Direct Marketing Magazine July/August 2017

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Customer In the mail relationship Catalogues management delivered by

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Holiday marketing

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The Authority on Data-Driven Engagement & Operations

Introducing John Wiltshire ❱ 6 The Canadian

Marketing Association’s new president and CEO Jennifer O’Neill

vol. 30 • No. 7 • July/August 2017

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Vol. 30 | No. 7 | July/August 2017 EDITOR Sarah O’Connor - sarah@dmn.ca

Ontario tourism destinations put visitors at heart of marketing Features

PRESIDENT Steve Lloyd - steve@dmn.ca

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CONTRIBUTING WRITERS Jason Nyhus Michel Benjamin Tom Sather Casey Bullock Napier Simpson Steve Falk Adrian Velthuis Hugh Hibbert Evan Wood Luke Karmazin Manon Laberge

The intersection of CRM and print

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July/August 2017

The future of customer relationship management Reducing churn, increasing profit

Advertising Sales Mark Henry - mark@dmn.ca

home@dmn.ca www.dmn.ca

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DESIGN / PRODUCTION Jennifer O’Neill - jennifer@dmn.ca

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CRM

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Introducing John Wiltshire The Canadian Marketing Association’s new president and CEO

Holiday Marketing ❯❯16

York Region’s “Pledge to Ignore” campaign gets the attention of distracted drivers

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Mobile sleepwalking and the content awakening A new location-based marketing strategy

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Your sender reputation may be keeping you out of the inbox

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Preparing for retail’s virtual future

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Put your content to work A three-step plan to kickstart your marketing and engage holiday shoppers

Excellent Execution

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Data governance: Priority in a data-driven world DMN.ca ❰

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Customer Centricity

Ontario tourism destinations put visitors at heart of marketing

By Napier Simpson

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Napier Simpson is chief marketing officer and chief operations officer of RTO4, which provides leadership and support to a flourishing tourism economy in Huron, Perth, Waterloo and Wellington.

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ord of mouth has always been one of the most powerful forces influencing consumer decisions—especially when it comes to tourism and travel.

You tell a friend you’re going to X destination on vacation this summer and they say you have to stay in a particular hotel because it was fantastic when they visited the same spot. Or they tell you to avoid a restaurant because they had a terrible experience.

These little pieces of insider intel and first-hand experience carry far more credence than any ad in a newspaper travel section or expensive commercial on TV. We trust the word of the person from our inner circle because of the relationship we share.

Never has this type of word-of-mouth influence been more prolific or easier to spread than in our digital age.

The growing prevalence of social media allows people to share their thoughts on a destination or a travel experience in real time. A growing number of travellers routinely post large amounts of content about their travels—whether for business or pleasure—providing tips and sharing recommendations with vast networks of friends and connections.

At RTO4—the Regional Tourism Organization for Waterloo, Wellington, Huron and Perth Counties in Southwestern Ontario, rather than invest in traditional destination advertising—such as the “Eat, Play, Stay” type of campaigns many destinations employ, we’ve been testing a number of initiatives co-developed with our tourism partners focused on creating highly shareable visitor experiences.

One aspect of that shift was the creation of what we call the Destination Animation Fund—part of our incubator approach to tourism product development and marketing. The initiative offers business operators matching funds to create new or enhanced tourism experiences that align with the destination’s core DNA—the things that make it unique. One caveat: the experiences must be highly ‘shareable’ and ‘highly shared’ and the operator must execute, measure and report on that metric.

Visitors are encouraged to share their experiences through social media, enabling RTO4 and its partners to indirectly reach a broader audience through travellers who have already developed a level of credibility, trust and influence within their networks.

We piloted the Destination Animation Fund on a small-scale last year in partnership with the Stratford City Centre BIA by providing $30,000 in matching funds for 10 projects in Stratford. That initial investment—which in previous years would have been spent on traditional destination marketing—resulted in more than $103,000 in direct investment toward creating new cultural experiences. Visitors and the local community shared their experiences widely via social media and many of the events were covered by local, regional and national media.

We were amazed by the creativity and passion of local tourism operators, who embraced the idea of developing new ventures to get visitors talking and sharing.

There were Bach Walks organized by Stratford Summer Music, where visitors enjoyed guided tours of a popular natural area and were delighted along the way by performances from the Canadian flute ensemble, Charm of Finches.

We had #RainyDayShakespeare, where hidden quotes from Shakespeare magically appeared on sidewalks and walls but only when it rained, rewarding visitors with a charming reason to explore the community when they might otherwise stay indoors.

And, in another example, the two-day Stratford Writers Festival was born, featuring author readings, panel discussions, Q&As, book signings and writers’ workshops in Stratford’s cultural downtown core.

Based on the success of its inaugural run, RTO4 and Stratford City Centre BIA expanded the partnership to include Stratford Tourism Alliance, the local DMO, and doubled the size of the fund to $60,000 this year, expanding it into more communities to create experiences that reach and appeal to an even wider audience. In addition to 15 new events in Stratford, the initiative has seen several new experiences developed in Bayfield and Elora & Fergus.

Individually funded projects are typically small in scale, but are designed to get visitors sharing and more engaged with the aim of providing visitors multiple new opportunities and reasons to stay longer and more fully interact in these destinations.

All of the partners invested in the Destination Animation Fund gain deeper insights of the visitors we want to attract. We don’t see them only as tourists. We see them as our most powerful marketers.

July/August 2017

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Feature

Introducing John Wiltshire

The Canadian Marketing Association’s ne

By Sarah O’Connor

T

he Canadian Marketing Association (CMA) has a new leader. John Wiltshire, who has served on the CMA’s board of directors for the past three years and whose most recent role was senior vice president, marketing of Investors Group, took on the mantle of interim president and chief executive officer effective June 26th of this year.

“I’ve really only had two jobs—I was at Canada Trust in the core of Toronto for a number of years, and then in 1996 I took [what was initially intended to be] a three- to five-year stint in Winnipeg with Investors Group, started to like what I was doing and never looked back,” explains Wiltshire. “This is a great opportunity to come in and get back in connection with the broader marketing community in Canada.”

The CMA began looking for a new president and CEO at a time when Wiltshire had decided to move on in his career. As a board member he was already well versed in the work of the CMA and excited about its missions.

“Coming off of what I would call a very satisfying, long career of providing marketing and product support for over 5,000 small business at Investors Group, it seemed to me like a natural next step to bring my previous experience and passion to a bigger stage and in particular at a juncture when the CMA is introducing formal accreditation to the marketing profession through the Chartered Marketer designation,” he says. “It was kind of an opportunity I couldn’t resist.”

Wiltshire grew up in London, Ontario and attended the University of Western Ontario, graduating from the Ivey Business School in 1985. After a decade working in Toronto for Canada Trust, he moved to Winnipeg and today commutes to Toronto for the work week.

Wiltshire is taking the place of Doug Brooks who served as president and CEO of the CMA from July 2015 until June of this year, following the retirement of John Gustavson, who led the association for over 25 years.

“I have huge respect for Doug and he was an excellent steward during his tenure,” said Wiltshire. “I would call him the father of the CMA’s transformation, along with the board

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of course. We have a very strong and engaged board. Doug is an operations and strategy guru for sure and he used his leadership experience at other associations and other companies to start us on the path to a formal accreditation program. The other thing he did internally that people don’t see is he boosted the CMA’s capabilities and sustainability in some pretty important ways as well.”

Wiltshire explains his mandate as follows: “In terms of the CMA’s strategic plan, obviously we see ourselves as the voice of marketers in Canada and I would say that we need to develop a stronger leadership voice in the CMA. How can we represent great Canadian companies and great Canadian marketers on issues that matter while at the same time keeping a strong focus on the Canadian consumer?

