Doing Words

iTunes Festival could be a triumph… of email marketing

// July 1st, 2011 // 0 Comments // Content, Marketing, Music

In my email inbox this morning was an invitation from Apple to watch a live music festival in London starting tonight, my time. The festival has been running since 2007 but it’s been gradually morphing from focusing on attending the live event towards leveraging Apple’s extraordinary distribution pipeline to deliver to a worldwide audience. This year I think they’ve cracked it.

Via a dedicated free live event app you’ll be able to watch the three nights of performances from 62 artists, live or on-demand, free. And we’re not talking B-list bands here either, there’s Paul Simon, Moby, Duran Duran and Coldplay (yes, I’m that old).

As in previous years, tickets will also be available to attend the festival if you’re in the UK, and they’ll be available only to contest winners.

Could this be bigger — and more profitable — than Glastonbury?

From today you can buy the latest album from each artist performing from iTunes Store or from the app and I’m guessing that’s part of the reason why artist management agree to the concept.

The other reason, and the reason why the festival is most interesting, is the email marketing opportunity. Here’s why:

How many people do you know these days who own an iPod, an iPad or an iPhone? Lots, right? It’s not a static number either, it’s still growing fast.

If they’ve ever used iTunes Store to buy music, TV, movies or apps, Apple has their email address, and unless they’ve opted out, their permission to send them weekly emails about content for sale in iTunes Store.

No big deal, right? Every online retailer and content publisher has an email database. But this is an email database unlike any other, since it now represents arguably the biggest and fastest-growing entertainment content marketing database the entertainment industry has ever seen. There’s an iPod Touch, iPad or iPhone in the bag of nearly every person on the train with you, in the pocket of nearly everyone jogging in the morning. There might be as many Android phones out there as iPhones, or Kindles as iPads, but add up iPhones, iPods and iPads? Big number.

The music industry created the commercial radio industry to market new content to consumers, but never knew who those consumers were, what they listened to, and where they were at. Then, MTV added a little granularity for marketers, was able to provide some logbook data on audience size, viewing habits and geo location.

Today, businesses as diverse as Amazon, CDBaby, MySpace and Facebook have a database of content customers they can market to via email, but with nothing like the detailed purchase and consumption data Apple has access to. And not only does Apple have the biggest database of entertainment content consumers, they also own the whole stack, from bringing major labels and artists together for an event, to reaching an enormous global market of music consumers via email, to actually selling and delivering and tracking the consumption of the end content.

Analysts studying Apple’s market performance look at profit per device shipped, app sales volume, and PC and handset market share. Does anybody know what the open rates are on emails from iTunes Store? What their click-thru rates are? Perhaps Apple’s biggest untapped and unvalued asset is the ability to reach more of the world’s music fans than any other media publisher?

iTunes: what a truly global retailer looks like (yes, even in Kazakhstan)

iTunes Festival is a big endeavour, and while Apple is the king of hardware, it doesn’t yet have enough entertainment content culture in its DNA, so along the way there have been mistakes made, goals reached for but unmet, and lessons learned.

But Apple is also the king of execution — it learns perhaps better than any other major brand. This year you can watch the whole event from your iDevice of choice instead of on YouTube, and for the first time, you can watch in HD on a TV equipped with an AppleTV using AirPlay.

The world’s number one retailer of music is on the cusp of becoming the next MTV and the next Glastonbury, all rolled into one. Like, wow.

From Zurb: Lessons from marketing Verify

// December 8th, 2010 // 0 Comments // Conversion, Marketing

I got to know Dmitry Dragilev, the frenetically productive marketing guy at Zurb after giving the company some feedback about an early version of their conversion testing tool for online marketers, Verify.

Dmitry’s gone to extraordinarily lengths to detail every lesson learned from setting up to launch, launch and post-launch marketing activity in this very detailed post: Lessons from marketing Verify. If you’re a startup marketer and you have 30mins at lunch today to read it, this is well worth your time.

How do ideas spread via social media?

// October 28th, 2010 // 0 Comments // Marketing, Social Media

Seth Godin lists 20 reasons why people might want to spread your message. very few of them involve anything that traditional advertising offers its audience:

See Seth’s 20 other reasons why ideas spread here.

