A really great example from the NBA’s Phoenix Suns (via Eloqua’s All About Revenue blog) on how using unique and deep personalization in your email marketing can drive incredible results. The Suns like any other business are looking to drive revenue from email marketing and similar to many other businesses know that their best chance at success is with previous customers, in this case former season ticket holders.  In order to make a truly personal and unique connection to their former consumers the Suns marketing team took a look at all the information available to them about these previous customers in their CRM system and tried to mine it for the most personal connection they could make. With that goal in mind they landed on a piece of information available to them about every former season ticket holder that was also completely personal to the particular customer, the date of their first season ticket purchase. 

The team then used this date to create a highly personalized email campaign in conjunction with several different microsites that covered different eras of the team’s history. By playing on the emotional connection that each fan has with the team and the fact that each team has marquee players at different times the entire campaign seemed like one-to-one marketing. If you first bought tickets in the 2004 you would be treated to an email that spoke of Steve Nash’s free agent signing and MVP win and their incredible 62-20 regular season. The links in that email would have taken you to a microsite with images and messages that related to the Steve Nash and Amare Stoudemire years when the Suns went deep in the playoffs several times. Each former ticket holder was sent a series of emails and taken to a site with images and messages the era when they first bought their tickets. Considering how passionate sports fans are, the highly personal email and reconnection made between team and fan had incredible results.

The campaign resulted in a 45% open rate, a 34% click-through rate and more than $200,000 in renewed ticket sales. Andrea Lechner-Becker said the Sun’s objective was to make a campaign that was “as customized and therefore personalized as ever” and they certainly hit the mark.

This campaign and the fantastic results show that the ability to form a deep connection with your customers can be found by simply looking at your customer data in new ways and using that in creative ways to form or reform a bond with your consumers or prospects.

What is the best marketing email you have received recently? Please share via comments and continue the conversation on Twitter #bestemail

Facebook has begun rolling out its messages service and while the idea of a social in-box is still in its infancy it is important for all businesses to take note of just what this means for communication with customers and prospects. Just like you felt in high school, being “liked” was never as important as it is right now.

Facebook has tried to position this service as something different than email, sms or chat. The idea is that your social in-box will be full of conversations, threaded messages that work together the way you would speak to someone in the real world. Facebook describes it this way…”To be clear, Messages is not email. There are no subject lines, no cc, no bcc, and you can send a message by hitting the Enter key. We modeled it more closely to chat and reduced the number of things you need to do to send a message. We wanted to make this more like a conversation.”While the nature and tone of the way you communicate with customers and prospects will change when you do so in a conversational manner (companies that seem to “get social” are already using this tone) it is really the gate-keeper effect that a social in-box will play that businesses and marketers need to take note of.

When Google rolled out it’s Priority Mail feature in Gmail, the idea was that you could sort your mail and that over time Gmail would get smarter about what you deemed “important”. While I personally like this feature it has yet to really prove it’s ability to be an accurate filter. With Facebook messages that is all about to change. Never has it been more important for companies to be “liked” by customers, partners and prospects. This is because with the new social in-box messages will essentially be segmented into two groups and the distinction is big and bold. If you are a “friend” or a “liked” brand of the person you are emailing via Facebook you end up in the in-box, if you are not in that elite category your message ends up in the dreaded “other” category, this may as well be labeled “junk”

Again I’ll let you read it direct from Facebook when they say…”It seems wrong that an email message from your best friend gets sandwiched between a bill and a bank statement. It’s not that those other messages aren’t important, but one of them is more meaningful. With new Messages, your Inbox will only contain messages from your friends and their friends. All other messages will go into an Other folder where you can look at them separately.

If someone you know isn’t on Facebook, that person’s email will initially go into the Other folder. You can easily move that conversation into the Inbox, and all the future conversations with that friend will show up there.”

While the notice does not mention companies or brands, the idea is that now more than ever it is important to gear up your “like” campaigns so in future your messages do not get lost with the other laggards.

How will you change your marketing because of the social in-box? Let me know in your comments.

