Crumbs from the Scone
If you live in the United States or Canada, there’s a chance you’ve used Groupon to receive discounts on a variety of products and services. “Since launching in November 2008, the Chicago-based deal-a-day website has sold over 7 million online coupons in 70 cities,” notes Jackie Huba at the Church of the Customer Blog.
Groupon’s success hasn’t gone unnoticed, however, and it has spawned competitors. But the company has a plan for staying in the lead: a fanatical commitment to excellent customer service.
Even if coupons aren’t a central component of your marketing strategy, you’ll find inspiration in Huba’s report from a recent visit to Groupon’s headquarters. Here are some of the things the Groupon folks do well:
Flaunting the fine print. You’ll reduce the chances of customer anger or disappointment by clearly outlining what they should (or should not) expect. “Groupon features terms and conditions in large type in a clearly labeled section right beside the deal highlights,” Huba says. “You can’t miss it.”
Offering an ironclad money-back guarantee. Unscrupulous customers might abuse Groupon’s liberal refund policy, but the company believes its generous approach builds trust with the majority of its honest clientele. And it works: Only a small percentage of customers request a refund.
Instituting a two-way rating system. When everyone knows they’re up for a critique, everyone stays on their best behavior. “Customers can give awards to merchants that they like or flag a merchant for a poor experience,” says Huba. “Merchants can also rate loyal customers or good tippers, and can flag unfriendly customers.”
Transparent, pro-customer policies are a great way to differentiate your business from the competition—and keep customers coming back for more.
Source: Church of the Customer Blog.
Crumbs from the Scone
Today’s consumers are “eager to use mobile devices to inform in-store decisions,” says Target’s Kris Roberts in a recent article that quotes experts on the subject at Knowledge@Wharton. Digital innovations, the article argues, are transforming how people shop.
As mobile networks improve, it’s becoming easier for retailers to target customers based on where they live or shop, and to communicate with them in real time. And location-based social networks (think Foursquare), which essentially ask users to share their retail patterns with friends, are offering vital new ways for brands to link to communities, the article notes.
But retailers aren’t adapting so well to the new reality, Roberts warns: “They continue to view online shoppers and customers at retail stores as two separate entities.”
So, to help sellers better meet the demands of today’s wired buyers, the experts quoted in the article offer a few must-do action tips. Among them:
- Update your organizational systems to better integrate in-store operations with Internet retailing. This is a daunting task, Roberts admits, and could require “a generation or two of management changeover.” But it’s vital to achieving the next point.
- Break down your silos, and get your teams working across channels—from stores to online to mobile and social media—to maintain branding and service at each customer touchpoint.
- Get shoppers more involved in decision-making. While the “primal” experience of in-store shopping is unmatched, so is the Internet’s ability to provide shoppers with information, Roberts notes. As consumers move between the two, they are playing a more active role in shaping their own shopping experiences. Find new ways to engage with them.
Integrate your teams—in-house, online and in-store. The 21st-century marketing team works in real time across all channels—and in partnership with wired and savvy consumers.
Source: Knowledge@Wharton.
Crumbs from the Scone
It’s one thing to market to people just like you. But what if you have nothing in common with your target audience? How do you get inside their head? In The Experience Effect, Jim Joseph offers a practical suggestion: “Read a book or go to a movie that depicts the customer—especially a book or movie that the target marketing is embracing,” he says. “You’ll get an incredible glimpse into their lives, their emotions, and their preferences.”
When Joseph—then a single man in his twenties—began marketing Johnson’s Baby Shampoo, he knew nothing about babies. He’d never even held one in his arms.
“So like every other new-mom-to-be,” he says, “I read the classic book What to Expect When You’re Expecting to see for myself what pregnant women are thinking about, worrying about, and purchasing as they go through the cycles of their pregnancy and as they make decisions for their baby’s arrival.”
But that’s not all. When his pregnant friends would go to the doctor for a check-up, Joseph would tag along to observe mothers interacting with their newborns in the waiting room.
He adopted a similar approach when marketing to another demographic he didn’t fit. “I used to watch Dawson’s Creek and Beverly Hills 90210 religiously when I was a brand manager on Clean & Clear teen skin care at Johnson & Johnson so that I could learn about teenage girls and their lives.”
Now the question: What can pop culture teach you about your audience?
“Good marketing comes from turning theory into reality,” writes Joseph, “so let’s make our consumers real people, not just a collection of data.”
Source: The Experience Effect.
Crumbs from the Scone
It’s been a long time coming, writes Dylan Boyd at Email Wars, but with “new systems of marketing automation we are finally gaining ground to creating trigger-based campaigns on actions, behavior and timing.” Boyd provides a thorough rundown on various trigger-based campaigns you might employ.
Here are a few highlights to help spur your creativity:
Time-Based Triggers. “When someone comes to your site and does something, you can actually start a clock that sends out emails based upon a ‘day plus X’ factor,” Boyd notes. The idea is to continue the conversation while giving subscribers some breathing room between messages. There isn’t a magic formula, he cautions, and you’ll need to fine-tune your program to see what works best. But Boyd has found success working with multiples of three: “By using a 3 day spread you can move them back and forth allowing the frequency to have enough room so as to not overwhelm your subscribers with so many emails that they unsubscribe.”
