From Lyris: 8 Building Blocks of Email Relevance

Marketers, it's time to put down the fire hose. Your email subscribers are more sophisticated today and more particular about what they want to receive - and it's not a steady stream of undifferentiated messages blasted relentlessly to a mass audience.

What do email subscribers want instead? Customized messages that:

• resemble conversations rather than lectures or sales pitches
• are personalized to reflect their interests, needs and wants
• arrive at logical intervals
• reflect their buying history, click stream data or their position in the customer lifecycle.

Need a number to back up this statement? According to a 2008 report from Forrester Research, "The top reason for unsubscribing from marketing messages was irrelevance: An overwhelming 74% of consumers unsubscribe for this reason."

Are your email messages relevant, or are they just more noise in the inbox?

How Relevance Builds a Stronger Email Marketing Program

Highly relevant email messages strengthen your marketing program in three key ways:

• Increase customer/subscriber retention
• Create higher return on investment through more customer engagement and lower email list churn
• Improve email deliverability by reducing unsubscribes and spam complaints

Besides the benefit that higher relevance brings to your email marketing program, consider what your competitors are doing. Your customers who unsubscribe or simply ignore your broadcast email messages might well be taking their business to a competitor whose messages are more relevant.

Maybe you think: "My subscribers opted in to receive email from me, so anything I send is relevant." True relevance is more complex. It actually has four dimensions: "The right message to the right person at the right time in the right channel."

8 Building Blocks of Relevance

Upgrading your email marketing program from a simple broadcast model - sending a single message to every address on your mailing list - to a differentiated program can seem like a daunting task, but every step you take will lead you closer to the goal of a relevant conversation. Keep in mind, you don’t have to tackle everything at once - take it one step at a time!

1. Content relevance: The look and feel of your online presence is consistent across all your marketing channels, from email messages to landing pages, your Web site and your mobile initiatives.

2. Welcome program: Engage email subscribers at the start of the relationship. Restate subscription details, manage expectations for content and frequency, provide links to FAQs, privacy policy, and other subscriptions, and invite subscribers back to your site. This also sets up to opportunity to gather information to start populating your preference center.

3. Preference Center: Subscribers have one-click access to a page where they can customize for content, format, frequency and channel, manage their subscriptions and account information, and opt in and out of message streams. This also provides the richer data that you will use for advanced personalization and segmentation.

4. Personalization: Using the information collected via your preference center, your messages employ dynamic content, reflecting subscriber interests, preferences, buying history and demographics.

5. Segmentation: Using preference, click stream and buying data you create a variety of message streams that reflect subscriber interest in different brands, products, purchase frequency, average order value and other factors.

6. Customized trigger and drip campaigns: Customer actions launch these messages automatically (see the previous Matches example), whether by a purchase, a data point such as a birthday or purchase anniversary, or an inaction including an abandoned shopping cart, or email reactivation program sent to subscribers who haven't acted on messages for a set time. Drip campaigns reflect the customer's place in the purchase cycle with content designed to answer questions and move the customer closer to a purchase.

7. Transactional emails: These are some of the most relevant and thus most acted-on emails and should be customized to reflect the action taken, such as a purchase or customer-support inquiry, account payment, subscription or cancellation, shipping or out-of-stock notice. Take the opportunity to up sell or cross sell customers on related items, offer them added value, update their preferences, make referrals, or take a survey on how you can improve their customer experience.

8. Unsubscribe program: Subscribers can easily opt out of message streams but are also given other options: change email address, change frequency or move to another communication channel (RSS feed, mobile, social network, direct mail).

Wrapping Up: Relevance and Your Marketing Budget

These days, many people are thinking they need to make their marketing budgets work harder for them. They're spending this money anyway, so they are seeking a better return.

Relevance is the key to those better returns: you have already identified people who are your customers or prospects through acquisition. You now have a much stronger opportunity to persuade them to do business with you again. You can do without having to pay the financial penalty of acquiring them again.

Relevance is the compelling path to growing your business.

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About the Author

Mike Weston is VP UK & EMEA Sales for Lyris. He's a leading figure and a regular speaker on the London digital marketing scene, with a particular focus on customer communication tools including email marketing and social media marketing.

Facebook Philippines makes the 10 MILLION mark!

Facebook has just announced that the Philippine community has reached the 10 million users.

