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Digital Marketing Strategy - Developing customer loyalty
Our recommendations on using digital media for customer retention
Traditionally, email marketing has been the most effective online marketing technique for communicating with and selling to online customers, but increasingly social media marketing is equally effective and can be integrated with email marketing.
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Our articles on digital customer retention techniques
Our pointers on the most useful practical articles on customer retention strategy from Smart Insights:
Richard Pentin (of TMW) has done some sterling work by teaming up with the IAB Social Media Council to tackle the hottest digital marketing potato; measuring and benchmarking social media ROI. Well, more specifically measuring social media activity that in turn impacts ROI.
Despite the very serious sounding name of the IABSMC, we feel that this provides some great thinking that in a framework could well help us all to formalise a way to manage, measure and compare social media performance.
The SlideShare presentation talks through each step of the process from establishing your intent, assigning the most relevant KPIs around the 4 As – Awareness, Appreciation, Action and Advocacy – and references other benchmarks in order to draw meaningful comparisons.
What do you think are it’s strengths and weaknesses? It would be great to hear your feedback and ideas.
Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg recently caused a stir at the Nielsen Consumer 360 conference by reportedly stating that Email is dead (she would say that wouldn’t she and if you listen to the whole clip she didn’t actually say what she was widely reported to have said).
However, her argument that only 11% of teenagers use Email daily is compelling and I find when talking to students they don’t really understand the concept of email marketing – they just perceive most marketing emails as Spam while being positive about integrating with brands through social networking sites.
What consumers say about their email and social media usage
Two recent surveys from the email industry suggest email is very healthy in terms of account usage and here to stay for the foreseeable future (they would say that wouldn’t they). Social network usage is surprisingly low although for a fairer comparison, SNS usage should be broken out by age group.
I’ve presented these figures since they can help inform your investment in email and social media and help argue against colleagues that have been swept away by the social media hype. Ask them whether they … » Read our full article
Email marketing has alway enjoyed a reputation as a reliable source of responses. Send an email, get sales…send an email, get registrations…send an email, get pageviews…
While the results are still remarkably good, each year they get a little bit worse…if you accept the ROI figures published by the USA’s DMA:
2008 $44.93 (return for every $1 invested)
2009 $43.62
2010 $42.08 (estimated)
Not much worse, mind, and many other marketing channels would sell a close relative for those kinds of figures.
However, high ROI comes largely from email’s low costs. If you want to ramp up the actual profits attributable to email, you have to invest more in targeting and technology.
The rate of decline also depends on what else is going on in the online environment. And there are several trends that warn against email complacency.
1. The diversification of communication
For many years, email was pretty much the only way you could get updates on new content or promotions from a website. This is no longer true.
The cracks first appeared with blogs and the accompanying web feeds. Now we have remote interaction and communication with websites via … » Read our full article
In email marketing, what you see is not what your readers see. Literally.
The lovely HTML email template you or your designer sent to your email account may look great to you. But once that email lands in the inboxes of your list, it can look very different.
Social CRM has been around as a concept for a couple of years now, but this is the best report I have seen which has a definition and outlines the strategy issues which need management.
The report is written by Jeremiah Owyang, ex Forrester Research, but now an analyst at the Altimeter Group. You can download it via the Slideshare embed at the end of my review.
Definition of social CRM
The report doesn’t define social CRM, instead seeking to show the scope of how it can apply in organisations through this diagram, which is a very useful framework, both for defining social CRM and defining a strategy.
Since I’m in the business of writing textbooks, I define social CRM as:
The process of managing customer-to-customer conversations to engage
existing customers and prospects with a brand and so enhance CRM.
In the definition I have deliberately avoided using the term “social networks” since conservations can occur across a range of site types, including Facebook and Twitter, but also a companies own blog, third-part blogs, reviews-and-ratings sites or in neutral web self-service forums like Get Satisfaction. … » Read our full article
