The Whitelist

Step right up, all the leading-edge content you can consume…  Howdy y’all (loving Atlanta).  Wow, been drinking from the firehose today, what an amazing calibre and quantity of information to digest.  Fortunately (thankfully), I’ve had help from my bloggingpartner-in-crime Chrissy in getting double the coverage of sessions than I could have done on my own.  She was in John Coe’s session early this afternoon on Data-Driven Creative (B2B) and did a great job picking up what he was laying down.  Here’s the rub: data and creative are not connected (by the vast majority of marketers – even the good ones), even though we KNOW that ‘the higher the relevancy of the offer and the message, the higher the engagement will be of the recipient’.  To get thru the clutter (and noise in the inbox), data and creative HAVE to be connected.

Okay John.  How?  Campaign plan comes first (driven by database), creative comes second.  The campaign plan needs to have 3 levels – 1st being based on demographic data, and the creative should be ’soft and relevant’ to a specific demographic.  2nd level is set around behavioral data (search inquiries, whitepaper downloads etc) and the creative needs to reference the behavior that triggered the message being sent – with a goal of getting recipient’s commitment to next buying step.  3rd level is then driven by relationship data (lead scoring, sales/site visits, high value customer…) and now the creative is functional, direct and a hard sell “we know you’re about ready” with a message goal of commitment to final steps in buying process.  Key point – the creative must involve 3 critical things – messaging, offer, and media (email vs postal).

Big-game marketing tools

You buying?  I’m selling.  Love this stuff, high calibre ammo to go big-game hunting.  Yeah baby yeah.

Gotta go get my Easy-on.  The 20’s themed SpeakEasy party started half an hour ago, I’m late.  More (much more) later.

new branding - nice

So we’re underway.  Great opening remarks from Bill Nussey to start the day.  It’s a packed house and after the first two elements, the Summit is living up to the hype!  Bill shared some of the recent and time-proven successes of Silverpop, notably 20 quarters of profitable operation; SP approaching the 1k client mark – a significant milestone in the industry; 375 employees and growing – it’s a compelling story.

a moving target? yes, but attainable

Bill started a great dialogue on engagement, and harkened back to last year when the term ‘engagement marketing’ started being used (as far as we know, it started at last year’s SP Summit).  Wikipedia has a great tool called ‘disambiguation‘ – especially useful when dealing with a term like engagement.  Of the over 1 dozen potential meanings, it was clarified as “to hold the attention of…”.  Going further and more focused to SP’s philosophy – “to involve oneself, participate”.  From there, we were treated to hear/see how the transformation of Marketing 1.0 to 2.0 is happening.  From interrupting to engaging.  From paying attention to participating.  And in particular, going from communicating to segments over to communicating to individuals.  It is the change of 1 way communications (and listening to echoes) vs true 2-way dialogue.

Bill wrapped up with sharing how everything is becoming marketing: every touch point, every support case, etc…  What this is then leading to (according to Bill’s crystal ball) is how we’re going to get from Optimization 1.0 (that can typically provide 5-10% lift) into the 2.0 environment (enabling lifts of 20-30% and more!), whereby O-2.0 is optimized for the individual, not for the site.  AND, this then segued brilliantly into how SP is making it happen.  The BIG RELEASE NEWS – Send Time Optimization.  Imagine, an eMarketing platform system so smart that it figures out when to deliver email based on when a recipient is online and “in” their inbox.  Optimization 2.0 – an enhanced, complex set of business rules and logic to ensure the very best results/conversions/ROI – for every INDIVIDUAL.

Excited – yes.  Inspired – definitely.  Engaged – absolutely!  Stay tuned, more to come soon – same bat channel (but various bat times).

Smart marketer at SP Summit

Very exciting time here outside of Atlanta at the SP Client Summit.  The pre-

Smarter. Has smart marketers working for him (Brad's boss)

conference ‘boot camps’ have wrapped up and the welcome reception is just getting underway.  Met some very savvy marketers already, and decided to do some ‘pre-release’ polling of what might be coming out from being under wraps as the ‘big release’ scheduled for tomorrow…

Brad Parmerter and Barry Burmaster of Trans World Entertainment have been clients of SP’s for over 5 years – this is their first Summit, and when asked ‘what game-changer do you think might be coming?’, they said that since the demographic they target is 18-34 yr olds, it’s all about SMS/mobile/and Tweeting, and that they’re hopeful the release is geared around that front.

Terry Sartor of UPS, a local Atlanta here at his 1st SP Summit

Terry Sartor is here from UPS (came all the way from downtown Atlanta), and was in the email-intensives ‘boot camp’ as he is tasked with getting up to speed fast on email.  He’s been doing online marketing for years within different divisions of UPS, but is new to email.  Top takeaways for him were getting a handle on the email measurements and analytics to prove ROI (coincidentally, the very topic I’m presenting on for Weds) and is keen on putting the best-practices he learned today about layout and design elements of content into production.  “WAIT!” he said.  “SOCIAL!  So critical for us, that’s a really important topic to bring some back some expertise on.”

Others that commented in passing said they would wish that the new release has something to do with getting a higher level/deeper involvement of engagement with their audience.  I think they’re onto something here…

So off to snack and drink and schmooze.  You’re quasi-official blogger signing off for now.

If you’re following best practices in email marketing, you’re not asking for anything more than the essentials on your email signup page.  It may be painful, but it is a best practice in permission-based email marketing to ask for a little and gain a lot in signups.

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