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20
Aug 10

Email Marketing - Are eBay getting it right?!

Nikki Parker Photograph

Using my hotmail address as a general dumping ground for email marketing, I did my usual daily trawl last night to see if anything of interest had been sent through.

As is the norm there was a message from eBay, and I half heartedly opened it (they never interest me much). I woke up a bit when I saw that they’d gone for more personalised email marketing with a ‘Great Selection Tailored To You!’ title – and surprise, surprise they put in three items that I’d recently looked at. Clever-ish, except that as with Amazon, they so often send you these and although you may have browsed for them, it doesn’t necessarily mean you have an ongoing interest in them. Without stating the obvious it could be that you either looked for them on behalf of someone else or have since purchased the item.



Possibly picking up on the fact that the most recent item I’d viewed was an office chair, the next section contained… wait for it… Office Chairs, under the title ‘These are our most watched items…’. Nice approach.

As I scrolled down further, there were various general topics – which I bypassed.

But now for the best bit – and the main reason for my post. Rather than frustrate me with an email communication that contained products no longer relevant to me, eBay did a clever thing. And it’s so simple too. They asked if the products were relevant to me – genius. Ok, perhaps ‘genius’ is a bit of an exaggeration but it did mean that they maintained my customer satisfaction. Nice work. And something other email marketers should seriously consider.


Do you agree eBay’s method of rating the relevancy of emails is an effective way of maintaining customer satisfaction. Leave your comments below.
 

About the author

Nikki is a Client Service Manager & Senior Online Marketing Executive in the Online Marketing team at Coast Digital. She joined the team in January 2008 and is focused on being the interface between the client and the Online Marketing team, running email marketing campaigns for her clients, as well as driving quality and structure throughout the business. Her clients include Wiltshire Farm Foods, apetito, and Slendertone.

Having spent 9 years as a Printed Circuit Board Design Engineer, she ‘fell’ into Digital Marketing in 2003 and has been passionate about it ever since. As such Nikki enjoys playing an important role in a growing company with technology at its heart.
 

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Comments

Posted By Nikki Parker | 20 Aug 2010 05:08:45
Thanks for your comment Becs. Just checked - they're images linking to different addresses for the system to pick up from the URL which you've voted for. They simply use their tracking to tell which you've clicked on.

Interesting point about the office chairs as I didn't go on to buy one. However, I did buy a music stand from eBay (and that appeared in the first three items). So it looks like they've not got to the point of removing things you've bought. However, as a colleague has just pointed out sometimes you return and buy more of the same so a good reason to promote previously browsed items (could statistically return more revenue than things you 'may' buy).
Posted By Becs | 20 Aug 2010 04:48:56
I'd be interested to know if that was a form (or an image of a form) within the email, because they don't work in a lot of email clients. Nice concept. I guess they can only go on as much data as you give them. I assume that there would be no office chairs shown if you'd actually bought on?
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