A friend working on a very cool stealth start-up approached me the other day to talk about sign up forms and the type of questions he should be asking people when they join his soon to be popular site. In a world of Facebook Connect, I first questioned what percentage of his audience would even create their own login on his site but as we discussed further it became apparent to me that whether people signed up directly on his site or they used FB Connect he needed to collect certain pieces of information that would not be readily available through FB but were vital for the marketing of his business. So again, in a world where it is anticipated that most users will log on to the site using FB, how could he capture the three or four (note that it is important to narrow down to at most 3/4 additional questions) pieces of information that would be vital to personalize marketing communications? Continue Reading…

The most used triggered email message stream generally surrounds abandoned shopping carts or website signups where you give your email but do not complete a profile. If you are not using triggered messages around abandoned shopping carts and signups, you should begin to do so (see a good article on how to get going form MarketingSherpa), the emails are effective and can help you address a customer’s (or potential customer) real issue in abandoning their purchase. The problem in my mind is that the very nature of these being triggered messages pulls the real personalization and chance to connect with the consumer out of the equation. These messages generally consist of a generic message indicating that you are receiving the message because you did not complete an action on the site sending you the email. If that action was a purchase, the site might use some dynamic information about what was in your shopping cart and if above a certain dollar threshold trigger a message that offers free shipping if you complete the purchase. Sites often will offer you other ways to get in touch with them including their social media profiles and will wrap with some generic information about how you are a valued customer (maybe even telling you when you first became a customer). For sites that need to scale to large volumes of abandoned carts or signups there is perhaps no other way, however for the businesses where each purchase still matters tremendously and where you are just building your customer base I think you can do better. Continue Reading…

Some of the best ideas are the ones that at the heart are really quite simple but it is in the execution that the winners and losers are separated. The “coming soon” page has been a staple of Internet business from the very beginnings of websites. As the Internet got more mature so did these pages, initially showing countdown clocks to launch dates and eventually including email signups and social media links. So if the idea was so simple, why then were so many companies struggling to be able to use their coming soon page to help build momentum and hype before launch? Sure many companies promised that if you signed up and tweeted a specific line you would get an advanced place in their beta launch list, but really nobody had come up with a way to make this all automated and effectively simple. Enter Launchrock. Continue Reading…

A really great example from the NBA’s Phoenix Suns (via Eloqua’s All About Revenue blog) on how using unique and deep personalization in your email marketing can drive incredible results. The Suns like any other business are looking to drive revenue from email marketing and similar to many other businesses know that their best chance at success is with previous customers, in this case former season ticket holders.  In order to make a truly personal and unique connection to their former consumers the Suns marketing team took a look at all the information available to them about these previous customers in their CRM system and tried to mine it for the most personal connection they could make. With that goal in mind they landed on a piece of information available to them about every former season ticket holder that was also completely personal to the particular customer, the date of their first season ticket purchase.  Continue Reading…