MarketingSherpa Blog

If you are new to email marketing this post should provide a framework to build on, and if you’re an experienced pro it never hurts to think about the basics every once in a while.

Let me tell you what this blog post – and optimization in general – is not about: it’s not about a set of “best practices” rules that you follow time and time again to achieve the best possible outcome. What this blog post is about is taking a look at the basic series of priorities in email marketing that are critical to optimizing any campaign, and how to better understand the psychology of your target audience in order to make continuing improvements to any email marketing efforts.

As a new reporter at MarketingSherpa, I’m currently taking the online certification and training courses offered by our sister company, MarketingExperiments. The first course I’m taking is about email marketing optimization. Here are a few beginner tips I’ve noticed…

Why should I give you my email address?

What are the basic priorities in email marketing? MarketingExperiments has developed a simple heuristic that puts the four critical optimization categories in order of importance:


The order of importance is probably pretty obvious – if you don’t capture an email address there’s no message to be opened. If the message isn’t opened there’s no possibility of clickthrough, and if there’s no clickthrough then the landing page won’t get visited.

All of this leads to the single biggest issue in email marketing right now – email capture has become very difficult. The people in front of the other computer screen have become very wary about spam and privacy, and very reluctantly give out their email address.

I know this. In fact I have more than one free Web-based email address, and I bet you are no different. The same goes for the people we’re trying to reach.

The value prop of an email capture form

MarketingExperiments has developed a second heuristic that is applied to each of the four categories listed above:

Don’t be put off by the possibly complex-looking formula. This heuristic is the key to understanding the psychology of your target audience. Since email capture has become something of an email marketing problem, and is the most important step in any campaign, let’s look at this formula through the email capture lens, but keep in mind it should be applied to all four critical categories.

For effective email capture (eme in this example) your audience needs to see two kinds of relevance – the offer and the incentive. The offer simply answers the “why” question, as in, “Why should I give my email address to this person/company/website?,” and is the value you promise in exchange for the address. The incentive is just what it sounds like – an appealing element in the process that helps you get an email capture. Both offer relevance and incentive relevance, done correctly, are working for you.

On the other side of the ledger, and working against your success, are friction and anxiety. Friction is psychological resistance in your audience and anxiety is psychological concern. You want to remove any concern your audience might have about providing their email addresses, but friction is a little different because you need to have some friction.

Just asking for an email address is an element of friction, and if you don’t ask for it, it’s going to be pretty tough to get that address. What you want to do is minimize the resistance in your audience and remove any concern they might have.

When you look at email marketing optimization in terms of four critical categories that can be broken down into a handful of elements shared by each category, it’s obvious that no singular set of best practices rules will give you optimal results. But thinking about each element in each category, and repeating that process on a regular basis, will help you achieve continuing improvement. Now that’s optimization.

Related resources

MarketingExperiments Online Training and Certification Courses

MarketingExperiments Email Marketing Course

Email Marketing: “I am not dead yet”

I always love attending MarketingSherpa events – the presentations are not only enlightening but also entertaining and the networking between sessions rocks! This year’s B2B Marketing Summit in San Francisco was fabulous — and for those of you who missed it, we’re doing an encore performance in Boston October 25th and 26th 2010 .

My contribution to the event was a one-hour session on effective B2B drip campaigns which was very well received. It included seven case studies of successful B2B drip campaigns from my consulting work for clients and the MarketingSherpa archives. While I don’t have space to give you all the details here (join us in Boston if you need to know!) I wanted to share some of the keys to success.

But first: are you currently doing drip email campaigns? How many of you don’t even know what a drip campaign is? About a quarter of the audience responded affirmatively to the first question – and another quarter raised their hands when I asked the latter question. So, just to get us all on the same page…

Drip campaigns take their name from drip irrigation, which saves resources by allowing water and fertilizer to be consistently delivered directly to the roots of plants. There’s less waste than with sprinklers and topical fertilizer application; drip irrigation also provides a consistent level of moisture to the soil, rather than the “soak and dry” experience that sprinklers provide.

Drip marketing campaigns are most commonly delivered via the email channel because of its short turn-around, quick delivery time and cost-effective nature. A drip campaign involves a series of messages that are sent or “dripped” in a predefined order at a predefined interval. Each message in the campaign stands on its own but also builds on the missives that have come before it. A drip campaign is a response to a specific behavior or status of the recipient – and it encourages a specific action.

