Marketers are keeping an open mind about using Twitter’s just launched Early Bird Exclusive Offers e-commerce service, but none DMNews spoke with had made a concrete commitment to use the deal-promotion platform.

Twitter debuted the service July 6 as its first step into online retail.

The program, which creates an additional revenue stream for the social site, will allow Twitter and select advertisers to promote time- and supply-sensitive deals on products and events, such as concert tickets. Twitter users who subscribe to @earlybird will see the offers in their feeds, where links will lead them to the point of purchase after a few clicks.

Aaron Magness, senior director of brand marketing and business development for online shoe store Zappos.com, said his company’s flagship brand likely wouldn’t utilize @earlybird.

“We really utilize Twitter as a means to form personal connections and interact with our customers and employees,” he said. “We don’t use it to offer discounts or deals.”

However, Magness added that he could envision companies that already use Twitter to offer discounts taking advantage of the service.

“It could be interesting for other sites and other retailers that are price sensitive,” he said. “We have a sister site – 6pm.com – that’s all about value for great brands. At that point, it might be something that is interesting for 6pm.com. I think it really depends on how the retailers are utilizing tools like Twitter.”

Twitter will use the service to generate revenue through agreements with advertisers.

The microblogging site was criticized through 2009 for lacking an obvious business model. Its other recent revenue-focused platforms include the Promoted Tweets and sponsored trending topics.

Early Bird is similar to strategies implemented by marketers including computer maker Dell, and JetBlue Airways, which regularly post deals on their own Twitter pages. The move also makes Twitter a competitor to other daily-deal websites, including Groupon and Woot.

Morgan Johnston, manager of corporate communications at JetBlue Airways, said the airline is open to the idea of offering deals on @earlybird, adding that it uses Twitter’s Promoted Tweets.

“We try to be an innovative company,” Johnston said. “We try to always look for what’s going on in the future. As new products and services and initiatives develop, we’re certainly going to take a look at them and see if they work with our strategy.”

It is unclear when the first deal will be posted to the feed. As of July 9, the @ earlybird page, which had nearly 23,000 followers, included a link to frequently asked questions about the program and a text message option for consumers. While

Twitter said on its blog that it plans “to choose exciting deals,” retailers will determine the prices of items and how many will be available.

Augie Ray, senior analyst at Forrester Research, said the service “seems like a fairly modest early entry” into e-commerce.

“In fact, I’m not even sure I’d call it e-commerce at this point,” he said. “It seems to be much more positioned as a bit of an advertising play, to be honest. It’s a different strategy for them because they haven’t been content producers.”

A Twitter representative referred calls from DMNews seeking comment to a company blog post on the platform’s launch.

http://www.dmnews.com/twitter-e-commerce-play-a-mixed-bag-for-marketers/article/174411/

The campaign will include e-mail marketing, in-flight and airport spots, and online and out-of-home advertising. Agency Carlson Marketing created the campaign.

The effort, “Be True,” was created eight months after an overhaul of the loyalty program, said Leann Guinn, coordinator of marketing programs at JetBlue.

She said the campaign is an opportunity for JetBlue to re-introduce the rewards program, adding that many JetBlue customers are not program members.

Guinn said JetBlue is targeting 25-to-50-year-old consumers, and its media plan focuses on individuals who are searching for travel in their day-to-day lives.

The company enlisted real people for the campaign. The campaign creative features the “real passions” of six TruBlue members, each with a story about dedication. For instance, one member talks about providing clean water wells in Tanzania, while another speaks about teaching improvisation.

The airline made changes to the program after a customer survey was conducted a year and a half ago. Taking consumer opinions into consideration, the company added more flexibility with accrued points that no longer expire, with the proviso that members must travel on at least one paid JetBlue flight or make a qualifying purchase with a JetBlue Card from American Express within 12 months of their last TruBlue transaction.

Members who sign up can participate in an enrollment program and flight bonus opportunities. Through July 8, members will receive 1,000 bonus points when they join. The airline will also provide an additional 2,000 points to consumers who buy a flight ticket and travel within 60 days of signing up.

http://www.dmnews.com/jetblue-campaign-touts-trublue-loyalty-program/article/173858/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+NewsDMNews+(DMNews+News)

Marketers have always known the value of brand building. Once consumers begin to trust a brand, their loyalty to it grows – and loyal customers have far higher long-term value than opportunistic customers. However, the greatest challenge has always been how to create customer loyalty.

Consumers have shown that they will defect from brands that bombard them with impersonal and irrelevant information. Similarly, they are more likely to make a purchase after a personalized interaction with a brand.

