So I went into this panel expecting to discover the holy grail of what the hell people should have in mind for mobile strategy, what can be done, what will be able to be done etc. Sorry to let you know that there is not a magic bullet or an answer. It was all over the board in regard to camps of thought around what you SHOULD do and HOW you should do it.
First you should know I love Zappos.com. When you lead with a tag line of “Powered by Service” and you deliver on service so ridiculously that it sometimes makes me laugh when we order a pair of shoes and they are there the next afternoon (no request for overnight shipping). Really this model is driving them over the top. BUT what have they learned that we cannot only learn from for Ecom business, but for for web service levels and branding?
From the Speech:
1200 brands, 200,000 styles, over 900,000 UPCs.
4 million items in warehouse
100% of products inventoried, no drop ship
7.5 million purchasing customers (2.5% of US Pop)
3.3 have purchased in last 12 months
75% pf purchases are return customers
Repeat customers have higher order size
$111 in first time order - to 143 in returning customer average in Q4 2007
On the way to break the billion dollar mark in sales.
OpenID is a web standard that is growing fast in the past few months. It has been around since 2005 but now the giants like Google, MSN, Yahoo. IBM, and others are joining up. I talked to Scott Kveton of the OpenID board and Luke Sontag at Vidoop (side note: they just opened a Portland office) to see what impact it could have on lead capture for businesses at SXSW.
My initial thoughts were that it would hurt lead capture on sites and slow the ability to capture data on visitors, leads and customers. If the process lives outside of the site with a 2nd and 3rd party hosting the data on an individual, how would you your your brand grow a list?
Not sure how many of you are using widgets for your brands or clients, or are even using them yourself. (note, they rock) but it caught my eye, and of course I installed it, that GQ in a recent email launched a widget. Notice that the email is on point, clear, and not loaded with anything else you need to think about. Just click and load. Easy as pie (wTF does that mean by the way, I can cook, and pie is not fun).
Point being, they have now taken me to a new reach system that they can push content or I can :pull: content as I want it. These are fairly easy to create and you can leverage content in RSS or XML or even MAT RSS (Media loaded RSS for audio and video). HBO audio intro each time it loads. Sonic branding through a widget … great idea.
Is your company or brand ready for a widget? Could you measure it? Could you find a way to use it? Well maybe, but most importantly would your customers or prospects use it. Engagement metrics would help justify this as opposed to sales/Click Through metrics here.
So today started out with some good panels and people that wanted to share. That is good as that I what I think this is all about.
BUT the best part of the day, so far, is the interview of facebook’s founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerber, by Sarah Lacy, author, BusinessWeek columist and co-host of Yahoo Finance’s “TeckTicker”. The interview was rolling along for about 1/2 and was fairly boring. Not all the fault of Lacy as he seems hard to pull real long answers out of, unless you are asking him about conversation and communication. The best part was when the audience took control of the interview, well with the help of Zuckerberg, He basically started the downward, or upward spiral in my opinion, by asking Sarah if she was asking him a question. She was very conversational, but often times would state the answers first and then ask him to expand on her answer to her question.
The Crowd took control then. She did not help herself anymore from that point on. She statd something to the likes of “Guys don’t you know my job is really hard, Jesus!” And then things like “Why don’t you all email me afterwards and tell me where I went wrong on this interview and tell me why I suck.” She blew it. She could have really channeled the energy of the crowd to capitalize on the reactions, but I think instead she got really pissed and started just saying things like “yep, uh huh, right” instead of getting back on her horse.
The crowd then started asking questions and it turned out well. The hook to this around email marketing is that Mark Zuckerberg stated that facebook was NEVER set up to be or replace email. That is why the “inbox” of facebook is so simple. So for all of you that keep talking about how these social media sites are replacing email, not so much. At least not yet as they have so many other things to tackle he stated. Launching in French tonight, did german, spanish and looking at other languages.
I am sure that there is so much more about this on the blogosphere in greater depth that I covered.
Off to next panel with CEO of Deep Focus and lots of film bloggers.
