I had an interesting and slightly odd experience a couple of weeks back which made me open by eyes a little (literally) – and it involves customer service.
When given the choice, I normally will try to push my money to local businesses in the town I live in, which is Maynard, MA. That said, we are lucky to have an optical shop right here in town which can do standard exams and provide you with frames or contacts. I never really need to go anywhere else other than Look Optical.
Here’s what I like about it. First, I can walk there. As someone who has been in the retail business, convenience of location is huge with a capital H – we saw it in every customer survey we did. Look Optical also has a good selection of frames and they actually make their own frames, too. Also good. Convenience and selection – two major hot points.
Alex Thayer – Look Optical
But here’s where the hammer nails it in – service. The owner is a guy named Alex and he’s one of those people who has that talent where he can remember people’s names and he cheerfully says “Hey Jeff!” every time I walk in and he’ll remember I like music and ask what I’m listening to these days.
What’s more, he has the ability to remember what frames I used to wear and on more than one occasion, he remembers what frames I have previously tried on and not purchased. There is the magic. I will likely never shop anywhere else for optical needs.
I went in a few weeks back to order some new contact lenses and get a quick exam. I’m in the room and we finish up and Alex turns off the bright-as-the-sun light that was shining in my eyes and I can see he turns serious and then he asks me “what do you think is the most dangerous thing about contact lenses?”
Of course, I have no idea and I say so.
The answer: you can lose your eye. WHAT? He then proceeds to tell me that he had a patient who developed some kind of bacteria issue and ended up in the city in surgery – and lost an eye.
I’d never seen him so serious and it was clear that he took it hard. So we talked about ways to minimize the risks, including washing your hands when you put them in and take ’em out (which I do every time, all the time, anyway) and also not swimming or showering in them, because water carries bacteria.
Now this I hadn’t heard before. Almost every Sunday, I shower with my contacts in after my Sunday night hockey league games. And I must confess I swim in my contacts because a) I’m blind as a bat and don’t like blurry vision in the water, but more importantly, b) I’m usually swimming with my children nearby and I’m damn well going to make sure I have clear sight of them.
Of course, Alex understood the latter and discouraged the former, but wanted to let me know there is some risk in showering and swimming with contacts and he wanted me to know about it. I’m glad I don’t live in Flint.
Bottom line – customer service is king. I will take my contacts out when I shower from now on.
In this case, my devotion to Look Optical IS about convenience and location, but truth be told, if Alex moved to Acton or Sudbury, I’d drive there. Because he knows my name.
This applies to online marketing and customer service. The better you know your customers and the better you cater to their wants and needs, the better off your business will be. This is basic marketing 101 type stuff, but I continue to see it muffed by companies big and small.
Sure, there’s software – GOOD software – that can automate this for you in some facets and it can be quite effective. But responding in REAL-TIME in human ways AS SOON AS POSSIBLE is where people start seeing you like I see Alex.
For example, my goals in Social Media at my last job were to try and respond to any and all mentions of our brand within 1-5 minutes. That was a lofty goal because I always had a lot of other stuff going on, but I’m proud to say that more often than not, I did it.
You wouldn’t believe how happy it made people. Does it show up in Google Analytics? Nope. Does it show up as a trackable ROI event? Nope. But I can promise you it shows up in people’s hearts and minds and that means one word, which maybe trumps them all: Devotion. I know this was effective because I saw repeat orders from certain people after I engaged with them.
So don’t swim or shower in your contacts, get to know your customers and be obsessed about making them smile. Open your eyes. Be human.
Now that the calendar has flipped to the New Year, I’ve had a flurry of job interviews and there’s been lots of activity. This is good of course, but I still find I have pockets of time. To help offset the restlessness associated with not having a full-time job, I’ve found that three things tend to happen:
– I try to help out around the house and do more with the kids
– I’ve caught up on a lot of shows on Netflix
– I try to teach and educate myself
One question that surprisingly hasn’t come up in the myriad interviews I’ve had is the traditional “what are your weaknesses” question. I mean, it’s gotta come at some point, right? In fact, at one point I even volunteered them.
