MarketingSherpa Blog

These past two weeks, I’ve been in endless debates and design meetings trying to choose new colors for our revamped and expanded Web site.

If you’ve ever had to choose site colors, you’ll understand completely. The three biggest problems:

(1) Everything’s really subjective. What a color “means” can be personal or cultural, but it’s not the same for everyone. Did you know baby girls wore blue and boys wore pink 150 years ago? Did you consider the green-means-money rule doesn’t work outside the US?

(2) Everything looks slightly different on differing computers. Non-dithering hues notwithstanding, most people’s screens look a little different. Laptops vs desktop monitors, old vs new screens, Macs vs PCs, varying background glare … the differences are not massive. But they are enough to make a pale brown appear to be pink.

(3) There’s virtually no data on marketing and color.

I know because I checked our site’s new Research Database, which has more than 1,800 records, for stats on color. Very little came up.

Turns out, you can find loads of articles on the Web about color choices. However, most are based on hearsay instead of lab tests, cultural associations and/or broad generalizations that don’t help much when you’ve got a palate of hundreds of hues to choose from.

My next step was to check out our Case Study Library with nearly 750 Case Studies. Did anyone test color choices?

Well, yes, they did. However, results were disheartening to a marketer stuck in a design meeting. Aside from the twin factors of legibility and good taste (based on target demographic), color tests were *never* a big factor in improving conversion rates.

The important factors were invariably things such as:
o Traffic source
o Offer
o Specific words in copy
o Ease of navigation (including lack of distractions)
o Relevancy of images
o Trustworthiness
o Reading comprehension (type size, type color, background color)

The last item on the list nearly always resolved to fairly big type (11-12 points+), in black “ink” on a white background. So that’s not color so much as eye-enablement.

So, you could say to yourself, well, since color doesn’t matter like this other, far more important stuff, I’m not going to pay attention to it. Let’s pick something quickly and end the debate.

Except for one thing: branding.

It’s how I found myself in this pickle in the first place. If you check the Wayback Machine — http://www.archive.org/index.php — for 2000, you’ll see Sherpa’s first site colors were bright red and yellow. These were chosen non-scientifically because they are my absolute personal favorites.

However, nobody else liked them, so I was shanghaied a few years ago into picking new colors so MarketingSherpa’s brand would feel more “corporate.”

What’s corporate? We ended up with red and gray. Which looked fine, if a bit boring to me. Unfortunately, red and gray also looked fine to a bunch of our competitors. If you’re a color-sensitive person, Jupiter, eMarketer and MarketingSherpa all looked pretty much the same.

We needed a new color scheme to stand out from the fray. Our first choice, nicknamed ‘Operation Desert Storm’ was finally vetoed because sometimes a palette of khakis and dark red don’t have thrilling associations.

Our second choice, nicknamed ‘Kindergarten’ was far more cheerful, but also vetoed because, well, you can guess why.

We actually went live last week with our third choice, ‘Brownie.’ And then too many people on staff complained the softer hues looked unpleasantly pink on older laptop monitors. (I got emails from folks with the words ‘Pepto-Bismol’ in the subject line.)

Anyway, all of this is to explain, if you’re in color choice meetings yourself, I feel your pain. Deeply.

And also, if you’ve been confused by the odd changes our site colors have been going through over the past few weeks (and days to come), this is why. Please bear with us. It will all be over soon, and then we can concentrate on the
important stuff.

If you want to improve email campaign conversions — at least incrementally — the answer may lie in your customer service department. Here’s why:

Every time you send an email broadcast, instead of clicking on hotlinks or order buttons, some percent of recipients will click on “reply to” and send you back a message.

What percent? Sherpa Reader Don Hoyt at Deerfield.com (who admittedly is in the business of helping companies handle these replies) says his own house mailings get 20% replies for big offers and 5% for non-offer messages, such as informational newsletters. That sounds a little high to me, but it probably varies a lot based on the quality of your list, your marketplace and your relationship opt-ins. Hoyt’s list is B-to-B and includes customers.

