SUBSCRIBERS RULE!

The Why and How of SUBSCRIBERS, FANS & FOLLOWERS

ExactTarget launched the “Digital Morning,” the first in a series of six research briefs from our SUBSCRIBERS, FANS & FOLLOWERS project.

This is probably the most aggressive research project I have ever been involved in. It’s also the most exciting. The approach we employed from the start reflects our Subscribers Rule! philosophy—namely that the customer comes first. The key to making your customers happy is to understand what motivates them to do what they do. It’s not enough to know simply WHAT they do, we need to understand WHY.

Most research of this kind starts and ends with a survey. In this case, researchers (such as myself) decide which questions we should ask. We decide what is important. This has the unintended consequence of limiting what we can learn. The questions we ask are the greatest limitation of our knowledge. This project represents an attempt to break free of those limits.

SUBSCRIBERS, FANS & FOLLOWERS started with a simple question, “What are the differences in how consumers use email, Facebook, and Twitter to interact with brands?”

We started with interviews and focus groups. These were conducted in March 2010. We asked why people use email? Why they use Facebook? Why Twitter? What is good about each tool? What are the problems with each tool? We asked how consumers want to interact with brands. What are the differences in how they perceive brands through email, Facebook, and Twitter? Every part of this project stems from those core questions and the detailed and, often, heartfelt responses we heard. These interviews and focus groups gave us more than 400 pages of qualitative content that would inform our survey.

The goal of the survey was simply to quantify the sentiments we heard in the focus groups. There were people who said their email usage dropped sharply as they started using Facebook and Twitter. Others said their email use went up since they had reconnected with old friends. The survey helped us put numbers to these experiences.

Digital Morning addresses a seemingly simple question, “Where’s the first place you go online when you wake up?” As it turns out, this tells us a lot about how people approach the Internet in general. The majority starts their day with email (58%), followed by Search (20%) and Facebook (11%). ‘Email-first’ consumers tend to be more interested in consuming information online. Yes, they participate in social media. They use Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, write blogs, upload pictures, etc. but they use these tools differently than people who start their day on Facebook. Facebook-first people are more, well, social in their approach to the Internet. The Internet to them is about interaction first and consuming information second.

Check out the report for yourself to get this first glimpse and stay tuned ‘cause we are just getting started!

Subscribers Speak: “How would you like marketers to communicate with you?”

In July, we sent a group of 12 ExactTarget to the streets of cities around the midwest to ask them how they wanted marketers to communicate with them. Here’s a video showing some of what we heard:

Interested in more on this topic? Check out the Marketing Preferences Research Bundle featuring Customer Knowledge is Marketer Power, a commissioned study on marketers approach to mulitchannel marketing conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of ExactTarget, and the 2009 Channel Preferences Study, ExactTarget’s proprietary study on the communication preferences of subscribers.

Jaffe on Twitter “Shiny Object Syndrome”

I’ve been woefully remiss in posting to SR! lately, but the absence hasn’t been so much due to a lack of things to say as it has been a desire for time to think.

Too often in today’s social media saturated world, the multitude of outlets at our disposal — IM, blogs, Facebook, Twitter, etc. — call upon interactive marketers to talk and opine constantly rather than listen and process thoughtfully.  This is problematic because interactive marketing demands strategy, and strategy demands more than knee-jerk emotionality.  It demands experience, analysis, and time to develop great ideas into beneficial actions.

With that in mind, I was pleased to see that Joseph Jaffe focused this week’s edition of JJTV on why the collective hysteria about Twitter might not be a good thing for interactive marketers.  Twitter is, after all, but one tactic among the myriad of internet-based marketing tools that can help companies connect with customers.

Much like email, Twitter’s value depends on the relevance and attentiveness of your followers (i.e., subscribers).  However, as Joseph points out, because of the temporal nature of Twitter posts, he’d be surprised if his followers had read more than 10% of his total tweets.

