Online retailers might want to take a look at Atlas Solutions’ Holiday Online Shopping Report: 2006-2007 when planning your advertising and promotional spend for the upcoming holiday season.

A couple of things that stand out about online holiday shopping behavior:

• Monday’s rule as far as online shopping goes and the peak time is between noon and 4 p.m. EST (correspondig with the workweek lunch hour)
• Tuesday’s are close behind in online shopping volume in the weeks leading up to Christmas
• The second Monday (tagged Cyber Monday) before Christmas has established itself as the busiest online shopping day showing sales activity almost 90 % greater than average. This year’s Cyber Monday will fall on December 15th if the study’s data holds true.

Strategies for getting your share of the online shopping dollar?

1. Plan your online advertising or email promotional campaign to coincide with the Monday & Tuesday workweek lunch hour buying rush
2. Emphasize guaranteed shipping delivery as the clock winds down to Christmas

Click Atlas Solutions’ Holiday Online Shopping Report to access all the details…

What’s a transactional email, you ask? Well it’s an email message that you send to a customer as a result of a transaction – an order confirmation, a shipping notice, thank you for buying/subscribing/registering etc.

maildogmanager.com reminds us to …

Mind our Ps and Qs when it comes to transactional emails… Here’s a list of the tips they offer for using your everyday, transactional messages to best advantage:

• … keep the subject line strictly transactional
• … transactional content must stay at the top of the email and be most prominent
• Jazz up the typical plain text email with nice formatting including HTML graphics …
• Add a few soft sell promotions … towards the bottom, including tie-ins to your existing promotions, email newsletter and more
• … add links to bring them back to your website or a place to contact for more information

Thanks to Mail Dog for reminding us that we should never pass up an opportunity to promote our products and services and what better place to market than under the rosy aura of a successful transaction…

You know the old entertainment saying/joke? The one that describes a person has “having a great voice but a face for radio.” The implication is while their voice is show biz quality their looks leave something to be desired.

Well, sometimes that’s the case in podcasting too. Except my twist is, “he has a voice for print.” In other words, his content his brilliant but his audio delivery is sleep inducing at best, painful at worst.

This became ‘painfully’ apparent to me while listening to a audio intro to a new information product offered by an internet copywriting guru. I won’t mention his name because he’s a pretty brilliant guy and I’ve been following his e-newsletter for years.

However, he’s now using Free IQ – which bills itself as The Marketplace for Ideas – to promote his products. Free IQ gives you a place to post an introduction to your product and a media window where you can deliver video or audio content with the capability to sell that or other content from that page. It’s actually a pretty cool idea for all of us infopreneurs. You can sell content, give it away or do both. They host and distribute your free content for free but if you sell it, hosting is free but FreeIQ takes 5% (and CC processing fees) of the selling price.

Anyway, my copywriting guru is using this to sell eReports. Unfortunately, he’s using the audio component to pitch his product and listening to him is actually so painful that I haven’t been able to make it all the way through. I click away.

My point is, if you’re into podcasting or vidcasting, practice. Practice your delivery, your inflection, your breathing, your pacing, your enthusiasm – all of those things that positively or negatively impact your listener or viewer. Don’t just drone into the microphone in your less than Paul Harveyesque voice. Subconsciously or consciously I’m equating the quality of your audio delivery with the quality of your content so when your voice or video delivery drives me away, it’s driving me away from your opportunity to capture me as a customer.

Like the other old joke goes, “Q. How do you get to Carnegie Hall? A. Practice, practice, practice!”

If you have info products you’d like to give away or sell – anything from eBooks to online courses to video and audio – you might want to consider FreeIQ.com (full disclosure: I signed up as an affiliate so this is my affiliate link). They’ll host, stream and distribute your free content for free and they make their money by charging 5% of the sales price (plus credit card processing fees) for the content you sell. They also have a ranking system in place that gives content better positioning depending upon the popularity of that content.

If you’re an infopreneur this may be the place for you to get broader exposure of your ideas and expertise and maybe make a few bucks to boot.

It’s an interesting concept and one you might want to explore. Once on the site, be sure and click on the Learn More link for a thorough explanation of their concept.

Another long post so here’s what my key points are:

1. Customer service should be the most effective marketing and sales tool in your tool box – guaranteed, you lose business when it’s not.
2. In most cases, some revenue trumps no revenue. Again, in most cases.
3. Stuff happens. So when it does, and your customers are adversely affected, express your concern, act quickly to minimize the impact and make amends as necessary – even if the stuff that happened was beyond your control. A simple, “I’m sorry,” can be the most effective strategy.