Those organizations that initiate personalized customer engagement will be rewarded with loyal customers. First impressions can’t be taken back, so it’s important to identify interested consumers effectively – to not damage your brand for future customers – and then to ensure that the initial engagement does not try to hard-sell, which may be rejected by the consumer.

Online lead generation is now used by marketers to initiate long-term customer engagement. Customer information and some basic preferences can be captured through most techniques in this arena. The latest approaches promote softer engagement at the outset and ongoing interaction to gather insight into the customer as well as increase exposure of the brand.

Creating a one-on-one dialog between a brand and an interested consumer is the kind of soft-sell that promotes long-term benefits. The customer is given more time in which the brand can nurture trust, as well as continually discover more information that enables further personalized engagement.

It’s important to ensure that engagement with the customer is varied and always relevant to the preferences you have established with them. Sending the customer coupons for free trials or a purchase discount are valid outlets for customer engagement. However, this is one part of the conversation, which should go further. Organizations should use communications, such as newsletters, to deliver company updates as well as consumer-oriented advice that will appeal to the customer. This engagement builds trust and also creates further context for the engagement. The more that you know about the customer, the more precisely you can target those special offers and promotions – and the more warmly they will be received.

http://www.dmnews.com/go-further-in-customer-loyalty-practices-to-build-brand/article/173631/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+NewsDMNews+%28DMNews+News%29

Many of us are still in love with the 4Ps, a strong model developed in 1960 that revolves around company-driven decisions on price, product, place and promotion.  After 50 years, it’s time for a new model to complement the 4Ps.  At the Internet Retailers Conference in early June, I spoke about the 4As, a 100% customer-driven model that is centered on awareness, assessment, action and ambassador phases.

This model is all about how our customers make decisions, how they learn, how they act after the transaction and why they decide to become or not become passionate voices for our brands.

Customers don’t care about your company as much as they do their online friends. They want to do one of three things online to help their peers. Share ideas, share product knowledge and help peers with problems. If you do even one of these well, you will connect.

Less than 50 people drive share of conversation for your brand. Similar to mainstream media, very few people make a real difference. The rest of us share and follow. Do you know who they are?

Your website is really just a place to store your favorite content.  It’s time you take each piece of that content and share it via a new content syndication network, so you reach 20 to 40x more people via social media.

Your search strategy is in need of work. If you don’t believe me, stop reading this column right now and write down the five questions being asked by your customers today about your brand. Know them?

Do you know the exact words your customers use when they are in decision-making mode? What if you could scrape those conversations in real-time, bring them back to a folder and decide who to outreach to?

I’ll end with discussion of a “dinosaur model” that we call customer service. A customer support approach where we wait for people to call us or visit our site is archaic. Even the best companies will have less than 10% of their customers call them in a given year, which means that more than 90% of your customers are figuring out their issues without you, right or wrong every year.

Your customers are making decisions every day about your brand. The question is: Do you know if they are falling in love with your brand or your competitor’s and how you could be more involved?

http://www.dmnews.com/are-your-customers-falling-in-love-with-your-competitors-brands/article/172946/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+NewsDMNews+%28DMNews+News%29

Guest Blogger Kathleen Kusek of Firehouse Marketing Services predicts a new focus and form for focus groups.

For those of us who saw The Brady Bunch when it ran in prime time, today’s focus groups are shockingly familiar to those at the beginning of our careers. Same one-way glass. Same semi-retired, ex-brand manager/mother of 1.5 children “moderating” the same group of target consumers gathered using more or less the same screening technique. Sure–now we can watch the action on webcam and we can check our emails and Facebook pages while our people are being interviewed…but I might suggest those advances don’t really improve our ability to glean insight. Did anyone think we’d have evolved to a better way of understand our precious target audiences’ needs and motivations by now?

The focus groups of the future should look different in the following ways:

–We won’t spend 10 to 20% of our precious time with moderators and respondents introducing themselves to each other so they can feel “comfortable” answering questions honestly. Come on–in this era of “consumers in charge,” focus group respondents are not the least bit hesitant to tell us what they think and will be even less so in the future. Painful as it can be, the people we pay to talk about our products or ideas aren’t generally looking to tell us what we want to hear. Cocktail party pleasantries are a thing of the past–these people are telling us what they think. In fact, just as an experiment, have the moderator introduce his/herself (the “his” is just a PC throwaway–focus group moderators are mostly from the pink ghetto) as the CEO of the company you represent. I’d bet my ranch that the respondents will answer as honestly, or perhaps even more honestly, than when they hear the same “I’m a completely objective observer” spiel delivered by 90% of focus group moderators across the country for the last 20 years. Just for fun, check out the respondents during that familiar 5-minute monologue and watch their lips move along to each word from the moderator’s mouth. Save yourself time by skipping this step. Instead, start by asking respondents a specific question to which you’d like an answer. Promise that they’ll be able to play along.

