The Importance of Being 'Liked'

If a tree falls in a forest, does it make a sound? If someone writes a blog and nobody reads it, does it exist?

Getting people to hear your message has always been a challenge but as well as the traditional methods such as Press/Direct Mail/TV there are now a number of other channels which bring with them a different set of rules.

I recently saw a connection of mine on LinkedIn had a status update that referred to a ‘Like’ they had for an update made by a connection of theirs:

Over 6,500 Likes and Over 1,300 Comments!

The sheer volume of likes and comments on this update show how a comment or update can travel far beyond your own sphere of influence, after all, one of the principles of LinkedIn is the 6 degrees of separation where we are all connected somehow and ‘my connection used to work with you’ sort of warmish leads.

Each person who is connected to one of the 6,526 people who liked the post would have seen that as an update from that connection (as I did when my connection liked the update), so if you think of all the people who saw it, but didn't bother liking the update there were probably tens of thousands of people who saw that update.

Getting a Like on a status update such as the one above reminds me of an episode of the Simpsons where Bart’s teacher Mrs. Krabappel gets passing motorists to honk their horns, seemingly in support for the teacher’s strike but in reality the placard she’s holding says ‘Honk if you love Cookies’.

Getting a Like (or a retweet) on a more sober business related message is harder but if it’s interesting enough people will pass it on as they’ll want to be generating useful content for their followers and there’s only so much content they can generate themselves.

If you can prove to be a useful filter of all the noise that’s out there then people will value what you say whether it’s related to your own or someone else’s content.

The most important thing I’ve learnt though is if you don’t ask you don’t get, so please like/retweet this blog and help to prove that point.

Our next blog will look at the ‘half-life’ of a tweet/status update and how to maximise the value of your activity to increase the proportion of your followers that see your message.

Dan Barnett

LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/danjbarnett

Twitter: @analysismktg http://www.twitter.com/analysismktg

http://www.analysismarketing.com/

What train prices can teach you about Optimisation

As a Swansea City fan living in Hertfordshire, getting back to watch games is a relatively lengthy process with myriad options involving car, train and bus.

In terms of optimal solutions if you had an unlimited amount of time and wanted to minimise costs then you could walk or cycle, if you had unlimited budget and wanted the quickest time possible between the two points you could charter a helicopter.

In this blog I look at the pricing structure of train fares between London and Swansea as an example of how there are potentially hundreds of possible solutions and the difference in cost between a simple and an optimised solution.

If we look at the prices of day returns on a Saturday between London and Swansea, for just one mode of transport, one journey and one train operator there are 512 different combinations of train tickets to get between the two stations (e.g., Paddington-Cardiff-Swansea, Paddington-Reading-Cardiff-Swansea etc.,).

When looking at the price matrix the main thing that is apparent is the sharp drop in cost to travel to Swansea from Swindon onwards compared to stations closer to London.

e.g. Paddington-Swansea is £69 and Paddington-Swindon-Swansea is £63.20 (£39+£24.20).

Breaking down the Paddington-Swindon part of the journey even further, this can be reduced from £39 to £37 by breaking the ticket at Reading (or £30.70 if also breaking the ticket at Didcot Parkway, with the proviso that only every other train stops at Didcot Parkway, limiting your options).

In short you can pay £69 for London-Swansea or pay £61.20 for exactly the same service by splitting the journey into several tickets (without having to get off the train) or £54.90 if you get on trains that stop at Didcot Parkway.

“So what?” you may say, but if a business could get the same results but for 10-20% less spend then it could transform their fortunes.

What does all this have to do with Marketing? Well, if you consider your starting station as where you are now with your business and the end station as where you want to get to e.g., 1,000 sales in the next month, all the relative journeys you could take to get there could include one or multiple marketing channels each with their own levels of ROI and points at which that ROI dramatically starts to flag.

For example, from previous experience you find it costs £5,000 to get 100 sales via Direct Mail or £4,000 to get 100 sales via email. Notwithstanding the fact that not all new sales are made equal, at face value you’d say you should put your money into email marketing.

In reality there’s likely to be a point at which the cost per sale is far above the average £40 that you’re getting from email marketing at which point you should be sending people your brochure in the post.

With optimisation you can make things as complicated as you like with the number of channels, constraints on who gets targeted when (and how often) etc., but the key thing is the more you understand about who responds well to what the smarter your targeting will become.

On our website we talk about the ‘binary thinking’ that often prevails e.g., “We tried email marketing and it didn’t work”, “Door Drops are too expensive” etc., and how the mix of right medium and right message will outperform a one size fits all policy.

Dan Barnett

Director of Analytics

blog@analysismarketing.com

LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/danjbarnett

Can Swansea City be Premier League off the pitch too?

Today saw the publication of football fixtures for next season and so the excitement from Swansea’s play-off victory is ratcheted up another notch as fans (including myself) start to pencil in visits to Eastlands first then the Emirates, Stamford Bridge and beyond.

With the riches that accompany the Premier League comes a greatly increased profile and an opportunity to maximise off-field earnings as well as those from TV and gate receipts.

