Author: Dan Morris

Strangely, I encountered two businesses this week whose social marketing mistakes exposed their lack of business acumen. They were both using social marketing as part of their plan BUT neither really understood how to marry it to their business. No matter how you slice it, if you’ve chosen to add “social marketing” to your mix – you’re still marketing!! The normal rules still apply.

The people at Dinosaur World in Cave Creek, Kentucky provided my first example of bad social marketing decisions. I had purchased tickets to Dinosaur World for myself and my kids on Groupon.com.  You may not consider Groupon to be social marketing, but know that it’s growth comes almost entirely from people in the social sphere.

I had no trouble with Groupon or the people at Dinosaur World on this trip. In fact, they were great. What was odd was the conversation I had with Dinosaur World about the value of Groupon. The extent of their Groupon followup was a sheet where they marked off the names of people who used the coupons (to prevent fraud). . . and . . . actually that was it.

That was it. They didn’t know if Groupon was providing to them the database of e-mail addresses. They weren’t tracking how much Groupon users were spending in the gift shop. They didn’t provide a coupon or flyer asking us to come back. . . nothing. It was almost as if the idea of Groupon was a novelty.

My second dealing was truly social marketing gone awry. At my local Daily’s Convenience Store, I stopped in to get a soda and noticed the Foursquare symbol in the window. Hmmm. . . So I checked in on Foursquare and asked the attendant if there was a Foursquare special.

By the way just because these marketing mistakes exposed a weakness in their overall strategy, doesn’t mean I didn’t receive great customer service – nor does it mean they lost me as a customer.

Anyway, he was quite excited to get out their book and see what the special was. I believe it was a free $.99 soda. Yay! That’s what I went in to buy.  He then asked what the password was. I looked at my Foursquare checkin, noticed I had also just became the Mayor, and showed it to him. “Foursquare isn’t giving me a password”, I said.

He said “well, I’ll need the password for the special”. Now the notebook is open so I can see the password plain as day, but I didn’t want to just fake that I got it from Foursquare. Then he said something like “. . .you get the password when you check in on Foursquare in Facebook and then it’s on the Facebook page”.

Hmm. . . yep. Someone at Daily’s didn’t quite understand how to explain it to the clerks. After all the time spent putting the program together, the value was lost on me because the clerk didn’t get it. We argued for 10 more seconds about it, but ultimately I bought the $.99 soda I was excited to get free.

The lesson is simple. Social Marketing is Marketing.  Just because it’s new and trendy doesn’t mean you get to skip the education. It doesn’t mean you can do Groupon and not see how to benefit on the other side.  We’re talking about businesses here – not romper room and not your 7th period study hall project.

If social marketing isn’t making you money – maybe there’s something wrong with your business strategy – not my Facebook habits.  Think about what kinds of problems social marketing mistakes will have exposed.

Save yourself some time and check out these tips. Avoiding marketing mistakes in your e-mail marketing program will save you time, improve your delivery rate and enable you to actually make logical and progressive changes.

Today a friend, with whom I work on a website, forwarded me 42 e-mails to add to our newsletter autoresponder.  He’d been sending them out one by one from his e-mail address, and that’s been working very well.

But the autoresponder takes him out of the mix. It allows him to concentrate on other things while his e-mail campaign works on autopilot for him.

Another good thing about e-mail marketing, in general,  is the ability to learn what your customer’s really want.  That’s really a vital part of the purpose of e-mail marketing – the autoresponder just makes it easy to keep going without getting tired of sending out e-mails yourself.

Finding out what people want is easy, if they click on it, it was interesting to them. Imagine a furniture store that sends an e-mail with a kids couch/desk combo link and a decorative botanicals link.  Imagine how useful it would be to automatically put those customers into two separate piles based on which one interested them? That would make it easy to send even more relevant e-mails, wouldn’t it?

Avoiding Marketing Mistakes in your email

Well, that’s the power of a good e-mail marketing program, but not what I learned loading up 42 e-mails. The service we use has a “spam” meter that tells you what level of spaminess your e-mail will trigger when sent out. Too spammy and you know it will likely be filtered out or end up in the junk e-mail folder.

