Engagement Marketing Archive

Dynamic Content and Analytics

Posted by: David King on Monday, August 22nd, 2011

Analytics can (and should) be used to match content to customer needs and propensity. This provides a ready mechanism to increase the relevance of marketing and therefore boost response rates and sales.

Finding The Frictionless Sale With QR Codes & PURLs

Posted by: Nathan Baldwin on Monday, August 15th, 2011

Any time we ask a customer to do something to complete a sale introduces friction that slows or stops the conversion process. Combining QR codes with PURLs is an effective way to eliminate some of this friction and boost conversion.

Open-Source Social Networking Analysis For Marketers

Posted by: David King on Monday, August 8th, 2011

Analysis of social networking data is becoming ever more important for marketers, yet much of the information is restricted to basic statistics. Fortunately, there are a lot of interesting and powerful open-source applications that permit more useful and valuable analysis of social networks. This article provides a sampling of a few.

Rethinking Householding

Posted by: David King on Wednesday, May 25th, 2011

Householding consumers has become a staple of database marketing. Yet, fundamental changes in demographics and behavior, coupled with the falling costs of direct marketing, provide reasons to rethinking the practice.

A Nice “Sprize” from the Gap

Posted by: Richard Muller on Friday, November 27th, 2009

So I’ve started my holiday season shopping today (like most of the population), and paid my annual visit to The Gap to shop for my wife and niece.  The window display caught my attention, announcing a new program called “Sprize,” describing a simple but compelling offering:  (1) shop today; (2) and if prices drop; (3) [...]

Life After Segmentation

Posted by: Richard Muller on Wednesday, September 30th, 2009

In Part 1 of this two-part post, I outlined how BCAA, one of North America’s largest AAA organizations, has used a custom segmentation model built entirely from their own membership data to improve the content and flow of communications, both through direct mail and email, and at the point-of-sale.   In this post, I discuss how BCAA [...]

Breathing Life into Segmentation

Posted by: Richard Muller on Tuesday, August 25th, 2009

Whether on the client or vendor side, many of us have had at least one experience as marketers with trying to move the results of a customer segmentation model off our desk and into the hands of others in the organization who actually engage with those customers.  As elegant as many of these segment models [...]

Social Media: Let’s Listen First

Posted by: David King on Wednesday, August 5th, 2009

Over the past several weeks, I have been struck by a curious phenomenon on the various marketing forums that I frequent. Over the past two years, there has been a marked increase in the number of questions about social media and its relevance to marketers. Even though we’ve had this medium for several years now, [...]

Measuring Your Brand and Social Media

Posted by: David King on Friday, July 24th, 2009

A recurring question from our clients these days is how to measure the effects of social media on their brand awareness and perception. Social media exposes something that has been largely hidden from marketers: how are consumers talking about your brand. To date, we’ve had to rely on market research to indirectly measure attributes, such [...]

A good IdeaX that could be better

Posted by: Richard Muller on Friday, July 17th, 2009

I recently spent some time on Best Buy’s branded social networking site called IDEA X, and for the most part I applaud them for their efforts. I’ve been saying for a while that I thought more marketers would be looking to create their own forums for engaging with their customers, rather than simply trying to [...]

Dear Toyota: You never write, you never call….

Posted by: Richard Muller on Monday, July 6th, 2009

I should start by saying (admitting?) that I own a 2004 Toyota Highlander (a year before they came out with their hybrid and about three years before owning an SUV became the social equivalent of smoking). But I have enjoyed the vehicle, and most importantly, have not had a single issue with it, from a [...]

What is Engagement Marketing?

Posted by: Richard Muller on Monday, June 22nd, 2009

Yes, another catchphrase, just after most of us who have been in the database marketing game for more than five years have finally gotten over what happened to “Customer Relationship Management.” I contend it was the sales management vendors who took the term hostage, and those of us on the database marketing side never got [...]

The Wave of the Future?

Posted by: David King on Friday, June 19th, 2009

After my last [grumpy] entry about direct marketing, I am posting a brief note on a new technology that marketers should be watching. In Internet time, this is ancient news, since it was unveiled three weeks ago. At Google I/O at the end of May, one of Google’s development teams showed off a new, but [...]

Rats and the Contact Center

Posted by: David King on Tuesday, June 16th, 2009

Each year, my sister gives me a humorous calendar, the kind that you peel off a sheet each day and are presented with some new joke. This year, she gave me one that contains a compendium of “Stupidest Things Ever Said.” Here’s the June 13 entry: “Rat complaints have gone up, but we look at [...]