Cielo Lutino

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Personalized jewelry, personalized email: How Limoges raised revenue per email by 300%

Although sales in the fine jewelry and better watch category declined in 2012, you wouldn’t know it from looking at the ledger of Limoges Jewelry, maker of personalized products such as class and couples’ rings.

Okay, so this online retailer doesn’t hawk fine jewelry, but a 300% increase in revenue and year-over-year (YOY) email sign-up growth of 100-400% and a 99% deliverability rate (you get the idea) is nothing to sneeze at.

Anatomy of a campaign: How charity:water raised more than $2m

In just six short weeks, it’ll be time for the September Campaign, the biggest annual fundraiser from nonprofit charity:water.

What the organization does this year to raise money remains to be seen, but it’s worth looking back more closely at its efforts in 2012, when the charity took in more than $2m ($300,000 more than its original goal) largely through digital marketing.

That shouldn’t be a surprise: charity:water founder Scott Harrison told the New York Times last year that he “absolutely” attributes the organization’s success to the web.

Learning to let go: Kentucky, the Philippines, and Nutella

One of my oldest friends is a middle-school guidance counselor, so she excels at offering comforting advice to downtrodden teens. “Everybody starts somewhere,” she tells one who flubs a math exam or another who failed to make the JV cheerleading squad. 

It’s equally good advice for brands and organizations that find themselves floundering in new media waters, like the State of Kentucky and Nutella, brands whose stumbles Tom Fishburne analyzed at Integrated Marketing Week last month.

The CEO of Marketoon Studios, who reeled off numerous real-life examples during his keynote, contrasted the two with the Philippines, which produced a campaign more suited to today’s marketing environment.

Five ways to create marketing worth sharing

Don Draper has left the building is an announcement bound to dismay any woman with a pulse, but it should hearten marketers.

That’s because Don Draper represents the old school of marketing, said Tom Fishburne, CEO of Marketoon Studios, at Integrated Marketing Week earlier this month.

In the Draper model, marketers decided what the brand stood for and what its strategy was. Every touch point with the customer was controlled.

Today those touch points have exploded and marketers have far less control, said Fishburne. To succeed in such an environment, we need to create marketing worth sharing, he continued, outlining five guiding principles.

How Nordstrom sees customers’ changing expectations

Retail giant Nordstrom competes against other luxury brands like Bloomingdales and Saks Fifth Avenue. It sells Citizens of Humanity jeans ($238), leather Prada men’s sneakers ($420), and Jimmy Choo clutches ($620). It does not sell tires.

So, why would it take the rubber discs from a customer insistent on returning them?

Seven ways to get prospects to do what you want

What would it take to get you to do what I want? If I looked you in the eye when asking? If it was a Tuesday? If your name sounded like mine?

According to scientists, it’s the last. We feel more warmly towards people or things we associate with ourselves, like if my name was Mary Anne and yours was Marilyn. They’re close enough in sound and visual likeness that I’d be more apt to do you a favor than one for, say, Richard or Jennifer.

These kinds of findings, argued Nancy Harhut at Integrated Marketing Week, have implications for marketers because we’re trying to get people to do things all the time: click on a link, choose our product over another, like our company on Facebook.

Knowing the instinctive, reflexive behaviors that people rely on when making decisions helps our marketing strategies and how we go about designing the prompts or triggers to get others to do what we want.

Harhut identified seven that will help you on your way to world domination.

How we got to the Relationship Era

Culture is the “stories we tell ourselves about ourselves,” wrote Clifford Geertz in 1973. What the virtuoso anthropologist meant: stories reveal our social reality as much as they shape them.

So what yarns are we telling ourselves about today’s marketing environment, and how do they influence our marketing?

Three tips for negotiating with online talent

Just when we were coming to terms with “blogger” being as legitimate a title as “journalist,” we learn that some are falling into a more rarefied category: online talent.

That subset, a wider group that includes Instagrammers, Pinners, Tweeters, and YouTubers, has reps who negotiate deals resulting in anything from emceeing runway shows and styling lookbooks to signing on as a brand ambassador for a major retailer.

Why events are the last bastion of integrated marketing

We can tell the last ten items a consumer bought on our site and we can tell the open rate of our email marketing campaigns, but few of us can say how long any one visitor at our event booth spent there and what they picked up.

The swag, a brochure, your business card, your hot intern’s telephone number, which was it?

This not-knowing is weird, says Liz Miller, overseer of daily operations at the CMO Council (CMOC), a global affinity network of top brand marketers. “Since when did a marketer get shy?” she asked recently.

How the other half markets: three lessons for luxury retailers in 2013

The posh set may still lord their smart handbags, pricey silks, and Ibiza getaways over the masses in the offline world, but in digital it’s a different story.

Online, luxury retailers struggle to keep up with the Kmarts and J.Crews of the world. In fact, according to a recent study by L2, one in five luxury brands still lack ecommerce capability, and 30 percent of them have yet to incorporate basic site search. 

Five tips for decoding the retail riddle

Representatives from Abercrombie & Fitch, Saks, and Maxymizer, a multivariate testing, personalization, and optimization firm, gathered last week at Econsultancy’s JUMP event in New York to discuss how retail can solve the riddles posed by today’s technological advances and changing consumer habits.

As retailers try to connect the shopping experience over multiple channels, this was a perfect discussion for all those looking to create a better retail journey for their customers.

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