Subject: With E-mail, Less Can Be More

From: Chief Marketer <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 29 Mar 2005 09:00:03 -0600

March 29, 2005 | A PRIMEDIA Property |

Table of Contents
E-mail: Less Can Be More
Magazines: Recognizing Reader Engagement
Price Promotions: Of Price and Men (and Women)
Demographic Targeting: Cable Network Addresses Asian Americans
Internet: Marketers Need to Keep Innovating
Radio: Embattled Broadcast Medium Seeks a Savior

This Week's Stories
E-mail: Less Can Be More
By Brian Quinton
DIRECT
As far as marketers are concerned, spam is in the eye of the beholder--and consumers consider an excess of even permission-based e-mails (PBEs) as spam.

A study of consumer e-mail behavior by DoubleClick last October found that the average person reported receiving 308 e-mails a week. About 62% of them were spam, while 8% were PBEs.

When asked how they judged a message to be spam, more than 90% of respondents named the usual suspects: offensive material, unknown senders, and the appearance of trickery. But 58% also said they considered spam to include PBEs that came too frequently from a company, even if they had once done business with it; and 57% cited "irrelevance" as another spam characteristic.

Dave Lewis, vice president of market development at StrongMail, says some of the most efficient e-mail marketers handle the "spam/not spam" problem by offering customers who want to rescind their permission a chance to personalize the e-mail channel by choosing their own frequency or content.

"These marketers take a customer's wish to unsubscribe as a signal that their current e-mail campaign is not hitting that person's hot buttons," says Lewis. "So they offer to restrict the subscription to certain product lines, or to change the cadence at which the consumer is e-mailed. That way, you're tailoring not just the message but the frequency with which it's delivered to the customer's wants and needs."

To read more about customizing e-mail, visit DIRECT.

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Magazines: Recognizing Reader Engagement
By Hershel Sarbin
I always look for "Adweek'"s Hot List of Magazines, but the March 14 lead really caught my attention. After all these years of wanting to measure reader engagement -- i.e, getting beyond PIB ad pages and total audience -- and wishing for a magazine-to-magazine ranking, I see that Monroe Mendelsohn Research has delivered a Readership Satisfaction Survey that "Adweek" now uses to evaluate reader involvement.

Ths ground-breaking addition was actually in development when MPA released its involvement study a year ago. That study was very worthwhile, but you could not do magazine-to-magazine comparisons MMR's Annual Survey, under the leadership of Bob Shullman, tracks 239 consumer magazines.

Stay tuned.

Hershel Sarbin is the publisher of CHIEF MARKETER.

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Price Promotions: Of Price and Men (and Women)
By Margery Weinstein
CATALOG AGE
While discounts are effective in luring prospective buyers, the lifetime value of already-established customers can be reduced by such price reductions. That was one of the findings that Dr. Duncan Simester, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Sloan School of Management, shared at a session at the New England Mail Order Association's spring conference last week.

Giving proven buyers discounts may train these individuals to wait for sales rather than making purchases at the beginning of the season. "If anything, it makes them more deal-sensitive, and more likely to wait for special deals in the future," Simester explained. The exception to this rule, he said, are inactive buyers, who often need the stimulus of the discount to start shopping from the merchant again.

In addition, shoppers respond to what Simester called "price cues," such as sale claims, price endings, and pricing guarantees, more than to actual price changes. He warned that companies have much less ability to raise prices on products whose costs customers are familiar with, such as a can of Coke, but have more leeway with products whose price most shoppers are less knowledgeable of, such as a pack of baking soda.

He also advised against overusing price cues. "The effectiveness of sales signs go down the more often you use them," Simester said, noting that customers will catch on to an overabundance of sales events. "It becomes an issue of credibility." Similarly, he said that companies need to watch the timing of sales, pointing out that a spring catalog, for instance, probably won't be able to get away with claiming that it has swimsuits for sale.

To read more, visit CATALOG AGE.

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Demographic Targeting: Cable Network Addresses Asian Americans
By Andrew Grossman
Backed by the powerful Comcast Corp., a new cable network aimed at Asian American viewers will try to tap into what the U.S. Census estimates is $363 billion in spending power.

AZN Television, formerly the International Channel, relaunched yesterday with a pledge to significantly increase its investment in original programming and provide a heavy dose of Asian films, drama, anime, and original series, most of which will air in their original languages with English subtitles.

"Advertisers have told us in the last two years that the Asian-American market is the most desirable audience that can be delivered," says AZN managing director Steve Smith, who expects to draw especially strongly from automakers, telecommunications, and insurance companies. "This is a way for advertisers to reach this market very efficiently," he adds, noting that AZN will do much of its promotion in local media targeting Asian populations.

The International Channel, which is in about 10 million homes, had never caught on among cable operators and viewers. Analysts believe that was largely because it tried to appeal to wide a range of ethnic groups instead of focusing on one group. Comcast is betting on the 13.5 million Asian Americans, of whom 85% speak English, according to the U.S. Census.

