Don’t wait for the perfect time or tool to end batch and blast emails and, instead, send prospects and customers relevant information now. That’s the word from Diana Primeau, Director of Membership Services, CBS Interactive, parent company of CNET, the world’s largest tech media source for news, reviews and downloads.
Primeau offered these tips:
For those of us interested in marketing, Amazon’s first ever “Prime Day” celebration could not have been more fun to experience. Intended as a special shopping day for members of Amazon’s $99/year Prime service, Amazon had practically promised ecommerce Armageddon leading up to the 24-hour event, with “More deals than Black Friday!”
As the morning unraveled, however, Prime Day quickly devolved into spectacle as the buying public hammered Amazon for what they perceived as lackluster deals.
Despite customer complaints, Prime Day was by most metrics a staggering success for Amazon. According to online retail tracker ChannelAdvisor, Amazon’s sales were up 93% in the United States year-over-year, and 53% in Europe. 34.4 million items were sold across Prime-eligible countries, shattering Black Friday records, and hundreds of thousands of new users signed up for Amazon Prime throughout the event.
When planning our promotions or campaigns, here are 12 quick tips we can extract from both the failures and successes of the now-infamous Prime Day.
Well, it’s that time of year again in Jacksonville, Florida. The sun is shining. The summer skies are blue. Surf’s up at the beach. And we at MarketingSherpa are doing our best to ignore the siren call of summer to focus on … applications.
Lot of applications. Over 300 applications to speak at MarketingSherpa Summit 2016 in Las Vegas, to be precise.
It was around this time last year that I came across a truly remarkable story. While culling through all of the speaker applications for MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2015 to find the best stories to share from the stage, I came across the story of Mary Abrahamson, Email Marketing Specialist, Ferguson Enterprises — the largest plumbing wholesaler in North America.
Mary and her team combined offline and online efforts to generate more than $10 million in online revenue through the Ferguson Rewards program, which included more than 90 in-person events. Courtney Eckerle, Manager of Editorial Content, MarketingSherpa, sat down with Mary in the Media Center at Email Summit before her session.
“Be transparent about what you’re trying to do with the customer information they’re providing to you,” Mary advised.
She also talked about the necessity of having quality content.
“In 2015, mediocre content is no longer okay. It’s really important to make sure that … you’re the source of information for your customers,” Mary said.
After her time in the Media Center, I interviewed Mary onstage about her entire case study. She took the audience through the customer journey of two personas and the targeted offers and content that helped them move through Ferguson’s funnel.
We generally think of only companies or campaigns having value propositions. For nonprofit companies, communicating the value proposition effectively is necessary for survival.
There is a value prop behind every action, including each email sent — why should people read your entire email or click through to a landing page? In the case of nonprofits, it seems this challenge is stronger, with no promise of a product at the end of the cycle.
This value proposition of action for email marketing answers the question behind why customers should take a specific action when they get your email — click.
Once people land on your page, that’s when you give them the reason to take action.
At Web Optimization Summit 2014, Tim Kachuriack, Chief Innovation and Optimization Officer, NextAfter, shared his experiences of working with nonprofits on email and landing page designs.
He explained that he was inspired at a MarketingSherpa conference a few years prior, when his page was selected for live optimization and critiqued in front of the entire MarketingSherpa audience.
Although confident that the page could more effectively communicate his value proposition, he mentioned his reservations when asking to test this page for the first time, saying,
“You guys helped me create this ugly, Frankenstein-looking version of the landing page,” Tim said. “It took much convincing and pleading, and many adult beverages. I convinced my client to actually let us, in fact, test this.”
It resulted in a 274% increase in revenue for the nonprofit.
The Economist, in association with New York-based marketing research firm Peppercomm, recently conducted a global survey of top business leaders and marketers on the topic of content marketing. 500 global business executives were surveyed to find out what they look for from content providers, and 500 global marketers were asked about how they build their content strategy. Findings were published in a study titled “Missing the Mark: Global Content Survey of Brand Marketers and their B2B Audiences.“
Let’s take a brief look at four key discoveries from “Missing the Mark”:
1. Though marketers are increasing their investment in content, content strategy remains poorly understood organizationally
93% of brand marketers surveyed have plans to either maintain or increase their budget for content marketing. Despite this heavy investment in content creation, less than a third of marketers believe that the purpose of the brand’s content is highly understood within their organizations.
2. There is a massive disconnect between the content that business executives seek and the content that marketers provide
The majority of global business leaders surveyed (75%) report that they turn to content to research complex business ideas within their industries. Specifically, executives find the most value in content that helps them to better understand the general views and practices of their peers. Also, content that presents two sides of complicated industry issues and content that confirms or sheds new light on business strategies are considered to have value.
In the often-flooded marketplace of ecommerce, customer reviews can make or break companies. At the MarketingSherpa Media Center at IRCE 2015, Daniel Burstein, Director of Editorial Content, MarketingSherpa, sat down with Joseph Jaconi, General Manager, Tech Armor, to discuss how Tech Armor’s focus on customer reviews helped transform this small ecommerce company into a major competitor.
