Thinking Digital

So, farewell then...

2009-11-20T15:24:00Z

So, the time has come. Or rather, the untimely end has come. Revolution is taken off the stands, its feature article spiked.

It is, in my opinion, a huge shame. I've been involved in the magazine in one way or another – reader, writer, interviewee, critic, blogger – for a dozen years. I've seen it change and grow and mature since its earliest raison d'etre of providing a more client-friendly window on our industry than NMA's then-trade newsletter view.

We, that is my friends and colleagues in the industry, even put up with the doldrum years of that one awful front-cover photoshop template and remained loyal. It's a crying shame that ad revenues couldn't support the title... but it's also testament to the power of the digital revolution itself, which Revolution has so diligently reflected, that has led to the incorporation of marketing into the online. The digital universe, once so revolutionary, took over.

That the print edition is going is not so sad, except that it ends a vital period of reporting and advocacy that has now, quite inevitably and probably quite rightly, moved online. As with all changes like this though it leaves the hugely talented and engaging people behind it adrift. I hope that this talent doesn't go wasted or diluted. Gareth Jones, Andy McCormick and the rest of the team deserve congratulations, as do their predecessors, for providing an important and valued perspective on our industry, one that has been accessible, informative and fun.

So, farewell then. Revolution is dead. Long live the revolution.

Here Lies the Wave

2009-10-20T12:30:00Z

So, I've spent a week or two experimenting with Google Wave. I've had some correspondence with some journalists I know, a Vistage colleague in the US, other people who run digital agencies. And it's been a frustrating experience.

I think partly the way they've done the beta release is to blame. It seems that very few large communities of people that already correspond have been given a pool of invitations. So conversation has been very fragmented. The beauty of Wave, which is a kind of rolling discussion incorporating instant messaging, social media, productive wiki and email, can't show itself clearly when there are six of you but not all on the same wavelength at the same time.

One of the features I found quite interesting is that you can incorporate a Wave into a web page. In my case I hosted a Wave in my blog for a week, and people who were logged in to Wave could view the embedded Wave and people in the conversation could interact with it. My coding's not up to much, so it didn't look particularly elegant, but it's a far cry from the basic comment field.

So I think that one day Wave could be awesome. While some of my online colleagues didn't see the attraction, I think it might become quite a revolutionary step. For example, imagine constructing a collaboratively-generated screenplay or feature article, where several people can be involved in different time zones, editing previous contributions and suggesting new, constantly honing and refining, fact-checking, editing and clarifying as you go along, until the final polished artifact is ready. On the other hand, I can see all sorts of mischief; and the experience of wiki, where attribution and defacement become important, may have to be revisited.

It's not in itself particularly original – it is after all an agglomeration and blurring of the borders between a whole host of technologies that have been around for between 15 and 30 years – but it may take discussion itself to a whole new level.

Well, what a week

2009-10-20T12:01:00Z

Well, what a week.

I started out the weekend getting my solo gliding certificate, and flying my first four flights with no-one else in the plane. Here's a picture of the KA13 I was flying (it's the red one at the bottom).

I then spent most of the rest of the weekend finalising our move into new offices while we wait for the brand new and very cool offices to be fitted out. How come? Well, we've just completed a deal to become part of Hasgrove-owned Amaze plc, the UK's biggest non-London digital agency. They've got 180 people in Manchester, Chester, Brussels - and pretty soon it'll be 50 in London too. We've made Head of Client Services Emma Nicol and Planning Director Pete Anderson shareholders in recognition of the work they’ve done over the past couple of years while we’ve built up to this point, and it’s well-deserved.

We'll continue to operate under the Underwired brand, and of course we own the eCRM.co.uk website and trade mark, so the pointy-head stuff we do, along with the lovely design work Jason Holland’s team produces, will continue but with a bit more, well, momentum behind it.

So, a momentous time. And we're extremely happy. You could say I'm flying.

Mixed bag of advertising that fails to build relationships

2009-09-28T21:02:00Z

After last week’s incredulous blog post about eBay leaping onto Patrick Swayze’s demise, and the general state of advertising (Go Compare anyone?), I’ve actually been paying a little more attention just in case there’s anything good in between the main events.

