May 17, 2013 Leave a Comment

What Warcraft teaches us about selling convenience

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One of the easiest paths to profit in World of Warcraft is to have a mage visit the various cities in the game and pick up stock items from various vendors and resell them at obscenely high prices.

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For example, here’s my mage visiting the engineering company in the game to buy some blueprints from him for 2 gold coins. She’ll resell these plans on the in-game market, the auction house, for anywhere between 20 and 437 gold, depending on how lazy the customer is feeling, and someone will buy them without fail in the next 48 hours.

Why wouldn’t the customer simply go to the engineering shop and buy it themselves? After all, there’s a big price difference in any currency between 2 and 437. Sometimes it’s lack of knowledge – the customer isn’t aware of the item being for sale from a vendor for relatively cheap. Most of the time it’s convenience – it’s quicker and easier to just buy it at vastly inflated prices off of the market than it is to trek all the way out to a distant city and buy it for yourself, even at a considerable cost savings. The customer is trading the cost savings for a time and travel savings.

This is the mundane lesson we often forget as marketers. Unquestionably, if you can be the finest quality with the best service at the lowest price, by all means do so and dominate the market. However, if you’ve got something that is effectively a commodity, finding a way to make it more convenient or easier can justify a higher price tag because people will pay to recover time and ease.

What product or service do you have that people would pay you more for if it were more convenient?

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May 16, 2013 3 Comments

Mailbag: Single or double opt-in for email?

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IMG_0351Ellen Butler asks:

“Do you require double opt-ins on your email list signups? Pls discuss! @cspenn @johnjwall”

Since we’ve got a pre-recorded show in the can this week for Marketing Over Coffee, I figured I’d tackle this here. Let’s review the choices first. When it comes to opt-ins for email lists, there are 3 different kinds:

  1. Single opt-in: fill in the box, you’re subscribed to the list.
  2. Notified single opt-in: fill in the box, you’re subscribed to the list and you get an email message confirming your subscription with an opt-out link.
  3. Double opt-in: fill in the box, you get an email asking you to click on a link to confirm your subscription to the list.

For years, the generally accepted best practice was #3, the double opt-in. It guaranteed that only the people who wanted to be on the list were, because it required additional action to be taken. That in theory meant high list engagement and spotless list quality. If you work in an industry where you are required to have proof that stands up to any rigorous audit (like an ISO 9000 or SAS 70 compliance audit), then #3 is still your best option and probably your only option. For the average marketer, however, #3 generates very poor results because an awful lot of people simply fail to open and take action on the confirmation emails.

The choice I practice for myself and recommend to clients is #2. Subscribe on a single opt-in and fire an auto-responder immediately. If it hard bounces, have the email software simply remove that address on the spot. If it goes through, then feel free to send to that address. It’s the best of both worlds – capturing audience with immediacy and giving instant feedback that lets people know their address has been used, while immediately taking out the trash.

Thanks for the question, Ellen!

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May 15, 2013 3 Comments

Losing for the win

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At the dojo

Last night at the Boston Martial Arts Center I had an interesting experience while coaching one of the green belt students on some avoidance techniques. The drill was simple: I swung at the student with a foam-padded bopper and after avoiding a relatively slow swing, they had to hit a padded target. It’s a drill of avoidance and footwork on one hand, and accuracy on the other. The drill encourages not only good technique, but presence of mind – you can’t just wildly avoid or you’ll be out of position for the target hitting.

What was interesting to me wasn’t the drill itself but two insights I had. The first insight was that I had to strongly resist my own urge to “win”, to hit the student with the foam stick. That wasn’t the point of the drill, and initially, my own ego and desire to “win” by the conventional definition (hit them with the bopper) was quite strong. It took me a good minute or two before we started to put myself in the right frame of mind, that I was there to help the student first and foremost, and to appropriately move at a speed that insured more success than failure, while not eliminating the chance for failure.

The second insight, which was part of that reframing, was that “winning” in this case wasn’t hitting the student with the bopper. Winning was actually “losing” the majority of the time for my role as the attacker. If I was not able to hit them the majority of the time, if I was able to have them succeed first and foremost, that was the true win, the win in the bigger picture. They’d walk away with more skill, more insight of their own, and more happiness rather than walk away demoralized or ashamed of their performance. In this case a narrow-minded personal “win” would have been a failure on my part as a coach and a failure on the part of the student.

When I look over my career, this is a pattern writ large. Those times that have been the most fruitful and the most successful were when I put a bigger picture win ahead of a narrow-minded personal win. When you help create success in others, they root for your success and actively look for ways to help you achieve it. Those times that have been the most stressful and unpleasant were because I created selfish success at the expense of others. In a world where you are the platform, creating situations where people don’t want to see you succeed is tantamount to career suicide, while creating situations where people are actively and eagerly supporting you is a rocketship to the top.

The challenge I continue to face is whether my ego is willing to lose small for the big win.

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Filed Under: Awakening, Buddhism, Business, Ninjutsu, On ko chi shin
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