Campaign replies fall into roughly four topical groups:

o Questions/response about the offer in the email – lion’s share
o Questions about buying your other offerings – 10%
o Technical or service questions about past purchases – 10%
o Email preferences (i.e., Take me off your list) – tiny %

Hoyt’s customer service team has a goal of personally responding to all these replies within 30 minutes of receipt. Their conversion rate from answers to the first two reply topics is 30%.

30% is a darn high close rate on an emailed offer.

So, you might consider a quick research project. Reply four times (once per topic above) to one of your own email promotions as if you were a “real” recipient. This will work best if you use a personal email account so it’s not obvious that you’re with the company.

Then sit back and see how long it takes customer service to reply to each and what’s in that reply when it comes.

If it’s gloriously and swiftly handled, give them very public kudos at the next interdepartmental meeting. If it’s not, don’t blame them. Instead, start a research program of your own to find out:

o What percent of campaign sends get reply-tos?

o How do the replies break down into topics by percent?

o How long does your email program or ESP take to sort these and get them back to your company for handling? (It can be as long as two days.) What would it take to speed this up?

o Who at your company receives them now and what training and tools has marketing given them?

o What about reply-tos for rented lists, affiliate campaigns or other partnered sends?

Your goal is to estimate how many possible conversions you’re currently leaving on the table due to slowly answered or uncompellingly answered replies. And how much would it cost you to fix the problem.

You may discover that handling reply-tos will continue to be imperfect. The conversions won’t be worth the extra work. Or you may find that you can optimize right away.

By the way — I had a meeting with our own ESP on Friday on this very subject, so I’ve just started my own research project into this same thing for Sherpa. We’ll see how it turns out.

Just before last Valentine’s Day, marketers at Idea Art, an
ecommerce site run by a small family owned printing firm in the South, sent an email blast to their list of 72,000 opt-ins. The offer: beautifully designed papers with which one could create homemade valentines.

Results were OK. But only just OK. Everyone blamed holiday email clutter. How could they expect a fabulous response rate with so many competing offers hitting recipients’ inboxes?

Most marketers would have heaved a sigh and moved on to their next campaign. But, the Idea Art team were too stubborn. Valentine’s Day is one of their biggest holidays. They were determined to make email work harder.

So, they whipped out a follow-up email before Feb 14. The creative was similar although not identical. The big change was the list. Instead of sending to their whole file, they sent only to the people who had opened and clicked on the last campaign … but not purchased.

Results were so outstanding that the campaign won a MarketingSherpa Award for Best Email Test of 2006. (I’ve popped links below with Idea Art’s creative samples and how you can enter this year’s Awards.)

I’m focusing on this campaign in my blog today not just because this week is Valentine’s Day, nor because this Friday is the deadline to enter this year’s Email Awards. Those two items are serendipitous.

Actually, my inspiration is an email Sherpa received last week from Michael Goldstein, who is Director Internet Subscriptions at PRIMEDIA Enthusiast Media. Turns out he’s running campaigns nearly identical to Idea Art’s (although to a completely different audience). The results are outstanding. Here’s what he told Sherpa:

“Some rough stats for you on our remail campaigns:

1. Remail campaigns (we’ve only done about 6 thus far) range from 12%-50% added production to the overall campaign (mitigated by premiums and price tests vs. previous campaigns without)

2. Open rates on remails are 4-5x higher than the original
campaign (which really makes sense since we’re remailing the people who either opened or clicked the first time around)

3. CTR is 2-3x higher than original campaign (for the same reason as above)

3. Unsub rates on remails are 30%-40% lower than the original blast

I should note that remails on a campaign are by default a much smaller select since we’re only remailing those who open or open and click. Still, if you have the means to do it with your email vendor, it’s a no-brainer.”

Thanks, Michael, for sharing your results with Sherpa readers! This indicates to me at least that nearly every emailer — including B-to-B marketers — should figure out how they can test the re-email idea.