For a tour of Facebook messages go here – http://www.facebook.com/about/messages/

I was fortunate enough to hear Lee Lefever of Common Craft speak recently at Mesh Marketing in Toronto. He spoke eloquently about his business (a fascinating story) and described that he has been able to achieve success through what he termed “Mass Democratization”. It is a world where cheap tools combine with a home based business and a web only audience to produce a real revenue generating and full time income stream.

Lee has a fascinating story and there is a full post coming on his “Explainer Network” but I wanted to focus on a few of the many great communication takeaways from his presentation.

Starting with the fact that expectations are changing, there are too many sources of information and we care about too much stuff to digest it all, Lee and his team realized that the key to getting increasingly complex messages across to an increasingly disinterested audience was short web videos in “Plain English”.

The presentation contained some brief looks at some of the videos Common Craft have done and a discussion of the fine line between giving too much away on YouTube and wanting to license some of that same content but at the end of the day the key point was how much time is spent on the script and exact messaging of a three minute (or less) video. You need to really have discerned what you want to get across to a tight message and then let someone like Lee help you shape that into a package of ideas.

An amazing statistic Lee quoted a study at the University of Western Ontario (I would love the link if anyone has it) where by subjects both read information about a product and watched a short video about a product – after 72 hours only 10% of the readers could meaningfully recall what they read but 62% of the video watchers could recall something meaningful.

It seems to be a common theme for me but if you have something worth getting attention for then find great professionals to work with who can help you shape that message into something people will pay attention to.

Photo credit – http://www.flickr.com/photos/walleyjm/

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D-A1l4Jn6EY

When was the last time you were deciding on a new restaurant, cafe or pub and didn’t turn to the Internet (whether at your desk or on your phone) to get directions, a review or even see who else might be there? Since I’m pretty nerdy the answer for me is that it would be completely out of character not to do a little online reconnasence work about the place before I suggest it to a group of friends. While I am on the far end of the spectrum that spectrum has definitely tipped to the point where I believe the majority of us now look up a place online before making a decision to go there.

Therefore, I am often surprised when I talk with small business owners and specifically owners of restaurants, coffee shops, bars etc how few of them are really aware that they have an amazing opportunity to promote their business by simply making it easy for customers to write positive (the negative reviewers seem to figure it out for themselves cuz their pissed) reviews or encourage a “check-in” on Foursquare, Yelp or Gowalla. Of course most of these businesses are already to be found on Yelp (and other review sites) but too few business owners have taken the time to beef up the user generated content (that makes up their listing) with their own images, descriptions and announcements. Even less of them seem to realize that there is a real bottom line business benefit to using these sites as a marketing channel and growing their brand by making it easy for the customers that love them to say something nice in an online review.

While it would take a lot more than my personal surveying to put hard numbers to it  (one study by the Yellow Pages Association and comScore found that local search for businesses, products and services grew 58 percent last year and reached 15.7 billion searches, more than a tenth of overall search traffic) I’ve made mention of my theory of “check-in currency” in a previous post so won’t dive into it here but in realizing how few of these business owners are taking advantage of this new digital currency I thought I would share some examples of businesses that are taking advantage of social media and local search to drive retail business and leave you with some simple tips that businesses can and should be using to promote themselves via online reviews.

There are many great examples of companies that are really using social media and local search to their advantage. As I have shared before Tasti D-Lite has integrated FourSquare into their loyalty program but you can also look to Jeff Diamond, co-owner of Farmstead Cheeses and Wines as a leader who makes sure he takes the time to reply personally to every comment/review left on Yelp. In one case, a reviewer complained that the person behind the counter was rude. Mr. Diamond sent a private message to the customer, apologized and asked for details. It turned out the employee who helped this customer was hard of hearing. By the end of the exchange, this onetime critic had joined the store’s wine club. He has since become a loyal customer. Or how about Danny Leclair, co-owner of Studio DNA hair salons in Los Angeles and Santa Monica, Calif., who uses Yelp and local search to promote special offers he said 50 percent of his new business now comes from Yelp, 30 percent from Citysearch and 10 percent from Google searches.

