Check out Wendy Roth‘s great article on the ways email marketing has changed in the last decade. It may have lost its shiny-object luster, but email is more important than ever as brands look to be more personal and relevant. Wendy does a fantastic job of highlighting what we’ve learned (at least what we should have learned) about what works and what doesn’t.

She says:

…email today is about each individual recipient: how to gain and retain their trust, send them messages they find most valuable, and market to them where they are, regardless of browser, platform, device, or even channel. Email isn’t just about email anymore, either.

Marketers who have recognized this fundamental shift and adapted to accommodate today’s dynamic marketplace are the ones today who are reaping the greatest benefits from email: a high return and a loyal, engaged audience.

In bulleted form, her 10 valuable lessons are:

• Acquisition is important, but retention is where the money is
• Email is all about the conversation again
• The ISPs are not the enemy
• An email message is its own creation, not a repurposed web page
• Email has broken free from the desktop
• “What’s in it for me?” still rules
• One size does not fit all
• A marketer can’t claim success until it’s measured the right way
• Email can go social
• It’s time to blow up the silo

Read the whole thing. Good stuff.


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My summary of his summary:

• The market is up.
• Spending is shifting from technology to staff.
• Google looks to be running over small paid-for competitors like a lorry (that’s a big truck).
• WA providers see growth opportunities in more customizable solutions and the addition of service offerings.

On that last point, I love this chart Ben includes to give a picture of where each product fits in the marketplace. Would love to see the same for US players.

Concerning direction of the industry, the themes seem to be the same as the US market:

• Incorporating multiple channels.
• More rigorous testing and optimization to drive marketing objectives.
• Increased use of predictive analytics to drive intelligence and decisions.
• Move from web analytics to customer analytics

Good Stuff.


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Customer engagement just got a kick in the pants. Adobe announced yesterday that it will buy Omniture for $1.8 billion. While a surprising development to some, Adobe was clear about its motivation… customer engagement optimization.

For designers, developers and online marketers, an integrated workflow—with optimization capabilities embedded in the creation tools—will streamline the creation and delivery of relevant content and applications. This optimization will enable advertisers and advertising agencies, publishers, and e-tailers to realize greater ROI from their digital media investments and improve their end users’ experiences.

They even included a pretty picture.

Judging from the size of the optimization box (and the cash), it would appear Adobe sees great opportunity and value in maximizing engagement impact. I wholeheartedly agree.

In the long term, the integration of the two companies’ technologies could provide marketers with a powerful platform. But, will that integration focus Omniture too heavily on the Adobe suite? Will analytic tools be equally capable in competing technologies such as HTML5?

As always, there will be pros and cons to a closed-loop solution. Should be interesting to watch things develop.

What do you think? Good move on Adobe’s part? How could it impact Omniture’s competitors (Coremetrics, WebTrends, Unica, Google, Yahoo, et al.)?


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“He managed to get more than 140 characters in?” some may wonder breathlessly. “How’d he do that? Can I do that too?”

No, he didn’t, although people are already producing workarounds to do just that. (I’m not going to point you to them, though.) What he did was turn off his brain. Meaning he couldn’t formulate his thought eloquently, elegantly or even briefly, so he didn’t even try. Halfway through the second sentence, the tweet ended mid-word with an ellipse (…) and a link.

I clicked the link and found what I expected – he’d simply scraped content from his blog and slapped it into Twitter, backing out enough characters for a tiny URL and three little dots. He went to the effort of copying context, pasting into the tweet, creating the URL, pasting it into the tweet, and deleting the characters to make it all fit – when it would have been faster, more effective and less insulting to his readers if he’d just thought of 140 thought-provoking words to make them actually want to click that link.

That’s right – I think it’s insulting. I guess some “pointless babble” is just too big and important for 140 characters?

Everyone knows how the 140-character limit for Twitter came about, right? It’s related to the 160-character limit established for text messaging. To avoid having to split text messages into multiple parts, the creators of Twitter capped the length of a tweet at 140 characters, keeping the extra 20 for the user’s unique address.

(That 160-character limit for text messaging, by the way, was established by a German guy named Friedhelm Hillebrand, who through a process of typing out random sentences and questions found that nearly every one came in under 160 characters. “This is perfectly sufficient,” he recalled thinking during that epiphany back in 1985. Gotta love engineers.)

Of course, any artist, inventor or visionary will tell you that restrictions, while initially stifling, often produce some of the most creative solutions. The tweet is being hailed by some as the modern haiku; one enterprising guy has already published a book on writing short-form (I suspect the book is longer than you think).

