Since last week’s announcement, the web has been abuzz with discussions and reactions to what is quite possibly Google’s boldest project in years: Google Wave.

It appears a Wave is a live communications object that 2 or more people can participate and interact with at any time. It’s a bit like a blend of an email, IM, wiki and social networking tool all rolled into one.

The big news however, is the proposed open source nature of the protocol that powers the wave. This effectively allows any service provider to build wave servers and wave clients, much as they can with email servers and clients. The success and ubiquitous nature of email is largely due to its open standard protocol, and Google’s move to position Wave as an open standard, both client and server side, dramatically increases the likelihood of mass adoption.

It is for this reason that there has been much commentary heralding the beginning of the end of email’s reign as the king application of the internet. While we heard similar arguments with RSS, Facebook and twitter, it does seem plausible that Google’s new, open protocol for direct and group messaging could chip away at email’s dominance over the next decade or so.

My first reaction to seeing the demo was “Wow, businesses are going to love this, how much more efficient is this going to make multi-participant email conversations”. 

My second reaction was “Perhaps this is a little too complicated. Email is simple and straight forward, yet how many corporate dramas are created by the accidental or misuse of the ‘reply all’ button. How will the workplace cope with such a dangerously flexible and complicated communication tool?”

My third reaction was “This platform is going to enable marketers to engage with customers in some seriously cool ways. With the ability to build extensions and gadgets, and the communication being a live object, this is going to radically change the electronic direct marketing game.”

My gut feeling at the moment, is that marketers need to watch the wave very carefully this year, as adoption is likely to be rapid, opening up a new line of communication with the consumer. In the short term, it is likely to be yet another channel we need to manage. In the medium term, with developers building gateways between wave and platforms like email, twitter and facebook, Google Wave could become a central aggregator to our currently fragmented online communications. In the long term, it could even knock email off its block. However with many people sporting a multi-decade email habit, I don’t see this happening anytime soon.

One thing’s for sure, at Enso we’ll be keeping a very close eye on Google Wave and its implications for changing the game of email marketing as we know it.

“Email is the tightest link ever forged between buyer and seller. Email is the heart beat of the internet.”

These words were delivered by Stan Rapp, 82 year old veteran of direct marketing and chairman of marketing agency Engauge, at the Email Evolution Conference in Scottsdale, Arizona earlier this year.

Stan Rapp is often credited as the pioneer of one-to-one direct marketing, and the above statement is one that should be carefully considered by anyone involved in brand marketing.

Unfortunately many organisations are not giving email marketing the limelight it deserves, and these are the same organisations that are unknowingly leaving money on the table. Some organisations have the perception that email is ‘cheap’ and subsequently fail to invest in the strategic planning and resources required to deliver their customers value and generate return. It is true that email marketing is very cost efficient, and well executed strategies are delivering returns far above those delivered by any other channel.

Email is rapidly evolving from an auxiliary marketing channel into the central brand-relationship, and direct-sales channel around which other marketing activities are being organised. Savvy marketing departments are realising this, and with the current economic situation, are reaping the cost effective benefits of investing in the channel.

Simms Jenkins recently published a brief but interesting interview with Stan Rapp at iMedia Connection titled “Why email marketing deserves more respect”. A must read for all marketers yet to realise the true value of email marketing.

San Francisco based law firm Howard Rice Nemerovski Canady Falk & Rabkin required an animated e-card to send out as a holiday greeting to clients and contacts, as well as promote their environmental program “Firmly Green”.

STRATEGY/EXECUTION

Enso designed and developed an animated e-card based on the firm’s hard copy card design. The card introduced Howard Rice’s commitment to the environment and their “Firmly Green” program. The e-card worked with Howard Rice’s contact database to personalise the greeting “to” the recipient “from” their specific contacts within the firm. The campaign was executed using the Cannonball email marketing platform. Howard Rice donated the savings from reducing hard copy distribution to Friends of the Urban Forest.

Business standards company, SAI Global, engaged Enso Consultancy to develop and deliver a targeted campaign to raise awareness and develop sales leads for their Information Security Management System products and services.

STRATEGY/EXECUTION

Enso developed a strategic, targeted and integrated approach incorporating direct mail, email and online channels. Targets were identified from SAI Globals current database of existing clients, as well as carefully purchased qualified lists. A direct mail piece was developed as a driver to a specially developed campaign website. The DM piece was personalised to each recipient with a unique key code which allowed for identification of the recipient when visiting the website and participating in the incentive competition. The website tracked and collected sales leads.

OUTCOMES

An engaging, interactive experience which had a high level of participation from the targeted recipients. The personalised key code and incentive component ensured a high level of exposure for the website content, and qualified sales leads where collected through the targets’ interaction with the website.

