luni, 29 septembrie 2014

Why You Shouldn't Have a Mobile Marketing Strategy

Posted: 28 Sep 2014 05:16 PM PDT

Before I start, I should address the irony of writing this post on a site that isn't yet designed for mobile. I don't make those decisions, nor have the insight into the development backlog. I still think this is the community to have this discussion with, so I'll just have to put up with the irony.

This post isn't really about responsive websites, though. I wanted to address a broader question. There are a few marketing topics that seem to make it into board rooms sooner than others. Social media was one – I've heard a lot of senior people ask "what's our social strategy?" over the years and now I'm hearing "what's our mobile marketing strategy?". That's why I picked mobile as my topic for our upcoming SearchLove conference in London.

But I don't want to give another talk on responsive design, mobile user-agent server headers and googlebot mobile. Those things have their place, but they are inherently tactics. Instead, I want to ask myself the question "what does a true mobile marketing strategy look like?". Before I get to that, some background:

The changing mobile landscape

I've been closely involved in mobile since the early 2000s. Before starting Distilled, I worked for a strategy consultancy called Analysys who specialised in telecoms (and particularly in mobile). I distinctly remember every year back then being hailed as "the year of the mobile" (the earliest reference I can find online was optimistic that 2000 was going to be the year of the mobile).

It's funny because a decade ago, we were doing email on our phones (the iconic Blackberry appeared in 2003), but somehow WAP, GPRS and the Nokia 6600 all failed to achieve ubiquity.

In the end, by 2007, we'd all stopped talking about the year of the mobile, which meant that even the explosive adoption of the iPhone took a while to fully seep into marketers' collective consciousness. At the recent ThoughtWorks ParadigmShift conference, I gave a talk on the three "paradigm shifting" trends I see in marketing at the moment (the other two being what I called "your TV is just another screen" and "robots are filtering everything you see"). I showed these stats:

Internet trends for marketers from Will Critchlow

Mobile tactics

I'm clearly not the first or only person to have noticed this, and it's generated a huge amount of thinking about "mobile friendly" and even " mobile first" design.

Towards the end of this post, I've collected some thoughts and further reading on specific mobile tactics, but before we get into that, I wanted to dive a little deeper into the strategic layer.

You shouldn't have a mobile marketing strategy

There's something going on that I've referred to as there's no such thing as mobile. What I mean by this is that consumers are seeing less and less of a distinction between their devices.

Internet trends for marketers from Will Critchlow

To see this, we first have to realise that 77% of all usage of "mobile" devices is done from home or work where regular computers are available.

http://think.withgoogle.com/databoard/#lang=en-us&study=19&topic=54&dp=211

The vast majority of the attraction is not mobility, but a combination of a device that is:

Ubiquitous (the same device everywhere)
Personal (with your settings, a degree of privacy, etc)
Always-on / instant-on
Designed for rapid interactions

It's the same set of trends that is driving the "bring your own device" (BYOB) trend that IT departments are having to learn to deal with.

Our computers are fighting back by becoming more like our mobile devices (instant-on, app stores, even touch screens) and our mobile devices are adding to their ubiquity advantages with features previously limited to the desktop (faster processors, larger and brighter screens, faster connections, better keyboards).

So, when you realise that all our data is in the cloud and our connection to the physical device is only sentimentality (and the cost of replacement), and you consider the range of screen resolutions that can be considered "mobile", you realise that unless you mean to target customers who are literally walking around at the time, mobile marketing isn't really a distinct thing – it's just the future of digital marketing.

Every marketing strategy should be mobile

You only have to watch a user who's never built their own website, and therefore can't empathise with the technical difficulties, try to use a website that doesn't work on their iPhone or iPad. They swear at the device. They swear at the brand. They wonder if they're doing it wrong or if their connection has dropped. They abuse the "idiots who built this website" without realising the difficulty of what they're asking for.

There's no such thing as mobile as far as the user is concerned. Which means you, as marketers, have to work exceptionally hard to play nicely with ubiquity.

