A recently published survey (subscription required) about the impact of personalization tactics in online ads revealed some interesting results about the shopping and spending habits of Internet users. The survey carved up the population of US Internet users who are willing to click on personalized ads into three primary spending categories: $1-$100, $101-$249, and $250 and over. The spenders in those categories were asked how likely they would be to click on an ad that contained greater levels of personalization. The first two categories slotted between 30%-39%, while 50% of largest spending category was willing to click on personalized, relevant ads.

While that survey question was specific to the network type of behavioral targeting (affiliates), the results can be interpreted for how a specific demographic category feels about personalization and relevance. Those who spend more when shopping online are much more responsive personalized, relevant ads and content online. This is an important finding for both network and those who deploy onsite behavioral targeting strategies.

Marketers with brands that appeal to high-income households should pay particular attention to this revelation. Using onsite targeting to personalize website content and or simply display relevant, optimized content is a no brainer. The numbers prove high income shoppers like the efficient shopping experience they get when brands care enough to show them relevant content. Marketers, is your website content relevant to your online shoppers?

Now it's about realizing the relevance. Taking the steps to successfully implement a new approach and mindset, and acquiring the tools or providers to make relevance a reality.

The Human Component

I believe the human component to realizing relevance is more significant than most give credit. Regardless of an organization’s digital marketing sophistication there is a tremendous chasm between those embracing relevance and those lagging far behind. On Monday I identified the role of the Evangelist. This role is critical to overcoming the barrier of complacency. “The Evangelist must convince others a new direction is a positive step, establish the value of a new mantra, and build the organizational consensus – a body of believers not skeptics.” Your organization’s Evangelist must be tireless and persuasive, and willing to re-teach others how to think about communication, on a daily basis, always asking the question “is this message valuable to us, or to the recipient?”

Until an organization can overcome ingrained habits and laziness leading to broadcast messaging there is no cause for the organization to worry about the technology component. The technology is only useful to an organization that understands its purpose.

The Technology Component

The finest technology cannot solely unburden an organization of its outdated habits. The technology can make adoption of a new approach easier, far less daunting, and accelerate the development of irrefutable proof-points by providing objective data that proves the relevance pay-off.

I will not shill for specific technologies or platforms here (obviously I am biased to our own software platform). Suffice to say the technologies available advance quickly, and there are many powerful platforms and providers ready to help serious marketers take the next step. Many cater to large enterprises, many focus on mid-size or small online and hybrid businesses. No matter the scale of your organization or specific needs, to realize relevance in your digital marketing there are three critical components that must work together:

1. Data: It must be available and accessible. If you have critical customer data in multiple systems, this data must be unified into a single software platform from which you can reference your full universe of known attributes. There are systems available now that can also track online behavioral data, allowing you to associate known and observed attributes. If this data is not within reach of the marketer – if various components of IT or data services staff must be enlisted to produce even the simplest data set – then this does not meet the definition of accessible or actionable. Picasso, Van Gogh, and Monet – they did not have to submit a workorder or ticket to prepare their pigments, paints and oils before putting brush to canvas. If your ability to re-imagine how you target your message to your customer – and act on your imagination – is hampered by poor access to data, you require a technology upgrade.
2. Content: Associating your digital content – banners, emails, SMS, landing pages, registration forms, video and rich media – with the data, is the next critical component. A rapid, yet fragmented evolution of online media over the last 15 years has spread this content out across many platforms, unless you have a multi-channel digital approach. So, while it’s a victory to unify your data, if it is not closely associated with the multiple content platforms, you’re schlepping customer data, segments, lists and activity reports between numerous applications. The practice of relevance means consistently extending the most relevant experience across channels. Your customers expect a single message from a single brand.
3. Deployment and Analysis: It’s likely that the platform or provider that is hosting and managing your digital content is also deploying the campaign through their respective channel, and producing the correlating activity and performance reports. Digital content, deployment and analysis across many platforms yields ungainly processes that involve scheduling and monitoring deployment, then associating that activity data and metrics to other reports from other channels.

