Thread Strategy: Built For E-commerce Breaking Through To Busy People – Part 2

As mentioned in our previous segment, Cole and Trevor have chosen a set of companies as trusted digital influencers to assist them with recommendations they need for everyday purposes such as travel, finance, dining and retail decisions. As a result, the brands associated with these decisions have become familiar and reliable “go-to” options in their busy lives. To put it another way, the brands have broken through all the gatekeepers at a fraction of the cost of traditional advertising, trade shows, often-challenging corporate PBX phone mazes and administrative assistants.

Cole and Trevor carry their inboxes with them everywhere they go. They make frequent glances at them in traffic, airports, elevators and between appointments. Always on. Always available for valuable information. Trevor subscribes to a men’s apparel newsletter. Six years ago, he received a pair of shoes and a vest as a Christmas gift. He liked the products so much, he signed up for the adventure brand’s free newsletter. A couple of times per week he checks his mobile device for the retailer’s “flash” loyalty coupons offering early admission, discounts, deal alerts sent via SMS (text) and customer appreciation events. As a subscriber, Trevor is rewarded.

Cole belongs to this same subscription program and another from a regional airline that alerts him via e-mail and SMS. Through both of these communications channels, he receives digital coupons with reminders, last-minute fair offers and boarding upgrades.

One afternoon while idling in traffic on the way home from a business trip, Cole received an SMS message from the airline in the form of a questionnaire. It was only four questions long and didn’t take very long to respond to respond to. Secondly, it delivered a coupon he could use for a companion fare on a future trip. The simplicity and ease of responding to the query arrested his attention, and gave him pause. The next week over lunch, Cole mentioned the deal he had received on his travel voucher to Trevor then asked him if his software company was using the tools to engage customer communication. Trevor said he wasn’t, but wanted to learn more. Here’s what Cole and Trevor did next:

1 – They huddled with IT, marketing and other company stakeholders to request a website review to learn whether site visitors were directed to a specific page;
2 – They requested a report that would tell them where site traffic from advertising was sent;
3 – They asked their marketing team if a landing page was capturing specific ads and offers;

Next: In our next segment, we’ll listen to the Cole and Trevor discuss their findings over lunch