We have a guy who works at our sister agency, Soup, who is the Moses of eCRM. Well actually his name is Giles (Captain Grimes).  So really, he is the Giles of eCRM.  Recently he gave a really good presentation at an Figaro Digital event on the 10 Commandments of eCRM.   In this week’s NMA, Justin Pearse used his opinion piece to promote the power of email (Email as good as any marketing channel when done right: i/d 13th May).
Giles and Justin are right, some clients jump on the latest “shiny and new” digital thing like iphone apps and AR, but have not yet cracked “traditional” online marketing like email.   So below are Giles’s 10 pearls of eCRM wisdom:

1. Plan, Communicate and Agree
We always asked the following questions of each new client:
o What are your aims?
Many clients don’t really have a clear idea of why they are using email marketing. It is worth spending time focusing on what you would like to achieve. Is it increased sales, reduction in service costs or loyalty?
o Are your aims realistic?
Once you start an email relationship with your consumers you need to maintain it, therefore make sure you consider your budget and the eCRM timeline.
o Do you have the resources to make eCRM work?
A half hearted attempt is worse than none
o Have you gained company-wide buy-in?
Internal sell in of ROI – get them to use it – biggest reason for failure
o Have you agreed targets for your eCRM?
Never underestimate the significance of asking this question
2. Registration
Quite simply, if you make promises, make sure you keep them. If you say you are going to send regular email updates, then ensure you deliver against that promise. Let the registrant know what they can expect from you and how often you will make contact. Don’t be afraid to ask them what they would like to receive. Also don’t be dull. Please don’t be dull! And finally make sure you get a formal opt in. Did I mention not to be dull?

3. Be creative but get your message across
The challenge here is to make sure the email design is exciting and creative, but does also is built in a way that gets through the spam filters. Make sure you give equal weight to form and function and also remember:
• Always adhere to email best practice
• Don’t be afraid of text only messaging
• Test to mobile devices as well as ESPs
• Don’t be too cryptic or too clever
4. Get the conversation going
Remember people will change their likes and dislikes over time. Make sure that you invite comment, opinion, suggestions and even complaint. Consumer feedback is how companies learn to improve what they do. It is important to talk to your database, not at them. The normal rules of conversation apply – just like social media.
5. Target, Segment and Personalise
I don’t know about you but I prefer to be called by name rather than Dear Amazon.co.uk Customer! It is not difficult to personalise emails these days. Or to segment your audience and send content which is relevant to their preferences.

6. eCRM: It’s part of the mix!
The rules and benefits of eCRM are similar to social media, hence why they work very well together. eCRM is fantastic at recruitment, building loyalty and generating customer information, but it should be used as part of the marketing “toolkit” and use in conjunction with other marketing disciplines. Did I just use the term marketing toolkit? Please shoot me!
7. Remember People Change
Deutsche Bank holds up to 10,000 pieces of information on all their customers. That is a company that really understands their customers. Ask questions, keep the communication going and act on what’s said. Do that and you’ll be friends for life!

8. Analyse this, analyse that and report the other
The investment can be high and the ROI is far from instant, therefore it is vital that you report successes and link them to tangible return from investment. Like social media, good eCRM programmes, take time and effort to develop but are well worth the effort.
The key metrics are:
• Attributable sales / traffic volumes
• Customer retention levels and recruitment savings.
• Recruitment levels through MGM
• Incremental sales
• Savings on customer service calls
• eCRM prompted Social Media activity
9. When it’s over, it’s over, accept it!
Even the best executed eCRM plans lose people. Don’t try to make it deliberately difficult for people to unsubscribe but do ask why they are leaving. Ultimately respect their decision and be polite.

10. Remember eCRM ‘s a Marathon not a Sprint
eCRM is all about relationship and relationships take time. Stick with the relationship and the rewards will be yours!
I will leave the final words to Moses:
May the LORD, the God (of eCRM), increase you a thousand times and bless you as he has promised!

 The majority of large corporations are run by board members who are either from accountancy, economic and/or engineering backgrounds.  Therefore western businesses like making “rational” decisions based on logic; understanding problems by analysing numbers, and generally using the attributes associated with the left hand side of the brain.  These organizations are also sceptical about things which are difficult to measure or hard to quantify.  Things like culture. 

 However, in Chief Culture Officer, Grant McCranken, argues that these are the very corporations that need to put cultural understanding at the heart of their senior management team.  This is an interesting and easy read in the style of the popular economic books made famous by Malcolm Gladwell et al.  It is full of intriguing business stories that support McGranken’s theory that organizations need to be living, breathing corporations that are fully plugged into all aspects of culture. 

