Does anyone remember back in 2005 and 2006 when mobile marketing was supposed to redefine every aspect of the marketing world? SMS would be delivering all our marketing messages. WAP (mobile-specific pages) would bring interactivity to the wireless phone. We'd be redeeming coupons from in-store banners and swiping our cell phone screens at the cash register. Our phones were supposed to bleep at us when we walked by a store that wanted to hawk us some great sale or new product.

Well, a funny thing happened.

The mobile revolution went ahead and happened, but it apparently didn't pay any attention to all of us marketers predicting its future. Let's look at the revolution as it is playing out now.

SMS did take off. It's used so often now that I wonder how we lived without it. It's become the instant messaging solution for the mobile world, but it's barely budged the needle for marketing messages.

WAP is everywhere, but most people don't seem to care. Dramatically faster networks coupled with increasingly powerful mini-browsers have brought the full Web right onto our little phones. If you haven't tried surfing the Web on an iPhone or an iPod Touch, then you need to rush out and give it a try. WAP didn't change the world; long live the mobile Web browser.

And, while the carriers are trying to figure out how to appropriately make your location data available to marketers, along comes Google. Try downloading the latest Google Maps for your phone. (It works on tons of phones, but best on the iPhone.) Do a map-based search for, say, a sushi restaurant and it'll pop up a list of matching restaurants right near you--all without you even typing in your ZIP code or location. Did I mention Google Maps is free? This is permission-based (implicitly) and non-intrusive, and it completely bypasses the telcos. Who would have predicted that?

So, what has been the biggest impact of the mobile marketing revolution? It's not advertising. It's not even closed-loop, permission marketing. It's branding. Yes, the original stalwart of marketing has taken the early lead on transforming the marketing world onto our phones. Ring tones, wall papers, screen savers, branded games and other applications appear to be dominating the eyeballs and dollars on the mobile marketing front.

This is why I love technology revolutions. They do change everything, but no one (and I mean no one) can ever predict how. I guess that’s why they call them revolutions <grin>. The most exciting news of all is that the mobile revolution is barely underway and, while I have no idea how it will play out, I can absolutely guarantee the most exciting parts are yet to come.

Posted by Bill Nussey at 08:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Another guest posting that contemplates the future of email, from my colleague, Scott Voigt...

From Scott:
It dawned on me the other day, that I spend more time with my inbox than I do with... well... anything! Seriously, this is sad, but totally true. Staring at Outlook (or at least having it stare at me) for more hours than I spend with my wife and daughter, what's up with that? Even worse, given the inordinate amount of time that I allocate to the inbox, I still don't feel in control of it. Calgon, take me away!

Unfortunately, I suspect that too many of us suffer from the same symptoms of email overload. The good news is that help may be on the way. As I mentioned last week, there are a number of start-ups that are creatively using technology in an attempt to make life in the inbox more efficient. Of the many inbox tools that I've tried, Xobni (inbox spelled backwards) might be the most interesting thus far.

Xobni (which is pronounced Zahbnee despite the fact that its logo has a macron over the "o"), is an Outlook plug-in that non-intrusively embeds itself at the right side of Outlook and provides a number of nifty inbox productivity tools. (To name a few: email search, quick access to previously received attachments, and a nice view of previous threads that have transpired with specific contacts.) For me, however, one of the most interesting aspects of Xobni is its ability to provide insightful, metric-based views into my personal email habits. Xobni's user-friendly analytics tool let's me slice the data any way I see fit:

• Who do I email the most?
• Who emails me the most on Saturday? (A: Bill Nussey. (Take a weekend every now and then, Bill.))
• When do I spend the most time catching up on email?
• Do I send more than I receive? (A: Yes. I guess I'm part of the problem.)

With this data at my disposal, I've been able to identify ways to take regain a little control over the inbox. For example, I was able to see that one of the folks on my team sent me a steadily increasing stream of emails leading up to our weekly meeting on Friday. By adding a 15-minute check-in meeting on Tuesday, I was able to eliminate a large number of time-consuming back-and-forth email threads.