Barclays seems to have caught a great advertising team – two ads for two different products were clever and eye-catching. I liked the latest ads for some car marque, which seemed to offer three different cars depending on your budget but I can’t remember which brand; likewise the “chasing her metaphors” piggy bank ad again, amusing ad but can’t recall the brand. I loved the army ad detailing a strike on an insurgent gun, but on reflection felt underwhelmed when this turned out to be the chap’s career highlight (the army chap, not the insurgent chap). I really liked the Cadbury’s Fair Trade ad. Actually, it was a mixed bag. I’m very glad I can avoid it all with a PVR’s ffwd button.

None of it however has been designed to develop a relationship. Even the Cadbury’s one, which presumably is part of a series designed to give me a rounded sense of the brand new brand onion, felt stuck on – unrelated to the Gorilla or those other ones that didn’t work. I’d love to see advertising that deliberately led off-screen, not just to the shop but to a place where a relationship can flower.

I can’t remember the last time an ad told me to visit the website in a clear, beneficial way. Oh, apart from all those second-string insurance aggregator sites of course, which do so so risibly it’s more a distraction than marketing (“let’s grab the consumer’s attention, at any cost” we imagine the account guy saying, shortsightedly – smacking of desperation on the part of both client and agency). I’d love to work with an ad agency that had the confidence to work with a digital specialist to create a genuine journey. Meerkats and Army aside, they just don’t cross-refer – and the beauty of the modern customer journey is that it can and should be fluid, media savvy and engaging, not ephemeral, boorish and – in some cases thankfully – entirely negligent of brand recall.

Shame on you eBay

2009-09-15T16:36:00Z

So, eBay scrapes the bottom of the advertising barrel, with an online banner / MPU combination listing results for Patrick Swayze memorabilia including a 99p video of Dirty Dancing – available now on eBay UK. I do hate advertising. In fact, there seems to be very little to redeem it these days. Ever since our ad breaks were transformed into zippy topped and tailed bits on Sky+, I've not missed it one bit.

And on the few occasions recently when I've actually had to sit through advertisements on the telly I've been shocked at how bad it is. To whit, crass ads that seem to have been created by morons from cheap advertising agencies, with no hint of irony. Bad acting (Peter Jones, there's no excuse), bad editing, bad voiceovers, bad construction, bad branding... has nothing moved on since the 80s? I'm aghast.

Anyway, the dross and unforgivably tacky online aberrations like eBay's let the few redeeming campaigns stand out, simples.

An email, by proxy

2009-08-13T20:59:00Z

I started to write a blog post yesterday about the ethics of signing an eCRM email personally, even though the signer would have been on holiday at the time of broadcast. It was an interesting question, scuppered a little by the vagueness of the ethical dilemma, and thoroughly undermined by the fact I'm off on holiday myself later today with no guarantee it would be published before I go.

This week I read about a new service that's caused a bit of a stir, that will send emails on your behalf to loved ones after your demise. Very little different to what a Will can do, though I suppose more easily distributed and less focused on a fusty solicitor's office and family tantrums, and more to do with being able to say things in death not possible due to location, fear or convention in life. In the meantime you can also, of course, have someone pretend to be you on your behalf – though a big brand hiring a PR company to write the CEO's blog is clearly beyond the pale (and doesn't achieve the Groundswell thing anyway). It's much, much more effective and engaging to just be yourself, something which, for example, Jane Fonda does so disarmingly on her blog.

Next week it will be Natalie pushing the button on Underwired's monthly news email (so if you want to read a few thoughts on the Payment-by-Results zeitgeist then drop her an email to join the list – natalie@underwired.com). And then of course while I'm away I'll be vicariously sending correspondents my out of office autoreply... the realisation of which finally spiked yesterday's blog draft.

Joining the dots between eCRM and acquisition

2009-08-07T10:20:00Z

Recession indicates retention. The solution (as everyone knows, even if few practice it) to the problems brought about by a severe downturn is first concentrate on what you have, not what you might have. Marketers must – must – get retention right, for a variety of reasons.

