A Glimpse Into The Future...

There's been quite a bit of chatter around the Salesforce.com/ExactTarget merger this week. With many industry experts & analysts all chiming in with their opinion. If you're an avid reader of all things digital media/ad tech/marketing tech...chances are you saw a move like this coming and likely many more just like it on the way. It's certainly no secret that companies like Salesforce.com, Adobe, Oracle, Google etc...have all made moves to bolster their end to end tech stacks, in an effort to become a one stop shop for their customers. Moving into the CRM/Email Marketing Space is simply the logical evolution here. Which is why I've aggregated a series of articles....all highlighting why we'll see this trend continue.

First, just take a look at the Marketing Technology LUMAscape. Consolidation is bound to occur:

MARKETING TECHNOLOGY LUMAscape from Terence Kawaja

The Data Providers: One Quadrant Chart To Rule Them All

Great insight from Ramsey McGrory, President & CEO of AddThis in this AdExchanger piece:

"In this piece, I did not call out a Z axis of diversified IT players such as IBM, Adobe, Salesforce, Oracle, SAP or even Amazon and Google (DSPs, ATDs, DMPs, Exchanges and the like fall somewhere on this Z axis as well). I believe they represent the sector focused on delivering some combination of infrastructure, data and services to companies that are consumer facing. These IT juggernauts are competitive with the largest consumer technology companies, and while they may not own data themselves, they must have data at scale integrated into their platform to provide valuable products and services."

The Data Driven Enterprise Marketing Revolution

Bizo's Russ Glass provides some great insight in this AllThingsD piece:

CRM as the system of record

"Salesforce has been spending much of the last decade building its CRM system. Since more than 75 percent of the companies that use Salesforce are B2B, the company’s CRM platform is arguably the system of record for the B2B marketer. This puts Salesforce, as the fastest-growing scaled vendor in the space, in the driver’s seat to become the platform where marketers keep their treasure trove of prospect and customer information and interaction data. Oracle, NetSuite, IBM, Google, SAP — and arguably even Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter — don’t want to see Salesforce have the lock on such valuable data. To fend off the Salesforce threat, these companies are developing their own audience data strategies, ranging from aggressive acquisitions to building cookie data exchanges, or even building their own social networks (if they’re not one already). As each realizes, the vendor that controls audience data “wins” because all marketing decisions are keyed off of this information."

B2B Audience Targeting Works On Facebook, Says Bizo's Russ Glass

Yet another gem here from Russ in this AdExchanger.com interview:

Is the marketing automation sector interested in your B2B data?

"To be honest, it's the crux of what is so exciting about the next stage of this space. Real-time bidding (RTB) brings phenomenal value, but there's a little bit of "so what?" When you can start to integrate automation into the core systems that marketers are using to be successful, now things get exciting because you've enabled more efficiency in the enterprise and the marketing team than they've had before. I'll give you an example. Bizo has integrated with Eloqua – one of many systems that we're integrated with – and this enables a marketer with the same process that they’re doing day-to-day, but through automation. It syncs email with social and display such that within a certain marketing automation wave, a consumer is going to get the display ad that syncs up with that message. As they move down the funnel, they’re going to get different ads, case studies – whatever the marketing may demand, based on where they are in the tunnel. From an outbound standpoint, you just automated a huge part of what the marketer does beyond email.

What's even more aligned with the Holy Grail of marketing is that all of that information about number of display ads viewed and that this person was served two social ads – that's now all part of the attribution data. You as a marketer can see how you are going to most effectively model to drive success. That’s a big example of the power that automation, integrated with the right marketing systems, can create."

Is offline starting to play in your world more?

"It is, but the last statement you made is important in here. We use offline data to help our clients associate their CRM system and all of their first-party data with our broader data set. Bizo doesn't maintain any kind of PII ourselves, but we help out clients be smarter about their data sets and more effective with their data sets through offline data. The onboarding process actually tailors the offline data."

What is the offline data these days that people try to onboard or use through you guys?

"It's the business email address. That's the key to the B2B "kingdom" – the business email address."

Russ is dead on here and not only is email king in B2B but B2C as well - hence the ExactTarget acquisition.

CRM Vendors In Hot Pursuit Of Paid Media

More goodness from the fine folks at AdExchanger.com:

"With digital marketing budgets expected to rise this year, customer relationship management (CRM) software vendors are ramping up their pursuit of paid media budgets.

