Martha Fires the Donald

posted by hal…
In today’s Media Daily News, Randy Siegel takes us on an imaginary journey through the next ten years of media and technology – Exxon meges with Yahoo, Google buys South Carolina and ABC’s “Desperate Grandmas” debuts to top ratings.

Of course, none of this would be funny if it didn’t have a whiff of truth. It points to the triumph of managers over people who actually make things and highlights our slow cultural drift toward blandness and comformity. Here’s the link – Headlines from The Next 10 Years of Media & Technology

Less Is More

by greg…….
Following up on my comment yesterday that “today’s consumers are so inundated with choices that they are looking for a reason to reject an option and move on rather than making an active decision,” I have some quantitative evidence in support.

The Marketing Experiments Journal has an article out today that concludes “emails offering one service compared to emails offering a choice of services bring higher conversions.” Their findings, they observe, aren’t surprising given that a website landing page which focuses on a single product or service will almost always do better than a similar page which tries to sell multiple products or services, and in their test the email with 1 free offer outperformed the email with 4 free offers in sales conversion rate by 464 percent.

Here’s the link to the article as published on iMedia Connect

And if you have a chance, check out MarketingExperiments.com – it’s a performance-based online marketing gold mine!

Customer Service as Marketing

posted by Greg.

Is customer service direct response marketing? Not exactly, but good customer service, like good direct marketing, leaves a direct impression, good and bad.

In this day of hyper competition for customers’ attention, good customer service is a must. It doesn’t even have to be outstanding, just above average, since most customer experiences are forgettable, at best. In fact, today’s consumers are so inundated with choices that they are actually looking for a reason to reject an option and move on rather than making an active decision.

Case in point. We just ordered a brand new computer from an online retailer. It didn’t work out of the box, but instead of replacing it with a new one, no questions asked, we have to ship the original back whereupon a technician will examine it, and if repairs need to be made, etc., etc. Meanwhile, we need this computer NOW so that we can serve our customers. Sure it may cost the computer retailer more money in the short term to replace it, but in the words of our purchasing agent, “they clearly don’t want repeat business.” You can do the math.

Contrast that with a password I needed in order to unlock a free .pdf white paper I received as part of attending a conference. I was supposed to already have the password, but I didn’t, and asked if it could be provided. Not one, but two separate people promptly addressed my inquiry, and one even left me a voicemail as a backup in addition to a separate email she sent. I thought this reaction, given the relative insignificant value of the transaction, to be a little surprising. But it was a pleasant surprise.

There is no question which company I had the better direct response with.