Emotional branding means customers stay loyal for the long haul!
Every marketer knows that branding is incredibly important – it enables customers familiar with your brand to distinguish it amongst a sea of competitors. The success of all these brands is about much more than the logo, it's about forming an emotional connection with their customers.
Image credit: Top 100 brands in 2011 according to Interbrand
With this much emotion involved in decision making, it’s easy to see how creating an emotional bond with customers makes a direct contribution to building profitability.
Emotional branding clearly differentiates companies from their competitors and helps to create deep intrinsic relationships between brands and consumers. Relationships with an emotional dimension are more likely to resist the temptation to defect than comparatively superficial price or convenience-based ones.
Only an insight-based, personalized marketing approach can form a strong enough bond with a brand,…
To grow your online community you need to engage it
For many brands, social media is becoming a significant part of, if not central to, theirdigital marketing strategy.
This being the case, the question of whether or not to grow a brand’s online community is often likely to be a matter of when rather than if.
Having recently gone through this thought process with a couple of the brands, I thought I’d share some of the insight from this experience.
The advantages of organic online community growth
Growing an online community organically, whether on facebook or anywhere else, has two great advantages. First, it’s inexpensive to do. Second, it will usually attract people who are most interested in a brand.
This can lead to a community full of brand advocates and customers who have engaged with a brand’s social media at some point in their buying…
By
14 Feb 2012
Dear Email,
I fell in love with you at first sight! You opened and whole new world for me. You’re smart, well read and fun to be around. Falling in love with you was easy for me.
Solid (as a rock) ♫
For years our relationship has been solid and you’ve always been there with new ideas and perspectives which have added more value to my life. You’ve helped me plan some of the most important times of my life.
Some Kinda Wonderful ♫
We’ve done some pretty cool things together! Remember that Christmas you helped me shop and got everyone the perfect gift? Or how about that amazing vacation we planned together? You’ve never let me forget a birthday or anniversary and…
Email campaigns we can learn from
“…the eye, tends to be impatient,
craves the novel and is bored by repetition”
W. H. Auden
Effective email marketing engages recipients, ultimately leading to more sales by delivering the right message to the right person at the right time.
Customers would rather see a beautifully crafted email appear in their inbox than a bad one.
Big brands can have a slightly easier email marketing task than smaller brands - an email from Amazon, Barclays, ASOS, or John Lewis already carries with it an expectation of what you will receive.
So, it's unforgivable for a big brand to take customers for granted.
Abercrombie & Fitch’s Christmas email campaign
Here’s a snap shot of my inbox showing all Abercrombie emails received over December and January:
You will notice the central subject line theme is “The Sale”
From…
Over 44% of adults now using the web to share grievances
Value: [rating=4]
Recommended link: Social Media Leadership forum
This report examines the role played by social media within the rapidly changing landscape of customer service. It was commissioned by Natalie Cowen, Head of Brand and Communications, first direct and created by Dr Andrew Currah.
The report reminds us how important the web and social media in particular have become to brands. In the Exec Summary, Natalie Cowen says:
“Over 44% of adults now use the web to share grievances about products, with companies expected to interact with companies online and get a speedy response”
It seems that many companies haven't changed the way they manage customer service in line with this - Dan Bosomworth summarised a survey in the autumn last year suggesting that 95% of customer Facebook posts were ignored by brands.
We’re alerting you to this new report, since if…
Putting Facebook at the centre of communications strategy including 8 techniques to engage Facebook fans
The brand we're featuring in this case has created the third most engaged Facebook Page in the UK. Although Vets Now is the UK's leading provider of Out Of Hours emergency veterinary care, its not a "megabrand", so it really shows what you can achieve if you get the communications strategy right. In this post I'll review what Vets Now set out to achieve and the lessons they have learnt in their online journey.
Whilst many organisations use social media to prop up, or drive traffic to an existing website, Vets Now took the opposite approach. To build a stand alone community of pet owners (quite literally a MumsNet for pet owners), they and their social media agency Fresh Networks decided to…
Email campaigns we like to learn from
I recently reviewed how ASOS does a great job of engaging their audience both through email and social media marketing. Here, I'm going to review one example of an email campaign I like, calling out what I think works well and not so well.
In the second part of 2011, ASOS seemed to make quite a few creative refinements to its email designs and this winter style campaign is a good example of the new approach.
Getting the creative balance right
Effective email design for a brand like ASOS needs to get the balance right between the visual appeal the brand offers with clear calls-to-action and offer. I think this creative gets this balance right:
Let's now go into some of the details:
The pre-header
Pre-headers are widely used in the US, but are not adopted so widely in the UK. This one is fairly…
Integrating blogging with other communication tools – an integrated approach
Although blogging is far from new, I find that relatively few organisations have really started using blogs effectively. Where they have, they have found a tool that delivers on multiple fronts because it's integrated into all their communications.
When used effectively, the blog is a place for you to develop newsletter content, integrate with other social media tools, showcase your expertise, play with ideas, research a topic and discover customer views. Of course, blogs also yield dividends in terms of SEO as other sites pick up your content giving you invaluable back links, and customers will get on with the job of tweeting and liking your work.
The Blog Central model
Below is a model I’ve developed to use when explaining the concept to colleagues and on my training courses. To make the point of how blogging must be at the heart of your communications,…
My ideas on how to deal with unpredictability in email marketing in the year ahead
As your local Greek philosopher never tires of telling you, the only constant is change.
Many industry experts devote the occasional post or two in January to predicting how email marketing will develop this year.
Instead, I'd like to look at what we might do to better exploit or cope with the dynamic nature of the email and online marketing environment in 2012. Because change isn't always as predictable as we'd like it to be.
Please chime in with your own ideas!
1. Revisit the basics
Like every year, vendors and the media will regale us in 2012 with all sorts of clever things you can do with your email marketing. Clever things that can bring great results, such as shopping cart abandonment emails that pull in £250 in sales for each £1 invested.
Not everyone can access the necessary tools,…
What are the implications for posting updates to brand Facebook pages?
Value/Importance: [rating=3]
Recommended link: Edge Rank Checker
And the answer is…
“The average Post Lifetime for a Facebook Brand Page Update is 3 hours and 7 minutes"
This nugget is baed on considering that each individual Post has a “lifetime”. A Post is considered dead when the growth in engagement is less than 10% of the largest growth of engagement between hourly snapshots.
This data was sampled for EdgeRankChecker customers for the month of December, 2011 across 500+ Pages and over 30,000 individual Posts. The average Page size was approximately 140,000. Page size was not found to effect this.
Of course averages, are just well, averages. So the study also looked at individual pages, Average Post Lifetimes for individual Pages were also examined: some Pages averaged a Post Lifetime of approximately 10…