 I am a sucker for self-improvement books, so I loved the bonus section entitled A Tool Kit for the Rising CCO, which is a practical guide to improving cultural knowledge.

 Overall I enjoyed this book, although I am not so sure that the CCO position will become a permanent fixture in all board rooms in the near future.  However I definitely agree that those businesses that understand and anticipate cultural change will have a huge advantage over those that don’t take it seriously.

 As with all successful business books these days, the brand is much bigger than just a mere book.  Check out the website to find more about the author and the community he has created:  http://chiefcultureofficer.ning.com/

 This is an very interesting business book, which at times is inspiring.

With the current focus for brands on social media, it seems that as an industry, we believe we have cracked the more ‘traditional’ forms of digital marketing. Well, I beg to differ. Our industry has a habit of chasing the possibilities that latest technology allows, often losing site of what a good campaign really looks like. With that in mind, here are my top tips across digital sectors to improve both results and value:

SEARCH
Revolution’s recent feature, “5 Brands that Suck at Search” was well-timed. Many FMCG brands focus purely on PPC because of the short term nature of campaigns. A more strategic, SEO approach can provide better results using a lower budget.
eCRM
Most FMCG brands are very poor at eCRM, despite customer retention and loyalty being at the heart of marketing. eCRM is definitely worth the quality focus to retain the customers who are so hard to recruit.
ONLINE ADVERTISING
Online ad spend continues to rise as it offers fantastic branding opportunities through rich media. Campaigns with significant budgets should consider pre-testing of campaigns (see http://www.dynamiclogic.com). With a live test, brands can run multiple campaigns to test which copy, images, etc produce the optimum results.
SALES PROMOTION SITES
Many FMCG companies continually build new sales promotional sites for their portfolio of brands – an expensive approach in the medium to long term. Its better to build one technical back-end for all brands and all promotions but needs the right execution to be flexible to deal with future opportunities.
USABILITY TESTING
FMCG brands spend huge sums driving uers to their online activity but generally not enough on the usability of their websites. Testing should be given at least 10% of the budget in order to ensure the execution is spot on. Like anything in life, you only get out of digital what you put in.
COPYWRITING
Great ‘onbrand’ copywriting is a real skill and can make a huge difference to the success of a digital campaign. Both clients and agencies do not allocate enough time and/or budget to this crucial part of the mix.
SOCIAL MEDIA
Too many brand managers assume that ‘doing’ social media is a cheap and easy option. But while they think in campaign lengths, consumers don’t have those boundaries. To do social media well requires a carefully planned programme, thought and ongoing commitment. As human nature never changes, the same rules of engagement apply: be polite, have a purpose.

All too often, viral is considered with all too little strategy. Brands need to think about what would be genuinely useful and relevant to the audience and then ask if a viral is relevant.

The common theme in most of these points is that there are still too many tactical campaigns and not enough strategy. While some tactical stuff is well executed, this ON-OFF approach to digital marketing ends up alienating consumers in the long-run. If brands really want to build relationships with consumers via digital, then more commitment, both in budget and planning terms, needs to be given.

To paraphrase a Mr Adam Ant, c. 1981 (digital) ridicule is nothing to be scared of.  I meet more and more marketing people who seem overwhelmed by the level of change caused by the digital marketing revolution and paranoid about their lack of knowledge.   This is understandable as digital is becoming increasingly complex, hence why there are specialist sectors in all areas from ECRM to search and now social media.

Even as an MD of a digital agency for nearly 10 years, I feel  I am working harder and harder just to keep  abreast of the ongoing change.  This is probably a natural human reaction to our 24/7 society as we all try to get to grips with the real time web.  It is ironic, however, that we all receive more information than at any time in history, but many people still feel that they don’t know enough.

If you are one of those marketing people intimidated by the digital marketing industry, here are my top 10 tips to improve your knowledge and remove that fear…….

1) Try and learn something new every day…..

How do you eat an elephant, as the self-help cliché goes?  One bite at a time.  Pick one subject a week and try to learn something every day.  Make a commitment to spend 10-15 mins per day, learning something new.

2) Use all your senses…

Experiment with the way you receive information.    Of course you can read blogs, trade mags and books but also try podcasts and watch youtube videos and slideshows.

3) Try the real world….

A great way to improve your knowledge of the virtual world is by getting out more in the real world.  Resolve to attend more digital events in 2010 and see expert speakers and attend networking events.

4) Get a digital buddy..

