3 Questions You Need To Ask Now For 2015 Success

Article by Ernan Roman Featured on CMO.com

Right now is the time to re-evaluate your marketing in terms of the new expectations your customers have developed in the past 6 months. What new insights are they providing regarding what they want—or do not want—from your customer experience, communications and company interactions?

Here are 3 key questions to ask right now. The answers will ensure that you take the smart actions for success in 2015.

1. Are You Ignoring Key Customer Segments? 
You could be missing out on new business because of perceived brand positioning. Take stock at year-end to audit your overall brand message and determine whether it is moving you toward your full potential--or limiting your growth.

Case in point: Buffalo Wings & Rings, a chain of 55-plus sports restaurants in the U.S. and abroad, has spent the past couple of years refining its image and brand appeal to women and families in order to reach a larger universe of customers.

As part of that effort, the brand embarked on a total redesign of its locations. Specific changes included soundproofing the restaurant area to reduce noise from the bar, where sports events are broadcast; adding cushions to seats and benches for more comfort; and relocating games for children away from the front door and the bar area.

In addition, Buffalo Wings revamped it Web site to give customers the ability to interact, get information, and become part of a community. "We wanted to create a new experience for the sports and wings category... Your brand is created by customers and how they use you," said Buffalo Wings chief executive Nader Masadeh. Added Diane Matheson, director of marketing, "[We] wanted to refine the brand and strengthen the concept with a distinct point of view." Results: This year sales have grown 12.5 percent to $72 million. Next year, the company plans to add up to eight new stores in the U.S. and 10 overseas.

2. Are You Communicating Effectively?
Different types of customers have different preferences for communication. Just because you have a communication method available does not mean it’s the best option for your core customers. So pause now to challenge your assumptions regarding content, clarity of communications, sales channels, and preferred customer media. This will provide insights regarding key improvements for 2015.

Also, consider: Per Voice of Customer research conducted by our firm for client MassMutual, the majority of customers indicated that they want proactive and customized communications that are personalized by their needs and life stage.

Case in point: Multibillion-dollar telecom service provider CenturyLink needed to understand why its call centers were receiving such a high call volume. It discovered that its own processes required customers to call multiple times to establish or modify service. To solve this pain point, CenturyLink revamped its processes. It also developed a new system, called Digital Dialogue, to integrate more than 35 disparate systems from multiple communication channels, and transformed the CenturyLink Web site into a seamless self-service experience.

“We’re trying to give customers better information. ... If we can give customers information before they have to ask for it, they feel that we’re having intelligent dialogue with them, and that we’re on top of things,” noted Lindsey Pardun, IT principal architect at CenturyLink. “And if we do need to talk to them, we can have a much more efficient conversation.”

Results: In the first two months after the launch of Digital Dialogue, 187,000 calls were automatically routed to the right agents.  

3. Do You Have An Effective Retention Strategy?
A recent Retention Science study noted that only 23% of marketers track the rate at which customers churn, less than 40% track customer lifetime value, and, not surprisingly, 70% believe their retention marketing efforts are average, poor, or need improvement. In dollars and cents, an Adobe study found that online retailers would double their revenues if they retained 10% of their existing customers. Instead, 80% of marketers were using their digital marketing budgets to acquire new shoppers.

Case in point: Groupon realized that its initial business model of daily deals and a bombardment of email with heavy discounts did not turn out to be a sound strategy. To better retain customers and give them a reason to come back, the company had to rethink its relationship with both its business partners and end-user consumers.

Groupon is now focusing on its online marketplace, reducing reliance on email, and improving relevance. It encourages subscribers to search for deals and explore its marketplace (a pull strategy) instead of relying on email (push strategy).

The company is also creating a tablet-based operating system for merchants called Gnome, which empowers it to improve customer retention by better managing transactions, keeping track of customers to launch specific marketing campaigns, and simplifying the whole process of redemptions.

While the company is not out of the woods yet, its efforts are paying off. Groupon saw 23% revenue growth to $751.6 million in Q2 2014, with a 29% rise in global gross billings. The total active customer count rose by 25% year-on-year during the quarter, with North American customer count rising by 18%. The North American transactions percentage resulting from search was 24% in the third quarter, compared to 9% in the same quarter last year.

