Influential Marketing Blog

Gilty Secrets: 10 Marketing Techniques From Today's Hottest eCommerce Site

To say that Gilt.com is on fire may be something of a understatement. The site, which features daily special sales of luxury products at discount prices is on track by some estimates to pull in $400 million in sales for the 2010 calendar year. The growth of Gilt.com has coincided with a shift in how many consumers are thinking about luxury products. As a recent USA Today piece noted, "the new world of luxury is less about designer labels and glitz and more about shopping savvy and an I-feel-good-owning-this mentality." Gilt.com has grown to over 2 million members by catering exclusively to this mentality.

What makes the Gilt.com experience so irresistible? A big part of it is the sense that you are getting a great deal on products from brands that are normally much pricier, but smart marketing is just as much of a component in the success of Gilt.com. Taking some time to analyze what makes the marketing so powerful, here are 10 techniques that Gilt.com is using which might help other brands to duplicate some of this success:

1. Featuring amazing imagery.
The experience on Gilt.com starts with amazing imagery. This is clearly not a site selling average products, because everything about the imagery used on the site indicates a premium and desirable experience. More than that, the images are changing every day, which demonstrates that there is fresh content all the time and that the site will be worth visiting again and again.

2. Offering a sense of exclusivity.

Core to the Gilt.com experience is a sense of exclusivity. You need to be invited to join the site by a current member, and only once you become a member can you access all the special deals. The irony of this is that they have plenty of "sneak in" ways to become a member without getting invited through secret links - but the SENSE of exclusivity is what is most important. It doesn't pay for them to actively prevent people from becoming members, but they work hard to make their current members feel as though they are part of an exclusive club.

3. Focusing on the backstory.

Every product sold on Gilt.com has a backstory which is almost as important as the product itself. Why? Because when it comes to many luxury products, there is an inherent need from the customers to have a shareable story that they can tell to others along with the products they purchase. It is not about buying a blender. It is about buying a blender from a Belgian company that has been making them since 1930, and that you cannot find in any retail store near you.

4. Creating an urgency to purchase without excessive pressure.

Every product that you put into your shopping cart expires after 10 minutes. This may seem like a diabolical move to pressure you into purchasing - and to some degree it does work like that. The aim, though, is to limit the amount of time you can hold onto a product that someone else may want to purchase. As a result, the sense of urgency to buy is built into the site, and when coupled with a relatively easy return policy, it means that they can focus more on converting browsers to buyers in a timespan (10 minutes) that most other ecommerce sites would envy.

5. Providing significant rewards for referrals.

Once you become a member, the reward for referring someone else to the site is a whopping $25 in credit - far more than most other sites. This adds to the exclusivity experience, but also makes it likely that people will share their referral link far and wide with others. As you probably noticed, it is working for me also since I used my own referral link in this post as well.

6. Integrating deeply with email marketing.

Every day, members of Gilt.com get an email telling them about the special deals of the day and reminding them to visit the site to purchase those products before they sell out. They have a blog and a Twitter page as well, but for the vast majority of their users, email is likely driving the largest consumption and traffic because much of their target audience are at work where emails often come with pop up notices letting you know a new one has come in.

7. Selling items that are sold out.

As items sell out or are held in member's shopping carts, the site automatically lets you know and gives you a chance to be placed on a wait list for a product. Not only does this add to your emotional sense of wanting a product (after all, if it is "sold out" it must be good, right?), but it creates a secondary sales channel for Gilt.com where you may not have been able to purchase the product you were most interested in, but might come back to purchase it if it were available. The other benefit of this model is that it helps for projections and planning new sales if you have a good sense of the most popular products based on something active such as a consumer being asked to be put on a wait list for an item, versus something more passive such as impressions to a product or brand page.

8. Standing behind products they sell with editorial.

Not only does Gilt.com offer new products every day, they also stand behind the products they do offer. This "seal of approval" concept lets consumers know that the products they are buying are authentic but also tested for quality and will be exactly what they expect. This also allows Gilt.com on the backend to work with more and better companies to feature products because there is an inherent validation that takes place for a brand that does get featured on Gilt.com that may extend to that brand building more of a relationship or awareness among a desirable group of consumers.

9. Creating a daily ritual.

Every day at noon EST, an email comes noting that the sales for that day are open. Conveniently scheduled at the time when many office professionals are taking their lunch break, this consistently allows Gilt.com to create a ritual for their customers. Not everyone will buy a product every day, but just knowing that this format will take place every day allows consumers to plan a visit to the site as part of their day and helps to drive a big spike in traffic because you know that as soon as the deals open online there will be a frenzy to buy the most popular items before they sell out.