Twitter and Facebook: millions of tiny broadcast audiences

// July 2nd, 2010 // 0 Comments // Marketing, Social Media

They’re showing how little they understand when they say they want to add a follow button to the order confirmation page in their shopping cart. Look, knock yourself out, it can’t hurt, but i would expect a 0.0001% clickthru rate on that. It’s not like many of us start following companies we buy from at most once a year, especially when it’s just a retailer of products made by other companies.

Offering useful advice, however, in a friendly, conversational tone — that might well get you some followers. Can you find a way to advise customers on using the product or service they’re considering buying? Can you offer advice on the decisions made before purchase or even on the industry as a whole?

Besides, in 12mths time average Australian Twitter users will probably have 500+ people they follow on average, so for brands, being followed by a customer won’t mean that customer’s seen your message. Lifestream marketing messages are ephemeral things. There’s no way for the marketer to determine an equivalent to impressions/month. It’s like radio or TV — broadcast. Without panel research or clickthru data to show it’s been acted on, we have no idea whether it’s been seen.

Think of Facebook, Twitter and anything that displays a stream of updates as a form of broadcast media, but an unusually fractured kind. On TV, every audience member’s viewing habits are different; on lifestream media, it’s not just their viewing habits but the programming that is different, according to the number and nature of things they follow.

People ask me how I keep up to date with all the tweets I get from the 1,000+ people and brands I follow. I tell them I don’t — but that’s not the point — by following 1,000+ people I ensure that there’s always something interesting to read whenever I have time for Twitter.

(This post was my first from an iPad. Another device further dividing attention into smaller chunks. I’ll tidy it up later, promise!)

Sourcebottle helped get my business on the radio

// March 11th, 2010 // 0 Comments // Marketing, Media relations

Back when Moses was a boy and milk came in bottles with cream on top, I worked in PR. Yuck! It’s taken me decades to work off the bad karma I built up by bothering people who don’t want to be bothered, about stuff they don’t want to be bothered about.

It can be a very inefficient way of communicating because you have to bother a lot of people before you find one person who is interested in what you have to say, still more to find someone who might get you some media coverage on it. PR can be expensive and time-consuming as a result, putting it out of reach of very small businesspeople like myself.

No more. I’ve been a Sourcebottle.com.au user for a couple of months (it’s free to join) and yesterday it paid off for me with a free, highly-targeted and efficiently unearthed PR opportunity for my tiny Milkooler.com business, which could never afford traditional PR services.

Sourcebottle makes the connection between media and marketer so much more efficient

It happened like this: a radio station on Queensland’s Gold Coast put out a request on Sourcebottle for products to be used by a promotional street team (they drive around in a branded truck, get people trialling new products, and broadcast their impressions near-live, on-air.)

Every day I get an email from Sourcebottle listing the new requests they’ve received from radio stations, magazines, newspapers, freelancers, bloggers and event organisers. I saw the request for promotional products for the radio station street team and filled in a response form. In half an hour I had a reply from the street team coordinator, with a postal address and contact details so I could send her a box of Milkoolers.

Too easy.

In Ye Olden Days of public relations I would have had to find a list of contacts in radio stations, send out a press release about Milkoolers, call to follow up each station, and hopefully, someone at one of those stations might want to take some Milkoolers and make some air time with them — a costly waste of everybody’s time.

In Ye Modern Days, I’ve scored myself some free airtime on a good regional radio network for the cost of answering an email and walking an ExpressPost bag up to the mailbox.

The only thing lacking from Sourcebottle now is a way of tying the media coverage back to the opportunity. Some kind of premium service, perhaps in conjunction with an existing media monitoring company, that uses the fact Sourcebottle knows to look out for a particular kind of coverage in a particular medium, during a known period of time. That would be very efficient indeed.

Thanks Sourcebottle.

My hunch says: don’t block people who follow you on Twitter

// March 11th, 2010 // 0 Comments // Customer relationships, Marketing, Social Media, Social Media

If you use Twitter as part of your personal or company marketing, Frances over at Edublog asks interesting questions: when potential contacts are researching you on Twitter, will they judge you by the people who follow you? Should you therefore invest time in checking your follower lists and blocking the spammers, scammers and pornbots following you? Does it reflect poorly on you if they are there?

First, my usual word of warning: nobody really knows yet.

No matter how impressive the social media guru or digital strategy expert, this is still shortly-after-dawn in the Age of Social Media and nobody really knows anything for certain yet. Social Media was born as a means of subversive online communication — it only recently and reluctantly began to bend to the will of marketers. The industry is still developing the methodologies that will one day tell us for sure the answers to these big social media questions.

