MarketingSherpa Blog

It’s fun being at Sherpa because we often get to see new study data before anyone else. This week, Anderson Analytics pre-released their new GenX2Z College Brand Study results to us exclusively. (See link below to three charts from the study.)

They track which brands, ads and Web sites college students name as their “favorite.” Results:

o Web: MySpace unexpectedly leapfrogged to number one, past
FaceBook and YouTube.

o Brands: Nike is the most beloved brand for the second year in a row. Coke plummeted from number two in 2005 to 15 in 2006. Express and Apple each moved up substantially from the bottom to the middle of the top 15 pack.

o TV ads: The most popular commercials — Geico, Miller,
CitiBank, Volkswagen — were all chosen by students because they were the funniest. Humorous creative equals a home run in the college crowd.

Or does it?

Thing is, humor doesn’t equal loyalty. 2005’s most beloved Web site CollegeHumor.com was demoted to number four this year.

Humor also doesn’t equal purchasing. None of the top brands named by students produce humorous ads. (And, according to
MarketingSherpa’s own 2005 study of IT professionals’ reactions to online ads, they loved to click on humorous banners but it didn’t affect their ultimate buying decision.)

Last week I was considering this data when I ran across USA
Today’s most recent Ad Track report.

As you may know, the weekly report conducted in partnership with Harris Interactive, asks more than 3,500 adult consumers whether they like a TV ad or not … and if they think it’s effective.

Last week’s study was about Hyundai’s Sonata ads. Reportedly, consumers thought these ads were 55% less effective than other ads on TV.

Here’s the thing, consumers are buying 44% more Sonatas this year compared to last year. USA Today’s reporter was mystified by this.

I wasn’t.

Thing is, the ads and marketing creative consumers like — or what they think is really funny — is not always (or sometimes ever) going to be the ad that moves the purchase needle. Plus, of course, the ad your own marketing team likes the most won’t necessarily be the winner either.

No one’s gut — neither your creative team’s nor end consumers’ — can tell you which ads will really work. Only testing can.

Which, pretty much sums up my entire marketing philosophy.
Got any data of your own on what people like versus what really works? Post it to this blog’s comments below …

Three useful links related to this blog:

#1. Three handy charts with more details on Anderson Analytics’ study
http://www.marketingsherpa.com/cs/anderson/genx2z.pdf

#2. USA Today’s Hyundai data:
http://www.usatoday.com/money/advertising/adtrack/2006-10-08-track-hyundai_x.htm

#3. Anderson Analytics
http://www.andersonanalytics.com

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Today is the first day of work for our new Web Applications
Development Manager Mike Minarik. So last Friday, I nipped down the hall to his office-to-be to see if it was stocked up, spiffy and ready for him.

There was a problem with one of the desk drawers, so it’s a good thing I checked. But that’s beside the point. The biggest thing I noticed when I got there was not one but two glossy new computers.

One was a PC and one was a Mac. A gargantuan, oversized Mac at that. Totally unfair. I don’t even have a Mac, and I’m President of the company. When you start work here, you have to choose one or the other. It’s one of those keeping-costs-on-this-planet rules the accounting department trumpets.

“How come he gets both?” I asked. “That’s what he asked for, and you said to give him anything he wants for his computer,” came the reply.

OK, so it does make a lot of sense. Every Web department should be strewn with multiple computer types … the better to test your site with. Unless you can see your site the way users may see it (including with a mediocre-sized screen set on low resolution), you can’t run a site properly.

On the other hand, I happen to know of a newish, complimentary, online tool that you can use to see what your site looks like in both Mac and PC. “Can’t he just use that?” I asked. Well, no, that would be cruel to take away a computer when two have been promised.

But, if you’re on a tighter budget than apparently we are — or perhaps having to approve new designs when working off location where you can’t get to both PCs and Macs, this online tool sure is handy.

Here’s the link:
http://browsershots.org/

Every year for the past five, MarketingSherpa has conducted a research study into the state of the search engine optimization (SEO) industry — the hundreds of firms and consultants who help marketers optimize Web sites to gain more search traffic.

SEO-driven traffic is the most desirable you can get from search engines. Why? Well, unlike PPC search advertising, there’s no cost per click. That’s because the traffic comes from so-called “organic” listings, the search results the engine shows naturally without being paid to run your ad.

Plus, clicks from these organic listings on average can convert as well — or even better — than the clicks from paid ads.

