MarketingSherpa Blog

Well, not exactly. But close.

The number of online newsletters published in the U.S. and Canada apparently doubled from 2003 to 2004, although it isn’t clear if the number really grew or if somebody just found more to count. And less than half of those are online-only.

Whatever — the 2004 edition of the Oxbridge Directory of Newsletters lists 4,949 online newsletters being published in the U.S. and Canada, up from 2,500 in 2003.

“Online” includes any electronic transmission, whether Web, email or fax. The directory counted 1,600 of the 4,949 as being available only electronically, while the remaining 3,309 are also in print format.

“Our paid search click conversion rates go down nights and weekends,” Marc Katz, CO CustomInk, told me when I interviewed him for this week’s Case Study (story below.) “Click volume goes down, but the proportion of orders to clicks also goes down.”

Marc also told me he normally gets about 20% of orders from consumers calling the phone number displayed prominently on the site. Here too there are definitely weekend patterns. He gets so few calls on Saturdays that “we only staff the line for three hours.” But then “Sundays are busier, and as the day wears on the line gets busier and busier so by Sunday evening it’s almost like a normal weekday.” So, he staffs phones for eight carefully chosen hours on Sundays.

Why does this matter to you?

When I ask most marketers about how they adjust their pay per click ad spending and/or their inbound call center hours for weekends, they tell me either “We don’t” or “We just shut down on weekends entirely.”

Hardly anyone, aside from the most sophisticated eretailers and catalogers, tweaks weekend schedules based on actual demonstrated customer use patterns. And, being b-to-b is no excuse for cutting call centers willy nilly on Sundays. Some of Marc’s customers are businesses.

However, one word of advice — don’t cut any paid search ads due to lower weekend conversion rates unless your metrics package is tracking whether those surfers wind up converting later. You may be cutting off your nose to spite your face. Weekend surfers may be researching purchases they intend to make from work the following week.

Got an interesting data of your own to share? Lemme know. aholland@marketingsherpa.com

Link to Case Study about CustomInk:
http://www.marketingsherpa.com/sample.cfm?contentID=2731

While you were relaxing last weekend, I was screwing together vast amounts of furniture for our lovely new offices. (Take my advice, don’t buy Ikea’s Sonne organizer unless you have a power screwdriver and 47-hours to kill.)

Now that we’ve moved into Suites 3 & 4 at 499 Main Street in super-cool Warren RI (picture Mayberry with a waterfront), I’m ready to make two critical hires. If you or someone you know is interested, and is either located near Warren or is open to relocating to RI or Southern MA, here are links:

Position #1. Managing Editor Newsletters

You’ll manage a team of reporters, meet daily deadlines, lead editorial development, edit articles, and write some yourself. Must be obsessed with serving readers A+ useful info. Salary and opportunity are great. Reports to Publisher. Apply at:
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.asp?u=96406489021

Position #2. Marketing Manager

You’ll handle all daily marketing activities & admin for SherpaStore.com and email newsletter circulation promos. Reports to Marketing Director. Must be good at spreadsheets, copywriting, multitasking, and phone/email communication. Direct response experience required, preferably in eretail or publishing. Apply at:
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.asp?u=85660510109

During my speech on “5 Biggest Challenges for Online Sub Marketers” at our Summit in NYC last week, I told everyone to worry about Google’s Gmail.

Why?

Because Google is going to insert paid third-party ads into incoming mail for users. Which makes sense — it pays the bills for that hefty one gig of mailbox-space Google will offer to lure users from Hotmail, Yahoo, etc.

If you’re a marketer or publisher sending mail, this means Google’s going to stick ads on the campaigns and newsletters you send. It may distract from your message, and certainly could hurt your click rates because more options spit clicks.

Plus — this is the scary part — an ad from your direct competitor could be displayed beside your email to your list.

Google probably won’t allow marketers to target email ads by sender or recipient, but they probably will allow ad buyers to target by keyword/key term. And, no they’re not protecting trademark now for search ads, so there’s no reason to assume they’ll protect it in email.

To sum up: your competitors may be able to put ads inside of all emailed messages Gmail users get that contain your company or brand name.

Our MarketingSherpa Editor called me today with a tiny bit of silver lining to help emailers cope with the Gmail cloud.

Turns out that other email services – including Yahoo and Terra Lycos – are starting to take a competitive stance against Google’s incursion by making their mailbox sizes bigger too. This is a complete reversal of the trend of the past two years with boxes becoming so tiny that loads of email bounced.

So, your bounce rates to live active accounts will probably be lower, especially over holiday and vacation-times when folks don’t clean out boxes as often.

