Use a diverse group. According to Roxana Strohmenger, an analyst with Forrester, a group with multiple perspectives from a diverse background will give better and more precise feedback and accurate predictability than individual experts alone. Ask people who may not traditionally fit your test groups. If your product is for men, include women in the opinion survey sample. If you’re targeting exclusively high-end consumers, the opinions of middle-class consumers may give fresh ideas for product refinement you might not tap into otherwise.

Use words like “others” and “people” instead of “you.” A simple change in wording can help people get out of their own way to give you the details you need most. For instance, a typical question might be: “What do you look for when selecting a ______ service provider.” But this is limiting. You’ll garner far more predictive insight when you rephrase it: “What do people look for when selecting…” or “What do others look for when selecting….”

Make it fun. Don’t make it painful for people to give you their feedback. Sure, you can send an email survey and hope for response. You might also consider adding a quick poll at the end of your email newsletter, or designing a game-like experience. Keeping it entertaining will help increase survey response rates.

Be transparent. If you’re even considering using any survey responses collected in the research process for future marketing materials or campaigns, be clear and open about it.

Choose good tools. Marketers should look for tools that make it easy to deploy polls and surveys, as well as easy to make use of the data received. Here at Knotice, the ability to create forms and surveys is one of our standard features. (Yes, it’s already in there.)

Our Concentri platform makes it easy, featuring a visual, point-and-click environment to create sign-up forms, surveys, and quick polls. These can easily be added to any landing page, microsite or email. You also can publish forms on web pages hosted outside of Concentri with a simple cut-and-paste of code. As people complete the surveys, the data and information gathered is then stored into its universal profile management system.

You can view and easily export results directly to Excel, as well as set up recurring exports so new form submissions are emailed on a set schedule. Form results can also be used to drive segmentation and triggered campaigns, for more powerful direct digital marketing well after the survey is complete. If you’d like to know more about this cool feature, let us know!

The marketer we met with was only focused on coming up with the best “strategy” possible to “get things off to the right start in year one.” However, in their passion to launch, they refused to consider the ceiling of their technology platform, what their lack of supporting approach would place on their learning in year one and on the success of their program overall (defined by them as their ability to correctly attribute a CPA/ROI to the investment). Frustrating as it was to have such a blinders-on conversation, it was heartening to be reminded that there are leaders and laggards in every phase of marketing, and that “winning them all” doesn’t always equate to good business. For mobile, there’s more to it.

My question to the greater community: For you, what matters most in the mobile channel today? Is it strategy? Is it technology? When does philosophy and approach come into the picture, if at all?

Assuming that having smart people and reliable technology is a given (though there are plenty out there that could use some help with both), what is your personal belief for your brand or offering?

My belief is that approach, technology, and strategic execution are inexorably intertwined. Anyone looking at solutions that are deficient in one or more of these areas is setting their programs up for inevitable self-limitation. Here are some key questions that deserve to be asked and answered by anyone looking at mobile for their brand. (I’ve also included some suggestions for why these matter.)

Approach: There are many choices in mobile today – more than ever before. An innovative approach is one of the ways you can deliver results to your unique business needs, given the relatively low bar for entry into the space for the many “me too” providers. That said, how do you define what experience you bring to your audience to address the true “mobileness” of consumers today?

You need a holistic, unified approach that considers key pillars – like SMS, mobile web, applications, advertising, email, physical world and PC. Without such an approach, you will be missing key interactions that can build a strong base for a program for both learning and proving value for everyone involved.

Technology: The mobile landscape is vast. Trying to “boil the ocean” is a daunting endeavor. With a strategic focus in mind, ask yourself:

• Does your technology platform facilitate data capture and content delivery to make the most out of your consumer’s willingness to engage in a mobile relationship with you?
• Does this happen in an accessible way, both financially and personally?
• Does the technology platform support and create the aforementioned approach in every way, with room for still-to-come strategic executions and learning experiences to occur?
• Does it functionally deliver and philosophically dominate?

