MarketingSherpa Blog

The number-one way to raise profits during a recession is to increase the percent of customers who are repeat buyers. Repeat buyers are nearly always far more profitable accounts because they’re cheaper to market to and easier to convert than anyone else. Nearly every marketer can improve repeats with a few simple steps, no matter how tight their budget is right now. Here’s a real-life story to inspire you:

A few years back, Leon Osborne, President Osborne Wood Products, conducted a quick research project to find out how many customers of his table-leg division were repeat buyers. He told MarketingSherpa, “The majority of our customers were first-time customers. Although our business was growing and everything looked good, that was alarming to me.”

So, he decided to run a test. “We hired someone to come in and go through the last 1,000 invoices and talk to customers… to ask basic questions.” None of the conversations was formally scripted, but typical questions included: “How did we do? Did we treat you courteously on the phone? Was the price good? Were you satisfied with the quality of the product? Was the packaging good? How do you feel about our company? Do you have anything that you’d recommend to make us a better company in the future?”

Responses were almost unanimously positive: “Great company. Wonderful prices. Customer service is wonderful.” Then, why didn’t Osborne have a higher percent of repeat buyers on the books?

His theory: “We felt that probably our competitors were doing a good job, and we were doing a good job and people were not ordering based on who did they order from before. Instead, they were ordering based on who did they perceive they did business with before.” Past customers might not remember the company name or how to reach Osborne. Instead, whenever they needed more table legs, they’d flip open a magazine or go to a search engine looking for likely ads to find a supplier … and wind up ordering from a competitor by mistake.

To combat the problem, Osborne decided to dedicate a customer service rep to follow up satisfaction calls. He hoped that adding a touch of human contact will enable new customers to remember the firm’s name and buy from Osborne again. “Sherry Chucci worked here for three years; she knew the business. She’s like an evangelist for the company.”

Sherry called each new account a few days after their shipment arrived. If she couldn’t reach anyone, she left a pleasant message on their machine and put a printed one-page survey in the postal mail with a postage-paid envelope. The conversation and survey were simply about satisfaction, never a sales message or promotion.

Results were outstanding. Osborne says that, currently, “5% of our customers are first-time customers whereas, before, it was 60% or 70% first-time customers. Within 6 months of bringing that program into play … we saw those numbers just change.” It went down to half and half, then 30%, then 20%….” The bottom line grew in reverse proportion. “Our business has grown 10% to 20% each year.”

My suggestion — in most companies, satisfaction phone calls are silo-ed far away from the marketing department in either customer service or product management. However, this story proves that satisfaction calls and surveys can actually be a successful marketing initiative. Why not conduct a test campaign, just as Osborne did, by phoning a slice of your new customers? Then, track the repeat buying habits of that slice compared to the main body of customers over the next six months (or however long repeat sales generally take.) Finally, use the resulting data to sell upper management on starting a routine satisfaction contact program under the auspices and budget of the marketing department for late 2008 and all of 2009.

Plus, of course, let Sherpa know how this works out for you.

By the way, if you need table legs, Osborne Wood Products is at http://www.osbornewood.com/

The US Supreme Court has ruled that if a company does not have a physical location (a store, office, warehouse, etc.) within a particular state, that state can’t require the company to collect and remit sales tax on customers located in that state. For decades now, many state legislators have floated ideas about changing that law because they “lost” millions of dollars in potential tax revenues.

First, the catalog and TV direct response advertisement industries fought back via associations, such as the Direct Marketing Association and the Electronic Retailers Association. New state taxes were unconstitutional; plus, they placed an unfair requirement on merchants not located in that state. Who wants the burden of bookkeeping and paperwork for different state taxes across the United States?

I’ve actually experienced this first hand because Sherpa has had employees in many different states, and their home offices were considered to be “business premises,” so we had to collect and disburse local taxes for many states. Each had different rates, paperwork styles, red tape and typical errors. It was very much like having to deal with many different versions of the IRS. Can you say “massive pain”?

