MarketingSherpa Blog

I’ve always wondered what works best in the battle to get noticed in the in-box, haven’t you? 

So I was psyched when Sherpa reader Ben Chestnut Partner at RocketScienceGroup contacted me about a quick study his team just conducted.  They sorted 40 million email messages sent to house lists by hundreds of their clients over the past 12 months by open rate.

Then they reviewed 20 messages from the top: Ones with the highest open rates, ranging from 60%-87%.  Typical subject lines (I’ve put “company name” instead of an actual company name) for these extreme winners:

– Eye on Company Name Update

– Company Name Newsletter February 2006

– Invitation from Company Name

– Company Name May 2005 News Bulletin

Overall, 17 of the 20 included the company or brand name of the sender.  Also, 10 had the word “newsletter,” “news” or a synonym such as “update.”  None of them featured an overt promotional offer, although three were invitations.

Most of all, almost none appeared to be written by a “marketer.”  They were fairly bland, factual, and even boring.

Chestnut’s team also looked at the subject lines for the 20 worst performing campaigns, which ranged from 1%-14% opens.  Typical subject lines in the bad pool included:

– Last Minute Gift — We Have the Answer

– Valentine’s Day Salon & Spa Specials!

– Company Name Pioneers in XYZ Technology

– You asked for more

Overall, only 10 of these featured a company name.  Only one contained the word “news,” and nine were pretty obviously promotional offers.  The rest were press-release-style headlines (“Now offering company name services!”), or brochure-style headlines (“True automation of your company name research”). 

In other words, the worst performing were all clearly written “by marketing.” 

One thing I found interesting: if you say the email has news that’s open-worthy, but if you feature the news as the subject line, that’s not interesting enough to open.     

Caveat: Loads of factors beyond subject line influence open rates, including how the house list was gathered, the sender’s brand strength, the average age (length of opt-in) of a typical recipient, deliverability, etc.  Also, we in email all know open rates are not a highly precise measurement tool.

That said, I still think this quick study is worth considering, if only as an idea generator for your own in-house tests this year.  Consider testing “boring” subject lines. 

Also, as this study reminds us, email newsletters have a big place in your email mix.  Recipients tend to prefer newsletters to promotions (and who can blame them?). 

If you’re interested in learning more, here’s a link to Ben’s info on his study:

http://www.mailchimp.com/resources/subject-line-comparison.phtml

By the way — have you done any studies?  Let me know. Our research team is always interested in reviewing third party data!

Welcome to the renaissance of email.

Email marketing is hot, hot, hot right now and I’m not saying that because I just got back from MarketingSherpa’s Email Summit in Chicago and I’m pumped with post-show fervor.

After three years of non-stop “search marketing rocks” focus, seems like the marketing world is taking a second look at its old pal email.  And in 2006 email response rates are looking darned good. 

It’s not the tired email-is-dead 2003 world anymore.  Junk mail didn’t kill email the way most “experts” expected.  Instead, the struggle to stay afloat in an ocean of junk made permission emailers much, much stronger. 

In fact, seems like most attendees and speakers landed their current positions about 18 months ago and they’ve just revamped their organization’s previously moribund email department.  Now, armed with test results, cleaner templates and automated systems, they’re ready to take response rates to the next level.

You could call it Email 2.0.  (In fact, I think I will.)

Ok, enough burbling enthusiasm.  Here’s our Summit Wrap-Up Report.

Opt-ins – how fast is your list growing?

Nearly everyone’s opt-in lists are growing like crazy (20% per year was the lowest number we heard, and that was from an extremely established niche mailer).

Double opt-ins (where people have to sign up and then respond to a confirming email to be truly added to the list) are also rising again as a corporate policy. 

This tactic was a stronghold of the very early email marketing community.  However, it faded away in 2001 as a broad swathe of “real marketers” leapt on the email bandwagon.  The game was all about lists and how to pummel them.

Those days have changed.  In the world of Email 2.0, marketers are as concerned with list quality, defined as the true yearning of names to be on your list plus their likelihood to click and convert repeatedly. 

When Todd Waterman of ‘Christianity Today International’ said his email team had switched back to double opt-in about a year ago, a lot of heads nodded in agreement.

Our two favorite tactics from show speakers for getting new opt-ins were:

#1.  Tweak test opt-in forms

Proving that no rule is set in concrete, David Kreitzer, Marketing Director Bella Pictures, says he more than doubled opt-in form conversions when he *added* an extra field.

Turns out brides visiting the photographer booking site were far more likely to complete and submit an email form when they were asked for the date of their wedding “to check availability.”  “It doesn’t do anything,” admitted Kreitzer.  “But she feels like she’ll get something immediate back from filling out our form, so it’s a good thing.”