TakeawaysThe needs and expectations of your customers are changing with astonishing velocity. Now is the time to:

• Investigate where your missing opportunities are hiding, and develop new strategies and methods of presenting your company to new customers.
• Understand whether your communication avenues are effective and make necessary changes to embrace customer needs and resolve pain points.
• Strengthen your customer-acquisition plan. Don’t rely solely on recruiting new business.

Use these final few weeks of the year to reflect on how much you don't know about customers’ evolving needs and what you must change to maintain relevance and competitive differentiation. Use multiple methods to learn from the voice of your customer and then act on those insights. The wisdom of the customer is unfailingly correct.

3 Ways Customer Listening Powers Marketing Effectiveness

Article by Ernan Roman Featured on CustomerThink.com

Today customers can make sure that their voice is heard like never before. And, if marketers don’t have measures in place to listen, they are turning a deaf ear to potentially significant problems and missing out on essential insights for improving their customer experience.

Following are 3 ways to leverage customer listening and examples of how companies are putting these strategies into action.

1. Realize that Customer Listening (and Responding) is a 360-Degree Commitment.

Engagement with customers includes business partners who are also the face of your brand. So, how every aspect of your brand listens to the voice of your customer and responds is key.

For example, NASCAR made the decision to revamp its marketing and listening in five key areas. But that’s not where it ended. NASCAR also encouraged its business partners and drivers to do the same.

“We developed an industry action plan,” stated Steve Phelps NASCAR CMO, “… A plan for digital and social, a plan for driver star power–and within each plan, [we came up with] a number of different action items … [In an] effort to be thought leaders who provide the best available experience to our fans. We strongly encourage those across the entire landscape of the sport to embrace digital and social media — from drivers and teams to tracks and corporate partners.”

With new technologies NASCAR is boasting 6,000 tweets a minute, 565,000 posts per day and one million posts per event.

2. Customers are More Than Numbers, They are People, Talk to Them … (And listen.)

Data gives you a good view of what customers are doing. However, it is not going to tell you why or give you the emotional factors like a conversation. Personal interactions can be more valuable than all the big data you will ever collect.

Starting in October, Flow and Columbus Business Solutions, a telecommunications company serving the Caribbean, asked customers to tell them how they felt. Michele English, Columbus’ executive vice president and chief customer officer noted, “Our plan is to significantly enhance our customer ‘listening’ systems and ensure that feedback is integrated into our daily decisions and connected to our customers’ experiences across the organization… we have to design and implement [operational processes] to ensure that every customer touch point in the organization can support our customers’ needs efficiently and effectively… We now look forward to more customer feedback. “

The Company designed an easy to use online customer survey and sent communications to customers to encourage them to complete the survey and tell the company what matters.

3. Make Conversation (and Listening) Easy with Social Communities

Online communities enable the exchange of ideas in discussion forums, polls and social media. They provide brand information, mitigate problems and provide opportunities for a collaborative two-way conversation.

Southwest Airlines launched a Listening Center to monitor its online communities using a keyword-based listening tool that pulls in mentions from social platforms. The Listening Center monitors insights in real time to quickly identify issues and immediate engagement opportunities. Customers can connect their Twitter handles to their Rapid Rewards frequent flier numbers to get personalized services. Southwest Airlines also leverages the Listening Centers to send apology letters for delays, find new opportunities for engagement and implement company-wide customer care.

Alice Wilson, social business advisor for Southwest’s marketing organization notes that sharing the information collected is the key to listening success. “The customer feedback means something different to each [department] and can inform each group in a different way…From a social care standpoint, [employees] want to help assist and resolve. But somebody from the marketing team may be looking at that [data and ask], how do we alter communications to help these future situations?…The point is not to keep it as a silo.”

Keys to Effectively Listening to the Voice of Your Customer:

• Listening should be at the heart of your marketing strategy.Listening lets you understand the “why” of what your customers are doing and experiencing so that operational issues, communication, and experience can be overhauled for a more positive overall brand impression.
• Learnings from Listening Needs to be Shared with Every Part of your Business. Having data without acting on the implications does nothing for your business. Set standards for how the insights from your listening programs are regularly integrated and shared with all departments so that changes and actions are put in motion to respond to customer needs and comments.
• Meaningful Dialogue Based on Listening. Develop authentic, honest and direct conversations based on listening, which lead to meaningful connections and two-way dialogue.
• Use Listening to Develop Strategies. Once you launch programs to listen, develop means for incorporating these learnings into new strategies that address the issues identified in customer conversations. Put in motion ongoing review of the data collected through listening programs so that you have a clear roadmap that delineates what customers are expecting, their pain points and their current/future demands.
• Listening Objectives Must be Established. If you don’t know how you are going to listen, you will not be able to hear what your customers are trying to tell you. Whether you have the means to set up a full scale listening center, a social monitoring program, a survey, or a call center monitoring program, know what you are implementing and how you will regularly harvest and utilize the insights.

