Online marketing, offline marketing: it's all the same these days

By Nur Bremmen: Staff reporter on 20 November, 2015

Remember when marketing executives had to convince their bosses to put time and resources into “that internet thing”? Well, bar a few stubborn hangers-on, it’s apparently safe to say those days are very firmly past.

According to Gartner’s 2015-2016 Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Spend Survey, 98% of marketing executives from large companies in North America and the UK agree that online and offline marketing are merging.

Respondents represent organisations with more than US$500 million in annual revenue across seven industries: financial services, high tech, manufacturing, consumer packaged goods (CPG), media, retail and transportation/hospitality. The survey took place between May and July 2015 and marks the fourth year that Gartner has surveyed marketers on spending priorities and marketing operations.

There is little doubt that digital marketing is now mainstream,” said Yvonne Genovese, group vice president at Gartner. “Marketers no longer make a clear distinction between offline and online marketing disciplines. As customers opt for digitally led experiences, digital marketing stops being a discrete discipline and instead becomes the context for all marketing. Digital marketing is now marketing in a digital world.”

Read more: The symbiosis of content marketing and SEO

Ten per cent of marketers say they have moved beyond digital marketing techniques and are expanding marketing’s role to create new digitally led business models. The blurring of the physical and digital worlds represents opportunities for marketers to apply customer insights to create and test new digitally led experiences and business models. Digital commerce is surging, capturing 11% of the digital marketing budget (up from 8 per cent in 2014) as marketers become more accountable for driving results.

“The rise in digital commerce is an opportunity for marketers,” said Jake Sorofman, research vice president at Gartner. “There was a time when marketing and selling were two distinct disciplines. In many cases, digital merges these two into a single, continuous activity from initial awareness, through engagement, conversion, transaction and repeat purchase. Marketers can now tie spend to revenue. In fact, it’s becoming a mandate.”

Two main factors are driving marketers’ interest in digital commerce: the need to point to tangible results from marketing investments, and the recognition that companies need more than a commerce platform to sell. In the past, we’ve seen digital commerce operations wholly disconnected from the marketing engine. Today, we’re seeing integration between marketing and digital commerce as two parts of a single discipline, where marketers bring everything from content marketing and brand storytelling to advanced analytics and multichannel campaign management to optimise digital commerce across channels.

Read more: 10 reasons it’s time for South Africa to wake up to programmatic buying

B2C companies have long been considered more sophisticated in digital commerce, but we’re seeing growing appetite by B2B companies under pressure to reach customers directly with digital commerce initiatives. They are looking to engage customers directly to better understand their needs, preferences and behaviours.

As CMOs face the digital transition, the survey showed that overall marketing budgets are on the rise. This year, 61 per cent of respondents said that marketing spending will be, on average, 11 per cent of company revenue, up from 10 per cent of company revenue last year. That one percentage point change represents a sizable increase — 10 per cent, year over year — in marketing spend.

“Bigger budgets, however, come with sizable expectations,” said Mr Sorofman. “Marketing is expected to drive profitable growth through the acquisition, retention and expansion of the most valuable customer relationships. As customer buying journeys and customer expectations expand, so, too, does marketing’s scope of responsibility. As a result, the marketing remit now often includes driving broad-mandate customer experience, digital commerce and innovation initiatives.”

Nur is an enigma with a passion for creating words. He recently entered a love affair with technology and chorizo sausages. He travels a lot — you catch him, if you can, at a Silicon Cape event every now and again. More

Online marketing, offline marketing: it"s all the same these days

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A message for email: Your days might be numbered - LA Times

Everyone hates email. It wastes our time, too much of it is spam. It’s ugly, it’s slow, it’s unreliable. And did I mention the spam?

Perhaps the worst thing about email is the way it makes us unlikable. I’m a reasonably nice person, but when I start sending emails, watch out. What I think is a perfectly ordinary, level-headed email often comes across to other people as demanding or insensitive.

It’s not just me — I’ve seen people get enraged at each other over a seemingly innocuous intra-office email thread that suddenly escalates like an international border incident. But when those people get together face to face, the anger and the tension dissipate in minutes. The problem in these situations is clear: It’s the way email enforces a kind of formality, combined with lack of nuance. The combination can be toxic.

No wonder people are fleeing to messaging apps including WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Snapchat and Kik. And on the enterprise side, no wonder Slack’s business is booming: If you can get your internal company communications off email and onto a fun platform that encourages productivity, shareability and searchability — while supporting GIFs and emoji — it’s a win for everyone.

Yes, there’s no doubt about it: Email is an unholy hack, a broken mess, an ever-growing floating island of garbage and dead fish swirling around in some forgotten part of the ocean. It needs to die, and the sooner the better.

And yet.

Let’s just imagine a future without email — maybe just a few years hence, when these messaging apps are widespread enough that you could legitimately say “I’m deleting my email account” and not be seen as strange or experimental. And, more important, when you could do that and still be confident that the right people could reach you, whether that’s by Twitter DM or Facebook or Slack.

First of all, none of the messaging apps has anywhere near the market penetration and reach of email, which reaches 2.5 billion people today, according to the Radicati Group. So you’ll probably need to keep a few messaging apps: Facebook Messenger for your friends using that, Snapchat for your other group of friends, Slack for work and so on.

