Forrester’s Financial Services Forum, Part 2

In Part 1 I highlighted the central themes of Forrester's Financial Forum as a "setting the stage" approach. There were some very meaty and specific insights from the conference that also deserve mentioning - especially for those who prefer more actionable insights.

A quick bloggers digression: I looked up "actionable" because I wasn't sure if it was an actual word or just a buzzword I use far too often. Results? I'm surprised to find that it’s actually a word - but by definition applies only to the legal arena (not to the arena I live and work).

Back to the bonanza with some specific insights and tidbits from the Financial Services Forum.

Benjamin Ensor, Vice President, Research Director, Forrester Research in his keynote address “Building Differentiated Customer Experiences”:

• “The Internet is ‘commoditizing’ retail banking relationships.” (This is not unique to Financial Services.)
• “Smart executives do not leave customer experiences to chance.”

Fredrick F. Reichheld, Founder of Bain’s Loyalty Practice and Creator of the Net Promoter Score in his keynote address “Winning the Loyalty of Financial Services Customers”:

• “Bad profits kill loyalty.” (Mr. Reichheld drew a very clear distinction between “good profits” and “bad profits,” and the definitions are driven by common sense.)
• Does loyalty really pay? What is the value of a loyal customer or customer-advocate? In the Net Promoter Score scenario, a “promoter” is 3.4x more profitable than a “passive” customer.
• Loyalty and advocacy should be tracked at the individual level, not as a statistical model. Individuals are loyal, segments are not.
• Note: If you are not aware of the Net Promoter Score model for evaluating and analyzing your customer satisfaction, you need to look into this here: http://www.netpromoter.com/

Kelli M. Negro, Director of Marketing, Schwab Investor Development in the case study presentation “Hearing the Voice of My Customer with Private Online Communities”:

• Schwab teamed up with CommuniSpace to create dedicated, private online communities to provide an online focus group, and much more.
• Kelli emphasized that for an online community to succeed it is imperative to find the “social glue” that will bind the community together and spur interaction. What’s needed is a common point of interest that crosses demographics or life stage barriers.

I’ll have one more post in the coming days to close out my thoughts on the information from the Financial Services Forum.

This is the second of three posts from Bryce Marshall highlighting some key insights from Forrester Research's Financial Services Forum Jun 23-24, 2008.

Forrester’s Financial Services Forum, Part 1

I was in New York City June 23 and 24 for the Forrester Research Financial Services Forum. This event brings together a stable of Forrester Research analysts and hundreds of administrators and marketers from some of the largest Financial Services providers in North America.

Two days of keynote and breakout sessions focused on three central themes that helped frame discussion on the state of the Financial Services vertical:

1. Improving the customer experience, enterprise-wide.
2. Implementing an intelligent, multi-channel communications approach.
3. Demystifying and leveraging Web 2.0 technologies such as social networks and online communities.

It’s no coincidence that points 2 and 3 really tie into, and support, the overall customer experience agenda.

As these themes unfolded it was clear the Financial Services industry shares some things in common with an industry Knotice is very familiar with: Cable and Telecom.

A short list of some of the traits and challenges the Financial Services industry and the Cable and Telecom industry share:

• Both providers typically index very low in overall customer satisfaction surveys. On average, customers just don’t like their providers.
• Both legal and regulatory compliance issues beyond those of most other industries.
• Both have a relatively limited portfolio of services and products (lines of business), with marketing success tied closely to cross-selling these services to all customers.
• Both industries widely recognize the need to break down silos between lines of business to enable a more cohesive and customer-centric communications approach.
• Both are taking a closer look at some key Web 2.0 technologies and wondering aloud, “Is there value in this for our customers and for our brand?”

Take a close look and ask yourself, “Is there value in this for our customers and for our brand?”

