Using Digital Market Intelligence to Drive Multi-Channel Success

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Using Digital Market Intelligence to Drive Multi–Channel Success

Yesmail is an organization that positively stands apart.For nearly 15 years we have stood for excellence inemail marketing, with planning and delivery capabilities unrivaled in our industry. We define ourselves by a better caliber of technology,insights, and service that help our clients get to ‘yes’sooner with their customers. We boast a complete portfolio of multi-channel marketing solutions and tools, including interactive marketing applications, data management, intelligence, leadgeneration and best practices consulting. Would we go so far as to say we are superior in our ability to use email to power intelligent interactionsthat actually drive business?

Table of Contents Introduction & Concepts 1 – 6 Facebook 7 – 14 Twitter 15 – 20 Youtube 21 – 26 Email 27 – 29 Conclusion 30

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Powering Intelligent Interactions

These days, marketers have an ever-expanding arsenal of resources to help them develop, execute, and measuretheir marketing campaigns. So what makes digital competitive intelligence critical in defining a brand’smarketing strategy? As digital marketing continues to grow and yield increasing ROI, digital competitive intelligence allows marketers to:

The Case for Competitive Intelligence

• Craft proactive marketing campaigns utilizing industry and competitor-proven strategies

• Create reactive campaigns in real time, offering more appealing competitive offers

• Develop piggyback or combination offerings that leverage existing in-market offers to further promote a brand and its services

e.g. If the Golf Channel is able to identify and track a sale on golf clubs by any major brand, they can run a promotion for a discounted Golf Channel subscription for anyone who has purchased discounted clubs. This approach enables any brand, regardless of size or budget, to benefit from a good marketing initiative.

• Evaluate campaign performance against their competitor set and the broader industry average through a meaningful engagement score

• Measure how email marketing drives social engagement

• Obtain engagement metrics for their own multi-channel digital campaigns

• Draw inspiration from competitors’ promotions, creative content, deployment tactics and more

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Our Objective

To better understand how competitive intelligence couldaffect a brand’s deployment strategy, we put YesmailMarket Intelligence to work. This proprietary tool tracks, collects and analyzes all digital campaigns deployedthrough email, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. As we dug deep into our data and patterns started emerging,we quickly realized the scope of our report had to be expanded. In addition to deployment strategy findings, we were able to identify considerably larger trends, which can redefine, inform, and fully optimize a brand’s content, creative, and multi-channel strategy.

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Because of their reliance on email marketing and their strong presence in the social space, we chose to track 20 leading brands from the retail industry:

For years, marketers have been emphasizing the vital importance of multi-channel marketing, but without the ability to back up its benefits with measurable data. Thanks to our findings, we are now able to substantiate its importance more than ever.

While we set out to clarify the value of competitive intelligence, we made a notable discovery: with each email message a brand sends out, its customer social engagement grows exponentially. In other words, we were able to identify a quantifiable relationship between email marketing and social engagement. Just think ofthe ways savvy brands can leverage these findings to develop their marketing plans and drive social engagement! We’ll walk you through all our findings and their implications throughout this report.

We chose these 20 brands in particular due to their focus on the 18-35 year old demographic, which furthersolidifies their digital marketing prowess.

Brand Sample Set and MethodologyThe Digital Marketing BreakthroughHow Email Marketing Drives Social Engagement

Abercrombie & Fitch

Aeropostale

American Apparel

American Eagle

Ann Taylor

Banana Republic

Diesel

Eddie Bauer

Express

Forever 21

The Gap

Guess

H&M

J Crew

Kenneth Cole

The Limited

Old Navy

Ralph Lauren

Tommy Hilfiger

Urban Outfitters

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Traditionally, engagement has been defined in fairly narrow terms. For Facebook, it is typically assessed by the number of “likes” and comments a campaign garners. For Twitter, the sheer number of retweets is considered indicative of campaign performance. For YouTube, the number of views, comments and ratings is deemed an accurate engagement measure.

These traditional definitions are there for a reason; to date, they have been the most accurate way to assess social campaign effectiveness. That’s why they became the foundation we worked with in order to create a more accurate way to obtain a telling engagement measure.

Optimal deployment times for digital campaigns has been one of the hottest topics in marketing in recent months. While the value of this information is undeniable, we see two common flaws in the way deployment recommendations are conveyed to marketers:

• Recommendations don’t always recognize that social channel marketing isn’t used in a vacuum.

Failing to consider key competitors’ campaigns and a brand’s own multi-channel marketing efforts prevents marketers from assessing the actual success of their campaigns against a meaningful base such as an industry average or competitive campaign performance.

• This leads to another obstacle; marketers lack an industry standard for measuring engagement. Without standardization, the true understanding of a campaign’s effectiveness is obscured.

