If providing an email address is a traditional opt-in, this is the equivalent of a super opt-in. You can’t blame yogaglo for asking, but give me a break. They want to turn me and my Facebook account into their little marketing machine, but what do I get in return? Absolutely nothing.

The ability for marketers to be granted this level of permission and access to consumer information truly provides the ingredients to revolutionize (I don’t use that word loosely) how brand relationships work and gain valuable insights into which customers are influencing other customers (at scale). However, the possibilities will be severely hamstrung if marketers don’t start thinking about what they need to give, to get this level of access. What is the value exchange?

Think about an old-fashioned email opt-in. When you request an email address as a brand, it’s important to convey the value the customer will get by providing it (e.g.: special offers, useful tips, etc.).

Not only did yogaglo ask for my email address, but they want my cell phone number, access to posts on my news feed, the ability to post to Facebook as me, and access to my master friends list and my custom friend lists (family, coworkers, etc). What’s the appropriate value exchange that yogaglow should provide?

The simplest way to answer this is in clicks and the value associated to those clicks. Granting the requested access will result in clicks by my friends as I interact with yogaglo (e.g.: access the site, watch videos, rate videos, etc). Those actions will create posts that will show up on my friends’ feeds. Some friends will click, some will click and sign up with yogaglo themselves.

If we were talking paid search, yogaglo would pay approximately $1.00 per click for the keyword “yoga videos.” With the average Facebook user having 130 friends, it’s not unrealistic that over the course of a month, a single yogaglo customer could generate 5 clicks. Here’s how I arrived at that number:

130 Friends
x 15 yogaglow Posts Per Month
= 1950 Monthly Impressions
x .25% Click Through Rate (quarter of 1%)
= 5 Clicks (4.875 to be exact)

If someone has 500 friends, this translates into 18 clicks. Some could argue that the .25% CTR is too low. Others could argue that it’s too high. I argue that it’s reasonable, but definitely should be tested.

At 5 clicks per month and a value of $1 per click (which again, it’s easy to argue it should be higher considering the friend endorsement), that translates into $60 in value over the course of a year from the average Facebook user. Once it’s adjusted to reflect the average lifetime of a yogaglo customer (e.g., 8 months versus 14 months), yogaglo has a pretty good estimate on the base value of someone clicking the “Allow” button.

I say “base value” because our math doesn’t accommodate for two important things. First, even if other Facebook users aren’t clicking, there is still the benefit of awareness advertising. And second, yogaglo now has access to a treasure-trove of information they can use to strengthen their relationship with customers.

So the way I see it, if I use my Facebook account to sign up with yogaglo and grant the requested access, I should get three months free. As we’ve demonstrated, it’s pretty easy to rationalize this value exchange. Equally important, it proactively demonstrates the reciprocal nature of the Facebook-enhanced relationship and the potential good things to come, versus requesting a level of access that simply could be off-putting and not the best way to kick off a new customer relationship.

If anyone has seen great examples of a strong value-exchange for a “Facebook super opt-in,” please share. I’d love to see them.

I opened it to find a tiny Book of Secrets. This little book contained secrets from how to cook perfect rice, to the secret of happiness, to the secret to quiet a crying baby. But the real secret was the company who sent it to me! My only clue was wedged inside the book, the hook of the promotion. I was intrigued to see what this was all about.

Apparently, by visiting this PURL, I would learn some kind of secret. So I typed in the address from the bookmark to “pull back the curtains.” And was surprised to see this:

Not the experience I anticipated, to say the least.

For all the effort and expense by the marketing team for this mysterious company, the PURL was a real disconnect. At that moment, they had me, then they blew it. I wanted the pleasure of a personalized online experience. It’s a shame, really. The company had created a direct-mail package that caught my attention, included an element personalized to me, but failed to either purchase the domain name for the campaign, and/or test to make sure the domain and PURL were working correctly.

So, here’s my secret (one you won’t find in the book): Test. When creating and deploying any direct digital marketing campaign, test everything.

As Dutch noted in that earlier post on PURLs, employing a customer-centric approach to marketing goes far beyond putting a person’s name on a piece of paper. It’s about building relationships and providing them with content they value.