What we know from our legacy in Cable and Telecom is that relevant communications can drive effective marketing while at the same time improving the overall customer experience. There is a very simple litmus test. Simply ask, “Does this tactic add value for our customers?” If a marketer takes an unfocused or lazy approach to development of the message and targeting requirements the answer, with few exceptions, will be, “No, this is not valuable to our customers.” The communication is serving the marketer’s interests only.

When communication is carefully planned, business rules are clearly followed, there is a targeted execution to ensure relevancy – a well-timed cross-sell offer, for instance – the answer is usually, “Yes, this adds value for our customers.” We find that this approach, with a simple litmus test to validate, meets the marketer’s goals.

This is the first of three posts from Bryce Marshall highlighting some key insights from Forrester Research's Financial Services Forum Jun 23-24, 2008.

The Online Marketing Database - Webinar Recap

Much of my presentation during last Friday's webinar, Taking Shape: The Online Marketing Database, focused on real-world approaches and best-practices you can use to get your online marketing database up and running successfully.

The first thing I covered is precisely what an online marketing database looks like. Once defined, I discussed how you can dramatically streamline implementation utilizing web services to integrate it with your existing systems, data sources, and online marketing infrastructure.

After touching on the role of the online marketing database, we discussed the following 4 keys to success:

1. The importance of selecting a unified data model and not trying to cobble The Online Marketing Database together
2. Having robust segmentation tools available to synthesize data and enable scalable segmentation strategies
3. Tightly integrating content execution platform(s) to make data more actionable and marketing operations more agile
4. Incorporating easy-to-use testing tools to ensure campaigns and experiences are optimized for top performance

Last, we ended with a case study where we put our own principles and platform into practice to promote the webinar. The objective of our own campaign was to increase sign ups for our webinar. I won’t give everything away, but we had a whopping 81% conversion rate on our most personalized, and relevant messaging.

As I mentioned in my post Wednesday, this subject often brings with it undue complexity. I hope the webinar is helpful in cutting through the complexity, and offers a level of clarity on how these concepts are put into practice.

Not Six Figures. Not 8 Figures. Low 7 Figures.

A source of mine recently told me that a big bank at a big conference was discussing their efforts to consolidate customer data to drive targeted and well-timed marketing communications. I heard it was an impressive solution. The audience was impressed. So much so, the speakers were continually prodded for the solution's price tag.

The first response was “it wasn’t six figures.” Assuming it wasn’t a five-figure solution, the audience pressed on. “It wasn’t 8 figures” the speaker said. I can imagine the audience was glad to hear that. Finally, the presenter from the big bank spilled the beans, “Low seven figures, and that includes IT costs,” he said.

Man, that’s a lot. But, more material than the actual amount is what it represents – complexity. For most folks, a seven-figure solution to overcome that complexity is prohibitive. However, the goal of the solution, consolidating data to drive relevant experiences, is something every marketer should be focusing on.

Last Friday during our webinar, Taking Shape: The Online Marketing Database, we covered this topic in-depth. Suresh Vittal, Senior Analyst from Forrester Research, discussed trends driving the need for a consolidated online database, the latest research pertaining to multi-channel data strategies, and the five challenges marketers must overcome. My portion focused on best practices for streamlining implementation and the four keys to success, which I’ll cover in more detail in my next post.

Thanks to everyone who attended the webinar. If you missed it, you can watch the entire replay here. Enjoy.

Respond to Your Customers, They Respond to You

Though this sort of tactic takes many names - event-based, activity-based, behavior-based, triggered, transactional, auto-responders - confirmation/response messages are a critically important part of an effective, integrated email program.

At the simplest level an event-based email (or SMS message) is one that provides a positive and quick response to a specific action taken by your customer. The goals of an event-based message can vary, but should always act to reinforce the value of the action the customer has just taken – making them feel more confident in the quality of product you are providing, and the service supporting it. It says you have your act together – and consumers like this.

