An article by MediaPost Publications cites an eMarketer research study predicting the global mobile marketing industry to reach $19B by the year 2012.

Domestically, the 2007 mobile marketing spend reached $878M and the U.S. is expected to lead the growth trend through 2011. After that point, the size and development of India and China are going to play a major part in the global market.

Widespread adoption of mobile marketing technology is yet to occur, with uncertainty regarding restrictions and regulations on mobile marketing as a possible obstacle. Even so, the statistics for customer interaction are promising at 12% in the United States, according to the article. For more information on mobile marketing regulation visit the Mobile Marketing Association (MMA) website; they have a Code of Conduct for Mobile Marketing drafted as a set of guidelines for mobile marketers.

Because mobile phones have become such an integral part of everyday life for so many people in this country, text-based mobile marketing is one of the most reliable ways to reach customers and serves as a great medium for customer retention campaigns or alerts and notifications. Mobile customer acquisition and marketing list growth opportunities arise when two-way communication is enabled via shortcodes or mobile text.

Even with such a high rate of expected growth, mobile marketing may not be for everyone. The majority (more than 70%) of the mobile internet marketing audience is below 35 years of age, so companies with a relatively younger customer base stand to benefit more from the growth of the mobile marketing industry, even if text-based messaging still makes up for most of the mobile marketing revenue. However, as time goes on with advances in technology and the adoption of mobile communication, especially in India and China, these demographics could change dramatically over the next few years.

In the newest release of our product, JuiceMetrIQs, we've implemented additional functions for better customer segmentation and segment analysis! We're continuing to work with our clients and strategic partners to develop the tools they need to increase customer retention, analyze their customer data, and subsequently create better targeted behavioral marketing.

JuiceMetrIQs users can now compare sales, acquisition, and customer demographic data from different segments side by side, making it easier to identify segment activity in relation to total sales.


Additionally we've re-introduced the data chart builder where users can create charts based on the type of data, segment, and date range displayed.


We've also included functions within our email marketing message reporting that allows users to create segments from link click activity, unifying customer purchase history with marketing interactions. This on-demand segmentation can then be used with our segment comparison tool to easily see how sales, acquistion, and demographics differs between customers who click on different links.

In terms of email conversion tracking, on top of tracking the sales revenue received from individuals sent an email, we now plot anticipated sales numbers (based on sales from the previous 6 weeks) so our clients can see how their email generated sales are performing in the context of expected sales levels.



It probably needs a little updating now, but for more information, check out our demo. 

By John Faris from the Red Door Interactive Biz Blog

On May 6th, Red Door hosted a panel discussion on Customer Lifetime Value that included a number of industry experts.

Red Door Interactive President, Reid Carr started the session with a quick introduction of the panel and the topic at hand. He pointed out that acquisition and conversion strategies often dominate the focus of Web marketers at the expense of retention and extension strategies. This leads to a lost opportunity for engaging with your customers and creating long-term value instead of one-off conversions.

At that point, the panel discussion kicked-off with speakers, Rick Enrico of Juice Media, Susan Tull of BlueHornet, and Katelyn Himes of La Quinta Hotels. Instead of providing a transcript of the entire session question-by-question, I’ll just summarize the main points made by each individual during the Q&A.

Rick Enrico proclaimed that the future of marketing lies in automated one-to-one communication with customers through multiple touch points. By leveraging data from marketing channels such as mobile, social, search, and email; companies can segment their users by behavior/interaction/analytics and then generate content that is hyper-relevant to each segment. Companies should use segmentation and relevancy to replace “batch and blast” in their marketing communications. Moreover, companies should move towards a pull marketing strategy in which they give customers a choice about how they interact with the brand. One customer may want to be contacted by mobile text message when a specific product is available, while another may want to be contacted by email when the company is offering special promotions. By giving customers the option to choose the content and the medium, companies will generate better customer lifetime value.

Susan Tull focused on email communications and started by pointing out that marketers have been talking about automated one-to-one marketing communications for ten years, but that now the tools are available to implement it effectively. Marketers need to get started with segmentation and one-to-one marketing now or they will be left behind. Companies should take a “crawl, walk, run” approach so they aren’t intimidated about acting now. You can worry more about advanced strategies when they get further into the process. One easy strategy to get started with is email link segmentation. Look at what links people are clicking on in your emails and segment those people into groups based on their behavior. Then follow-up with those various groups with relevant messaging based on the links they originally clicked on.

Susan stressed that the first thirty days after someone opts in to email is typically the best/most profitable time to engage with them. The rest of the panelists nodded in agreement. Companies should send a series of messages during that period to encourage the customer to engage with the brand and/or make purchases. With regards to analyzing results, many marketers are mistakenly judging the value of a campaign by looking at one-off transactions when they should really be looking at customer lifetime value.

