Tomorrow there will be people wondering whether their Christmas wishes will be granted this year. And marketers are no exception, many of whom will be hoping for some festive cheer after what has been a difficult year.

Here are five wishes we think many marketers will be hoping come true this Christmas:

1. Proliferation of smartphones

Smartphones are an exciting prospect, with their flashy touch screens, the explosion in the popularity of apps and because they’re such a personal device. There have certainly been some impressive marketing hits and misses this year. As we learn from those who got it right and avoid the mistakes of those who got it wrong, smartphones will become an integrated part of the marketing mix.

Even if millions of people don’t get smartphones in their stockings this year there’s no need to feel glum. There’s still plenty of fun to be had with short codes and coupons in the meantime.

2. More businesses realising the importance of the web

I could sprout off some stats about the millions who went shopping online this Xmas and the millions more searching for product information throughout the year. But I think a timely example is the recent race in the music charts. The X Factor marketing juggernaut had the power of TV, radio and in store advertising powering its campaign. Rage Against the Machine had Facebook.

Rage’s victory (on download sales alone) was a great demonstration of social media flexing its muscles to influence opinions and spread ideas. More businesses need to realise that online is where their customers are spending more and more of their time, and invest in their web presence accordingly.

3. More investment in PURL campaigns

We bang on about PURL campaigns a lot on this blog, and for a good reason –they’re just so darn effective.

Marketing needs to be targeted and personalised if it’s going to appeal to people weary of being carpet bombed messages of little relevance or value to them. PURL campaigns, whether integrated with print or email, enable you to deliver customised messages based on an individual’s preferences and capture data for future campaigns at the same time.

In 2010 you’ll need to be marketing smarter if you want people to listen, which is why many marketers will be hoping they get the funds they need to deliver targeted PURL campaigns next year.

4. Less spent on celebrity endorsements

The implosion of brand Tiger has had many brand strategists shaking their heads and saying we’ve already seen the first and the last one billion dollar brand.

Whether or not Tiger Woods seeks deliverance on Oprah, brands are now nervous of risking millions having their identity stapled to a fallible human being. Many marketers will be hoping the millions saved on celebrity endorsements can go on campaigns they can more easily predict and control.

5. Job security and rebuilt teams

2009 has certainly been a difficult year. Despite everyone agreeing that marketing more in a recession is the smart thing to do, most companies have guillotined budgets, leaving depleted teams scrambling around to deliver the same results on a shrunken budget, slowing momentum and dampening morale.

With signs of brighter times ahead, many marketers will be hoping the grip on the money hose is loosened, and they can start rehiring and jumpstarting campaigns that have been put on hold.

Here’s hoping that Santa makes some of these wishes come true and spreads some festive joy for all the overworked marketers out there this Christmas.

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BDA (Buckingham Design Associates) blog – real people giving real opinions, and a complete lack of agency waffle. BDA deliver an exciting blend of design and creative marketing for the Oxford, Milton Keynes, Northampton and London region.

According to a recent study many of the top brands struggle when it comes to being loved. In fact, none of them scored above 30% at the ‘love score’ amongst customers, based on criteria such as whether the brand ‘makes time to reward me’, ‘relates to me best’ or ‘cares about me more than just money’.

So what’s gone wrong with the top brands’ love lives? Why aren’t they creating the emotional connections that are supposed to come from millions spent on marketing?

Well, the low levels of affection for brands have been blamed on a lack of personalised engagement. After all, you need to make people feel special if you want them to love you back.

Internet dating is about relationship building

Internet dating is like marketing in many ways. There are two main approaches:

• You can send the same message to as many potential partners as possible
• Or pluck nuggets of info from their profile about their passions, hobbies and interests to drop into personalised messages

So which approach do you think works best? Yep, you guessed it – taking the time to show an interest in people as individuals is the best way to get a conversation going in the internet dating world.

Once you’ve started a dialogue you can then keep asking questions to make your messages more relevant before reaching a conversion in the form of a date. Where you go from there is the subject of a different blog entirely.