The big marketing debate over search engine optimization was not whether to do it — it’s self-evident you’d want to appear at the top of free rankings for keywords important to your brand. No, the big debate has been instead about whether you should do it in-house versus hiring an external expert to help you with it.

I’ve always been of the personal opinion that if a complicated marketing tactic can make a big difference to your bottom line, you’d better get expert help with it. But, that’s just an opinion. What matters is the data.

That’s why last year we conducted research, asking more than 2,000 marketers whose sites had been optimized, what the results were and whether or not they used an outside expert. The data was phenomenal. The marketers who had used in-house SEO resources saw an average 73% lift in overall site traffic.

The marketers who outsourced SEO to an expert saw an average 110% lift in overall site traffic.

With results like these, it made perfect sense to me when our tracking also revealed the SEO firm industry had grown year over year revenues by 124% from 2004 to 2005. I was delighted to see such a leap in marketers following data-proven best practices.

All of which makes the results just in for this year even more shocking. According to MarketingSherpa data just in, SEO industry year over year growth came to almost a complete halt in 2006. Total revenue growth was a teeny tiny 6.7%.

Did the SEO firms do a bad job? Not that I can tell. In fact, the average SEO firm added 76% more expert staffers to do the work better. In an industry where man hours are to a great degree what distinguish great campaigns from failing ones, this is a good sign. (See link below to more study data.)

In addition, there’s positive evidence from marketers themselves. This August, we asked more than 3,000 marketers what tactics get the best ROI. Traditional online ads got the worst response at 24% saying banners had great ROI. Paid search marketing (PPC) did much better with 57.5% of marketers saying their PPC campaigns got great ROI.

But, then came SEO, now King of All Tactics. ROI-wise at least. SEO headed the list with a remarkable 69.2% of marketers saying they got great ROI from it.

With all that fabulous ROI, plus years of proof that in-house SEO just doesn’t do as well as outsourcing, why is SEO industry growth sagging so dramatically?

It’s a mystery to me.

Useful links related to this article

MarketingSherpa’s Search Marketing Benchmark Guide:
http://www.sherpastore.com/Search-Marketing-Benchmark-SEO-PPC.html?8966

MarketingSherpa’s vendors:
http://www.marketingsherpa.com/vendors.html

Most ad agency Web sites make me absolutely nuts as a visitor. Instead of giving me quick, easy navigation to whatever I want to know, they just can’t resist showing off how creative they are.

And in their outside-the-box, wow-aren’t-we-unique, so-
revolutionary way, most end up looking pretty much the same — much like teens who dress as punks or goths. Generally, this means strong background colors such as black or red instead of white, copy in reverse type (or ultra-fashionable tiny pale gray type) and lots of Flash-based content.

I’m especially annoyed by having to scroll over nav buttons (or in some cases cutesy graphics) to make navigation completely visible. I don’t have time to horse around on your site. I’m looking for something quite precise and I want it now, now, now.

Probably part of this is because I’m a Type A personality. And an overcaffeinated one at that.

Which is why I was utterly charmed by the home page for Barkley Evergreen & Partners (BEAP), which is the largest employee-owned ad agency in the US. Yes, they had that darned Flash stuff — in this case, you mouse over navigation tabs to see people flopping about on stuffed chairs. … I’m not sure of the point but I’m sure it’s extremely creative in an agency sort of way.

However, they also went outside the agency-site-box and added an enormously compelling click button on their home page just for people like me. It reads:

“If you’re a type A person, click here before you waste any more precious time.”

When you click, up pops a one-page factoid sheet. Love it, love it, love it!

I asked Erica Wren, BEAP’s Marketing & PR Manager, how many
visitors click on this button. Turns out, the button has been clicked 10,763 times in the past 12 months (including twice by me.) That equals 15% of the home page’s traffic in the same time period.

Now, the rule of thumb in site design is: every major page should have obvious click link/navigation for every type of persona who is at least 10% of your average visitor population. Some people want lots of lots of information, some people want to play with rich media and some of us want to cut to the chase already. Your site must please all of them pretty much instantly and simultaneously.

OK, that’s oversimplified, but you get the picture.

Based on that rule, my personal award for agency home page of this year goes to BEAP. But it may not be around for long. Erica says a redesign will launch Oct. 31st. So here are two links:

BEAP home page — original version until Oct. 31, 2006:
http://www.beap.com

Canned version — we’ve posted screenshots here so you can see it no matter when you happen to read this blog:
http://www.marketingsherpa.com/cs/barkley/study.html

By the way, do you think MarketingSherpa should help uplift the state of the ad agency Web site world by holding awards? Lemme know by posting comments on this blog and we’ll act on your suggestions.