If you work with someone who also feels they need to learn more, buddy up with them, and share what you have both learnt over lunch or coffee once a week.  The best way to ensure you have learnt something is to try to teach someone else.  Recently I heard that Time Warner pairs its most senior executives with young graduates.  It recognises that even the most experienced media professionals struggle to keep up digital innovations, so what better than to learn from the new digital natives within the organisation.

5) Set up or join a group

Set up a digg or tumblr account so that your department or company can start sharing interesting digital news and work.    Join a linkedin or facebook group and connect with people with experts in the areas you want to learn about.

6) Develop your personal Twitter newsfeed

I found Twitter fantastic for listening and learning from some of the brightest and best people in the world (and Jermaine Defoe).

7) Use digital to pursue your passions

If your passion is photography, sport, art, films or train spotting become more active within the relevant digital communities.   Find more groups, participate more in discussions, write a blog post, record a youtube video.  Get involved!

8 ) Ask for training

Ask your company if they will pay for training in any form of digital training.  If they refuse, offer to co-fund it.  Invest in your own future.    Ask if your company could invite specialist guest speakers.  At Skive, clients pay us to train their marketing staff, but very often for prospective clients we initially offer free training sessions.

9) Don’t be afraid to ask silly questions….

If you are with digital people who are using terms that you don’t understand, ask them to explain.  If you don’t know, there is probably someone else in the room who is also baffled.

10) Be excited, be very excited…..

Try and change your feelings from digital dread to a real excitement about learning something new and different.    No one knows it all and we are all learning as we go……

There has been a lot of recent talk about the future of agencies in this post-digital age, each agency-type making a stand to justify how future-proof their models are with what seems like much hyped self-benefiting prophecy.

Traditional networked ad agency stargazers are claiming the demise of the pure play agency and the digital rise of, yes, you guessed it, the traditional networked ad agency. On the media side, Damien Blackden, President of Omnicom Media Group, wrote in the Guardian this week about the ‘potential demise of creative agencies’, predicting media agencies were best placed to take advantage of the new world of social media / digital 3.0.  A good article, it has to be said, yet Damien does work for a media agency and in the words of the first person to post a reply comment on the article – “no shit Sherlock”. Other industry commentators (read ‘specialist digital agencies’) are proclaiming that traditional agencies only understand digital through the narrow lens of their marketing speciality (i.e. advertising); that it is only digital agencies which really understand digital from a business transformation perspective (as outlined by Mike Nutley of NMA recently)

Over the last 2 weeks, I have been speaking to two different multinational organisations on this subject and the recurring belief was in having a focus on building relationships with digital agencies like Skive – independent, medium-sized and owner-managed – as they were better value for money compared to bigger traditional agencies. Their words, not mine!

As the future agency debate rages on, the possibilities in digital become ever greater and the speed of change moves up a gear. It is only right for agencies, with their natural survival instincts, to seek evidence demonstrating how best placed they are to take advantage of the changes in consumer behaviour and interactions with digital media.

However, as the traditional lines between agency disciplines (media v creative v PR v digital) become ever greyer, clients need to seek out agency partners which they feel really understand the opportunities which digital has to offer and how to exploit them to their advantage. Regardless of agency type, clients should give the job to the best agency in terms of vision, creative insight, delivery skills and value for money.

Whoever wins that war will be the agency type of the future!

I attended an event organised by the MCCA this week entitled “Gain an unfair, competitive advantage for the year ahead from expert insights”.  It had some very interesting people on the panel and there were some great insights.

One thing I found surprising was a strong feeling by a few of the panelists that one of the biggest threats to the traditional advertising & marketing model was that of government / EEC regulation and legislation.   Now clearly this is true for the sectors involved with politically hot topics like alcohol and unhealthy foods aimed at children.   However, I am not the first to say this, but the biggest threat to traditional advertising surely is social media.   The level of trust in advertising as measured by the Advertising Association has recently fallen to 14%, whereas 78% of consumers say they trust the recommendations of other consumers (Nielson, Trust in Advertising report).

We have always read the books, seen the films, bought the brands, etc recommended by friends and family.    Through the growth of digital social networks we now have access to many more consumer opinions. The power of online recommendations has helped Amazon build its business, and this type of social commerce is becoming more and more popular among the e-tailers.

Yes undoubtedly the advertising and marketing industry should fight against draconian & unfair regulation and legislation, but social media is a big and real threat to those who choose to ignore its increasing significance in the lives of people – and therefore its relevance to brands.

Image courtesy of @Tambako the Jaguar http://www.flickr.com/photos/tambako/3852252970/sizes/m/