Google Tabs happened, now marketers must step up their game

Marketing is always most effective when it is delivered with something else of value. If you open your postal mailbox and its nothing but ads, you tend to throw the whole bunch away. But, if one offer comes along with other interesting pieces of mail or if it includes something valuable like a gift card or a coupon, you tend to give it more attention.

Very profound statement.  It is not worth delivering a piece of mail or email without an offer.  The offer doesn't have to be something that cheapens your brand, but it has to deliver value to the customer receiving it, or else you will become junk mail or unsubscribed.

The new Gmail tabs obviously create an interesting challenge.  Even though they are being viewed less, it may provide customers a better way to interact with brands.  When all email is together, emails can get skipped or just ignored as they scan through.  However with the tabs, a customer has to be going and looking for a promotion.  Isn;t that what digital marketing is all about?  Engage with the customer when they want to be engaged, instead of the bombarding of their email feeds?

We asked nearly 5,000 consumers their attitudes toward the switch to Gmail Tabs inbox view. About 40 percent of respondents say they now spend less time with promotional messages from their favorite brand, while only 7 percent of users say they spend more time with promotions. This large percentage of respondents revealing they don’t spend as much time with their favorite brands shows that marketers must up their game.

Marketers should always be stepping up their game.  I get so many emails from companies on a daily basis, maybe this will make them stop and think about the "spam" strategy that seems to be the norm in this channel.  When emails are targeted and offers are valuable and thought out, customers will engage with your brand no matter what tab they are on.  Continue to over communicate and your brand will never make it out of the promotions tab.

Source: http://gigaom.com/2013/10/06/google-tabs-h...

The Presentation Mistake You Don't Know You're Making - Heidi Grant Halvorson - Harvard Business Review

More is actually not better, if what you are adding is of lesser quality than the rest of your offerings. Highly favorable or positive things are diminished or diluted in the eye of the beholder when they are presented in the company of only moderately favorable or positive things.

This is an intriguing article on add-ons.  It is based on an interview, but there are interesting tidbits later in the article on consumer behavior.

Psychologists Kimberlee Weaver, Stephen Garcia, and Norbert Schwarz recently illustrated the Presenter's Paradox in an elegant series of studies. For example, they showed that when buyers were presented with an iPod Touch package that contained either an iPod, cover, and one free song download, or just an iPod and cover, they were willing to pay an average of $177 for the package with the download, and $242 for the one without the download. So the addition of the low-value free song download brought down the perceived value of the package by a whopping $65! Perhaps most troubling, when a second set of participants were asked to play the role of marketer and choose which of the two packages they thought would be more attractive to buyers, 92% of them chose the package with the free download.

As marketers we tend to find more and more to throw in, we call them soft or no-cost add-ons.  This is intriguing to see that may be negatively impacting the offer.  I guess when I look at it as the consumer, the more stuff there is doesn't necessarily make it worth more in my eyes.  Something to test for sure.

Source: http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/10/the_presen...