Yup that’s right. Models.

In our never-ending quest to scope out all the research being done in the field of what works in marketing, Sherpa’s research team discovered a study conducted by REVEAL World Wide.

These are folks who hire models for street teams to work NASCAR and Kentucky Derby events on behalf of brands such as Heineken and Slim Fast. This June, 53 models took their questionnaire on online marketing. Key results:

One Model Place (62%) and Craig’s List (55%) were the top two most used sites for self-promotion.

MySpace came in much lower at 20.8%, even though 75% of the models had a MySpace account. Plus, it tied with Craig’s List for first place in the “easy to use” rankings.

Why so low on the good-for-marketing scale then? As you might guess, although gazillions of people visit MySpace, they don’t tend to be would-be employers. Models land far more positions from Craig’s List (92%) and One Model Place (86%) than MySpace.

Success in marketing online generally is not about masses and masses of eyeballs. It’s about the right eyeballs at the right time (i.e. targeted niche media wins vs broad reach media.) That’s why as one respondent said, “The best modeling Web site is Craig’s List.”

By the way, what do models really want online? Less hype and more “real information” as one put it. Better screening of wanna-be employers, links to reputable local agencies and profiles of competing models for a start.

So, if you want to start a content site or email newsletter, I smell a target marketplace that’s looking for good stuff. That said, they don’t want to pay for it. You’d have to be ad supported … if your brand is targeting the model (or aspiring model) marketplace, this is an opportunity to grab their allegiance.

Useful links related to this article

REVEAL World Wide:
http://www.revealworldwide.com

MarketingSherpa 2006 research shows B-to-B marketers’ use of personas is far higher than expected. In fact, 40% of business technology hardware marketers use personas for their marketing. (That compares to 22% of software marketers and 19% of professional services marketers.)

I have to admit, until a few years ago I’d never heard of personas at all. To hear at least 1/5th of marketers now swear by them was startling. Can personas really be all that useful?

Then, I thought back to a balmy Saturday night this summer when my husband and I were sitting on a sidewalk bench in Newport, RI, watching the world go by.

Saturday night in Newport is date night. Hundreds of visiting couples from all over the world strolled by us. I amused myself by forming theories about women’s shoes. The higher the heel, I figured, the less secure she was in the relationship. Women in flats seemed ultra comfortable, in more ways than one.

I turned to my husband to share this revelation only to find he was staring in a completely different direction. Turns out gangs of small boys were rocketing down a hill a few feet from us on skateboards — in heavy two-lane traffic.

One of them, going roughly 30 MPH while crossing lanes, actually answered his ringing cell phone at the same time and yelled, “Don’t call me now, Mom, I’m busy.” I can only imagine the heart attack the mother would have had had she known precisely what he was doing when she called.

Anyway, it was at that moment that the incredible usefulness of persona-based marketing was brought home to me.

There we were — two people watching the world go by from the exact same park bench. But for one of us, it was a thrilling shoe-fashion show, and for the other an exciting sporting event.

If that park bench instead were a marketing communication (or Web site) and you tried to create an “average” message to attract the “average” of us two, you would have completely, utterly failed.

Our attentions were simply too different. You can’t average-out separate passions into one general message to please both.

And that’s what persona marketing is. You create research-based characters each matching one of the very distinct groups of folks who visit your site or view your marcom. And then you make sure there’s distinct content on that site or marcom specifically created to please each of them.

No one general message will ever work well because there are no average people.

Now, I’m asking for your help. Several Sherpa readers have written in asking if we could share useful instructions on creating personas that really work. Especially how to avoid creating personas based on internal assumptions that may not be true in reality.

So, we’re putting together a special report on the topic to be published here shortly. Got a real-life story or lesson of your own on how your organization created personas that worked? (Or didn’t.) Let us know at feedback@marketingsherpa.com

I was completely unprepared to hear the horrible truth. We’ve interviewed dozens of top ecommerce marketers over the years for Sherpa Case Studies, and when we asked them, ‘What’s your cart abandonment rate?” nearly all told us “around 20-30%.”

When we surveyed 1,100 ecommerce marketers this year, I naively expected the data to match up. It didn’t. It really, really didn’t match at all.

Turns out the average cart abandon rate was 59.8%. (Lesson learned — never rely on anecdotal data as your primary source for important numbers.) This measurement was the total number of shoppers who actually purchased divided by far larger number of those who put something into their cart.

