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 Web Marketers Get Personal
The New York Times reports that starting next week, a handful of marketers in the United States will begin sending customized ads to Internet users who land on About.com, Lycos and nytimes.com, among other Web sites. So, instead of seeing a random advertisement for the Audio Book Club or the e-travel agencies Orbitz and Priceline, you might see ads addressing you by name, mentioning some of your past purchases at the site and urging you to return. Analysts and industry executives say this new approach offers online sellers a new and inexpensive way to retain customers they have spent heavily to acquire. In recent years, marketers have mainly used e-mail messages to persuade users to return, but spam filters now block many legitimate commercial e-mail messages and spam-weary consumers are less inclined to open commercial messages that make it to their in-boxes.Analysts and industry executives would do well to try to understand that customers want to be left alone. Interruption marketing does not work, we are learning to screen 'messages' out. It is increadible how the industry does not get the customers' 'message' to stop interrupting - all the pop-up blockers, spam filters and reluctance to part with email lest it's hijacked by zealous direct marketers. Sarah Fay, president of Carat Interactive, a Boston-based advertising firm, predicted that advertisers would work hard to make customers comfortable with such ads. Loyalty marketing is becoming one of the top ways to increase sales. You see it with catalogers, and how sophisticated they are about mining their e-mail databases. This gives you a new way to touch people who really have a relationship with your company. No, it doesn't. It gives you a new way to annoy people. If you want to touch people and have a 'relationship' with your customers, perhaps a different industry would be more suitable. Offer value for value, give them something they are interested in, entertain them, inform them, engage them. Just do not interrupt them. *Note* - Your remarks will not appear immediately because we use a comment moderation system.
Comments
Yes it does, and the advantage of the technology I was referring to (Dotomi) is that it is non-interruptive. The marketer's customer is served a message via standard advertising unit while browsing content (you may consider this interruptive too, but currently most sites are serving ads so they can offer content, and at this point, in-page units are generally accepted by the online viewing population.) This is an alternative to emailing the same customer, a customer who has opted in to receive information from the advertiser. Since this quote was taken out of context, it's difficult to tell that this was what was being discussed. I am a huge believer in only giving the customer the amount of information they want to receive by email (we call this CMR "customer managed relationships".) The best relationship marketers are allowing customers to designate the number of times they choose to hear from a company. In my experience, when marketers are sensitive to what their opt-ins are looking for, they can be very successful in developing a relationship with customers. And yes, there are many, many people who do choose to receive marketing messages - "Promotions and Special Offers" are the biggest draw for opt-ins, believe it or not. You need only to look at the gigantic difference in open rates when mailing to a proprietary opt-in list, vs. a rented opt-in list. Posted by: Sarah Fay at July 10, 2004 02:53 AM |
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