MarketingSherpa Blog

In online marketing it’s the little dinky details that can make or break your campaign’s incremental success.

You work hard on offer, creative, media buys, etc. and then a tiny tech detail can depress results. Example: do you specify all your campaign hotlinks open a New Window?

Unless specified, most hotlinks will just take over an existing window your recipient has open. As MarketingSherpa reader Steve Hardman of SeniorMag.com notes, this can be so annoying for the recipient that it hurts your relationship.

Steve wrote me to say, “I wanted to thank you for one incredibly decent thing you guys do that many other newsletters do not. Your newsletter links open to a blank target.

“It probably doesn’t seem like much, and offering a thanks might seem silly. But when you have multiple windows open as I always do, it is aggravating when a newsletter link takes over an open window that I didn’t intend it to. I may be in the process of updating content or posting through that window, so when a newsletter link takes over, it is annoying to be taken away from that. As a result, I often wait until later to click on a link and ultimately end up not doing so. I know I can always trust your newsletters.”

Admission: Until I got Steve’s note, I had no idea we were doing this thoughtful thing. Turns out Holly Hicks on our email production team came up with the idea. (Go Holly!)

You may want to check with your email team to make sure this is how they are coding your newsletters and campaigns, too.

Sponsor: New! Search Marketing Benchmark Guide 2006 ~~~~~~~~~~~~
MarketingSherpa’s new Search Benchmark helps you compare your results & budget to the norm. 210 charts include:

– Typical Cost Per Click & Click Rates – Conversion rates for B-to-B, B-to-C, & Ecommerce – What your competitors are budgeting for search – Do agencies get better results than in-house marketers? – SEO (Optimization) vs PPC campaign data

+ 3,271 marketers’ real-life 2005 search campaign data: http://SEMGuideWeekly.MarketingSherpa.com Or call 877-895-1717
~~~~~~~~~~~~

Think you’ve got a tough job? I’d like to introduce you to a personal hero of mine — Carl Hutzler.

For almost eight years he’s been director of AntiSpam Operations for AOL. He’s been unfailingly pleasant and helpful to the hordes of upset and demanding people constantly barraging his department with questions.

— AOL users who want less junk email
— Other ISPs who want zero junk sent “from” AOL users
— ISPs seeking to copy AOL’s anti-junk practices
— Permission-based emailers fretting about filters
— Reporters covering all of the above

Last Friday (April 1st) Carl moved to a new job in AOL’s Host Mail Development team. He explains, “This is the side of the house that does the design and engineering of our email system and includes the developers who make the magic happen (on the server side).”

Given that Google’s Gmail just upped the ante in the fierce competition for masses of email accounts by doubling account storage space, Carl’s new job will be anything but a vacation on easy street.

Please join me in wishing him best. His hard work over the past eight years has touched all our lives even though you probably never heard of him. Carl deserves a round of applause.

MarketingSherpa reader Britt Hult of EF Education wrote me from her office in Hong Kong in response to the Case Study we published on VistaPrint (see below).

Turns out her company also tests VistaPrint’s idea of using a translated version of their standard template for each country versus very different Web design for each country.

She said, “We manage a Web site that has a standard template for worldwide use and about 40 different localized country versions.

“One of the most time-consuming conversations in the company is the extent to which the look and feel of this template is appropriate for each local market, with country managers always claiming that the site needs to have a more local look and feel.

This is despite the fact that we have standardized our offline brochure design worldwide for years. The only country we have tested this on is Korea, where we implemented a ‘Korean’-looking homepage to appease the country manager and found it had no impact on conversion.”

Britt is going to share the VistaPrint results with her team to see if it helps build internal consensus. In the meantime, she asked that we write more Case Studies on international marketing.

So, if you’re marketing outside the US and have fascinating test results to share, please do let me know! Maybe you’ll appear in a MarketingSherpa feature story.

P.S. Here’s that VistaPrint story mentioned above: http://www.marketingsherpa.com/sample.cfm?contentID=2943

MarketingSherpa reader Britt Hult of EF Education wrote me from her office in Hong Kong in response to the Case Study we just published on VistaPrint (see below).

Turns out her company also tests VistaPrint’s idea of using a translated version of their standard template for each country versus very different Web design for each country.

She said, “We manage a Web site that has a standard template for worldwide use and about 40 different localized country versions.

One of the most time consuming conversations in the company is the extent to which the look & feel of this template is appropriate for each local market, with country managers always claiming that the site needs to have a more local look & feel.

This is despite the fact that we have standardized our offline brochure design worldwide for years. The only country we have tested this on is Korea, where we implemented a ‘Korean’ looking homepage to appease the country manager, and found it had no impact on conversion.”

Britt is going to share the VistaPrint results with her team to see if it helps build internal consensus. In the meantime, she asked that we write more Case Studies on international marketing.

So, if you’re marketing outside the US and have fascinating test results to share, please do let me know! Maybe you’ll appear in a MarketingSherpa feature story….

P.S. Here’s that VistaPrint story mentioned above:
http://www.marketingsherpa.com/sample.cfm?contentID=2943

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

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

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

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

Another note….

You may have noticed that normally I never recommend any agency, vendor or consultant because I don’t think it’s fair to everyone else. But a friend of Sherpa just got laid off, and I think he’s so wonderful that I can’t help but give him a quick mention.

His name is Thom Pharmakis and we profiled his work in our past Case Study on Land’s End’s exceptional email newsletter copywriting. Now, he’s one of hundreds let go since Sears acquired Land’s End.

Thom loves Wisconsin (and often rhapsodized about the area in the Land’s End newsletter) but he figures the chances of landing a new full-time newsletter job there are fairly slim. So he’s decided to become a copywriter-for-hire and is hoping to land a few clients looking for great newsletters.

If you’re interested, Thom can send you a link to some clips:
thompharmakis@yahoo.com

Sponsor: New! Search Marketing Benchmark Guide 2006
~~~~~~~~~~~~
MarketingSherpa’s new Search Benchmark helps you compare your
results & budget to the norm. 210 charts include:

– Typical Cost Per Click & Click Rates
– Conversion rates for B-to-B, B-to-C, & Ecommerce
– What your competitors are budgeting for search
– Do agencies get better results than in-house marketers?
– SEO (Optimization) vs PPC campaign data

+ 3,271 marketers’ real-life 2005 search campaign data:
http://SEMGuideWeekly.MarketingSherpa.com
Or call 877-895-1717
~~~~~~~~~~~~

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here are three more tips Marty shared with me:

Tip #1. Text-only gets best results

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

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

Tip #2. Customize your copy to each newsletter title

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

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

Tip #3. Be flexible in media buy dates

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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