Why do nearly 60% of online shoppers abandon their carts at some point in the process?

As I’ve mentioned in a past column, http://www.marketingsherpa.com/article.php?ident=29683, our research indicates the problem may not be the design of your shopping cart — in the distant past consumers couldn’t figure out how to check out or got tangled on the way. Nowadays, most consumers are very well trained in the steps of using an online shopping cart.

Instead, the problem is nearly entirely marketing related in nature. This should be good news because that means marketing can work to fix things without having to overly involve the technical department or invest in heaps of new programming.

According to our consumer research as well as Case Studies, you should be running the following four tests to see if you can reduce abandons:

Test #1. Promote return/exchange policies

Try placing a hotlinked bit of copy that reads something like “Returns Are Easy” in your cart. The place I would most recommend would be immediately next to the button shoppers click to confirm the order. You’ll make that nail-biting moment of final decision a bit easier.

Test #2. Post reassuring security icon(s)

I have to be honest at this point, even though some security vendors may hate me for it. Every single time I’ve asked marketers if adding a security-related icon to their site helped conversions, they’ve said yes. However, I haven’t seen any significant evidence that one particular icon works better than another. In fact, I strongly suspect the thing to test is not so much which icon but rather how many of them (do multiple work better than singular or is it protesting a bit too loudly about safety?) and the placement of them.

The cleverest test I ever heard of was a lesser-known merchant who placed the Better Business Bureau icon on the button that shoppers clicked to begin the checkout process. On that particular site, it helped sales. I’m not saying this would work for anyone else, just that it’s worth a test!

Test #3. Include privacy and trust language next to fields asking for personal data

We’ve been hammering on this for years, and it drives me nuts to see how many merchants still completely ignore it. Yes, there’s data showing it works. Yes, it’s stunningly easy to do … probably about 10 seconds of programming. I have no idea why this is overlooked — perhaps it’s too easy?

All you do is include a briefly worded hotlink such as “We Value Your Privacy” directly next to the form field where shoppers are asked to enter their email addresses.

Test #4. Remind them of their abandoned cart

Some merchants have tested running exit pops for everyone who abandons a cart … usually featuring an extra added discount. However, pops are vastly blocked these days, so you may as well test one, but don’t expect much.

The next best thing is to send an email to those abandons — but don’t make it overtly salesly. Instead, make it appear to be a routine transactional email. That’s not a lie, because it is after all a transaction they were in the middle of conducting when they left your site. You can simply — and possibly in text-only — note that the items are waiting in their cart for them.

Then, a few days later, you can send a second note alerting them the cart is about to expire, so you’re contacting them for their convenience so they can check out before it’s too late.

Other merchants have tested a “why didn’t you buy? or “what did we do wrong?” survey with great success. Partly the information is useful, but also the appearance of the survey in emails often by itself serves as a prod to complete the transaction. Either way you win.

Whatever tests you decide to run to increase cart stickiness, do them soon. Holiday season is a heartbeat away. In the meantime, see link below for more data from this study to help improve your site’s fourth-quarter performance.

— For a copy of MarketingSherpa’s Ecommerce Benchmark Guide 2006 featuring 311 charts and 23 eyetracking heatmaps, go to:
http://www.sherpastore.com/e-commerce-benchmark.html?8966

Useful links related to this article

MarketingSherpa’s Ecommerce Benchmark Guide 2007:
http://www.sherpastore.com/e-commerce-benchmark.html?8966

MarketingSherpa’s vendors:
http://www.marketingsherpa.com/vendors.html

I woke up this beautiful fall morning with a feeling of heaviness. It’s the fifth anniversary of September 11th.

September 11th was a Tuesday. That day I woke up psyched. MarketingSherpa had just won its first national editorial award, and we were going to announce the news via email to readers at noon.

In the meantime, I had a 9am meeting with Dan Miller, our Web designer back then, to choose typefaces for our site revamp. We decided to surf a few news sites — USAToday, NYTimes.com, CNN.com — to see what typefaces they used. I guess you know what we discovered instead.

MarketingSherpa was then headquartered at the top of the Adams Morgan area of Washington, DC. It’s on a hill about a mile from the White House and surrounding government buildings. By 11am, when I had expected to be putting the final touches on our award announcement email, instead I was standing in the street outside our office.

