MarketingSherpa Blog

For two years now I’ve been mildly infamous in emarketing circles for badmouthing RSS.

Don’t take me wrong — I adore the idea of RSS, a direct opt-in info feed to one’s desktop. But, I’m thoroughly underwhelmed with the reality of RSS … so far. Fewer than 10% of Internet users can reliably be said to use RSS on at least a weekly basis (compared to the 91% who check email that frequently).

And, few RSS feed publishers track any useful results metrics. (Ever asked an RSS fan how the incoming traffic converts compared to other traffic sources? Deafening silence.)

However, RSS is great for certain aspects of search marketing. And, now that both AOL and Yahoo have announced they’ll be charging email senders $2.5-$10 per thousand emails sent to guarantee delivery, RSS is looking mighty fine to me.

We all knew the email party had to end, right? It’s gotten more and more expensive over the years. MarketingSherpa’s average reader is spending more than six figures on email marketing service providers per year now.

But, last week’s announcement by AOL may rock everyone’s budgets massively. The proposed charges would roughly double most mailers’ send costs. (The mainstream press avoid mentioning this by talking about fractions of a cent per name; but, when you do the math, things look ugly.)

What’s specifically happening? I can’t tell you for sure, despite lots of research and behind-the-scenes interviews, because the AOL and now Yahoo deals have not been detailed in concrete. (As late as last Wednesday all sources said Yahoo would never join the pay-me-to-deliver-email Goodmail program, and that AOL whitelisting would be “phased out.” Now both these positions appear to be reversed.)

Fact is, companies such as AOL and Yahoo that process email for their customers can stand to make A LOT of money by charging senders. And hey this is a capitalist society and they are in business to make a profit.

If the charge-to-deliver email trend sticks (and I bet it will) other email clients, from MSN’s Hotmail to Gmail, as well as corporate email servers, will start charging too. Your budget for email may double over the next 12 months. And then it will double again when rates start, inevitably, going up.

Just as with CAN-SPAM, the new system won’t stop unwanted email. It’s simply a toll-road tax and should be labeled as such. (Don’t give us guff about improving the in-box for consumers or delivery for mailers. This is about profits, and what’s best for your stockholders. And that’s ok.)

On the mailer side, hopefully this will galvanize folks to do better list hygiene, segmentation and ruthless pruning of inactives.

And, I can tell you right now, as a mailer myself, RSS is looking pretty danged good right now. We’ve already offered an RSS feed for quite some time, but now I’m going to start promoting it like crazy. So here are two links for you:

Hotlink to pick up MarketingSherpa’s own RSS feed http://www.marketingsherpa.com/rss/msherpa_rss.rss

Quick info about RSS for newbies http://www.marketingsherpa.com/sample.cfm?contentID=3179

Late last year, the folks at Three Deep Marketing (a firm offering survey software to the marketing community) asked me if I would help them get the word out about a questionnaire they wanted marketers to take.

I said yes — as long as the questionnaire was truly for research purposes (not a lead gen device asking for contact info) and as long as I could share the resulting data with you guys.

More than 300 MarketingSherpa readers wound up clicking over to start the one-page questionnaire and 27% completed it. I’ve posted the formal results PDF for you online (link below).

Here’s my quick take on a few of the results.

-> Marketers vehemently don’t want to be pitched in person or on the phone by a rep. 70.9% of respondents said “No phone!”; 57.3% didn’t want a face-to-face meeting; and 63% weren’t interested in a group presentation meeting.

However, most were cool with Web-based presentations and pitches. 86.4% would like emailed info; 87.4% wanted links to an info Web site; and 74.8% would attend a Web-based demo from their own computer.

I suspect that most business prospects would reply the same way to these questions; however marketers’ answers were perhaps a bit more dramatic because of the traditional sales vs marketing personality chasm.

-> 64% of respondents want more marketplace feedback, yet only 36.9% would use an easy-to-use survey tool to get it.

My take? Color me dumbfounded. This explains why I’ve never to my knowledge gotten an editorial survey from an email newsletter that’s published for marketing purposes.

The editors of trade magazines have used annual questionnaires for years to make sure their content hits the spot. For an unknown reason this practice has never been copied by marketers publishing newsletters. It should be.

(My golly, here you are competing for attention in your customer’s inbox and you never survey them to make your editorial more engaging?)

-> 34% of respondents said their biggest marketing challenge is measuring ROI of campaigns, while only 7.8% said they had a hard time quantifying lead status before handing off to the sales team.

While I agree that measuring ROI is getting harder with multi-channel communications (all those touchpoints intersecting on the same prospect), I was saddened by the lead quantification answer.

Frankly, when we interview demand generation marketers for Case Studies, we find too many of them focus on generating loads of leads rather than qualifying those leads. And then they complain about how sales never follows up on all the leads they’re given.

It’s another example of that sales vs marketing chasm I mentioned above. Marketing has to get more proactive about truly qualifying every lead and *only* handing over the best ones.

Anyway, rant over. Here’s that link I promised to the research results PDF with 13 interesting data charts: http://www.marketingsherpa.com/3deep/study.html

Acck! Even though we’ve published the annual MarketingSherpa Wisdom Report featuring readers’ own contributed stories for four years now, every year there’s at least one production screw-up.

This year was no exception. My team tell me the reason is because I always “rush the deadline” pushing them to move faster than is responsible. But I can’t help myself, I’m too impatient.

Anyway, this year as I was reading the more than 300 submissions (for 110 spots) one particular story was chosen but then somehow left behind “on the cutting room floor”. I guess I could republish the report as a ‘Director’s Cut Edition’ but it seems simpler to pop the left-behind story into my blog here…

This story was submitted by Stone Reuning of SEO Advantage, Inc:

“We offer SEO evaluations, so naturally we see all the blunders and mishaps of web sites that are not performing well in the search engines. One of the most common structural mistakes we see contributing to a weak organic search engine presence is inconsistent linking to the index page.

Inconsistent linking to your most important pages can dilute the search engines’ perception of the importance of those pages. When you link to your index page in different ways, the search engines treat each as a separate page. For example, if you link to your index page with http://www.domain.com/index.htm in one place and http://www.domain.com/ in another place, search engines do not recognize this as two links to the same page. This applies to links throughout your site as well as inbound links from other web sites.

In 2005, we saw the importance of consistent link structures play a major role in at least two cases: 1. A new client whose website was suffering from inconsistent linking throughout the site realized a major jump in search engine performance within one month of SEO implementation, increasing website leads by 4 times.

Other SEO tactics were also employed, but it’s likely that correcting the link structure accounted for much of the immediate result.

2. Another client had some work performed by a designer who inadvertently used inconsistent linking structure. Google PageRank fell by 2 points immediately, and the site’s performance suffered until the structural corrections could be made.”

By the way, in case you have not gotten your complimentary copy yet, our 2006 Wisdom Report which features 110 more reader-contributed stories like this one is ready for you at: http://wisdom.marketingsherpa.com (open access)

Throughout last year Google fiddled with the programming behind AdWords in its never-ending quest both to offer surfers more relevant listings and to make more money for shareholders.

AdWords expert Andrew Goodman (see our review of his latest book plus a giveaway hotlink below) calls the current situation AdWords version 2.6.

I’ve gotten loads of upset letters from Sherpa readers on this topic — mainly folks frustrated (and sometimes outraged) because Google’s asking them to pay far more per click than they were expecting to. So I called up Andrew to ask for an explanation.

Andrew says, “I’m seeing a number of 10-20 cent charges for clicks I incurred on terms where I was the only advertiser. In essence this means there are no consistent minimums. There are now times where you’ll pay .20 for what used to be a .05 click.” (And, in fact, I’ve met AdWords clients who have had to pay a heck of a lot more in the same situation recently.)

Plus, it seems that low-budget marketers tend to have their campaigns deactivated by Google more frequently these days. Andrew says, “You’re punished for not bidding high enough, for trying to bottom fish for cheap clicks. Under the new system there is less cheap inventory available, even for clever marketers.”

This in turn hurts marketers who use averaged cost per click data to convince their bosses to invest in more expensive terms. You could afford to take a hit on ROI for a few high profile search terms because of the bargain basement terms mingling in your spending mix. That’s not as easy anymore.

Andrew explained to me that the way AdWords 2.6 decides where your ad will be ranked (and what you’ll pay for a click) now seems to be determined by the following equation:

Your chosen maximum bid cost per click (CPC) multiplied by Your ad’s “quality score”

According to Google, a quality score is “determined by the keyword’s clickthrough rate, the relevance of the ad text, historical keyword performance, and other relevancy factors.” Which to my own mind is Google-ese for “a bunch of stuff we won’t explain the detail so marketers can’t jerryrig the system and so we can change the specific formula whenever we decide to.”

