MarketingSherpa Blog

Microsoft vs. Apple’s as unavoidable as death and taxes. But the battle has taken an interesting twist that should be carefully monitored by anyone in the online content publishing business.

Apple’s iPod is essentially defending a proprietary model selling content as one-off downloads (in this case songs for 99 cents each).

Microsoft, on the other hand, is taking the spoiler role, selling monthly subscriptions like the new Napster to Go which gives you 1000 songs for $10/mo.

I don’t know about you, but if I add up the price to own those same 1000 songs on iTunes, I’m looking at, what, $1000?

I’ve been a big fan of Apple cut my multimedia teeth on the Mac (though I am forced to admit I went big blue ten years ago). Still, this seems to be shortsighted on Steve Jobs part.

Give us a similar subscription model, Steve, and we’ll be loyal for life.

NYTimes.com has the story (log-in required)

— Brian Blum

We all know that the BBC is the big gorilla of the British web scene. But, according to a committee that was commissioned to write up a report on the Beeb’s online presence, the BBC is overlapping too much with the private sector in some areas. Indeed, concluded the Graf report, the BBC could even be undermining the development of private web content in the UK.

In response, the BBC has already closed five of its sub-websites. In addition, the broadcaster announced that a minimum of 25% of its online content would come from external providers by 2006.

The BBC’s news website was not affected by the announcement.

The full story is here

OPA’s latest online content sales report is out here..

With data from comSCORE (who track what people actually do online, not what publishers say they are selling) Jan-June 2004 content sales were $753 million. It’s a 14% increase over the same period in 2003.

Bear in mind, this does *not* include the vast majority of B-to-B content sales (comSCORE has a very hard time tracking anything sold to a micro, vertical or niche audience) nor does it include porn.

According to a separate study from the Internet Advertising Bureau, online advertising dollars shot up 35% in Q3 to $2.43 billion. To our knowledge this data is self-reported by the publishers who sell ads. So it’s not nearly as accurate as comSCORE stats.

Anyway, OPA says the point is the gap between online ad spends and content purchases is widening. The ratio will be something like 10 to 1.5 in favor of ad spends supporting content online.

I say, hey, at least everything is growing.

— Brian Blum

I’d like to thank Sherpa Reader Jeffrey K. Rohrs, President Optiem LLC, asking me to look into tests he’s noticed retailer Ross-Simons conducting this year.

He wondered why sometimes he gets email campaigns from them in text and other times in HTML. (Link below to samples Jeff sent me.)

Ross-Simons’ Internet Marketing Director Anne Driscoll told me, “We tested HTML when years ago just like everybody else, and it was four-times as effective as text. However, now we’re testing to see if text can convey an urgency that’s not necessarily there in HTML.”

So her team has created two different HTML templates for their house-list campaigns. The first is a standard, branded HTML email that looks similar to their site. They’ll use it for regular announcements, and a first wave of sales promos.

The second is a looks-like-text HTML format with all obvious graphics stripped. This pared-down look is used for promo reminders – sent as a second wave to a campaign. Turns out it’s “as effective or even more effective than standard HTML” for an urgent reminder that a sale is about to end.

“It’s less to do with deliverability and more to do with the way a customer interprets a message,” notes Anne.

Here’s a link to the samples Jeff sent me of the text vs HTML: http://www.marketingsherpa.com/ross/ad.html

Thanks again for your support, and keep those suggestions coming!

Most marketers are so obsessed with their own search rankings (i.e. where your site and ads show up on search engines), that they may not always think about search from the other side — how what people are looking for is also constantly changing.

Mike Grover the Marketing Director over at CMP TechWeb’s just sent me results from the past 90 days of hundreds of thousands of actual visitor searches on their sites. These are the top search terms that aren’t company names:

Sept 2004 non-company-name terms
1. RFID
2. Outsourcing
3. VOIP
4. ERP
5. Web Services
6. Linux
7. Spam
8. sp2
9. Spyware
10. Wireless

August 2004 non-company-name terms
1. RFID
2. VOIP
3. Outsourcing
4. ERP
5. CRM
6. Linux
7. Salary Survey
8. Spam
9. Web Services
10. Wireless

July 2004 non-company-name terms
1. VOIP
2. SPAM
3. LINUX
4. Outsourcing
5. ERP
6. Wireless
7. Spyware
8. CRM
9. VPN

You can see that the concerns and interests that the mainly IT-pro population on CMP TechWeb’s sites really changes over in short periods of time. It makes me think:

– You need to be able to create white paper and webinar offers on a super-speedy schedule to get the most results as the painpoints of the marketplace alters.

– Ditto for changing ad copy and landing pages. (Luckily this is easier online than in print/DM.)

– If you’re budgeting for 2005 search ads based on 2004 key term traffic data, your numbers are gonna be off. This stuff is in flux. Mike also gave me a 90-day list of the company names most searched for, and you can see real differences here too. I bet it has more to do with who’s running heavy ad campaigns and/or product launch announcements. So, yeah, non-search PR and ads do affect search traffic.

If you are planning a big non-search promo, you should budget for your name-related search traffic to rise accordingly too. (And then email me to tell me by how much — I’m very interested in relations between campaigns.)

September top companies searched for
1. SAP
2. IBM
3. Cisco
4. Oracle
5. Peoplesoft

August top companies searched for
1. SAP
2. EDS
3. IBM
4. Peoplesoft
5. Cisco

July top companies searched for
1. Cisco
2. SAP
3. IBM
4. Oracle

Like many marketers working for venerable brick and mortars, Shane McGlaun had to pitch long and hard to get his boss at Tyler Texas’ Goods Pharmacy to let him experiment online.