Seattle Hotels Miss the (Service) Mark 

Seen this metric around? … Research reveals that it costs between 7 and 11 times as much to attract a new customer as to retain an existing one. The managers of two Seattle area hotels need to be reminded of this…

My family and I spent several days in Seattle for my daughter’s graduation from Seattle Pacific University. Great school, great education and hopefully, now, great job! And by the way, THANK YOU, Kait, for getting it done (and done well) in 4 years.

For the first part of our visit we stayed at the Bellevue Downtown Courtyard by Marriott. It’s a great hotel, friendly service, convenient access, lots of amenities – I’d definitely recommend it. So why does the manager (assistant manager in this case) need a lesson in Customer Service = Sales & Marketing? Read on…

Although I didn’t realize it when I made my reservation I’d lucked into a great promotional weekend rate – I just thought the rates were lower than those in Seattle due to its location in Bellevue. I’d only booked the hotel for 3 days of a 5 day stay but our experience was so positive that I decided to extend my stay for 2 more days. I told the assistant manager we’d like to stay a couple extra nights and asked what the additional cost would be. Over twice what we’d paid! Wow! That’s when I discovered we’d had a great promotional rate. That’s when the manager could have stepped in, made another sale and cemented our loyalty to their property.

I quickly informed her that the price was a little too steep and we’d be checking out after all. But the fact is if she’d merely stated, “I guess you didn’t realize you’d had such a great rate but since you’re already here, why don’t I split the difference between what you paid and what our regular rate is; would that work for you?” Maybe it was split the difference, maybe a healthy percentage discount but the fact is that the hotel wasn’t full by a long shot and here was a chance to earn 2 nights additional revenue rather than leave a room sit empty.

Our little missed revenue opportunity doesn’t amount to much as far as the hotel’s overall profitability goes but when you begin to aggregate all of these missed opportunities and the opportunity cost associated with leaving the last impression a not so positive impression then, over time, it is significant. So remember, 75% of the potential revenue is a much larger number than 0% of potential revenue and great impressions of extraordinary service pay extraordinary dividends.

Our second, less than impressive, hotel customer service shortfall came when we moved into the Paramount Hotel in downtown Seattle. The hotel is only 11 years old but it’s definitely showing a bit of wear around the edges although overall the property was nice and our room adequate. So what nits can we pick…

• The staff was less than warm and fuzzy starting with the front desk clerk who threatened us with a $200 fine and required us to sign a document agreeing to the fine should we smoke in our hotel room – we don’t smoke so it wasn’t an issue but the aggressive approach was very off-putting.
• Who charges for internet these days? $10 a day seems a bit excessive considering that the Marriott we’d just left not only offered free connectivity but access to several free workstations with complimentary printers in the lobby.
• The water was lukewarm, not hot, in our hotel room and drizzled from the sink spigot but blasted from the shower nozzle.
• The hotel was downtown so we expected to pay for parking but they never bothered to explain that there would be a parking charge – $25/day to be exact. Not horrible but guys, disclose please.

But the biggest nit of all and the one that lost them my business and recommendation for the future was going to work out the next morning and returning very sweaty and very smelly and very ready to take a hot shower only to find that the hot water was completely gone. I called the front desk, no answer. Hung up, called back. 20 rings later the valet station picked up. I explained the situation. He very hurriedly said he’d transfer me. He sounded uncomfortable and harried as if he’d been handling a lot of these calls. I got the front desk and they informed me that the boiler had blown up and I could expect at minimum a 2 hour wait.

Okay, stuff happens but how did they take an unfortunate situation and turn it into this blogging diatribe? They didn’t say, “We’re sorry for the inconvenience.” “We’re sorry that you have to take a freezing cold shower or that you have to go to your appointment sweaty and smelling and doused in aftershave to mask the aroma.” All they said was boiler blew, 2 plus hours to fix. So while they fixed the mechanical problem they totally ignored the customer relationship problem. What could they have done:

1. Apologize.
2. Offer some sort of accommodation for the inconvenience like a free cocktail in the restaurant or a free dessert. Nothing huge, just something.
3. Got on the horn to one of the local health clubs and arranged to make their locker room facilities available at no charge to hotel guests.
4. Used their fancy phone system to alert all the guests that the hot water was out and that they were working diligently to minimize the inconvenience and, oh yeah, they were very sorry. If I’d known that I wasn’t going to be able to shower, I probably wouldn’t have worked out. At the very least they could have put a sign in the workout facility stating that the hot water was out.

Mainly they could have acted like they cared about the comfort and convenience of their customers.