MarketingSherpa Blog

Personal travel arrangements often require coordination with other parties, whether it’s your spouse, friends or other family members. That’s why travel activity retailer Viator’s sharable wish lists are such a great idea.

Many ecommerce sites offer wish lists to visitors. They’re especially useful during the holiday season when families are figuring out what to buy one another. The impression I’ve gleaned from marketers is wish lists are useful, but they’re not a strong ongoing performance driver.

Online travel, on the other hand, has a more practical application for wishing. Friends and family members going on trips often coordinate what to do and send each other ideas. Viator’s wish lists make it easy for travelers to share ideas, and the team places “Add to my wish list” links prominently on their product pages.

I noticed these lists during a conversation with Kelly Gillease, Marketing Director, Viator. Visitors can view items on their wish lists directly on the homepage. From the homepage, with one click, they can view a form to send the list to up to three people with a personalized message.

“We do get a fair number of people creating wish lists, emailing them and sharing them,” Gillease says. “We’ve found it really does help boost our conversion rates.”

Gillease’s team plans to build on this success by creating account pages where site visitors can view all their lists, among other features.

Are there other effective applications for wish lists that you’re seeing? Are they helping lift your conversion rates? Let us know in the comments, and thank you.

I’ve been pretty busy lately, so I admit I wasn’t paying much attention when Google added Buzz to my personal Gmail account last week. Then I started seeing blog posts and articles outlining some pretty serious privacy concerns about the new social networking feature — and they got my attention.

Sure enough, when I clicked on the Buzz icon in my account I saw that Google had manufactured a list of followers for me, and a list of people to follow, all based on names in my inbox. Some of those names represented friends of mine, who I didn’t mind sharing information with — but some certainly weren’t friends.

Then it hit me: I’d just been opted-in to a social network without my permission.

I wasn’t pleased, and spent a long time trying to figure out how to un-enroll in Buzz. Turns out, lots of people are mad – suing mad, as a matter of fact.

So, Google’s big misstep is a great reminder for other marketers: Social media and email work because they represent permission-based marketing channels. Prospects and customers have to proactively reach out and say, “Yes, I want to hear from you” by subscribing to your email newsletter, becoming a Facebook friend, following you on Twitter, and so on.

So if you’re launching new social media features or thinking about ways to get social media followers onto your email lists, don’t assume every name in your database is open for enrollment. For example, a lot of B2B vendors are launching branded, private social networks. Don’t be like Google and automatically create accounts for every prospect in your database.

Just ask them first. It’s so much easier than countering a firestorm of bad PR and potential lawsuits.

End-of-year craziness meant that many of you couldn’t find time to share a marketing lesson for our “2010 Marketing Wisdom from the Field” report. So we’ve extended the deadline for you to share quotes about test results, campaign lessons or other insights you gained in 2009.

You now have until Sunday, Jan. 10 to share your wisdom with fellow marketers. Simply send us a short story highlighting a successful — or not so successful — experience from 2009, told in your own words.

This deadline will not be extended again, so don’t wait. Click here to share your quote:
http://sherpa.wisdomreport.sgizmo.com
(New Deadline: Jan. 10, 2010)

Thanks!

The year is almost over, which means it’s time for us to compile our annual Marketing Wisdom report.

So before you enjoy some time off for the holidays, please take a minute to share a story about a great test result, campaign lesson or other insight you gained during 2009. The deadline is Dec. 31, 2009.

Here’s the form where you can share your contribution:
http://sherpa.wisdomreport.sgizmo.com

In January, we’ll release our 2010 Wisdom Report at no cost to readers. It’s like a crowd-sourced marketing guidebook, compiling the best campaign lessons, test ideas, inspirational stories and creative solutions to common problems — all based on the experiences of the Sherpa reader community.

Here’s how it works. Your quote — a short story told in your own words — must be based on a real-life experience.

A few suggestions for your entry:
– How you coped with the recession and limited resources to execute your 2009 marketing strategy
– A test campaign that worked better (or worse) than anticipated
– Lessons learned about specific tactics, such as social media marketing, lead scoring, email autoresponders, etc.
– Career stories — everything from hiring to budgeting to dealing with office politics

So think back on your challenges and achievements of the past year. We’re sure you’ve got a great story to tell that will help make us all better marketers in 2010.

Here’s the entry form link again:
http://sherpa.wisdomreport.sgizmo.com

Thanks!

We’re in San Francisco for our 6th annual B2B Marketing Summit, and this year we’re trying something a little different. In addition to the Case Studies and panel discussions attendees have come to expect, we’re kicking off the event with a new feature we hope will help marketers process all the information that you typically have to absorb at one of these shows.

Dr. Flint McGlaughlin, Director, MarketingExperiements, and Brian Carroll, CEO, In Touch, are leading a training session this morning to outline the top five ways to improve your lead gen programs. They’ve identified the five key “levers” that make the fine-tuned lead generation machine run.
Those levers:

1. Increase campaign response rates to drive more inquires
2. Optimize lead qualification to focus on “high quality” leads for sales engagement
3. Develop Service level agreement between marketing and sales to increase lead acceptance
4. Intensify leads in the marketing funnel with lead nurturing
5. Accelerate leads currently in sales pipeline

Think of those five levers as a framework to examine each aspect of your lead generation campaigns. Look for tweets and blog posts over the next two days, and a summit wrap-up report next week, that will use those levers to help categorize great lessons learned, key takeaways and data points from the show.

