Hitting the Bull’s Eye

Automated marketing gives publishers access to incredibly refined and better timed outreach.

By Bill Mickey
Monday, June 1, 2009

Publishers have expanded the data in their integrated databases to dizzying extremes, creating fields for every possible demo and touchpoint a customer has with a brand. This is reflective of the way customers choose to interact with a product, and publishers merely want to capture that interaction to better target cross-sell and upsell opportunities. These dynamics also open up new ways of marketing to customers. By virtue of having a much richer collection of customer information, publishers can move away from mass marketing and close in on automated marketing that’s organized and triggered by specific customer interactions.

Several Levels of Detail

“Because of the nature of the registration forms and we have a lot of people in the database, we’re able to track on an ongoing basis their engagements with content and events,” says Frank Cutitta, general manager of IDGConnect. “We can append the files that they’ve done certain things. People become prime candidates for triggered mailings.”

While many publishers would be happy just to have that level of data on their customers, Cutitta notes this is only the basics. Imagine the detail you could have if you married user interaction with a series of asset criteria. In other words, how would you characterize that whitepaper a person downloaded? Is it content that educates a novice, or is it content that helps a person decide what to buy? “More important on a micro basis is we have the ability to assign attributes to each of the assets—intimacy and buying stages, for example. It shows that a person has a relationship with an asset, but as we drill down further there’s a DNA that gives you rich detail of the intricacies of the assets they engage with.”

What’s essentially going on, says Cutitta, is you’re bucketing engagement into propensity. “The end-game here is to take what was normally a $40 lead and turn it into a $140 lead based on behavioral engagements and propensity to buy.”

Rodale is another publisher that is representative of a growing array of channels through which customers are interacting with products. “Anywhere someone is registering or signing up for a newsletter, an event or a promotion on a site,” Todd Leiser, Rodale’s VP of Rodale Direct, told AD last March, “there is a lot of activity, a lot of complex communication channels developing from that.”

Consequently, Rodale rolled out a new marketing platform called the Marketing Decision Platform that abandoned the rigid, scheduled, and often over-generous email marketing for automatic blasts that are triggered by specific interactions. “It’s a contact sequence that’s based on individual-level activity, or inactivity, and the timing of when they came in, where they signed up and whatever else we know about them. We’re then able to start them on a path of customer communications that’s much more relevant and much more timely.”

Triggers Are Good, But…

Yet, for all the targeting engagement tracking and automated marketing can provide, you can’t avoid the fact that you’re still sending another email to a customer. It’s what happens after that email is sent. An obvious point, but an important one. “Triggers are good, but the only problem is you’re sending them another pice of mail,” says Cutitta. “The ideal situation is at the point of engagement they will choose to get the next piece of mail. At that moment, the engagement becomes self selected.”

At that point, the customer is self-appending their own database profile.

At the end of the day, you’ll want to decrease burnout while increasing response, but if you can add revenue to the mix, then you’ve made the whole process worthwhile. “If we can combine reducing list fatigue with increasing revenue at the same time, that’s nirvana,” says Cutitta. “If I can mail to 10,000 people and get a better result than 100,000, that’s a good thing, but the whole process has a trust factor because they have the experience of what they’re getting next.”