Friday, December 2, 2022
Uncommon Content: User experience should not be a joke, but it is
Uncommon Content: User experience should not be a joke, but it is: This post was just going to feature a joke, but it became slightly more complicated as a result of my search for a written account of it. ...
Monday, August 22, 2022
Mary Poppins' Guide to Gamified Marketing
“In every job that must be done, there is an element of fun. You find the fun and - SNAP - the job's a game.”
Those words of wisdom from Mary Poppins are backed by science that finds that when people are interested and engaged in a subject, they enjoy a shot of dopamine to the brain. Marketers can capitalize on that effect when utilizing gamification to engage customers and deliver a fun experience that associates warm and fuzzy feelings with a brand.
Home decor and shopping get gamified
Design Home: House Renovation is the name of the game. That offers an irresistible combination of video games and shopping.
Some of the pieces can be purchased virtually for the game alone. But the real big money would come through buying actual sofas, rugs, tables, etc. for one’s real life home. And that would be quite the payoff for the affiliated sellers and brands.
This is marketing that doesn’t feel like marketing because it draws the shopper in through active play. To get players even more motivated, it offers“Daily Design Challenges.” There is also a social aspect to it with voting on rooms and the possibility of borrowing from friends through the Facebook connection.
FOMO or an addictive component is also baked in with the possibility of advancing levels, gaining access to unlocked rewards, and the promise of discovery of “brands and trends,” as well as the “new pieces added every day.”
Generating excitement for new offerings
Building on brand loyalty is fundamental for sustained business. When you add in a crossover with another brand associated with play, you can add some fun to that fundamental strategy.
Adidas did that in partnering with LEGO for a range of products.
This past spring, when it introduced its Adidas Ultraboost DNA X Lego Plates shoes, priced at $200. While the collaboration alone generated buzz, LEGO pushed for even more engagement by sharing ideas for customizing the shoes on the “adults welcome” section of its site.
See 6 incredible ways to customize your LEGO® adidas Originals Superstar for ways sneaker collectors, designers, and just creative people who wish to share their passions on their feet found to use the shoes as a medium for imaginative arrangements. The idea is to inspire others to follow suit, engage more with the shoes and the possibilities inherent in connecting LEGO bricks.
Promoting products via virtual games
Speaking of LEGO and gamification, the brand aims to engage kids with a section of its site showcasing LLEGO® video games available for PC, PlayStation, Xbox, Nintendo Switch™ and other consoles.. Those are searchable by theme, which also leads to all related products.
For example, the Star Wars will direct you to the Rise of Skywalker game, where you could choose to be on the light or dark side. It also leads you to a view of the many LEGO characters and sets within the Star Wars universe. The same holds true for other themes for which there are many sets available.
LEGO also offers a range of apps, some of which are specifically designed to bridge the virtual game and the physical world. Among these offerings is what is called “EGO Hidden Side,” which promises live participation in a ghost story that can involve a number of players..
Playing the game of FOMO
For its 25th anniversary, Pokémon collaborated with OREO to Issue a limited-edition collectible cookie that generates FOMO. The 16 distinctive Pokémon designs are promoted as collectible, motivating customers to buy multiple packages to be sure they get them all.
The OREO site warned fans of the cookie or the game that only some the limited edition packages will have all 16 version inside. And to truly complete their collections, they will have to buy enough to even obtain the “super rare Mythical Pokémon.”
I Infusing new life into an old product
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| Mary Poppins using a magic snap to clean up the room |
Gamification elements like AR can also be used to revitalize interest in a product that is usually not front-and-center of a person’s cooking experience. Table salt is a good example of that.
Nearly all of us use some in cooking and baking but don’t think all that much about the brand involved. Morton Salt wanted to get their attention, particularly as more people were taking up cooking at home when not eating out during the pandemic.
To that end, the brand introduced an integrated marketing campaign across all channels combined with QR codes on labels to activate an AR experience. That idea was to give customers “several fun and educational ways” to engage with the brand.
You can see the short video about it here: https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1091572674646934
For a warning about how just jumping on the gaming bandwagon can backfire --as it did for Coke -- see Major Marketing Missteps from Adidas, M&M's, and Coke
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Wednesday, August 17, 2022
Sustainable Loyalty: Reaping the Rewards of Reduce, Reuse, Recycle
“It’s not easy being green,” a fact that Kermit has bemoaned. But for brands that do it well, it can foster greater customer loyalty.
