I’ve mentioned it before but today is the actual launch of the Email Standards Project. Why is this important? Well this page explains it all. It’s just as important that marketeers can deliver their message consistently as it is for (potential) customers to be able to read and view the messages they want to read after they’ve given their permission to be contacted.
Tag Archive for 'marketing'
In a recent BBC horizon programme, Professor Lesley Regan, looked to create her ideal beauty cabinet. The programme featured prominently (in the interest of science you understand) a particular product from Boots, No7 Protect & Perfect Beauty Serum. On the Boots website this product now varies between being sold out and customers only being able to buy one, even though it’s 3 for 2 on the home page. This stuff has become like gold dust even though the programme aired nearly a month ago.
Yesterday my wife’s friend called her to tell her she was on her way to the local Boots because they’d called her to tell her it was in stock but to be quick! I’m not sure if they got any that way but later we moved onto ebay where there seems a healthy trade selling the product around 50% above the retail price. Meanwhile stock levels are so low they’re advertising the fact and customers are being steered towards other similar products one of which is also at a limited stock level.
All of this without TV advertising (not counting the horizon TV programme of course) selling a £16.75 product by word of mouth with a buzz through mothers who meet at a local primary school every morning. They all have permission to talk to each other and be influenced by each other, which is why many of them wear crocs as well. They all have permission to have a conversation and although television creates a subject for the conversation, tv advertising seems not to unless it really stands out and I can only think of a couple that do at the moment. Conversations like these with implicit permission happen all the time and if I wanted to sell a product or service this is where I would start, the virus might be slower to spread but I suspect it would have a longer lasting effect.
I love (especially today) Ikea’s idea of selling someone a kitchen through a valentine’s email. A bit of lateral thinking, a bit of effort with some recipes, a rich red kitchen and a couple of steamy robots and there you go. So much email marketing is uninspirational and has so little effort or thought applied to it it’s good to see something well thougt through and a link to a site that has a greate deal to hold the interest. Plus it arrived just before lunchtime so the food angle strikes home straightaway.
Food is the music of love after all, or is that the other way round?
Despite the promises last week of impending greeness Marks & Spencer this email tells us, extols even the benefits of buying flowers from foreign climes. Why buy? it says, because these roses are from Columbia and Kenya! The first bullet point on the M&S press release states a very worthy aim “to become carbon neutral”. This is not the way to do it. I realise of course they’ve already bought the flowers but customers do notice these things you know.
Etsy is opening it’s doors in Brooklyn (bit too far for me for a few months) on 1st Feb. So that’s a Web 2.0 business with a huge global community opening a bricks & mortar store, is this High St 2.0, (I know that’s a bit clumsy at the moment but it might just work), is this the reinvigoration of the High Street or is it the Internet killing the High Street or is it just a business using another channel to market? Hopefully we’ll be off to NY soon for a poke around so that’s one definitely worth a look.
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