Joel Book on Interactive Engagement

We had a great time at "Hot Topics in Internet Marketing" at NIU's Naperville campus yesterday. We spent a full day with some great guest speakers that I will be highlighting in my blog (hopefully a few of the participants will help out as guest bloggers for the sessions that I missed). Food and facilities were great also so Thanks to our support teams at NIU Naperville and NIU Outreach. Keep following us on the hashtag #niunet on twitter.

Folks really enjoyed Joel Book (@joelbook, http://www.linkedin.com/in/joelbook) from Exact Target's presentation on innovative brands and how they are using interactive marketing to attract and retain customers. That's Joel in the picture above 'engaging' with two of my colleagues from NIU Outreach. Joel said that successful brand are using a triangle offense of email, social and mobile to engage customers once they have come on board. He said that 58% of consumers begin the day with email, which aids the buying process, improves service and maximizes retention for customers. Those who buy products marketed through email spend 138% more than non-readers of email.

Best Buy stays connected with its customers via email after the sale and so does Scott's Turf Builder. Johnston & Murphy personalizes its offers based on customer information. Multi-channel interaction is a must and the true challenge is to manage the customer conversation in both inbound and outbound channels. Exact Target is working to become an Interactive Marketing Hub where the audience and content can be managed and reported on centrally. Campaign management certainly needs some help as our students learned managing just two channels in their live project for Restaurant.com this semester.

Some other Joel Book gems include "Serving has become the new selling" and "Think it through, not just think it up." I am sure that we will all be quoting Joel on these and many more gems from his talk. I am so glad that we have a relationship with thought leader Exact Target and have been using the tool in the classroom since 2004. More on the conference to come!

Email Marketing/Mobile

We had a good discussion on email marketing before I left for DMA and then learned the Email Marketing tool Exact Target. We learned the reason to use a tool like ET is the ability to get emails past potential spam filters that ISP's might set up and to manage many different emails effectively. The ability to include dynamic content for personalized offers is also a big plus of this type of system. A company such as Careerbuilder.com might send millions of emails per month and needs to effectively manage and track campaigns. Even though email marketing is a small percentage of total online advertising, its ability to target customers and be integrated within an overall multiple channel marketing campaign makes email an important and influential medium. Good emails have an effective and descriptive subject line and a clear offer or purpose. While email open rates remain higher than those of direct mail, we learned that same week at the CADM monthly luncheon program on mobile marketing that mobile emails can have an over 70% response rate! It seems as each new type of way to reach the customer comes on the scene response rates are high and then level off, but I am thinking mobile rates might remain high. People read their text messages within seconds typically instead of days or hours for email. We also learned how to identify "phishing" emails that want to get personal information for fraudulent purposes and about the CAN-SPAM act and how to remain compliant. Good email marketers want to follow the guidelines of that act and comply by having a subject line that clearly states the advertising purpose of the email and is consistent with the body of the email, a valid reply to address, a physical address and an unsubscribe provision.