“I think that our objective here is really to have healthy industries that are able to actively develop markets for their products here in Canada and abroad. I think that whole leadership voice, representing our industry for sure is at the core of what we do. Being an association, allowing opportunities for education and association amongst marketers in Canada is absolutely critical, it’s who we are and so that continues on.

“More and more the key priority from a strategic perspective is to actually work on the marketing profession itself. We’ve announced our new Chartered Marketer designation and we’re now doing the hard work to create a pathway to this achievement. The reality is that we need to convince as many marketers as possible that this is a worthy and noble cause and for them to get on board. We want to make this designation the name brand designation in Canada for marketers who want to raise the bar in terms of the profession.

“The final part of the mandate really is stewardship. What that means to me is taking care of this great association, and leaving it stronger and more valuable than it was when I began. That’s about culture, it’s about revenue, it’s about relationships, it’s about expansion, it’s about all of those things together. That’s my mandate in a nutshell.”

Wiltshire is committed to serving all Canadian marketers, from CMOs down to new graduates just entering the profession. “The thing about being a marketer is that at the very core of it you’re trying to find a market for your products and services,” he notes. “It really hasn’t changed since the beginning of time from that perspective. The means through which you do that, the empowerment of the consumer but also the ability for you to really understand your consumers… never before has there been a better opportunity of connecting good products and services to new consumers.

“There are huge implications coming from I would say three things: the consumer and consumerism, increased interest from governments in protecting consumers and finally the technology and the digital world we live in. I think those three things lead to a lot of change but the exciting thing as marketers is that we can get closer to our customers and we can give them more and more products and so many different ways to make their lives better.

I don’t think there’s ever been a better time to be a marketer than today.

“At the heart, I believe Canada is a great country and I believe there has never been a better time for it, as Canada, to thrive in the global economy. It’s got brand attributes of kindness and humility along with its service orientation, its diversity, opportunity for innovation, the size of Canada. That’s exactly what the world is really looking for. And so we need to take action now so that there are more and better jobs for marketers, more and better goods and services for Canadian consumers.

“As it relates to the opportunity personally, for me, I think it’s a worthwhile pursuit. I want to leave a legacy and I’m at an age where I think a little bit more about those things. If the CMA can play a role in that somehow under my leadership I think that would be personally gratifying for me. I would also say that this is the heart of our board members as well, and certainly as you talk to them you get the same sense of wanting to make Canada a better place in the world. That’s a pretty neat purpose to have so I’m looking forward to that.”

July/August 2017

Feature

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Jennifer O’Neill

ew president and CEO

July/August 2017

DMN.ca ❰

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CRM

The future of customer relationship management

By Luke Karmazin

“C

RM tech is about to make a series of leaps,” suggests Jonathon Millman, the founder and president of Shift CRM. Millman believes that the new technologies we’re seeing now are the first taste of the future.

Industry-tailored, cost-effective, time saving, fully automated, endlessly integrated—the CRM of 2027 is the ultimate bridge between marketing, sales, support, and management. And the more data we have at our disposal, the greater the potential for innovation.

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“The last decade was all about the CRM system as a single source of truth,” he adds. “But now we’re on the verge of turning that data into insights you can act on with just a few clicks.” Long-term trends in the CRM ecosystem are starting to emerge and the technologies that will enable the greatest advances for businesses are those that can link departments and unify organizations.

Improving performance automatically According to a 2015 survey of 127 sales and marketing executives,

one of the key issues facing today’s sales teams is a shortage of dedicated sales hours. Reps spend about one-third of their time engaged in actual sales and almost 20% of it managing and reporting on their CRM. In short, there’s still plenty of potential for automation and general optimization for the most common user roles. What’s exciting about this isn’t just the potential to get more done, but the opportunity to systematically test and improve. Industry veterans like Millman have long believed that smarter, more data-aware systems were the only way to

eliminate missed opportunities to optimize sales teams and entire organizations. “It’s about making processes smarter, not simply educating employees.”

One of the key innovations expected in the CRM of 2027 is a more thorough integration of marketing and content assets, beyond just file sharing. With simplified user interfaces and enhanced machine learning, sales reps could rely on their CRM to “test” the effectiveness of content assets for different customers and steps in the sales process and suggest key materials for July/August 2017

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CRM use. A/B testing is commonly associated with email marketing, but deploying and monitoring the effectiveness of content will soon be possible in every part of the customer journey.

Marketers stand to benefit greatly, but the same technologies will look very different for other departments. For difficult-toautomate areas, like customer support, simple enhancements can let support representatives manage many more tickets and unify an increasing number of support channels. CRM platforms are beginning to integrate support requests via Twitter or Facebook as though they were standard email requests. By 2027, AI-equipped CRMs will pick up on changes in text and sound that indicate moods, with both IBM and Salesforce testing variations of ‘emotional’ analysis.

If a customer sends an angry tweet about the product, your CRM can view and process the information, and prioritize the item for quick follow-up by an appropriate support staff, even while it generates a fitting response message.

Better communications and cooperation Scaling a team and equipping them for success is a serious problem for growing businesses. Sales people are in constant need of new content, but because sales and marketing are often siloed off, the process of creating content is often a time wasting game of email tag or Dropbox digging. Maintaining alignment between departments is just one issue that the next generation of CRM systems will tackle. Communications and collaboration is already starting to look a lot more like social media and several of the leading CRM providers have brought the “feeds and groups” mentality to their platforms. In a few years these groups will extend beyond organizational borders, serving as a new way to work with partners or other influencers outside your company.

On the marketing side, content strategists will soon be using AI-equipped CRM tools that can actively monitor performance and alert them to opportunities to replace underperforming content July/August 2017

or tailor it to a specific audience. A CRM platform with intelligence enough to integrate and evaluate content could improve the overall value and readiness of content for the sales teams, and even update it with key information. These features could constitute a massive time-saver, with a synchronized consistency that’s near-impossible to replicate—if you’ve ever had to update your marketing assets with new links or the latest success story, this kind of unity across content might be straight out of science fiction.

Smart segmentation is another opportunity for AI to leverage data in ways that simply wouldn’t be possible for a marketer, or even an entire team, to replicate. AI is already able to serve up custom suggestions on e-commerce sites for each user (think Amazon frontpage), and soon that will extend to tailored campaigns to match clients with communication channels and specific offers best suited to them. Millennials might see targeted tweets offering 25% off, while more affluent middleaged clients might receive an e-blast offering 15%. Next time you offer a promotion, it can continue to optimize results based on what worked during the last campaign.

A truly futuristic CRM system could build on and inform marketing, making it simple for any user to send emails using the right terms and talking points for the audience. If a salesperson is using a lot of software acronyms in an email that’s going to a non-technical executive, it could eliminate confusion by suggesting alternative terms, or even curating some customer education content based on keywords. Making the most of every opportunity and eliminating confusion between teams is what every manager strives for, and now that’s rapidly becoming one of the most promising uses for CRMs. Is the artificial intelligence hype justified?

In short, yes. AI has applications in every department, every role, every task. There’s never been anything like it. In many ways we’re witnessing the kind of positive disruption that Cloud CRMs brought us in the mid-

2000s. Some industries and businesses will look completely different in a decade and those that don’t adopt AI quickly could be unable to compete on price or simply outclassed by better delivery.

Current AI-powered features have only scratched the surface, and we’re already seeing a disruptive influence in some use cases. Salesforce’s AI offering, Einstein, is a stellar example of the kind of data-driven enhancements we ought to expect from the CRM of 2027. Einstein has both text and image recognition abilities, but with improvements in natural language technology, the next frontier may be the phone call.

