Category: marketing

Reporting relevance

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In July, this blog has gotten most visitors in a single month than ever, more than doubling the number from June. Views per day and per post have doubled as well. The reach was expanded to new countries, such as Ukraine, Papua New Guinea and the Netherlands, and viewership in an important country such as Germany was consolidated (visitors increased 1,000% month-over-month). The most popular hour to post is confirmed to be 8PM, as most of this blog’s audience seem to be online then.

This is all true. And of course, it is irrelevant.

With the amount of data we get exposed to nowadays, it is easy to get distracted by numbers and fake successes. We have actually developed an extended capacity to focus on the numbers that confirm what we believe is happening and boost our confidence, without talking about the ones that actually matters.

Why are you tracking what you are presenting? How does that affect the change you are trying to make? Are you closer or farther away from achieving that? Can you measure the final change? Is an history of those numbers, going back at least 12 months, available? Would people react differently if they would see natural numbers rather than percentages?

Those are important questions when preparing your next report. If you don’t know how to answer them, or if you catch yourself cheating while answering them, do everyone a favour and do not press send.

Don’t make it difficult

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When adding complexity to a customer experience, we should ask if we do so to deliver more value or to put a patch on some insecurity of our organization.

Having customers queueing on the phone just means we are not sure we will be able to handle their questions.

Sneaking an hidden price in the service just means we are not sure people would pay for it.

Asking a question that does not change the transaction in any way when the customer is at the counter and ready to buy just means we are not sure we have enough information.

Pushing ads when the customer is seeking content just means we are not sure the customer would pay for the content alone.

Needs and wants are often fairly simple and straightforward, and it is worth the effort to attempt to meet them on the same field. On the other hand, fears and doubts are often quite layered and complex, and it is delusional to believe we can push them to the customers by keeping their experiences worth living.

Fair price

Fabrizio2 Comments

In our days and age of uninterrupted special offers, it’s worth keeping in mind few things.

Free does not exist. It’s a mirage, an oasis of opportunities where all you can actually find is mere sand. That’s why, for example, social networks are such a disappointing experience: not only they are not free to their real customers (advertisers), they are also not free for us all, for our communities, for the society. They are fake, a mirage indeed.

Cheap does exist. And yet, you have to keep in mind that somebody is paying for the missing bit. Sometimes it is the customer, in the form of poor quality. Sometimes it is the employees, in the form of poor working conditions. Sometimes it is the community, in the form of less taxes. Almost never, it is the owners.

Expensive does scare. First, because we live in a world of cheap. Second, because not necessarily the premium price prevents the risks intrinsic to cheap from manifesting. So, you might turn out with something you have paid very much for and is still poor quality, bad working conditions, low taxes.

Fair does entice. It is the result of continuous negotiation and changing scenarios. Also, it’s not only applied to monetary evaluation. As consumers, we are empowered to ask for fairer quality, fairer working conditions, fairer taxes. Also when they do not affect us firsthand. Especially when they do not affect us firsthand.

Fair is a difficult concept, and it is often overwhelmed by convenience. It is ok if we are not ready to go for it. Let’s just be mindful about what the other options imply.

What you are and who for

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Few months back I got to know Stripo. I was looking for a way to spice up our internal email updates, and I wanted a tool that could let me build a compelling visual easily and with no coding.

The tool is great, there’s a free trial if you want to check it out. But what really stands out to me after having visited their website few times now, is the perfect way their solution is introduced to the world, right above the fold of their website.

Drag & Drop Email Template Builder – Simple and clear, sets you right away on the right course to understanding what you are looking at. At the same time, they are telling you they are not in the same business as other popular Saas that deal with email, positioning their offering in a very specific niche (“email template builder”). It’s interesting to notice how some of their competitors fail to do just that, because they prefer to put the emphasis on the more common and confounding term (“email”), or because they add complexity with the use of a second term (“content management platform”).

Create professional and responsive email templates fast without any HTML skills – While it is mainly a confirmation of the sentence above, this value proposition statement adds two important elements: what’s in it for me (“fast” = time saving) and why should I stop my research here (“without knowing any HTML skills” = a solution for people with no technical background).

Opportunities

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Why would people rent a car and not drive it?

Even a service as straightforward as car rentals can have things to figure out. So chances are your product, your service, your software might not be used for the application it was originally designed for.

Two points to make here.

If that’s the case, and most likely it is, the best way to find out what is happening is asking your customers. No need to sit in a meeting room with product, marketing, sales, customer success to second guess the needs of your audience. Ask them. Actually, get them involved and listen to them even if everything is going as planned. That’s almost always a signal that you are missing something.

Then, how do you react to finding out? You might be instictively led to force the original use on the customers. Teach them, penalize them, leverage price and place to guide the wrong users away. Or you could make an opportunity out of it, understand that your plans are irrelevant, leverage product and promotion to adapt to what you have found.