When the Internet took off, state legislators immediately saw it as a new area of taxation. Early attempts were beaten off by the same logic and by lawyers who stopped states from harassing direct mail and TV merchants. However, as you may know, since June 1, the state of New York began requiring state taxes from all ecommerce sites with affiliates based in New York state.

They’re estimating $50 million to $70 million in taxes per year. The costs, including battling lawsuits filed by such merchants as Amazon.com, not to mention the paperwork involved dealing with thousands of merchants, won’t be negligible.

Key: if this works, and if New York manages to keep and enforce this legislation effectively, you can expect dozens of other states to follow; many might do so in time for the 2008 holiday rush. Who cares about federal law when it’s a recession year? And ecommerce should be bigger than ever this year because of gas prices. Who wants to drive to shop when they can surf at home?

Some merchants, including Overstock.com, are reacting by cutting their affiliates in New York until the law changes. Presumably they did the math and figured the cost of paperwork was greater than the profits they make from accounts brought in by New York affiliates. If the New York law stays on the books, the problem then comes when dozens more states start asking for taxes too. Should Overstock cut affiliates in every state?

According to Sherpa data, ecommerce sites rely on affiliates for roughly 45% of revenue. Although there are tens of thousands of active affiliates in the US, for most, it’s a part-time income. Roughly 1%-2% of affiliates are responsible for the lion’s share of all that merchant income. Will we see merchants begging their most profitable affiliates to move from state to state in order to flee the newly enacted taxes?

I can’t say whether the new law is right or wrong. The world has changed profoundly since federal law was written; now, brick-and-mortar stores are in competition (and cahoots) with websites. It almost doesn’t seem fair that a retailer who has taken the extra risk, expense, and trouble of launching a brick-and-mortar store in my state should have to deal with more tax administration than an Internet retailer should.

However, it also doesn’t seem fair to use affiliates as the loophole to zap taxes through. In my mind, affiliates are icons of the type of entrepreneurialism and clever small business ownership that has made this country great. They are also actual residents of the states in question. How can it be right to crush the livelihood of your own state’s residents to get your hands in the pocket of a business several states away?

If law changes, it should be on a federal level. And affiliates should not be affected.

If you want more info, my friend Shawn Collins at Affiliate Summit Inc. has been tracking the matter closely. He’s also working with colleagues to consider forming an industry association for affiliates. A guy worth knowing.

Affiliate Marketing Blog by Shawn Collins:
http://blog.affiliatetip.com/archives/new-york-affiliate-tax-recap/

Ten years ago this week, innovative marketers tested adding the first call-us buttons to their websites. Results were delightful –- so much so that early testers, including several divisions of IBM, rolled out call-us buttons to more of their Web pages.

Yet, beyond a certain circle of best-practices-type marketing organizations, call-us buttons never really took off the way they should have in the larger world. I’m not sure why –- possibly it’s because the buttons cost next to nothing to implement, don’t use razzle-dazzle technology and aren’t as cool and sexy as videos, search ads or viral campaigns. In the ceaseless marketing march toward Web 2.0 hipness, call-us buttons got left in the dust.

Well, now that we’re in a recession (which we are no matter what the government proclaims), it’s time to add a call-us button to your site improvements agenda. You don’t need razzle-dazzle or the latest great thing. You need what works –- what’s proven to increase responses quickly, cheaply and effectively.

How call-us buttons work:
You add a button (or form) to every page of your site (or to landing pages), which prospective clients might abandon because they have questions they need answered to continue. It works best on considered-purchase page paths –- something expensive or complicated that folks may want to talk to a human being about before making a decision to buy or to add your name to the vendor shortlist for the boss’s consideration.

