Building the Hotline Right (Part 4)

AMP and Email 2.0

AMP is one of the biggest innovations in email in recent times. The underlying tech has been proposed by Google. AMP works in Gmail and Yahoo mail clients but is not supported by Apple. So,  if one has a gmail ID but is viewing the email in Apple’s mail client, the AMP features will be lost and the standard non-AMP version of the email will be shown. Because Apple mail clients account for almost half of the consumption of email in the US, marketers and ESPs (email service providers) have largely ignored AMP. Matters have been compounded because creating AMP emails takes some effort – while AMP editors are now coming to market, it is still not as easy as drag-and-drop to create the emails. Finally, there is also the issue of capturing the data entered in the AMP email – that needs a data storage service to be integrated. For all of these reasons, AMP has been a non-starter since its introduction over 3 years ago by Google. This is what I had written in an essay on AMP a year ago: “AMP for email is new and exciting; it offers marketers many innovative ideas to strengthen the brand-customer relationship; there are still significant challenges in mass adoption; it remains a “technology for the future” (much as it was 2 years ago when it was announced).”

The situation in markets like India is very different. Gmail and Android accounts for 90% or so of the market. As such, most emails are viewed in the Gmail client and is thus AMP-ready. We at Netcore are already rolling out AMP campaigns for many of our customers and seeing big increases in email engagement. The lead time creatives is being reduced by our recently launched AMP Editor and ready templates. The underlying theme of “no landing pages and no click throughs” is too powerful a proposition for brands to ignore.

This is what I had written on AMP in my recent Email 2.0 series (part 7): “[AMP] enables the creation of microsites in emails. Think of AMP as enabling email apps. AMP is a big leap forward. It eliminates a click to the website or app for a wide range of use cases: filling a form, gathering feedback, scheduling appointments, showing live content, creating interactive games and collecting zero-party data. AMP makes email a two-way channel … AMPlets which can be easily inserted into emails are another innovative solution. In fact, brands should consider creating an AMP-based interactive footer with multiple AMPlets … Whether it is 50% or 90% of their base, brands should make use of it because the benefits in terms of attention and engagement are big.”

AMP creates what I think of as the “Living Email.”

Thinks 574

Bill Venners: “I can’t tell you how much time is spent worrying about decisions that don’t matter. To just be able to make a decision and see what happens is tremendously empowering, but that means you have to set up the situation such that when something does go wrong, you can fix it. When something does go wrong, it doesn’t cost you or your customer an exorbitant amount. It isn’t ridiculously expensive. When you get in situations where you cannot afford to make a mistake, it’s very hard to do the right thing. So if you’re trying to do the right thing, the right thing might be to eliminate the cost of making a mistake rather than try to guess what’s right.” [via Shane Parish]

FT: “A letter can’t be written while you’re walking, or eating dinner, or on a bathroom break from a meeting, or watching television. It requires you to be still and to take the time to gather your thoughts. It requires you to slow down. And when we do slow down, our thoughts have a chance to slow down too, and to sort themselves out. We have space to note and consider our feelings, and time to consider how to choose our words. Researchers suggest that writing by hand has a wide range of benefits, from stimulating neural activity in the brain that can lead to a meditative state, to boosting creativity and our ability to make connections between ideas, to stimulating learning and improving our memory. I am not suggesting that letter-writing is the key to faultless communication, but it is a practice that helps to foster a clarity of thought before we speak things out into the world. Even if we never post the letter, it will probably have informed our thinking and feeling about the person to whom the letter was addressed…In the art and challenge of communication, so much happens in the space between the words.”

NYT: “If one looks at the history of the internet and tech, there are two tracks: financial, and product and tech, [Chris] Dixon told host Kara Swisher. The financial process has been “this crazy uncle that’s jumping up down,” he said. “I thought last year was too high. It think this year, it’s too low. … But it just seems wildly volatile to me in a way that doesn’t fully make sense.” It should be viewed separately from the product and tech track, he said, rather stating it should be through the long lens of history. “I put blockchains into the history of computing,” he said. “If you go back to World War II, every 10 of 15 years or so, there’s been a new computing wave. And for each of those—and I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this and reading the history of it—each of those waves had what I call the incubation phase…Web3—which combines “the best features of the open, decentralized protocols of Web1 with the advanced modern functionality of Web2″—has the potential to render powerless the handful of giants that control the web, and put that power in the hands of users, Dixon said.”