Hundreds of government workers were silently, grimly, trudging up that hill toward me. They had been sent home for the day; most official buildings were closed. But the Metro was also shut down, so people were walking in their suits and dress shoes with their ID tags still around their necks, some for miles.

That noon instead of our planned issue, I emailed readers a note that our DC and NY staffers were all OK, but we would not be publishing that day. It felt wrong under the circumstances to even consider talking about marketing, let alone awards. More than two dozen readers emailed me back saying this was the right decision. Dozens more continued to email in through the week, with their impressions, stories, feelings about unfolding events.

I began to realize, for the first time really how much of a community MarketingSherpa and our readers had become.

This morning, I thought for a long time about the changes the past five years have brought to the marketing community, which were in part caused by 9/11.

The economy at the time of the attack had felt to many of us as if it were on the verge of recovery from the bubble burst. Business technology and online marketers had been the hardest hit, and the following months weren’t easy.

Many of the Case Studies we researched and published over that next year listed as their ‘Challenge’ budget cutbacks and marketplace constraints due largely in part to 9/11. Online marketers focused heavily on search, affiliates and any CPA (cost per acquisition) media buys they could talk the by-then increasing desperate online publishers into.

Many online publishers who’d hung on through a year’s recession already, switched business models to test paid subscriptions. And B-to-B marketers started a boom in webinars that has not yet abated.

On a personal note, many of us made life choices and changes, some of which were only possible due to the Internet. Peers and colleagues moved to Portugal, Colorado … you name it, in a search for a more balanced life. If you only have today, many of us thought, where do you want to have it?

Influenced by this idea, in 2002 we moved MarketingSherpa’s headquarters to offices in a small town in Rhode Island. It was something I would have never dreamed of prior to 9/11.

I also never dreamed top-notch researchers and writers would move from more high-powered centers to join us here, and in part because they too sought a more balanced life in the post 9/11 world.

Five years on and the economy, while still a bit worrisome, has for the most part recovered. And the Internet’s commercial viability has taken huge strides ahead — at the time of 9/11 ‘dot-com’ was almost a dirty word. Now it’s one of the backbones of America.

But, are we better marketers? Today, while searching for the words for this column I watched news reports on television. And there, in the midst of thoughtful memorials, was a disturbingly violent ad for the film ‘The Black Dahlia.’

Just business as usual I guess. But that media buy should never have been made. Not during daytime television small children might be watching, and certainly not on 9/11.

So that’s my message for today. Many of our lives and marketing tactics have improved as a result of the changes we made in reaction to 9/11. It was a horrible event, and I wish it had never happened. But, I’m proud of how the marketing community as a whole has grown and changed in reaction to it. Most marketers that is …

Note: Your thoughts, reflections, and stories are more than welcome on this blog.

I’ve seen a 180-degree change in marketers’ attitudes toward search marketing in the past 12 months. Last year, marketers we spoke to in nearly every industry were busy expanding their search campaigns from hundreds to thousands and even tens of thousands of keyterms. The long tail was very much in fashion.

However, as 2006 has worn on, I’m more often hearing a new refrain. In part driven by excesses of 2005 as well as rising click costs, many marketers now tell me their revised SEM focus is about tightening focus.

If you’re cutting your search budget to target only keywords with immediately obvious ROI (i.e. where clicks convert on the first visit), first consider this real-life story that Michael DeHaven, Ecommerce Marketing Manager at CareerBuilder.com told me:

“We were beginning to cut the majority of our paid search budget, because we were struggling to get any ROI at all. Too many employers who clicked didn’t buy on their first visit.”

But, before the final SEM budget decision was made, DeHaven asked the tech team to create a new longer-term tracking system that combined multiple databases — initial search tracking cookies, ecommerce activities, the site’s registered user database and the business development and call center’s CRM systems.

Measured results were beyond dramatic.

“For one paid search team, there was maybe $10K in immediate revenues. When we evaluated it after 15 days, it was $120K. When we looked at the delayed impact 30 days out, there was about $1.2 million. Going further out to 45 days, it was over $3 million. It blew me away when I saw this.”

That one revelation not only changed CareerBuilder.com’s SEM plans, but it also propelled the marketing team to re-vamp the home page and email tactics they had in place to convert those delaying employers. Look below for Sherpa exclusive Case Studies on both of these revamp projects.

I hope you find this data as inspirational as I do.

BTW: Do you have interesting stats of your own tests to share with the Sherpa community? We’re accepting posted comments on *all* MarketingSherpa stories and Case Studies now at our site so that you can share your know-how with the community. Just click on the “Post a Comment” link on any story.

