In-line marketing = f (online marketing x offline marketing)

I am a firm believer in aligning online and offline marketing efforts. At QLogitek while working on marketing our SaaS supply chain solutions I always strive to drive this point to my team.

Mathematically, effective marketing, what I refer to as inline marketing, is an integral fucntion of both online and offline marketing. In other words

In-line marketing = f (online x offline marketing)

When a HARO inquiry,requesting for input from marketing experts on effective ways to unite online and offline efforts, came in few weeks ago. I suggested a simple strategy featured as a Tuesday Tip by LotusJump.

I suggested that cafes, restaurant or small business do a periodic (annual, semi-annual, monthly, etc.) special discount day for bloggers in your neighborhood and advertise to all store visitors using flyers in their store and through verbal promotions

My view is this will help you connect with the bloggers in your community and will likely get you free publicity from people linking to your site who want to share this special discount day info with all of their blogger friends.

Corporate blogs are more trustworthy than spam-email!

It looks like Nigerian spam emails narrowly lost out to corporate blogs on trustworthiness…just kidding, but almost true. People trust direct mail more than corporate blogs.

According to the author of Groundswell, Josh Berneoff, “People don’t trust company blogs.” This is the result from a 2008 Forrester research (report available here after registration).

The data suggests

• “blogs rank below newspapers and portals, they rank below wikis, direct mail, company email, and message board posts. Only 16% of online consumers who read corporate blogs say they trust them.”

• “among regular blog readers (at least once a month), 24% trust company blogs. Among bloggers themselves, 39% trust them.”

Josh’s own view is “don’t give up on blogging,” but be thoughtful about why and how you blog. After the diagnosis of the situation he prompts corporations to have non-corporate seeming blogs! I will let you think about that for a moment while I offer my take on the situation.

Regular members and contributors of the groundswell, to use Josh’s term, won’t be very surprised by this data . I hope Josh was not surprised either, that is not clear from his post. Like the groundswell member next to me, I visit blogs like “blogs.forrester.com/groundswell/” and “http://thinkitservices.blogspot.com/” periodically. I trust these blogs and engage with the respective authors who are surely not Mr.Burns type, but are authentic individuals willing to partake in a discussion.

In my view corporate blogs can only improve if corporate policies at least (1) facilitate percolation of thoughts from the groundswell to decision makers inside the firms four walls and (2) encourage current employees to blog. After all isn’t a blog just the venue to share authentic thoughts among individuals? In my view

blog = human beings + dialogue

When I looked at the data presented in the study my surprise is not that corporate blogs are untrustworthy. I am surprised that they are less trustworthy than company emails, direct mail, and online classifieds! This I think is the result of construct validity of the instrument used for this study.

Link

Email campaigns and their consequence

Email campaigns are inexpensive compared to other marketing campaigns, so most organizations continue email campaigns without measuring their effectiveness or thinking about their consequences. Continuing (ineffective) email campaigns can result in two negative outcomes – (1) brand erosion and (2) loss of customer good will even among die-hard fans.

Today our marketing team sat down to take a hard look at our email marketing campaign. We are going to pull relevant data from last few campaigns to assess our performance.

I am a data-geek so I am looking forward to seeing the data on our past email campaigns. I am especially keen to look at the following dimensions (1)number of emails sent, (2) bounce rates, (3) open rates, and (4) click through rate.

Good references:
1- Chittenden and Rettie (2003), An evaluation of e-mail marketing and factors affecting response, Journal of Target Measurement and Analysis for Marketing
2- Mullins (2007), How to ensure that your marketing emails are effective rather than annoying, Journal of Marketing.