Thursday, March 17, 2016

Many Websites Miss the Mark on E-mail Sign-ups

The e-mail subscription efforts of commercial websites are surprisingly spotty, according to a recent study by digital marketing firm Publicare Marketing Communications. Publicare attempted to subscribe to e-mail lists on 6,757 websites. Shockingly, given the value of e-mail acquisition, 10% of sites did not even offer e-mail subscriptions, and 18% made it hard for visitors to sign up by hiding the subscription form on subpages or requiring a user account prior to sign-up. So congratulations to the 87.3% who put the subscription form on the home page, and the 29.7% of those who then promoted a simple form with a pop-up layer. But shame on the 13.2% who got folks to join their e-mail list and then dropped the ball, failing to deliver even one e-mail within two months of winning a subscriber. And despite the high ROI of e-mail marketing, only 18.8% offered an incentive, such as a coupon, for joining the mailing list. By the way, opt-in strategy ran the gamut from confirmed opt-in (46%) to single opt-in (34.2%) to double opt-in (19.8%). For a useful infographic, see https://hive.publicare.de/en/email-marketing-benchmark-part1/

Tuesday, March 15, 2016

Leaping the Hurdles to Cross-Channel Attribution

Cross-channel attribution is an acknowledged challenge now that most marketers combine multiple channels--both digital (search, e-mail, social media) and offline (direct mail, TV)--for multiple customer touchpoints in the buying cycle and a flood of data. Multichannel marketers need to identify the sales contribution of each channel, campaign and component (offer, creative, data targeting, timing, etc.) to optimize marketing spend and maximize bottom line and growth. A recent Direct Marketing News magazine article by contributing writer Jason Compton outlined the complexity of the issue. Here's a telling statistic: 38% of digital marketers have no attribution model in place and 34% rely on a single touchpoint, per Webmarketing123's 2015 State of Digital Marketing survey. Issues include lack of a common and lasting customer identifier across channels; use of simplistic first-touch or last-touch attribution over complex data matching; the cost (69% of attribution tech users polled by Forrester were companies with over 1,000 employees); and failure to integrate offline with online channels. For example, Forrester Research found that over 90% of marketers included online display and paid search in attribution models but only 42% included mass media and just 26% incorporated direct mail or catalogs! The prospect of attribution improvement is not out of reach, however, and the article provides real-life success stories, from cataloger Cabela's to a small, regional quick-serve chain, plus some handy "do's" and "don'ts" for the attribution-challenged. For details, read http://www.dmnews.com/dataanalytics/curing-marketers-attribution-addiction/article/478079/