Posted on February 23rd, 2011
With Verizon finally carrying iPhone and iPad and mass merchandisers such as Walmart selling smartphones on the cheap, the number of smart phones and mobile devices is bound to soar. This presents loyalty marketers a great additional touch point with their customers through mobile apps. What functionality should a marketer pack in a mobile app? To answer this question, in this blog, I’d like to take a look at different uses of mobile apps that have appeared in the marketplace.
Mobile Transaction Platform
Major retailers such as Amazon.com and eBay have developed their mobile apps that allow consumers to buy products directly from within the app. Compared with a mobile commerce website, these apps tend to be more user-friendly and incorporate the touch and swipe capabilities of smartphones for easier manipulation of product pictures, smoother transition between pages, and overall faster shopping experience.
Point-of-Sales Integration
Short of offering full mobile transaction capabilities, another type of app tries to mesh the mobile device with POS transactions in the physical world. A great example is the Starbucks Card Mobile app. Having registered a card in the app, a Starbucks card holder can use the app to pay for purchases at 6800 Starbucks stores in the US and additional locations in the Target store. The store POS system scans a barcode displayed in the app instead of a physical Starbucks card. Of course, this type of app requires equipment compatibility at offline locations, which can require costly investment. Read More »
Posted on January 13th, 2011
Last semester, my Internet marketing students completed a social media project. They were asked to follow three social media channels by a company of their choice, and then write up their experience about it. Together, we observed 30+ companies’ social media practices, ranging from lesser-known brands to major players in the social media arena such as Starbucks and Best Buy. In this blog, I would like to share some qualitative conclusions from those observations.
Photo by Flickr User Widjaya Ivan | CC 2.0
What Works
Polls and questions: Asking consumers easy questions that are tangentially related to the product seems to receive good reactions from consumers, and many do respond. A key to this practice is to time the questions based on what’s on consumers’ mind at the moment (e.g., holiday, economy, etc.).
Contests and submissions: It may seem like a lot of companies are running contests nowadays. But in our observation, it still seems to work quite well among consumers. Visibility of winning is important. An example is ESPN’s use of fan-submitted photos as its profile picture. This is updated every week so that the chance of winning is pretty frequent.
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Posted on December 2nd, 2010
Lured by Cyber Monday deals, I bought something from ToysRUs.com for the first time this past weekend. Besides the order confirmation email, I received six additional promotional emails from the company, in just three day. That averages about two a day. Annoying? Sure! But ToysRUs is not alone. In the last one to two years, I have seen major retailers dramatically increase their email promotion frequency. Just a few weeks ago, I had removed myself from the email lists of well-known retailers such as New York & Company, Victoria’s Secret, to name just a few. Some of these companies were sending me daily if not more email messages about something on sale. It appears that either the recent economic recession has turned these retailers desperate, or a new marketing bible is out there somewhere teaching these retailers to bombard consumers with emails.
Is this strategy effective? Business aside, let me ask you this: have you ever met someone who can talk your head off and don’t know when or how to shut up? If you can’t picture that, think about Adrian Monk’s upstairs neighbor in the hit TV show Monk. What do we do when we meet people like that? We usually try to avoid them like the plague. I did with those retailers. When I asked my students what they do, they said they simply deleted the emails. I am sure this is not what the retailers intended.
Photo by Flickr user oddharmonic | CC2.0
Now, I am not discounting the effectiveness of email marketing. When used appropriately, emails can be an effective and low-cost way of communicating with customers and keeping a business in consumers’ mind. But just like most things in this world, too much is not a good thing. Let me present a few reasons why daily or too frequent promotional emails are neither necessary nor effective: Read More »