Of course your message or offer has to be ultra-compelling to make it past fast-delete when they get back to their computers. But, you already knew that.

Useful link — Janet has posted a screenshot of what an incoming message looks like in Gmail for you. She asked me to note that since Gmail is in beta, the format may change considerably when Google actually rolls it out:
http://www.marketingsherpa.com/images/gmail.jpg

P.S. Here’s a free link to my wrap-up summary of the Subscription Summit as well:
http://www.contentbiz.com/sample.cfm?contentID=2709

Publisher’s note: Andrew dashed off these notes as an internal memo for us. I thought you might enjoy them too.

The conference had a strong turnout and there was good energy. I found the content enlightening, both for what was being said and what was not being said ….

Search engines were typically reticent about fielding specific questions that they felt divulged too much information about their technologies, while the web designers, SEO’s, and marketers picked and prodded for answers to why their site was “blacklisted” or is not showing up properly on a organic search or why some link farms are detected while others are not. (This interaction was very entertaining.)

Fox in the hen house award went to Eric Ward. He was part of the “Link Building” session which included Google and Ask Jeeves. He essentially said not to really consider the ramifications of links on your search engine results because they often don’t find all the links on your site any way and that some of the most valued links are not tracked by the search engines. He was a breath of fresh air.

Other than that, the seven hot topics at the conference were:

#1 Click-fraud

This was the Large white elephant that was consistently walking around each room. A few people brought it up but no one really stayed on the topic. No one really wants to talk about it, but everyone knows it is an issue. Tuesday morning there was some buzz about the article in the “India Times” about companies that are hired in India to find specific keywords and click on them. This issue seems to be something that needs to be better addressed and considering the importance of this topic it seemed to be an overt omission that there were no sessions devoted to this topic.

#2 Local Search

– This is clearly going to be an area that is going to grow in the very near future. It seemed that Google is a bit behind in Local search and that there are search competitors who may have a bit better of a handle on it than they do. The technology for local search seemed to be falling short of the marketer demand…I anticipate some serious advances by search engines in the field of Local search.

Many local marketers were complaining to the Search Engines that they generate strong content about a local markets and their sites are being pushed well down the organic search listing by the Content Aggregators like Expedia, Hotels.com, and Travelocity which may just have better overall traffic. These aggregators may have better traffic numbers, but they are not the authorities regarding local markets.

#3 Greater Description of Keyword

– As I had mentioned in the IT Marketing Metrics Guidebook, the greater the number of words in a search, the more specific the end-user is in their search which is commensurate to higher conversion rates. The more words in a keyword search, the greater the conversion rate. In addition, it is generally less expensive to purchase 3,4 and 5 word keyword searches that 1-2 word searches. So not only is it better at conversion, it is cheaper to buy. Don’t expect this to remain true for too much longer—the genie is out of the bottle. Buy them while you can.

#4 Dayparts (aka Dayparting)

Google and others talked about the importance of looking at dayparts, both in measuring comparative usage between online and TV and how dayparts affect interest and intent. I think I heard the word “Dayparting” come out of about 5 different speakers mouths, (they said “Dayparting” and not “Daypart” because of the web’s insistence to think they are inventing something that has been around traditional media for the last 100 years). There is definitely something relevant to purchasing specific daypart that we may see coming up in the near future. Google seemed to be positioning themselves to look at this as a viable purchasing method.

#5 Rise of the web analytics tools

Out of the maturation of the search marketing category is the honing of Web Analytics tools. Finally, there is a business model online that is a foundation for data and research to base their software and tools around.

The metrics are clear. (Particularly BtoC — BtoB is a bit more in the dark that’s what my book is for.) Clickthrough, conversions, Average Revenue per purchase, ROI of purchasing… These are very concrete tracking metrics and the new tools that have been created for both search and website conversion tracking are proving to be extremely helpful.

#6 More personalized search

In the same vein of local search, customized search was a big topic for marketers who don’t feel that their brands are being as well represented in queries that are really looking for their specific content. They all understand the parameters in paid search, but when it comes to organic, they feel like the larger aggregators are able to monopolize the listings and think it is in part due to the traffic on these sites.

While Yahoo was showing their “Shortcuts” (ability to just type in “Weather in Boston” and get a full weather report or “Yankee Scores” and get a score and schedule listing) this was again more of a topic being talked about by the marketers than implemented by the search engines. MSN was not at the conference and some think that they may be in development of a highly customized search interface that allows the user to really fine tune their search queries.

#7 Dynamic Pages are terrible for search engines

If at all possible, avoid dynamic URLs (I’m sure you know this already). These pages are very confusing to spiders and webcrawlers and are generally ignored. If you really want a page listed on an organic search engine, do not use a dynamic URL use a static html page.

