Rewarding your best customers while boosting your sales

Nowadays sports fans have a multitude of options available to them for following their favourite team. Online game-trackers providing real time play-by-play, HD television and internet radio feeds. Sports franchises themselves are probably most worried about the emergence of HDTV because the product is so good that it is almost like being in reasonable seats at the game. That means they need to find a way to make the game experience that much better to encourage fans to continue to buy tickets for the real deal.

Like a franchise rewards their top players with long-term contracts, they also need to look at ways to reward their best customers, season ticket holders.

A football/soccer team in Italy has come up with a brilliant way to thank their best fans while at the same time probably create a large rush for merchandise. Recently Parma Football Club revealed their kits (or uniforms as us North Americans call them) for the upcoming 2012/13 season.




 

See those faint grey lines on the white part of the jersey? Those are the names of every single season ticket holder. Genius. What better way to thank your fans than having your players wear their name in games. I guarantee they will sell quite a few jerseys, especially to the season ticket holders. 

Think outside the boxffice

This isn't a revolutionary idea but it is something I believe in, so it makes an appearance on the uber-exclusive Kliff's Notes blog.

Sometimes it is easy to get stuck in a rut walking into the office five days a week, sitting in the same chair, in front of the same computer for eight plus hours each day. This rut can affect your demeanor, your mood, and ultimately your creativity.

That's why some of my best thinking happens when you get the chance during the week to get out of the office. Whether it is heading to a clients, attending an event or just taking a half hour and walking around the neighbourhood, that bit of change seems to spark the brain into creating new opportunities that may help one of my clients. Some of them are completely off the wall and probably don't deserve to see the light of day, but giving the old brain a chance to breathe makes work a little more interesting and effective I find.

A couple of weeks ago I was taking the subway out to an event with my client and I found it much easier to articulate what I was working on for her and how it was going to help their business. Something about being free of the shackles and corporateness of an office just allowed my thoughts and concepts to flow smoothly.

Give it a try next time you are stumped or want to impress a client. Maybe i'll have all my client meetings on the subway from now on!

Are you being a twit?

Are you making the most of your Twitter account?

You may be working hard to come up with clever or relevant tweets for your target market or unique offers to send to your followers, but if you haven't put the time into acquiring and cultivating the right followers then you are just wasting your time.

If you are a B2B company and think that following medium-to-large sized businesses twitter accounts is getting you any value, then you should rethink that idea. These accounts are maintained by the communications/marketing/pr department of a company, so unless you are selling advertising or other products related to these specialties then you aren't hitting the decision maker for your product. The people you need to try and get following you are the decision makers in those companies. But how do you find those people?

• Collect business cards from networking and business meetings then check to see if these contacts are on Twitter
• Go through the Followers of the company's corporate Twitter account, the people managing the account will often like to follow members of the company
• Use other social media profile information (ie. Facebook, LinkedIn) to see if contacts have listed a Twitter account

Just following these people won't guarantee they follow you back, but it is a good way to let them know you are on Twitter and introduce yourself to them. When one of these people gets an email notifying them "John Smith is now following you!" the reaction will often be to find out who this new follower is.

Now all you have to do is keep them interested in what you have to say.

Advertainment

Pretty sure i'm not the first to term the phrase "Advertainment" but if I am then let's hope I earn some serious royalties from it just like when Donald Trump tried to copyright the phrase "You're fired".

Anyways, the point of this post is to talk about how brands and companies can use Advertainment to engage users and get their message in front of copious amounts of eyes. As I was going through my blog reader today and reading Andy Sernovitz's latest post I couldn't help but laugh out loud. What a brilliant way to sell your impressively, terrible, beater of a car. The creator could have just put together a plain old Craigslist ad or posted it on Cartrader.com or any other car selling website but instead they created what can only be seen as one of the most brilliant marketing pieces i've seen in a long time. Although they clearly have an advertising background a similar ad could have been created using Microsoft office, not InDesign, Quark or other professional layout programs. He used humour and creative messaging to make his product go viral and that is a great lesson for small businesses everywhere.