“Marketing is perhaps the hottest area in the customer-facing realm right now, and it is evident the place has multiple holes to fill and many approaches to take,” observed Paul Greenberg, president of The 56 Group, a consulting firm that focuses on CRM strategic services.

Combining data sets – i.e. “breaking the silos” to serve customers relevant ads and offers – is one of the holes that marketers are trying to fill. CRM vendors are approaching the problem by offering more ways for companies to fuse their CRM data with advertising.

Customer demand drove Salesforce.com’s decision to produce Social.com, a tool that lets marketers connect their purchase and customer loyalty data, as well as data from contests, whitepaper downloads and other conversion pages to their social ad campaigns, according to Peter Goodman, VP of Salesforce Marketing Cloud."

Changing Lanes: Solving the Decade-Old Problem of Cross-Channel Ad Attribution

Surprised to see another AdExchanger.com article? Don't be! Kim Reed Perrell CEO of Adconion Direct offers some great insight here:

"However, unifying digital spending is a way for most advertisers to begin aligning their attribution capabilities. Simply put, if your media campaigns aren’t served, managed and distributed from a single platform for a single user, you can’t know the impact of one touch point to another for any given user and therefore can’t make meaningful attribution models."

JEGI's Tolman Geffs Talks CRM Developments, e-Commerce Trends

In this AdExchanger.com article, Jordan Edminston Group's Tolman Geffs details their view of the market:

"Trend number two is integrating that customer experience through the e-commerce platform back into the CRM system and then into the marketing machine. That integration is the key next step. For the next three to seven years, you’re going to see a tremendous amount of investment, growth and M&A in that area. Salesforce buying ExactTarget is a great example of that. That’s an example of integrating CRM into marketing messaging.

For the players in ad tech, this is an emerging stack that a number of them will get acquired into. You’re already seeing this with folks like Oracle, IBM and SAP building both stacks of e-commerce capabilities and enterprise marketing capabilities. They’re going to continue making those acquisitions and those will be increasingly integrated."

At The Merkle Summit: Building The Marketer's Competitive Advantage

David William CEO of CRM powerhouse Merkle provides his view:

"Revisiting his “Connected CRM” (cCRM for short) theme of the previous year, Williams provided an update and noted the move “from the campaign-focused world to the customer-focused world,” and how it’s now about utilization of relationships, rather than “the matching” of data points. And, for the marketer’s bottom-line purposes, it’s about how those relationships get monetized."

The New Data Driven Ad Stack

In a data driven world, you live and die by the quality of your data…simple as that. Which is why there is a massive shift taking place in the ad tech marketplace right now, as CRM and paid media converge. Traditional CRM players (Oracle, Salesforce, IBM etc…) are now making aggressive moves to integrate paid media offerings as part of their overall solution.

Wait…what? CRM companies want to get into the paid media business? Most of us have been trained over the years to think of display & paid media as a purely branding focused, awareness driving…top of the funnel stuff. But guess what…it’s not. The rise of programmatic buying has lead to greater efficiency, targeting & reach for advertisers. Which translates into paid media actually being used successfully for direct response & performance based advertising. So it stands to reason that if paid media can be used to drive conversions you might as well target the people you know have a much higher likelihood of converting – your customers!

The limitation of email marketing has always been the fact that only a small percentage of your overall customer file will ever actually open your message. And the only real solution was to send more email…until now that is. We are now witnessing the intersection of paid media and CRM. As Bizo’s Russ Glass points out in this AllThingsD article – at the core of the data driven marketing revolution is the CRM database:

“With the CRM system as the system of record, seamlessly connecting all of the marketing systems in an enterprise, executing programs and then measuring success becomes possible — once the right data can be plugged in.”

And what is the data driven marketing revolution you ask? Well at LiveIntent we’d probably say it’s the ability to reach your subscribers everywhere…on the web, mobile, video, social etc…Because if I’m Walmart and I know that 80% of my email offers are going unread, I want to reach my subscribers, with my offer, anywhere and everywhere they are.

