Marketing

Surprise marketing - turning a transaction into a relationship

When I picked up my car on leaving Vancouver’s Listel Hotel last week, I found a gift-wrapped package on the dashboard with a card on it wishing me a safe journey. Wrapped in purple crepe paper were two meal-sized chocolate-chip cookies. A fun treat on the run? Of course, but so much more. That simple gesture went a long way to assuaging my annoyance at paying $24 a night for parking. Rick Spence, Surprise marketing tactics endear

Today’s WhatIs.com word of the day is transactional marketing.  Most marketing is voodoo to me, but I sort of ‘get’ transactional marketing. It’s like Davies Hardware Store when I was a kid.  My mom and I would go in on a Saturday morning and the sales rep (who drove a school bus during the week) would come up and greet us and help us find what we needed. We paid and left.  Our whole relationship with Davies Hardware was right there at the point of transaction.

I like that. I miss that simplicity.

A few months back I ordered a sweatshirt at Lands End with a Guiding Eyes logo.  A few weeks after that I started getting emails about pet products and several catalogs in the mail clearly aimed at dog lovers.  I wasn’t just a customer, I was a target.

Clearly, I’m not just valuable to Lands End because I bought something, I’m valuable because my name and demographics and areas of interest can be sold.

Marketers wrap up all this nonsense under a nice-sounding label.  They call it ‘relationship marketing.’  Relationship marketing is supposed be all about customer retention.  The idea is that by gathering as much data as they can about you,  the company can serve you better.

Unfortunately there’s no real relationship in relationship marketing.  Lands End was not being helpful to anyone but themselves by passing my data on.

But there IS a marketing technique they could have used right there at the point of transaction that might have helped them to build a relationship with me and capture my customer loyalty.

It’s called surprise and delight marketing.

According to Joseph Ferrara,  the keys to a successful surprise and delight marketing effort are

• a genuine “no strings attached” giveaway
• value that exceeds expectation
• creativity
• giving at a time of immediate need
• providing an emotional positive experience (a wow response)
• making it personal

I’d also add “Given at the point of transaction.”

What if, instead of just sending me more dog catalogs, Lands End had targeted my order as “dog related” and included a dog biscuit with my Guiding Eyes logo’d sweatshirt?

Wouldn’t that have been cool? Not only would I have been surprised and delighted — I would have been way more forgiving that they passed my name on.

Overheard: Overlay ads beat out pre-roll ads for viewer’s attention

In a study released Thursday, Google and MediaVest used NeuroFocus findings to show that overlay ads appearing in YouTube videos grab consumers’ attention and boost brand awareness. Mark Walsh, Google: This Is Your Brain On Advertising

With revenue from YouTube ads falling short of company expectations at an estimated $200 million this year–mostly from display ads–the pressure grows to find new ways to monetize the Web’s largest video site.

I had to look up overlay ad.  They’re semi-transparent overlays that cover the bottom fifth of the screen and then disappear after 10 seconds. If you click the ad, a pop-up with a full commercial plays right in the main player. At the end of the commercial — or when you click the close icon — the original clip resumes playing.  Overlay ads come in two flavors, video and plain text.  If marketers were observing my brain waves, they’d see that my emotional response to such an ad was favorable.  Unlike a pre-roll ad, you don’t have to sit through a commercial to see the content.

Today’s word is neuromarketing.

Overheard: Why page views are important for lead generation

A better gauge of a Web entity’s user profile would be to look at the composition of PVs, because heavy users will drive PVs and tend to counteract the diluting impact on the core target that a UV metric can have. In December 2007, for example, Media Metrix reported that 62% of Unique Visitors to aarp.org were age 50+ (eligibility for AARP kicking in at age 50); but 77% of their Page Views were accounted for by persons 50+, and 79% of their total minutes. But there is another important reason to think in terms of pages when assessing a web entity’s audience make-up. Ads are distributed across pages, not UVs. The more pages one consumes, the more ads one is exposed to, and the more likely that consumer is to see your ad. If an advertiser runs a campaign on a site, the audience profile of the exposures to that campaign will tend to mirror the profile of the Page Views, not the Unique Visitors. In the AARP example above, then, let’s restate thusly: 62% of the aarp.com unique audience is comprised of persons 50+, but these persons see almost 80% of the ads. Josh Chasin, Where The Buys Are: Ads Live On Pages

Something else I want to remember that Tris Hussey wrote: Don’t look at a link away from your blog/web site as asking people to leave, think of it as building a larger network of people who will link to you.

Overheard: Top 10 ways to kill your server

Scalent Systems builds software that can take 1 or 1000 machines “From Dead Bare Metal to Live, Connected Servers in 5 Minutes or Less”. But we were sitting around on April Fools’ day thinking about how many ways we’ve heard of hardware dying… and we came up with our own interpretation.

Overheard: Your life is a cartoon

Microsoft is running another viral marketing campaign — this time they’re creating a comic strip about IT pros. The strip will run for six months and they’re inviting readers to send in story ideas. That’s right — you think up the situation and they’ll create the strip for it (if they chose your idea).

The HHH Comic Series is a daily web comic that adapts tech stories from actual IT Professionals and Developers - a web comic that reflects the real lives of IT Hero’s such as you. Every business day we will release a new episode driven from suggestions from the IT community. Make sure you sign up for the RSS feed so you can have it delivered straight to your RSS enabled inbox or favorite RSS client when a new episode has been released. And remember - We want you to help drive the story!

You can submit your story ideas here. I’m going to submit one about computing in the cloud.

Overheard: Forget CPM — the new buzzword is “performance management”

Performance management is the new battleground. And we’ve been saying that for six years, at least. There’s sort of a category collapse going on where CPM and BI, reporting, and analytics are kind of starting to merge. The lines are getting very grey and I think customers are broadly viewing all this stuff now as performance management. Rob Ashe, Working Under the IBM Umbrella

So…IBM buys Cognos, Oracle buys Hyperion and SAP buys Business Objects. Hmmm.

Overheard: Why marketers love virtual trade shows

Online marketers are fans of virtual events because it costs less and often results in more targeted leads. The virtual version of trade shows don’t usually completely replace regular trade shows but are a way to cut costs or add value. Perhaps the biggest advantage of a virtual trade show is that you can track what people at your event do. Janet Meiners, Trade Shows Go Virtual

Overheard: Microsoft is hot on viral marketing

Extreme Makeover–Server Room parody. I just wish it was funnier.

Overheard: Mommy, why does Microsoft want us to buy a server?

This children’s book parody is a viral promotion for the Windows Home Server campaign. The author, Tom O’Connor, and his PhD are bogus. The small print on the title page explains that he’s made up. Whoever did write this deserves credit, IMHO. Very clever. Yes, that’s me reading the book.

The campaign is indicative of unusual creative approaches by big advertisers as they seek to break through in cluttered categories like technology. Among the most popular are so-called viral campaigns, so named because they are intended to be passed from one computer user to another with an endorsement implied by such personal sharing.

Stuart Elliot, What Next, Having the Office Christmas Party at Home?

Overheard: Nano bad. Cleantech good.

The “nano” prefix has fallen out of favor. Names are changing again. And even Lux Research, which started out as a nanotech analyst firm, has rebranded itself with the latest trend: yes, “cleantech.” Nano bad. Cleantech good. Howard Lovy, False claims inform consumers as they ‘talk nano’