MarketingSherpa Blog

Next Sunday at 6 p.m. EST, The Biography Channel will be airing their special on Google. Ray Allen, CEO American Meadows, who is the officially profiled AdWords client on Google’s site, told me Biography sent a video crew out to interview him for the show.

I asked him what made his campaigns so successful beyond the fact that he relentlessly measures conversion rates and ROI.

“Copywriting is my big thing. I’ve been doing it since the beginning of time,” he said. “Everybody talks about ad rank. They don’t talk about the words. If your ad is at #1 or #2 and it says ‘Wildflower Seeds,’ I’m going to kill you by saying ‘Wildflower Seeds on Sale.’ It doesn’t matter if you’re #1, if the guy at #3 is a copywriter, he’s killing you.”

His advice for hiring creatives to conduct search campaigns for you — get a copywriter with an old-fashioned mail order background. Someone who has years of writing high-impact copy that grabs the sale in 10-12 words.

When I was chatting with Earthlink’s Executive Vice President Don Berryman for our Case Study (see below) he said something that really struck me, “Online purchasers really don’t like to be sold too much, maybe that’s why they are doing it online instead of calling our 800 numbers.”

Earthlink gets 10-12% of its orders online these days and about 50% from phone call-ins. (The rest come from those promo CD ROM disks and deals with PC makers such as Dell.) So, there’s plenty of activity for Don to draw this insight from.

Recently I’ve heard several other marketers — both in b-to-b and b-to-c — make similar comments. The breakdown seems to be between impulse shoppers/visitors versus deliberate visitors.

If someone is responding impulsively to a promotional message you’re running in any medium, then a more sales-y landing page and site generally works best. Deadlines, gift with order, exclamation-points … all that classic stuff can help the conversion.

However, if someone is proactively surfing the Web looking for exactly the sort of thing you offer, classic promo copy and offers can seem far too much like hype. Salesy messaging may lose you sales.

Instead, this type of shopper prefers clear, explanatory language detailing what your offer is all about. Comparison charts work extremely well with this audience because they’re probably looking at your competitor’s sites at about the same time anyway.

So, your promo-style pages might work best for house list campaigns via email, ad banners, and offline ads promoting online response. On the other hand, your calmer, explanatory pages might work better for search-driven traffic.

Worth testing anyway … and be sure to let me know how it goes.

By the way — Here’s that Earthlink Case Study I mentioned: How to Convert More Online Shoppers with Live Chat Pop Invites — Detailed Result Data from Earthlink’s Tests
http://www.marketingsherpa.com/sample.cfm?contentID=2932
(Open access until March 12, 2005)

When I was chatting with Earthlink’s Executive Vice President Don Berryman for our Case Study (see below) he said something that really struck me, “Online purchasers really don’t like to be sold too much, maybe that’s why they are doing it online instead of calling our 800 numbers.”

Earthlink gets 10%-12% of its orders online these days and about 50% from phone call-ins. (The rest come from those promo CD ROM disks and deals with PC makers such as Dell.) So, there’s plenty of activity for Don to draw this insight from.

Recently I’ve heard several other marketers — both in B-to-B and B-to-C — make similar comments. The breakdown seems to be between impulse shoppers/visitors versus deliberate visitors.

If someone is responding impulsively to a promotional message you’re running in any medium, then a more salesy landing page and site generally works best. Deadlines, gift with order, exclamation-points … all that classic stuff can help the conversion.

However, if someone is proactively surfing the Web looking for exactly the sort of thing you offer, classic promo copy and offers can seem far too much like hype. Salesy messaging may lose you sales.

Instead, this type of shopper prefers clear, explanatory language detailing what your offer is all about. Comparison charts work extremely well with this audience because they’re probably looking at your competitor’s sites at about the same time anyway.

So, your promo-style pages might work best for house list campaigns via email, ad banners, and offline ads promoting online response. On the other hand, your calmer, explanatory pages might work better for search-driven traffic.

Worth testing anyway … and be sure to let me know how it goes.

By the way — Here’s that Earthlink Case Study I mentioned: How to Convert More Online Shoppers with Live Chat Pop Invites — Detailed Result Data from Earthlink’s Tests http://www.marketingsherpa.com/sample.cfm?contentID=2932 (Open access until March 12, 2005)

“We never pay for a non-top position ad in an email newsletter,” Marty Brandwin, Marketing Director at Jinfonet Software told me the other day.

