Global Digital Marketing & Retail by Alex 71
Inspiration from across the world for retail enthusiasts, e-commerce professionals, marketing lovers and technology fans. Welcome back! I summarized some great links again, I stumbled upon this week.
🇭🇰 Hong Kong MTR tourist QR code at Sheung Wang Station
The MTR, the subway system in Hong Kong, is the lifeline of Hong Kong. During my recent visit I used it -as always- a lot and it works great. High frequency of trains, very affordable, safe and clean. If you haven’t been there you cannot really imagine, I guess. At one station I saw this sign, sticked at the wall near the exit, that gives guidance in and arond the station. Great idea! Although you can ask LLM’s nowadays also (as I tested already a few times), I think this is still valuable for visitors. The landingpages looks like this (direct link here→https://www.mtr.com.hk/en/customer/main/discover-cen-shw.html or screenshot below in the gallery. I think a few things can be improved and help both the visitor and HK:
A menu with selection of type of sightseeing/things to do: f.e. bar, restaurant, museum)
A menu item “deals” so venues can get traffic from the MTR to the shop and this can also generate some revenue for the HK tourism board, paying back the design and prints, so they can place it at more places.
Language selector (nowadays it is very easy to translate this to so many languages. Tip: https://www.clonable.nl/
Advertising elements (for example for e-sims, because that’s what travelers need)
Step by step directions (f.e. 1) Take exit 2, go right 2) walk 400m (4 min) go right) etc. Something that can be used even without an online or poor connection.
SEO: It’s easy to make topic clusters of these types of content, making it possible to attract and prepare future MTR users and sell tourist cards.
See gallery, left side current landingpage, 2 right images some mockup with the ideas above embedded.
📖 Book Snippet: Mindshift from Brian Solis
During my recent travels I read a book. The book “Mindshift” from Brian Solis. Really a great book! This week I will share a few pages and also next week. Next week more practical this week something I think more people might have.
One of the insights early in Mindshift by Brian Solis emphasizes the value of individuals within organizations who possess the ability to foresee future trends and envision possibilities. These people often aren't in traditional management roles but contribute bottom-up, challenging the status quo and driving meaningful change. Sometimes I feel myself in this role in a large organisation. So I was happy to read I am not the only one.
Details and do buy: https://www.amazon.com/Mindshift-Embracing-Unlimited-Possibilities-Visionary/dp/1394198590
📧Forbes: E-mail Marketing 2025 alert: prepare now
Forbes has an article on possible changes in e-mail that can affect the way you do and analyze e-mail marketing:
Email remains an appallingly basic technology. Despite all its advances, the core architecture remains the same. Anyone can access anyone else’s inbox with just an email address. Those addresses are basically given away for free—harvested, leaked, stored, searchable. This month, Mailmodo says, “spam messages [will] account for more than 46.8% of email traffic.”This is why enterprises are looking for new solutions—Teams, Slack, even instant messaging platforms. because even with all the advances and the “outside sender” and “untrusted sender” warnings, too many emails get through.
“Shielded Email consists of a system to create single-use or limited-use email aliases that will forward messages along to your primary account.”
Just look at one warning issued to marketeers when Hide My Email was released: “Now users can create a limitless number of fake addresses they don’t even check, dramatically reducing engagement. And, worse still, they can easily deactivate them without affecting their primary email, meaning marketing databases could be full of ‘dead’ addresses. This is important because a low deliverability rate can affect sender reputation, meaning your carefully crafted campaign ends up in spam.”
So keep an eye on that and do continue with cleaning up your e-mail lists regularly, keep on using double opt-in , try to find a strategy around disposable e-mail adresses, maybe incentivice the use of primary e-mail adresses, create a communication center with multiple channels (such as also messengers) but the main thing is, send out relevant, high quality, personalised, unique content!
🇨🇳 Payment in Chinese restaurant: NFC chip with Alipay
China’s payment system is so advanced, I can write a complete series of blog posts on it. It’s system makes it fun to pay. I wrote earlier on it while I lived in China. This time around I was having dinner with some friends and former collegues and something new grabbed my attention. A sticker with NFC chip on the table. So when we asked for the bill (mǎidān), we got this time a little receipt, holded the phone on the NFC chip, automatically “Alipay” opened, we paid the amount and off we go. No need for fancy/expensive POS material’s just a cheap NFC chip did the trick. Usually you just show the confirmation screen (if asked) or at smaller shops sometimes they have a phone somewhere in the corner that gives a voice confirmation after you paid.
📢Microsoft Clarity and Google Ads become friends
Clarity just announced brand new Google Ads features that will be rolled out over the next few months.
You will soon be able to integrate Google Ads directly into Clarity. Connecting Google Ads will give you a dedicated advertising dashboard which will display all of your main campaign metrics. You'll also be able to easily find heatmaps/session recordings grouped together by your Google Ads campaigns.
Ok this is really great! The integration of Microsoftr Clarity in Google Ads. This will make it a lot easier (and more complete) to analyze performance. Think of user frustration detection, a direct integration between quantiatve and qualitative metrics and better analyze behavior after clicking. Good news!
and: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/clarity/advertising-dashboard/ad-campaign-details
🏭B2B Marketing tactics for 2025
I like B2B, I work in B2B currently. One of the B2B marketing experts is mr
. He wrote: 5 B2B Marketing tactics for 2025. Go read it, it is a good article and you can use the tactics right away. I think still many B2B companies follow more B2C practices and it is good to dive into the (slight) differences in B2B. Start with mr Pierre a fellow substacker, so support him!
In for more?
Checkout my previous newsletter with these topics:
🇨🇳 Air Coffee: get coffee or food delivered by drone in Shenzhen
🔍The Role of SEO in making branding understood by search engines and AI
🇭🇰Hong Kong Kong’s first selfie studio: enabling story’s
📖Book snippet: This is strategy from Seth Godin
That’s it for this edition.
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