Archive for May, 2008
Yes, Google, Dunkin Donuts Has Free Iced Coffee Today
More than any other brand, Dunkin’ Donuts has popularized iced coffee in the United States. So when a friend reminded me of their “free iced coffee” promotion happening today (Thursday, May 15, 2008), I was a bit surprised that I hadn’t seen or heard any ads for it. No radio commercials. No TV spots. Not even a subway ad or billboard.
Were they doing this purely by word-of-mouth, as a “thank you” to loyal customers who would then tell their friends about it?
I decided to go to DunkinDonuts.com to see if they were at least promoting it on the homepage.
Yes! I knew I could count on them to follow through on the homepage. This may seem obvious to many of you, but not following through on the homepage is the curse of many cross-channel campaigns (GoDaddy is a good example).
Alright, so they’ve got the homepage covered. Now let’s see how they’re doing on search.
What? No iced coffee!? “Stay tuned for our new Free Iced Coffee date”? Ouch. Let this be a reminder to us all that, the next time someone tells you to “Google yourself,” it might not be a bad idea. They could have easily updated this page with new details.
Oh, well… This campaign is still a winner.
Ten years ago, if you ordered an iced coffee at a Denny’s restaurant in suburban Detroit or a Waffle House in Nashville — and I have — the waitress would look at you like you were crazy. “Um, we’ve got iced tea,” they would insist, forcing me to explain the complex artistry that goes into creating creating iced coffee (i.e., take coffee, pour into glass filled with ice).
Sure, iced coffee has been a staple of the New York City diet for as long as anyone living can remember. And, yes, Starbucks did get even the most unlikely customers hooked on “grande” iced lattes. But Dunkins never tried to convert working class folks into latte-sippers. Coffee and donuts, that’s their game; so iced coffee was never much of a stretch.
What else might they have done to sweeten up the campaign? If the Dunkin Donuts free iced coffee promo is it a hit in your area, leave a comment to let us know if you plan on stopping by to get a cup.
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Time to make the donuts? FutureNow can help you caffeinate your campaign by planning it from the customer’s perspective.
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Written by:Robert Gorell
Another Reason She May Abandon You: Hormones
I go into the garage for a hammer. On my way back into the house, I stop for a cold drink and remember that the kitchen trash needs to be taken out for tomorrow’s collection.
Dropping the can at the curb, I turn and notice that the landscaper forgot to turn on the drip irrigation system, so I trot over and flip the switch. I walk back into the house and realize that I forgot to put the cold bottle of water back into the fridge. I open the door and find my hammer, sitting on the top shelf, chilling next to a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc.
I’m glad I found the hammer. The only question is, “What did I need it for in the first place?”
Welcome to my world. Now in my late forties, I find myself staring down the barrel of menopause and I’m not thrilled about it. It’s not the age that bothers me (it’s only a number) but the havoc it wreaks on my thought process. With four times as many connections between the two sides of the brain, women already have a difficult time concentrating on one thing at a time. Throw in raging hormones and it’s virtually impossible to stay focused. Distraction rules the day.
All to say this: When shopping online, nothing drives a woman battier than putting items into a shopping cart and pushing the “continue shopping” button, only to be sent back to the homepage or a section she’s never visited. What if she wanted to buy the same item in another color? What if the original item page had listed complementary pieces that would go with the one she just ordered?
Imagine shopping in a home supply store. You pick up a light bulb, put it in your basket, and POOF! You suddenly find yourself back at the front entrance with the lighting department positioned all the way at the rear of the store. Do you feel like walking all the way back there just for your next item? Nah, I wouldn’t either. In fact, I can’t seem to remember why we came here in the first place, do you?
If you really want your customer to “continue shopping” on your site, make sure you guide her back to where she really wants to be. Otherwise, she might just might forget what she needed you for and abandon you altogether.
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About the author: Michele Miller is co-author of The Soccer Mom Myth — Today’s Female Consumer: Who She Really Is, Why She Really Buys.