Like most heavy search marketers Andrew has gained some behind-the-scenes insights while trying to reverse-engineer the current formula. His tips:

– Your landing page’s relevancy to the search term is probably affecting your cost and rank. If you’re using a generic landing page for a wide array of campaigns, your ad rank may fall and your cost per click may rise. Your campaign could even be disabled.

– In fact if your landing page contains anything that would hurt you if it were being used to attract organic listings (ie. bad SEO) your AdWords ads could be penalized.

– The visible URL you put in your ad is probably considered part of the ad text by Google, so relevant words in that will help you. (I’ve certainly seen plenty of data showing the right wording in a click link can help clickthrough rates.)

– If you’ve been running ads for a particular search term for a year or more, Google may be less likely to penalize your rank for temporary downward blips in clickthrough performance.

– Your overall account lifetime might matter as well. If you keep switching AdWords accounts (or perhaps switching SEM agencies if they use their accounts for your campaigns) then you lose your history each time and risk your ad rankings and costs. – If you’re using somebody else’s trademark terms in your ad, your rank could fall, so test with and without trademarks.

– Test dayparting to turn off your ads during times of day (or days of week) when your clicks are historically lower.

– Try using Google’s dynamic keyword insertion tool to get higher rankings.

Last but not least Andrew says when you launch new campaigns, you might try bidding more aggressively than you plan to for the long term just to get the highest possible ranking and “demonstrate” to AdWords that your ad can get great clickthroughs when it’s in a good position. You’re paying to establish a “this is a good ad” history with the program, which perhaps will give you a leg up once you take your bid back down in future.

Andrew notes, “It’s a bad time to be a new advertiser. There are times you just set a budget and burn it in order to get where you need to be.” He suggests that you “keep a lower ROI but high clickthrough rate ad in rotation with one-two lower clickthrough rate, higher ROI ad just to keep the quality-score wolves at bay.”

In the meantime, Google’s competitors are also studying the 2.6 system and deciding how much of it to copy in their own programs. If you’re a major PPC spender, now is the time to get on the phone with an account rep at Yahoo/Overture and the new MSN Search and see if you can influence their development.

You know, sometimes I’m awfully glad that I’m just leading a research team instead of having to actually conduct online ad campaigns myself anymore. Today is definitely one of those times…

Here’s that link I promised to our review and giveaway contest for Andrew Goodman’s new book: http://www.marketingsherpa.com/sample.cfm?contentID=3117 (Giveaway contest ends 1/23)

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I love chatting with Hannah Paramore on the phone. She’s the President of Paramore/Redd Online Marketing which is based in Nashville, and her accent is just delicious.

As we were shooting the breeze last Friday afternoon before kicking off for the weekend, she said two really smart things in quick succession that made me grab for my pen so I could scribble them down for you.

Pledge #1. To make your email more successful in 2006

“Less copy, better headlines, and let’s sell it on the landing page.”

Pledge #2. To make your site more successful in 2006

“Repeat after me: My site is a dynamic marketing tool and it will never be finished … and that’s ok.”

Hannah told me that she actually starts all client meetings by making everyone in the room, from big-time CEOs to lowly marketing assistants, raise their hands and say the appropriate pledge out loud.

I love that idea — having everyone in a creative meeting start by pledging out loud the overarching rule behind success.

Whether you agree with these two rules (obviously I do) or you have your own house rule that is even better (another good one might be, ‘test it, test it, test it) why not start your next marketing meeting by having everyone take the ‘Pledge’?

During my routine check of the blogsphere the other night, I came across a post about MarketingSherpa listed in Feedster that I was a little scared to click on to check out.

Why? Well, the named blogger was our Director of Internet, Scott McDaniel. I knew he had a personal blog when we hired him this summer, but I didn’t think much about it. Now here he was apparently writing about Sherpa in, gulp, public.

I always made fun of those big corporate types who were so uptight about their official messaging that they didn’t let employees blog, or worse yet, fired folks for saying the “wrong” things in personal blogs.