In the meantime, here are those two links I promised you:

Creative sample and details from Idea Art’s test:
http://www.marketingsherpa.com/emaw2006/37.html

How to enter this year’s Sherpa Email Awards:
http://emailawards.marketingsherpa.com/
(Entry deadline is this Friday, Feb. 16th)

Last week, I had the honor of meeting a top email vendor’s Client Advisory Board. I won’t reveal names here because I wasn’t there as a reporter, so it’s unfair to “out” anyone. But, trust me — everyone in the room was from a well known company, including B-to-B and famous consumer brands.

The occasion was a little intimidating — these were the heads of email marketing for some of the smartest brands I know. Luckily, the organizers did one smart, simple thing to put us all at ease: each of us had to introduce ourselves and say how we ranked our organization’s use of email on a scale from 1 to 10.

No one ranked their company as high as a ’10’.

Nor even a 9 or an 8. Most felt they were anywhere from 1-5. Why were some of the top emailers in the world dissing their own programs?

Because we all know what can be done with email, and we’re nowhere near that glory yet. Example, I rated Sherpa’s email programs a “3.5” because we need to improve or create:

o Delivery, especially past corporate filters
o Dynamic, triggered messages with personalized content
o Integrating Web site measurement further
o Tying email in with our SFA system
o A/B testing our opt-in forms
o Outreach programs for hard bounces

Everyone around the table agreed that “the challenge is execution.” Not externally – the vendors seem to be ready to meet our needs or are going down the R&D path very quickly. (Which makes sense given how incredibly competitive the email service provider marketplace is.)

Instead, that execution challenge is a two-fold internal battle for most companies:

Battle #1. IT

“I’m tired of dueling with IT,” one marketer at the table said. Some solutions others suggested:

“IT likes building things, let them help you write email system requirements. Never develop an RFP without them, you can’t write requirements in marketing that are sufficient for IT.”

“You need an owner of email marketing over on the tech side; if you’re constantly shuffling and educating people on the help desk, you’re in trouble.”

“Make your next email hire someone with an IT background.”

“Give IT credit for the help they’ve given you when you report to senior management. Become the marketer for their campaign for internal recognition.”

Battle #2. Staffing

“A year ago I would have said we’re a 10,” said one heavy direct response marketer. “But, now the bar has been raised. Email has gone beyond the blast to one-to-one marketing.” Other marketers said their bar was raised when email moved from multiple corporate silos to one central department.

Both one-to-one marketing and centralizing are best practices and will increase response rates substantially in the long run. But, the big problem for 2007 appears to be the fact that few email departments are staffed up to handle the work.

Corporate thinks marketing should be happy to have this fairly new department focused on email. Marketing thinks corporate needs a reality check on how much work email actually is. Many around the table had only one dedicated email staffer. Some had to share email staff with ecommerce or Web marketing tasks as well.

“I did a presentation where I showed other departments exactly what goes into creating a single email newsletter send, how many hours. They were shocked,” explained one attendee who just got the go-ahead to hire more email staff.

Another marketer said his team had just finished a carefully pre-tested newsletter template re-launch. The goal? To keep response rates steady while reducing the hours it takes to create a typical send. He hopes that by saving staff time, they’ll be able to field more campaigns and tests, thus increasing overall program health.

The meeting as a whole was a revelation to me. I discovered that, as much as I am frustrated with our own email’s deficiencies, my fellow marketers are equally frustrated. There’s something terribly comforting about that.

I also set up a meeting with Chris Heine, the Senior Reporter on our team who is in charge of the email beat. “Pull some focus off of cool-creative or cool-strategy of the week,” I told him. “It’s time to focus on the practical realities of running a successful email program.”

Got ideas for Chris’ coverage from now on? Please post them online at the comments link below link, and/or contact him directly at ChrisH(at)MarketingSherpa(dot)com

Thanks.