The button lets people request to be called by an expert service rep who can answer any questions they might have. It’s not a chat box –- some folks don’t like chat at all, and others feel it’s too annoyingly “slow.” It’s also not a sales-rep-will-call offer – nobody wants to be sold. They want to be assisted.

You can set up the button, so that your call center calls immediately (the faster the better, just like chat; no one wants to sit waiting) or at the time each user asks to be called. If you have business clients, be sure to ask for extension. If you can operate only during limited hours, state the hours upfront on the button and include a cross-link to a Web form for questions during off-hours. Make sure someone actually responds to the Web form (a shocking number of companies do not).

Start with a small test that measures what percent of visitors to one page with a highly visible call-us button actually use it. Also, measure what percent of those calls result in a favorable activity (anything from a request for more information to a direct conversion.) And, consider having the reps making the calls ask folks to hang on the line for a brief satisfaction survey at the end (“Was this helpful?” or “Would you be more likely to buy from us as a result of this service?”). This will give you the call volume and results measurements you need to create projections and sell your management team on a rollout.

Last, don’t abuse the phone numbers you receive. Calls should be placed based on prospects’ wishes. If they didn’t ask you to call again, don’t. Otherwise, people will quickly learn to never click on a call-us button again.

Why do people prefer call-us buttons to picking up the phone and reaching out to you? They’re sick and tired of automated phone systems, on-hold wait time and being passed from person to person while trying to find the right expert to answer a question. It’s a pain in the neck to get through to most companies these days. Call-us soothes the pain point.

Every time you overcome a pain point that’s a barrier between you and a prospective customer, your sales rise. The only question is by how much.

Were you one of the Few, the Proud, the call-us-using marketers of the past decade? Please post your comments below. Tell the rest of us how things worked out.

I’ve worked for brand-driven companies and for A/B test-driven companies. Each was equally snooty and disdainful of the other.

To summarize, brand marketers thought A/B testers were pointy-headed geeks, while A/B testers thought brand marketers were bubble-headed blondes. Luckily, the twain didn’t often meet … until now.

Instead of relying on “fuzzy” data from focus groups, awareness studies and Nielsen ratings, brand marketers now are inundated with detailed numbers from every campaign that touches the Web, email or mobile in some way. Once you have numbers, testing to improve results is the logical next step.

As for A/B testers, the plethora of cheap, do-it-yourself online response vehicles has lowered the barriers to competition. Now anyone can launch a direct response campaign to your marketplace without first investing hundreds of thousands of dollars in printing, postage, fulfillment and media costs. Suddenly, a strong brand is the only safe harbor to launch your merchant ships from.

In practical terms, this means political battles are beginning to rage in marketing departments across America. Whichever side you’re on — brand vs A/B — someone else on your team is evangelizing the other direction as the best way to beat the recession.

Who’s right and who’s wrong? Hate to say it, especially as a chief proponent of measurement in marketing, but brand should always win.

Brand is so critical, in fact, that every company must assign a Chief Brand Evangelist who has *veto power* over any and all proposed A/B test ideas. Test all you want, but never test outside of brand guidelines … unless you are considering changing your entire brand positioning as a result and the CEO has been brought into the picture.

It’s that serious.

You see, I’ve worked for A/B testing companies and brand-driven companies. The brand-driven companies could sell almost anything within their brand far more easily than the testing companies could. The brand’s fans would line up to buy anything that brand had going. You could A/B test your brains out from here to kingdom come, but all those incremental gains year after year would never add up to the sole selling power of a strong brand.

Of course, the gold is having a strong brand with a team that’s able to A/B test, within guidelines, to improve results for it. That’s a company worth investing in.

“I’m Twittered out,” one of my favorite bloggers posted last week. Like many early adopters, he got caught up on the Twitter craze, tweeting night and day for months.

And, then, the whole thing got old. Was it the inevitable cool-thing-cooled-off? Or was it just too much communication about oneself already? I’m thinking the latter.