–We won’t have 7-10 respondents for 90 to 120 minutes (I swear, some people are STILL doing 2-hour focus groups) anymore. In too many cases, the meaning of “focus” has been lost in our focus groups. Instead they’ve become a catch all for every wild hare that the extended marketing team may have–a faster (though not cheaper or better) way to answer important questions that can and should be addressed quantitatively. Respondents don’t want to focus on the things we care about for 120 minutes and we shouldn’t try to make them. In fact, if we can’t hone our questions to be answered in 60 minutes, the problem is likely on our side. Wasn’t it Einstein that said a problem well defined is half solved? He was no dummy. The focus groups of the future will have fewer people for shorter amounts of time.
Parenthetically, with wide-spread internet access, it’s the back room that is really hurting for focus lately. The time and expense tenured marketing execs incur to attend focus groups in person, only to be immersed in work at the home front and respond with “what was that, again?” when respondents address key questions on the table, continues to amaze.
I don’t mean to be pointing the finger here–most of us suffer from Back Room ADD. It’s dark, fun people are gathered in a small space and candy is abundant. It’s basically entrapment. No news here–it was always tough to focus in the back room.
But the new variable is Internet access. As a key amenity, focus group facilities of the future should tout the absence of conductivity. It’s a scary premise to agree to, but we should hold hands and take the jump. We’ll learn more from the people who matter most and generate a better ROR (that’s return on research, in case you were wondering).

–We’ll elevate the position of “moderator” to Consumer Scientist (lab coat optional). This person (though a betting person would say he/she is still more likely to be a female, because we really do listen better, don’t we ?) will be trained in psychology to analyze not only what respondents say, but what they mean. This trained professional will know how to understand what our participants say, and be able to read their silences and their expressions and their interaction with information and the other respondents, resulting in an equation that equals insight not otherwise gleaned from the verbal answers. If we are just looking for an unanalyzed response from an appropriately screened respondent, we can easily get the answer online for a fraction of the time and cost, never ever requiring a middle seat on the redeye. Our Consumer Scientist of the future will share true insights based on their superior understanding of things like neuroplasticity and stress created by the delta between ideals and reality and other aspects of psychology that aren’t taught in top business schools. But we’ll be the ones on the hook to translate those insights into motivating messaging, innovation and product improvement, arguably the hard part.

What’s the timeline of the more focused focus group? I hope it’s tomorrow, generously giving ourselves a full day to soak up all these pearls. Some marketers are making great strides already (you know who you are–so please take a moment to feel appropriately self satisfied). The optimist in me says five years, paying no attention to where we are now versus two decades ago. If I’m right, I’ll be richly rewarded with “free” M&Ms and unbearable self satisfaction.

http://www.marketingpower2.com/blog/marketingnews/2010/05/what_will_the_focus_group_of_t.html

Do

Be granular: Use the power of the Internet to custom tailor your campaigns as much as possible. If you’re buying search ads on Google for blue widgets, then make sure your text ad creative is about blue widgets, and once the user clicks this ad, the landing page should be all about blue widgets too.

Google is not your only friend: While Google is a great way to build your sales, it’s not the only game in town. FaceBook, MySpace, Yahoo  and MSN have great self-serve products as well and generally there is less competition on those platforms for you to make a bigger profit, especially if you can be creative.

Bring them back: You may have noticed that after you visit a commerce site, their ads start showing up all over the web whenever you are doing your search for weeks afterward? That is behavioral targeting (BT) at play, and one of this strategy’s major features is retargeting. A number of companies allow you to display ads to users that visited your site but didn’t buy. The idea is to target users that have expressed interest but for some reason didn’t checkout. Give them a better deal in your retargeting efforts.

Don’t

Go home: To your homepage that is. In most cases you should be linking your ads to specific product pages. Internet users are bombarded with information, and if they don’t see the content on their first click, chances are they will not spend the time searching or browsing to your site to find what they were looking for.

Miss upsell opportunities: What makes Amazon so successful is their ability to upsell. They are the masters of selling your complementary products and products “you might like”. Your shoppers have their credit cards out, make sure you take advantage of it.

Ever stop testing: John Wanamaker, the father of modern advertising once famously said, ”Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.” This quote is still true in most cases today—except when you advertise online. The Web gives you the ability to split test ad creative, multiple offers and multiple landing pages, all in real-time. If you’re not constantly split testing and optimizing, then you’re not improving your metrics. Besides generating more profits, stronger metrics allow you to outbid your competition for ad inventory, spend more on advertising and affords a broader range of ads to build up your market share.

http://www.dmnews.com/constantly-evolve-your-online-marketing/article/172480/

According to the report, entitled “Manifesto for E-mail Marketers: Consumers Demand Relevance,”  64% of consumers want marketers to know the types of products or services they like; 54% want marketers to know whether the consumer is a new or returning customer and 36% want marketers to know their shopping habits (e.g., online searching, in-store visits, and catalog purchases).

