Leap to it

A friend of mine, who I’ve known for more than 20 years, is convinced my birthday is 29th February. It doesn’t matter how many times I tell him my birthday is in January, the notion has taken on a tradition status, that I now look forward to the leap year to receive birthday greetings from him.

Email marketers have also cottoned on to the fact that an extra day is sort of special and have been sending me offers to ensure I spent my “spare” day shopping with them. I tallied a dozen emails in the past few days promoting leap year deals. And some were executed much better than others.

Lingerie etailer Figleaves.com sent me an email with a 29 percent off discount code, making it the most generous marketer of the bunch. Similarly, Presents for Men also offered 29 percent off, but customers had to shop from a special “leap year” range. Other offers included “up to” 29 percent off, with an additional 10 percent discount code from Asos, while apparel and maternitywear specialist Isabella Oliver included a free mystery gift to leap year shoppers. 

As well as the best offers, Isabella Oliver and Figleaves also stood out in my selection of 12 as having the most enticing subject lines. Isabella Oliver went for “Fashion for free, TODAY ONLY! Receive a special gift with every order” while Figleaves went straight for my wallet with “Because it only happens every 4 years! 29% off - Email Exclusive!”

Beauty and cosmetics etailer CheapSmells, seemed, well, cheap in comparison. The subject line was punchy enough: “One Day Only Leap Year Saver - 5 Percent Off Everything Voucher Code”. But upon opening the email, the code only applied on orders of £50 or more. As it only happens every four years, perhaps CheapSmells could have pushed the boat out a little more.

Clearly keen to capitalise on the leap year concept, QVC also sent a themed email. But I felt it missed the mark: “Miri, spread the cost of your favourite brands with QVC this Leap Day”. My first thought was “what, no special offer?” The email copy went on to say: “Leap Year only happens once every four years so to help you celebrate in style we are offering all on-air items and selected online items in 4 Easy Pay instalments. Enjoy a full day of your favourite shows and brands, including beauty from Laura Geller, home electronics from Bose and much more”. Is it just me, or does this email leave you feel a bit deflated?  Have we all become “too trained” to expect money off?

Another marketer I wanted to see more from was The Last Detail, which sells wedding favours and table decorations. Its email was definitely on the right tracks—with plenty of calls to action for subscribers to get involved in its debate as to whether women should propose to men (well, it is a leap year tradition). There were links to The Last Detail’s Facebook page, where subscribers could take the quiz to see if they’d found Mr Right (I have, it says), videos including “Our top 5 Wedding Proposals” and a blog post on the “Top 10 places to pop the question to your man...” Plenty going on in the email, but it wasn’t selling me anything. I would have liked to see at least a couple of product offers—after all, we have a whole four years to wait until the next leap year.--MT

Paying a premium

First there was Amazon Prime, then came Asos Premier, now M and M Direct has launched its Premier service, offering customers free express delivery, free returns, priority mailings and exclusive offers.
Amazon Prime, Asos Premier and M and M Direct Premier are membership programmes that charge customers an annual fee for added-value services. Amazon’s service costs £49 a year; Asos currently charges £14.95 and M and M Direct charges £14.99 as an introductory price. But do they represent good deals for the merchant and the consumer?

I looked at joining Amazon Prime, but could not see any immediate benefits as a consumer. Sure, I could get “free one-day delivery on millions of eligible items sold by Amazon.co.uk”, but what about the items sold by third-parties on the site; not all of those are eligible. Not to mention that most items are eligible for Amazon’s free super-saver delivery anyway. I may have to wait up to five days to receive my purchase, but if I wanted it sooner I’d pay the one-off delivery charge. For most items I am happy to wait a few days. Although my family buys a lot on Amazon, I don’t think our shipping costs rack up to £49 a year. Thanks, but no thanks. This offer clearly works out better for Amazon and if people are willing to pay £49 when they could get a very similar service for free, Amazon is definitely the smartest marketer out there.

The Premier offer from apparel etailer Asos is instantly more enticing for consumers. It offers free next-day delivery as well as a returns collection service. I can see the immediate attraction of not having to trudge to the post office to return a parcel. Another benefit, at least for a catalogue nut like me, is that Asos will mail its customer magazine to Premier customers each month. I have bought from Asos a couple of times over the past year or so, but they’ve not sent me a magazine for several months. I was told by a customer services rep that “we send out the magazine every month to a random selection of people who have ordered from us in the last six months. This means that if you keep ordering from us you will receive the Asos magazine,” she directed me to the online version, but it’s just not the same. For £19.95, or even the full price of £24.95, the Asos Premier deal is much better than Amazon’s. As Asos already offers free delivery with no minimum order value, albeit not next-day, I guess the Premier service is a way to reclaim revenue from deliveries. It’s also a great way for Asos to communicate directly with its very best customers. Plenty of online retailers can segment their databases to find out who among their customers buys the most often. But using a service like Premier, Asos knows exactly who its most engaged customers are. To use a much-bandied term, the people who subscribe to a service like Premier are likely “brand advocates”, willing to pay extra for a service from their favourite retailer. Impress these people and they will tell their friends, who may then also join the service, who will tell their friends, and so on.