Kreitzer agreed with everyone that while sweeps and free bonus offers raise opt-ins dramatically, name quality nearly inevitably suffers.   He recommended tieing Web analytics and email systems together to be able to track true value of name.

The good news is you don’t have to work for a mega-marketer such as HPShopping.com to be able to do it (although their email team revealed that they indeed do tie everything you could desire into one analytics database).  Mid-size and low-budget marketers can get in on the integrated tracking fun by using ASP vendors (many with low monthly fee structures) with open APIs. 

#2. Use co-registrations

Kevin Doohan, Web Marketing Director ConAgra Foods, told everyone he’s constantly looking for ways to shave email program costs — including ruthlessly cutting frequency on newsletters with lower ROI.  Then he slams every penny of savings into buying more co-registrations.

“It’s a complete land-grab right now to get permission to get into the in-box.” 

His offer: a simple recipe PDF download, plus recipe newsletter.  His cost per name: “Really cheap.”  His ROI: “Co-registration names perform extremely well.”

Speaker Nick Usborne, Publisher ‘Excess Voice’ newsletter, said he gets more than 40% of his new names each year from bartered (that’s right, free) co-registration partnerships with similar email newsletter publishers.  “Once you set up the deal, you sit back and watch the names come in on automatic pilot,” he said happily.

Surprisingly, when Usborne asked the jam-packed room how many used co-registration to grow their lists, perhaps only a dozen hands shot up.   

Creative — design for email

The days when your email template was a direct knockoff of your Web site template are over. 

Email templates that work are increasingly simple.  The only Web site navigation most award winners and speakers prominently included on their email templates was a hotlinked logo and a search button.

Plus, many email templates are slimming down from typically two columns to just one column.  In the meantime, typeface font sizes are up — often to 12 points for body copy. 

Images are still critical for many mailers, but smart designers are moving compelling text above the image so if recipients block images, they still see something of interest in their email preview pane. 

(By the way, although B-to-B emailers have wrestled with their design to look good in the preview pane for a few years now, according to speaker Loren McDonald of EmailLabs, consumer marketers will have to start worrying soon.  Yahoo and MSN Hotmail are scheduled to add preview panes to their email services shortly.)

Creative — copywriting for email

Seems like nearly everyone has been rethinking their copywriting for house lists this past year. 

Partly it’s driven by keep-it-simple.  How few words can you use to get them to click?  Few recipients are actually “reading.”

But a bigger part of the change is driven by the nature of the house list itself.  You worked hard to gain that opt-in; now to improve ROI you have to keep opt-ins actively interested in your content.

Which means fewer sales alerts, and far less promotional language altogether.  In fact copywriters have to split their voice in two.  Outbound messages to the non-interested masses have to be peppy to capture interest.  That means your Web banners, POP displays, print ads, TV and radio commercials and direct mail campaigns to rented lists should be “promotional” in tone.

Copy for the already-interested audience — especially email opt-ins, inbound phone calls, and search clicks — should be far more FACTUAL in tone.  You’ve gotten them to the store, now they’d appreciate it if you’d stop pitching them and serve their information needs instead.

Case Studies presented by marketers as disparate as E-LOAN and Intercontinental Hotels illustrated this point.  E-LOAN dumped their old “Click for Lower Rates!” newsletter in favor of a quietly practical personal finance tips ezine with hotlinks to a few tools.

Intercontinental Hotels team decided against mentioning offers in their newsletters for Hotel Indigo.  Instead, each month they send opt-ins beautifully photographed epostcards with playful haikus.  “Subtle” was the byword in the copy department.  And it worked, their clickthroughs are insanely high.

Email — truly global

Email, along with the Web, is one of the few departments in most marketing organizations to go global.  Although we’ve seen the trend coming, we were surprised by how many marketers mentioned, almost offhandedly, they were now in charge of campaigns to multiple countries.

This doesn’t always mean translating everything. As Pamela Jacobs of IBM explained, “We’ve scaled back.  Technical translations can be a problem for most of the world, so English is most-trusted by recipients.  We only translate for areas like Russia and Japan where English could be a bigger barrier.”

Lesson: If you are translating for local markets, don’t ruin recipients’ trust in the email medium by relying entirely on US-based translators (or software) to do the job.  Have every campaign reviewed by a *local* native.

Another lesson: Some languages (such as German) translate a lot longer.  So your carefully crafted call to action above-the-fold may require a heck of a lot of scrolling.  Look at what copy looks like, how it lays out in both the preview pane and in the fully opened email for every language you translate into.

Last but not least, bandwidth is rotten in some countries (yes, even at work), so if you’re sending people to anything that doesn’t work beautifully at 56k, consider an alternate option.

Office politics and the email VP

For many mid-size to large organizations, the biggest email marketing trend is, centralization.

