MarketingSherpa Blog

Last weekend as I was cleaning up the kitchen, I had the radio on to my local NPR station’s pledge drive. Usually they pull in a celebrity of some sort to help them raise money. A famous musician or radio personality. Guess who the celebrity guest was?

Their customer service email guy.

He was great. He talked about various emails he’d gotten from people who loved the station and wanted album information. He frequently mentioned how he always emailed them back, “Why don’t you make a contribution and become a member?”

It was clear from the way the regular announcer treated the email guy that the station considered him a real celebrity. Someone who enough listeners had a personal connection with that they would dig in their pockets and donate.

It makes me think, now more than ever your customer service department has your brand reputation in the palm of their hand.

Our Senior Reporter Catherine Getches submitted a new Case Study on McDonald’s Chipolte this week that completely illustrates the power of the email guy. It’s the first Case Study below.

Anyway, here’s a round-up of the most useful info the MarketingSherpa gang put out over the past week. Enjoy.

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CASE STUDIES

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#1. McDonald’s Chipotle Restaurants Revamp Site & Email Campaigns to Maximize Viral Pass-Along

�It looked like a heavy metal band’s site,” Chipotle’s email manager Joe Stupp describes the restaurant chain’s Web site before its big revamp this summer.

Even with a bad site, they got a heck of a lot of visitor email. So they focused their revamp and subsequent email marketing campaigns on taking advantage of it. If you copywrite email marketing campaigns, you’ll enjoy the sample copy in this Case Study. If you’re in charge of email customer service, you absolutely have to check this thing out.

#2. Oakwood Uses Advanced Web & Email Tactics to Survive the Recession on a Smaller Marketing Budget

Before the recession hit, $500 million corporate temporary housing industry leader Oakwood already had an 8,000-page Web site and an email newsletter. So when business got tougher, Oakwood’s marketer had to go beyond Web marketing 101 to improve sales on a smaller budget.

If you depend on your Web site to generate sales leads, this is a useful Case Study for you. Yes, there are some tactics (and cool metrics measurements) that companies of any size can take advantage of. Click here.

#3. The Onion – How the Web’s Most Beloved Humor Site Stays Profitable

So many independently owned Web sites have gone under in the past year, that many fans of The Onion worried it might topple too. Never fear. The site is profitable and staying strong.

Although our Case Study is a fun read (hey, it’s The Onion after all), it also includes some genuinely useful info on online ad sales that might help your own site improve. Enjoy.

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PRACTICAL KNOW HOW

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#4. How Hewlett Packard Doubled its Own Site’s Sales with Web Analytics

Seth Romanow, HP’s Director of Worldwide eBusiness Research & Metrics, oversees the gathering and analysis of a profoundly huge amount of data from HP’s site. Then once a week he gets together with his analysis team to make little tiny incremental site changes based on this data.

Over the past year, these little changes have doubled the site’s visitor-to-buyer ratio and added millions to HP’s sales. Not bad. Learn how Romanow’s team has done it.

#5. Alexis’ Tech Column: Refer-a-friend from Plain-Text Email?

Yessiree! Thanks to lots of readers helping her test solutions, our Tech Editor Alexis Gutzman has found the way to include a refer-a-friend link email that works *without* forcing email readers to click to a form on the Web (which many don’t feel like doing.)

Her solution is detailed here (note: if you’re a typical marketer your eyes may glaze over, we suggest you forward this link to your tech dept.)

6. My Marketing Column: Testing Emailed Transactive Offers

According to early tests conducted by Kim MacPherson over at Inbox Interactive, adding transactive offers — i.e. buy now forms that people can fill out in email instead of having to click to your site — can double your sales. Which is a pretty powerful reason to consider testing it yourself. More details, including a FlowersUSA campaign sample and my reality check here.

#7. Top 3 Ways PR People Annoy the Heck out of Journalists

This article contains a few home-truths from the journalist’s point of view about why PR people are hard to work with. Chances are your company commits at least one of the sins mentioned. Here’s your chance to stop it and make journalists love you.

Until next week!

Anne Holland, Publisher

MarketingSherpa

Last weekend as I was cleaning up the kitchen, I had the radio on
to my local NPR station’s pledge drive. Usually they pull in a
celebrity of some sort to help them raise money. A famous musician
or radio personality. Guess who the celebrity guest was?

Their customer service email guy.

He was great. He talked about various emails he’d gotten from
people who loved the station and wanted album information. He
frequently mentioned how he always emailed them back, “Why don’t
you make a contribution and become a member?”

It was clear from the way the regular announcer treated the email
guy that the station considered him a real celebrity. Someone who
enough listeners had a personal connection with that they would dig
in their pockets and donate.

It makes me think, now more than ever your customer service department
has your brand reputation in the palm of their hand.

I’ve known Kim MacPherson since we both worked at the same big
publishing company, wore suits every day, and sat around in
formal meetings trying to convince offline executives that “e”
was worth investing in.