Engagement: The Traditional Definition

Additional Digital Marketing Factors

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Ultimately, engagement is not about the quantity of your followers but the quality of your interactions with them. The only way we can accurately compare engagement for both brands is by considering the size of brand following and effectively controlling for it. We created an algorithm that successfully accounts for the size of a brand’s follower base, allowing marketers to compare brands and campaigns across a specific channel in a much more meaningful way.

To illustrate the difference between actual engagement and volume-based engagement, let’s examine the Facebook presence of our 20 retailers over the three-month period we tracked. The graph to the left shows how these retailers stacked up in terms of average volume-based engagement (defined here by the sum of “likes” and comments per campaign).

The results aren’t exactly surprising. The best performers—Ralph Lauren and H&M—are large international brands with sizeable followings and impressive marketing budgets. Smaller brands, like the formerly catalog exclusive Eddie Bauer, rank much lower in average number of comments and “likes” over the three-month period.

But if we control for follower size and recalculate the actual engagement score of each brand, the graph looks quite a bit different.

A volume-based engagement comparison of Facebook campaigns from Eddie Bauer and Ralph Lauren is based on the number of “likes” and comments each campaign boasts. However, this type of comparison is, at best,uninformative. Since Eddie Bauer has a relatively modest following of about 73,000 Facebook brand “likes”,while Ralph Lauren boasts over 4.9 million, an Eddie Bauer campaign will consistently garner fewer “likes” and comments when compared to a Ralph Lauren campaign. This, however, doesn’t mean it’s less engaging.

The Case for Standardized Actual Engagement: Our Example

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GuessForever 21

American EagleDiesel

Ann TaylorUrban Outfitters

Old NavyExpress

Banana RepublicGab

Tommy HilfigerThe Limited

J CrewAmerican Apparel

Kenneth ColeEddie Bauer

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See how dramatically the ranks have shifted? Otherwise average-performing brands have emerged as engagement leaders, while previous high performers have fallen in line. Thanks to a standardized engagement score, we can now compare apples to apples.

It is only through this measurement of actual engagement (rather than volume-based engagement) that marketers can accurately assess the effectiveness of their digital marketing, identify the true engagement champions within their competitor sets, and learn from their competitors’ high-performing campaigns in order to improve their own strategy.

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We’ve kept the order of the brands from the previous chart but we’ve ranked them according to the actual engagement their campaigns have garnered over the three month tracked period (engagement is also represented by the green bars)

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Ralph LaurenH&M

AeropostaleAbercrombie

GuessForever 21

American EagleDiesel

Ann TaylorUrban Outfitters

Old NavyExpress

Banana RepublicGab

Tommy HilfigerThe Limited

J CrewAmerican Apparel

Kenneth ColeEddie Bauer

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Actual Engagement Adjusted for Size of Brand Following



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The Twitter comparison of the 20 brands we tracked is equally interesting. Like with Facebook, it is not surprising to see brands like Forever 21, H&M or Abercrombie & Fitch rack up the highest volume of Twitter interaction due to sheer size, popularity and marketing resources. In this context, it is hardly counter-intuitive that a small brand with limited store locations such as Eddie Bauer ranks last in terms of volume of customer interaction in both Twitter and Facebook. As we’ll see on the following page, Eddie Bauer is a particularly interesting phenomenon due to the huge fluctuation in its ranking in terms of volume-based vs. actual social channel engagement.

The graph below shows how the 20 retailers in our data set stacked up on Twitter in terms of averagevolume-based engagement (defined here by retweets per campaign).

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Forever 21Urban Outfitters

H&MAbercrombie & Fitch

Tommy HilfigerGap

American EagleBanana Republic

Old NavyGuess

Express IncAnn Taylor

Ralph LaurenKenneth Cole

American ApparelAeropostaleThe LimitedEddie Bauer

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When it comes to actual engagement, the resulting Twitter rankings are telling. There is a valuable lesson to be learned from insights from volume-based and actual engagement. On one hand, volume-based engagement is representative of a brand’s prominence within its industry. It also provides a great way to effectively track follower growth over any specific timeframe and thus allows marketers to assess the effectiveness of a brand’s marketing efforts and the customer’s overall satisfaction with its product.

On the other hand, having the actual engagement data enables marketers to identify the true top performers across Facebook and Twitter and learn from their winning campaign practices. Furthermore, the true engagement data provides tested and proven marketing strategies that have worked for a brand’s competitor and/or industry.

With this in mind, we used market intelligence data collected for our set of 20 leading retailers to identify the true engagement champions, discover various campaign trends and gain actionable insights from Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and email.

*All engagement data from here on out is based on actual engagement as defined above.