Last Thursday I met with our new Senior Reporter, Sean Donahue, who covers the B-to-B marketing beat for us. He wanted to know best practices on how to get more people to sign up for webinars.

I said, “And don’t forget the thank-you page. When a prospect signs up for a webinar — or a white paper or newsletter for that matter — be sure to include more hotlinks or offers on the ‘Thank you’ page they see right after submitting their registration. Prospects are in the perfect mood right then to learn more about you, so they may click on links for white papers or other offers. Why not deepen the relationship right then?”

He said, bless his newly Sherpa-ized heart, “Got any data on what percent will click for another offer?”

Naturally, I did. The number was 40% … but it was from 2001. It was time to get some new benchmarks. To get a quick read, I looked into our own in-house numbers.

When folks sign up for an email newsletter on MarketingSherpa’s Web site, the thank-you page features opt-in offers for additional newsletter titles.

When I checked the data last week, 39% of all visitors to that thank-you page took advantage of another offer. I was surprised to see how little has changed since 2001 (you can’t say that about most things on the Internet.)

Another interesting fact: the most popular offer on that page gets a 29% acceptance rate, which is fabulous, but not the whole 39%. That means giving folks a choice on that page has helped our overall offer conversions increase by 10 percentage points.

(This is *not* true of all promotions on the Net or in postal DM. Most often, single focus gives better results.)

My final takeaway — if you have any thank-you pages out there for anything that only say, “Thank you,” you are wasting very valuable real estate.

Why slam a blank wall in people’s faces just when they’ve begun to respond to you? Keep that response curve coming.

And let me know if you have any data of your own on this front. I’m definitely interested.

If you’ve read more than a few articles (or heard speeches) about what lifts email campaign response rates, you’ve probably noticed they all boil down to the same word: relevancy.

Now, it’s all very well for experts to proclaim, “Be more relevant,” from the podium. But how do you actually put relevancy into action?

I was just blown away by a real-life example based on data from our own programs and wanted to share the results with you.

Last month, we did a complimentary teleseminar to review our latest Benchmark Study data for MarketingSherpa readers. We asked folks to sign up in advance, and then we emailed them hotlinks to the presentation and the special telephone number to call at the appointed hour.

Everyone who registered received the same three emails over 48 hours. So these went to the same list, same general topic and the same “From.” Only the time and subject line varied:

Email #1. Sent Dec. 18th
[Sherpa] Your Access Info for Tomorrow’s Teleseminar
Measured open: 18.6%

Email #2. Sent Dec. 19th
[Sherpa] Just 1 Hour Until the Email Marketing Teleseminar
Measured open: 50.5%

Email #3. Sent Dec. 20th
[Sherpa] Thanks + “Email Marketing Benchmark Guide 2007”
Measured open: 48.7%

Wow, huh? The difference is striking. I don’t know about you, but this data inspires me on two fronts:

o Time-of-day-triggered campaigns

Auction and last-minute-discount sites already know this. But the rest of us, including B-to-B marketers, can probably create more time-driven campaigns.

Check with your email service beforehand though — sometimes sends don’t go out precisely when you think they will due to backlogged servers. Plus, some system resend messages to ‘soft bounces’ for up to 24 hours after the initial send to get more mail through, which could make your “one hour left” message look pretty silly.

o Post-transactional thank-you campaigns

Have you added an offer — even just to evergreen best-of content– in your new opt-in Welcome letter yet? How about testing special links in other transactional messages, such as shipping notes? Our research team is conducting studies on this right now; we should have some more data to present at Sherpa’s Email Summit in March. I’d love to hear your data, too.

Speaking of relevancy, here are three relevant links for you:

If you missed the teleseminar discussed above, you can get a transcript, MP3 file and, yes, the PowerPoints — they’re complimentary for Sherpa readers:
http://www.marketingsherpa.com/article.php?ident=29823

Have you done any email campaigns (or newsletters) recently that got great results? Consider entering MarketingSherpa’s annual Email Awards. Ten categories (including B-to-B) to choose from:
http://emailawards.marketingsherpa.com/

Finally, here’s a link to info about Sherpa’s Email Summit; it’s nearly 70% sold out already, so quick ticket reservations are recommended:
http://www.sherpastore.com/Email-Summit.html?1150

I’m out sick today. In fact, I’ve been sick on and off for about three weeks now, with varying crescendos as some new bug delights in my weakened state.