In summary, customers have a lot to say and they want you to listen. The good news is that customers generally have valid concerns and smart advice to offer. Marketers and customers will both benefit if the marketer creates multichannel ways of listening to customers and processes for acting quickly on their input.

5 Tips to Boost Native Advertising Effectiveness

There’s good news for marketers when it comes to consumer acceptance of contextual advertising. Consumers have come to terms with these ads... but only if the content is relevant, authoritative, and trustworthy.

According to a study Edelman/Berland, Getting In-Feed Sponsored Content Right: the Consumer View:

» 86% of consumers feel that online advertising is necessary to receive free content online.

» 60% of consumers are more open to in-line ads that tell a story than ones that simply sell a product.

» Relevancy (90%) is the top factor in sparking interest in in-feed sponsored content, it is the top factor in the ultimate success of this type of native advertising.

Online entertainment company, Netflix has embraced the concept of native ads in a big way with a series of campaigns that has presented different content applicable to targeted audiences in varied media. It ran a contextual native ad campaign which discussed the popular TV show, “Orange is the New Black” on the New York Times website. Based on the positive results of the New York Times campaign the company decided to ramp up on native ads with an initiative on Wired which discussed TV viewing habits over the years. Netflix is using the articles to reach digital audiences looking for good storytelling—and then reinforce the message of a subscription-based entertainment service. 

Both campaigns had the intended result—shares that helped the company reach an even larger audience beyond the original viewership. And while there is some discussion over which outlet ultimately netted the bigger catch, both avenues together resulted in approximately 140,000 shares. But that is not the whole story, because the posts were also viewable on social media such as LinkedIn and Twitter. The average time spent on the ads topped a desirable 3 minutes.

5 Takeaways to Boost the Effectiveness of Native Advertising

1. Be Transparent; Own up to owning the sponsored content. There is a fine line between the “advertorial nature” of native ads and actual in-your-face in-line ads. But customers are just beginning to understand the concept of native advertising so to earn viewer trust, brands need to be upfront that the content being published, while relevant, is advertising with a message.

2. Fit In; Understand the look, feel, and format of the media you are using, so that your native ad fits what viewers expect to find on the site. As mentioned earlier, being disruptive rather than informative is a sure fire way to ensure that your native ads won’t work.

3. Keep VoC Front and Center; As in all marketing listening and understanding what customers want from you is key to delivering content that will be accepted and embraced. Fill a need with your native ads or be entertaining in a manner that fits the personality of your key customer.

4. Be a Good Storyteller; You want your native ad to go viral, so present a good story that viewers will want to share.

5. Be You; consistency across all media is key. When you are not true to your core brand message (no matter where or how it is presented) it is confusing to consumers who know you for who you are. If you are going to go in a new direction then be upfront about it so readers can go with you.

Is Your Preference Center Hurting Your Customer Experience?

Feature story from CMO.com

“I’m in a cold sweat.” So began the call from the CMO of a prominent Fortune 100 company. “We’ve invested millions in new customer engagement technology and just realized that we never actually asked our customers how they define more relevant communications and experiences.”

Perhaps you, too, have had the awakening that the yield you’ll receive from the millions invested in new technology rests on your ability to deliver a personalized, preference-based customer experience. Research conducted by our firm, ERDM, for clients such as IBM, MassMutual, QVC, and Norton AntiVirus indicates that for many consumers--B2B and B2C--preference centers presumably designed to engage them are, in fact, alienating them.

This article, the first installment of a two-part series, provides insights regarding the special role preference centers play in enabling companies to capture the deep preference information necessary to drive truly personalized communications. Unfortunately, many brands are falling short. While conducting our ERDM VoC research, customers told us they are not receiving the expected value from preference centers. Among their statements:

» “Misleading--they are focused on the company’s sales goals, not on learning the customer’s preferences.”

» “They’re not focused on my preferences. The focus is on the stuff they want to sell my company.”