Fundamentally, people use their devices for:

communicating with other people (1-1 and 1-many)
consuming media (text, images, video)
searching for answers

As a marketer, you can see the opportunities to be available, be found, be recommended in any of these uses. To improve your chances, you will need to consider:

Your platform – the CMS you use, the outputs it's capable of
Your content – the strategy of what to create and the tactical execution
Your audience – where are they and how can you reach them?
Your conversion paths – what do you want people to do and what would encourage them to do that?
Your measurement abilities – how are you going to quantify and demonstrate success, and how are you going to refine your approach in light of new data?

So, what does that sound like? It sounds a lot like the approach we take for every client who comes to us for digital marketing.

And that's what I mean when I say that every marketing strategy should be a mobile marketing strategy. Through every single step of that process, you can (and should) append "on mobile" to the question.

How might I be wrong?

What if apps beat the mobile web? That's the biggest threat to web marketers right now in my opinion. Clearly this is a threat to Google as well (how do you index the app ecosystem?). So it's interesting to look at their response because they're also embracing it. Think about:

The pace of innovation in, for example, mobile gmail apps versus desktop gmail
How Chrome is sneaking an operating system onto every device you own and can now run Android apps
How much a search in Chrome looks increasingly like a search in the Google app - with features moving from the app to mobile Chrome in a similar way to the way features move from mobile to desktop
The trend towards app constellations for most of the major mobile players – taking a slice not only from the monolithic apps, but also from the regular mobile web ("there's an app for that")

I don't think the pendulum is going to swing too far this way, however. Turns out that it's not only Google that relies on indexing the sum of published human knowledge. Can you imagine going back to a world where you can't Google for an answer? I can't.

So, I think that even in this situation, "content" remains something resembling the mobile web – as does much of ecommerce away from perhaps Amazon. The long tail of providers simply works against "an app for everything". You might have an app for your favourite store and your favourite newspaper, but you're not going to have 15 of each (in my opinion).

So where do we focus our marketing? In my opinion, we focus on search, social and content. Those are the fundamental human activities which are enhanced by ubiquitous computing devices, and they're ones we understand deeply. The future looks like brands as publisher like never before.

So, should I build an app?

I don't believe this is a marketing question. It's a product and business question. I think the answer could well be "yes" for many businesses if you have elements that can be improved by:

Native APIs (camera, coarse or fine-grained location, etc)
Game-engine-style graphics abilities
Offline functionality
Lock-in that actually benefits your users somehow

But it's not a marketing question. Aside from a small number of communication tools that can grow via viral loops (think: whatsapp), apps are not a discovery mechanism. The vast majority of app store searches are navigational (i.e. people searching for apps they've already heard of) and I don't see that changing any time soon – an app store search isn't going to replace a general web search for knowledge and so it's not going to add people into the top of your funnel.

It's also such a hugely fragmented market that – from conversations with developers who've seen their apps sitting at #1 in moderate-sized categories – I know that even success doesn't inherently drive more downloads and more success.

Tactical recommendations for mobile

Apart from repeating the advice to think about how your site appears on mobile, I wanted to end with some positive recommendations – i.e. what should you do tactically?

Pay attention to "dark referral sources" that obscure the incredible mobile drivers of growth for networks like Facebook and, if your audience is active on Facebook, realise that Facebook marketing increasingly is mobile marketing
The same is actually true of email – 66% of emails are now opened on mobile devices
Consider all those native APIs and the apps that make the best use of them – 10% of all photos mankind has taken were taken in the last 12 months
While most mobile sessions are not happening out and about (77% happen at home or at work), all true mobile sessions of course do happen on mobile devices so it's worth thinking about hyper-locality (iBeacons)
Of course, it's not enough to drive just engagement, you need to drive revenue, so it's well past the time that most people should be thinking about mobile CRO (video here if you have a DistilledU account)
Make the most of second-screen mobile use (see slide 38 onwards) if you are spending money on offline or branding plays
Watch for emerging networks – there are a variety of factors that power a high degree of volatility in mobile social (see slides 53-54 onwards)

The key lesson here? We need to stop focussing on mobile as a device we use when 'on the go'. Mobile is no longer a distinct thing but, rather, simply the future of digital marketing. It must inform every strategy we devise as marketers, and at every step of the way.