So I loaded up all 42 and got to see the spam number on each, as a whole. I was amazed at the number of them that got “Super Spam” written all over them.  So I carefully went through the body copy and headlines changing little things (the list below) in each until they were all in good shape.

If you can avoid making these mistakes, your e-mail is going to fly through the filters and make it to your customers’ inbox:

In the Subject Line. .

• Don’t use dashes or hyphens
• Also, make sure not to use the word “Don’t”
• Delete all punctuation except commas. And skip using quotes as in: Check out this “tasty” treat
  
• Avoid the use of the ellipsis. That’s the thing that looks like this . . .
• Avoid the use of the phrase “is going to be about”
• Capitalize the first word, but not any other words. If you can avoid using proper nouns, that will be easier.

In the body of the e-mail

• Make sure your e-mail has at least 3 sentences, and a link at the bottom that takes the person to the website the e-mail comes from. For example, if you send the e-mail as info@domain.com, put a link at the bottom to http://domain.com
• If you’re given the option, choose to send the e-mail as html, but also check the box to allow the e-mail to be sent as text if the subscriber doesn’t accept html e-mails.
• Finally and most importantly, follow all the Can-Spam Act rules enacted by Congress. They carry steep fines if you’re not following the rules. If you want to know the rules, you can get a copy here at Joe Marsh’s site.

That should do it. If I’ve missed something or if you’ve learned something we should add to this, leave everyone a note below.

I recently wrote about how the airlines are very close to charging you more just to sit down – which I thought was ridiculous. But then I went and saw that the Indianapolis Zoo has similar logic to their policy.

It wasn’t the Indianapolis Zoo prices that prompted this post, it was the feeling I had when I left that made me wonder if they understand the value of integrating price changes with value changes. When word-of-mouth is crucial to your operation’s success, problems like these turn into a major marketing mistake.

Companies raise prices for a variety of reasons, the worst of which is when it seems arbitrary. Gas stations raise and lower prices daily in accordance with the economics of that commodity. Retailers will often raise prices as a pass-through of shipping and transportation increases. But the real winners are the companies that raise prices because they ultimately raise value.

That brings me to the Indianapolis Zoo prices. I recently attended the zoo, the day after they raised prices for the summer. In fact, the price went from $8.50 to $15.50. That price change shows up on their website and in their pamphlets as the summer price increase – which you clearly know months in advance. There’s nothing in their literature about the extra value they’re providing because of the summer change.

Unfortunately, the marketing squad and the operations department must not have been communicating. For this seasonal price change to make sense, there must surely be new stuff to see and do. I was OK with the raised prices until I came upon a bunch of exhibits that weren’t yet open, bathrooms that weren’t open, water fountains that weren’t usable and their brand new Warthog exhibit without . . . warthogs.

In their defense I’ll say they did open a bat exhibit, which was a small 8 x 12 pen where 6 bats were hanging. And they also opened an Orchid exhibit. Not too shabby, eh? Well it appears the bats were placed in an existing cage that once held some other animal – and the Orchid exhibit. . . it wasn’t in the zoo. It was outside and was free to all who ventured to see it.

As I spoke about in my post Adding Value with Giant Marshmallows, you should not feel you’re earned the right to raise prices – unless you know customers will appreciate the added value to their experience.

So I left the Indianapolis Zoo feeling jipped.  I got to pay double what yesterday’s crowd had to pay – yet the experience was just the same. What is the likelihood that future exhibits will garner my attention?

My question to you, to answer below, is are you looking at your company from your customer’s eyes? Are you judging the value of their experience from a cost perspective? from a user experience perspective? And are you taking into account the perceived value you must be providing when you raise prices? Start the discussion with your thoughts below.

Sometimes I’m surprised that big companies like Hallmark can make huge marketing plan mistakes. But I was flabbergasted that Hallmark really blew a huge opportunity the other night during their broadcast of the November Christmas movie.

I’m a sap, I must say and heard my wife ask no fewer than 3 times if it was OK to watch the movie. She knew I’d get teary-eyed 10 – 15 times and I knew it, too. Those Hallmark movies are good for that. But Hallmark goes above and beyond these days, they buy almost all the ad time and fill it with sappy commercials too. Continue reading “Marketing Plan Mistakes – A Hallmark Case Study”