A summary of findings indicates that many preference centers don’t provide a resource that is:

» customer-focused

» comprehensive across different product lines and channels

» easy to find, use, and update as customers’ needs change

Insights such as these are helping CMOs and CIOs realize they need a far deeper understanding of how customers define preference-driven engagement. This includes understanding how customers define a value-based relationship with their brands, personalization, and appropriate questions to ask regarding their preferences.

The Only Votes That Count Come From Your Customers And Prospects

For today's empowered consumers, personalization is a basic expectation. To achieve this heightened level of personalization, more accurate customer data is required.

“For customers, the preference center is the mechanism to voice how they wish to interact with a brand. For marketers, it allows them to develop a deeper understanding of their customers,” Jennifer Downes, Lenovo NA’s director of direct response marketing, told me. “That said, the reality is that marketers as business people have metrics to meet, which may be at odds with providing the best customer experience. The key to success is for the marketer to find creative ways to meet these metrics without creating a conflict with the customer's desire for relevant engagement.”

Added Diangelo Tyler, director of online marketing at Thomson Reuters: “Keep in mind that the preference center is for the customer, and they hold the power of voice. The criteria for a truly customer-centric preference center is simplicity. As marketers we must honor the choices of our customers if we want to keep them engaged from that point forward.”

Satisfaction A Given--Engagement Now The Critical Differentiator

Our VoC research also indicated that relevance and personalization is viewed as a service and benefit, not just a sales tool.

“As marketers, more relevant, preference-driven communication ensures greater audience engagement and maximizes marketing efficiency,” Denice Hasty, SVP of consumer marketing at Comcast, told me. “I think governance and vetting the strategy and tactical plan across multiple business functions is key. Strong execution requires maximum coordination. One misstep can cause a really bad experience.”

B2B and B2C consumers understand that in order to receive more relevant information, they need to share personal information. Among ERDM clients, we have witnessed preference-based engagement drives consistent double-digit increases in response, revenue, and customer lifetime value.

Takeaways From Execs Who Have Been Through The Preference Center Experience

In summary, customer-focused preference centers are essential for encouraging customers and prospects to opt in and provide deep preference information. This also provides marketers with unprecedented amounts of rich and accurate customer data, which will drive dramatic increases in response, revenue and customer engagement.

Here’s what we’ve been told:

• Lenovo’s Downes: “It’s critical that we enter into the process with an open mind, accepting that we don’t have all the answers. We must be diligent in asking questions in an unobtrusive way and be willing to let the customer guide us in formulating a customer-centric preference center.”

• Thomson Reuters’ Tyler: “We did some market research ahead of deploying our new email preference center. Our objective was to determine what was most important to the customer. Simplicity was the conclusion. It was critical that we make it as quick and simple as possible for our customers to manage their preferences and marketers to get access to their permissions.”

• Comcast’s Hasty, SVP: “We are just scratching the surface of what we can do in this space. As our markets become increasingly fragmented on interests and needs, delivering the right message at the right time in the right way will be impossible without a solid preference management practice. Online, we believe in a value exchange–the best offers online to our most engaged online audiences, which also provide the best progressive profiling data to act upon in future interactions.”

In my next article, I’ll focus on specific tips and recommendations from CMOs and senior execs regarding preference center functions and experiences that are critical whether you are about to build a new center or make improvements to an existing preference center.

New Research: It’s Not About Satisfaction It's About Engagement

The Challenge: Businesses that rely heavily on customer satisfaction surveys as a gauge of overall customer happiness, without an evaluation of total customer engagement, run the risk of losing valuable sales opportunities.

The banking industry has a lot to teach us about how not to get stuck in a rut of perceived customer satisfaction.

According to a recent Gallup poll, "research shows that banks that only consider customer satisfaction -- even extreme “top box” satisfaction -- are leaving significant cross-selling and up-selling opportunities on the table."

•  Less than half (45%) of customers who are satisfied say they would consider their bank the next time they needed a product or service, however, that consideration skyrockets to 83% among customers who are both satisfied--and fully engaged.

•  Customers who are fully engaged and satisfied are also more likely to say they will open new accounts, switch from another bank, increase balances, and add ancillary products than are those customers who are just satisfied.

Additionally an Ernst & Young Survey noted “understanding customer behavior, attitudes and requirements is more vital than ever for banks’ strategic thinking....banks need to reevaluate their assumptions and fundamentally change how they interact with their customers.”