M and M Direct’s offer is very similar to Asos. It includes free express shipping, free returns, “priority mailings” and exclusive offers. Already, M and M says 50,000 people have signed up to the programme since March. Again, like Asos, M and M calls out receiving regular catalogues as a key benefit. Its non-offer price is £19.99, cheaper than Asos’s full price. The real added benefit here is that M and M Direct normally charges £6.99 for express delivery and £3.99 for standard delivery compared with Asos and Amazon where customers can opt for free delivery on most items. That means that the service essentially pays for itself after just two orders. For regular shoppers, that’s a very tempting deal.

If I genuinely shopped that often with a retailer, paying for a premium service would definitely appeal. It’s a concept that would work for anything purchased regularly--pet supplies, vitamins and supplements, home-office supplies, childrenswear and baby products, and so much more. If margins permit, we may see many more of this premium services crop up. After all, there’s nothing customers love more than being treated like VIPs.--MT

Seven companies reach Catalogue e-business Readers’ Award shortlist

Seven highly respected direct commerce businesses have reached the shortlist of the inaugural Catalogue e-business Readers’ Award. Having received some 462 votes, it was too close to call between Asos, Boden, Charles Tyrwhitt, Kiddicare, Lakeland, Net-a-Porter, and The White Company. As a result, it will fall to delegates at the CatEx Round Table Day—held on the same day as the ECMOD Direct Commerce Awards on 6th April—to cast their votes so that the outright winner can be named. The outright winner will then be invited to accept the trophy as part of the ECMOD Direct Commerce Awards evening.

In related news, congratulations to Carol Cade of the Book People who, by making her nomination for the readers' award, won our prize draw of two tickets to the Awards evening. Enjoy the night!

For information on booking a seat at the ECMOD Awards visit www.ecmod360.co.uk.

For information on attending the CatEx Round Table Day visit www.catalogueexchange.co.uk.

Birthday blues

It was my birthday last week. People had warned me that it wouldn’t live up to the hype and they were right. But it’s not the party that let me down (the “big 0” celebration was fabulous), it’s the lack of promotional emails I received on the day that disappointed me.

“Event-triggered marketing” is such a buzz phrase—and some online retailers are better at it than others. But even Asos, which has sent me a “happy birthday” message for my last two birthdays didn’t bother this year. The only saving grace was an email from snow and surf gear etailer Blue Tomato which offered my €10 off my next purchase of €50 or more.





Retailers, take note: when you ask customers for their dates of birth, they fully expect something in return for divulging this delicate information. The least you can do is send them a special offer on their special day. Act smarter by analysing transactional history: for example, if the customer usually spends £40 or less, send an email offering 10 percent off a £60 spend. Even if the offer is never taken up, just the notion of “remembering” your customer’s birthday can make the recipient feel warm and fuzzy about your brand.--MT

Click your support

You’ve probably sent all your Christmas cards already, so here’s an idea for next year. A lot of companies these days send Christmas e-cards and give the money they save on postage to charity. But why not take the e-card concept a step further?

I received an email today from fashion etailer Asos that read: “Asos.com will donate 10p to the [Udayan Care] charity on behalf of every customer who shows their support by clicking here”.

If just 5 percent of Asos.com’s registered user base clicks through, the company will raise roughly £13,500. This is such a fantastic idea, and so easy for the consumer. I’d like to see more of this next year, especially from the big players. Smaller companies can get involved too, perhaps a penny for each click, or a sum for every 1000 clicks. How about it? --MT

Delivering info about deliveries

When I searched for "Royal Mail" and "strike" this afternoon, Google News delivered "about" 2,368 news stories as results. (I love how Google News won't pin itself down to a specific number of stories but instead feels the need to qualify the number with "about".) A sampling of the headlines: "Royal Mail national strike would cause havoc with Christmas post" (The Telegraph); "Firms' fears over post strike threat" (Scunthorpe Telegraph); "Prepare for disruption" (Burton Mail); "The last post" (The Independent).