- It’s where your current revenue is
- It’s where the lowest hanging fruit for additional revenue is
(all you have to do is not screw up, then ask for more business)
- It’s where your biggest advocates lie
- It’s where your data sits
- It’s the biggest source of prospective customers for your competitors

and so on. Reducing churn protects your customer base against better offers or a better story from your competitors, and yes, they’ll try anything. But customers have a certain amount of inertia. Once they’ve started a relationship with a brand they’ll only move through lack of appropriate attention or if you don’t deliver on what’s been promised, so retention starts with not offending customers. ECRM creates stories that will keep customers engaged, and great eCRM creates stories that massively increase engagement and not only reduce churn to near-zero but increase purchase frequency, average transaction value, and active advocacy.

The customer relationship management bit of eCRM isn’t the whole story.

Buried in the above list though is a gem. “It’s where your data sits”. Your best source of information – not just for segmentation strategy – about who’s likely to spend more is your existing customer base. The data you already own can tell you how to run extraordinarily efficient acquisition campaigns.

(By the way, many people in digital have long thought that acquisition campaigns are a load of rubbish because generally they’re about feeding huge numbers of people into a funnel in the hope of converting the few people who, more or less by accident, have been hit at the right time to buy.)

By combining the segmentation that’s been created for eCRM programmes that focus on retention with the data that gets collected on how those segments behave over time in reaction, we suddenly have a potential gold mine. Great eCRM doesn’t just retain, enhance, increase - it tells you how to acquire. The new, richer data tells you which types of people are most likely to be movable from low-value to high-value. And this in turn tells you what kinds of people you want more of. And that, put simply, tells you where to spend your money to increase your feed into the improvable segments. ECRM suddenly becomes not just about retention marketing, but about all marketing.

Motivating the CEO

2009-07-28T15:22:00Z

- I just had a call from a brand we've been after for a long time – they're the world's largest operator in a high profile leisure sector. We've been talking with them on and off for the last few months, but things had gone a little quiet.

Now, in a recession, new business prospecting is hard. In fact, as an eCRM agency we're pretty much honour-bound to concentrate on retention, delivering more bang for our clients' bucks and making sure what we do really works. The corollary is that (hopefully) word then might get around and we'll win more business. The truth is that most of our new business this year has come from existing clients (with one or two notable exceptions), and previously having concentrating on winning multi-brand groups, that's turned out to have made perfect strategic sense.

So it was very nice to find myself on the receiving end of a forty-minute phone call clarifying exactly what the first few steps in a relationship might be. One of the questions I asked during the conversation was what had prompted the call. Seems the CEO had got in touch and told him that retention was a highly strategic issue and that the brand needs to invest in eCRM. Client's pleased, though I suspect he might have wished for the buy-in sooner. Agency's happy, because as long as the client's goals and the budget are right, who's worried what the trigger is?

But I am. I'd love to know why, after 18 months, the CEO has had an epiphany about digital and retention. It's slightly like the old days, when we could speak with marketers all day long but it was the CEO who bought the website (and when I say old days, I mean 1995). I'm fully aware that reducing expenditure and improving margins are highly strategic issues, and I'm also aware that digital can address these head on. But I'm wondering why the sudden awareness of eCRM. I'd love to think it was articles in magazines like Revolution, but I'm not certain CEOs read them. I'd be flabbergasted if this particular CEO was following my Tweets about eCRM.

However, I do know that digital has become a strategic issue amongst some business leaders, forced by recession to take a long hard look at how and why the world is changing around their brands. Social media is turning sales funnel-oriented acquisition on its head, Forrester Research are re-educating business strategists with robust models for initiating change – both through listening to what they've called the groundswell and by using different approaches to segmentation to drive customer engagement. Don Tapscott's Grown Up Digital is showing up at CEO professional development organisations like the excellent Vistage. CEOs are really taking note of a (rare) opportunity to leverage the changes wrought by recession that incorporates a new marketing world view driven by customers in a medium that is digital.

Ultimately I guess it's the CEO's responsibility to ensure the senior team – and particularly marketing and sales – are on the right track to support the strategic goals of the business. And these strategic goals are not just weathering the storm, but preparing for the opportunities to come.

I'm hoping it means I might get a few more calls.

PS. If you are a CEO, and you're reading this, that last sentence was a hint ;)

You should follow me on Twitter here.