What goes into a good event-based message? This can vary widely, but should include some combination of the following:

• Thank the customer for the transaction: Let them know you value their activity – whether it’s a purchase, reservation, registration or subscription.
• Confirm the details of the transaction: Take the time to work with IT to ensure this is being done correctly! And test, test, test!
• Provide details related to the transaction: This can include shipping details, installation date, helpful online resources or usage tips, even next steps.
• Contact information for customer service: Especially for changes or corrections to the order – consider a dedicated 800 number, web page or email address specifically for order corrections.
• Is this a good time to market?: This can be a good opportunity for a targeted up-sell, but you must be smart about this. Don’t counteract the value or objective of the message with an inappropriate or overwhelming pitch. The customer will tune out the entire message and the program will miss its mark (plus, CAN-SPAM includes content restrictions for transactional emails).

When our clients launch a well thought-out and executed event-based email program they will generally see open rates 2x or 3x those of their scheduled email tactics. Looking for a way to jump into mobile marketing? Event-based SMS messaging can be extremely valuable for notifications or alerts that are time-sensitive.

Event-based programs provide a crucial balance in the online marketing mix. When the customer sees your brand name in the “From” line and starts associating this with valuable content (rather than non-stop pitches) guess how this effects their perception of the brand? Yes, in a good way.

Finally, these programs can be very cost-effective, usually requiring minimal maintenance costs compared to the ongoing value they provide (and sometimes Customer Care or CRM departments will pick up the tab for you).

It’s a marketing truth: Respond to your customers and they will respond to you.

How Mobile Works - A Tactical Primer, Part 2

This is the second entry of a two-part series examining the four key elements of mobile marketing needed to successfully execute a mobile marketing campaign.

In my previous entry I discussed two extremely important elements deserving consideration in order to achieve successful mobile marketing campaigns. Specifically, that customers are the ones who pay and things to think about when building the opt-in process. There are two additional elements that also warrant attention to ensure the consumer experience is smooth and engaging.

Message Flow

Not only are your opt-in, opt-out, and help messaging defined in advance, it’s important to define the entire message flow in advance. This must also be approved by the carriers pre-launch, and requires careful planning.

But the other part is understanding that the medium is still the message. In this case, it means your message is a serial, two-way conversation in 160-character bites. While some may consider it limiting or prohibitive, there are plenty of benefits to having 160-characters per message. It’s immediate. It’s brief. It carries its own urgency. How you craft the messaging to lead your customers to the desired outcome is vital. You must consider how to make a conversation with a machine feel engaging and natural.

Making Investments Pays Off

What’s the best way to make your investment in mobile pay off? That could probably be the topic for another post (or three), but a couple of quick suggestions are worth noting. First, make sure your target has an affinity with your brand or product. This is the reason you’ve seen mobile take off in the sports and entertainment realms so quickly. If they don’t have an affinity with your brand or the product brand, consider partnerships you can leverage. The inability to form that affinity with brand, product or partner endangers good opt-in results.

Second is to use the data to your best advantage. One goal you should have when crafting your campaign is to get much smarter about your customers. Don’t just ask questions, though, find fun ways to get insight to customer preferences and demographics.

Happy texting.

How Mobile Works - A Tactical Primer, Part 1

This is the first entry of a two-part series examining the four key elements of mobile marketing needed to successfully execute a mobile marketing campaign.

I talked a bit earlier about convergence in the mobile space, and my colleague Bryce talked about determining your needs for a mobile strategy. Let’s set aside what mobile marketing will look like in the future and whether or not you need a strategy today. Let’s assume you already have a strategy and want to get some mobile (SMS/MMS) campaigns going. Then what ? Here are some key points you need to understand about mobile marketing.

Customers Pay

There are many plans out there that include unlimited or generous texting limits, but the majority of plans do not. Unlike email, search, or display advertising, your mobile message may incur a distinct per-message charge for your customer. That means you need to consider the value of your message to the recipient very carefully. Does the recipient find value in your message? Enough to pay for it?

