Online marketers feeling the pressure to maintain sales in these straightening times may be tempted to start sending out more emails than usual to their customer base. This is no bad thing, so long as the messages are right. However industry figures show that while volumes are increasing and delivery rates are constant, the open rate and click through rate are declining which suggests the messages lack impact.

So the question becomes not so much how many emails to send but how good to make the offer. In the restaurant market, the days when the offer of free bottle of wine would significantly increase bookings are over. Email offers need to be compelling and differentiated enough to make them worthwhile. We recently ran a campaign for Slug & Lettuce to win a holiday in New York that led to a big increase in bookings, whilst for Novus Leisure a campaign that offered Champagne at half-price let to them selling the majority of their annual quota of Dom Perignon during September alone.

When the email offer is good, the promotion significantly unique then customers will take action. If you make it easy enough to take the action then it will go viral. A lot of people remember the Thresher offer from last year, so long as you have control of the parameters and are prepared for the offer to go wild, the results can be spectacular.

Relevant websites: http://www.latenightlondon.co.uk, http://www.slugandlettuce.co.uk

“It’s only when the tide goes out that you learn who’s been swimming naked.” Warren Buffet’s famous axiom is in all too frequent use in these times of financial Armageddon but it still remains a useful one for online marketers as they trade through these exceptional conditions.

A great deal is made online of differentiating functionality and experimenting with new features, which is great if your main objective is brand differentiation. However spend too much time tinkering with your costume as the tide goes out and you won’t have any water to swim in at all – if you’ll forgive the extended metaphor.

The place to focus budgets right now isn’t on developing brand differentials through experiential marketing, but on the conversion funnel.

In the midst of the financial crisis that enveloped the country during the second week of October 08, We carried out an email campaign for one bar and restaurant chain that generated over 5000 new enquiries within three days, representing a huge leap on prior performance. The reason – well the offer was great but the campaign allowed customers to easily make their enquiry and because of this, it was quite literally like turning on a tap within their eCRM system.

Of course the communication process has to be good and automating large personalised campaigns is never easy, but the investment will pay off several times over if it’s done well.

So even while the tide is going out, some savvy operators online are seeing large percentage increases in their online trade simply by focussing on customer service delivery and loyalty schemes for their existing and new online customers; in measurable campaigns that add to the bottom line. 

If there are just two words embedded in the DNA of brand Aardvark Media, they would have to be customer service. Everything we do online, however technical, has to first tick the box saying that it makes life easier for the customer.

Being focussed on this in my work life, I’m probably quicker than most to voice dissatisfaction as a consumer but recently I’ve had such a jaw droppingly bad experience at the hands of Virgin Airlines that it demands a public airing.

 I’m flying with the family to the US soon and as I have a couple of young kids, I decided to take advantage of an offer to upgrade to premium economy so you get a bit more room on the long haul flight. To do that you have to ring the Virgin customer services line which starts with an automated menu (which disqualifies it from being a customer service line in my book) and ends, eventually, with a call centre overseas.

My first call was fairly straight forward, I made the booking and was informed that an e-ticket confirming the upgrade would be emailed to me within 48 hours. It wasn’t, so I made a second call. I was on hold for 10 minutes while they checked the booking – “no problem, the e-ticket will be with you tomorrow sir.” Tomorrow passed and still no e-ticket so I made a third call and spent 40 minutes on hold this time. As I hold longer than this for no man I hung up and called back when my patience had returned.  Twenty minutes on hold again and when I got through I was informed I had to pay an extra fuel surcharge for my booking but that the e-ticket would definitely be with me in 48 hours. It wasn’t. I called back again and held for 15 minutes.

When I got through this time - my fifth call, they asked me if I knew who I had spoken to last time – as if it were my responsibility to record this rather than there’s to keep notes on the system. I had the name but this meant they tried to put me through to that person who was, of course, engaged. When I got through I was rewarded with notice of a further fuel charge but by now desperate to conclude matters, I paid up and pleaded that they just get me the ticket. “Certainly sir, it will be with you in 48 hours”.

And of course it wasn’t. I did eventually get the ticket but all told, I reckon it took about five hours to upgrade me  – that’s upgrade, i.e., pay them more money.

What’s astonishing about this experience in 2008 is that it still exists. We have the technology and we have the skills to create happy customers who keep coming back and yet this automated, chaotic nonsense remains. And from Virgin, formerly the consumers’ champion.

By the way, if, by any chance Virgin pick this up on their blog monitor and want to call me to apologise, they’d better be prepared to hold. 

Reflecting on my old Morris minor whilst looking at my new iphone, it occurred to me that actually they have a lot in common, despite being technologically worlds apart – they’re both really easy to use, add value to my life and as a result, I’ve grown attached to them emotionally .

Businesses can learn a lot from this. Take for an example the restaurants and bar sector. If I’m looking to book a table at a favourite or new restaurant, I want to speak to them or email or book online – not via a third party – but with them. How can a restaurant expect customers to begin to bond with their brand if they put bookings out to third parties? It really bugs me that I frequently have to sign-up with a restaurant website only to be told that I have to sign-up again with someone else just to make a reservation enquiry!

Savvy operators in the sector have realised that investing in direct online relationships with customers and making it easy for them to book and interact, will help them grow their business, even in difficult times. It’s a throwback to good old fashioned customer service, but with high tech underpinnings – a Morris minor with an iphone installed perhaps.

20 Things is a free ebook, from a blog called New Music Strategies, and it’s true, it does draw its examples from the music business, but I think it’s worth reading for anyone that’s considering, or re-considering their approach to the internet, as it’s a good guide to the state of things today, and while it may be talking about music, a lot of the ideas it has could easily be adapted to other industries.

The same site also has a manifesto that has one particular insight worth quoting here:

“One of the biggest mistakes music businesses make when trying to adapt to the online environment is to acknowledge the changes that have happened online and then set about adapting to accommodate those changes. In fact, those changes are still underway, and it is a process of navigation, not a process of conversion from an old model to a new one. By the time you have adapted you will be obsolete again. Develop a strategy for keeping up.”

I follow the work of Schulze and Webb with interest, and have for as long as they’ve been around. They’re an R&D consultancy, helping other companies think about the way in which their business can adapt and be enhanced by the opportunities that the internet and other modern technology offer. I don’t know that they’re always right, but they’re always thought-provoking. And their presentations are very entertaining.

I think the slides of their talk from ETech this year provide a lot of material to think about for the near future, from the idea having a little action figure on your desk (that’s your actual desk, not your computer) that moves in some way to indicate when one of your contacts has come on line, to the more abstract idea of RSS-I (RSS-Interactive), a means of developing an aggregating system like RSS for all the little decisions that websites ask you to make, so that you could queue them all in one application, and process them later in a batch of yes/no (or similarly simple one-click decisions) rather than having to visit each website, in response to an email or other push-prompt.

Their big insight, though, is their notion of generation C - the generation coming into maturity now, who don’t really remember a time without the internet, and whose response to not being offered the exactly the product or service they want (particularly on-line) is to go away and build it themselves. That certainly describes a lot of my friends, even the ones who aren’t terribly technical themselves - they’ll just talk someone else (often me) into building it for them…