The corporate seasons greetings message is an opportunity to spread the spirit of the season and thank everyone for their support over the year. It is also an opportunity to send out something fun, interesting and different from your usual business communications to engage your contacts on another level, and demonstrate another side to the personality of your organisation.

DEPENDING ON YOUR SITUATION OR REQUIREMENTS, A SEASON’S GREETING CAMPAIGN CAN ACHIEVE A NUMBER OF COMMUNICATION OBJECTIVES THROUGH A PLATFORM THAT IS OFTEN LESS RESTRICTIVE THAN OTHER CAMPAIGNS. IT CAN BE USED TO ADDRESS PR ISSUES, BUILD STAKEHOLDER CONFIDENCE AND EVEN BECOME A SOPHISTICATED VIRAL MARKETING AND PUBLICITY CAMPAIGN.

Your festive season message is a ideal medium to remind your customers that you are more than just a money making machine. Promoting your organisation’s Corporate Social Responsibility program or credentials is a popular and well received message that ties in nicely with the season of giving.

What’s more, taking your campaign electronic and distributing online via email can make it fun, interactive, measurable and environmentally responsible. Electronic greeting cards, or e-cards as they’re often called, can include animation, audio, video and interactivity to deliver true brand engagement, and can be easily personalised to the recipient from their specific contacts within the organisation. They can also include personalised messages or targeted content depending on your contact segmentation. Because they can be developed to dynamically retrieve information from a database, personalisation can be based on any data that you hold. You can also easily measure the readership of your communication through the usual email and web metrics.

However, if you do wish to distribute a traditional hard copy card, environmentally responsible options are available to minimise the environmental impact of your campaign. There are many options available in recycled, unbleached paper stocks from green paper mills. Printing can also be done with organic, vegetable based inks using water efficient processes.

So whatever you choose to do, remember that Christmas creeps up on you quickly, so now is the time to act and start planning to ensure you make the most out of your festive season communications opportunity.

One example of an emerging service that has its roots as a product, and is rapidly changing an industry, is Software as a Service (SaaS). Previously, companies had to purchase a piece of software and install it on their machines. Now several catagories of software are available as services where they are installed and maintained on the vendors equipment and run as rich internet applications.
In many cases it changes the way the software is sold, purchased and the relationship between supplier and client. Enso Consultancy’s own innovative Cannonball platform is a prime example of SaaS.

I believe on a practical level that services marketing is the ‘new marketing’ that will inform marketing practice as a whole. It’s about selling the experience or the promise of an improved condition of the customer and can be applied equally to products and services. There is certainly a lessening requirement to distinguish products and services marketing as unique categories. Indeed many products are becoming customised or heterogeneous (such as NIKEiD ), and it is often the intangible qualities of a product that becomes the focus of its marketing. Product marketing has followed services in attempting to establish an ongoing relationship with the customer, one that begins before the product is sold, and continues afterwards. In many cases the product comes with an ongoing service such as support, training or membership to a club of some sort. A great example of this is the Brisbane Lexus dealership. Lexus of Brisbane offers purchasers membership to the Lexus Owners Club with benefits and privileges such as gymnasium, Perisian arcade, billiard room, lounge, boardroom and of course car servicing all within the car dealership’s facilities. Where does one draw the line between the product and the service, the tangible and the intangible?

So, if services marketing is the ‘new marketing’, and IHIP is out the window, what are the emerging ideas that may give us a hint into innovative marketing of the future? Three areas I believe are important considerations in any modern services marketing strategy are value creation, customer centricity and co-creation. Without getting into too much detail, following are 6 practical initiatives which focus on these ideas.

1. Reconsider your marketing to be a service in itself.
   That’s right, your marketing initiatives can be treated as, and become a service for your current and prospective clients. This is a service you provide to them free of charge, and becomes the first stage of the value chain that involves the client. Your marketing efforts should be focused on providing value before any service engagement is made. Simple examples of this are information services (email newsletters, mail-outs), free evaluations / consultation or online resources or entertainment. This form of marketing is pull centric rather than push centric as it draws people with the value it provides.
2. Consider whether you could provide value to clients through your client network.
   If interactions and networking amongst your clients would provide the opportunity for them to extract value from each other, how could you could best facilitate these interactions using your brand as an umbrella. Possible examples include developing an online community or hosting events and functions or providing membership to a club.
3. Consider opportunities for co-creation of marketing through fostering active brand advocacy.
   How could your clients participate as co-creaters of marketing initiatives or even products and services themselves. Co-creation focuses on the customers experiences and derives value for both parties through the relationship formed between the supplier and consumer. The consumer, through involvement (either actively or passively) becomes a great advocate for the brand. An example of a co-created product and service is SugarCRM, in which users around the world create their own customisations specific to their needs, and sometimes this innovation is fed back into the core product and hosted service.
4. Embrace web 2.0 methodologies.
   Web 2.0 facilitates an online relationship and conversation with your customers. The technologies allow you to give your customers a voice and can be an economical platform upon which to facilitate user generated content and co-create value. Check out the article on Web 2.0: A New Dimension in Brand Marketing.
5. Implement a CRM program.
   Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a not software system, it’s a customer centric approach to business. It often involves maintaining intimate knowledge of individual customers, analysing this information and feeding it back to every stage of the marketing and sales process chain. A CRM approach helps you focus the business around the needs of the customer and tailor individual marketing and communication pieces. In modern marketing where relationships are important, CRM is a valuable approach.
6. Build an innovative brand.
   A brand is one of the most valuable assets a services organisation can develop. It is a platform that informs everything an organisation does, from the services they offer, to the client interaction. A brand is the customers’ perception of the values, personality and the quality of an organisations products or services. Innovative brand building and management for a service organisation needs to consider the clients role in their brand, after all, a brand is not what you say it is, it’s what they say it is.

