Janet Lee Johnson | The Art of Marketing

Here’s a little cautionary tale for those who’re interested in selling online. I was staying with friends this weekend and witnessed (almost) first hand the frustrations of a poorly implemented web site design for shoppers. It went like this (with only the names and addresses of my friends altered to protect the innocent):

Setting the stage: two of Sam’s granddaughters are 4-year-old twins, and she delights in Christmas gift giving - always equally. When the family was packing up from their Christmas visit, someone discovered that one of the girls’ Disney Fairies Queen Clarion Porcelain Dolls was broken.

Sam, being the generous and thoughtful grandmother that she is, went online to find another one. And the first result in her Google search was a listing from Toy Store Inc. offering the doll. When you follow the link and arrive on their site, they look fairly legitimate, so she gave them her VISA card and filled out the billing information and the shipping information, all of which they requested. And she enthusiastically waited to hear that her order had arrived at Mary’s.

And the first email arrived.

Sat, Jan 3, 2009 at 1:36 PM, ::Toy Store Inc.::  <sales@toystoreinc.com> wrote:

Thank you for your recent order. Below is your confirmation that  we received your order. Please review the information below and notify us immediately if you  have any questions.

Customer Service ::Toy Store Inc.:: sales@toystoreinc.com

————————————————————–
ORDER CONFIRMATION                    Invoice No. 7978

Bill To:
[Sam]
[Sam's address]

US Ship To:
[Mary and the Twins]
[Mary's Address]

US Order Date:        1/3/09
Payment By:        Visa
Confirmation No:   []
Shipment Tracking:  ::Toy Store Inc.:: Items
1 Disney Fairies Queen Clarion Porcelain Doll 10″  @  $39.99 = $39.99 Sub-Total: $39.99
Shipping:  $12.00 (Standard) Sales Tax: $0.00 ::Toy Store Inc.:: Total: $51.99   .      –
http://www.toystoreinc.com
where your toys get delivered

(JLJ: Notice their tagline: where your toys get delivered)

Another email arrived just a few days later:
To: Sam
Subject: Fwd: Order Confirmation  Begin forwarded message:
From: “Toy Store Inc” <sales@toystoreinc.com>
Date: January 8, 2009 12:02:21 PM PST
To: Sam

Subject: Re: Order Confirmation

Hello,
We do not ship this item other then the billing address. We have  cancel your order and give you a full refund. Thank you
Jennifer

(I had a look at their policy page here: http://smub.it/janet/toystoreshipping, and nowhere does it state that they do not ship items other then the billing address.)

Well, then Sam had a bit to say:

Friday, January 09, 2009 6:24 AM
To: ’sales@toystoreinc.com’
Subject: RE: Order Confirmation

In all the hundreds of times that I have ordered items through  the internet, I have never heard of something so ridiculous; YOUR  SITE HAS BOTH BILLING AND SHPPING SECTIONS TO COMPLETE.  And in  any case, if you insist that you must deliver items only to the  billing address, why wouldn’t you ask whether I would like the  item shipped there - which I do - Send it to me and I’ll mail it  myself.  I do not want the order cancelled.  I want the item.   Please process and confirm.
Thank you.

January 13, 2009 5:42:13 AM PST
To: Toy Store Inc <sales@toystoreinc.com>
Cc: Sam

Subject: Fwd: Order Confirmation

Will you please advise whether you are processing my order - I  want this item.

January 15, 2009 5:39:35 AM PST
To: Toy Store Inc <sales@toystoreinc.com>
Subject: Fwd: Order Confirmation

ARE YOU PROCESSING MY ORDER, OR NOT?  (JLJ - Sam had forwarded the email string)

January 16, 2009 6:57:13 AM PST
To: Toy Store Inc sales@toystoreinc.com
Subject: Fwd: Order Confirmation

Okay.  I give up.  This was the worst ordering on-line experience ever.

January 16, 2009 10:25:37 AM PST
To: Sam
Subject: Re: Order Confirmation

[Sam]

Your order has been cancelled and its been refunded for a few days already. We been scamed too many times and on the website we clearly stated that we reserve the right to cancel unauthorized transactions and yours is one of them.
Thank you
Jennifer

Oh, Jennifer and Toy Store, Inc. Yours is a sorry tale of not thinking like a customer. No wonder you get scamed. You set yourselves up for it by not revealing your true intentions with ordering and shipping policies and forms that don’t match your actions!

Pull down your “Ship to:” form if you never ship to an address separate from a billing address. Update your shipping policy to match your real intentions. And change your tagline, please!

Your About Us section clearly states:

In business since 2006, our mission is to provide the best & highest customer satisfaction.

If this is your standard and your customers (like Sam) experience different results, my bet is you’ll be out of business by year’s end, which is exactly what she said, in her final note to them:

January 17, 2009 11:52:33 AM PST
To: sales@toystoreinc.com
Subject: Re: Order Confirmation

I’m sure that you will be pleased to know that I was able to get my item through Amazon.  It’s just amazing that you people can actually be in business; your incompetence is overwhelming.

