How to pick the right way to reach the consumer

Latest posts | Feed | By Mark Brownlow on May 27, 2008

Hot on the heels of the Habeas survey comes more detailed research from ExactTarget on channel preferences among consumers.

The 20-page white paper is behind a registration screen, but worth the effort to download because it offers a thoughtful, realistic and surprisingly objective (for an ESP) look at exactly how you should approach one of today's biggest online marketing problems...

With consumers using any number of different communication channels, just where do you focus your marketing efforts? Do you foxtrot with Facebook? Tango with Twitter? Samba with SMS? Or do the paso doble with double opt-in email?

The lessons I took away were these:

Email remains a strong channel. Not necessarily because people prefer to use email above anything else (even if most age groups do), but because people prefer to use email to interact with businesses.

This reflects the wider point that consumers are not using one channel to the exclusion of all others. Nor are they using many channels for the same purpose. Instead, each alternative channel has a particular role or context in the life of each consumer.

SMS is for texting friends and getting urgent alerts. Email for writing to grandma and receiving event information. And so on...with a different pattern for each person.

This insight leads to two practical conclusions...

First, you need to give people a choice of ways to hear from you and let them pick the best one. Which means getting away from seeing RSS, instant messaging, social networks, email etc. as competitors and instead viewing them as components of a wider holistic approach.

Second, when you look at where to invest your time and resources, you need to reflect on how your delivered content and relationship with the recipient fits with the context of each communication option.

Email's great strength is that people accept its use as a vehicle for commercial messages (permission-based ones at least). The newer channels don't have that yet. The newer communication channels are more private. More personal. More suited to those businesses with a more intimate relationship to the consumer.

So a punk band can probably use SMS willfully to reach its fans. But a supermarket chain might have less success.

However, these preferences and contexts will change through time. Just as banner ads and email did. I remember the days when ads on websites were cursed as the spawn of Beelzebub.

So the right distribution of resources among different channels now will not be the right distribution in five years time. It pays to constantly review the situation.

Email evangelists tend to assume that the younger generation will all switch as one to email as soon "as they get a real job." People probably thought the likes of me would return to the telephone once we left university.

The Greeks were right. Everything changes.

Fascinating isn't it? If you haven't spent time on how best to reach your target audience in a crazy online world, use the study report to kick start your thought processes.

Tags: email marketing, multichannel marketing, consumer communication preferences, exacttarget

[This post brought to you by Campaigner Email Marketing]
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1 Comments:

From a marketing perspective, I think the most important thing is to figure out who we’re talking to and whether or not they represent our target market. From there, we can further strategize about the best way to reach the best people. I think that media audits would be very helpful in this discovery process. We’ve been working on www.buysafemedia.com and it has some useful information about print media auditing. The question now becomes, can we apply the same principles to the Internet?
By Jack Wojcicki, on 30 May, 2008