So a quick overview. We have been hitting all sorts of great panels. Some better than others. Some have been rather motivating, others have been informational, and a few a little soft. But overall there is a huge crowd here of people from all industries learning and interacting with one another. I have been blogging some and will possibly share them later this week when I get a chance to clean them up.
A few email service providers here, which was a little surprise to me, and some of them look to have pulled out the marketing dollar stops with neck hangers, stickers, postcards, 1-sheeters, and more. Will need to swing by the exhibit floor sunday when it opens.
Some of the people I have met on Day One have been very interesting. Some have been partners or clients, and still others are just Twitter friends from PDX. Love seeing all of them.
Had a chance to hit the bloghaus towards the end of the day. It was a hidden PACKED room of bloggers from all over typing away, swilling beer and blogging. Interesting as one of the people there was a rock accordion player that was playing classic rock and singing. He should stick to just playing music. But it was different and entertaining.
Came back to drop off the goods accumulated from the day, sort through the trash, post this and then off to Dorkbot (a performance and beer drinking opp - yes there is a repeated theme here) and then off to Ave A/RXRFish, Google, 16 Bit and frogdesign event. Should be a good night. Only worried about this daylight savings thing going to happen tonight. I predict that it is going to throw a wrench in a few people’s works.
I love getting emails from people showing me them wearing the Tshirts we made for the Bloggers Unite panel at the eec Conf in San Diego in Feb. Makes me happy that I made a 100 of them for everyone.
Funny as I am still getting emails from people asking for them. Might need to make another run here soon as I am out. Gave my own to a guy they call SCO at Exact Target, it was REALLY the one off my back from the panel. Hope you are enjoying it SCO.
If you have one and read this blog, send me your photo in it at dylan AT eroi.com.
Cheers.
So if you are still on the fence about Twitter, below is a video to help you understand it more. But just to throw you a curve ball, I want you to also look at www.shifd.com and www.pownce.com. Both very cool and all three serve similar and different means. Just wish I could MASH these three up.
Besides the fact that I lead strategy across all product lines at eROI and not just on the email side, I am constantly looking at what is going on across the marketplace. I look for email marketing disrupters. You should too. So many technologies hammering customers during the day. It is not just an IM/Email/RSS world now. It is an always on, uber connected, new new new, info overload world. And we all absolutely love it.
Hoping to find some great new ideas and tech at SXSW this weekend. If you are there, twitter me at twitter.com/dtboyd
Greatest thing about Tech, I just posted this blog post from the runway of PDX on the way to Austin. Imagine that one…. Place, time and technology shifting.
The Guys at CommonCraft do some of the best new media video. This one is about Twitter.
Well not that I found the golden arrow, but I did stumble upon a Yahoo Corp email blog. Sheds some light on things and more importantly on changes and feature sets in Yahoo Mail. We have seen over the past 2 years email delays from Yahoo from 20 minutes to 2 days at times. And we are not just talking about delays with email campaigns sent from emailROI. We are talking about delays from personal email accounts to other users in Yahoo, Gmail and MSN, and even corp email clients.
Delays with email are frustrating not only from a campaign site, but also from a personal communications standpoint.
We use our ReturnPath account to test ISP deliverability daily by auditing not only our IP addresses but also the delivery of seeds to client campaigns. It is always shocking to see US based Yahoo clients have long delays.
Anyone else seeing this from time to time?
Interesting story today on TechCrunch about how some of these people cannot keep up with their email communications. I know that it is an issue. We rely on email more than any other application out there to communication to peers, clients, employees, loved ones, customers and prospects. So when you got a bunch of really smart people in a room and gave them 40 minutes to come up with a new life changing application, it was funny that they focused on inbox management.
I know many of us get between 200 and 500 emails a day. You can’t truly respond to all of them in real time, some take thought and answers. I have told you before that I have a rule in my management style where I try to get down to under 40 emails in my inbox by the end of every day. Somedays I win, somedays I lose this battle.
