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Facebook Email Targeting & CRM Retargeting: Important New Tools for Marketers

1 Oct

Email marketing is a delicate art. In today’s world, fewer than 1/5 of recipients will open a commercial email message. For every 10 people who click on an email link, one person permanently opts out. While new subscribers are likely to open and click, results fall-off by 65% or more within just 4 months of email list subscription.

For most marketing organizations, email lists are full of high-potential contacts who no longer wish to receive email. In B2B, this is particularly an issue in businesses with  long sales cycles and high levels of lifetime customer value. While a prospect may be interested in a product or solution, they may not want to receive any commercial email.

A few weeks ago, Facebook rolled out a new advertising feature that allows marketers to display ads to targeted recipients selected via email address, phone number, or Facebook user ID. The new feature allows a self-service advertiser to upload an encrypted list of 20 or more contacts with the ad they want to show. Facebook will automatically target the supplied ad to the specified contacts.

This type of marketing, often referred to as CRM retargeting, allows advertisers to invest in building awareness or driving conversion within a known group of contacts. A large IT provider, for example, could drive an online campaign targeting known CIO’s who arbitrate buying decisions for their firms. A telecom company could market new devices to customers on expired contracts. Concert promoters can promote shows to people who have purchased tickets in the past. And all of this can be done using a prospect’s email address or phone number but without sending an email.

For B2B marketers focused on nurture marketing or content marketing, CRM retargeting enables marketers to reach prospects with relevant messages and content through an additional channel. It makes is possible to invest in advertising specifically targeting people who would prefer to not receive email. For companies with very large accounts, it would be possible to build account-targeted campaigns that deliver a unique message to representatives of a specific company. For companies looking to build a Facebook follower base, the new model allows them to promote their brands directly to a list of customers or fans who are most likely to engage online.

While others have attempted to use email as a filtering method for display advertising, two things makes Facebook’s new service unique: a billion member reach and a collection of multiple address for many of their members. For people with multiple addresses — work, home, school — Facebook is likely to have a match for whatever address might be in your CRM system.

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SMS: The Only Effective Digital Communication Channel?

26 Jul

In 2012, we’re living in an era of ignorable information.

According to a study by Mogreet, 88% of emails are never opened, 84% of Facebook news feed items aren’t viewed, and 71% of tweets are ignored. But there is one digital communication channel that almost always gets attention: SMS. An amazing 98% of SMS and MMS messages are opened and read by recipients.

Here are some other interesting statistics on SMS:

– There are 234 million mobile device users in the U.S. with access to SMS capabilities vs. 161 million Facebook users, 28 million Google+ users, and 18.7 million Pinterest users.

– 174 million Americans text daily. That’s 74% of people with mobile devices. In comparison, 91 million people use Facebook daily (57% of users) and just 2.8 million use Pinterest daily (15% of users).

– Every day, 6.4 billion text messages are sent in the U.S. During the same period of time, 3.2B Facebook “Likes” are awarded and 300M new Facebook photos are uploaded.

– While 58% of users login to Facebook daily and 57% of people check email fewer than 4 times per day, mobile phone users look at their phone an incredible average of 150 times per day. That’s roughly every 7 minutes during waking hours.

For marketers, the prominence of SMS shouldn’t be ignored. While the rules for sending SMS are very different than for other communication channels, SMS and other phone application notification methods are an increasingly important communication channel. While these statistics focus on SMS messages, other application-specific notifications are equally as effective at delivering messages and updates to mobile phone users.

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Do Great Consumer Products Market Themselves?

18 Jul

Spotify. Dropbox. Foursquare. Instagram. Facebook. Flipboard. Pinterest. Twitter.

Everyone knows these insanely popular companies even though they’ve invested almost nothing in advertising. In each case, they built a strong brand by building a great product or service and letting their customers spread the word.

With their success, a new generation of entrepreneurs are rethinking their approach to marketing. It’s increasingly common to hear luminaries talk about marketing as a weakness: the notion that only weak products require marketing.

So, is it true? Do great consumer products market themselves?

Here are a few thoughts:

  • Marketing isn’t advertising: Too often, I hear smart people talk about marketing as if it is only advertising. Advertising is just one way to build a business. There is so much more to marketing: product management, design of referral programs, visual identity, messaging, competitive analysis, collection of customer feedback and ideas, choosing new markets and segments to target, picking company / product / service names, building awareness through savvy PR and promotion, etc. While companies with great products may not need advertising, marketing often plays an important role in the rapid growth of product awareness and usage.
  • Very few products sell themselves: What almost all of the companies featured at the beginning of this post have in common is that they are free Internet services that appeal to a mass market population. While it takes real work to get people to try a free site, application, or service, the barriers to broad adoption are much lower. Products that almost never sell themselves include things that cost money, enterprise products of all types, and niche products that require more work to find first-time buyers and where it is harder to build the powerful cyclone of hype that benefitted almost all of the companies listed above.
  • Media attention matters: There are many companies that have built great products and still remained obscure. What makes the companies featured here special is that they have benefitted enormously from media attention. They all drove frenzied levels of media hype before they even had revenue. While some of this stems from great products and strong growth, much of it comes from thoughtful media strategy, direct press engagement, and charismatic founders who are trained to tell a powerful story.

 

So, if you have the right kind of great free product, what can marketing do to drive such insane levels of adoption?

Here are a few general principles for marketing a great consumer product:

  • Make sure the consumer experience is awesome: Create mechanisms to understand the user experience, to get constant feedback, and to solicit ideas so that the product keeps getting better and better.
  • Make sure your message is clear: Make sure that the messages about your company, your product or service, the problems that you solve, and the experience of being a customer are clear, consistent, and compelling. Make sure that everyone in your company can tell the same great story.
  • Keep customers coming back for more: Create the right experience for every customer to drive engagement, up sell to paid versions (if that is your model), and minimize churn and abandonment. Measure all of these things and look at the impact of every change on the metrics that matter.

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Facial Recognition Goes Mainstream: Marketing Implications Yet to Come

29 May

First there was Minority Report and a future where digital billboards would recognize people and present overly personal advertising. Then the technology became real as smart digital signage learned to recognize gender and facial expressions of passers-by.

Now, face.com is making a mainstream business out of facial recognition of uploaded photography and TechCrunch reports that “Face.com’s CEO has shrugged off rumors that it is being acquired by Facebook for up to $100 million when we asked. But the addition of its facial recognition tech to Facebook’s mobile apps could make sure friend tagging continues as the social network’s user base shifts away from desktops.”

While it’s hard to know what will happen with the current generation of facial recognition technology, a future of facial recognition may not be that far off. Whether used for recognizing repeat customers in a retail store or identifying marketable characteristics in an out of home advertising environment or online, the face may be the next frontier of marketing.

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