If that’s the case, Joseph wonders, aren’t we all putting a disproportionate amount of emphasis on Twitter’s importance — especially when most of us have yet to fully optimize the performance of channels such as email and search?

Here are Joseph’s thoughts — feel free to share yours via the comments link above and to the right.

The Twouble with Twitters

Current TV’s “SuperNews!” just did the definitive animated send up of the Twitter-sphere.

Yes, there are two sides to every story.  But this side is the funniest and the most likely to bring a smile to my SR! blogging co-hort’s face.

And yes, Morgan Stewart, this one’s for you.  Enjoy!

The Twouble with Twitters

The Spam Logic of @GuyKawasaki

Guy Kawasaki. Twitter Evangelist or Social Media Spammer?

As I write this, I am perhaps as disturbed as I have ever been as an interactive marketer thanks to Guy Kawasaki’s keynote at Search Engine Strategies NYC.  If you’re not familiar with Guy, give his Wikipedia bio a quick read for background.

Let me begin by saying that Guy is always an engaging speaker–and for the speaking fee he commands, he should be.  It is amazing what he has accomplished at Apple, through his various ventures (including Alltop), and on Twitter (building 91K+ followers is no small feat).  However, today’s address to the SES NYC (#sesnyc) attendees was less of a keynote than it was a classroom session on how to spam a new channel — Twitter.  My favorite, oft-recycled Guy quote trotted out yet again today:

“If I do it, it’s clever marketing. If it’s done to me, it’s spam.”

I don’t care if we’re talking email, search marketing or social media — such self-serving logic is what has clogged our inboxes with junk mail, filled the Google results with irrelevant MFA (Made for Adwords) sites, and frankly, what will soon cause Twitter to collapse under its own weight.

Guy can get away with such statements because he is an extremely likeable (ahem) guy.  But the reality is that the strategy that he is espousing to gain Twitter dominance is nearly identical to that of a common email spammer or black hat SEO — the ends justify the means.  His use of services that search Twitter for relevant phrases and then pimp (”Twimp”?) Alltop’s content in direct replies is spam, plain and simple.  The recipient didn’t ask for the content and yes, while a small percentage of recipients may appreciate the Alltop link, the vast majority find it to be noise.

Isn’t that the very definition of spam or are we too blinded by the social media buzz to get that?

Guy seems unphased because his strategy has propelled him to a level of Twitter celebrity the likes of which few know (which makes his claim that there are no A-listers on Twitter pretty laughable).  But what if EVERYONE followed his advice?  What if EVERYONE auto-followed, bot-tweeted, and republished tweets through 3rd party accounts?

The answer is that Twitter will become a calamitous cacophony of noise — and the noise-to-signal ratio would genuinuely threaten its usefulness as a mass communication, one-to-one communication or search tool.  Just ask Google’s search spam guru Matt Cutts (@mattcutts) . The black hat marketers will find & exploit Twitter’s every crack & cranny, and Guy Kawasaki is giving them a roadmap to do so.

At the end of the day, Guy is right.  Subscribers do rule even on Twitter.  You and I have the right to follow or unfollow anyone we want.  After today’s session, I’ve decided to unfollow @guykawasaki because frankly, his is not the type of marketing philosophy that I want to support — let alone follow.

Inbox Insanity: The Future of Email

After three weeks on the road at conferences (OMS and eec) and speaking engagements (MIMA), it’s good to be back home — and back behind the SR! blog machine.  All the travel has provided ample fuel for thought which I hope to share at least somewhat coherently here one the pages of SUBSCRIBERS RULE!.

Today, I want to start by sharing the deck from my Wednesday morning presentation to MIMA.  I don’t know what they put in the water up there in Minnesota, but it makes for an amazingly interactive crowd for 8:00AM in the morning.  Seriously — if your regional interactive marketing association is looking for inspiration, look no further than MIMA.  They have built something special up there.

But I digress…MIMA was kind enough to invite me to do a presentation called, “Inbox Insanity: The Future of Email.”  For longtime readers of SR!, you’ll recognize the title as being partly drawn from a post I wrote back in October 2008 called “Inbox Insanity or Why 23 May Be Enough.”

