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RFID and Beacons location-based technologies are not mutually exclusive and they are very powerful marketing tools for events and festivals

Since the emergence of Beacons technology, it has been widely discussed if it’s better than the pre-existent RFID technology. Discussions make comparisons between them and even suggest that it will override its predecessor. However, it isn’t a matter of being a substitute because it isn’t the upgraded technology of the other. They complement rather than conflict with each other. They have similarities and differences, but above all, one will be more useful than the other depending on what you are trying to achieve, the environment you are going to apply it in and your budget. Let’s first briefly clarify what are they:

RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) is a data collection technology that uses radio waves to track tags that are installed in objects and hold data that will be sent to the reader. In the case of mass gathering events, the tag is usually embedded into wristbands or cards and the ticketholder’s personal data can be electronically stored in it (Lee, Seo, Song and Gadh, 2010).

Beacons is a data collection technology that uses Bluetooth low energy signals to track devices like smartphones, tablets and computers that are in its vicinity and enable to send location-based messages. The mobile devices must have an appropriate app and have their Bluetooth turned on (Zaim and Bellafkih, 2016).

Both technologies collect data on people’s movement and thus they are very useful for festival and event organisers in terms of security and crowd management because they can track, control and contain crowds. This data also allows organisers to analyse collective behaviour by identifying the most visited stages/stands which helps to gain a better understanding of their audience’s favourite points and therefore, improve the design of the festival/event and the attendees’ experience in the future (Mowafi, Zmily, Abou-Tair and Abu-Saymeh, 2013; Frontoni, Mancini, Pierdicca, Sturari and Zingaretti, 2016). For event marketers, these technologies can be used for mobile marketing and social media marketing campaigns to make campaigns more personal and enhance the users’ experience (Oinonen, Jalkala and Salo, 2012; Grewal, Bart, Spann and Zubcsek, 2016). To see real examples of festivals and events using these technologies read this article.

Several studies reveal that smartphones are an essential part of life for users. They can enhance feelings of belonging and social connectedness and within an unknown environment like festivals and events, they can be more than essential because they can provide a socio-technical support very valuable for attendees (Kolsaker and Drakatos, 2009; Luxford and Dickinson, 2015). Considering that most attendees will be carrying a smartphone when attending an event and the ability of these devices to support location-based applications it seems smart the use of Beacons technology as a marketing tool. If you intend to drive sales, Beacons can send push-notifications to the attendees’ device with special offers to draw traffic to the bars and restaurants (Johnson, 2014). If you want to enhance your audience experience, you can also send messages about interesting things going on during the event or even last-minute changes in the schedule.

The down-side of Beacons is the necessity of a mobile device and although Beacons are energy-efficient still drain some of the battery’s device. In one day event is more likely that everyone will carry a device with full battery and there will be plugs to charge the battery if needed. In festivals that last more than one day attendees will encounter the difficulties of finding a charging station plus the cost of charging their devices. You may want to consider this when using Beacons at your festival. However, this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use it. You always can place loads of free charging stations around the festival site, like EE and Glastonbury do (Glastonbury festival, 2016).

Considering also that mobiles can be lost, damaged or stolen, RFID wristbands are a very good option at mass-gathering events. They are safer and more comfortable to carry and they not only can collect data but can be used for many other things. Because they can read up to 1,000 tags per second at a 100% read rate in a setting in which multiple attendees are entering the venue at the same time, RFID is great to use as the event-ticket. Besides they reduce ticket fraud because the tags can’t be cloned (Intellitix, n.d). They can be used as cashless payments which reduce queues and increase revenue (O’Kane, 2016; Roberti, 2014). Their social media integration allows attendees to have interactive experiences such as checking-in portals to win prizes, photo booths connected with social media, posting updates on social media and so on. Check this video to see some examples and benefits of RFID wristbands at events.

Beacons can guide people to move in an indoor environment in a similar way GPS does outdoors, therefore they may be very useful to help event attendees to navigate inside large building and exhibit areas.

RFID readers are more expensive than Beacons and thus this is something you should bear in mind when considering using any of these technologies (Check this article to better understand the cost differences). However, the benefits that RFID can bring to your event may outweigh the cost to implement the technology, hence the choice must consider all the cons and pros of both technologies.

