Month: September 2010

Here goes. My first post as the CEO and co-founder of a new interactive agency—an email-centric interactive agency. Am I crazy? Depends on how you look at it. Ask anyone who knows me well and they will probably say, “Yeah, Morgan’s kinda kooky.” But from a business perspective, I believe an agency focused on email marketing makes all the sense in the world. Many in the online world have moved on to more exciting things. No doubt social media is exciting. It’s fast moving and fast growing. I love social media. I study social media. I participate in social media. We understand the critical role social media plays in marketing landscape and work with brands to bring email and social media together in powerful ways. But hundreds of social media agencies have been started in the past few years. Very few people are starting email-centric agencies and I continue to hear from marketers looking for help. After spending the past 3 years conducting in-depth...

Email, Facebook, and Twitter each provide marketers with the ability to compile a database full of customers and prospects. This ability to gather consumers into a visible list certainly looks like the familiar paradigm of database marketing. And given the fact these consumers are now part of "our databases," it seems logical that these would meet the criterion for retention marketing. After all, they are in our databases, so the job of acquisition is done, right? Based on the Subscribers, Fans, and Followers research I have been engaged in over the past several months, looking at the differences in how consumers want to engage with brands through these three channels, I believe this is a potentially serious mistake. First, consider newly released data on the impact one-to-one communications through these channels have on increased purchase intent. After becoming an email subscriber, 27% of consumers say they are more likely to purchase from a brand and another 41% are neutral, which I've interpreted as...

No doubt you've heard, "It costs less to keep customer than it does to create a new one." Assuming this is true, it would seem logical that companies should spend more on acquisition than retention, which is exactly how the data play out. According to a recent report from Econsultancy, 65% of marketing budgets are allocated to acquisition compared to only 35% that are spend on retention marketing. This represents old world thinking. The logic of spending more on acquisition than retention in fundamentally flawed -- it merely perpetuates the problem. Let me explain. I recently cancelled my account with the premium television provider I have subscribed to for seven years. They wouldn't replace my receiver. My point was simple. Each month I paid a "rental fee" for the equipment, the equipment wasn't functioning properly, and so I believed they should replace it at no cost. They didn't see it that way. The rep on the other end of that call was simply...