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Forever 21Urban Outfitters

H&MAbercrombie & Fitch

Tommy HilfigerGap

American EagleBanana Republic

Old NavyGuess

Express IncAnn Taylor

Ralph LaurenKenneth Cole

American ApparelAeropostaleThe LimitedEddie Bauer

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Actual Engagement Adjusted for Size of Brand Following

Again, we have kept the order of the brands from the previous chart but we’ve ranked them according to the actual engagement their campaigns have garnered over the three month tracked period (engagement is also represented by the green bars)



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With over 7 billion visits a month and an unprecedented 900 million active members, Facebook is the Godfather of all social channels. So it comes as no surprise that “The Social Network” presents a valuable opportunity for marketers to reach their audience. At the same time, however, marketing efforts on Facebook are facing serious engagement challenges due to the sheer volume of campaigns and the fact that Facebook is still used primarily for personal needs. That’s why it’s particularly interesting to examine the dynamic relationship between Facebook, marketers and consumers.

As shown on the graph to the right, based on our dataset in the three-month tracked period, brands are using Facebook to reach their customer base more and more often. This, in and of itself, is not an unexpecteddiscovery; as marketers are adopting the digital channel at a rapid pace, the volume of Facebook campaigns will continue to rise. What’s interesting about this channel, as shown in green on the graph to the right, is the way Facebook customer engagement is trending. It’s easy to assume that an audience will become less responsive to marketing communication due to over-messaging, but customer engagement is currently growing at an even faster pace than campaign volume.

This finding provides an interesting context for social media marketing and validates Facebook marketing spend, and the channel’s consistent presence in every savvy brand’s marketing plan. Let’s examine some telling Facebook insights that can easily shape a brand’s strategy and optimize its campaigns.

Facebook

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*measured across all tracked brands



When is the best time to deploy a Facebook campaign? We hate to say “it depends”, but we must preface our findings with the assertion that campaigns are developed over a particular timeframe, for a particular market set, and in a particular industry. Taking this caveat into consideration, here is what we found:

The number of deployed campaigns per weekday varies month-to-month. Over the three-month period we tracked, the most utilized days of the week have been Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. This suggests that marketers want to continuously test new tactics to see what sticks. What’s more, if we do a cumulative average, Fridays had the most consistent campaign volume, making it the most popular deployment day over the entire period.

Similarly, in terms of engagement, while Tuesday was the most engaging day of the week, if we break it down by month, we can see that Saturday, Tuesday and Friday emerge as the most engaging days of the week within each individual month tracked.

Day of the Week Trends

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• Campaigns deployed on Tuesday earn the highest engagement even though Tuesday ranks 4 in terms of number of deployed campaigns.

Counter-intuitively, Tuesday is also one of only two weekdays exhibiting a decline in number of deployed campaigns over the tracked period.

• The lowest number of deployed campaigns is during the weekend.

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and over the three months tracked

Weekday Campaign Volume vs. Weekday Engagement



Hour of deployment is an essential campaign component—it can make or break any Facebook campaign. Because the average Facebook user logs on multiple times a day, it’s imperative for marketers to know when campaigns get the highest exposure and largest engagement. This information will, in turn, provide for an educated guess about their consumers’ browsing patterns, which can inform and optimize Facebook strategy. Here is what we discovered in terms of time of day trends:

• Campaigns deployed between 10pm and 12am Eastern Time (ET) were an engagement goldmine. Based on volume, however, this timeslot was the least utilized for deployment.

One possible explanation for this may be that the 20 brands analyzed largely focus on college students as a key audience segment. During the late evenings, college students are still awake, not tending to family or getting ready for an early work day, so they have ample time to interact online with both brands and friends.

• The least engaging time of day to deploy a campaign was from 1am-4am ET (perhaps for obvious reasons related to conventional sleep schedules).

• The most popular time of day to deploy campaigns was between 11am-1pm ET, while paradoxically, this timeslot was in the bottom 30% in terms of engagement.

Time of Day Trends

When it comes to the optimal frequency of Facebook campaigns deployed per month, there is no universal number that guarantees success. However, we closely examined the number and frequency of campaign deployment utilized by the five most engaging retail brands on Facebook: Ann Taylor, The Limited, Ralph Lauren, Eddie Bauer and Banana Republic.

This is a telling statistic that suggests the number and frequency of Facebook campaigns should be carefully determined and duly tested in order to enhance instead of curb engagement.

• These brands deployed between 20 and 32 campaigns per month.

• Conversely, the five least engaging brands averaged 54 campaigns per month.

Campaign Frequency Trends

too muchtoo little

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Given the variety of Facebook formats and the fact that marketers are partial to some over others, we wanted to gauge which type of Facebook posts perform best and which ones seem to be most popular with marketers. Here is what we found:

• Photo content comprised 43% of all Facebook campaign deployments. This trend provides additional context for Facebook’s sizeable investment in the Instagram acquisition.

