3 Easy Programs to Automate Today:

• Confirmation Messages: Right after somebody gives you permission, a confirmation message is the most important message you will ever deliver. Make it valuable, make it remarkable and make it laser focused on the person who gave you permission. This single touch point will set the stage for how a subscriber interacts with your message the next time they see it.

• Birthday Wishes: Everybody loves a birthday. By automating a simple happy birthday message to go to subscribers on their birthday, it carves a special place in a person’ heart forever. Add a coupon or a free visit or a free ticket or an album download to make the experience extra special. Engagement and conversion on birthday emails is out of this world.

• News/Blog/Media Posts: You don’t need to spend weeks working on a newsletter or crafting the perfect message. Use blog feeds, news feeds and media feeds (twitter, youtube, facebook) to syndicate content from other places online and automate that content into a single piece of communication. In this way you have fresh content and social engagement from across the web.

Even the most sophisticated companies have a hard time understanding why to automate and how to put automation into practice. Of course advanced automation like geo-targeted event alerts, dynamic content, triggered sends and so forth are really dependent on the data which is accessible. For example, you can’t automate geo-targeted show alerts without knowing where subscribers live. So any deep automation program is going take an investment both in data collection and building the automation.

Why Invest in Automation:

• Time Saved/Money Saved: Automation saves a ton of time. Often we find that the cost for manual tasks to build and send messaging, is 30x the investment of automation over the course of a year.

• Increased Engagement / Increased Revenue: Using data to target and deliver messaging, we can drastically increase the interactions which people have with a message. For example, I there isn’t enough time in the day to write an individual, personalized message to a subscriber list of 100,000 subscribers. With automation and dynamic content, I can deliver personalized messages ever single day.

• Happy People: People love relevancy and to be given only the information which is important to them. Extraneous messages train people to no longer pay attention and tune you out. Automation makes it easy to deliver relevance and make subscribers and customers happy.

If you have program which you would like to automate or a great idea of something which you think we should explore, drop us a line.

The V1.1 release of the GeoMonster brings:

New GUI
Login Check, lets you know when login failed or passed
Easier workflow
Notification bar
More responsive error codes
Performance increase

Even though the GeoMonster has traditionally required zip code on a subscriber in order to target, we have a solution identified for those lists that only have email address. If you are an ExactTarget client who could use this functionality, let us know and we will be happy to install it into your account. Hit us up for more information.

Cheers,
DD

Some of my highlights from Connections included hanging out with Morgan Stewart and talking about the convergence of email, social and mobile marketing, discovering some advanced data marketing strategies from my new friend Ami Packard from Expedia and presenting our Roadrunner Records Social Profile story in the entertainment and media showcase with our friend, Lauren Kufta, New Media Coordinator at Roadrunner Records. In addition, our team member Josiah Kaiser spoke at the Developer’s Track on the evolution of Live Capture and Mobile Automation.

Wow, what a week!

One of the things which really struck me was how far behind the music industry (in general) is on the sophistication spectrum from other industries.  There are organizations who really push the envelope, but, generally, the music industry is 2-5 years behind on direct email, SMS, voice and social strategies and implementation.

Yup, the music industry missed the boat.

And the travesty of it is that the music industry has the asset which every other industry covets… they have fans. They have people who actually care! Best Buy dreams of having the type of loyalty which is baked into the music industry.

Why is the industry behind the sophistication spectrum? Here is my take…

The Music Industry is Spoiled. - Or, at least, it has been. Because of the fan asset they haven’t been driven to innovate, strategize and do the work around really owning and engaging the life cycle of the fan until recently.

Who’s Job Is It? – In every other industry it is the MARKETER’S JOB to be in charge of customer acquisition, retention and growth. In the music industry it used to be the label’s job.  . .  that is what they do. . .  they sell. Now days? Well, now days, it is anybody’s guess. Is it the manager, the drummer, the label, the distributor, or the publicist? Who knows? Consequently, nobody has developed the skills and competency to do it well.

Bright Shiny Objects! - There has been fascination over the last decade for the music industry to run after the latest and greatest bright shiny object. Ring Tones, Mobile Fan Clubs, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Reverb Nation and Topspin have all be heralded as the savior of the music business. These are all amazing and fascinating pieces to the fan engagement tool set. . . but they don’t constitute a holistic, strategic long-term-strategy for fan-relationship-management(FRM). They  don’t account for not learning the very basics of permission-based marketing.

Who Owns the Fan? – I find it fascinating that Artists have been writing into their riders that they also get a copy of the concert ticket buyer manifest complete with customer email address. It is fascinating because it places the value on the list, rather on than on the subscriber. It suggests that permission is sharable. . . that the promoter, artist and ticketing company should all be able to contact somebody just because the have access to the same database. . . without any real permission process. Yes, the music industry spams the fans more than any other industry out there.

There have been big moves across the major labels and promoters to initiate broad CRM based strategies and solutions and the managers and artists are certainly getting more savvy. It will be interesting to see how it plays out over the next few years and we certainly will be trying to be one of the leaders in the mix.

Below is the sophistication spectrum which we use to work with clients on understanding where they are and what their goals in revenue can be.

If you would like a more complete understanding of this chart visit the link below:

The Sophistication Matrix

A full copy of our slide deck is available for download here.

We are really looking forward to what the future holds here.

Eblasting is lame. Broadcasting the same email message to everyone at the same time, is a weak strategy.

If you want to drive a high a high return on investment, go for relevance. Target and deliver real value that improves a person’s life.

See, this is what Forrester found out during their executive survey…