So what does internet dating teach brands?

If brands want to be loved they should try mirroring the tactics that work so well in internet dating, and deliver campaigns that are personalised to match the interests of individual prospects.

Thankfully, we now have the technology to build these campaigns.

With Purls (personalised URLs) we can create websites customised for each individual prospect, and then use variable data printing to send them personalised promotions based on every click and page view.

Boots, for example, could reward its customer better by sending them personalised print and online promotions based on their purchase history. Not only will this cut down on the printing costs of sending an entire catalogue, but will also deliver marketing that’s more relevant and better received.

Brands need to remember that people are individuals, with their own interests and preferences. So, as in the internet dating world, they need to treat customers as unique individuals if they want to be more loved in return.

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BDA (Buckingham Design Associates) blog – real people giving real opinions, and a complete lack of agency waffle. BDA deliver an exciting blend of design and creative marketing for the Oxford, Milton Keynes, Northampton and London region.

Next month everyone will be able to start playing around with Google’s snazzy new app: Google Wave. It’s already being billed as the future of email and revolutionising the way we collaborate on the web, as the hype machine pumps out superlatives.

So is the hype justified? Does Google Wave truly offer marketers new opportunities for starting a real dialogue with customers? Or will it be another niche tool few will use outside the web savvy crowd?

What is Google Wave?

Imagine the love child of email and instant messaging and you’re not far away from picturing Google Wave.

Instead of emails you send ‘waves’, to which recipients can reply, edit your message or chat in real time just as you would on messenger. Members of the wave can also drag and drop photos, videos and links into the conversation, as well as go back and edit earlier posts.

The ability to build a group conversation in this way obviously offers great potential for collaborating on projects. But does Google Wave offer anything new to marketers?

Is Google Wave the future of email?

You’ll often hear email marketing being described as an ‘ongoing dialogue with customers’ or a ‘one-to-one conversation’. But marketing emails often seem more like infomercial broadcasts than a two way dialogue.

Well, Google Wave could change all that with its welding together of email and instant messaging. And it has the potential to offer email marketers the level of engagement they’ve been striving for.

If Google Wave becomes a success, instead of asking website visitors for an email address you’ll ask them to join your wave. As well as receiving your latest promotional offers, members of your wave will be able to ask questions in real time and interact with other members in an open format.

This level of interactivity means marketing messages will have to be about more than just encouraging clicks to buy your products. They will, in fact, be more like sitting around a table having a chat with your customers, than making a speech to a captive audience.

But how can you have 100s of conversations at once?

Google Wave offers great potential for greater customer engagement with your brand. But it also presents a challenge: how can you manage conversations with 100s or 1000s of your customers at once?

Well, if Google Wave does prove to be the success its creators hope, and starts to replace email, marketers will have to find a way of using what could be the ultimate conversational marketing tool.

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BDA (Buckingham Design Associates) blog – real people giving real opinions, and a complete lack of agency waffle. BDA deliver an exciting blend of design and creative marketing for the Oxford, Milton Keynes, Northampton and London region.

In its Madison Avenue strutting heyday, advertising was the only way to sell. Back when people spent their evenings reading newspapers or glued to the TV, brands relied on ads to grow desire and plant jingles in people’s minds.

But unfortunately for the once cocksure ad man, people and times have changed.

The old adage of ‘advertise or die’ is now being replaced by ‘evolve or die’. People are binning newspapers permanently, and fast forwarding or switching off the TV altogether.

The problem with advertising

Advertising’s first aim has always been to grab attention. Then it implants an appealing collection of thoughts and feelings that spring to mind when people are trawling supermarket shelves.

The problem is that consumers have been dazzled with advertising for so long that they’ve started ignoring it. Over time, the unfulfilled dreams promised by ad men have created cynicism, and an attitude has grown towards avoiding ads altogether.

So, brands need to find new platforms for engaging with their ad weary public. For many, this has simply meant diverting their budget online.

But as studies are showing, people are forming buying decisions based on the quality of the content brands provide, and not just on their advertising.

