Baseball season is in full-swing! To celebrate this national pastime and shed some light on common characteristics and behavioral tendencies of baseball fans in America, Emailresponsibly.com would like to share some interesting facts and statistics from Experian Simmons’ National Consumer Study.

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Although the number of Americans watching March Madness (15%) ranks behind the NFL’s Super Bowl (38%) and MLB’s World Series (22%), the sport has quite a distinct following. Firstly, college basketball fans tend to be slightly older. In fact, Americans in the 18-24 year old age bracket are 4% less likely to be very or somewhat interested in college basketball than those 45 years of age and older. Read on for more statistics and trends pertaining to those most likely to be following March Madness this month.

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What sets fashion-concious consumers apart from all the rest? As you may expect, many of them rely on the media to learn about next season’s trends and to start planning their shopping lists. Experian Simmons recently conducted a study to learn more about this unique, fashion-saavy group, taking a closer look at the key behaviors and traits of those consumers who use fashion magazines to help them determine what clothes to buy.

Here are a few key findings:

• Those residing in the West and Northeast are more likely than the average adult to consult fashion magazines to help them decide the clothes they buy.
• Most of their online activity consists of shopping, followed by gathering information for shopping, instant messaging, airline/car/hotel info or reservations, and digital imaging/photo albums.

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To this day, a great deal of teenage culture remains unchanged. For example, teenagers still face the same growing pains and social acceptance issues; and they still spend their money on clothes, video games and music. But, the evolution of the world around them has also caused a number of significant shifts in behavior that marketers should be aware of. Today’s teen population has access to so much more technology and information than it did 10 years ago, leading to the following trends and inclinations:

Teens go online to communicate – of online activities done in the last 7 days, communications, like IM and email, top the list, and are followed by playing/downloading games and music.

More teens now have cell phones – the cell phone industry has seen rapid growth, with cell phone usage among teens going from one-third ownership in 2003 to two thirds ownership in 2007. Read More »

As marketers, we all know the importance of segmenting our customers based on their key demographics, behaviors, attitudes, and affinities. But exactly who are these anonymous people we bucket into groups of hundreds, thousands, or even millions?

To help shed some light on what your customers look like and how they act, we proudly present “Know Your Personas,” a regular feature highlighting key customer groups to consider in your marketing strategy. This data appears courtesy of our friends at Experian Consumer Research, the home of Simmons.

The Multi-Channel Shopper is defined as ‘someone who shops and buys in more than one retail channel – online, catalogs, in-store, mail, phone.’ For this episode of Know Your Personas, we’re exploring what makes up today’s multi-channel shopper – specifically who these important consumers are, where they shop, and their attitudes about shopping to help you reach them more effectively.

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Given that no one in Boston seemed to be working today due to the combination of Columbus Day and afternoon playoff baseball (ok, really just the baseball), this article in New York Magazine seemed all-too-appropriate.

Amazingly, it seems that many in the political sphere believe a baseball statistician — not a seasoned political pollster – might be the best candidate to successfully predict the outcome of the upcoming election.

The article doesn’t have too much to do with email directly, but it certainly reinforces the notion that there’s a treasure trove of value in your data, whether it’s used for predicting votes will be cast, who will win the World Series, or how many airplane tickets you will sell to a new market. Most interestingly, the article also gives marketers motivation to try new statistical methods for predicting customer behavior based on Nate Silver’s common-sense, out-of-the-box method:

Every other pundit, though, was doing what they’ve always done, i.e., following the polls. Silver decided to ignore the polls. Instead, he used this observation about demographics to create a model that took voting patterns from previous primaries and applied them to upcoming contests. No phone calls, no sample sizes, no guesswork. His crucial assumption, of course, was that each demographic group would vote in the same way, in the same percentages, as they had in other states in the past.

Like many of the so-called Moneyball breakthroughs in baseball, this was both a fairly intuitive conclusion and a radical break from conventional thinking…But his hunch about demographics proved correct: It’s how he called the Indiana and North Carolina results so accurately when the polls got them so wrong.

Let’s face it: it shouldn’t take a national holiday like Mother’s Day or a major news event like the recent vice president nominations to remind marketers to be tactical in marketing to women. The simple fact is that women hold tremendous financial sway over the global economy, so they certainly deserve our undivided attention as responsible marketers.

Jake Swearingen of BNET has a short piece this week on “Some Common Mistakes When Marketing to Women,” with some handy quotes from Marti Barletta, president of the TrendSight Group. The article gives some tips that email marketers can certainly learn from, such as the impact of lifestyle images on female customers:

“Making it personal is more important to appealing women,” says Barletta. “They get impatient with theory. They want to know how it affects people…Women are interested in people and character,” says Barletta.

A great example of this tactic in action is the latest Vera Bradley campaigns featuring their Resort Collection of bags and accessories. In all three emails, we see their products in their appropriate context — vacation getaways — and in two of them, we see female models in carefree, relaxed poses. The imagery and copy make it clear how the products are beneficial to the end user in simple terms.

Vera Bradley’s “Resort Collection Series”
Sneak peek the new Resort Collection from Vera Bradley
Vacation in style with the new Resort Collection form Vera Bradley.
Dive into the Resort Collection from Vera Bradley.

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