Kim went on to write the bestselling book ‘Permission-Based Email
Marketing That Works’ and to found email-focused agency Inbox
Interactive. I went on to found MarketingSherpa. Both of us now
wear jeans to work on a regular basis. 🙂

Sometimes it seems like all I ever hear, think, or write about
these days is email deliverability – s*pam filters, bounces, etc.
I needed a mental break. Yesterday afternoon I called Kim up
to ask: What’s new in email marketing that can help response
rates besides improving deliverability?

She said, “Transactive offers embedded in the landing page.”

In other words, sending your order form complete with credit card
input form in the body of an email so that recipients can order
straight from email; without having to click through to a
landing page on your Web site at all.

Kim says, “We’re just testing it now with clients. We did a
side-by-side with Ancestry.com. We sent identical emails only
one had the form built in and the other required a click. It
looks like the form can double conversion.”

Why?

“You’re really capitalizing on that impulse buyer. The less
clicks you make a prospect go through the better.”

The bad news is: Just like everything else that isn’t plain
text-only, this will not work for all email clients. I don’t
have an exact list of what it will and will not work for yet, but
you’d better assume that wireless/PDA, Lotus Notes, Eudora, and
most AOL users are not worth mailing this to.

Plus, it doesn’t work if your recipient isn’t plugged into the
Net at the time they decide to respond to it. Lots of email
users at home still download their mail, turn off the connection
and then read it.

Kim isn’t sure what they’ll see when it doesn’t work – probably
an error message. I’ll bet you can customize that techie-written
error message to be more user-friendly and get some saved sales
that way.

Kim adds, “You definitely have to plug the fact that this is a
Secure Email.” Enough users have been conditioned to believe
their credit card info can be stolen in mid-send otherwise.

(BTW: Alexis says this is a big myth, yeah it can happen but
thieves don’t bother with onesy-twosy email catches when they can
crack an entire e-store database to get zillions of numbers at
once. I say, myth or not, as a marketer you have to reassure
people or that sale is gone.)

If you’ve tested putting transactions within an email send us
your notes on how it worked out (and if possible a campaign
sample) so we can talk about it in the future. Contact our editorial director Tad Clarke at tadc(at)marketingsherpa(dot)com

Useful links related to this article

1. Sample of a FlowersUSA transactional campaign
http://www.transactis.com/clients/flowersusa/creative3/creative.html

2. Kim’s book and company
http://www.emailmarketing101.com
http://www.inboxinteractive.com

3. The technology behind Kim’s transactional tests
http://www.transactis.com

Many of you have asked, “Why isn’t your Blog part of your main site?”

Well, from the start I figured it was best to keep a church and state separation between our editorial content. MarketingSherpa’s various “Official” newsletters (six of them now) are written by various members of our editorial team (myself, Senior Reporter Catherine Getches, Contributing Editor Mark Brownlow, and Tech Editor Alexis Gutzman). They are very factual, based on in-depth interviews with the marketers we cover. I worried that a first-person opinion Blog by mainly just me, would give you the wrong impression of the rest of the stories.

Well, last week I learned I was wrong. At our Newsletter Publishers’ Workshop, I learned that people really like to have a personal note included along with their more formal articles. I learned the most popular newsletters include both kinds of editorial.

As we drove back to the airport after the show, Alexis turned to me and said, “Well that’s it. You should move SherpaBlog into the SherpaWeekly newsletter. It can be the first part of each week’s issue. Kind of like a hostess welcoming you to a party. You’ll go and mingle with the other guests later, but first you want a personal note.”

I know a smart idea when I hear one, so that’s what will happen. Instead of dashing off a note whenever here at odd hours, I’ll do a Blog/letter in SherpaWeekly each Thursday morning.

This means if you’re a SherpaBlog subscriber, you won’t get any more issues. It doesn’t make much sense to email out a Blog separately. In the old print publishing days I would have said, “We’ve merged the two lists together and you’ll get the Weekly automatically.” But in this brave new permission world, it doesn’t seem right anymore to do that. Instead it’s entirely up to you.

If you’d like to continue getting my Blog emailed to you, just sign up for SherpaWeekly. It’s quick, it’s easy, you can get off the list with one click anytime, and no, we never ever rent or share email addresses with other marketers. Thanks for your support.

What does it mean if your Web site is #31 for your most important keyword on (free) search engines? According to new research (about which you won’t be reading from anyone else for a week) from iProspect, it means that you might as well be number 3001.

This is not your typical “we surveyed our clients and they all thought that [fill in your marketing tactic here] was the most important part of an online marketing mix.” No sir. iProspect hired Dick Morris to write the survey and Vote.com to conduct the research. (We tend not to report on that other kind of research.)

The most important results of their 13-page not-quite-a-white-paper-not-quite-a-marketing-brochure (although perhaps my copy was a pre-publication draft) were as follows:

• The largest group of search engine users (32%) look at the entire first page of results before clicking a link.
  
• Only 12% of all search engine users consistently look at more than three pages of results before either following a link, rephrasing their search, or going to a different search engine.
  