After three years’ persistence, Shane got the go-ahead to launch an entirely new site to try to take the 68-year old pharmacy nationwide online. The new business, HealthyLifePharmacy.com launched this January.

30 days later, Shane had to report “miserable failure.” The site had only made one single sale despite receiving thousands of visitors from SEO and paid search efforts.

“We had an attractive site, but it just couldn’t sell anything. Visitors didn’t go any further than the page they landed on, and most pageviews didn’t last but a second.”

Instead of giving up, Shane analyzed the data, pitched his boss for a bit more time and budget, got help from expert Steve Jackson at ConversionChronicles.com, and worked long hours for two months to launch an entirely revamped site. “The color scheme is the only thing we kept.”

Now he’s getting a .8% conversion rate from visitor to sale. And, as he puts it, the battle is only started. I bet he’ll hit 2% before the end of this year. What helped?

-> Promoting the phone number more prominently.

“Probably half the orders call and ask a lot of questions. They want to make sure what they are buying is going to work for their loved one, and that they are reading the information correctly. They don’t believe the price and description, so they call to verify. It’s been an eye opener.”

-> Highlighting key words and adding white space in heavy copy areas. You need detailed text to explain many of the products properly, and Shane wants to make sure folks who don’t read everything can get to the important parts.

-> Retooling product descriptions so they describe benefits, rather than relying entirely on the manufacturers’ feature-focused descriptions.

Example: “Instead of just saying ‘It weighs four ounces’, now we add, ‘and you can carry it in your diaper bag quite easily.’ That makes more sense to moms.”

Shane also discovered that by adding a question box asking “What is your top concern?” to his newsletter sign-up form, lots of visitors would submit ideas. “You’d be amazed at what people will put in that blank — some their life stories.”

The results have helped him create a newsletter that readers find truly compelling. (Great idea – we may test that ourselves!) Shane’s a personal inspiration to me because he didn’t give up when things looked bad, and he didn’t blame the medium. I figured you might find him inspiring too….

I’m not sure why, but such is the nature of PR people that they almost never include clients’ URLs in press releases or emailed story pitches. So I frequently go to search engines to find somebody’s client’s site, and see if we should write about them.

It’s not always easy to find the link even then because so many marketers are buying paid ads against their competitors’ names. So, there you are looking for Acme Company and five of Acme’s direct competitors spring up to coat the results screen.

So I was extremely interested to hear about new study results from an outfit called NameProtect®.

This month, they analyzed the paid search ads that appeared on Yahoo! and Google against the trademark terms associated with America’s top 100 brands (as ranked by Interbrand and BusinessWeek.)

– 92% of the top 100 brands’ had third-party ads appeared in search results against their names.

– Of these paid search ads, 98% included the actual brand name in the ad. So the trademarked brand name was in the text of the third-party ad. (This is a critical factor in determining whether the sponsor is violating trademark rights.)

– 45% of the ads were for directly competitive and potentially unlicensed offerings. Others were for related offers.

– Just 7% of the paid ads were placed by the actual brand owner.

So, the big brands are currently not protecting their trademarks very aggressively in paid search. I guess big companies move more slowly than nimble competitors. However, I’ve heard the courts don’t tend to look favorably on brands who have a history of leaving their trademark out defenseless and unprotected in the cold competitive world, even if it is the brave new world of search.

Time to call legal and get those cease-and-desist letters flowing!

“Tell that to the next corner-office stuffed shirt who doesn’t think email marketing pays off.

That $15.50 per email-marketing dollar spent is roughly 17% more than in direct-mail campaigns and 73% more than telemarketing campaigns, according to a new study from the Winterberry Group, a New York-based research and consulting group.

Winterberry also predicts that email sales will go up to $16.70 per dollar in the coming year, compared to $14.60 generated per DM dollar, and $9.71 in sales per telemarketing-campaign dollar.

(We got these numbers from an Internet Retailer story, which you can read here, but we should be getting more detailed numbers soon, so check back for an update.)”

“Do you like to stick a big ol’ promotion into your order confirmations or CRM follow-ups to upsell or cross-sell customers? You might think those are transactional emails, and thus exempt from CAN-SPAM, but the Federal Trade Commission isn’t so sure.

The FTC today dropped another shoe on its way to implementing CAN-SPAM: It just opened another comments session (open through September 13, 2004), this time on its definitions of what constitute’s an email’s “primary purpose.”

This is a pretty key stage in the rulemaking process, because email whose primary purpose it defines as commercial has to comply with CAN-SPAM. Transactional and informational ones don’t.

Here’s what the FTC is considering:

What it boils down to is this: If an email message looks commercial, then it is, either by what you put in the subject line or how prominently you feature ads or promos — your own or a paid advertiser’s — in your content.

In other words, if you send an order-confirmation email that features an upselling promo in the subject line or is the first thing somebody sees when opening the message, that could make your email commercial, not transactional or relationship-focused.

1. Any message is commercial if it only advertises or promotes a product or service, either in the subject line (“15% Off If You Act Today!”) or in the message body.

2. An email message that has both commecial content and a transactional/relationship message (subscription or order confirmation, customer service follow-up, etc.) is commercial if you put the promo in the subject line or if it’s the first think somebody sees after opening the message.

3. Email messages that mix promotional content, such as your own house ads or third-party ads, with informational content, as in an email newsletter, are commercial if they give the ads top billing in the subject line or message body, especially if you give the ads more real estate, color or graphics to make them stand out from the text.

Craig himself explains how the unexpected deal came about here.