Behavior-Based Triggers. “Let’s say you came into an ecommerce site, looked at a shirt and a hat, compared some features, or read some product reviews,” he explains. “Armed with this knowledge, [a marketer] could send [an email that features] that product.”
Transaction-Based Triggers. Frequently, these strengthen your customer relationship by responding to a purchase they made, Boyd notes. The message might contain a special offer on their next visit, a suggestion that they review a product or service, or a survey requesting feedback.
Don’t let that trigger finger get rusty. “These types of emails need to be continuously monitored, measured and changed up,” says Boyd. “If you get into the rut of just letting it go, eventually the impact will wear off.”
Source: The Email Wars.
Crumbs from the Scone
In 2005, the Harvard Business Review published the influential article “Marketing Malpractice: The Cause and the Cure.” Its authors—Clayton M. Christensen, Scott Cook and Taddy Hall—argued that we often set ourselves up for failure by focusing on customer types rather than customer needs.
“To develop and promote products that make headway in crowded markets—or even expand markets—companies should focus on the ‘job’ that customers want accomplished,” explains Kathryn Roy at MarketingProfs. “Their article expands on the legendary observation made by Harvard Business School marketing professor Ted Levitt: People don’t want a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole.”
To illustrate the point, consider what McDonald’s learned when it investigated the “job” performed by a milkshake: A surprisingly large number of shake sales happened during breakfast hours. Why? Customers with long commutes wanted something to occupy their attention during a boring drive and keep them full until lunch. “In other words,” notes Roy, “these customers bought the shakes to perform a specific job: to satisfy their hunger and allay their boredom while being quick and convenient to purchase and easy to consume behind the wheel.”
By slicing and dicing customers into segments, McDonald’s had missed a cluster of customers united by the “job.” And there’s a good chance your company does the same thing.
“It’s scary to narrow your focus to a smaller set of prospects,” notes Roy, “but if you address [a customer’s] needs—the ‘jobs’ they want done—before your competitors do, you can boost wins, revenues, and morale.”
Source: MarketingProfs.
Crumbs from the Scone
The word “viral” has become synonymous with social-media success, writes Ian Greenleigh in a post at ReputationOnline. “It’s even showing up on business cards.” Some of the professional titles Greenleigh has recently seen: Viral Brander, Viral Marketing Planner.
But the companies that assign these titles “don’t understand social media,” Greenleigh asserts. In short, no one “creates” viral content, he says, and “no amount of blood, sweat or tears can make something ‘go viral.'”
In his Anti-Viral Manifesto, Greenleigh lists the assumptions he says need to be shot down regarding viral marketing. Among the myths:
If success is repeatable, there is a formula for creating successful content. No there isn’t, Greenleigh states: “Normally, it doesn’t even matter if the second piece of content bears any resemblance to the [successful] first, [what matters is] that it is marketed to the same network,” he notes.
Content is king. “Not really,” he says. “If whatever you’re sharing is great, it will be shared more. But if it’s not so great, and you have an existing fan base, it will still get traction.” What matters most is the “kingdom” you create with your customers, he says—based on long-term CRM.
Good guys finish last. Wrong again. Service wins over sensational in the long run. People who “work hard to build networks of brand advocates still see ROI from their efforts,” Greenleigh concludes. “They know that all the metrics involved in supposedly calculating viral-ness don’t mean diddly if they can’t point to results that mean something to someone.”
Trusted content beats viral content over time. When you are viewed as a trusted content provider, Greenleigh says, “your network will do the heavy lifting once you give them something to spread.”
Source: ReputationOnline.
Crumbs from the Scone
If a subject line gets truncated on its way to your subscriber’s inbox, cautions Mark Brownlow at Email Marketing Reports, it can do more than cause a “wry smile” or a “little embarrassment.” It can cause outright confusion, or it can tell your customers something you didn’t even mean to say. Horrors!
Here’s his advice for avoiding two major subject-line traps:
Remember that any subject line is subject to truncation—even if you never exceed the recommended 50-character limit. You probably account for this limit by frontloading critical keywords, but you might not realize just how frontloaded those terms need to be. “My Yahoo! Mail inbox,” notes Brownlow, “has just 27 characters displayed.” Consider, for instance, how the 50-character subject line Hit it out of the park with iPad this Father’s Day would look if recipients saw only its first 27 characters: Hit it out of the park with. You’ve just lost your product and your holiday theme in one fell swoop. “Perhaps, then, frontloading should mean what it says,” he advises: Make sure you place your hot words “right at the front, not just close to it.”
Exercise caution when using critical “conditioners” in your subject line. “Conditioners are those little extra words or numbers that change the meaning of the words that precede them,” says Brownlow. “There is an important difference between ‘50% off Ice Age’ and ‘50% off Ice Age 3.'” Likewise, he explains, Make Your Neighbors Green With Envy takes on a thuggish environmental tone if truncated to Make Your Neighbors Green.