De-fragmenting digital

2009-07-09T10:17:00Z

- Most clients have a web agency, an online media agency, an online advertising agency... Some have an email delivery platform, or an email marketing agency, SEO and PPC specialists. And then the advertising agency or the sales promotion agency do tactical stuff (virals and vouchers, gobbling money to little useful gain). You might have some of these, or work for one.

Most clients spend lots of time getting their agencies to improve what they've got by 3%. That's a 3% better website, or a 3% better performing ad campaign. It's all, from what I can see, very tactical, very incremental, deeply fragmented.

But we're in a recession, and it's just not good enough. There's a huge opportunity to think again, to take stock and look around at what's possible today, not what was possible five years ago when you started on the road to improvement. Today customers expect to have a voice, they expect you to listen to their needs, observe their behaviour and deliver them relevant, timely brand-engagement-inducing nudges and touches, wherever they are, online or off.

ECRM offers a slightly different way of looking at things, provided you define eCRM as a strategic approach rather than an executional method. It requires that you head back into the customer data, evaluate all the touchpoints you currently have - the website, ads, emails, SMS, social media - and create a strategy that is designed not to have the most engaging website, but the most engaging customer journey. This way you become channel-agnostic, and digital execution becomes subservient to how you relate to your customers, not the other way round.

It's worked particularly well for companies like McCain Foods who've turned digital on its head and are now having a single conversation across several different channels. Brand engagement with brand resistors has gone up from 14% to 63% in ten months, which is staggering.

Using a top-down strategic view doesn't mean getting rid of your agencies, it just means they'll all be working to a single over-arching strategy, rather than just doing the best they can do in their niche. It means you get a coherent plan that can be delivered as usual through segmented email or segmented microsites, but is flexible enough to incorporate new channels (like social media) as they emerge.

All digital de-fragmentation takes is a little strategic thinking, but what it leads to can be revolutionary.

You should follow me on Twitter here.

Making eCRM sizzle

2009-07-03T10:09:00Z

ECRM is king. So why isn't everyone doing it? OK, perhaps the rhetorical excuse for a diatribe about how everyone really must start doing it properly is a bit transparent. Actually there might be a perfectly rational explanation, no matter how much I might, as a passionate advocate of eCRM, be wary of it. The answer is very, very mundane.

We've recently been involved in two quite big pitches, for brands everyone's heard of and almost everyone uses, both in transport. We've been drafted in as a wildcard – the brief's been about making email marketing deliver revenues. We've come in and talked about strategy and how relationships, customer journey cycles and touchpoints affect frequency of purchase and average transaction values. We've talked at length about the processes involved in mining data, creating simple customer segmentation then rich, layered segmentation (starting with sponge cake and aiming for gateau, I suppose). We've described processes for selecting email providers, deliverability consultants, analytics. And we've talked about the results – millions in demonstrable incremental revenues, customer lifetime values that go up by 3% (read: millions of pounds), over the first couple of years.

Looking back over these two pitches, which we didn't win (our normal win rate is around 75%), it's clear why. These two clients wanted to improve their email marketing. Simple as that. What we should have talked about was how we improve email campaigns so they drive results. We should leave the data stuff as a functional but implicit element - same as usability, or build standards, or testing. We've been guilty of trying to explain the thinking, not the practice. In old speak, we've been trying to sell the sausage, not the sizzle. Sure, eCRM is infinitely more complex than just email marketing... there are plenty of big projects that integrate segment-driven microsites, emails, SMS and e-commerce, all in aid of making the customer the centre of a brand's universe. But actually from some clients' points of view they may simply want to take the next step in improving what they do already, and that may be taking a newsletter and making it more relevant through simple segmentation.

And if we do take this approach to those pitches where the brief really is for improving email marketing, then perhaps we can take these clients and move them on to eCRM by stealth. If we can start with quick wins – the kind that generate sudden revenues - then we can go on to justify spending time and money on strategic thinking, segmentation and online touchpoints. In retrospect, we've been guilty of a lack of patience, and it's a trait endemic to the leading edges of the digital industry. So with (probably the vast majority of) clients new to eCRM, we need to start on ground that's already familiar, in order to help transform the mundane into something that ensures that it's the customer who's king.