Twitter has been around since 2006 and gained huge use among the cognoscenti in 2007. Rave reviews in The New York Times, Wired, etc., made everyone wonder if Twitter was the next big thing. Would tweets supplant email marketing? How about blogs? Or perhaps mass IMs?

To me, Twitter felt a lot like blogging in 2001 and email publishing in the mid-1990s. A text-only, uniquely personal way of publishing your thoughts and ideas to that special section of the universe that actually cared about them.

Will Twitter evolve to become a significant marketing medium just as email and blogging did? Currently the marketers I see testing it most are personality-driven gurus, the folks who use the Internet to build and maintain a fervent fan base who will buy anything with their name on it.

I suppose a few CPGs will jump in next, perhaps with celebrity tie-ins (“Sign up for Jessica Simpson’s Twitter feed sponsored by blah, blah, blah.”) And, it’s a natural for entertainment properties.

However, my advice for most marketers is to hold off from adding Twitter to your list of “must-do” tests for the time being. Don’t feel stressed out by yet another Internet marketing tactic you have to figure out on the run.

Nothing’s proven yet, and you can do a lot better with your budget and time (the latter the more important resource) by testing and optimizing any current marketing campaign online or off that’s responsible for 20% or more of your current responses or eyeballs.

Put your energy toward what’s working and what could work better before you launch tests into yet another newer Internet marketing idea. Especially in recessionary times when every response really matters.

But, before you do that, just take two minutes right now and surf over to Twitter to make sure that all your brand names (including company name and names of any celebrity execs) are signed up. You need to make that preemptive strike — take your names before some outsider decides to take them for a ride.

Also, if you haven’t already, do the same for YouTube, Flickr, Facebook product pages, etc., etc. It’s just like in 1996-7 when I used to advice companies to go get their own branded “dot-coms” before someone else bought their names out from under them.

Lastly, if you work for the type of company or boss who likes to be seen as cutting edge, consider signing up for your own personal Twitter (it’s free) and start tweeting a few friends. That way in the committee meeting or quarterly presentation when someone asks, “Hey, what are we doing with that Twitter thing?”, you can look like a humble hero, “Oh, I’ve been testing it out for a while now …”

When the economy starts slumping, many marketers start sending specials to their email lists more frequently. After all, zapping out a special offer to your house list is about the cheapest and easiest way to drum up some fast responses. It’s also a pretty big mistake.

Why? Because if you send too many specials, too frequently, to the same exact people, they become tone deaf and they stop adoring your brand name and wanting to buy from it.

Compounding this problem is the fact that the people on your house list are usually Your Biggest Fans. They are on the 80-side of the 80/20 rule about profitable accounts. They are your evangelists and word-of-mouth spreaders. They are the email audience who, if treated right, will have an astounding lifetime customer value.

Example: I’ve been pounded no fewer than 10 times with different ‘special offers’ from a particular home decor brand in the last three weeks. I’m a multiple-time past purchaser. Although I eagerly clicked on the first couple of email specials, now when I see an email from them in my inbox, I snort with boredom and hit ‘Delete.’

What can you do to keep both the bottom line and the house list happy?

Try giving your biggest fans a big reason to open your email. As a fan, I don’t just care about specials. I care about YOU. I would love a behind-the-scenes story, perhaps some photos and bios of craftspeople making the products. Or maybe a story about what the purchasing directors are seeing trend-wise for the coming year (things I can look forward to buying from you.) Or perhaps a funny, home-made music video made by the guys in shipping …

The more I know about your brand — the people’s faces, voices, stories, etc. — the deeper my personal connection is likely to grow. As a member of the house list, I begin to feel like an insider. And the next time I get an email from you, I open eagerly.

The good news is, this “infotainment” email tactic raises short-term sales as well as customer lifetime value.

Want a real-life example of how this can work? Check out Sherpa’s classic Case Study of how Land’s End’s weekly email newsletter was partly responsible for lifting the brand’s online sales from $138 million to 218 million in 2001, during the worst of the last economic downturn.