Einstein is already helping eliminate arduous CRM tasks like data entry and contact organization, but the next few years could see it handling complex assessments in many industries.

One preview put it to work for a sales rep at a green technology company, where Einstein helped

manage solar panel sales. The AI could immediately identify the customer’s roof and figure out if it was fit for solar panels. It searched for the address, spotted it on Google Street View, identified the roof type and communicated its solar panel readiness to the salesperson—all within seconds.

Not only could salespeople qualify existing prospects, but search for new ones for whom solar panels are a no-brainer.

The future of customer relationship management represents a fundamental change in the way companies work; empowering different user types to work more collaboratively towards common goals, automatically identifying effective strategies and pushing them to every part of the organization. Automation, especially with advances in AI, will allow teams greater focus than ever before.

Luke Karmazin leads marketing and public

outreach at Shift CRM.

Connected. Informed. Effective.

It pays to be a NAMMU member.

Talk to us: membership@nammu.ca 416-860-1097 NEW 1-877-477-5697 DMN.ca ❰

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CRM

Reducing churn, increasing profit New study shows companies place more emphasis on winning new customers rather than keeping existing ones, leaving revenue on the table

By Jason Nyhus

T

he growing influence of online subscription masters like Netflix and many other newcomers with products ranging from baby diapers to snowboards and luxury cars are driving a clear shift in today’s approach to e-commerce and monetization.

Traditional buy-to-own purchase options are taking a back seat to pay-for-access models like subscriptions. For consumers, subscriptions are more flexible and convenient. For most companies, however, subscriptions are more challenging and complicated.

When not managed properly, subscriber turnover or churn can a leave a business open to risk and revenue on the table.

new organic sign-ups and are missing the multiplying negative impact involuntary churn can have on their business growth, profitability and innovation efforts. The fact is, there is very good motivation to address this issue of churn: losing customers is expensive. Forrester’s findings state that 91% of those surveyed reported that it costs them “at least twice as much to acquire a new customer as it does to keep an existing one.” This figure says it all—for subscription-based businesses who want to maximize revenue opportunities, it is time to devote time and attention to actively managing down involuntary churn.

The subscription facts An early 2017 Forrester Consulting study commissioned by Digital River evaluated the impact of mismanaged customer churn on subscription-based businesses.

The results were clear; for longterm profitability, companies must maximize subscription renewals. The study surveyed 204 professionals in North America and Europe who were responsible for their company’s subscription and recurring payments customer retention strategy. Underscoring the importance of strong payment renewal processes, companies surveyed reported that, on average, 62% of their subscription revenue comes from renewals. Yet the average organization lost more than one-third of their customers to churn. And of the customers lost to churn, 34 per cent left involuntarily, or not by choice.

The Forrester study suggests that businesses have put a greater emphasis on efforts that produce

Voluntary and involuntary churn Churn—voluntary or involuntary—happens when customers drop out of a subscription service for any reason.

Voluntary churn refers to those customers who choose proactively to end their service. Involuntary churn largely occurs at the moment of subscription renewal, leading to unexpected service disruption because of profile changes or processing issues like an expired credit card, a declined charge or a changed mailing address.

Whatever the reason, involuntary churn can be prevented with some planning.

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Churn impacts more than just profit Loss of revenue is an obvious outcome of churn, but there is a hidden cost as well: stifled innovation. According to the Forrester study, more than onethird of respondents blamed fear of causing churn for their reluctance

to spearhead new pricing and packaging models, putting them at a competitive disadvantage in a rapidly evolving industry.

The study also showed that nearly 50% of the survey’s respondents reported that increases in chargeback rates can result in missed revenue forecasts.

And, without proper renewal management, costs to service at-risk customers can become increasingly more burdensome and impact profits.

Top culprits behind involuntary churn Involuntary churn is most often the result of technology and communication failures, which can be minimized with the right tools and strategy. According to the study, recurring payment failures is one of the most common causes of lost renewals—whether by insufficient funds, credit card limits or credit card changes.

Another major reason for attrition: relying too heavily on automated renewal methods.

While convenient, the study shows that without sophisticated management, renewal problems can surface when customers change or close direct debit accounts, when a card expires or even when the card brand changes.

The winning formula for a cash cow The results from this study suggest that managing a subscription model requires firms to undergo a fundamental shift of focus: from customer acquisition to retention and from selling products to selling experiences. Managing both voluntary and involuntary churn may seem difficult to

influence, but it is certainly not impossible when you take a proactive approach. The first step: don’t accept that involuntary churn is simply a cost of doing business. Organizations need to radically change their mindset from assuming involuntary churn will occur, to making a concerted effort to nurture the relationship with the customer from the initial payment moment and thereafter.

Second, adopt a holistic approach to subscriber retention, using the right tools and employing the right expertise to help examine the entire process, end to end, for areas that need improvement.

Consider combining customer and payments data for better decision making and communications and use a full-service, integrated payments solution to ensure a seamless payment experience from the beginning to the end of the customer lifecycle.

Working with a single, integrated solutions provider to manage online subscriptions is especially useful for new companies that are launching an e-commerce program for the first time, need help expanding into new markets but lack internal resources, are constrained on time, or have outdated or incompatible technology.

The combination of the right mindset with the right tool set will help subscription-based businesses minimize churn—both voluntary and involuntary. It also can ensure money isn’t left on the table, profit goals can be achieved and opportunities to innovate are maximized.

Jason Nyhus is vice president, global marketing

and communications at Digital River, Inc. July/August 2017

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CRM

The intersection of CRM and print

By Steve Falk

T

he constant change in marketing technology has demanded an “always in beta” approach. With e-commerce and digital marketing growing so rapidly, I’ve had to rethink the intersection of data and print.

My conclusion is that the richest opportunities are realized when we bring together the best of the benefits of CRM with personalized variable print and workflow automation. It’s a mouthful but it means a rethink of the spray and pray practices that are associated with direct mail (DM). A mailing can now consist of one piece, perfectly personalized, segmented, timed and automated to deliver the most effective message.

The name “direct mail” carries many negative connotations now and our conclusion is that the newest ways to use the personalized printed mail channel are so different from what we called DM that maybe the name is holding it back as a strategy.

Business leaders have dictated that ad budgets swing from print to digital but I think what they are really looking for is a personalized and highly targeted channel, which digital delivers, but so does print when it is served up as a dynamic digital print media. Maybe others like P&G’s brand manager Marc Pritchard, who recently criticized his company’s digital spending in the New York Times, will be coming around to see the value it can bring when it is used similarly to digital for a timely and personalized message with a high ROI. I’m a tech guy with a penchant and history in printed mail ( I actually studied painting and photography and then some computer animation which naturally lead to direct marketing, right?), and my goal is to help my clients develop the best strategies to drive sales to their companies or donations to their non-profits. The outcome is eye-opening and the solution, ❱ DMN.ca

ResponsivePrint, brings together the best of the immediacy and personalization of the digital platforms with the super-power communication of physical mail.

Let’s not forget that despite extreme growth in digital communication, roughly nine billion pieces of mail circulate through Canada Post in a year. That’s a lot of parcels, cards and letters. There are fewer items mailed these days and more parcels shipped thanks to e-commerce, but as far as the power of a printed mail piece to drive successful communication, printed mail still has a unrivaled punch that drives action. It’s physicality is cumbersome but it turns out it is also worth the effort, because that is what brings its value. Read on, we’ll get to some interesting neuroscience that backs this up.

When digital ad returns track downward where do you spend your next dollar?