Take away points:

Drive sales and enhance attendees’ experience with beacons push-notifications

RFID wristbands are safer and more comfortable

Beacons rely on mobile devices

Beacons can guide people in indoor environments

Beacons is cheaper than RFID technology

RFID reduces waiting times and ticket fraud

RFID enhances attendees’ experience through interactive activities

 

References

Augur, H. (2017) Real Time Location System [RTLS] Study: How do RFID and BLE differ? [Online] Available at: https://kontakt.io/blog/ble-and-rfid-rtls-how-is-rfid-positioning-different/ (accessed March 21st 2017).

Frontoni, E., Mancini, A., Pierdicca, R., Sturary, M. and Zingaretti, P. (2016) Analysing human movements at mass events: A novel mobile-based management system based on active beacons and AVM. 24th Mediterranean Conference on Control and Automation (MED) [Online]. Available at: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.ezproxy.brighton.ac.uk/document/7536047/authors (accessed March 6th 2017).

Glastonbury festival, (2016) Download our 2016 app + keep your phone charged [Online] Available at: http://www.glastonburyfestivals.co.uk/download-our-official-2016-app/ (accessed April 21st 2017).

Grewal, D., Bart, Y., Spann, M. and Zubcsek, P.P. (2016) Mobile advertising: A framework and research agenda. Journal of Interactive Marketing [Online] 34. Available at: http://www.sciencedirect.com.ezproxy.brighton.ac.uk/science/article/pii/S1094996816300032 (accessed March 20th 2017).

Intellitix, (2012) Overview of Intellitix RFID Solutions for Festivals and Events [Video online] Available at: https://youtu.be/Xce5c0xTSyk (accessed April 21st 2017).

Intellitix, (n.d) How does RFID Access Control technology prevent fraud, secondary ticketing, unauthorized resale, passbacks and staff leakage? [Online] Available at: https://www.intellitix.com/en/faq/ (accessed March 3rd 2017).

Johnson, L. (2014) Bonnaroo’s App Sent More Than 97,000 Push Notifications to Festivalgoers This Year [Online] Available at: http://www.adweek.com/digital/bonnaroo-s-app-sent-more-97000-push-notifications-festivalgoers-year-158948/ (accessed March 6th 2017).

Kolsaker and Drakatos (2009) Mobile advertising: The influence of emotional attachment to mobile devices on consumer receptiveness. Journal of marketing communications [Online]15(4). Available at: http://www-tandfonline-com.ezproxy.brighton.ac.uk/doi/abs/10.1080/13527260802479664  (accessed March 21st 2017).

Lee, J.Y., Seo, D., Song, B.Y. and Gadh, R. (2010) Visual and Tangible Interactions with Physical and Virtual Objects Using Context-aware RFID. Expert Systems with Applications [Online] 37(5). Available at: http://www.sciencedirect.com.ezproxy.brighton.ac.uk/science/article/pii/S0957417409009774 (accessed March 2nd 2017).

Luxford, A. and Dickinson, J. (2015) The role of mobile applications in the consumer experience at music festivals. Event management. [Online] 19(1). Available at: http://www.ingentaconnect.com.ezproxy.brighton.ac.uk/content/cog/em/2015/00000019/00000001/art00003 (accessed March 21st 2017).

Moth, D. (2014) RFID vs. iBeacons: Which is better for event marketing? [Online] Available at: https://econsultancy.com/blog/65310-rfid-vs-ibeacons-which-is-better-for-event-marketing/ (accessed March 21st 2017).

Moti Mireman (2014) What is beacon technology [Video online] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dpSGbWxjQNw&feature=youtu.be (accessed March 20th 2017).

Mowafi, Y. and Zmily, A. and Abou-Tair, D. and  Abu-Saymeh, D. (2013) Tracking human mobility at mass gathering events using WISP. Second International Conference on Future Generation Communication Technologies (FGCT 2013) [Online] Available at: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.ezproxy.brighton.ac.uk/document/6767212/ (accessed March 2nd 2017).