Brand perceptions are being formed online

Last year brands spent nearly £3 billion chasing after the migration of eyeballs onto the internet. But simply raining down ads isn’t an adequate response to the way in which people use the web.

A survey of UK consumers, last year, found that 86% had researched a company online before deciding whether to buy their product. And 22% always conduct an online background check before parting with their cash. Whilst these stats sound promising, less than half (49%) found the information they were looking for.

So, brands should start providing useful content on their website if they want to engage people’s interest and influence their buying decisions. After all, people use the internet to find information, not advertising.

Brand perception is built at every touch point

Advertising can be expensive and makes less of an impact than it once did. There are also now too many other ways in which people can engage with your brand (and they’re looking for a conversation that isn’t one way).

So you need to consider how your business is engaging with customers at every touch point. Whether it’s via magazine ads, direct mail, email or customer service, every engagement influences how people perceive the quality of your products.

And as the survey shows, people are increasingly demanding informative, useful content that answers their questions and assists their buying decisions. Which is why advertising alone, ultimately, is no longer enough to satisfy the needs of today’s cynical, connected consumer.

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BDA (Buckingham Design Associates) blog – real people giving real opinions, and a complete lack of agency waffle. BDA deliver an exciting blend of design and creative marketing for the Oxford, Milton Keynes, Northampton and London region.

In follow up to last week’s brochure design tips, we thought we’d discuss why you should consider printing your brochures digitally, rather than rely on good old lithographic.

Digital is being hailed as a revolution for small business’ print marketing: compared to litho, digital is quick, often cheaper and can deliver messages personalised to your customers’ interests.

Why is digital printing different to lithographic?

Traditional litho ‘offset’ printing requires the creation of a plate for every print, which is then used to transfer the image via a rubber blanket onto the paper.

Litho is great for printing 1000s of catalogues, magazines and books at a relative low cost. But its cost is less attractive when you’re only after a few hundred brochures and flyers.

Digital printers, on the other hand, don’t require the creation of a plate. Instead they use software to render digital images directly onto the press, bypassing the need for an expensive plate altogether. This offers numerous benefits…

What are the benefits of digital printing?

Cheaper – without the need to create a plate for every image, small businesses can print small quantities of brochures, flyers and business cards cheaply. There are already a few web-to-print businesses (such as moonpig.com and lulu.com) that have sprung up to capitalise on the low cost of small, customised print runs.

Faster – each litho print run takes a long time to setup. Digital presses, however, can be setup quickly and are capable of enabling next day, or even same day delivery.

Greener – the elimination of a plate, and shorter make-ready, means you also don’t need all the other printing materials and waste that go along with them. So you no longer have chemicals, ink and paper filling up your bin; and because you only print what you need, less chance of obsolescence. Some digital printing machines are even designed with their own recyclability in mind.

Customisable – every print can be customised to include unique content, such as the customer’s name, personalised URL and relevant images. Personalising marketing helps improve the response rate because people are more likely to engage with content that’s relevant to their interests. Litho, on the other hand, only allows a static ‘one size fits all’ message per print run.

High quality – the quality of digital printers is rapidly improving, and is almost indistinguishable from traditional litho. Their reliability is also getting better, and eventually they’ll be just as consistent, and competitive, at long print runs too.

Digital printing puts one-to-one marketing into customers’ hands

Digital print has opened up print marketing to small businesses by making it cost effective to deliver timely, relevant and personalised messages. This is the type of marketing weary consumers are crying out for, so digital print technology has arrived at just the right time.

Here at bda we’ve experienced first hand the benefits digital print offers for one-to-one marketing. In a recent campaign for Siemens, digital printing enabled us to create individual brochures personalised to match the responses customers logged on their website. This enabled Siemens to not only deliver marketing finely tuned to their customers’ interests, but also saved cash because they only needed to print what was requested, rather than end up with a pile of unwanted brochures gathering dust.

Litho still has a role to play in printing mass produced materials. But for fast, cost effective and personalised one-to-one print marketing, you have to go digital.