Their highest-response newsletter of all time was about a local tractor auction … but it sold a lot of chinos! Includes 10 useful creative samples. Open access until June 5th.

Lands’ End Discovers Stories Work Better Than Sales Pitches in Its Weekly Email Newsletter
http://www.marketingsherpa.com/article.html?ident=22943

It’s the Facebook marketing secret hardly anybody knows about yet. Each of your products and brands can have their own special Facebook pages — without charge currently.

I’m not talking about regular Facebook profiles. Those are for real human beings only — you’ll get booted if you try to make one for a product or brand, so don’t do it. (Unlike MySpace, where even my dog, Betty Boop, has her own account.)

Facebook has created an alternative for marketers. To check it out, go to the homepage of Facebook (the one you see before you log in). Click on the small text link titled “Advertisers” at the footer of that page. This takes you to a homepage to buy ads. If you look closely, though, you’ll also see a free offer to post a Facebook page for your product even if you don’t advertise.

Obviously, Facebook hopes to monetize this somehow, someday. In the meantime, why not take advantage of it?

Then your product or brand can start networking with customers, fans and their friends and their friends … etc. Probably works especially well for strong brands that already have built-in enthusiast and fan bases.

Let me know how it works out for you.

Starting a blog is easy. Keeping a blog going for more than a few months is hard. If you are one of the relatively few, the proud, the multi-year bloggers, you should give yourself a gold medal for sustained effort above most people’s capacities.

However, is your hard work really paying off as much as it could?

Very few blogs are optimized for success. Here are the top 5 action items I’ve been testing on a side blog of my own that you can use to improve your blog today — easily, cheaply and quickly.

#1. Add search capability

Blog visitors love to search your blog for posts and content that directly interests them. A search box is a fantastic engagement device to get more page views and more engagement.

After I tested adding a search-this-blog box at the bottom of my own personal blog’s homepage, the search results page became the second most popular page on the entire blog!

Google is just one of several providers offering free blog search tools that you can add to your blog’s template with a few mouse clicks. I’m not even remotely technical, so if I could do it, you can, too.

#2. Increase your “older posts” hotlink size

Most blog templates feature an “older posts” hotlink that appears at the end of the page, so when visitors have read a page, they can click on it to keep going. If your blog doesn’t have this link, add one to your template immediately. If your blog has this link already, enlarge the point size. I made mine as big as the headline type so it could catch the eye.

Sure, some people will click on hotlinks on your blog navigation column to go to other pages, but a heck of a lot won’t. Adding prominent “older posts” link at the end of every page gets you more page views per visitor. More page views means more engagement.

#3. Offer an email subscription

Drives me nuts — I discover a blog I adore, but it only offers an RSS feed. Like the majority of Internet users, I don’t routinely use or check an RSS reader, but I do routinely check email. If I really like a blog, I would vastly prefer to be pinged via email when a new posting goes up. Otherwise, no matter how much I enjoyed that blog, the chances that I’ll remember to revisit it are slim.

Feedburner is one of several services that allow you to add an email opt-in box for your blog quickly, easily and, best of all, for free. Once you get more than 1,000 opt-ins or so, you may want to graduate the list up to a formal email service provider. This way, you can control the template and look of the email sent, as well as have more access to your list and mailing stats.

#4. Use keyword analysis to inspire more posts

You should be tracking basic blog stats by using free analytics tools, such as Google Analytics, or by tying your blog into your main site’s analytics software. While it’s fine to see how many visitors you get, the most useful report is actually the keyword analysis report.

There, you’ll find a list of the terms that visitors used in external search engines (Yahoo!, Google, MSN, etc.) to find your blog. Sometimes, the list will be an unhappy surprise — lots of visitors may be coming in because of a keyword that occurs in one of your posts that’s not truly reflective of the topic you write about. For example, I once mentioned “Serbian Women” in a headline and now get quite a lot of traffic from what appears to be men looking for love … not quite the readership I had in mind!