• How most people use search engines. They:

  1. type a search term
     
  2. review (up to three pages, but usually just one page of) results
     
  3. follow a link OR if not satisfied, type a revised search term
     
  4. review results
     
  5. follow a link OR if not satisfied, go to a different search engine and try the first search term again

What does this mean to marketers? No news there: search engine optimization/marketing matters.

I would love to see comparable research on how often people click on the sponsored links (from someone other than Google) that appear on the side of the page, rather than like Overture’s, at the top. If you have anything on that topic, please send it my way.

Never schedule your annual conference to take place in another city two weeks after you’ve moved house. I guess if this Blog is useful for anything, it’s how-to-avoid-Anne’s-mistakes.

Anyway, the Email Publisher’s Workshop this Monday was quite an experience. My Official Notes are posted for ContentBiz readers at the link below. They print out to 8 pages, so I suggest you go ahead and print them out rather than getting eyestrain from reading them on your screen. Which may not be brainy of me because then you won’t be able to impulsively click on the link to buy the full Workshop transcript which I placed at the end of the notes. (How do you do long content and still get impulse clicks? Not solved yet.)

Here are my unofficial notes just for you Blog readers:

#1. Text dominates HTML! After one speaker said text works better for his advertisers, a few different people in the audience came up to me during the break and said they’ve found the exact same thing. “It’s not worth the work to publish in HTML.” Sosummit in mid-May and the 2nd annual Email Publisher’s Workshop in mid- October. Buh-bye.

Link to the Official Workshop Wrap-Up (much better than above)

http://www.contentbiz.com/sample.cfm?contentID=2179

I just got a note from a magazine publisher who wants to sell ads in the magazine’s sister-email newsletter. His concern, “I’d like to be able to reasonably predict what impact soliciting sponsorship of our newsletters will have upon advertisers in the printed magazines. The fear is that it would cut into the success of our magazine advertising.”

Here’s what I told him: “My suggestion is that you pitch the newsletter sponsorships as an entirely different product that fills an entirely different need for the advertiser.

If their strategy is becoming a best-known name brand and being the company/brand that people think of when they think of that category, then print ads work very well.

If their strategy is to get out time sensitive news (perhaps a hot offer or product launch) or to make a soft direct response offer designed to grow their own in-house prospect list, then your newsletter is the best place to sponsor.

In other words, if your newsletter sponsor has to ‘steal’ funds from another budget to pay for ezine ads, perhaps those funds should come from PR and/or direct mail, not space advertising.”

Agree, disagree? If you’ve got some real-life experiences to back this one up, let me know.

Are your headlines showing up in Google News? If this latest Google launch has even a quarter of the success that the main Google site does, it could become a major traffic driver for news content sites.

The “about” page proudly states that Google News isn’t created by humans. No editors, no writers, no managing editors. Nothing but
the non-journalist programmers who wrote the code Google robots use to surf 4,000+ news sites on the web and bring back headlines. Google hopes this non-human factor will make it more interesting than news selected by people. Unusual sources might get top spot and opposing views may jostle next to each other on the page. We’ll see. My theory is the mighty buck will speak out at some point and paid placements will end up taking the lead.

Anyway, if you think your site should be included in their sweep, email your info to news-feedback@google.com. Google notes,
“While we can’t guarantee that we will add all sources that are recommended, we will review all the suggestions we receive.” Go ahead, flood their inbox!

Thanks to reader David Yale of Control Beaters who sent in this note, “DoubleClick finds that 12.6% of its clients’ emails bounced in the second quarter of 2002, which is an all-time high.” There are a zillion reasons why bounces are getting higher constantly, including people switching email addresses as they change jobs or just change boxes hoping to slow down spam overload. Plus ISPs are increasing their anti-spam vigilence, and bouncing mail that may be perfectly good opt-in, but innocently shares a spam characteristic such as many identical messages being sent to multiple mailboxes in the same system (such as Yahoo) within seconds of each other.

DoubleClick figures the biggest problem is ever-decreasing mailbox sizes. Last year both Hotmail and Yahoo decreased the sizes of their free email account holder mailboxes in an effort to save on server space and to get people to pay for something (in this case a bigger mailbox). Also some corporate IT departments are reducing employee mailbox sizes.

Which adds up to a powerful argument in favor of less-rich email. Logos, pictures, Flash animation, audio, etc., all the fun with tech and design you have with email is becomming verbotten. Yes we can do it, and officially most people can receive it, but unofficially their mailboxes are too full. Bounce!

Former stock analyst Phil Leigh launched his own independent media company, Inside Digital Media, this week and I for one am psyched. He told me he’s planning to interview people who are doing “cutting-edge stuff in audio and video over your PC.”

So far he’s done exclusives with execs at RealNetworks music, DRM-leaders Macrovision, Live365.com, Movielink and more. The interviews are mainly audio, so you have to plunk yourself down at your PC and be prepared to listen rather than read.

To be alerted when Phil runs another interview (tends to be about weekly) send a blank email to
interviews-subscribe@insidedigitalmedia.com
http://www.insidedigitalmedia.com/