This didn’t happen to me.
Let’s get back to the Netflix thing for a second, though. One show I’ve just started watching is season one of “Louie,” with Louie C.K. and it’s great. Little 20-minute nuggets of Louie’s hilarity and discomfort!
Yesterday I was watching an episode where Louie had a stand-up show in Birmingham, AL and ended up having a gun pulled on him in the parking lot of some run-down restaurant. An older police officer ended up knocking the gunman senseless and giving Louie a ride back to his hotel, but not before asking Louie for a kiss on the lips. It was awkward TV at its finest.
Louie goes in to thank the cop.
Louie felt like he owed the policeman something for how he helped him and didn’t expect THAT ask from the cop, but he got out of his comfort zone and accommodated him.
My point? Get out of your comfort zone! I’ve never been interested in much of anything related to IT, networks, servers, coding and such. However, the world of Marketing has evolved to the point where Marketers can’t just do Marketing anymore. You need to be well-versed in many of the different elements within a company that touch Marketing, namely….everything. I learned this first-hand at my last position, where some of this knowledge could have come in real handy.
So here’s a weakness. And I have time, so I’ve started to address it.
Thanks to my longtime friend Dan Cederholm for recommending Treehouse, an online resource where you learn about UX, coding and just about anything else about computers going back to the 1950’s. I’m earning badges and learning stuff I never thought I’d care about. I’ve had a lot of those moments where I say “so THAT’s what that means” and dare I say, I’m enjoying learning more about IT and coding and it will undoubtedly help me at some point in my next role (oh, did I mention I’m looking?)
So yes, I’m watching some Netflix here and there and taking some breathers, but I’m also adding tools to my toolbelt. Moral of the story – once again – don’t ever be satisfied with what you know. Find out more. DO more.
I’m not what you would consider adventurous when it comes to investing. The older I get, the better this position seems to be. Do I regret not being more aggressive when I was younger? Maybe, but when it comes to money, I’m all about safety. I will gladly forego the dramatic highs of gain if I don’t have to experience the harrowing lows of major loss. I’m just not built that way. Financially, anyway. In other ways, I am. Topic for another day.
I have a small amount of play money set aside in an individual stock account at Fidelity. This little pile was created as part of a performance bonus I received at Ask.com maybe ten years ago. I parked it in three stocks, one was a renewable energy technology, another was a backend technology provider to telcos and cable/internet providers. The third is a pretty safe Fidelity Mutual Fund. I vowed to sit on them for years. And I did. Until this week.
The mutual fund stays (see: safe). I made a little money on the other two, but times are changing and that calls for me to change, too. I’ve sold them and am now going long on Netflix and Twitter.
Twitter is the riskier gamble, but I keep thinking that when it comes to consumer internet technology, they’re the best value right now. I also think about it practically and how I use it in my own life. If I ever need to read more about a breaking news story or find something quick – I go to Twitter right away. And I ALWAYS find it.
Case in point: the other day my wife and I heard zillions of police cars, ambulances and fire trucks whizzing by our house. Something is up. You’re not going to find it on Facebook or Instagram. Or Snapchat. Or the local newspaper website.
It took me literally 10 seconds to find it on Twitter – a house fire right down the street. Now, this was not a monetized event for Twitter, but I’m banking that more and more of their solution will be soon enough. It’s utility. And utility pays the bills.
Netflix seems obvious. A consumer play that is strong and only getting stronger. They have good competitors, but I believe Netflix is the equivalent to the IPhone – a market share beast. If you look at their plans, they’re not even global yet and their proprietary content is in its infancy. I think there’s a lot of room for growth in their stock. Plus, I loved Bloodline. So awesome.
Look, I’m no expert. But I do look at the trends and the financials and do my best and I think these two are poised for growth. It also helps that the market has been down so much in the last week – great time to buy. So I’m sticking with them (hopefully for 10+ years!) and we’ll see what happens.
