I recently attended the 2008 Association of Travel Marketing (Red Rock Hotel, Las Vegas) and I had the pleasure of sitting in on a presentation given by Porter Gale, the VP of Marketing for Virgin America. Ms. Gale gave an excellent presentation on how Virgin America is redefining air travel.
As everyone is probably aware the Virgin Group is probably one of the most intriguing and successful brands, and of course a good part (if not all) of the credit goes to the leadership of Sir Richard Branson.
I listened intently to try and learn as much as I could about the Virgin Group's marketing strategy, especially as it relates to launching a new business. While it seems that they have the magic formula, in business as in life you can never anticipate all of the challenges that lie before you. It was during the question and answer period that the most basic of questions had me thinking about their short-term chance at success.
The question from the audience was simply " are you profitable?". The answer was "no, but we are at plan". As everyone knows it is not uncommon, in fact it is almost expected that a start-up will be in the red (again, usually by design) for some period of time. I just had to wonder if they contemplated the sudden and dramatic increase in oil prices when the airline was first conceptualized. The Virgin Group certainly must have deep pockets, but I also wonder what their tolerance for pain is.
This is the part of marketing (and business for that matter) that I do not like. You can never plan for all contingencies as there are too many variables. I certainly hope that they survive as the airline industry is in desperate need of fresh ideas to improve air travel. We shall see...
Thursday, June 19, 2008
Saturday, June 7, 2008
Emails Appends are Hot
To e-mail or not to e-mail...that is the question.
While the debate rages over the effectiveness of e-mails for prospecting, no one doubts the fact that many consumers prefer e-mail communication with a "trusted source", certainly over the dreaded telephone call. We often see organizations that have a large customer master database and wish they had more email addresses. Going back after the fact is mostly a futile effort as the consumer is not just going to offer his or her email address for the purpose of receiving promotions, unless you find a very creative and compelling reason for them to give you this valuable piece of their personal information.
What is a marketer to do? First and foremost you need to address the real problem. Why are you not getting e-mail addresses from your client transactions? Probably because it was not an imperative in the past, and old habits die hard. So either invoking a penalty or offering a reward, you get the front-line personnel and systems to buy-in to your plan to get as many e-mail addresses as possible. We should also talk about mobile phone numbers, but I will save that for a different post. But now you have hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of customers without an email address. What to do?
A very common resolution to the problem is the e-mail append process. Basically you submit a file of names and addresses. We match the address to a consumer file of email addresses, send the matches an "opt in" email and as long as they do not opt out (giving them a week or so to respond) the e-mail address is now all yours! What kind of match rate can you expect? Probably around 20% if you have a somewhat recent customer master file, meaning that the transactions are relatively current, say in the last three years or so.
The e-mail append process is another reason why getting a good mailing address and an accurate name spelling is important. But again, that is the subject for another post.
While the debate rages over the effectiveness of e-mails for prospecting, no one doubts the fact that many consumers prefer e-mail communication with a "trusted source", certainly over the dreaded telephone call. We often see organizations that have a large customer master database and wish they had more email addresses. Going back after the fact is mostly a futile effort as the consumer is not just going to offer his or her email address for the purpose of receiving promotions, unless you find a very creative and compelling reason for them to give you this valuable piece of their personal information.
What is a marketer to do? First and foremost you need to address the real problem. Why are you not getting e-mail addresses from your client transactions? Probably because it was not an imperative in the past, and old habits die hard. So either invoking a penalty or offering a reward, you get the front-line personnel and systems to buy-in to your plan to get as many e-mail addresses as possible. We should also talk about mobile phone numbers, but I will save that for a different post. But now you have hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of customers without an email address. What to do?
A very common resolution to the problem is the e-mail append process. Basically you submit a file of names and addresses. We match the address to a consumer file of email addresses, send the matches an "opt in" email and as long as they do not opt out (giving them a week or so to respond) the e-mail address is now all yours! What kind of match rate can you expect? Probably around 20% if you have a somewhat recent customer master file, meaning that the transactions are relatively current, say in the last three years or so.
The e-mail append process is another reason why getting a good mailing address and an accurate name spelling is important. But again, that is the subject for another post.
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