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BDA (Buckingham Design Associates) blog – real people giving real opinions, and a complete lack of agency waffle. BDA deliver an exciting blend of design and creative marketing for the Oxford, Milton Keynes, Northampton and London region.

In order to bring together some of the posts from thinkbda.com, we have created an ebook of 6 of our most read blogs from Winter 2008.

The blogs contained include:

1. Marketing in a recession – can you afford not to?
2. Branding – what’s your big idea?
3. The new email marketing – talking to customers individually?
4. Discover the power of storytelling
5. Logo design tips – what does an image say about you?
6. Going tribal – two UK websites thriving from tribal marketing

The ebook is FREE and you can download your copy here.

We hope you like what we have put together and do keep reading our site.

[This is the second half of a two part post. You can read part one here.]

Consumers are never happy unless you give them what they really want

In another recent post, Seth Godin commented on how consumers are never happy, but are constantly demanding freebies, updates and product improvements from businesses.

Seth suggests you can continue feeding the demands of unhappy customers, as though trying to buy a spoilt child’s affection, or you can give them what they really want: a sense of connection, to feel appreciated and loved.

Generic mass marketing cannot make people feel special or loved. Email blasting the same message to every customer is like sending a bulk message to your entire address book at Christmas, when what they really want is a personal message in an individually addressed card.

Luckily, the technology is now available for marketers to satisfy the desire for greater relevancy and connection. The ability to track and record an endless supply of data on customers means you can deliver one-to-one marketing personalised to match the interests and preferences of each individual.

Here are a few more marketing tips for making customers feel special and loved:

• Offer valuable insight or information (e.g. in a blog, newsletter or eBook) on solving a problem which can’t be easily found elsewhere
• Listen to your customers’ interests and preferences using personalised URLs
• Deliver timely messages and offers e.g. a congratulatory message and discount on their birthday
• Follow up sales with an email, even if it’s just to say thanks
• Tell your audience a captivating story about the history of your business which they can invest in emotionally and feel a part of

If you make them feel unhappy, remember to tell them they’re special afterwards

People aren’t interested in businesses or their products. They’re interested in how a product makes them feel and the promise of what it can do to improve their lives. Marketing’s aim isn’t to sell features, but the emotional benefits people will gain from them, or as lipstick maker Charles Revson once put it, “In the factory we make cosmetics. In the store we sell hope.”

So when looking to acquire customers, marketing’s aim isn’t to deliberately make them feel unhappy or inadequate, but to appeal to their inherent aspiration to better themselves, improve their lifestyle and enhance their standing with others.

Just make sure that once you’ve persuaded people to become customers you then switch your focus to making them feel special and appreciated. Because otherwise your customers might look elsewhere for connection and attention, which your competitors will be only too happy to provide.

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BDA (Buckingham Design Associates) blog – real people giving real opinions, and a complete lack of agency waffle. BDA deliver an exciting blend of design and creative marketing for the Oxford, Milton Keynes, Northampton and London region.

You might think the constant siege of inboxes by spammers has tarnished email’s reputation as a marketing tool forever. However, email still remains the workhorse of online marketing and integral to relationship building. Spam is merely its evil twin.

Email can start a dialogue, enhance your credibility and generate sales long after prospects have left your website. It’s even more potent when you’re smart enough to speak to recipients as individuals, rather than bellow the same speech to the entire crowd.

Relationship building

Capturing a customer’s email address when they visit your website should be your top priority. Because no matter how much flash animation and handpicked testimonials you throw at them, less than 5% (and that’s being generous) of visitors will be ready to buy on their first viewing.

So rather than hope they’ll come back on their own accord, you need to be able to maintain a line of communication with prospects long after they’ve left.

If you can capture their email address (e.g. in exchange for a free newsletter or eBook) then you can develop the sales process over time, because email can be a potent tool for relationship building and earning your prospects’ confidence.

Focus on the prospect

As any salesman will tell you, people like to do business with those they get to know and trust, which is exactly what email marketing campaigns are all about. Your strategy isn’t to force recipients into submission by mail bombing offer after offer, but to engage their interest with relevant messages that provide valuable and useful content.