Oinonen, M. Jalkala A. and Salo, J. (2012) Combining RFID technology with social media marketing – a value network analysis. International journal of business information systems [pdf] 11(4). Available at: https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/b4a3/3a1bf23a3c1c1b6a87df8bb5e40f40c6673a.pdf (accessed March 20th 2017).

O’Kane, (2016) High-tech bracelets bring cashless ease to music festivals [Online] Available at: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/economy/growth/high-tech-bracelets-bring-cashless-ease-to-music-festivals/article30688714/ (accessed April 3rd 2017).

Roberti, M. (2014) The benefits of going cashless [Online] Available at: http://www.rfidjournal.com/articles/view?12137 (accessed April 11th 2017).

Vincent (2013) RFID – How it works? [Viedo online] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y2dwIrm4H-w&feature=youtu.be (accessed March 20th 2017).

Zaim, D. and Bellafkih, M. (2016) Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) based geomarketing system. 11th International Conference on Intelligent Systems: Theories and Applications (SITA) [Online] Availabe at: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.ezproxy.brighton.ac.uk/document/7772263/ (accessed March 20th 2017).

 

Social media marketing – Are you using your social media and the social influencers effectively?

 

The phenomenon of social media has revolutionised the marketing industry, influencing various aspects such as marketing practices, consumer behaviour, opinion attitudes, purchase behaviour and post-purchase communication. Many researchers consider social media a very powerful and cost-effective marketing tool beneficial for organisations (Hudson, Roth, Madden and Hudson, 2014; Mangold and Faulds, 2009; Enginkaya and Yilmaz, 2014). It provides an opportunity for marketers to gain unmediated consumer insights, creates brand awareness anywhere in the world, allows engagement and interaction with potential and current customers and much more. A report by Stelzner (2016) identifies that 81% of marketers integrate their social media and traditional marketing activities. This report also analyses what marketers think are the benefits of social media marketing: 89% of them indicate that their social media activities have generated more exposure to their businesses. Increasing traffic was the second major benefit reported by 75% of marketers. 68% report using it to develop loyal fans and 66% claim gaining marketplace insights.

On the other hand, other researchers argue that social media is presenting many challenges and they claim that organisations have lost control over their brand’s image because of it (O’Brien, 2011; Constantinides, 2008; Genslera, Völcknerb, Liu-Thompkinsc and Wiertzd, 2013). Its ability to support peer to peer dialogue allows customers to communicate directly to their friends or other customers, transforming users from content consumers to content producers. The dissemination of brand content is hence, not anymore only in the organisation hands or under their control; these brand’s storytellers have the power of reaching a large audience and this content is not always positive content about the brand. One in 10 UK business leaders claims that their business has lost between £50,000 and £100,000 as a result of negative online content (Fetherstone, 2014).

It’s then clear that social media is a very useful marketing tool but at the same time, it can damage the brand image and thus brands need to find the balance between the negative and the positive aspects of this powerful marketing tool.

Through an analysis of several studies, different recommendations to leverage your firm’s social media and its storytellers have been collected:

  • Social media platforms need to be updated and give immediate response to customers’ requirements, otherwise, the brand can devalue in the eyes of the customers and the use of social media, as a marketing tool, would be pointless (Kietzman and Hermkens and McCarthy and Silvestre, 2011). Check this social media management tools to help you to keep your social networks updated.
  • Appointing a specific social media marketing manager to control the firm’s social media networks is essential (O’Brien, 2011)
  • A cultural change must be done from ‘selling’ to ‘helping’. Demonstrate that the brand cares about the customers’ needs and that the basic motive of the firm is to help them to make the best choice to achieve their personal objectives (Holliman and Rolley, 2014).
  • Demonstrate that the customer’s voices are being heard, their opinions are taken seriously and properly addressed will help the organisation to avoid negative word of mouth (Dekay, 2012)
  • Negative comments must not be ignored because this shows that the organisation is careless of their customers’ voice and opinion. Instead, they must be responded in the best possible positive way in order to transform them in positive comments. (Dekay, 2012). Here are some tips to handle negative online comments.
  • User generated content tends to be more trusted by other users than the brand’s content and thus identifying these social influencers and collaborating with them will ensure that the content that the firm wants to share is listened and trusted by the audience (Amaral, Tiago, and Tiago, 2014). This article facilitates a customizable influencer index that helps analyse and evaluate the degree of influence of any blogger and any particular topic.

