Uncertain times? Definitely, but its not all depressing.

Bradley Johnson and Kevin Brown, in their introduction to Ad Age’s annual 2009, looks at how marketers still launch new products, campaigns, and tweak marketing messages even in major recessions.

Here are some strategies marketers could adopt in this down time.

1) Targeted rather than mass marketing.

Most have already made the leap towards sending marketing messages that are relevant and customized to each individual, but those that haven’t/ refuse to will likely lose out in 2009.

Targeted messaging creating campaigns that are relevant to each segment and each individual in your datalist. Customizing everything from messaging to the offer and design.

2) Build marketing applications.

Applications add variety to your marketing message and can help brands build better relationships with their customers. They can be as simple as Facebook applications, interactive games or content aggregators that work through viral marketing.

Read: Applications- The next wave of marketing.

2009 will be a year where marketing has to find more innovative and cost-efficient ways to connect with the customer. Competing on price may not be sufficient in the fledgling economy.

3) Quality in direct mail not quantity

Suzanne Obermire, reports news of a postal slump for the USPS in volume and revenue. Sending direct-mail isn’t cheap and with decreasing marketing budgets, they have to be used more effectively with other mediums through interactive campaigns.

4) Measuring effectiveness of marketing

One of Seth Godin’s first 2009 blog posts has to do with ensuring ads work. No longer can marketers run ads they don’t measure or track. The same level of analytics that we associate with adwords campaigns, will be necessary to measure response from email, web, print and direct mail campaigns.

Tweet this Post:

As a consumer, we all have multiple relationships with our “evoke” set of brands in various product categories. An “evoke” set of brands are the initial brands that come to mind when making a purchase decision. Whether the relationship is mutual, intimate or obsessive, we all make purchase decisions based on these relationships. What [...]

Tweet this Post:

Its that time of the year again! A few weeks to the holiday and while you finish up on marketing tasks for 2008, it is also time to prepare for 2009.

Now, more so than ever, your marketing plan and marketing calendar for 2009 should be high on your december to-do list! And while you set goals for the number of new customers, how you are going to distribute your advertising budget, etc., don’t forget to plan for regular marketing campaigns to your prospects list..

We’ve found in our own marketing, that campaigns to a particular segment persistently gets double the response and conversion as our other segments.

The difference - we sent more regular messaging to that particular segment…

… and because we kept our campaign messages relevant and customized them to each individual, we were able to build better brand recognition which gave us double the average response rate for this segment!

I’m sure you will too!

Relevant posts:
Read: Our post on how often you should send emails

Connect with me on Twitter http://twitter.com/RyanLou

Tweet this Post:

Anne Holland of MarketingSherpa wrote about converting email with images turned off. She quoted a statistic that 59% of consumers and 90% of business email users view some or all of their email with images turned off.

In the article she highlighted an example of an email she received from a HomeAway email newsletter (A vacation lodgings firm).

See what the newsletter looked like with images turned off. http://www.marketingsherpa.com/cs/homeaway/1b.html

The good: Each image included “alt tags” and clickable links that allows for clicks to specific sections of the travel website. The tags and clickable links provides users with options even when they have no idea how to view the images. Contrast this to the Borders Rewards email (view in the post) that is filled with some of the best email designs but are blank when images are turned off.

For designers, another solution with blocked images is to setup the email using tables instead of Div layouts. This allows you to display emails with blocked images while still maintaining designability.

Read the post for screenshots of how it works

Tweet this Post:

You know passive income, what about passive marketing?

While the term has been used by some to refer to the lack of proactive-ness - not getting out to network with people, making presentations, cold calls… I would like to think passive marketing works for you in getting leads while you spend more time going out to meet people and following up with leads throughout your sales cycle.

You could do that with static microsites that ends with a form or you could get much better response and lead conversion with automatically created personal urls. L2 has been building one such site to allow marketers and digital service providers to testdrive L2’s Fuse product. Like a microsite, it involves a static data collection page ( www.1to1campaigns.com ) which collects basic information like first and last name to create a purl along with some contact information.

Once this information is filled out, prospects are taken to their very own personal url (1to1campaigns.com/firstname.lastname) which tracks interest based on what the prospect saw. For insurance companies this would be knowing whether the prospect is interested in auto insurance, health insurance or disaster insurance even before you make the call!

It also sends an automated email to remind prospects of the URL so they can return to the site easily keeping them involved and participating on the personal url.

With an entirely automated campaign like this one, you will have the time to focus on the other elements of your marketing (following up with leads, direct mailers, conferences, telemarketing…) but still ensure you get good response off PPC ads, print ads, your corporate website, etc.

Marketing that works for you 24/7, what a concept!

Tweet this Post:

I heard a bad answer given by a presenter at a direct marketing event once. His answer was “nothing” and he was right from a technical viewpoint, but clearly wrong in terms of the marketing process. He was answering the question in relation to the design of web landing pages, but this is applicable to Email, Direct Mail and most marketing mediums.

Clearly the campaign creation process is substantially different and involves taking a different approach to campaign goals, creation of content and the campaign offer.

1) Campaign goals are different

Typically, B2B campaigns are not motivated by an immedate sale. They usually involve human interaction as an end goal;

* schedule a Webex
* get a meeting with a decision-maker or influencer
* give a free consult

For most B2C campaigns, success depends on how much sales increase. For most, the sale is usually immediate and is done directly from the Personal URL. Purchases mostly happen without a conversation with your sales staff. E.g. buying a pair of Nike sneakers, a book from Borders, etc.

Tweet this Post:

Share with us your stories of how you have reached your customers through the new media via comments and trackbacks from your blog.

Tweet this Post:

In Software as a Service, we believe that the key to success still lie in service quality. Sure, the SaaS makes it cheaper than creating it in-house and more convenient than an enterprise solution, but the main benefit is the quality of service that it affords.
In a business environment that is increasingly competitive, it is still difficult to find a company that provides quality service and support for their customers. Yet this simple act goes a long way to keeping current customers happy, keeping businesses afloat and sales coming in.

Tweet this Post: