Whether you’re promoting a professional sports team, a NASCAR race, a movie opening, a rock concert, a gallery exhibition, subscriptions to a symphony orchestra season, or any other entertainment event, you need to find more cost-effective ways to build brand loyalty and get your message to the right people at the right time.

Entertainment marketers who have learned how to obtain a comprehensive view of the demographics, psychographics, and behavioral characteristics of consumers have been able to get relevant, timely messages in front of exactly the kind of people who are interested in their events. By engaging their audience with desirable offers and information, these marketers realize dramatic increases in response and conversion rates.

Imagine being able to target local men who like to watch sports. Or imagine being able to precisely deliver a customized promotional offer for subscription to your upcoming concert season to middle-aged, high-income, couples with an interest in classical music. Unsure exactly which way someone’s cultural tastes lean? Imagine sending them multiple offers and being able to track exactly which ones they click through to. These are just a few examples of the ways that hyper-targeting can deliver the right message to the right people.

To learn more about targeted email advertising for entertainment marketers, read the full Hyper-Targeted Email Advertising Entertainment Industry Spotlight.

Content marketing is one of the top five most used lead generation tactics, according to the MarketingSherpa 2012 Lead Generation Benchmark Report. It is a great way to build a relationship with your customer by offering them something valuable in exchange for subscription (to your newsletter, etc). It is a way to convert attention into interest, so that when they actually need your services, you, and not your competitor, will be the first thing on their mind. Here are five steps from a recent MarketingSherpa webinar to make the most of content marketing:

1.      Map your existing content across the funnel

You’re relationship with your customer should involve moving in microsteps toward a final commitment. Each time they answer “yes” to the next offer, they are moving along the funnel to the ultimate goal. When you’re mapping your content, the goal is to simplify and sequence your content to continuously nudge prospects along your funnel.

 2.      Craft a biographical sketch of your ideal customer

Often, a message that seems clear to you can be confusing to your customer.  As a marketer, you have to learn to see your offerings through the eyes of your customers. Try to imagine who your ideal customer is, and then get into his/her head. Think about their needs. Content must be relevant, important, and urgent.

 3.      Identify content distribution channels in which you have the greatest potential influence

Once you have created content, you need to effectively get it in front of the right people at the right time. One can measure the potential influence of a channel with three criterion/factors: Reach (how many people you’re influencing), capacity (to what depth are you influencing each person), and intensity (to what degree can each person you’ve influenced enact change).

 4.      Connect Decisions

Create a clear connection from the relational, to the transactional, to the contractual commitments that make up your funnel. Marketing only exists where choice exists, and a marketer’s job is to influence choice. Think about how you are going to influence someone to take the next step.

 5.      Optimize your message at the transactional and then contractual transitions in your funnel

Once you have the connection, you’ve got to get the message right. The value proposition is key.

To learn more about effective content marketing, watch the full web clinic by Marketing Experiments.

Over the past three years, many Consumer Packaged Goods marketers like you have seen brand loyalty decline as consumers changed their shopping behavior in response to ongoing economic hardship. You need to work harder on building closer relationships directly with consumers. In this highly competitive environment, you need to redefine value and differentiate your products for specific customer niches based on quality and branding instead of on price. But building that close relationship is extremely difficult unless you can reach precisely the right people at the right time with the right message.

Top CPG marketers have successfully used Hyper-Targeted Email Advertising to combine hundreds of very specific demographic, psychographic, and behavioral characteristics to connect with and emotionally engage a precisely-targeted audience for a particular offer. They have effectively promoted a wide range of products, including:

• food products to people who enjoy cooking
• pet products to pet owners in a specific income bracket
• a new health drink to higher-income people interested in a healthy lifestyle
• a low-calorie snack to women who are dieting
• eco-friendly cleaning products to “green” consumers
• with a little imagination, the possibilities for targeted campaigns are endless

To learn more about email list rental for consumer packaged goods, read the full Spotlight on Hyper-Targeted Email Advertising in the CPG Industry.