Xobni has been in beta testing for a few weeks, and, like most beta products, still has a few kinks in the system. (It still doesn't seem to be counting all my incoming messages.) Regardless, if your life revolves around email, I'd recommend that you take it for a spin. Beyond productivity improvements, Xobni will give you a glimpse into factors that are going to play a huge role in the future of the inbox. Next week, I'll dig a little deeper into some of those factors and how they might eventually influence how a consumer views and interacts with messages in the inbox.

Until then...

Posted by Bill Nussey at 05:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

I've been inviting my colleague, Scott Voigt, our head of product marketing, to put together some guest blogs over the last few months. I am pleased to include his first blog entry below...

From Scott:
A few months ago, the Internet was abuzz with the meme of Inbox 2.0. A couple of articles in the Wall Street Journal (here and here) and a post in the Bits section of The New York Times, pointed to a future where the inbox would begin to take more proactive role in managing communications, acting as much like a social network as it does a hub for receiving good ol' SMTP messages. Leading the charge on this new frontier are a number of start-ups (Boxbe, ClearContext, and Xobni to name a few) that are, in essence, using technology to help consumers manage their overload of email. More recently, we've seen some of the big inbox providers indicate that changes were indeed on the horizon. To wit, at this year's CES, Yahoo's Chief, Jerry Yang demonstrated a future version of Yahoo! Mail that included a "simplify my inbox" button, which, once clicked, would reorder messages based on "people that are important to me."

My colleagues and I pay careful attention to anything that has to do with changes (perceived or real) that may impact the inbox. As such, a number of us have been testing these new inbox tools, talking to inbox providers and holding late-night bull sessions in an effort to intuit email's future and its impact on email marketers (all the better if we can devise new offerings to better serve them ). At the most recent Email Insider Summit, I shared some of our initial findings in a presentation that contemplated the factors present in a hypothetical "inbox algorithm" that inbox providers might use to categorize, prioritize and sort messages. Bill has been kind enough to lend me some real estate in his blog to expand on this topic. So, over the next few weeks, I'll try to contribute some additional commentary on the future of the inbox. (I just can't bring myself to call it Inbox 2.0.)

Until then...

Posted by Bill Nussey at 06:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Welcome back! I hope everyone had a great holiday and that you are all off to a wonderful New Year.

It's been a while since I've posted, but a colleague sent me an interesting article from MediaPost that seemed like a stimulating and provocative way to kick off 2008. The story is about social networks and the future of email. The writer, Max Kalehoff, defends email’s role in the much-hyped world of social networks. He notes that email is the engine behind many social networks, and that as young people mature, email may well replace social networks as their core communication tool.

To me, it’s more about the difference between business-to-business and consumer-to-consumer communications. In BtoB, the variety of traffic, the need for people to be able to contact you uninvited (e.g., “Hi, I’d love to buy your product”) and the age-old manage-your-life-via-email-folders make a strong case for email’s continued prevalence in business. For purely interpersonal email, however, social networks can provide a powerful alternative: no spam, better tracking of threads, control over who can contact you, deep context with the individuals you’re communicating with and so on. I don’t think everyone necessarily will use two email addresses for personal and business communications, nor will those who do necessarily use social networks exclusively. However, I do think we’ll continue to see a rise in social networks underlying our daily CtoC communications.

Either way, this line of thinking misses what may be the most interesting question of the day--what about business-to-consumer (BtoC) email? After all, this is how many of us make our living.

As a consumer, how will I want the companies that serve me as a consumer to communicate with me? Frankly, it seems like I’m going to want them to come through whichever channel I use for CtoC communications. This could seem threatening to our business but I believe it also represents a huge benefit. The fact is that consumer channels are diverging. In addition to social networks and email, there’s an increasing use of RSS and chat not to mention the explosively growing mobile channel. I believe that our industry is uniquely well-suited to provide the universal marketing dashboard/tool suite that enables marketers to reach their permission-based audience regardless of channel.

And, as some of you are well aware, many companies in our industry, including my company, Silverpop, are already well on their way. Speaking for the industry, I hope that 2008 will be looked back on as the year where email marketing took the next step.

Posted by Bill Nussey at 02:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

A colleague recently sent me this post by New York Times reporter Saul Hansell to the Times' technology blog, Bits, about a new concept called “Inbox 2.0.” Hansell explores the idea that your inbox may no longer be ranked purely by when messages are received, but by the relevance of the sender. Needless to say, this could have a big impact on legitimate commercial email not to mention spam.

In many ways, I like this idea even though this kind of change can feel very threatening. Anything that helps recipients make sense of all their inbound communications is a good thing in the long run. For instance, a message from your boss, your spouse or your project leader might climb right to the top of your inbox, whereas messages offering college degrees (that your spam filter misses) would live down at the bottom. As a consumer, I find the idea somewhat compelling.

The idea faces some definite hurdles. For instance, while I absolutely want to see my e-boarding pass from Delta the moment it comes in, the latest promotion from Delta may not be as urgent. It’s not clear to me how an inbox provider could distinguish between these two extremes. Additionally, older ideas like challenge/response have never been widely adopted, even though they offer a more robust solution to managing the inbox.

Only time will tell whether this is the beginning of a paradigm shift or just another good idea to add to the “never reached critical mass” heap.

Posted by Bill Nussey at 09:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

One of my favorite speakers at the recent Silverpop customer conference in London was Michael Nutley, editor-in-chief of New Media Age, the U.K. weekly news magazine. Ignoring the standard PowerPoint and visual aids, Michael got up and did something unusual--he just spoke.

He gave a terrific presentation, and I filled pages with notes on his provocative ideas. I won't take you through them all, but here are a few things he said that really stood out for me:

• PVRs (personal video recorders like TiVo) are the rejection of interruption advertising.
• The hegemony of TV and TV advertising is breaking down because people no longer live scheduled lives.
• Communities are no longer limited by geography--they can now be based on shared interests regardless of where members live.
• All roads lead to interactivity--all media is moving toward a dialogue.
• Quoting G. M. O'Connell, founder of Modem Media, on the overuse of interruption-based advertising, Michael said, "You can't annoy people into liking you." This is a sobering point for marketers of otherwise well-respected brands when they ask, "How often can I send to my email list?"
• In the social media space, you don't buy media--you earn it. This is one of my favorites.
• Brands are no longer what we as marketers tell people they are--brands are what people's friends tell them they are.
• Marketers should aspire to the condition of service. In other words, view your marketing as a service to your customers.
• Each new medium spawns a brand new form of advertising. For the Web, it was search. The question is, what will the ideal advertising form be for mobile? It's definitely not search, Michael said. My own thought is that it's not likely to be any form of interruptive marketing because mobile devices are simply too personal and too awkward to manage a stream of incoming messages.

Michael, thanks for coming out and doing such a great job.

Posted by Bill Nussey at 10:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

In my previous post on using email for the lead paint recalls, I glossed over how such an email might work. The problem for retailers is that many customers will have purchased several products that are affected by the recalls. The trouble of creating a separate email for each possible product (as well as for related products that aren't being recalled) is matched by the risk that customers will get frustrated with receiving a stream of messages when only a single message is needed.

It turns out that there is an evolving feature set available in a few leading email marketing tools that makes a single email possible--it's called relational tables. Actually, relational tables have been around for a while, but use among marketers has been pretty limited. I suspect that some of this is due to the fact that set-up of campaigns that utilize multiple tables can be pretty complex--sometimes even requiring marketing teams to have someone on staff who can create and maintain SQL statements. As such, through most of its history, email marketing has been about flat lists--each recipient has a single set of attributes like email address, name, age or gender. In relational tables, each recipient can have multiple attributes of the same kind.

In the case of our product recall message, retailers could use their existing customer email list, but link it to a product purchase table that contains all the products purchased by all their customers. The simplest use of relational tables would be to send one message per product, but benefit from only having to set up a single target/segment definition. An even more interesting approach would be to use a feature like Silverpop's multi-match dynamic content. MMDC takes advantage of Silverpop's ability to handle relational data but it allows every matching product record to be put inside a single message. So, if customer A bought one affected product, that person's message would contain only that single product. However, if customer B bought eight affected products, that person's message would list eight products. This is an entirely new level of personalization and something that both marketers and consumers will be seeing more and more in 2008 and beyond.

Posted by Bill Nussey at 07:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

For anyone who thinks online BtoB marketers lead a less exciting life than their BtoC counterparts, think again. I recently read a great post about BtoB new media marketing on Valeria Maltoni’s blog Conversation Agent that may just change your mind.

Quoting the results of a June online survey of more than 300 marketers by research company, Guideline, Valeria reports that BtoB companies overall embrace more new media platforms sooner, and are much more likely to allocate a higher percentage of their media budgets to online marketing channels than their BtoC counterparts.

BtoB marketers also take a more bottom line approach. They concentrate on lead generation, and have more experience with proven platforms such as email, online ads, search engine optimization and Webinars. BtoC marketers on the other hand tend to focus on brand building through emerging channels. Although BtoC marketers have more experience with viral video, social networking and mobile marketing platforms, BtoB marketers also use emerging channels for brand building, and have more experience with blogs and wikis.

Posted by Bill Nussey at 08:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I was recently on a great discussion thread about the future of email--how important is email to the future of interactive marketing? Here was my contribution to that discussion:

The ability to communicate online is evolving at an unprecedented pace. Social networking, mobile, UGC, chat, virtual worlds, etc., all provide incredible new ways for people (and marketers) to reach out and influence each other. These new technologies are darned interesting, and I haven't met a marketing executive who believes they don't matter. To many marketers, and particularly those focused on Gen Y, I can see why TV, direct mail and even email would seem uninteresting by comparison.

In light of these exciting new technologies, it's understandable that some marketers might be tempted to bypass email altogether. But ignoring email would be no different than ignoring Web sites—both are necessary and critical pieces of the Internet world. Anyone who downplays these foundational elements is disconnecting themselves from the very pulse of the online experience.

The real question about email is whether it's the buggy whip or the wheel. Is it an accessory to an approach that is quickly fading away, or is it a foundational piece of a very long evolutionary cycle?

You know my vote.

Posted by Bill Nussey at 09:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Steve Smith recently wrote an article for MediaPost's Mobile Insider citing recent Nielsen study findings that video makes up less than 1 percent of iPod usage. Wow. That got me thinking. Is video really going to catch on in handheld players and phones, or is it a pipe dream?

As those of us from the email world know, embedded video in email enjoyed a short renaissance back in the late 1990s until Microsoft decided that Java and other plug-ins were deemed too scary. Microsoft disabled those features in email by default and pretty much ended the video email momentum.

But the PC is a different story. Back in Sept. 2000, Microsoft released Windows ME (Media Edition) with the promise that computers would be great platforms for listening to music and watching television. Of course, Microsoft was WAY ahead of its time, but its vision is proving out six years later. More and more Web sites have animation, and even feature video ads all over them. I watch nearly all my TV on my Microsoft Media Center PC attached to my TV at home. And, of course, there is this little site called YouTube...

So what can we take away from this?

Video works.

Of course, not all video works in all situations, but I believe video has no equal when it comes to engaging people. Short-form video seems to be the "killer video app" on computers, at least for the early 21st century. My friends and I were trading our favorite humorous commercials over email before YouTube made it one-click easy. People use computers in an active way and expect fast results. Short videos seem to fit that to a T.

Looping back to the original question: will video on mobile phones, iPods and other tiny screens, truly become a reality? My view (pun intended) is that video will find a way. Short-form video will help bridge the gap (see the Verizon and YouTube deal), but I suspect we'll see entirely new forms of video and video devices emerging as the world's most engaging medium finds its way to the insatiable eyes and ears of consumers.