[Editor’s Note: The image is of Saturday Night Live’s Tina Fey, wielding a pink axe in a fake commercial for a fake drug called “Annuale”. Pharmaceutical marketers, and anyone with a sense of humor, should watch it.]
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Written by:Michele Miller
Podcast: How to Profit from the Social Media Groundswell
Social technologies have changed much more than our marketing strategies; they’ve changed us.
Social technologies have changed how we gather and share information. They’ve changed who we meet, where we meet, and, sometimes, how we meet. They’ve changed how we buy, what we buy, and where we buy. They’ve changed what, how, and how much we know about the people around us. And while social technologies may not have changed what it essentially means to be human, they’ve certainly amplified, at once, our voices, our influence, and our need to be heard.
Right now, a brand — possibly yours — is experiencing a public relations mini-disaster thanks to a comment left on a message board; a university student is recommending a movie to 372 people at once via Facebook; Barack Obama’s social media-driven campaign is beating the odds (and the Clintons).
Welcome to the groundswell.
Josh Bernoff, Vice President & Principal Analyst at Forrester Research joined us recently to discuss the soon-to-be-bestseller he’s co-authored with Forrester’s Charlene Li, Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies. The book is a brief history of social media — fully seasoned with research and anecdotes from the most notable triumphs and failures of the so-called “Web 2.0″ era — that explains how to thrive now that customers and clients own your brand.
Click here for the Groundswell podcast
Of course you’ll buy the book, but here’s a 15-minute interview you can download (by right-clicking) while you wait for your copy to be delivered.
POST (not haste)
As Josh explains the paradigm of Groundswell thinking, don’t forget POST:
• People - What are your customers ready for? What do they want? What’s motivating them?
• Objectives - What are your goals?
• Strategy - How do you want relationships with your customers to change?
• Technology - Swap “tactics” for “technology” and the same is true. The people, objectives, and strategy must come before your choice of technology/tactics.
Want to find your customers’ social technographics profile?
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Read more about the phenomenology of social tech at the Groundswell blog, or any of these other great blogs.
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Written by:Robert Gorell
Mobile Marketing Conference Ticket Winners Announced
Big thanks to everyone who took part in our ticket giveaway for the IMC Mobile Marketing conference.
Your questions were fantastic and have given us — and the conference presenters — a lot of great ideas for discussion topics. You also made it very difficult to choose a winner!
So, without further ado, our free ticket winners are…
Chana Hercenberg:
As a consultant, someone who has spent time researching the industry […], I would say one of the most important issues to address for a business going mobile is how do you best design a robust and engaging money making mobile page in a small amount of space? What are the best technologies available, and what are the best tips for optimizing the space?Sudhir Bhojwani:
Are we going to see more of companies such as Blyk ad model MVNO? How big is this market really? I feel it only affects young subscribers.Tim Peter:
Simple question: Why do we think anyone will *ever* transact using a handset when they’re holding a phone in their hands? Wouldn’t it just be easier to call? Shouldn’t the emphasis be on tracking the outcome of the call itself and using *that* as the call-to-action?
Don’t forget: We’re assembling a crew of mobile marketing experts to answer not just these, but ALL of your other questions in following posts. Stay tuned!
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P.S. IMC is still offering a 20% discount for GrokDotCom readers.
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Written by:Robert Gorell
What a Google & Yahoo! Image Search Reveals
My friend Juan Guillermo Tornoe’s Hispanic Trending blog is always a good read. His post “Search Engine’s Perception of Hispanic vs. Latino” made me think.
First, the headline made me consider why I think of myself as Hispanic but never use the term Latino to describe myself. For those of you confused by that, Spanish is my first language. I never learned English until I went to school. My parents immigrated to the US from Argentina in 1962 and my mother’s family — they’re Sephardi Jews — spoke Spanish as their first language, centuries before Columbus bumped into the island of Hispaniola.