10. Customizing to platforms.

Soon after the iPad was launched, Gilt.com was ready with an app for iPad users that allowed them to purchase directly from the app. Today, more than 10% of overall sales come from the iPhone and iPad mobile platforms that this number is growing. By offering a customized experience for users on certain platforms, Gilt.com is making it easy to purchase no matter where you happen to be.

Not every brand will have luxury products or find this daily sales method easy to duplicate, but taking some of the marketing lessons that Gilt.com already knows could help a large number of brands who have some ecommerce component of their sites to create more engagement with their customers, and convert more of them to action as well.

Marketing In The Age Of Disposable Email

Some guy named Bob probably hates me. I don't know him and he doesn't know me ... but he's the unfortunate registrant of Bob.com and has used his first name for his email address. Yup, you guessed it - that makes his email address bob@bob.com. That also happens to be the email address that I have used for the past ten years to fill out forms that require an email address that I don't want to give. For more than a decade, Bob has been getting my junk email and to tell you a truth, I feel bad about it. That alone isn't the reason I've had to give up my use of Bob's email, though. The reason is that I can't pick up those confirmation emails that you need to click on in order to activate an account.

Recently, I came across a site called Mintemail that has found an interesting solution ... disposable email. This is essentially what it sounds like - an email address that is good for four hours, usually just long enough to use to register for a site, get a confirmation email and pick it up. The service has lots of smart features built in, such as automatically saving the email address to your clipboard so you're ready to paste it into a form. Every once in a while, there is a solution so simple you wonder why no one else has done it first. I love seeing things like that and this definitely qualifies. If you have a form that requires your audience to enter an email address they are not interested in giving you, it looks like you won't be able to rely on the confirmation email to get you a working email address anymore. In the age of disposable email, it looks like you're going to have to work harder to earn the right to ask for a user's email address. I suppose the upside is that now those bogus emails will bounce after four hours. I bet poor Bob wishes I found this site a lot earlier.

Link Credit: http://www.vqcdesigns.com/blog/

Influential Marketing Blog Featured in Wall Street Journal

Many of you may have already caught this yesterday, but this blog was cited in the Recommended Reading  section of the Wall Street Journal yesterday in an article by Keith Huang.  As Jay Berkowitz from Ten Golden Rules shares on his team blog, my blog was one of 60 resources that they recommended to the journalist as part of their reading list and was selected from that list as a recommended resource for companies looking to "optimize their online presence."  Here's the writeup:

Influential Marketing Blog, rohitbhargava.typepad.com
Rohit Bhargava's blog is intellectual and educational. In a recent post, he discusses the art of stamp collection and how, even today, many smaller countries use stamps as a key marketing tool. He writes, 'Next time you pass a post office in any country, pay attention to how they are using their philately to promote the country, cater to tourists, or commemorate moments of significance.'

It is a great media hit and to be selected from a list of what I am guessing were 60 stellar resources is flattering.  I'm in awe at being included among the other bloggers and authors mentioned in the article - including Seth Godin, Steve Rubel, Matt Cutts, John Battelle, Chris Anderson, Joseph Jaffe, and Danny Sullivan. Thanks to Jay for including me in this great list, and to Keith for selecting to include my blog!

A Recap of 2006 on Influential Interactive Marketing

Let's start with a warning ... this is the "clip show" post where I recycle a lot of old material so if that causes you extreme pain, please close this window now and come back tomorrow.  For all the rest of you, it's the holidays and a quick glance around the marketing blogosphere will show that these clip show posts are in right now.  With nearly 400 post on this blog already, there is lots of content to choose from ... allowing me the luxury to conveniently ignore those posts from the past year that are outdated or that I just don't like anymore.  Here is a sampling of the rest:

Concepts & Ideas:
This is a collection of concepts and ideas that were introduced or discussed on this blog and then travelled virally to other blogs and were discussed elsewhere in media.  A good collection of ideas, many of which I still hope to implement on a client campaign (but haven't yet).

• Soundbombs
• Virtual Hugs
• Placecasting
• Widget Marketing
• Text Messaging Customer Service
• Tagging with Domain Names
• Social Media Optimization
• Automated Blog Translation
• Photopedia
• Human Search Filters

Rules & Guides:
These are a group of "Guy Kawasaki style" posts written in list format as guides to various topics from SMO to viral marketing.  It's a format I have always liked and you will probably see many more posts in this format going into 2007.

• Avoiding the Dark Side of Social Media
• 5 Rules of Social Media Optimization
• Signs Your Viral Marketing May Flop
• 7 Tips on Pitching Bloggers
• Golden Rules of Blog Etiquette

Presentations & Published Work:
Links to presentations given at industry events as well as guest contributions to other blogs.  There is some good powerpoint link bait in here, useful for those who are interested in any of these topics but couldn't make it to the events referenced.