Here are some good examples of managing effectively influencer marketing campaigns:

Birchbox – an online subscription service for beauty supplies – teamed up with lifestyle blogger Emily Schuman (with more than 390,000 Instagram followers) to customise their May box. It was a win-win partnership: Emily was related to a very reputable brand while sharing something of value to her audience. While Birchbox was exposed to a tremendous relevant audience, which received over 18,000 likes and reached more than 550,000 consumers.

Toyota collaborated with popular travel and adventure YouTuber Louis Cole (with nearly 2,000,000 subscribers). Louis in his FunForLouis channel shared his Toyota sponsored road trip to promote the Toyota Wonderwagon van across the California West coast. Toyota managed to advertise its travelling style van to a very relevant audience with a video that reached more than 1,5000,000 views.

lynda.com is an online education company offering thousands of video courses in software, creative, and business skills. To avoid being affected by ad blockers they collaborated with popular YouTubers such as Jack Douglas of Jack films (with over 2,700,000 subscribers) who managed to mix his regular content with Lynda’s sponsored content. He challenged his viewers to learn a skill from Lynda.com and share their creations with him, which he shared on his weekly videos of #YAY series. Some of his videos received more than a million views; whereas Lynda.com reached more than 46 million subscribers.

 

References

Amaral, F., Tiago, T. and Tiago, F., (2014) User-generated content: tourists’ profiles on Tripadvisor. International Journal of Strategic Innovative Marketing [pdf] 1(3). Available at: file:///C:/Users/gusi/Downloads/10.15556IJSIM.01.03.002%20(2).pdf (accessed April 15th 2017).

Constantinides, E. (2008) The empowered customer and the digital myopia. Business Strategy Series [Online] 9(5). Available at: http://www.emeraldinsight.com.ezproxy.brighton.ac.uk/doi/full/10.1108/17515630810906710 (accessed April 15th 2017).

Dekay, S. (2012) How large companies react to negative Facebook comments. Corporate Communications: An International Journal [Online] 17(3). Available at: http://www.emeraldinsight.com.ezproxy.brighton.ac.uk/doi/full/10.1108/13563281211253539 (accessed April 15th 2017).

Enginkaya, E. and Yilmaz, H. (2014) What drives consumers to interact with brands through social media? A motivation scale development study. Procedia – Social and Behavioural Sciences [Online] 148. Available at: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S187704281403941X?_rdoc=1&_fmt=high&_origin=gateway&_docanchor=&md5=b8429449ccfc9c30159a5f9aeaa92ffb (accessed April 14th 2017).

Fetherstone, E. (2014) How to deal with negative online comments [Online] Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/small-business-network/2014/sep/12/how-deal-negative-online-comments (accessed April 14th 2017).

Genslera, S., Völcknerb, F., Liu-Thompkinsc, Y. and Wiertzd, C. (2013) Managing Brands in the Social Media Environment. Journal of Interactive Marketing [Online] 27(4). Available at: http://www.sciencedirect.com.ezproxy.brighton.ac.uk/science/article/pii/S109499681300039X (accessed April 14th 2017).

Holliman, G. and Rowley, J. (2014) Business to business digital content marketing: marketers’ perceptions of best practice. Journal of Research in Interactive Marketing. [Online] 8(4) Available at: http://www.emeraldinsight.com/doi/abs/10.1108/JRIM-02-2014-0013 (accessed April 15th 2017).

Hudson, S., Roth, M.S., Madden, T.J. and Hudson, R. (2015) The effects of social media on emotions, brand relationship quality, and word of mouth: An empirical study of music festival attendees. Tourism Management [Online] 47. Available at: http://www.sciencedirect.com.ezproxy.brighton.ac.uk/science/article/pii/S026151771400171X (accessed April 14th 2017).

Kietzman, J. and Hermkens, K. and McCarthy, P. and Silvestre, B. (2011) Social media? Get serious! Understanding the functional building blocks of social media. Business Horizons [Online] 54(3). Available at: http://www.sciencedirect.com.ezproxy.brighton.ac.uk/science/article/pii/S0007681311000061 (accessed April 15th 2017).

Mangold, W.G. and Faulds, D.J. (2009) Social media: the new hybrid element of the promotion mix. Business horizons [Online] 52(4). Available at: http://www.sciencedirect.com.ezproxy.brighton.ac.uk/science/article/pii/S0007681309000329 (accessed April 14th 2017).

O’Brien, C. (2011) The emergence of the social media empowered consumer. Irish Marketing Review [Online] 21(1/2). Available at: http://web.b.ebscohost.com.ezproxy.brighton.ac.uk/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?sid=9febee9c-a85e-4d90-bf89-6ad4dc2f5b13%40sessionmgr101&vid=1&hid=115 (accessed April 15th 2017).

Stelzner, (2016) Social media marketing industry report. How marketers are using social media to grow their businesses [Online] Available at: https://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/SocialMediaMarketingIndustryReport2016.pdf (accessed April 15th 2017).

 

How top music festivals are using creative digital marketing initiatives to engage their fans while fulfilling their high technological expectations

The majority of music festival attendees are millennials (born between 1800-2000), “the tech generation” (Nielsen, 2015; Festival insights, 2015; UKFA, 2016). This generation relies on technology and social media platforms to interact with music, they use these sources in their everyday lives and most importantly, they consume experiences through technology. Therefore, to differentiate among others festivals must come up with innovative marketing initiatives to connect with them and fulfill their expectations. Social media, the internet and mobile applications are some of their means (Van Winkle, Cairns, MacKay and Halpenny, 2016).

Let’s see how smartly renowned music festivals are leveraging technology and social media platforms to engage with their audience and differentiate from the competition.

Lollapalooza fan app contest

For its 20th anniversary, Lollapalooza created a contest to create a fan app for the festival. Any resident or organisation domiciled within the 50 United States could participate. Fans as well!!. Once the apps were created, fans had to vote for the one they liked the most and would like to use at the festival as the festival app. Consumers are eager of being part of more stages of the creation of the product and firms can take advantage of that interest of being involved by engaging user-innovators in the process (Constantinides, 2014). User-generated products are friendly adopted by users and tend to overtake trends because they combine the brand information with knowledge of user needs, which leads to a product that users want and thus will use (Bogers, Afuah and Bastian, 2010; Ogawa and Pongtanalert, 2013). This was a smart interactive way of engaging fans in the creation of something very useful for them while leveraging their needs and knowledge to improve the app. The outcome of this: a strong relationship between the fans and the festival, an improved product that consumers want because they developed it according to their needs and a great marketing strategy to engage fans. Here you can learn more about the benefits and challenges of involving users in product development.

These are the two winners of the contest:

 

Bonnaroo line-up announcement

Every year Bonnaroo festival announces the line-up in an innovative way through the Bonnaroo Line- up Announcement Megathon (BLAM!) event, but in 2015 they created a hype by making the fans to announce the line-up themselves. Fans had to call a number on a specific day and time to find out one artist on the line-up; then they had to announce the artist on Instagram, Twitter or Vine in a creative way and using the #bonnaroo hashtag to create a buzz about it. Social media enables consumers to share content and interact with other users, they can share their views and influence other users. Consumers are not passive anymore and they like being part of the generation and distribution of content. When consumers generate content through social media they can become the voice of a product or brand and thus create awareness about it (Kim and Johnson, 2015). If utilised well, user-generated content can be a great free marketing tool to promote festivals and a way to create a feeling for the fans of being part of the festival. It’s a win-win situation!. Line-ups are one of the most expected features of a music festival; by giving the fans the exclusivity of being the first ones to find out the line-up and announce it themselves was a great strategic marketing tactic that engaged fans and made them feel special, which created a strong bond between the festival and the fans. Have a look at some stats and info about how user-generated content is changing content marketing.

 

Glastonbury: Where’s my welly?

For Glastonbury’s 40th anniversary, Orange in partnership with Glastonbury created a competition to giveaway tickets for the festival. Each of the fifteen days that the competition run, a photo was posted on the website where participants had to find a strategically hidden orange welly in a crowd from past Glastonbury festivals. At the end of each day, the ones who found the welly were put into a prize draw where the winner would be picked arbitrarily. Gamification in marketing includes fun and competition to engage and motivate customers to attain or win something and a way of creating value creation. Games in the form of contests attract customers to the company’s website or social media platforms and are a rich source of data (Conaway and Cortés-Garay, 2014). Check this video of “how gamification can engage your audience”.

 

Tomorrowland Golden Ticket Contest

One thing social media marketers must learn from music festivals is about how great they are leveraging social media and fans to promote their brand for free. Tomorrowland tickets always sold out extremely quick and they are incredibly difficult to get (some sites even give tips on how to get them!). Therefore, since 2012 the festival runs a contest through Facebook to giveaway Golden tickets and from 2013 participants have to make a creative picture or movie related to the theme of the festival, which changes every year, and share it on their Facebook pages. Again, some smart use of leveraging user-generated content. Knowing how desperate fans are to get tickets, the festival can be certain that fans will do anything to get them. A clever way of engaging your audience and getting free marketing through it.

This is the video of the 2013 winner:

You've showed your amazing capacity and creative spirit once again… But there can only be one winner of the 2013 Tomorrowland GOLDEN TICKET. And the winner is….

Posted by Tomorrowland on Tuesday, 23 July 2013

 

Bibliography

Bogers, M., Afuah, A. and Bastian, B. (2010) Users as innovators: A review, critique, and future research directions. Journal of Management [Online] 36(4). Available at: http://journals.sagepub.com.ezproxy.brighton.ac.uk/doi/abs/10.1177/0149206309353944 (accessed January 16th 2017).

Conaway, R. and Cortés-Garay, M. (2014) Gamification and service marketing. Springerplus [Online] 3(1). Available at: https://springerplus.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/2193-1801-3-653 (accessed February 13th 2017).

Constantinides, E. (2014) Foundations of social media marketing. Procedia – Social and Behavioural Sciences [Online] 148. Available at: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1877042814039202 (accessed February 13th 2017).

Festival insights (2015) The European festival market report 2014 [Online] Available at: http://www.festivalinsights.com/2015/01/european-festival-market-report-2014/ (accessed February 16th 2017).

Kim, A. and Johnson, K. (2015) Power of consumers using social media: Examining the influences of brand-related user-generated content on Facebook. Computers in human behaviour [Online] 58. Available at: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0747563215303186 (accessed February 20th 2017).

Nielsen (2015) For music fans, the music is all a stage [Online] Available at: http://www.nielsen.com/us/en/insights/news/2015/for-music-fans-the-summer-is-all-a-stage.html (accessed February 16th 2017).

Ogawa, S. and Pongtanalert, K. (2013) Exploring characteristics and motives of consumer innovators: Community Innovators vs. Independent Innovators. Research technology management. [Online] 56(3). Available at: http://web.a.ebscohost.com/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?sid=bf7fed0a-ebfc-414c-a608-b363f3760b26%40sessionmgr4006&vid=0&hid=4101 (accessed February 20th 2017).

UKFA, (2016) UK festival awards and conference Market report 2014/2015 [pdf] Available at: file:///C:/Users/gusi/Downloads/UKFA_infographics_16lr.pdf (accessed February 16th 2017).

Van Winkle, C., Cairns, A., J. MacKay, K. and A. Halpenny, E. (2016) Mobile device use at festivals: Opportunities for value creation. International Journal of Event and Festival Management. [Online] 7(3). Available at: http://www.emeraldinsight.com.ezproxy.brighton.ac.uk/doi/full/10.1108/IJEFM-04-2016-0025 (accessed January 16th 2017).

Effective tactics for Email marketing. Waitrose analysis.