Second, image search is revealing. The way people use the terms Hispanic & Latino is often interchangeable. However, it’s obvious that the people using the term have different ideas about what they mean. I simply never thought before about how valuable image search is in understanding the underlying terms. Marketers take note: What an interesting way to determine relevance!
Read the post. It’s short and it might make you think, too.
So, what is the right term; Hispanic or Latino? If there isn’t one right term, how do you choose which one to use?
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Written by:Jeffrey Eisenberg
How to Get Buy-in for Conversion Rate Optimization
I just arrived home from San Francisco where I attended the eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit. As always, it’s great to catch up with friends and participate in enlightening conversations. A key theme of my presentation: how to get organizational buy-in to testing and conversion optimization.
Marketers often get so worked up about the prospect of optimization and persuading more customers that we forget something. Before we can pursue optimization, we must convince those in our own company about optimization’s value.
Here, then, are some tips for convincing executives, coworkers, teammates, and anyone else in your company of the importance of investing in marketing optimization, analytics, and conversion improvement efforts.
Get the Math Right
When you present your numbers, don’t assume your listeners are getting the math right:
- 100,000 people visit your Web site
- 3 percent of people convert into a desired outcome
- Your site gets 3,000 total conversions
What happens when you increase conversion rate by 1 percent? How many total conversions does your organization hear?
- 3,030
- 4,000
Translate All Numbers Into Dollars
Another dangerous assumption to make is that your listeners can translate numbers into dollars. Always show impact in terms of dollars. Use average order value (AOV) or average lead value (for lead-generation or registration sites).
Let’s say your AOV is $50 and your company spends $200 for every 1,000 visits. For those 1,000 visits, your conversion rate is 2 percent, which equals 20 actions. For every 1,000 visits, you gross $1,000 in sales (calculate: $50 AOV x 20 actions = $1,000 in gross sales). If you increase your conversion rate modestly to 3 percent, your gross sales increase is 50 percent, or $500 per 1,000 visits (calculate: 3 percent x 1,000 visits = 30 actions; 30 actions x $50 AOV = $1,500 in sales).
It’s also helpful to show the dollar impact over an entire quarter or a fiscal year.
Oftentimes companies have a hard time determining AOV or average lead value with any degree of accuracy; that’s OK. Of course, the cleaner your data, the easier it will be to have organizational buy-in. The key is to show some sort of monetary value. We often encourage our clients to make a conservative estimate that most in the company will agree on.
Leverage Your Reach
Show your team the advantage of taking control of the visitor instead of existing solely at the mercy of visitor traffic.
With an AOV of $50 and a modest conversion rate increase from 2 percent to 3 percent (50 percent), the sales increase is impressive, but that’s only one part of the story. In the table below, you can see the impact of increasing both conversion and traffic:
In the “good” column, you get more from the traffic and spend. Your CPA (define) goes down, and you generate more profit from your advertising. You won’t grow faster, but you make more.
Let’s say you reinvest some of those dollars into acquisition spend to drive more traffic. You can grow exponentially and outspend your competition, you can even afford for the conversion rate to go down a bit. Your conversion and traffic increase rockets your growth dramatically.
This advantage of conversion rate optimization is often missed or overlooked by many companies.
With a conversion rate increase, you now have a choice:
- Use incremental profits to expand reach: 133,000 visits x 4% conversion rate = 5,320 orders
- Lower your marketing acquisition costs. If your acquisition cost was $100 per action, with this efficiency it would now be $66 per action.
Again, even with modest increases in conversion companies can begin to wean themselves off addictive traffic or make their traffic work harder for them instead of working harder for traffic.
Is There a Catch?
While there are many tools to aid marketers in their quest, there’s still no conversion rate black box. Conversion optimization always require resources and effort, trial and error, and sometimes sweat and tears. And it never ends. Optimization is a continual process of gaining customer insight, implementing changes, testing, then starting the whole process over.
