Brands Need Integrated Campaigns To Reach Connected Consumers

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Digital strategies like social marketing will influence at least 80% of consumers' discretionary spending by 2015, according to Gartner. The findings, released in a joint study with ExactTarget, analyze multichannel marketing techniques, as well as tips to lead consumers to purchases.

The Marketer's Guide to Multichannel Campaign Management suggests that brands must move away from running campaigns individually and toward the integration of many campaigns, such as email, social, search, voice, video and more.

The strategy supports consumers moving to a "hyper-connected" model, where many gain access to online content through more than one device simultaneously. Most will connect through some form of mobile device. eMarketer estimates access through nearly 116 million U.S. smartphones this year.

Gartner estimates that 6.7 billion devices will connect to the Internet by 2014. Mass-market campaigns on average get a 2% response rate. Personalized email messages on mobile devices, however, continue to climb.

In fact, the percent of consumers who opened email on mobile devices rose "double digits" during the first half of 2012, according to Jeffrey Rohrs, head of marketing research at ExactTarget.

As marketers prepare for the 2012 holiday season, Rohrs said a successful cross-channel strategy requires knowledge of device, channel and content preferences for a specific campaign. The study approached 1,500 U.S. online consumers on online interactions and brand expectation.

Sixty-six percent of participants made a purchase after receiving an email marketing message, compared with 16% after receiving a text marketing message.

About 76% prefer email compared with other channels for receiving customer services messages, but 25% prefer text message when it comes to real-time travel alerts. Nine percent of consumers age 25-34 prefer text message over other channels for delivering tickets to an event purchased online.

Sixty-six percent of teens ages 15 to 17 prefer email compared with 4% on Facebook when it comes to permission-based marketing. The same age group also admits to making a purchase after seeing a message about the product on Facebook.

When it comes to social media, 20% of Twitter users tweet weekly. Sixteen percent of survey participants ages 15 to 17 said they made a purchase after seeing a message on Twitter, and 20% made a purchase after receiving a message on Facebook.

Online purchases continue to rise. U.S. retail e-commerce sales for online retail spending rose 15% to $43.2 billion in the second quarter of 2012 compared with the year-ago quarter, according to comScore. The uptick represents 11 consecutive quarters of positive year-on-year growth and seven consecutive quarters of double-digit growth.

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8 comments on "Brands Need Integrated Campaigns To Reach Connected Consumers".

1. Ted Rubin from Collective Bias / The Rubin Organization
   

   commented on: August 9, 2012 at 10:35 p.m.
   Anyone who thinks email is dead, just does not get the power of the medium and the fact that people still read email and use it to help manage their lives. Jeff Rohr's... there is a guy who "gets" it.
2. John Grono from GAP Research
   

   commented on: August 10, 2012 at 8:22 a.m.
   Everyone reading this article does so because of email is testament to the fact.
3. Merri grace Mcleroy from Integrated Marketing Strategies LLC
   

   commented on: August 10, 2012 at 10:10 a.m.
   The trend toward, and viability of multi-channel marketing strategies isn't news, but it's time for social marketers to acknowledge that certain demographics are intellectually, physically, emotionally and wirelessly connected to email.
4. Norman Smit from Integrated Media Strategies
   

   commented on: August 10, 2012 at 12:54 p.m.
   Part of the problem why integrated strategies are planned from the inception is because often the skillsets required for these different media are so different and in many organizations, siloed. Web, digital video, advertising, social media, database development, email marketing, and other approaches seldom are planned to work together and strengthen each other. Part of what my company does is assist with the strategic change required to plan and implement integrated campaigns.
5. Tom Imboden from Waterfall Mobile Inc
   

   commented on: August 10, 2012 at 1:40 p.m.
   I mean, of course Jeff Rohrs' is going to push email...he works for ExactTarget. The idea of multi-channel is misconstrued, and wrong. Marketers need to take a cross-channel marketing approach, where the consumer is at the center of communication, and different channels communicate with them in different manners. I think this is what this article is getting at, but interchanging the terms makes it a bit confusing because multi-channel marketing and cross-channel marketing are two VERY different things.
6. Tom Imboden from Waterfall Mobile Inc
   

   commented on: August 10, 2012 at 1:44 p.m.
   Also, this belief among marketers that there is a concept that "email is dead" I find funny. (See comments 1 & 2.) I work for a technology company in mobile messaging and no one believes this, at all. There is just a general understanding that there are more ways to engage a consumer than just email (heavens!), and relying on just email is wrong and archaic. I think people are just afraid and / or too lazy to come to this realization and think outside the comfy box that they have mastered - email marketing.
7. Paul Baron from WebTel Marketing
   

   commented on: August 11, 2012 at 1:20 a.m.
   Totally agree with the assessment and promise of the "hyper-connected" model. But, let's not leave out the convergence of online and in-store with the emergence of location based marketing. Media-2go.net had a great platform for proximity advertising that extends, and add value to any digital strategy or integrated marketing campaign, at the point of presence. 70%-90% of all consumer purchase decisions are made in store. 40% who “opt out” online want to “opt in” while in store. Check out www.media-2go.net or their US distributor webtelmarketing.com.
8. Tom Beakbane from Beakbane: Brand Strategies & Communications
   

   commented on: August 11, 2012 at 12:16 p.m.
   "Digital strategies... will influence at least 80% of consumers' discretionary spending by 2015". Really? Surely digital strategies will "influence" all spending in some way. These numbers mean little without details of the context. Which brands? Which consumers? Which (multi-channel or cross-channel??) channels? In some situations e-mail is effective, in others it is not. Insightful comments from Norman, Tom, Paul... would it be possible for you to provide some examples? We have set up www.integratedbrands.org that will enable you to showcase specifics. The question of how best to achieve integrations is crucial for every marketer.

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