Eggblogg

Wish me luck!

With the New Year upon us it’s time for us to make our resolutions, and this year I’m going to stick to mine! Lose weight, stop smoking, quit drinking. Really, I am… I hope… Oh, who am I kidding?

However, my one steadfast resolution for 2008 is to become a regular blogger. I’ve been putting it off for long enough now and feel that this is as good a time as any; starting the New Year as I mean to go on. It may take me a while to find my blogging voice or start writing with clarity but I’m going to give it a whirl.

So, I wish you all the best of luck with your New Year’s resolutions, whatever they may be, and if you have any blogging tips or words of encouragement I would be ever so grateful to hear from you.

Thanks and see you back here in the New Year.

Tis the season to be talking

Those of us lucky enough to be together with family and friends over the next week or so will no doubt be doing some of that good old human activity known as catching up. Finding out what's been going on in other people's lives, comparing notes, turning off for a short while from the daily treadmill. In other words, talking. You know. That stuff we used to do before texting, emailing and Facebooking took over.

And whether or not we mean to, many of us will be doing a bit of unpaid marketing. I've already done some today myself. My mother was impressed with the boxed gift that I'd received from my brother, delivered from M & S in time for Christmas. "That's a good idea!" The rest of the phone call consisted of me explaining how easy it was to order online, how you can have it giftwrapped ... the only thing I couldn't tell her was the price.

Marketers have long held positive 'word of mouth' to be the ultimate marketing tool. It's fabulously persuasive, it's authentic and it's free. But the negative variety is just as powerful, and word of mouth can't be controlled. In a similar way, the marketing potential of online social media has yet to be proven. Perhaps we need to put more energy into playing the game rather than controlling it.

Having said that, here's what Doug Meacham has to say about Participation Ethos as a Real Business Model ...

The pain of online shopping

Online shopping continues to grow - we recently learned that on Monday 10th December at 1.09pm, shoppers spent £767,500 on the internet in just 60 seconds. A new record.

These kinds of stats never surprise me, as for the past few years I've always preferred to shop online when possible. I seem to be a rare female - one who doesn't like shopping (the kind that involves traipsing round shops, getting annoyed by other shoppers and putting up with horrible service.)

Still, I wonder if, for some retail sectors at least, the worm may soon be turning. Consumers are becoming less patient with clunky websites - there's nothing like a session of grappling with poorly designed website search features to send a person scurrying back to the High Street.

And recently, my neighbour claimed that he no longer searched on the web for flight or hotel deals. He got so fed up with following links from search engine results, promising cheap deals, only to spend ages looking in vain for them on those uniformly dreadful travel booking portals.

Now he just calls his travel agent, who has all the contacts and does all the searching for him. Not only that, but he finds those elusive deals. Let's hear it for good old fashioned personal service!

Three 'quick wins' for your email marketing

At the recent E-Commerce Expo event, Sean Duffy of Emailcenter presented some timely reminders* about how attention to detail can make all the difference in email marketing. For example:

Using a personal 'from' name rather than the generic company name. When Toptable changed the 'from' name on their campaign from 'Toptable' to Alex - Toptable', opens increased by 5%. And when Corporate Direct inserted the individual client account manager's name into the 'from' field, it brought a massive 70% increase.

That particular statistic does sound quite exceptional, nevertheless this is something I'm taking on board and will be suggesting to some of my clients.

Reporting by domain. If you're experiencing deliverability issues it's worth checking to see whether it's ISP specific. Emailcenter gave the example where, thanks to a client's domain name being mistaken for a spammer, the bounce rate to Yahoo addresses was found to be 98%! But after a dialogue with Yahoo the problem was resolved.

This is one of the reasons it's worth working with a reputable UK email service provider - our own lovely partners at Sign-up.to, for example!

Taking a long term view, not per-email. I know I've said this before, but it's as true as ever. ResponsibleTravel.com identified the 45% of their list who hadn't opened an email in 6 months. See also Mark Brownlow on this topic.) They targeted just that group with a different subject line, and managed to re-engage 8% of them.

Getting permission to email people is a precious gift, so until they say they don't want to hear from you any more, surely it's worth trying to hang on to them?

* 10 quick wins for your email marketing (powerpoint slides) from Emailcenter UK.

Is there such a thing as respectful, respectable marketing?

I think so ...

Apparently, the latest release of TV series Futurama paints a grim picture of direct marketers as aliens interested only in fleecing gullible people out of their personal details (I wonder if the bad guys have English accents?)

The public's perception of your average marketer does seem to lie some where between the estate agent and the politician. Even some of my oldest friends express wonder that I could enjoy such a, well, down and dirty profession. Especially if I say I'm in email marketing (ah! you're one of those people who know how to get past the spam filters) or search engine optimisation (ah! the black art of getting Google to place you at the top)

There are certainly times when I'm ashamed to be a marketer, but I stick to my belief that it doesn't have to be that way. If you can't respect your audience you can't expect their respect.