In this case of the guy I dumped, I think he just got intellectually lazy. For an example of clueless, check out Ad Age – an organization reporting daily on how to use Twitter.  Here’s a tweet from today:

Despite Creative Firepower, Olympics Ad Push Doesn’t Sway Chicagoans: CHICAGO (AdAge.com) — For all the creativ.. http://bit.ly/wF4e0

Note how it peters out right there at the “creativ…” That’s because no one could be bothered to modify the “slug” – the front end of an article that journalists used to send out via something called a “wire service” (Google it, youngsters). They’re thinking like a print outlet. Some copy editor had to write a headline to fit within a designated character limit. The same discipline is required to express information as a tweet. Heck, if it’s a good headline, you may just have your tweet right there. But they didn’t even think of that.

If I wanted an RSS feed from Ad Age, I’d subscribe to one. That’s not what I want on Twitter. Deliver the message, but respect the reader. I think 140 characters is “perfectly sufficient.”

How do you measure the impact of customer engagement with your content and communications? How can you use a customer’s pattern of engagement to strengthen the relationship and drive sales?

The tight integration of content, data, cutting-edge analytics and technology can deliver optimal customer interactions and drive your marketing objectives. Learn about an innovative approach that is providing marketers with an actionable gauge of relationship strength and the ability to drive and optimize ROI.

Engagement Impact: Driving Relationship and Sales at the Customer Level

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Featuring Trae Clevenger, Vice President, Strategy & Innovation

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Recent events have supported and highlighted several points made in that paper, particularly in the areas of social colonization and social commerce.

Last week, Zappos launched the beta of its new social shopping site, My Zappos. There you can put items in your “closet”, solicit input from your friends on Twitter and Facebook, view their opinions on your selections and buy. As Zappos puts it, “…shop with friends so you’re only buying the coolest gear!”

Then today, 1-800-FLOWERS launched a fully functional ecommerce store inside Facebook. According to the company, and as far as I can tell, it’s the first online retailer to do so. Future developments could be quite interesting. Integration with a birthday calendar? Group purchases? Feedback, suggestions, reminders from friends?

Think of the possibilities. You can publicly offend your significant other by stating that pair of shoes would make her clown-like feet look even bigger… and then the same friends who gasped when they read it on Facebook can tell you what to buy and how much you have to spend at the flower store.

For now, these pioneers are simply selling in a more overtly social context… customers’ existing social spheres (as opposed to reviews/recommendations from strangers). It’s not the full community-gaining-power-over-the-brand thing Forrester predicts will eventually come, but definitely movement along the continuum. The power shift to consumers is well under way.

Does this font make me look fat?


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In an open letter to all Zappos employees, CEO Tony Hsieh calls it a “big day in Zappos history.” According to Hsieh, Amazon initiated the talks several months ago.  Read his full letter here.

Hsieh says the management team will remain in place and allowed to run the company “the way we have always run Zappos.”

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos posted this video on the acquisition.

Zappos has certainly been a rising ecommerce star of late and a poster child for the power of combining a strong culture with social media.

What do you think? Good move for Amazon? Good move for Zappos? What about the role of social media in Zappos’ rise?


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Adding 100 million users in seven months is amazing, and shows the impact social media is having on everyday life, and the potential power of the medium. Most Website owners would kill for a tiny, single-digit percentage of this growth.

Facebook posted the following video which allows you to watch how Facebook has grown to 250 million users around the world. A fun way to see the expanded coverage.

How long until Facebook reaches 500 Million users? Only time will tell.

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Not exactly a shocker as downward revision itself has become a bit of a trend. Around this time last year, ZenithOptimedia was still predicting 2.6% growth in 2009. Since then, along with every other prognosticator, they have lowered the number every few months as the market comes to grips with the extent of the meltdown.

No changes to the gist of the forecast:

Offline – Bad

Online – Good(er)

North America – Bad

Asia – Good

Global internet advertising is still predicted to grow 10.1% in 2009 and ZenithOptimedia says “Its familiar virtues of transparency, accountability and flexibility have proved even more attractive in a recession than ever.”

With the internet’s share of ad spending coming at the expense of traditional mediums, it does continue to beg the question; Will the recession force a lasting sea change? Seems inevitable. At the very least, you would expect marketers to demand more accountability if they’ve gotten a bigger taste of it online.


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Social Media: Unlocking the Awesome Potential of Behavioral Disorders

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