Just for a minute, imagine that your ad didn’t get out this week.

There’s good news and bad news there, right?  Lots less markdown, but what would the sales impact be?  5 or 10%?  30%?  More?  The great unknown is how many secondary shoppers compare ads before deciding which store to shop.  If your customer base is like most stores, about 50% of your total sales each week come from what Neilsen classifies as “tin” or infrequent, value-focused shoppers. The ones who pay special attention to ads.

In this perilous operating environment, there is a real danger that one important conduit to your customers could be in grave danger.  Especially if you depend on newspapers to deliver your message.   Since 2005, we’ve seen the incredible decline of newspapers accelerate in a way that is frankly stunning.  From decades of operating at profit levels approaching 50%, newspapers can now barely lay off people fast enough to avoid bankruptcy.  In fact, today’s announcement of the Chapter 11 filing of the Chicago Sun Times adds to what is now a very long list.

There will be survivors.  Papers deliver content to readers on behalf of advertisers.  The desire for local content isn’t going to go away.  Just the delivery mechanism will be dramatically different.  Meanwhile, there will be a wrenching transition—scratch that, there IS a wrenching transition and it happening now, exacerbated by the pressures of the economy.

If you rely on newspapers, or one could argue, just about any other print based media, it might be prudent to begin now to begin to control your own destiny.  If you have a loyalty card and you use it correctly, you already know that your database is one of your brand’s most valuable assets.
Right now is the time to put a plan in place to get individual e-mail and SMS text addresses from customers.  But if you’re like most people you are thinking, “no one wants more spam in their inbox.”  Think about this:

• Last week research came out that indicated that, next to e-mails from family and friends, people spend the most time with opt-in e-mails from businesses.  That’s you.  It added up to an estimated 45 minutes per week!  That is a lifetime in the Internet age—especially when there’s no articles to get through before they come to your wonderful marketing message.
• Your best customers, even your second tier customers are truly in a relationship with you.  They want to hear from you.  They deserve to hear from you.  If you wan to keep them in the relationship, that is.
• Aggressive price conscious customers may be the bane of your existence, but your best shot is to give them something beyond the below cost ad specials to look at.
• Take a look at the traffic on your web site by day of the week.  You may find that there is a spike that coincides with your ad effective date.  Hmmmm….. Might be an opportunity to reach out right there.

Putting together your initiative to build your customer e-mail and SMS data base can be as simple or as complex as you have the bandwidth to make it.  It might involve in-store, on-line and direct to consumer components.  But one thing is certain:  The risks and the rewards are both large.  If you misstep and irritate or alienate, you will wind up in the bottom of the digital trashcan.  If you do it right, you’ll remain a valuable part of your customer’s lives.  They will be much more likely to shop with you more frequently and for a longer time.  More on that in a future post.

Start soon.  From the way things are going, the day might be around the corner when you wind up with a very large stack of print ads and nowhere to put them.

There’s a study out today from Merkle that is fascinating.

It says that right after e-mails from family and friends, people spend the most time on opt-in e-mails from companies (permission e-mail)! Shocker.
It really supports what we always say about brands. When people invite you into their lives, either via their TV sets or their desktops or their mail boxes, they actually want communication from you. Not too much of it mind you–the number two reason for opt-out is too high of frequency, but if you can remain relevant and interesting to someone, you can certainly keep their attention.

Here’s the rub: People are becoming more and more cautious about signing up for e-mail blasts. They are buried with communication and can’t keep up. So they certainly don’t want to opt in to a company that is sending two or three e-mails every day during the holidays! (Are you listening Neiman-Marcus? Hello Auto Sport?)
That means your invitation should be honest and offered with humility and an understanding of the imposition that you’re potentially becoming.

Also, it’s smart to use your analytics to determine where an e-mail might be appropriate. We have one client who’s site gets a significant bump every Sunday, the day their weekly ad breaks. This speaks to the fact that the Sunday newspaper is becoming less and less of a factor for most customers and rather than take the paper or go out and get it, they’re just as like to go on-line and hit their favorite stores to see what’s new. Knowing that they’re visiting that day gives us an incredible opportunity to expand the relationship, via an e-mail offer or even tailored offers.
I would love to hear where others are having success in opt-in.

Here are some key points from the Merkle Study:

Time spent with permission email has stabilized since the gains seen last year. 59% of all email users spend twenty minutes or more with permission email weekly, with just over one- quarter spending an hour or more weekly

Permission email accounts for about a quarter of all time spent with email, second only to its primary function of communicating with friends and family

Just over half of all permission email recipients have added at least one company to their address book, and do so for 25% of the companies sending them email

There is an inverse relationship between the email types that are most valued and the quantities consumers receive

The biggest reasons subscribers choose to opt-out of permission email continue to be lack of relevance (cited by 75%), followed closely by sending too frequently (73%)

Slightly over half of respondents said that they were less willing to sign-up for email communications when compared to just a few years ago - showing that they are exercising caution.