The holidays are coming, and with them comes the opportunity to increase holiday sales. The trick is to get your offers and promotions in front of the right audiences (those most likely to buy) at the right time. Retailers have proven that email marketing is one of the most effective tactics for achieving this; last year, more than 83% of major online retailers increased their email volume during November and December. Here are five sets of ideas for maximizing the ROI from your 2012 holiday campaigns:

1. Target early bird shoppers with time-limited deals.

Early bird shoppers are organized consumers who know what they want. This group is looking for deals and want to beat the avalanche of holiday shopping to come. They’re shopping now! Appeal to them with special offers:

• Create urgency with a “Limited Time” offer
  (i.e., Save 20% before Dec. 10)
• Offer a free gift with purchase while supplies last
• Announce special pre-holiday hours
• Invite them to beat the rush and sales

2. Make your emails stand-out for big-time shoppers. Holiday shopping enters the period of peak orders and revenue highs from November to mid December, as the big time shoppers start spending. Competition can be tough during this time, so make your emails stand out in the inbox with these ideas:

• Send an offer with a “Hurry Before Offer Expires on December 5” – it’s been proven that a simple “Hurry get it before it expires offer” goes a long way toward increasing store sales.
• Create a series for Hanukkah or the 12 Days of Christmas, and present a new offer/gift idea each day.
• People like lists. Try “most popular products” or “top 10 gifts under $20.”
• Remind shoppers that you offer gift cards and gift certificates for those hard-to-buy-for friends and relatives.

3. Make it easy for last-minute shoppers. Research and experience show that many holiday shoppers wait until the last minute to purchase their gifts. This period of holiday shopping is called the “Last Minute Frenzy,” and starts mid-December. Schedule a few emails in December that’ll speak to this audience by offering easy, last-minute gift suggestions and mentioning benefits:

• Most popular products list
• Top 10 gifts under  $20
• Gift cards and gift certificates
• guaranteed delivery by X
• Last-minute gifts for under $50
• extended hours for more holiday shopping
• free gift-wrapping

4. Appeal to bargain shoppers from late December through the New Year. Just because the holidays are over, that doesn’t mean the spending and shopping have stopped. Plan to send a few bargain bounty emails touting your end-of-year sales and discounts:

• holiday clearance sale
• Post holiday sales
• Stock up for the new year and save
• Return that ugly sweater from grandma and get what you want

5. Use targeted email advertising to expand your reach and grow your house list. If you don’t have a large enough in-house email address list to make email marketing an effective addition to your holiday mix of tactics, hyper-targeted email advertising can provide you with a fresh, highly targetable opt-in email address list of over 70 million consumers.

Holiday email marketing should be relevant, timely, and valuable for your customers. Keeping important dates and holiday shopping patterns in mind will help you to target products, services, and offers to your new customers at the right time.

Still unsure about what your most effective Holiday campaign looks like? Along with our high-integrity, high-performance email list rental, we offer full-service consulting expertise, and a proven campaign optimization framework, making sure that it’s a happy holiday for everyone.

Contact us to discuss your holiday marketing plans.

A chart published by MarketingSherpa revealed that, after organic searches, targeted email advertising provides the greatest volume of traffic (close to one quarter of overall traffic) to the websites of the study’s participants. Most importantly, email marketing campaigns resulted in conversion rates almost on par with organic searches, even though the latter had almost twice the traffic volume.

According to Brad Bortone at MarketingSherpa, “email marketing offers marketers the opportunity to generate a high volume of targeted traffic to specific landing pages. This creates an engaging experience that is ideal for qualified lead generation.” That’s what we’ve been saying!

Clearly, if you haven’t done so already, it’s time to divest some of the time and money you’ve been putting into social media, and test hyper-targeted email advertising as a component in your campaign mix.

We are currently offering a special bite-sized pilot program that makes it easy to measure the impact that email list rental can have on your business. Contact us to learn more.

We all know that consumer media consumption patterns are rapidly changing, but an August 2012 research study by Google, Ipsos, and Stirling Brands, provides some startling data on the predominance of multi-screen based interactions. The insights provided in The New Multi-screen World: Understanding Cross-platform Consumer Behavior, may help you craft better advertising campaigns:

• We are multi-screeners: 90% of all media interactions are screen-based, spread across smartphones, tablets, desktops/laptops and TVs; leaving just 10% of interactions to radio and print. Your ad budgets should reflect that split.
• We move seamlessly between multiple devices to complete a task over time, in either a sequential (starting a task on one devices and completing it on another) or simultaneous mode. Your marketing strategies can no longer be viewed as “digital” or “traditional,” and your plans must consider the whole consumer experience across channels, making it as seamless as possible.
• TV no longer commands our undivided attention: 77% of TV viewers use another device at the same time during a typical day.
• The prevalence of sequential usage of multiple screens makes it imperative that you enable customers to save their progress between devices. Saved shopping carts, “signed-in” experiences or the ability to email progress to oneself helps keep consumers engaged, regardless of device used to get to you.
• During simultaneous usage, content viewed on one device can trigger specific behaviour on the other. You should therefore not limit conversion goals and calls to action to only the device where they were initially displayed.

More than ever, your campaigns need to be designed as seamless multi-screen consumer experiences that integrate email advertising, web, social, TV, and more. Read the complete report here.