Why? He says, “Our past numbers show us there’s at least a 50% drop off in clicks from lower positions.” So, unless the newsletter’s reach is extraordinarily on target and the lower position is a heck of a lot cheaper than the top, it’s not worth his time.

Here are three more tips Marty shared with me:

Tip #1. Text-only gets best results

I’ve heard for ages that text-only ads (versus ads that look like banners and include graphics or colors) work best in newsletters of any kind. Marty added that these days text-only newsletters are the best to run ads in to reach B-to-B audiences.

Turns out so many corporations are filtering out anything with even a hint of HTML, that many newsletter publishers he knows are switching to text-only just to get through. IT staffers are among the most likely to add personal filters onto their email box, so if you want to reach them, it’s critical to be text-only.

Tip #2. Customize your copy to each newsletter title

“There isn’t a generic sponsorship,” notes Marty. “We’re really careful to customize the message to the audience. If you send the same ad to everyone, it just doesn’t work well.”

That’s a rock-solid rule I’ve heard for more than five years now. Yet hardly any marketers obey it. Tweak your ad copy for each newsletter you run in.

Tip #3. Be flexible in media buy dates

Your offer calendar and the newsletter publisher’s open slots may not always match up. Some popular newsletters are sold out months in advance these days.

Instead, let the account rep know what your goal is as far out as possible. “We’d like to test being in your top position in third quarter if you think we can get a .75% click rate with the right offer.”

The rep needs to move lower-slot inventory now, so they may promise you better slots later in the year in exchange for taking something else now. And, since you’re helping out, you get everything at a discount. “We’ll negotiate great deals on being in there sooner,” says Marty.

Note: Do you have any newsletter ads that are doing really well? I’d love to hear about them.

I’ve got navigation bars on the brain, probably because we’re in the midst of planning a site revamp right now and navigation should always be priority #1 in design.

(If they can’t find what they want quickly and easily, your site is worthless.)

Black text on a white background is far easier to read than anything else, especially when it’s as small as navigation text usually is. So I was surfing looking for design examples of great black and white nav bars when I discovered the glory of Wellhaven Gifts for Seniors.

Not only is their left vertical nav bar super-easy to read, but the copywriting is exceptional.

Why? Each item on the navigation bar is worded using the exact phrase a consumer searching for a gift might word their search. Links include “Gifts for Grandma,” “Retirement Gifts” and “50th Wedding Anniversary Gifts.”

It’s searcher-centric wording versus “about us” wording.

Wellhaven President Patricia Curry admitted the copywriting was directly derived from search marketing tactics. “Yes, our menu links reflect what our customers, adult children of elderly parents, search for when looking for gifts.”

When done well, this searcher-centric copywriting seems incredibly easy. Just like competitive figure skating. Until you try it yourself that is…

…then somehow that old list of products and services in your internal-corporate language keeps creeping back in.

Wellhaven Gifts for Seniors — http://www.wellhaven.com

MarketingSherpa is creating a special report for you in partnership with the Viral & Buzz Marketing Association, and we need your quick input at:

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.asp?u=11516859463

You’ll find a quick one-page questionnaire to let us know what you think about viral ads.

Plus, if you’ve conducted a viral campaign, you can also submit it to be included in the report’s companion Viral Ad Showcase so our 173,000 weekly readers can see the glory of your strategy and creative!

Viral Advertising Showcase submissions are free, and all campaigns selected for the final Showcase will include contact and hotlinks to the agency that created them (if included on submission form.)

Submission deadline: February 24th midnight Eastern Time.

Yes, everyone involved will get both the results data and access to the Viral Ad Showcase in in a couple of weeks, as soon as we’ve published it for you.

Thanks in advance for your help in creating a truly useful and interesting Viral Ad Special Report…

Here’s the link again (yes if you have a Blog or ezine you can share it with others in the marketing and ad industry)
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.asp?u=11516859463

I received this note from a reader who asked not to be identified because she’s tired of scammers hitting her promo sites.

“Dear Anne,

My promotional Web forms have been besieged by scammers trying to qualify for samples, which they then bring to Wal-Mart for store credits, or sell on eBay. Our data shows how they submit multiple variations to ‘game’ our promotion qualification form.

We have programmed a lot of flags into our online forms, but still these scammers keep trying to get through. We now have to manually check all form entries in addition to the scam ID programming we have done.

I believe there is a business opportunity for all of us online marketers to pool our scammer data into one single file, so that all of us can check our entries against it and disqualify people BEFORE we send them an expensive sample.”