I figured that lots of direct sellers would be responding to the fearsome headlines with messages on their websites reassuring customers that even in the case of a national strike, their orders would be delivered on time.

Once again, I figured wrong.

Of the 20 ecommerce sites, both b-to-b and b-to-c, I visited, only four had some sort of disclaimer on their home page.

Office supplies cataloguer/retailer Staples placed its message front and centre, just below its logo: "Your order will not be affected by any Royal Mail strike action. For your peace of mind, remember that your order is NOT delivered by Royal Mail and will continue to be delivered next day as usual."

On the other three websites, the messages appeared below the fold. Even so, they were difficult to miss. Fashion etailer Asos went with a bold albeit somewhat ungrammatical "Royal Mail Strikes Delivery Unaffected". Fellow apparel merchant Cotton Traders, which caters to an older audience, posted a genteel "For complete confidence your order will be delivered by private courier". And general merchandiser Littlewoods tied its message to a reminder that "Standard delivery is free on all orders. Don't forget... our deliveries are not affected by any postal strikes".

So of my informal survey, 20 percent of the websites were addressing what is undoubtedly a concern of many consumers. As for the other 16 websites, several of them (Amazon.co.uk, Marks & Spencer, and Liberty) prominently promoted free shipping offers, but they didn't reassure shoppers that the orders would actually arrive. For the others, it was business as usual.

Some of these companies may still be scrambling for delivery alternatives and therefore can't promise uninterrupted service. But department store John Lewis issued a statement this week stating that it has switched its parcel deliveries to other carriers--so why not post this info on its website?

Maybe John Lewis and some of the others are afraid that by mentioning the strikes on their sites, they're planting a fear in the minds of consumers and that therefore the less said the better. Or maybe they feel it's too early to start pounding the message.

A former editor of mine said that when writing a feature or a presentation, you should "tell the audience what you're going to tell them, then tell them, then tell them what you told them". In other words, you can't repeat your message too early or too often. For consumers who are already a bit hesitant about parting with their hard-earned money, it's not too early to reassure them that they'll actually receive the merchandise they've opted to spring for.--SC

ECMOD quickies

One drawback of attending a conference with an especially good programme of sessions and speakers: There’s no way to cover everything you want to. Such was the case at ECMOD this year. Nonetheless, here’s a selection of notable quotes and quick takeaways that I’ve gleaned fromt the conference, which began yesterday and ran through today at Earls Court in London:

• “The successful catalogues we work with focus on having a website better than their catalogue,” said Bill LaPierre of list and data firm Direct Media/Millard during his Thursday morning session. This ties in with one of his truisms of direct marketing in the 21st century: The website is the core business, and the catalogue brings in incremental sales—the reverse of the longstanding conventional wisdom.

• Also from LaPierre: Sixty percent of the success of a catalogue is down to the merchandise, 20 percent to the mailing list, 10 percent to the creative, and the remaining 10 percent to customer service.

• In addition to helping ecommerce sites with their search engine optimisation efforts (by providing more content for search engine spiders to crawl), a blog “kind of builds a personal trust, as people want more and more information about companies these days,” Karen Watson, co-owner and managing director of The Real Flower Company, said during a Wednesday morning session on social media.

• At the same session, Wiggly Wigglers founder Heather Gorringe said, “Podcasts aren’t always thought of as social media, but I actually think they’re the start of it all.” Wiggly Wigglers has had great success with its folksy yet informative podcasts, as well as with other social media. Facebook, for instance, drives about 7.5 percent of all traffic to the rural-lifestyle cataloguer’s website, and Twitter drives another 7.5 percent. Of Twitter, Gorringe said, “It puts us on an even platform with companies that have an enormous budget.”

• Another panelist of the Wednesday morning social-media session, Asos’s James Hart, said, “Your community is not just your customers. Your community is you and your customers.”

• Discussing his company’s launch in the US market during a session on UK brands expanding overseas, Boden managing director Julian Granville noted, “In the US we planned for just about every disaster scenario there is, but we didn’t plan on this much success.” The message: Just as you should have contingency plans for underperformance, be sure you are prepared for greater-than-expected demand.

• Think “free” is the most effective word you can use in an email subject line? Think again. In her Thursday afternoon session, Michelle Farabaugh of consultancy Lenser said that of the emails her company had tested, seven of the 10 most-effective ones had “New” in the subject line.