Finally, automating your newly developed, relevant communication tactics is a very important value-add feature in the technology evaluation. Once investing in the human component of conception and architecture, the advantage of leveraging sound technology to deploy automated marketing programs triggered by specific events and behaviors brings an organization closer to realizing relevance.

The Process Component

I always remind our clients, “email, mobile and website marketing are fantastically fast in deploying and measuring results. However, sound strategy, planning, development, and analysis still take as long as they did 20 years ago.” Sure we have tremendous tools that help us compile, sort, organize, design, and disseminate ideas and data. But, realizing relevance takes operational discipline and, yes, campaign lifecycles will in fact be extended due to the marketer who now manages multiple data conditions, audience segments, content assets – and the obligations that appropriately impact testing and analysis.

Wrapping Up Relevance Week

New processes should not be daunting. The goal of embracing relevance in digital marketing communications is helping you realize a positive business outcome: doing more with less. You achieve equal, or greater, results by any measure. Yet, you’re sending fewer emails and SMS messages, deploying more targeted ads not extending reach, and converting more orders through more relevant offers, and more relevant website and landing page experiences.

I hope this week’s discussions on the barriers to relevance, the return on relevance, and the realization of relevance have inspired you to take up the torch, and start taking the next steps towards a more effective and consumer-centric view of direct digital marketing.

The discussion of a return on relevance begins with Jupiter Research’s 2006 report “The ROI of Relevance.” In the world of digital direct marketing especially, this report was the objective, authoritative source of credibility for companies like Knotice for which relevance is a cornerstone of our brand position, our pitch, and our strategic roadmap.

In “The ROI of Relevance” analyst David Daniels concludes clearly that “despite additional campaign costs, relevant campaigns increase net profits by an average of 18 times more than do broadcast mailings.”

Back in 2006, however, the realization of relevance was still in its nascence with a lot of ground to be made up. Daniels, “Sixty-percent of consumers who make immediate purchases from email messages did so because messages contained products they were already considering, but only one-third of promotional email marketers said relevance was one of their top three goals.”

Finding objective support for the value of relevance in communications, despite a potential increase in up front campaign cost, is found across the Internet. So yes, the up front campaign cost rises when relevance is in play. A marketer must reference more data points than the email address, like a customer’s shopping history, demographic profile, anniversary date… anything. The reference to these additional data points must be supported by some basic variance in content. Therefore your costs will increase – even if it’s basic segmentation and adjusting an email subject line or product feature. But, the return on this additional work is exponential increases in profitability. This can be measured. And, your boss will not argue.

My career in marketing started not on the technology side but as a brand manager – a more nebulous definition of an advertising account manager. In my perspective the argument for relevance is deeper than a numbers game. The numbers bear out the ROI math in very simple formulas such as 1 email sent = $2 revenue. But, every marketer is responsible for understanding that relevance is about the brand. This is about creating a brand voice that has informative, interesting and worthwhile things to say to all its constituents and customers, not simply generating noise and chatter. This distinction is slightly tougher to measure. It can be summed up as: noise and chatter brands are not good brands while relevance is.

In his blog “Marketability” David Kinard suggests this brand-relevance concept is better expressed as “pertinence.” Kinard, “To me, pertinence is possibly the most critical element in marketing as it drives the focus away from my-product-my-company to the customer, audience, and consumer. To be pertinent means to be both IMPORTANT and RELEVANT.” I think this is a great rubric for evaluating your marketing efforts.

Essentially “relevance” or “pertinence” is the discipline of audience-centric communication. The my-product-my-company mindset produces noise and chatter. Audience-centricity values understanding the information the consumer provides, the feedback they are willing to give, and behaving in kind – whether proactively or reactively. Shouldn’t we all strive to have our brands as pertinent to as many consumers as possible?