Useful link related to these notes:

Search Engine Watch (organizers behind the conference)
http://searchenginewatch.com

I got stuck in traffic yesterday morning while driving over to sign the lease for our new offices. This is Rhode Island, so although I was on a main route, there was only one lane each way. Which meant I became darned familiar with the Muzak van directly in front of me.

The Muzak logo was painted on its rear along with some branding copy. I got a smile from thinking about this stressed-out van driver struggling to bring soothing music to the rest of us. Then I thought about how cool the logo was, compared to my mental image of the company… and so on. Muzak certainly got their money’s worth from that out-of-home ad.

Here are three more fun out-of-home campaigns I’ve heard about recently — along with creative samples (link below) that will make you smile too:

#1. Bobblehead billboard

Ignite Media, a Vancouver-area auto deadlership’s ad agency, glued more than 700 different bobbleheads to a billboard, hoping for the “Holy cow” factor. They’re measuring results by conducting phone surveys. And, they’ve already started a massive collection of dinky cars for the next rendition.

#2. StadiumTRAY

Trump Taj Mahal Casino Resort is putting its message literally into the laps of sports enthusiasts. They’ve printed a 4-color ad onto the cardboard trays that concession stands hand out at Philadelphia’s Wachovia Complex. The art is fairly cleverly designed to work with the shape of the tray.

#3. Bigger, better (measureable) truck-side ads

Bic pens as well as several TV and radio shows are running ads that completely take over the sides of large trucks. Unlike truckside promos that are painted — which can limit your creativity — these are printed on a giant sheet of plastic which is then affixed to the side of the truck for as long as you want your campaign to run.

It’s got much more impact, plus you can run a campaign for a more limited time. And, we love this, the vendor offering the service uses GPS to track your trucks, and ultimately measure brand impact on the particular demographic you wanted to influence.

Here’s a link to a Web page where we’ve posted creative samples of all three campaigns:
http://www.marketingsherpa.com/coolads/ad.html

Here’s an idea that I think any site big or small could use to improve sales or lead generation…

While surfing last night I typed “www.ilovebetty.com” on a whim to see if anything would come up. (Betty is my dog.) By golly up came a Web site with that exact name!

In fact it was a clever tactic from the folks at loveletters.com who’ve apparently bought the “ilove” URLs for loads of names, and redirect them to the main loveletters.com site. However, their system cleverly inserts the specific name you were typing. So I saw a page with the headline “I Love Betty.” Which, naturally warmed the cockles of my heart.

You don’t need to own a bunch of URLs to personalize a page new visitors see this way. In fact, you can use your Web analytics and/or affiliate marketing system to note what URL visitors are coming from, and then jerryrig your content management system to automatically display related content. Three examples:

— Paid search clicks convert far better if they see their exact search term included in the wording of headline on your landing page. This can be automated so it’s not much work for you, no matter how many hundreds of search terms you have ads under. (See the link directly below for a Case Study I did on a b2b marketer who tested this.)

— Affiliate and marketing partner clicks are more likely to buy if they see a little note at the top of their landing page that references where they saw the offer. I invented a “pink sticky note” for our own store we use this way. (Link below to sample.)

If you arrive via an affiliate link in our store, and we’ve activated the note, you’ll see a note that says something like, “Welcome MarketingVox Readers!” or “As seen in Advertising Age…”

If the affiliate is a guru who the clicker is likely to respect, we may even have that person write a more personal-sounding review or recommendation to post there.

— You can also use extensions of your regular URL to send visitors to highly personalized pages. For example, a division of Hewlett-Packard sent personalized postcards to the best prospects on its list directing them to a Web page with their name in the URL (not-real-example: www.hp.com/bettyholland).

Their site’s content management system automatically stuck that name in the headline and copy so the visitor felt like a site was built just for them. Conversions were outstanding. (See link to our Case Study directly below.)

Please let me know if you’ve tested an idea like any of these, and if I can report on it. In the meantime, here are the links I promised:

— Case Study: Targeting Landing Pages by Keyword Improves Paid Search Conversion Rates Dramatically
http://www.marketingsherpa.com/sample.cfm?contentID=2526

— Case Study: HP Tests Personalized Web Landing Pages for Email and Direct Mail Campaigns — Data & Samples
http://www.marketingsherpa.com/barrier.cfm?currentID=2457

— A sample of our “pinky sticky notes” in action:
http://sherpastore.com/store/page.cfm/2146?a=weekly

— I Love Betty (and if you knew her, you would too.)
http://www.ilovebetty.com