Thursday 23 February 2012

email Marketing

In class today we watched an online seminar by Steve Lomax from the TFM&A show which looked at email marketing. It contained a case study on Boden and discussed the use of social media to enhance email marketing. The online seminar is available to view here. It showed the large role that personalisation and segmentation play in email marketing. The level of customisation that sophisticated email marketing can allow is a very potent tool.


Here is a maketing e-mail I recently received from Lateroom.com which I will now critically evaluate. Firstly I think the e-mail is quite effective as I usually open the e-mails from Late Rooms. I think this is down to the fact that Late Rooms is a web site that provides bargains on last minute booking of hotels. I read it to check if there are any deals for the weekend etc. I receive e-mails from Late Rooms weekly on a Wednesday, this is very regular but is not too intrusive and does not become too much of an annoyance.

The email has a personal greeting and if you click it on it you are logged in automatically to your account. It is also personalised to similar hotels and locations that I have booked in the past. The email also includes a special deal of the month, which this month is a 4* hotel reduced from £149 a night to £39 a night. This is a very tempting deal and I think a monthly deal is highly effective. The email also has a competition in it which you can enter for free if you complete a survey for Late Rooms. This allows Late Rooms to collect valuable eCRM data at no cost.

The email also has links to Late Rooms facebook and twitter accounts. This is another tool which Late Rooms can utilise to market products. the email also has a section that says "To ensure that your LateRooms.com emails arrive in your inbox, just add laterooms_offers@news.laterooms.com to your safe folder, address book or list of approved email addresses." This is a good idea as it will mean that their emails will not be blocked by spam filters. To conclude I think that Late Rooms email marketing strategy is effective and they are a good example to other companies in how to run email marketing campaigns.

Electronic Word of Mouth eWOM

Search Products
The search product I am using to find eWOM about is the Samsung Galaxy S2. The first example of eWOM I have found is a blog post from @gregjroberts on his web site www.greg-roberts.com. The post is available here. This review is very positive and seems to be fairly respectable and reliable. I think consumers would respect gregs opinion as he is neutral and has a knoweldge of mobile phones and technology without really being an expert. The second example of eWOM about the Samsung Galaxy S2 is from Tech Radar and is available here. This review is well written and has this video included in its review. The consumer may be put off by the professionalism of the review as online consumers give higher credibility and relevance to customers than marker-created sources. They prefer reviews by fellow consumers such as Gregs above. The third example of eWOM I have about the Samsung Galaxy S2 is this youtube review from www.mobilephonesforum.net This is a consumer based independent review for an independent consumer web site and therefore I believe will have a lot of sway on online consumers. The final example of eWOM is from Amazon it has a technical and professional review as well as customer reviews below. This seems like the perfect use of eWOm as it also uses the highly effective recommendation systems.

Thursday 16 February 2012

Critique of Daniel et al (2001) Towards a map of marketing information systems: an inductive study

The article by Daniels et al (2001) proposes an outline process map of marketing (as seen above) which is used as a basis for a map of IS applications in marketing. I found it very useful as there are a number of features of the marketing function which result in distinct requirements for IS suuport (Leverick et al.,1998).

The map of marketing domain proposed by Daniels et al (2001) is a very useful map and seems to cover all the areas of marketing. It is a good basis for the map of IS applications in marketing (as seen below).


However the study is not perfect and the methodology could have been improved. The case companies used are arguably not broad enough (as seen in the table below). There is no case company fromt he resource industry and the use of the Business School as the CRM application could maybe be better suited to a hotel company as they are the major industry that uses CRM.



Article Reference

Elizabeth Daniel, Hugh Wilson, Malcolm McDonald, (2003) "Towards a map of marketing information systems: an inductive study", European Journal of Marketing, Vol. 37 Iss: 5/6, pp.821 - 847

Available on Emerald here

Company Blog Reviews

Innocent Drinks



Innocent drinks have a blog that they have updated daily since 2006. They use it mostly for PR as it reaffirms their brand identity as a fun and ethical company. They post funny pictures and videos often and also recipes. They encourage interaction with a comments section on each blog post.

Adidas Group
Adidas Group have a very good blog which is run by their Cheif Corporate Communications Officer Jan Ranau. The blog has 3 main types of posts business operationsposts by employees and posts about sustainability. It is a very good blog and keeps the public up to date with what the adidas group are doing. It is mainly for PR but also has some marketing elements to it. The sustainability posts add to adidas' ethical brand image.