VerticalResponse Email Marketing Blog for Small Business

Skittles Replaces Website with Social Media

In a bold move to spark some word of mouth, Skittles has changed its entire website and turned it into a social media extravaganza. Yesterday the Skittles home page was their Twitter stream, and today the home page is now their Facebook Fan page. They appear to be rotating through all of the social media outlets.

To get to different areas of their site you're now presented with the hovering navigation box. For instance, now when you click on "Media" you're taken to their You Tube and Flickr pages. Gutsy move especially if they don't always monitor these highly trafficked pages.

They do present visitors with a screen that asks their age and tells the visitor that there might be content not suitable for kids.

If anyone Tweets the word Skittles it will appear on the Skittles site in the Twitter stream.

In an interview with AdWeek, Carole Walker, VP, integrated marketing communications for the brand, had this to say, "Skittles' brand positioning was a border zone . . . Skittles lives in a world that is unexpected." 

Seems like instead of pushing marketing messages out to their consumers, they're letting consumers do it on their behalf.

Bold or crazy? I don't know. But I did see on their Facebook page they have 585,000 fans and growing, they've got 1,500 wall posts of people talking about Skittles, they have 16,000 pictures that match the criteria "skittles" on Flickr and countless Tweets by the minute. They are targeting their exact market with the tools that this market lives and dies by. Seems like they may have tasted the rainbow on this one but you tell me!

Idea from a Nail Spa for Your Business - Referrals

At a neighborhood nail salon, I've seen that they've got some pretty good ideas when it comes to marketing. Seems like they're trying to get more business in the door for some of their other services.

In a printed piece by the counter their message is that you can get a discount for referring people - a nice 20% off. Good deal. What I really like is that they go one step further and ask their customers to put their selling shoes on (pun intended) and get out there and sell their Thai foot massages. Then they give a free massage after you've referred 5 people.

I think it's a great idea, give up $65 to get 5 new customers in the door.

Can you put this to work for your business? Comment and tell us your story.

Remarkable Service - Worth Talking About

We talk about the "extra" things you can do to get people talking about your business or your service. We even put it on our marketing checklist of 2008. Here's a great idea you can take away if you're in the hospitality business or not.

True Story

My husband and I recently took a trip to LA and stayed at The Standard hotel downtown. I asked the concierge if they would get us reservations at the nearby Takami Sushi restaurant. She confirmed so off we went. As soon as we arrived and gave our name to the hostess she said "Ah yes, you're coming from The Standard" and she showed us to our table. Our waitress came to take our order and said, "the hotel would like to buy your appetizer." Nice. Well done to both the restaurant for remembering where they just got two new customers and the hotel for going the extra mile.

Do you have a business that lends itself to co-marketing opportunities with a neighbor?

Clothing Retailers - Give one free dry cleaning around the corner when someone purchases more than $100.
Italian Restaurants - Give one free dry cleaning when a customer spills red wine or pasta sauce on their shirt from the delicious food you serve!
Hotels - Give one day pass to the gym down the street or give a free gelato coupon to the local gelato shop.
Realtors - Give a housecleaning coupon for $50 off the first clean or a local handyman coupon.
Jewelry Shop - Give a coupon for a free basic manicure from a local nail salon if someone purchases from you.
Car Dealer - Give a coupon for a free detailing.
Online Retailers - After someone has purchased offer a discount code to a complementary product. A good example is when wine.com used to offer discount codes for Omaha Steaks after you purchased.

Hopefully your neighbors will give the coupons or gifts to you for free or heavily discounted since you just potentially walked a new customer through their doors. Then it's up to them to do a great job converting them for repeat business. Either way, both of you have the potential of looking great, just like the restaurant and the hotel.

Word of mouth isn't always a campaign you can just start, it's all of the remarkable things you do for your customers. But when they're successful, they can start to get rolling, just like me talking about the restaurant and the hotel.

Do you have any ideas on how to get word-of-mouth rolling? We'd love to hear them!

Someone Tried to Put One Over on VR? I don't think so...

Every week I use an online tool from Andiamo Systems that helps me track what people are saying about VerticalResponse online real-time (plug: my husband's rockin' technology, try it). I came across a cryptic post and asked Richard, our Manager of ISP Relations and Policy enforcement (long title, I know) to look into it.

I've asked him to post this, it's unreal. Richard, take it away...

"It’s 6:00 on a Tuesday evening, I’ve just arrived home, and what do I find in my inbox but a fairly cryptic email from Janine that says:

Does this make sense to you?

http://www.thealbanyproject.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=1184

I followed the link and found a blog article discussing some particularly annoying sounding political spam going out through a company called “linkedcampaign.com.”  Makes sense so far.  But then I read:

Linked Campaign is an email marketing service provided by a company called VerticalResponse Self Service Direct Marketing in San Francisco, with servers in North Carolina.

This, of course, did not make sense at all.  First, I know we don’t offer any sort of service called Linked Campaign.  Second, all our servers live here in San Francisco with us and don’t often make the journey to North Carolina (at least not while they’re on the clock).  Third, the type of mail described in the blog post would be very unlikely to make it out through our system.

