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!

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.

SUBSCRIBERS RULE! Philosophy Part 1: Love Thy Subscriber

With February, the month of love (pronounced “luv”) upon us, it strikes me as the perfect time for a quick refresher on why marketers should love their subscribers.

Love Thy Subscriber!

First, a word on what I mean by “subscriber.”  You see, in this digitally fragmented age, a subscriber is anyone who gives you permission to communicate with them via specific one-to-one channels.  The most obvious and productive of these channels is email.  I don’t just say this because ExactTarget pays the bills.  I say it because the research says so.

Marketers can also acquire subscribers through channels other than email such as RSS, SMS (text messaging), Facebook (”friends”), and Twitter (”followers”).  While the nuances of each medium differ both in terms of what you can send and how you send it, they each share a common reality — subscribers, not marketers, rule.  In other words, the subscriber controls the relationship’s beginning as well as its end (the dreaded “unsubscribe”).

Thanks to the economy, the shrinking efficacy of traditional marketing channels, and the increasing cost of direct mail, subscribers are now much more than a “nice to have” — they are a core asset of every company’s marketing program.  The reasons are simple:

1. Subscribers want to hear from you.
2. Subscribers are often your best customers.
3. It is much less expensive to email. text, update & tweet to subscribers than it is to reach strangers via third-party advertising.
4. You can reach subscribers instantly.

Clearly, there’s a lot to love about subscribers.  So why do so many companies treat them like an afterthought rather than an asset?  Why do so many marketers “batch & blast” subscribers rather than build relationships with them?  What can we do to elevate subscriber to their rightful place of honor atop the marketing food chain?

At ExactTarget, we answered this question by launching the SUBSCRIBERS RULE! philosophy — three simple tenets that, if followed, can help any company build better, more profitable relationships with their subscribers.  The three tenets are:

• Serve the individual
• Honor each individual’s unique preferences with regard to communication, content, frequency, and channel
• Deliver subscribers timely, relevant content that improves their lives

For those who attended our Connections User Conference last year, this is a bit of review.  Heck, you even got a music video to nail home the point.

For those who are new to the SR! Philosophy, however, I will be digging deeper into each tenet means to your email, SMS, and social media marketing efforts in the days to come.

There’s simply no time like the present, however, to show your subscribers that you love them — and there’s no better way to do that then working hard to ensure that their preferences are honored and their needs met by each and every one of your one-to-one communications.

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.

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

Facebook ≠ Email Platform Video Rant

I love it when folks send me interesting YouTube videos to ponder.  In the one below, Kevin Dugan (@prblog on Twitter and author of the Strategic Public Relations blog) offers up a video rant set to a killer mash-up of the Beastie Boys “Sabotage” and Led Zep’s “Black Dog” (catch it before the copyright police pull it down).

The gist of the piece is that Facebook is not an email platform, and that if you use it to send your “friends” junk you will sabotage your marketing efforts (hence the Beasties song selection).

Kevin’s message is dead-on; however, his advice holds true for email as well.  Whether the inbox is in Facebook or Yahoo, MySpace or Gmail, LinkedIn or Outlook, the fundamental rules are the same:

1. Do not send without permission.
2. Send only through authorized channels.
3. Send only relevant content that was requested by the subscriber.
4. Send only in a volume that is reasonable or is requested by the subscriber.
5. Stop sending when they unsubscribe or “un-friend” you.

To put it another way, the SUBSCRIBERS RULE! philosophy ain’t just for email — it’s applicable to every form of one-to-one media, including social networks.

With that introduction, may we present “Facebook ≠ Email Platform” from Kevin Dugan: