Monthly Archives: October 2014

Email Marketing: Some Small Tips

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Using one of my email subscriptions as an example, in this post i will be examining the  contents from e-newsletter, Retail Week, particularly focusing on its design, personalisation and relevance to me as its end consumer. Additionally i will be drawing upon Mohammad, M et al (2013) Email Marketing review for small businesses to further my review in this post.

First of all, while scanning the message and its contents, i found little to no marketing riff-raff, diversion links to other services or promotional eyesores averting me from which was important to my emailing experience. Content was kept suitable and concise and much in keeping with the permission based content i signed up for. I can safely say that Retail Week have delivered on my expectations giving me the only the content in which i subscribed to prior to this email.

While all the content is somewhat relevant and useful, i feel like the breaking news stories have been compiled together to fill the page. It feels standardised with no focus on personalisation which i know would make for a more pleasurable experience, giving me the opportunity to view only the news stories that suit my interests.

I have these news bulletins set twice daily and expectedly they comprise of similar content, not really giving me any good incentive to open the second bulletin. Rather this, it would be an idea for them to reinforce their strategy by possibly offering me a call-to-action (CTA) incentive or potential free download. While this kind of strategy can negatively impact the perception of the brand, CTA’s get unprecedented traffic through impulse clicks.

While companies want to preserve credibility, there is a way to appear at the very least, polite about trying to sell a product or service. Soft-Sales is an approach where you formulate “gentle reminders” as a means of promoting new products in an attempt to soften the pretence on what can appear to be aggressive sales. Thereby tailoring certain offers on a CTA basis Retail Week could potentially increase their subscription list over a wide range of platforms. Aggregating the  two (CTA and soft-sales) is a cohesive tactic and a potentially very effective one if companies want to explore new revenue streams whilst sustaining a loyal following.

Pre-determined triggers are a fantastic way to target consumers when they are most susceptible and likely to be of value. However, Retail Marketings should be using alternative strategies in order can reinforce the message of the brand and to remain interesting to its target market. Thereby effectively utilizing personalisation techniques and a further promotional incentive, such as CTA strategies, they may find that competitive advantage that we all know is so vital in such a augmented marketplace.

TED on Big Data

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TED talks goes big with Big Data – some great insights from storytelling experts TED

As we have already established, Big Data is important. But just what’s next for the world of machine learning, and what can it bring for future industry? Kenneth Cukier (The Economist) explains all with the benefits and limitations of Big Data.

Big Data – The Future of Management

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The likes of Amazon and Google have had a rather big head start in this era of digital data, leaving many traditionalists long in its wake. But its easy to see why companies that are born digital tend to have a greater understanding of their consumer markets. Simply put, the digital lynchpins are engaging vigorously with Big Data, extrapolating various unique insights that only strengthens managerial and strategic decisions. In the past we would use analytics as a means of making business decisions, much of this left down to “gut-feelings” or “roundabout” guesses. The Risks were higher. However, what we have now is an articulate understanding of the market with the capabilities to manipulate Big Data.

McAfee & Brynjolfsson (2012) explores just what makes Big Data so special and sheds light on how data-driven companies perform. Zooming in on some contemporary issues they illustrate the before and after effects of Big Data on a US airline. The before demonstrates poor service scheduling, bad weather predictions and a fleet of unhappy customers. Fearing that the company was losing millions in revenue, they sought decision-support technologies that would predict arrival estimates. Thereby compiling data of weather, flight schedules and a backlog of flight history, the company could predetermine flight arrivals. This provided a constant flood of information and pattern matching to assimilate exact arrivals and next departures.

“It’s a simple formula: Using big data leads to better predictions, and better predictions yield better decisions” McAfee & Brynjolfsson (2012)

So it’s not just digital companies that will reap the future benefits of big data. What is now needed is “a new culture of decision making”. We must remember the value of human input and impact of managerial decisions. The data is all there, it’s just how we decide to manipulate it that will dictate our success. Online Databases are rife with business intelligence that remain rich in variety and value, more the reason to have many eyes on one pie. The risks may be mitigated, but the stakes in this case are higher with competitors having that same access and same opportunity. Laggards should see this as an opportunity to recast their gaze on arguably the biggest technical advancement since the inception of the internet. Big Data will mark a changing of the guard for how we base our future decisions, those that fail to keep up with the curve will simply be left in its wake.

McAfee, A. & Brynjolfsson, E. (2012) Big Data: the Management Revolution. Harvard Business Review

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