Marketingsherpa Blog

This week’s consumer marketing newsletter article wrapped up 2011, and featured four B2C trends to watch in 2012: the mobile marketing channel, local search, online privacy and the new features in pay-per-click advertising.

These choices were based on the 80 (give or take a few) interviews with consumer marketers that my reporting colleague, Adam T. Sutton, and I conducted over the past year. One B2C trend that received serious consideration, but didn’t make it into the article, is content marketing.

Sure, content has its place in any overall marketing strategy, but I’ll bet when many marketers hear “content marketing” as a channel, they think B2B – whitepapers, lead nurturing campaigns, third-party validations within specialized industries, etc.

In fact, content is becoming an important part of consumer marketing efforts.

I’m going to present several case studies and how-to articles from this past year that illustrate just how important it truly is. (Note: MarketingSherpa articles often feature numbered tactics. In this blog post, I’ll call out several specific tactics within linked articles.)

  Read more…

I think it goes without saying that online shopping is no longer just a convenient option for consumers. It’s a retail mainstay, and a key to holiday marketing success.

Wasting no time in supporting this point once again, IBM has just unveiled the findings of its fourth annual Cyber Monday Benchmark, revealing that online spending for Cyber Monday 2011 eclipsed the previous year’s sales  by 33%, and even this year’s Black Friday sales by 29.3%.

As crazy as it can be for consumers, holiday retail is like bacon-flavored manna for marketers. While the online opportunity is huge, it’s crucial to stand out from the crowd, by remembering those who make up the crowd.

You must offer shoppers a thorough, convenient, enjoyable online experience, and promote your shopping experience as part of the holiday solution, not a digital extension of the traditional holiday hassle.

With the growth of e-commerce as a viable alternative to in-store retail, aided by more Web-exclusive discounts, free shipping offers, and the like, you can help boost business by providing an efficient, but personal online shopping experience that ensures your customers will never again long for crowded malls and crazed deal-hunters.

Here are three tips to help make the holidays happy, for your customers and your bottom line.

- Read more…

The holiday shopping season is upon us – the proverbial golden goose for consumer marketers. I’m sure you’ve planned thoroughly throughout the year, and just have to focus on how to execute, execute, execute in these last remaining days before December 25 rolls around.

But, it’s too late to make impactful changes to your plans, right?

Right?

Well, I’ve been listening to one of those “challenge the model” books on tape (you know, the ones that tell you, “Burn the status quo! The only rules that exist are the ones we impose on ourselves!”). So, I’m understandably pretty worked up. All the same, I say we take on this beast. Let’s try to make a few last-minute shifts and move that needle.

If you can spare a minute away from your daily transactional data, let’s brainstorm a few last-minute ideas to help you get an extra bump in sales this holiday season (and I’d love to hear your ideas in the comments section, as well). After all, anything’s possible. As long as you commit.

- Read more…

When you think of marketing automation software, you likely think about B2B companies with those long sales cycles, and extensive lead nurturing and scoring to help move prospects through the pipeline. Because at B2C companies the distance from prospective customer to paying customer can be so short, realistically, marketing automation isn’t a necessary tool for many consumer marketers.

And just because marketing automation isn’t a great fit for many B2Cs, it certainly deserves more attention at any company with a longer sales process. Read more…

The pressure for B2B marketers is on. Buyers are empowered with an ocean of information available to them online through search engines and social media sites. They are researching their purchasing decisions on their own instead of engaging with Sales early on. Trepidation exists among the marketplace because of a struggling economy, making it more difficult to close new accounts.  Winning over modern B2B buyers requires organizations to revolutionize their marketing approach, and adopt a truly customer-centric approach.

At MarketingSherpa, we have just launched our annual B2B Marketing Benchmark Survey to identify key tactics B2B marketers can use to adopt customer centricity, and ensure success in an increasingly  challenging environment.

Let’s hone in on this concept of customer centricity. What is this and why is it so important to us now?

In today’s marketplace, the B2B buyer has the power. They can research their purchasing decisions before we even know who they are. They have instant access to peer and third-party opinions of our products and services through social media sites, and information coming directly from the company is received with more skepticism than ever before. We have to earn the trust of our buyers if we ever hope that they will choose us over the competition. This brings me to my next question:

How well do you know your customers?

I am currently in the middle of our B2B Marketing Workshop tour, and the number of attendees that do not yet have buyer personas established for their audience continually surprises me. This is a critical first step towards embracing customer centricity and achieving B2B marketing success. Before you can deliver content to your audience that is going to build trust and drive conversions, you must have a solid understanding of their interests, needs, motivations, etc.

