Archives: December, 2011
Ho, Ho, Horrible: Worst Holiday eMail Campaign Ever?
I don’t have to say too much, because this terrible email campaign is eloquently awful and speaks for itself.
After reading the entire email, it’s easy to see where they go terribly wrong:
- I don’t know the sender and won’t likely trust BIG promises from a stranger: Stranger Danger!
- header is generic and tells me nothing—why would I open?
- they refer to an ‘amazing and an excellent opportunity’. What the heck is it?
- 4 days only!! Wow, that spurs me to action
- unnamed product that costs $100s.
- they expect me to click through to to a strange site for an expensive mystery product. I don’t think so.
I did change their name in the email copy below—to protect the guilty.
Read it and weep:
Read MoreAmazon’s Kindle Fire Broke a Vital Content Marketing Rule: Understand Your Customers’ Needs Before Attempting to Provide a Solution
Tens of Thousands of Disappointed Users Expected Much More from Jeff Bezos and His Crew
As many content marketing thought leaders have pointed out, Amazon is a superb content marketer. When it comes to books, for example, the content they provide increasingly replicates and replaces the individual attention that independent stores have provided for hundreds of years. Amazon learns what you like, makes great suggestions, invite you to participate in evaluating books, music, videos, and tons of other products.
Although they were not the first to deliver an e-reader, the Kindle quickly came to dominate the e-book marketplace. Moreover, Amazon was brilliant to enable Kindle functionality on your PC, on iPad, on an iPhone on a Android phone, and pretty much anywhere you are likely to consume books.
So, naturally, those of us who are genuine Amazon fans expected much more From the hugely hyped Kindle Fire.
Cheap and Easy to Use Technology Enables Even Small Companies to Trump Traditional Media
Content Marketers Can Deliver Great Information Products to a Targeted Customer Base
Fortune 500 companies have long had the technological resources and investment capital required to build sophisticated content marketing solutions—and to manage huge amounts of demographic data relating to their prospects and customer bases. Many of these firms, such as Best Buy, Proctor & Gamble, Microsoft, and Amazon.com, probably know more about us than some of our relatives do. They also do a terrific job of delivering relevant and compelling content to different segments of their prospect bases.
Smaller companies, however, have had to rely on media companies to deliver their message to their targeted buyers . This has certainly been true with print publications and, until recently, online as well. Affordable technology is now changing all of the rules.
Just a few years ago, it would have been laughable to imagine that a very small organization could create and maintain a Web site that could be updated daily—and that would allow visitors to interact and even buy products and services. Today, this is not only possible but pervasive. In fact, a 10-person company may be able to outmarket a 10,000-person company in a carefully chosen niche.
There are four core components underlying the shift in the technological balance of power away from media giants and toward companies of all sizes:
- The ability to create sophisticated online publications such as Web sites, digital magazines, and e-newsletters
- The ability to manage huge amounts of data relating to current and future customers
- The ability to leverage social media to engage targeted customers
- The ability to do each of these simply and inexpensively
Read More