Tech Armor, a screen protector e-retailer for mobile devices, started out selling on Amazon a little more than three years ago. The company now sells on major marketplaces across the U.S., including Walmart.com and eBay. This quick expansion can largely be accredited to the company’s focus on maintaining good customer reviews.
“We really built our brand around service and support,” Joseph said. “We’re a small company, but over 60% of our human resources is dedicated to customer service and support … that’s including sales, marketing and everything we’re doing.”
Joseph shared the following tips on how to handle customer reviews.
Watch the whole interview here:
How can you attract more traffic to your ecommerce store? How can you improve conversion on the traffic you’re currently getting? At IRCE (Internet Retailer Conference + Exhibition) 2014, we sat down with 39 marketers and ecommerce experts to bring you actionable ideas to improve your results.
To help you prepare for IRCE 2015, today on the MarketingSherpa blog I’m taking a look back at a few of the key lessons I learned from the interviews at last year’s event.
Lesson #1: User-generated content is not free labor for marketers
User-generated content. Community-sourced content. It’s been called many things, but brands have found success by encouraging customers to create their own content and share it with their peers.
No site has been better at this than Wikipedia, which refers to the practice as collaborative writing by volunteers. “The free encyclopedia that anyone can edit” gets the sixth most traffic in the world, according to Alexa.
I asked Jimmy Wales, CEO and Founder, Wikipedia, what advice he would give to marketers looking to engage their audience to create content.
Jimmy likened the typical approach of crowdsourcing to, “It’s sort of like if you opened up a bowling alley and you said, ‘Gee, we’ve got all this bowling to be done. How are we going to trick people into bowling for us.’ Instead you say, ‘Well, wait. What do people want? They want leisure time activity, beer and a hot dog. They want it to be family friendly. They’d like to have a league so they can compete with other teams and so on.’ So you think, ‘What’s the infrastructure we can build here? We’ll offer a bowling league, we’ll make sure there’s hot dogs and beer.’ And people will come, because you’re thinking about what they need first.”
“Don’t think about the work you would like people to do. Think about what it is people want to do and how you can empower them to do that,” Jimmy advised.
Even though the Internet Retailer Conference and Exhibition (IRCE) 2014, the world’s largest ecommerce event, was held during the FIFA World Cup in Brazil, more than 60 Brazilians made it to the conference.
The contingent was led by Priscila Inserra, Executive Director, and Renato Gonzaga, President, Concierge Brazil. The goal of their organization is to advance Brazil’s digital marketing by exposing executives to knowledge gathered at ecommerce events across the globe.
“Brazil is really growing in (the digital marketplace), and we are proud of it,” Priscila said. “We are starting to exchange experience. We don’t consider ourselves as mature as American companies, but we can learn a lot. We are taking as much content as we can back to the businesses in Brazil.”
Priscila was surprised by the event’s focus on technology.
“In Brazil, we focus a lot on marketing,” she explained. “America has tools that are much more sophisticated. But when we can join the expertise of the Brazilians and Americans, they will work well together.”
Watch the whole interview below: “Global Ecommerce: Developments in Brazil“
When a prospect enters her credit card online and hits “buy now,” chances are it isn’t her very first visit to the site or touch point in the sales process. According to Jeffery McCollum, Founder of CAKE, a digital marketing company, a sales path rarely leads directly to conversion.
“The client might see a display ad and not do anything. They might get an email and not do anything. But then they go to Google, search for the product, and purchase it,” he explained. “There’s touch points leading up to that sale, but marketers only count that Google click. But it’s really important to understand how effectively marketing dollars in those other channels contributed to the actual sale.”
Watch the whole interview here:
Ecommerce offers a great opportunity because it allows marketers to sell globally much more easily than opening brick-and-mortar locations around the world. This video from the MarketingSherpa video archive features Rob Garf, Vice President of Industry Strategy and Insights, Demandware, covering this topic with some tips on global ecommerce and insights from the frontlines of selling online in new geographies.
Preserving brand value across multiple cultures
According to Rob, global ecommerce is growing, and the first challenge is preserving brand value while meeting the specific needs of the new marketplace.
“First off, you can’t not pay attention to [global ecommerce]. Retailers — historically, how they grew globally was to have to stand up an entire physical location, retool their entire supply chain, and it was really expensive,” he said.
“The digital world really allows you to grow across boundaries in a real, more efficient way. Be able to test different markets. Be able to reach new consumers and ultimately grow the business,” Rob added.
Rob explained that it comes down to culture and being entrenched in how the consumers behave and how they want to interact with the brand, and those factors are affected by geography. In order to accomplish this in marketing, merchandising and promotional practices need to be adjusted. In Rob’s words, “Have a local presence in order to be local.”
Watch the video to find out more of Rob’s advice on marketing ecommerce globally:
