Rajesh Jain

MyToday Microns and Mus

What I will write next is a vision for the MyToday platform – I will know whether it succeeds in the months to come. I like to share ideas openly because I have always believed that by ‘open-sourcing ideas’ one can get inputs from others which could make the idea better. So in that spirit, here is where the imagination takes over.

MyToday.com already supports the creation, publishing and sending of microns. The new element in this is the addition of Mus. My initial thinking was to price microns at a fraction of emails to drive the interesting use cases – these were short emails and thus cheaper than emails. Since emails themselves are quite cheap (15-45 cents per thousand emails, or about 1-3 paise per email), making microns even cheaper would not be that attractive. Emails anyways have the best RoI and technically, they can do all what microns can, so just offering something cheaper did not make sense.

It was then that I thought of eliminating the unit pricing for emails entirely – make the price linked to performance (based on the opens). While this was a step forward, this again meant we were still playing the price game.

That was when a new idea came up. The low open rates in promotional emails (typically 15%) has meant that brands have taught their customers to ignore emails. What if we thought of microns as being the opposite and target 100% opens?! While the content of microns would be a key driver, that’s when the idea of adding a points program came in – and “Mus” as a reward for attention and action was born. Mus would be the secret sauce to make microns a habit in the lives of consumers.

Netcore’s 70% market share with emails in India meant that we can potentially take the idea to a large number of brands and thus create a points program across brands. This is still not a done deal but has potential. What brands would agree to would be to pay not Netcore/MyToday but their customers! This payment would be in the form of points – Mus. Each micron would thus be a carrier of rewards, enticing the recipient to open and act. In effect, microns with Mus had the potential to train consumers to open every incoming brand communication with the µ in the Subject field! If brands agree, this would be a great win-win for both them and their consumers.

Of course, the question of how Netcore would gain remains. We would need to spend on sending the microns and managing the platform. But we would not get any cut from what the brands paid the consumers. This is where I decided to take the long view. Done right, Mus had the potential to be a gamechanger in the world of brand to consumer communications. If it works, it would move brands to use more of Netcore’s communication and customer engagement and experience platforms providing plenty of monetisation opportunities in the future. Start with delight and the deals will happen!

So, that’s the idea. Will it work? Can it transform brand-consumer engagement? We will find out in the months to come!

The Hurdles

The idea that I have described about creating a points system for brands to reward consumer attention and action seems like a simple enough idea that it should have been quite common by now. But it is not. That is what intrigues me. Why have brands not done this? Here are some reasons that I can think of as to why this has not happened.

First, such a program can only be done in the digital world. In the offline transactions world, we had brand-specific loyalty programs. These were typically physical cards which had to be shown at checkout and to which points were added. As ecommerce grew, the mobile number or email address became the identity to which the points could be linked. The rise of a digital identity also led to the creation of multi-brand programs (Payback in India, for example). Credit card companies also created their own points programs to drive the usage of their cards over other payment alternatives. As these programmes grew, so did the benefits and rewards of owning and using a card. One thing common to all is the linkage with a transaction because it is impossible to measure and track engagement in an offline world.

Second, until recent times, digital was not a large channel for most brands. Hence, digital communications and engagement was a small part of the overall marketing program. As such, the basics were all that was important – send out the receipts and offers, and hope for some clicks. Digital’s growth has skyrocketed in the past few years and a new class of digital-only direct-to-consumer (DTC) challenger brands have emerged. So, it is only now that there is a critical mass of digital brands – some digital first, some digital only and some hybrid (offline first, with digital as add-on).

Third, engagement budgets have been mostly much smaller than acquisition budgets in most marketing departments. The exciting thing is to get new customers – which means running TV ads or doing large spends on Google and Facebook. The bigger the budget, the more exciting it is for the marketer. Once a customer is in, engagement, retention and growth are typically given to a much smaller team with even smaller budgets. These teams do their bit – emails, campaigns, push notifications, SMSes with a single objective to get the consumer back to the website or the app. In these smaller budgets, there is little room for rewarding attention.