Sometimes co-located with the Web marketing team, email is now a single department.  Marketers from various product lines, departments and countries all line up to be served by a single in-house email agency.

The job is both exhilarating and exhausting.  You serve as the company permission gatekeeper, legal expert, creative guru, tech manager and analytics expert. 

You need tremendous power (stemming from the very top) because often enough you’re seen as the big old email meanie.  You’re the one who slashes copy (non-email writers nearly invariably write too long); enforces brand-wide design rules; carefully throttles frequency; and bars marketers from blasting their targeted offer/news to the whole list.

Interestingly, the biggest battle right now for many (aside from coping with the sheer number of campaigns marketers are heaping at your gate) is fighting off the IT department.

Seems that in many organizations IT has noticed that email marketing is taking off and getting a bigger share of tech budgets.  Now IT, which normally makes marketing stand in line for help, is butting into meetings demanding that email tech be brought in-house.

“How do I convince IT they don’t want to manage email?” was one of the biggest questions asked repeatedly at the Summit.  Speakers (many of whom had been though the same battle) suggested inviting top ESP and delivery audit/reputation management vendors in for IT presentations.

Turns out when IT people see what a major headache getting email out through filters is (not to mention all the other delivery challenges), often they run from the idea of taking over email.

Another idea — one marketer brought his head of IT to the Summit and asked him to talk to each of the vendors personally.  Now that marketer is about to get out Requests for Proposal (RFP) to their top three outsourcing choices, with IT’s full support.

Useful links related to this article:

MarketingSherpa’s sign-up form for occasional news about our upcoming 2007 Email Marketing Summit (speaking gigs, dates/places, etc.)

http://www.sherpastore.com/Email-Summit.html

MarketingSherpa’s Email Benchmark Guide — all the data and stats on email marketing your heart desires

http://www.sherpastore.com/Email-Marketing-Benchmarks-Conversion-Data-2006.html

Plus, we’d like to thank the Email Marketing Summit’s top three sponsors:

Goodmail  http://www.goodmail.com

Eloqua  http://www.eloqua.com

SubscriberMail  http://www.subscribermail.com

Even as little as 18 months ago, business-to-business marketers could offer a webinar in practically any topic and prospects would leap to sign up for it.  That novelty factor has worn pretty thin now (especially in technology marketing).

These days webinars are a lot like white papers — you can generate loads of leads and educate the marketplace but only if the title you invented sounds utterly fascinating to prospects.

To a huge extent your entire campaign’s success is bound up in copywriting as few as 5-7 words.

How do you do that?  Well, here’s an inspirational note I just received from Sherpa reader LaSandra Brill, Sr. Manager, Marketing Communications for Mirapoint Inc: 

“Dear Anne,

My marketing organization was tasked with obtaining IT leads (IT Manager, Director or VP) in the education market. We had run a number of customer case study webinars in the past, so many that our pool of available customers was becoming scarce.

We wanted an educational topic and we wanted it to fit a need but we didn’t know what that need was.  We went back to our internal sales forum where reps ask each other for advice or information on things. We noticed that there was a common trend of customers who were asking for advice on how to create/write an RFP.

So we made that the topic: The Art of an RFP: A messaging and email security case study.

This proved to be a popular event topic with 668 registrations and 287 attendees. We had so many questions that the event went over the time limit by 20 minutes. The leads are still being qualified but we’ve already seen a 1% conversion to opportunities!”

LaSandra’s story points out the importance of tapping your reps for ideas.  They’re on the front line more than marketing is.  I also think the RFP idea is one other marketers could swipe for their own niches.  (Just make sure your niche uses the term “RFP”; some use very different terminology for the same thing.)

Plus, in case you’re wondering, her cited attendance rate equals 43%, which is about 9 points higher than I’d expect given many other marketers’ experiences I’ve heard from.  Bravo!

By the way — got a real-life campaign story of your own to share?  Email me at feedback@marketingsherpa.com!

Although everyone in search marketing is excited about the possibility of Pay Per Call (where you run a search ad but instead of clicking on a link, consumers pick up the phone and call), as with all new ad fads, the reality doesn’t quite match the hype … yet.

Here’s a letter I received the other day from Sherpa reader Mike Merten on his test campaign results.

“Dear Anne, The business I advertise with Verizon pppc is Internet marketing services and the campaign is national. Verizon has a decent pppc system, but I’d have to honestly say that about 80% of the calls I get are telemarketers — often several calls the same day from different people within a company working on the same campaign.

My own personal joke is that I now know what new telemarketing campaigns are kicking off nationally — I just go by the nine or ten calls I get from the same company (different representatives). I think that when people had to use print directories to do telemarketing, they at least had a sheet that they could cross out names on. Not so with the online generation I guess. Out of the 15% to 20% or so calls that are “good,” I did very recently land a very good account and have other work I’ve got a good chance of getting. The system does work, but it’s just that you have to deal with so many telemarketers and really stay on top of the calls you’ll mistakenly be billed for. One of my other clients quit the pay per phone call campaign I had set up for them after several months. Their marketing guy said that the pay per phone call results paralleled pay per click results generally. We used just about ALL the pppc providers, and the results: 170 calls or so, 11 qualified leads, 1 sale. But they use a call center and plenty of the calls were hang-ups they were charged for — again probably telemarketers!

Telemarketers — the spam of pay per phone call. One thing that I learned is that the I’ll get one customer/client out of 10 phone calls mentality does not apply to pay per phone call, at least if your campaign runs national. Local might be different story and better. The incoming call problems you’ll have to deal with if you have one of these pppc accounts are that. (1) You have 15 seconds in which to decide if somebody’s a telemarketer or not. If they don’t come right out and say it (or if they have a strong foreign accident, kind of roll out the words or plain simply deny it’s a sales call), you’ll go over the threshhold and get charged ($12.70 a call in my case). The problem with this is that you might erroneously blow a good call, which actually happened to me (the guy called back). (2) Expect to deal with representatives from the same company calling you thinking that maybe they’re the first one to do so. One mouth doesn’t know who the 10 others are calling, and the telemarketing campaign may be national. (3) Expect to have to take good notes, because you may get five to six calls in a day’s time. (4) Expect to have to review your weekly/monthly record of calls, determine all the calls that are baloney and then have to talk to Verizon’s people possibly several times to get things straight. Even then they’ll only give you a break if the calls hover around their 15 second threshold. Anyway I hope the above comments give a few people some insight into how these programs REALLY work. I’ve been doing mine for a month and a half and am still hoping.”

Thanks for that insightful note Mike!

By the way, if you, like Mike, are considering testing the so-called “tier B” search networks such as Pay Per Call hoping to get clicks outside of the bigboys, check out the special report MarketingSherpa did on the subject last fall. Here’s a link:

Tier B Search Marketing: Pay-Per-Call, Local, Shopping Engines, & the Minor League Search Networks http://www.marketingsherpa.com/sample.cfm?contentID=3113 (Open access until April 17th)

And also — if you have a real-life story to share about *any* marketing tactic you’re testing (offline or on), be sure to let me know at feedback(at)marketingsherpa(dot)com.

Have you ever created a campaign that generated truly outstanding results … only to see it cut or altered beyond recognition a little while later? I’m pretty sure it’s happened to a lot of us.

For example, after I presented a Case Study on a high-responding ecommerce campaign at trade show last year, a gentleman came up to introduce himself. “I’m the marketer who did that campaign, it’s a pleasure to meet in person. Unfortunately, since we last talked, the campaign’s been discontinued,” he said.

“Why?!” I asked. “The president didn’t like it, so we just don’t do it anymore,” he explained. “I know, I know, it doesn’t make any sense. Politics, I guess.”

In my experience, the problem of canning or altering campaigns that work comes down to one of three causes:

#1. Boredom — The marketing department is bored of the creative, the offer, whatever. They figure (often without any evidence) the marketplace must be bored too. Anyway, newer is always better, right?

#2. Ego/salary justification — A new marketer, agency, or president has come on board and they want to put their personal stamp on the campaign.

#3. Politics — Power have changed hands somewhere internally and whoever now has it wants to pull a few strings or make changes for pet projects/pet peeves, regardless of how it affects marketing results.

Now don’t get me wrong. I’m all for testing new tactics as well as testing tweaks to already proven campaigns. But, the key word is TESTING. Keep marketing campaigns that are already proven to work as your control. Test new ideas against the control. Then roll out the winner and then start testing again.

If you’re from the traditional direct response world, you’re rolling your eyes and saying, “Duh” right now. You’re no doubt remembering such famous controls as the ‘Wall Street Journal’s’ two young men package that ran for almost 20 years.

Boredom, ego and politics weren’t allowed to kill that campaign before its time because all that mattered was:

o did it still reflect the brand accurately?

o was it still generating better response than anything tested against it?

What’s causing this particular rant? Well, I had the flu pretty bad last week and so, I took a breather from editing new stories every day and re-published one of my all-time favorite classic Case Studies. (Link below.)

It’s about building a microsite that generates loads of leads. I quickly clicked over to that site to check that it was still live since we first published the story. It was. But it was changed, to my mind horribly. Given what I know from publishing more than 500 Case Studies on marketing, the changes have reduced the microsite’s effectiveness.

Why was the site changed? I’ll bet one of the three reasons came into play. One thing is for certain, I’ll bet no one did a split traffic test first to see if the tweaked format worked better than the old one.

