Respect Your Guests

Does this happen to you?

You download a single white paper from a Website. Before you can read it, your phone rings. 

It's the company's rep. He's pushing a demo.

You beg for time. 

Big mistake!

A rep now calls you every 48 hours.

In her blog, e-marketing maven Ardeth Albee wrote recently that one white paper download "does not equate to a relationship."

She has it right. 

A visitor's one brief encounter with your Website shouldn't trigger a barrage of phone calls.

Companies that push sales conversations on one-time Website visitors hurt themselves.

They come across as too-hungry.

And the more companies act too-hungry, the more they'll encourage future visitors to provide fake phone numbers. (Research by marketing automation firm Eloqua shows—remarkably—that fewer than five percent of phone numbers entered into the forms gating Web content are fake.)

Please, respect your guests.

Facebook Ups Ad Targeting

On September 1, Facebook began inviting advertisers to reach its users by targeting them through phone number or email address.

Facebook skirts privacy worries by emphasizing that advertisers already have that information (in fact, an advertiser has to send the info to Facebook, which looks for match-ups within its database).

Advertisers can blend phone number- or email address-targeting with other demographic markers (like age, gender, education and interests) to reach specific Facebook users.

 

So an advertiser with no more than a phone number could, for example, target ads to affluent women in their 40s with graduate degrees in physics and an interest in golf.

Another Early Retirement

You can't pick up an advertising textbook that doesn't mention Avis Car Rental's slogan, "We try harder."

The poster child for competitive positioning, the slogan was at the time of its roll-out half a century ago a powerful shot across the bow of the Number One car rental company, Hertz.

Alas, Avis has announced it will retire the slogan in favor of a new one, "It's your space."

Avis' chief marketing officer told Advertising Age the new slogan "presents the brand in terms of the customer experience and the advantages inherent in renting from Avis."

Nothing lasts forever in this wayward world. But I wonder why Avis chose such a humdrum slogan, when it had something so right.

I have a feeling the next early retirement at Avis will be the CMO.