Digital Minds Forum

A few weeks ago whilst on holiday, I went to investigate a disturbance outside my tent in the middle of the night, some drunken louts shouting, swearing and getting rather physical with each other. Having phoned 999 I decided to venture outside and try to resolve the matter once and for all.

So, dressed in my silky nightdress, hunters wellies and London Marathon raincoat …. I was almost ready… just the final weapon…my iphone.

Once, outside, armed with my handy iphone confronted by this group of drunken non-English speaking men, I desperately hunted through my apps. I guess I was looking for a ‘light saber app’ or ‘pretend your surrounded police app’ I actually don’t know. Instead, I found my ‘flashtorch’ app which is fact a pointless colour screen and flashed that around thinking they would soon see I had come equipped with my iphone and disappear.

What planet are we all living on? I had ventured in to some warped reality of iphone, wii and sci fi. A real testimony to digital marketing living and breathing the virtual world. I hadn’t even had a drink!

Luckily, in this instance the police appeared and everything was dissolved peacefully. For me it was a lesson that perhaps I’m getting just a little to reliant on my gadgets….and perhaps taking my digital marketing world a little too seriously.

Read and watch all the ins and outs of Old Spice’s repositioning success through digital media -

http://www.digitalbuzzblog.com/old-spice-social-campaign-case-study-video/.

So you want to data capture the email addresses of as many visitors to your website as possible. How do you achieve this?

The interruption marketing way is to have a nasty pop-up appear as soon as someone clicks through to the site. Not a good idea – will instantly cause people to bounce away and cause immediate suspicion of your brand.

The permission way is to woo the customer with a nice reward. A white paper, a freebie, a competition. You give them something useful and in return they give you their email address. Permission equates to win:win.

So having persuaded the customer to click through for the reward, what hoops do you then demand before they claim their prize? The temptation is to capture all vital statistics possible – full demographics, source of referral plus at least the name of the family cat, their insurance renewal date, child’s middle name and more beside. Research, however, shows that the more complex the sign-up form, the less likely someone is to complete it. What is the real “need to know” data at this stage? Probably just their name and email address. Once you’ve begun to build a relationship later you can begin to learn more about them as they reward your wonderful communications with increased permission.

So keep it simple. Capture the need to know, reward the customer with something worthwhile and then begin the business of building a relationship. Don’t reward with spammy eblasts. Dance with them, woo them and show them you care.

Marie Page runs an international e-business selling instructional DVDs teaching contemporary musical instruments. She blogs at http://musicademy.com/blog