As a Marketing guy, I’m also long on the opportunity for video in 2016-2017. The way it’s setting up for social media and digital content, there’s going to be a LOT of opportunity, not to mention fun things to do, for marketers. Whatever my next role is – and I’m actively looking – I hope to make video (both canned and live) a huge part of the plan.
If you’ve ever challenged yourself to some kind of professional or personal feat, be it completing a large project at work or training for (and then running) a marathon, human nature tells you to chill out and rest for a bit. Recover. Maybe even allow yourself to be lazy for a small period of time. Don’t. Capitalize and use some of these retail tips for January!
Don’t Do This.
Often times, the time frame after a period of intense projects or events is the BEST time to step on the gas. In the same way a stock market dip is the best time to invest, a quiet period after something intense is often a time when you can capitalize in a big way.
Today I’ll talk mostly about retail, because that’s where most of my recent experience was. I no longer need to clarify if I mean offline or online when it comes to retail, because if you’re not thinking about both facets intertwined, then you’re already behind and you should seek work as a pager salesman.
I always approached January as an enormous opportunity to drive sales and approached it as a way to really get the year started off right. Because I wore so many hats in my job (a benefit AND a burden, of course), there was always a lot to do if I wanted to have this success and a lot of planning for it needed to happen in December, when you’re in the middle of total madness. But it’s always madness.
So here’s a few things I did to try and supercharge our retail business in Q1. This, by no means, is an exhaustive list, it’s just a few basic things you can and should do.
Create new customer segments. Well, it’s Q4 at retail, so there’s a darn good chance that you’ve piled up a healthy stack of first-time shoppers. Create a segment (your call on if you want to do multiple segments by online-offline) and welcome them to your brand in as human a way as possible. Don’t club them over the head with aggressive new product emails or beg people to buy stuff – they just did that, man! Come up with a way to delight them, perhaps some examples of your most successful social content from the past few months, a peek into the company culture or a new shopper discount (if discounting is part of your makeup). And duh, thank them for being new to the fold.
Extend Promotions. Maybe you had a weaker Q4 then you expected or maybe your company is just into discounting all the time, but this one is totally situational. I know one thing – whenever we positioned a discount or promotion as a “limited time extension,” it usually roared. So if you had a promotion going in December, announcing an extension of it in January isn’t a bad idea and it’s a pretty good bet you can wring out some additional sales to all those people who got gift cards to your store for Christmas.
Increase PPC and Social Spending. The research I did indicated that our competitors pulled back on spending pretty dramatically in January – and of course we did as well. So I don’t mean increase over December, I mean increase over last year’s spend or if you have any insight into your competitors spend, be more aggressive. I’ve always debated the reliability of the various competitor monitoring services available, but then again, it seemed to pay off each time in terms of YOY growth in this channel. The retail business I was in (ice hockey and lacrosse equipment) is quite seasonal, so each year it seemed I chipped away more and more budget from the slow periods and even experimented with zero budget for a slow month at one point. But if you can be aggressive at a time when others are less aggressive, you can squeeze some growth.
Evaluate Cost of Acquisition By Channel. In some ways, even though this isn’t directly customer-facing, it’s arguably the most important. It’s something you should be doing monthly or bi-monthly (depending on what business you’re in) anyway. Take a look at each of your marketing channels – PPC, Social, Email, etc and understand what you are paying to acquire new customers. It will open your eyes. For example, to measure CPA for paid search for a given period, take your total spend and divide it by your total number of conversions. Voila. CPA. Repeat it for other channels as best as you can and see what’s performing better and where you can improve/manipulate and optimize. Computing this can get murky, for example you’ll need to decide if things like cost of labor or things like shipping costs play in. It’s also difficult to quantify things like traditional media buys (TV/Radio) without an associated unique URL being advertised or something. But plowing more dollars into the better performing areas is basic marketing and a good way to start the new year fresh.
There you go. Now enjoy this little ditty from The Decemberists, great music for January. See what I did there?