And how do you reach your subscribers everywhere? Email of course! Email is the only identifier that can be used to target offline CRM data, online. Which is why the CRM piece of the new ad stack is becoming so critical. Nothing beats first party data…as shown by Facebook, eBay, Amazon and perhaps now Twitter all creating advertising solutions that leverage their treasure trove of 1^st Party CRM data. And now advertisers have the ability to use their own 1^st Party CRM data to create addressable audience segments. It’s a 1^st Party – Party!

In 2011 Forrester said that we are now living in the “Age of the Customer” – which meant putting the customer at the center of your business was required in order to compete in todays world. In another Forrester research piece titled “Embed The Customer Life Cycle AcrossMarketing”, Forrester says the following:

“By investing additional spend on retention marketing to increase share of wallet with existing customers, marketers are placing their money on a much surer bet – the people who have already demonstrated some level of affinity for the product or brand – than an indiscriminate cast out to the wider pool of potential shoppers or buyer.”

That just about sums it all up! Today’s landscape is extremely fragmented, with customers interacting with brands across multiple channels and now devices. If you’re going to invest in getting your existing customers to spend more of their dollars with your brand, you’re going to need to reach them everywhere. Putting your CRM database at the center of your ad stack enables brands/marketers to achieve this. A recent AdExchanger article highlighting Valueclick's Dotomi  business summed it up perfectly:

"Hello paid media, you're in the CRM business now."

To Facebook Thanks For Everything, Email

Don't call it a come back - but email is sexy once again. We went through some tough times over the past few years as marketers sought to find the next big thing. Flocking to social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, MySpace and on and on and on...Poor old email was feeling a little left out in the cold, still the most powerful tool in any marketers tool kit - it was getting NO love. It was all about Social, Social, Social! For all the promise however, Social has never even come close to delivering the ROI of email. It is not only the most widely used application across any device and it's also the single most preferred channel of communication - a major double whammy. Oh and yeah that pesky ROI thing, nothing touches email - so make that a Trifecta.

So all this time, email continued to do its thing...makes brands a ton of cash. While Facebook was struggling to figure out how in a post IPO world it was going to create new ad products that got marketers excited about using its services. Then a funny thing happened....

Facebook, once heralded as THE email killer...not only didn't kill email, actually went 180 degrees in the opposite direction and made email the crown jewel of its advertising services. WOW! Who would have thought that was possible? Just two years ago, every pundit declared over and over that email is dead, Facebook is how brands & people communicate. Well that never quite became reality, some brands actually soured big time on Facebook (GM anyone?) while email volumes continued YOY increases. And here we have Facebook actually creating a sort of email renaissance...my friends, dare I they are bringing sexy back to email?

Why?

It's pretty simple actually...Facebook recognized that brands have rich 1st party CRM data sitting inside of their databases. How could they unlock those data sets and allow marketers to use this data on their platform for targeting? The answer is simple - email! Email address is the unique identifier of the web and as it turns out the large majority of Facebook users, use the same email address to sign into Facebook as they do to subscribe to emails from brands. Creating a match made in heaven.

Since the introduction of Facebook's Custom Audiences product, the folks over at Facebook have continued to innovate ad solutions which leverage email for targeting. Look-a-like audiences was introduced and most recently Facebook's most aggressive foray in email targeting - Custom Audiences bundled with 3rd Party offline data. Working with partners like Acxiom, Epsilon and Datalogix, marketers now have the ability to target their own customers using 3rd party data to give them additional insight into what their customers might be interested in purchasing. The feedback thus far has been outstanding. Email innovation at its finest, brought to you courtesy of Facebook!

If you'e thinking wow 3rd party data overlays are pretty darn cool - 1. you'd be right and 2. let's talk a little about how exactly Facebook was able to accomplish this. Oh that's right...email address. Given its status the unique identifier of the web. So how do you marry offline data to an online profile? Well email of course...And guess what? This isn't cookie data, this is matching hashed emails to bring these data sets together. So by its very nature, extremely accurate when a match is made. So....uhhh....yeah, this email thing turns out to actually be MORE important than we originally thought, which is kind of a big deal considering how important it already is. And then there's this small issue of 3rd party cookies and the rise of mobile traffic, making ad targeting even harder, unless you're using email as your targeting key that is!