At the Direct Marketing Association (DMA) 2012 conference that just wrapped up in Las Vegas, Future Flow Media Principal Consultant, Chris O’Neill shared his experience with hyper-targeted email advertising as an invited speaker alongside executives from IBM, Strongmail, and Rapleaf. Chris’ main message was echoed throughout the conference that was attended by 10,000 direct marketers: a huge competitive advantage is being realized by the marketers who are most effectively utilizing data to deliver the right message to the right people at the right time.

Keynote speakers Chris Anderson, Editor-in-chief of Wired, and David Fischer, VP of Facebook, both pointed out that 21^st century markets are all about long tail niches of people with unique, specific tastes. Marketers can no longer target the average, mass market; they need to use data to cost-effectively identify and reach the specific people most able to convert.

Some of the key take-aways from the conference include:

• Better targeting is an ongoing challenge: a top priority for all marketers in attendance is to find more targeted, higher quality, and more cost-effective methods to reaching new prospects.
• ROI needs to drive mix decisions: the number of marketing channels available to marketers is increasing (re-marketing, email, social, etc.) but overall budgets are not. This means that budgets need to be carefully spread across many tactics. Planning the best tactical mix is a big challenge and requires accurate measures of ROI and cost-effectiveness.
• All industries are realizing gains with more targeted advertising: successes are being realized across all industries with some of the biggest winners being: B2B, healthcare and wellness, and automotive.
• Better integration is needed: there is an explosion of specialized, fragmented direct marketing products and services (widgets, data, analytics, etc.), driving a need for better integration of all offline and online tools and tactics.
• Social is now a staple: social is no longer a new buzzword, nor is it a stand-alone cure-all; it is an established tactic that needs to fit alongside all of the other tactics in an integrated campaign mix.
• Process matters: all of today’s available data and tactical opportunities do not deliver results unless campaigns are planned and delivered with a solid process and proven methodology. Without expert advice on best practices, a smooth project execution framework, and careful management of every detail, the most promising campaigns will fall flat. More than ever, the right agency and execution partners are critical to success.

Conference keynote speeches and highlights are available on the DMA2012 YouTube channel.

Like most casino, lottery, and other gaming operators, you’re probably still recovering from the slowdown induced by the recession. You need to compete harder than ever in order to attract, retain, and recover players. It is notoriously difficult to track the impact of your marketing spend in this industry. In such a noisy advertising world, your current media investments may be falling short if they lack accountability and are not sufficiently targeted. Or maybe your current tactics just can’t deliver the wide reach and solid return on investment that you need.

Hyper-targeted email advertising can cost-effectively deliver highly customized messages to the most receptive audience sub-segments to help you stand out from your competition and achieve greater response rates. An email address list that is continuously compiled, enriched, and verified for freshness and accuracy gives you the power to:

• segment and model your market,
• target the customers of your competitors,
• deliver your relevant offer to people with specific gambling and travel interests,
• target consumers living in specific areas,
• test market.

To learn more about targeted email advertising for gaming operators, read the full Hyper-Targeted Email Advertising: Casino and Gaming Industry Spotlight.

If you struggle with data and Return on Investment (ROI), a recent Columbia Business School study found that you’re not alone: over 57% of marketers are not basing their budget decisions on any type of ROI analysis. Data on impressions, delivery rates, open rates, click through rates, and conversions from your online marketing campaigns are easy to track, but on their own those metrics say little about the bottom line impact of a campaign, and they don’t help you make sound decisions about including specific tactics in your future campaigns. Unless you’re accurately calculating your ROI, you may be wasting your money or missing out on great opportunities.

In response to this need for better, fact-based decision-making, Future Flow Media developed a comprehensive set of Return on Investment (ROI) calculators for email marketing campaigns. These free online tools enable media buyers and email marketers to accurately determine the business impact of past campaigns and make better decisions about their investments in future projects. The calculators are based on Return on Incremental Marketing Investment (ROIMI), the best measure of the short term financial impact of an incremental marketing spend. A complete description of the ROIMI approach is provided here.

Separate calculators are provided for each of the five major types of email campaigns, according to the primary conversion objective:

We all know an email’s subject line is critical. If it’s not effective, the rest of the message never gets seen. The question is, what do consumers respond to: creative subject lines or straightforward, clear subject lines? A recent MarketingSherpa case study explored this question in detail with 20 different subject lines sent to 45,000 subscribers while measuring responses to the emails across several channels: email subscriptions, traffic, Facebook Likes, Tweets, and comments.

The results? Clear subject lines outperformed creative versions on average by a whopping 541%.

Read the full MarketingSherpa article to learn more about why subject line clarity is paramount.