I feel pretty bad outing what I consider to be bad marketing here. Our job at Sherpa is to be supportive and applaud great marketing, not to diss marketers who, sometimes through no fault of their own, are forced to do the wrong thing.

So, I apologize and hope not to do it again. Rant over.

=== Follow-up:

Here’s a note I received from MarketingSherpa reader Raquel Hirsch of HIRSCH STRATEGIES INC. (www.HirschStrategies.com) in response to the above blog.

“Anne,

Thank you, thank you, thank you for outing the ‘dirty little secret’!

In my (humble) opinion, it’s not “politics” or “boredom” that allows organizations to make irrational marketing decisions. It’s marketers’ lack of discipline to align marketing and advertising with the business model and fully understand how their employer makes money and how marketing decisions impact that model.

As a result, when budget-cutting time rolls around, marketers have no data to defend what the CFO sees as the largest pool of unallocated dollars. And when a bored (?) CEO decides the current campaign, microsite, or whatever is “tired” and needs “refreshing,” marketers have no data to protect the current tactic or strategy. Of course, this comes at a price: marketers continue to complain they “get no respect” in their organizations.

As long as marketers remain enamored of the “creative” and not strive to take a more pragmatic (dare I say, “scientific”?) approach to marketing execution via testing and optimization, and as long as a marketers cannot clearly articulate the impact of marketing decisions on revenues and profitability, they will be left to the vagaries and vicissitudes of “boredom” and “politics” –- and will continue to “get no respect” in the organization.”

==== Here’s that story link I promised: case study: 5 Best Practices to Create a High-Impact Sales Lead Generation Web Site http://www.MarketingSherpa.com/sample.cfm?contentID=2662 (Open access until April 9th)

P.S. If you’re wondering why I presumed the new microsite to be less effective, it’s because there are far fewer calls to action and response devices running down the right hand and in the top middle. Fewer response devices almost invariably mean fewer responses.

As some of you know I’m engaged to be married this summer. My fiancé is from the former Yugoslavia, so I’ve been traveling there occasionally as the wedding gets closer. Which is how I found myself on a plane the Saturday before last, heading into Serbia for a week.

Former Serb President Milosevic had died a handful of hours before, so the plane was packed to the gills with journalists. BBC, CBC, CNN, you name it. I was the only journalist aboard from the marketing beat though ;-).

In between meeting almost endless family members in Belgrade, Novi Sad, and the exceptionally lovely country town of Sombor, I slipped in a few meetings with marketers. Here are some quick notes for those of you interested in marketing in Eastern Europe.

-> “American” is not the fabulous brand it used to be. Most Serbs think of us as the folks who bombed them for reasons that remain somewhat confusing. Oddly, the state of Montana is not included in this dark cloud. Name a store or brand ‘Montana’ and product flies off the shelves.

-> Old is out. Chrome, pale wood, sheets of glass, and 1950s-style Swedish design is in. If you’re a 20-something, you wouldn’t be seen in a café that isn’t “modern” (and thoroughly un-Serb looking).

-> Coca-Cola’s promotional team have outdone themselves. You can’t swing a dead cat without hitting Coke signage and bottles of the stuff in vending machines and newsagent booths on every street corner. My favorite, a sidewalk café in Novi Sad that itself is a huge plastic Coke can complete with red tables and matching branded stools.

Pepsi is virtually invisible, although available. Red Bull is making headway. McDonald’s is barely there at all, although fast food loaded with sugar, grease, beef and/or potatoes is in fashion (one brand of potato chips advertises itself as “very very fast food!”).

-> A massive generation gap makes young and middle-aged Serbs (and probably these generations in all emerging capitalist nations) very different from their peers in more established markets. The following is my potted explanation, which no doubt some Serbs will take exception to:

If you’re 40-something, you remember your parents’ lifestyles of no-cost housing, relaxed work hours and easy-to-get (albeit low) pensions with longing. In contrast, you’ve spent your career battling 40% or higher unemployment, insane inflation, civil war and NATO bombing, and have worked two jobs just to pay the rent.

On the other hand, if you’re in your teens or a 20-something, the work world is glittering and thrilling. For the first time in 15 years, consumer goods are available and the economy is actually improving. In one small town, half the inhabitants making over 20k euros per year are still in high school.

Western companies and most Serb ad agencies are hiring cheap youthful Serbs like crazy because their work ethic is awesome.

In short, the older generation is exhausted, broke and just needs a rest while the younger generation is working their butts off to invest in a car, a computer and yes, a lot of Coca-Cola.

-> As Svetlana Kekic, PR Manager of Continental Banka, explained to me, marketing has only begun to gain respect as a business tactic in the past few years. Before, although a company might have a marketer, she (almost always a she) was more likely to be chosen for her looks or familial relations than for any skill or training. And in fact, only in the last decade was marketing taught in college.

