Cross-Channel Digital Communications Are More Effective Than TV and Radio Spots

Responsys announced a lot of innovations last week at their annual conference.

The platform Responsys allows marketers to reduce their reliance on paid media by focusing on new school relationship marketing channels. It’s amazing to me how much companies spend to acquire traffic. About 95% of the budgets in the digital marketing space are spent on paid advertising. Yet every business consultant knows that you can gain a bigger lift in revenue by increasing folks already in your pipeline than by going out and acquiring new prospects at the mouth of the funnel.

And Responsys has case study after case study of folks that have done just that.

Southwest Airlines for example established a corporate wide focus on cross channel communications. They launched campaigns via email, text and retargeted advertising. Retargeted advertising

Retargeting is an online advertising technique that focuses only on people who have already visited your site.  Anyone who has visited your website will receive a small identifier on their computer (called a cookie).  When the user visits any website that has advertising on it, and where your ad has been placed on the major networks, then your ad will appear to those users.  It generally costs less than most advertising models and generally outperforms other advertising tactics.  Here are a few examples of the creative that went out via their platform.

And the results speak for themselves.

Southwest Airlines has over 10 million email subscribers, 1.7 million Facebook fans, and 1.2 million followers on Twitter, and tens of thousands mobile subscribers.

“Our number one transaction days used to be when we dropped a TV and radio spot. Now our number one transaction days are when we execute an email campaign coupled with a mobile and social campaign through Responsys.”

–Director of Marketing, Southwest Airlines

Companies are learning how to use cross-channel communications to increase engagement and have more meaningful dialogue with their customers. We think this is a good thing, both for companies that are prepared to stomach the good and the bad that comes along with the raw conversations that will happen once they open these channels, and for the customers that they serve.

Organizations prepared to stomach this type of change need to be sincere in their approach, be willing to have conversations in public view, and provide value beyond “brochure-ware.”

Latin American Countries Most Interested in the Cloud

Source: Terra.Com

A study from Tata Consultancy Services indicates that Latin American countries are the most interested in adopting cloud-based systems, followed by Asian countries.

The research, which included the participation of 600 IT managers from large companies, noted that 39% of Latin American companies are already using cloud computing applications, a figure twice the American rate (19%) and more than three times that of Europe (12%).

According to the same survey, 28% of Asian companies use cloud-based systems.  Respondents cited flexibility and simplification of procedures as their main reasons for adopting the cloud.  The model’s second major advantage for Latin American and Asian companies would be the possibility of adding or removing systems quickly.

On the other hand, concern with the cloud’s security weaknesses is the main reason for companies, especially public companies, not to adopt the use of remote servers – only 20% of respondents indicated that they trust cloud-based systems with their corporate data.