MarketingSherpa Blog

At the Media Center at MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2015, we interviewed your successful brand-side marketing peers, along with researchers and industry thought leaders.

One interview stuck out from the rest because we interviewed someone who’s title was “customer.”

Jill DAmato, the wife of our own Brian DAmato, Senior Vice President of Partner Solutions, MECLABS Institute (parent research organization of MarketingSherpa), agreed to sit down and answer a few questions.

We had recently fielded a survey with 2,057 American consumers about their email preferences, and it was interesting to sit down with a representative customer to help bring that survey data to life …

“Email is great, because it’s very quick and easy. But it does have to be something very catchy and very relevant and timely. Because if it’s not, I’m not going to open that,” Jill said.

Read more…

A well-timed and well-crafted message always has a chance to generate buzz through social media. If people like your message enough, they’ll send it to their friends. But they have to see it first.

During a call with Gary Wohlfeill, Creative Director, Moosejaw Mountaineering, I realized that getting attention is easier through some channels than others. Wohlfeill and I discussed his team’s recent holiday promotion (keep an eye on our free newsletters for the article). They ran the effort mostly through Facebook and Twitter.

Leading up to launch, the team sent messages through the social channels to build anticipation. They got some attention through Facebook, but it was harder to gain traction in Twitter, Wohlfeill says.

“Twitter is much more like a river. You drop a pebble in the river and you have to be standing there to see it go by. So you have to drop a lot of pebbles to reach a lot of people.”

Wherever you send a message, it’s going to have to compete for attention. Whether it’s a billboard competing with highway traffic, or an email competing with an inbox, competition is there.

Twitter, it seems, thrives on limited attention. Being seen can be a challenge. And once you’re seen, you can only hold attention for 140 characters–unless you get a click.

Two good ways to increase your chances at capturing more attention:
1. Be interesting enough to entice people to share with friends
2. Link to relevant content

Two of the latest marketing trends–social networking and SMS messaging–are becoming routine for some marketers, and their roles are becoming more clearly defined.

Chad Hallert, Director, Ecommerce, Eldorado Hotel Casino, and his team have experimented with building and promoting to a list of SMS subscribers since early 2009. In some ways, the team uses SMS similarly to how they use Facebook and Twitter. However, they’ve found SMS messages attract more immediate attention to promotions.

The team’s tried sending channel-specific promotions to SMS subscribers and social followers, but without fantastic results, Hallert says.

“We tried stand alone offers with mobile, social and email…when you break them up to pieces, nothing really competes with email, and the other two don’t look as valuable as they are.”

Instead, the real value of SMS and social are their ability to improve the results of an integrated campaign, Hallert says. He’s seen results improved by 5% to 8% by adding an SMS alert and Facebook updates to campaigns that already included website, paid search and email promotion.

This is due in part, Hallert says, to customers subscribing to more than one promotional outlet. A person who receives a text message and email about an offer is more likely to convert than a person who receives only one of the two.

The marketing power of the team’s SMS subscribers and social followers is likely to improve as the lists grow in size in relation to the team’s email subscribers. Currently, their SMS list is about 10% of their email list in size, Hallert says.

For now, the team is seeing social and mobile marketing add more value to integrated campaigns than the channels could generate by themselves. Watch our consumer marketing newsletter for a case study describing how Hallert’s team leveraged the immediacy of SMS to take advantage of the weather’s impact on hotel bookings.

I opened my Sunday newspaper this weekend and noticed an unusual ad stuffed among the many circulars. The ad was a full-sized grocery bag, and it was anything but subtle.

Office Max’s promotion runs from Aug. 16 to Aug. 22 and gives shoppers 20% off everything they can squeeze into the brown bag. If you’re thinking how best to fit a new office chair into the bag–don’t worry. All furniture qualifies for the discount, according to the small print. Computers, printers, and a few other items are among the unfortunate few that do not qualify.

I was surprised at the style and creativity of the ad. The bulky brown paper certainly stood out from the rest of the Sunday circulars, and the design looks good. There’s even a pattern down the side instead of the usual blank brown space:

Have any marketers reading this tried something similar? Or have you seen other companies try something similar in the past? Let us know in the comments…

Referrals from friends are a strong influence on how teens and tweens learn about “new brands and cool new stuff,” according to survey results released last week by Pangea Media.

Pangea is an entertainment an online advertising company that operates a network of quiz-related websites. The survey received 2,396 responses, and allowed for multiple selections when asking “How do you find out about new brands and cool new stuff?” The results:

o 76.4 % friends
o 75.5% stores
o 56.8% television commercials
o 52.6% magazine ads
o 39.8% online ads
o 35.0% Web/search engines
o 27.7% television shows

The results from asking how they “learn about new stuff” online (only one answer could be given):

o 27% ads in search engines
o 24% social networking sites
o 21% when friends email or IM
o 15% pop-up ads
o 13% trusted website

The results underscore that one of the best ways to earn your brand the elusive “cool factor” among consumers age 10 to 19 is have your brand referred to them by a friend. Stores are another powerful place to reach this demographic, even more so than any type of advertising queried, according to the survey.