Katelyn Himes gave the in-house marketer’s perspective on customer retention and value. Companies should leverage behavioral data to further engage with their target market. For example, La Quinta saw their email response rates nearly double when they segmented respondents and non-respondents and sent a special follow-up message to each group. Marketer can also see great value when they create event-triggered email campaigns. Event-triggered emails tend to be more relevant to the user and may increase their patience and receptiveness in receiving other promotional offers via email. By analyzing and segmenting users based on recency, frequency, and monetary value (RFM), companies can be more strategic with who they market to and how they market to them. Lastly, Katelyn stated that companies should treat their customers like a spouse. Give them a chance to provide feedback, listen to their feedback, and take the necessary actions to create a happy long-term relationship.

In the end, the whole panel agreed that customer perception is reality, and that testing is crucial to any marketing efforts that a company undertakes.

--Partnership offers integrated marketing intelligence solution to existing clientele--

SAN DIEGO – May 5, 2008 – Juice Media Worldwide, an on-demand marketing intelligence application provider, announced today its strategic partnership with Off Madison Ave, an award-winning, fully integrated marketing agency.

With the partnership, Off Madison Ave will be able to use Juice Media's integrated marketing platform, JuiceMetrIQs™ to offer more comprehensive, targeted marketing services to their existing clientele. Off Madison Ave plans to use JuiceMetrIQs to automate, execute, and measure marketing campaigns while giving their clients more insight into the results of their marketing efforts.

"JuiceMetrIQs solves the longstanding issue of enabling our clients to easily segment databases quickly and reliably," said Jason Baer, Director of Strategy at Off Madison Ave. "Personalized, targeted lifecycle marketing is more effective than traditionally used batch and blast methods. JuiceMetrIQs allows us to target individuals based on specific criteria, making one-to-one marketing truly achievable."

JuiceMetrIQs aggregates sales, customer, and campaign tracking data into a single web-based application, allowing its users to deliver and track highly-targeted marketing campaigns. JuiceMetrIQs' ability to determine revenue at the customer-interaction level enables marketers to develop personalized campaigns that lift conversion rates and increase customer retention.

Now more than ever businesses must leverage personalized communications to achieve success," said Rick Enrico, President and CEO of Juice Media. "Together, Off Madison Ave and Juice Media are focused on solving the distributed data dilemma by offering an easy-to-implement automated marketing platform for businesses that need improved cross-channel marketing reporting, efficiency and results."

About Off Madison Ave:

Off Madison Ave, a collaborative marketing communications firm located in Phoenix, redefines what it means to be an agency by delivering results-focused strategies and new methods of measurement. The agency focuses on a fully integrated approach to business consulting, public relations, advertising and interactive marketing. By embracing its signature "outthink. outperform." mentality, the firm serves clients as a partner, advocate and advisor with an in-depth knowledge of their business, industry and competitors. Each discipline invests the time and resources to assess client needs, develop strategic planning, elevate brand awareness and raise revenues.

The agency continues to earn a No. 1 ranking for public relations and Internet marketing in the state, and was voted one of the top two advertising firms by Arizona Business Magazine. Off Madison Ave has served as the designated Southwest regional partner of Worldcom Public Relations Group, www.worldcomgroup.com, the world's largest consortium of independent public relations firms, for the last five years. A sampling of the firm's clients includes: Nike, DMB Associates, Inc., APS/Pinnacle West Corporation, Allied Waste, National Academy of Sports Medicine (NASM), Phoenix Art Museum, Avnet, Cruise America, Arizona Federal Credit Union, DrWeil.com, Kimpton Hotels and many more. Visit www.offmadisonave.com for more information.

About Juice Media:

Based in San Diego California, Juice Media Worldwide develops JuiceMetrIQs, a SaaS on-demand Marketing Intelligence platform. The JuiceMetrIQs application automatically unifies distributed consumer data from multiple IT systems in real-time to enable marketers to deliver highly personalized one-to-one communications based on purchasing patterns and previous marketing interactions. JuiceMetrIQs empowers marketers to deliver marketing messages to customers through the right channel, with the right content, at the right time. For more information please visit http://www.juicemetriqs.com.

(continued from Internet Retailer: Do You Know Me? Part 2 of 8)

The following is an excerpt from the Internet Retailer article, "Do You Know Me?", by Don Davis.

More Design Work

In term of making use of the integrated customer data, Petco initially will use it to produce customized monthly e-mails. Each e-mail can be personalized with up to 12 items the customer has purchased or shown interest in.

In the second phase, Petco will customize the web pages visitors see based on their profiles. Customers who have made online purchases in the past or signed in to ther PALS account can be identified by cookies placed on their computers.