Sight, Sound & Success

U.S. banks seeing the highest returns on their advertising investment are not necessarily those spending the most but instead have the heaviest TV budgets. A new report from financial-services research firm Aite Group, which examined ad-spending trends and return on advertising performance of 32 of the largest 50 U.S. retail banks from 2006 through 2008, found that top 25% highest-performing banks are those with TV-heavy buys. The 32 banks included in the report accounted for 75% of ad spending by the top 100 bank advertisers, a group which spent $1.9 billion on advertising in 2007, according to market-research firm TNS. Yet according to Aite, sheer budget size does not always yield high returns. “There are a lot of factors that figure into bank performance,” said Ron Shevlin, senior analyst at Aite Group and author of the report. “Sales ability, ad execution and asset optimization are all things we found done particularly well in the top quadrant of banks.” He said banks in that top quadrant — which include big names such as Citibank and Wachovia, as well as smaller companies Huntington, BB&T and Hudson Bank — did best in driving deposit, loan and IRA account growth, which is, after all, the ultimate goal in bank marketing. While other banks succeeded in ramping different traditional metrics of advertising return, such as awareness, he said those ad dollars were ultimately lost because they did not result in new deposits, loan or IRA growth.

Social Network Surge

The rapidly evolving world of social networks and blogs has officially grown up. Last year, the largest increase in visitors to such “member community” Web sites came from those ages 35-49, according to a new report from The Nielsen Co. “Social networking isn’t just growing rapidly, it’s evolving–both in terms of a broader audience and compelling new functionality,” said Alex Burmaster, author of the study and communications director across EMEA for Nielsen Online. But grow rapidly it did. In 2008, over two-thirds (67%) of the global online population visited what Nielsen dubs “member communities,” which include both social networks and blogs. That placed “member communities” as the fourth-largest online category, ahead of “personal email.” What’s more, the category grew twice as fast as any of the other four largest sectors, including search, portals, PC software and email. According to the Nielsen report, Facebook–which has now surpassed MySpace as the world’s most popular social network–was visited monthly by three in every 10 people online across the nine markets in which Nielsen tracks social networking. In Brazil, meanwhile, Google’s Orkut social network had the largest domestic online reach–70%–of any social network in these markets. Germany saw the greatest increase in penetration of social networks and blogs across 2008, from 39% of the online audience in December 2007 to 51% in December 2008–a relative growth of 39%. In addition, mobile is playing an increasingly important role in social networking, according to Nielsen. U.K. mobile Web users had the greatest propensity to visit a social network through their handset, with 23%–or roughly 2 million people–doing so, compared to 19% in the U.S.–or some 10.6 million people.

Morning Show Mayhem

To promote its flagship morning show, “Good Morning America,” ABC has bought ads in rival early-bird programming, including CNN’s “American Morning.” In other words, when CNN’s John Roberts cuts to a commercial break, you might see an ad suggesting you change the channel to watch GMA’s Diane Sawyer instead. Since rival networks were not likely to accept an ad from ABC News, ABC made the purchases through local cable operators in the top 10 national markets, allowing its GMA ads to run between 6 a.m. and 9 a.m. on a range of cable-news channels. ABC’s approach is the latest use of local ad time to circumvent the awkward times when a particular TV network would prefer not to run a certain ad. Alan Ives, executive producer at ABC News, says it makes sense to hunt on other channels for non-GMA watchers and hope to lure them from competitors’ programs. “It’s easier to convert someone who has the TV on at the time than it is to run a print ad to get them to remember.”

Strangest Media Opportunity of the Week: The Doghouse.

Less heard about but no less tragic is the story of the pets that are left behind as the family piles into the car and drives off. It was the plight of those animals that was running through the mind of Phil Jones, art director at an ad agency in Charlotte, N.C. Jones, a dog lover, had just finished reading a story about those abandoned pets. Says Jones: “It was one of those a-ha moments after reading a news article. The Humane Society of Charlotte is one of our clients, so I thought ‘We can do something about this, and it’s timely.’” From that a-ha moment arose an idea and then a plan and from that an alternative media campaign. The centerpiece is a dog house. Over the dog house is a sign that reads “Foreclosure” in bold red letters. It sits in front of the Humane Society of Charlotte. Next to the dog house stands a post and on the top of it is a box that looks just like those boxes you see in front of homes that are on the market. But inside, instead of the listings for available homes in the neighborhood, are listings for abandoned pets that are available for adoption.The great tragedy of this vicious economic downturn is the number of people forced onto the streets by foreclosures, and it seems not a night goes by on the evening news where we’re not told of some hapless family saying good-bye to their home.