Looking for deals for this holiday season?  Well, Black Friday and Cyber Monday are the days to buy online.

Look for free shipping deals, special limited-time offers and exclusive product bundles.

My new company, kajeet, is joining in.  We've got free shipping running and if you buy a kids cell phone on Thanksgiving or Black Friday, be sure to use promo code "FRIDAY15" at checkout to get 15% off any cell phone.

Check out the selection of LG Rumor phones in Champagne, White, Blue and Green.  With no contracts and unlimited FREE parental controls and just $169.99, the Rumor at kajeet is a great deal.  With 15% off and free shipping, it's the can't miss wireless gift for the kid in your life this holiday season.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Bookmark to:

What's the value placed on a social media marketing campaign by the marketers that develop the campaign?  It's hard to tell, because one typically can't get access to the key metrics associated with the campaign, particularly sales attributed to the effort and ROI.

I was intrigued by a new social push by Sony Ericsson for the Z750a flip phone, created by their agency, Iris.  The campaign is titled "Bringing Purple Back."

Well, neither Sony Ericsson nor Iris would give me any objectives for the campaign.  Neither was any information or speculation found on unofficial Sony Ericsson blog sites about the campaign.

Being an inquisitive guy, I decided to use the crude but effective research technique of following the money to learn more.

Smart marketers tend to invest more dollars where volumes are high and margins are high, and less when the expected outcome is otherwise. 

I tend to think of Sony Ericsson as a fairly smart marketer, based on my hypothesis that they're focused on the consumer--they've got a great assortment of cell phones and get generally very good reviews for the products, which are eye-catching and (to my mind, anyway) competitive with anything out there.

So how much is Sony spending on the Bringing Purple Back campaign?  Not much.

Let's take a look at what I've found this morning:

1. Prizes of just $2,393.  Six lousy free cell phones and one grand prize of a $599 gift card, positioned as a free pair of designer shoes. (Why not a phone and a free year of AT&T service?  But I digress.)  No million dollar sweeps.  Not even a free phone a day.  Six over the course of a six week promotion.
2. Short promotion length.  Six weeks.  Unless something is absolutely crazily viral, it takes a couple of weeks at minimum to get a campaign off the ground.  By the time things are up and running, it's game over.  The excessively short time frame smells of a budget compromise.
3. PPC buys of $0.  Go to Google and Yahoo and try to search for "Sony Ericsson 750a".  While I don't expect the Bringing Purple Back website to pop, why no PPC spend?  (I tried a number of different KW searches including the obvious "Purple Cell Phone" and came up snake eyes.)

Say the agency fees for the planning and site were $300K.  Sony Ericsson spent over $88 million just a couple of years ago to sponsor the WTA women's tennis tour.  What do you think gets daily attention back at HQ?

In conclusion, I have to believe that either this social effort is either:

1. Not worth much to Sony Ericsson and given an appropriate amount of investment and care.
2. A botched effort, due to poor planning and low budget (see the PPC buy screw-up above).
3. A test.

If it's got the right amount of effort associated with it, given the expected ROI, then OK.  (I still have to believe that some PPC, particularly at the kickoff when you might get some search attempts, makes sense.)

If it's a botch, then I hope there's a good campaign debrief on the calendar for Sony Ericsson and Iris to review execution against objectives and so forth.

What do you think of the effort? Might it work?  Could purple be the new black?  Do you like the Z750a phone?

photo credit: Marco Gomes

Bookmark to:

Guy Kawasaki, who is one of my favorite regular blog reads and speakers, is the author of The Art of the Start, which is a quick and worthwhile read for anybody thinking about starting up their own company.

One of the 10 things you should do, according to his book, is "Make Mantra." I absolutely loved this, because it accurately describes what all truly innovative companies are doing and, more tellingly, what a lot of big companies are not doing.

I think that Papa John's has "Made Mantra" with their focus on making it easy for the customer to order.  They've sold over $1 billion of pizza via their online ordering tools.  According to the CNN article, it's just the start of likely dozens of new ways a Papa John's customer can order.

Now that's a mantra--make it easy to order.

So what are you doing to make it easy for your customer to buy more of your products?  Or more often? Or more efficiently?