"The biggest challenge is the amount of creative you need for targeted home pages," says Lazarchic. "If I know you're a cat customer, the center theme of the home page and the offer shouldn't be dog-focused, it should be cat-focused."

Lazarchic expects to be sending personalized e-mails using the new data store by May.

The first phase of Lazarchic's plan should be standard practice, or at least in the plans for any progressive email marketing campaign and any decent email service or marketing software provider should be equipped with the tools required to deliver personalized, dynamic content. The foundation of behavior based marketing is the ability to tie customer records with sales data. That single connection gives marketers the ability to develop and execute a variety of email campaigns including: customer reengagement/win-back, customer retention, and customer acquisition.

The second phase to the Petco plan may not be for everyone, but is an innovative marketing move for those who do have an e-commerce component. If graphic elements other than featured products are made dynamic, too, then that extends the idea of relevant marketing to "relevant branding". If the look and feel of the website reflect the identity of the customer and/or the relationship between the individual customer and the product, then increases in customer acquisition and retention can be expected.

"More design work" is definitely needed to initiate these campaigns but the bulk of the work would only need to be done once, and the pages/emails generated by dynamic combination of the various elements would result in the equivalent of potentially hundreds (if not more) of static marketing messages. It may seem like a big undertaking at first, but in the long run, automated marketing solutions will undoubtable save time and resources while strengthening customer relations.

A recent report performed by the CMO council reveals some staggering results:  50% of over 450 marketers worldwide said they had only a fair, little or no knowledge of their customers.

The report focused on where and how “marketers are ‘operationalizing’ customer intelligence and insight to reduce customer churn, increase lifetime value, improve the customer experience, and increase the effectiveness and targeting of marketing spend."

While Web 2.0 is developing at a breakneck pace, marketing technology seems to be left behind (or at least its effective implementation). What’s great about Web 2.0’s is that it spreads user-generated content; its value comes from those who ultimately use it. Marketing departments need to tap into the proven success of this model: content succeeds when it’s based on the customers themselves, but right now the majority of companies seem to be missing out.

According to the report, a major obstacle for the companies surveyed is the unification of disparate customer repositories, resulting in the inability to garner adequate customer intelligence and insight.

The CMO Council believes that “investing in integrated systems that harvest customer insight is critical to driving both marketing and business performance.” Simply put, comprehensive marketing solutions should be designed to leverage customer data for the creation and delivery of relevant marketing that reduces customer churn and increases loyalty.

Here are the CMO Council’s key findings:

• Only 15 percent of marketers say their companies are doing an extremely good or effective job of integrating disparate customer data sources and repositories; 55 percent note there is room for improvement or a deficiency in this area.
• More than 31 percent of companies surveyed had customer churn rates of more than 10 percent and 32 percent reported turnover of five to 10 percent. In comparison, more than 62 percent said they desired or expected a churn level of less than five percent
• Respondents believe customer churn significantly impacts business performance through revenue loss (59.9 percent), reduced profitability (39.6 percent) and greater marketing and re-acquisition costs (36.3 percent)
• While churn is a big issue, nearly 67 percent of those surveyed say they have no system for re-activating dormant or lost customers, while just over half of respondents have a strategy for further penetrating or monetizing key account relationships.
• While more than 35 percent of respondents report that the CMO or marketing department (38.9 percent) has primary responsibility for the customer analytics function, they are not leveraging its value. Over 31 percent of those surveyed do no data mining at all and 63 percent are only doing moderate levels of data mining for intelligence and insight.
• The top six strategic applications of customer information by marketers include:
  • Up-selling and cross-selling
  • Segmenting and targeting
  • Driving retention, loyalty and promotional programs
  • Identifying new opportunities and unmet needs
  • Improving customer service
  • Shaping personalized and customized communications
• Key initiatives to increase customer retention include improving customer communications (65.2 percent); addressing complaints, problems and pain points (51.8 percent); and enhancing the customer experience (54.8 percent). Unfortunately, fewer marketers noted their companies’ willingness to modify business practices and policies to accommodate customer needs.

Read the original article: "Marketers are Flying Blind When It Comes to Leveraging Customer Data and Analytics, Reports the CMO Council."

Petco's goals for delivering relevant marketing is a major undertaking. The level of personalization they are trying to reach with their campaigns is what most other businesses should strive for. However, creating one part of the integrated marketing system, as the article states, required six months of dedicated development! That's a major investment that many companies just don't have the resources to make.

Consequently a company, Juice Media is addressing the ever growing demand for these types of integrated multi-channel marketing technology solutions. Part of the JuiceMetrIQs solution is its ability to connect and report across multiple points of sale and access all those records and information from a single application. It's all about having the ability to really know your customers and develop behavior based marketing.