The hottest area of marketing now is nope, not the Internet. Branding rules. Branding is the killer app that rocks the Eastern European business world.

Why? Consider how many new companies, stores and products are swamping in to take advantage of this emerging market. Almost every brand is a new one, almost every one jostling for attention with hundreds of equally new-to-market competitors.

In Svetlana’s case, the bank she works for has managed to prosper through two rounds of M&As that have winnowed the pack of more than 100 banks to now just 41 (and more winnowing to come) through the power of its brand. Unusually, Continental Banka has had a PR department for nine years, and the name recognition in the marketplace is now paying off.

Unfortunately most of the brand marketing I saw for other companies of every type imaginable consisted of the put-a-pretty-girl-in-the-picture variety. No one’s explained to the wanna-be brand marketers of Serbia that cheesecake is an indistinguishable commodity, not remotely related to brand-building.

Anyway, Saturday night, just before I hopped on my plane to get back home, I had a quick last meeting, this time with Mr. Nikola Orlovic, the recently retired head of economic analysis for the Serb treasury.

I asked him what some of my new friends, who are beekeepers in Sombor, could do to move their stockpiled honey into new marketplaces. (Their local farmer’s market can’t possibly absorb the quantity of honey produced.) Should they consider exporting? “How would that work?” I asked.

“Yes,” he advised me (through a translator.) “However, the first thing they need to do is to make a brand presentation. A brand is essential for everything.”

Ok, I agreed, what next? “The Internet is very powerful for marketing,” he said. “Had I heard about that?”

Why yes, I think I had.

Over the past six months, every marketer I’ve talked to who uses email extensively has told me the exact same thing. So, I’m going to go out on a limb here and call it a trend. Super-short email copy for offers.

I think we all started out thinking that email copywriting was like writing a letter. And for a very few, very special brands (mainly based around an individual) that’s still the case. But based on reams of anecdotal evidence across multiple industries, I’ve gotta say, how short can you cut it?

Fact is, people don’t spend more than a few seconds when they open and review email prior to making a clickthrough-or-delete decision. And, from what I can tell, that clickthrough decision sure isn’t being made by anyone reading *complete* sentences, sentence after sentence in order.

Our eyetracking studies show the eye skips around more than that. Flick, flick, flick.

Instead of plodding along reading word after word in order, the eye is seeking clues that will allow it to cut-to-the-chase quickly. People want to make that clickthrough-or-delete decision and get on with life.

Alain Tremblay, who’s been heading the email team at Bell Canada since before there even was an email team to speak of back in the mid-90s, told me his copywriters have changed the way they write messages.

“Before we would have a descriptive before the link. An example: ‘You will find all sorts of good information about your service call answers here, and, remember if you want to get your messages, dial *98.’ We found that was just too much information. They just wanted to know where to go and click. Now we just say ‘here’s the info on message retrieval’ and the content is the link.”

He continues, “It’s obvious the more stuff you put in the email the less people are gonna read it. I sound like a broken record when I say this, but it’s keep it short, keep it short, keep it short.”

“Back in the old days we thought more than 300 characters sounds like a lot, and right now, we’re A LOT less than that.”

The idea behind Alain’s newer copy (which by the way gets significantly higher click rates) is copy as navigation.

That’s right, you’re not explaining and informing and detailing and convincing and half-way converting. You’re just getting the frigging click and letting the landing page take over from there with the more detailed information.

And now, of course, I’ve taken up plenty of words to tell you to just use a few. Ah the little ironies of editorial life!

It’s my blog, so I can rant if I want to.

This morning when I walked in to say “Hi” to our wonderful head of customer Service, Sharon Hamner, she was about to cry tears of rage and frustration. Turns out Nova, the credit card order processing company we use, is suddenly and without warning declining all Visa and MC orders from SherpaStore. Yup, for the next 48 hours (until the dot of March 1st), all Visa and MC cardholders will be declined at our store no matter how good your card is. (However, if you use Amex or Discover, or want to be billed, you’re still ok.)

Why are Mastercard and Visa stopping us cold in our tracks via Nova? Because we’re too successful.

Visa and MC don’t like merchants who do well because then the card companies’ risk gets higher. You see, legally in the US, consumers have 90 days to complain about a fraudulent charge and get it reversed.

This consumer safety net is the number one reason why ecommerce has been phenomenally successful in the US. I’ve talked with plenty of marketers in other countries that don’t have such consumer protections, and they say it’s far tougher to get online orders.

However, the safety net scares the heck out of the card companies. Why? Well, what if a merchant suddenly goes bankrupt or flees the country with all of their past 90 days’ revenues and leaves the card company holding the bag? What if the card company has to refund heaps of upset customers?