Fourth, should brands decide to spend to reward attention and action, someone in the C-suite would definitely bring up the issue of double spending: “So, you are spending on sending the email, and then also spending to get someone to open or click the email? This doesn’t make sense at all.” And thus any rewards program would be nipped in the bud since no email company would be willing to take up a pure performance campaign because they would have no control on the creative, and there is a finite, non-zero cost for sending emails.

Fifth, should all these hurdles be crossed, no loyalty brand would be willing to run a program where 100% of what the spend is passed on the consumer.

Finally, to really make a program like this work, it would need to get multiple brands on board – consumers will not find it attractive if points can only be earned across one or two brands.

A product or program has to solve all these problems simultaneously to succeed. And this is what the Netcore’s MyToday Microns and Mus platform hopes to do.

Microns and Mus

Microns are short, informational content delivered in a sequence to the email inbox. They can be consumed in 15-30 seconds. They are uniquely identified with the µ in the Subject. They are thus a new category of emails – neither transactional nor promotional. They offer something useful and interesting to the recipient. By using email as the transport mechanism, microns can be subscribed to and delivered to almost every Internet user. (An estimated 4 billion people have email addresses.) Email is not controlled or monopolised by any corporate entity thus making it an open communications platform. It has been around for 50 years and will probably be around for many more.

Mus are points that are earned by consumers for actions done in their engagement with brands. Initially, Mus are earned within microns: opening a micron, clicking a link, filling a survey, referrals to family and friends. Later, they could be extended beyond microns – clicking on SMSes or push notifications, downloading an app, completing a profile to share personal information with a brand, and so on. Mus are a transfer from a brand to consumers. Mus are this earned by consumers. They can be spent on rewards or gifted to others. As the use of Mus expand, they can become currency – a medium of exchange.

Mus reward attention and action. They can work across brands because they are linked to the email identity of a person. They can be thought of as a cross-brand (or coalition) loyalty program, or even like airline miles. The innovation is that for the first time, non-transaction behaviour in the form of attention and actions are being rewarded. Typically, loyalty programs are linked directly to purchase – get a certain number of points for spending money on goods and services. Mus reward brand engagement. [As far as I know, there has never been a loyalty or rewards program for multi-brand engagement.]

Each micron would show in its Subject line the total number of Mus the recipient has at any point of time along with the number of Mus to be earned for opening the specific micron. The aggregate is also updated in real-time in the body of the micron. By showing the total microns in the consumer’s wallet, spoofing is avoided since only the microns platform (MyToday) and the consumer would know the total at any point of time.

Emails are paid for by brands based on volume. So, each email has a finite non-zero cost for a brand. Microns with Mus would be different. They could be sent by a platform like MyToday for free. Only when they are opened would brands pay – and this payment would be in the form of Mus which are transferred in their entirety to the consumer. So, MyToday becomes like a loyalty program operator – an intermediary between brands and the consumers. Mus offered by brands are added to the wallets of the consumers for them to use. An attractive redemptions platform would be needed to ensure that Mus have value – thus directing favourably the attention and actions of consumers.

It all sounds interesting and exciting. So hasn’t anyone done it before?

Seconds to Sell

Attention is a hard problem to crack.

• Morgan Housel: “You have five seconds to get people’s attention. Books, blogs, emails, reports, it doesn’t matter – if you don’t sell them in five seconds you’ve exhausted most of their patience.”
• Exchange4Media (quoting research): “Human attention dropped from 12 seconds in 2000 to just 8 seconds in 2018, beating out the ever-distracted goldfish, which clocks in at 9 seconds. This could mean that as a result, advertisers and publishers are struggling to hook consumers and keep them engaged.”
• Wyzowl has some infographics on attention span.
• Digital Doughnut: If you are an email marketer, you have only 3 seconds to capture the attention of your audience.

An alternate view from The Mobile Presenter: “If the human attention span was really that short, we would never have made it down from the trees. You have to be aware that there are two types of attention span: Focused attention is the amount of time that a human can focus his or her undivided attention on something. This, according to several sources, is indeed at around 8 seconds for the average human these days. For the context of presentations, however, the other type of attention span, called sustained attention, is more important. The average value for that attention span is somewhere close to 20 minutes.”

