Marketing with Technology and More

Sealed for Your Protection

I am in Columbia Missouri this week for an exciting occasion.  My daughter is graduating from The University of Missouri (I’m one proud father).  Anyway, the trip necessitated a stay in a local hotel.  Having visited her numerous times, we knew what the area had to offer, and opted to try a brand new Hilton Garden Inn that had just opened on the outskirts of town. 

By today’s road warrior travel standards, it was pretty nice.  Free Internet, breakfast, coffee in the room, soap, shampoo, an alarm clock.  But the alarm clock is where it got oddly strange.  At about 10:30 PM, when my wife and I were ready to turn in, I looked at the alarm clock and it said 5:20AM.  So I looked at the clock for the “set time” function and could not find it.  So I called my daughter over, the new college graduate (figuring she would be pretty smart) and she could not figure it out either.  It was easy to set the alarm, but there did not seem to be a way to set the time.  In frustration, I called the front desk.

I simply said, “could you tell me how to set the time on the alarm clock in my room?”  His response was, “you can’t, it is sealed for your protection.”  He told me he would be happy to come up with the tools required to reset the time if I wanted or, he could arrange for a wake-up call.  I told him that this was pretty ridiculous.  I think he somewhat agreed, and had grown tired of telling clients that they could not set their own alarm clocks.

What am I being protected from?  My guess is the hotel is hoping no one will steal an alarm clock they can’t set (although the time has to be off in order for someone to figure that out, so a thief probably would not realize this until after they had stolen it and taken it home).  Sometimes we do things in business that are designed to serve our own best interest (not the customer’s) and then try to disguise it with some lame explanation that does nothing but frustrate a user or consumer even more.  Put as much control in the hands of the customer as you can (especially when it comes to setting their own alarm clock).

A Video with Impact

A TED last year, we saw a video by a professor from Kansas State named Michael Wesch.  It was titled The Machine Is Using Us, and was an incredible explanation of Web 2.0.  Today I watched another video that he produced.  This one is extremely powerful.  Titled A Vision of Students Today, It tells the story of today's college student in a very interesting way, and it illustrates the power of this incredible information distribution tool - YouTube.  Watch this video, and see if you agree, it really has impact.

Email Success Secrets when Images are set to off

Send out an effective email marketing message is not as easy as it used to be.  At SubscriberMail we have just completed a survey of executives and 63% of them have images turned off as the default on their email clients.  What this means for marketers is that despite all the effort you go to in order to make the message look great in the inbox, it is often lost when it arrives.

The SubscriberMail team has learned many great ways to optimize your messages, and today we released a new whitepaper titled The Great Suppression: Five Strategies to engage audience members when images are Suppressed by Mail Clients.  You are welcome to download a complimentary copy.  As a matter of fact, you may want to check out our entire White Paper Library, filled with great email content.

Google AdWords Marketers - Beware! Phisher's are Out There

I think I am pretty savvy when it comes to on-line purchasing.  The last thing I thought is thatI would ever fall prey to is a Phishing scam, but Phishers are crafty. 

As a business we are regular Adwords users on Google.  I had not used them in a while, so I reactivated a somewhat dormant account the other day.. A day later I ger an email telling me that my account information is not up-to-date, and that I need to correct it.  Diligently I clicked in the message and went to the site that the email pointed me to adWRods.com .  When I spell it out, it is obvious, but without the emphasis, it is easy to go to a bogus site.

When I arrived at the site, it looked just like the Google site, and I readily provided the requested information.  The last thing I would want is our Google campaign shut down because my credit card information was obsolete.  Fortunately, the latest versions of the major browser try to give you a heads-up.  In my case, I received a message that made me look closely at the URL.

I was like they fly in the spider web.  Once I was caught, I was doomed.  Phishers are creative and ingenious.  You have to be diligent every time you provide credit card information.  The identity you save may be your own.

United Airlines - What were these people thinking

I received an email from United Airlines today asking me to participate in a study on the "Elite Membership" kit they sent to me.  I looked at the survey and thought - who put this together, their marketing intern.  Actually, I think a marketing intern would have done a better job. 