The Bottom Line
You can’t always control the amount of visits, but you can control what you present to visitors. Why not optimize it?
Still have doubts? Ask yourself: what would it cost you to double traffic (if this is even possible) versus doubling conversion rate?
*Article cross-posted on ClickZ
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Editor’s Note: At FutureNow, we insist on measurable ROI for our clients. That’s we start by identifying the areas that will make the most difference to your conversion rate and other vital performance metrics. Please contact us to learn how we can help you, or an executive team you know, market better.
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Written by:Bryan Eisenberg
Facebook Ads Prove That “Targeting” Demographics Is Silly
Social media advertising isn’t just another fad. With all of that juicy customer info we give social networks each day, for free, businesses of all sizes are lining up to cash in by offering the right ad to the right person, guaranteed — or so they think.
Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn’t.
Here’s the promise Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder and CEO, made to media buyers last November:
With Facebook you will be able to select exactly the audience you want to reach, and we will only show your ads to them. We know exactly what gender someone is, what activities they are interested in, their location, country, city or town, interests, gender [etcetera, etcetera] . . .
Several months later, this is the result:
Apparently, David at Broccoli & Cheese wasn’t a good target for this ad:
As you read this, thousands of 18-34 year old men are watching Tampax commercials. Not because they want to, but because television is an imprecise medium that makes it hard to get the right ads to the right people. As a result, we’ve been conditioned over decades to expect irrelevance at the commercial break.
But wasn’t the Internet, and in particular, social media, supposed to turn that tide? Take Facebook—they know more about my day-to-day life than my parents do, and surely enough to serve me ads that I’d find remotely useful. But they’re dropping the ball. Big time.
[…] Will someone out there besides Google please get their [expletive] together?
If MarineCFO’s Chief Financial Officer is reading this, chance are s/he’s not thrilled with Facebook.
To be clear, I don’t think MarineCFO was silly to place this ad. It’s just that, like me and perhaps even you, we’re easily seduced by the promise of demographics. We like to think it’s sufficient.
Demographics are like catnip for marketers.
They make being wrong feel so right. They always seem to have the right answer. They help us justify lazy decisions. They give us such wonderful opportunities to prejudge our audience — specifically, how they define themselves and what they want to hear, see or read — based on a few scant details. Yet by themselves, demographics can never be accountable for anything because they’re based on correlation, not causality.
Marketers, and the advertising platforms that prey on them, need to look beyond the logistics of ad placement and stop thinking of “targeting” as a one-way, two-dimensional process. Demographics are important, but without the context of psychographics [define], they’re quite often useless. To paraphrase Mark Twain, to a media buyer armed with vague demographic data, everyone looks like a target.
I wonder where and how these ads would have been placed had they planned the campaign with personas.
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Written by:Robert Gorell
Study: Brand Erosion Caused By E-Commerce Friction
The new “Ouch Point” survey from the Opinion Research Corporation suggests that U.S. e-commerce websites are still — believe it or not — frustrating shoppers.
As first reported by Direct Magazine, the survey found that…
- 19% dislike learning an item was back-ordered or out of stock after said item was placed in a shopping cart
- 14% are frustrated by Web sites that malfunction as payment is being processed
- 8% are confounded by unclear return policies
- 6% don’t like unclear shipping information
- 6% dislike not getting an acknowledgment after an order has been placed
Adding another dimension to these numbers, Jack Loechner at MediaPost explains that:
. . . iCongo, Inc., released the results of a consumer survey conducted by Harris Interactive that reveals [that] 33 percent of online U.S. adults indicated they are more likely to shop online rather than in-person at a store due to the high price of gasoline.
If there were ever a time to optimize your e-commerce website, it’s now.
What else causes friction? Read FutureNow’s 2007 Retail Customer Experience Survey for answers.