Take the recent 2016 U.S. Federal Election, for example, where candidates spent over $60 million on direct mail to help their fundraising drives. It ​reportedly cost between 20-37 cents of the dollar raised to use DM for fundraising and the reason they spend that is that you just cannot send enough email to people or buy enough digital ads to get the income you require. At a certain point there is a diminishing value in spending more in the digital channels and that is where you come back to print. It is where you can spend your next advertising dollar when digital returns start to track down.

So back to my challenge. Could I

Andy Spears of Satov Consultants

make printed mail part of a digital marketing strategy? I looked to the fastest growing segment of the digital economy and it seemed natural to study how e-commerce was dealing with engaging their clients. If you are a marketer at an e-commerce company, you may know this painful story. Here was a business that by its very nature was a pure digital play.

Customers search online, find what they need, add to a cart, pay and boom, it’s delivered to their home. The growth in e-commerce for the past few years has been staggering compared to other parts of the economy so they need to feed that monster with engaged and delighted customers and speak to them about what they were offering. But, like the election fundraisers mentioned previously, there was diminishing returns in the digital strategies that they gravitated to as digital natives—search, programmatic

ads and email.

A decade or so after e-commerce became mainstream, spam filters, indifference to email and Adblockers came to roost. As an e-commerce marketer, how do you engage your customers if your channels are Adblocked or your email hits the spam filter or is just ignored. There may be whole segments of the customer base that just cannot be engaged this way. It’s frustrating for a digital marketer to see the diminishing returns. You just can’t throw another million dollars in email and programmatic and get the results that your initial investment in digital returned.

Some of these companies responded by getting physical. Yes, they opened stores where people could see and touch the things they were going to buy. Online only was not getting the growth they needed. It turns out that having a bricks-and-mortar physical store July/August 2017

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CRM is a growing trend. Even Amazon announced a store location.

Conversely, we have watched retailers open online at record rates to soak up some of that market too.

It seemed that suddenly the pure digital world of e-commerce was recognizing that having a foot in the physical world was important to success.

And the physical world is where printed mail is naturally grounded.

Perhaps there is an opportunity here? Didn’t Canadian Tire return to their catalogues? I’ve also heard rumors that IKEA is mailing about 10 million catalogues to Canadians.

They seem to understand the value this brings them.

Canada Post wanted to understand that value and better share it with their customers, for obvious reasons. They’ve done some great research that uses neuroscience to study how printed mail leaves a greater impact on the recipient when compared with digital. The researchers wrapped wires around the heads of hundreds of participants and found, not surprisingly, that printed mail “​captures and sustains consumer attention, triggers the emotions that drive action and optimizes recall.”

So this is the ecosystem into which we developed ResponsivePrint. E-commerce companies had several main challenges—abandoned shopping cart rates were hovering around 70%, win-back programs and loyalty programs could have low response due to Adblockers, unopened email and maximized results for programmatic ads.

Strategies that used triggers to send emails or introduce ads on a customer’s screen are wonderfully personal and immediate but they also are negatively affected by the same things.

Personalization is the key to good engagement by digital marketers and it’s driven by excellent CRM resources, the backbone of all e-commerce systems. So this is perfect ground for a variable print workflow automation that outputs fully dynamic printed mail within hours of online triggers.

So we have the perfect candidate for triggered workflow that creates personalized communications.

July/August 2017

A personalized postcard is mailed within hours of an abandoned shopping cart Abandoned shopping carts are a perfect place to use this strategy.

With so many carts abandoned by customers who are logged into a site, this is a great place to start to add value. We’ve roughly calculated that based upon an average shopping cart value of X and a cart abandonment rate of Y there are $ Z in missed sales opportunities that could be saved. So we developed workflow that securely transfers data to us and allows us to print dynamic postcards and letters within hours. This results in quite impressive response rates and allows for segmenting and multi-variate testing on the fly so that the strategies mimic the kind of strategies used by digital campaigns. This is not direct mail as it is commonly understood—it is highly targeted, highly personalized and very immediate. Low volume mail can have high yields when these conditions exist.

But the same rules apply to many online situations, not just online retail. CRM tools are the basis for most customer relationships online so similar strategies can be used.

A financial institution has home addresses and can track activity on a website and send out a high value mail piece triggered by that activity.

Recency, frequency and value factors can be included in the queries that select who will receive the mail piece and purges will eliminate repetitive mailing to the same customer.

In a way, we’ve come full circle in our development. What was old is new again and we find that introducing some highly personalized printed mail to the digital strategy is perfectly in line with the thinking that built stores to support e-commerce. Using a physical approach to a digital strategy is worth considering as part of the mix now that it can be automated and short runs of high value communications flow as easily as automated email and programmatic triggers.

As president and owner of Prime Data, Steve Falk leads a tremendously talented and engaged team. He’s earned all of his adult income with businesses that put things in the mail and continually searches for opportunities where mail can add the most value to customer and donor communications.

Check us out online dmn.ca

For online advertising opportunities contact

Mark Henry, mark@dmn.ca For online editorial opportunities contact

Sarah O’Connor, sarah@dmn.ca DMN.ca ❰

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Feature

Mobile sleepwalking and the content awakening A new location-based marketing strategy

By Adrian Velthuis

L

ocation, location, location! The old adage about real estate is now more true than ever for mobile advertising—the fastest growing segment in media. For years, marketers have sought to leverage the inherent location insights that mobile devices provide. The rapid growth of location-aware, programmatic mobile inventory has empowered brands to deliver location relevant information to their consumers at scale. Direct marketers are perhaps the best able to leverage device location to drive consumer action in the real world.

The mobile experience has evolved into the primary touch point for consumers on the go.

Consumers pick up and unlock their smartphones nearly 100 times each day. And they are greeted by what? Either the home screen—basically a file folder of static icons, or the last screen—the last application that they were using before the device went idle. Research demonstrates that over half of the time, that initial experience delivers little value to the mobile user who is looking for something, anything, more engaging. As the mobile experience increasingly dominates user media consumption, wireless carriers are taking notice and are eager to participate in the monetization opportunity. This drive by wireless ❱ DMN.ca

carriers will unlock new media opportunities for direct marketers.

Mobile carriers are actively creating a new user experience and hence new media opportunity. This new real estate is best known as the “First Screen.”

Instead of the home screen or last screen, wireless carriers are distributing mobile apps that present premium engaging content on the First Screen. Wireless subscribers are delighted to discover rich, engaging content presented to them immediately after device unlock in lieu of the static, legacy experience to which so many of us have become accustomed.

Sleepwalking through content The pattern of consumers aimlessly digesting content is nothing new.

Marketers have long faced the challenge of developing ad formats and creatives that engage the consumer, whether they are flipping through a magazine or surfing through dozens of television channels in rapid succession.

This behavior is more prevalent than ever in the smartphone environment. Consumers acknowledge that most of the time, they unlock their device with no specific purpose in mind.

Facebook and YouTube have reaped tremendous benefit from this behavior. As consumers navigate through their smartphones looking for

something of interest, these two destinations have become the default choice. First Screen content discovery offers a new and powerful opportunity for marketers, while satisfying the dominant user desire on mobile, namely, something to do on mobile.

First Screen content intersects the user journey immediately after they unlock their device, capturing those moments when the user is most likely to engage. Opted-in subscribers choose their content experience and it is presented to them, ready and waiting after they unlock their device. And of course, content enables advertising in the natural value exchange which mobile subscribers have come to understand. Perhaps most impactful, these First Screen moments are characterized by the user’s desire for engagement rather than interrupting a task.

First Screen content turns mobile somnambulists into active consumers of content and advertising—an ideal candidate for direct marketing initiatives.