The four data points related to all items were (you could only pick one):
- Received it
- Read it
   Received it and Read it
- Don't remember

So here is the question - can I read it if I don't receive it?  It would not taken much brainstorming to figure out that this did not make any sense.  Then it asked me about my membership card, and had the same four options.  I don't know about you, but I don't usually do much reading of my membership cards when I get them.  The second page of the survey asked how useful this information was to me.  I can't believe that they really think much of the advertising they throw into their envelopes these days is very useful to anyone.

It brings me to my point.  We assembled and sent out SubscriberMail's annual email survey in conjunction with the EEC this week.  We initially sent a small sample to test questions and reports.  When we got the sample back, there was a major back end issue with reports.  We were able to reconfigure the survey and send it out correctly.  If you are doing a survey, testing a small sample can give you great feedback on how to improve questions and what the reporting will look like.  Don't trigger a survey without testing.   Perhaps I was in the United test group - for their results sake, let's hope so.

Cool Little Service for Web Marketers

I found a great new little service that will help any marketer working on Search Engine Optimization.  Yoocrawl crawls any web site and provides you with all of the related data to a site.  Check out the IP addresses, outbound links, list of keywords, titles,etc.  This is all data you can search for by reading the code and checking for the ip address, however, this little tool does it all in one place...for free.

The Web - Instant Market Research

I love the power of the web for feedback.  I had a community project I was involved in, and as part of that project I needed to conduct a simple survey.   Before the web, undertaking this task would have been daunting.  I would have had to print up surveys send them out (if I could afford the postage).  Then wait until the surveys were returned and then tabulate them.  If I wanted to get more details, I could get really fancy and run cross tabs. The cost of doing this kind of research was out of the scope of most community organizations (and many marketers).

Tonight, I sat down at my computer, used Zoomerang to put together a very simple survey.  I used our SubscriberMail system to send a message to the community (who had opted in to hear from us).  Literally five minutes after I launched the survey, the data started to pour in.  I can easily run cross tabs, and I can automatically send a follow-up email to anyone who has not clicked through to the survey.

As a marketer...what is not to love.

DMNews Article on Email Marketing in a Down Economy

When the economy goes South as it unfortunately appears to be doing, marketers need to scramble to get better ROI from fewer marketing investments.  I recently wrote an article for DMNews that discusses the steps smart marketers are taking now to use email marketing as a great tool as the economy tightens.  You can read the article titled "Email Marketing - A Bright Star in a Down Economy" here.

A Pen that is Mightier than A Computer

Every year at TED there are some cool new technology introductions.  This year was no exception, and one that really captured my attention was a new "pen."  It is actually much more than your average pen however.  It is called the Pulse SmartPen by a company called LiveScribe.  What makes this device interesting is that when you take notes (using special note paper), it captures the ambient sound in the room where you are writing.  Later, if you want to review your notes, you can tap the pen to any word on the page, and it will play back what was going on at the time you took the note. 

This is a fantastic concept for any situation where you need to take notes, but might want more detail (a lecture in school for example).  The pen has a variety of other functions too.  For example, if you have a phrase that you have written down, you can touch the pen to the phrase, and it will repeat it back to you in a foreign language.  Another feature is that you can write down numbers, and then arithmetic statements such a plus or minus.  By touching the numbers and math statement, plus adding an equal sign, the pen will give you the correct answer to the math problem.

The pen is not available yet, but will sell in both  one and two gigabyte models for under $200.

Marketing's Philosopher

When I was out at TED this year I ran into Seth Godin.  I wish I had more time to spend with him as I think he is a marketing genius.  He's often referred to as a guru.  I think that is the wrong moniker.  I think he is really a marketing philosopher.  Sometimes he makes simple statements that boil things down to their essential nature.  Today he posted the following:

"Persistence isn't using the same tactics over and over. That's just annoying.

Persistence is having the same goal over and over."

If more salespeople and marketers paid attention to this advice, the world would definitely be much more enjoyable (and less annoying).