The Internet Marketer's Secret Weapon
We’ve all done it – deleted the CEO’s user account, used “cc” instead of “bcc”, forwarded an obvious urban myth to that “insiders only” discuss list in all seriousness, or sent “testing testing” to a million customers on your email list.
Today’s Question of the Day is:
What was your biggest “doh!” moment when it comes to online marketing, and what did you learn from the experience?
Share your embarrassing moments and read about other’s after the click…
5 CommentsBig news today – Barrie-based start-up “Hot Banana”:http://www.hotbanana.com/, (see our “Five Questions for Krista Lariviere – President, Hot Banana”:http://www.onedegree.ca/2005/07/15/five-questions-for-krista-lariviere-president-hot-banana for background) has been acquired by “JL Halsey”:http://www.jlhalsey.com/ for around $2 million.
While the name JL Halsey might not ring a bell, many marketers will be familiar with their services such as “Lyris”:http://www.lyris.com/, “Sparklist”:http://www.sparklist.com/, and “EmailLabs”:http://www.emaillabs.com/.
At the closing of the Hot Banana acquisition, Halsey paid the owners of Hot Banana approximately 1.9 million Canadian dollars in cash and will make installments totaling up to approximately 750,000 Canadian dollars if Hot Banana achieves specified revenue and technology integration targets in the first and second year following the closing. An additional 500,000 Canadian dollars will be paid subject to working capital and other adjustments.
Interestingly, the company announced the acquisition of popular web analytics firm “Clicktracks”:http://www.clicktracks.com at the same time.
The core of the press release with all the details follows the break…
Everyone on this site will surely know the “4 P’s of marketing”:http://marketing.about.com/od/marketingplanandstrategy/a/marketingmix.htm. I must come clean, I have a favorite P. It’s Price. I’ve always been a secret admirer of the pricing strategies of companies, even before I got into marketing myself. I can’t understand anyone not admiring the genius of the “Buy One, Get the Second Half Price!” offer.
An accountant would say that this is just a marketing trick and that it would be more honest just to say “Get 25% off this item but only if you buy 2 of them”. That’s why there are no accountants in marketing. The strategy is to create extra demand for a product that you already have a qualified customer for at the till. For every customer who you get in the door interested in the sale item, you double the speed of your inventory movement. It’s genius. Then, of course, there is the Walmart approach of constantly rotating in-store price discounts. This strategy encourages frequency and loyalty in shopping behaviour and I would guess also increases the total amount of time spent in store.
Comparing these pricing innovations in the offline world with pricing online demonstrates the maturation process still needed in online marketing.
Let’s take one of the biggest and most successful online retail sales sites as an example, “iTunes”:http://www.apple.com/itunes/. Don’t get me wrong, I love iTunes for its simplicity of use and its vision of creating music “experiences” for customers. Further, at a billion paid downloads and growing, it’s tough to argue that they need a whole lot of coaching from me. That said, I would suggest that their current pricing practices reflect their existing dominance in the music download space (78%, I heard). I would predict that as new entrants increase their own market share, iTunes will naturally have to look at maturing its pricing practices to compete.
So what does iTunes do with pricing that so violates my sacred and favorite “P”?