In the meantime (as Quasimodo said to the archdeacon) I have my hunches. Here they are.

Please don't judge him by his Twitter followers.

Relax, don’t do it

No, I don’t think a follower list full of spambots and pornbots reflects poorly on you. I don’t think you should prune your follower lists. I believe in most cases, people will not judge you by the calibre of people following you on Twitter.

If someone does judge you on the kinds of people who follow you on Twitter, it’ll vary greatly by age, industry and nationality. You won’t find the same standards applying in Paris as you do in Texas, or between tweens and seniors. Twitter is a very international community and there’s no easy way to track location or demographics of the people who view your Twitter profile unless they also choose to follow you.

So why worry about unmeasurable opinions of people you can’t identify?

There are more productive things you can be doing

For most of us, the investment required to curate our follower list will not equal whatever return we get from having a ‘clean’ follower list or the risk we take by not having a ‘clean’ follower list. (This may not be true for conservative politicians, church leaders and captains of industry.) I have 1,700 or so followers currently and I’m not even going to try to keep so many followers in line. The spambots and pornbots will eventually wither and die from neglect if Twitter’s own anti-abuse team don’t get to them first.

You won’t see me saying this often…

Let’s take a leaf from the pages of Old Media History. If you own a television set, TV networks can’t stop you watching their programming. There is no ‘block’ button on the control panel at your local TV station. Yet the demographic composition of a TV audience is essential to the success of a television when courting advertisers.

How do they change their audience composition? Through means much more subtle and yet even more effective than a ‘block follower’ button. They use programming changes to change the content being broadcast and when it is broadcast. And they use audience research to learn more about not just who their audience is, but what sort of content they need to offer in order to reach the audience they aspire to.

What is the Twitter equivalent of ‘programming changes’? Change what you say, change when you say it. Change what you reply to, and how rapidly you reply to it. Encourage interaction with the followers you aspire to have more of. Seek less interaction with pornbots. Respond less often to phishing scams. Please, for all our sakes!

‘Audience research’ on Twitter is not dissimilar to TV: time-consuming, inaccurate and prone to erroneous conclusions. But it’s still worth a try. Pick a follower who typifies your ideal audience. Take note of who they follow and what they reply to. Mimic. Repeat.

No undo

Remember, I’m making this up as I go along, based on what I observe every day and what I can find in my hunch bag, but here’s the big take-away: I am not a fan of the ‘block’ button. If you decide to block followers who your business contacts won’t approve of, what next?  because there’s no ‘undo’.

What if you’ve just blocked someone still finding their way around social media etiquette the hard way? What if that person might have become a valuable business contact or customer if you’d just given them another chance? Even if you keep following them after blocking them to see if they turn over a new leaf, you’ve sent them a message: you don’t want them following you. It’s a small thing to not follow someone, but a very large thing to not let them follow you. There’s no undo.

No wonder TV sets don’t have a ‘block viewer’ button.

Oh, Facebook, could you send me a more boring marketing email?

// November 18th, 2009 // 0 Comments // Marketing

I’ve been writing EDMs lately and that’s prompted a blog post or two on how to do it better.

This morning Facebook sends me what may be the least interesting EDM to land in my inbox in the past 12 months.

I know Facebook has some tight brand and interface guidelines, but it’s got to be hurting their EDM open rates.

The only reason I’d open this one is to lambast them on Doing Words!

Let’s count the sins they’ve committed…

The Apple Mail preview pane view of this email tells a story. And it's a long, boring story that nobody wants to read (but click the image to see a larger version).

(more…)

VirginBlue shows exactly how NOT to email your customers

// November 14th, 2009 // 0 Comments // Communication, Marketing, Writing

Wow, for a brand that I thought cared about its customer relationships, VirginBlue really messed up this week. Maybe Friday the 13th played a part and everybody wanted to squish the error in a hurry before the weekend began, but this episode was really worth thinking through a second time, even if it meant missing Friday night drinks at the VirginBlue watering hole. (more…)

Email marketing: ring a bell, get a food pellet.

// November 9th, 2009 // 0 Comments // Marketing, Writing

Email marketing can be tough. Your strategy and execution doesn’t have to be that bad for it to shut down communication with customers. Here’s how:

Every time you send an email to a customer, they can:

Open, read and respond to it;

Open and read it;

Delete it without reading it;

Unsubscribe from it; or

Flag it as spam.