Emails which offer to solve a prospect’s problems, help them sleep better at night and feel they’ve benefited from the interaction is how you can win trust, confidence and credit card numbers.

Rather than talking endlessly about yourself and how much profit you made last year, relationship marketing emails need to be focused on the needs of your prospect and how your product/service can enrich their lives.

As well as earning trust with valuable content, email can be used in many other ways to foster loyalty, such as invitations to live events, timely promotions (such as a birthday discount) and getting feedback on what your customers want from you.

Don’t blast, listen and engage

Perhaps the biggest impact of spam on email marketing has been the speeding up of the demise of lazily blasting the same message at every customer. People now receive so many marketing messages that if your email doesn’t appear to be relevant then you’re only a mouse click away from being deleted or blocked forever.

Simply repeating the same offer to every prospect in the hope of seducing a small number is no longer the smartest strategy. People now want and expect to be treated as individuals, and I’m not talking about just featuring their name in the subject line.

Modern tracking and analytics enables you to capture an endless stream of data on prospects. Along with their buying history and demographic profile, modern one-to-one digital campaigns utilising personalised URLs are able to record data on your prospects’ interests, preferences and desires. You can then segment and customise future messages pitched to appeal to each prospect’s personal triggers.

However, the process of fine tuning emails to be as relevant and personalised as possible never ends. Even after campaigns have been launched, you need to run A/B split tests on every adjustable element, such as the subject line, layout and the call to action at the end.

Watching how people interact with every email enables you to listen to what they’re thinking and how your message can be more finely tuned in the future.

Email is about one-to-one dialogue, rather than bellowing a single message

As with every aspect of marketing, the more relevant, timely and personalised your email marketing can be the more chance of provoking the right response, or as the popular mantra goes ‘delivering the right message to the right person at the right time’.

Delivering mass untargeted emails is now more likely to get you blacklisted than welcomed into people’s inboxes. However, modern email technology means we can now build and fine tune personalised one-to-one email campaigns which are pitched to match the desires of each individual prospect, leaving lazy email blasts to the spammers.

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BDA (Buckingham Design Associates) blog – real people giving real opinions, and a complete lack of agency waffle. BDA deliver an exciting blend of design and creative marketing for the Oxford, Milton Keynes, Northampton and London region.

Marketing is often seen as a business’ glamorous side. Glossy brochures, flashy advertising and fancy product launches can seem like a lot of fun compared to telesales and bean counting. Building brand awareness and luring customers away from the competition is an important duty to perform. However, marketing also has a defensive role to play.

Along with customer services and sales teams, marketing has a duty to actively engage customers, keep them happy and retain their loyalty, particularly when times are tough.

Retention offers the best return

With the economy continuing to nosedive, in a recent survey of 100 European businesses 34% said that retention was their primary concern. A plucky 8% said that chasing new customers was still the first thing on their mind, which is a big drop from 40% last year.

Although not carved into stone or approved by the office of statistics, the consensus is that it costs five times more to acquire a new customer than it does to retain an existing one. When you also add their lifetime value into the equation it doesn’t take Carol Vorderman to tell you that ensuring your customers feel loved is the smartest way of spending your marketing cash.

Active customers are happy customers

Studies show that during a recession you should market more rather than less. Although the temptation is to guillotine budgets and bunker down, if you maintain a presence and engage with customers during turbulent times you position yourself to prosper once the storm has passed.

Active customers are happy customers, and running campaigns that reinforce the sense that buying your products is the smart thing to do is the best way of provoking them into retail therapy. Whether it’s rewarding their loyalty with discounts, sending them a newsletter or just a simple thank you card, actively engaging customers lets them know that you care about them, and stops them looking elsewhere for affection.

Knowing what to say and when to say it

Retention marketing isn’t a strategy led blindly by the heart. You know when your customers want you to talk to them simply by watching your database.

