4/14/11 Marketing 491

Chapter 13-Emarketing

The context in which an ad is displayed is just not if not more important than the ad itself. If you have ever looked at a local business in your neighborhood the business’s that typically get the most customers are in the best most traffic dense locations. For E-marketing an ad online gets more users/viewers exposed to your ad than any physical place possible. However traditional advertisement formats may fail on the web. As a marketer in order to effectively drive up awareness an ROI for a given company an ad must be creative. Once you have a unique ad there are many successful formats to place that advertisement in whether that be a YouTube video or a viral email. However the downside to display ads is that they are essentially an interruption to a viewer by not engaging to them directly. The message being sent in the ad is interpretive and the consumer may or may not interpret the advertisement in a positive way.

The video on YouTube went viral! The viral video made by Blend Tec gave the company a huge ROI in terms of its worldwide brand recognition and sales.

The reason for its success was simple it was unique. It had a man in a doctor’s uniform blending anything from kitchen appliances to cell phones. People want to see things they have never seen before and even better than want to laugh. This viral video did both of those and more. The method the video used was brand advertising. Brand advertising puts the brand name and product benefits in front of the users. This video shows that Blend Tec blenders are not only reliable and but durable; “where they can blend anything”. The goal of the hilarious videos was to build awareness for a new high quality blender for the consumer market. This campaign shows the value of connecting with consumer conversation versus interrupting them with unwanted advertising.

I think one of the key elements of having successful email marketing is that you must have a professional email address. Senders from Yahoo, Hotmail, and even Gmail are more likely blocked than company or education email addresses because more often than not viruses and spam come from those email accounts. For example, the best email address is Firstname.Lastname@company.com. The second key element is giving recipients plenty of opportunities to engage with the email and act on the offer. Links to direct an email user is important to direct a user to the next step for response. The third key element is checking to see if your email is able to get through ISP filters so you can reach more accounts. Check if you email is on blacklists and use services like Return Path’s Sender Score Reputation Manager that screens for 60 reputation variables.

-Tim McCauley