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Join FutureNow’s Bryan Eisenberg on June 3rd in New York City for the Call to Action seminar. Based on his bestselling book of the same title, Bryan will show you how to improve conversion and brand affinity by reducing friction for the customer.
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Written by:Robert Gorell
Website Optimization vs. Redesign: The UFO Metaphor
Who would throw away a perfectly good UFO house?
That’s exactly what happened in Taiwan more than 20 years ago, as you can see from these Flickr photos.
Wow. An entire resort filled with UFO-style houses.
Abandoned.
Seeing this made me think of the websites that are abandoned each day, each quarter, by businesses that decide they need to redesign instead of enduring the less glamorous process of website optimization.
According to one blog, there are a several rumors as to why the “UFO house” resort in Sanjhih was abandoned. One story suggests that someone was killed there and the resort is haunted. Another is that the Taiwanese government outlawed bathing beaches in the area. But the most believable explanation is that the design was impractical; the resort is in a remote, windy area near the sea, and if the houses are indeed made of fiberglass as it appears, it would get incredibly hot in the summertime.
Form without function is art, not business.
In August of last year, Internet Retailer’s Form and Function survey of “243 chain retailers, catalog companies, virtual merchants and consumer brand manufacturers,” and found that…
60.3% . . . have redesigned their e-commerce sites in the past year, including 20.1% in the past three months and 14.3% within six months. Of the retailers planning to overhaul the look of their web sites, 74.7% expect to do so within 12 months and 28.6% within 90 days.
[…] “The pace of web site design is brisk because more retailers know that having an attractive site that makes it easy to find merchandise and make a purchase is a competitive advantage,” says Joey Lechtner, director of e-marketing services for Fry Inc., an Ann Arbor, Mich., web site design and e-commerce development company. “Retailers ‘keep up with the Jones’ [sic] and if their competitor redesigns a site, they notice and take action.”
A costly redesign? Just to keep up with the neighbors? What if these earthlings — these so-called “Joneses” — take their design cues from outer space? Sure, there are times when a website redesign makes sense, but if you plan it with human visitors in mind in the first place, redesigning each year would seem crazy.
And let’s face it. Maybe you don’t need a redesign. Maybe you just need to recognize that you’ve built a cool-looking-yet-impractical UFO house that would be fine if you just painted it white and installed solar panels, reflective glass and an air conditioner.
That’s my website optimization metaphor and I’m sticking to it. For now.
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Written by:Robert Gorell
Win Tickets to the IMC Mobile Marketing Conference
If you’ll be in New York City on June 4th — or looking for an excuse to visit — here’s your chance.
The IMC Mobile Marketing conference, in addition to offering a 20% discount to all GrokDotCom readers (click here for details), is letting us give away three free tickets to their event.
How To Enter
All you need to do is leave a question — not a comment — below that addresses a common or interesting concern about mobile marketing.
Be specific. The more detail you give, the better our chances of giving you a clear answer.
The three most interesting questions (according to Bryan and me) win. It’s that simple!
Who Should Enter
Anyone reading this who wants to learn more about mobile marketing; especially those who read GrokDotCom often but don’t comment. We’re setting one of the free tickets aside for a first-time commenter, so don’t be shy!
Why You Should Bother
Because EVERYONE’S questions will be answered. That’s right. Even if you don’t win, we will have mobile marketing experts (from the conference and others) answer your questions. Besides, your odds of winning free tickets are pretty darn good.
How You’ll Know if You’ve Won
We will email you. We’ll also announce the winners next Monday in a new post.
Good luck, and may the best questions win!
UPDATE: Thanks for the great questions, everyone! The winners have been announced. So, if you have already left a question below, we will get your question answered in upcoming posts as soon as possible.
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Editor’s Note: Happening in the same hotel, the two days prior, June 2nd and 3rd respectively, FutureNow’s Persuasive Online Copywriting and Call to Action seminars give you even more profitable excuses to visit New York.
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Written by:Robert Gorell