These businesses are not run by the most tech savvy individuals, but they’ve taken the time to invest a little bit of brain power in learning how to make the most of what are essentially free marketing tools. Telling you all this is of little value if I don’t leave you with some easy things you can do to boost your local and social marketing efforts today with $0 invested.

Starting at the very top of the heap lets talk Google and specifically Google Local which is now technically Google Places. The point is that you don’t want to miss having your proper store information, pictures, links etc on Google so that you show up when people try to find you specifically or even when they make a general search. Believe me your business seems a lot more important when it shows up on a Google Map and your competition’s business is nowhere to be found.

So visit Google Places and get your information in there. I would also recommend you ensure your listing at Bing is up to date

Head here at Yelp and take the time to watch their video and understand how to get your business online if it is not already there or claim your listing if someone else has review you.

Yelp also gives you some great tools to understand who is visiting your listing and offers you all the tools you need to respond to reviews. If you think you will have the time to consistently reply to reviews on Yelp I think that it offers an extremely personal way to let people know that your business is about people regardless of what it is that you sell.

Next go to FourSquare and claim your business and if you really want to be amongst the coolest kids on the block create some specials based on the number of check-ins at your location and of course reward the Mayor. Foursquare makes it very simple to do and you’ll be shocked how many of your iPhone, iPad, Blackberry and Android toting customers appreciate your way of recognizing them. FourSquare will even help you get some stickers to promote that you are a welcome place for users and a great check-in location. People who check-in buy things and in the end you’re the winner.

Not only does FourSquare also provide you detailed stats like Yelp, it also has a proximity based mobile ad network that you will be a part of by offering FourSquare specials. These tools are again free so really what are you waiting for.

Of course every business should be knocking it out of the park with Facebook and nobody has laid it out better than Mashable here and Tamar here.

Finally, I’d highly recommend you begin Tweeting if you are not already using Twitter you read this guide by Mashable and started right away.

Remember that social and local can be your best friends if you take advantage of a few free tools and follow through on the best practices you find.

Good luck and thanks for reading.

I have to admit that I quite enjoyed my own open letter to Starbucks, so I thought I’d bring back the format in this my open letter to Motorola.

Dear Motorola,

I don’t work for you and to be honest I haven’t owned one of your products for a while, but I know enough to know that you are undoubtedly the leader in bluetooth headsets for mobile phones.  I say this not to flatter you but to remind you that your market dominance is always at stake and that you can and should use your power in the market to continue to dominate. To that end, I’m here with a little suggestion for you and it goes something like this.

With all the states, provinces and other jurisdictions enacting laws that prohibit the use of cellular phones without a handsfree option there are going to be a mass amount of people who need to get in the market for your products quickly. Now of course you could take the traditional approach and offer some deep discounts right around the same time these various pieces of legislation pass, and I suggest you do. But here is where I think you can use your deep pockets to both make yourself look good and garner new customers. First why don’t you reach out to every law enforcement agency that is going to have to hand out tickets and offer them a coupon for $25 off any of your bluetooth headsets and $50 off any of your in-car setups. Talk about Guerrilla Marketing, you end up making the boys and girls in blue your street team, literally! Now while, we’re at it, why not tell the same police and governments that you will do a joint awareness campaign with them and get them to foot 50% of the marketing campaign that you were going to run anyway?

Nobody (just ask Maria Shriver) is going to be happy getting pulled over for using their phone, but I’m pretty sure that those same people will be picking up a bluetooth device sometime shortly after getting the ticket. So there is a completely new customer base up for grabs and I’m happy to give you what I think is a leg up. Since you don’t pay me and I’m quite confident that I’m not going to get any swag in the mail from you as a result of this suggestion I’ll let you do the math on the budget and break-even for this type of campaign, but I’m a betting man and I’m betting you can’t go wrong.

So with that, I thank you for your time and if you’re feeling generous after reading this letter I am happy to take any and all payments for the marketing campaign suggestions contained herein. You know where to reach me.

Michael G. Cohen