A buyer persona is a detailed profile that represents an actual, real-life group of your target audience. It includes common interests, motivations and expectations, as well as demographics and other behavioral characteristics. Buyer personas enable you to deliver highly relevant content to your audience that will build trust and drive qualified conversions.

In a perfect world, we would be able to develop one piece of content and have it appeal to your entire audience. In reality, it is likely that your market can be broken up into multiple buyer personas. You will need to first identify these personas, and then develop unique content for each profile.

So, how can you get started with the first step, identifying your buyer personas?

This process is far too complex to cover in detail for one blog post. Plus, you’re busy – so I’ll just give you the highlights:

1. It’s going to start with research, and a lot of it. Start by talking to customer-facing departments. Ask them about motivations, challenges, common objectives, etc., for your best and worst prospects and customers.

2. Next, talk directly to your audience. Get your prospects and customers on the phone and ask them directly about their interests, motivations, challenges, etc. Ask them what types of content they want, and what format. Be sure to be in contact with best and worst prospects. You will want to be able to distinguish the differences that exist between these two groups.

3. You can also mine your in-house database. Look for common traits that exist for customers with large deal sizes, shorter timeframes to purchase, most repeat purchases, etc. Then identify common traits for customers that make returns, have the smallest deal sizes, or are for some reason less profitable. What is the difference between these two groups?

4. You can also conduct a survey of your audience, asking them about their interests, challenges, etc.

This research will get you started on identifying buyer personas, and adopting a customer-centric mentality. You will then be able to develop content that will be uniquely relevant, interesting and valuable to those groups in order to build trust and drive qualified conversions. You will also be able attract more of your ideal customers, instead of customers that make returns and are not a fit for your solution.

Related Resources

MarketingSherpa B2B Summit 2011 – in San Francisco and Boston

B2B Email Marketing: Why renting third-party lists is among the worst tactics

B2B Marketing: Combining sales and marketing knowledge to improve lead qualification

MarketingSherpa 2011 B2B Marketing Benchmark Report

Quick quiz, savvy marketers.

What is going on in this picture?

A.      Their flights were canceled and all the hotels are booked up, so they’re camping out on the street for the night.

B.      They are pioneers of the latest fad – urban camping.

C.      They represent a new demographic – homeless yuppies. They bought a McMansion that was foreclosed on, yet took all the nice gear they bought at REI and now are forced to use it merely to survive.

D.      They are the natural consequence of some very impressive loyalty marketing.

The answer, of course, is D. They are camping out, on line at the Fifth Avenue Apple Store to be one of the first few people to buy an iPhone.

Polish toilet paper and well-designed telephones

“I remember once, a relative in France sent us three rolls of toilet paper. We couldn’t believe how soft it was. We were in heaven,” my colleague, MECLABS Research Manager Zuzia Soldenhoff-Thorpe told me recently. She grew up in Communist Poland, and her parents would wait in line for six hours in the Polish winter just to buy toilet paper. Scratchy, rough toilet paper. Not the fancy French stuff.

And that is understandable. Toilet paper is a necessity. Communist Poland rationed it.

But what would drive otherwise rational people in the world’s richest nation to wait in line for a telephone? Well, loyalty. In their view, they have solidarity with the brand.

So, what are the benefits of creating solidarity forever with your customers?

The value of a loyal customer

“A loyal customer is less price-sensitive and nearly immune to competitive entreaties. A loyal customer is often open to trying line extensions. Finally, a loyal customer is much more willing to forgive your inevitable small fumbles. (Does anyone seriously think Apple is going to lose core customers because iPad production delays due to the Japanese situation? Not likely.),” said Micah Solomon, author of “Exceptional Service, Exceptional Profit.”

On the other hand, sometimes customer acquisition costs are so high that you need loyal customers just to break even. “It is estimated today that a large credit card portfolio has an 18-24 month window to repay the initial acquisition cost of that customer. Without loyalty and engagement you are losing money on every acquired customer,” said Mark Johnson, CEO, Loyalty 360 (the Loyalty Marketing Association).

A few data points to consider:

• It is six to seven times more costly to acquire a new customer than retain an existing one
• Brand advocates recommend and share products two to four times more than the average consumer
• 60 percent of customer who hear of a positive (or, in fairness, negative) experience will change their buying habits
• Over three years, customers referred by online grocery shoppers spent an additional 75 percent of what the original shopper spent

Of course, to benefit from that, first you must get the referral, and then you must keep them as customers for that long…

How to win and keep loyal customers

So, how do you instill loyalty? If your target audience is a dog, the answer is easy (Tummy Yummies). If, however, your audience is the jaded, savvy, demanding, rapidly evolving, skeptical, fickle, streetwise, cynical modern consumer, what then?