There’s also a difference between standard and premium text charges. Premium charges occur when the entity sending the message collects a per-message fee in addition to the fees charged by the carrier. Think about the “Lucky Case” game on NBC’s Deal or No Deal where you get to enter a contest, but each text message entry costs an additional $0.99 – that’s a premium fee. While these can be a revenue stream in and of themselves, they need to be accompanied by a compelling promotion or very high - value content. If your message is strictly for marketing purposes, steer clear of premium fees.

Most of the campaigns you’ll create as a marketer will only be “standard” charges – the ones the carriers impose. While you do need to be cognizant of the fees customers may pay, the only other consideration is that your opt-in message carries some text along the lines of “Standard text messaging fees apply.”

Mobile Opt-In

Opt-in is its own beast when it comes to mobile campaigns. Perhaps because of per-message fees and likely due to lessons learned from the advent of email and the subsequent spawning of spam, the process of opting-in is much more closely watched by the industry and government agencies. This involves carefully planning out the processes your audience will use to opt-in, opt-out, and get help well before the campaign starts, and getting those approved by the carriers in advance of your campaign launch.

Your mobile marketing provider should be able to walk you through this process or handle it for you. But it’s important to know that this process exists and that it is designed to make the mobile marketing arena safer for marketer and consumer alike. Build in some time for these approvals.

This is the end of part one. Check back for the other two key elements to successful mobile marketing campaigns.

Governing the Internet, Mobile Edition, Volume 1

As advertising within digital channels continues to grow thanks to breakthroughs in technology, the Federal Trade Commission is getting busy. As Mobile Marketer first reported, FTC commissioner Jon Leibowitz outlined some of his concerns in a town-hall forum in early May. His comments may indicate emerging guidelines to regulate the still evolving discipline of mobile marketing.

Many mobile tactics still lack definition. The FTC’s decision to police mobile brand-to-consumer communications more closely will both define, and refine, mobile marketing. There are four notable areas Leibowitz concentrated his comments.

First, disclaimers will have to be included. If mobile coupons, for an example, must have a disclaimer on them (which are often lengthy), will text messages expand beyond their current character limitations? Or does mobile marketing become more about awareness than sales-driving calls to action?

Second, the FTC is concerned about the possibilities of spam over mobile. To me, this is an understandable form of regulation, something that has enhanced email marketing from the consumer’s perspective.

For some, here’s the whopper – the FTC will take a very close look at the admissibility of GPS/location-based targeting. The concern revolves not only around the targeting, but the frequency that consumers may receive the messages.

The final point outlined in Leibowitz’s speech is marketing to teens via a mobile device.

A trend to follow is how the opt-in evolves in mobile marketing. The opt-in has become important for email and even behavioral targeting. It is safe to assume the same will be true of mobile, especially as it relates to location-based mobile targeting.

Interestingly, resolving the differences between the web on mobile and the mobile web may solve these issues entirely. If the web on mobile (e.g. the iPhone) wins out, then a mobile device is just another device with regular Internet and email access. The winner of that battle will forever change mobile strategies, tactics and the entire mobile landscape.

Do You Need a Mobile strategy – No and Yes

There is a great deal of uncertainty in the marketing world about the mobile channel. We see it every day. Is mobile marketing effective? Can this be demonstrated? What is the investment? How do we do it well? What does success look like?

Our responses can vary based on the client and their marketing goals. A recent post in Ad Age Digital included coverage of the New York Media Information Exchange Group (NY:MIEG) breakfast panel discussing this very question: Does every marketer need a mobile strategy?

My personal response to this question is to first take a step back and define the term "mobile."

A current definition of “mobile” or “mobile marketing” encompasses SMS or MMS bi-directional messaging, mobile advertising in its nascent state, mobile-friendly web content and perhaps some forms of mobile social networking (Twitter) all generally taking place on a mobile device like a cell phone or a smart phone. In these terms, it’s true that not all marketers need to be active in the mobile channel. Not all marketers have a clear-cut path to implementation of mobile tactics that makes sense for their brand, their customer or prospect, or their budget. My colleague Brian Deagan summed up this argument very well in his Lunchpail post here, and Dutch Hollis spoke to the possibilities of mobile targeting here.