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Aspirational brands: Is magazine content the future for online retailers?

Posted: 29 Sep 2014 01:51 AM PDT

We’ve known for some time now that the hard-sell doesn’t really work online. So what strategies are brands in 2014 using to urge browsers to buy online?

They’re using magazine content.

What is magazine content?

Well you can call it visual content marketing, editorial content, lookbook content or whatever you like.

Essentially, it’s content that has an editorial look, and that presents features, information, advice and inspiration alongside products on-sale in an integrated fashion.

The likes of Liberty, Harrods and other luxury brands and retailers have been embracing this kind of content to drive their eCommerce sales for a while, and it’s a strategy that looks like it’s here to stay. Let’s look at a brand that was early to the magazine content party…

The Net-A-Porter Example

Net-A-Porter.com was a relatively early adopter of this kind of content, re-launching their weekly on-site magazine, The Edit, in early 2013. Described as 30 pages of fashion shoots that allow readers to buy directly from the pages, as well as news, features and interviews with women from around the world.

NAP’s editor-in-chief, Lucy Yeomans, said ahead of the re-launch:

“We have an extraordinary customer base and we have to make sure we are looking after their needs, and that means bringing in the best of everything out there.”

The ambition of this new content focus, according to Tess Macleod Smith at Net A Porter, was to create a more in-depth customer experience:

“The aim is to inspire the consumer from the very beginning of her journey — and follow her all the way to the end.”

The-edit-by-net-a-porter

The approach appears to have worked brilliantly well for the brand in the last eighteen months, with the company seeing 18% growth in the year to February 2014. This success also means that the company has taken the decision recently to produce its own glossy magazine, to link the offline and online browsing experience.

“It has been a commerce/content hybrid from the beginning. The website opens with a magazine-like "Edit". Readers can become shoppers by clicking on images in both articles and adverts. The new paper magazine extends that idea into print.” says Schumpeter in The Economist. “There is no disguising that Porter [the new print magazine] will help blur boundaries between writing about goods and services…and selling them”

They key term here for me is ‘blurring boundaries’. Magazine content, when executed well, can have a startling effect on our willingness to purchase. What’s more, the ‘shopability’ of products featured in magazine content is made more natural.

So for fashion forward brands, magazine style content is working supremely well and is therefore, presumably, here to stay.

But what about more traditional brands? Are they embracing this new marketing approach?

I’m taking a look at some traditional British retailers, known for their quality and brand, but not necessarily their forward-thinking attitude to marketing, and discovering how they are approaching magazine-style selling to consumers online.

Marks and Spencer

The launch of Marks & Spencer’s sleek new magine-style website in February (below) was followed swiftly in July this year with news that the retailer had suffered an 8% fall in online sales. So what was the problem? Was the move too revolutionary for a brand that targets such a wide age-range and demographic? Going shopping on websites means "reading a magazine", says M&S's online chief, Laura Wade-Gery. So was the fact that a large percentage of their target audience are more likely to be reading Gardeners’ World or Home and Garden than Vogue the big problem?

According to The Economist, they wanted to ‘weave stories around their products’; let’s take a look at how they achieved that…

The Key Elements of the magazine-style page

Weaving a story means creating looks, inspiration, ideas and desire for a product.

a. Authorship and editorial authority

Adding simple elements such as an author bi-line or image help to reinforce the concept of editorial authority and objectivity. Net-A-Porter calls it "enhancing its online experience to its customers and providing compelling content and an authoritative editorial voice on its websites." (Drapers)

b. Social sharing buttons

Integrating share buttons reduces the burden of sharing content socially and encourages multiple shares across platforms.

c. Product link buttons – start the purchasing cycle

Facilitating a move to a product purchase with ease by using ‘Shop the look’ or ‘get the product’ buttons – this may be a good element to A/B test – your customers may not respond to your language in the way you think.

d. Upselling – lower cost products as add-ons

Ecommerce sites have been offering us ‘add-on’ products during the checkout process for years. Lower price point items work well as they are ‘impulse buy products’ Here, tempting add-ons or complimentary accessories are integrated within the content.

e. Encouraging further exploration of magazine-style content

Browsing online is no different to flicking through a traditional glossy magazine. Sometimes you want to read more, sometimes you’re selective in the articles you read. Giving online browsers the options to continue their browsing journey on your website is key – keeping them on your site is better than letting them leave without making a purchase.