The thesis of the presentation is pretty simple: the future of marketing is the future of email marketing.  I base this on the following observations:

• Social media is not new.
• Every communication advance over the past 15 million years yielded a new “social” media.
• Email is a social media — indeed, it is the most utilized social media in the world.
• The social media explosion has led to inbox fragmentation.
• As a result, I have over 23 inboxes that I check with varying regularity (email, VM, FB, Twitter, etc.).
• This inbox explosion is not sustainable because time is a precious resource.
• Therefore, consolidation of multimedia messaging into a single dashboard is quite likely.
• In a way, such”dashboards” already exist — just look at the iPhone or Yahoo’s  beta Social Inbox where email, VM, SMS, IM, and social updates commingle.
• The social inbox gives consumers more control and marketers less control (if they ever had it).
• Accordingly, marketing communications increasingly exist by consumer invitation.
• And all such invitations are easily revoked.
• As a result, all marketing is increasingly going to be governed by the same consumer attitude that surrounds email marketing today — namely, if you send something irrelevant, unrequested or untimely, you will be considered a spammer.
• Therefore, all marketers would be wise to embrace the SR! philosophy regardless of the medium in which they work.

For an outside perspective on my presentation, check out Interactive Snack’s overview of the session.

While I probably raised more questions than I answered, I think that’s probably a good thing.  We all need to distrust anyone who says they have the answers right now.  We don’t live in a period of answers — we live in a time of creative destruction, rapid evolution, and downright confusion.

Through it all, however, there is one thing of which I am sure.  Making your marketing communications more relevant, timely, and personal — regardless of medium — can only improve your results.

Thanks again to the great folks I met up in Minneapolis.  I hope to be back soon with more things to ponder (and yes, perhaps a few answers too!).

Cheap Advertising that beats Super Bowl Commercials

YouTube’s Ad Blitz allowed Tubers to vote on their favorite Super Bowl ads. This “Free Doritos” commercial took top place in the voting, it also happens to be the most watched 2009 Super Bowl commercial on hulu.com. The most interesting thing is that the commercial was not produced by an agency, it was the winner of Doritos’ consumer-generated ad contest. According to AdAge, the commercial only cost $2,000 to make, but Doritos will be shelling out $1 million to brothers Joe and Dave Herbert (who BTW happen to be from ExactTarget’s home state of Indiana).

At $3 millon for a 30 second spot to reach 98 million consumers, I calculate this to be about $40 CPM for ad impressions. Truthfully, they have continued to get milage out of the ad on the internet, so we can bring that down a bit… call it $30 CPM.

Looking at the cost of impressions on YouTube, this “ad” for Charlotte radio station 96.1 The BEAT takes the cake for cheap advertising. The cost, a leotard, a webcam, and a little dignity (okay, a lot of dignity–but this is a radio station intern, what did he expect?). I’ll go with the conservative estimate and throw the $150 webcam into the equation. Add $50 for the outfit and you come to less than $0.09 per 1,000 views.

Let this serve as encouragement as we think about how to grab the attention of our audiences on a mass scale. Clearly, the people at The BEAT know their audience. In this emerging landscape, anyone can give big brand marketers a run for their money!

MySpace Entering the Social Inbox Fray?

MySpace webmail on the horizon?

TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington reported last week that MySpace has been building a new webmail offering on the down-low for the past several months.

According to the article:

The first hint of the new service was a reassignment of some MySpace employee email addresses to [name]@myspace-inc.com, which people have noticed. This is a sign that they are preparing to assign MySpace.com email addresses to users, which is exactly how Yahoo handled the transition when they launched Yahoo Mail in 1997 - Yahoo employees moved to yahoo-inc.com email addresses. We’ve subsequently confirmed that MySpace is currently building a webmail product.