That’s no easy question to answer. So, I passed it around to a few industry leaders to see what advice they could give you to help you foster loyalty in your customers…

• Be transparent – As Dr. Flint McGlaughlin, Managing Director, MECLABS says “Tell me what you can’t do, and I might believe you when you tell me what you can do.
• Be accessible – “Make your company extremely easy to reach via your marketing materials and correspondence,” Micah Solomon said. “Don’t – if you can avoid it – send out mass emails from a ‘do not reply!’ address; either have the address accept replies or have it extremely clear how to easily reply through an alternative mechanism.”
• Deliver a rewarding experience, not just “rewards” – “Loyalty is MUCH bigger than just points, it is expanding to the process, techniques, software, ideas, communication mediums and interactions that create and engender engagement and loyalty. It is NOT ABOUT POINTS anymore,” Mark Johnson said.
• Step out of your shoes – “You cannot treat others as you would like to be treated. Instead, you must identify what they want and treat them as they want to be treated,” Bob Lucas, Managing Partner, Global Performance Strategies advised. “Talk to your customers and solicit their opinions and expectations, then build marketing initiatives around them. This individualized approach to communicating with others is more likely to result in greater customer satisfaction, retention and loyalty.”
• Less can be more – “Every day, we are bombarded with messaging from brands trying to hold our attention, and the ability to communicate a relevant, personalized message that appeals to your audience plays a crucial role in engagement and loyalty,” according to Rod Hirsh, Global Director, Brand and Content, Thunderhead. “Establish a baseline of what good communication practices are and make it a policy to exceed expectations. Aim to streamline and cut excessive communication while at the same time creating a better customer experience.”
• Build a relationship, don’t just sell – “Relationships trump product. Anyone will tell you that,” said Andreas Ryuta Stenzel, Marketing Director, TRUSTe. “Sales and Marketing build and own relationships at scale more than almost any customer service organizations, especially these days with the more personal touches that automated nurturing and social media bring to the table.”

Here are a few thoughts of my own as well. And I’d love to hear what you’ve learned as well.

• Be the customers’ advocate – Always ensure your company is delivering true value to your customers, not just a value proposition. You are the one making a promise to your customer with your innovative, creative, out-of-the-box marketing campaigns, so you also better be the one making sure your company comes through on that promise. Of course, that is no small task and likely involves Sales, Product Development, Manufacturing, Customer Service, and many more parts of your organization. But just because you cannot perfectly complete that challenge, doesn’t mean you’re exempt from trying. Or as Rabbi Tarfon said, “You are not required to complete the task, but neither are you free to desist from it.”
• Don’t be shady – As marketers, we are always trying to be persuasive. But, c’mon, there are limits. Dishonest marketing breeds disloyal customers.
• Radiate passion – You can’t expect passion from your customers unless you live it and breathe it yourself. Yes, we’ve all got bills to pay. Yes, we all need a job. But when and if possible, market things you are truly passionate about. Or spend enough time with your customers to understand why they really care about your products. Sure, it’s easy to do this if you’re a Harley enthusiast. But even a VP of Sales and Marketing for an industrial hose company can find a passionate way to communicate with the audience.

Related Resources

The Last Blog Post: How to succeed in an era of Transparent Marketing

The Last Blog Post: Marketers must embrace change

PPC Ad Optimization: Testing, unique landing pages, and honesty

Good Marketing: How your peers brought joy to the world (and their boss)

When I was a kid, I thought suggestion boxes in restaurants were strange. I wondered: what do people suggest? And why does the box have a lock? The whole thing seemed mysterious.

Later in life, when I worked in restaurants, I realized there was no mystery. The boxes were empty. The rare suggestions they held invariably used four-letter words and misspellings.

Today’s suggestion boxes are different in almost every way:

• First of all, they’re digital. Customers are more likely to sound off about your company in a social network or review website than in a hand-scrawled note.
• Second, people actually use these new boxes.
• Third, you don’t own the suggestion box. Somebody else does.
• Last, and probably most important, is that the lock is gone. Suggestions are posted for the world to see.

Kip Clayton, VP, Marketing and Business Development, Parasole, is aware of the trend. He oversees marketing for Parasole’s portfolio of restaurants, and his team uses tools monitor the Web for customers’ comments and feedback.

