Tag Archives: Digital marketing

December 3, 2015 · 12:55 pm

Hurry Up!

I know you all want to hear another rant on ad blocking about as much as you’d like to hear an endless loop of Tiny Tim singing Tiptoe Thru The Tulips.  I’ll keep it brief, therefore.  A company called Soasta did some research with the Harris folks about what website users were looking for as they surf around.  Not surprisingly, they found the following (as reported by eMarketer):Most Important Attributes of Website Performance According to US Internet Users, Sep 2015 (% of respondents)

When it comes to website performance, internet users say personalized content is less important than a website’s ease of navigation and speed, according to a September 2015 survey. More than three-quarters of US internet users said that a leading attribute of website performance was that it was easy to navigate. Another top attribute was speed; 73% of respondents indicated so.

Here is a truism (at least one I’ve found) about digital interactions: people hate impediments.  It doesn’t matter if it’s a landing page from an ad that doesn’t go directly to the reason someone clicked on the ad or if it’s just a plain old web page.  People are pressed for time.  Any impediment we put in their way has a high likelihood of derailing the interaction.  Web pages that are slow to load because of external calls get closed.  For you non-technical people, that means when the page calls out for an ad (especially if it needs to fill the ad via a programmatic auction), or some behavioral tracker, or anything else like analytics.  Popups are an impediment as well – it’s something in between the user and what they are trying to do. The research bears this out.  Personalization, on the other hand, can help speed up the interaction since it’s based on the user’s likes and preferences.

Ad blockers generally speed up page loads.  That is one of the main reasons people use them besides avoiding tracking.  If we help people hurry up, maybe they will, in return, be more responsive to the marketing information we present instead of doing all they can to avoid it.

Make sense?  What are your thoughts?

 

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November 18, 2015 · 1:44 pm

Not Sexy (But Effective)

There is a big debate going on about whether advertising is dead. It may be, to a certain extent (that’s a much longer post) but I’m also certain that marketing lives on, albeit in a very different form than it was a decade ago. No matter where you come out on the aforementioned question, you’re probably in the business of reaching out to your customers or potential customers to increase sales. Today’s topic is an unsexy but highly effective way to do just that.  

I hope you or your marketing folks spend a lot of time on email, but I’m doubtful that’s true. It’s “old” technology, and I think we all sort of gravitate to more recent stuff. It’s not as much fun as video or social media nor as interesting as paid search. It just works.  This from the folks at Retention Science:

Although flashier channels like social media and mobile marketing routinely steal headlines, email is still the core of every effective digital marketing strategy…Email marketing generated the highest ROI for eCommerce in 2014, and consistently outperforms other channels in engagement and conversion. Even tech-savvy Millennials prefer to communicate with brands through email; 47 percent of respondents chose email as the preferred channel, while only 6 percent selected social media.

Integral to that statement is the notion of control.  People like that they can see what they want to see and unsubscribe if you’re not helpful (how’s THAT for good feedback!).  Email is much easier to personalize, and the offers can be fine-tuned.  Are you really going to make 100 different videos to reflect the nuances of your customers?  Probably not.

Email is one of those things in business that reminds us that the new, shiny object might not be the best use of our time or resources.  Building a mailing list is hard, and just using content (fill this out for a free whitepaper or report) won’t do it alone.  Great content combined with innovative thinking and smart socialization can help.  So can working with another brand that complements yours.  The reward, however, is well worth the effort.

A personalized ad, delivered which is requested by the customer, delivered when the customer wants it, and which is highly actionable and measurable sounds like email in a nutshell.  It also sounds like a pretty good thing to me.  You?

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November 16, 2015 · 11:33 am

Getting Personal

At the tail end of last week, I received a mailing from the folks at Total Wine.  It’s one that comes along each week and contains what Total calls my “weekend recommendations.”  It shows me some highly-rated wines that are supposed to fit my tastes.  The problem is that they don’t.  There are several bottles of white wine listed and I don’t drink white wine.  There is some expensive champagne and I prefer prosecco.  I don’t believe I’ve ever bought pinot noir in the store and yet there is a pinot recommendation as well.  

I’m not surprised. Although I shop fairly regularly at Total and love the store, there is no system in place to associate customer purchases with customers.  There is no loyalty card, as I have with a supermarket or two, to record what I’m buying, how often etc.  Without that information, recommendations can’t be personalized.  It’s the difference between me walking in the store and having them greet me by name as opposed to a generic hello.

I think we’ve all become spoiled by personalization, so much so that I think the ability to personalize the customer experience is table stakes for any retailer.  Notice I’m not limiting that to online retailers either.  My supermarket personalizes every trip as soon as I use their scanner to shop by delivering instant coupons and savings on products I buy or might like based on past buying.  We’ve all used Amazon and seen their recommendations.  In fact, their algorithm is so good that it’s worth examining what they’re using to determine your personalized selections and deleting things that you don’t want to include (maybe you bought something as a gift that should not be included, for example).  Netflix famously paid a lot of money to scientists that improved their recommendations by 8.5%.

Any business needs to think about how to incorporate personalization, even those of us that are not in B2C businesses.  Still showing generic decks to potential customers?  Still have a standard rate card that you send out when people ask for price quotes?  Still think you’re in tune with customer expectations?

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