MarketingSherpa Blog

Today I spotted two print mag sub offers that are using pop-ups to convert nos into yes’. If you go to PC World’s online magazine order form and then you decide against buying, as you click away up comes a colorful pop-up with the headline, “Are you sure you want to pass up [the offer]?”

(Which is, as Bruce McCurdy, PC World’s Online Product Development Manager, says, hugely ironic because PC World editors are constantly running front page stories on how to get rid of pop-ups.)

Baseline Magazine, which is a new Ziff Davis title for IT pros, tries a variation on this theme. Instead of a pop-up that looks
advertising-ish, their pop-up when you leave the form without subscribing looks like one of those official grey rectangular boxes your PC uses to ask for instructions sometimes.

The copy begins, “Are you sure you want to navigate away from this page? The form should take under 5 minutes to complete,
etc.” Then the user is prompted to click either “OK” to continue leaving the page, or “cancel” to stay on the page and keep
filling out the form.

http://www.pcworld.com
Baseline: http://www.omeda.com/ziff/bsl/bsl.cgi?p=homepage

Thanks to all of you who wrote me in response to last week’s SherpaBlog. Here is a quick summary of what I’ve learned from you:

– Pages must print:

If you decide to switch right-hand links to the left-side of pages based on the usability lab research I mentioned last week, make sure users can print pages without losing any information off the right edge.

I had our Web guy Ryan add a “print this story” button to the top and bottom of every article on our site to help with this problem.

– SEO is unaffected:

For those of you who were concerned that your search engine optimization might be affected by moving links from the right to the left, I asked expert Jill Whalen of HighRanks.com for advice.

Jill said, “Either way of having the links makes absolutely no

difference to the search engines. Unless your HTML page is over 110K (not including graphics), the spiders will index *all* the content and follow *all* the links.”

– For eCommerce keep your buy button right-side:

Click analysis researcher, David Niu of NetConversions told me based on his data, “A retail best-practice that we’ve observed is that call-to-action should be placed on the right-hand side and most cross sell and up sell opportunities are also best placed there or under the product.”

– In email, right-side links not always visible:

Loads of you wrote in to note that when it comes to email newsletters, you do not always open your window all the way to read. Smaller windows = right-hand columns being cut off.

If a newsletter (or other mailer) wants clicks, don’t put critical stuff over on the far right.

Until next week�

Thanks for your support,

Anne

Anne Holland – Publisher

MarketingSherpa

AHolland@MarketingSherpa.com

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CASE STUDIES

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#2. Vary Email Creative by Region for Higher Response

At long last, we got someone besides a travel company, to go on the record saying that different offers and creative work better in different parts of the US.

Pamela Hoffman at Ajilon discovered strong regional biases quite by accident when she created an email campaign template library for her company’s 100+ regional sales offices. Turns out account reps in and clients in California liked very different campaigns than the Midwest, or Northeast. More here, including some creative samples: http://www.b2bmarketingbiz.com/sample.cfm?contentID=2362

#3. How to Target Asian Americans Through Integrated Online/Offline Marketing

Every wondered what it’s like to market a Broadway show? Here’s a fascinating behind-the-scenes story, including results.

This is a must-read if you are involved in grassroots community-based efforts, or you’re hoping to learn more about how to approach the Asian American demographic. Plus, includes a photo of the coolest promotional t-shirt we’ve ever seen: http://www.consumermarketingbiz.com/sample.cfm?contentID=2367

#4. How to Make a Niche Community Site Profitable; Plus 4 Ways to Market CD ROMs to Your Members

If you market to mothers of young children, you’ll find some fascinating insights into the demographic in this story.

Also, if you’ve ever dreamed of quitting your corporate job and starting your own online publishing company for profit, you’ll be inspired by this story of a husband and wife team who are living the entrepreneurial life-style in Austin Texas.

P.S: Be sure to click on the link to creative samples at the end of Case Study, because their clean design is really lovely:

http://www.contentbiz.com/sample.cfm?contentID=2363

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PRACTICAL KNOW-HOW

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#5. Special Report: How Rising Junk Mail Rate Affects Legit eMailers: 36 Brands Accused of Spamming

What do Amazon, Dupont, Marriott, Crate & Barrel and Bank of America have in common? In the last 24 hours each has been accused of being a suspected spammer by consumers. Ouch.

In part I of our Special Report on how the rising junk mail rate affects legitimate emailers, you’ll learn:

Just found this fun little MagBlog from the folks at PressFlex who build sites for print mags. It features links to news and
articles on how to sell print magazine subs via online marketing, something which I’ve definitely felt the print folks could be doing *much* more of.

Also features enough typos to make me feel better about my own lame spelling habits. Of course they are Hungarians blogging bravely in English, while I’m typo-ing away in my native
language.

http://magazines.pressflex.com/news/categoryfront.php/id/7/MagBlog.html

Nancy Beckman just let me know she’s launched CPA Tipline, a no-cost newsletter for publishers and advertisers who want to connect about CPA advertising. I think it’s a great idea, especially if she can help publishers weed through the cruddy offers from slimy operators and find the good ones that are worth investing a test in.

http://www.cpatipline.com

According to this quick article in Editor & Publisher, the New York Times Digital ceased sending breaking news version of it’s emailed News Tracker service several months ago because “of technical delays resulting from having more than 1 million users.”

On this Wednesday they plan to tell the 500,000 regular News Tracker email recipients that the service will not be free anymore. The service will cost $19.95 year starting June 13th and go up to $29.95 sometime later (which allows NYT marketers to plug a $10.00 off offer for a while now).

This news underlines one harsh fact: Email isn’t no-cost to send. It may be cheaper than postal mail, but it’s not free.