Guy Kawasaki talking about "Make Mantra" is below.

photo credit: ronnie44052

Bookmark to:

Every once in a while, I get a great email from one of the many companies I do business with online. Today's great email is from ProFlowers and contains both an outstanding offer and some great strategic thinking.

Unbeknownst to me, ProFlowers suffered from some serious downtime yesterday. And with it getting close to Valentine's Day ordering season, that's a huge problem. The good news is that their website is fixed.

The better news is that I'm saving 15% off my wife's Valentine's Day flowers!

I'm a regular customer of ProFlowers and have been for years. The product is good, the pricing is (I assume) good and they make it their business to stay in touch with me with offers relevant to my gift-giving needs.

Today's email featuring the 15% discount was a surprise to me, as I wasn't on the website yesterday. The email also features a "forward to a friend" option that allows me to extend the discount to as many friends as I'd like.

So why is the potential cannibalization of full-price sales a good thing?

After all, ProFlowers should be able to tell that I never hit their site yesterday and wasn't impacted by the outage. And their CRM system should tell them that I'm pretty likely to buy from them anyway.

But this is a good idea for the following reasons:

1. It locks in the sale. I'm getting hit pretty regularly now with offers for Valentine's Day. This gives ProFlowers a chance at ensuring I buy from them (locking in 85% of the revenue) as opposed to 1-800 Flowers or any of the alternatives (yielding 0% of the revenue)
2. Generates word of mouth. Of in this case, word of blog. The email pass-alongs probably won't yield a lot of sales, nor will this blog post. However, at a very low CPA for the sales they generate (it's not $0 if you assign the revenue forgone to new customer acquisition, although I'm not sure how they're allocating the costs.)
3. Increases the size of the prospect database. As part of the process of passing along the email to friends, ProFlowers generates invaluable data that gives them new prospects to market to or, at the very least, adds data elements to the original recipient's data record.

I'm assuming that ProFlowers is running a series of tests on this email as well and is tracking the performance of people who actually were impacted by the outage, different discount amounts, landing page experiences, etc.

Summary and takeaways

1. Don't obsess about cannibalization. Test discounts and offer differences across channels, and don't let your desire to never cannibalize and sell everything for full price get in the way of a good offer. The caveat of course, is you need to do the math before you dream up a potentially revenue-impacting test.
2. Remember that pricing is fully transparent. If you put an offer out there, the world will know and tell their friends. Use transparency to your advantage to drive WOM whenever possible.
3. It's the offer. As the direct response saying goes, "if you want to dramatically improve your response, dramatically improve your offer."

Bookmark to:

A client recently asked me "who can tell me if my website is working well for me?"  My immediate response was "your customers and your browsers."  This, of course, triggered a conversation of how it was possible to talk to tens of thousands of (usually) anonymous visitors, collect their insights and then translate that to marketing improvements.

Prior to a large amount of advertising moving to the web, with the associated tracking and analytical capabilities, my response didn't make a lot of sense.  Unless you were the sole proprietor of a local general store or had massive resources to undertake a large amount of expensive primary research, it was really hard to figure out what exactly about your marketing was working for your customers and prospects.

Until the rise of web analytics, that is.

In my opinion, the best thing that's happened in the last several years for online marketers was when Google acquired Urchin software.  This event made it easy and free for marketers to analyze the results of their online marketing activities.  Sure, for large business or those with specialized needs, solutions such as Omniture might be better.  But the majority of businesses can do just fine with Google Analytics.

And now that Google Analytics was free, it became fairly simple to add another great product: Google Website Optimizer.  This product makes it easy even for a small company to undertake A/B or (provided the traffic is heavy enough) multivariate testing.

If you've found yourself in any meetings recently arguing the merits of "red vs. blue" or where to place a button on the website, ask your online marketing team if they're using Website Optimizer or any other systems, such as Optimost or Offermatica.

If not, get one of these installed now--life's too short to spend time arguing over the color of the sidebar, the placement of a button or the length of the copy on a website.  Especially when your customers will tell you exactly what makes them buy from you.  And when your internal back-and-forth will result in you making decisions that result in suboptimal ROI.