Over the past 30 days, Facebook has registed over 1 million new users from the Philippines, keeping the country's ranking at No. 2 across Asia Pacific, in terms of number of users.

Indonesia 18,550,000

Philippines 10,300,000

Australia 8,180,000

India 6,900,000

Taiwan 5,900,000

Malaysia 4,870,000

Hong Kong 2,830,000

Thailand 1,960,000

New Zealand 1,450,000

Japan 930,000

Vietnam 788,000

South Korea 511,000

Google Shopper: Mobile Shopping for Android Phones

As I await for the arrival of my Nexus One Google phone, news about what it can do with it definitely excites me. Today, I heard about a new Android app called Google Shopper that brings shopper marketing to a whole new level using your mobile phone.

Mashable writes about it:

Google has just rolled out “Google Shopper,” a new mobile application for Android devices that offers a variety of different ways to search for products.In addition to basic search functionality, users can search by voice, take a picture of cover art, or scan a bar code to get detailed product information and price comparison. Google introduces the application on its website and in the video below.

As AndroidAndMe notes, the app clearly competes with the likes of ShopSavvy, who tells the publication that Google [and Amazon] “are and always have been our biggest competitors.”Google could deal a much stronger blow to the upstart by including Shopper – currently a Labs product – with new Android handsets. We also don’t see why Google wouldn’t extend the app to other mobile platforms as well.

Here's the video demo from Google on YouTube:

How do you think this will change how people shop at the store?

From iMedia: Marketing Tools for Small Businesses -- 3 must-haves

3 must-have marketing tools for small businesses

By Eric Groves

February 02, 2010

ARTICLE HIGHLIGHTS:

• Email marketing delivered $43.62 for every dollar spent in 2009
• Online survey tools allow you to easily request anonymous feedback from your customers
• Countless small businesses have made valuable connections through their participation in social networks

Small businesses naturally gravitate to tools and strategies that quickly generate revenue without incurring significant costs. So it's no surprise that web-based marketing technologies have become a boon to small businesses because of their low cost and ease of use. Tools that are purpose-built for small businesses project a more professional image and deliver a richer set of management and monitoring capabilities than online tools targeted to consumers, which are often ad-supported and limited in function.

The essential small business marketing tools described below encourage stronger customer relationships and are easy to use and affordable, which makes them must-have tools in the small business marketer's toolkit.

Get connected. To stay abreast of the latest developments in email, survey, and social media services, check out the exhibit hall at ad:tech San Francisco, April 20-21. Learn more.

Email marketing
Despite critics who have called email marketing's effectiveness into question, email marketing continually delivers the highest ROI for any marketing method. According to the Direct Marketing Association, email marketing delivered $43.62 for every dollar spent in 2009.

What makes email marketing so effective? It's simple: permission and relevant content. This means that the recipient is looking forward to receiving messages and considers the content of the emails to be beneficial. For marketers, this translates into a pre-qualified list of prospects and returning customers. All you need to do to keep them is stay in touch with content that is compelling and useful.

Businesses can achieve several important goals with email marketing, but the most important are strong, lasting customer relationships. With email marketing, you can consistently communicate your expertise, your offerings, and your brand, thereby building trust and recognition. When the time comes for customers to make purchases, they'll naturally turn to the businesses they're familiar with and loyal to, and they're more likely to recommend those businesses to others.

Online surveys
The most successful small business owners understand that listening to their customers is critically important. Yet, it's not always practical to engage in one-on-one conversations to find out what every customer is thinking. That's where online surveys come in. Online survey tools allow you to easily request anonymous feedback from your customers at their convenience.

Whether conducted frequently, such as after a purchase, event, or customer service issue, or just once a year, surveys are an excellent way to glean valuable information about your customers' satisfaction, experience with your business, or feedback on your product. For example, a retailer might survey his customers to find out what product lines they'd like to see expanded. A consultant could survey customers to learn what marketing challenges are most important to them for 2010. In both cases, the survey results will help guide important business decisions that neither business owner may have determined without the help of the customer base.

Another benefit of online surveys is the opportunity for your customers to feel like they're a part of your business. In fact, asking customers about the best way to communicate with them -- either via email, Facebook, Twitter, or some other mode or combination -- is a great first step in gathering useful feedback. By opening up a two-way dialogue and inviting them to offer suggestions and constructive criticism, your customers feel that they're contributing to your success. Knowing that you took their advice or considered their feedback creates a sense of loyalty that will naturally lead to longer and stronger relationships.