• 7 Rules for Getting into Search (Search Engine Strategies Conference)
• 7 Tips on Pitching Bloggers (White Paper)
• The Human Side of Search (Search Insider Summit)
• Guide to Blog Marketing (SixApart Seminar) 
• Finding your Personality in Personal Media (Guest Column on Strumpette)

That's it.  Look out tomorrow for an all new post about what I think the top ten marketing ideas to watch will be in 2007.

Why Lawyers Always Lose on The Apprentice

It's a Thursday afternoon and I'm stuck in legal limbo on an email marketing piece we are trying to release for a client which is going through yet another round of legal reviews.  It leads me to think of The Apprentice and the often adversarial relationship legal professionals have with marketing ones.  On the show, at least half of the professionals they cast are usually lawyers.  Why?  Because they make for great drama - never quite understanding branding, marketing, advertising or sales aspects of winning tasks -- but always offering the ability to deliver a cold shower upon any random flames of creativity.   

They keep the show interesting, providing the discord needed to prevent the boring outcome of everyone agreeing on a reasoned course of action and taking it.  No conflict = no compelling reality TV.  Maybe it's not fair to take this extreme example and blame it all on the lawyers - after all there are many professions outside of law where creativity may not be as necessary as in marketing and advertising.  But to quote Guy Kawasaki's view from his successful experience working on the first Macintosh launch ... "sometimes it's ok and even advantageous to ship crap."  You get it out there first and fix it later.  Successful startups know this - and sometimes rely on it to their detriment.  Risks bring rewards, and lawyers are trained to help companies avoid risk.  It seems to be a built-in adverse relationship, and one that marketers in every situation will continue to struggle with.   

FutureMe.org

It's late and I'm doing some last run throughs for a client presentation tomorrow morning and can't keep my mind from wandering a bit.  I was thinking about the future and how some of our conclusions to be presented tomorrow as part of a discussion of "new media" might seem archaic if I were to revisit them a year or even several months down the road.  The past often seems odd in light of the future ... but I wonder if looking back, I would ever be able to recall the thoughts or inspirations I had tonight in coming up with what seems (at least to these tired eyes) to be a well thought out piece of intellect sure to illustrate just how smart we really are about this blog stuff.

I came across a post today on the Daily Innovator blog about a site called FutureMe.org which might help.  The site offers the ability to write yourself (or someone else) an email to be delivered in the future.  Of course, scheduling content to go live or emails to be sent at set time is nothing new.  But here's the premise behind the site:

two fellas started this so that you could write yourself a letter to be delivered at a later date. we've all had to do them in high school and college. it's sorta cool to receive a letter from yourself about where you thought you'd be a year (two years? more?) later. FutureMe.org is based on the principle that memories are less accurate than emails. we strive for accuracy.

I have always loved the idea of a time capsule (as I hear the collective groan from my teammates who consider it - rightly - to be a totally cliche idea because of its overuse as a PR stunt).  Just the idea of sealing a message or a thought up for some period of time and waiting until some point in the future to dust it off, open the "cork" and taste the past ... it's exciting.  I'm going to write one to my 2010 self about today.  Not about blogs, but about my 1 year old son who pointed at my shoes this morning, looked up at me and proudly declared his first word (sort of) -- "yeesh?"  Yup, some moments are worth remembering.

Email Marketing Needs to Get Back to Basics

Yesterday I came across this box banner ad for the Room Store on the Washington Post homepage.  As a consumer, I went to the Room Store 2 weeks ago, and fell in love with a two piece brown leather sofa set.  Since the list price is more than $2000, I figured I would wait for a sale.  So along comes this banner ad, which I click on hoping to find the sale I was waiting for.  But the imagery on the landing page suggests that this particular sale is just for mattresses.  So I continue to the website hoping to find an email form where I might opt-in to receive marketing messages about future sales.  Here I am, a consumer - knowing what I want, that I want to buy it from Room Store, that it is (presumably) a high margin item for the store, and wanting to placed on their marketing list ... and I came away from the site anonymously.  They don't know who I am, or anything about my purchase intent.

As far as squandered opportunities go, this would seem fairly huge ... but certainly not common, right?  Wrong, according to a new article from Marketing Sherpa (article has free access until 10/23).  In their coverage of a survey released by SilverPop today, they state that 29% of the top 360 companies (as listed by Dun & Bradsteet rankings) don't offer an email opt-in form anywhere on their Web sites!  With all the backlash against spam and making opt-outs easy, are marketers forgetting about the opt-ins?  Right now the prevailing "glass half empty" view of email marketing makes it a risky proposition where companies often have more legal reviews that content reviews of outbound marketing messages.  The lesson here is that successful email marketing campaigns need to focus on getting back to the basics ... a customer gives us their email address, and we send him/her relevant messages that they will care about.  It doesn't get much simpler than that.

