Ken Carr's

I spent a great day at the Gridley conference in Manhattan. One of the best quotes came from the respected author, David Meerman Scott. I won’t get it precisely right, so I’ll have to paraphrase, but he was speaking to the changes in marketing. He said, historically, there were three ways to get attention: Buy it with ads; beg for it with PR; and using a salesforce, badger one person at a time. In the future, attention will have to be earned.

In my personal view, earning attention is another way of describing “engagement marketing.”

Well put, David.

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Thanks to my colleague passing along this recent eMarketer article, which points out the interesting differences in the way B2B and B2C marketers approach social marketing.

According to the article, which cites a new Business.com social media benchmark study, both sets of marketers are rapidly adopting social media, but they are going about it differently. For example, B2B firms are more likely to manage profiles on Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube, while B2C companies are more likely to be present on Facebook and MySpace. And, B2B companies are more likely to participate in discussions on third-party sites like Yahoo! Answers and LinkedIn and monitor company mentions on various social media, while their B2C counterparts are more likely to support a system of user ratings and reviews and manage online communities for customers and prospects.

Of the many interesting takeaways, the one that surprised me most was the apparent higher level of focus on social marketing of B2B marketers over their B2C colleagues. I’ve always thought of social marketing as a consumer-centric endeavor, but as a B2B marketer, I think the relatively small number of customers makes it easier to engage on social media.

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Everyone in marketing vehemently agrees that data-driven targeting has the potential to change the world of marketing in the future. Well, a company called Next Jump appears to be doing it today. The firm, which serves as a technology engine to a sizeable network of retailers, analyzes data to draw inferences about what a person would be likely to buy, and at what price. It has kept a low profile over the years, but its promise and achievements so far are truly unique.

Described by one employee as a “personalized advertising platform,” the company says that 60 percent of Web surfers who see an ad or offer click on it, and that one out of every 11 people who see one of its ads makes a purchase. For comparison, a 5 percent click-through rate is considered great performance, as is getting viewer in 1,000 to make a purchase.

If you’re a fan of data-driven targeting, this short article about the company that recently appeared in the New York Times is worth a read.

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In the never-ending fight to block spam, Internet service providers first created content filters. Then came the “spam” button. And now, the gatekeepers of deliverability are looking at a new way to determine whether your email makes it to the inbox:

Engagement.

Every marketer talks about engagement (and we are big fans of the idea here at Silverpop). But the inbox folks at America Online, Yahoo and others are taking the idea to a new level. In short, if your recipients aren’t interacting with your messages, it could affect whether an ISP delivers your email.

As you can see in this Direct article on the topic, spammers have found a way around the spam button by artificially driving down complaint percentages. This is one reason the big ISPs are looking for new, even more inventive ways to determine if your messages are truly desired by your recipients. Engagement is becoming the new spam button.

While the details are still private, it’s a pretty good bet that ISPs will be looking at factors like opens and clicks to determine just how engaged your recipients are. If you want to successfully make it into the inbox and stay there, a low complaint rate will no longer be enough. Your recipients will actually have to read and interact with your messages.

This is definitely bad news for spammers. But in the greater scheme of things, it’s a move that will help legitimate marketers and recipients alike. As we move into 2010, it’s more important than ever to make sure your messages are relevant and engaging. Your lifetime customer relationships, ROI—and increasingly your email deliverability—are counting on it.

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Silverpop just released its analysis of early holiday email marketing campaigns, and the results make for some quick and meaty reading. Our research team looked at the email marketing programs of 70 retail and consumer product companies, comparing last year’s campaigns with those sent last month. Among the findings:

• Marketers sent 25 percent more emails in November this year than they did in 2008. During the week leading up to Thanksgiving through “Cyber Monday” following the holiday, they sent 22 percent more emails this year than last.
• Response jumped for subject lines offering discounts. Sixty-two percent of marketers studied this year used a discount offer of some type in the subject line, compared to 66 percent last year. In 2008, the open rate for emails offering discounts was only 17 percent. This year, it jumped to 31 percent.

• What kind of subject-line offer generated the most opens? A gift with purchase or buy-one-get-one (BOGO) promotion was far more likely to generate an open (36 percent) than a percent off (21 percent), or dollar or British pound off purchase offer (12 percent).

For more results, including list growth, deliverability, and open and click-through rates, check out our news release here.

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Nearly one in four email messages sent on Cyber Monday failed to reach the inbox, according to a ClickZ article citing findings by deliverability services firm Pivotal Veracity.

According to Pivotal Veracity, only 76.2 percent of the emails sent out on what has become one of the busiest e-commerce days of the year were actually delivered, compared to deliverability percentages generally reported to be in the 80s to mid-90s.

Pivotal Veracity attributes the lower deliverability to an unmanageably high volume of messages going out almost simultaneously on Cyber Monday. The most popular time to send was between noon and 2 p.m. Central Time.

“It’s not so much a matter of what marketers did wrong individually, but what they did wrong collectively,” Pivotal Veracity’s Len Schneyer was quoted as saying. “They all sent at what appears to be the exact same time…” As a result, Internet Service Providers were forced to take stiffer measures than usual to contend with the volume of email that required processing.

Marketers are always looking for the best day and time to send email in order to get the best response. But even if there’s an optimal day to send your message, there’s no one best time for everyone on your list. Your subscribers are all different. Because your message is most likely to be spotted when it’s at or near the top of the inbox rather than buried somewhere toward the middle, the best time to send a message isn’t a specific hour that applies across your list, but rather, when someone is most likely to be in their inbox.

If more marketers had been able to optimize their send times on Cyber Monday so that they coincided with when their recipients were most likely to be checking their inboxes instead of blasting them all out during a two-hour window, they may have been able to avoid the glut of email that caused the drop in deliverability.

As an aside, in our 2009 Cyber Monday report due out tomorrow, Silverpop clients, many of whom presumably also used our Send Time Optimization feature, did considerably better than the industry averages cited by Pivotal Veracity, scoring deliverability percentages in the high 90s.

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Social networking site Tagged.com has agreed to pay $750,000 in penalties and costs to settle lawsuits alleging it engaged in deceptive email marketing practices. As part of the settlements, reached with New York and Texas, the San Francisco-based company also agreed to adopt reforms around its use of invitation emails. You can read more in this MediaPost Online Media Daily article.

The two states sued Tagged earlier this year for allegedly duping new members into providing their email addresses and passwords. Tagged then sent emails to members’ contact lists that appeared to have been sent directly from the members themselves.

In addition to paying the fines, the agreement calls for Tagged to provide clear and conspicuous notice to users before accessing their email inboxes and to obtain users’ explicit consent before sending email invitations to their contacts. On its blog, Tagged says it has overhauled its registration and invite-your-friends processes, and will soon be adding more new features to increase member privacy.

This is an interesting case on its merits, but what struck me is the potential implications for forward-to-a-friend and viral emails. While it’s not the same thing, many marketers elect to have their viral emails appear to come from the friend who signed the person up rather than from the marketer. In this case, the friend had more knowledge about the resulting email(s), but I have to wonder if some future court will take this ruling and seek to apply it to the age-old forward-to-a-friend technique.

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