In between sleeping, sleeping and sleeping, I surf the Web. Aside from sites about presidential marketing, homemade birdfeeders and TV shows you can watch on your iPod, I’ve been watching the slow-but-steady impact of Jeffrey Rohrs’ ‘Sausage Manifesto,’ which is not about food but about search marketing.

Jeffrey named the manifesto named after the famous saying, “People who enjoy eating sausage shouldn’t watch it being made.”

To wit — marketers who like buying search clicks should not ask where precisely all the clicks come from because it might upset you.

The fact is that heavy search marketers have known for years that in addition to true search clicks, some so-called search clicks were actually click fraud, clicks from cruddy content sites (especially splogs — spam blogs) and typo URL landing page clicks.

And, the truth is that search engines have been notoriously slow about sorting this stuff out. Why bother? Marketers are flocking to buy clicks in droves, profits are up and Wall Street is pretty happy.

As MarketingSherpa’s own research shows, marketers are more resigned to the situation than angry about it. 57% of marketers we questioned this fall who are monitoring click fraud likened it to email spam, but 23% said it’s a non-issue or becoming a non-issue.

Should you care? If search is a big part of your budget, you should. Plus, if you have a brand that you want to market carefully (i.e., not have your brand name on crud sites) then you should.

So far, some industry biggies, including Andrew Goodman and the folks at Search Engine Watch have posted thoughtful comments to the Manifesto. Also worth noting, a Yahoo! search exec has posted favorably. To my knowledge, however, no one from Google, MSN or Ask.com has posted to the Manifesto yet, although they must all be aware of it. That’s too bad.

My take? Every single area of media buying (which in the end is all that paid search is) has its snarls. For example, postal mail list rental has nixies. To pretend that search is oh-so-shocking because it’s also imperfect is disingenuous at best.

However, to pretend search is perfect is dumb and annoying. Just as DM has no-fault tactics to handle nixies, PPC search networks should offer better tracking and make-goods.

Anything that raises the industry’s awareness of problems and — more importantly — points to ongoing solutions is worth a read. Check it out today:
http://www.sausagemanifesto.com/the-sausage-manifesto/
(Open access with no ads, no registration)

Did you forget? Nearly every year I do until about mid-February. … The year has changed, so you need to update your Web site and email newsletter templates so the copyright line reads (c) 2007, org name. In my experience, the Web and email team often forget to do this until someone in marketing sounds the alarm bell.

How much does updating the copyright year really matter? Well, I suppose Legal will tell you it’s a help if they have to go after someone who rips off your content. My main focus is marketing though, and I just think old copyrights look lame. Especially for lesser-known brands where surfers may have found you via hotlinks from other sites or search engines.

If someone trips over your site during a search and never heard of you before, there is a chance they’ll scroll down to your copyright to see how long you’ve been around — if you’re for real. A copyright reading (c) 1998-2007 is inherently more trustworthy than one that reads (c) 2004-2005.

OK, so having written this I now have to scamper around Sherpa offices making sure we’ve updated our stuff, too.

Great marketing so very often is *not* about big new ideas. It’s about great, everyday execution, plus testing small ideas that can add up to a lot. Added up over time, that incremental stuff can move mountains.

The small marketing idea I’m most excited about this week is from a new Case Study we’ve just done on a B-to-B podcasting campaign by marketers at IFS North America (see link to article below).

Podcasting is fairly neat stuff, but the aspect that really got my attention was the creative sample of an email newsletter IFS sent to clients and prospects. Their newsletter template includes a clever addition I don’t remember seeing before:

Besides a “Read More” link under each story or podcast summary, they included a separate “Send me more information on this topic” link. If you click, it opens a new email message in your in-box complete with a subject line that specifically references the story or podcast you want to know more about.

