Event Triggered Emails

Once again, i'm going to bang on about B&Q, the UKs No 1 DIY/Garden Centre Retailer, not just because I am a devoted employee, but because I love the way they use events, in these examples weather events, to send out emails that give a very personal message to the reader, but also sell their products.

The email I received from B&Q a few days after the news of the weather warning.

Here was the email that I received from B&Q, cleverly titled "Get prepared for the ice & snow."

With the recent weather warning the UK has faced, B&Q has seen the opportunity to make consumers aware that they are here for you with all the essentials to make sure you are prepared for the bad winter weather we are going to witness.

An email like this, I would normally open as it would grab my interest as I would want to be prepared for the winter, and there may be a product there that could be of use to me.

It isn't a personalised email to me, however the way it has been structured, it is sending out a personal message that makes the reader feel that it is personal. It makes me, as the reader, overlook the fact that they are trying to sell you their products.

An email I received the day after the big storm that hit the UK

 From the looks of it, B&Q will have a standard template which has links to the various departments (e.g Garden, Rooms, Decor, Fix, Build, Eco, Offers, Help & Advice) and it seems the structure is the same as well, featuring 4 products advertised that relate specifically to the event in hand.

I would't complain about the layout of the email, it is structured well, easy to navigate around. There isn't a lot going on. From the main picture of the snowy road, that takes you to a landing page which is under the 'Help & Advice' section of the B&Q website. This then leads to individual products that B&Q believe to be helpful in a situation that we may find ourselves in.

This is the first company that I have seen that has taken on a strategy like this and I feel that it could become extremely beneficial to them. It reaches audiences and gives them that one step ahead of the competition of Homebase and Wickes because, as shown below, they both don't have anything near what B&Q has.

Homebase Help & Advice Page

Wickes Help & Advice Page

In all, another great example of how B&Q are using email marketing to subtly market their products to the end consumer. This is because no other company (that I am aware of) does marketing like this and it is a great way of interacting with your customers.

Feel free to comment if there are any other retailers that do marketing like this as I am interested to find out. 

Is Email Marketing really the 'King?'

During my reading week, I've come across a blog post by Arthur Middleton Hughes on 'Why Email Marketing is King.'

From reading it... Yeah, I can see his point!! 

For starters, the cost of Email marketing is so much cheaper than the likes of TV, Direct Mail (DM) and Print. eMarketer reported that US companies are spending $64 million on TV advertising per year, $34 million on print ads and $39 million on DM. These are huge budgets, but compare this to email, which is around $1.5 million, I begun to think.. why aren't companies using email marketing more to their advantage?! 

Secondly, Email Marketing has the added feature of being able to measure the outcome of your email campaign within 24 hours!  This isn't an option when it comes to TV print and DM as you don't know who has seen the TV/Print ad and whether their purchase was related or influenced by that ad. Whereas, with Email, you can see who opened the email, how long they looked at the email for, whether they clicked any of the links and whether they bough anything or not. This means 'testing' of email marketing campaigns is possible as it is so cheap and measurable, that you can evaluate which was the better email approach etc. Admittedly, an email may not create a direct sale there and then, however it is a great way to create an impression on the reader to then want to go to a local store and buy the item. Yes, this means it isn't as measurable in this sense, but that is what a TV/Print advert does, but they cost sooooo much more! 

Due to the possibility of adding in electronic links to your emails, this opens up the ability to market your businesses WHOLE range of products, not exactly something you could do on a TV ad! 

A great example of this is B&Q. The number 1 DIY and Garden Centre retailer have recently (well, last year) introduced a loyalty card that offers deals and offers instead of points, like your Tesco Clubcard. It's called 'B&Q Club' and, basically, you sign up with your email, name and house number/Postcode and you receive 1 email a week on a Friday which details the weekly offers available to B&Q Club members. The weekly email obviously has links to all the relevant products that are on offer that weekend, but it is a great driver of footfall in stores as well. Admittedly, I do work at B&Q, hence why I know so much about the B&Q Club, but I see the effect that this email marketing campaign has on a weekly basis. If the email wasn't sent out, footfall and online sales wouldn't be what they are, and it shows how a high street retailer is adjusting to new methods of marketing in order to beat their competition. 

Getting my head around Google Analytics

First of all, it all seemed very confusing as I have NEVER used Google Analytics (GA) before!

However reading through a couple of Econsultancys articles on Google Analytics, I now feel a lot more informed and can see how useful it can be to an organisation for a range of reasons.

The first article I looked at, as a beginner of GA, was titled 'How to use Google Analytics advanced segments a guide for beginners.'

It was a great article which explained what advanced segments were and what range of segments there were. It also went on to explain why they should be used. This opened my eyes to see what uses there were and then how important it can be to an organisation on what sort of visitors were looking at the page in terms of what device they were using, where they lived, the time of day and many other methods of measuring and informing the website owner a little bit more about their visitors. It went on to include information on how to create a customer advanced segment which you can personally choose what specific segments you choose to focus on. 

Once I had read this I also found an article, on Econsultancy again, which was '10 useful customer Google Analytics reports and dashboards for publishers.' This was also very interesting to see what custom made Dashboards people have already made which can be applied to my own GA account by downloading them. 

There were a variety of different dashboards which I found interesting and useful. 

The first one I found interesting was about when people are viewing your content. This dashboard basically looked at what time of the day people were looking at your webpage and it also detailed what days were most popular. This would be a great way of planning what day to post your blog and at what time. This could increase the amount of visitor to your page, increasing the awareness of the blog/page. 

The second dashboard I found to be interesting was the referring sites dashboard. This shows which site referred viewers to your page, and also how many. This can help target specific pages, for example if it was Twitter, to tweet your page more often as a lot of people were referred to your page. 

The third, and final dashboard I found most interesting was Social Media Dashboard which basically detailed no. of people that read an article, the revenue generated by visitors clicking on your site and the 'Per Visit Value' and the most socially shared content. 

As a beginner, I found both of these articles EXTREMELY useful and would recommend any new blogger or page owner to read some of the articles on the Econsultancy site. I now feel I can use GA to my advantage tracking visitors on this blog and going from there. 

BIG DATA: Is a picture really worth 1000 words!?

So the guys at Google, MIT and Harvard have been thinking about the phrase 'Is a picture worth 1000 words" and well, two guys, Jean-Baptiste Michel and Erez Lieberman Aiden, have the outcome that it is not worth 1000 words... It is worth 500 BILLION words!!

Google is currently in the process of digitizing books and publishing them online.  So far they have digitized 15 million books. I thought this was a lot, until they uncovered that 15 million was only 12%!! So they've got a fair way to go.

What this digitization has enabled is that you can now analyse what words people have written in their books from centuries ago and compare that to what people have written in their books recently. This allows trends to be picked out to see what everyone is writing about. The way of analysing this is by the use of Ngrams - a new way of picking out and underlining key trends of words! A key tool i'm sure if you're looking to do that?

A phrase called culturomic came up in this video, it is the application of massive scale data collection and analysis of the study of human culture. Apparently everyone can do this, but to me, hearing it for the first time.. What does this mean!?

The link for this video is below.. Have a click and have a look.

http://www.ted.com/playlists/56/making_sense_of_too_much_data.html - Look for the second video in the playlist "Jean-Baptiste Michel + Erez Lieberman Aiden: What we learned from 5 million books"

This is where it begins...

Blog 1 - the first of many! Watch this space!