Inspired (in part) by a post on ReadWriteWeb on how enterprise RSS is dead (really Marshall?), I thought I’d show how I use RSS every day. I think RSS is a critical business tool - especially for marketers - and it’s a free tool that can save time, increase your awareness and improve your productivity.

What’s RSS?

There’s a great 3-minute video called RSS in Plain English by Lee Lefevre of Common Craft on YouTube: http://smub.it/janet/rss. Watch it first, then pop back to me.

See you in a few.

Welcome back - wasn’t that a great, simple explanation?

So to me, RSS is about two things:

1. Subscribing - like my own custom magazine subscription, subscribing to RSS feeds is basically a way to have news and blog posts that you’re interested in come to you, vs. going out and searching for them.

For example, I like to read my friends’ blogs, and keep up with my clients’ blogs. I set up subscriptions every time someone announces they’re blogging, and every time I get a new client who blogs. I also like to read top technology and marketers’ blogs. So every time I find another interesting one, I subscribe to it.

To subscribe, you generally just right click on the RSS Feed button, which looks like this:

Copy the URL that’s there, and paste it into your RSS reader. Since every reader is different, I’ll show mine here - Attensa - where you click on the Add Feed button, and paste the URL.

Immediately your reader will start ‘listening’ to the web for you. I can read all of my subscriptions all in one place, my RSS feed reader. It looks like this: (Click on the thumbnail to get the full picture!)

2. Search - like an indefatigable watchdog, “persistent searches” alert when subjects I’m interested in (like my clients’ products, brands and names) are talked about online.

I set up searches in my RSS feed reader for every new client that I have. That way, if there’s something being said that I need to be aware of, I’ll know, and be able to either respond to it, or let my client know about it. I also keep a persistent search on my own name. I think it’s important to have early knowledge of anything being said about important topics and brands, and it’s incredibly easy to use RSS to do all the work for me.

To use RSS, you need an RSS reader, and there are tons of them on the market, tools from Yahoo!, Google, Portland’s Attensa and NewsGator… a list of RSS readers is here: http://smub.it/janet/rsslist.

Regardless of what you use, start experimenting with RSS. Start by doing what I do -

• Subscribe to your favorite blogs - read them from one place at one time…
• Set up persistent searches for yourself, your brand, your product names, or your clients’ brands.
• Set up persistent searches for keywords of interest to you - I keep my antenna looking out for “health 2.0″ and others.

In a very descriptive article (you might call it Rx for healthcare brands) over on the Back of the Book blog, Ellen Hoenig-Carlson writes a prescription for healthcare marketers that answers the question:

How to optimize our brands in the current environment?

To illustrate just one point in 10 in the Rigors of 2009, Ellen writes:

“Instill less fear; stimulate optimism, provide support and hope. Consumers feel burned from the economic crisis and are often highly frustrated with healthcare systems, but this goes for internal stakeholders as well. When employees are scared, they don’t speak up; they aren’t capable of new thinking or putting the customer first.  Fear will prevent the open and honest collaboration that builds critical relationships inside and outside organizations.”

The wise marketer, faced with penultimate challenges of economy, fear, shrinking budgets, etc. - even if you’re not in pharma marketing - will learn things from this article.

One might think - due to my absence here - that I’ve just returned from some exotic trip over the holidays. Only in my mind. Although the view from my office was transported from a neighborhood of Portland to that of a Alpine ski village for about 10 days.  The holidays were delightful for me and mine… and I’m just now back to blogging.

I have been working away through the holidays, and am proud to say one of my recent client projects has just come into fruition: the delight of bringing Ellen Hoenig Carlson’s voice into the blogosphere.

Ellen is a long-time pharma marketing executive, and today consults with some of the most visible brands in the healthcare space. I’ve been lucky enough to be her Sherpa as she’s pointed her enthusiastic intelligence into the social media space.

Her post today is especially relevant to those of us who are contemplating 2009 with a mixture of excitement and fear. (Who isn’t, in this world climate?) One of five marketing points in her post today, “Stepping Up to Change in 2009” rang especially true to me:

“Breaking through fear. The brain is highly responsive to fear, and doesn’t allow for learning or new thinking when people feel afraid. Fear is one kind of stress that disables the very kind of thinking that we need most. “

Amen.

Just as we’re watching banks latch on to the money we’ve recently injected into the financial systems in this country, we must pay attention to how our brains latch on to fear - playing with it, allowing it to morph throughout the conscious and unconscious patterns as we go through our days (and nights).

Who’s been waking up at 3:00 a.m. and thinking anything but negative thoughts lately? Can we train our brains to focus on the positives (even in the middle of the night), or is it just best to turn on the light and read? (Note: a colleague of Ellen’s is launching a blog that will cover that very soon… stay tuned!)

Anyway, welcome to the blogosphere, Ellen. Your five imperatives for marketers in 2009 comes at just the right time for me. Thank you for lending a sane voice into an increasingly complex world. Perhaps in listening and learning, we’ll not only be better marketers for it, we may also sleep more soundly through the night.