The technology platform that supports early and advanced efforts should allow you ready access to data. Such data can be leveraged for proving business theories, understanding results from every interaction you have, and turning those interaction-informed insights into future marketing opportunities.

Strategy: Depending on where your program is today (stand-still, crawl, walk, run), your needs for strategy and execution will differ tremendously on a day-to-day basis. Aptly named “best practices” deliver the goods for solid program foundations and compliance with strict regulations. With that foundation, you need a strong partner — one with insight, creativity, listening ability and cohesiveness. A strong partner intimately familiar with the nuances of their toolset, one that is solution oriented, will help get you in market today. They’ll also be able to drive your program where it needs to be in the coming 12-18 months. Ideal partners in the mobile space have notable references and experience executing with reliability, creativity, and timeliness – remaining beyond reproach with compliance. They have the proper tools at their disposal to effectively execute across all mobile channel destinations and connectors.

Have an experienced partner design a strategy specific to your needs. Look for the technology to support future strategic growth. Ask them if they have the ability: to create unlimited keywords or segment from a single keyword; to easily generate dynamic landing pages based on what 2-D code was scanned or from what email was clicked; to capture SMS dialogs, mobile web browsing activity, downloads, form responses, app interactions, email opens and subsequent mobile device-driven behavior; to personalize messages and content down to a user-profile level; to track coupon requests and redemptions, and to make all of these data points marketable and useable, by whole or by segment. This is where power comes from as it pertains to mobile data and the relationships they can drive.

Other Related Posts:
Updating the Rules of Mobile Strategy
Connection at the Point of Decision
Mobile Marketing Experts Agree on Fundamentals
And other posts by yours truly…

Dutch: “1) Marketers should resolve to commit to effective SMS programs (not just talk about them) that support a rich mobile Web experience. 2) Marketers should resolve to think mobile Web first and “app” second.”

Dave: “I would just encourage marketers in 2011 to constantly reevaluate where their programs are on a holistic level. Too often I meet with smart marketers who, instead of having a synergistic combination of elements, they have essentially a ‘marketing attic,’ piled high with trinkets, boxes, and once-hot marketing initiatives now gathering dust. This accumulation of seldom-used or out-of-date tactics can be recycled and exchanged for a better model that takes a stronger, user-friendly approach. The end result will likely be greater efficiency and better growth in the future.”

Bryce: “For more brands to start understanding their customers and prospects as a cross-channel entities. This starts with better insights gained from consolidating disparate data sources and outputs, creating a single view of the customer and their interactions across channels. What are they reading, where and what are they buying, how do they look for help when they have a question? Then using this insight to tailor the marketing outreach, optimizing channel strategies, content, frequency and spend to create more relevant and valuable experiences for researching, buying, or getting customer support.”

So, what are your resolutions for 2011? Add to the discussion by leaving a comment below.

A recent article from Scientific American was very critical of user-generated content. The article, from writer Michael Moyer, offered site examples of Amazon.com, TripAdvisor, and Yelp. Moyer writes that the collective conclusions offered in consumer comments are, “inaccurate at best, fraudulent at worst.”

The article did make valid points, with analysis and quotes from established and very smart contributors such as Wharton professor Eric K. Clemons. He offers a judgment of user-generated content based on its inherent biases, that those reviewing have a stake in their comments since they invested money. Consumers could be happy with their purchase, or upset about it, and those conclusions will skew collective conclusions inappropriately.

I believe what’s missing from this article is a dose of reality – that “crowdsourcing” and user-generated content should never be on the receiving end of quantitative analysis. A numbers-first analysis simply does not do justice to what those reading product and service comments or ratings and reviews value – the qualitative opinions of fellow consumers. Anything from a story about using a product to a user’s knee-jerk reaction can be valuable to any consumer making up his or her mind. For many shoppers, these comments are so important they seek ways to reference them while in a physical retail location. Smart manufacturers are accommodating this evolution in consumer behavior.