(Note: Marketing vendors and consultants, please don’t be self-promotional in your postings. Thanks.)

Useful links related to this article:

Case Study: How to Raise Email Newsletter Clickthroughs by Testing Content Types
http://www.marketingsherpa.com/article.php?ident=29682

Case Study: B-to-B Home Page Design Tests to Turn More Clicks Into Accounts
http://www.marketingsherpa.com/article.php?ident=29681

According to MarketingSherpa’s latest B-to-B Marketing Study (see link below) 80% of business technology marketers who’ve tested co-registration as a way to generate new business leads in the past 12 months found it to be effective.

That data didn’t surprise me because I’ve seen similar data from marketers in many different niches, ranging from ecommerce sites such as Sierra Trading Post to news organizations such as USA Today to tech giants such as Oracle. In fact, 32% of marketers who gather new email names via co-registration offers on third-party sites say those names perform as well as regular house names.

So, exactly what is co-registration?

You simply put your opt-in offer as an extra check box on another site’s registration page or order form. Then, the other site sends you the names of everyone who checks that box so you can add them to your email list. You can pay on a per-name basis, or in some cases run the campaign as a barter.

Source #1. Controlled circulation networks

Several vendors run online networks gathering business executive names mainly for controlled circulation business magazines. (Example, one of them is SynapseConnect’s FreeBizMag.com.) They place offers on a number of B-to-B sites and then ask responders to answer a long list of questions to qualify to receive targeted trade magazines for free.

Generally they sell co-registrations from this system for about $5-$8 a pop. This includes snail mail address and often even phone as well as email, and you can target by title, ZIP, industry, etc.

Most of these networks’ clients are trade magazine publishers, but I know of several B-to-B marketers who are using these services to grow their own lists as well.

Source #2. Creating your own third-party info site

I also know several B-to-B marketers who’ve gone this route. They got together with several complementary vendors in their same field and created an educational site for the industry. It can contain articles, a white paper library or a glossary, or even a special offer such as a sweeps.

All partners work together sending email campaigns to their own house files to visit this new site. Then all benefit from resulting registration opt-ins. An example of such a site is The CFO project.

Source #3. Special offers to business news sites

Although many trade magazines are still mired in the print-past and refuse to consider co-registration (often the ad sales reps haven’t even heard of it), some publications are testing ideas.

For example, The Economist has offered a co-registration program for more than two years to such advertisers as Oracle. In this case you purchase “complimentary Economist subscriptions” and they send out an offer to their opt-in list of free readers asking folks to sign up — handing over their email address to you — to get into the paid site. (See sample below.)

Source #4. Related vendor’s “thank you” pages

Are you friends with any vendors in your field who are not direct competitors but share a similar target market? Ask them if they would consider putting a co-registration offer on the “thank you” page of their own online offers.

So, when new prospects sign up for a webinar, white paper, email newsletter or to attend a user conference, the page after they sign up could say, “Thank you. You’ll get your XYZ in the mail. In the meantime, would you also like to sign up for this?”

Admission — aside from word of mouth, this sort of thank-you page co-registration is how my own company gains most of our new opt-in subscribers.

Three quick tips to maximize your co-registration campaign:

Tip #1. Isolate the incoming names

Best practices now say you should isolate co-registration names from your house list. Keep the files separate, or at least code name origin scrupulously so you can segment, mail, and track them separately. This way you know which partners send you great names and which to cut. You also can send targeted mailings and offers to those names in future that might not appeal as much to other lists.

Tip #2. Polish your creative

Your creative consists of a logo (generally 120×60 but some sites ask for 80×60) and about 250 characters of copy including white space. That’s not much copy, so just as you would with a search engine ad, carefully write it to be as powerful as it can be.

I recommend you test offer copy to see which pulls the best opt-ins for your program. However, “best” doesn’t equal “highest volume.” You want names that will be high-quality prospects, the rest are just a waste.

Tip #3. Be relaxed about barters

Don’t get too picky about name counts. Some barter deals will yield loads of names, others just a few. Again, remember that quality matters far more than quantity. As long as you are getting highly-targeted, responsive names, you are coming out ahead. Grab them and keep on smiling.

Useful links related to this article:

Co-registration samples:
http://www.marketingsherpa.com/coreg/ad.html

— For a copy of MarketingSherpa’s new Business Technology Marketing Benchmark Guide, which features data on co-registration, go to:
http://www.sherpastore.com/technology-marketing.html?9006