Not every marketer needs to be implementing mobile marketing tactics in the next 12 to 24 months. This is a perfectly acceptable strategic statement for a company to have: “Our strategy at this time is to forego the production of content to be accessed on mobile phones, or the distribution of messages directly to mobile phones via SMS, mobile-friendly emails, web pages or mobile social networks.”

However, every marketer needs to know what the future of mobile marketing holds. As Ad Age asks, will there “even BE a ‘mobile’ category in the near future?” CNET’s Natali Del Conte responded at the NY:MIEG event: “in five years we’re not going to be talking about mobile, it’s just going to be part of connectivity.”

“In five years we’re not going to be talking about mobile, it’s just going to be part of connectivity.” – Natali Del Conte

When we define “mobile” in this more literal long-view the answer is clear: you must have a strategy for the future marketplace where the majority of consumers are engaged actively (daily) with portable media/communications devices (hopefully our future selves will stop calling them “phones”). As Ms. Del Conte summarizes, “If you don’t think about the fact that your content is going to be everywhere and people are going to be taking it with them all the time then you’re remiss at this point.”

While not every marketer needs a long-term mobile strategy, every marketer does need to formulate a strategy for the “all-content-is-portable” near future. E.g. “Our long-term marketing strategy recognizes the rapid changes in how consumers interact with online media. We are developing a five-year roadmap including a shift in focus and budgets to the production and distribution of content where and how the consumer demands.”

Right Now, Mobile is a Service

Since the news broke that GameSnake.com and Knotice are entering into a partnership, I thought I’d take a moment to offer some behind-the-scenes insight on how this partnership came about, and how it’s reflective of our current, overall mobile philosophy.

The Partnership

If you like playing pickup sports, or going mountain biking with a group, GameSnake.com is perfect for you. GameSnake members are able to configure their entire portfolio of physical activity in one place.

Members put in the activities they like and how far they’re willing to travel to participate. When anyone within that mileage radius, skill level and preferred activity organizes a game online, the other people that satisfy those criteria are sent an email and/or a mobile alert. Knotice will be sending the emails and alerts. Members can accept/decline the invitation, or communicate with each other and discuss specifics. GameSnake members will also be able to see what games are going on via bi-directional SMS (e.g. text to the GameSnake shortcode).

GameSnake is ground-breaking in their blend of offline and online social networking. They offer a place for sports and recreation enthusiasts to congregate and communicate both on and offline. GameSnake provides a valuable service to active people. Their approach coincides with a core principal to our approach to mobile marketing.

The Philosophy

Mobile marketing is only as good as consumer adoption. While adoption of standard services, like voice minutes, continues to increase rapidly, consumers have been slower in incorporating other services like SMS, MMS and data plans. In certain demos, yes, the adoption is already there. In others, the numbers will increase with time; and improvements in the overall mobile experience will spur growth in those mobile content delivery methods.

For now, mobile marketing programs are only as good as a consumer’s willingness to engage.

The numbers bear that out. In a report cited by eMarketer in January, and originally published by Deloitte Development and Harrison Group, only 61-percent of consumers that have a mobile device actually text message. That is a cross-section of all demographics with 86-percent of “Millennials” (ages 13-24) texting and only 15-percent of “matures” (ages 61-75). Internet access for all user demographics is all the way down at 35-percent.

While Knotice has capabilities ranging from the mobile web to MMS couponing the numbers show low adoption. Consumers are more interested in mobile marketing if it is adding value to their consumer experience and less interested if you’re trying to sell them something. As the trust begins to build between the consumer and their mobile device the adoption curve will spike and mobile marketing will evolve. Until then, it’s all about service. Until then, it’s all about value-added services that make a consumer’s life a little better, and in turn, the brand relationships a little stronger.