Building the Hotline Right (Part 3)

The Chasm

Marketing budgets of brands have been focused on three categories. With the rise of digital-first customers, the bulk of the spending is for new customer acquisition via the likes of Google, Meta (Facebook) and Amazon who together account for $360 billion of the $450 billion annual digital spend, which is about 60% of the global $750 billion spend on advertising. The second spending category is on sending push messages (primarily email and SMS) to their database with the hope that these push messages get opened and acted on. And then finally, there is the spending on the martech platforms which focus on the engagement, journey orchestration and personalisation on the brand’s properties (website and app). The first is focused on new customers, while the other two categories are focused on existing customers. As I have written previously, half of the spends on new acquisition are being wasted because of reacquisition and wrong acquisition – both an outcome of not building better relationships and gathering the right data from existing customers.

There is a chasm: marketers spend to acquire new customers, and then spend on the properties where the customers transact by either spending money or time. Very little attention has been paid to bridging the chasm other than blasting out lots of messages to every email address or mobile number they have. Yes, there have been improvements in segmentation and personalisation over the years, but the limitation has come from the capabilities of the channels. The only big innovation in email in the past 20 years has been the shift from text to HTML. SMS has largely remained the same. In India, we have gone backward ever since TRAI banned 2-way SMS interactions for brands almost a decade ago. Apps have enabled push notifications but these are being increasingly blocked by consumers. WhatsApp is working to bridge the chasm with its popularity and interactivity but it can be quite expensive for sustained usage and the risk of a centralised intermediary changing the rules is ever present.

For marketers to cross this chasm means converting the 1-way broadcast relationship with their customers into a 2-way conversation. This is what has been missing in the relationship. With brands firing away their messages, customers have become trained to largely switch off leading to open rates in single digits – meaning that 9 of 10 brand messages are ignored. This is therefore the crux of the challenge: how to make brand messages 2-way, engaging, exciting and something that customers look forward to.

Until now, brands had no easy way to bring interactivity to their push messages. AMP in email changes this. With interactivity can now come incentives for actions that marketers wish to drive. Atomic Rewards via a pan-brand loyalty program focused on the customer’s time (rather than money) is the way forward. The same idea of micro-rewards can be extended to other push channels for an omnichannel hotline. In the future, a WhatsApp-like inbox exclusively for brands (what I have termed as Micronbox) can further improve the hotline experience. Taken together, AMP, Atomic Rewards, Omnichannel and Micronbox thus become the pillars for bridging the chasm and building the hotline.

Thinks 573

Marc Andreessen: “You’re dealing with human behavior on the part of all the people in the industry and all the things that we’re doing and our own behavior and our own biases and our own ability to think clearly and all the people we coach and work with. But then, look, these products launch, and they have to take in the market. And to take in the market, they have to get a large number of people — who are busy already in their daily lives out in the world — to basically take something new seriously, and to want to use it and want to buy it and pay for it and have it really affect how they live. What I’m figuring out over time is the psychology-sociology elements are as important or more important than the business finance elements or the technology elements.”

Anticipating the Unintended: “India needs to create between 15-20 million non-farm jobs every year to keep pace with those entering the labour force. The labour participation rate has remained in the 40-45 per cent range for a long time. New job creation data can be contentious but it is difficult to argue that India is creating anything more than 3-4 million jobs every year. The quality of many of these new jobs isn’t great. The merry-go-round of employees switching jobs and getting big hikes in the IT/ITES sector shouldn’t blind us to the reality in the broader economy. There aren’t enough jobs. The two prerequisites for job creation, an 8-9 per cent GDP growth and skew towards sectors like construction, infrastructure or labour-intensive exports aren’t being met. The reason the job crisis hasn’t snowballed into a larger political and social issue is the immense faith in the PM among the youth. There’s a strong belief among them that India is on its way to becoming a superpower. The regular dose of nationalism and jingoism that’s amplified by the media helps continue this narrative.”

Shane Parish: “The most practical decision-making is not making better choices, it’s learning to deal with uncertainty. The most common thing holding people back from the right answer is holding on to your previous beliefs. Instead of instinctively rejecting new information, take in what comes your way through a system of evaluating probabilities.” More.

Building the Hotline Right (Part 2)

History

One of the things that struck me when I went to the US for further studies in the late 1980s were toll-free numbers. The 1-800 numbers were everywhere. These toll-free numbers were the way brands interacted with customers. You could call almost any brand and speak to a human agent. The enabler for the toll-free call was the concept of the “collect call” or reverse charging. Instead of the calling party paying, it was the called party that bore the cost.

RingCentral has the early story on toll-free numbers: “The 1-800 number got its start in 1967…The idea was to cut down on collect calls, which could be labor-intensive since they often required a live operator. The early adopters of toll-free numbers were primarily hotels and car rental companies, which took lots of reservations from across the country over the phone. Because of this, the story of toll-free numbers is also the story of the modern call center.”

The 1-800 toll-free numbers were the early versions of hotlines. Companies had vanity numbers (like URLs of the Internet age) so customers could easily remember them. An example: 1-800-FLOWERS, where the letters translated to digits on the phone keypad. From BeBusinessed: “By the late 90s, most businesses had a secret formula for this that still holds true today. If customers were more likely to get the number from a business card or website, i.e., the phone number was right in front of them, memorableness is not as important. If the average customer is finding you through a billboard, TV or radio ad, it’s important for the number to stick in their memory easily, so vanity numbers work better.”

Any customer could call a brand representative and ask for assistance, report a problem or give feedback. It was only one-way: there was no way for a brand to get in touch with a customer. In fact, unless customers were part of a loyalty program, it was almost impossible for brands to have a 1:1 relationship with customers. At times, the wait times were long. I remember once waiting an hour to speak to an airline representative when my baggage did not arrive after a flight.

From a FastCompany article in 1997: “The 1-800 number, staffed by a customer-service rep who debugs your computer or orders flowers on Valentine’s Day, has become such an institution that it’s hard to believe toll-free dialing has been available only since 1967, and that toll-free service as we know it today has been in place only since 1980. Americans dialed toll-free numbers 20.6 billion times last year. That’s more than 56 million calls a day. Today 40% of all calls on AT&T’s nationwide network are toll-free. The volume has tripled in the last five years.”

With the rise of the Internet starting in the mid-1990s, email addresses and web forms started replacing the 1-800 numbers. Now we have the chat windows (at times powered by bots) that are taking over. The future is probably a hybrid – combining AI (machine intelligence) with human intelligence. Lisa Morgan writes at TechTarget: “Hybrid chatbots not only help to close the gap between human knowledge and the kinds of queries a chatbot can answer, but also help ensure that queries involving an emergency or another emotional issue are dealt with empathetically. This requires adjustments to the words the chatbot uses and a quick handoff to a human agent who understands the customer’s dilemma and the best way to address it.”

From toll-free numbers to “contact us” web pages to chatbots – businesses have always wanted the customer connect. But in the past decade or so, focus and marketing budgets have shifted from existing customers to new customers.

Thinks 572

Economist: “Not so long ago, Latin America was on a roll. A commodity boom brought healthy economic growth and provided politicians with the money to experiment with innovative social policies, such as conditional cash-transfer programmes. That, in turn, helped bring about big falls in poverty, reducing the extreme income inequality long associated with the region. The middle classes grew. That helped underpin political stability. Democratic governments generally respected human rights, even if the rule of law was weak. Growing prosperity and more responsive and effective politicians appeared to be reinforcing one another. The future was bright. Now that virtuous circle has been replaced by a vicious one. Latin America is stuck in a worrying development trap…Its economies have suffered a decade of stagnation or slow growth. Its people, especially the young, who are more educated than their parents, have become frustrated by their lack of opportunity. They have turned this anger against their politicians, who are widely seen as corrupt and self-serving. The politicians, for their part, have been unable to agree on the reforms needed to make Latin America’s economies more efficient. The region’s productivity gap with developed countries has widened since the 1980s. With too many monopolies and not enough innovation, Latin America is falling short in the 21st-century economy.”

FT: “Novels can cast a spell in a way that no other form of entertainment quite matches…Nigel Newton, Bloomsbury chief executive, calls such titles “a marvellous escape in brutish times”…Readers are familiar with the feeling of their imagination being pulled into a story and consciousness of the real world slipping away, although they are just words on a page. The psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi used the term “flow” for “the state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter”. He was referring to forms of work and artistic endeavour, rather than simply reading a book, but there are similarities. Long-form reading does require a bit of effort, especially in a world with many distractions, from watching television to scrolling mindlessly through social media…Books also offer something rare and precious: a break from economic worries and media fragmentation. The experience of following a narrative so closely that nothing else intrudes is so valuable that every generation craves it.”