Lets look at another example…

Clarks

Clarks has jumped on the magazine format bandwagon and produced some great content for its site this autumn, such as this Biker Boot page. This page comes just in time for the explosion of autumn/winter collections that appear every year around the time of London Fashion Week.

Clarks has clearly taken cues from the likes of Net-A-Porter and other high-end brands and the result is slick pages that look like they would fit nicely in Vogue.

Clarks has included classic magazine elements such as imagery around inspiration for the collection, images of well-known stars wearing a similar look, and ideas of how to wear the biker boots with different outfits. What’s great about this page, and others like it on the Clarks site, is that they have taken advantage of third party products (as examples of how to style the footwear) to make the page seem more objective.

This page has also included a high-quality video, which backs up the look ideas and helps visitors imagine how the looks could be realised in real life, and facilitates the easy purchase of these accessories.

Not only has Clarks done a great job in creating engaging and readable magazine content, these pages are great landing pages for web users searching Google for ‘Biker Boots’ as they are both engaging and highly relevant.

And so on to our final brand….

The Body Shop

This brand always seemed to me to be a divisive one; you were either a Body Shop customer or you weren’t, and I always was. So how are The Body Shop going about capturing new customers?

Take their new Argan oil range for example. Argan oil has been a buzzword in the fashion and beauty industry for the past few years (see Google trends graph below), but The Body Shop has moved beyond its use as solely a product for hair to create a range of skincare using Argan oil.

Because this product has been a hot trend over the past few years, all of the top beauty and women’s magazines have produced features and reviewed argan oil products, so how has The Body Shop compete and introduce itself to new customers in this space?

By answering their questions!

Research based queries around argan oil, its benefits and advantages are growing:

What is argan oil? Monthly Keyword volume: 590 (and growing)

Argan oil research informational query keyword universe: 3,150 (and growing)

So The Body Shop has created an information hub to capture consumers in the research stage of the buying process and introduce them to their new product range.

The Body Shop’s What is Argan Oil? page is targeting the web users who are seeking out information, ie, they are in research mode so therefore the purpose of the page is to convert researchers into potential purchasers.

The Body Shop has created some visually engaging content about this topic, which means it is more likely to be seen as an authority by search engines and visitors. However, I think this landing page would benefit from a less sales-y approach, incorporating more objective content and trust factors such as quotes from magazines or bloggers.

This content is split across two pages, though I think it would make more sense as one single, longer page. I think longer form is more appealing these days and visitors are likely to miss out if they are required to click through to a second page.

I would have included some trust factors on these pages, such as reviews from magazines or online publications. There’s no shortage of blogger reviews of this product range (for example: here and here, especially from their in-store showcase events.)

Alex’s closing thoughts

Is the key to this kind of content, as Business of Fashion says, ‘shortening the path between inspiration and transaction’?

Is it all about creating a story and inspiring browsers with ideas?

Does viewing this type of content increase our willingness to buy or the amount we are willing to spend in once transaction?
Does it make us more likely to re-visit a site, either to browse or make a transaction?
Does magazine-style content evoke luxury and quality?
Does magazine style content feel more authoritative and impartial?

What do you think are the key elements of magazine content that create the desire to buy? Do you find this type of content more authoritative or objective (in spite of your marketing knowledge)?

duminică, 28 septembrie 2014

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis

Elephant in the Room Minsky Moment

Posted: 28 Sep 2014 06:02 PM PDT

The "elephant in the room" is debt. Try as they might, central bankers have not been able to spur credit, hiring, or much business expansion because of the elephant. Things are even worse in Europe.

Via email, this is a guest post from Steen Jakobsen, chief economist of Saxo bank.

Debt - The Elephant in the Room

'Interest on debt grows without rain' – Yiddish proverb

This proverb explains most of what goes on in policy circles these days. We are now watching Extend-and-Pretend, Episode VI: Promises for improvement amid ever growing debt levels.