Microsoft Losing Marketing Battle for Email Users

Hotmail is dying.  As I noted several months ago, my Hotmail account was the direct casualty of the coming of Gmail. There were even online eulogies.  Despite every reason to keep using Hotmail (I use their messenger client, run windows at work, even have a complete address book set up at my Hotmail account) - I too made the switch last year and left Hotmail behind.  A recent Marketing Sherpa study release says the same thing.  People are leaving Hotmail.  But what is the primary reason for this mass defection?  In my previous post, I suggested that Hotmail was a victim of its own initial dominance in the webmail space.  People had their first email addresses at Hotmail, have held them the longest, and therefore now receive the most spam there as they signed up for offers, ordered products and distributed their Hotmail address widely across the Internet.

Looking deeper at their demise, I wonder if perhaps branding was a key part of their problem as well.  Google has Gmail, Yahoo has "Yahoo Mail" - both of which tie to their parent brands.  "Hotmail" was an anomaly.  Did this mean the brand of Hotmail didn't get the same marketing support as other Microsoft initatives?  Word, Excel, Powerpoint all started with the "MS" tag in front of them.  They are clearly Microsoft brands.  The MSN butterfly came onto the scene late.  Today Hotmail, Messenger and Passport all have the "MSN" tag in front of them - and perhaps for MSN Messenger or the Passport network this will work, because Microsoft was still establishing the brands.  But they are all based on the success of Hotmail, which hasn't turned out the way Microsoft envisioned.   As odd as it seems to find Microsoft on the losing end of a marketing strategy battle - in Hotmail it seems that's exactly where they are.   

Sent from my Blackberry Wireless ...

I read somewhere that Michael Jordan used to get $30,000 every time he sneezed. He wasn't getting paid to sneeze, of course, that's just how much he would make every microsecond of the day based on his annual dollars from salary and sponsorships. Much of it came from retail fashion (sports apparel) - an industry that has integrated "brand placement" into their products better than most. People wear clothes proudly displaying the makers brand logo or tagline all the time. What better way to advertise your product than to get people to wear it, and pay you for the privilege? 

Online, email has begun to offer similar placement opportunities.  My email address has a "@yahoo.com" tag at the end of it.  Every message also states "Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around" at the bottom. Blackberry has their tag line too, which is also becoming something of a subtle status symbol (ie - "I am too busy to respond to your email from an actual computer, but I'm important enough to have a Blackberry to respond").  At the launch of Gmail last year, it was instantly treated as a geek-status symbol. But if email has such potential for brand integration, why doesn't nike.com offer customers their own addresses?  Where are the big advertisers when it comes to offering their own branded email? 

One explanation for the absence of initiatives like this could be the overhead required to develop a service, set up mirrored servers, implement and update security patches or any other technical difficulties inherent in launching email services.  The same challenges exist for in-house search engines or keyword marketing.  The difference is that providers like Google and Microsoft offer the ability to syndicate and rebrand these services to roll out as an integrated part of a site.  What if email could become a commodity service like this?  Imagine if marketers could not only register users' email addresses, but provide the actual addresses in the first place. That could be the next big level of relationship marketing online.

One DM Firm that should Stay Offline

I recently got an email from a service called "Where Christians Meet" promising to help me find my soulmate.  Intrigued at how I made it onto this list (considering I am married and not Christian) I checked into it and found that the email had been sent by a company called Harrison Direct.  Apparently they are a DM firm that specializes in email marketing, though clearly not in accurate targeting.  Their website provides a description of their services:

Whether your objective is to acquire new customers, retain valued existing ones, build brand awareness or increase revenue, Harrison Direct will facilitate direct communications with the best target audience.

Huh?  The rest of the five page site offers similarly useless marketing gibberish to describe the company.  Didn't we leave these days of brochure-ware "internet presence" sites behind us?  It seems like the main call to action is the "Unsubscribe" page, which presumably gets so much use, they have included it on the main navigation.  The really interesting part is that their unsubscribe feature is protected by an "enter the graphics you see" feature to prevent fraud.  Their contact us form has the same thing.  As if large numbers of spammers where going to their site and entering fraudulent comments. 

In any case, I'm now happily unsubscribed, and waiting for their next campaign where I will probably have to do it all again.  If only there weren't so much security on the unsubscribe feature ... maybe a malicious hacker would take my email account and unsubscribe me from multiple emails without my knowledge.  I should be so lucky.

ADDENDUM (07/10) - Check out some other experiences with Harrison Direct