Dear Reader,
Hi from a post-Thanksgiving New York City where the days are noticeably shorter.
The early evening dusk creeps through my windows earlier and earlier each day.
So it’s not surprising that many people find the period between Thanksgiving and New Year’s depressing. By contrast, it makes the first noticeable glimmer of longer days in January fill me with joy.
Yet, you still have a spark of light to carry you through these shortened days: One month remains in 2022!
Use it to do something special for you. It doesn’t have to be big or expensive or time-consuming.
Your goal:
To feel better regardless of your current situation or responsibilities.
So permit yourself to take a break from your routines and deadlines.
Then use this precious non-work, non-chore time to spend as you like. It doesn’t matter how small, silly or self-indulgent what you do is as long as it makes you feel good!
Why?
Because you deserve to treat yourself well!
Table of Contents | Volume 10, Issue 48
- Marketing Lesson of The Week – Black Friday and Cyber Monday Bring In Sales
- Content Communicates – Are You Overmailing Your Email List?
- Voice Notes – Pulling the Voice Assistant Plug: What It Means For Voice Marketing
- Mark Your Calendar
Marketing Lesson of The Week
► Black Friday and Cyber Monday Bring In Sales
In the US, Thanksgiving officially kicks off the holiday buying season. Across product categories, merchants and marketers pack the long weekend with a variety of sales targeted at getting customers to buy, both at retail and online.
That said, 60% of shoppers started looking and buying as early as October due to high-profile sales, most notably Amazon and Walmart.
As a result, many people used the holiday sales including Black Friday and Cyber Monday to load up on things they needed or wanted and waited to go on sale. For example, we bought a Dyson vacuum cleaner to remove allergy-inducing dust.
While revenue from the various Thanksgiving weekend sales events isn’t reported consistently across any one source, eMarketer’s forecast breakout provides a daily breakout for ecommerce purchases. (Editor’s note: eMarketer has been a reliable forecaster over the years.)
Overall, the total 2022 holiday season is projected to generate $1.297 trillion, an increase of 7.0% from 2021. Most of this year’s increase is attributable to inflation. (Source: Insider Intelligence/eMarketer – November 26, 2022)
Recommended Reading
► Consumers Use BNPL For Holiday Purchases
To stretch their buying power, customers use BNPL (aka, Buy Now Pay Later) options. They’re a new spin on old-fashioned layaway plans where customers put down money on items and paid for them over time in installments.
Offered by companies like Afterpay and Klarna, BNPL companies compete with Visa and Mastercard payment offerings.
By contrast, BNPL plans often target people who can’t get credit cards. They allow customers to purchase goods without interest for 30 days. After the initial period, customers opt for a payment plan involving additional credit charges.
Further, like credit cards, vendors also pay a fee based on a percentage of the goods sold based on the BNPL service and the store.
The total 2022 US BNPL payment volume is projected to reach $75.60 billion. This averages $957.46 of BNPL spending per user increasing 13.5% over 2021. (Source: Insider Intelligence November 28, 2022)
Actionable Marketing Tip
- Understand your buyers’ payment preferences. They tend to vary by age and financial status.
Content Communicates
► Are You Overmailing Your Email List?
Last week, notes from almost every list that had captured one of my email addresses pushed themselves into my overflowing inbox like it was a rush-hour subway.
It didn’t matter whether they were one of my inbox regulars or had compiled my address from some unknown source.
Even worse, many had read the same piece of marketing advice:
Express your gratitude before making your Thanksgiving sales pitch.
From a marketing perspective:
When you send a communication to someone’s inbox, you need their prior permission or they consider your email to be spam. It’s like having a note from a parent to participate in certain activities when you were in school.
This shouldn’t be a news flash. In the 1990s, Seth Godin dubbed this Permission Marketing.
Living In a message-stuffed environment, each of us has developed our own ways to extract the most important information we need in a given context at a specific place and time.
Regardless of the device used to consume your message, your communication’s ability to enter and attract the recipient’s attention depends on whether you’ve fulfilled your initial delivery promise in terms of quantity and timing. Otherwise, it’s just another interruption.
At a minimum, your marketing message must fill your audience’s need or desire to know, do, go, buy, or be entertained. Or, it’s gone.
If every communication is buy, buy, buy, expect your email recipients to go bye, bye, bye. They’ll unsubscribe, block, or add a rule that puts you in junk mail purgatory. To make matters worse, this can hurt your email deliverability score, preventing your message from getting to others who may want it.
In light of the recent social media news and related changes, treat your owned email list recipients as marketing royalty because you can contact them directly. So they may be the only people willing to pay attention to what your business or brand has to say.
Be willing to go to the mattresses for your email list, in the words of The Godfather. Vigilantly protect it from executives across your organization who feel the pressure to send more sales messages without concern for the list’s true business value.
Based on my experience, these promotions may bring in some sales but they cost you dearly in terms of the harm done to your list. As a result, it shrinks and delivers less value per email address.
Like your brand, your email house file is a key element of the value of your business.
Recommended Reading
Voice Notes
► Pulling the Voice Assistant Plug: What It Means For Voice Marketing
Less than a decade after voice assistant technology captured the world’s imagination, Amazon Alexa, and Google Assistant appear to be on the wane.
Amid the tech sector’s biggest slump in two decades, companies are tightening their belts. So investments in secondary devices and voice assistants are on the chopping block.
For its part, Apple’s Siri was developed for the iPhone. It predates Amazon Alexa and Google’s smart voice assistant and related technologies.
Amazon determined that Alexa was a “colossal failure of imagination” and a “wasted opportunity.” Even worse, Alexa was on track to lose up to $10 billion in 2022 (Source: Business Insider.)
So it’s not surprising that Amazon announced its biggest layoffs to date, 10,000 jobs, heavily affecting the Devices Division, which includes the Alexa team.
Why did this happen?
Alexa failed to deliver results for Amazon.
To give users an easy way to order from Amazon, Alexa devices were sold at cost. Initially, this seemed like a good strategy since 5 million devices were sold in its first two years yielding a billion Alexa interactions per week.
Unfortunately, most of Alexa’s interactions didn’t produce revenue for Amazon. Instead, people asked for basic information like the weather or to play a song.
Also, Google has decided to scale back development and support for its Google Home Assistant service. Like Amazon’s Alexa, Google Assistant failed to deliver value for its parent company in terms of advertising revenue.
While these devices aren’t disappearing soon, their growth curve has flattened. This makes sense since the smartphone remains the preferred device for voice interactions.
Despite the voice assistant slow down, don’t interpret this to mean Voice Marketing is going away. It’s just an early shakeout in the market.
Voice remains important to marketers because it’s integrated into every aspect of the purchase journey. In the process, buyers use voice content, web chat, video conferencing, IVAs (aka AI-powered IVRs), and phones.
Actionable Marketing Tip
- Get up to speed on how your audience uses voice devices related to your business. This includes the purchase process and other uses.
Recommended Reading
Plan Ahead: Mark Your Calendar
► Marketing Planning Friday Forum — December 9, 2022, 11:30 am ET
MarketingProfs presents Pam Didner, Lauren Sisneros and Samantha Stone.
Virtual and free with registration.
► Live Review: Webpages, Keywords and Contents — December 14, 2022, 5-6 PM CT
An Orbit Media presentation with Andy Crestodina. Virtual and free with registration.
(BTW–You can submit your own material for review!)
► Digital Book World – January 16-18 in New York City
The annual gathering of the publishing industry returns to New York City after six years.
► Are you hosting an event that you’d like us to add to the Marketing Calendar?
If so, let us know by using our Contact Form with the Subject Line:
Event For AMG Newsletter Calendar.
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Happy Marketing,
Heidi
P.S.: Want Heidi Cohen to contribute a quote or other commentary to your next article, presentation, video, research, or book? Then hit reply to this email and ask.
P.P.S: Did you miss last week’s AMG Newsletter? Previous newsletters can be found in the AMG Newsletter Archive.