Frontload, and watch those conditioners. As you write and test subject lines, don’t forget that a lot can get lost in truncation.
Source: Email Marketing Reports.
Crumbs from the Scone
“Would you ask the best violinist in an orchestra to take over as conductor without any preparation?” asks Michael Leimbach in a Pro article at MarketingProfs. “Probably not. And if you did, you wouldn’t have very high expectations for the orchestra’s performance.”
But that is exactly what you do when you promote top salespeople to management roles without preparing them in the critical areas of coaching, motivating and developing their people. “Ultimately,” notes Leimbach, “well-managed teams will deliver more sales at higher margins than those that are poorly managed or left to their own devices.”
To maximize sales potential—and, thus, fully leverage marketing’s lead-gen efforts—Leimbach says a manager should have ready answers for five important questions her team might ask. Here are a couple:
Where are we going? “If salespeople are not connected to the overall business direction,” he notes, “they feel out of the loop and are less able to carry out their role in achieving the broader business goals. By communicating the company’s vision, strategy, and challenges, and how the sales team fits into the big picture, managers provide their teams with a sense of belonging to a larger whole and ensure their salespeople are able to make a meaningful contribution to the organization’s success.”
Where do we go for help? Due to organizational barriers, a salesperson might feel hampered—for instance, when rounding up needed implementation resources or trying to help a customer with a technical problem. “Successful managers clearly communicate how well the organization is supporting the sales function and can work with other functional leaders to orchestrate the kinds of resources their sales team needs,” he says.
Don’t assume your best salesperson is a natural-born manager—give her the tools and training she needs to lead her team to success.
Source: MarketingProfs.
Crumbs from the Scone
Your B2B email marketing program might have a good reason for sending a steady stream of one-size-fits-all messages to prospects. “The idea being that by keeping these folks exposed to your company’s name and logo, you’d stay ‘top of mind,'” notes Ardath Albee at Marketing Interactions. “That process is now referred to as ‘spray and pray’ marketing.”
As you might guess, there’s a problem with the “spray and pray” approach: It doesn’t work to gain or maintain customer loyalty.
Why? Because awareness doesn’t promote action, Albee explains. “I’m aware of Anheuser Busch. I love their Clydesdale ads. But I don’t drink beer. I’m also aware of many other beers. If I had to pick one, it would probably boil down to a ‘close my eyes and point’ exercise because I have no expertise in selecting beer.”
What’s a better approach? Albee creates a scenario in which a business needs to choose an email service provider (ESP).
- Vendor A sends the usual offers and testimonials. “They rave about how well their customers are doing by using their superior system,” she says.
- Vendor B, meanwhile, sends educational content that enables prospects to improve their email campaigns—even if they don’t become a customer—and demonstrates how other customers have succeeded.
While Vendor A is less expensive than Vendor B, the customer has gained more confidence in Vendor B. And even though the Vendor A service might equal that of Vendor B, it won’t be the company that gets the call. “[S]taying top of mind wasn’t enough to win [Vendor A] a customer when compared with all that Vendor B did to go beyond just staying top of mind,” Albee concludes.
Give ’em info they can use. It’s not enough to stay at the top of customers’ minds; show them why you deserve to be there.
Source: Marketing Interactions.
Crumbs from the Scone
Whether you’ve run out of inspiration or simply want to refine a good idea, a freewriting session might be the best way to get your best thoughts on the page. “I’ve seen people use it to create a strategic direction for their company, brainstorm ideas for a personal branding campaign, plan a product launch, think through employee engagement problems, rehearse ways of handling a negotiation, write books and blog posts, and more,” says Mark Levy at the Compelling blog.
When you sit down with the sole purpose of writing whatever crosses your mind, you’re able to override the internal editor that keeps you sounding smart, confident and consistent—usually by killing risky, daring, original thoughts before you’ve had the chance to finish a sentence.
To keep your internal editor in check, Levy offers this advice:
Set a time limit. Your freewriting session might last for as few as five minutes, or as long as half an hour. “When the timer starts,” explains Levy, “you start. When it finishes, you finish. By using a timer, you can forget about logistics, and spend your attention and energy on flat-out writing.”
Don’t pause. If your mind goes blank, write about your mind going blank. If you’re frustrated by the choppiness of your thoughts, write about that. “Stopping for more than a second or two gives your internal editor a chance to reengage and disrupt the process,” he notes.
Write at a swift rate. “Your fingers needn’t fly over the keyboard,” he says. “They just need to move at a clip slightly quicker than your norm.” This faster-than-usual pace will help to keep that internal editor at bay.
Use a no-holds-barred freewriting session to get all of your ideas on the page—then decide which ones deserve further consideration.
Source: Compelling.
If you live in the United States or Canada, there’s a chance you’ve used Groupon to receive discounts on a variety of products and services. “Since launching in November 2008, the Chicago-based deal-a-day website has sold over 7 million online coupons in 70 cities,” notes Jackie Huba at the Church of the Customer Blog.