A better First Screen solution presents a win-win for consumers and marketers. Consumers embrace First Screen content and marketers access a diverse audience of engaged users. Look for this media category to grow rapidly, because wireless carriers are big winners as well, who can now participate in the mobile advertising value exchange that

has been dominated by Facebook and Google. Millions of mobile users in the U.S. already enjoy First Screen content today, generating billions of pageviews each month.

Multiple U.S. wireless carriers are actively gearing up to launch First Screen content for their subscribers before the end of the year, and thereby, actively participate in the mobile advertising ecosystem at serious scale.

Yes, mobile location has become a key variable in the value proposition of mobile advertising. Mobile subscribers readily exchange that data for location-based content. But for sophisticated marketers, location represents just one of many decision variables. The real challenge remains the same— engaging consumers when they are otherwise sleepwalking past your message. First Screen inventory reaches consumers when they are most likely to engage. As millions more mobile subscribers wake up to First Screen content this year, direct marketers have a golden opportunity leverage locationbased targeting in a new, highly impactful media experience.

Adrian Velthuis is a 17-year veteran of the mobile advertising industry. As chief revenue officer at Mobile Posse, Adrian has responsibility for ad sales revenue, content partnerships and overall user development and growth. He brings an intense focus on data insights to drive sales success.

July/August 2017

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In the mail This column is sponsored by

To learn more about Canada Post’s integrated direct marketing solutions, please visit canadapost.ca/smartmailmarketing.

Catalogues delivered by mail boost in-store sales Yellow Shoes sees a 4% conversion rate increase each time it mails customers its new catalogue

By Manon Laberge

Yellow’s strategy • Eight million catalogues mailed annually • Three to five multimedia campaigns annually • Targeted neighbourhoods selected according to past results

4%

Increased conversion rate

July/August 2017

I

n 1916, Samuel Avrith was already innovating by offering his customers sample shoes. The yellow labels that identified models bought from Quebec manufacturers inspired the name of the store: Yellow Shoes.

Now, 100 years later, Yellow has more than 85 stores and is Quebec’s top shoe retailer. It’s one of the most well-regarded and popular companies in the province.

Beloved brand If you ask people in Quebec, the family-run business inhabits their collective memory, just like Jean Coutu and Saint-Hubert. Since the 1980s, whenever the retailer’s catalogue is delivered to a household, each family member flips through it and, usually, the whole family heads to the local Yellow together.

Whether it’s for back-to-school, the holidays or the new season, shopping at Yellow is a tradition among Quebec consumers.

“We design our catalogues with care. After all, they showcase our latest products,“ explains Douglas Avrith, president of Yellow Group Inc. “But we must always be ready to adapt our offering to the whims of the Canadian weather; so we complete our printed offer with digital and point-of-purchase advertising for greater immediacy. The catalogue brings people to the store; our in-store offers keep them in... and they buy.

In 2015, during a tough spell for the retail sector, our sales figures rose by four per cent.“

Delivering brand image Yellow Shoes started distributing catalogues 30 years ago, nearly always trusting Canada Post with the task.

“The results prove it: our catalogues are more valued when they arrive by mail,” says Avrith. “The attention people give our catalogue benefits our brand image.

We tried other methods, but the results were just not the same.“ After a mail campaign, the weekly conversion rate at Yellow stores increases by four per cent. In a sector as volatile as the shoe industry, that’s a remarkable result.

33% of Canadians will make a purchase in-store, online or over the phone after receiving a catalogue.

To learn how smart use of direct mail can increase your online sales, visit canadapost.ca/ smartmailmarketing.

Manon Laberge is the managing editor of Language Services at

Canada Post.

DMN.ca ❰

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Holiday Marketing

York Region’s “Pledge to Ignore” campaign gets the attention of distracted drivers

By Hugh Hibbert

D

istracted driving is a leading cause of accidents on Ontario’s roads.

Whether texting or talking on a phone, drivers who were not giving the road their full attention caused 16% of all at-fault collisions in York Region between 2013 and 2015, according to the Region’s 2016 Annual Traffic Safety Report. And distracted walking—pedestrians looking at their phones instead of traffic signals and vehicles—can also lead to accidents and injuries.

As York Region officials recognized, these accidents are entirely preventable. They just needed to raise awareness about the problem and somehow convince those most likely to engage in these risky behaviours to stop. Thus was born York Region’s innovative Pledge to Ignore marketing campaign. ❱ DMN.ca

Beginning in June 2015, York Region, in partnership with York Regional Police and York Region Paramedic Services, challenged motorists and pedestrians to “pledge to ignore” their cellphones when driving or walking near traffic. The make-a-pledge strategy grew out of research that found when people sign a petition in favour of something, they become even more committed to it. The Pledge to Ignore campaign directed people to register their pledge at york.ca, and organizers set a goal of registering 50,000 pledges by the end of December 2016.

As the campaign website noted, “Each pledge represents one less distracted driver.”

Despite a relatively modest budget of $80,000, York Region’s Pledge to Ignore campaign featured an outsized communications strategy aided by its media, advertising

and analytics partners. Focusing on Millennials, a group whose members are the main smartphone users, analysts began with a scan to determine where they were concentrated within York Region.

Using Environics Analytics’ (EA) PRIZM5 geodemographic segmentation system, which classifies Canadians into 68 lifestyle types, they identified three distinct segments of Millennials: those who never left home, those living on their own and those who had returned home. Mining secondary data— from Vividata and EA’s SocialValues datasets—they extracted insights about the Millennial groups’ demographics, lifestyles, media usage and, most importantly, social values. Focus groups identified attitudes about distracted driving, why people do it and how they might be persuaded to stop.

The information helped York

Region determine the best media channels, locations and messages for reaching these Millennials.

“The data really showed us where Millennials liked to receive messages and how they perceived them,” says Caroline Berryman, supervisor of marketing & communications in the office of the commissioner, transportation services, at York Region. Members of her team, including GIS Project Specialist Andree Gates and Data Scientist Peter Su Chu, scoured a wealth of reports and maps to help create the campaign’s data-driven execution strategy.

For example, behavioural data indicated that Millennials were open to out-of-home advertising messages in pubs and washrooms.

And unlike their parents and older siblings who respond better to newspaper advertising, Millennials prefer personalized marketing July/August 2017

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Holiday Marketing interactions. That prompted York Region to send younger staff members to make informal presentations at Frosh Week events at local college campuses and York University. And with Millennials always eager to acquire more tech

gadgets and accessories, free phone cases were added as an incentive to make a pledge.

“The data pointed us in directions we hadn’t thought about,” says Berryman. “At the Frosh Week events, we really talked to the students, telling them to remove their ear buds and hoodies when crossing the street, that distracted driving and walking can cause serious accidents. And they were very receptive.”

The campaign also prominently featured holiday-related messaging in witty print ads, postcards, and e-cards—part of the coordinated collateral developed by Fingerprint Communications. Visitors to the York.ca/pledgetoignore website could send a Mother’s Day e-card proclaiming, “Mom, because I love you, I promise to ignore your calls.”

Or they could send a Father’s Day printable postcard that declares, “As an expression of my love…I promise not to call you.”

Even Valentine’s Day offered an opportunity to raise awareness with an e-card from a lover pledging to give a stranger undivided attention. The card reads, “Even though I love you, when I’m driving, a stranger crossing the street is more important to me. That’s why I’ve signed a Pledge to Ignore my phone when driving. I’m doing this for you. Happy Valentine’s Day.” The message was clear: “I took July/August 2017

the pledge. How about you?”

