Connectivity and Commerce: Today’s Messaging Mediums Force the Evolution of E-Marketing Practices

Connectivity and Commerce: Today’s Messaging Mediums Force the Evolution of E-Marketing Practices

by Stephanie Jordan

Marketers’ classic customer touchpoints—Web, call centers, retail point-of-sales, email—are rapidly being joined by Facebook, Twitter, mobile devices and more. In the wake of customers’ growing adoption of the latest messaging technologies, marketers in turn need to adopt new e-marketing practices and processes.

While corporate IT struggles with which messaging mediums to allow employees to access on corporate networks, the flip side to the growing new messaging ecosystem means people are almost always “on” through one channel or another. Today the most often sited new vehicles are Facebook, smartphones, mobile devices, Twitter and the like. But the reality is there will be something else around the corner. Consumers and end-users are becoming a very tech-savvy bunch and seem to have an insatiable appetite for new communication mediums. Just look at Google+, according to comScore, the social network introduced in late June is already past the 25 million visitor mark as of July 24.

“People are addicted to content like never before,” agrees Sean Corcoran, senior analyst with Forrester Research, Inc. “Armed with popular social applications and constantly improving mobile devices, people are accessing, sharing, and creating content at all times and from all places.”

An interesting feature of new messaging is that most offer end-users greater and greater control to select whom they communicate with and to block messages for themselves. While under debate as to how many people actually want all their communications in one place, Facebook’s Social Inbox, dubbed a “modern messaging system” by the company’s CEO and introduced last year, is a prime example of multiple channels converging while allowing users to determine who can access their inboxes.

“That form of blocking is making the consumer the final arbiter of what reaches them and that changes the nature of the game relative to how enterprises interact with ISPs and telcos,” observes Dave Lewis, chief marketing officer for Message Systems. “If the consumer is the final arbiter of what they receive they are making the decision not just on email but across channels.” Lewis is not suggesting that ISPs and telcos will walk away from spam or virus filtering, but he does think it might mean they will stop trying to project what subscribers want in their inboxes. This could change the whole role of reputation systems too.

Why is this significant? We are at a pivotal intersection of technology and marketing practices. Not that long ago, direct marketers spent money on stamps, focus groups, catalogs and dreamed up snappy campaigns for print, TV and/or radio. But once email was adopted by the masses, coupled with the Internet (followed by Web 2.0) all that changed.

Shift in Content Consumption

Once again we find ourselves at an important milestone for e-marketing because all these channels translate to a change in the way content is consumed. Messaging technology is enabling more and more power toward consumers to choose whom they listen to, how often and by what means. This in turn impacts how buyers interact with companies. Lewis believes there is a new kind of empowerment in messaging. If a customers’ expectation is not being met, it is easier than ever for the customer to simply cut the relationship.

“We have seen converged devices, like messages coming into smartphones, and now we are seeing converged inboxes,” explains Lewis. “This means messages across channels can be seen in one place. I can see everything that a company is saying and doing with me. So any disjointed communications or over communications is all highly visible to me now. Layer in my expectations that what you send to me is contextually relevant and if it isn’t, I can now block both the messages and block you. I have the capability of doing that across channels. The consequences of this in terms of connectivity is pretty significant, especially the connection between connectivity and commerce. This is where today’s wake up call is.”

The thirst for technology that consumers are displaying impacts the business-to-business world too. Workers are bringing in personally owned devices into their workplace along with their communication expectations.

“Our communication patterns have changed,” says David Daniels, CEO of The Relevancy Group and former vice president and principal analyst with Forester Research. “Communications are becoming shorter. This change is mainly being fueled by the device, but it also has other sociological patterns profoundly effecting the way we receive information and the velocity of the exchange of the information.”

In a recent study, The Social Inbox: The Impact of Facebook Messages on Email Marketing authored by Daniels and published earlier this year, it was revealed that 39 percent of consumers (ages 13 to 71) access one or more of their personal email accounts on a mobile device. “This makes my replies likely shorter right there,” illustrates Daniels.

Another change Daniels found is that study participants ages 27 to 32 have a separate email account for brands and another one for communicating with friends. “We are creating our own kind of divide. Unfortunately, I don’t think marketers are allowing people to do that. You have to allow end-users to say: ‘I want these kinds of messages from you on these kinds of subjects on these types of devices.’ Facebook has done that—not necessarily from an advertisers perspective, but from a user’s perspective.”

The idea of a single inbox for many messaging channels is, according to Daniels, somewhat confusing to most people today. “Conversion of the inbox is not even realized by consumers. It is really visionary.” But Daniels does believe, however, that marketers should be thinking in those terms. “Organizations need to understand who is following them on email, Facebook and Twitter. If you are spewing out all these messages to customers through different channels, the first step is for the organization to align their own outboxes. On the consumer side, it ultimately will be driven by device sophistication.”