Why would a blogger think we offered this “Linked Campaign” service?  I went to the linkedcampaign.com website in hopes of finding out.  And I certainly did find out:

Linkedcampaign.com was nothing more than a copy of our entire website as it appeared in March of this year! 

I immediately commented to the blog post (and emailed the Albany Project owner) to explain the situation.  They very quickly edited the article and posted two very detailed correction posts explaining that we were not involved with the problem email.  I couldn’t have dealt with nicer, more professional people than the folks at the Albany Project.

I then set out to track down the owner of Linked Campaign.  This was complicated by their use of Domains by Proxy to hide their WHOIS info (the owner of every website is required to have their contact info published to a WHOIS record, which can usually be looked up by anyone).  Domains by Proxy refused to release the information to me without a Court Order or a Subpoena.  I understood this was necessary to protect their customers, but that didn’t make it any less frustrating (or any less suspicious that the owner of a website that was a copy of our site was hiding their WHOIS info).

Luckily, the spam emails had gone out through a perfectly traceable IP Address that led back to Road Runner (an ISP).  I contacted Road Runner, discovered they were hosting the linkedcampaign.com website, explained the situation, and they took the website down.

I also discovered that one of the websites responsible for the spam emails had a very small print contact phone number at the bottom of the main page.  I contacted this number, and after being passed around a bit (and being given a different phone number) found the owner of that site, who put me in contact with the owner of Linkedcampaign.com.  The owner apologized, said he didn’t know the Linked Campaign domain was being used to mimic our website, and explained the numerous steps he’d take to ensure the problem never happens again.  And so far so good in that regard."

JP: So the bottom line is, keep a tab on what's going on about your company online, then make sure you act on it, bad things can happen to the best of companies. Good news for all of you? We spend a ton of time protecting our reputation so your email gets in the door!

 

VR Music Video Premiere!

Many of you have seen "AppEx Baby" music video. Our very own Furious ALF stars in it. If you haven't seen it you should, it's a good short watch. Due to popular demand, VerticalResponse has released our 2nd music video, "Nuthin' but an App Thang" starring the crazy antics of Furious ALF and debuting another VR star, 2Fein.

Read why we do these crazy videos here.

Restaurant/Bar Reviews...How Do You Handle Negativity?

You get a great review, published in this week's newspaper, you want to tell the world. Of course you get your email marketing list together and send it out to all of your customers. But, what do you do when someone visits a review site and reviews you poorly?

Restaurants are being reviewed at almost double the pace of any other category. And the sites are getting a ton of traffic. Look at Yelp and CitySearch in the past year. There are thousands of reviews for restaurants alone and these sites have become the place where everyone looks for reviews before they patron the place. It can make or break anyone's decision before choosing to go to a new restaurant. So what do you do? Here are some suggestions:

Regulars make for good reviews - More often than not people think to place poor reviews rather than good ones. Remind your regulars, the people that visit you often and love your establishment, to get on a specific review site and tell everyone why they love it. How about sending an email campaign to your list with a link to a review site? It could really help you in the long run!

Read often - You might find that by reading the same thing over and over you could make a change in your business that affects the bottom line positively. Are you being reviewed for poor service? Is it the same server? Are there one or two dishes that keep getting "panned" ?(Pun intended!) It's up to you to listen to what your customers are saying, then make your changes.

Chime in! - Address concerns that your reviewers have. If the steak is too chewy and you've replaced that supplier since last year, go ahead and tell people. Post your own review addressing all of the concerns that people may  have had in the past and what you've done to correct any. Then invite people back.

Just a few ideas on how to address those nasty little reviews...IF you ever get them.

Easy Ways to Start Word of Mouth

Word of mouth can be an easy way to start to build your customer base and email marketing list. Can you rely on it solely? Probably not, only a few lucky ones can say they have. But it should be thought of as part of your marketing mix. There is a reason why retail stores have always printed their logos prominently on their merchandise bags. So here are very very easy ways to start some word of mouth for your business.

1. Include a "signature" in the bottom of every transactional email your company sends out as well as your personal email. Ask your recipients to  tell their friends about your goods or services.

For example:
Rocco's Restaurant, for the best in Southern Italian Cooking, tell your friends!
www.roccos.com
123 Any St.
Anytown, CA 11111
(123)-345-4567

This way if they keep your email they'll have an easy way to remember where you are, and if they forward the email for some reason the forwarded recipient will see your message.

2. Include customer testimonials on your site and in any marketing materials.  Some customers will want free advertising and ask you if they can participate. More often than not your customers will tell their friends to check out their testimonial driving more traffic to your site. These are your customer "influencers". I can't tell you how many more eyeballs we got at VR by putting our customers in our ad campaigns.

3. Give away a pre-stamped postcard for people to use with your logo, graphic, website and location on it. If a customer uses it, it's a cheap way to get a potential new customer on the receiving end! This is great for destination places like hotels, wineries, retail shops. Theme it with the city you're in!