You’d imagine that the consumer judges each new unread email from you independently of previous emails. But you’d be wrong.

The hidden gotcha with email marketing is the cumulative effect of response. A Pavlovian (or perhaps more accurately, Skinner-ian) effect in which customers will begin repeating the same response they had to your previous emails. (more…)

Businesses: just tell me where you are!

// October 30th, 2009 // 0 Comments // Ecommerce, Marketing

This Friday afternoon finds me googling for coffee machine retailers, and cursing at small business websites that bury their location information deep on an About or a Contact page. Each time, I’m reduced to shouting, “Just tell me where you are!” in frustration at discovering each promising-looking supplier is located a thousand, two thousand, even three thousand kilometers away. ARGH!

I’m googling because our Baby Gaggia coffee machine has been back for repairs once too many times and my caffeine levels are critically low, but mainly it’s because my searching highlights how crazy small business owners are if they don’t make their store location front-and-centre on their website.

Newsflash: just because you now have a website and might in theory be able to sell your product or service to customers worldwide, in practice, 98% of the time, you won’t. Building global sales was an early promise of the interweb that turned out to not be true, most of the time, for most businesses.

Your market is the people who can be bothered driving to your store. Your web presence is an important part of convincing them (a) that the drive will be worth it; and (b) your store is the only one they need drive to. No more than one in a hundred thousand online businesses will be the next Zappos.

Even large corporations selling intangible services (such as Yahoo! and Google) can confirm that selling is still best conducted face-to-face. Certainly, both Google and Yahoo! are often able to sell a global audience to marketers, but both companies must maintain local sales teams in each major market to service their advertising customers. They mostly sell their audiences to advertising customers within a taxi ride of their office.

So this afternoon, I’m yelling at the nine browser tabs I have open, each displaying a very nicely designed coffee retailer’s website. My local, Forsyth Coffee, would be the logical choice, and they sell a very nice Expobar Minore III at a good price. But they don’t keep it in stock and owner Rob is more than a little hazy when it comes to delivery and installation. It was meant to be here today, and when I rang him this afternoon he said he’d call them Monday. This could drag on another week. And. I. Need. A. Coffee. Machine. Like. Now. Rob has until end of Monday and then I’m cancelling my order. He’s an all-star roaster and he has my bean business for life but this machine thing just can’t go on.

Mind wandering. Let’s finish this blog post and then see if I can control this with a beer. Where was I? Yes: the supreme importance of LOCATION.

Very nice website design but WHERE ARE YOU LOCATED?

Here’s a beautiful website design for fivesensescoffee.com.au. Great visual elements, lots of personality and interest. They’re so cool they’re even offering free tickets to the most excellent Edge Of The Web conference as prizes to customers. And their SEO work has been good enough for them to appear in my first three Google search results.

But guess what? They’re in Western Australia. I could buy a coffee machine in Singapore and it would be closer and cost less to ship here. All of the machines they sell are available from other retailers in Sydney (if I go to the trouble of establishing which-of-the-bastards are located in Sydney, that is.)

How to help me find you

If you accept (and you better, because I’m scary right now) that most of your customers will be local and not global, there’s one very important thing you must, at a minimum, do: include your suburb and postal code (preferably your entire address) somewhere prominent on your homepage. You might also consider including it in the title and metatags of your home and other pages (though these days that makes somewhere between less-to-no of a difference.) You should definitely take the time to ensure your business and its location are listed on Google Local and any other online yellow/whitepages directories service your area (many of which will be free.)Google Local has a way to go in most markets before it really kicks butt, and Google needs to maintain an uneasy truce between it and its own competing paid search ads, but it’s well worth using, since it’s free, only takes a minute to create a listing, and even comes with some tidy reporting that associates impressions and clickthrus with the search terms used.

Almost nobody interacts with my Google Local listing. But at least I can see that (thumbs nose at Yellow Pages).

Added bonus: better conversion rates!

Wondering why your web business gets so many visitors and so few customers? Well, could that be because you’re attracting site visitors located several thousand kilometers away from your shop? Want to improve your visitor-to-customer conversion rates? I bet you could make a big dent in that just by including more location information on your homepage and making sure it appears in your business information on all the major search engines.

Enough rational thought. SOMEBODY BRING ME A BEER!