Author Archive
E-commerce Still Too Complicated For Most
I was catching up on my reading from last week and noticed this gem from eMarketer. In it they shared some data from the Pew Internet & American Life Project study in February 2008 on the positive and negative attitudes of online buyers by age.
One thing jumped right out: Across the board, the percentage of those surveyed who had negative things to say about shopping online was higher among older shoppers, with one exception. Can you guess?
“Online shopping is still too complicated.” Unbelievable, huh? But it’s a sentiment evidently shared by 18 year olds and 65+ year olds equally.
To me, this just shows the opportunity that still exists in the e-commerce space. The burden is really up to us as marketers to understand who our visitors are and what they what to see in order to be comfortable purchasing. It’s a challenge that keeps me passionate about this space and I hope motivates you.
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Written by:Brian Bond
Dear Airline Industry, Being “Least Awful” Won’t Save You
Each day it seems there’s a new headline about the latest “amenity” for which an airline plans on charging us, which, of course, causes a ripple effect as every other airline chooses to follow suit with a justification that comes across as, “Well, now that Airline X doesn’t have to give you free water, neither do we.”
Correct me if I’m wrong, but doesn’t this sound like the opposite of the effects competition is supposed to create?
Like us, many of you are frequent fliers and are concerned about these trends. So when Jeff Eisenberg pointed out a site that highlights the fees associated with this growing phenomenon of sacrificing service to maintain pricing, I thought I’d share it with you.
For me, this illustrates a couple of things.
1.) We have surpassed the number of elements it takes to trigger over-choice behavior (aka “analysis paralysis”). Before, it was just price, departure/arrival times, and brand that influenced our flight-booking decision. Now, with so many other factors involved — multiple bags, bag surcharges, seating, drinking, and the (in my eyes) completely unforgivable “minimum stays” United just announced — has caused consumers to be put in the position of having to make a very complex decisions, which typically causes people not to choose*. The way I see it, the airline industry is headed right back to the time of the travel agent, paying someone to make sense of the mess.
Unless the travel sites can quickly adapt and easily incorporate these new elements to their functionality.
2.) The airline industry is devoid of real positive differentiation and unwilling to compete beyond price. As Jeffery pointed out in our conversation, airlines will become completely dependent on their ability to market being the “least awful.” One Philadelphia newspapers even launched a spoof of this concept last week with ads for a fake airline called Derrie-Air, which supposedly charges passengers by the pound. (Hat tip to the Influential Marketing Blog for spotting this.)
Normally I would say, “Market-capitalism to the rescue!” and insist that open competition will allow the fittest to prosper. But amid government subsidies and an apparent lack of interest by carriers to compete on something other than price, I’m skeptical this will right itself. So this is my open call to airline owners (yes, even Virgin Airlines) to reposition their fleets by differentiating themselves by meeting or exceeding customers’ wants, not just the bare minimum expectations we’ve grown accustom to by the current state of the airline industry at large.
My question to you, dear reader, is this: What ideas would you bring to bear on this problem? How would you change the company, product, or marketing to better meet the consumer’s needs, as well as the health of the industry?
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*From Barry Schwartz’s “The Paradox of Choice” presentation at TED.
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About the Author: Brian Bond is VP of Marketing and Product at FutureNow, Inc.
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Written by:Brian Bond
The Impact of Site Outages
Last week, the online world was jolted with something we all thought was impossible: Amazon.com went down.
Outages happen all the time, but there is a scale at which this becomes amazingly rare and the amount of time of the outage was surprising. 30 minutes to two hours doesn’t sound like a lot of time, but when you consider the scale of a business like Amazon.com, it has massive impact to the sales of the company. Advertising Age estimated that Amazon may have lost $1.8 Million, based on the company’s last quarterly earnings report.
Personally, I doubt it was that large — considering Amazon’s revenue mix and the date/time of the outage — but it was a sizable chunk of change. Then consider the collateral brand damage of taking down the sites of all the small businesses who decided to trust Amazon.com as their platform for launching their businesses. Try measuring the true impact of that hit.
The most chilling impact, though, is how much forward momentum was just wiped out for the company and the marketing team responsible for reaching their targets. How many of the hard-fought growth numbers for the period are just negated by technology failure.
This type of impact sneaks up on a company as it matures. It reminded me of an instance in my career, managing acquisition marketing for a large online subscription business. On a particularly high traffic day, the store went down and I was shocked when no one dropped everything to start fixing it.
The problem was scale. In the past, when the company was small, an outage like this wasn’t a big deal because they only lost a few sales. But as the company had grown (with the same people in the same roles), the scale and impact of such a problem was forgotten. It wasn’t until I brought management an estimation of the 5-6 figure number we were likely to lose because of the issue that the whips started cracking and the problem received the attention it deserved.
There are insights to be gained from both examples that any effective marketing team should put into practice:
1) Analytics and Tracking: Make sure you as marketers are watching the health of your site and ads. Most analytics packages have alerts for metrics. Build reports that allow you to see critical areas of your site in real time. For instance, I had a real time view of all the steps of our purchase funnels on my desk at all times and it saved the day a few times.
2) Marketers, understand the importance of building it right as well as fast. Sometimes we push developers too hard to deliver in tight time-frames and scalability and fail-safes are sometimes the first code to get cheated. Developers, empathize with your marketing team’s critical deadlines and don’t go overboard on scalability.
