Email marketing is routinely cited for delivering strong results for a modest investment.  In Datran Media’s 4^th annual marketing survey, responders overwhelmingly selected email as the strongest performing channel, with search coming in a distant second.  And while social media can now lay claim to the most time-consuming internet activity, email still remains the most active activity online.

According to a new report from TNS and reported in eMarketer, “users also are still significantly more likely to send and receive email messages on a daily basis than they are to do any other activity.”  Not too bad for a channel that was supposed to be extinct.

The more attention that an ad receives, the higher the ROI should be for the advertiser. To have 15 individual views in one page visit means that the audience acknowledges the ad and also feels emotional connected. Online ads have the potential to increase the likelihood of an immediate or future sale because consumers do not feel that these ads are intrusive to their online browsing. The ads become a part of the experience which creates an optimal channel for an advertiser to connect with the audience.

According to US ad spending estimates by eMarketer, US mobile ad spending will be up 79% to reach $743 million, eMarketer forecasts. That growth will slow somewhat to still-dramatic double-digit rates as spending hits over $1.1 billion in 2011 and more than $2.5 billion by 2014.

In recent years, several key changes affected the market, providing businesses with the opportunity to launch a mobile marketing strategy.  Those changes include the growing US and global mobile markets, specifically the increased adoption of smartphones.  New solutions for delivering and receiving marketing messages across carriers has also made it easier for customers to read and share messages.  What’s more, the price of data and text messaging plans has made consumers less sensitive to the cost of sending and receiving mobile communications.

Various forms of mobile marketing exist, including: SMS, MMS, Mobile Web, Apps, Mobile Ads, MMS, as well as other merging location based technologies.  Out of all mobile communication channels, SMS is the most widely adopted consumer channel and the easiest to deploy. SMS is the largest mobile ad format, with spending of $327 million estimated for 2010 according to eMarkter.

My mother-in-law has a great expression.  In the family we call it, “updating your prior.”  What it means is that you always have to remember to update your prior view of things, because otherwise you are making false assumptions based on outdated information.

As marketers we often fall into the trap of neglecting to “update our prior.” We pick a demographic and a target profile, and we stick with it. This is natural byproduct of having studied and chased after a singular customer segment for many years. Over time, however, customer needs may have changed, and new prospects may have emerged unnoticed. Examples of this tendency include industries like automotive and electronics.  In these markets brands have been targeting men forever, not realizing that the wife in the family may be the primary decision-makers for household purchase decisions. Unfortunately, a narrow focus on demographics can cause marketers to miss critical shifts in their audience profiles.

A recent study by Microsoft confirms this theory.  The study shows that premium brands have been missing up to 50% of their best audience by relying too heavily on targeting only to the affluent. Purchase behavior turned out to be a more important indicator than affluence.  In fact, 43% of online customers in Europe are premium buyers, yet this group is not affluent by any traditional measure.

So what are some of the other reasons marketers may be missing their targets?

1. Customers Are a Moving Target

Changing habits and overlapping interests and hobbies can sometimes be hard to correlate with buying behavior. While there is a preponderance of information available on the Web, many data providers offer a limited view of the user.  With the right audience measurement tools, however, marketers can put the pieces together to create a coherent picture.  A story in Ad Exchanger describes a marketer targeting home-based business users with children.  In order to reach this demographic, he had to combine data for micro-business users, home-based users, and households with children from three separate data providers. Scaling audiences can be particularly difficult without the ability to normalize and aggregate audience profiles in one place. Using web-based tools to measure who is engaging with your messaging and who is responding to your offers will give you a better view of a larger potential customer pool.

2. Aiming at the Wrong Target

Products are often delivered to market with preconceived expectations about who the audience will be.  When David Roberts, the CEO of PopCap launched a game called Bejeweled on Facebook, he fully expected the game to appeal to a young male audience.  Instead, he was astounded to learn that 70% of the game players were women.  The social aspect of the game was an attraction for young mothers who were stuck at home, and wanted to play and interact with friends and family.  I’m not sure why anyone thought a game called Bejeweled would be a magnet for young males, but never mind. The company had to integrate this new view of its customers into its marketing strategy.

3. The Unintended Target

Toyota Scion was a car designed specifically to appeal to a youth segment with a focus on customizable features and a low price.  The original target was young people, 20-25 years old, and Scion avoided the Toyota brand name because they felt it was too ‘old’.  Toyota soon discovered that the Scion appealed simultaneously to both millennial upstarts and empty-nest boomers.  Auto makers now are looking to replicate this model and design more Twin Peaks Cars. That is, cars that have two peaks in a line graph of the age distribution of the buyers.

So how can brands best identify and consistently maintain the right targeting?

The key to developing good market targets is to be clear on your segmentation strategy, and then market specifically to those targets. But don’t fall in love with a target profile, be flexible and ready to make changes based on updated data.  Ideally, marketers should measure customers based on three yardsticks, behavioral, transactional, and demographic. Behavioral marketing allows brands to identify their highest value segments.  Transactional data allows marketers to revisit their current customer profile to see if anything has changed.  Demographic data makes it easy for brands to understand their audience and identify customers.

Marketers need to learn how to optimize marketing based on business intelligence gathered during the campaign.  The real-time technology platforms that enable audience measurement and campaign management provide an advantage to the marketer.   Those platforms, coupled with smart targeting techniques, create a new opportunity for greater scale and efficiency in online marketing.  Marketers can discover new customers by using audience measurement that provides more insight into those responding to your message. In other words, sometimes you just need to update your prior.