If you track your customers’ buying behaviour you’ll be able to see the warning lights when something is wrong. Then it’s time to send out the surveys to find out what you can do to make things right.

Ask your customers when they plan to buy again. If not, why not? And what can you do to change their minds. A customer survey can be a marketing campaign in itself, so remember to find a way to reward those giving you honest feedback.

Retention reminds customers you’re there

When you consider that your existing customers contribute 80% to your revenue, engaging with them and keeping them happy should always be on your mind. And with digital media, it’s easier than ever to run one-to-one retention campaigns targeted to appeal to the preferences, hopes and desires of every customer.

So whilst times are tough, don’t sit in silence praying for easier times, but continue to remind your customers you’re still around and that you love them because it’s what they’ll want to hear.

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BDA (Buckingham Design Associates) blog – real people giving real opinions, and a complete lack of agency waffle. BDA deliver an exciting blend of design and creative marketing for the Oxford, Milton Keynes, Northampton and London region.

The desire to feel special is a natural human emotion, and people want to be treated as individuals, rather than merely another target on a mass marketing bombing campaign. The problem with a lot of marketing is that it fails to make people feel special, but simply dumps the same message as wide as possible to hit as many targets as it can.

Simply pouring money into unrefined email blasts and bulk mailings is a clumsy and expensive approach, because we now have the technology to engage prospects in a one-to-one marketing dialogue that’s more relevant and personalised for each individual.

With a recession looming, the competition for customers is only going to increase.

So, to engage people’s attention your marketing needs to appeal more closely to their interests than the rest. And the evidence shows that integrating direct mail with digital is the best tactic for getting more personal with prospects.

Direct mail makes the introduction

Despite what some internet fanboys (might) think, print isn’t dead and will be the touch point of choice with most prospects for many years to come. In fact, a Pitney Bowes survey found that 73% still prefer to receive product announcements in the mail compared to reading them on a screen.

With this in mind, direct mail is the best medium for introducing prospects to online promotions. It’s effectiveness in launching a one-to-one campaign extends beyond merely the name on the label, because the website address it sends people to is personalised too.

People love to see their name in print, and few can ignore the curiosity of visiting a website featuring their name in the URL.

Personalised URLs look after the conversation

It’s when prospects visit their own personalised URL that the conversation really begins.

Not only does each mini site greet them by name, but also features products and services carefully arranged to match their interests. This customised approach already helps improve your chances of generating leads.

However, where a PURL’s power really lies is in its ability to listen as well as talk. Every mouse click and interaction is recorded and added to the feast of information stored on your database, ripe for future targeted marketing activity.

Cost effective, quick and a high response

In a recent BDA campaign for Siemens we experienced first hand how effective an integrated, personalised campaign can be.

A letter was sent to prospects promoting Siemens’ ‘A Meeting of Open Minds’ breakfast seminar along with their own personalised URL. On each individually addressed website, prospects could interact with a ‘cost calculator’, to see what savings they could make, and then book their place on the seminar.

Recording the interests of prospects, by how they interacted with the site, was estimated to save two weeks of telemarketing and generate leads at half the cost of conventional marketing activity.

The personalised one-to-one approach was also so effective in attracting interest that Siemens had to run two additional seminars to cope with demand.

Personalised campaigns get you closer to your target

The tracking provided by personalised websites enables you to get progressively closer to every prospect. From initial acquisition through to retention, with each subsequent campaign you can fine tune your offer to appeal to the interests of each individual.

Numerous case studies have shown that integrating direct mail with digital campaigns is the way to go. Recent research by the Royal Mail found that over half of consumers prefer a combination of the two, and that integrated campaigns could increase customer spend by 25%.

The technology is now available to deliver one-to-one campaigns that are relevant, targeted and provide a much better response from consumers.

So are you going to continue bombing your prospects with mass untargeted messages? Or are you ready to get closer with personalised URLs?

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BDA (Buckingham Design Associates) blog – real people giving real opinions, and a complete lack of agency waffle. BDA deliver an exciting blend of design and creative marketing for the Oxford, Milton Keynes, Northampton and London region.