But, now I find myself on the other end of the stick. Now I was the one with an employee who knows all — the good, the bad, the ugly — who’s blithely blogging away about us in his spare time. It makes you think. Corporate transparency is all very well and fine until you’re the one who has to sashay onstage in the emperor’s new clothes.

Anyway, I bravely clicked on the link. And then I started breathing again. http://www.scottmcdaniel.com/2005/12/13/whats-new-whats-not-lets-start-with-the-job

Back in the 1970s the catalog industry ran eyetracking tests to discover what people’s eyes did when they “read” a catalog. The results startled many: eyes skim diagonally across a page in a Z-like motion looking for items of interest, rather than reading “in order.”

While fascinating, not many of these tests were conducted partly because the equipment was clunky. Consumers had to wear a big metal headset with wires sticking out around their head, so it was hard for marketers to believe the results closely mirrored reality.

In November 2004, I was thrilled to discover eyetracking technology has been updated for the Web age. It’s now super easy for participants; no headset at all. Folks just sit in front of what looks like a regular computer monitor and act like they would normally online — looking at Web pages, scrolling (or not) and clicking.

The resulting colorful “heatmaps” tell you how people’s eyes really see the Web and how that makes them click.

I was so wowed by the potential data that we wound up conducting eyetracking studies throughout 2005 and included the resulting heatmaps in three MarketingSherpa research reports:

– Landing page eyetracking for our Landing Page Handbook – Search marketing eyetracking for our Search Benchmark Guide – Email campaign eyetracking for our Email Marketing Benchmark Guide (See link below for sample.)

Along the way I discovered eyetracking has three key benefits:

#1. Because the way human’s eyes are “hardwired,” a very few participants can give you data that applies across much bigger groups. So, the cost of doing eyetracking studies is minimal, as you only have to recruit a few participants per design iteration.

#2. You can run eyetracking tests on mock-up Web pages (or search engine results pages, or email creative). The participants don’t need to know it’s not a “real” site, as long as the HTML page they see looks real. This is great for testing design ideas before you build out an entire site or campaign.

#3. Eyetracking allows for multivariate testing. This means you can test extremely different creatives against each other to determine a winner. (This was tough for me, with my A/B testing background, to get my head around at first.)

We used a firm called Eyetools Inc. to conduct our tests because they were the only ones I’d heard of, but there are several other good ones out there now. Plus, some interactive agencies, such as Enquiro, are now buying the software so they can conduct tests in-house.

If you’ve done any eyetracking, or you plan to, please do let me know how it turns out and what you learned. I’m extremely interested in covering this topic in future issues — so you may find yourself the subject of a MarketingSherpa Case Study!

Here’s that link to a test result — it’s on page 6 of this PDF: http://www.MarketingSherpa.com/exs/EMBG06_execsumm.pdf

By the way – if you’re interested in any of the Sherpa research reports I mentioned above, they’re all available at http://www.sherpastore.com or call (877) 895-1717.

How many emails did you have in your inbox when you came back after this holiday weekend? Mine wasn’t too bad – only 2,784 messages, mainly from eretailers promoting “Black Monday” offers and from readers outside the US who didn’t have Thanksgiving off.

No fewer than 16 LinkedIn requests to connect were also in the pile.

(LinkedIn is one of those social networking systems online, where you can swap personal connections with other members. It has its uses, mainly for biz dev and some recruiting. I use it, albeit rarely, when researching story sources.)

I have this gargantuan pet peeve about people using social networking services; networking wanna-bes who hope to tap into my personal (and closely guarded) network of connections shouldn’t send me a form letter.

Yet, roughly 85% of the “requests to connect” I get use the default message LinkedIn provides for the writing-challenged:

“Anne,

I noticed that you are also using LinkedIn. I’d be happy to recommend you to the people I know. If you feel the same, please accept my invitation to connect networks. I’ll only pass requests on to you from people I trust, and I hope you’ll do the same for me.”

It’s not such a bad letter really. It’s just that it’s a form letter.

Why should I bother to connect personally with you, if you can’t be bothered to write me a personal note? Plus, because the average businessperson has more than 3,000 connections, you should probably include a description of how you know me if you’re not 100% sure I’ll remember your name.

Here are three examples of LinkedIn notes where the authors took 30 seconds to write a real note instead of lazily sending the form letter. Yes, I added each to my network immediately. In each case, it wasn’t about the cleverness of the writing, it was about the fact that it was honestly, personally-written.