Use the list to see which terms you already have traction with. If they appear to be generating useful, relevant traffic, then increase your use of those keywords in other posts, especially in headlines. Obviously, don’t overstuff your keywords, but using a favorite term or phrase over several posts can’t hurt.

#5. Include a contact hotlink in your sig
If you want readers to contact you, perhaps because you offer consulting or other personal services as your line of work, don’t hide your contact information! I’m startled by how many bloggers hide their full name and contact info under a generic “About Me” button somewhere on the nav bar.

Don’t force visitors to seek that button out and click on it for answers. Instead, include a brief sig and even a “Contact Me” hotlink as your “name” at the end of each post.

This is something you can set up quickly in your blog template without any extra cost.

Good luck and let me know how it goes. Got more blog improvement tips for your fellow Sherpa readers? Use the comment box below!

When your CFO casts about for recessionary cost cutting, replacing human beings with automated recordings and online account centers, replacing paper with email, it seems like an awfully intelligent step. And, it may be … for this quarter. But, you’re risking future profits.

Why? People are not made out of electrons. Not yet, anyway.

Human beings make brand loyalty and additional purchasing decisions based on their impressions of your brand. Those impressions are based on sensory experiences. If the only sense you appeal to is an electronic one, your brand’s grip on their loyalty will be fleeting. Sound, touch, smell and taste beat vision by a landslide; especially, words or numbers on a screen versus relevant images (not stock photos).

In addition, the experience of talking to a human being on the phone, even briefly, resoundingly beats the sensory and emotional impression of an automated audio system giving recorded information (however personalized). A real human being’s live voice touches customers on levels that no recording ever can or will.

When you cut costs by going electronic, you’re cutting those strong sensory impressions. You’re putting a wall of frosted glass between your customer and your brand.

How do you prove the value of real human beings and print materials to your CFO? The answer — try to wring permission for a test cell. Take one segment of customers (making sure it’s a true cross segment with no unusual aspects that could skew results versus your normal demographic) and start doing business the old-fashioned way. Offer them a human being to call via direct dial; send them the occasional printed letter and/or catalog.

How do you reach out via multiple senses while keeping your business “green”? The key is in alternating experiences — mix in a few snail mail letters with your routine email series rather than switching whole hog from one to the other. And, of course, use ride-along opportunities as much as possible. If you have to ship something real-world, such as a fulfillment package, make sure personal letters, etc., are included in the package to share postage and reduce the total amount of mail sent.

Also, don’t waste your print-and-postal splurge on generic marketing that make as much sense in email. Use print for highly personalized offers and/or for highly detailed communications that require so many pages of information that it’s more convenient in print.

On the phone rep front, it may not be possible to have them work virtually from home, but you can encourage carpooling and use of public transportation with cash incentives. One of my old companies even paid for a public bus shelter outside our building so we wouldn’t get soaked or freeze while waiting.

Then, naturally, detail these green-friendly measures on your website and other ‘about us’ communications.

Last, a little story to help you see how moving from electronic to print may help the bottom line:

Years ago, MarketingSherpa used to offer our Benchmark Guide and Handbook customers their choice of print versus PDF. However, I began to wonder if the PDF-only accounts were as brand loyal and likely to buy again as the print-buyers. Our Web team checked PDF download stats. Turned out that as many as 40% of customers who purchased PDFs never got around to downloading them, despite reminder emails! Unless everyone downloaded and reviewed the Guide they’d bought, how could we count them satisfied or expect referrals or future purchases?

So, I bit the bullet and started sending every single customer *both* a PDF and a printed copy. I didn’t raise prices, aside from adding an at-rate postage charge, because I didn’t think it would be fair. However, I did watch carefully to see how renewal, referral and account lifetime sales rose over the next 12 months. Results were outstanding. In fact, overall sales went up nearly 60% the next year.