Lewis thinks that the messaging convergence that is happening today means e-marketers need to change their approach to fit the times. What is so new about all this? “We have always talked about marketing needing to be customer centric,” responds Lewis. “But now we are talking customer centricity squared. It is not just about getting the content right and relevant, how and when and where that content is delivered. It is taking contextual relevancy to the next level and incorporating the channel, the time, and the presentation of content—all these must be brought into account now. That then, and this is what I think is significant, implies changes to your marketing and sales cycle.”

Disruption to Business Processes

The anticipated disruption of marketing and sales cycles by multiple messaging channels is also reflected in Daniels’ study. The finding of persistent consumer switching of email addresses, coupled with the increased adoption of Facebook Messages will drive increased dormant accounts, he says. Daniels expects that this will create response rate, engagement and possibly delivery engagement implications for e-marketers. He also believes that increased dormant accounts may reduce overall list size, which will impact Email Marketing Service Provider economics.

“Email service providers rely on marketers to have huge lists, but if look one-third of their lists are dead,” reveals Daniels. “Our consumer data response to the question: Have you created a new email address in the last year had 31 percent saying ‘yes’. Daniels does acknowledge that the percent may be slightly high due to age range of the respondents, but he feels that number is still consistent with historical data. “It means marketers really have to track email addresses and know if the email address is being clicked on or if it is dormant.”

Facebook messaging popularity also changes the current landscape in the way people allocate their online time. Daniels writes in the paper that Facebook’s dominance in time spent online potentially could create “ad-revenue implications for other webmail-inbox providers.”

Daniels points to yet another issue that will increasingly happen when multiple channels combine with multiple marketers within a single organization. “If I follow a company on its Web site and its Twitter and its Facebook and then I buy, which channel should get attribution of that sale?”

This fragmentation created by multiple channels combined with the way most organizations are structured could make managing messaging channels difficult. As an example, Daniels says: “When I talk with call centers I ask if they collect email addresses. Usually the answer is ‘no’ because those workers are incented to keep the calls short and that would elongate the call time, which they are measured on. On the other hand, the marketing people are told they need to collect more digital addresses and are incented to do that. The goals of the organization are siloed and not aligned. Consumers on the other side, however see just one company not a bunch of separate islands.”

One way to avoid “separate islands” believes Corcoran is to put someone in charge of all publishing and maintain a single editorial calendar across multi channels and multiple business units. This ensures someone has a singular view of the company and can determine the “right content and timing.” Corcoran along with co-authors Emily Riley and James McDavid go into detail about this in the research document How to Develop an Interactive Marketing Content Plan published by Forrester.

Organizations needing to align their own outboxes is echoed by Lewis too. “How do you manage cross channel communications when you are set up in silos and your metrics are designed to support that structure? You can’t very easily. What you need to be thinking about here is managing the flow of communications across channels anticipating that your customer is going to move in and out of different channels.”

Corcoran adds that many organizations are not set up for today’s agile communication from a budget standpoint either. He notes that often the biggest piece of the marketing budget is allocated to “one-way traditional media” and that the rest of the marketing organization is “not prepared to manage always-on conversation.”

To be effective today, Lewis feels e-marketers need to be thinking in the following terms:

• Individualized—one-to-one communications where relevant, preference-driven messaging is the norm and meets customer expectation.
• Real time—in the moment communications where the message and response, action and reaction occur right now.
• Interactive—two-way communications where active dialogue (not passive monologue) is the key to engagement; where it’s more about the conversation than the initial message.
• Multi-channel—cross-channel communications where customers use multiple channels and fluidly move between them; where channel choice, brand consistency and coordinated messaging truly matter.
• Converged—melded communications where message types blur (marketing, service); where channels become incidental as interactions that begin in one channel and are consummated in another.

“You have to maintain contact and activity with the customer across whichever channel of communications they choose to use,” stresses Lewis. “That gets into the whole organization structure and whether they have the technology structure to actually achieve those goals. Convergence is about consolidating and integrating data, systems and business processes on a single platform.”

Lewis is very straightforward to say that Message Systems is doing just that with its products and recommends enterprises think about how messaging works today before investing in point solutions that are built toward a silo approach and strung together because “chances are they will not scale and be flexible enough with the direction e-marketing is heading today.” Lewis also maintains “a single platform solution that supports message convergence improves effectiveness and creates efficiencies, reducing total cost of ownership.”

Most organizations are just now trying to figure out how to use the new messaging channels, let alone working toward a single cohesive approach. “Many marketers have not thought about what is really happening with these customer behavioral changes,” says Lewis. “They haven’t gotten their heads around ‘how does my company interact with customers and what are the consequences of this going forward’. We haven’t seen the true impact of these behavioral changes on business practices.”

Impact of Mobile on Marketers
Most marketers would agree that mobile and social have moved very quickly from neophytes to established marketing channels. Richard Lees, chairman of dbg, a multi-channel marketing and email services business and data expert, acknowledges there are challenges with the new channels. However, he says “When it comes to data gathering and gleaning intelligence to manage a customer’s journey, they are ultimately just new channels that need to be treated in much the same way as the existing channels.” But are marketers looking at the new channels holistically?

