Archive for December, 2005
Posted on December 8, 2005 by Robbin Steif
Just because this post is about email marketing, don’t think it’s off topic. I try hard to write only about conversion.
Before I sent out my email newsletter yesterday, I personally (i.e. not a blast) wrote all the people who might be interested in being on my list and said, “Are you interested? Here are the details. Don’t be embarrassed to say no, we are all busy people.” Of course, a few people didn’t reply, but those who answered said “Yes!” and usually thanked me for asking first.
So I sent out the newsletter (it was on the topic of scent)… and one recipient, who had heard me speak at a seminar, called me up to ask me to do a project. Send me a contract today, she said.
I learned three things. 1) It never hurts to be polite (my mother taught me that one a long time ago) 2) It never hurts to ask and 3) Remember to keep touching the customer in subtle ways. Conversion comes through lots of different channels.
Robbin Steif, CEO
LunaMetrics
View Comments (1 Response) | Categories: Conversion Science, Email
Posted on December 5, 2005 by Robbin Steif
So I finally got on Amazon to order those holiday gifts, before the real rush begins next week.
I ordered more than their minumim $25 for free shipping. And I was awed to see that they had automatically pre-checked a faster shipping rate — one that I had to pay for. In other words, if I didn’t know that they offered free shipping over $25, or wasn’t paying attention, they would have taken my money.
Amazon, I’m surprised at you. Yes, I know that you always need to make money, like the rest of us, but don’t pre-check radio buttons. Especially don’t pre-check radio buttons that work in your favor and not necessarily in the customer’s favor.
Robbin
LunaMetrics
View Comments (No Responses) | Categories: Conversion Science
Posted on December 2, 2005 by Robbin Steif
I claimed this blog on Feedster tonight. One of the links that I clicked on didn’t work. Instead of giving me an ugly 404 Error, Page Not Found, they served up a wonderful page with their own template and great text. “We just revised our site,” it read, “We can’t find that page. We’re sorry. Really.” Frequent readers of this blog will know that I love polite error messages but it doesn’t matter how polite the message is when the missing page makes the customer irate. Tonight, that’s how I felt when the page that enabled me to sign up for Feedster was just not there. In fact, there was an “Aren’t we cool?” edge to the error message that really rubbed me the wrong way — no, you are not cool when your login page is nowhere to be found, and you just sound stupid.
Robbin
LunaMetrics
View Comments (No Responses) | Categories: Conversion Science
Posted on December 1, 2005 by Robbin Steif
Earlier this week, Marketing Sherpa did a great piece on the importance of ensuring that your site and all the widgets on your site, like calculators, work with Firefox. They pointed out that 20% of their visitors use Firefox (and about 17% of Lunametrics visitors use Firefox.) So I dutifully downloaded it to check out my site and my customers’ sites, and became a convert immediately.
I know, most of you slashdot.com types have been using it forever, but I was doing the IE thing because it was easy. Firefox, I learned, is way faster. There really is a downside, though – not everything works. For example, there was a little tool that I used to love to use when I helping customers do email marketing. You typed in your “subject” and “from” lines, and it shows you how they render in different email programs. But it doesn’t work with Firefox. Ditto for my own statistics!
Maybe open source hasn’t taken over the world quite yet, but it’s coming. Is your site Mozilla friendly?
Robbin
LunaMetrics
View Comments (No Responses) | Categories: Firefox
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