Enso Consultancy, Enso’s new Brand, Marketing and CRM consultancy arm has been officially launched along with a brand new website. Enso Consultancy combines with Enso Studios to offer clients a complete communications solution from strategy to fulfillment. Enso Consultancy looks forward to working closely with you to achieve your communications and business objectives.

New talent joins the team

Enso has also recently acquired the creative talents of Melanie Schafer, Alex Murphy and Christine Churchill as valuable additions to the team. We hope you have the opportunity to meet these delightful team members soon.

Enso sponsors Queensland AMI seminars

Enso Consultancy have demonstrated their commitment to the professional marketing community by becoming a sponsor of a series of Australian Marketing Institute seminars in Queensland. The first sponsored seminar titled ‘What’s new in Services Marketing’ is to be held on June 18 at the Brisbane Hilton. We’d love to see you and catch up with you there.

If the iPhone follows in its older cousin’s (the iPod) footsteps as expected, we can soon expect relatively wide spread, wide screen and wide band internet access in the hip pockets of technology enthusiasts and willing consumers. This will really cement the ‘third screen’ mobile device as an important marketing and communications channel, and I expect will supercharge mobile marketing initiatives across Australia.

Not only is the iphone a mobile, pocket size, broadband internet device, it also provides an application platform upon which savvy marketers can build innovative, value adding brand interaction experiences.

Make no mistake about the opportunities that such a platform represents and the value of getting your message into the hands of media hungry, affluent iPhone consumers.

The simple presence of the iPhone will undoubtedly increase consumer appetite for handheld media consumption and prompt competing products to rapidly hit the market. So perhaps it’s time to review your marketing and communications channel mix, is there room to add mobile? I expect some amazing iPhone targeted marketing campaigns and applications to be launched soon after the Australian release.

Even if you aren’t ready to embark on a mobile channel specific plan, those of you already engaged in email and online marketing should pay attention to this new browsing platform. It is only natural to assume that shortly there will be a number of your customers consuming your emails or browsing your website through the iPhone while out and about and on the go. iPhone (and, I expect similar device) browsing is a little different to desktop browsing so it will pay to ensure you provide your iPhone friends with an optimized experience.

In fact, recent studies have suggested that carefully adapting your email program for mobile platforms such as the iPhone will lead to higher a ROI. A report in DigiTimes suggests that current iPhone users spend 10.4% of there device engagement time on email compared with 2.8% for all other mobile phone users. Internet use is 12.1% of the time spent on the iPhone compared with 2.4% on other mobiles.

So what are some things to start thinking about now to become iPhone ready?

For websites, two big considerations need to be taken into account; the iPhone’s lack of support for Flash, and its reduced processing power compared to desktops. While the web browser is Safari, it won’t necessarily render your website the same way as Safari on Windows or OS X, so testing on the platform is a must. Because of the smaller screen, a user will be doing a lot of zooming in and out to consume your web content, so you’ll need to test your site’s usability in this regard.

Email marketers are likely to be the big beneficiaries of the new platform. HTML is supported, images are displayed by default, and even iFrames work which would allow dynamic or time sensitive content to be loaded and displayed in the email. Certainly the iPhone will become another critical email testing platform for your HTML email campaigns (along with Outlook and the various Web Mail platforms) and optimizing your design and the positioning of the call to action for the iPhone may also have positive outcomes.

With a simple strategy to optimize your current digital communication initiatives for the iPhone, you can take advantage of the growing audience ready to engage with your brand through the device. In a future edition of THE ORANGE, and following our own extensive experimentation and testing, Enso Consultancy will outline some specific steps you can take to leverage the iPhone audience.

Digital seems to scratch the itch of the instant gratification generation with seemingly immediate results; impressions, click-throughs, conversion rates and a whole host of metrics to with which to calculate roi.

I would also suggest that softening market conditions and weakening consumer confidence is also accelerating the flow of marketing dollars online as marketers seek more economic and accountable ways to spend their budget.