In addition, 85% of surveyed consumers want companies to ask about their e-mail preferences at registration.

“Because consumers have clearly indicated that they will reward marketers for personalized, preference-driven messages with their engagement, e-mail marketers need to capture information that allows them to get to know their subscribers better,” said Andrea Orvis, group director of strategic services for e-Dialog, in an e-mail. “They need to stop looking at e-mail as a tool for a quick sale and instead look at it as a way to build more profitable and enduring customer relationships.”

Approximately 2,000 consumers were polled in an online survey, which took place during the first quarter of 2010. Forrester Research conducted the survey on e-Dialog’s behalf.

http://www.dmnews.com/consumers-want-personalized-e-mail-from-marketers/article/171888/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+NewsDMNews+(DMNews+News)

“Renewal efforts are critical to maintaining a donor base, and properly managing that type of campaign is important for the National Wildlife Federation,” said Shawn Salta, VP, mail operations & postal affairs at DirectMail.com.

NWF chose DirectMail.com from a pool of five undisclosed shops after the nonprofit put out an RFP, said Martina White, director of marketing for membership acquisitions and renewals at NWF. NWF’s previous renewals mail shop had been Iwco Direct, she said.

DirectMail.com and NWF have worked together off and on for the past six years on a contractual basis, as well as on an ad hoc basis, Salta said. White explained that this previous relationship and NWF’s awareness of DirectMail.com’s capabilities set them apart from competing companies.

The renewal work will involve sending approximately 500,000 mailings per month to reactivate dormant donors, who can receive up to ten renewal notices.

Merkle, another of NWF’s agency partners, will contribute copy and creative for each month’s mailing, while DirectMail.com will handle data processing, packaging and some of the printing for each renewal effort, White said.

The two companies have also partnered to create a direct mail campaign to help raise money for the oil spill disaster clean-up in the Gulf of Mexico. Merkle designed the copy and creative for these mailings as well, after DirectMail.com recommended a package design that could be turned around the quickest, given the urgency of the oil spill disaster. A standard #10 envelope design proved the most cost-effective and easiest to manufacture.

“DirectMail.com is on our go-to list of shops for any number of different campaigns we do, so when we identified the need for a quick turnaround on the package design, we called two vendors, and DirectMail.com had better pricing, so we went with them,” White explained. “From the time we awarded them the business, 850,000 mailings had to be turned around in five days, which they did.”

The NWF has 1 million active donors, she said. The nonprofit does one appeal mailing each month, in which donors are asked to donate to a particular environmental cause.

“This will be an extra appeal mailing for May,” White said. “Typically an appeal mailing is to 400,000 donors, so this is more than double that, due to the broader interest and timeliness of the emergency.”

All proceeds from the fund-raising effort will go toward on-site cleanup, where NWF VP of direct mail Dave Strauss is currently aiding the cause, White said.

“This will be restricted fundraising, with all money going to Gulf rather than going toward keeping the lights on here,” she explained. “It’s a matter of just grabbing the opportunity when it arose.”

http://www.dmnews.com/nwf-directmailcom-partner-for-renewal-contract-oil-spill-fundraising/article/

For more marketing news, check us out on Twitter!

http://twitter.com/MyPersonalPR

The company’s goal is to more accurately attribute ROI to its social media initiatives. It worked with Rockefeller Consulting Group/Insight Capitalists on the program.

“We’ve figured out a way to track any Tweets that go out through our customers to a prospect that actually comes to us and becomes a customer,” said Brian Bradley, EVP of strategy and marketing at MicroBilt. “So we can associate our new customers with any of those referrals, and the ROI can be traced directly to the customer that referred the new one.”

The MicroBilt Rewards program offers customers points towards items including office equipment, hot air balloon rides, tickets and trips. Reward points accumulate when a search or report is requested from MicroBilt.com.

“We started thinking how could we use Twitter to connect to those loyal customers, reward them for Tweeting about us and reward them for actually referring customers,” Bradley said. “We have a program to reward direct customer referrals, or through another channel, like e-mail, and this is a new way to do that.”

MicroBilt has embraced social media since its partnership with comedians Rhett & Link on the YouTube video series, “I Love Local Commercials.” The information provider sponsored the vignettes on humorous commercials for local companies.

“The success of that program has been an eye opener for all of us — it’s been a catalyst for us to continue to find ways to use social media,” Bradley said.

http://www.dmnews.com/microbilt-mixes-reward-program-with-twitter/article/171161/