• Photo content was the most engaging campaign type, most likely because it’s easy to share, quick to browse, and requires limited time investment.

• Video is the most promising Facebook format, as evident from its rapid and consistent growth in customer engagement.

• Interestingly, video was utilized in only 6.5% of Facebook campaigns, while the customer engagement it garnered was disproportionately large.

• Status updates and posts containing links are on the decline in terms of engagement, likely due to:

Spammy, vague or uninformative status updates

Unspecified link origin or destination

Customers’ growing reluctance to follow a link leading away from Facebook

• Interestingly, link and status updates comprised 50% of all deployed Facebook campaigns in the tracked period.

Campaign Format Trends

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Actual Engagement for EachFacebook Campaign Format

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“What content will my audience best respond to?” This is the million dollar question—and the one most challenging to answer. Customers will inevitably find different content appealing, but by adding campaign engagement to the equation, digital competitive intelligence can alleviate some of the guesswork and provide a more relevant frame of reference.

Competitive intelligence enables marketers to identify the campaigns that have prompted the highest customer interaction. We looked at the most engaging Facebook campaigns for each month within our three-month tracked period. Among the 20 marketers we examined, Ann Taylor and The Limited emerged as the decisive champions of Facebook engagement with 73% of the most engaging posts coming from these two brands.

Each top-performing campaign had these essential characteristics:

These findings can dictate the way a brand develops content based on the successful practices identified through competitive intelligence.

• Campaigns communicated purpose by identifying desired customer behavior.

• Campaigns provided an incentive for performing a specific action.

• Campaigns empowered the customer by explicitly putting them in charge.

Content Type Trends



Provide Incentive

Placing the customer in charge

Identify desired customer behavior

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Examples



While going through the Facebook data and identifyingtrends, patterns, and popular practices, we discovered a remarkable relationship that provides measurabledata supporting the claim that multi-channel marketingconsistently delivers better results.

We overlaid email campaign data and Facebook engagementdata to examine whether Facebook engagement increasesif an email campaign is deployed in the same timeframe. Whenwe compared customer engagement for stand-aloneFacebook campaigns to Facebook campaigns that are accompanied by an email campaign, the results were noteworthy.

Facebook engagement grew by roughly 50% when oneemail campaign was deployed and by 100% when two emailcampaigns were deployed in the same timeframe. Giventhe wide adoption of social share buttons, thisrelationship makes a compelling case for multi-channelmarketing programs that are spearheaded by email.

Email Marketing and Facebook Campaign Engagement

Number of Emails 0 1 2deployed in the same timeframe as a Facebook Campaign



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Based solely on the selected brands we tracked over a three-month period, we developed the following recommendations for marketers to optimally engage their audience on Facebook:

• Prior to posting on Facebook, deploy an email campaign that prominently features social share buttons to encourage multi-channel engagement and ensure that the promoted offer reaches audiences beyond the intended email recipients.

• Deploy best content on Tuesday, since it typically garners largest engagement—but never forget to consistently test, in order to stay informed of trends, remain flexible and adjust strategy when industry or competitor standards change.

• Deploy Facebook campaigns later in the evening, within the 10pm-midnight ET slot, depending on the brand’s target audience and lifestyle. Again, frequent testing is essential.

• Where possible, include a photo or a video in Facebook campaigns, as these two formats achieve the largest engagement.

• Ensure that campaigns identify desired customer behavior and provide a proper incentive.

• Develop a deployment schedule that limits the monthly campaign count to 35, giving audiences an opportunity to remain interested while avoiding over-messaging.

Implications for the Facebook Channel

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With over 200 million tweets and 1.6 billion search queries generated daily, Twitter continues to grow and solidify its status as the second largest global social channel.

Curiously, however, based on our marketer set, we saw a drastic decline in Twitter use after a huge spike in the second month we tracked. While the spike can most likely be attributed to the proliferation of conversation around special events such as the Super Bowl, the Oscars, the Golden Globes and Valentine’s Day, the sharp decline is harder to substantiate.

Over the tracked period, while Twitter usage seemed to diminish, actual engagement exhibited consistent growth. Taking this into account, it seems that marketers should re-evaluate their approach and investment into this powerful channel, especially considering that 10% of brands in our data set do not have a Twitter account or have not used it in months. Given our set of retail brands that heavily target customers aged 18-35, it is telling that 10% are not utilizing a channel like Twitter, where their key demographic is particularly active. Interestingly, based on our analysis, there is a 100% brand presence in only two out of the four digital channels tracked. All 20 retail brands have presence on Facebook and through email, while Twitter and YouTube are lagging.

