Multichannel Marketers See ROI Measurement as Top Challenge
As highlighted recently in a MediaPost Real-Time Daily post, quantifying and optimizing ROI across channels is a top challenge for today’s marketing execs. Gone are the days when direct marketers could afford siloed channel strategies, and AccuList USA’s multichannel campaign services, supporting integrated solutions across channels, are just one way we have evolved to meet demand.
The Challenge of Multichannel ROI
Citing a new global survey conducted by the programmatic marketing and analytics firm DataXu, the Real-Time Daily article notes that U.S. senior marketers now say the single greatest challenge in their jobs is developing an accurate way to quantify ROI across the variety of channels. Another 37% of U.S. marketers say their biggest challenge is developing an efficient marketing mix across channels to drive ROI. The U.S. marketers are not alone, however; difficulty tracking the success of a marketing campaign into metrics was cited by one-third of global marketers as the largest threat to the success of their teams.
Higher Bar for Digital Skills and Data Literacy
In meeting multichannel challenges, marketers also feel the bar for technical skills is set higher than ever before because of expanding digital technologies and proliferating data sources. So it’s no surprise that 78% of U.S. marketers point to understanding marketing technologies as a skill critical to their mission, and 72% think grasping digital media is crucial to success. Overall, 65% also say it is necessary to be data literate.
Testing Into the Right Channel Mix
Testing to optimize marketing mix ROI is an approach that some marketers are now taking, per the article, including survey author DataXu. These marketing teams are randomizing deployment of existing budgets across various channels and then measuring business outcomes to pinpoint where a campaign is most successful, transforming a media plan into a controlled experiment. “This methodology identifies the causal link between media investments and business outcomes — sales or brick-and-mortar foot traffic,” Gar Smyth, VP of marketing at DataXu, explained to Real-Time Daily.
For the article and its statistics, go to http://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/280801/marketers-biggest-challenge-is-quantifying-roi.html
Study Debunks Marketing Myths About Millennials
Given that millennials love digital technology, does that mean they prefer digital marketing? Not according to a recent Target Marketing magazine article debunking several marketing myths about millennial customers, including the notion that digital advertising is the most effective way to reach those born between 1980 and 2000. Author Linda Antos, market development analyst at commercial printer Quad/Graphics, cites recent Quad/Graphics research to show that traditional print marketing–direct mail and catalogs–actually has greater power to move millennial buyers, a group forecast to spend $1.4 trillion annually by 2020. It’s certainly why AccuList USA continues to attract clients to its vetted mailing lists for consumer and business catalog marketing.
Millennials Don’t Ignore Print
The first myth Antos takes on is the belief that millennials ignore printed marketing. She cites an annual study by Quad/Graphics that tracks millennial shopping and media habits and preferences. It shows that 82% of millennials read direct mail and 54% look forward to receiving retail catalogs in the mail. Within 30 days of the survey, 49% reported taking print coupons to the store to shop and almost three in four used grocery retail inserts, higher than the average shopper.
Digital Engagement Isn’t Ad Engagement
Myth No. 2 involves assuming that millennials’ known addiction to daily digital interaction means they pay attention to digital advertising. The Quad/Graphics survey found that nearly half say they ignore e-mail and Internet ads, and 45% ignore mobile ads. By comparison, only 15% ignore direct mail ads. When it comes to millennial social networking, less than 10% say they made a purchase based on social media ads, and only 1% purchased from a social site.
Millennials Respond to Bargains
Another false generational stereotype is that millennials are less cost-conscious. In the Quad/Graphics millennials study, 49% said it was fun to see how much they could save with coupons, loyalty cards and discount offers, and 57% said they responded to “Buy One, Get One Free” offers in direct mail. More than half also responded to gift card and percent-off offers, and 52% said they switched from their regular brand to take advantage of a coupon offer.
Multichannel Efforts Pack More Punch
The surprise power of direct mail with millennials doesn’t diminish the need for digital marketing but does underscore the value of multichannel marketing. The Quad/Graphics study found, for example, that 37% of millennials did report accessing retailer websites to view a weekly ad, and 46% will read an e-mail if it is from their loyalty rewards program. Thus, combining direct mail with digital can leverage marketing power across channels, which is why AccuList USA recently developed its Digital2Direct product combining e-mail and Facebook targeting with direct mail.
For the complete article and more results of the Quad/Graphics research, read http://www.targetmarketingmag.com/article/marketing-to-millennials-3-myths-shattered/
How E-mail Response Can Survive the Spam Filter Gauntlet
For e-mail marketers to deliver those open-worthy, click-inspiring e-mail messages, they must pass through a gauntlet of spam filters determined to weed out irrelevant, unsolicited inbox clutter and scam. That’s why, as an e-mail list brokerage, AccuList USA works to not only vet the opt-in e-mail rental lists we recommend but also to insure success by advising on CAN-SPAM compliance, privacy policies, creative and deliverability issues. We’re glad to pass along a recent Target Marketing magazine article with some basic tactics that may help prevent spam filters from draining the response of your next e-mail campaign.
Do You Look Like Spam?
The first step to making sure your e-mail campaign doesn’t run afoul of spam filters is to understand the basics of U.S. anti-spam legislation (CAN-SPAM): no use of deceptive headers, sender names, reply-to addresses, or subject lines; provision, without exception, of an unsubscribe link that remains working for at least 30 days after sending; and inclusion of a physical address. ISPs use spam filters to try to net out potential e-mail offenders and reduce spam complaints. The filters scrutinize and score a range of e-mail elements, and prevent e-mails with high “spam” scores from reaching inboxes. The challenge for e-mailers is that different mail servers use different scoring algorithms, the algorithms are confidential, and filter criteria may periodically change.
Tactics to Get Past Spam Filters
Despite those challenges, Target Marketing article author Michael Lundberg suggests several ways for e-mails to avoid being netted out by spam filters. Since permission-based e-mail is an essential requirement, spam filters try to insure that the sender and recipient are acquainted; this is why personalization of the “to” field, sending from a verified domain, and asking recipients to add your e-mail address to approved contacts are all smart policies. Content counts in spam filter scoring, but the filter algorithms’ exact triggers in terms of specific text or images are unknown, so the best policy is to have a clear, engaging template sent to those who have opted in to receive e-mail, Lundberg advises. Sloppy code and extra tags can flag spam to filters, so use popular e-mail templates or work with an experienced e-mail designer. To avoid the risk of putting all your apples in one e-mail design basket, use A/B or multivariate testing to find the best combination of content and targeting for filter-proofed delivery and inbox engagement, suggests Lundberg. We would add that a high rate of undeliverables and bounces in an e-mail deployment also signals spam to ISPs, so make sure any e-mail list–house database or prospecting effort–meets industry standards in its permission policies and hygiene, which are priorities in AccuList USA rental recommendations.
For the complete article, go to http://www.targetmarketingmag.com/article/know-avoid-spam-filters/
