Simon Lilly's Blog

Email marketing on ice at Ben & Jerry’s

// July 8th, 2010 // 6 Comments » // social media, web thoughts

Speculation over the past 18 months has been rife that email marketing is dead. Dead is probably far too harsh a term, but I think most progressive digital marketeers would agree that the sooner bad email marketing dies the better! By bad I mean, un-targeted, badly designed, sliced-up image-laiden email messages that can only be summarised as e-mail fail.

So when one of the guys in our team got an announcement from Ben & Jerry’s, that they were stopping their monthly customer email, I thought it would make a brilliant blog post on a big company making a massive digital marketing mistake…

On closer inspection, it’s actually an extremely very well planned and executed piece of digital marketing. Take a look: Ben & Jerry’s is Moo-ving

Here’s 3 reasons why I think they did the right thing:

1. They asked their subscribers what they wanted…

Asking their audience what they wanted, before making a decision like this, is the best way to decide. By asking their customers and then referring back to that in their communication it’s ten times harder for their subscribers to do anything other than just go with it.

2. They exited in style…

Ben & Jerry’s emails have always brought a smile to my face (and they’ll be missed), but the excuse that their ‘hooves simply weren’t built to type quickly‘ is light-hearted, tongue in cheek, but basically says that they only have so much digital marketing resource and they are going to move it to where their customers want it to be.

3. They left the barn door open…so the cows could come home

Digital marketing is always changing and they’ve cleverly not ruled out future e-mails – ‘it was too hard to say goodbye to e-mools altogether, so we’ll still send you the odd email on special occasions‘.

So the future for Ben & Jerry’s lies in the social media playground of facebook and twitter, considering all of the above I like their thinking.

P.S. Ben & Jerry’s got a great ‘festival themed’ homepage at the moment, well worth a click (and turn up the speakers!)

Review: Delivering Happiness by Tony Hsieh (CEO, Zappos.com)

// June 7th, 2010 // No Comments » // web thoughts

Over 244 pages Tony Hsieh, CEO of the world famous Zappos.com brand provides a wonderful insight into what made him the ‘hip, iconoclastic’ and inspirational CEO that he is today. When was the last time a book left you with a inspirational thought or idea after every section you read? This book not only delivers happiness, it delivers inspiration.

Undoubtedly there will be reviews that are cynical over the way he progressed from selling button badges from his bedroom through to a multi-billion business in Zappos.com. Did he just get lucky? Was he in the right place at the right time? Quite possibly a little bit of both, but what comes through chapter after chapter is that he is an inspirational business leader that has a different way of approaching business.It also talks about the mistakes he and the business has made and what the lessons they learned were.

The book is a three-parter. Section one looks at Tony’s journey to create a profitable business = The end result being LinkExchange, which sold for a mere $265 million to Microsoft. Section two provides a fascinating insight into his approach to investing in start-ups and how one investment really grabbed his interest and became his baby! The last section is the coming together of the three key themes through out the book – ‘profits, passion and purpose’. It is divided into two sub-sections, the first part openly discusses the Amazon buy out of Zappos and the way that it was communicated to the business. While the second part, turns to focus on the reader and how through reader participation, the added benefit that the book may well deliver is personal happiness.

For me this is a brilliant book for anyone with a entrepreneurial streak in them or anyone who is looking for inspiration to improve the culture of the company that they work in. Highly recommended.

Find out more at the official website – Delivering Happiness Book or pre-order a copy today at Amazon

A $1.6 million e-commerce nightmare at 6pm.com

// May 23rd, 2010 // No Comments » // e-commerce, web thoughts

It’s every e-commerce managers nightmare – a product went live with the wrong price and customers have realised. In the bargain hungry, viral jungle of the internet a simple pricing mistake can cost you a significant amount of revenue.

6pm.com is the sister site to Zappos.com, one of US’s biggest and best online retailers. The 6pm site focuses on end of line clearance and bargain items at up to 70% off retail. Unfortunately for them (fortunate for their customers) for 6 hours every item on their site cost no more than $49.95. With any kind of incident that involves online transactions for a large number of people, how the brand deals with a mistake is critical.

Recently The Outnet ran a $1 sale to celebrate it’s 1st birthday, unfortunately they under-estimated the popularity and the site constantly fell over during the course of the promotion. They came out, apologised and offered free shipping for a whole month to say sorry, but while their customers were having problems the Twitter-sphere was full of brand negativity.

So how did 6pm.com respond to such an error? I’ll give you two options:

Option 1) Send every customer that bought an item at a discounted price an email, apologising and blaming a clause in their T&C’s for their legally sound reason for cancelling the customers order.

Option 2) Honour every single order made, at an approximate cost of $1.6 million dollars.

Yep, they went for Option 2 and the reason I am writing about it on my blog is two fold. Firstly to make such a significant decision so quickly shows a well run, finely tuned organisation. Secondly, they handled it perfectly – open, honest and most importantly the decision they made was the best one for their customers. Read the full blog announcement over at 6pm.com – http://blogs.zappos.com/blogs/inside-zappos/2010/05/21/6pm-com-pricing-mistake

Even the Zappos CEO, tweeted a tongue in cheek remark when announcing it:

Are you the next Mayor of your local Starbucks?