York Region’s social media initiatives (all tagged with #PledgetoIgnore, of course) also were supported by traditional media and event programs. With data indicating Millennials enjoy listening to radio and streaming radio, 105.9 The Region promoted the campaign at events and during on-air interviews where local celebrities, including Wendell Clark and pop singer Jully Black, were invited to make the Pledge to Ignore. York Region staff made presentations at 37 high schools and offered a special incentive for these younger Millennials: a video dance party hosted by cable network Much Music would be awarded to the school that collected the most pledges.

Throughout 2016, radio spots, web ads, social media and YouTube videos urged people to visit York.ca where they could “pledge to ignore” calls and texts, encourage their friends to join them and download challenge kits for workplaces and schools. But the most prominent feature on the site is a pledge counter. It logs in real time how many people have taken the pledge and it serves as an undeniable indicator of the campaign’s success.

In fact, the Pledge to Ignore campaign exceeded all of York Region’s goals. By the end of 2016, the campaign had registered 60,270 pledges, surpassing its goal by 21%.

The secondary school presentations reached 2,775 students; some 40,000 promotional pledge cards were distributed to students in grades 10 and 11. And ads placed in campus and pub washrooms had the potential to reach 383,000 impressions.

All these efforts have increased awareness about the dangers of distracted driving and walking among a population segment most at risk. Campaign organizers have a new goal: 100,000 pledges by the end of 2017. Have you made the pledge?

Hugh Hibbert is the director of consulting

services at Environics Analytics for the government and education sectors.

DMN.ca ❰

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Holiday Marketing

Preparing for retail’s virtual future The unexpected but important link between payments security and VR/AR adoption that retailers must understand

By Casey Bullock

T

he ability to secure transactions and safeguard data serves is a true differentiator for any business or technology. In the case of virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR), the consumer intrigue and appetite is there—but security concerns aren’t far behind. In fact, 42% of global consumers surveyed as part of Worldpay’s “360 consumer: how VR is reshaping the buying experience” report identified security of payment details as one of the biggest barriers to VR/AR adoption, coming in second only to the high price tag of devices.

Though unease around security is present, consumers are also aware of the benefits that these technologies can bring, including saving time, more immersive shopping experiences and the ability to experience products or services they otherwise wouldn’t be able to purchase.

Despite concerns, three fifths (59%) of the 16,000 consumers surveyed across eight countries are looking for retailers to utilize VR/AR in-store and 63% want to begin seeing the technologies used within shopping apps. Rather than focusing on payments security as a hindrance to the growth of

VR/AR technology usage, it may actually present enterprises with a unique opportunity to surprise and delight customers.

Shifting from interest to confidence Demand for VR and AR technologies has never been higher. With predictions that the VR/AR market may be worth as much as $108 billion by 2021, according to Digit-Capital, it’s no wonder there’s an increased interest in seeing how these advanced technologies will transform the ways in which enterprises and consumers interact.

Though plenty of buzz surrounds these engaging platforms and the drastic changes they seek to bring, it doesn’t mean taking commerce into the virtual or augmented world will be easy. Consumers are craving more compelling and digitally driven experiences, but not if that means sacrificing their privacy and security. For virtual commerce to thrive, the purchasing of goods and services in virtual environments must deliver peace of mind—and a user experience that provides a feeling of security above all else.

Just a quarter (25%) of global consumers surveyed view VR/

AR devices as secure enough to buy products and services, but the comfort levels vary drastically based on the country. Only 23% of Dutch consumers surveyed view these devices as safe for making payments, compared to 59% of shoppers surveyed in China. In the UK, only 35% of respondents would even consider making a purchase using VR/AR. Consumers in Western markets tend to be less comfortable with the idea of making payments in VR, which contrasts starkly to the Chinese market, where mobiledriven consumers are open and eager to expand their interactions with merchants beyond the desktop environment.

For VR/AR adoption to grow on a global scale, the technologies and how they approach payments have to be positioned as more than just the latest, greatest innovation— consumers must see a true need for virtual commerce and the benefits it brings to their everyday lives.

The new security opportunity In approaching VR payments, thinking about the methods being used to safeguard online purchases can ease some of the uncertainties associated with virtual commerce.

While a fifth (19%) of consumers surveyed expressed that they

Three-fifths (59%) of the 16,000 consumers surveyed across eight countries are looking for retailers to utilize VR/AR in-store and 63% want to begin seeing the technologies used within shopping apps. ❱ DMN.ca

would never be comfortable using VR/AR to make purchases, Worldpay’s research also found that there is still an opportunity to help change those perceptions.

Consumers from around the world said they would be more comfortable using VR/AR devices for payments if various advanced security capabilities were made available. For instance, 38% of respondents said fingerprint scanning would make them more comfortable with VR payments.

Integrating trusted security capabilities within the VR/AR environment helps to replicate real-world commerce experiences and establish confidence in the security of purchases.

Security methods like entering a secret code or password (32%) or providing alternative payment methods such as PayPal (29%) were also identified by consumers as ways to alleviate payment security concerns in VR/AR. From retina scanning to allowing payments to take place similarly to how they do in the real world, there are many security and data entry considerations that can positively impact VR as a commerce platform.

By seeing payments security as a ripe VR/AR opportunity—not solely an adoption barrier— enterprises have the potential to deliver unmatched user experiences that are both engaging and secure.

Casey Bullock is general manager, global e-commerce – North America for Worldpay.

Current responsibilities include managing all commercial personnel working directly with Worldpay’s clients in the North America region.

Prior to Worldpay, Mr. Bullock was VP, GM fraud solution for Chase Paymentech focused on the creation and delivery of enterprise-class fraud prevention capabilities into the e-commerce marketplace.

July/August 2017

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Advertorial

Personalization: Online Revenue’s Secret Sauce

By Susan Wall, Vice President of Marketing, Bronto Software For many years, retailers have been attempting to tackle the “problem” of online shoppers abandoning before they buy.

It can happen when a shopper departs after looking around a retailer’s website or further along in the process when they have moved a few items to their cart.

One way retailers have dealt with the problem was to spend money chasing their customers all over the web with retargeting ads. While these ads have a purpose, we believe there is a more personalized way to approach the issue – one that can turn abandonment into the start of a long-term relationship.

At Oracle + Bronto, we have seen numerous retailers use abandonment communication strategies to understand their customers better, target them more effectively and provide The Internet has the barriers the hyper-personalization thatremoved entices consumers to stay to loyal to a specific brand.

shopping across borders. The data is clear

Last year–was watershed yearground for cart abandonment emails. theaUS is fertile for Canadian Most of our customers found their recovery emails (as we merchants looking to communications. find new customers. call them) to be their most lucrative They stopped spending money trying to avoid cart abandonment, instead treating an abandoned cart asshare a stageof of a selling How can you get your this pie? cycle.

Focus on the reasons US consumers are

As an example, Canadian denim giant Silver Jeans added interested in Canada’s products: unique an abandoned cart campaign that has a 16% conversion rate. Because of this initialand success, they plan to turn the merchandise better prices. abandoned cart message into a series.

information, visitcart bronto.com.

The nextFor stepmore for retailers is augmenting recovery efforts with browser abandonment approaches. By focusing on the point that the customer abandons browsing, retailers shift the focus earlier in the purchasing cycle. The philosophy is similar to cart recovery – treat an abandoned shopping session as the first step in a sales opportunity. After a customer finishes browsing without purchasing or even adding to the cart, the retailer will send a reminder e-mail.

This may include an incentive, but should be tested to

July/August 2017

determine the most effective approach based on the shopper and the product.