If and when MySpace enters the webmail fray, it will instantly become the web’s third largest webmail provider at 125M users, trailing only Microsoft’s Hotmail (284M users) and Yahoo (277M users).  Gmail, however, will have something to say about that as it currently claims 118M users and is growing faster than any other major webmail provider.

What this means for email marketers remains to be seen; however, it is yet one more bit of evidence that the social inbox arms race is on.  Can an open Facebook webmail client be far behind?  Stay tuned.

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Social Inbox Concept

Fear Not, Brave Email Marketers!

In the course of my career, I’ve come to realize that email marketers carry a disproportional amount of FUD (fear, uncertainty & doubt) compared to marketers in other disciplines.

I’m no psychoanalyst, but I’m guessing it’s due to the fact that email marketers exist at the whim of the ISPs and the myriad of ways in which they render, filter, and block emails.  I also suspect that despite the medium’s unassailable ROI, we all have a little bit of a complex because the cost-effective nature of email means that we command less of the marketing budget (and therefore, in-house respect) than our counterparts who wield large advertising budgets.

The FUD cloud that hangs over email marketing becomes all the more evident when you stand us side-by-side with the social media crowd.  Talk about extroverted!  Those folks love to talk, link, share, and pontificate — and they do so despite the fact that social media is struggling itself to command more of the overall marketing budget.  My colleague Morgan Stewart summed it up perfectly in his article for MediaPost’s Email Insider this week when he stated:

Social media folks understand authentic interactions with customers, they get customer relationships, they just haven’t figured out how to make money! Contrarily, email marketers know how to make money, but too many of us consider a deliverable email address a “relationship.” Let’s face it, we are socially retarded.

If only we could create that X-Filesque alien/human hybrid — the best of the email marketer and the social media guru — we might have an unstoppable force in the marketing department.

Well, guess what.  It’s happening.  As I discussed earlier this week, thanks to Yahoo, Microsoft, Gmail, and even AOL’s Bebo, 2009 stands a good chance to be the year that delviers us a viable social inbox — a space that brings all of our email and social interactions together in one place.

With email and social merged for consumers, email marketers and social media gurus will have no choice but to collaborate.

While this sounds wonderful to some, email marketers will have to fight off their FUD instincts.  It’s easy to see how social inbox features (such as the “From Connections” view in Yahoo’s social inbox beta) will strike fear in the hearts of email marketers who seek to sell rather than serve subscribers.

My firm belief, however, is that the social inbox holds great promise for email marketers.  Here’s why:

1. It’s an Inbox. Who in the online marketing world understand the inbox better than email marketers?  Our understanding and respect for the inbox environment should prove to be a tremendous asset as we seek to increase consumer engagement and response no matter the medium.
2. More integration means more use. The more communication tools that the social inbox can integrate into a single dashboard (email, IM, SMS, Twitter, social networks, etc.), the more consumers will remain in the inbox, and the more responsive they will become to relevant, timely messaging of all types.
3. Email’s strengths will shine. Email supports images, attachments, archiving, search, multiple recipients, and messages more than 140 characters.  The social networks depend on email to drive engagement, send account notices, and alert you as to new friends and followers.  In the social inbox, email’s strengths will shine as part of the expanded suite of communication tools that users have at their disposal.
4. Relationships will rule. The social inbox will reinforce the importance of relationships.  As a result, companies who take the time to understand and serve their email subscribers needs will be rewarded with above average response and an opportunity to extend those relationships into the social media (or vice versa).

While the social inbox will bring change, it will also bring opportunities to those who remain focused on the “four rights” — sending the right message, to the right person, at the right time, through the right medium.  So, set aside the FUD fellow email marketers, and focus on the fundamentals.  Subscribers will still reign supreme as the year of the social inbox unfolds.

The Beta “From Connections” View & You

Having dubbed 2009 “The Year of the Social Inbox” yesterday, I’d like to spend some time this week digging into what that might mean for reputable email marketers — i.e., those who follow the SUBSCRIBERS RULE! philosophy.

