Our 2008 Channel Preference Survey showed how college students are experiencing a tipping point of sorts with their personal communications. In fact, 34% of 18-24 year-olds said they use email and 34% said they use text messaging (SMS) when asked the medium they use “most often” to send written messages with their friends. However, just 19% prefer instant messaging (IM) and 9% prefer sending messages via a social networking site.

Will the entrance of today’s college students into the workforce change the way businesses communicate in the future? Will Facebook be the way young employees communicate with one another in 2011?

I think that most of the difference in personal communication preferences can be attributed to life-stage (unique needs, communication types, acceptable norms) than a generational difference that will be carried with to the adult stage. Using the “When in Rome, do as they do in Rome” concept, I think the platform, or forum for the communication is what primarily drives the messaging media selected. So, as today’s college students enter the workforce they will most likely be forced (or strongly coerced) to adapt to the email culture of their employers.

New platforms like social networks will prove difficult for marketers to penetrate, because most will approach it a bit too brazenly. Our survey data showed that 18-24 year olds report being nearly immune to the ploys of marketers. However, a new survey from Synovate shows some aren’t being entirely truthful. Or perhaps, is it just that when they interact with brands it is in a much more social manner? For example, 62% of 18-24 year-olds in the Synovate survey reported passing along comedy clips. Perhaps the best way for marketers to have their brand talked about is to encourage this kind of friend-to-friend pass-along. Maybe our ads just need to be funnier?!

Stay tuned for blog updates with additional takeaways from a recent panel we conducted as we hosted a number of faculty and students from the Ball State Center for Media Design. We’ve got lots of nuggets to share and insights for marketers on how to pick the right medium for the job.

Q:  Are there email design considerations I should make in the midst of a tough economy?

A: Since email design is the artful visualization of a business plan, marketers need to first ensure their communications strategy is solid. The focus should be on the subscriber and the financial challenges he or she is facing. Economy-induced challenges create strong emotional subscriber responses that need to be acknowledged and addressed in marketing communications.

Here are some tips:

1. Show appreciation. Customers should feel appreciated for their loyalty, so include a thank you note or email. Send holiday well wishes and request their feedback on how to better serve them in the new year. This shouldn’t be a check box survey that asks for their satisfaction level on a five point scale, but a sincere open-ended question that allows them to express their needs, concerns, and suggestions. Demonstrate that it is about them, not about you.
2. Be Patient. Your subscriber is a person facing financial challenges, not number 5,241 on your data list. Be careful to avoid damaging your one-to-one relationship by increasing the quantity – and promotional force – of your messages. Subscribers’ disposable income may be stretched, so be sensitive to your level of purchasing insistence. Remember to provide extra relevance during these times to keep brand engagement high – even if purchases wane.
3. Be empathetic. Acknowledge tough times by offering valuable product-related solutions. Think creatively about emotional solutions that may encourage a purchase when budgetary restrictions are loosened. Share stories, solutions or resourceful ideas from other subscribers who are feeling the same economic pain. Consider creating an online community for subscribers to connect with each other. Listen.

All of these tips should be encompassed within the core communications message and resultant design focus. They should not be used as a gratuitous intro sentence preceding a 700 pixel deep promo visual. The message placement and dedicated design real estate demonstrate your sincerity.

Appreciation, patience, and respectful persistence will help nurture strong customer relationships during stressed financial times. The economy will rebound – be sure your loyal subscribers are still with you when it happens.


Melinda Baxter, Director of Marketing Services

I know you’ve heard me tout the value of personalizing email content hundreds of times. Still, I am amazed that many marketers don’t believe personalizing email is worth the effort! So, for those of you who still doubt the value of personalization, here’s more proof.

Writing in the October 28th issue of MediaPost’s Email Insider, Alex Madison and Lisa Harmon of email marketing agency, Smith-Harmon, note that a report put out this past summer by the Aberdeen Group found that top performing, or "Best-in-Class," organizations that collected and used data to personalize email campaigns, experienced an average order value increase of 57%.”

The report “Email Marketing: Get Personal with Your Customers” identifies the effects of email personalization on subscriber engagement. The study represents the views of more than 550 organizations and groups companies based on annual performance increases. Through their survey, Aberdeen found that top performing organizations (referred to as “Best-in-Class”) are twice as likely as “Laggards” to use the information collected within their database to personalize email campaigns.

Thomson CompuMark Believes in Personalization

Dave Wieneke, Interactive Marketing Manager at Thomson CompuMark, has proven the value of email personalization. He sends the monthly Client Times Online newsletter “on behalf” of CompuMark’s 22 account managers to attorneys who specialize in brand and copyright law. Each subscriber’s newsletter carries the photo and contact information of the CompuMark account manager with whom they work, and articles are personalized based on the defined preferences of each subscriber.

Says Wieneke, “The dynamic content tools of ExactTarget make this kind of personalization straight-forward; our marketing team implemented this without any specialized resources.”

