February 22, 2007

I do enjoy attending/exhibiting at vertical-specific tradeshows. I always find that they provide a great place to validate marketing messages, getting immediate feedback to what messages resonate and what do not. It is kind of like watching your AB split test results for an email marketing campaign getting returned in real time. Say the message one way with one person, say it differently with the next. Measure, compare. Rinse, wash, repeat.

Today, for example, I was marketing Marqui at the BC Tourism Industry Conference in Victoria (along with one of Marqui’s web marketing consultants – Mike Sommer). As most of the attendees here are Tourism and Hospitality focused, a standard one-size-fits-all boilerplate description is not appropriate. Yes, marketers within this industry are just as concerned about attracting new sales leads, brand consistency, and effective communications as those outside of the sector, but they also have other worries. Here is the elevator pitch that I was using today that appears to be resonating:

Tourism and Hospitality organizations are focused on delivering an exceptional customer experience. This is what they are trained to do. This is what “customer service” is all about. At Marqui, we improve the “pre-experience” experience as well as the “post experience” experience for travel and hotel companies alike.

The pre-experience addresses everything from attracting people to your website (SEO, PPC campaign integration, dynamic website content) to delivering precision marketing that sets the stage for the experience (e.g., sending a targeted email to a visitor notifying him or her of an upcoming event that coincides with their visit or “Your weather forecast is…”).

The post-experience involves following up with the visitor and marketing to them in the means that they prefer (e.g. an email thanking them for their business, an RSS feed of a promotion or special in an off-peak time, or a newsletter with more details about the region or experience). The post-experience also involves engaging your clientele in a dialog: fostering a sense of community through a blog that the users can contribute to, posting a photo of the client of the eco-tour excursion so that they might share it with friends and family, inviting comments/feedback be it through a survey or bulletin board, etc.

For those interested, more insight into the messaging of our hospitality marketing can be found at this landing page (created through Marqui of course).

Posted by at February 22, 2007
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February 15, 2007

Some of you may have already noticed that when we launched our new Website a month ago, we also had reference to a new product called “Marqui Mail” listed under the Solutions tab. I guess you could say that this was a quiet launch.

Marqui Mail is an affordable, on-demand electronic newsletter and e-mail solution that simplifies communications with existing customers, sales prospects, and the community at large. It was built to accommodate the needs and requests from several customers who wanted the email campaign and newsletter functionality contained within Marqui On-demand, but without the full feature set.

How affordable? Let’s just say that at less than half a cent per e-mail (that’s $0.005), you could have sent out your Valentine’s Day campaign to all your customers and still have money left over for a box of chocolates (assuming of course that you have less than 20,000 customers … more than that, and it would have been a few pennies more).

For those of you who are interested in e-mail marketing (and really, who isn’t), I would encourage you to look at Marketing Sherpa’s E-mail Marketing Survey from late last year. The following excerpt sums it up well:

Posted by at February 15, 2007
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