“Hi Anne,

I’m taking advantage of this rainy Friday afternoon to reconnect with old friends and colleagues via LinkedIn. But we aren’t in each other’s networks at this point. Maybe you could add me to yours?

Good luck on the upcoming show! I have no doubt it will be a success as always.

Take care,” — Andrew Bourland

“Ahoy thar pirate Holland! Hope all is well in Sherpaland. Connectez vous?” — Aaron Dragushan

“Hey Anne,

We met @ the BMA meeting in Denver last month, and we talked about doing case studies together.

Anyway, I found you while I was searching my network at LinkedIn. Let’s connect directly, so we can help each other with referrals. If we connect, both of our networks will grow. To add me as your connection, just follow the link below.” — Natascha Lee

Anyway, I’m not writing this as an endorsement of LinkedIn over other systems, nor as a request for anyone else to request linking to me. I just figured, if you (or your biz dev reps) are using social networking you might want to improve the odds that someone will want to network with you.

Good luck!

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Around midnight last Friday I started feeling pretty poorly. I was in a San Francisco hotel (our B-to-B Summit had just ended), so I grabbed the Yellow Pages from the bedside table and looked for a local doctor who’d be available at such a crazy hour.

And, being me, when I got the doctor on the phone we naturally started talking marketing.

Turns out the 24/7 house call business is booming, much to the delight of five physician-entrepreneurs who started San Francisco On Call Medical Group. Their clients have included the rock band Blink 182.

“How did Blink 182 find out about you?” I asked. “They saw our ad in Google,” explained Dr Clifton Sewell.

The doctors have been running paid ads on Google for four months now, under terms such as “San Francisco Doctor.” They’re spending roughly 50 cents per click for top positions and their total monthly spend is about $500. “We get about 20-30 new patients a month from it, so we’re happy,” said Clifton.

I couldn’t help but give him a few tips that might increase the conversion rate — such as adding their photos to their landing page because people like to see people. “You should consider adding a photo to your Yellow Pages ad as well,” I added. “You’re already running four-color so it won’t cost you any more.”

“Nah,” Clifton replied. “We’re doing so well with paid search ads that we’ve decided to cut our print ad and just use standard plain listing. The Internet is where people find us. Almost nobody uses the phone book anymore.”

Guess that makes me the last of a dying breed.

Anyway, if you’re a rock star visiting San Francisco and you need a doctor in the middle of the night, I recommend these fellows: http://www.sfoncall.com

The other day I get an email from a Sherpa reader with a really great SIG (signature section).

Instead of just a name and contact info, this marketer put a little business card-style box at the end of her note to me, including a hotlink to a page of videos about her company. Naturally I asked her how the SIG was working.

She said, “Oh that’s an initiative from our Web department.” So I called over there and got the guy who invented the SIG box on the line.

Turns out last year he’d been fretting over the variances in everyone’s SIGs. When you’re a big ecommerce and high tech company with thousands of employees there’s a lot of email going out from everyone’s accounts, and everyone had “invented” their own SIGs to stick at the end of letters. Why not, he wondered, give folks a few branded formal templates that might work better? Last fall he created a selection of officially-approved SIGs, posted them on the company intranet and everyone could take their pick. The SIGs’ hotlinks were all coded so the Web department could track SIG traffic amount and value with a 14-day cookie (although they did not track by individual employee).

Results? The company (which is public and has asked to not be named here) now receives just over 5,000 clicks from employee email SIGs per quarter. The average revenue per click is $9. You do the math.

As the Web guy pointed out, some of these buyers might have clicked anyway. They might have been responding to email from a service or sales rep and used the SIG hotlink to get to the site more easily. But, some of them might not have visited the site at that time if the unusual SIG hadn’t caught their eye.

Because you never know why people are clicking on a SIG link, the best landing page turned out to be one with a choice of educational content (folks loved the company videos) plus lots of navigation links to shopping and service options.

It was more interesting than a formal company home page, but still easy to use as a launching pad for a broad site search. (This is the opposite of most landing pages, which should be extremely focused with little or no navigation.)

Maybe you should start thinking about what you could do with your employee email SIGs. Chances are, you can do more. And while you’re at it, track the clicks from them!

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+ 3,271 marketers’ real-life 2005 SEM results: http://SEMGuideB2C.MarketingSherpa.com Or call 877-895-1717
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