“We always monitor what people are saying about us, whether it’s food writers, other members of the media, or most importantly, our guests.”

Such analysis provides Parasole with a variety of information it can use to improve customers’ experiences.

Feedback on lunch at launch

For example, in November, Parasole launched Mozza Mia, a pizza restaurant in Edina, Minnesota. The restaurant specializes in wood-fired pizzas and homemade mozzarella cheese.

Each month, the team received a report on the online feedback about the new restaurant. Information was pulled from a variety of websites, such as OpenTable and Yelp. Based on customer commentary, the report graded the restaurant in areas such as food quality, beverages, and menu options.

“By February, we were getting pretty clear feedback that people wanted more choices than we were offering,” Clatyon says.

Mozza Mia offered a diverse selection of pizzas, but customers could not order in the traditional “build your own” pizza style that so many other pizza restaurants used. The team decided it needed to offer the option.

“Within a week, we had a plan for how to handle the logistics and inventory to allow customers to build their own pizzas,” Clayton says.

Suggestion turns into success

Mozza Mia offered the “build your own” pizza option less than one month later. Now, if customers want a simple pepperoni pizza, they can have it.

The pizzas quickly grew to comprise 10% of the restaurant’s sales, Clayton says, and helped the restaurant overcome the “veto factor.”

“The last thing you want is people ‘vetoing’ your restaurant because you don’t offer what they’re looking for,” he says. “That doesn’t mean you try to be all things to all people, but the flipside is that you better be listening to what people are saying and asking for.”

Related resources

Market Research via Social Media

Social Media Marketing: How to optimize the customer experience to benefit from word-of-mouth advertising

Social Media Measurement: Moving forward with the data and tools at hand

Social Media Measurement: Big data is within reach

Social Media Marketing: Tactics ranked by effectiveness, difficultly and usage

newBrandAnaltyics -  how Parasole monitors the Web for customers’ comments and feedback

Photo: hashmil

A priest, a rabbi, and a minister walk into a bar. And the priest says, “Hey, if we use FourSquare, we’ll save 50% off an appetizer.”

Ugh. It’s pretty hard to mix humor and marketing. It doesn’t mean marketers don’t try every day. Some are wildly successful (Mr. Rolling Cooler Cooler Roller), while others fall flat. Some are even worse…

How to lose customers and alienate people

Gilbert Gottfried was recently fired by Aflac because he brought disgrace to a talking duck. No small task. But the problem was, Gilbert Gottfried was thinking like a comedian, not a marketer. And perhaps Gottfried can be excused, because he’s not really a marketer. He’s been doing standup since he was 15. Job #1 for a comedian is to get the laugh. No matter how inappropriate the joke is, if it’s funny, it’s a success.

Not so for marketers. Job #1 is to sell the product. If you can make a funny ad that sells the product, that’s great. If you can make a boring ad that sells the product, that’s great too. But, never, ever produce anything that alienates your customers. Perhaps the hardest day to successfully walk this tightrope is on April Fool’s Day.

I had loads of fun viewing, dissecting and joking about all of the April Fool’s Day promotions, and I’m sure many of you did as well. But, after a few days, I tried to put on a sober face and a marketer’s hat and analyze these hoaxes – which are essentially marketing promotions – for their possible affect on their target audience. Here’s my Monday morning quarterback analysis of one classic, two recent high performers, and one I think is in serious need of improvement…

Taco Liberty Bell

The year was 1996. Back then, the national debt was a pressing problem (you may have to strain a little to imagine a time like that).

The Punchline: Taco Bell is buying the Liberty Bell to pitch in and help with the debt. Thanks to this purchase, it will also be rename this national icon “Taco Liberty Bell” and display it in Taco Bell’s corporate headquarters (Historic sidenote: Since the Internet wasn’t as widely adopted back then, Taco Bell used something our forefathers called a “print ad” to communicate this hoax).

Get it? Because… Taco Bell is at the forefront of groundbreaking marketing campaigns, and marketers will put their names on anything to turn a quick buck.

Analysis: I included this classic example so we could compare this year’s efforts to what marketers were doing before all April Fool’s hoaxes were essentially carried out online. See, it was still possible.

Also, because this was one of my all-time favorites. Probably because “Taco Liberty Bell” is just such a great line, and as a writer I’m a real sucker for great lines. (Writer’s sidenote: Supposedly, the sole reason Jerry Seinfeld made “Bee Movie” was because he loved the punny title).

