Thursday, May 21, 2015

Messy Marketing? See Stanley Steemer's Cleanup

Stanley Steemer's e-mail and direct mail strategies were sending customers on a messy path through channel silos and poorly targeted messaging, until the company decided to clean up its marketing. Take a look at the national carpet and floor cleaning firm's successful marketing revamp, as reported recently by Direct Marketing News magazine. Stanley Steemer's e-mail and direct mail weren't working together and results were hard to track, the company says of its pre-2014 marketing efforts. The cleaning firm decided to tackle one channel at a time, starting with upgrading e-mail frequency, content, and segmentation. So it went from one promotional e-mail a month to three, with the same offer at the beginning of the month and end of the month and a content-driven e-mail in between. Its e-mail welcome series' design and content were also refreshed. Then Stanley Steemer changed its e-mail segmentation strategy, going from segmenting only by branch or franchise contacts to segmenting by customer engagement (opens and clicks), purchase behavior, and offers, as well as branch or franchise group. By April 2014, it was time to tackle direct mail segmentation and content targeting, too. Now Stanley Steemer sends nine direct mail pieces a year with 10 to 20 different segmented versions per campaign, based on list information and purchase behavior. Results? Stanley Steemer saw a 33% increase in direct mail-generated bookings, and a 200% increase in mail response rates after launching its acquisition strategy. For e-mail, campaigns have delivered a 20% month-over-month increase in online bookings. Just introduced this March, a new e-mail trigger program for incomplete or cancelled orders had delivered a 50% rise in average open rates by April. For more details, read http://www.dmnews.com/email-marketing/stanley-steemer-cleans-up-its-email-and-direct-mail-strategies/article/410071/

Tuesday, May 19, 2015

Google 'Mobilizes' As Smartphone Search Tops PCs

Surging mobile usage has tech giant Google "mobilizing" resources to adapt and profit--with important marketing impacts. Marking a clear tipping point, Google announced this May that its influential search engine now has more search requests on mobile devices than on personal computers in the U.S. and many other parts of the world, according to an Associated Press report in The Washington Post. The growth in mobile use --for e-mail, search, social networking, even shopping and donating--has been rapid since Apple first introduced the iPhone in 2007. Among Google's strategies to accommodate mobile preferences was the launch in April of a "mobilegeddon" change in its search recommendation system to favor websites that easily read and load on smartphones. The change sent websites scurrying to make themselves mobile-friendly to avoid demotion in search results. Google also has been introducing advertising formats that tend to work better on mobile devices. For instance, rooms can now be booked within hotel ads, and car ads can be swiped to comparison shop, the report notes. Mobile ad prices are on the upswing, too. Previously, marketers were unwilling to pay as much for commercial messages displayed on the smaller smartphone screens, but the race for mobile space is heating up. The AP story quotes Google as saying that mobile ad prices are climbing steadily and will continue to do so. Jerry Dischler, Google's vice president in charge of its “AdWords” service, summed up the urgency of a mobile strategy for today's marketers: "The future of mobile is now." See the complete AP story: http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/google-searches-on-mobile-devices-top-those-on-pcs/2015/05/05/cccd64de-f366-11e4-bcc4-e8141e5eb0c9_story.html