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Free Expedited Holiday Shipping Expected

I was a little surprised by this email I received from Patagonia today. Free two-day shipping on all orders over $100, through December 22nd. Of course, it’s a standard now that you can get your last minute shopping done and get a free shipping upgrade with larger online retailers. So why is the subject of this email “Free 2-Day Shipping – Our Gift to You”? I would guess that throwing in some free stickers, a free $2 donation to an environmental non-profit, free socks, something else – would resonate much more with most of Patagonia’s customers. I would guess that most of them are savvy enough to know that free two-day is standard fare with most retailers and brands, and it doesn’t have as much of an impact on the open or clickthrough rates as a subject like “Free 2-Day Shipping and Free Donations” or even just “Free 2-Day Shipping Begins Today”.

None-the-less, Patagonia is on it with the promotion, and right on target with timing for the last minute dash for consumers cash.

Tags: free shipping, holiday shopping, Patagonia

Thanksgiving is the New Black Friday

Happy Thanksgiving everyone! How many marketing emails have you received today? Not many? Me neither. Makes me wonder: why don’t online retailers take advantage of Thanksgiving as a jump start on the holiday shopping season?

The season essentially starts in early November these days, as most retailers start to ramp up  promotions and marketing. But Black Friday is the first day of heavy marketing. Remember when it was Cyber Monday? That’s no longer the case because most internet shoppers now spend time online at home every day, making the Friday after Thanksgiving more of a play than waiting until for everyone to get back to work on Mondays.

So, why not Thanksgiving itself? I was online for a while this morning – and I bet you were too. A quick scan of the analytics data for the various retailers who are clients at SwellPath shows that traffic isn’t down too much – maybe 25% to 50%. I bet it would be a little more solid if emails had gone out pre-dawn.

I’m going to make a forecast here and now: in the next couple of years, Black Friday will be begin on Thanksgiving morning. Shoppers will start looking for marketing promotions and special deals early Thursday; and they’ll start getting a little shopping in before NFL, turkeys, and pumpkin pie.  But make sure to get those emails (or Tweets, Facebook updates, etc.) out early, because as the folks at Clicky have pointed out, traffic drops off when it’s time to eat.

Magento & Google Website Optimizer Integration

I’ve got a new post over on the SwellPath blog that takes a look at multivariate and a/b testing.  Check it out.

Tags: a/b testing, Google Website Optimizer, Magento, multivariate testing

Birthday Wishes from Facebook and Adidas

Happy Birthday to me!  I don’t see enough sites taking advantage of stored birthdates to send customized messages on a birthday, but I got a few today.  I got several emails from vBulletin forums I’m registered on, all the same format:

Subject: Happy Birthday from [forum name]

Hello [username],
We at [forum name] forums would like to wish you a happy birthday today!

The first one was great, but after the 3rd I wasn’t that impressed.  Can’t these be customized a bit more?

Another message I got was from Facebook.  Of course I heard from about 75% of my Facebook friends, with birthday wishes on my Wall etc.  But Facebook itself took the time to wish me a Happy Birthday from the top of the home page.

Finally, one other noteable: Adidas sends a nice email with a 15% off coupon code every year, and they send it a week before your birthday, beating everyone else to the punch.

If you are capturing your members or customers birthdates, are you using that data to send them a special something?  If not, should you be?

Tags: adidas, Facebook, targeted birthday messaging, vBulletin

Competitious Keeps Tabs on Your Competition

I recently started playing around with Competitious, and I think it’s a pretty cool idea.  They’re in beta still, so I expect it will become a bit more robust.  It looks like they raised some angel money about 18 months ago, not sure of any VC infusion or anything since.  But it’s a great tool for the smaller businesses that want to have an organized interface to track their competition.  It’d be a great tool to hand off to an intern and have them update and monitor every day, and then have the key stakeholders (Online Marketing Director, VP of Marketing, etc.) login and check out; or it can send them email updates for certain happenings.

Here’s how it works. First you create an account and then create a project.  You add your URL and name as “My Company” and then you add your competitors’ URLs and names as your competitors.  You can see the project I set up using my old friends at Tactics.com as My Company, and then adding some of their competitors.

Once you have them all setup, you can then build a feature matrix.  You enter categories and features, and then check off features that the sites have or don’t have.  For example, a category might be, Community & Social Media and a feature may be Blog.  You can view the very simple feature matrix I set up.

You also can add “Clippings” you find on yourself and competitors.  This is a good way to track everyones PR and press.  It would be cool if there were some type of Google Alert integration, or something similar, that you could set up to suggest new clippings.  For now, the onus is on you to find them and add them, but they have a bookmarklet you can use to quickly add one, via a popup or redirection to the Competitious project.  Here’s a shot of me adding a great article about Tactics to the Clippings, via the bookmarklet popup window in Firefox:

They also have a traffic comparison section, that pulls in the Alexa graph for the sites in your project.  This section is a bit janky, mostly because of Alexa.  But they claim to have a more robust setup for the full product release.

Overall, lots of room for improvement with Competitious, but they are still in beta, and I really like the idea.  It has some great potential, if you have someone to spend 30 minutes or so every day pushing data into the project, then it really can streamline the monitoring part of keeping up with the Joneses.

Tags: competitor monitoring