Let me begin with a simple acknowledgment.  The features of the social inbox will undoubtedly vary greatly by provider.  For all the differences of the soon-to-be-evolved Yahoo Mail, Microsoft Live Hotmail and Google Gmail, they will also share the goal of aggregating online communications in a manner that puts the consumer in charge (not marketers).

With this in mind, I’d like to take a look at the potential ramifications of a very simple feature found in the limited beta of Yahoo’s Social Inbox.  The feature, the “From Connections” mail view, is described in this video, and you can see the feature in the screenshots below:

"All" Email View in Yahoo's Social Inbox Beta

"From Connections" Email View in Yahoo's Social Inbox Beta

In the top, “All” default view, the inbox is unchanged from its current state.  The user sees all of their messages including permission-based emails from the New York Times, The Cheesecake Factory, Yahoo, and Chili’s.

In the bottom, “From Connections” optional view, however, the user sees only those emails from people with whom they have “connected” via Yahoo’s connection process.  According to this video, your connections need not be Yahoo users, just people who have confirmed your connection.

As Yahoo proclaims in the image callout above, it envisions that the “From Connections” tab will be used to “cut through the clutter.”  With one click, users can see all their emails from connected friends.

The flip side, of course, is that with that one click, the “All” view is hidden, and so too are all of the emails in there whether they are transactional, permssion-based or even personal inquiries from people outside of the users “Connections.”  For those keeping score at home, that’s what Yahoo means by “clutter.”

Putting on my consumer hat, I think I’ll love this feature.  Just as on Facebook, I decide who are my Friends/Connections, and that enables their messages to get preferential treatment in my inbox.

Putting on my marketing hat, the “From Connections” email view in Yahoo’s beta raises the spectre of a new round of “Add to Address Book” mania.  I can see the email headers now — “Add Us to Your Connections,” “Add Us as a Friend,” “Seriously, add us — we’re cool,” etc.

The issue here, however, is a bit different.  The “Add to Address Book” effort was largely a creature to ensure email deliverability before the evolution of sender verification.

The potential “From Connections” view issue is one of visibility and response, not deliverability.  Your message still gets delivered — but unless you’re a “Connection” your message will only appear in the “All” view of the email inbox.  Whether this makes the “All” view a new form of email purgatory akin to the Junk Mail folder — only time will tell.

One thing is for sure, however — it has never been more clear that email marketers have a stake in the world of social media.  So if you’ve been putting off dabbling in Facebook and tweeting on Twitter, better make a quick resolution to do so in 2009.  The knowledge you gain may help you navigate the new twists and turns of the social email inboxes to come.

Tune in tomrorow as I’ll make the case that the social inbox is the best thing to happen to email in a long time (even with the “From Connections” view).

The Year of the Social Inbox

With the clean slate of 2009 upon us, an endless parade of pundits, publications, and politicians are dusting off their crystal balls in hopes of proclaiming what 2009 will be “the year of.”  Today alone, I’ve read that 2009 will be the year of the subject line, the “naycation,” thoughtful consumerism, and the ox.

Whatever 2009 will be, it will, for the most part, be unexpected.  Taking this into consideration, I am prepared to make my prediction:

Microsoft and Yahoo will help make 2009 the “Year of the Social Inbox.”

After the failed merger of these Internet titans in 2008, I can understand fully if my prediction is met with skepticism.  Each company, however, has been working hard behind the scenes to evolve their respective email inbox offerings in such a way that they fuse the best parts of the email inbox with the immediacy, control, and serendipity of social networking applications like Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, and YouTube. If they succeed, they bring their millions of “old school” Internet users into the social media mix in new and extremely interesting ways.