HMS National, the Florida home warranty marketer, used Voice of Customer Insights to increase customer engagement and boosted renewal rates by over 50%. VoC learnings helped them develop more effective strategies for engaging customers throughout the customer lifecycle, starting at the moment of enrollment.

Another company which understands that engagement equals customer loyalty is Discover Card, which has led the credit card industry in customer brand loyalty for 17 consecutive years, according to an annual study by the independent research firm Brand Keys, Inc. The research found that emotional engagement is the dominant driver of purchase decisions and brand loyalty.

This is evident in Discover’s Cashback Connection page, which notes “for every reward there’s a story. We want to know what Cashback Bonus means to you.” This tactic humanizes a company benefit and ties it directly back to the consumers using it.

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Three key factors for their success:

•  Discover Card has created the highest levels of loyalty by leveraging real, emotional value.

•  They provide an experience that lets consumers actively engage with the brand so that expectations are created, understood, and ultimately delivered.

•  Discover Card uses the information gained through its strong customer relationships to develop product features that are directly consistent with consumers wants.

Key Takeaways:

» Understand how your customers define satisfaction and engagement, and develop processes and metrics to keep measuring these factors on an ongoing basis.

» Use voice of customer feedback from research, call centers, customer service interactions, sales reports, etc. to develop a holistic view of your customers needs…and use this information to drive  continually improving customer experiences, communications, and offers.

» Establish personal and emotional connections with customers that are both authentic and differentiating.

Pseudo-Customization Is Annoying; True Personalization is Valued

The Challenge: A recent article in The New York Times highlighted the fact that customers find poor etailer customization "creepy”. It appears that businesses are still not providing customers with true personalization.

Today's sophisticated customers expect personalization across all points of contact. And, they expect these communications to be relevant and based on their stated preferences. A common sentiment expressed during recent Voice of Customer (VoC) research we conducted sums it up this way, "I expect more than just ‘we’ve looked at everything you’ve bought over the last X years and this is what we think you’ll like’. With today’s technology, I expect much more than that!"

Speaking with The New York Times, Patagonia's vice president of global e-commerce described the consequences of getting personalization wrong: "We saw customer frustration at being targeted outweigh any benefit. If you got it wrong once, it outweighed getting it right 10 times."

Many marketers are liable to draw the wrong conclusion, and do away with customization altogether. But abandoning multichannel customization is not an option.

Customers today view true personalization as a requirement for their preferred shopping venues, rather than as simply a perk. They're sophisticated enough to expect marketers to provide true preference-driven personalization, not just simplistic purchase based pseudo-customization.

And, per results of our Voice of Customer research efforts, today’s consumers will opt-in to share increasingly detailed personal preference information in exchange for marketer’s promise to deliver relevant information and offers.

This is not to say that traditional targeting methods are no longer relevant. Demographic and transactional data remain useful data points. But, in order to achieve necessary levels of accuracy, they must be enhanced by opt-in preferences provided by consumers.

In the Times article cited above, Mahender Nathan, Godiva's vice president for e-commerce and digital marketing, made the point well, "In conversation, if you think it’s odd that you know something about someone that they didn’t share with you, don’t use it."

The inverse holds as well: when someone “opts” to share something with you, they expect you to remember it in conversation―just as customers expect marketers to add value using the preferences they've shared.

KEY TAKEAWAYS FOR MARKETERS

» Replace Pseudo-Customization with Preference-Driven Personalization
You can only personalize a customer experience based on customer preferences if customers opt-in to share their preferences. To make sure they do so, offer a compelling value proposition.

» Supplement Transactional Data with Self-profiled Preferences
Transactional data is an extremely valuable indicator of historical customer preferences, but it's not enough. Use it, but only in tandem with self-profiled preferences.

» Understand the Reciprocity of Value Equation
Consumers will opt-in and share increasingly detailed personal preference information in exchange for marketer’s promise to deliver personalized and relevant offers, and communications across the multichannel mix.

How Jawbone Uses Customer Forums to Improve Products

The Challenge: Ongoing feedback from customers is essential. Have you integrated Forums into your Voice of Customer, (VoC) feedback process?

As businesses including AmEx and Pinterest have recently demonstrated, socially engaged customers are the most valuable customers. But driving revenue isn't the only advantage of engaging your customers. Engaged customers are an essential source of VoC feedback, and product forums are an ideal way to engage them on a continual basis.

