There’s been a noticeable increase in the use of QR codes in marketing of late in the west, long after they became a common sight in Japan. However there’s still quite a way to go, it seems, before these little square blocks of data become truly accepted.
A survey of 1000 British teenagers has found that 72% of 11-18 year olds don’t have the software to read QR codes or aren’t aware their phone can read them. Additionally, only 43% believed QR codes could be read by a phone, 8% of girls thought they were a magic-eye picture(!) and only 33% knew what they were called.
This lack of awareness is understandable – most phones don’t ship with a dedicated QR Code reader built in, and limited space in marketing materials often makes displaying detailed instructions on what you need to do to scan such codes a little difficult to achieve. It’s not a new problem – in late 2008 I wrote about a Pepsi campaign that went as far as listing twelve tips for scanning a QR code – including the desperate-sounding “Try anything!”
The findings of the new survey, issued in a mailshot by youth research agency Dubit, shows that if the codes are to take off beyond curious early adopters, consumers need to be educated on how to use them. Whose responsibility is this though? Should phone OS designers add a large QR button right into the interface? Should an enterprising developer create and market a QR code reader with the aim of becoming a widely known brand that everyone knows they need to use? If so, where’s the economic incentive for them to do that when charging for the reader software would be pointless?
There’s no easy solution, but without one these handy physical shortcuts to the Web might remain strange little ‘magic eye pictures’ forever.Image source
This post originally appeared on the American Express OPEN Forum, where Mashable regularly contributes articles about leveraging social media and technology in small business.
Marketers plan to increase spending on e-mail and social media marketing more than any other tactics in 2011, according to a recent survey.
As marketers find opportunities to build audiences, conversation and conversions with clever cross-promotion between the two mediums, e-mail and social media tactics are becoming increasingly popular and intertwined.
Incentives Drive Clicks and Conversions
Dingo, a pet food company in Ohio, used Constant Contact to create a promotion that rewarded customers with a $20 coupon if they signed up for the company’s newsletter and “Liked” its Facebook Page, with the catch being that the page needed to get to 5,000 fans (from a base of around 300) for the promotion to kick in. Mike Halloran, the owner of Dingo, says it reached its goal within three days, as pet owners found out about in the Dingo newsletter and forwarded it to their friends and “liked” Dingo on Facebook.
Mark Schmulen, general manager for social media at Constant Contact, says that Dingo’s campaign illustrates a growing trend among customers. “Of all channels, e-mail marketing and social media go hand in hand better than any other,” he said. “Getting your customers to share your message with friends is the most effective way to grow your business.”
Gary Levitt of upstart e-mail marketing provider Mad Mimi sees a similar trend. He cites one of his customers, bag and accessory retailer Timbuk2, as a great example of how to integrate e-mail and social. The company’s strategy is “to use a Facebook application to handle [contests] rather than setting up and optimizing a landing page of its own.”
The company’s e-mail newsletter — which has more than 100,000 subscribers – recently featured a promotion to win a free bike, helmet and messenger bag to fans of the company’s Facebook Page. So far, the opportunity has driven more than 6,500 clickthroughs to the giveaway, versus just nine clicks (yes, nine) to the company’s prompt that encourages e-mail subscribers to become Facebook fans.
Promotion Works Both Ways
These promotions can also work the other way, however. Shoe retailer Crocs not only promotes social media through its e-mail newsletter, but also promotes its e-mail newsletter through social media. For example, the company will inform its Twitter followers or Facebook fans about a special offer that’s only available to newsletter subscribers. The company also lets Facebook fans sign up for its e-mail newsletter from an app that’s built into its page, something that Andrea Stow, senior global eMarketing manager for Crocs, says has resulted in a “gigantic leap in our e-mail subscribers.”
Stow continues, “Our strategy is understanding and knowing that there might be duplicates [subscribers to multiple mediums] — but the more customer touch points, the better conversion we’ll have.” Jeff Rohrs, vice president of marketing at ExactTarget, the company that powers Crocs’ e-mail marketing, adds, “What I really like that Crocs is doing is they realize they don’t have to abandon the channel — it’s not an either/or scenario. You work them all together and you end up with more subscribers, fans and followers overall.”
That reach, says Stow, gives Crocs the ability to stay in touch with customers year round — important for a company that only expects its average customer to buy new shoes two or three times per year at most.
E-mail Will Only Get More Social
Although companies like Crocs, Timbuk2 and Dingo are still relatively early movers in the integration of e-mail and social media — Schmulen believes only 10% of Constant Contact customers are using social media to its full potential — the pace of evolution in the space is only going to accelerate.
Both Constant Contact and ExactTarget made big bets on social last year with their acquisitions of NutshellMail and CoTweet, respectively, and both now speak of a next wave of innovation built on more precise targeting based on social data. To that end, Constant Contact acquired BantamLive in February, a deal that Schmulen says will let his customers “see who’s talking about [them] and who the actual influencers are.” Similarly, Plaskoff of ExactTarget says his company is working on tools that leverage user profile data through Facebook’s open graph API.