// May 17th, 2010 // No Comments » // social media, web thoughts

Mashable today covered a story that users of location-based social networking tool Foursquare could qualify for discounts at Starbucks. Social-media savvy customers simply need to regularly check-in at their favourite Starbucks. If you are the person that checks-in most at a particular venue then Foursquare rewards you by making you the Mayor of that location. Starbucks is one of the most pro-active brands in the social media space and is rewarding it’s Starbucks Mayors with a discount voucher for a Frappuccino.

The strategy behind this is a simple one, a check-in on Foursquare is the equivalent of a status updates on Facebook or a tweet on Twitter, in that the message is instantly transmitted to your Friends / Followers. This kind of thirst quenching viral promotion via social media puts your brand at the forefront of the customers mind and is another fine example of digital viral marketing.

Is location the next big digital marketing trend? For some food-retail businesses the answer probably is an immediate yes, for the rest of us it’s a case of watching, listening and learning.

10 Ways to Deal With a Social Media Explosion

// March 28th, 2010 // No Comments » // social media, web thoughts

What is the best way of preparing or repairing your brands reputation when big news breaks online? From a secretive new Apple product launch to a damning piece of negative press, once it appears online, its only a matter of time before the waves start to hit the social media shores.

I’ve taken 10 key learnings from a number explosions that I’ve observed and been involved in over the past few months and wanted to share them with you.

1. Predict

If at all possible, thorough preparation for a big online news event can be priceless. Creating a set of frequently asked questions can be a extremely valuable resource when composing blog comments, Facebook replies or Twitter tweets. If you have the luxury of a PR team then these guys can be invaluable at helping prepare.

2. Prepare

Can your blog cope with a traffic spike or do you need to use a plug-in like WordPress’s Super Cache to take the strain? If you have a good relationship with your host, let them know before that traffic is coming so that they can have support available if your hosting does start to slow down.

3. Plan

Big announcements usually have a time that they go live. Make sure that everything you need to be is in place before the event. This allows you to totally focus on dealing with the positive feedback and/or negative fallout that the announcement may bring.

4. Filter

If you are expecting feedback from your announcement/release then carefully prepare your feedback channels. Make sure comments are enabled on blog posts, create a Facebook Note that all of your comments can accumulate in and consider setting up a dedicated e-mail address for feedback to be sent to. Setting the channels up effectively means you have less places to monitor and messages can be communicated quickly across fewer places.

5. Observe

You don’t always need to rush in and react to the fallout from an announcement. More often than not there will be positive and negative messages – look for trends and themes, especially in the negative comments.This will help when composing replies.

6. Respond

Preparing a reponse that answers a number of concerns is more efficient that addressing each one seperately. That said, your reply strategy should be dictated by the volume of responses, ideally you would reply to each and every piece of feedback individually, but sometimes that just is not possible.

7. Trust

This one involves a leap of faith that some people may not be willing to take. If you are confident in your brand (and your customers) then have faith that the loyal and passionate customers will see the positive side and hopefully they will make up a large volume of the social media buzz.

8. Listen

Even if you aren’t planning to respond to tweets on Twitter, still listen to what people are saying. You might find it useful for coming up with answers or even predicting the questions that haven’t been asked in other channels.

9. Rotate

Dealing with an onslaught of feedback via Twitter, Facebook, the Blog is tough going. Creating unique, well crafted responses quickly and efficiently is time consuming and mentally tiring. Make sure you have more than one person fire-fighting otherwise the quality of responses may drop over time.

10. Evaluate

Don’t wait until the explosion has passed before you begin to evaluate. Keep notes of lessons learnt during quiet periods. There can be a huge amount of activity in a short period of time and this stop-start nature will mean that recalling all the occurrences in detail will be challenging.

Now you know what to do, find out what not to do…

5 Things to Avoid During a Social Media Explosion

// March 27th, 2010 // 1 Comment » // social media, web thoughts

The spotlight turned back on to social media management recently following the way that Nestle handled the ‘social media explosion’ that occurred on their Facebook Page. Greenpeace created a video about Nestle’s use of palm oil in Kit Kat’s and how it directly endangered the lives of orangutans. This video quickly went viral after it was removed from YouTube and the main focal point for the public’s rage was the Nestle Facebook Page.

Below are 5 things to avoid doing when the going gets tough.

1. Moderation

Don’t delete peoples comments, unless they are totally irrelevant or break the terms of use of the environment you are in. On Facebook there is a Report function that might be advisable to call upon rather than deleting a comment. The removal of comments is both frustrating (for posters) and confusing (for readers).

2. Composure

Remain calm and collected, don’t rise to any comments that are obviously posted to generate a reaction. Never reply in anger.