So, all you have to do is click “send” in email, and a few minutes later the service department at IFS gets back to you.

Why would anyone click on a “send me more info” link instead of just getting the info themselves from your site? Many reasons, I guess. Perhaps they are too busy to go to your site right now and want the info in their in-box instead. Maybe they want something they can more easily flip in its entirety to colleagues.

Or maybe your newsletter reminded them that they had a different question they need answered, and the email link is the easiest way to start a note to your service department.

I contacted the IFS team — including Chuck Rathmann, Marketing Communications Analyst; Paul Bundy, Newsletter Guru; and Elaine Wimberly, Online Marketing Maven — to find out what kind of response rate they get to these info links.

They were very polite, but I think a bit surprised to hear this small thing was a cool new marketing idea that might be thrilling enough to write about.

After consulting with his colleagues, Chuck told me, “I guess email response from those links is pretty spotty, and what we do get is mostly from customers — but something so easy and intuitive would be silly NOT to include.”

Well, maybe intuitive for IFS, but not for anyone else I’ve met. So, my idea of the week is, why not test adding an “email for info” response hotlink on your email offers, ads or newsletter article summaries.

The fact is, anything that encourages your customers and prospects to engage with you is a very, very big idea in the long run.

P.S. Regarding your participation in our annual Wisdom Report: Every January, we publish a new book packed with 100+ contributed ‘lessons learned’ from MarketingSherpa readers.

This Wednesday, Dec. 20, I’ll email you a link to a form where you can submit your own ‘lesson learned’ for potential inclusion in the 2007 edition. You’ll have 11 days … but many of those are holidays for a lot of people. So, you may want to start thinking about the quote you’ll contribute now.

Yes, as always, we’ll distribute the final Wisdom Report to all readers on a complimentary basis. Plus, we’ll credit and hotlink to everyone whose quote is published.

Want some ideas? Check out the last Wisdom Report to see last year’s reader contributions:
http://wisdom.marketingsherpa.com

Useful links related to this article

Case Study: How an Enterprise Software Company Created a Podcast Program — 15 Useful Tips
http://www.marketingsherpa.com/article.php?ident=29811

Would you like to get your company featured in The Wall Street Journal? How about BusinessWeek, CIO Magazine or Ad Age? Keep reading for useful links …

Due to reader requests, we’ve begun re-publishing one of Sherpa’s most beloved weekly features, our PR Interviews. Each week, we ask a famous-name reporter or editor: “How can someone get a big fat mention in your publication?”

I invented this series four years ago in response to a reader survey where someone wrote in, “Just tell me how to be more famous.” It was a heck of a lot of fun to produce and read these. Often, the reporters would rant about dumb things they wished PR people would not do so frequently and reveal easy ways to get more coverage.

But then we had a problem … after 165 issues, we ran out of media outlets that most Sherpa readers cared about.

Luckily, this is one of those problems that time solved beautifully. Most media have different editors or story angles now. Plus, what with blogs and podcasts, there are more influential media outlets than ever.

So, we launched the series two weeks ago with fresh reporting and will bring you a new PR Interview for at least the next 200 weeks.

In case you missed the first one, here’s how to get featured in Forbes.com:
http://www.marketingsherpa.com/article.php?ident=29793
(Open access until Tuesday, Dec. 12)

Plus, here’s a link to this week’s PR Interview on how to get mentioned in Stuart Elliott’s hugely influential ad column in The New York Times:
http://www.marketingsherpa.com/article.php?ident=22881
(Open access until Monday, Dec. 18)

From now on, if you’d like to us to do a PR Interview on any particular media outlet that you want to be mentioned in, let Editorial Director Tad Clarke know at TadC(at)MarketingSherpa(dot)com. He’ll make sure that interview is moved higher up in our calendar per your request.