Drip campaigns are most commonly used to nurture leads – they often use education, testimonials and other tactics to move prospects through the early part of the sales cycle and take them from “less than hot” to “hot,” or at least “very warm.” As with drip irrigation, drip marketing campaigns are a resource-efficient way to serve a large group of constituents.

I shared seven case studies with the audience in San Francisco – here are the key takeaways:

1. Define your Goal(s): Know what you’re trying to achieve going in – and go further to define what specific action(s) you want the recipients of your drip campaign to take.

2. Understand that Content is King: When people contact me about drip campaigns, they usually want to talk about the timing and frequency of efforts. But those factors have much less impact than the content of your program. And once you’ve fleshed out the content, the timing and frequency fall in line naturally.

3. Develop a Message Map: The first cut of this should be a brainstorming session to determine the key messages which need to be conveyed to get recipients to take the action desired. The second cut is to figure out what real-life examples you can use to illustrate these key messages.

4. Bucket your Content: After your message map is done, it’s time to separate this information into a series of efforts. There should be some content that appears in every message; but each individual email needs to focus and go into detail on some aspect of your message map. It’s not a drip campaign if you send the same information over and over again. This exercise will determine how many efforts or individual sends are in your drip campaign.

5. Decide on Your Email Format(s): Although the majority of drip campaigns utilize letter-style email messages, but newsletter, short-form editorial and other formats can be just as effective. Don’t limit yourself to one – make the format support the content.

6. Utilize Design Strategically: Typically the copy is front and center in drip campaigns; design and images should be used to support, but not overshadow, the copy. Video and other interactive media can be effective as well, but only if they support the business goals.

7. Adding Segmentation to a Drip Campaign can Increase Its Effectiveness: Creating sub-campaigns which are based on lead quality, behavior or other actions increases the relevancy of your efforts and will increase overall campaign performance when done properly.

8. Detail Your Efforts in Advance: Developing a decision tree and/or flow chart of your drip campaign provides a blueprint for implementation and will help keep you in line with your business goals.

9. Use Social Media to Drive Acquisition: Social media allows you to communicate a single message to a large group – use it to entice people to opt-in to your drip campaign so you can deliver more relevant, targeted content to specific segments of your audience.

10. Look at Overall Campaign Performance: Obviously you’ll look at standard metrics like opens, clicks and conversions by effort and then look at the average of all efforts. But be sure to take the next step and evaluate the cumulative unique campaign metrics. A key link in a recent campaign garnered an average 25% increase in unique opens send-over-send. The unique clicks on the key link increased by more than 100% after the second send; after the sixth and final send, nearly five times as many unique recipients had clicked and visited this key landing page.

Marketers have many software vendors to choose from. There are laundry lists of companies willing to upgrade your website analytics, email marketing, display ads and almost any other part of your online business.

The growing list of platforms is making the job more complex. Work is done through several dashboards, and data comes from several directions. You have to spend time with each platform to achieve a single goal.

That is why Lisa Arthur, CMO, Aprimo, argues for marketing integration. Aprimo is an integrated marketing software provider. Arthur says integration can help marketers get back to focusing on driving higher ROI.

“The goal and promise of marketing integration is to simplify the complexity of marketing and allow marketers to spend more time on the strategy, the messages and the content, instead of chasing data and ad hoc processes,” she says.

Integration essentially pulls fragmented marketing processes under a single, centralized platform. The approach can free up some of your time, as well as:
o Streamline a multi-channel ROI calculation
o Cut campaign launch time
o Align disparate marketing goals
o Give executives and managers a quick view of overall marketing performance
o Give multiple marketing teams a central platform to work from

A key to starting the integration process is to align business strategy and marketing objectives with the goals of the effort. Consider how aligning marketing data and technology under a central platform help your company achieve its goals.

Second, marketing integration is more of an on-going journey than a short project. The process can continue for years and will require an executive sponsor. If you’re interested in integration and you’re not an executive yourself, find an executive to champion the project and point to how it will improve business goals.

Third, you should track and benchmark operational and strategic metrics. For example, on an operational level, will your team get campaigns planned and launched faster after integration? Strategically, will your team improve campaign performance?

Not all of your marketing needs to be integrated at once. Your team can start small by centralizing a disparate and manual process — such as creative review. Emails, ads and landing pages can be viewed and approved from a single, central location, rather than through an endless chain of emails.