Online marketing, in all of its iterations – from search to display to onsite targeting and email – creates a “measure-first” response from many marketers. But, as Einstein so eloquently stated, “Not everything that can be counted counts; and not everything that counts can be counted.” Consumers place tremendous value on the opinions of fellow consumers, and then draw their own conclusions.

User-generated content is the ideal companion to direct digital marketing. The value a consumer places on email, mobile, and Web communications is the key to effectiveness – and there is plenty of evidence that consumers LOVE user-generated content. The core direct digital marketing channels are the key to delivering that valued content more efficiently and effectively.

What types of user-generated content influence your purchases?

Very few communications channels actually die off completely. And, if they do, it is a long, slow, and drawn out type of death… the kind we see in old Westerns. Take, for example, the telegram, generally considered a dead medium. Long after old Westerns featured this once advanced form of communication – which first hit the marketplace in 1856 – the telegraph lines became silent. Everyone knows the telegram was not being heavily used in the past decade – or the past five decades – but Western Union did not send its final telegram until February of 2006. After a long, slow, drawn out decrease in telegram usage it was declared dead.

It is for this reason that it is so dangerous to declare the death of a medium. In fact, modern mediums, unlike the telegram, evolve, rather than die out.

Marketers still have a use for mass marketing, direct mail, and email marketing. In fact, the idea that email marketing is being discussed as a dead, or dying, channel lacks credibility. Each channel is evolving in its own way.

Evolving in mass marketing may be a shift from using it as a promotional tool to solely a branding tool. Evolving in direct mail means finding measurable ways to boost customer traffic to offline and online locations. Evolving in email marketing requires more emphasis on lifecycle communications and behavior-based programs.

Direct digital marketing has its role to play in enhancing the evolution of various communications channels. The ability to push personalized and relevant messages to email, mobile, and Web channels with such ease has forced marketers to make budget trade offs during an economic downturn, but those trade offs will likely stay in place. Money once earmarked for direct mail campaigns or TV buys was reallocated to a more accountable, more quantifiable, marketing discipline. That does not mean, however, that mass marketing, direct mail – and certainly email marketing – are dead or even dying out.

The desire to draw eyeballs to a headline must not overpower the mandate to advance the marketing dialogue in a productive way, for the good of the industry. Before declaring death of a communications channel, let’s first look for the signs of evolution.

• Is mobile a good way to gather email addresses?
• Are email and mobile so closely related as channels that marketers can mix and match without consequence?
• Are ESPs REALLY able to just add mobile to their product offering, or are mobile capabilities so different that native platform development is mandatory to achieve really great results?

Let’s take a look at a recent mobile-email cross channel program and analyze it from two different user experiences.

Auntie Anne’s, a delicious pretzel company that usually can be found in a mall near you, recently launched an SMS campaign designed, I think, to gather email addresses. The campaign asked users to text a keyword to a shortcode (good idea) then reply to the message with another keyword + your email address (questionable idea). The coupon would THEN be sent to your email where you could retrieve it one day and redeem it in store.

My experience with this campaign was as seamless as can be expected, despite the personal inconvenience of not receiving a text message back with the coupon. In fact, sending that coupon to my email is pretty inconvenient for me as a user, delaying my coupon redemption and forcing me to take extra steps for a moderate discount.

My colleague’s experience with the campaign was different. She is still waiting to receive her email (more than 24 hours since she opted in).

This type of cross-channel campaign structure with mobile as a gateway introduces two basic drawbacks (there are a few more, but I’m running out of space).

The inherent channel confusion delays action. Sure, capturing email addresses with mobile can help build an email database, but the user experience is not neat and friendly. The only way that coupon can be used immediately by any user is if they are also able to receive email on their phone. And, if they can receive email on their phone, why not just send the coupon via SMS? Are the colors and brand nuances SO important that the message just has to be delivered via email? If the coupon is sent back via SMS the user redeems it immediately and has a good, delay free experience… while the brand comes off looking relevant and modern. The question begs – is an email address still so much more valuable than a mobile phone number/opt-in?

