Social marketing is a shiny new toy and almost everyone is wising up and getting involved, as they should. In fact, a rumor is spreading that the new Mac OS, Snow Leopard, is integrating Facebook addresses directly into its own address book app. There’s no question that social applications are becoming central to our online lives, and soon social apps will be a central part of the very operating systems we use. People are tweeting, flickring, and facebooking like mad, with…

...continue to read "Social Media Is Not the Message"

I love Nikon. My dad had a Nikon. I bought my first Nikon SLR (an F3) when I was in college and a couple of years ago my wife brought me into the digital DSLR world by buying me a Nikon D60 for Father’s day.  So it pains me to see a company I love make such critical mistakes.

Last night, I got an email from them on my Blackberry.  Like most people, I typically just delete promotional…

...continue to read "Nikon’s Email Marketing is Out of Focus"

I’m not gonna lie…what you’re about to read was inspired by a real-life online shopping experience.  I won’t mention the guilty site, but I’ll say they sell clothing and jewelry to young urbanites.

As I relate the following three eCommerce mishaps, be thinking about whether you can eradicate all of them from your business by the time the “Holiday Rush” hits. ALL are preventable, if you start today and take one item at a time.

Let’s start at the “precipitating event;” the spark…

...continue to read "3 Ways to Lose an Online Sale"

We marketers are very busy people. In today’s challenging economy, with its rapid digital pace and customers empowered like never before, the demands are never-ending. So, we love things that make our job easier. Or at least appear to.

According to one definition:

Marketing automation is the use of software to automate marketing processes such as customer segmentation, customer data integration (CDI), and campaign management. The use of marketing automation makes processes…

...continue to read "Beware Marketing Automation Without Data Clarification"

In the offline world, have you ever been chased by retail staff because you opted not to buy something at their store?

Never?

You mean no one has ever blocked the exit and said something like, “Hey, I saw you put that bottle of wine in your cart, why didn’t you buy it?”

It sounds funny until you realize that most online remarketing services offer to do exactly that to your website visitors.  They’ll pester them with e-mails, pop-ups, and phone calls should…

...continue to read "Can Bad Assumptions Lead to “Gorilla Marketing”?"

I am a big advocate for Clear. if you haven’t heard of it before, Clear is a high-tech card that gives you access to express security lines at airports across the country. Instead of inching along through airport security, you fly through in mere minutes. When you travel for business and have to wait in long security lines the cost of clear is a no brainer.

As soon as Clear had a lane at the Delta Terminal at JFK, I signed…

...continue to read "Let’s Not Be This “Clear” With Our Email Marketing"

According to a recent study by eROI, 18% of US e-mail marketers are not tracking the effectiveness of their email campaigns. According to them, the reason most marketers are not tracking site conversions is that did not know how (really?), while lack of time and budget were also listed as concerns.

The problem is larger than that. In another email marketing study in 2007 by Silverpop, it was found that many people’s email marketing sucked, and that there was poor messaging…

...continue to read "Are You Sending Emails in the Dark?"

According to copywriting legend Eugene Schwartz, a headline’s main job isn’t to sell; it’s to gain the readers attention and compel them to read the ad.  And this is sound advice, but the Internet also requires one other thing in today’s web 2.0 copy world… Step 1. Scent: Web copy adds the requirement of scent.  Your headlines and sub headlines have to assure visitors that they’re in the right place.  A compelling headline that doesn’t orient readers…

...continue to read "3-Steps for Writing (and testing) Great Headlines"

By now, many online retailers should be familiar with the abbreviation “RFM,” which stands for recency, frequency, and monetary value. For a refresher, here’s my explanation from 2002.

Over the past several columns, I’ve examined conversion rate basics. This week, we continue our study of the basics with an updated look at RFM.

Recency represents the number of days since the customer last completed the action you’re profiling. Frequency represents the number of times the customer has completed this action since the…

...continue to read "The Power of RFM"

This may be a sign of the times, but it’s not totally infrequent that a business will attempt to take advantage of a competitors demise – and there are classy and sleazy ways of going about it, right?

I received an email today from Staples.com. The subject line read “Will Office Depot closings affect you?” In the body of the email they lead off that “you can always count on Staples” and show what looks like the beginning of a press…

...continue to read "Sign-of-the-Times Marketing"