This isn’t about bleeding supporters dry, it’s about engaging with supporters through the means of targeted and relevant content (both Online and Offline). Although it feels like treason to say it, I don’t think Swansea have done great things on this front so far.

Regardless of what’s been going on this season, the only contact has been a weekly email every Friday afternoon which has a couple of one line teasers to content on the website with the rest of it being advertisements.

It could be argued that the aim of a newsletter is to drive people to the website and so content in the newsletter isn’t crucial. Unfortunately, in my opinion the content in the newsletter is so bland that I rarely bother opening them as I know that I’m better off just looking at the website directly now and again (I’m sure in plenty of cases however people will neither open the email or visit the website).

For successful off-field business, a club needs to be able to identify who is doing what with them. The obvious starting point are Season Ticket holders, but then beyond that there’s everyone who subscribes to the email newsletter, everyone who buys Match Day tickets (both Home and Away), Club Shop sales etc.,

One example of where this may have helped is after sealing promotion they announced the sale of a final batch of 2,000 Season Tickets. Rather than being able to determine those who may be more deserving of the opportunity of buying these tickets, it was announced on a Thursday afternoon that they were going on-sale at the club ticket office at 10 a.m. the next day, in-person sales only.

This meant that those season tickets just went to the first people who could get down to the ticket office and didn’t have to worry about work the next day. Some would say that real fans would have bought their Season Tickets already but there will be others who would argue they have been forced out by those jumping on the bandwagon.

It doesn’t have to be like this though, by combining all customer interactions you can then have a more solid understanding of:
• Who your key supporters are
• Who to target to try and increase their interaction with the club
• Delivering different offers/communications for different segments e.g., Those who bring children to the game, those who travel to away games, exile fans etc.,

This approach could be a cost effective strategy for a non-league team let alone a Premier League side but all too often is overlooked as it’s too far removed from the day to day running of a football club but is about:

• Capturing data
• Consolidating data into a single area
• Analysing the data to gain insights on activity

Which of course is where we come in, so if there’s any football clubs out there who are looking to get more from their data then get in touch.

Dan Barnett

Director of Analytics
blog@analysismarketing.com
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/danjbarnett

Spotify – Signing their own death warrant?

In a bid probably to improve profitability and maybe also to appease record labels who feel too much is being offered for too little, Spotify have recently changed their terms of use.

Usage of the free service will be limited to 10 hours a month and users will only be able to listen to a track 5 times ever before it’s blocked.

The aim of this is to persuade more people to join their £4.99 ad-free or £9.99 a month premium offering (which gives Mobile access and other benefits), prompting numerous comments from people saying they would just go back to illegal downloading.  The kind of people who illegaly download are probably not the kind of people you wanted anyway even on the ad-supported free model so are no big loss.

For those who would pay if the price is right, it seems as if Spotify have been too aggressive in the change.

I like Spotify but not sure it’s worth a tenner a month. How about £5.99 for the mobile version but with ads? I can afford £9.99 a month but it’s all about that perception of getting value for money.  It’s not necessarily a rational position to hold, but £5.99 seems low enough to not have to think about it too hard and can become more an impulse rather than a considered purchase.

Alternatively price the £9.99 version somewhere between £60-£80 up-front for a yearly subscription.  It’s so difficult when you’ve provided something for free to get people to pay, even if you are offering extra bells and whistles for that money.

If Spotify are thinking “If we make the free version less attractive, more people will move to paid” this would be a risky strategy and is arguably the wrong focus, a better idea might be to get more value from the ads in the free version.

Ultimately, Spotify’s move suggests they’ve not been able get enough value from advertisements to pay record labels what they would consider fair value for the content.

Anyone who has used Spotify on a regular basis will be familiar with having to listen to a small number of ads ad infinitum, including a large number of ones from Spotify themselves.

As Tesco have done with their Clubcard, Spotify have the ability to have a real understanding of who their users are and personalise communications accordingly. I would argue that my choices of what I listen to, how often and when would give a pretty good idea of the kind of person I am.

I get an email monthly from Spotify (it used to be weekly) which is a very generic “Here’s what’s new” email. They never try to sell me related content whether that be links to tours, merchandise etc., or even push me to particular bands websites or to try particular new artists they think I’d like. I don’t get the feeling they are ‘sweating the assets’, it’s more “let’s have a push on premium subscriptions this month”.

Spotify are sitting on a potential goldmine of data but I don’t get the feeling they know what to do with it. The responsibility to use this data however also lies with the record labels, here they are with an opportunity to tightly target their audience but it seems they are more interested in maintaining the current income model around royalties for plays and the odd download.

Any artist related ads seem to be the kind of polished ads you’d get on commercial radio, whilst I’m not advocating bad production values, there must be scope for smaller acts to have quick ads tightly targeted to their likely fanbase, a quick voiceover and thirty seconds of a track with a link to the band on Spotify or their Website/Facebook page etc.,

In such a competitive market as online music, Spotify’s changes could be the beginning of the end for them which is a shame as the service has a lot going for it. Personally, it’s encouraged me to listen to 6 Music a lot more with the paradox being I now listen to a greater range of music via a radio station (on BBC iPlayer) than I did when I had access to 13 million tracks on Spotify.

