Micro-Channel: Video And E-Mail

Staying with my current fascination of Crutchfield, here's how the venerable direct marketer uses video to describe the Polk Surroundbar.

It's quick, crisp, and complements text-based copy or user generated reviews.

Best of all, we capture this information in our database, right? We create an indicator that measures the most recent date a customer viewed a video (and we'll certainly get more sophisticated in time). And when we tailor our e-mail marketing campaigns, we sub-segment the video viewers from everybody else --- offering them vastly different content.

Eventually, we use Multichannel Forensics to see how video micro-channel users evolve and change, knowing and understanding the role video plays in the customer experience.

Fun stuff!

Consumer Reviews And Writing Copy Online

Consumer Electronics is one of the places where reviews are often utilized.

At Crutchfield, you might be concerned about shelling out almost $500 for a Blu-ray DVD player. But fellow consumers walk you through the process by stating their opinions, in this case, opinions of a Panasonic Blu-ray DVD player.

Pundits like to debate the merits of user-generated reviews. That's not what we'll discuss here.

There are folks who are paid to write copy. Sure, in some cases, the vendor dictates what must be written. In other cases, however, the copywriter plays a major role in the selling of merchandise. It's fascinating how the art of writing subject lines and paid search keywords is thoroughly explored in our industry. The art of writing honest online copy, however, is seldom broached.

Why don't we sell online? Why do we write such generic text, boring text that has been written so many times that the customer no longer choose to believe it, preferring to hear the words of a theoretically objective purchaser the customer never met?

And then we go a step further. We allow our customers to rate the reviews written by other customers.

Why don't we allow our customers to rate the copy written by our coypwriters? Wouldn't that be a spectacular way to learn the style of copy that customers really prefer? Why don't we let our customers rate the subject lines written in e-mail marketing? I bet we'd learn more from that than we learn from testing different subject lines --- we'd learn that the subject line that tested as performing 9% better, placing it in the "best practices" class, actually rated 2 out of 5 stars by our customers. Wouldn't that be a humbling experience?

As the age of unfettered online sales growth comes to a close, as we're forced to actually prove our worth by actually using the online channel to actually sell merchandise in a stagnant economy, we'll need to start over from scratch when it comes to writing copy online. We're going to need to learn how to sell all over again. There's no reason a new class of rainmaking online copywriters can't emerge from this movement.

Redirection: How Catalogs Create Demand For Online Pureplays

Given that catalogers seem to enjoy yesterday's discussion about the failure of catalog and multichannel marketing, is is appropriate to share the following outline concerning demand generation in 1994, 2001 and 2008. Of course, what follows in the image is only a theory of mine --- no hard evidence to prove one way or another. Click on the image to enlarge it.



















My theory suggests that catalog marketing is as effective as it has ever been. However, Google and Social Media have stepped in and redirected demand that would have gone to your brand.

Redirection (otherwise known as "transfer" in Multichannel Forensics) happens in many different ways.

• Google and SEO --- think about how many of you found my blog via Google/SEO?
  
• Google and Paid Search.
• Social Media --- Check out Manolo's Shoe Blog as an example.
• User Generated Reviews --- You see an item advertised in the Crutchfield catalog, you read a review from a customer on Amazon.com, and you ultimately buy the item on Amazon instead of Crutchfield.

Redirection is lethal for a brand that doesn't play along. Since this is just a theory, I don't have any solid numbers to back up my thesis --- I would surmise, however, that maybe 25% to 50% of your demand is "at risk" for redirection.

This theory suggests that we have two important objectives.

1. Prevent redirection of demand away from our brand.
2. Induce redirection of demand to our brand.

A metric like the "net promoter score" would be useful, wouldn't it? You look at the percentage of demand that is redirected to your brand, then subtract the demand that is redirected away from your brand. The net is your score --- positive is good, negative is bad. Think of Zappos. Their score has to be amazingly good, right? Footsmart sends a catalog, the customer checks prices online, and buys at Zappos where she gets the item tomorrow via free shipping. Footsmart gets a negative score in this instance.

Abacus/Epsilon --- what do you think? You could so easily help the catalog industry that pays your freight by generating an index of this nature for your clients. There you go, free product development information from The MineThatData Blog! You've got bright people, make something happen! Heck, toss me a few pennies, and I'll develop the prototype.

Too often, we view the world through tactics, like catalog marketing or e-mail marketing or paid search or SEO or affiliate marketing. How often do we view the world in the context of "redirection"? How might we approach competitive advantage via the concept of redirection?

Crutchfield Community

Crutchfield does an interesting job of blending together blog posts and forums in the Community Section of their website.

It is nice to be able to see how many folks viewed each blog post --- when you see a thousand or three thousand people viewing each post, you start to think that maybe folks find the content interesting.

Here's a link to the Crutchfield Community RSS Feed, if you're interested in subscribing.

Retailers Using Social Technology, Community, And RSS

In addition to the Saks Video Catalog, many retailers are using social technology, community, and RSS feeds in interesting ways. Many in our catalog audience are looking for new ways to have a relationship with customers. Let's review a small sample of brands using social technology in one way or another.

Urban Outfitters has an interesting site that features articles, videos, an RSS feed and a MySpace page.

Neiman Marcus communicates fashion via their InSite Blog.

Ice.com's Just Ask Leslie Blog combines customer questions and short features.

eBags uses bookmarks to tag items you are interested in.

Mac Cosmetics, a $274 million division of Estee Lauder, has customers who are literally inventing products for the brand, sharing the ideas on YouTube. Their product development folks should take a peek at this! My wife found the video when searching for ideas on how to store Mac products. Take a peek at YouTube to see how other folks are doing marketing and product demonstrations for you ... heck, this young lady has almost 14,000 views.

Nordstrom has a MySpace page for their BP division.

Paperspine, an online book rental brand, hosts a blog about books.

Zappos is using Twitter to allow folks to communicate about the venerable online shoe brand.

Patagonia hosts The Cleanest Line, a blog for employees, friends, and customers.

Overstock.com offers a diverse array of community-based options.

Crutchfield has a community section on their website.

Burpee Seeds features their RSS feed on the homepage.

Hallmark has an interesting blog for their Shoebox division.

Here's the Shutterfly community.

Use the comments section to share other ways that retailers are using social technology, community and RSS feeds to partner with consumers.