What’s the secret I was supposed to discover in this experience? I’d still like to know.

The following three examples illustrate dramatic improvements to the guest experience and the basic business value possible when you incorporate a data-powered, multi-channel direct digital marketing strategy.

1) A Simple Shoulder-Stay Promotion with Onsite Targeting Technology
Because online booking is the entry point for a transaction, the booking process must be smooth and easy. However, the booking engine still provides an opportunity to up-sell by offering a shoulder stay package – without disrupting the mandatory ease of the process – using onsite targeting technology. Onsite targeting transforms formerly static space on a webpage into a “live zone” capable of rotating dynamic content based on information like a website visitor’s browsing activity or preferences. If a guest indicates their stay will end on a Friday, you can use a live zone to offer a discount for the guest to extend the stay through the weekend. If a guest indicates their stay will begin on a Monday, you can use a live zone to offer incentives for the guest to arrive during the preceding weekend. Using direct digital marketing, a shoulder stay package is easy to setup and maintain for the marketer, but it also delivers value to the guest.

2) Keep Guests Informed with eConcierge Programs
The email channel is most frequently used for building loyalty by virtue of its importance to the prospective guest. But traditional messages and uses of email have grown stale — consumers are becoming less responsive. Direct digital marketing’s data-driven foundation transforms a stagnant email approach into a valuable eConcierge program for guests, demonstrating that a guest is not an afterthought once they have booked a room. An eConcierge email program simply delivers three emails to a guest at regular intervals once they have booked a room. The first email welcomes the guest, the second educates them on amenities and events in areas that may interest them, and the third email is an up-sell. Each of the three emails contains smart content based off of known or behavioral data about the guest, captured in the universal profile management system. For example, email number one can be a personalized thank you from the property manager while email number two can offer discounts to an on-property restaurant. The final email is ideal for demonstrating an understanding of an individual guests needs with a link to quickly book a tee time at a golf course or an easy room upgrade. Providing every guest with access to an automated, smart, and measurable eConcierge program successfully leverages the email channel to enhance a guest’s experience.

3) Easy Check-In/Check-Out with Mobile Technology
Check-in and check-out are also key components of the guest experience. Simple mobile programs — like an express mobile check-in and an express mobile check-out — significantly reduce the amount of time a guest is forced to wait in line, opening up time to explore the various amenities available on-property. As guest mobility increases, the ability to communicate with them while they are on-the-go is increasingly important. Providing the opportunity for a guest to sign up for text message alerts while on-property is another way to open a convenient communications channel with a guest.

The three examples outlined here are only a brief introduction to how an effective direct digital marketing partner can help hoteliers and other providers positively impact the guest/customer experience. Data-driven direct digital marketing opens the door to redefining short-term goals and building long-lasting, profitable relationships.

When considering onsite targeting, some advice:

One Size Does Not Fit All: Avoid trying to “boil the ocean” when planning for Web site personalization. Instead, look for simple, powerful tools that streamline personalization and targeting efforts while capturing and storing both known and unknown customer attributes.

Data is King: Data is at the center of all successful site personalization. Marketers should seek out technology capable of supporting real-time, data-driven campaign execution. But technology alone isn’t enough. You need real-time data within unique user profiles, and the ability to customize the user experience based on the most current information.

Keep it Simple: Marketing personnel must be able to understand, easily access and use the personalization tools available. Look for a solution that is easy to learn and simple to navigate – one that will seamlessly integrate data and processes. Power doesn’t have to be complicated.

Avoid Redundancy of Efforts: Be sure to avoid introducing a technology or system into your organization that requires staff to work double-duty on the execution of personalization tasks. Profile data should be native to the software for a seamless execution of onsite targeting and other direct digital marketing efforts, combined for a more robust consumer experience overall.

Seek out an experienced partner to help optimize the effectiveness of onsite targeting efforts and maximize your ROI.

However, putting it into practice has proved less sexy and sometimes more confusing for people. A lot of the confusion stems from the difference between location-based marketing vs. advertising and the requisite opt-in action for both.