4. Include a tell-a-friend link on every web page so a user can include a little note when they forward the page.

5. Giveaways - What about giving away an inexpensive logo'd pen or calendar magnet with your information on it? I'm all for giving away useful gadgets so that your information is constantly in a user's face. Plus if they use it around others then your logo gets viewed again and again!

Rocket science? No way, but these are really easy ways to get started at a pretty low cost.

Love to hear any of your own ideas!

Starbucks and T-Mobile - A Remarkable Combination

There are so many ways a business can build an email list whether it's offline or online. One of the many is word of mouth. (You can tell I'm hot on word of mouth being this is the 2nd post on word of mouth I've done in a week.) Today I wanted to talk about Starbucks and T-Mobile.

So for some icky reason I have to spend one day out of the month working out of Starbucks. Don't ask. My husband and I sit in comfy chairs pecking away at our keyboards like crazy. We buy a cup of hot cider and (try to) relax. I have to say bravo Starbucks. The one place I actively sought out to get online because I TRUSTED I could have a comfy seat and get internet access. Why? Because I see people working on their computers every time I run in and out of there to get my coffee and I have been invited to meetings there. (It's not like Starbucks has a big ad campaign "Work at Starbucks ... free!")

Capitalizing on the guilt sale? Perhaps. I sure felt like I had to buy something while sitting in their chairs for 6 hours. (The hot cider is to die for...WITH the whipped cream of course). In fact, I felt like I had to buy more than one thing. Who cares, I got internet access and a roof over my head. I even got sick of working and browsed around their "store" full of gifts around coffee.

So Starbucks and T-Mobile both have now two loyal customers (and T-Mobile has our email addresses) and I can go to any Starbucks and know I'll get what I need.

Can you think of anywhere else you seek out a trusted service like this? I actually think that being able to sit for "free" and work all day is pretty remarkable for the price of a cider and $10 Wi-Fi.

Here are a few others I was thinking about:

• For Sunday brunch at the Palace Hotel ($40) you can eat all of the most remarkable food you want and drink an endless supply of mimosas. I've told a hundred people about this when they want to impress their visitors.
  
• A store I go to on Union St. asks me every time if I want an espresso while I shop. I also gave them my email address because I want to know when they have cool new items.
• After your 1 hour massage at Splash Spa you can spend the entire day steaming and relaxing. While I'm there they promote "buy in bulk for better savings".
• Jet Blue is inexpensive, nice seats, great legroom and FREE TV. It's the first place I go to when I have to fly to the East Coast. They also heavily promote their frequent flyer program on the plane.
• Our local self-storage place offers a free use of a pick-up truck to move in.

I went back to the office and told everyone about my positive experience and they really need to think about Starbucks in a bind for their "office" needs. Now that's some good word of mouth.

Oh, and great people-watching too!

4 Rules of Word of Mouth Marketing

I sat through many sessions at the Word of Mouth Marketing Show a few weeks ago in DC. I’m going to be posting a bunch of ideas that came from it.  The one thing that really resonated for me was the fact that the customer is finally in control. Did you know that 30% of the population is reviewing products online today and making their voices heard? I didn’t. It’s a pretty big number when you think about it.

Word of mouth or "buzz" marketing has always been a necessity for any business. But since tools on the web make it easier than ever to talk about a product it's becoming vital. Look at Amazon reviews or yelp.com. Salesforce.com has a review center, even one on VerticalResponse. They've all got people talking.

Andy Sernovitz, who up until recently headed up WOMMA.org, wrote a wonderful book on WOM and Buzz. I read it, I love it, you will too. It's a quick read. I sat in his session and got some great ideas and examples on the 4 rules of WOM. Check them out…

1. Be interesting, be remarkable – Zaza Nail Salon right around the corner from us has HUGE theater-style reclining leather seats, Carnegie Deli in NYC has 7” tall corn beef sandwiches, each in its own way is worth talking about. Ask yourself, what have you got?

2. Make people happy – The Mini Cooper, Dyson working on the vacuum for 14 years to get it right, Target rolling a semi into Manhattan on the hottest day selling air conditioners off the back of the the truck, all of these brands created buzz because they’re fun and they’ve got a story that makes us happy.

3. Earn trust and respect – I trust that Starbucks is always going to have working WIFI and somewhere for me to sit. Nordstrom’s is always going to take a return, no matter what. We make sure your email is delivered. Have you got something people trust?

4. Make it easy for people to talk about you – Another example Andy gave was Kiehl’s skin products, whatever you buy, they’re constantly giving you free samples of other products you might like. What do you do? You talk about it.

I talked to Andy later on about his book and he said "Janine, all of the information in this book leads to buzz, but in the end, you've got to collect email address and communicate to them. Email is just the number one way." I couldn't agree more Andy.

I’ve got so much more to write about on this subject. None of us have big advertising budgets to play with so we all need more ideas about how to create buzz for our products or services.

What's your buzz? Share!