But, upon thinking about this more, was it really effective? According to Wikipedia, “The campaign cost just $300,000, but it generated an estimated $25 million equivalent in free publicity, with a sales increase exceeding $1 million for the first two days in April.”

It even became a bit of a meme in its day, with then-White House Press Secretary Mike McCurry saying that the government was also “selling the Lincoln Memorial to Ford Motor Company and renaming it the Lincoln-Mercury Memorial.” (Historic sidenote: Ya see, there used to be a Ford brand named Mercury…)

David Paine, Founder of PainePR, the public relations agency that executed the campaign, feels that the climate today is much more cautious and a comparable prank is not possible. Also, it’s harder to stick out with so many companies pulling April Fool’s Day pranks. It’s just become expected.

So, let’s forget those impressive numbers for a second, and try to decipher the messaging. The underlying joke is that Taco Bell is a great marketer. But, is that really its value proposition? My guess is that Taco Bell’s value prop is more along the lines of – “cheap, fast food that’s not a burger.” And this marketing hoax doesn’t convey that idea at all.

Of course, I could be wrong. Maybe Taco Bell would prefer customers focus on the marketing than what’s in the food.

Now on to three examples from April Fool’s Day 2011…

Gmail Motion

The Punchline: No longer are you confined to a mouse and keyboard, great inventions at the time. You can now improve productivity and increase physical activity by typing email with your body motions.

Get it? Because… Google is coming out with so many new, free, cool beta products, you never know what they’re going to come out with next.

Analysis: To me, this one is the flat out funniest. I love the main video. The deadpan guy dancing around to write his email messages not only cracked me up…but my daughter as well. Plus, I noticed one of our developers had the Motion Guide posted on his wall. If you can get a writer, a developer, and a 2^nd grader, that is a pretty wide demo you’re appealing to.

Overall, I think this prank ties very nicely into Google’s main value prop, which I would guess is “But we, somehow some way, keep coming up with funky cool technology like every single day.” And I think supporting the brand and the main value proposition is essential for everything a marketing department produces, even a prank.

If I had to find fault, though, this perhaps draws some attention to the technological prowess of Google’s main competitors – Apple and Microsoft.

After all, developing a product so you no longer have to use “outdated technologies like the keyboard and mouse” could also refer to touch screen technology, where Apple’s iOS and iPad seem to be beating Google’s Android touch screen operating system pretty handily.

Also, what Google is treating as so difficult and science ”fictiony” as to be an outlandish joke is a reality for customers of Microsoft’s Kinect, “a controller-free gaming and entertainment experience,” in a quote that must have been written by a team of lawyers in Redmond. It’s actually a pretty cool-looking response to the Wii from Microsoft’s Xbox gaming system, a sensor device that picks up motion for a whole-body gaming experience.

Of course, Kinect is just for games, right? Well, some hackers at USC gave Microsoft some nice press off of the Gmail Motion prank by combining Kinect with software they’ve developed to make what seemed ludicrous on April Fool’s Day a reality just a few days later.

Starbucks Mobile Pour

The Punchline: Can’t wait to walk to the next corner to get to a Starbucks? You can use a new smartphone app to have a barista on a scooter deliver your cup of coffee to you.

Get it? Because… There is no spot on Earth that is more than 12 seconds away from a Starbucks location. We’re almost too convenient.

Analysis: This ties in very nicely with Starbucks brands and reinforces the main value prop of “much cooler than the average cup of coffee and you can find us everywhere.” Plus, the underlying theme without saying it is…really, you’re getting your coffee at McDonald’s? Would their headquarter people even know what a smartphone is? Or a scooter? Or a decent cup of coffee?

If I had to find fault with this…it’s just not very funny. Yeah, the overall concept is amusing. But they didn’t spend much time on the execution. I think Starbucks was a little nervous about going too far out on the limb. This was even posted by “April F.”

And now, on to a bad attempt at humor…

Insects Raised with Compassion

The Punchline: There’s not one main joke, just a fake Whole Foods Market homepage with headlines like “Insects Raised with Compassion,” “Save Money With Refurbished Spices,” turning the lights off in the store for Earth Day, etc.

Get it? Because… I’m stumped. Best I could come up with is – You’re an idiot forpaying so much for our foods and your environmental leanings should be derided as well.

Analysis: To me, this one is a huge fail. I’d say Whole Foods’ value prop is nicely stated right under the logo on their website “Selling the highest quality natural & organic products.” This prank totally undercuts the value prop…and the brand.