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As with Facebook, the time of day and day of the week Twitter campaigns are deployed are critical in terms of engagement. Even though Twitter considerably differs from Facebook, the guiding principle still holds: marketers need to deploy at the right time and with the right content in order to achieve optimal interaction with the customer. Here is what we discovered in terms of timing:

• Only 16% of all campaigns are deployed on the weekend.

• 20% of all Twitter campaigns are deployed on Fridays, while paradoxically, Friday reaps the lowest customer engagement.

• Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday are consistently the most engaging days of the week with only a marginal difference in the engagement they garner.

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• Over 84% of all Twitter campaigns were deployed within regular work hours (between 9am and 7pm ET), which means that less than 16% of campaigns are deployed in the evening, at night, or in the early morning.

• Interestingly, only 30% of the timeslots that received the most engagement were in the seemingly popular 9am to 7pm period.

• The most engaging timeslots were in the early morning hours of 5am-6am ET and 7am-8am ET.

These trends leave a clearly defined opportunity for brands to test new deployment hours in order to better engage their audience. Twitter campaigns deployed before the beginning of the workday may perform better due to the lack of consistent competition and over-messaging.

• The five most engaging brands deployed between 45–70 Twitter campaigns per month.

• The five least engaging brands averaged between 95 and 115 Twitter campaigns per month.

Much like with Facebook, when it comes to Twitter, there isn’t a one-size-fits-all answer to the conundrumregarding optimal number of campaigns. However, we were able to closely examine the deployment frequencypatterns exhibited by the retailers in our dataset. Here is what we discovered:

These results clearly communicate that the quantity of campaigns does not necessarily translate into quality of customer engagement.

Time of Day Trends Campaign Frequency Trends

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Content Type Trends

When we examined the top 10% most engaging Twitter campaigns of the brands studied, the content trends we identified for Twitter and Facebook were quite similar. The most engaging Twitter campaigns often stick to one or more of the following principles:

• Communicate purpose by identifying desired customer behavior.

• Provide an incentive for performing a specific action.

• Empower the customer by explicitly putting them in charge.

• Feature a celebrity mention.

• Include a famous saying or a celebrity quote.

• Incorporate some fun, feel-good tweets with a similarly fun, feel-good hash tag.

EXAMPLE: Abercrombie & Fitch is the king of breezy tweets with a light, weekend vibe:

Study or party? Definitely party… #Priorities

Why isn’t every night Saturday Night? #PerfectWorld

You never mean for it to be, but it always is a #LazySunday

Celebrity Mention

Famous QuoteCelebrity Mention

Identify Desired Customer BehaviorIncentivize

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Email Marketing and Twitter Engagement

After we substantiated the correlation between email and Facebook engagement, we decided to test the same relationship with Twitter. Here is what we discovered:

As illustrated by the graph to the right, average Twitter engagement grows when an email campaign is deployed in the same timeframe. Overall, when compared to campaigns unaccompanied by email messages, Twitter engagement exhibits an increase of over 25% when one email campaign is deployed and an increase of over 40% when a second message goes out.

This further validates the relationship between email marketing and social engagement, which provides great tactical implications for adjusting multi–channel marketing strategy in order to positively impact customer engagement.

Number of Emails 0 1 2deployed in the same timeframe as a Twitter Campaign

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Implications for the Twitter ChannelBased solely on the specific brands we tracked, the comprehensive competitive intelligence data, and the corroborated relationship between email marketing and social engagement, we were able to develop the following insights for Twitter :

• As with Facebook, prior to posting on Twitter, marketers should deploy an email campaign that prominently features social share buttons to promote and facilitate sharing across multiple social platforms.

• Since Tuesday seems to be the engagement winner across the social board, marketers should consistently test it against other deployment days, not only in terms of Twitter, but also with Facebook and email. Tuesday seems to provide the largest engagement opportunity for a multi-channel marketing plan.

• The largest number of both Twitter and Facebook campaigns is deployed during regular work hours. Marketers have an unparalleled opportunity to test alternative deployment times that will reach customers outside of work and at a time when they may be more inclined to make a personal purchase. Such deployment times are early mornings before customers get to work, and evenings when promotional messaging will reach them at home or on the go.

• Less is more. If a brand isn’t careful about the number of messages it puts out, it could leave a bitter taste in the consumer’s mouth.

• Twitter is all about value-wrapped brevity, but due to the nature of the channel and the fact that an average Twitter user tweets multiple times a day, there is an understandable requirement for content variety. It is important for marketers to switch it up and tweet about cool offers, customer satisfaction, celebrity glam, or feel-good comments about the weather, weekend or recreation.

