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).

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.

Navigating to success

My daughter is in college, and is working on a project for one of her classes.  She is working on a presentation for her speech class about the effect of web design on consumer behavior.  She sent me a copy of the speech outline and one of the key items in her talk really hit me as it relates to web interfaces:  “Shopping patterns and consumer behavior are not just random acts.”

This is basic marketing, but it is amazing how often major organizations forget about this.  From experience I know that the challenges related to user interface design is that many organizational factions get involved and everyone has a perspective.  What you often end up with is a design that looks like the elephant that was described by six blind men. 

Never forget that in most situations, people come to your web site with a specific goal in mind.  Very few will end up there by random chance.  Don’t design a website or email message from your perspective as a marketer, but from the perspective of the visitor.  Marketers are so used to push marketing that sites are often designed from the perspective of “here is where we want to push you” or “this is what we want you to buy”.  When you do this with little regard to ease of navigation, your website is doomed to underperform.

A great example she uses to illustrate this is walmart.com.  Just visit the site and move your mouse around.  There are so many navigation components that you can easily get lost.  Her research indicates that on an average day, the number one retailer in the world has .2 percent of all global internet traffic (compare this to Amazon, whose daily reach is as high as 5 percent).

In addition to these points, as a father, it is wonderful to see your daughter have such insight – she makes me very proud.

Zappos in the Airport

I was in the airport in San Diego last week, and while going through security, noticed that something was different than at other airports.  The little baskets that you put your shoes and laptops in had liners.  These liners were promoting online shoe retailer Zappos.  Easch had a different promotional slogan. What a great marketing idea.  According to information I have found on-line, this is being piloted at several airports.  The company providing the service, SecurityPoint, provides the TSA with the bins at no charge, and charges the companies for the advertising.

Made to Stick - One Chapter at a Time

This is brilliant.  Selling a book a chapter at a time.  Made to Stick Author's Chip and Dan Heat have broken their book into bite size chunks which are for sale through their publisher.  I have to admit, the concept of Amazon putting the entire book online for browsing has bothered me as an author.  However, I would be happy to sell pieces of a book if someone wanted to buy it.  In fact, the digital price of a chapter is more than most authors make in royalties off the entire book.  Kudos to Jake McKee at Community Guy for uncovering this brilliant piece of digital marketing.

What does your company have that can be chopped up and sold in bite size pieces?