I may be harsh because it cuts a little close to home. I shop at Whole Foods. I’m dead center in their target demographic. They make nice margins on food because their customers have deep-seated, eco-friendly values and are looking for healthier food than they could find in the supermarket. Also, occasionally, a little something special, more artisan than Kraft Mac & Cheese at a normal grocer.

And yet, Whole Foods undercuts all of this. This April Fool’s Day prank mocks environmentalists by saying it will shut off all the lights in its store on Earth Day, so you better bring a flashlight or buy one of its “torches of 100% reclaimed wood.” This is clearly based on Earth Hour, a very serious attempt by the World Wildlife Fund to prod action on climate change.

“Insects Raised with Compassion” belittles anyone who would buy more expensive meat because it was raised under more humane conditions. Refurbished spices with “favorite flavors that won’t break the bank” makes me think I might as well buy McCormick in a regular grocery store than fork over the extra bucks to Whole Foods. And the joke about artisan cheese lip balms…maybe artisan cheeses are ridiculous? Maybe I should just stick to the Publix deli?

Look, I can take a joke. I’m not seriously offended. But, remember, the point of marketing is to push product, not to get people to laugh. If this was a standup comedian like Gilbert Gottfried, he could rightly say, “It’s funny. Get over yourself.” But Whole Foods’ job isn’t to be funny; it’s to sell expensive food. This marketing hoax does not do that. It undercuts the brand Whole Foods has worked so hard (and spent so much money) to build.

It’s “The Simpsons” job to make fun of Whole Foods customers, not the Whole Foods marketing department.

Of course, it’s easier to burn down a house than build a new one, so what do I think would be a good marketing hoax from Whole Foods? How about joke that they’ve opened a new organic factory farm where they can now mass produce organic products? Show videos of workers assembling artisanal foods on a Detroit factory assembly line? This would underscore Whole Foods brand, not undercut it. They would be saying, “The joke is on the people who buy the mass-produced ‘food’ product and don’t buy our stuff.”

Laugh with your customers, never at them.

Related Resources

Marketing Wisdom: In the end, it’s all about…

Marketing Career: You must be your company’s corporate conscience

Top Online Marketing Lessons of 2010: What worked and what didn’t in the last 365 days of experimentation –Web Clinic Replay

Free MarketingSherpa Newsletters

My blog post this week has truly been an exercise in real-time reporting. “Plan A” was to cover some of the Super Bowl marketing activities going on in Dallas this week, but then “Snowmageddon 2011″ hit late Monday night, left me iced into my driveway and knocked the media and marketing universe surrounding the Super Bowl into a brand new level of frenzy/panic/excitement — something like “frenzanicment.”

When the uniqueness of Super Bowl week marketing gets kicked up even higher with a freak weather event, the result — however interesting it might be — just isn’t going to apply to many other real-world marketing situations.

Plan B

But when that freak weather event is affecting a huge swath of the rest of the United States, and local marketers are jumping in with real-time campaigns and CRM activities such as sending messages about new store and office hours in reaction to the event, that’s something any marketer can relate to and maybe gain some insight from to use for future real-time marketing opportunities.

With that in mind, this post is “plan B” — some crowdsourced, real-time reporting on various marketing efforts taken in response to Snowmageddon.

Getting customers to your bricks and mortar location in a blizzard

• Leyla Arsan of Lotus Marketing Services offered this interesting restaurant promotion: One of my clients, a 20,000-square-foot  restaurant in Chicago, offered a blizzard promotion. For each inch of snowfall, they offered guests that percentage off their check. For example, 20 inches = 20% off your total bill. On Wednesday night, they had over 100 guests with only a few hours to promote the special. They used email marketing, Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare to promote the special.
• Style Masters Salon & Spa located in the greater Philadelphia area distributed emails offering 20% service discounts for same-day bookings during snow storms January 26-27. The January 26 promotion filled the appointment book within 25 minutes, while the offer on January 27 took the salon from a 20% booking rate to 52% in 45 minutes. “We couldn’t be more pleased with the results of this last-minute email campaign,” said Christina Vagnozzi, owner of Style Masters Salon & Spa. “Our clients are anxiously awaiting this next storm to see what we come up with.”
• The Boston-based B.Good restaurant chain posted a humorous photo to their Facebook page featuring a giant snowman built at one of the locations while staff awaited customers. The photo was posted on a day when the area received more than a foot of snow. “The photo generated great buzz with ‘Likes’ on our Facebook page, and encouraged walk-ins when we ordinarily would have seen few, if any,” said Jon Olinto, Co-founder B.Good.

