Amazon: excellent; excellent; bad

Every year I address the issue with my students about a website that has the objective of branding and the website that has the objective of sales. The key difference is in the way content is presented - specifically to sell things there must be appropriate calls-to-action. And this screenshot of the front page of Amazon is a perfect example ...

Notice the urgency, immediacy even, of the message 'today only'. Excellent.

Well, I have been considering a 'fire' device for a while, so a £30 saving appealed to me, and I clicked on the link. Notice how alongside the 'free delivery' message the urgency is hi-lighted by a running countdown clock until the offer end. Excellent.

So I clicked on 'buy now' and got this page ...

Yep ... only available in a sort of pinky-purplish colour they call megenta. 

You guessed it. I don't want a device in that colour.

So ... not only did I not buy one - but I feel I have been part of a 'bait and switch' operation [if you don't know what that is, look it up on Digital Marketing Definitions] - which has left a sour taste of the experience ... and of Amazon.

Humble flight pie

The previous entry on this blog was one of a whole series of similar comments about KLM/Air France [for they are now one]. 

Well today, this arrived ... 

Of course, me being me, I can't just make a compliment without some kind of caveat, so: pink writing on a light blue background is not the easiest to read.

This is just not going to fly away

KLM have got a lot of their digital marketing right - but a quick scan on this blog will tell you this is something they just cannot seem to get a grip of. For new readers, I'll set the seen by saying that I have had a KLM 'airmiles' card for around 20 years. In all that time I have only ever flown with them from Newcastle airport. And yet they still keep sending me details of offers flying from other airports.

This one is worse in that I actually booked a flight to Amsterdam [for later in the year] earlier in the week. So, it is as if they are rubbing my nose in by saying 'we started the offer a couple of days after your booking ... but - haha - you wouldn't have qualified anyway as you are flying from Newcastle'. 

It's not rocket science KLM - just add a field to your email messaging so that I only get offers that I might be interested in.

Footnote: yes, I know it is now that it is now KLM/Air France

Speaking with forked tongue?

I can't work this one out. Is it just poor translation [if so ... it's bad practice from one of the world's biggest online companies] or is it deliberate to remind us it is a Chinese company. I suggest the latter as some of the grammar is perfect and others far from it.

One size doesn't fit all

So I needed to check something on my PayPal account, and went to their homepage. OK, so maybe I wasn't really concentrating ... but I could not find the 'log in' button.

I even refreshed the page. Then I realised I needed to scroll across - and lo and behold ...

In this case it was not a disaster for the organization as I needed to get onto the website - but had I been looking for a product and was following links from a Google search, I would have just 'bounced' back to the SERP and gone to the next link in line.

Lessons: 

1 Forcing users to scroll across has been bad practice since 1996.

2 I am using my PC with a a 23 inch / 60cm screen

3 No matter what settings I may have on my PC/screen or what I might or might not have on my PC... it is NOT my fault that the page has not rendered in my screen's viewing area. The designers should develop the website for ALL users - and if that means 'down grading' the technology [or losing the fancy toys they love to put on to show off their design skills] so be it. It is the customer that pays their wages.

Footnote: they got it right on my iPhone. Go figure.

 

 

Gender issues?

So I've been looking on ebay for a travel bag that I can take in a Ryanair cabin - don't get me started on how Ryanair's permitted size is a couple of centimetres smaller than the size of bag allowed on other airlines, as in: the bag I have taken around the world in the cabin of 'proper' airlines. 

However, that is not the purpose of this story. Because of my searches on ebay, that company 'targeted' me for other products. Well ... I say 'targeted', but really I mean 'fired off some very loose shots in my general direction'. 

This is what I got when I clicked on an ebay 'Pre-Loved Bags for Him' ad. 

Even two of the bags I've not hi-lighted seem to be rather feminine - though this is likely due to another bug-bear of mine: ebay advertisers scatter-gunning key terms for searches [a scatter gun is the opposite of a rifle, as in 'not targeted']. 

And while I'm on the subject of selling on ebay - I can't be the only person looking for bags that are allowed in aircraft cabins, so including the dimensions in the description is a bit on the important side. And to the seller of a bag I was willing to pay £100 for if it was the 'right' size ... ignoring two requests from me for its dimensions has cost you a potential sale. 

Ho hum 

Oh, a footnote to this is I eventually found a suitable bage at a reasonable price ... in a shop, that is; a retail outlet in a physical building where I was able to pick up and measure the bag prior to purchase.

Sorry, you're too late

So I thought, I known - I'll go somewhere sunny for Christmas. But it was Sunday December 20th, so it would be a last minute booking. So I went to latedeals.co.uk. Trouble was, I could only book a date from the 24th. Presumably there are no flights leaving the Uk on Monday 21st, Tuesday 22nd or Wednesday 23rd?

Let them eat cake

In my books I advise having a 'local' person check translations for global websites. Here's and example from ebay where a term has got lost in translation ... 

 PS if the title of this post has confused you - Google it, it's your history lesson for the day :-)

Twitta-vert

For reasons I won't go into [it was professional  :-) ] - I searched for "Katherine Jenkins" on Google - and near the top of the SERP was this:

Now ... this may not be representative of the songstresses Tweets - but this is not what social media is all about. Nor is it good social media marketing.

Hmmm, perhaps a little insensitive

Only a couple of weeks after the Paris atrocities, the normally excellent, eMarketer.com sent an email with this headline:

However, by accident or design, the linked-to article was: