Customer loyalty, like love, can be fickle and fleeting. Every brand craves it. But few really achieve it. It’s time to rethink the ways brands woo their best customers. Building and sustaining loyalty is part stimulus-and-response, part value exchange and part emotional experience. The quality of the relationship rather than the number of transactions is the barometer for loyalty. The dynamic mix of rational and irrational elements must be considered in the context of macro factors, like a recession, or micro factors, like an awful in-store experience. Even though the average household belongs to eighteen programs and actively participates in seven of them, consumers are ambivalent about loyalty programs. They like what they like on their own terms. Enthusiasms wax and wane. They want to hear from brands – but not that often. They are governed by a WiiFM (what’s in it for me) mentality, even for brands that are near and dear to their hearts. And even long-standing loyalty can be derailed by aggressive price offers. Digital, social and mobile channels creates new and creative opportunities for brands to communicate and interact with loyal and potentially loyal consumers. This, in turn, empowers fans to interact, respond and share. Everyone Read more…
Asynchronous triggered mail is intriguing. The idea is that rather than blast out an email to a targeted list (the spray and pray approach) that consumer behavior drives email dispatch. So rather than send a million emails on Tuesday morning, you deliver the same million emails one-by-one over the course of a month. Based on using pixel tracking, brands determine which sites or behaviors are related to their product or service and which actions might infer interest in their brands. They make a buy, much like re-targeting on these sites, but rather than trigger a display banner ad or a social media unit, the action triggers an email. Yahoo and Gmail already do a version of this tactic by mining email accounts and triggering text messages and interstitial ads based on the content of the email consumers’ receive. Almost half of all email is opened on mobile devices where conversion is notoriously low. Open rates in general hover around 30%. And there is really no optimal day/ time combination to maximize email response. So the idea of adapting email as a one-to-one tool is appealing. Asynchronous delivery, also called email on-demand, has the potential to change the perception of this Read more…
If information and engagement are business goals, websites, the ultimate icons of the Internet age, are quickly becoming obsolete. Consumers now engage and interact with mobile apps, social networks, text messages, email and dynamically loaded loyalty cards much more than they do brand websites. In fact, for the vast majority of brands, consumers visit the site once; get the information they want, opt-in and never return. That’s why savvy marketers are looking carefully and skeptically at added investments in complex websites. Many are de-emphasizing the role of a website in a brand’s digital ecosystem preferring instead to use more agile and cheaper channels to maintain on-going relationships and generate sales.
At this time of the year, retailers make technical and functionality investment decisions focused on Holiday 2014. The biggest issue is what to invest in mobile marketing. Fortunately retailers can rely on the 13th Annual Merchant Survey produced by my friend and colleague, Lauren Freedman at the e-tailing group, for insight and direction.
Now that they’ve drawn a crowd and sold themselves to Yahoo, Tumblr is trying to figure out how to make a buck. They’ve marshaled traffic, usage and psycho-demographic stats and are trying to simultaneously associate themselves with Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest, to gain consideration and access to social ad budgets, while differentiating themselves from the competition to attract specific brands and buys.