Digital seems to scratch the itch of the instant gratification generation with seemingly immediate results; impressions, click-throughs, conversion rates and a whole host of metrics to with which to calculate ROI. However, has too much focus on these metrics caused us to forget the fundamentals learnt during the golden years of brand advertising?

Indeed an interesting phenomenon has occurred within the online channel. There seems to be a trend of marketers reducing their spend in online display advertising and diverting these funds into paid search advertising. The reason: the metrics are clear, the search engines are delivering more traffic and conversions than display. Basically Google is being credited with the conversions and therefore receiving a larger slice of the pie.

So Google is taking the credit, but is it really doing the hard work? Advertising in traditional media has long worked successfully on the principle of engagement and repeated exposure, leaving it up to the consumer to take action when ready. At this time the consumer recalls the advertisement and perhaps looks up the yellow pages or visits a business for further information. There are no direct realtime metrics at the marketers fingertips. Who gets the credit – media placement, directory listings or point of sale advertising? ROI can only be calculated long after a campaign launch and often only through survey research and analysis of the bottom line.

Search engines are simply the directory or gateways that consumers consult once they are ready to take action. This could be motivated by repeated exposures to online or offline advertising which cement the purchase decision, but Google delivers the traffic and takes the credit.

While search engine advertising is an important component of most online strategies, it is dangerous to over value the metrics of where the final traffic is coming from and neglect the communications which provide the motivation for the search in the first place.

In a medium where there is so much data, you can easily get obsessed with the metrics and become blinded to the nature of how things are actually working. Display may be working harder in the area of brand advertising then conversion metrics may suggest. While there may be a swing away from display, the pendulum will return as marketers become less obsessed with the traffic metrics, gain a greater understanding of online consumer behavior, and reconsider the complimentary relationship between display and search.

Recent work with a client reminded me that one strategy that is often neglected is how to best deal with unsubscribes. Email, being a permission based channel, is going to involve a continuous stream of unsubscribes for one reason or another.

Now any good email management platform will handle legislation compliant, and best practice methods of providing a recipient an easy and quick method of unsubscribing from your email list. This commonly involves a double-opt out method (an initial action followed by a confirmation) to ensure the recipient really wants out. Once the double-opt out requirements have been satisfied, the system immediately and efficiently prevents the recipient from receiving further emails.

Now in an ideal world we would only have subscribers and no unsubscribes as our list grows with highly engaged, active and satisfied recipients. However, people will unsubscribe for a number of reasons – their interests or responsibilities change, the feel they are receiving emails too frequently, they are receiving emails too infrequently, they don’t find the communications relevant, they don’t find any value in the communications, they don’t like the look of the communication, they don’t like the tone of the communication and so on.

Unsubscribes should not be seen as a bad thing – they do contribute to maintaining a list of engaged and active recipients, however the problem is that we don’t often know why they are unsubscribing. This is valuable information that may assist us in further segmentation of our list, refinement of our message and satisfaction of more customers. Devising a strategy around unsubscribes can not only lower your unsubscribe rate, but can also help you drive more value from your entire list.

Following are a few of strategies to consider:

• Send a goodbye message reminding the recipient of the value of your email communication with instructions to easily re-subscribe.
• Ask them why they are unsubscribing and collect feedback and reasons that may help you plan future communications. If you are using a double-opt out system, in the confirmation step, you can ask the unsubscriber to complete a short survey to explain their reason for leaving. Combine this with the tip above and you might keep the contact.
• Offer them different content. Perhaps you have the recipient in the wrong segment of your list. Offer them a subscription to your other segments or alternate content.
  Make them an offer. The unsubscribe process can be an ideal time to make them an offer they can’t refuse. If they take up the offer, you may actually retain them and strengthen the relationship. The offer should be relevant and based on the profile data you have on the recipient. If you maintain profile data that is indicative of the value of the particular customer, you can use that to vary the generosity of the offer.
• Give them access to update their own profile and preference centre. This is more a strategy to prevent them from unsubscribing in the first place by allowing them to control the type, frequency and content of the email communications they receive from you.