Google recently announced a change in their privacy policies. The new format will combine existing privacy policies into one, gathering customer data from all of its services including search, Gmail, YouTube, Google+, and Google Docs. Essentially Google is making a move to be more competitive with the likes of Facebook who has been collecting a wider spectrum of data while providing its customers a more personal experience. Having a unified privacy policy that applies to all products will allow for data integration across multiple mediums and will improve the personalization of a user’s experience. So what does this mean for marketers? Overtime customers will become desensitized to such policies as the all inclusive privacy model becomes the norm. Google is leading the way and opening the flood gates for other marketers to revamp their privacy policies as well.

Takeaway: The winners will balance privacy with increased value through personalization.

In order to make this work to your advantage, you will need to reassess your privacy policies and find a balance that customers are comfortable with. Most privacy policies were created between 2001 and 2005 when the public was still sensitive about this subject and therefore are due for a makeover. However, in order for a revamped privacy policy to provide balanced benefits, it must be carefully tailored to fit the behaviors and comfort levels of its customers. You will need to dig into your existing policies and adjust accordingly.

It has long been understood that pointing all your company’s marketing efforts in one direction will not yield the best possible results. Most recently, multichannel integration has included both online and offline mediums, but not without a significant amount of confusion. A recent STRATA study found that “more than half of US media buyers said less than 25% of their clients are running online and offline integrated campaigns” and even more surprisingly, one in four media buyers didn’t have a single client employing a multichannel strategy. This could be attributed to the fact that it is a considerably more complex process to measure the combined ROI of a multichannel marketing campaign. A Mckinsey Consulting study suggested that “onlines confusing and incompatible set of metrics may be most at fault” for the low percentage of marketers making use of a multichannel campaign as well as the “challenges with measuring overall investment”. Marketers are getting lost and instead of utilizing the tools available to them, they are shying away from integration all together. This doesn’t have to be the case. There is an easier way to integrate online and offline. Email is the one channel that will help immediately while providing rich customer metrics. An effective email marketing campaign can help solve the problem of origination as well as track the results of a particular campaign and compound its positive effects by layering impressions across multiple channels.

With eLoop 5’s Action-Based Messaging (ABM) feature, your business’s marketing can become more dynamic and versatile with a few easy steps.

Key benefits of ABM's include:

• micro target based on subscribers behavior
• automatic follow up based on extremely specific criteria
• message triggering based on any subscriber action or inaction
• gather data based on your customer preferences and respond accordingly
• increase personalization
• enhance lead nurturing during specific points in your sales cycle

As a marketing professional, you are constantly under pressure to maintain and improve your customer engagement. It is no longer acceptable to blindly blast messages and assume the job of retaining that subscriber is done.

Despite enormous efforts on the part of marketers, email deliverability rates have halted after the first half of 2011, coming in at 81%, according to a study released on September 20th by Return Path. 

Although reasons for this are numerous and often situational, a certain amount of blame in this case can be placed on “priority inbox”. This lovely little tool, created last year by Google, essentially puts a brain within your email account. It sees and records every action and configures message placement accordingly. So what we’re seeing are high reported delivery rates that don’t necessarily reflect the number of messages actually delivered. Technically the provider may have accepted it, but it doesn’t mean it’s landed in the customers’ inbox.