The workshop will be led by Datran Media’s brightest email marketing stars, Jason Oates and Todd Boullion, as well as other industry veterans from ReturnPath, Exact Target, and Eloqua .  They will address a variety of topics ranging from email monetization to email compliance.  Each workshop module breaks down into several parts and includes case studies and strategies that will help you achieve your marketing goals. Attendees that complete the two day workshop will receive a certificate of completion.

If you want to get a head start on any of the topics, you know, just to be sure you ace the certification, check out our whitepaper and webinar library that offers tips on all the topics convered during DMA.

For more information, visit the DMA Conference Web site.  We hope to see you in San Francisco!

Read what Scott Knoll, General manager of Aperture, has to say about the importance of measurement and why it matters to to you.

According to the study, email marketers are excited to start using video in email.  73% of respondents thought video would raise clickthrough rates for their email programs, and the same number believed video made email recipients more likely to convert.  However, unlike posting a video on a Web site, there are some challenges with getting video to work in email.

Besides needing the right technology in place, video email requires an ISP that can successfully deliver the “see-mail.”  Therefore, marketers believed the most effective way to integrate video with their email campaigns was to link recipients to a video landing page, closely followed by embedding video players directly in email messages.

We’ve actually seen some success using embedded streaming video first hand.  Last year, leveraging technology from Goodmail, Datran Media helped deliver live embedded streaming video within the body of the email for PGATour.com  Not only did the campaign win multiple awards, it helped PGATour.com see a staggering 142% increase in clickthrough rates.   I guess it’s true what they say, seeing is believing.

One of the areas marketers associated with the most important marketing strategy is measurement.  While marketers are not slashing budgets, they do need to provide accountability for their results, and therefore, measurement is more important than ever before.  40% of respondents said one of the biggest drivers for developing marketing measurement and accountability programs was to justify spend to senior executives. 65% wanted to make marketing more strategic within their organization.

Earlier this year, Datran Media conducted its own marketing survey and discovered that marketers and advertising agencies intend to aggressively deploy online measurement tools in order to obtain actionable business intelligence from their marketing campaigns. This trend will accelerate the budget allocation shift into measurable digital channels going forward.

For the majority of marketers surveyed, clicks (72 percent), conversions (59.2 percent) and impressions (58.4 percent) remain the top three metrics that matter. These data points are indicative of a campaign’s overall success, and the survey findings demonstrate that marketers are now fully focused on quantifying their return on investment. 87.2 percent of respondents said that they believed accurate online audience measurement was important for driving increased brand awareness, increased revenue and better campaign performance.

So what does this all mean, and how should marketers use it to their advantage? Is a click measured in email the same as a click measured in a display campaign? How we as an industry understand this data — how we access it, incorporate it, and implement data insights into actionable intelligence — has been a significant stumbling block for interactive. Marketers need to begin incorporating campaign results from all channels and developing a measurement that assesses the value of a marketing message as a whole. This methodology lays the foundation for the next generation of interactive audience measurement and helps you understand how engagement in the email channel, for instance, ties back to a search or social media campaign. When you use data from a variety of sources like search, email, and direct mail, you can more accurately measure audiences and put an actionable plan together for your next outreach.

The point of the story here is not that I have to rethink my diet, but that receiving messages like this is what I love about email.  And I’m not alone.  According to a CrossView survey among US shoppers in various states, there is a significant consumer preference for receiving promotions via email as opposed to other methods of delivery.

Why email?  Maybe it’s the ease of receiving and redeeming a promotion; it comes directly to you, often personalized, without you having to search and scour for discounts like my Mom used to do in the old Sunday circular.  It’s also a deal you likely want based on emails you’ve signed up for in the past.   So until I am ready to register to receive news and promotions from health food stores, I expect to see discounts for ice cream because it is what I want.

Furthermore, the study reveals 35% of consumers said they were specifically shopping due to receiving a promotion from a retailer.  That makes perfect sense.  Ice cream was not originally on my menu for the day until I saw the coupon.

So this news is really a win-win for consumers and marketers.

As marketers rev up their new acquisition programs, it’s important to think about the customer as more than just a number in a database.  Customers are savvy and are clearly in control more than ever before.  So to truly be able to penetrate a new audience, you must treat them like you would a close friend.

Every great relationship, be it with a friend, co-working or customer, is dependent on good communications and a continuous fair value exchange.   Without that, someone always feels left out, abused and taken advantage of.  If you don’t understand how to listen and value your friends and relationships you’ll have limited success in your personal and business endeavors.   How often do you hear of people or groups of people being referred to as Readers, Customers or Consumers?   Those names are a bit impersonal, but not as bad as Aggregators, Data, Leads or Screamers.   How a company refers to its prospects and customers tells you lot about how those people are treated and valued.   How do you like it when “that friend” (and you all have one) call you or stops by only when they want something but are never interested in returning the favor or bringing some sort of value to the table…beyond what you’d expect from an acquaintance.

We’re all somewhat dependent on each other and while developing a competitive advantage is important in business, it’s much more important to building trusting, efficient, scalable and sustainable relationships.    If we pick a few important common goals, we’ll be much more aligned with our partners and that’s one of the most important competitive advantages you can have.

Remember, if you put the customer’s needs and wants first, you will generate not just a lead, but a loyal customer.