Good Read and a Must Understand: Drake Morton

Who Hijacked My Email Program?

by Aaron Smith , Wednesday, April 16, 2008

ONE OF THE MOST challenging aspects of managing an email program is the delicate balancing act required to satisfy multiple constituents with different (and often conflicting) priorities. The challenge is intensified when stakeholders take a more hands-on approach, claiming to be “helping” your program when in fact they are more interested in using your program to serve their needs.

While we like folks within the organization to be interested in our efforts, and we hope the C-suite is aware of our work, too much interest can end up hindering rather than helping a program. Messaging is diluted and performance is diminished when email program managers are whipsawed in opposing directions. I like to refer to this phenomenon as “email program hijacking.” (more…)

Understanding the Basics: Drake Morton

Email Production: Keeping the Wheels

On Your Program

by Aaron Smith , Thursday, April 10, 2008

MOST ANYONE WHO’S DRIVEN an email program would agree: it’s a volatile, high-speed, NASCAR-style ride. As you zoom along the racetrack — avoiding the potholes of ever-changing business goals, competing stakeholders, deliverability issues and rendering errors — keeping the wheels on requires precision, a tough hide, plain old elbow grease and dumb luck.
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Excellent Read: Drake Morton

Targeting Beyond Transactional Behaviors

by Phil Leggiere , Wednesday, April 9, 2008

SERIOUS BRANDS, MOST MARKETERS WELL know, cannot be built, nurtured or sustained by transactions alone. Yet most behavioral targeting platforms remain entrenched in a purely transactional model of customer behavior rooted in direct response. Moving to a truly brand based model of BT, David Rosen, senior vice president of Loyalty Lab, explains below, means identifying, encompassing and integrating a wide array of non-transactional behaviors.
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You Need to Understand: Drake Morton

Do Consumers Know Their BT?

by Steve Smith , Friday, April 4, 2008

WITH THE TERM “BEHAVIORAL targeting” only now popping into the public lexicon, it seems fair to ask whether consumers, around which privacy and tracking controversies swirl, even know what the words mean. And so the new survey of users’ knowledge and attitudes towards BT by consumer privacy group TRUSTe and TNS is one of the first benchmarks we have on general attitudes about this specific kind of tracking. We asked Colin O’Malley, vice president of strategic partnerships and programs, TRUSTe, to drill into some of the surprising results.

Behavioral Insider: Do consumers even know what behavioral targeting is? Can they distinguish it from other types of ad targeting?
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Making It Personal

by Aaron Smith

Understanding simple ways to layer segmented content into batch and blast email programs. Personalization is another advanced but easy-to-implement tactic proven to produce more relevant campaigns, inspiring recipient engagement and stimulating program performance.

When we employ segmentation strategies, we address our subscriber base in blocks based on common criteria such as geography or gender. Personalization takes segmentation to the next level. When we personalize, we speak directly to each of our subscribers as individuals based on distinct attributes, preferences and behaviors, such as name or purchase history. Personalization is one of the greatest ways to leverage the email channel, which is unique in its ability to address individual recipients.
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Excellent Read: Drake Morton

Building Brands In A Recession

By Cory Treffiletti

Whether you’re an economist or not, and whether you want to full believe it or not, the U.S. economy is in a recession. The leading economic indicators point to the fact that consumer confidence is down, the housing market is unstable and the Fed has steadily been decreasing interest rates to battle the credit crisis over the last few months. Unemployment rates have gone up — and even our business of online advertising is seeing our major brands make cuts while they battle their uncertain futures.
Ad agencies can confirm what’s going on by examining their clients and seeing that many of them are reducing their forecasted budgets and/or making their campaigns more accountable to key performance indicators like direct response metrics to rationalize their spend. This last indicator is one that I find interesting, because every experienced person I know in advertising or marketing suggests that the best way to build and maintain a brand is to spend money during an economic downturn — and this recession will be that prime opportunity!
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Understanding Your Audience: Very Good Read: Drake Morton

Teens Have Their Stuff Together

An advance release of the Teen Topix study by OTX and the Intelligence Group finds that 81% of teens (13-17) say they are at least somewhat happy, and over a third say they are very happy. Teens report to be happiest with their relationships with friends, their talents, their abilities, and their school performance. And more than three quarters are happy about how they “look” Online. (more…)