3. Change

Resist the urge to edit or tweak your original statement, treat a post in social media like you would a blog and use strike-throughs and updates to modify a message.

4. Haste

The immediate reaction to a social media onslaught on your Facebook Page or Blog is to quickly reply to each comment or query. The danger here is that the quality of your message will be effected. Slow down and where possible compose responses that meet the needs of a number of commenter’s into a single reply.

5. Abandon Ship

I’ve seen on more than one occasion a brand’s Facebook Page that has been abandoned after an explosion. If the situation is not managed well the community of ‘fans’ that remain may be very jaded and any communication that the brand communicates might be met with negativity. The only way to resolve this would be to back track and clearly address the root cause of the original problem and hopefully move forward from there.

I hope you’ve found these 5 pieces of advice useful and it would be great to have any additional words of wisdom added in the comments below…

Facebook Mail to rule the webmail world?

// February 6th, 2010 // No Comments » // social media, web thoughts

When was the last time you logged into your Hotmail account? Not recently I would imagine…Facebook’s latest project is looking to make your Hotmail holiday a permanent thing.

TechCrunch has released details of a project codenamed ‘Titan’ that may well change the face of e-mail marketing. Facebook are planning to launch a full functional email solution much akin to Gmail or Hotmail in the coming months. So what will it include?

• Access from the walled garden of Facebook or via POP/IMAP (Outlook/Express/Live Mail can be used to read your email.)
• A unique @facebook.com email address. Probably based on your Vanity URL

The quick win could be for Facebook to utilise it’s Microsoft connections and base their email solution on Hotmail, but knowing Facebook they are going to develop this themselves.

If they do develop something unique to themselves from the ground-up then we could have a whole new email client to deal with – more testing of e-mail rendering and spam scoring is guaranteed…

So where does this fit in the webmail landscape? I think Gmail has a hardcore, committed following that love the labelling, organisation and simplicity of the conversation based layout. The big threat ironically could be to Microsoft and it’s Hotmail solution. This has become a spam filled webmail system that people are using as a rubbish bin for unwanted email. If a new solution was introduced that offered better spam control, a great user-interface and was hosted on a website you visited almost daily then I think the winner is clear to see.

This project is one that all digital marketers will have to watch closely.

Read more about this at AllFacebook in their 5 Features Facebook Should Add To Their New Email Product

Come see our latest creation…

// January 26th, 2010 // No Comments » // web thoughts

Apple are the undoubted masters of the top-secret launch event. Their next unveiling is set for Wednesday 27th January at an Arts Centre in San Francisco. The web seems to have been whipped up into quite a frenzy for whatever Mr Jobs and Co. are going to announce and if it has as much impact as the iPhone has had then the speculation will turn into something that creates even more digital marketing opportunities.

Tune into the biggest live blogging event of 2010 (okay it’s the first too) at your chosen tech blog of choice from 6pm GMT…

Engadget | Gizmodo | TWiT

Friday Five – Free Edition

// July 10th, 2009 // No Comments » // web thoughts

I’m currently reading Chris Anderson’s new book Free (Buy on Amazon or read online for free @ Scribd) and this has inspired today’s blog post. I’ve highlighted five sites/blogs that offer you something (pretty useful) for nothing!

1. Creative Commons Imagery via Google Search – This has only just gone live, but Google image search now allows you to search for images that you can use on your site, with your blog posts, etc for free (just don’t forget the credit).
2. User Testing @ fivesecondtest.com – For free? Well it’s not a massively comprehensive solution, but if you want to check if a design is conveying the key brand messages, this online service might be perfect. Simply upload a concept design and people then have 5 seconds to look at the design and feedback to you what stood out.
3. Wireframe Tool – The Pencil Project is a great browser-based sketching an GUI creation tool that works inside of Firefox. One simple download and away you go…
4. Twitter’s taken over the online world, which is probably a good thing. Grab this free Twitter Icon Set made available by the ever-excellent Smashing Magazine.
5. WordPress templates are easy to find, but quality ones that work with the latest versions 2.7+ are not so easy.  Here are 15 high quality, but still free templates that Noupe have pulled together.

Would love to hear any great resources any of you have found for free recently in the comments?

Friday Five – Michael Jackson Edition 03/07/2009

// July 3rd, 2009 // No Comments » // web thoughts

The sad passing of music legend Michael Jackson saw some very interesting online impacts from traffic surges on social media sites, through to chart topping sales of digital downloads. As the dust begins to settle a number of sites have looked at the impact it had online:

• Social media gurus FreshNetworks look at the rise of Flash Mobs to celebrate the life and music of MJ. Some great YouTube clips on there.
• Times Online highlights the power of Twitter for real-time news (Every article like this must make Google cringe).
• Twitter and Facebook had massive usage increases as the news spread, the Tech Blog at the LA Times looks at the numbers.
• The LA Times looks back at how gossip website TMZ stole the limelight from TV news channels all over the world.
• TechCrunch reports that the web as a whole struggled to deliver information as everyone rushed online to get the news.