Use videos to tell your brand’s story

Stacey Hylen of BusinessOptimizerCoach.com sent this idea: I shot some videos outside in the blizzard with some tips to help small business owners learn how to profit from Snowmageddon and what they need to do in their business to prepare it for another one (things they can do to become more of a global business so local events won’t hurt their business as much.)

I am going to promote the heck out of the videos and also offer a Snowmageddon special through my newsletter and through social media sites.

Real-time email marketing — be proactive

Rick Delashmit of FruitMyCube.com in Belleville, Illinois: We had to delay some of our scheduled FruitMyCube deliveries this week due to the weather. We notified several hundred customers of the order delay/cancellation with this email.

Then today (Wednesday), as we opened up ordering for next week, we announced that we would be including one of our hand-dipped Chocolate Covered Strawberries in each Cube as a thank you for their patience through the “Snowpocalypse”. Then come Valentine’s week, we’ll tie all this together by allowing our customers to add a Gift Box of the berries to their FruitMyCube order. Here’s the email that announced the free chocolate covered strawberry.

Cold calling in freezing weather

Jenny Vance, President LeadJen: As an outsourced Lead generation company, LeadJen is conscious about using client billable time when we will see the highest connections and also highest conversions. Typically, those two things have a 1:1 relationship. If you have more connections/conversations, you have more conversions.

However, we have found that a winter event is much like the holidays because while the ability to connect is greatly reduced, the quality of the connections is much higher. This is because we have an easy way to personalize the message and a universal conversation topic—weather!

The people that are in the office are also not as inundated with requests and interruptions, so the cold call is less of a bother. In order to maximize the conversation topic, we include reference to weather in our voicemails, live dialogues and also email content.

We’ve found that it greatly improves our inbound response to those messages. At the end of the day, we estimate that instead of a 1:1 relationship between connections to conversions, we see a 1:2 relationship. It so critical that during winter emergencies that have the potential to cripple results, LeadJen has been able to stabilize and sometimes improve project performance.

Real-time marketing is nimble marketing

“The great news about today’s marketing tools is that they allow marketers to be really nimble and react to circumstances, like the recent spate of snowstorms, in real time,” said Eric Groves, Senior Vice President, Strategy, Corporate Development and Innovation Constant Contact. “Simply using the ‘excuse’ of the snow as a reason to reach out and share a compelling promotion not only helps maintain sales during what might otherwise be a bit of a slump, but also strengthens relationships with customers by rewarding loyalty.”

All marketers know to tailor campaigns and offers to events like Valentine’s Day or St. Patrick’s Day, but the nimble marketer will also react to events such as weather or breaking news to take advantage of publicity and promotional opportunities. It doesn’t have to be a freak snowstorm rampaging across most of the country, although there’s a lot to work with, as seen above, to get into the world of real-time marketing. You just have to find the opportunity in the news, events, announcements — and yes, even weather — that happen every day.

Related resources

Constant Contact, used by Style Masters Salon & Spa, B.Good and FruitMyCube.com for their online marketing campaigns

Lotus Marketing Services

Real-Time Marketing: David Meerman Scott at MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2011

Riding a real time Amazon announcement to reach an influential journalist

Email Marketing: Why should I help you?

“And I still…haven’t found…what I’m looking for.” Hopefully Bono wasn’t talking about your website.

According to the MarketingSherpa Ecommerce Benchmark Report, customers who use the search box on ecommerce sites convert at nearly three times the rate of general browsers. Yet, 52% of marketers graded their internal search a ‘D’ or  ‘F.’

On Monday, I’ll be presenting on the “Exploring On-site Search with eTail, BabyAge.com and MarketingSherpa” webinar with Jack Kiefer, Founder and CEO, BabyAge.com, and Kelly Hushin, Editor, the eTail Blog.

But before we share some of our research and case studies about on-site search, we wanted to hear what you had to say…

Four major points

1. Understanding of misspellings and synonyms

Search today must tolerate typing errors, spelling mistakes, and other altered forms, without requiring a preset dictionary. We use our patented algorithm(FACT) to first of all understand what visitors are looking for in a shop. Phonetic is king.

On BabyAge.com when you search for “armchair” instead of “arm chair” you get no results. It looks like BabyAge.com is trying to maintain search by manual optimization because “sleighbed” works!

So you can point out the long tail of search again. Same for fischer-price instead of fisher-price or “chocolat” instead of “chocolate” or “sumer” instead of “summer”.