P.S. I'm headed off for two great weeks of intensive email discussions. This week is the Email Insider Summit in Deer Valley, Utah. And next week is my regular gathering of the top emailers in the country. This second gathering will feature top-notch speakers on social sites, mobile marketing and user generated content. I should definitely have more to talk about on the subject of mobile video after I listen to these folks.

Posted by Bill Nussey at 11:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

What is SaaS, you ask? It's an acronym for "software as a service." SaaS is beginning to replace terms like ASP (application service provider), hosted software, etc., that describe software made available over the Web.

So why do I love it?

Reason #1--It's what we do.
The first reason I love SaaS is that it's what we do at Silverpop. We manage the servers, the software and the network as one complete solution for our clients. I've been running or funding companies involved with creating and selling software for almost 25 years, and I can tell you that SaaS is going to change the world of technology.

Reason #2--SaaS is REALLY useful for marketers.
The relationship between marketers and IT is often strained or worse. IT departments thrive on long-term planning, predictable requirements and relatively static software solutions. Marketing, on the other hand, is all about change. If a competitor makes a move, marketers are expected to respond--immediately. If a critical campaign isn't getting the response it needs, marketers must be able to drop everything, change the campaign and re-launch. IT cycles and marketing needs just don't align in most situations.

To put it another way, if an IT solution works well at Coke, then Pepsi would be interested in looking at it, too. But the idea of Coke or Pepsi ever doing anything similar in the marketing departments is so hard to imagine that people use the two companies as an aphorism of competition.

SaaS changes everything for marketers. All of sudden, marketers get an IT solution custom-built for their needs. And, even more important, the support and maintenance of that solution are designed around the cycles and planning needs unique to marketing. Few internal IT departments could afford the kind of minute-to-minute support that marketers crave. Yet when a SaaS company like Silverpop provides a similar solution across hundreds of marketers, the economics start to make a lot of sense.

SaaS isn't going to put IT out of business. Not by a stretch. It will, however, move some (and maybe most) of the software used by marketers out of the corporate data center and into the hands of purpose-built companies that specialize in the service models that marketers demand.

Stay tuned for more reasons why I love SaaS...

Posted by Bill Nussey at 10:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

We've all seen interactive marketing statistics in one form or another, but The New York Times has just published a good article on click fraud that condenses these stats nicely (Marketers Demanding Better Count of Clicks, Oct. 30). Among them:

• Internet marketing has grown 30 percent a year for the last few years.
• Of the $267 billion spent by advertisers in 2005, only 4.7 percent or $12.5 billion went to interactive ads, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau.
• The top 50 advertisers spent just 3.8 percent of their budgets on online ads--excluding search--in the first half of 2006, according to data from TNS Media Intelligence.
• Proctor & Gamble, the nation’s biggest advertiser last year, spent less than 1 percent of its $4.6 billion ad budget on online ads in 2005. And General Motors, the second-biggest advertiser, spent just 2.5 percent of its $4.35 billion budget online, according to TNS, which does not include search ads in its figures.

Posted by Bill Nussey at 01:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Reader Dean Collins posted a comment on my recent entry about why email marketers love the "unsubscribe button." He wonders if perhaps too much is being made of the unsubscribe button, and asks why marketers view it as an improvement over an unsubscribe link in a message. Thanks for your comment, Dean. A few thoughts:

• The unsub button is always visible and is the same for every mailing, regardless of sender -- no more searching around to find the link at the bottom of the message.
• The unsub action will be a single click -- much easier than the clicking to open a Web page, confirming you really want to unsubscribe and then hitting submit. Some opt-outs are even more complex than this.
• The unsub button will only appear if the sender has a good reputation. ISPs will not endorse the old spammer trick of using an opt-out request to confirm the existence of a "live body" on the other end -- only authenticated senders with good reputations will be able to have this link activated. For end users, this means that the link will always work.