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.

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.

The power of email to personally engage a recipient in your brand, and to continue the communication while learning more and more about the recipient and strengthening the relationship, is undisputed.

The permission based channel has continually delivered extraordinary ROI in the past, and new sophisticated approaches to the channel promise a very bright future. A well planned, well executed email program can directly drive sales, increase brand loyalty, and strengthen customer relationships. A poorly planned and executed campaign can result in significant brand damage.

Most businesses have realised the the importance of the channel and are running an email program, if you’re not doing it, or not doing it effectively, at best you are leaving money on the table, at worst you could be damaging your brand.

Many business find themselves in 2008 with inadequate resources assigned to the channel. It may be that the marketing department is running the program as adjunct activity without its own line item in the budget and no real resource allocation besides a software subscription. Emails are being written, designed and sent out to the list, open and click-through rates are being glanced at then the marketing department calls it a day on email and gets back to work on other elements of the marcom mix. 

In today’s environment of swamped inboxes, spam filters and high customer expectation, for a businesses is to see a high ROI and protect their brand, they need to invest more resources in a program that earns trust and provides real value to the customer. Earning trust and delivering value in 2008 requires a more sophisticated and strategic approach now that the novelty has worn off. An investment in this now will pay big dividends as emerging mobile platforms drive increasing importance in direct online marketing.

Below are 5 key topics for consideration to increase the performance of your email program.

Relevancy, Segmentation, Relevancy 

It is all about relevancy now. How well do you know your contacts, are you ensuring that you are only sending them relevant content. Technology is making it easier to profile list members based on information they provide and a continually building behavioral profile. Dynamic segmentation, dynamic content and trigger based campaigns have become technically eaiser, but careful planning and analysis is the key to relevancy. Successful email campaigns will talk directly to each recipient with relevant and value adding content.

Put email at the core of your marketing campaign channel mix

Email is a great channel to use at the core of your campaign. Indirect channels can find prospects and ignite interest, and then hand them over to power of direct, personalised email to further drive engagement, build rapport and provide support throughout the purchasing cycle. Most smart campaigns, even using traditional media will integrate a response device, email can then follow-up and build the relationship.

Test, test, test

Continuous testing is one of the easiest, yet commonly ignored strategies to improve the success of your email program. A/B split testing can quickly guide you towards which subject line, offer, copy and design your segments respond best to. Low open rates; test different subject line approaches. Low click through rates; test different content, call to action and offers.  Keep testing, keep refining, keep improving. Continual testing and refinement over time should be reflected in improving ROI metrics.

List maintenance

List maintenance is critical. Poor list management not only dilutes your success metrics, but can also harm your email reputation leading to increasing deliverability issues. Proper bounce management cannot be overstated. Close attention also needs to be payed to inactive list members. If they fail to respond to a reactivation campaign, it’s best to clean them off the list. Allowing and encouraging your lists members to keep their own details up to date through an online profile and preference centre is a convenient way to have the members contribute to list maintenance. Why not let your users keep your list up to date for you? 
 

Campaign Planning

Planning is the key to success. An effective communications campaign rarely involves a single email, and cross selling strategies may bridge two otherwise separate email campaigns. Typically a campaign might consist of time triggered emails, online response triggered emails, offline action triggered emails, and product or service life-cycle triggered emails. In addition, user actions in one campaign might make them ideal candidates for another (cross-sell) campaign. With mounting complexity, careful planning is critical to efficency and effectiveness. This planning must review all the various pathways a user might follow through a campaign and the possible bridges between different campaigns or offers. Frequency and relevancy must be analysed through every possible step of the communications campaign. Modern EDM platforms like Cannonball make planning and executing multi-email campaigns, as well as bridging different campaigns a much easier task.