Adds Faris Yakob: “I recently saw a speaker from one of the world’s largest digital media companies claim, without substantiation, that on mobile our attention spans have decreased once again. We can now only muster two seconds for an ad, they maintained, which borders on the subliminal. It turns out that’s because that’s how much they get on average in the stream – it has nothing to do with the audience or effective brand communication.”

More from Andrew Littlefield: “Marketing departments have built entire strategies on top of this unproven assumption [of the Goldfish Myth]. They’ve pushed down the quality of their work, made it shorter and “snackable,” desperate to appeal to an audience of fish. Yet that same audience will watch a 4-hour football game or binge-watch an entire season of House of Cards in a single weekend. The result has been a wave of low-effort marketing content that floods your audiences timeline. It adds no value to your customer’s life, but we sit and wonder why our content strategies aren’t working.”

Put it all together and here is my take my how to grab attention (especially in the email inbox):

• Communication must be based on an opt-in (subscription) and not spam
• The Subject line is obviously important: this is where “Mus” can play a role by paying recipients for their attention (and action)
• The content must not be purely unpersonalised infinitely long promotional broadcast – this is where microns matter
• Ideally, there should be a dedicated inbox for brand marketing communication – here is where the micronbox comes in

The combination of subscription, an incentive (Mus) wrapped in a micron and delivered to a special inbox can transform brand-to-consumer communications. Just as loyalty programs reward the Best customers, Mus in microns are the key to unlocking attention of the Rest customers – moving them from inactive or semi-active to expectantly engaged.

Pay (for) Attention

On the issue of paying for attention, Michael H. Goldhaber had this to say in his 1997 talk:

Contrary to what you are sometimes urged to believe, money cannot reliably buy attention. Suppose it did work that way. Then you could have been paid to sit here and listen closely even if I were to read you something as boring as the phone book or an unabridged dictionary. Presumably it wouldn’t even matter if I kept repeating the same few syllables over and over. If money could reliably buy attention, all I would have to do is pay you the required amount and you would keep listening carefully through all that, not falling asleep en masse, nor allowing your minds to wander. In truth, even if you had been paid a huge sum, this would be most difficult, and if you did it, it would be a testament more to your own deep sense of principle than to a general condition in which another roomful of similar people could be expected to do equally well.

Someone who wants your attention just can’t rely on paying you money to get it, but has to do more, has to be interesting, that is must offer you illusory attention, in just about the same amounts as they would if you had instead been paying money to listen to them — which by the way is closer to the case here. Money flows to attention, and much less well does attention flow to money.

And here is Brice Berdah in UX Collective: “Attention is a resource that can lead us to action. Once we have it, we can also pass it to someone else, and put her/him under the spotlight. To understand how attention works in our modern world, considering its relationship with money is vital. We tend to think that money can buy attention yet we fail to recognize that this feat cannot be achieved consistently. Money cannot reliably buy attention…Different forms of incentives are tested to have highly engaged users that frequent check back their feeds, the biggest one being gamification. It is the import of gaming reward mechanisms on non-game mediums, such as apps…By adding points, achievements, unique rewards, power-ups and random reward schedule, apps and websites developers can ease the adoption of their service and increase engagement.”

It was in this context that I had discussed the idea of microns and loyalty. Here is what I had written previously: “Adding elements of loyalty and gamification can make microns much more rewarding. Our attention has a lot of competition; if someone is willing to pay us for it, they have the potential to stand out. By disintermediating the media and ad platforms, brands can build a direct hotline to their customers, with the rewards working as magnets for visibility, engagement, actions and eventually, transactions.”

As I thought about the problem, I decided to narrow it down. Rather than target the entire universe of consumers, what if brands could just focus on their existing customers and reward the less active ones for their attention? The prize for entrepreneurs to get it right is a large chunk of the global advertising pie. For brands, it is an optimisation of their huge marketing budgets. And for consumers, their ‘delete’ mindset could be converted to a ‘delight’ mindset when it comes to dealing with the inflow of messages they get. How can a win-win platform be created for all? It was time to bring multiple strands – microns, loyalty, micronbox – together into a larger idea of “Mus” (pronounced as ‘mews’; and derived from the µ symbol that I have previously suggested as an identifier for microns). Mus can become the currency for attention and action.