If you are interested in creating such a database, or cooperating in any other clever way to stop offer-scammers online, please contact me and I’ll pass the word onto the marketer who wrote me this letter so you can get in touch.

Just write to aholland@marketingsherpa.com.

You may have seen the news on the wires this morning — we’re holding a formal press teleconference next Tuesday Feb 15th at 2pm ET (11am PT) and naturally you’re also invited.

You’ll discover the top-line results of our new Landing Page Eyetracking Study conducted in partnership with Eyetools Inc, and see a sample heatmap showing how human eyes “see” landing pages.

Get your dial-in number and password by signing up here:
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.asp?u=18386850910

I’m fascinated by the fact that human eyes all tend to look at Web pages in the same way — there’s a pattern of involuntary movement. If you know the eyeflow pattern, and what elements can affect it, you can tweak landing page design to get better results.

Does it work?

Well, I had our own in-house Web designer tweak our landing pages last Thursday night based on the Study results. We didn’t change a single word of copy — just layout.

Preliminary results show paid conversions up by 64%.

My golly. 64% more sales from a few layout changes that took maybe an hour, tops. Now, as you can imagine, my heart is bursting with evangelical fervor to share this data with the world to make everyone’s landing pages more effective!

Anyway, please do sign up to attend our news teleconference next week at http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.asp?u=18386850910

If you can’t wait that long, and you’d like a copy of the complete study in your hands, it’s over at SherpaStore.com as part of our brand new Landing Page Handbook.

See you next week!

Last year Wachovia improved the results of their house ads almost twenty-fold. It’s a big gain for their revenues because house ads (ads for your own offers that run on your own site) clicks are far more likely to convert than ads run anywhere else on the Web.

Ilieva Ageenko, Wachovia’s VP & Director of Emerging Applications, told me in her gorgeous Cuban accent how they did it. “We were guessing in most situations about where to place the ads, then we implemented new Web analytics.”

“Our marketing group analyzed the average amount of time spent on a page, and compared it across the different types of ads — static, rotating banners, rich media, and so on.” If typical visitors didn’t spend enough time on a page to see rotating creative or load rich media, then the team put static creative there instead.

Conversely, they put ads that require more view time on pages that typically already got more view time. Then they tweaked creative such as skyscrapers versus buttons, to figure out what size worked best on each particular page.

The overall amount of rich media used rose a bit after the team discovered to their joyful surprise that 76% of site visitors were on broadband connections.

Three lessons learned:

o Optimizing house ads can produce a quick ROI for Web analytics investments, which makes upper management happy

o Media buyers should ask about average page visit time for each section of a site when planning creative placements

o Although just under 50% of US households have broadband connections, around 80% of at-work Web surfers are on broadband. Since many people do personal surfing at work, business-to- consumer sites may have far higher broadband users than you think.

By the way, I want to give credit to Wachovia’s new analytics firm, WebSideStory, for introducing me to Ilieva. Thanks!

I’m emailing this Blog into our production department (who thankfully are located in Arkansas so they are at work today). Our main offices in Warren RI are closed, as are most businesses here, for the snow emergency per order of the Governor.

I’ve spent the past few days holed up in the storm at my fiance’s house together with his 17- and 20-year-old. And, boy, have I learned a lot about the future of marketing to this new generation.

Lesson #1. “What’s a forward slash?”

When I called out an URL to Sara, who is 17 and has been surfing the Net since she was 12, she could only get an error page. Turns out she’s never heard of a forward slash. In fact, when she types in URLs, she doesn’t bother with www or any of the rest of beginning. She just types in the brand name.com and assumes she’ll get there.

When marketing to kids, don’t spell out the whole URL – it’s assumed.

Lesson #2. Thumb typing speed

When Petar, 20, wanted to email his girlfriend, he whipped out his cell phone instead of going all the way across the room to the computer. Everyone who fusses that cell email won’t really take off until someone can fit an entire keyboard into the appliance has missed the boat.

Petar, and his friends, can type at blinding speed with a single thumb on the phone. He doesn’t need to look at the pad — and can multitask, talking with the cell phone held up to his ear while typing and sending an email with it at the same time.

Lesson #3. Everything is obviously a commercial

Both kids assumed that the cars used in the classic movie Smokey & the Bandit were all paid promotional placements. “That entire movie is really a commercial, everything on TV is,” they assured me. If you think your clever guerrilla campaign isn’t being spotted by these kids, you’re more naive than they are.

Now it’s time to get back to shoveling, sanding, and horsing around in the cold.

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