Six Marketing Trends to Watch in 2011 

A direct mail rebound is afoot, and consultant Jonathan Margulies has already begun seeing it.

"Somewhere around the midpoint of 2010, people began investing again in the mail chain in a way that they hadn't really been doing since the recession began," says Margulies, a director at the strategic consulting firm Winterberry Group in New York. Indeed, London-based ZenithOptimedia expects total direct mail spending in the United States to rise 2.9 percent in 2011 - that's up from its prediction of 1.7 percent growth in 2010.

The media agency estimates marketing services as a whole will jump 2.6 percent this year. Mail likely won't be the only channel to benefit from a healing economy. Here are six trends to watch:

ROI takes priority: Clients will be focused on return on investment more than ever before, says Susan Reiter, director of client service at marketing agency BKV in Overland Park, Kan. No medium will be exempt. "Even social media - we're seeing it's not just creating the dialogue but how you monetize that," she says.

Acquisition efforts restart: In 2011, "we return to the business of growth," Margulies says, and direct mail will remain ideal for winning new customers. "[Acquisition] is one area where the number of credible digital substitutions for mail just isn't very deep right now," he says.

Targeting pervades: When deploying precious dollars, marketers will be carefully selecting the audience. "We see credit card direct mail coming back, and I think the targeting and the scoring and the scrutiny of whom to send that to is a lot tighter than it used to be," says Barry Kessel, chief executive officer of RTC Relationship Marketing in Washington, D.C. Expect to see more targeting online, too, as marketers employ new tools and data resources.

Tablets take off: Research firm Gartner is predicting "media tablets are poised for strong growth with worldwide end user sales projected to total 54.8 million units in 2011, up 181 percent from 2010. "Marketers will be experimenting with new ways to reach tablet users through vehicles like e-mail, search, social media, online display advertising, video, branded apps and even catalogs. I personally think that, over time, tablets will revolutionize what we see as the catalog industry," Kessel says. "You'll have a tablet that will dynamically give you content based on data that they have about your previous purchases."

Digital integration strengthens: The convergence of direct and digital will accelerate as media fragmentation weakens single-channel campaigns. Expect more widespread use of what Reiter calls the "new shiny fun toy" - quick response (QR) codes. These quirky two-dimensional barcodes redirect a mobile browser to a website, video or message at the click of a smartphone's camera.

Personalization progresses: The industry will continue to test techniques that make campaigns feel more personal, like variable data printing (VDP) and personalized URLs (PURLs). "We've captured a lot of data now at this point," Reiter says, "and I think marketers are really trying to integrate that data into the target audience's experience."

Source: Deliver Magazine, Mindy Charski   www.delivermagazine.com 

Four steps to a behavior triggered e-mail program

A number of organizations have found that behavioral triggered e-mails help build customer loyalty, boost ROI and streamline marketing tasks. These automatically triggered e-mails can thwart shopping cart abandonment and improve customer relations, but it's important to avoid overusing the tactic, which might annoy existing customers.

Get started - If you don't already have a behavior triggered e-mail program in place, start small. "Start with something simple like a Happy Birthday e-mail, which doesn't require syncing with external resources or help from IT," says Loren McDonald, VP of industry relations at Silverpop. The next step would be to get more sophisticated and sync Web-browsing data and add an abandoned shopping cart trigger.

Consider costs - While triggered e-mails don't necessarily cost any more to send than other e-mails, they do require initial upfront costs. Marketers should be prepared to integrate Web browsing data or purchase data from their e-commerce platform into their e-mail system. Also, it might be necessary to upgrade your e-mail program to include a transactional e-mail tool. The good news is that the volume of this type of e-mails is, in general, lower than general e-mail due to the specialized nature.

Best practices - Marketers should make sure that the triggered e-mails are relevant to consumers and focus on the customer conversations that matter to the customer. "There are some actions that merit a follow up, and others that don't. So a marketer may have scads of data, and be able to follow up on all of it with a trigger, but that doesn't mean they should," says Shar VanBoskirk, VP/principal analyst at Forrester Research. "Better to think about what is the natural question a customer is asking with their behavior, and how might a trigger answer that question or build off of the question."

Challenges - Triggered e-mails are worth the investment, but can involve more steps than a simple e-mail newsletter program. Marketers must understand that they will be syncing data from multiple sources and may have to get on board with an internal IT department. "The challenge is the workload of setting it up and the technology that is involved," says Carolyn Nye, marketing manager at S&S Worldwide. "But once it is up and running, customers appreciate the service."

Source: DMNews November 2010