What about “schanon” instead of “shannon”? It doesn’t work. In Europe, we deal with many languages and understanding the phonetic is really important. Even spaces matter – “infantseat” (21 results) instead of “infant seat” (1000 results).

2. Relevance

The order of the right products that are displayed on the result page is vital.

Top-sellers and revenue boosters should always be placed on top, while sale items and bad sellers should be placed below the fold or on the next page.

Make sure to show only deliverable products, because nothing is more frustrating for a customer than finding out that the just-found-present takes 5 weeks to deliver.

Use an intelligent result system that incorporates information like relevance, top sellers and availability status, to avoid frustration and to turn more visitors into buyers.

3. Speed and filter

A survey of 600 Internet users showed that more than half felt that a “suggest” feature is “important” to “very important.” An additional 25% found the feature to be “rather important.”

When online retailers provide such a suggest feature, the drop-down menu should note the number of matches for each of the terms listed.

General search terms (such as “shirt” for an online clothing retailer) normally produce a very large number of results. The right filter navigation prepares the list for the user, permits sorting and selections to be made, and displays appropriate navigation tools. The user can now quickly narrow down the results according to brand, price, size or other attributes.

4. Merchandizing and optimization

Today on-site search is one key factor to understand the customer in your online shop. But you should also be able to generate insights from this data and use on-site information to generate AdWord campaigns and optimize, test and configure your shop for a higher conversion rate.

– Mathias Duda, Head of Sales, FACT-Finder

Simple things

There are many simple things companies can do to improve performance of their site search to deliver a more user-friendly experience, and potentially result in higher conversions (for e-commerce sites, in particular). Here are a few of them:

1.  Incorporate rich auto complete

This feature significantly enhances the usability of your site, by not only suggesting possible terms when visitors start typing the first letters of a keyword (like most search engines do today), but also showing images, start reviews, price, discount info, short product description, and even a “buy now” or “check availability button,” without the need to press the search button and wait for the results page to appear. This powerful feature gives people an easier way to click through to the items they’re searching for and typically results in higher conversions.

2.  Test different positions for the search box, and not which positions generate the most search traffic

One online retailer – Black Forest Decor – took this approach, moving its search box from the right-hand upper corner of its site to the center. The company made other changes at the same time, including increasing the size of the search box. The company found that site search revenue per customer increased 84% and the conversion rate increased 34%.

3.  Offer “add to cart/buy now” options directly from the site search results page

Smart e-commerce companies create as few steps as possible from search to checkout. When you allow visitors to add products to shopping carts or to go to checkout directly from search results, they’re more likely to complete the purchase – particularly if they know exactly what they want and they see it in the results at a price they’re comfortable with.

4.  Show ratings and reviews in search results

Site visitors place high value on the opinions and feedback of other people who’ve shopped for similar products or services, and showing the average rating in search results helps them better determine what they want to click on. You should allow visitors to further refine or reorder their search results based on ratings. You should also show, in the search results, the number of reviews that a product has.

5. Be sure to include refinement options that are relevant to the search query

Refinements are a useful way for visitors to narrow down results by certain criteria – for example, brand, gender, price range, etc. Refinements should be relevant to the search term, so will vary from one search to another.

For example, if a visitor to your site has searched for “camera,” it may be useful to have refinement options for the number of megapixels and the screen size. If someone searches for “TV,” then you may want to offer screen size and resolution refinement options. Apparel retailers can offer refinements for men’s and women’s items, as well as size, color, or other relevant attributes.

The trick with refinements is to keep them relevant and useful. This can be done by tracking the most popular and related search terms for each product category, and dynamically creating the refinements based on the keywords that people have entered.

– Shaun Ryan, CEO, SLI Systems

The new slang

Know your audience’s slang. Aside from plain old keywords, there’s going to be all sorts of wacky short-hand terms, acronyms and inside jokes you ought to be aware of. You can nab your market from folks inside the bubble already that way.

– Erica Friedman, President, Yurikon

Related Resources

Internal Search Data Inspires Store Page Re-Designs: 4 steps to boost revenue 50% – Members’ Library

Four Simple Steps to Tweak Site Search Box & Lift Conversions 20% – Members’ Library

How Eretailer Tripled Conversions with Internal Search Changes – Members’ Library

How to Improve Your Company’s Internal Search and Lift ROI – 9 strategies and tips – Members’ Library

How to Use Internal Site Search Data to Revamp Your Home Page: People’s Bank – Members’ Library

photo by WellspringCS