But read on to see how they decided to solve this problem. Would this actually help us as email marketers, wait we already have tracking on reads, clicks, conversions. Just on on a standard email format….
I wonder sometimes about motivators for email marketers and shoppers. So many ecommerce stores offer free shipping on orders when they hit X dollar amount, so why would free shipping be such a draw? I mean our family shops at Zappos all the time for the kids as shipping is not even a consideration or driver. Actually it is the reverse by the fact that they never charge to ship, have it there usually in 1-2 days, and then allow you to return it gratis. That is a winning combination to me.
But then again there are not any Zappos retail stores, so it is built into the business model. But with Diesel they have a few stores and some retailers that carry the product, so maybe the great leveler to them is the free shipping idea. To me it is not motivating me to click through as much as an offer to get free shipping when you spend X. Maybe it is just me but when shirts are $80-$90 I think that they should be leading with making me want to spend that much and not make the shipping an issue.
What do you think? Will we see shipping as a cost factor go away? Is it still a consideration or motivator to your shoppers? If it is to you, go ahead and use my code on this email….
With a brand that stands for luxury and excess I was surprised to see SilverJet using the newsletter as an opportunity to tell you how expensive the competing airlines are to them. Typically the costs I have seen for a flight on this airline are in line with others. So are they discounting now? Is that on brand or a warning flag that they are scrambling for flyers?
Take a look a the the right hand column to see how they call this out. I think it is actually a great and interesting idea, but not on brand with such a young company.
I have personally been watching them and looking for a reason to jump across the pond on SilverJet. If these prices stay I just might take the plunge.
What do you think about this tactic of calling out our competition’s pricing in your emails? Love to hear your thoughts. I mean I could talk about a reptile named ESP changing their pricing recently to be in line with the rest of the industry, but why would I do that DJ? Just glad you made the move.
So a few weeks back I posted about Nordstroms not listening nor using my subscription center preferences. Man, did my post work? Even from the ribbing I got from a few others out there about me and the women’s product emails I was getting from them, I was excited to get this email this week. Actually an email that was 85% targeted to the male demographic. Nice work guys!
As a tribute I got in my car today and dropped some cash at the retail store. (Yes not all purchases happen online - but email can drive the sale offline) Just my way of saying thanks for listening to me as a subscriber. Now I just hope that this does not revert back and it was just a fluke.
But the bigger picture here is that you NEED to listen to your subscribers if you have a preference center for email subscriptions. Whether is it frequency, content, etc, listen to what they tell you and make sure to drop targeted, relevant emails. It makes all the difference.
Keep up to date with new Case Studies being released by eROI monthly in our new Resource Center. Recently added studies cover the multiple award-winning Wacom PowerOfThePens.com Campaign, Building Customer Value, Q3 2007 Time Study, and a new Email Marketing Campaign Launch Sheet from our Strategy Team (good to keep handy as a check list in deploying your email campaigns without missing a step).
Enjoy the benefit of our new Resource Center with an intelligent profile system that helps you remember what resources you access.
Start Your Training as an Interactive Marketing “Zen Master” now
Once again we are on the road to OMMA. It is like a twice a year pilgrimage to a place that brings the interactive marketing world together in one place for 2 days. We are also, actually me, excited to be speaking at the email tracks again. I will be leading a panel this time around.
The title is: Email in 2008: One of your strongest media vehicles
The description is:
See how the market leaders are leveraging the power of email as the killer social networking app.
Driving interest, viral messaging and more, email is keeping costs down and sales high. Learn how to think beyond your standard media plan to incorporate email in new and exciting ways.
We have a great group of 4 panelists from different media and online backgrounds that are sure to make this a good learning experience. Sure if won’t be quite as fun as the email bloggers keynote I did back at the eec conference in San Diego last month, as I am out of t-shirts to throw out to the audience (speaking of I have 6 left if a few of you still wanted one, let me know by commenting - won’t publish them), but I am going to really try to take the topic level up a notch.
So if you are going to be at OMMA, come listen and participate in our panel event.
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