Your social network of choice
Everywhere you turn these days, someone is talking about Facebook, retweeting Ashton Kutcher's latest comment, or asking you to connect on LinkedIn. While all the hype can seem a bit frivolous, the business benefits of social networks are very real. Countless small business owners have made valuable connections, including new customers, through their participation in social networks.

Participation is the key to success when it comes to social media. Much like email marketing, you must first offer real value before you can expect to get anything in return. Simply being there isn't going to place your brand at the center of the conversation. You first have to establish your credibility as a member of the community and a legitimate expert in your field.

Establish yourself as a resource by sharing your knowledge. This may mean linking to your blog posts, media coverage of your product or business, or your email newsletter. You can easily add value and show you "get it" by offering your thoughts and commenting on another's blog post or tweet, or by answering a question on LinkedIn Answers.

Once you've committed to a particular mode of communication, be consistent in using it. Frequency of communications is always a challenge for busy small businesses owners, but a regular effort to communicate will help deliver your message most effectively. Eventually, your audience will begin to anticipate your outreach and even look forward to your next tweet, post, update, or newsletter.

Low cost, high return
Today's small businesses face an ongoing battle for mindshare among their target consumers. These low cost, high return marketing tools provide small businesses with the advantage they need to cut through the noise and get their messages heard without breaking their budget.

Eric Groves is senior vice president of global market development for Constant Contact Inc.

Globe G-cash Goes Online

Globe G-cash announces its new team up with Boku.

Here's what the Globe website had to say:

If you’re a big fan of virtual goods (especially on Facebook applications and online games), then you’ll like what we have in store for you.This week, Globe Telecom made a partnership withBOKU, Inc., one of the world’s leaders in mobile payments. BOKU has developed direct mobile payments relationships with hundreds of game and applications developers, including the most popular ones in Facebook.BOKU’s Paymo service, together with Globe GCASH, now helps you virtual goods, services, and products from anywhere in the world, using only your mobile phone.

And here's what the Boku website had to say about it:

Today, we’re happy to announce that we’ve teamed up with Globe GCASH, a leading mobile operator in the Philippines, to create a model for mobile payments of virtual, and eventually, physical goods. Through this great partnership, both companies will extend their reach to a larger international community that we think will benefit from being able to seamlessly effect mobile commerce around the world.

From iMedia: Social Media & Intellectual Property RIghts

How to avoid getting sued over social media

By Anthony J. Biller

February 02, 2010

ARTICLE HIGHLIGHTS:

• Traditional intellectual property rights still apply to the internet and online forums
• Make sure your agreements give you the right to use material in a new form of distribution
• If your copyright is violated, put the offending party on notice

The online arena is still an emerging landscape for intellectual property (IP) where it is easy to misstep in trying to avoid IP landmines. Whether you are a small business looking for content to help get your website up and running or suddenly find an image or text you created on another company's site, it's possible you haven't taken the appropriate steps to protect yourself and prevent IP theft.

Marketers and online content creators often struggle to understand how traditional IP best practices apply to internet content. Major companies like Toyota and Skittles have recently come under fire for their usage of user-created media.

When Toyota launched a new microsite to promote the 4Runner SUV, the company did what others before had done: aggregated content from social networks to help promote the brand. This strategy didn't necessarily break the mold. After all, Skittles launched a similar website earlier this year with a much-publicized social media home page including Twitter feeds, comments from Facebook fans, and content from Flickr and YouTube.

Skittles ran into a problem with the inappropriate, and sometimes vulgar, content that appeared on the site, Toyota faced accusations of copyright infringement from photographers who had posted images on Flickr.

Social networks are free and flourish with user-generated content. The platform lends itself to a sharing environment, where copyrights and trademarks often aren't considered. However, as these sites become increasingly popular venues for marketing, a basic understanding of how IP law applies to online property will help you avoid finding yourself on either side of a dispute.

Here are a few simple steps to prevent an online intellectual property theft accusation:

1. Traditional intellectual property rights still apply to the internet and online forums.
There is a misconception in some quarters that if content appears online, particularly in a social forum or blog, it's public domain material. That's false.