Second, these messaging apps all have their own ways of doing things, so each has its own rules and its own interface. Lest you think that’s a small problem, just look at how often people mistakenly send private direct messages to all their Twitter followers. Even the CFO of Twitter made that mistake, and who can blame him? It’s ridiculously easy to do this. So you need to use extra caution with Twitter, WhatsApp, Snapchat and whichever apps you’re using, to ensure that you are using each one the right way, and not committing some horribly embarrassing (or business-threatening) mistake.

Third, they’re not interoperable. Each messaging app has its own separate platform, its own notifications on my mobile devices, its own list of my friends. You can’t send a message from Messenger to your friend on KakaoTalk, and you never will be able to. There’s no incentive for these companies to open up their message platforms to all comers.

Fourth, these platforms often lack fundamental features that are actually quite useful. Slack, for instance, still doesn’t have threaded messages. If you don’t reply to someone’s post super quick, you might as well forget about it, because someone else is going to start another conversation and then no one will know what you’re replying to. (I know there is a workaround, but it’s kludgey.) Or how about filters and folders? It’s often quite useful to filter messages from a certain person — your boss, for example — into a special high-priority folder, where you can give it special attention, or save it along with all the other messages that person sent.

Fifth: Spam. You may not have noticed it, but if you’re a Gmail user, outright spam is getting rarer and rarer in your inbox, thanks to ever more sophisticated spam filtering. Google has spent more than a decade honing its spam algorithms, and the result works pretty darn well. Twitter, by contrast: If you missed the old days of X10 camera spam and offers for green card lawyers, just turn on the setting that lets anyone send you a direct message even if you’re not following them. Google’s spam mechanism has the equivalent of a PhD, while Twitter’s is still in kindergarten.

Finally, there’s one more angle to consider: Email, from a marketer’s point of view, actually works, with a return on investment of 38 to 1, according to DBS data. There’s a reason that Twitter and Slack, despite being their own messaging platforms, still send daily emails to people. For many Internet users, email is still the way they’d prefer to be contacted, and companies are happy to oblige, because engagement levels are so much higher than in other media.

And email marketing companies are thriving — Campaign Monitor, to name one example, raised $250 million last year.

Now, you could argue that this is exactly the problem: Too much email marketing is making email useful only for marketing. But I think the reason email marketing works so effectively is because, at the end of the day, people are still very attached to their inboxes.

We may complain about email. We may suffer from crappy email clients and all-company email threads that never end. Our inboxes may never get close to zero.

But if the current crop of messaging apps really did succeed in killing off email, I think we would all start to miss it pretty soon.

Dylan Tweney is a content strategist and journalist. His weekly column, Dylan’s Desk appears on Venture Beat.

dylan@venturebeat.com

Twitter: @dylan20

Web: Tweney.com

Copyright © 2015, Los Angeles Times

A message for email: Your days might be numbered - LA Times

Red Letter Days Consolidates Programme Exclusively to Affiliate Window

Red Letter Days, one of the pioneers of the experience industry, has consolidated its affiliate programme from Affilinet to partner exclusively with global performance marketing network, Affiliate Window.

Set up in 1989, Red Letter Days has gone from strength to strength and today offers hundreds of experience days for individuals, couples, and groups, including corporate solutions for some of the UK’s biggest companies.

Red Letter Days’ aim to grow their affiliate programme by 15% in 2015 and develop relationships with long tail affiliates, led to their decision to partner exclusively with Affiliate Window. “The main reason for consolidating with Affiliate Window is that they work with a vast range of long-tail affiliates compared to Affilinet” says Gemma Crozier, Affiliate Marketing Manager for Red Letter Days. “We have always worked on growing the long-tail, and in order to continue to develop the channel, it makes sense for the brand to move exclusively to Affiliate Window. We are keen to explore the new tools and technologies their network has available, such as the assist data, which would allow us to find ways of working differently with certain publisher types.”

Red Letter Days’ activity in the performance channel is fully intertwined with the rest of their online marketing mix and as such, is coordinated so that a consistent message is delivered across all channels. Joshna Patel, Head of Online for Red Letter Days explains “by consolidating to Affiliate Window we are able to get a better view of the channel as a whole, especially when it comes to benchmarking and enables us to manage our programme more efficiently.”

Anthony Clements, UK Country Manager at Affiliate Window comments: “Affiliate Window has enjoyed a successful, long-running partnership with Red Letter Days since 2008, so we are delighted they have chosen to move their programme exclusively to our network. This decision highlights how our technology and innovative tools can help an advertiser to build a sustainable and balanced programme, with a significant number of contributing content publishers. We’re proud of our work with Red Letter Days, and we look forward to helping them continue their growth in the Performance Channel.”

In September 2014, new assist KPIs were introduced to Affiliate Window’s advertiser and publisher reports, allowing retailers to understand how customer journeys are influenced by publishers or other channels. Following the consolidation from Affilinet and exploration of these KPIs, Red Letter Days will be re-launching their programme and invite all publisher types to join.

-Ends-

For press enquiries please contact:
Affiliate Window PR & Marketing Department

e: PR@affiliatewindow.com
t: 020 7553 0333

Published on: 9:27AM on 2nd February 2015

Red Letter Days Consolidates Programme Exclusively to Affiliate Window