Posted by Bill Nussey at 03:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Try wrapping your brain around this: short-term permission.

As marketers, we are so anxious to build our lists that we grab every opt-in we can and hold onto it forever. But what if we tried something new? Some products clearly have short-term buying cycles. Think about mortgages, car buying, or insurance. You usually only buy these once every few years. Why do marketers force opt-ins that last forever?

What would happen if the car site's opt-in clearly stated that it would only last for three months? I would love to see whether the opt-in rate would rise -- I'm betting it would. First, prospects wouldn't have to endure mailings long after they've made a purchase. Second, the mere fact of saying that it's short term is likely to add a huge degree of credibility and show customer-centric thinking. I suspect many people would opt-in just to see what would happen.

Some well-designed control group testing should show whether this would work. If any of you have ever tried this, or decide to give this a try, please let me know how it works out.

P.S. For good measure, add in the opportunity for a permanent opt-in on your last few messages to see if you can capture those buyers who have a longer-term interest.

Posted by Bill Nussey at 09:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I wanted to take a quick pulse on the world of RSS and marketing. How is it doing? What's its future?

eMarketer recently published an article that suggested that RSS is much-ado-about-nothing: http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?1004127

It's surprising to me how often the low consumer awareness of RSS is used to suggest that RSS isn't being used. Most consumers have no idea what SMTP, HTTP and SSL are but that doesn't stop them from using email, surfing the web or buying things online. The fact is awareness does not equal adoption. We've all read last October's Yahoo!/Ipsos study (PDF) . Even though it's a bit out date now, it highlights the fact that consumers' adoption of RSS is well beyond their awareness.

A more upbeat view of RSS comes from Rebecca Lieb's recent Sept. 8 column in ClickZ. She cites a wide range of innovative uses of RSS. Her list blew me away in terms of the diversity and innovation of some of these applications. Without a doubt, RSS is a key component of a lot of innovation that is going on across the country. As consumers adopt RSS (even if they don't know they are doing so because they use Yahoo! or Google or Outlook) to get at these innovative feeds, their ability to be marketed to through those feeds and others will only increase.

Posted by Bill Nussey at 09:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Did I get your attention? Okay, so demographic targeting will never die any more than the Web will kill TV or RSS will kill email. But a recent article in Fortune magazine did get me thinking about this.

In its August 21, 2006 issue, Fortune editor Geoffrey Colvin interviewed the CMO of Best Buy, Michael Linton. It's a great interview and I recommend reading it all the way through if you can: http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2006/08/21/8383648/index.htm

The part that really got me thinking is Linton's quote, "... trying to market to demographics is less important than trying to market to purchase patterns or behavior." He goes on to explain that consumers don't necessarily want to be grouped in by their age or income levels any more. He says that marketers are far better off marketing to people based on what they do rather than who they are.

For decades, marketers have had little, if any, real behavioral data to work with. Marketing was brand driven. Purchase information was lost in the downstream retailers and distributors. Pre-purchase behavior was all but impossible to track. For all these reasons and more, marketers have developed a great deal of expertise around grouping their buyers by the only information they had available -- their demographics like age, gender, income and ZIP code. This approach led to the movement of the data companies like Axciom, Experian and Equifax into the marketing world. By matching customers' names with the demographics these companies gleaned through their credit businesses, marketers were able to get new insights into segmenting and analyzing their customers.

The Internet is changing all this.

For the first time in the history of marketing, not only is it possible to easily link purchase information to marketing databases, but the even more elusive behavioral data is now readily available. I think Mr. Linton's quote will be seen as visionary as we look back in the years to come.

Ask yourself, if you want to find the 10,000 people most likely to respond to zero-percent financing on a new car, would you rather know their age and ZIP code, or which people recently clicked on your newsletter looking for more information on financing options? For the new generation of marketers, the answer is easy.

I don't think demographic targeting is ever going away. But mark my words, the rise of behavioral targeting is now officially underway.

Posted by Bill Nussey at 09:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)