To limit this risk, the card processors give each merchant a revenue limit. That’s right, you can only make so much per month. While it makes sense in theory, the problem with reality is that:

#1. Most card processing companies don’t warn most merchants about this revenue ceiling. So you have no idea it exists until you hit it or hear about it from a colleague.

Luckily, I was warned three years ago by the ecommerce VP behind a household brand name’s site that had been shut down one weekend by card processors for “making too much.”

#2. Most card processing companies don’t alert you when your ceiling is imminent, nor do they tell you at the moment they cut off your processing capabilities. Suddenly all your orders are rejected, and that’s it.

#3. Most card processing companies are slow and bureaucratic. No service rep or supervisor has the ability to help you on the spot. All decisions must be kicked to an executive in another department who may get back to you in 48 hours. Or not.

The fact that your site is rejecting orders NOW doesn’t concern them.

#4. Most card processing companies are exceptionally unfriendly to merchants that are smaller than, say, megalithic. In exchange for a 2%-3% cut of your revenues, they’ll refuse to give you a personal service rep or to allow reps to tell you their last names or direct phone extensions or let you speak directly with anyone who has any power.

As I said above, we’re not the only site to have run into problems like this. In fact, the list is as long as my arm and lots of famous names are on it. We’re actually luckier than most because being forewarned, we’ve been pro-actively negotiating our limit on an ongoing basis for years now.

Plus, we’re not new nor suddenly skyrocketing (two things processing companies fear and despise). Our business has shown steady trends for six years now, and customers like us so we don’t get many chargebacks.

Despite all of this, our store was cut off with zero warning late Friday night. We were penalized for being successful. In America. Thank you.

Well, all I can say is thank goodness for American Express and Discover. These two companies sidestep the archaic regs that hem in Visa and MC and are more than happy to take our business. Even when we do really well.

For the next 48 hours if you want to order from us, you’ll have to use Amex, Discover or contact Sharon’s department for an invoice at (877) 895-1717. And you know what? That’s just fine with me. I’m fed up with the other two card brands right now.

Funny, the biggest Net marketing trend these days I hear when interviewing people is Google hate. “Everyone loves them, they have the best brand in the world, but really they stink!” is a typical rant. I think most of it is due to human nature more than any research.

You know: Google is massive, Google is insanely powerful, Google and Bill Gates both have a “G” in their names. Jealously and fear are very powerful.

Last week, not one but two separate research studies were released revealing “Ta da!” that Google clicks are not quite up to snuff compared to other search engines. (Link to more info below.)

First, BIGresearch released a study with the key finding, ‘Yahoo Tops Search Engines for Influence to Purchase.’ (Note: These folks mainly study the consumer marketing world, not B-to-B.)

The next day, Web analytics firm WebSideStory released a study showing the following conversion stats across their many clients:

AOL traffic 6.17% MSN traffic 6.03% Yahoo traffic 4.07% Google traffic 3.83%

However dramatic this data, you should also realize (as I do) that the average marketer is often buying up to tens of thousands more keywords from Google than they are, in particular from AOL or MSN, so of course conversions would be lower. Broader terms equals lower conversions (but often cheaper CPC and better ROI).

Also, whether or not clicks from Google’s non-search AdSense network are included is not noted. If they are (and I bet they are) lower conversions would make sense as contextual ads almost invariably pull lower conversions than search ads. Duh.

OK, while I’m not the biggest Google fan in the world (it’s hard to unwaveringly adore a company that holds massive power over your bottom line -– as Google does for all of us who rely to some degree on search traffic), I suspect this anti-Google research is in some part a very human backlash against its gargantuan-ness.

My recommendations in response to these studies?

#1. If you’re focusing ONLY on Google get thyself onto additional mainstream search engines, niche engines, and/or shopping engines. As we’ve documented for two years now in our Search Marketing Benchmark Guide, a sizeable portion of the online marketplace uses search engines that sometimes are not Google.

A smart direct response marketer would never mail only one list unremittingly. Why focus on a single search engine?

#2. If you are lumping in contextual ads with your search ad buy, as far too many marketers are, split these campaigns and track them separately.

Just because an AdSense campaign has the “Google” name on it doesn’t mean it’s going to perform as well as ads that actually appear on Google.

#3. Search optimization (SEO) is generally far less expensive than an aggressive paid search campaign to get the same amount of traffic. Plus, the effects are longer lasting, and conversions are frequently in the same range (or even higher) than paid ads on engines.

This year marketers will spend roughly 1/8th of their search budgets on SEO, and 7/8th on paid search ads. That’s really stupid. (Lemmings, cliff … you get the picture.)

#4. Don’t use any search engine’s free analytics program to track your conversions. Why would you give someone who sells you ads all the data they need to decide if they should put the price up higher?