According to a recent article in Ars Technica (”Yahoo begins rolling out social, extensible e-mail inbox“),  Yahoo’s social inbox is already in limited beta and its features include:

• “My Connections” — Akin to friends on Facebook or people in your Address book, these folks get top placement within the Yahoo Social Inbox main page
• “Updates from My Connections” — Akin to FriendFeed, this sidebar aggregates updates from your Connections across a number of social media applications like Twitter, Flickr, and YouTube.
• A new Yahoo home page that eschews banner ads in favor of your more personalized updates from your Connections

I plan to explore what “The Year of the Social Inbox” could mean for email marketers all of this week.  As homework for tomorrow’s post, be sure to watch the following videos from Yahoo:

• Yahoo Mail: Understanding the New Smarter Inbox in Yahoo Mail
• Yahoo Mail: Getting to Know Your Smarter Inbox

In so doing, keep an eye out for the “From Connections” option within the inbox.  Should email marketers be concerned?  More tomorrow…

The Yahoo Social Inbox - In Limited Beta Now

When It Snows in Houston…

I had the good fortune of attending MediaPost’s Email Insider Summit this week in Park City and will be sharing some observations from the event in the coming days.  At the moment, however, I have a different story to share — and bear with me, it will have a lesson for email marketers.

He's Mr. Snow Miser -- and he owes me six hours of my life back!

For those who follow my personal Twitter feed (@jkrohrs), you may have seen that I had quite the return trip from Utah yesterday.  After an on-time, uneventful flight from Salt Lake City to Houston, I was pleased to see that my connecting flight from Houston to Cleveland was on schedule despite the crazy fact that it was snowing in Houston.

Yup. Snow in Houston.  Last time that happened?  December 24, 2004.

With a snowfall total around an inch, I was optimistic that the impact on my connecting flight would be minimal.  When we boarded early, I was even more optimistic.  When they closed the door and the seat next to me remained empty, I was ecstatic and embraced my newfound elbow room.

As it turns out, I would need the room because I remained in that grounded plane in Houston for the next six hours.  The pilot spoke to us a total of six times during that period, each time apologizing for the delay and chalking it up to a long queue of planes waiting to get de-iced.

During those six hours, all the passengers in coach were offered was water.  That’s it, water and six announcements from the pilot.  When we finally got to the de-icing crew, they ran out of solution after only de-icing half of our plane.   When the pilot shared that factoid, I thought for sure it would trigger a full-on passenger revolt.

When I did finally arrive in snow-free Cleveland this morning — at 5:00AM — I was still on tilt about the experience and thought about what the crew could have done differently to make the experience less frustrating.

They could have offered food.  They could have offered beverage service.  They could have advocated more forcefully to the tower that we be allowed to return to the gate without losing our place in the de-icing line.

Yes, all of those things would have helped, but the number one thing they could have done was COMMUNICATE BETTER.  Hourly announcements are simply insufficient to diffuse the growing frustration when you’re stuck on the tarmac in a sardine can.

And with that realization, it hit me.  There are a lot of companies that are figuratively “stuck on the tarmac” due to our uncertain economy.  On board are customers who aren’t sure when (or if) the company is going to get back up off the ground.  Instead of treating these critical audiences like adults who can handle truth and uncertainty, the “pilots” of these companies are clamming up — and in return, the customers worries and frustrations are being heightened.

Case in point.  Two of the banks with whom I have accounts have been the subject of headline-grabbing takeovers in the past month.  Despite the fact that this is BIG NEWS, I have yet to receive so much as an email from either bank explaining to me what this situation means to me and whether my accounts are safe.

Email should be on the front lines of crisis management for any company.  Your email subscribers are like the passengers on my plane — they have opted-in to be there, and they are hungry for information.  Instead of letting their imaginations run wild and frustrations build, companies would be wise to OVER communicate in this economic climate.  Be candid, clear, and honest.  Admit that you don’t know what you don’t know — but you’ll be certain to let your email subscribers know when you do.

Email subscribers are the elite frequent flyers of your marketing ecosystem.  They are your best customers, and it’s high time that troubled companies pick up the email microphone to do more than share the latest marketing offer.  They need to use that microphone to let us know about the weather outside and their plans to get back into the air.

We frequent flyers are hearty souls, after all.  We can handle the truth.