line?

Another key skill was the ability to personalise the deal - and I don't mean the free sunroof being offered by my colleague as he walked past the prospect at my desk brandishing a can opener! These days we can even personalise the content of a website without even knowing who the individual is, but just because we know where they came from in terms of search engine and the search terms they used.

Another frequent ploy was the 'my wife/brother drives one of these' comment that acted as a precursor to the recommendation/reviews of today.

Of course not all the tactics were of such a dubious nature. We would often genuinely try and help the prospect buy rather than sell them something by asking key questions about how many miles they would be driving in town or on the motorway, how many people they would carry etc etc. We might even offer to show them the brochure

The level of personalisation of course depended to a certain extent on how much we felt we could stretch the prospects budget. Metallic paint, comfort packs, headlight washers were all on offer and by asking a few questions we could quickly gauge what was appropriate . And of course the option to further cross sell up sell was never missed in particular if we could imply that having gone for the leather seat option the leather care scotch guard treatment was a must. Of course this is now very cleverly done in real time on line by making use of the web analytics available to create unique levels of personalisation for each visitor

And we even had our version of a re-marketing or cart abandonment program. If a customer decided that actually they weren't going to buy, we would give a clear signal to our General Manager who would accidentally bump into the customer as they were about to leave the showroom and either illicit a reason for the lack of a purchase and make an ofer that would counter that or actually just them make them an offer they couldn't refuse

In fact sometimes that offer would take place via follow up telephone call 48 hours later if we felt that worked best. Timing was key

Not all ideas are new. We just get to action them faster these days..and the salesmen are much more like an Algorithm than a Swiss Toni




Image courtesy of The BBC

Love Me or Like Me...Just Follow Me

In a previous post I talked about best practice in terms of un-subscription pages. One of the suggestions was to give subscribers the opportunity to follow your brand via another channel such as Facebook or Twitter.


Of course ideally you don't want subscribers to un-subscribe, but what if you notice that they are not engaging with your emails? Should you try and head off the un-subscribe at the pass?


Recently I've not been opening my Habitat emails - not because I've fallen out of love with them, but just because I'm not buying for the house. They have spotted the lack of engagement and I received a very interesting email from them this morning. The subject line was 'Love Habitat? Like us on Facebook!' and the main image and copy looked like this

'We noticed you're not loving our emails, so why not like us on Facebook instead?'


I think this is a great example of using email engagement data to keep subscribers engaged with the brand..one way or another