I am a very cautious person when it comes to opening unknown emails. I suppose I am scared of fraudulent email thieves trying to steal my personal information or emails with attachments that will infect my computer with a virus. Therefore I usually don’t open an email unless it is from one of my circle of users, it is from a company I know or a company I’ve interacted with at some point. Furthermore, there must be something in the subject line that grabs my attention because It’s something I’m interested in; and if my name comes in the subject line I’ll also be more willing to open it. Considering all these points I’m going to analyse what made me opened an email from Waitrose and how good it is in terms of what tactics are used in the email in order to attract customers.

screenshot_2016-10-29-11-55-25

The email subject line is the first point to grab the attention of the email receiver. It has to be relevant to the customer and personalised if possible (Chadwick and Doherty, 2012). My Waitrose email subject line was offering an exclusive offer in Cadbury roses plus a 25% discount in Heston’s ice cream. Both products are similar to other products I previously bought in Waitrose with my Waitrose card and thus it was relevant to me which drove me to open it.

It is also very important that organisations only send emails to customers who have granted the permission to contact, unless they do, customers will probably tag those emails as spam. Furthermore, by law the email must have an easy opt-out process (unsubscribe link) in case the customer doesn’t want to receive more emails. Below there is the example of my Waitrose email with a link to unsubscribe.

screenshot_2016-11-01-15-32-52

 I gave my email address to Waitrose when I signed up to get my Waitrose card and because of that when they send me an email I shouldn’t tag it as a spam; however this email wasn’t in my inbox but in my junk folder. This may be because of the way Waitrose has to submit emails. Therefore, two things must be taken into consideration when submitting emails, so that webmail services don’t detect them as spam: 1) including the name of the customer in the subject line. 2) Sending emails to different customers in small amounts and with different content. Organisations must make sure that the host they use to submit emails allows sending large number of emails at once (Mohammadi, Malekian, Nosrati and Karimi, 2013). Waitrose could have included my name in the subject line, but they didn’t and maybe they sent the same email to a large number of customers at the same time; which could be the reasons I got that email in my junk folder instead of my inbox.

The call-to-action (CTA) buttons are links in the email that will send the customer to a landing page or online application outside the email with the aim of attracting customers and turn them into leads. It is very easy to fail in the way of creating CTA buttons and thus ruin all the effort invested on the email campaign. Here is a guide to create effective CTA buttons.

One of the CTA buttons used on my email was a link to buy the Cadbury roses. The CTA button was very clear about the intention of clicking it with a simple and short sentence saying ‘shop offer’ on the top of the Cadbury roses’ picture. When the customer clicks on an offer in an email the landing page where is taken must be specific for the offer, so the customer focus only on that offer and doesn’t get distracted by other things that may drive the customer to don’t take action. The email and the landing page must have a similar design and same message. For example, my Waitrose email said that the item was £3.60 when purchasing with my Waitrose card and the same is said in the landing page as it can be seen in the image below. Besides both have a similar look which makes the customer think is in the right place.

screenshot_2016-10-29-11-55-25  screenshot_2016-11-01-18-01-36-1

References

Ellis-Chadwick, F. and Doherty, N. F. (2012) Web advertising: The role of e-mail marketing. [Electronic version] Journal of Business Research, Volume 65, Issue 6, June, pp 843-848. [Online] Available at: http://www.sciencedirect.com (accessed 28th October, 2016).

 

Mohammadi, M. and Malekian, K. and Nosrati, M. and Karimi, R. (2013) Email Marketing as a Popular Type of Small Business Advertisement: A Short Review. [Electronic version] Australian Journal of Basic and Applied Sciences, Volume 7, Issue 4, pp 786-790. [Online] Available at: http://ajbasweb.com (accessed 1st November, 2016).

 

 

How IKEA benefit from the use of social media

Ikea decides to stablish social media to create a mutual link between all the organisation departments around the world, however this presented certain challenges since the investement or use of social media wasn’t understood in the same way everywere. Therefore they resolve to create a listening hub (physical space) with a social media command centre in order to detect, share and distribute insight across the comapny. This hub allows stakeholders to gain a better insight of the global idea about the brand.

Through this program the organisation realised of the differences of the perception of the brand in different regions and they also realised which social media was used the most depending on the region. Thanks of all this data collected the brand knew where they had to take action to improve the perception of the IKEA brand.