To be effective, browser recovery must consider many more variables than just the pages a customer views; it needs automatically to recognize each consumer and understand their deeper intentions. That means drawing on data from multiple shopping sessions, purchase history, ratings, location and other personal attributes. As an example, if a customer typically buys around $150-worth of products, a retailer can now send emails after that person abandons the shopping process, highlighting relevant product offers that hit the customer’s “sweet spot” of $150. To encourage a larger expenditure, the e-mail might include an incentive for purchases above their typical purchase size.

72%

of understanding US consumersofare What comes next? With an whoopen the to purchasing from Canada. customer is, the next steps of hyper-personalization include newer geo-targeting options and product recommendations.

Geo-targeting recognizes where a consumer is physically located and reacts accordingly. It could be as simple as publishing local store hours in an email or as sophisticated as sending a real-time SMS coupon as the customer nears the store.

The final step in personalization is to recommend the right product at the right time. Product recommendations do not happen in a vacuum. Stores need more than the conventional “people who bought product X like ….” A good recommendations engine takes all the available data into account – shopping preferences, purchase history, the date, Only physical location and more.

20%

We have seen many times that sending targeted personalized emails after abandonment works well. Sales increase have done along so. with customer engagement and brand loyalty. Retailers of all sizes are using the technology to get ahead of their rivals and secure the spending of online customers long into the future. To find out more about how to turn abandonment into effective and repeatable sales, visit www.bronto.com.

DMN.ca ❰

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Holiday Marketing

Put your content to work

A three-step plan to kickstart your marketing and engage holiday shoppers

By Michel Benjamin

M

arketers have gone crazy for content, and for good reason. From site content and photos, to recipes, ebooks, videos and blogs—content drives interest and interest drives sales.

Having more pageviews, more time on your site and a smaller bounce rate means more eyeballs on your product or service, which means you have more opportunities to make a sale—which is every retailer’s goal during the holiday shopping season.

This all sounds great, but how can we as marketers make the most of our existing content assets—or figure out how to create better content using the resources we have? By leveraging data.

We can probably all agree that personalization is a key part of successfully marketing to your audience—and data is key to creating the personalized experiences that consumers demand. Brands and retailers are sitting on a goldmine of data—including page views, clicks, purchase behavior and even app downloads—that can be used to do just that. Here are three easy steps to put your data to work on your content and kickstart your marketing plan to reach and engage with your ideal holiday shoppers.

1

Optimize your existing content tools The first step is taking a look at the mountain of data you have

❱ DMN.ca

at your fingertips to understand who your audience is, what they interact with and what engages them most effectively. Creative content is important, but you should make sure the messaging you are using actually speaks to the audience. Not every one of your customers will be motivated by the same things and you need to let your knowledge and insights about the consumer lead the way.

For example, a fashion retailer might discover that their best shoppers consistently spend time with the outfit inspiration pages of their site. The brand can then use this insight to put more suggested outfits into their holiday email and social campaigns targeted to these shoppers. By leveraging data in this way, your existing marketing assets become more personal.

topics not related to your product offering. Then, use this audience to offer customized content that keeps them on your site longer, increasing the likelihood of a purchase and helping to drive brand loyalty. An electronics retailer could retarget consumers who previously purchased a stereo system with an ad for complimentary speakers or CDs. Once again, the goal is giving the consumers what they want and care about using the insights you have about your audience. And hopefully by giving the audience what they want engagement increases, meaning your holiday sales increase too. So you are reaching the audience who wants to know about your products and not wasting ads on those who aren’t interested.

2

3

Supercharge your CMS You have site visitors that are already interested in your products and services—why not figure out what content actually makes them tick?

Integrating a data management platform, or DMP, with your content management system (CMS) gives you the ability to understand who your ideal customers are, both in terms of demographics, interests and actions online, and serve them specific content on your website.

For example, you can build an audience of consumers who have previously purchased or even added certain products to their cart, or who are interested in other

Avoid redundancy How many times have you visited one of your favorite sites, only to be greeted with the same ad for a product you’re no longer interested in? Probably more times than you can count.

Avoiding redundant messaging is a huge component of content personalization. And as more people move between mobile, desktop and the web, your messages need to feel native and unique to each platform. By segmenting your consumers into audiences, you have the ability to deliver fresh ads to users based on their interests, their purchase histories and even the type of device they use.

Send a user a mobile coupon for a product they just viewed on desktop, for example, or target a user who has abandoned her online shopping cart with a social ad containing a “Buy Now” button and a coupon that makes the buying process seamless.

At the same time, you can choose to suppress your continuing campaign to an audience who has already been exposed to it a certain number of times. This can help you avoid becoming that advertiser who seems to spray their ad at you continuously. This will have a positive effect on your overall advertising spend. You will either pay less overall or only spend money reaching the audience who is interested, which is likely where you want your money to be going anyway.

Personalization is the future, but that future is approaching faster than you think. If you want to win—and keep—customers this holiday shopping season, you need to view personalization as more than just the cherry on top.

It’s a key ingredient in your content marketing mix. And a well thought out data strategy is the engine that will drive success.

After jumping head first into the marketing world at advertising agency Koroberi upon graduating from the University of North Carolina, Michel Benjamin has held various marketing roles encompassing everything from media buying to event planning to public relations to launching websites. She is currently the director of corporate marketing at Lotame and is based out of Montreal, Canada.

July/August 2017

Do you make decisions about your marketing operations?

Are you responsible for customer acquisition, retention or loyalty?

Is your department in charge of fulfilling orders or customer service?

Sign up NOW for a free subscription to Direct Marketing magazine.

Visit our website at www.dmn.ca and learn more about the magazine Direct Marketing is a Lloydmedia, Inc publication.

Lloydmedia also publishes Financial Operations magazine, Canadian Treasurer magazine, Canadian Equipment Finance magazine, Payments Business magazine and Contact Management magazine.

// 22

Feature

Your sender reputation may be keeping you out of the inbox

By Tom Sather

R

egardless of how the world changes, email remains one of the most popular and effective marketing channels. A whopping 72% of consumers prefer to have brands communicate with them via email, and recent studies estimate that email marketers achieve as much as $38 in ROI for every $1 spent.

With numbers like these, it’s clear that email is just as relevant and valuable as it’s ever been. And yet there’s one very basic step that many marketers fail to master in their quest for email success: simply hitting the inbox in the first place.

If email doesn’t reach the inbox, ❱ DMN.ca

brands lose the ability to connect with customers and ultimately make a sale—so every message counts. But recent Return Path research shows that 21% of email fails to reach its intended target.

That’s one out of every five emails sent.

So what’s causing this massive fail, and what can marketers do to make sure their email gets delivered?

Understand what stands between you and the inbox Today’s consumers have dozens of options when it comes to choosing an email platform, so mailbox providers do everything they can to provide an outstanding user experience. In particular, they

carefully analyze every message and every sender that attempts to reach their users, to ensure that only legitimate and wanted mail lands in the inbox.

To help in this monumental task, mailbox providers have developed complex and ever evolving spam filtering algorithms. Every mailbox provider’s algorithm is unique, but certain factors weigh heavily in the calculation. One of those critical factors is sender reputation.

Know what factors into your reputation Sender reputation is one way that mailbox providers can judge whether or not a sender is legitimate. While no two mailbox providers evaluate sender

reputation the same way, they all incorporate similar elements.

1. Complaints: Spam complaints provide a clear signal to mailbox providers that a sender’s messages are unwanted. As the rate of complaints generated by a sender increases, mailbox providers begin to filter incoming mail from that sender to the spam folder.

2. Spam traps: Spam traps are email addresses that are used to catch spammers. Typically they were either once used by a person and then abandoned (recycled) or they are addresses that were never used by a person, created solely to catch spammers (pristine). Having spam traps on your list indicates to mailbox July/August 2017

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Feature 5. Blacklists: Blacklists are lists of IP addresses and domains that have been reported as known sources of spam. Mailbox providers run incoming IP addresses and domains across multiple blacklists to see if they have been listed. Your reputation will take a hit if you show up on a blacklist.