Brands jump on the circularity bandwagon
Circularity is the name of the game of keeping products in use rather than throwing them out. For the clothing market that means avoiding the wastefulness of fast fashion in favor of clothing that endures for many uses and that applies sustainable practices in production and recycling.
The online consignment shop, thredUP, shifted the paradigm of thrift shopping from trawling through racks in-store to scrolling through options on your phone or PC. In addition to making buying pre-owned clothing that much more convenient, it branded it as not just economical but socially responsible, as it explained on a blog post:
Here’s the facts:
-Fashion will drain a quarter of the world’s carbon budget by 2050.
-26 billion pounds of textiles are dumped into global landfills each year.
-A single T-shirt takes 700 gallons of water to produce.
Here’s what we can do:
-Consume less.
-Reuse more.
-Choose used.
Over the years, thredUp has partnered with popular brands that gain a halo effect from participating in the resale market due to its green cred. Brands like Adidas are even using their partnership with it to launch their own Give Back initiative xclusively on their own branded app.
Clothing for a better future
One of the brands to embrace sustainable standards for clothing is Primark. In the Primark Cares section of its website, it details its commitment to reduce its carbon footprint in production and increase the longevity of its clothing.
As Primark explained in Love Your Clothes, Love Your World:
“When it comes to fashion, durability — how long a product lasts — really matters. It’s not just about getting better value for money by keeping your clothes longer, it’s about improving our impact on the planet so there’s less waste.”
For proof of progress, Primark said it would be working with WRAP and will follow a "’Target, Measure, Act’ approach, where businesses set targets, measure their impact and track progress, both on an individual basis and towards national targets” for the UK.
,Primark already uses recycled or sustainably sourced materials in 25% of its clothing lines. It has pledged to increase that to all its product lines by 2030.
The brand’s CEO, Paul Marchant was quoted i the ncorporate pledge,, saying. “ Our ambition is to offer customers the affordable prices they know and love us for, but with products that are made in a way that is better for the planet and the people who make them. We know that’s what our customers, and our colleagues, want and expect from us.”
Gaining by losing a million pounds
It’s not just the clothing industry that is concerned with going green. The beauty industry has also woken up to the imperative to reduce waste..
One way to make it happen is by cutting out unnecessary packaging. That’s what e.l.f. recently announced in sending out an email with the subject line, “e.l.f is committed to sustainability.”
It promised that it was shedding unnecessary waste in its packaging. “Say Goodbye to 1,000,000 Pounds of Packaging” was the way it phrased it, and it illustrated that point with an image and a gif.
There’s a double advantage to reducing excess waste from packaging. Of course, it generates less waste of paper and plastic. But also the lighter weight means greater efficiency in transportation and fuel consumption.
Finding new approaches to make clothing and beauty products more sustainable is a win-win. One win for the planet and another win for brand loyalty. That's why it’s a good bet that we will see many more brands communicating their pledges to improve their environmental impact.
Related:
Don't just aim for different
Visualizing the customer journey
What makes content marketing effective
What the Little Prince teaches us about marketing
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Wednesday, July 13, 2022
A is for Apple and APIs in the ABCs of BNPL
Digital technology and integrations between banks, fintech, and retailers are not just changing the how but when of payments. As a result, the way consumers pay for their purchases includes an increasingly popular option called buy now, pay later (BNPL).
Nearly every major retail store and site now offers customers the option to pay with a BNPL. The players in that space already include the Swedish fintech Klarna, as well as the US-based Sezzle and Affirm. The name behind many store credit cards, Synchrony, also has its offering, and now even bank-branded credit cards like Citi and Chase, as well as Amex, give their customers the option to use BNPL.
The space is heating up even more with Apple’s announcement that it would offer its own BNPL called Apple Pay Later through a subsidiary of the company that has obtained lending licenses.
Use of BNPL has exploded, accounting for $100 billion in retail purchases in 2021, up from $24 billion in 2020, as reported in Fintech Times. The forecast for the market indicates that the trend is here to stay. The global market for BNPL is expected to hit $3.98 trillion by 2030 with a CAGR of over 45%, starting from 2021, according to Allied Market Research.