Dan Barnett
Director of Analytics

blog@analysismarketing.com

LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/danjbarnett

Using Maps for extra direction

It doesn't matter how much work you might put into various parts of a project, by far the thing that generates the greatest interest is when a map is included.

Generating segments or profiling customer behaviour is all very well but the advantage of a map is that it is highly visual and also relates to tangible real-world locations rather than some abstract concept of customers with similar behaviour.

Maps can help show where you have high/low customer penetration, which areas have higher average order value, more delivery complaints etc., They can also be used to find areas that have the closest profile to your best customers to help aid acquisition.

At Analysis Marketing we use maps in a variety of scenarios and have put a brief guide together to the kind of things you can do using maps. 

The guide is available on our website here.  If your business could benefit from using maps then get in touch with us for a no obligation discussion on how we can help you to visualise your customers.

Dan Barnett

Director of Analytics
blog@analysismarketing.com
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/danjbarnett

Can I get you to read this?

Where in traditional Direct Mail the envelope design took on the role of trying to entice the recipient to be interested enough to open and spend proper time considering the contents, in the online world the email subject line has the same job put is hampered by being purely text.

Unless it’s from someone you know well or a business you have a regular relationship with, that particular email is fighting for attention with all the others that flood in along relating to work, social life and all the emails saying their various non-existent online bank accounts have been suspended (I hope it isn’t just me getting those).

A good example of an email subject that does its job is from Tier1 Online (a computer/electronics supplier) who I get an email from most workdays, an example of a recent subject line being ‘Netbook clearance Archos 10 Windows XP netbook only £169’, from this I don’t need to read the email, if I’m interested I’ll open, if not, I’ll leave it.

A not so good example are the emails I get from Staples, with examples such as ‘FREE Flying Lanterns – offer ends tomorrow!’ and ‘FREE Cocktail Set!’ which are just wrong on a number of levels:

1. What on earth do these products have to do with a stationery/office supplies company?
2. Everybody wishes they worked for a cool, fun brand but exclamation marks have their place and it isn’t here
3. In the body of the flying lanterns email (I only looked for research purposes) is a banner at the bottom saying ‘10% off Ink and Toner’ which actually is relevant to me (if not the most exciting thing in the world)

For me the main things to consider are:

1. Avoid generic terms such as ‘August Newsletter’ or ‘Great Gift Ideas’, these aren’t going to tip the balance and make me bother to open the email
2. A bit of personalisation might help as it’s a quick way of sorting the real from the spam (e.g., ebay emails contain my user ID so I know they are genuine)
3. Test, Test, Test: if ‘FREE Flying Lanterns’ really is the best way to get people to buy paper clips and post-it notes then go for it but if not try out different options to improve your open rates, click through rates and ultimately sales

Dan Barnett
Director of Analytics
blog@analysismarketing.com

LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/danjbarnett

Incremental vs. Absolute Sales - giffgaff mobile

In recent weeks I’ve noticed an increasing number of advertisements for a mobile operator called giffgaff.

They are being marketed as being a more ‘community’ based company with support coming in the shape of on-line member forums rather than call centres. In return they are offering quite competitive rates.

On further examination the company is owned (but independent from) O2 so is to some extent an aim by O2 to increase market share by appearing to be a new challenger to the existing brands rather than a brand extension.

In the saturated mobile phone market, a new customer for giffgaff will be coming from either O2 itself or one of their few other competitors. As giffgaff uses the O2 network the people most likely to switch over will be current O2 customers (of which I am one), not least because O2 customers will be able to use O2 locked handsets on giffgaff.

From an analytical perspective the key is the overall incremental profit made between O2 and giffgaff combined, the numbers below are purely speculative but give an indication of the kinds of things that need to be thought of when acquiring sales.

The incremental profit depends on the proportion of O2 customers being cannibalised and the profit giffgaff make from a customer compared to how much O2 were making from the same customer.

In the calculations below I’ve taken a very basic £5 a month lower profit as this is the drop in price for some of the equivalent tariffs. The figures are purely for illustration only showing a potential scenario:

Example Figures for use in calculating incremental impact:

Proportion of giffgaff customers that are from transferring from O2 – 30%

Average monthly profit from a giffgaff customer - £8.75

Average monthly profit from a customer on O2 prior to moving to giffgaff- £13.75

Average incremental monthly profit – £4.63 (70% of base providing £8.75 and 30% costing £5 a month)

In the example above the level of incremental profit is just over half of the figure when cannibalisation is not taken into account.

There are lots of other factors to throw into the mix such as Advertising and Operational costs and how giffgaff impacts on retention (better a move to giffgaff than T-Mobile), but the figures above show how if you concern yourself with absolute rather than incremental sales, you could end up spending a lot of money for little incremental gain.

Dan Barnett
Director of Analytics
blog@analysismarketing.com

LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/danjbarnett