Your team may not have a conversation around integration tomorrow, but if your number of marketing channels continues to grow, you might want to consider having the conversation soon.

News of email marketing’s demise has been around for years.

Cases in point:

• I’ve been on many panels where the topic is “Email is Dead; Long Live <Fill in the Blank>” where “the blank” is Blogs, RSS, MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube – you name it. Typically it’s a point-counterpoint format, where I’m alone on one side of the stage and there are at least three “experts” on the other side dissing on email.
• News sources, from About.com to iMedia Connection to the Wall Street Journal have run articles about  all the latest online marketing tactics – and how they will displace email in a matter of months or years.
• I recently did an audit of a large organization’s email program, from acquisition through creative development and into conversions and overall performance. At a presentation to the field reps, it only took a few slides for an attendee to raise his hand and ask why we were bothering, since no one used email anymore (even though their members are career professionals in their early 20s through retirement age).
• Ever since I started my email marketing consultancy, over nine years ago, people have asked me what I was going to do when email died. Confidence in my career choice was not high.

All that said, email is NOT dead yet. Nor is it dying.

Each year, the Direct Marketing Association ranks marketing channels by the ROI generated. Email has led their rankings for a number of years; in 2010 they project that email marketing will return an average of $42 for each dollar spent, down from more than $43 in 2009. Email is the leader by more than a nose; the #2 channel was Internet search advertising, which returned just under $22 per dollar spent in 2009.

Forrester also weighed in on email earlier this year, projecting that U.S. spending on email marketing will increase by a compound annual rate of 11% until at least 2014, when it will reach $2 billion.

A recent MarketingSherpa survey found that email was one of only two tactics where more organizations increased budgets than decreased them in 2009. Nearly 50% of companies reported that their email budget increased, compared to 14% who said it decreased (the balance said that their email marketing budget stayed constant). The only other tactic where more budgets increased than decreased? Social networks and blogs, where 48% of companies increased budgets and 20% decreased them.

The latest report that supports the life left in email marketing comes from Yahoo! Hotjobs, which recently  published an article on six new careers they felt were “coming of age.” Number five? You guessed it – Email Marketing Manager. Yahoo! reports it delivers an average salary of $69,000 and encourages those interested in moving into email marketing management to pursue an MBA.

My experience in the trenches supports the health of email marketing. My email marketing consultancy has been busier than ever in the past few years. I continue to grow my client base and just brought on a new employee to help me meet the demand.

So the next time someone suggests to you that email is dying, smile and just hum the tune to Monty Python’s “He’s Not Dead Yet.” Then go back to the office and continue to hone your skills to succeed in this exciting industry which is very much alive.

Editor’s Note: Jeanne Jennings is teaching MarketingSherpa’s Email Essentials Workshop Training in 12 locations across North America this year; the next one takes place in Toronto on October 19th. She’ll be blogging about the course material and her experiences during the tour. We’re excited to have her on board and contributing to the blog.

Related Resources

Master the Essentials of Email Marketing in One Day with MarketingSherpa Email Trainer Jeanne Jennings

Email marketing Case Studies, How To Articles and Interviews

Email Marketing Awards Gallery 2010: Winning Campaign Details and Creative Samples

What’s the difference between a webinar and a website? The last four letters.

At first, this seems like a bad joke out of the “1,001 Wacky Jokes for Children of Marketers” (which I believe is out in paperback now). But take a step back from your website and webinar, look at the big picture, and you’ll quickly find that they both have the same goal – a conversion.

At MarketingExperiments and MarketingSherpa, not only do we research and publish information about the most effective marketing practices – the “what really works” – we also conduct webinars ourselves.

With that in mind, here are five questions we ask ourselves when staring in the mirror on the morning of a webinar…

Are you providing value?

According to MarketingExperiments research, the most important positive element to conversion is motivation. A negative element that hurts conversion is friction. Not to be overly simplistic, but given this paradigm, the ideal situation to use a webinar is when you have customers motivated enough to overcome the friction of having to take an hour or so out of their day and spend it with you.

Of course, this is why so many B2B companies conduct webinars. They have complex knowledge and products that customers are, at some level, motivated to find out more about. But let’s drill a little deeper into that thought, and perhaps address that second question as well. For any conversion to happen there must be a value exchange, and webinar attendance, while not a final sale, is a mini-conversion. So the best kind of customer to reach is the one you can truly provide value for.

