Your emails are costing you

Posted: October 5th, 2009 | Filed under: fail, just tips, marketing | Tags: email campaigns, emails, fail, opt-in lists |

Economy is shaky, people are spending less, businesses are turning up a notch on their marketing efforts to drive sales. Makes sense. Some of the brands I purchased from before  (most noticeably Victoria’s Secret and Endless – I’m looking at you) thought a daily email with different deals is one way of driving sales. Send me enough deals and surely I will take the bait eventually, right? Wrong.

The daily email deals are annoying after one week, then feels like spam after a few weeks, then it becomes unbearable – I went and unsubscribed from the brands. Now I won’t be notified of future deals, which is opportunities lost for these brands.

Just because email is free doesn’t mean you should contact your opt-in subscribers list every day (unless your business model IS about daily deals like Groupon). Bombarding your list constantly with emails will come off as spammy, downgrade your brand experience for your customers and could cost you your businesses.

It’s really that simple

Posted: September 11th, 2009 | Filed under: marketing | Tags: cupcakes, marketing, secret sauce |

super mario cupcakes by hello naomi cakes, cupcakes and cookies

Do you want people to notice your business? talk about your product? spread the word on your service?

Make your product/service remarkable, and you will succeed. It’s really that simple. Hard to do, but worth all the effort.

For example, I am not the biggest fan on cupcakes (crazy, I know!), but one look at Hello Naomi’s Super Mario cupcakes and I couldn’t help myself but went straight to her site to see what other amazing-looking cupcakes she also makes. It was almost instinctual. No sales pitch, no one ask me to click on a link, no advertisement brought me there. I was sold on the product because it was remarkable. And I’ll think of Naomi’s cupcakes if I ever need to buy some.

All the marketing campaigns, PR, SEO, online tools can’t help you if your product/service sucks. You can even have a visually-boring website if your product is amazing, people will still use it and keep coming back, look at Craigslist.

Make it remarkable, and you’ve done the hardest part.