In the beginning the network will draw on acquisitions from Korea, Japan, China, Thailand, and India, most of which have not been seen in the United States. It will gradually introduce original programming, all of which will be broadcast in English and air on Wednesday nights.

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Internet: Marketers Need to Keep Innovating
PROMO
Promotion marketers are way ahead of the game when it comes to driving consumers to the Web and using the interactive medium to build sales, disseminate information, or to just create some plain 'ol fun.

That's a big advantage considering that a new study suggests that mature Internet markets, including the U.S., have shown minimal to flat growth in Internet user's time online at home, forcing online companies to evolve their business to stimulate additional Web growth.

"As the Internet has officially become an important part of our lives, the U.S. is primed for the next 'big thing' to spike Internet usage," Kaizad Gotla, senior Internet analyst, Nielson//NetRatings, said in a statement. "There are many opportunities ahead for companies online, but if they just continue to do what they're doing today, they're only going to move sideways."

To read of some innovative interactive online promotions, visit PROMO.

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Radio: Embattled Broadcast Medium Seeks a Savior
By Andrew Grossman
Elvis Costello once sang, "Radio is our sound salvation." Now it turns out his ironic tone may have hit just the right note: The question today is, Who will save radio?

Two recent marketing events spell out the broadcast radio industry's woes in today's digital communications world. Last week XM Satellite Radio and Hyundai Motor America announced that the Korean carmaker will become the first to install XM as standard, factory-installed equipment in every vehicle, starting with its 2006 models. Competitor Sirius Satellite Radio made a somewhat smaller splash saying it would market its receivers as factory-installed options beginning in May on some Jaguar models and in July on some Range Rovers.

Two weeks earlier, a less publicized event still had troublesome implications for the industry. Radio YourWay rolled out a major upgrade to its TiVo-like device that enables listeners to record and playback radio programming at their convenience. The company joins Griffin Technology's Radio Shark -- $69 at Griffintechnology.com -- in marketing devices that enable radio listeners to skip the ads.

Braodcast radio is in enough trouble as it is. According to the Radio Advertising Bureau, sales revenue was only $19.6 billion in 2003 compared with $19.8 billion in 2000. Alternatives to broadcast radio, such as satellite radio, Internet radio, iPods, and the growing "pod-casting" phenomenon -- in which users can download free content from the Internet to use on their portable devices -- have put heavy pressure on the industry.

Some blame the major radio ownerships for audience and advertising erosion. "Clear Channel and Infinity [Broadcasting] have been essentially undermining the quality of the listening experience," says Ted Schlader, an analyst at Forrester Research who last week released a study on digital audio.

Ad clutter has gotten so bad that Clear Channel last year reduced its commercial load by 20%. Music lovers have also grown tired of the numbing sameness along the dial, as few nonpublic stations will stray from strict play lists of hits in whatever genre they air.

So is radio-TiVo ready for the top of the pops? Not yet, according to Schlader and a "New York Times" review of Radio YourWay, (which was listed for $200-$250 at radioyourway.com).

"They don't have a program guide because one does not exist," Schlader says. "So they are fancy VCRs rather than like TiVos. ... It's not a breakthrough as TiVo was for television."

Schlader says a true radio-TiVo will not arrive until a company invents an end-to-end solution that includes the application and the guide. "That won't come to broadcast radio anytime soon," he added.

"The New York Times" was also skeptical. In his Feb. 26 review, David Pogue panned Radio YourWay for its tinny sound, skimpy battery time, poor reception, and clunky software. "In short, almost every aspect of Radio YourWay needs improvement," he wrote.

Satellite radio is a bigger threat, as XM and Sirius listenership has grown 150% in the past year to 4.5 million subscribers. Sirius signed ratings powerhouse Howard Stern away from Infinity Broadcasting with the promise of no FCC-imposed censorship on his bawdy broadcasts.

Online radio, an 11-year-old growth industry, is thriving as well with major players such as Yahoo, MSN, AOL, and Live365 competing with commercial radio stations. Clear Channel and Infinity have already announced plans to create similar platforms.

In its study, Forrester found that radio still has a huge advantage because 56% of music lovers listen most frequently in the car. Nonetheless, 48% listen to music on portable devices and 21% on their desktop computers.

Does radio have a savior? Schlader and others believe it could lie in high-definition technology, which will vastly improve audio quality and give local stations a second or third channel for data services.

Like HDTV, HD-radio will start slowly, Schlader predicts, because of its initial $500 price tag for receivers. But by 2010, he says, the costs will fall to $150, and 9.7 million homes will have HD receivers. By that time, "broadcasters [will] introduce multiple-channel programming over the existing airwaves and services like continuous traffic updates," he wrote in his report.

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