Product forums have been around for years. But mobile product designer Jawbone has pioneered innovative ways to use forums for 24/7 VoC research. In recent years, they had extraordinary success with their Bluetooth headsets and speakers. Unfortunately, Jawbone had much more difficulty last year when they launched UP, a wristband that tracked steps, meals and sleep patterns, and synced with user iPhones. It was a revolutionary idea, but it didn't work.

Jawbone offered refunds to customers who purchased the UP band, and they conducted a thorough survey of everybody who requested a refund. More importantly, they invited customers who took their survey to join an exclusive product development forum. By doing so, they ensured that their new forum would be populated by customers who were eager to engage.

Jawbone Insiders is an exclusive forum that allows customers to provide continual feedback into product development and design. It includes directed activities like surveys and polls, as well as forums where customers can freely contribute ideas and feedback.

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Forums like Jawbone Insiders can give all marketers an instant snapshot of their customers’ desires and needs, as well as indicating areas that require more in-depth VoC research.

BEST PRACTICES FOR VoC PRODUCT FORUMS:

» Reward Engaged Customers with Exclusive Offers
Not all customers are or will be highly engaged with your company. When you find ones who are, make sure they know that you find them special. Reward them special offers, including exclusive access to in-depth product development forums like Jawbone Insiders.

» Create Incentives for Customer Engagement
Jawbone Insiders incentivizes nearly every survey and poll with drawings and prizes. The possibility of winning a free product drives customer participation—and it’s an inexpensive proposition for most businesses.

» Communicate How Customer Feedback Drives Product Development
To maintain long-term engagement, make sure your customers know how their feedback is impacting your product development. When you release new products, tell customers which features you owe to their feedback. And don't forget to say "Thank You"!

New Value Exchange: Preference Info to Drive Personalization

THE CHALLENGE: Consumer frustration with Opt-Out marketing policies is growing; marketers need to convince them to share information regarding their preferences in exchange for a valuable, personalized relationship.

Unfortunately, Opt-Out Is the New Norm

There are now over 200 million numbers listed on the National Do Not Call Registry. Moreover, a number of states have introduced “Do-Not-Mail” bills and the topic of “Do Not Track” legislation is red hot. Overseas, governments are taking even more drastic actions. For example, the Italian government banned all unsolicited mail, phone, email, fax and mobile communications.

As consumers find more ways to avoid unsolicited marketing communications, panicked businesses are responding by creating opt-out relationships wherever they can. This is the wrong approach.

Customer Frustration is Growing

Today’s empowered consumers are questioning why the burden should be on them to Opt-Out. In fact, prominent Opt-In campaigns have resulted in enthusiastic customer response. Consider the case of comedian Louis C.K.

In recent years, Louis C.K. has risen to prominence as a stand-up comic, an actor, and, with his show Louie, a writer, director and editor. And with his self-produced and distributed “Live at the Beacon Theater” video, he’s setting an important example for online marketers. Rather than forcing his consumers to Opt-Out, he asked them to Opt-In—in a prominent, tongue-in-cheek way:

“I’m going to be offering other things through this site. Would you like to hear about them?

- Yes, I’d like to receive further emails about Louis C.K. things.
- No, leave me alone forever, you fat idiot.”

The latter was selected by default. The customer response was unequivocal: “‘Opt in’ as the default is such a minor thing, but it makes people feel good.”

Create a Reciprocity of Value

Rather than making “Opt-Out” the default, marketers should compete to engage consumers with compelling value propositions that motivate them to Opt-In.

The most compelling value you can offer is relevance. Consumers are eager for meaningful personalization. The challenge for marketers is to make them aware that, in order to receive or access increasingly relevant information, consumers must share increasing amounts of information regarding their preferences.

Microsoft used Voice of the Customer (VoC) research to create a highly personalized experience in their Business Resource Center, which asked over 14 detailed business questions in order to deliver targeted and relevant information. As a result, they have achieved opt-in rates as high as 95 percent.

3 Takeaways for Marketers

> Create a Reciprocity of Value
Consumers opt-in to share increasingly detailed personal preference information in exchange for marketer’s promises to deliver relevant information and offers.

> Opt-In Is Not About Passively Agreeing to Receive Email
It’s about actively opting-in to a relationship and self-profiling your preferences and aversions.

> Consumers Are Eager to Tell You How They Want to be Treated
The key is to ask.