Recently in marketing Category

I don't like lazy marketing.

I've never given the Golden Spiders permission to email me or my business, yet again today they did.

Annoying.

However it's also quite amusing ..

One of the emails landed in our helpdesk which stripped out ALL the HTML .. what was left over wasn't exactly um .. intelligible..

If you're going to spend money registering domains in target countries and doing targetted pay per click campaigns you should also take the time to do some basic market research. And no, I don't mean pure figures - I mean cultural stuff.

Jonathan Brazil spotted a really silly mistake this morning:

If you go to the hassle of buying a .ie and sponsored Google links for Irish searches, don't call it EIRE and price your products in GB£

The ad in question:


And here's another one I found:
I can't think of anyone IN Ireland using the term "Eire" or in what context they might even try to use it.

Seriously.

If you're going to try selling to us then learn to speak to us in terms we understand and use.

If you want to tell me why I'm getting an email (newsletter) that's fine. It's actually quite helpful, as I could easily forget how I ended up subscribing myself to a list or if I ordered from somewhere...

However putting this kind of text in your email footer is one sure fire way of getting me to list you as a spammer:

DISCLAIMER: This message is not "SPAM" because it contains our identification and unsubscribe instructions. This message was offered to you for one of the following reasons: your email address has been selected from a database that you have subscribed, your email address was made public by you; you have requested to receive the offer; you are a partner of our company; your email address is in our database as a result of previous correspondence.

There are so many things wrong with that disclaimer that it's almost impossible to know where to begin.

The ones I "love" are:

"it contains our identification and unsubscribe instructions"

Um .. ok... so? That doesn't mean anything at all...

The one though that really gets me is the "your email address was made public by you"

That is both hilarious and scary

(And just in case you're wondering - I got two copies of the same spam to two addresses that aren't published anywhere .. )

Our latest silly marketing idea is to help push .me domain names.

Check it out here

While I doubt this is Oracle's normal policy, they really do need to teach their staff how to market properly.

Using email to help promote sales is a good idea, but the way that this is being done is incredibly bad and damages email marketing in general.

So far today I have received 5 separate copies of an Oracle "offer" on my work domain. I also received multiple emails a couple of weeks ago in my personal email.

It is incredibly annoying.

Why?

Because I never signed up for ANY of these emails and now I'm being asked to unsubscribe, which in some cases is going to be nigh on impossible as the emails in question do not send - they are only setup to receive only.

So how can I get off Oracle's spam list?

I can't reply to the emails, as they seem to be coming from some automated system.

And judging by the email addresses that are being targetted it's pretty obvious that the email addresses were scraped off websites.

Ikea came to Ireland a few months ago and opened their shop on the outskirts of Dublin city.

Lots of people got excited and forgot all about the recession for a few weeks and went "Ikea crazy".

Now Ikea are running adverts on Facebook.

You'd be mistaken for thinking, like I did, that they "got it".

Here's the ad:
So since it's Christmas and my mother likes Ikea stuff I click on the link.. Which takes me to their Irish site (obviously), but here's what you get:
Translation.
If you want to get an Ikea gift card you cannot buy it online. No. You have to physically drive all the way to their shop.

Since they have so many shops in Ireland, this is obviously a very convenient option, and is one that you will obviously want to choose.

So Ikea are spending money on an online advertising campaign which takes you to a "cul de sac" (their non e-commerce enabled website)

And how about their domain usage? While they own ikea.ie you better not type it into your browser, as it won't do anything useful for you. You'd need to type in www.ikea.ie - yes, it's 1995 all over again!

(and Ikea aren't the only highstreet shop that doesn't "get" the web - try getting a Marks and Spencers gift token if you're in Ireland!)

Seth Godin has organised a free ebook which features thoughts from seventy "big thinkers".

Similar to some of his own recent books, the ebook's format lends itself to being dipped into ie. you don't need to read it cover to cover.

It's only 82 pages long, so it's not exactly a chore to read it anyway!

You can grab it here or read more about it on Seth's blog.

I get contacted by companies trying to sell me products and services on a regular basis.

Sometimes the "fit" is really wrong - we don't buy or sell furniture, so trying to sell us wholesale lots of armchairs isn't going to work too well.

Of course a lot of it is down to technique.

If you can build up a rapport with a client then it's going to be a hell of a lot easier to sell them goods and services.

Of course if you manage to completely alienate the client they're not going to want to buy from you and may even take out a barring order.

A couple of years ago we were approached by a software vendor that was selling a content management system. Basically it was a tool for building websites easily. It wasn't free and it wasn't cheap. It didn't integrate easily with our existing software at the time, so it just wasn't of any interest to us. So we politely declined the "offer". You'd think that would be the end of the story, or that it is a total "non-story", but 24 hours later the sales person was in touch with us again saying that he wanted to "speak to someone else" as I obviously "lacked vision".

Brilliant!

So this "genius" not only lost the sale, but has managed to put himself in the position where I would not do any business with them ever again.

Or how about the sales guy from a particular glossy magazine...

First off he gave us a media pack with totally unrealistic sales projections. Unrealistic in that you'd practically have to clone readers in test tubes to get that kind of readership. We told him that we weren't interested and that we didn't think the content was particularly good (it was always about 2 months behind the UK publications in the same vertical).  Since it was pretty obvious that we weren't going to buy ads from him anytime soon you'd have thought that he'd have moved on .. but no, he kept on ringing and ringing and ringing..

Another thing is to actually do a small bit of research before you pick up the phone.

There's little point in trying to acquire a client that you've already got (upselling to them is a totally different matter)

More than once I've had over-zealous, but rather silly, sales people trying to sell me things I'm already buying.

Google Adwords - we've been using them for years. Yet the first time we got a phone call from Google it was from one of their sales people asking us if we'd be interested in buying any. I think we were paying about 1000 euro / month at the time to Google, so they didn't make any extra sales!

Or the sales guy from a vendor we've been dealing with for about 8 years:
"I believe you might sell domains and hosting" - have you even visited our website?
"I think you've done some business with us in the past" - not really - we just enjoy giving you about 5k a month cos we're really nice that way!

Of course some sales people have a "script". While that script might be useful to a point, it shouldn't get in the way.
A couple of months ago we got a call from a company in the UK that wanted to sell us advertising on TV. Of course they didn't say that - what they said was that they could get us onto the TV - which was a good way to stimulate our interest.
So I pick up the phone - around this time you normally would expect the usual introductions and exchange of pleasantries. Instead I was treated to about 5 minutes of machine gun "spiel" from some girl who wouldn't let me get a word in edgeways!
Now we may not have been interested in buying the ads, but I was curious as to how it worked and how much it cost etc., - but I don't think I even managed to ask those key questions.

Some sales tactics are plain annoying, but others are just so incredibly dumb that they leave you speechless.. and then people wonder why it's hard to get a decision maker on the phone!