Concludes Schmulen, who was also a co-founder of NushellMail, “What we’re seeing today [is the] social call to action [becoming] the primary call to action inside of newsletters.” Expect that trend to continue as marketers start to realize the benefits of doing so and technology providers continue to integrate e-mail and social tools into one package.
In the summer of 2010, Foursquare’s Head of Business Development Tristan Walker and American Express’s Vice President of Global Marketing Capabilities David Wolf started talking about ways to work together to redefine loyalty for local merchants.
The fruit of their conversations is now on display in the city Austin, Texas where 60 merchants — including Whole Foods, Starwood Hotels and Stubb’s BBQ — are offering Foursquare users “spend $5, save $5″ rewards when they load the special and swipe their AmEx cards.
The pilot program started Friday and will run through Tuesday, March 15. Participating merchants have posted “Austin Unlocked” window clings to highlight their participation, and Foursquare users need only register their American Express cards to unlock this new type of special — the Loyalty Special.
Loyalty and Location in Real-Time
On Friday, Walker and I journeyed to Le Cafe Crepe so he could demonstrate the special in action. Upon arrival, Walker launched Foursquare, checked in to the cafe, tapped to redeem the offer and then hit the green “Load to Card” button to initiate the special — see a 44-second walk-through in the video above.
Several minutes later (there was a long line), Walker placed his order, the cashier swiped his AmEx card, and then together we waited for proof that the $5 savings reward had been activated by his swipe. Seconds later, Walker received a push notification alerting him that he had successfully redeemed the special. Soon thereafter, he also earned the “Swiped @ SXSW” badge — for each badge redeemed, American Express is donating $1 to Grounded in Music.
Walker was quick to point out that the experience was nearly frictionless, happening exactly at the time of sale without requiring integration with the cafe’s point-of-sale system.
This is what Walker and Wolf believe is a ground breaking initiative that finally creates the closed loop between a consumer’s digital behavior and their offline spending behavior.
Phase One
Wolf calls the South by Southwest Interactive relationship with Foursquare, “phase one.”
Being a first-of-a-kind program, AmEx decided to not only fund the offer — it’s paying for all of those $5 credits — but to also send out a street team to recruit and train local merchants, print up informative cards for attendees and make QR code pins to get the word out at the festival.
American Express is making the financial investment because it believes it can use phase one to get to phase two: when the company’s local merchant network will be able to set up, run and fund their own offers.
Wolf talks about the partnership as a strategic move on behalf of the company to align itself with a hip startup working on the location-meets-loyalty challenge. “We wanted to partner with a young, innovative company who understands the importance of providing value to merchants,” he said.
Wolf also explains that “American Express is anxious to play in this space because of this closed loop of information that we get.” To create the closed-loop effect, American Express is allowing a third party to access its APIs for card member data, merchant data and transaction data for the first time ever.
Regular Since 2009
On Foursquare’s end, Walker speaks of the startup’s desire to work with a preeminent company that truly understands loyalty, understands customer appreciation and has connections to local merchants. One of Foursquare’s goals, he says, is to recreate the type of brand affinity that consumers have with American Express.
“Foursquare has taken inspiration from AmEx’s ‘member since’ designation as to how we allow our users to evangelize or stake their claim to place. Much the same way that AmEx allows for that ‘member since’ designation, we want to create a ‘regular since’ designation … and allow merchants to communicate with those folks who are the most fervent, and are evangelists for their brands,” said Walker.
In working with AmEx at SXSW, Foursquare is taking this “regular since” idea to the next level, while also delivering on its closed-loop promise to American Express and the participating local merchants.
Next up, phase two.
Disclosure: American Express is a Mashable sponsor.
Is Flickr good for SEO? Can Tumblr drive traffic? If these questions are part of your day-to-day work, hold onto your hats; here’s an infographic that’s actually useful for a change.
If you’re doing any social media marketing, here’s something for your to print out and hang up near your desk as a handy point of reference. CMO.com, together with SEO firm 97th Floor, have created this chart showing which social networks are best for various organizational, CRM and marketing goals.
For example, if you need massive pageviews for your site or a client’s site, Facebook and Twitter are just so-so for referring their users to your content. If you want to see really big clickthroughs, you should optimize for StumbleUpon and Digg. And if your goal is search engine optimization, don’t think that Facebook’s “no-follow” links are doing you any favors; instead, focus on Flickr and YouTube to see your desired results on Page One.
When you think about best-in-class social media campaigns and true leaders in social media marketing, you realize that most of the time, creative and successful marketing teams pick a specific platform for a specific reason; this chart gives you the tip of the iceburg when it comes to making the right choice for your own company’s or clients’ campaigns.
Check out the chart below, and in the comments, let us know about your experiences with marketing, CRM, PR and SEO across these various platforms.