Your knee-jerk reaction might be, “I provide value to every possible customer.” However, it will better serve your efforts if you take an honest self-assessment of your possible content, and decide who (if anyone) would give something for this content. Because attendees are paying with their time.

Are you communicating that value?

Every activity that happens before the webinar is your chance to make this sale. Remember, this is essentially a sale and the price is your audience’s time.

Your title, the description of your webinar, promotion blog posts, tweets, social media conversation – these all must be focused on a challenge or objective the customer has, not on your product’s features and functions.

All of your pre-webinar activity must create a solution to that challenge on three levels.

• It must be relevant. If your audience is mid-level warehouse managers, telling them how to recreate an entire manufacturing process over which they have no control is not relevant to their challenge of meeting their production goals within the current process.
• It must be urgent. Your customers will not spend an hour with you to solve a problem that is 15 months away. They have to meet this quarter’s goals and numbers and that is where their greatest motivation lies. In the long run there is no long run if they don’t fix short-term problems. Or, as noted economist John Maynard Keynes has said, “In the long run we are all dead.”
• It must be important. Your audience likely has many challenges in their job. But if you are only addressing something minor, why should they spend an hour with you? Put another way, would you try to sell better tires for an airplane that has no wings?

Take an unbiased look at your efforts and make sure you truly are addressing your customer’s most pressing issues, and not just, like many companies, putting new wrapping on the same sales pitch.

Are you constantly engaging your audience?

For the host, the key is value, value, value. Why start the webinar with an ad for yourself, as so many do? What is the value for the customer? Every minute they remain on the webinar is a micro-sale to get them to stay on for the next minute.

As Flint McGlaughlin, the Director of MECLABS Group, teaches, “Dazzle me gradually.” Continuously provide value to your audience, to overcome the inherent friction of staying on any webinar.

From a technology standpoint, have a conversation with them using polls and answering submitted questions throughout. Have staff on hand to conduct Q&A through your platform since you won’t likely have the time to address every question on the call. Encourage them to have a conversation with each other by using a Twitter hashtag.

Again, your focus is not the sale, its helping and providing value to your audience.

Are you listening to your audience?

Once you have dazzled your audience, give them a way to learn more about how your company can help them. Over time, you can start to measure the value of these leads with your sales team and then discern how many leads you get per webinar and how much these leads are worth. Are they more likely to close than a bought list or other cold lead? Do they end up being higher-value deals since they are from more motivated, more engaged customers? Answers to these questions will help you determine ROI.

Beyond ROI and independent of leads, make sure you keep a finger on the pulse of your webinars themselves by making sure your audience has a way to provide you feedback and let you know how much value and help you provide through them. By keeping an eye on this soft metric, you can use your webinars to help educate a community instead of alienating potential customers.

Are you building a community?

Before, during and after a webinar, social media and other content marketing is an excellent fit to building a community around your solution (and, as the name suggests, your solution is not your product but rather the value you provide to customers).

Before a webinar, solicit feedback through LinkedIn to understand what topics your customers want more information about. Then, perhaps release a juicy whitepaper that you can dissect live on the webinar. During the webinar, use a Twitter hashtag to facilitate conversation with (and between) attendees. After the webinar, write follow-up blog posts (with audio and video replays) to share information with those who couldn’t attend, and interest them in attending your next webinar and further feeding the virtuous value cycle.

Remember, a webinar – just like social media – is a channel. It has no inherent value. Your job is to provide that value.

Related Resources

“Double the Value of Your Online Testing: Don’t just get a result, get the maximum customer insights” Web clinic

“Top Five B2B Marketing Practices For 2011” webinar

How to Promote Your Webinar Via Google News

The Art of Inventing Must-Attend Webinar Topics: Real-life Inspiration

Marketing with white papers and/or webinars

Pay-per-click advertising in search engines is a veritable money machine for some companies. They put money in, turn some wrenches, and money comes out the other end.

However, PPC is not a miracle worker. Turning those wrenches can take a lot of work. And there are several marketing goals PPC achieves less effectively than SEO.

Comparing data from MarketingSherpa’s 2011 Search Marketing Benchmark Reports: SEO and PPC Editions, more marketers reported SEO as “very effective” at achieving the following objectives:

o Increasing brand or product awareness: SEO: 42%; PPC: 34%

o Improving brand or product reputation: SEO: 29%; PPC: 19%

o Improving public relations: SEO: 27%; PPC: 6%

Clearly, more marketers believe SEO is more effective than PPC at changing people’s opinions about their products and brands. However, when it comes to conversion-related objectives such as increasing lead generation and online sales revenue, more marketers report PPC as “very effective” than SEO.

