3 Random Marketing Thoughts

in

Here are three random marketing related things on my mind this week.

  1. Facebook is becoming more and more powerful as a marketing channel. One neat thing they’re doing is allowing advertisers to send them a list of all of their customers' email addresses. Facebook will then cross reference the advertiser's emails with their own user base and re-target ads to drive repeat purchases. I’m sure there are some privacy questions around this but that’s a super compelling proposition for advertisers -- a very efficient way to spend ad dollars.
  2. If you’re shopping for a television on Best Buy’s website, you might be shocked to see small advertisements for televisions from other merchants on the page (with links out to their websites). The risk that you might click on one of these ads is apparently offset by the high CPA Best Buy will get if you end up clicking away and buying the television from someone else. That’s pretty amazing – and a clear sign that the consumer is so much more in control these days. Best Buy's thinking is, "hey, if people are going to shop around, we might as well get a piece of it."
  3. A while back, I learned (the hard way) that when you misspell a word in the subject line of a marketing email, it’s very likely that you’ll get a higher response rate than if you had spelled the word correctly. The mistake jumps out and gets people’s attention. I got an email from Choice Hotels last week that spelled Worcester, Massachusetts as “Worchester”. I opened it right away…to find that they had spelled it correctly in the body of the email. Not a tactic I’d recommend, but sometimes you just gotta do what works.