Here's where I get to plug my own company since, this is after all my blog. We're doing the exact same thing here at LiveIntent. Not only do we allow the same functionality that allows brands & marketers to upload their 1st Party CRM (also 3rd Party) data but we can use IAB standard display units that will serve across our entire network of 350+ publishers. Meaning you can target your audience in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Meredith, Hearst, Conde Nast and so on....some pretty cool and powerful stuff. And if you're a publisher you can now sell this solution to your advertisers if you are working with us. We call it CRX - Customer Relationship Extension and the premise is the same as Facebook's...marketers want to target their best customers...which are their subscribers of course! Since you'll never get 100% open rates, make sure you are getting in front of your non-openers as well.


Facebook and email, once mortal enemies but now star crossed lovers....This is a storyline worthy of Shakespeare himself!

Own, Don't Rent Your Audience

Do you own or rent your audience? What do I mean own vs. rent? Simple...do you own a 1:1 relationship with your subscribers or are you dependent on a 3rd party distribution channel to reach your audience?

The reason I ask is because over the last few weeks I've come across a large number of online publishers who have chosen to simply ignore email. Choosing to instead promote social channels as a way to connect with their audience...some not even including the option to subscribe via email. These aren't some mom & pop sites with a 1MM page views either. These are large, well funded digital media companies with tons of site traffic. To be honest, I'm baffled as to why...just can't wrap my head around it. Over the past two years I've seen companies that have built their entire audience strategies on 3rd parties, severely impacted when their distribution "partner" decides to make a change. We've seen this with Facebook and the absolute collapse of social readers. As well as with Google and its series of algorithm updates, which have caused sites to lose as much as 40% of their traffic, almost overnight. I

If you don't own your own distribution, the question is...why not? It's never been easier & cheaper to setup an effective email marketing program. It's crazy to me that publishers out there completely ignore email to focus on channels where the rules can be changed at any time. It's not as if email is only used within certain audience groups...it's the preferred communication channel with every single age group!

Go ask any retailer what their most valuable asset is and the answer will be 100 times out of 100, their email database. Why should this be any different for publishers? It's gotten to the point where Publishers are putting Facebook & Twitter stats on their media kit. Really...come on! As someone who was on the media buying side, I can tell you that Facebook & Twitter stats mean next to nothing. Great, so you've got 1MM Facebook likes, how many can you actually reach? 100K, maybe??? I've been let down more times that I can count hoping social promotions would help me hit my goals...never did. Guess what always delivered? Email....always.

So why this lack of attention to the most powerful tool in your media kit? I can venture a few guesses. Most view email as nothing but cost center. It costs to send and it's difficult to sell and monetize. If that's been your take...I've got some GREAT news for you!

LiveIntent has completely changed this entire dynamic. Publishers can now sell email inventory the EXACT same way they sell display, with the same features and functionality they are used to in web display. Which means you can bundle email inventory together with display to immediately increase your sell through rates. Additionally anything that you don't sell, can be monetized via the LiveIntent exchange (LFX). So now publishers with high traffic websites can begin to make email collection a priority as they can finally monetize it like they do the web.

Pretty great huh? That's not even the best part. Your email database will be your single MOST valuable asset. Not web traffic, not Facebook Likes or Twitter Followers. At LiveIntent we've seen this first hand...to give you a point of reference: across the entire LiveIntent Exchange (700MM Impressions/Month), email display inventory has a CTR of nearly .3%. That's not a decimal point error either...Click through rates are 5-10x higher than web display. So it should be valued 5-10x higher....making it easily your most valuable source of inventory.

So the time is now to start aggressively building your email file. Not only can you monetize it directly you're also going to get the ancillary benefit of clicks & page views to your site. Perhaps the greatest benefit however is ownership of a 1:1 relationship with your audience. That alone is worth the cost.

And there's much much more! However I'll have to save that for my next post.

Email Marketing's Inferiority Complex

Not a single day goes by without some industry "expert" predicting the death of email. If you took what they said to heart, email should be been dead 10+ years ago - but it's not. As a matter a fact it's healthy than ever...It is perhaps the single most pervasive application in existence, perhaps only eclipsed by the browser. According to data from Pingdom, there are 2.4B internet users and 2.2B email users. That's some serious penetration right there! But scale, ROI and the overall effectiveness of the channel doesn't seem to earn it any goodwill, EVER. It's just taken for granted time and time again and kicked to the curb as soon as something sexier walks through the door.