At MECLABS, we’ve conducted a lot of research on value propositions. We found this element to be so essential to successful marketing, we included it in our Conversion Sequence, which our researchers use during their optimization research.
Your value proposition is the primary reason a prospect should buy from you. And since it is such a vital building block to successful marketing, you would think every professional marketer would have this down cold. But from past analysis and audience interaction, many are entirely missing the boat on what their “primary reason” should be.
In fairness, once you’ve taken a sip of your company’s Kool Aid, it’s very hard to get truly discover what your value prop should be. So, in today’s free Web clinic at 4 p.m. EST – Do You Have the Right Value Proposition? How to test, measure, and integrate your Value Proposition online – Dr. Flint McGlaughlin, Managing Director, MECLABS, will share our value proposition discoveries to help you nail this crucial element of your marketing programs.
But first, we turned to your marketing peers and ask them how they find the most effective value proposition. Here are a few of our favorite nuggets of wisdom…
Product or brand?
The first thing you need to determine when deciding on your most effect value proposition is whether you are selling a “product” or a “brand.” Let me explain.
Product
If a prospect is looking for a product, this is typically a product or service that either they have not bought before or in cases where yours is one whose feature set is much greater than one they have purchased before.
In this case, the value proposition must first sell the visitor on why they should buy this type of product or service. Once they are convinced that they need this type of product or service, they must then be sold on why to buy it from you.
When you’re selling a prospect on a product, you typically highlight benefits of owning the product, namely what’s in it for them to buy your product or service. If they already buy something similar and you’re trying to get them to upgrade to your product or service, focus on additional benefits they’ll receive once they have upgraded.
Remember that when selling a product (as opposed to a brand), you’re not just in competition with your competitors. You’re also in competition with them doing nothing at all, in many cases. After all, if they have found a way to do what they need to without your product or with a lesser version of your product, you must first overcome the resistance to do nothing at all. Time-sensitive promotions may help here, which not only give prospects a reason to act, but to act NOW.
Brand
If most of your prospects are currently buying something similar to your product or service, you’re selling the brand, since they’re probably already convinced that they need this type of product or service (or they wouldn’t be buying it now). Mostly, they just need to know why to buy it from you.
When selling a brand, you want to focus on competitive differences between your product or service and competing options. Focus on benefits, providing examples of how their lives will be better with your product than without it. You may want to identify pain points they now suffer with that your product or service will alleviate. Include both logical and emotional reasons to act now.
When selling a brand, as with selling a product, you also often have to compete with the option to do nothing. For example, if I host a web site on one ISP, it may be a lot of work to move to a new one. As a result, it may take far more to get me to switch providers than it took to get me initially to sign up for the ISP I have. Here, time-based incentives may work well, creating a “ticking clock” scenario that prods a prospect to act now.
You may want to offer incentives for a prospect to switch from a key competitor, such as waiving start-up fees, sweetening the pot with a discount, or giving the first month of a subscription-based service free.
Summary
When seeking your most effective value proposition, it’s important to understand each of the major demographics to which you’re selling. Put yourself in the shoes of your prospects. Feel their pain points and imagine what it will take to get them to take action, whether that is to make a purchase, provide personal information in a Web form, or even to take a micro-action, such as clicking on a link.
Gather all the ideas you can and refine them as much as possible, but when it comes right down to it, you’ll have to test and let your customers decide through their measurable actions the messaging to which they respond best.
The most skilled testers I have encountered will accurately predict the winning experience in a given test at most 75% of the time. Even if you’re one of these experts, you still owe it to yourself and to your business to test your assumptions. You can learn some amazing things about your audience that you might never have discovered without testing.
Disclaimer: My views are my own, and do not necessarily reflect those of my employer, Adobe Systems Inc.
– Steve Myers, Optimization Consultant, Adobe Systems
Value, Fascination, Authenticity
There are three key factors to optimizing your value proposition.
Value Factor
Explore what products or services people buy – not necessarily from you, but from companies within your industry. Take each item and rate how well your company delivers (value, price, functionality, etc.). Prioritize your best, and most popular products/services. Fix (or kill) what is of little value. Enhance the good stuff.
Fascination Factor
Explore exactly why people buy from you. Assuming it’s NOT price, (if it is, don’t bother with any of this) dial up the mystique, or prestige, or trust, etc. to become irresistible.
Authenticity Factor
Learn how to communicate with your audiences so you have two-way dialogue. Don’t SELL them. TALK to them. They will tell you the value proposition that is most appealing.
Your value proposition lies at the intersection of unmet market needs, company core competencies and currently unclaimed positions.
This is found through market research (customers, potential customers, industry experts, employees), an honest assessment of operational capabilities, and competitive analysis. Therein lies your unique position.
The next step is to craft a compelling, customer-centric message. Tweak it and test it.
– Kristin Tedesco, Marketing Consultant, Next Lifescience
And one of my favorite quotes I’ve come across about value proposition…
“Strategy is based on a differentiated customer value proposition. Satisfying customers is the source of sustainable value creation.”