Short put, we're still working with the same dog-eared script we were introduced to all of five years ago, when markets had stabilized in the wake of the financial crisis: maintain sufficiently low interest rates to service the debt burden. Pretend to have credible plan, but never address the structural problem and simply buy more time. But while we were able to get away with this theme for an awfully long time, the dynamic is now changing as the risk of low inflation (and even deflation) is a brick wall for the extend-and-pretend meme. Yes, interest does grow without rain, and the cost of maintaining and servicing debt grows especially fast in a deflationary regime.

Mads Koefoed, Saxo Bank's macro economist projects US growth at around 2.0% for all of 2014. That will be the sixth year with US growth near 2.0% - so despite lower unemployment, despite a record high S&P500, the economy has a hard time escaping that 2.0% level. Any talk of higher interest rates is hard to take seriously when US growth is going nowhere and world growth is considerable weaker than expected in January or as recently as July, for that matter. It seems everyone has forgotten that even the US is a part of the global economy.

The fourth quarter is always the most politically interesting time of year. Countries need to get their new budgets in order. The EU, IMF and World Bank will need to pretend they agree or accept the weaker data, which has to mean bigger deficits. It's a tiresome exercise to watch denial-in-action as EU governments and other policymakers try to make something so obviously unpalatable go down easy in their internal reporting. It's obvious that buying more time (extending) is always the number one priority, followed by projecting (pretending) the forward looking growth will reach an ever higher trajectory in order to make the budget fit within the supposed constraints. Or in France's case, the recent unilateral abandonment of meeting budget targets for the next two years is already a fait accompli.

Who's next?

Such behavior would cost you your job in the private sector, but in the economic model of 2014, which reminds us more of Soviet Union than a market based economy, its par for the course. But, many would protest, it would be even worse if we hadn't done so much to "save the system", right?

Well maybe, except for the fact that those economies where belief in State Capitalism is strongest: Russia, China and France, are all at the end of the line. Time has caught up. Negative productivity, capital flight and a system built on protecting the elite is failing. France is now moving from recession to depression. China is moving quickly from denial towards a mandate for change, Russia's future has not looked this bleak since the late 1990's. Meanwhile the US continues on sluggish 2.0% growth. Investors and pundits seem to have forgotten that we were promised 2014 would be the end of the crisis. Instead, we are speeding towards the inflection point at which debt becomes harder to service because pretend-and-extend policy making have created a depression in investment and consumption.

The public debt loads continue to inflate across Europe: Portugal's public debt has ramped to a staggering 130% of GDP – up from about 70% in 2007. Greece's public debt load, even after the restructuring of Greek debt a few years ago, has swelled to 175% of GDP. The EU now has far more systemic risk than at the beginning of the crisis. With zero growth or as our economist Mads sees it, 0.6% with the arrow pointing down, debt levels continue to rise relative to GDP. And most importantly, the current flirt with deflation will make servicing the growing debt even more expensive. The nightmare for ECB and world is deflation as it's a tax on debtors and a boon to net savers. The new reality is that we currently stand face-to-face with the very deflation risk that just about everyone denied could ever happen when Q1 outlooks were written.

Two other global threats, or time bombs, if you will, outside of the EU are risks from the growing costs of servicing debt in China and the USA. In China, the governments national and local have piled up considerable debt, but it is the overall debt service costs in all of China that are the real concern, which have only grown so large with the dangerous assumption by Chinese banks, companies and citizens that they can count on a public bailout. According to a Societe Generale analyst, total debt service costs (including maturing debt and roll overs) in China area at nearly 39% of GDP. Compare that with the closer to 25% of GDP for the USA in 2007.

In the US, interest on US government debt cost over 6% of budget outlays in 2013. This is relatively down from its worst levels when interest rates were much higher, but only because FOMC has so drastically lowered the costs for the US government to issue debt with a zero interest rate policy. And now the debt load is vastly larger than it was before the financial crisis – at 80% of GDP (net debt according to IMF) versus 45% of GDP a mere 10 years ago. So are we actually to believe that the Fed can lift the entire front-end of the curve from 0-1% (current rates out to three years) to 2-4% over the next two years without massive further stress on the deficit and only adding to the debt? Servicing 2% interest when growth is 2% means you are doing worse than standing in place if you also have a budget deficit.

