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Five Tips to Better Digital Customer Conversations

Use tips in Behavior-based Brand Interactions for True 1-to-1 Marketing

Todays changing marketplace increasingly gives consumers control over their brand relationships, including the terms of engagement. Emboldened and empowered by technology, consumers voice their preferences to you, the marketer. They tell you implicitly and explicitly -- where, when, what, and how often they are willing to engage with your brand. Perceptive marketers are listening to and capitalizing on what their customers and prospects are saying as well as to what theyre not saying, but doing. These marketers are combining off- and on-line real-time behavior information to produce a customer profile that is both higher in resolution and accuracy. This, in turn, leads to greater precision in 1-to-1 marketing communications and new approaches to executing and measuring the campaigns that present them to consumers. Marketers are moving away from transactionbased direct-to-consumer marketing campaign tactics (e.g., volume email blasts) to interactive ones that are more conversational and continuous. Many of the brand interactions occur via digital media, as they support a bi-directional flow of information. Its like marketing to a consumer audience that comprises hundreds of thousands of segments

i.e., segments of one. And, it is highly automated. If you intend to use conversational marketing tactics for richer, more mutually rewarding brand engagements with your customers, heres some interactive best practice tips you should know. Marketers recognize that following tips like these help mitigate risk while shortening time needed to develop their own interactive marketing competency. You will, too. Make sure your custoMers and prospects hear you eMail deliverability. Email bounce rates should be less than 2 percent. You probably already manage hard and soft bounces, the terms that categorize the SMTP reply codes your email service provider (ESP) gets from your consumers mail servers when they refuse to deliver a message. Thats right. Nothing bounced. The ISP refused to deliver the email. See if your ESP scans the refusal message text for key words that explain why. Some codes mean the ISP will never deliver the message (e.g., invalid user) or theres a temporary interruption but theyll keep trying (e.g., mailbox is full). Use the information to update your list and keep it clean, as bounces (i.e., the volume

of them) work against your brand and its associated email deliverability. And watch your bounce mix. More soft than hard bounces means youre getting more blocks. Make sure your custoMers and prospects know you and what you want theM to do. You can test this yourself, but studies consistently show higher email open rates are positively correlated to subject lines that are less than 50 characters and contain action words such as confirm, take, or reserve. In addition, youll find you can get higher open rates when you use words such as tips and guide, as your recipients are expecting resource materials that may be useful to them. Dont include your company or brand name in the Subject Line, as it already appears as the sender (i.e., From). Youll save precious Subject Line real estate for the call-to-action. See if you can get higher open rates than the industry average of 23% (2010 Email Marketing Benchmark Survey, MarketingSherpa). use descriptive inforMation to show you know theM as a person and behavioral data to target and version your coMMunications. Weve come a long way from age and income et al as factors in audience selection and creative versioning. Use descriptive demographic or selfreported information to influence your creative choices and/or message tone e.g., mom with young kids who likes vegetable gardening differs greatly from an empty nester with the same interest; a young single woman living in the city differs from the soccer mom, etc. Of course, you use behavioral data to create high quality audiences for push campaigns, and the data are usually aggregated, calculated, averaged, or modeled. Examples include RFM, Average Order Value (AOV), Elapsed Time Since Last Transaction, etc. Its time to get granular and real with behavioral data. Real-time, that is. Use your individual-level web analytic behavior data to drive variable content in your digital communications. And, capitalize on the varying value of

different behaviors, as they may warrant the use of different brand responses. Someone who put a blue sweater in her digital shopping cart may be closer to purchase than another who browsed sweaters on your ecommerce site. Combine the historical behavior of each (i.e., assess customer value) with real-time on-line behavior and send a site visit follow-up email with versioned copy and unique incentives. Youll increase conversion rates and drive incremental revenue without subsidizing a sale that might have happened anyway. You protect your margin - i.e., your ROI. And, youll be ahead of the competition according to a leading industry analyst report that cites only 1 in 5 use dynamic content today. use personalized Microsites for clarity and focus. Interactive marketing campaigns with click-throughs to personalized microsites, landing pages, have significantly higher response and conversion rates (i.e., 2X) than campaigns with a corporate site link. And, because they are more focused and contain key words, microsites increase inclusion rates for on-line searches. Make sure you have a default or nonpersonalized version to render for unknown visitors. And consider other ways to maximize their ability to combat consumer inertia and improve campaign performance: Use branded URLs, limit the use of Flash for instant page loads, and keep your microsite to a singleaction page. expand perforMance Metrics for actionable insights. Marketing conversations are intended to foster more meaningful brand engagements over the life of the consumer/brand relationship. As such, you need new to track and report new measures to demonstrate success. Use new dimensions of current measures like open and click-through rates (CTR) that may be good indicators of engagement. Add them up for each individual to create aggregate recency and frequency values that show each individuals degree of engagement. Once done, create quintile groups to rank customers high to low. And, because the absolute

values are a related to the individuals amount of opportunity (i.e., the number of times you presented them a chance to respond) you should create aggregate open and CTR percentage rates. Also, check your CTRs, and see if you have any short-visits that you shouldnt count. These are CTRs to a landing page visit of only a couple of seconds. Dont stop there, as render rates are a key factor affecting open rates. That is, image-blocked messages result in fewer opens, and most email services block images so its worth a look. This is a problem for brandminded marketers who focus more on the appearance or creative of the email rather than its adherence to direct marketing best practices or technologyinduced rendering issues. Use your site analytics service and leverage page tagging to monitor render rates. Take all five ideas or just a couple to get you started on developing an interactive campaign foundation that you can extend and expand over time with new ideas you source from marketing automation companies like Aprimo, industry analyst reports and research, or from the insights you gain from your own marketing tests and post-campaign results analyses. Marketing and its associated practices, processes, and enabling technologies will continue to change at a fast pace. And the consumers with whom you want to communicate will be increasingly mobile, exercising their right to pull marketing content for consumption. Use interactive digital conversations to show your marketing agility to meet the demands of todays marketplace, with the flexibility to adapt to future ones. Your customers will thank you with repeat business and brand loyalty.

about apriMo Aprimos integrated marketing software enables B2C and B2B marketers to successfully navigate the changing role of marketing by taking control of budget and spend, eliminating internal silos with streamlined workflows and executing innovative multi-channel campaigns to drive measureable ROI. Only through the use of Aprimos modular and on demand software, Aprimo Marketing Studio B2C and Aprimo Marketing Studio B2B, can marketers truly integrate marketing organizations, manage, deliver and track the right message targeted to the right audience over the right channel and translate Marketing efforts into measurable business impact and revenue. Hundreds of thousands of Marketers trust Aprimo to revolutionize their marketing including Bank of America, Honda, King Pharmaceutical, Pearson Education Ltd, Time Warner Cable-NY and Wal-Mart.

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