Tuesday, June 7, 2022
Why You Should Allow Customers to Pause Marketing Messages
Glad to see major brands are taking my advice to enable customers to opt out of themed promotions.
Now that I'm on DoorDash's email list, it wants to use any and all occasions to market to me, including the upcoming holiday of Father's Day. But someone at the company realized that such messaging may not be appropriate for all customers and that it would be a nice gesture to ask before pushing out promotions around that theme.
I especially appreciate it this year because I did lose my father just last month. That doesn't mean I feel upset by Father's Day marketing, but I can imagine some people would be.
Last year I wrote about the email I got from ShopRunner ( see The Pause that Refreshes Marketing Relationships) that drew enough of my attention to warrant a click (very rare for me, I assure you). Its subject line was “Skip our Mother’s Day emails this year.”
For those who clicked the preference to pause, it explained that the pause on Mother’s Day communication doesn’t mean that it is pausing all marketing messages -- only the communication linked to that theme. As I noted, it's really a smart move that reduces email fatigue and the irritation of spam. It also lets you hear directly from your target market what they consider irrelevant.
People can have any number of reasons to find Mother’s Day messaging a pain, whether it is merely irrelevant or a sad reminder that they’ve lost their mothers or mother-figures or their children. Linking a brand with those negative associations is not the way to make people like it better.
I said this then: "I think this is such a great idea that it should be applied to all occasions marketers like to seize on for messaging: Father’s Day, graduations, back to school, Thanksgiving, and Christmas, etc. To really show customers you care let them pick what occasions they’d rather not hear about."
It makes sense, right? Certainly, DoorDash got that message, though the company probably paid some consultant huge sums of money to get the guidance they could have had for free by reading my blog last year.
Related posts:
Churchill's Guide to Writing
Monday, May 23, 2022
Typing Horses Promote Iceland
The emails are about on par with what you'd get if your cat walked across your keyboard, but real emails are not the point. The stunt is an attention-getter for tourism for Iceland, and it does that quite effectively. See the Visit Iceland site with the suggestions of what you can see in that country when you "outhorse" your emailing to an Icelandic horse.
Wednesday, April 6, 2022
Where HubSpot messed up
As I mentioned in What Edison can teach us about SEO, the first rule of writing is following through on what you promise in the title. If you fail to do that, you're guilty of bait-and-switch, or what is commonly known as clickbait.
The promise the reader is not just about the topic covered but the approach and extent promised in the title. Consequently, if the title promises to explain a concept in 300 words, how long should it be? Just 300 word, not 500, and certainly not over 1800 words. Yet that's just what HubSpot did with its article entitled What Is an API? The Answer in 300 Words or Less.
That's Application Programming Interface (API) which connects many functions across many forms of business.
In truth it's a very thorough article that's been updated more than once to grown more comprehensives since it was first published in 2013. However, the promise of the title is not "Everything you need to know about an API" but a super-short overview that can be read in under a minute. For the current length, the article is described as a seven minute read.
What HubSpot should have done in this case is retain whatever short form the article may originally have held and then offered a link to the longer form with a CTA introduced along the lines of, "That's APIs in a nutshell. If you want to understand more about how they work for marketing, take a deep dive into the subject here."
Wednesday, March 23, 2022
Churchill's guide to writing
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| Public domain photo of Winston Churchill in 1936 |
Necessity is not just the mother of invention but of improvement when brevity in writing is demanded by a state of war.
It began with the reason it was particularly necessary for their writing:
To do our work, we all have to read a mass of papers. Nearly all of them are far too long. This wastes time, while energy has to be spent in looking for the essential points.Anticipating the style of writing that we have come to expect in short form content online, Churchill offered four specific directions for removing anything extraneous:
1. Using "a series of short, crisp paragraphs"
2. Removing the statistical analysis or more involved discussion from the main part of the report and offering it in an appendix.
3. Using of "headlines only, which can be expanded orally if needed."
4. Eliminating all "woolly phrases" that add needless words like: "It is also of importance to bear in mind the following considerations..."
Churchill acknowledge that while the style "may at first seem rough as compared with the flat surface of officalese jargon." However, the higher priority then was "saving time," and, he added that, in fact, such focus offers additional benefits: "the discipline of setting out the real points concisely will prove an aid to clear thinking."