An author of a statement and a trademark owner still control the rights to their copyrights and brands when they place their materials on the internet. One common element for online content is that the forum host typically posts a policy that notifies contributors that by placing content on the host website, the poster is granting the host a license to use and republish that content. While such policies might provide a valid license for the website host to republish material actually owned by its posters, it provides no license or rights to third parties visiting such websites.

2. Register your IP and know the scope of your licenses.
These are fundamental prerequisites to IP management. Copyrights protect expressions, which include a wide range of on- and offline content including writings, drawings, songs, pictures and movies. Trademarks protect identity. Registering your copyrights and trademarks enhances your rights, provides significant leverage in enforcing those rights and, in the case of trademarks, provides constructive notice nationwide of your rights.

Also, if you obtain permission to use material offline, you can't assume that it's fine for you to post or distribute that material electronically. You need to verify that the preexisting license included the right to use the material in the new form of distribution.

3. Prominently display your IP protection.
Many people copy online content out of ignorance. To help prevent this, post your notice of copyright in near proximity to your works. The notice should state the year the work was completed, the legal name of the entity/person that owns the work, and the copyright symbol.

The following is a standard format: ©2009 by Coats and Bennett, PLLC. A copyright footer on each page is not highly effective for giving notice that particular works on the page are copyright protected. If you operate a high-content site, it's a good idea to dedicate a page to "copyright information" where you state your position on other people using your content.

4. Understand who really owns the content you use.
Even if you incorporate properly licensed art in your brand's online presence, look behind the license. While you may have licensed the right to use an image from a particular author, does the image contain elements that the author has no rights to license for advertising?

For example, if you license a photograph of a person driving a sports car for use in an advertisement, you are most likely only licensing the copyright in that picture. If the person or car is identifiable, has the person in the picture and the product owner licensed or otherwise agreed to the use of their images in your advertisement? Such embedded images raise trademark and publicity rights, beyond the overall copyright.

Also, explore if agreements that were in place before you put the content online give the right to use the material in a new form of distribution.

5. Take action.
If your copyright is violated, put the offending party on notice that they must immediately take down the image or text, or properly attribute credit and pay your licensing fee. Because there is a third party involved, you can also put the ISP and web host on notice that the website is violating your rights. If you receive notice that you are violating a copyright, react quickly. An uninformed mistake can typically be rectified, but you may face serious consequences if you ignore fair warning.

6. Don't confuse copyright infringement and plagiarism.
Copyright infringement occurs when someone makes an unauthorized copy of someone else's expression, or makes an unauthorized derivative that is substantially similar to the original works (when comparing the similarities). Plagiarism is passing off someone else's ideas or thoughts as your own. While it may get you expelled from some schools and professions, plagiarism itself is not illegal. Plagiarism might also involve copyright infringement, but not typically.

Plagiarism is avoided by giving proper attribution to others when you use and repeat their thoughts and ideas. Attribution avoids the charge of plagiarism, it is not, however, a defense or excuse for copyright infringement.

Conclusion
Managing copyrights and trademarks online typically involves applying traditional best practices and law to this new medium. Expanding to new forums like online sites can help grow your brand and connect with consumers, but also means that you have to steer clear of IP infringement and protect your content.

The old adage "if it looks too good to be true, it is" applies more than ever to online content. It is easy to copy and paste content onto your site or post it online without a copyright. However, this practice leaves open the possibility of an ensuing legal battle that could be far more costly and time-consuming than following best practices from the onset.

The potential consequences for infringing someone else's copyrights and/or trademarks include loss of your profits associated with the conduct, the other party's damages, enhanced damages, attorneys fees, and a permanent injunction prohibiting further publication, as well as corrective advertising explaining the past infringement. Under certain circumstances, a party can be liable for up to $150,000 in statutory damages for each instance of willful copyright infringement.

The IP rights landmines are real, but with proper attention and knowledge, they can be avoided.

Anthony J. Biller, Esq., is a member of Coats and Bennett and leads the firm's litigation practice.

Windows Phone 7 Series: Feature Video

Microsoft jumps into the touch phone bandwagon with their version of mobile software-hardware optimization: the new Windows Phone 7 Series.

Yes, we all know Apple was the first to set the standard with the iPhone; Google then comes up with the Nexus One running on their open-source Android platform. How well do you think the Windows Phone fare up?

Check out this video on YouTube showing the phone's features, with special note to a new approach to navigation: (If you don't see the video link, go instead to: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IOTrqlz4jo )