This abuse has lead an entire industry to suffer from what I'm calling "Email Inferiority Complex". Which is the perpetual feeling of inadequacy as compared to other digital marketing channels. This complex has lead many of us within the email space to lash out every time someone speaks poorly about our beloved email or predicts our collective demise. We continue to show proof, that dollar for dollar email has the highest ROI of any other digital marketing channel...it's king of the hill. Each time we shout a bit louder and comeback to the table with even better data, showcasing email's dominance but no matter...the attacks keep coming.

So it is high time we take these challengers head on...we need to issue a simple, yet effective challenge to all those who tell us "email is dead" and this is:

Remove email marketing from your mix for the next 30 days.

That's it...pretty simple no? If you really think email is dead and you've got all the answers on what's going to replace it - then just simply do so. Take all of the resources you were going to apply towards your email efforts and dedicate them somewhere else. This should help us get to the bottom of things REALLY fast. Time for all the pundits, experts, analysts etc...to put their money where their mouth is.

We can use the Hash #EmailChallenge to see who's up for it and track the results. However I suspect all of us email folks already know the answer but as you can probably tell, we're kinda sick and tired of being told we're irrelevant or will be in the near future. As my man Axl Rose would say - "get in the ring..."

The Secret to Social Media

Here's the secret to engaging your audience on Social:

That's right....Bacon! If you are a community/social media manager looking for ways to boost engagement and response rates. Here's a little challenge! Find a creative way to post a picture of Bacon and let me know if it cracks your Top 10 most engaging posts of the last 30 days. Who's up for it?

Moving Beyond the Like

How many times are we going to read similar headlines? Social doesn't work....Facebook doesn't work....Twitter doesn't work. Blah blah blah blah....

I am so tired of reading over and over again how there's no ROI from investing in Facebook. There's plenty, if you know what you are doing and the simple fact of the matter is, most don't. In the 2012 Facebook Ad Report, conducted by Social Fresh with help from – Buddy Media, Convince & Convert, Likeable Media, Webtrends, and BlitzLocal  - we get some insight into what marketers are actually doing within Facebook. And the answer is not a whole lot...More than half of all respondents said they used between 2 & 5 total segments for audience targeting. This is shocking - given all of that data and targeting options provided by Facebook and this data is coming from technology companies that can help marketers manage 1,000's of audience segments.  It's pretty clear that marketers need help with their audience targeting strategy to at least make Facebook Ads a viable source for ROI. Then there's EdgeRank, posting content etc...is it worth it? How much should we invest? And on and on and on. If marketers are investing so little effort with their media dollars then can we really expect them to invest what's needed to make a Page work? Facebook Ads as well as managing Facebook Pages can all be done in a way that helps marketers achieve their goals but let's for a second move beyond that. Let's get into where Facebook as well as other social channels can really accelerate your growth.

Social Design.

"Social Design is a way of thinking about product design that puts social experiences at the core. Create these social experiences with the features available on Facebook Platform."

(Taken from the Facebook Developers site: https://developers.facebook.com/socialdesign/)

Brands and marketers that understand this concept have moved beyond the  "Like" and have invested in "authentications". This is how you tap into the power of the Open Graph.  All one needs to do is go take a look at Facebook's Developers site to and view the Open Graph Case Studies to see what kind of results this integration can yield. Here's a few charts that will help visualize what tapping into the Open Graph can mean:

It's pretty clear from the charts above that if you can think about how Social Design can fit 

into your business/product - you can leverage the power of Facebook's Open Graph to dramatically accelerate your growth. What could you do if you knew your customers:

- Friends

- Relationship Status

- Favorite Movies, Teams, Celebrities

- Friends Birthday's

- Check-in's

This list goes on and on...You are only limited by your own creativity. By getting users to authenticate with your App you are creating a value exchange - the customer is giving you access to their data in exchange for you providing them a unique and positive experience. In world where data is considered the new "oil" - it's surprising to me how few people are trying to actively take advantage of what Facebook can provide. And it's certainly not a shock that those companies that do - are building incredible businesses.

The social naysayers will continue hammer away at Facebook, Twitter etc...singing the same song they've been signing all this time. Meanwhile in the background, companies that are social by design from inception, will continue to innovate and disrupt. 

Game on.