Monday, March 14, 2022
Colgate needs to brush up on its email communication
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| Uupload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/16/Toothbrush_toothbrush.JPG/512px-Toothbrush_toothbrush.JPG |
What Colgate got wrong
It forgot that in marketing communication, less can be more more, and more is only welcome if the audience sees value in it.
Some time ago, I granted Colgate permission to email me in order to receive its promotions. What I had in mind by promotions was value for me, meaning special offers and/or coupons. But Colgate seemed to think it was just about constantly reminding me about Colgate products with no financial incentive attached.
Finally, today, I decided I had enough of the Colgate clutter that wasn't bringing any value to my inbox. I put in a request to stop the emails.
What Colgate got right
The opt-out form offers a menu of reasons to select that the folks on the marketing team should note in planning future campaigns. Most opt-outs include the first three, but this one adds a fourth option that fit my motivation exactly:
That was nice to find exactly my reason without having to fill in other or pretend I had not opted in.
Friday, March 11, 2022
From multi to omnichannel marketing
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| Photo by Pickawood on Unsplash |
Not all marketing strategies deliver the same rates of returns. Omnichannel marketing outperforms single channel at the rate of 2.5x.
To get to that, it’s not enough to build an easy-to-navigate eCommerce site supported by marketing campaigns that reach out to them on various channels. All those components have to be integrated to work together through an omnichannel strategy.
The ROI of Omnichannel Marketing
The returns of omnichannel marketing over single channel are quite impressive, according to the data offered on Clickz:
Engagement rate: 18.96% on omnichannel vs 5.4% on single-channel
Purchase frequency: 250% higher on omnichannel vs single-channel
Average order value: 13% more per order on omnichannel vs single-channel
Customer retention rates: 90% higher for omnichannel vs single-channel
One channel doesn't cut it
Most eCommerce businesses today do not rely on only one digital marketing channel. When competing for customer attention, you need to reach out to them in different ways in the hope that what they didn’t click on an email may still get a click on SMS or an ad served on social media.
In a survey by HBR (Harvard Business Review), 73% of respondents said they use multiple channels during their shopping journey. That includes email, SMS, MMS, social media, as well as searches on the site.
The challenge for retailers is maintaining coherent and consistent communication that makes the most of the different ways of connecting. A Facebook or Instagram ad may be what first grabs the customer’s attention, though they may need some follow up to convert to the level of putting together a shopping cart with an email or MMS message that offers personalized recommendations.
So why do we call this omni and not just multichannel?
Multichannel marketing is simply messaging that a brand uses across various channels to try to increase its reach. In contrast, omnichannel marketing is not just about sending the messaging out across the different channels but linking up the data on feedback on each one back to the customer to personalize the experience through responsive adaption.
Customer interests are not static but constantly changing as they respond to contextual triggers. Brands that utilize omnichannel use big data analytics to update customer data and adapt each message that goes out accordingly. An omnichannel approach adapts to such shift to make marketing messages as relevant as possible.
Timely texts
Emails remain an important marketing tool for all businesses, especially eCommerce. However, widespread smartphone use makes texts a very effective way to get attention, as they work off a device many people keep at hand for most of their waking hours.
Text messages the perfect medium for sending time-sensitive information. That includes:
Announcement of new product drops, especially if one of the benefits you offer SMS subscribers is early access to what’s new.
Promotions for same-day flash sales, particularly if they are set for certain times like noon to three.
Notification that something they wanted to order is now back in stock or is now on sale.
An urgent notice that their selections in a cart they abandoned are in danger of selling out.
Channeling Success with Targeted Communication
Targeted messaging is much more effective than generic messaging. The basis of that communication is identifying customer segments, and it can get even more relevant with personalization with product offerings and promotions selected specifically for that customer’s interests.
No matter how responsive your customers are to emails or texts, it’s important to remember that a single channel does not fit all customers under all circumstances. You need to adapt to the needs and context of the moment to deliver the right message through the right medium..
For example, you could have a customer who has subscribed to both emails and texts. Even though sending an SMS is fast and easy, it's not an appropriate medium for longer messages. You also can use both channels for reminders say of an upcoming promotion or a price drop on something they have looked at but didn't end up adding to cart or that they added it to the cart but failed to complete the transaction.
On that basis, you can get the right offer to the right person at the right time, and through the right channel.
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