You don't NEED to spend huge dollars to have an advertising agency create you an ad with Jerry Seinfeld or aliens. If you don't have marketing/advertising dollars to spend you have to use creativity and have a sense of humour to get the word out about your product/brand. In this digital age it is becoming easier for brands to make a big splash with a smaller amount of money. The masses are using advertisements as a source of entertainment and if you make one interesting enough they will do all the work for you.

Making a boring product viral

I was forwarded a video ad this week by a friend of mine. As soon as I watched it and laughed multiple times throughout I have decided to give it Ad of the Year already. Why? Because this company took a boring product and managed to make a hilarious ad that has gone viral. The quality of the ad itself is very good, so clearly they didn't film it on their iPhone. So they may have spent some money on the ad itself, but they don't need to spend a single dollar on media because the masses are doing it for them. The company is called Dollar Shave Club and they have a great offer to go along with their brilliant video. Here is the video:



Check out the rest of their website at www.dollarshaveclub.com. This is the type of brilliant company that will be a goldmine for Mike the founder. As a male I can confirm that I am always shocked by how much razors cost in a store, and I always forget to buy new razors so if I can get a razor delivered to me each month for $1, then you've got my attention already.

Love the video, love the brand, and i'm sure they are getting a tonne of traction from this. When was the last time you wanted to forward a video or a website dedicated to razors?

This whole brand and campaign give hope to the boring brands out there. It just shows that with a little creativity and not taking a stuffy corporate approach to advertising can have a big impact.

Why travel agents will be no more

Earlier this year I wrote about how my girlfriend had a tough time dealing with Lucky Brand jeans customer service. Fortunately they reached out finally and went above and beyond to rectify the situation. Unfortunately I still hear some shocking stories of customer service from friends, it just can't happen in this day and age. The individual has too much power to hurt your brand.

Recently two close friends of mine were married and wanted to go to Fiji on their honeymoon. They also had their wedding registry with Flight Centre to help pay for their trip. Since this was such a major trip for the two of them, they decided to use an expert to plan and book it. Unfortunately this so called travel expert didn't do his research and relied on outsourcing the accommodations to a Fijian travel firm. This resulted in my friends being placed in a worn down, family hotel on the mainland of Fiji where beaches aren't nearly as good as on the outlying islands. They arrived after traveling from Vancouver ready to relax and were instantly disappointed. They had been overpromised and under-delivered. Images they were sent were those of the hotel's sister property which was much nicer, but was double the price they were told. After two days they determined the hotel just wouldn't do and contacted their "professional" agent to help them switch locations. After he dilly-dallied for a day they went online and booked their own accommodation for the rest of the trip.

They arrived at their new accommodations to find it was cheaper than what their "professional" travel agent had booked them and much more to the specifications they had indicated to him, which he had failed to produce. It was off the mainland, featured pristine beaches, no screaming children, and a very nice private bungalow.

Now, I know there is no way a travel agent will know where to stay in every country in the world, it's impossible to ask that of them. What is possible, is for them to do a little bit of research on locations before recommending something to a new client. If an average joe can go on Trip Advisor and Expedia and read reviews why can't a person who's job it is to book travel for people? Such a simple thing could have avoided the enormous headache that is being created surrounding this entire catastrophe.

Now Flight Centre is holding up a refund for my friends by saying it depends on what the Fijian travel agency THEY outsourced to tell them they will give back. Well, unfortunately it's not my friends problem that YOU outsourced to Fiji. The only mistake my friends made was booking using a Flight Centre travel agent. Now that you have failed on booking travel AND customer service I'm sure they won't make that mistake again.

Oh and now they've told all their friends too, so..... you've got that going for you Flight Centre.

Awful Execution

Is there anything worse than a mass communication piece from a company you have a relationship with that forgets your name? As a marketer and someone with half a brain I realize that they don't send out individual emails, but I also understand that my cell phone company should have a system that allows them to put my first name into the email instead of....

They executed the "Dear" part well but that is about as good as they did on this piece in which they were asking their customers for help in making the company better. I have one suggestion for them, but I'm not sure if this email was meant for me because there isn't any name on it so I guess i'll have to save my thoughts.

When you are sending out a mass email or mass communication check your database, check your system, and for goodness sakes do a test run to make sure everything will go smooth. You are sending this out to YOUR clients, I wouldn't want to embarrass myself like this.