Thursday, July 23, 2015

Prepping Non-Political Ads for Social Election Impact

The 2016 presidential election is already grabbing headlines, ad space and social media attention, and it's only going to get more intense. This election cycle, non-political marketers not only have to be concerned about competition for consumer attention in broadcast media and direct mail, they will need to plan for a political blitz in social media, such as Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter. Marketers need to start planning now for how to prevent their non-political messages from being drowned out, squeezed out, and priced out of the social media space. A recent Direct Marketing News magazine article by Perry Simpson, digital content coordinator, warns that cost-per-click (CPC) pricing--a popular way to sponsor and boost posts on Facebook and other social sites--is likely to increase significantly as politicians fight for attention. Simpson suggests three ways to prepare now for the social impact of the election frenzy. First, analyze your geographic performance, especially on a state level. Excluding battleground states, which are likely to see larger CPC spikes, is one option if those states are not key to performance. Next, test and hone messaging now to make sure your creative is as compelling as possible, since cost-per-click on networks like Facebook is affected by click-through rate (higher response lowers CPC). Finally, tighten up CPC bids before the election grabs the market. Lowering bids closer to your desired CPC will avoid outstripping target spend when bids start to climb because of political competition. For more detail, read http://www.dmnews.com/social-media/3-tips-for-non-political-marketing-during-the-presidential-elections/article/427133/

Tuesday, July 21, 2015

Are Inbox Placement Fails Sapping Your E-mail?

It's an old saying in business that you can only manage what you measure. A recent Target Marketing magazine article by Tom Sather, Return Path's senior director of e-mail research, makes the important point that many marketers are not measuring, and thus not managing, e-mail inbox placement rates. In evaluating e-mail campaign performance, they may focus on improving subject lines, list targeting or brand engagement without realizing that a key part of the target audience never saw the message. They may be comforted by a good deliverability rate, but that rate only measures the percent of e-mail that did not bounce. Inbox placement rates, on the other hand, measure the number of messages actually arriving in subscribers' inboxes, taking into account those undelivered plus those shunted into spam folders. E-mail inbox placement will be affected by bad addresses and ISP filtering for poor reputation, content and engagement. Inbox placement will in turn fundamentally affect the validity of benchmarks and testing results as well as e-mail ROI, Sather points out. To put his remarks in perspective, note 17% of permission-based e-mails fail to reach inboxes globally--6% going to spam folders and 11% blocked--according to Return Path's most recent "Inbox Placement 2014" benchmark report. U.S. marketers did only a little better, with 13% of e-mails failing to reach inboxes on average. But on an industry basis, inbox placement rates have a wide range, with the best inbox placement rate attributed to health and beauty pitches (96%) and software and Internet e-mails at the bottom (43%). For Sather's comments on why inbox placement matters, read http://www.targetmarketingmag.com/article/inbox-placement-rates-cant-measure-cant-see/