• Based on the YouTube trends we’re about to share, and the fact that the video campaign format is the second most engaging on Facebook, we can make a strong case about multi-channel marketing that heavily utilizes the inherent capabilities of both Twitter and YouTube.

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Out of all digital channels we examined, YouTube is in a league of its own, uniquely positioned to utilize other social channels to drive traffic. According to metrics provider Alexa, YouTube ranks third globally in site traffic, right behind its parent company Google and social media giant Facebook. Fun fact: 500 years worth of YouTube videos are watched in any given day. This further attests to YouTube’s enormous potential, which brands have been slow to recognize and fully utilize as demonstrated by the telling stats below.

As seen in the graph to the right, YouTube marketing campaigns showed consistent growth within our brand set over the three-month tracked period. However, as marketers attempted to adopt and more widely utilize YouTube, their efforts left much to be desired.

While YouTube campaign volume was growing, customer engagement with those campaigns was steadily declining. This decline may be attributed to a larger volume of poorly

• 15% of tracked brands do not have a YouTube channel.

• Only 35% of the brands that have a YouTube channel deployed campaigns during each of the three months tracked.

• 20% only deployed campaigns in 1 of the 3 months tracked.

• The number of average campaigns per month per brand is 3.5.

planned or executed campaigns that failed to appeal to customers and incite the desired behavior. From the digital channels we examined, this is the only one that exhibits the curious pattern of growth in volume and simultaneous decline in engagement. The conclusion here seems to be that even though marketers are starting to recognize and utilize this channel, creating an engaging YouTube campaign is easier said than done. Solid strategy, a dedicated professional resource and substantial investment of time and effort are required for results.

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The graph to the left tells a compelling story about the optimal YouTube deployment days that complement our Facebook and Twitter findings:

• Monday is the most engaging day for YouTube, however it is one of the three least utilized deployment days.

• Tuesday, the most engaging deployment day for Facebook and Twitter campaigns, is a close second when it comes to YouTube engagement.

• The largest number of Youtube campaigns are deployed on Friday and Thursday.

• As with Facebook and Twitter, the weekend continues to be the least utilized time of the week for YouTube with barely 8% of campaigns going out on Saturday and Sunday combined.

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Even though time of day for campaign deployment doesn’t play as central of a role with YouTube as it does with Facebook and Twitter, it is still an important component of a successful campaign, especially since so many customers are going directly to YouTube to browse through content. Based on the time of day trends we identified, it is clear that YouTube offers significant areas of opportunity that marketers can explore to optimize their campaigns.

• 68% of YouTube campaigns were deployed between 11am-7pm ET.

• Only 10 out of the 24 one-hour timeslots in a given day were utilized for campaign deployment in any of the three months tracked.

• The least popular deployment timeslot across the three-month period was 8pm–2am ET.

• Surprisingly, the 2am-3am ET timeslot achieved the highest engagement.

• The 6am-7am ET timeslot comes in 2nd in terms of engagement, although it is the least utilized deployment timeslot.

Time of Day Trends

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The duration of a brand’s video campaign is a key variable when it comes to engagement. It’s no secret that brands have a tougher time attracting and keeping their audience’s attention. A video needs to be short enough to be easily digestible for the consumer, but long enough to tell a compelling story that prompts a reaction. Finding the middle ground is both challenging and rewarding. As exhibited by the chart to the right, 45% of all campaigns are between 30 and 90 seconds, while only 11% are less than 30 seconds.

In terms of engagement, however, things look differently. Here are our insights, based on the most engaging 10% of YouTube campaigns of the brands we analyzed:

• 33% of the top performing campaigns are under 30 seconds

• 28% are between 60-90 seconds

• 17% are between 120-180 seconds

• 11% are over 180 seconds

• Interestingly, the 90-120 second segment is not represented in the 10% most engaging campaigns

These findings can likely be attributed to the most frequently used YouTube formats: most brands populate their YouTube channels with TV commercials (typically ranging from under 30 to 90 seconds), music videos, short documentaries (e.g. documentary of TV commercial shoots), and consumer-generated content, all of which are usually over 120 seconds.

When developing a YouTube strategy and allocating budget for video development, duration and content are key components to consider.

Video Duration Trends

You Tube

Video Length of Campaigns Deployed(By Percent)

1–30s

30–

60

s

over 180s

120

–18

0s

90–120s60–90s

11%

24

%16%

15%

13%

21%

Video length in seconds

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Powering Intelligent InteractionsYou Tube

Even with the differing nature of YouTube, we found some striking similarities between most engaging content strategies for YouTube, Twitter and Facebook.

• Celebrity guest stars rack up impressive engagement.

• TV commercials promote a high number of views.

• Incentivized behavior, like posting user-generated content for a prize, is still a great engagement factor.