The data lead me to believe that people searching to learn more about a company or industry are more interested in natural search results than paid results. Ads take on a larger role as searchers make purchase decisions or consider other conversions (such as reaching out for more information).

If your team is hoping to lift brand awareness and reputation, you’re better off working to improve your natural search performance than increasing your PPC budget. PPC is not necessarily ineffective, but it’s likely to have a smaller return than time invested elsewhere.

If you’re in B2B marketing, chances are you have a complex sale. And I’m not just talking about your sales process. I mean the communication involved to make the sale itself happen – starting with the value proposition. Does it clearly answer this question, “What value does your company provide to your customers?”

Sometimes, the problem with marketers is that we think like marketers. We add powerful marketing words to everything we write – “New!” “Easy!” “ShamWow!” We want to include every possible feature and function (with no small prodding from product development). We also want to cast a wide net to gain market share with every possible audience segment.

The result can be long and confusing. Because we marketers aren’t really trying to make this complexity any clearer, we’re trying to make it more compelling. But what if, instead of thinking like a marketer, we thought like scientists?

“Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.” – Albert Einstein

Scientists, unlike marketers, are actually trying to understand something – usually something of breathtaking complexity. As Occam’s razor loosely states, “…the simplest explanation is usually the correct one.”

Now, there are a few caveats here. If you’ve ever read anything from a scientist, you certainly know that the writing itself isn’t simple and clear. But this heuristic does help keep scientists focused when delving into theoretical models.

Just what the heck does your company do?

With this in mind, take another look at your value proposition. And remember that all-important word – value.

• Does it clearly communicate what your company does?
• Are you trying to be persuasive at the expense of clarity?
• Is value to the reader plainly stated?
• Why should anyone care?

Hey, I have a background as a copywriter. So no one appreciates clever wordplay more than yours truly.  But as a communications consultant to B2B companies, I’ve also encountered far too many companies that didn’t clearly demonstrate what they do…and certainly not why anyone should part with scarce budget dollars to acquire it.

Crafting a value proposition is tough, and this blog post alone won’t help you do it – but if you can clearly communicate with your audience, at the very least you’re off to a good start.

MarketingSherpa B2B Marketing Summit ‘10

Looking for more B2B marketing strategies and techniques? At the upcoming MarketingSherpa B2B Summits in San Francisco and Boston, attendees will gain in-depth knowledge from the top of the funnel to the bottom line. But not just from the people here at MECLABS.

MarketingSherpa is fortunate to have a large community of experienced marketers who frequently share their expertise. B2B Summit attendees will listen to a variety of case studies presented by their B2B marketing peers.

PLUS: If you’re attending, you can share the lessons you learn with your peers by sending us your key takeaways for our Summit Wrap-up Report. If you have something good to say, we’ll quote you in the article.

Despite the rocky environment for marketing budgets during the last two years, a much larger percentage of organizations increased their email marketing budgets in 2009 than decreased them, according to MarketingSherpa’s 2010 Email Marketing Benchmark Report.

We spoke with several marketers this week to uncover a few more email marketing trends. We asked for their impressions on this vital tactic’s role in today’s marketing. Here are the highlights we found:

Deeper Integration with Digital Channels

Email marketing is becoming less of an isolated silo and is taking on a more cohesive role as marketing channels further integrate. Email has long tied directly to companies’ websites, but lately it has expanded to connect with audiences via:

– Social media

Click-to-share buttons added to email messages with strong, relevant content are expanding the reach of marketing campaigns.

– Mobile

Mobile devices are frequently used to read email, and marketers are formatting messages to ensure they render clearly.

– And others

Companies are asking for customers’ email address as the points-of-sale, and they’re linking emails to videos on YouTube.

The next step, says Blaine Mathieu, CMO, Lyris, is that companies should develop an integrated mindset and plan how marketing channels could be best combined to achieve the most effective results.

Tactical Advances from Technology

– More Sophisticated Segmentation

Email marketers have long segmented their audiences to deliver customized content to increase relevancy and response rates. In the beginning, segments were often broadly determined, such as by product category or topic of interest.

Now, behavioral segmentation is more common. Marketing teams are studying their subscribers’ actions and timing and crafting messages based on their positions in the buying cycle. This technology has been around for several years, but more marketing teams are taking advantage.