The return on relevance in digital direct marketing is clear, and the human and organizational barriers need to be overcome. On Friday I will talk more about the technological and “how-to” factors in the realization of relevance.

In concept, relevance is simple: it’s the process of varying the why, when, what and how of a message based on information or observed behavior of the audience.

Relevance is agreed to be a positive force in online consumer communications – a game changer as measured by response, conversions and ROI – enabled by advancing technologies only dreamt of years ago.

However, implementation and day-to-day application of relevance as a communications mantra is generally the industry exception, not the rule. If the concept is universally espoused but application lags far behind, what are the barriers to adoption? Is it the technology that is the barrier as much as the enabler? Technology that is fragmented, overly complex, or unworthy of capital investment is often cited as a culprit.

On Wednesday and Friday I will address the technological issue in greater detail. It’s important to consider that the barriers to relevance are equally (if not more) human, than technological. There are 5 common barriers ingrained within organizations (big and small) that stifle adoption of new visions.

The 5 Barriers to Relevance Adoption
For each of the 5 barriers there is a specific role required to hurdle each barrier. Though each role need not be filled by a single person, each role must be filled or adoption can fail. What are the barriers, and how do we hurdle them?

Barrier: Pervasive, business-as-usual mentality within an organization or department
Hurdler: The Entrepreneur/Visionary
The Entrepreneur/Visionary is a leader who strives to fix the thing that isn’t broken. This leader takes risks, and going the extra mile is in her DNA. You will find this leader ahead of the curve, far in advance of the tipping point. The Entrepreneur/Visionary must be present to shake-up the establishment, and to start the domino falling.

Barrier: Internal lack of consensus undermining the solvency of a new direction
Hurdler:The Evangelist
The Evangelist must understand the value of new directions and ideas, and have the talent and earnestness to guide the rising tide – the groundswell. The Evangelist must convince others a new direction is a positive step, establish the value of a new mantra, and build the organizational consensus – a body of believers not skeptics.

Barrier: After the initial hoopla, enthusiasm and dedication wane, and processes revert
Hurdler:The Motivator
The Motivator is tireless and charismatic. Far from just a shrill “rah-rah” cheerleader, the motivator leads by example and compels others to maintain consistency and discipline as a supplement to enthusiasm. The nature of the universe is towards entropy and decay, and it takes conscious, dedicated motivation to maintain new processes and disciplines until they become second nature.

Barrier: Inconsistent, ineffective implementation, operations and analysis
Hurdler:The Manager
Not nearly the sexiest of roles, but equally important. Many great concepts have been torpedoed by lackluster implementation and management. The Manager does not require the vision or charisma, but the talents to keep a diverse entity on task, organized and running smoothly, herding multiple skills and applications, both human and technological, to a single endpoint.

Barrier: Altruistic belief that the success of a project is its own reward
Hurdler: Personal Incentives
Here’s the danger in altruism: it assumes everyone from the Entrepreneur/Visionary, Evangelist, Manager, Motivator down to the Doer has an equal, inherent interest in the realization of a new vision. There are high stakes in accepting a challenge and raising the bar higher than it was set before. In today’s business culture not all of the players in most organizations share this outlook. Appropriately creating incentives for each player in their role to share in the victory when great things are achieved disarms the very last argument of quiet dissenters: “what’s in this for me?” If the goal is worthwhile to the organization, it’s worthwhile to create the personal incentives.

So, how does your organization hurdle these barriers? What if each of these roles is not filled? Whether your organization is big or small, these barriers to adoption will exist and you must find the individual(s) to fill each critical role. If you see the talents or passion within your team, you may have to go further to empower individuals to fill new roles. If your Visionary is not in a role of authority, you may have to shake up the organization so they can set the direction. If your Manager is himself micro-managed, allowing them to take more responsibility may be the answer. And if you do not see these talents within your organization you will have to develop them internally, or bring them in from the outside.