If you are using one of these optimization products and you're still having these meetings, then something else is wrong and you may not be using them correctly.

Trust me, your customers--when it comes to buying your products and services--are far smarter than you when it comes to landing page and website design.

I used to teach an internal class on direct response marketing and would show an example of three different online creatives, with the objective being to drive downloads of a software product.  When I asked a room full of 30+ people that probably contained over 400 years of marketing experience and probably 35 advanced degrees which creative delivered the best ROI, less than 25% picked the winning creative.  And even those folks couldn't tell me why they voted for that one.

Now imagine a multivariate test of a heavily-trafficked landing page, which results in several thousand "recipes."  Any chance your CEO picks the one that sells the best?  OK, maybe they hit it right once--blind dogs and acorns, after all.  But how about the nth time?  Not a chance.

So, let's say you're not using Website Optimizer or a similar product and maybe aren't too familiar with the products.  What to do now?

First, I suggest watching a quick (5 minutes or so) Google Website Optimizer overview.  Second, find an hour or so and watch this YouTube overview of the product, which goes into more detail about how to use the product for an A/B test.

Then, test something.  Run a simple A/B test of a couple of your landing pages.  Or maybe your registration pages.  It doesn't matter, as long as you get going.

Summary and takeaways

1. Don't guess--test.  If you don't empirically know why something works on your website, develop a hypothesis, design and test and know it.  Then, repeat.
2. Take advantage of free tools.  Like Google Analytics, Google Website Optimizer is free.  The only thing you pay for is your time and--by stopping the endless meetings and arguments and associated meetings--that's even free.
3. Build an organized testing plan.  You still can't test everything, unless you've got unbelievable amounts of traffic.  So definitely do use that experienced team to help prioritize the testing agenda

Bookmark to:

Today's example of online marketing waste, which probably went awry someplace in the 4% of process (see Focus on the Four in our featured article section), comes from Samsung in the form of a promotion for their new Blackjack II cellular phone, which is available to subscribers of AT&T's wireless network.

A couple of reasons why it's a good thing I received this promotion:

1. I'm an AT&T customer, meaning no worries about porting my number over or breaking contracts.
2. I used the Blackjack in the past, and Samsung knows that because I registered the phone and my email address with them.
3. I liked my Blackjack phone, although there's no way for Samsung to know this subjective piece of information.

Now, a couple of reasons why it's not a good thing I received this promotion.

1. I'm an AT&T customer, but am currently tied to a contract with my iPhone.
2. I used the Blackjack, but my usage of AT&T's services has gone up substantially since I switched to the iPhone.
3. I love my iPhone and AT&T probably can divine that by looking at my usage pattern with iPhone vs Blackjack.
4. AT&T and Samsung could have avoided reaching out to me by just thinking for a minute or two.

Something's clearly not in sync between Samsung and AT&T Wireless. The Samsung promotion leads to a very nice landing page and the "buy now" link took me right to a page where I could see the offer to upgrade to the Blackjack II. A simple login to my AT&T account, however, reveals the problems that I'm not eligible for an upgrade, etc. etc.

So what would I suggest Samsung do differently in the future?

• Segment. I'm sure Samsung did do a whole series of tests with different headlines, offers, creative and the usual to different target audiences. However, it looks as if they forgot to consider who absolutely wouldn't buy the product. My usage and purchase history of handsets for use with AT&T makes it pretty clear that while I'm possibly in the market for the next generation iPhone, I'm not going to go to the Blackjack, at least not now.
• Share data with your partner. Clearly, AT&T and affiliates sell a lot of Samsung product. I'm sure they've got a close relationship and one that should be able to--once you get your lawyers comfortable that you're on the up-and-up--allow them to merge the email address at a third party. And, at the very least, drop the email addresses of individuals that are not likely to respond, leaving only a small portion of names in as a test to confirm the hypothesis.

Your takeaway: As one of your up front questions when developing campaigns, ask yourself the simple question "who absolutely won't buy my product" and make sure you avoid marketing to them. And then to a clean test to confirm your hypothesis. Then either bank the improved ROI or (my preference) invest it into more big, needle-moving tests.

Bookmark to: