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Showing posts from 2012

Online Persuasion and Personalisation

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I was just watching this interesting video about online persuasion:   Many things that are described in the video will react in a "yes of course, that's logical" response of many people. But it can be very interesting to look more at behavior and online marketing and to develop for a plan based at the six weapons of influence from Cialdini. If you are active in more countries or especially more continents, there will also be cultural differences to keep in mind. I wrote about cultural differences in social media earlier . So how can these weapons of influence from Cialdini be used online? Weapon of influence Short explanation Use at internet Scarcity Make products or services scarce Easy Reciprocity People tend to return a favor when a favor is given to them. Medium-Difficult Commitment and Consistency f people commit, orally or in writing, to an idea or goal, they are more likely to honor

Email marketing: how not to do it (1)

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I can't believe there are still big ( jetstar pacific) companies who do email marketing in this way: Sending important e-mails with lot's of people in the CC (not professional, spam sensitive) and then also to ask a reply to all (many people do not even know this function). This is so 1999, make a professional landingpage and make sure you have a good workflow to answer questions instead of asking a reply to all.

Event summary: CRM in one day

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This week, I visited the event " CRM in 1 Day " in the Netherlands. If you want to excel with your online or multichannel shop, a good CRM strategy is a critical factor. A lot of things were obvious, but I will share some insights and my opinion below. The presentation of the keynote speaker is available at slideshare. Social CRM: where's the money? from Clo Willaerts The keynote speaker referred to a  TED talk   from Pattie Maes. It's from a few years ago. When I watched the video, I already noticed that it is only a small step before parts of the examples given become reality. Offline and online integrate. When buying a book in a bookstore, see the reviews at your phone immediately. Project and share information everywhere. Albert-Heijn supermarkets in Holland now started a test, with scanning and paying products with your cellphone. Next step is of course to add marketing, reviews and personal advice. Just like in the  TED talk . It is importan

E-commerce - email communication after purchases

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I have collected a few recent examples from online communication after some online purchases. Examples are mostly in Dutch. But I will explain the pro's and con's in English. Still I think (and I wrote about it here as well) that companies can improve their (online) communication so much more. Good communication and service goes beyond a "we recommend you" e-mail. Think about all customer touchpoints, about your vision and mission and create contact moments that in the end will give you a positive ROI and customer experience that will be shared online massively. Especially (But not limited to) the travel industry can start much more effective campaigns by better segmentation and not placing every cross and upsell possibility in these one or two confirmation mails. Be there with the right content at the right time. Not everybody will book a hotel right away if they purchased a flight ticket for 5 months away! Value for the customer, value from the customer. Ma

A short summary of digital marketing news

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Some (international) internet and e-commerce news from the past week, including some reports and a social media monitoring checklist. Tripadvisor and Belgium hotels Belgium hotel owners hate customers The Belgium hotel federation wants to limit tripadvisor reviews. This is the other way around. Partly there is something to say about their criticism. But why don't they see the chances and opportunities the reviews can bring them? Be creative. Make sure your guests write at Tripadvisor, sent out after stay email marketing communication to remind all the guests to leave reviews, print out the reviews and put them in a guestbook at the lobby. People who are satisfied will react and negative reviews will be less in this case. But above all, make your guests feel comfortable and happy. Webinar IBM has an interesting webinar (recorded) about the changing consumer behavior. It is in English (landing page in Dutch) Social media monitoring checklist I created a social medi

My collection of digital marketing infographics

The last few weeks, I started to collect interesting infographics and images about (international) digital marketing. My collection starts getting into shape. I am planning to make a few infographics myself also the next few weeks. My Pinterest board now has infographics about: Traditional Marketing vs New Marketing . An infographic about the change from push to earned marketing. Of course this is changing the landscape at this moment, but in some cases traditional marketing remains valuable. Facebook's Timeline tutorial . An infographic with some advice about how to setup your new facebook page for organisations.  A social media triage  This one can be very helpful if you try to setup a plan for your company about how to respond at social media. Every case is unique, so also needs to be treated this way. But this infographic gives some guidelines for the people that deal with the comments posted at social media in the first line.  Sometimes explaining is so easy wi

Differences in international webdesign and usability

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International Website Design is more then just translating. (but if you translate do it correct otherwise you keep on closing a shower door) I am wondering about international usability and design, so I decided to do some research.Differences in design and usability in various countries can make or break a site. Of course people are the same world over and the main usability guidelines remain the same. However there are country specific things to take into account that can make your site work better in specific countries. With the emerging markets rapidly growing and the global aspects of internet, it is critical to understand the differences of your international customers. In a few European website projects, the biggest problems in the fields of usability and design were the following points. Character problems in on site search engine and the connected emails used for email marketing. Special characters necessary for some languages gave problems in displaying. Display of

International Digital Marketing Information April 2012

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I am reading some international digital marketing information this saturday afternoon and I summarize some interesting links below. Europe is still busy thinking about the new European Cookie law . A law that will have a big impact at the online industry this and next year. A big test case will be the United Kingdom, where the law will get into force at the 26th of may. Other countries will follow later. A lot of things are still very unclear  and most likely we will see a big increase of the use of pop up screens or lightboxes asking for certain cookies consent. Mr Dave Evans from the ICO gave a little more explanation and the good news is, that if you use first party analytic cookies you might be left alone, if you inform your users well. Europe is still not a single e-commerce market, so differences between countries are common. A new e-commerce lobby group called " ecommerce-europe " has started and one of their goals is to optimize Europe's e-commerce. I hop

Email marketing AirAsia

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A few days ago, I received an email from AirAsia . I like AirAsia, and I hope to fly with them soon again. But the email I received, is in my opinion difficult to understand for the subscribers. Apparently they changed their "sender e-mail address" and they try to improve their sender reputation and to prevent getting in their subscribers "spam folders". In this case, the e-mail is not clear and could be improved in my opinion. Why should a general subscriber of their email marketing programme care about AirAsia changing their sender e-mail address?  I think the most people that receive this e-mail do not understand a thing about email deliverability.  An e-mail " sender address"  is something else then changing the "e-mail address"  as it suggests. Why didn't they provide a link to a landingpage where they explain how to add this address to the "safe sender's list" for the most popular e-mail clients? This can even b

The world's best airports : how do they perform online?

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The worlds best airports in 2011 are (according to this website) the ones described below. I decided to take the first 3 and Schiphol, this saturdaymorning, to do a short quick review. I took Schiphol because I am Dutch and I visit the airport a lot. That's the only reason. I think they can improve also a lot in their online and multichannel communication. Airports are nice, they are always busy, you can do a lot in multi channel communication to optimize the user experience and a lot is written about airports at the web. So by listening to the visitors of your airport you can optimize your services and give the best possible airport experience to the visitors. Unfortunately not all of the best airports in the world have a good digital communications strategy. This is the list of world's best airports in 2011: 1) Hong Kong International Airport 2) Singapore Changi Airport 3) Incheon International Airport 4) Munich Airport 5) Beijing Capital International Airport 6)

6 reports about global digital marketing

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6 Reports about global digital marketing. Sometimes reports can come in handy. Especially for market research or writing an online strategy. I summarized a few interesting reports about international digital marketing. Most of the reports described can be downloaded free of charge. If not an extensive summary can be downloaded. 1. Nielsen: Global Trust in Advertising. This report  writes about all forms of digital advertising and the trust people give to these forms of advertising. Differences between continents are described. We read that in the middle east and Africa, people trust mobile text ads, much more then the global average. Maybe this is because mobile internet penetration is higher in these regions due to in some cases absense of fixed landlines. As I described earlier , especially the Chinese are very fond of user recommendations and especially from people they know. Also online video advertisements are more trustworthy for the Asia Pacific region then the global a

Basic steps for a SEO quickscan

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The following steps are just some basic guidelines for a SEO  quick scan. But following these steps will give you a basic status of your sites SEO performance. When analyzing search results, always make sure you are logged out of your Google account and your cookies history is clean. Always remember: Google indexes pages and not websites. Your internal link structure is very important as well as each page and the backlinks to pages. Technical SEO First of all start with installing the SEOMOZ toolbar for FireFox or Chrome. It has lot's of SEO tools integrated. Check how many pages are indexed in Google. Can roughly be checked by using the command "site" in the major search engines. E.g. site:www.yoursite.com . Try it with and without www. Right under the search bar you will see the indexed pages from this domain. Also in the SEOMOZ toolbar is a possibility to check the indexed pages. Is the website using frames? The usage of frames is not adviced . I

Cookie Law (e-privacy directive) : examples, tools and scripts

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A collection of links with information about the new cookie law , that is in force in the UK at the 26th of may, and other countries in the EU will follow shortly after that. I still hope, that at least, permission is not necessary for analytics cookies. Plugins / Checkers Plugins for browsers to see what cookies there are currently used at your website. A Google Chrome plugin that gives you feedback about the usage of cookies at your site: http://www.cookielaw.org/get-started-with-optanon.aspx Another plugin for Google Chrome that gives a detailed report about the cookies your websites uses: http://www.attacat.co.uk/resources/cookies#axzz1qhd4xxwV   Examples A few photoshopped possibilities can be found here . Some live examples that I found so far: The site below is using a nice mechanism. People are asked for consent, by a bar at top of the screen. But also a banner is shown at the site, telling the user it's status: Cookie status

Cultural differences in international social media

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Cultural differences in international social media Cultural differences in international social media: Mixi (JP) - Facebook (US) I like to research and experience cultural differences in digital marketing in general. This time let's take a closer look at cultural differences in social media. There are not only linguistic differences, otherwise you could simply translate everything, but there are also differences in behavior. So if you are a global player and you have a brand communication manual or a social guide, be aware there might be local differences necessary. Especially in social media, where there is direct contact with fans, customers and their friends, it is so important to communicate the right thing and to understand your audience so you can take the right conclusions. Global social media behavior A while ago, I saw a presentation by Fons Trompenaars  and in his presentation he described some real nice cases of different reactions in the world at the

EU cookie law: how to visually deal with it

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The EU " cookie directive " is forcing European website to ask users for consent for most (marketing) cookies. (cookies which are not part of a service (cookies which are necessary for the service or for the performance of a contract) do not need consent. Many webshops and websites are struggling on how to ask users their approval for using certain cookies. I photoshopped some idea's and found some example websites with idea's how to deal with the new law in a visual way. Just for my better understanding on what we can do to comply to the law in it's current form I summarized some idea's in this article. They are just idea's, since I could not find any commercial websites that are already complied to this directive. There are still discussions and different interpretations between countries. Let's hope the commission revises this e-privacy directive. But with the information available now,as from the 26th of may this cookie law is enforced in th