When I joined a NEPA roundtable on the economics of publishing yesterday, the moderator said, “Oh here’s Anne who doesn’t have to worry about spending money on fulfillment.” I immediately objected, “Hey I spend a lot on email list hosting and on email production staff, not to mention building the back-end database and Web design and hosting. Online publishing isn’t cheap or free.” Everyone looked startled. Well, welcome to reality.

http://www.editorandpublisher.com/editorandpublisher/headlines/article_display.jspvnu_content_id=1898063

Made a flying visit (in and out of DC in under 6 hours) to the NEPA show(www.newsletters.org) yesterday. Wish I could have stayed longer, but an insane editorial schedule here precluded that. Quick notes:

– Email is finally on the table for the print newsletter publishers, mostly as a marketing tactic. I spoke with half a dozen publishers who were mailing hundreds of thousands of emails per month to their usually-very niche markets. The real success seems to be on the ancillary products front. You can sell free email subs reports, videos, event tickets, audio conferences, etc. The subscription sales front is a harder pitch than a one-off to a free list.

– Everyone at the editorial roundtable I attended seemed to be focusing on how to get more from a tight editorial team when you can’t hire more people and the content bar is constantly rising.
When I said, “Oh my problem is hiring people who can write solid, detailed business how-to content quickly and concisely for online publication, I’m looking for several and I’m in hiring hell.” Everyone started sputtering.

The editors around the table definitely thought I was a clueless jerk. “There are so many good people looking for work! I turn them away!” said one. “I find the problem isn’t with the writers, it’s with the training the publication gives them,” noted another.

Afterwards though, a few people on the publisher-end came up to me individually to say, “You are right, you know. It’s almost impossible to find really good newsletter writers. There are lots of would-bes, but few home runs.” I felt a lot better.

– Entrepreneurs are on the rise again. I met about eight people who had quite their jobs and were busy working on a print subscription newsletter launch scheduled for this summer. They were all very niche, and deeply passionate about their topic.
Often from the expert or editorial end of things, rarely do print newsletter founders come from the marketing/management end of things.

– We definitely need a group who can talk about company management issues for successful independent publishers at the 3- 6-year mark with $500k-$3 mill sales. Several of us agreed the problem is less what to do about marketing or editorial, and more about managing cash flow, legal, admin, launches, etc. In other words, running a growing company.

I’m talking to folks about founding some sort of “Successful Sophmores” group of publishers, let me know if you’re interested.

aholland@marketingsherpa.com

eDiets, the leading subscription site in the weight-loss category, has been a pretty closely held private company, until
now. They are presenting at the upcoming RedChip San Francisco Investor Conference Wednesday, June 4 2003, at 9:30 A.M. PT.

David Humble, CEO, Robert Hamilton, CFO, and Alison Tanner, Chief Strategist, will discuss the Company’s business strategy, recent
developments and outlook. The Company’s presentation will be Web cast live for investors and will be avail for replay following the conference at:

http://www.firstcallevents.com/service/ajwz382678364gf12.html

I have preached in the past that marketers with common sense
would stick some important links on the right-hand side of Web
pages because people read English left-to-right and most people
click using their right hand.

It seemed like a “duh.”

Then I learned that a usability lab in NYC has repeatedly tested
this for loads of prominent sites … and found consumers ignore
the right-hand column almost completely because it’s a spot that
so often contains advertising.

Seems that Web surfers’ eyes have been trained to stop looking at
all places on pages that routinely carry advertising — even if
the site they are on is ad-free.

Whoa.

So last weekend our Web designer Ryan took time out from his
heavy barbeque schedule to begin switching all the links on
MarketingSherpa sites from the right side to the left side.

Now we’ll begin to track to see if it makes a difference or not
in clicks and conversions.

In the meantime, I’m wondering does this rule apply for HTML
email newsletter design too?? If you know, contact me.

I have preached in the past that marketers with common sense
would stick some important links on the right-hand side of Web
pages because people read English left-to-right and most people
click using their right hand.

It seemed like a “duh.”

Then I learned that a usability lab in NYC has repeatedly tested
this for loads of prominent sites, and found consumers ignore
the right-hand column almost completely because it’s a spot that
so often contains advertising.

It seems that Web surfers’ eyes have been trained to stop looking at
all places on pages that routinely carry advertising, even if
the site they are on is ad-free.

Whoa.

Last weekend our Web designer Ryan took time out from his
heavy barbeque schedule to begin switching all the links on
MarketingSherpa sites from the right side to the left side.

Now we’ll begin to track to see if it makes a difference or not
in clicks and conversions.

In the meantime, I’m wondering does this rule apply for HTML
email newsletter design too? If you know, contact me.

15 minutes ago I got a call from my Dad.

“I don’t want to bother you at work,” he said, “but you should
know the email you sent me this morning about getting a trainer
for your dog was flagged by my ISP as ‘Maybe Spam’.”

I flipped open my ‘sent mail’ folder and reviewed the note I’d
written him. Even with all of Sherpa’s research on how filters
work, there was nothing, nada, zilch, I could see that would make
any filter system think my little note was evil.

Over the past few weeks, you may have noticed the same thing
happening to much of your sent email – whether it’s bulk mail or
just individual notes.

Over-zealous filters are stopping a heck of a lot of non-junk
mail.

So, when AOL and MSN both announced this week that 80% of the
email their users are getting is unwanted junk, it made me wonder
what part of that 80% is misidentified good stuff – like my note
to Dad.

In the filter world they call it “false positives” and no one
admits how many of those they stop from getting to email users.

In reaction to this, I held a Sherpa-wide staff meeting this week
to announce a new Company policy: if a communication to anyone is
really important, always, always, always follow-up with a phone
call. Never assume email got through.

It so often doesn’t.