Are we hurting the environment? I don’t think so. I’m pretty sure that most people printed out their Guides when they got the PDFs anyway. I’m also pretty sure many printed Guide owners tend to share them — letting colleagues borrow their copy. That’s something you can’t do with Sherpa PDFs without breaking copyright and the law.

At about the same time, we also began extending our customer service phone hours to include both US East Coast and West Coast business hours so customers would be more successful at reaching a human being when they called. Again, the effort paid off in terms of more satisfied customers and longer term accounts.

Pretty soon after that, a business publication rated me as “The Most Influential Woman in Online Advertising” for that year. Made me laugh — much of that Internet influence was gained because we strengthened our offline impact.

My husband types two-three words per minute (it’s true, I timed him once).

So, late last Tuesday night, when he decided to donate to Barack Obama’s campaign after watching a bunch of speeches on TV, he got me out of bed to go online and do it for him.

The donation form wasn’t anything unusual — much like most charity and political sites. But, the next page, that ‘Thank you for Donating’ page made me sit up and get excited.

Wow — this is a page every marketer in the world, but especially nonprofits seeking donations, should examine for potential right away. I’ve posted a screenshot of it below, so you don’t have to donate to see it.

Here’s why you should take a look:

Most ‘thank you’ pages are dead ends. These pages show up when you opt in for a site’s email newsletter, submit a form or buy something. You see a “thank you” or confirmation and, perhaps, a receipt. But that’s it. Aside from the rare exception — such as Amazon’s post-purchase page — visitors are given nothing more to do, no place to click to, no more interactive choices. Just flat, this-transaction-is-over politeness.

Emotionally, the moment you’ve done a transaction of any kind, you are MORE likely to be open to doing another transaction than at any other time in your relationship with that brand or site.

In effect, the customer has just nodded his or her head and said, “Yes.” Why not present them with another feel-good offer for them to say “yes” to while they are in head-nodding mode?

Every salesperson in the world knows this. They get their foot in the door and then keep cross-selling and up-selling merrily along. “And would you like fries with that, Mister?”

In Obama’s case, that thank-you-for-donating page features a highly entertaining video, featuring in Web 2.0-style, some of his fans imitating his speeches. Plus, there’s a tell-a-friend viral form that you can use to send a hotlink of the video to everyone you know.

The box for forwarding is awe-inspiringly big. You could enter about 25 email addresses if you so choose. I know I found myself entering a few more names than I had planned just because there was more space and he got me on a roll. (Of course, in my case, I was forwarding to marketers I know to say, “Hey, we can copy this idea!”)

How can you copy this idea?

If you have a newsletter, content site or blog with great content, why not list hotlinks to your Top 3 Most Popular Posts Ever on your thank-you page? This way, new fans can continue exploring.

If you seek donations online, why not add a video about your cause, (soft-sell not ‘Donate now’) to your thank-you page for new donors to forward to friends?

If you market for a highly complex product or service, why not include a quick introductory video of an inside sales or service rep in that prospect’s region with a personal plea to “contact me with your questions about technology, budgeting or integration, I’m here to help you understand this thing.” This would be perfect on the thank-you page after new leads register.

Anyway, take a look at the sample and start brainstorming. This is fairly cheap and easy technology and won’t require your IT department to leap through flaming hoops or increase their budgets.

Useful links related to this article

Email with useful hotlinks Obama sends to new donators:
http://www.marketingsherpa.com/cs/vidty/1.html

‘Thank you for Donation’ page:
http://www.marketingsherpa.com/cs/vidty/2.html

Landing page that “forwarded friends” get in their in-box from the thank you page:
http://my.barackobama.com/YesWeCanvideo

Yes We Can video screenshot (in case live link dies someday):
http://www.marketingsherpa.com/cs/vidty/3.html