Whatever the timing, the USA, China and Europe are all headed for another Minsky moment: the point in debt inflation where the cash generated by assets is insufficient to service the debt taken on to acquire the asset. The US productivity growth last year was +0.36%. The real growth per capita was about 1.5%. Anything which is not productivity is consumption of capital. So, the only way to grow an economy without productivity growth is temporarily with the use of debt – about 75% debt and 25% productivity growth in this case.

Since the 1970s, US productivity growth rates have fallen 81% - the move onto the internet has ironically made us bigger consumers and less productive. Had we remained at pre-1970s productivity, the US GDP would have been 55% higher and the outstanding debt to GDP would be easily fundable.

I just returned from Singapore on business – Singapore, to me, used to be the most rational business model around. Its founder Lee Kuan Yew was one of the greatest statesmen in history. Now, productivity is collapsing in Singapore. They are, like us, becoming the Monaco of the world, an economy based on consumption and not on productivity and growth. The developed economies are growing old in demographic terms, but we're still not wise enough to realize that our current model is a Ponzi scheme rushing toward its inevitable Minsky moment. No serious policymaker or central banker is talking about the truth told by simple maths and hoping that things turn out well. Hope is not good policy and it belongs in church, not in the real economy.

Steen

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com

Reflections on Catalonia, Crimea, Iraq, California, Nation Building

Posted: 28 Sep 2014 11:09 AM PDT

Catalonia Independence Vote to Proceed on Schedule

Arthur Mas, president of Catalonia declared today that the vote for independence of that region will go as scheduled on November 9. Spain contends the vote is illegal and vows to stop it.

El Economista reports Arthur Mas Calls for Vote on Independence of Catalonia.

President of Catalonia, Artur Mas nationalist, officially called for a vote on the independence of this rich region of Spain for the November 9, challenging the Spanish government began the process to prevent it.

In a ceremony at the gallery Gothic Palace of the Generalitat, the seat of regional government in Barcelona, Artur Mas, supported by his executive and representatives of other nationalist parties, signed the decree of convocation of this non-binding referendum.

"This is the way democracies are expressed and political projects are born. Voting it is the responsibility of the Democrats do not circumvent it," then said in a brief speech.

"Catalonia wants to talk, want to be heard, want to vote," he said Mas, who continues to ask Madrid to allow the query as London did in Scotland, where the "no" won Sept. 18 in a referendum with broad participation.

The proposal flew like a lead balloon in Madrid. Prime Minister, Mariano Rajoy Initiated a Process to Suspend the Referendum.

Reflections on Catalonia, Crimea, California

There is a lot of puffery in Spain given the resolution is nonbinding, unlike the vote for Scottish independence.

In the US, if California wanted to cede from the union and form its own country, look on the bright side: California independence would be a huge upside for the rest of us.

Such a referendum, if allowed to stand, would take a lot of socialist votes out of the US House of Representatives. That would be a good thing. Unfortunately, there will never be support in California to cede from the union.

Crimea Votes Overwhelming to Join Russia

In Crimea, citizens voted 96.77% for integration of the region into the Russian Federation. Some claim the vote was rigged. Perhaps so, but by how much?

A Gallup Poll in Crimea following the referendum shows overwhelming support.

More than eight in 10 (82.8%) say the referendum reflects most Crimeans' views.
About three-fourths of Crimeans (73.9%) say Crimea's becoming part of Russia will make life better for themselves and their families, just 5.5% disagree.
Crimeans are overwhelmingly likely to view Russia's role in the crisis as positive (71.3%) rather than negative (8.8%).
Outside of Crimea, responses are practically reversed (66.4% see Russia's role as negative, 15.6% positive).
Though Ukrainians outside of Crimea are somewhat ambivalent about the United States' role in the crisis (39.0% say it has been positive, 27.7% negative, and 21.6% neutral), Crimeans are far more unified in their view that the U.S. has played a negative (76.2%) rather than a positive (2.8%) role.