Recognize how reputation impacts deliverability Sender reputation is a valuable tool for mailbox providers, but it’s also critical for marketers to understand their own reputation.

Otherwise you could end up with poor inbox placement and not understand the reasons why.

At Return Path, we’ve created a free reputation tool—Sender Score—which incorporates the same elements mailbox providers use in their own calculations.

Sender Score evaluates a sender’s IP address and produces a score between zero and 100.

In a recent study, we looked at the impact of sender reputation on deliverability and found that inbox placement increases with improved sender reputation—especially at Gmail, Microsoft and Yahoo.

Senders scoring above 91-100 (the best possible reputation score) had significantly more of their messages delivered to this inbox, while those scoring below 90 saw more mail diverted to the spam folder.

Take steps to improve and maintain your sender reputation A poor sender reputation will keep your messages from reaching the inbox. It’s important to not only build up a strong reputation, but also maintain that reputation to achieve consistently high inbox placement. Take these steps to make sure mailbox providers consistently recognize you as a reputable, legitimate sender: Sign up for feedback loops Feedback loops are services that notify you when a subscriber complains about your email using the “this is junk/spam” button.

Most mailbox providers offers their own feedback loop service.

Sign up with the mailbox providers that are most frequently used by your subscribers and then take steps to limit the impact on your program by immediately removing or suppressing any subscribers who mark your email as spam.

Immediately remove unknown users Identifying unknown users is fairly simple. When you send mail to an unknown user, you’ll receive a hard bounce code and an explanation of why the message was not delivered.

These unknown users are abandoned or invalid addresses, meaning there is no subscriber at the other end and they provide no value to your email program. As soon as you receive a hard bounce code, remove or suppress that subscriber from your list.

Keep your subscriber list clean Sending to spam traps and inactive addresses will hurt your reputation.

The quickest way to ensure a clean list is to run it through a list hygiene service, which will identify all bad addresses so you can remove them from your list. You can also do this manually—simply identify any addresses that have not interacted with your mail in the last 90 days and suppress or remove them from your list.

Know when you’ve been blacklisted There are numerous blacklists and each mailbox provider factors different ones into their reputation calculation. Use a blacklist lookup tool regularly to make sure your IP addresses are not listed. If you find that you have been blacklisted, find out their delisting process, which is normally available on their website.

Monitor your reputation Sender reputation is not static.

Nearly any activity can influence your reputation. It’s important to continually monitor your reputation for unexpected drops.

The sooner you know there’s been a decline in your reputation, the more time you’ll have to find and fix the problem before it can significantly impact your deliverability and hurt your bottom line.

Tom Sather is senior director of research at

Return Path.

providers that your acquisition practices or list hygiene are not up to par.

3. Unknown users: Unknown users are addresses that don’t exist or were recently abandoned by a user. When marketers mail to these addresses they receive a hard bounce code informing them to stop sending to that address. Continuing to send to those addresses is viewed as spammy behavior.

4. Send volume: Mailbox providers monitor the volume of email sent by each sender.

Consistency is key! Large spikes in volume are viewed with suspicion and can lead to throttling and filtering by mailbox providers.

July/August 2017

DMN.ca ❰

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AD:

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cleanlist.ca an interact direct company

// 25

Resource Directory LIST SERVICES

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To advertise in Direct Marketing Resource Directory Contact: Mark Henry, mark@dmn.ca

// 26

Excellent Execution

Data governance: Priority in a data-driven world Creating a roadmap to protect and manage vital data assets

By Evan Wood

A

Evan Wood is senior vice president, marketing

and sales operations at Environics Analytics.

Data governance: Common program elements ❯❯ ❯❯ ❯❯ ❯❯ ❯❯ ❯❯

❯❯ ❯❯ ❯❯ ❯❯ ❯❯ ❯❯ ❯❯ ❯❯ ❯❯

❯❯

Policies Data cataloguing Data privacy and compliance Data documentation Data breach management Data transfer and data migration Data standards Data integration Data security and access Data storage Data stewardship Data retention Data quality Data issues management Data architecture and data models Data quality KPIs

❱ DMN.ca

s organizations continue to embrace the benefits of leveraging data both big and small, data governance as a strategic business program has never been more important. A solid data governance policy not only mitigates the risks associated with data mismanagement and possible security breaches but also provides the ownership, accountability, process, planning and performance management required by every organization, department and individual that handles data.

While some may regard data governance as managerial overkill or even unnecessary, a number of common data-related challenges make the case for why proper governance is critical today: ❯❯ Redundant or inconsistent data residing in organizational silos undercuts a single view of customers; ❯❯ No clear ownership of key data assets obfuscates who is responsible for managing and protecting the data; ❯❯ If processes and other intellectual property related to data management are undocumented, that knowledge typically disappears when employees leave the organization; ❯❯ Poor data quality can reduce the value of the assets; and ❯❯ The absence of a common naming convention for metadata can hinder effective searching.

These are just a few of the many issues that can leave an organization vulnerable to inefficiencies and ineffectual initiatives downstream if they are not managed systematically.

Data governance provides a set of processes to ensure key data assets are formally managed throughout an enterprise. The most common elements include policies and procedures around data integration, data storage and retention, data issues management, data quality KPIs and third-party access.

However, the specific elements of a data governance program will depend on the organization’s business priorities, such as regulatory compliance, risk management and its reporting structure to address governance gaps or pain points. Once these issues have been clarified, a roadmap can be developed to guide the effective implementation and management of a governance program, which may include some or all of the elements listed at left.

As with most business process and workflow management initiatives, creating a roadmap for data governance is critical. It provides not only the building blocks for structuring the program and putting it in place, but also defines the rules for ongoing management and modification. The task of roadmap development may fall to one key individual

such as a chief data officer or chief privacy officer, but often it will be spearheaded by a multi-person, multi-departmental task force (sometimes referred to as a data governance office). The benefit of the latter approach is that, by including key stakeholders from multiple business units, departments and functional areas, and gaining their buy-in on the key objectives and processes for data governance, there will be a higher degree of compliance across the enterprise.

Your data governance roadmap Developing a data governance roadmap includes the following key steps, typically led by a data governance steering committee established within the data governance office: 1. Define the program scope, priorities, mission, roles and development timelines.

2. Establish regular data governance overviews and educational opportunities to involve stakeholders in the effort, as well as to identify data stewards by functional area (individuals who can act as representatives of the data governance office in their department or group).

3. Develop, document and communicate data policies including data access controls and identify any key data issues.

4. Prioritize data issues to be addressed and implement tools for data cataloguing (e.g. data dictionary, metadata naming conventions, etc.).

5. Initiate data quality programs (to address data priorities from step four) and implement tools to measure the value of data governance (e.g. scorecard to measure compliance, issues resolved and policies documented).

6. Convene quarterly status meetings for the Data Governance Office to review policies and procedures such as measuring and new metric setting, issues identification and trending, reporting and communications and collaboration.

With data increasingly viewed as a critical asset to any organization, it only makes sense that data governance should play an equally vital role. It is a strategic priority that must be embraced and led from senior management, and it is of concern to every individual or group that creates, collects, processes, manipulates, stores or somehow handles data. In today’s data-driven business world, that means virtually everyone. And to be successful, data governance must be established as a program guided by documented policy reinforced with ongoing communication among all stakeholders. The importance of the program cannot be overemphasized and its value, supported with metrics, should be publicized throughout the organization.

July/August 2017

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