It astonishes me that marketers who would never publicly reveal their conversion data will hand over the keys to the data castle in exchange for a little free software. Google may be an awfully nice brand, with awfully nice people, but this is business, remember?

Since when do you allow an ad sales rep inside your books?

Anyway, rant over. Here’s a link to my other blog over at ContentBiz where I first discussed this data last week and gave links to studies: http://blog.contentbiz.com/

As Sherpa reported in a Case Study last week (link at the end of this Blog), Newegg.com increased revenues 30% last year to hit approx. $1.3 billion. A small part of the rev gains were from their “Bill Me Later” program, which is what we did the Case Study about.

However, Marketing Director Stuart Wallock and VP Howard Tong also told me their HUGE site revamp last April helped, too. “Our conversion rate did dip a little for a few months because customers needed to get adjusted again to the site. But eventually the new site ramped up to go beyond the previous site’s conversion rate,” Stuart told me.

The old site converted visitors to purchasers at 4%-5%. After the dip, the revamped site is now running at 5%-6%. With more than 450,000 daily unique visitors, that one point equals a massive revenue gain.

Naturally while I had Stuart and Howard on the phone, I was looking at the new site like crazy trying to guess the design elements that made the difference.

#1. Big typeface

“We took into consideration that people aren’t using small monitors anymore, so the resolution size is much larger and they’re stretching it across. We like to use big type so it’s very easy to read. It does seem larger than life. There’s gotta be a lot of information, but the information has to pop. That’s why our pictures are pretty big and our typeface is pretty big,” Stuart told me.

Side note: In my interview with Steve Krug (aka Web Design God) a few weeks ago, he noted allowing visitors to view your site in bigger typeface is quickly becoming a critical best practice.

#2. Wish lists

The site already had wish lists, but the functionality was revved up a notch. “The wish list is one of the most powerful things we have on the site,” Stuart told me. Two keys:

o Anyone can email a friend (or relative) their list easily so, for example, kids can send lists to parents, or IT consultants can send them to clients.

o Shoppers can post their wish lists to get feedback and review from the rest of the user community. This peer input can help decision-making.

#3. Make consumer reviews very SEO-ed

Newegg.com is famous for customer reviews; in fact some customers brag about their reviews. Now the individual product pages are designed in such a way that this customer-generated content is among the first that search engine spiders notice. Content from the manufacturer is secondary.

This helps because customers are more likely to use terminology that other consumers search by. Also, a customer review page can be a more trustworthy landing page than marketing hype from the manufacturer.

#4. Dynamic width (not fixed)

Most sites these days used fixed width. (Example: Yahoo, where no matter what your screen resolution, the width of the content that appears is always the same. If you have more room on your screen, you’ll see more white space on the sides but the same size Yahoo content in the middle.)

Deciding fixed-width’s popularity must mean users prefer it, the team switched to fixed width. “That was the biggest mistake of the year,” Howard told me. “We got a lot of violent backlash. Customers really liked the dynamic width of our Web site and that it would adjust to their screen or resolution.”

“Should you try this, too?” I asked our own Web team. Turns out dynamic width design is a massive pain and very, very hard to do well without weird white space and holes showing up on screens. In fact, Howard said it took his Web team a solid month to redesign the dynamic width back in. So it’s not a decision to make lightly.

#5. Adding more manufacturer content

The team redesigned the product pages in modules, which made it easier to stick in more content. One of the modules was a tabbed section “Item Intelligence” for extra manufacturer info. Part of the site’s product managers’ income is bonuses based on item revenues. So they have an incentive to push manufacturers to come up with content for this section, which can help conversions.

The content can include white papers, how-to guides, videos and 3D images.

#6. Four home pages

Yup — incoming homepage traffic is split into four equal chunks with each seeing a home page featuring 12 different special items. Visitors can click on links to see the other home pages. Even though these links are tiny (and I would think hard to notice), they are among the top five clicked links on the page.

“We’re widening our home page real estate by 75%,” explained Howard. “People like to browse; it’s window-shopping for geeks.”

#7. Bigger, flashier cart button

“It used to be just a cart with a little arrow. It wasn’t big enough. People’s eyes weren’t going there, so we made it big, bold and very exciting to look at,” said Stuart. The team a/b tested several different cart icons before picking the winner, so go check it out.

What’s next? The team told me they are experimenting with personalized email campaigns this year. I may have to go buy something at Newegg.com just so I can start collecting email samples.

In the meantime, here are two handy links for you.

Sherpa’s recent Case Study on Newegg.com http://www.marketingsherpa.com/sample.cfm?contentID=3173 (Open access until 2/20)

My Steve Krug interview http://www.marketingsherpa.com/sample.cfm?contentID=3165 (Open access)