Justice was served in Crimea. The people clearly got what they wanted, and they did so in a peaceful, democratic process, undoing a haphazardly pieced together nation that simply did not belong together as configured.

Who am I (or anyone in Kiev) to question what an overwhelming percentage of the Crimeans want?

Nonetheless, arrogant outsiders with zero legitimate interest insist "the vote must not stand" and Russia must return Crimea to the Ukraine.

Instead, I propose, the US ought to consider outcomes like the Crimea vote and the Ukrainian civil war before it goes poking sticks at bears and stirring up geopolitical trouble.

Reflections on Nation Building

Nation building by outsiders does not work, ever. Results are especially bad when outside forces haphazardly piece together nations to suit political whims.

Iraq and Ukraine are proof enough.

In Iraq, the Kurds want their own nation. The US is against the idea.

But why shouldn't the Kurds have the right of self-determination?

I seem to recall at least one great nation got its start that way. Anyone else remember? And isn't the voting booth preferable to war?

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com

Seth's Blog : Two purposes of user feedback

Two purposes of user feedback

What's a customer worth?

A customer at the local supermarket or at the corner Fedex Print shop might spend $10,000 or even $25,000 over the course of a few years. That's why marketers are so willing to spend so much time and money on coupons, promos and ads getting people to start doing business with us.

But what happens when it goes wrong? What if a service slip or a policy choice threatens that long-term relationship?

If you know what's broken, you can fix it for all the customers that follow. It seems obvious, but you want to hear what customers have to say. After all, if people in charge realize what's not working, the thinking is that they might want to change it.

At the same time, a critical but often overlooked benefit of open customer communication is that individuals want to be heard. Your disgruntled customer doesn't want to hear you to make excuses, and possibly doesn't even want you to fix yesterday's problem (probably too late for that), but she does want to know that you know, that you care, and that it's not going to happen again. Merely listening, really listening, might be enough.

Big organizations (and smaller, unenlightened ones) grab onto the data benefit and tend to ignore the "listening" one. Worse still, in their desire to isolate themselves from customers, they industralize and mechanize the process of gathering data (in the name of scale) and squeeze all the juiciness out of it.

If you live in the US, you might try calling 800-398-0242. That's the number Fedex Print lists on all their receipts, hoping for customer feedback. It's hard to imagine a happy customer working her way through all of these menus and buttons and clicks, and harder still to imagine an annoyed customer being happy to do all of this data processing for them.

The alternative is pretty simple: if you're about to lose a $10,000 customer, put the cell phone number of the regional manager on the receipt. That's what you and I would do if we owned the place, wouldn't we?

Answer the phone and listen. It's an essay test, not multiple choice.

When in doubt, be human.

• Email to a friend •

luni, 29 septembrie 2014

Why You Shouldn't Have a Mobile Marketing Strategy

Why You Shouldn't Have a Mobile Marketing Strategy

The changing mobile landscape

Mobile tactics

You shouldn't have a mobile marketing strategy

Every marketing strategy should be mobile

How might I be wrong?

So, should I build an app?

Tactical recommendations for mobile

Aspirational brands: Is magazine content the future for online retailers?

Aspirational brands: Is magazine content the future for online retailers?

What is magazine content?

The Net-A-Porter Example

Marks and Spencer

The Key Elements of the magazine-style page

Clarks

The Body Shop

Further reading:

Seth's Blog : Wishing vs. doing

Wishing vs. doing

More Recent Articles

duminică, 28 septembrie 2014

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis

Seth's Blog : Two purposes of user feedback

Two purposes of user feedback

More Recent Articles

Pagini

Persoane interesate

Arhivă blog

luni, 29 septembrie 2014

The changing mobile landscape

Mobile tactics

You shouldn't have a mobile marketing strategy

Every marketing strategy should be mobile

How might I be wrong?

So, should I build an app?

What is magazine content?

The Net-A-Porter Example

Marks and Spencer

The Key Elements of the magazine-style page

Clarks

The Body Shop

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duminică, 28 septembrie 2014

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