I was putting out my recycling last night when I realized that you can really learn a lot about people by simply looking at their recycling bins. Every Wednesday on my street it’s a sociologist’s dream when all the bins are lined up down the street, overflowing with information about you. It’s your real-life About Page!
Yes, this is mine.
Are there lots of newspapers? Chances are there’s people over 40 living there. Lots of diaper boxes? Baby on board. Lots of craft beer bottles? Good chance I can be friends with you. You can see where people shop and where they get their pizza. You can learn a lot.
I am not voyeuristic. I generally subscribe to the notion that whatever goes on in your house is your business and I don’t walk down my street each Wednesday studying people’s bins. It’s just something that occurred to me this morning.
Some websites About Us pages are great. Others….not so much. Personally, I click on About pages all the time. Much like the outdoor recycling, it does give you a glimpse, though not a complete one, into who a company is. I feel like an About page should be fairly succinct and much like a news article, get the most important information out there in the very first sentence or two.
With that in mind, this is how I crafted the about page at my last job. There’s plenty of info there for people who want to know more, but all you need to know is right there in the first paragraph. If I’d change anything about it, I might move the second paragraph into the first, but people are cognitively setup to read further if the snippets are smaller.
Now I’m going to pick on my former employer a little bit. When you click on Ask.com’s About Link, you are taken here. This page is an IAC page, which is the holding company which owns Ask (among many other internet properties) but there is virtually NO information about Ask.com specifically on this page. This is a turn off. At least to me.
Are About pages going to affect your conversion rate one way or another? Doubtful. But don’t discount its importance – getting across your core personality, business and culture is really important, so take some time and construct something interesting.
Now, I beg you to listen to my favorite band from the ’90s, Teenage Fanclub.
I was fourteen years old when I attended my first concert in December, 1985. Thirty years ago! It was KISS at the Worcester Centrum (setlist here) and yes, I still call it the Centrum and yes, I will always call it the Centrum! This was the era when they toured without any makeup. At the time, I was blown away – all the people! So loud! Such showmen! In time, I began to realize it wasn’t a great era for KISS and the show was quite average.
Yeah, don’t do that again, guys.
As a total music dork, I’ve kept nearly ALL of my concert ticket stubs, including that KISS show. I’ve got some doozies, too. The Beastie Boys and Public Enemy in 1986 (Centrum!). Pearl Jam at Peabody’s Down Under in Cleveland (capacity 200! Setlist here). Nirvana on Halloween night in Akron in 1993. The list goes on and on. Those ticket stubs are somewhere in my house and I intend to repurpose that content at some point. The idea was to create a large piece of art that includes ALL my stubs and hang it up. Someday….
Which brings me to another topic – repurposing online content. By now, us Marketers know that the old adage “build it and they will come” doesn’t happen automatically – and it definitely doesn’t happen right away. Once in a blue moon you may catch lightning in a bottle and have something quickly go viral and man, let me tell you how good that feels. However, 95% of the time, you gotta work to make your content successful before and after posting.
Which is why I’ve never had any issue re-using old content. Obviously you need to choose wisely, as you don’t want to re-use content that is dated and will make you look out of the loop. While I was at Pure Hockey (large niche retailer), I consciously created content that I knew I could use down the road – and I did.
Our Hockey Stinks series, for instance, was an idea I came up with in January of 2014 and published in August 2014. Most of the promotion for this was for the hockey buying season of August-November 2014, but you can bet I repurposed this content a year later (Aug-Sep of 2015), when I used it for brand awareness on Facebook via some paid social campaigns. And guess what? It was good content that people can identify with, so it got tons of comments, likes and shares again. I also targeted the paid campaign to a slightly different audience, which helped.
There is nothing wrong at all with re-using content, as long as it’s the right content. If it moved the needle before and it’s not promoting an old product, there’s a good chance you can have some success or leverage it for another purpose later. So go ahead, post the same stuff multiple times. Different times of the day, different times of the month or different times of the year!
In this case, my devotion to Look Optical IS about convenience and location, but truth be told, if Alex moved to Acton or Sudbury, I’d drive there. Because he knows my name.