• Vague, interest-piquing video descriptions often pay off because they bank on audience curiosity.

Content Trends

The Gap, Banana Republic and Old Navy are all part of the same parent company. Out of those brands, the one that performed best in terms of customer engagement across the tracked social channels, is Banana Republic. There are interesting implications to this since the successful best practices developed by this brand are not leveraged by the rest. The lack of cross pollination, and the limited coordination across channels suggests that a great opportunity for strategy optimization is missed here, much to the disservice of the brands in question as well as the customer.

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• Based on our YouTube, Facebook and Twitter findings, the weekend may present a good opportunity for multi-channel campaign efforts. One well-performing weekend campaign on YouTube can successfully translate into customer engagement on another social channel.

• Continue banking on Tuesday while consistently testing against other days. Even though it ranks second in YouTube engagement after Monday, its clout in terms of engagement with the other social channels is undeniable.

• As with the other social channels, an off-work hours deployment can be a great opportunity to engage customers on their own personal time. Experimenting with early morning hours and late evening timeslots may prove to be a winning strategy.

• Determining the most appropriate video length and type of content is essential for optimal engagement. Keep video content under 3 minutes while focusing specifically on videos between 25-90 seconds. Content may take the form of TV ads, fan-generated clips and music videos.

• Since YouTube still seems to be in the early stages of effective adoption for marketing purposes, we need to emphasize consistency. Because marketers are not utilizing the channel consistently, customers may be less likely to engage with the content on regular basis.

If done right, YouTube can be at the forefront of any marketing effort. It has the capacity to drive incredible customer engagement due to its viral nature, but this can’t be achieved in a vacuum. YouTube needs to be supported by other channels in order to reach its undeniable potential as a marketing vehicle. Unlike Facebook and Twitter, YouTube lacks the correlation previously identified between email marketing and social engagement. One likely explanation is the fact that YouTube share buttons within email have not been widely adopted and multi-channel marketing efforts often overlook YouTube as a viable marketing tool, despite its considerable muscle.

At the same token, as YouTube presence is becoming a “must”, marketers are underestimating the investment they need to make in order to generate interesting and engaging content. A viable way to remedy this situation would be anall-encompassing multi-channel marketing strategy that successfully incorporates and promotes the brand’s YouTube channel through relevant, targeted, and easily sharable content. Here are some tactics we recommend when executing such holistic campaigns:

YouTube Channel Implications

• Start off with an email deployment that features all relevant social channels where the brand has a presence. This approach encourages email recipients to connect with the brand on multiple platforms, while subtly engaging them and, ultimately, leading to conversion.

You Tube

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In their most recent marketing forecast, Forrester dubbed email marketing “the workhorse of [the] interactive mix.*” Email continues to be the glue that holds multi-channel marketing together while providing measurable ROI. Email is the only channel that demonstrates month-to-month consistency in contrast to the rapid growth of YouTube and the decline of Twitter. In fact, the month-to-month email volume for the tracked period exhibits a minimal variation of 1% to 3% monthly.

Thankfully, the question is no longer “to send or not to send.” It is “when to send and how often.” With the email channel, like with the channels we’ve examined so far, there is no one right answer. Key variables, such as competitors and industry, are different for each marketer, but there are some interesting findings that can help determine a brand’s best deployment practices:

• 35% of all email campaigns are deployed on Monday or Friday, with those being the top two deployment days over the three-month period. Marketers can play off of the beginning and end-of-week trend with emails deployed on Tuesday, Thursday or the weekend.

• Only 20% of campaigns are sent over the weekend, a great opportunity for brands attempting to engage consumers during breaks from their busy work lives, when they are most likely to address their personal shopping needs. Again, performing adequate testing is essential.

Email Day of the Week Trends

340

320

300

280

260

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Av

era

ge

Ac

tua

l C

am

pa

ign

En

ga

ge

me

nt

*Forrester Research, Inc., US Interactive Marketing

Forecast, 2011–2016; August 2011



In order to gauge the optimal number of emails brands should send, we looked at the email volume of our five least and most engaging brands on Facebook and Twitter. Here is what we found:

As email drives social channel engagement, consistent email communication garners greater interaction with the brand, leading to an increased opportunity for customer conversion. Truly innovative and savvy marketers will leverage this relationship to develop multi-channel programs that yield results.

• The average number of emails sent each month across the tracked set was 17.

• The five most engaging brands on Facebook and Twitter averaged 22 emails a month.

• Interestingly, the bottom performing five brands on Twitter and Facebook sent less than 15 emails a month on average.

In contrast to the social channels, the preferred times for email deployment favor the early morning timeframe before customers head to work.

