CM Summit Round Up

 Hi All,
The CM Summit managed to surpass all expectations this week, as part of the Internet Week schedule. Before the event, the list of speakers and topics was enough to get excited, but what the agenda materialized into was much better! The digital A-listers included Dennis Crowley, Dick Costolo, and Arianna Huffington, and the presentations and discussions were insightful and practical.
One of the main focuses of the event was the challenge of how to engage customers.  This is something everyone struggles with, no matter what business you’re in. Email Marketing is a great tool for doing this for many  reasons, mostly because it’s digital so you can capture customer behavior and use it to engage.
From the very first “touch”, there are multiple reasons to engage with a prospect or even a casual contact. If the person has shown an interest in your business or organization, you need to capitalize on that first introduction. In other words, assume that they could become a customer. At the very least, invite them to be part of your community, your blog, and social network, so you have other opportunities to engage them in the future. Sure, it’s email marketing 101, but do you remember to follow up every time?
The other side to this is ongoing customer interaction.
With digital marketing, you can survey, track, record, and capture the “voice to the customer” to deliver the services and products they want. Okay, sounds great in theory, but do we do it in practice? For instance, when was the last time you surveyed your subscribers? They’re all heading out for vacation now… do you know if their preferences will change over the summer? So the key word here is practice. A great quote from the event was, “If you haven’t failed then you’re not trying hard enough.” So don’t be afraid to ask subscribers what they need and want from you. But there are 100s of methods of engaging customers, and not all of them will work for you, so you have to experiment, survey and test until you find what fits.















Let’s dig a little deeper into some of the tactics brought up at the summit. They’re not rocket science, but reinforce how important these practices are to your email marketing success. You can, as we mentioned, use your GetResponse newsletters to link to your social media pages or your forum and engage your clients there. That’s great, but your “front line” of action should be to engage them directly from your emails. According to a 2010 Marketing Sherpa study, over 78 percent of respondents said they still preferred email as their primary channel of communications, with social media coming in a distant second at 22 percent.
First of all, let’s look at your From address. It should be a real, monitored email address, specific to your campaign or newsletter. Even if you think your email shouldn’t require feedback, always give your readers the option to respond. So dump the noreply@xxxx.com for welisten@xxxx.com. Within your message, mention that readers can provide feedback by just replying. Even if customers don’t reply, it will tell them that you’re interested in what they think.
Secondly, spend as much time as you need on your subject line… it’s that important. Think “bait”. Keep it short, to the point, but titillating. Include enough to give them an accurate summary of what’s waiting for them, but try a question or command format to generate curiosity. A question within the subject line will tell them that the answer to that question is valuable and they can find it somewhere in that email.
Third, use your Email Marketing Tips Blog statistics as an investigative tool. Here’s what I mean. If you have complementary products or services, insert links to these “value-added solutions” in your email, then track the actions taken by your readers to get a clear indication as to what they want to buy, see or do.
At present, a lot of you do this, however your readers may not be aware that their choices are molding your brand and what you deliver to them in your promotions, newsletters, and campaigns.  Let them know this. Customers respond positively when they know their choices matter.

I’ll finish up our engagement discussion with an example that may spark your creativity. This is a case study from Paramount Pictures.
You’ve heard of the movie ‘Paranormal Activity’, right? If you haven’t, I highly recommend it. Well, the film was produced for $15,000. It was aimed at the cult horror audience initially and wasn’t planned to go out to mass audiences. So Paramount gave the marketing team a budget of $0 to build awareness… sound familiar?  Anyway, what they did was put it in the hands of the fans. They set up basic HTML web pages with ‘Demand It’ options. You could watch the trailer of the movie and demand that they bring it to your town.
Enough demands = A one-time showing in your area.
This way they knew that the cost of showing the film would be covered by the demand. Then they asked attendees to give feedback on the website, which created awareness that led to more requests in other areas. The result?
A worldwide gross of $193,770,000 driven by the fans of a $15,000 movie with a $0 marketing budget! Genius.
Paramount didn’t stop there. To thank all the folks who made it all possible, they offered the chance to be included in the movie credits for the DVD release. How cool is that! If you’re curious how many people decided to engage in that offer, check out http://www.paranormalactivityproject.com/ and take a look. Yikes.
The take away from this is that every brand has the ability to engage their audiences – without spending zillions of dollars. Once you take the time to find out how to communicate with them and when, you’ll be breaking all your old campaign records, fast!
Until next time.
Mick