Yesterday, bright and early, Rebecca reminded 200 or so ‘Jericho Brainy Breakfast’ attendees that digital was the elephant looming in the rear view mirror. ‘… Look out, it’s behind you’.  You’d better start your engine.
Some of her points:

• No more whinging about not having any budget for digital.  Just stop doing something else that you are doing now.  Snip.  Chop.  Slice.  Hey presto – there’s some cash.
• Don’t try to get big permission, take a small bite first – just get enough go-ahead to get something low risk started.
• Talk it up, set goals, get others excited, and prove your results with hard facts.
• Package your pitch up for each audience.  You might need to tell your story four different ways when you explain it to IT, sales,  CEO, customer service.  And much more… she’s fantastic.

Here in eDM-land, moving budget from one place to another has been our staple.  For years we’ve been saying things like ‘how about you don’t do a billboard and you can fund your email marketing comms audit and redesigns for the next year’.  Well maybe a couple of billboards, or the entire outdoor budget.  But, the point is we were well aware that many companies didn’t even give email a line item in the budget.

Since the recession it is the reality that budgets are likely to be cut, so money has to be moved, as you can see from this chart.  In this study of 1500 marketers, only two tactics showed increases in budget – email and social media.  The reason is clear  – they make money per dollar spent.  Here is the email chart.  Plan to spend less somewhere to make more everywhere, and have more fun doing it.  Get better reporting that proves your point, and then ask for more budget to do it all over again.  How to spend your money:

1. Audit every email that leaves your company and stop making excuses – if it’s ugly get it redesigned.  It costs the same to send an ugly email as it does a beautiful one, and it’s far less effective guranteeing less pass-along, lower responses and even less deliverability.   See great emails here and scroll and tick to choose to download a whole look-book here.
2. Automate where you can – life cycle, lead massaging, date and event triggers, tranactional.  Some cost up front in planning and set up, for ultra cheap perfectly timed ongoing communications.
3. Outsource. If you dont have the resourcing you need, get it from a supplier (like us) who can collaborate letting you either hand the lot over, or just the bits that are in the to-do list but are not getting done.
4. Audit and improve data capture process and the forms themselves.  I’m going to post on this process again soon.
5. Review activity, benchmarks and trends at least quarterly and make sure they, and your goals align with eveything else you are doing.
6. Test and measure – sometimes best outsourced if it’s in your too hard basket.
7. Get the best software tools. I know I’m biased as heck but if you don’t have the right toolkit a lot of the stuff that can be automated isn’t and it costs you dearly in time and money.