The second drawback is that email is filterable, where SMS is not. Users can lock down their inboxes and prevent a company’s message from making it to their eyeballs. A mobile opt-in has no such limitations. Once the mobile opt-in is secured, it is locked in until the user decides otherwise (it’s that whole Customer 3.0 thing I wrote about a while ago).

Cross channel campaigns using direct digital marketing’s primary channels are not only a good idea, they are increasingly necessary. The customer is multi-channel, so the user experience should be, too. However, when the use of multiple channels negatively impacts the user experience, then cross channel is not the answer. When considering a cross channel campaign, perhaps the first question that must be answered is, “How will this be perceived by my customer?”

Pamela Kaufman, the CMO of Nickelodeon and MTVN Kids and Family Group, will deliver a keynote entitled, “Adapting Your Marketing Channels to Connect with Your Customers.” While that seems fairly self-evident, few companies have actually been able to successfully keep a brand intact across the disparate communications channels. Therefore, hearing from someone who has pulled it off is compelling. Likely among the techniques Kaufman will share is the use of direct marketing principles across a variety of very different communications channels. While The Lunch Pail focuses on direct digital communications channels, it is likely that lessons learned from other channels apply in the direct digital space, and I’ll be sure and relate some of the key takeaways.

Another keynote I’m looking forward to will be delivered by Steven Sickel. He will speak on “Transforming to a Real-Time Marketing Organization.” While the drum beat for converting marketing organizations from “batch and blast” to “direct and measured” has been a dull tone gaining volume for years, the fact that a hotel company – Sickel is the SVP of multi-brand and relationship marketing at Intercontinental Hotels Group – is speaking on the subject proves the promise of the idea maturing. The value of direct digital marketing in facilitating real-time, targeted communications with consumers is well documented. The possible applications for direct digital marketing technology within the hotel space are seemingly endless.

I am also interested in a breakout session entitled “Adapting Marketing to High-Tech Realities.” I do not want to make any unwise, preconceived judgments about this topic. However, I am curious to see what will be communicated. Does the definition of reality include direct digital marketing technology and its unique ability to centralize data and multi-channel content distribution? Or will this session perpetuate the fractured landscape of single-channel technology providers? The answers to those questions are very important for shaping the direct digital – and overall – marketing universe.

What can develop in mobile marketing - limitations on vendor fragmentation - is not what has developed for websites, especially in retail. If the shift in marketing spending from acquisition to retention holds strong in 2010, the purpose-built website solutions designed to run websites and be eCommerce engines become immediately outdated and cumbersome. The kind of fluid flexibility required on the Web is not best delivered by big, overly-sophisticated tools. Marketers need elegant solution for improving the user experience and relevance of the website experience – and that is exactly what onsite targeting delivers.

Plenty of money is already tied up in myriad online acquisition techniques. Where companies are beginning to realize the greatest opportunity exists to improve sales figures is on their own website using smart, data-driven onsite targeting that rotates dynamic, relevant, and personalized content into any spot on a homepage or throughout an entire website. The rules-based onsite targeting technology is fairly straightforward, easy to use, and very accountable. Of course, it is also only as good as the data powering its content execution. If onsite targeting is 2010’s direct digital marketing trend 2a, then the data used to power it,universal profile management, is trend 2b.

Universal profile management is a concept that has received a fair share of attention in 2009. To gain a complete understanding of universal profile management – a direct digital marketing data mart designed to capture and store behavioral and known attributes of consumers – read this article from iMedia Connection. The real value of a universal profile management system is in its inclusive data capture and storage capabilities and its proximity to the content execution, specifically, it lives within the same software platform. Cutting out the need to slog data from one platform to another, or rebuild segments multiple times, is not only a time-saver, it also creates great cost efficiencies.

If you are interested in learning more about these, and other direct digital marketing trends, check out this article published by 1to1 Media. As great as 2009 was for the growth of direct digital marketing, 2010 holds tremendous promise for marketers, and consumers.