Inherently, marketing is relationship based or ideally permission based. Advertising is usually an interruptive accompaniment to content or experiences that aspires to attract a marketing relationship from people who don’t already have that relationship with a brand. As a consumer, what are you more likely to embrace on your mobile device?

Location-based mobile marketing and location-based search is going to be much more effective than location-based display advertising. By allowing an end customer to use their location information as “currency” to receive useful content or interactions, they are empowered and self-selected to be open to marketing messages that are relevant to them.

Things like “check-in” and “use current location” are low-overhead behaviors that folks are getting used to. These will continue to become mainstream. Over the next couple of years, the marketing challenge will become less about how to do location-based marketing, but rather how to respond when a customer says “I’m here.”

Among the article's many interesting points is this statement:

“The technology reaches beyond the personalization familiar on sites like Amazon.com, which uses its own in-house data on its customers to show them new items they might like.”

The statement is important because it is positioned in a way that suggests consumers are okay with targeting and understand its value. Taking it a step further, most companies aren’t using in-house data to drive content relevance on their sites to unauthenticated visitors. The general acceptance combined with the technological know-how creates opportunity for onsite targeting to continue its growth trend in use and adoption.

As with the rest of the industry, there is a great deal of nuance in how onsite targeting is done. The key difference between the way Knotice primarily does onsite targeting and a company like [x+1], which is featured in the WSJ article, is [x+1]’s algorithmic-based approach and Knotice’s rules-based approach. Algorithms are important and they definitely serve a market need. But it is important to note that the complexity and lack of basic controls with algorithms are not for every business or every audience type. When that truth is uncovered the value of a rules-based approach comes into focus.

The lesson: Onsite targeting is important, but make sure to investigate which method works best for your business. It is easy to overbuy because of the bells and whistles. But, don’t lose focus of the marketing goals and the audience’s needs.

This article from The Wall Street Journal is excellent. It may surprise some consumers, but it gives clarity to how mainstream targeting techniques are, making them less alarming and increasing market opportunity.

Back then I doubted if Android would be an iPhone killer. Today it is very plausible. Especially if Microsoft, Google, and Adobe decide to team up and kill the iPhone together. I realize that may sounds nuts, but there was something to the phrase “enemy of my enemy is my friend” 2500 years ago, and that principle will likely play out somehow in the next five, too.

There is precedent for Apple getting its “superior and more elegant” ass/Mac kicked by competitors who know how to appeal to developers. Steve Jobs is a genius with product design, but his track record is less genius-y when we’re talking software platforms and developer communities (unless you’re a whiz with Objective C… which, by the way, was the main language for the NeXTSTEP OS back in 1986).

Apple has definitely made some unpopular moves for developers with iPhone OS 4.0. Jobs has overplayed his hand in the past, and it seems like he might be doing it again.

What do you think?

After I did the online check-in, I didn’t receive the email containing the mobile boarding pass. I figured something like this would no doubt hit my inbox. I checked my junk mail folder and it wasn’t there. My junk mail folder is the equivalent of email purgatory. I have so many rules to keep my inbox clean (back to my clutter-phobia), that valid emails can easily end up there. The last possibility, my spam folder, is the equivalent of email hell. Three emails usually end up there in a week. To my surprise, my mobile boarding pass containing my scannable QR code, was one of them. This is a great example of why everyone – including savvy IT departments – needs to work with partners who understand email deliverability.

Qualifier #2: Be prepared

Organize your email so the boarding pass is readily accessible. If you’re checking a bag, you’ll need to show it to the security person and again when you’re boarding the plane.

Qualifier #3: Don’t use it if you have a mobile phone / device with a very small screen

My experience with the security guy was pretty telling in terms of the current state of scanning QR and bar codes on a mobile device. When I first showed the security guy my phone, he stared at the screen and said “I don’t see nothing.” Oops, the screen turned off. I turned it back on and gave it to him again.

At that point, he reached under his podium and pulled out a fancy-dancy scanner. He aimed it at the phone, scanned the QR code, and handed the phone back to me. When I enthusiastically said, “Hey, it worked!” he sarcastically replied, “This time.” When I questioned him further, specifically about why it works better on some phones than others, he explained that they have trouble scanning phones with small displays. If they can’t scan it, the customer has to go back and get a paper boarding pass, which would totally suck. So, if you think you have a small display you might just want to start off with a paper boarding pass.