Read the article except below to learn about the motivation behind Petco's big move, what it took to make it, and how they plan to use their new marketing technology for improved customer acquisition and retention.

The following is an excerpt from an the Internet Retailer article, "Do You Know Me?" , by Don Davis.

Data Silos

Many retailers would like to follow Petco’s lead, but find their efforts stymied because customer data is held separately by store, e-commerce and catalog/call center systems. Nonetheless, a growing number of multi-channel retailers are creating cross-channel data repositories, and using them to provide more relevant offers and improved customer service.

Driving these efforts are the growing numbers of multi-channel consumers who want to receive offers that matter to them. 64% of consumers said they went online to do research before making a purchase within the past three months, including 77% of those with incomes of $75,000 or more, according to a study by e-commerce vendor Sterling Commerce.

And the best thing a merchant can do to ensure repeat patronage is “provide special offers based on my prior purchases,” said 59% of respondents last year, in a survey by interactive marketing firm DoubleClick Performics and research and consulting firm The E-Tailing Group.

But technical and internal political issues prevent many retailers from sharing data across channels. While a survey last fall found 75% of retailers collect customer-specific data in stores and 45% online, the most common way that data is stored is separately by channel, an answer given by half of merchants responding, according to Retail Systems Research.

“They’re collecting a tremendous amount of information about customers, but haven’t figured out how to share that across channels yet,” says Brian Kilcourse, managing partner at the research firm.

Why? Lack of both time and senior-level support, suggests a study released in January by the Direct Marketing Association, a trade group. In that survey, the top two challenges to cross-channel integration were “time required to evaluate promising practices” and “difficulty in measuring return on investment,” each chosen by 84% of respondents. Close behind, at 83%, was “organizational culture does not support integration.”

Some have overcome the obstacles, such as Petco, which expected to complete this spring merging store and web data into a single customer data mart. Lazarchic says there are three main tasks: collect the customer data, gather it all in one database and then figure out how to use it.

For many multi-channel retailers, he says, identifying store shoppers is difficult because many transactions are anonymous. Petco has the advantage of a long-standing loyalty program called PALS that has signed up millions of customers with offers of discounts and rewards. When a PALS member makes a purchase, that information goes into the file for that customer.

For Petco, the toughest piece was creating the customer data mart, which took an internal team six months to complete, Lazarchic says. Each customer’s profile will include, besides online and offline transactions, information drawn from analytics provider Coremetrics Inc. about what the customer searched for and viewed at Petco.com. “Before we only knew what you purchased,” Lazarchic says. “With the Coremetrics data we’ll know your interest and intent.”

The customer profile has 150 or more data points. Petco not only tracks what type of pet a customer owns, but whether he buys premium or organic food, and which purchases he makes in store versus online.

It’s all aimed at making offers relevant. “If a customer buys 40-pound bags of dog food in the store because he doesn’t want to pay shipping charges, I want to keep marketing messages for store stuff store-specific,” Lazarchic says. “But if he’s buying three and a half pound bags of cat food online, I’ll send him online cat offers. I want to keep it specific by channel and pet type.”

According to the following article, Petco is planning to take an ambitious step toward personalized behavior based marketing. Petco's Director of e-Commerce has announced that they are going to engage in more comprehensive multi-channel marketing campaigns to improve their customer acquisition and retention rates.
 
The following is the first of several excerpts from an the Internet Retailer article, "Do You Know Me?", by Don Davis.

--With relevance as the goal, more multi-channel retailers seek a clearer picture of cross-channel customers--

As a shopper at Petco.com clicks on pages showing cat food, the pet supplies retailer can make an educated guess about which cross-sell offers to feature. But there would be less guesswork if Petco knew that the same customer had visited a Petco store in Syracuse, N.Y., last week and purchased a self-cleaning CatGenie Cat Box for $300.

For that customer, an accessory like the CatGenie Washable Granules might be just the thing. And, knowing that the same customer has bought dog food at that Syracuse store for years, the site could also feature the spring closeout offer on fleece dog vests.

That’s the level of personalization Petco Animal Supplies Inc. hopes to offer on its site this year. It’s the product of an initiative that combines in a single customer database not only what a customer has purchased in stores and online, but also information about what products she viewed on the web site and which e-mails she responded to.

Petco already has used the data store to test personalized e-mail campaigns, and the results make the retailer confident that the project will pay off, says John Lazarchic, director of e-commerce. “E-mail campaigns that are personalized have the highest response and conversion rates, with some campaigns up to 100% more effective than generic e-mails,” Lazarchic says. “Even if web site personalization is half as successful, it will be well worth the work and expense.”