– Automated messaging

“There is no way any company can interact one-to-one in a relevant manner with thousands, tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands of people,” says Dylan Boyd, VP Sales & Strategy, eROI.

The increasing need for relevance and volume in email communication has driven the rise of automated email marketing. More teams are establishing automated email series based on events, such as abandoned shopping carts and white paper downloads. The growing sophistication of product suggestion and other personalization technologies has given these messages a personal, tailored touch.

Less Tactical, More Strategic Planning

Digital marketing has witnessed a boom in third-party solutions over the past few years. The growing lists of targeting and analytics platforms have outpaced many market teams’ abilities to leverage them, especially since many require a high-level of technological expertise to establish. However, the adoption process is simplifying.

“Especially in the last year, the tools of an email marketer and an online marketer are finally becoming simple enough to use and connected enough to each other across channels that the marketers no longer have to be a technologists – they can be marketers again,” Mathieu says.

Google rocked the search world last week by introducing a new feature that automatically predicts and displays search results as users type their queries.

Google Instant met with a swarm of speculation, including predictions that it would kill SEO, change SEO, and not change SEO.

All commentary is speculation at this point. Google Instant’s impact on search marketing will not likely be clear for another 30 to 60 days. The change will likely affect some marketers more than others, depending on search’s role in your marketing.

The folks at search agency and software provider Covario sent me a seven-page brief on the topic they wrote for their clients. Three highlights from their analysis and predictions:

1. Top organic positions are more important than ever

As users type search queries using the new feature, a drop-down “suggestion box” appears, pushing down paid and organic search results, and pushing some organic results below the fold.

Results pages with three or four ads in the top position sometimes only list one organic link above the fold (see image). The links pushed below the fold will likely experience a drop in traffic.

2. More ‘broad matching’ in PPC

Since users see results as they type, marketers will migrate toward strategies that use broad matching on the first keywords of popular multi-keyword queries.

In the short term, CPCs will increase and advertisers will have to budget more toward Google to drive similar volume, according Covario’s brief.

3. Not all searches are “Instant”

Google’s new feature is designed to work in the following browsers:
o Internet Explorer v8
o Safari for Mac v5
o Firefox v3
o Chrome v5, v6

Users running other browsers will perform traditional Google searches. Filtering your website analytics to track visitors by browser will help your team better understand how Google Instant changes your visitors’ behavior.

Please note: Covario’s brief emphasized that its analysis is strictly speculation. Only time and rigorous testing can determine what impact Google’s latest feature will have on your marketing and the marketing community as a whole.

Offline ads are likely to get a refreshing breath of relevance as 2D barcode technology becomes more prevalent in mobile phones. The pixelated images can be added to magazine and billboard ads, for example, and scanned by mobiles phones to pull up various media, such as a product videos or landing pages.

Smartphone users who have the technology or who download and install the software simply have to point their phone’s camera and at one of the barcodes. The software then communicates with a server to send the user to a registration page, video, app download, or whatever the desired media may be.

Although less efficient, feature-phone users can take a picture of a code and send it via MMS to a specified phone number to load the desired media.

“There’s really nothing the end-user needs to know other than how to turn on their camera for this to work,” says Mike Wehrs, CEO, Scanbuy.

Scanbuy creates technology to enable cell phones to read barcodes, and also runs a backend system for renting 2D codes to businesses. Marketers can purchase one or a handful of codes and a set number of “scans,” or impressions. Then it’s as simple as defining what you want a phone to load after scanning a barcode, and adding the code to marketing materials.

“Done appropriately with the right kind of support and end-user prompting, you can get enormous positive results from the inclusion of a barcode,” Wehrs says.

Wehrs cites his team’s work with Verizon. Advertisements in Verizon stores encouraged new Android smartphone owners to scan 2D barcodes to instantly download new apps (samples of the ads). The team achieved 175,000 app downloads in the first month, Wehrs says.

Wehrs can rattle off many marketing opportunities the codes present. The codes, for example, can have the media they load changed over time. Products can have codes permanently applied to them, and when scanned, offer a new piece of media every month, creating on-going customer engagement.

There are many 2D barcode standards. Google has embraced the QR standard, which Scanbuy’s technology supports along with several other popular ones, Wehrs says. Take a look if you think your offline ads could benefit from offering mobile consumers deeper interaction.