Atanu Dey: “Economics does not tell us what we should or must do: it does not have the power to compel. But it has explanatory power. It can explain why we do what we do, and could reveal the possible consequences of our proposed courses of action. Most significantly, if powerful people who have control over and influence others — politicians, bureaucrats, public intellectuals, popular entertainers — are ignorant of the fundamental lessons of economics, it usually spells disaster for the people. Worse than that, if the people are themselves unfamiliar with the basic economic truths, they are guaranteed to not be able to judge whether their elites are doing what is best for the collective. The fact is that the fundamental truths of economics are all counter-intuitive, and they seem to defy common-sense. It takes a bit of training, though not a lot of it, for us to understand the basics, and when we do, it becomes part of our common-sense…The good news is that now anyone can, if he wishes, learn the basics of economics because there are immense resources on the web for that. Will it improve his financial situation? No. But it will help him better understand the world he lives in. And if enough people understand the world as it is, then the ignorant elites will not be able to push policies that make the world worse than it has to be.”

Building the Hotline Right (Part 1)

The Crux

In my previous essay, I wrote about how the Email 2.0 hotline is at the crux of the brand-customer relationship. In this series, I will delve deeper into how brands can build the hotline right. The four pillars that we will discuss are: AMP, Atomic Rewards, Omnichannel and Micronbox. We will also cover some interesting ideas like the Living Email and Performance Email. I will also explain how the hotline holds the key to the bottom line.

Let’s begin by summarising the key ideas from my previous essay:

What is the crux of the brand-customer relationship? Among all the challenges faced by a modern marketer, what is the gnarly problem to tackle which can unlock profitable growth? The candidates were many: optimise ROAS (return on ad spending) on Big Tech platforms for new customer acquisition, offer bigger discounts to drive more revenues from existing customers, to invest in more martech solutions for omnichannel engagement and personalisation, and so on. In fact, there are many profit killers [Parts 3 and 4 in my Extreme Retention = Profit-centric Marketing essay] in a business which can be addressed and converted into profit creators. But there had to be that one thing which could be the gamechanger – the crux faced by marketers, a challenge that was critical and solvable.

… What brands lacked was a “hotline” to their customers. When a brand spoke, a customer would respond. And of course, it had to work the other way also. The hotline was the prerequisite to bringing customers to the brand’s properties … The hotline was the crux that brands had to solve for. Get the hotline right, and you have a 2-way relationship going with the customer … More than a shiny, new feature of the website or app, what brands need to realise is that it is the hotline that is the crux for their customer relationships. If they can shift the mindset from “delete” to “delight” in their messaging, it would solve every other problem for them.

… Building the hotline with existing customers is the only way brands can get their attention and solve for data. It is one of two ways to bring customers back to the properties (app and website) – the second method being big spends on branding. The hotline is the trick marketers have missed in the two other obsessions – new customer acquisition and adding bells and whistles to the app and website.

… Email 2.0 offers interactivity in emails via AMP, daily habit-forming content via Ems, micro-incentives in the form of Mu tokens as Atomic Rewards, a new metric to track engagement intensity via Hooked Score, and a new type of product-led agency (Progency) to do it all. Email 2.0 is the best way to build the hotline – better than 2-way SMS or even WhatsApp. Everything that can be done in other push channels can be done via Email 2.0 – and at a fraction of the price.

… The combination of AMP and Atomic Rewards offers a very powerful combo to build the hotline. AMP offers an “All-in-Email” approach – Shop in Email, Search in Email, Play in Email, Browse in Email, Earn in Email, Chat in Email, and so on. There is no need to leave the email at all – no need for click-throughs and landing pages! Atomic Rewards offers the foundation for Loyalty 2.0 – incentives for marketers to nudge customer actions. Mu tokens can be used to get attention and zero-party data; they can also be used to drive referrals and reviews because every customer also has a network and voice. Think of Mu tokens as the non-monetary equivalent of loyalty points which are linked to money and transactions.

… So, the message to marketers: make the Hotline via Email 2.0 as the crux for customer relationships. It will not only improve customer experience but also drive profitable growth.

The first question to then address is: why have brands not done what seems such an obvious idea? To answer this question, we need to go back in time when customers could simply call a number and talk to a brand.