Qualifier #4: It’s more complicated than it seems

It’s wild how little things like touch screens really can make this entire process more complicated than you’d initially think. For example, when I was boarding the plane I gave the lady my phone to scan the boarding pass. She looked at it and said, “It’s blank.” She handed the phone back to me. With people waiting behind me ready to board, I opted to step out of line and see what went wrong.

It turns out that when she was preparing to scan the phone she accidentally touched the display, and inadvertently scrolled the QR code off the screen. After scrolling it back into position, I got back in line and handed her the phone for the second attempt. This time, she typed the boarding pass number into her computer instead of scanning. When I asked why she didn’t scan it, she replied, “This is easier. I should have just typed it in, in the first place.”

As I mentioned, I think Continental did a great job with their mobile boarding pass. The above qualifiers (other than #1) should not be interpreted as gripes. They are definitely pushing the envelope and innovating. It’s extremely valuable for the direct digital marketing industry – companies and vendors alike – to look at (and experience firsthand, when possible) real-world implementations like Continental’s. It definitely provides a glimpse of the convenience and simplicity mobile can deliver when flying, assuming the screen isn’t too small, it doesn’t shut off, and it doesn’t scroll too much.

There are 3 keys to implementing advanced mobile marketing tactics into the direct digital marketing mix. The first key is data. Having good data enables relevant communications and personalization that help induce action on the tactic. Good data really is important because it helps marketers develop complete mobile marketing strategies instead of limiting themselves to one-off mobile programs with a limited shelf-life and a difficult to measure result.

The second key is interaction. That means the mobile marketing software platform the marketer is using must plug into and interact seamlessly with other business systems already deployed within a given company. If the software platform can’t get data in real time or send triggered text messages, then the mobile strategies and tactics will be limited.

The third and final key to implementing advanced mobile tactics is support. To be completely honest, the carriers don’t always make program approval and shortcode provisioning a simple process. It can be tricky, especially if the goal is to have a mobile program up and running quickly. A good mobile marketing partner not only has the software you need to execute your mobile marketing vision, but they also must provide you and your marketing team with the support and services necessary to make sure the program is effective now, scalable later, and always shows the desired result.

Here’s an interesting screencast that not only shows 2 real-life examples of advanced mobile tactics and how they’re constructed, but it also contains data points that reinforce the idea that a successful mobile marketing approach right now must be text-centric.

Here’s a question to ponder: In what ways is the current mobile marketing landscape similar to email marketing before it took the next step and hit the mainstream?

I didn’t say to blow up or implode anything. What I suggested is that as an industry, we shouldn’t continually ask marketers to pay more to perpetuate the fragmentation that plagues their interactive marketing operations. For too long, the collective knee-jerk reaction of the industry, as evident from Elana’s original article and follow up comment, has been to accept this as the operational status quo for how things are done. Some believe it’s a fact of life…at Knotice we think it can be fixed. Nothing wrong with a difference of opinion.

I had a chance to observe the “operational status-quo” in its ridiculously inefficient glory earlier this year at a customer summit for a leading analytics provider. During a seminar on analytics-driven email marketing, an hour was spent explaining how to get rudimentary site visitor segments exported out of the analytics package and imported into an ESP so emails could be triggered by browsing behavior (for the record, there were some “large, very large” companies in attendance wanting to know how to do this).

To think that with all of our industry’s digital marketing power, recommending to batch imports and exports is a joke. Perhaps a better alternative is simply to have an email marketing platform that can also store web analytics behavior in real-time so you can be thinking about campaign strategies instead of integration strategies. These types of platforms are out there.

But, as Elana pointed out in her response, online behavioral information is just one piece of the puzzle. In “large, very large” companies, information about customers comes from many systems across many channels. We just can’t implode all of the operational systems and start from scratch. That’s why we recommend web services as a less combustible approach. As part of our webinar a few months ago, Taking Shape: The Online Marketing Database, we provided an introduction of how this can work to streamline implementation, allowing companies to leverage their existing legacy environment instead of making wholesale changes.