3) Understand, in real dollars, the impact outages have to the top and bottom lines and invest appropriately to protect your performance.
Sounds like something the dev team should do, right? Well, yes, but this is one area where two eyes are better than one and where healthy collaboration helps the entire enterprise.
And to Amazon.com, your recent outage sent the bookworm-like staff here at FutureNow into a raw panic, but we empathize with your recent pain and hope you’ve learned many powerful lessons from the issue.
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About the Author: Brian Bond is VP of Marketing and Product at FutureNow, Inc.
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Written by:Brian Bond
Persona Models Presentation at SMX West 2008
Last week, I had the privilege of speaking at Search Marketing Expo (SMX West) about using Persona Models in Search Marketing. It was a pleasure to share the dais with Gord Hotchkiss from Enquiro Research and Ian Lurie of Portent Interactive — both outstanding, smart people who gave great presentations.
Our presentations went over the high-level basics of creating personas and planning content that speaks directly to your personas. We had a full house for our session and I’ve received lots of insightful questions since from audience members. Overall, the feedback has been extremely positive. But what struck me most was the coming of age of the notion that personas ought to be an integral part of any online marketing plan.
This really excites me, to see people so open to a concept that Future Now has proved effective in almost every interaction. The sheer number of seminars about visitor behavior and the number of times I heard “persona” used in comments and questions suggested a bold new era for interactive marketing.
The rest of the conference was equally thought-provoking. I thought it showed a deeper level of thinking and debate than I’ve witnessed at past industry conferences. (Hats off to Danny Sullivan and the crew at Search Engine Land!)
If you’d like to see my presentation, here it is:
For more in-depth instruction on how to creating personas for your business, read Part 1 and Part 2 of Howard Kaplan’s series on “How to Get Started with Personas.”
If you’d like help planning your online content strategy with personas, contact us.
[Editor’s Note: Brian Bond is VP of Marketing and Product at Future Now.]
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Written by:Brian Bond
America’s Test Kitchen Shows How to Sizzle an Email
For years I’ve been a fan of the America’s Test Kitchen chefs and their magazine, Cook’s Illustrated. I’m a bit of a foodie — and a pragmatist — so I love that they give their audience no-nonsense, real world advice on how to cook. And even though they have a hit TV show, they continue to publish their Cook’s Illustrated in black-and-white and illustrated in order to reduce costs so that they don’t need to run ads in the magazine. They’re authentic and passionate, and that energy feeds the relationship with fans like me.
I’m a sucker for good, experience-based marketing; the kind that draws you into an experience with a product or service. So, what’s even more impressive to me than the magazine is that they have some of the best email marketing around.
In addition to their typical, retail product-based emails, there’s one thing I love more than anything about this company: Christopher Kimball’s newsletter. Kimball is the CEO/Editor-in-Chief and, in addition to being head of the company, he runs a family farm in a small town in Vermont. For as long as I’ve been a subscriber, Kimball’s newsletter has always had a welcoming, familiar tone, describing every detail about “what’s going down on the farm.” He talks about the harvest, funny happenings around his small town, updates on things the family has cooked, links to photos, and so on. Here’s an except from a summer update:
“Two weeks ago, our family and neighbors turned out to help get Jean’s hay in [links to photos], and our strawberry crop has been terrific. Adrienne will turn out at least a couple dozen jars of strawberry jam and probably a similar number of raspberry. The 23 rows of corn were better than “knee-high by the fourth of July,” and all the potatoes are doing well and are free of potato bugs, at least so far. I hope to start digging new potatoes out of the ground by early August, steaming them, and serving them with nothing more than salt, butter, and chives. Click here to see recent photos of the farm [links to photos]”
It’s a whole email of this rich commentary, interspersed with links for recipes on the Cook’s Illustrated site and updates on the filming of their weekly show on PBS. But here’s the thing: I’m absolutely compelled to read them. What’s more is that I completely look forward to taking a 15-minute break from city life to be transported to an environment that seems so alien to me, yet I’m allowed to experience it as a resident. I pour over each link and look at every photo, but more importantly — for them, anyway — I’m driven to read the recipes. Why? I’m curious and excited to learn what made the cobbler he and his wife served at the latest community event so amazing. And that’s the point. His words draw me into the experience and persuade me to interact with the brand and its products.
Knowing when it’s more effective for your copy to have personality and create an experience, versus cutting straight to the point, is crucial. It’s about showing your audience that you know them by anticipating their interests and needs. That’s what Kimball does so well, and it works.
Want to know how Kimball does it? If you’d like to craft authentic, engaging prose that turns visitors into customers, customers into fans, and fans into advocates, join us for our upcoming Persuasive Online Copywriting seminar in Orlando. (Sorry, kids, no coyotes and freshly-picked apples, but you might find a cartoon mouse or two.) If you can’t make it to Florida, perhaps you’d like to buy the Persuasive Online Copywriting e-book or simply subscribe to Future Now’s free newsletter instead.
[Editor’s Note: This is the first post from the latest addition to Future Now, our first-ever VP of Marketing, Bond… Brian Bond. It takes a brave soul to market the marketers, so if you’ve enjoyed the email soufflé, feel free to wave ‘hello’ in the comments. Welcome to the team, Brian!]
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Written by:Brian Bond