Lees notes in a blog that a recent survey of marketers, when asked about their multi-channel marketing found that while 51 percent were using five or more channels and 98 percent were using at least three to get their messages across, at that time only 35 percent were storing the information gathered from those channels in a single database. His research also discovered a lack of empirical evidence used by marketers to drive decisions when choosing their channels: 49 percent were using available budget to guide their choices; nearly half were being guided by gut feeling and one in two said the expertise and experience available within the company guided their choices.”

One reason Lees cites for why customer data did not drive more of the channel decisions is “the volumes of data that can be gathered across all of these channels is genuinely daunting.” He goes on to quote daily figures of millions and millions of Internet users, tweeters, Facebook users, etc. and acknowledges that what in all the possible data out there is the most useful to collect can be a difficult decision. Another challenge to the data, as was mentioned earlier, is the speed at which behaviors change and information moves.

“Not only do we have more channels to feed our customer profiles, making the data deeper and richer than it has ever been before, but we also need to understand this data quickly, because customer behavior changes so rapidly and they expect immediate responses,” Lees says.

The place to start advises Lees is to ensure consistency of data collection across channels. He recommends the use of a single database to make data integration easier and make compliance easier, although others might suggest that isn’t necessary, as long as a customer has a single unique identifier across the company. (Note: given Daniels’ research on email addresses a customer email address should not be used as the unique identifier!)

Email Still a Fav

While multi-channel is the new norm, email is still the favorite channel by most users for offers (86 percent) and product and service updates (76 percent) found a different survey conducted be dbg.

While mobile may not be where customers want to receive communications (95 percent declared mobile the most intrusive channel to receive offers in Lees research) many people are using mobile devices to retrieve their email. This phenomenon presents yet another challenge for e-marketers: how email messages render on phones.

“Due to a lack of standards, and spotty HTML and CSS support, email design has always been considerably more challenging than Web site design,” says Aaron Smith, vice president of Campaign Services at Responsys. “Now, with the growing trend toward subscribers reading emails on mobile devices, there’s a whole new set of design concerns.”

To address this the company recently published Responsys 2011 Email Design & Coding Recommendations guide that addresses the design impact of smartphones and Facebook Messages on email marketing campaigns. The guide provides marketers with design recommendations for HTML, mobile and text emails, including specific best practice coding guidelines, to “ensure marketers’ emails meet the needs of consumers, perform well on mobile devices, achieve higher inbox deliverability rates, and optimize the user experience via email, mobile and social channels.”

Facebook’s increasing dominance means marketers need to re-think email design. “The rollout of Facebook’s new messaging platform, Facebook Messages, will also start to significantly affect email design by boosting the importance of text email design,” predicts Chad White, research director of Responsys. “Facebook Messages displays the text version of an email by default and we expect few subscribers to bother opening the HTML version. Marketers need to address this when planning their campaigns.”

Getting Started

Neither Daniels nor Lewis believes there are many good examples of e-marketers that have truly converged multiple messaging channels for their entire organization. “There isn’t a company out there that I know of that is doing this well,” says Lewis. “There are companies that are doing certain parts right. But honestly, it is not even a reasonable expectation at this point. These things are happening very fast. The good news is—if you haven’t yet started—you are not significantly behind yet.”

None of the experts think the challenges that message convergence presents will be simple to overcome. “Is this going to be easy for some organizations to do?” Lewis asks, “I think the honest answer is probably no. There are some organizations that have grown up online and are more adept, because that’s how they’ve been interacting with customers all along, but for other enterprises this is going to be very disruptive.”

Lewis also notes that, “It will require a mindset change, very probably organizational change, and a sustained commitment to customer-centric practices across the company.” And it won’t necessarily be cheap, he adds. Daniels and Lewis have co-authored a white paper entitled: The Dollars and Sense of Message Convergence that goes into more detail on the challenges and approaches for e-marketers and their organizations to better manage the realities of multi-channel messaging.

“Clearly it’s a challenge to create and manage a multi-channel single customer view,” states Lees, “but it’s a challenge most businesses can’t afford to overlook. Brands that fail to get joined-up are likely to neglect the expectations of their customers.”

It would be naive to think if we integrate Twitter, social media and mobile devices into more traditional marketing channels that we could then rest. As Lewis points out, “Whose to say there won’t be another Twitter around the corner? We don’t know the end game at this point, you have to (A) be able to accept some ambiguity and (B) more importantly, you have to have agility as the cornerstone of what you are doing to be able to respond to customers’ changing preferences and respond to new channels that may emerge that we can’t anticipate today.”

As the saying goes: Change is the only constant. The reality is there has been a shift in the way we communicate as a result of technology. It is now upon e-marketers to alter their marketing practices and processes in response.