The questions are: Why are carts being abandoned, and how do we, as marketers, get shoppers to come back? Here is the good news – nearly 65 percent of online shoppers end up coming back to complete their purchase. But, what about the remaining 35 percent of shoppers that have abandoned their carts and are nowhere to be seen? Where have they gone, and is there anything we can do to get them back?

First, let’s face one fact – some shoppers simply do not intend to make a purchase and are just browsing. However, many shoppers are likely comparison shopping and have not yet made a decision as to where or when to buy. Perhaps they are searching the internet, looking for a better deal or a coupon. Meanwhile, their cart sits abandoned in an online store. Before restocking the online shelf, let’s consider some options for bringing those shoppers back into the fold.

As a shopper, here is what I like or would like to see more of.

First and most important… notice I’m gone. Send me an email reminding me I’ve not yet made a purchase. Sweeten the deal. Offer me a coupon. Better yet, offer me free shipping!! I often struggle with the shipping fee, especially when I know there is the option of visiting the bricks-and-mortar store. Even though I much prefer shopping online, the shipping fee often leads me to abandon my cart. Yes, guilty as charged. I have lots of abandoned carts in the Internet world. So many that I’ve forgotten! And, in most cases, the company has done nothing to bring me back. Such missed opportunity.

Second, when I return to your website, make sure my shopping cart is still there. Do NOT make me re-shop. I do not want to do that.

Third, before I leave your website, offer me the opportunity to have my shopping cart either emailed or texted to me. Maybe even a reminder text in a few days that I’ve still got some shopping to do. In a few days I may either return online to complete my purchase (with my free shipping promotional code) or end up in your bricks-and-mortar store and have the items selected right there on my mobile phone to help me quickly and easily complete my purchase.

The opportunities are there. Marketers just have to take advantage of them with smart direct digital marketing strategies.

Marketers at CTAM are looking for wins – from the big, mountain-sized wins as well as the quick, daily wins. The search for the easy marketing wins is why is it great to talk about the value of and straightforward solutions for onsite targeting and testing.

The guys in the high corner offices can strategize about media platforms, and the content distribution rights, what is free and what is paid for, and the disappearing young male TV viewer. The marketers in the trenches worry about providing relevant and timely experiences to customers and prospects through the corporate website, microsites, and landing pages.

The technology, tools and concepts are straightforward with onsite targeting and testing – no high corner office types needed here. The IT team deploys some simple code snippets on the website and then they are out of the equation (the math is simpler when IT is not a factor).

Get those marketing synapses firing and quickly recall all of the straightforward, undeniably successful marketing and communications practices that are employed across direct mail, email, telemarketing, etc. Include those basic tenants in the web experience across the .com site and .net customer portal. IT is the 101 things like:

• Is this website visitor a customer? If so, talk to them like their business is valued and offer them more opportunities – include offers for services they do not already have, not offers on those they already do have (for less than what they are paying now).
• If they are a customer, in addition to seeing the great offers for additional services, perhaps they want a simple “Thank You” and a small but valuable demonstration of your affection, like a coupon for a free movie or a gift card to a local restaurant.
• What services are available for prospective customers in a given footprint (and which are not available in their town, yet… but will be soon)?
• Which offers are most compelling across demographics groups? Is it the savings and convenience of a bundle, the enviable speeds of the broadband Internet, or the economy of the basic, “lite” packages?
• Are there special offers that are just for that customer’s area? Can the website provide this information without requiring a zip code first?
• In those battleground markets, where customers have seen their neighbors switch to AT&T and Verizon… and now they have serious doubts about the quality and value of their service, too… they are on the fence. Some positive reinforcement of their purchase decision is helpful to get them off the fence and keep them off?

Yes, the website can be the frontline tool to satisfy customers and prospects needs with the right offers, the right information, and the right communications at precisely the right time. This is what onsite targeting enables. Lots of little, daily wins adding up to one very big thing: success.