Thinks 571

FT: “We long to believe that we can be creatures of the day and night, that we can defy the dark to enjoy 24/7 lives defined by long working hours, minimal sleep and, if technology adverts are to be believed, going jogging in the middle of the night. In fact, insists University of Oxford neuroscientist Russell Foster in Life Time, we are “not able to do what we want at whatever time we choose. Our biology is governed by a 24-hour biological clock that advises us when it is the best time to eat, sleep, think and undertake a myriad of other essential tasks.” Pitched somewhere between science book and lifestyle manual, this is a comprehensive manifesto for living in harmony with our body clocks, penned by someone who has devoted his career to studying them. Chasing perfect synchronicity not only increases happiness and mental sharpness, he argues, but potentially reduces the risk of diseases such as obesity and diabetes.”

Frank Knight: “The first commandment, with respect to any intelligent action is self-evident: “compare the alternatives,” beginning with understanding  what they are. But that is what people dislike doing. And the second and third are, appraise the alternatives, and then act on the basis of the best knowledge or judgment that is to be had. The basic axiom is that it is better not to act unless it can be done intelligently; as people are and as the world is, the odds are strong that bad results on balance, rather than good, will follow from acting ignorantly, at random – and acting on false knowledge is of course worse; but unhappily it is more common.” [via CafeHayek]

Decrypt: “Soulbound Tokens (SBTs)…are a primitive, or foundational building block, in an emerging Web3 trend known as the Decentralized Society.  DeSoc sits at the intersection of politics and markets and, much like the wider Web3 context into which it fits, is based around principles of composability, bottom-up community, cooperation, and emergent networks that are owned and governed by network users. It aims to augment Web3’s trajectory toward hyper-financialization to something more inclusive, democratic, and decentralized. SBTs are an essential feature of DeSoc. Similar to a resume or medical records in the non-Web3 world, SBTs are non-transferable tokens that represent “commitments, credentials, and affiliations” that make up the social relations on Web3 networks. In other words, they are tokenized representations of the myriad traits, features and achievements that make up a person or entity. Crucially, Souls can issue and attest SBTs to other Souls; so for example a college (represented by one Soul) could issue a SBT certifying that a course has been completed to a student’s Soul…In their purest and fullest expression and manifestation, however, Soulbound Tokens stand to become a foundational element of the Decentralized Society movement, in which communities emerge around shared networks and goods that are owned and managed by the Souls that use them.”

Thinks 570

Eric Ashman: “A VC’s job is not to help founders build great companies. Instead, a venture capitalist’s job is to raise money from Limited Partners (‘LPs’) to invest in a portfolio of startups that will produce returns that can outperform the stock market. LPs are primarily institutional investors, such as foundations, pension funds, family offices, university endowments, and sovereign wealth funds. Those LPs view venture capital as an asset class. A part of a diversified portfolio that also invests in bonds, stocks, real estate, and commodities. That’s your startup right there, in a portfolio with 90 other startups, in your VC’s 7th fund, as a part of a diversified mix of investments in Standford’s endowment fund.”

Economist: “The corporate world has changed since the mba first became a rite of passage for high-powered executives. Management teams answer to a growing number of “stakeholders”, from employees to social activists, and face public scrutiny on their companies’ environmental, social and governance (esg) record. Simply creating shareholder value no longer cuts the mustard. One consequence of this trend is that running a modern business requires an ever-expanding list of credentials and competences. In addition to financial and digital literacy, strategic acumen and communication skills, executives are expected to be clued in on supply chains, climate science and much else besides. They must ensure that their workforces are diverse and inclusive. And as work life goes hybrid, mixing time in the office with home working, they are also asked to spend more time checking in on subordinates.”

WSJ: “President Reagan understood something neither party grasps today: that the value of the dollar isn’t a function of how many dollars government supplies but of how many dollars people demand. Money is supplied insofar as it is demanded by people who can put it to good use. Inflation arises when people have less use for money, which is why stagnation comes with it. Reagan beat inflation not by reducing the official money supply—M2 nearly doubled during his time in office—but by boosting demand for money. The great lesson of the Reagan era is that money supply is determined by investment opportunity. Absent such opportunities, no matter how much money the government gives people, they will reject it and turn it into stuff. Here is the radicalism of Reagan: Orthodox economics attempts to use both monetary and fiscal policy to manipulate the availability of dollars. Reagan used both to increase the utility of dollars.”