Since Thomson CompuMark began personalizing email, the number of clickthroughs has increased by 63% and the amount of time subscribers are spending on content has gone up 41%! This is genuine subscriber engagement!

Using CRM Data to Personalize Email Content

One of the reasons Thomson CompuMark has been successful in personalizing email is because they have integrated their CRM system (Salesforce.com) with their email system (ExactTarget). To learn more about how to use CRM and Web Analytics data to personalize email content, download the ExactTarget white paper, “Integrating Email, CRM and Web Analytics”.

You just can’t make this stuff up. I saw this story on Yahoo a few days back which read: “U.S. doctors have found the Bee Gees 1977 disco anthem "Stayin' Alive" provides an ideal beat to follow while performing chest compressions as part of CPR on a heart attack victim.”

Now, since I’m a drummer in my spare time, using a popular rhythm to use as a comparison to a critical heart rhythm makes sense to me. It speaks my language. Thankfully, because of this article I now know that I can comfortably conduct CPR at the right pace since I seemed to have the tempo of Stayin’ Alive stored somewhere deep in the recesses of my brain.

Those connections to individuals are less easily predicted online. Yet these types of esoteric facts about an individual can make the difference between a non-response and a sale. The problem is most marketers don’t know what questions to ask or which behaviors to monitor.

In fact if a marketer wanted to target me differently based on my being rhythmically-oriented, they would have to guess, ask me, or append psychographic interest data from a database that somehow listed my subscription to Modern Drummer Magazine (which I haven’t had in 20 years).

Combining preference data and behavioral data is the only way to go. Neither are perfect, but combined they are very compelling. Preferences alone may point you in an entirely different direction than a subscriber’s actual behaviors. That is one of the points we made in our recent whitepaper, “Messaging Behaviors, Preferences and Personas.” Our research with the Ball State Center for Media Design showed combined observations on media usage behaviors with survey data on how each type of medium is used.

We found, for example, that teens tend to use social networks extensively and most often when communicating with friends. However, most of this same group said they were much more likely to respond to a promotion when presented to them via direct mail or email (unless it is spam) than via a social network or a text message. They hold these newer media to be more personal to them.

That isn’t to say that social networks should be devoid of marketing or businesses. In fact, a recent survey from Cone showed that adult users of social networks have some expectation that businesses will be there (not sure if it is expectation or “acceptance”).  In this survey 51% said companies should have a presence in social media but only as needed or by request. Our own research points to the same thing: Opt-in is still king and email is not dead….and now I can do CPR!

This from John du Pre Gauntt, senior analyst at eMarketer commenting on plans by Verizon to impose a fee on marketers sending text messages to Verizon customers in an eMarketer article, "Will Mobile Marketers Pony Up for Texts?". The fee was originally proposed as 3 cents per message delivered, and not surprisingly, this plan has been met with resistance from marketers using text messaging.

SMS marketing would change drastically if this goes through. Here are a couple of thoughts on how SMS marketing might change if marketers are assessed fees:

The Bad:

• News alerts (e.g., The New York Times) and social network alerts (e.g., MySpace) would no longer be financially feasible. This according to Steve Livingston as quoted in a recent interview with The New York Times.
• Companies may shy away from customer service alerts (e.g., flight status alerts or financial alerts) due to the cost. This type of customer service message was identified as the most desireable form of SMS marketing in our channel preferences survey.

The Good:

• The caliber of promotional text messages would improve. With higher delivery costs, the ROI won't be there unless campaigns are well executed.
• If used to offset fees charged to subscribers, it could benefit some marketers as the costs associated with text messaging is a major turnoff for consumers. According to our Channel Preferences Survey, 80% of consumers feel marketers should pay them back fro messages. Is the plan to stop passing the credit consumer accounts?

At the end of the day, a move by carriers this direction would encourage promotional marketers and discourage companies using SMS to send alerts. This is contrary to what consumers are looking to receive from corporate text messaging programs.

Following the recent release of our latest research paper, Messaging Behaviors, Preferences, and Personas, done in collaboration with Ball State's Center for Media Design, there have been some requests to see more detailed data by age. Specifically...

@josephjaramillo wrote: 18-34 doesn't make sense as a group. I'd rather see 18-24, 25-34.

For the collaborative study with Center for Media Design, it made sense to use a slightly broader age group in order to merge our insights with their observational data. As you might imagine, following people around all day is a slightly larger undertaking than collecting survey data, so this was necessary in creating personas that include both attitudinal information and data on real-world media exposure.

That said, we do have the attitudinal data people are asking about. Here are two charts showing preferences for where consumers want companies to send them permission-based promotions and unsolicited promotions. This is not the same as driving purchases, which is referenced in the report... we have that data in smaller age chunks also, I just need to compile it. Enjoy!

Data for opt-in promotions:


And here is the data for unsolicited messages (aka, SPAM):