Alternative marketing thinking

Like most people IBM’s Luis Suarez was drowning in email he would receive at work. Tired of his ritual of spending many hours of his mornings answering mails, Suarez decided to cut back. The fact that he is a social computing evangelist at IBM helped him make the switch easily. His one act, of cutting back on answering every mail he received reduced his mail traffic by 80% in the first week. He also started to use more social networking tools, like instant messaging, blogs and wikis, among many others. Read more from New York Times.

The Royal Bank of Canada has started a unique web portal to help students learn about money management, through video and text blogs by six chosen bloggers. RBC p2p claims to be a place where students can voice their own thoughts about the kind of banking they really need and want. The six bloggers are a mix of university students, aged between 19 to 29 years, right from all the way in Saskatchewan to British Columbia. A good thing would be to link up this blog to more student-popular social websites like Facebook, MySpace and others. We think that Twitter updates on what students are discovering would also revolutionize it and make it more interactive, something that students would actually talk about even when they are not using it.

Steve Lubetkin, founder of Professional Podcasts LLC talks about how professional video podcasts can help banks in promoting thought leadership. Using interesting references from Clint Eastwood films and various social media like Vodcasting, virtual worlds and networking sites, Steve explains how the Internet has opened up an entire new range of opportunities to communicate. This communication is what is going to change the face of marketing as we know it today. Interestingly, Steve unravels how marketing, which is all about conversations and engagement, is linked to leadership. Watch the podcast here.

A recent report from Forrester says that ninety-seven percent of consumers in the US use email. The figures many not be so high in India, but the usage is close to the same among those belonging to the top SECs. Even though email adoption rates are so high is it being used right? Seventy-seven percent of respondents to the Forrester survey say they receive too many email offers. Seventy-two percent delete most email advertising without reading it, and only five percent buy things advertised through email promotions. According to Stephanie Miller, vice president of strategic services at email service provider Return Path the problem is a lack of long-term customer strategy. “Many marketers think of email as a broadcast channel, not as a way to connect with individuals.” When integrated with data like CRM, POS, and Web analytics, email can leverage customer data to have a real dialogue, but very few marketers actually do it. There are some very good insights on how companies could use email better in this two part series from 1to1 weekly. Read them here and here.

Wikihow has an educative post on how to teach our children one of life’s most important skills. To manage money. How to properly manage both spending and saving habits. If children are shown the appropriate balance between the two, you can save them many years of financial difficulty. The post has some very simple ideas, starting with parents becoming role models. By inviting children to participate in the budgeting process. By providing children an allowance and working with them to find saving and spending strategies. By giving children a place to put their money. By establishing limits. By keeping a ledger and more. There are so many simple ideas on how to do things with money on the Wiki that you begin to wonder why no bank or financial institution is setting aside a small sum in collaborating with efforts like these? WikiHow link. Don’t forget to scroll down to see more ideas.

The smart folks at Organic recently featured the new PayPal site (This link takes you to a holding page that will let you sample the Beta page or the old site, now how many traditional brands are willing to let you do this). And how the redesign has brought in a great amount of simplicity to the whole experience. The new site, they say, is a great example of focusing exclusively on the user, and not worrying about PayPal’s internal priorities, something many brands are still unwilling to let go. The old site, for instance, used Paypal-centric language like merchant. The new site though uses much consumer-oriented language and calls-to-action. The information hierarchy is much better with login top left, streamlined navigation and different experiences for users and merchants. The new site seems much better organized around what customers want and when they want it. It’s easier for a user to find the information they need quickly and easily and to get their questions answered. We wrote about the redesign of the Wells Fargo site in this newsletter a few weeks ago.

If the recent eMarketer study on the effects of customer ratings on their websites is anything to go by, banks should be looking seriously to let users leave testimonials or user reviews on their sites. The study shows that over half of online retailers in the United Kingdom, the United States and Europe said their overall conversion rates had gone up in the past year. Over three-quarters said their site traffic had increased. And average order values rose for 42% of the responding online retailers. The survey conducted by E-consultancy and Bazaarvoice found that 28% of online sellers were using customer ratings and reviews. More than half said they were considering it. More than half of all online sellers considered user-generated content either extremely important or very important to company strategy over the next year. A majority of online sellers thought a major benefit of such reviews was to increase conversions, while 73% thought improved customer retention and loyalty were major benefits. Nearly six in 10 thought the fact that customer reviews improved search engine optimization was a major benefit. More at eMarketer.

One of the things about a design job is that the entire process is driven by gut feel and individual opinion. So when Well Fargo Bank decided to redesign their website, they relied on gut, right? Wrong! The new site has been driven by inputs the bank got from analytics. And the results are already there to see, a spectacular, 50% increase in online applications! The team behind the site redesign collated the 100 most-popular search terms to determine what customers most wanted to find out and couldn’t. Topping the list were mortgage rates, security information, and ATM/branch locations – which subsequently were handed premium positions on the new home page. The experts like what they see on the Well Fargo site. Forrester’s Brad StrothKamp “The Wells Fargo home page is a best practice for financial services, and a blueprint for how eBusiness managers should use metrics to develop more effective Web sites.” Some more from Finextra.

Behind the millions of online auctions at eBay lies a goldmine of data that researchers can use to study human behaviour. Ulrike Malmendier, an economist at the University of California at Berkeley, spent time on the site to understand how people spend their money on auctions. The study has proven once again that shoppers act in unexpected ways. She and her team tracked 166 auctions offering “CashFlow 101,” a personal-finance-themed board game. During the seven-month trial, the game’s designer sold the box set on his website for $195. Meanwhile, eBay sellers usually offered an opening price of about $45 and set a one-click, “buy it now” price of about $125. It looked like a great deal for buyers. They could pay less than retail to end the auction immediately or place bids in the hope of fetching an even lower price. But this is where eBay users fell prey to what Malmendier and her co-author, Stanford University economist Hanh Lee, call “bidder’s curse. “Apparently, some bidders grew so enthusiastic about winning the auction that they lost sight of the “buy it now” price, sometimes offering more than $185. They found that in 43 percent of the auctions the bidders ended up paying more than the ‘buy it now’ price. Malmendier says, they did larger studies involving iPods, perfumes and colognes and in 40 to 50% of times eBay auctions exceeded the “buy it now” price. More on Ebay.

Emrah Kovacoglu a former P&G marketing executive is out to make sense of the jumble of tens of thousands of beauty-care products — and create the industry’s killer digital media app in the process. When launched, TotalBeauty.com will aim to catalog and update in real time the vast array of beauty products; review as many as possible in-house; have visitors review them on their own; and provide a “personalization engine” that lets people sort through them in categories such as price, “eco issues,” skin and hair type. Though the mechanism is different, the ambition is like that of Google’s mission of organizing all the world’s information — yet focused only on the highly fragmented $42 billion beauty-care market with nearly 4,000 brands. More from AdAge.