I’ll be posting more-extensive coverage of ECMOD on our Catalogue e-business website (www.catalog-biz.com) and in the November issue of Catalogue e-business magazine—once my brain cells have processed everything and, just as important, once my feet have forgiven me for wearing court shoes two days in a row for the first time since last year’s ECMOD.--SC

Now I'm a believer

For the longest while, I didn’t quite get all the hype surrounding Asos. Sure, it sells a broad range of apparel, and yes, its website has top-notch navigation and functionality. But being the jaded soul I am, I expect no less from an ecommerce site. Praising an etailer for offering multiple search and sort options, to my mind, is like rewarding a child with extra sweets simply because he did his homework. He’s supposed to do his homework, just like ecommerce sites are supposed to make shopping simple.

But now I’m an Asos fan. And it’s because of the problems I had in completing my order on its site.

Two days ago I tried to buy two items from Asos, but the site insisted that my credit-card details were wrong. I retried several times, then tried with my debit card. No go. So I filled out the online form and emailed it to the Asos customer care desk. Within the hour I received an automated response “just to let you know we are still looking into your query”.

Apparently my query was a tricky one, because I heard nothing else until the next day. “Thanks for your email and we’re sorry to hear you've been having problems placing your order,” read the second message. “We have passed on your details to our Technical Team and they are working round the clock to get this resolved as a matter of urgency. They aim to get this fixed within the next 24 hours, and as soon as they have any further information, we will send you an email to advise. Please accept our sincere apologies for any inconvenience this may cause.” I liked the tone of the message: apologetic, helpful, friendly. I decided to give Asos one more day before shopping elsewhere for the items I’d been trying to buy.

And lo and behold! This morning I received another email: “Hi there”. Right away I knew the problem was resolved; Asos wouldn’t greet me with a jaunty “Hi there” if it were about to tell me bad news.

“Great news!” the email continued. “Our Technical Teams efforts have now paid off and we’re pleased to let you know that the problems you have recently experienced, when trying to place your order, have now been fixed. We know that you are probably eager to get shopping again, but before you do please can you delete the stored card information and then re-enter and save, ensuring you select the correct card type – you are ready to go! As a thank you for your patience we’d like to offer you a 20% discount off your next shopping spree with us…” As much as I loved the cheery but not too familiar phrasing of the message, I loved the discount even more.

Full of the warm-and-fuzzies, I went back to www.asos.com and bought not only the two items I’d originally tried to purchase, but a few small additional products as well. In doing so, I found even more to love: the care instructions included on the product pages, that I’d receive my order within two days at the standard P&P, that I could request a specific delivery date for just a few pounds more.

Okay, I concede: Asos just might live up to its hype.--SC

Diarise this

Here’s a smart way to let your customers know of an upcoming product launch, sale, or other event that requires them to visit your website or call your sales line.


In its latest email, Asos.com invited customers to download a reminder to their Outlook email programme that the new Mango range launches tomorrow. Of course it only works if your customers use Outlook to receive your emails (and not Gmail or Hotmail), but I think it’s a neat little widget. Surely a great way to drum up traffic to your site at specific times, assuming you can cope with that traffic that is…—MT

Too old for Asos?

I was going to post a note about how impressed I was with Asos’s 12 top tips for staying stylish on a budget email. I loved the way it appeals to cash-strapped fashionistas without sounding desperate or gloomy about the economy. And the tips were pretty good too, though I am not too keen on the socks with heels trend.
But between receiving the email and composing this post, another Asos email landed in my inbox. Which brings me onto the real topic of today’s post—I think I am too old for Asos.
This has come as quite a shock to me, and frankly I’m hurt. First I don’t get the heels/socks trend, then I receive an email featuring 90s grunge as a fashion flashback. Uh-oh. Were the 90s that long ago that they now qualify to be a fashion flashback? They must be. But I am not quite 30 yet. And I've been a follower of Asos since before the Buncefield oil depot explosion destroyed its warehouse and catapulted the company into the public eye. Back then I was just 25 and a prime Asos target. I have grown older but it hasn’t. I am Wendy to Asos’s Peter Pan.

I fear my next emails from Asos will be trading me up to its maternity range or kidswear products… Asos has me in an age limbo. So where do I go from here?--MT

It's Asos's world

In its continuing quest for world--or at least World Wide Web--domination, apparel etailer Asos is beta-testing its Asos Life online community. It promoted the soft launch exclusively on Twitter: "We know you love Asos, and it’s because of that that we wanted to let you guys see our community first … to get your opinions on what we’ve done so far, and to help us shape future versions." Even in beta, it's an exhaustive effort, with blogs, forums, groups, and all the other trappings of a first-rate social network. I do question the ROI on the project, though. Then again, only a fool would bet against Asos at this point.--SC