Our digital multi-channel analysis was conducted by overlaying email data with social data, and further solidifies the relationship between email marketing and social engagement. Based on the most popular times of day for email deployment and social campaign deployment, we may conclude that email campaigns are, in most cases, deployed before social channel campaigns, which enables them to drive social engagement, promoting brand awareness and encouraging interaction with the brand.

• The 6am-10am ET timeslot is most popular for email deployment, with 43% of campaigns being sent in that interval. Even though some AM timeslots are popular with social channels, all are in the late morning or just before noon. Twitter’s most popular deployment times occur after 9 am, Facebook’s are between 11am and 1pm, while YouTube’s are exclusively after 11am.

• The least popular timeslot for email deployment, 6pm-10 pm ET, presents another interesting contrast—a mere 3% of emails are deployed at this time, even though this time slot is utilized fairly consistently across all tracked social channels.

Time of Day Trends Campaign Frequency Trends

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In line with our emphasis on the importance of multi–channel marketing, it’s important for brands to make their emails mobile scalable in order to accommodate access from any type of device. If consumers are unable to quickly and easily view an email on the go, they can’t fully engage with the brand, and their likelihood of opening future communication diminishes. Incorporating all applicable social share buttons is a must when it comes to email, as it greatly contributes to multi-channel customer engagement. Based on the competitive insights discussed in this report, we can draw some interesting conclusions about the most effective ways to execute email campaigns that drive social engagement:

• As a top performer in terms of social engagement, Tuesday is a great candidate for deployment testing. It is the third least utilized day of the week for both email and Facebook deployments, but ranks first in engagement with both Twitter and Facebook. A Tuesday email campaign should, as often as possible, be accompanied by Facebook and Twitter posts to promote customer interaction and drive social engagement.

• In terms of time of day, since the early morning slot for email is particularly popular for retail brands, marketers should test alternative deployment times that are generally less utilized in the retail industry. As per our email insights, deployment in the less cluttered evening hours would provide a nice alternative over the jam-packed early morning timeslots.

• Conduct consistent testing of the days and times of email deployment in order to ensure the audience is reached at the most opportune time.

• Since the weekend is the least utilized time for email campaign deployment, that’s a good place to start testing. One interesting approach would be to deploy emails in the early morning hours on weekends so the marketing message is at the top of the inbox when customers wake up. The benefit here is two-fold:

1. Since the email volume sent by competitors is considerably smaller, it’s easier to cut through the clutter.

2. Since most retail shopping is typically done on the weekend, this approach may prove successful in boosting weekend sales.

At Yesmail Interactive, we’ve merged some of the best practices we’ve outlined in this report into one winning program we’ve called the Social Magnifier. It integrates social share buttons into email, delivers the right content type and action items necessary to prompt customer interaction, and leverages the relationship between email marketing and social engagement. It’s an email-driven program that promotes social sharing by rewarding it with discounts and giveaways. The result is multiplied social engagement, massive audience growth, and considerable increase in conversion rate. Ask us how we do it!

Email Implications

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In today’s digital age, it is imperative that marketers reach out to their audience through multiple channels in order to provide various platforms for the consumer to interact with the brand. While marketers have plenty of tools at their disposal to assist with the goal of customer engagement, they have been slow to effectively harness the power of competitive digital intelligence. When properly collected and analyzed, digital competitive data provides in-depth, actionable insights that can definitively improve a brand’s marketing strategy.

A truly optimized marketing strategy means multi-channel marketing. There is a lucrative correlation between email marketing and social engagement with Facebook and Twitter—the two most popular global social platforms. In addition, leveraging the very specific, yet extremely powerful nature of YouTube can further improve strategy. By leveraging this cross-channel relationship and thein-depth insights derived from digital competitive intelligence, marketers can choose from a variety of ways to optimize their brand’s campaigns by examining each channel individually, as well as looking at all of them from a holistic perspective.

Conclusion

You Tube

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You

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Yesmail Market Intelligence provides real-time, in-depth competitivedata across multiple digital channels and industries. Competitivedata is often very difficult to collect and even harder to analyze. WithYesmail Market Intelligence these challenges are eliminated as real-time data from four digital channels feeds directly into one user-friendly dashboard. Yesmail Market Intelligence doesn’t just let you sneak a peek at what your competitors are doing, it enables you to dive into their digital campaigns and evaluate industry market trends and best practices. By helping marketers to refine, adjust or completely redefine their strategy, Yesmail Market Intelligence is one of the most sophisticated tools for improving marketing efficiency and ROI.

About Yesmail Market Intelligence

Interested in learning more?

Yesmail Interactive Tel. : 1-877-YESMAILEmail : [email protected] : www.yesmail.com 309 SW Sixth AvenueSuite 700Portland, OR 97204

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Using Digital Market Intelligence to Drive Multi-Channel Success