And we’re off…

National brand marketers are in a challenging position as the power of localized marketing shows positive results. Some marketers need to reach large audiences through nationwide advertising, which makes it hard to localize the ads.

Alistair Goodman, CEO, 1020 Placecast, and his team strive to overcome this challenge–particularly for driving traffic to nearby brick-and-mortar stores. They help marketers run campaigns that are able to detect a consumer’s location and customize the ads to include localized elements.

“An advertiser can run a national campaign but actually create a large amount of local relevance,” Goodman says.

When building a campaign, Goodman’s team first asks marketers for:
o A list of the physical store addresses to which they want to drive traffic
o A profile of their target audience
o The goals of the campaign

This information helps narrow down the exact location of the campaign’s target audience, and helps guide the design of the localized ad. The ad will likely have some consistent elements — such as a product image — and some interchangeable elements — such as a city name, local imagery, or the address of a nearby location.

Knowing which regions to target, the team then finds publishers that have localized content for those regions.

“We create a network of publishers that have what we call location-specific content, where we can apply our approach to targeting,” Goodman says.

These publishers might be local classified, news or events websites. Other publishers, such as travel, weather, and real estate sites, operate nationally but deliver localized content. Visitors to these sites identify themselves as either residing in or interested in certain areas.

Goodman’s team recently worked with Avis Rent A Car to drive people to Avis’ off-airport locations. They were able to create a national campaign that connected ad viewers with the nearest Avis center.

The ads they displayed on regular websites encouraged viewers to click to see a map or book a car. The ads they displayed on mobile websites encouraged viewers to click to call the nearest Avis center.

The team did A/B testing of the localized ads vs. non-localized ads. They saw a 50% higher clickthrough rate on the customized Web ads and a 124% higher click-to-call rate on the customized mobile ads, Goodman says.

“When you’re able to develop a relevant message, you’re able to achieve much stronger results.”

I opened my Sunday newspaper this weekend and noticed an unusual ad stuffed among the many circulars. The ad was a full-sized grocery bag, and it was anything but subtle.

Office Max’s promotion runs from Aug. 16 to Aug. 22 and gives shoppers 20% off everything they can squeeze into the brown bag. If you’re thinking how best to fit a new office chair into the bag–don’t worry. All furniture qualifies for the discount, according to the small print. Computers, printers, and a few other items are among the unfortunate few that do not qualify.

I was surprised at the style and creativity of the ad. The bulky brown paper certainly stood out from the rest of the Sunday circulars, and the design looks good. There’s even a pattern down the side instead of the usual blank brown space:

Have any marketers reading this tried something similar? Or have you seen other companies try something similar in the past? Let us know in the comments…

Well over half of marketers report that they’re using strategies that emphasize value propositions–such as sales, coupons and discounts–to pull through the down economy. The data comes from a collaborative survey from LinkedIn and Harris Interactive, published last week.

The survey queried 1,015 advertisers between June 22 and June 30, and 2,025 adult consumers between June 24 and June 26, to get both groups’ opinions on ad effectiveness. You can read the full release here.

Three in five advertisers (61%) say they are using a value proposition strategy and almost three in five consumers (57%) say that the strategy is working ‘very well’ or ‘well’ to help marketers sell.

From the charts below, empathetic messaging was the second most reported strategy used by marketers to address the economic crisis at 39%, and 24% of consumers say the strategy is effective.

Interestingly only 18% of marketers report using a ‘luxuries for less’ strategy, while 34% of consumers say that it works ‘very well’ or ‘well’ to help sell products. This disconnect could be due to a low number of luxury product marketers in the survey–or it could be a genuine disconnect between what consumers say they want and what advertisers are giving them.

Take a look at the survey’s results to see if you are using any types of messaging or tactics that are being reported to be less effective than others. You might just be able to make a few tweaks to your efforts to boost performance.

In case you haven’t seen the link in our newsletters or on our homepage, we’re currently accepting speaking proposals for our 2009 B-to-B Demand Generation Summit.

With the deadline for submissions just two weeks away — May 21 — I wanted to give our readers another heads up. This is your chance to stand up and share your best practices, most successful campaign tactics, or insights into what works now in B2B marketing.

Again, we’re most interested in your own experiences, campaign war stories, case studies and lessons learned in areas such as:
o Lead nurturing
o Lead scoring
o International demand generation
o B-to-B email
o Paid search advertising and SEO
o Social media marketing
o Events
o Creating marketing content

Take a few minutes to submit your proposal here.

Don’t forget, this the the Summit will be held September 23-24 in San Francisco, and October 5-6 in Waltham, MA.

Return on investment is top of mind for marketers these days as most marketing efforts come under the scrutiny of ROI justification.

Here are a few insights gleaned from an interview with Jim Lenskold, President of the Lenskold Group, about how to improve and optimize the measurement of marketing ROI:

1. The biggest challenge in improving marketing ROI is removing cultural barriers and instilling a sense of discipline in planning and assessing the financial contribution of marketing.

2. Marketing strategies that do a better job targeting higher value, higher converting segments have the greatest impact on ROI.

3. Measurements that use market testing and modeling are most conclusive and often under-utilized when measuring marketing effectiveness.

4. Choosing measurements that provide insight about how to improve future initiatives is the most important step in generating greater performance and profitability.

5. Using revenue instead of profits as the return is a basic financial error that marketers make. It must be corrected for accurate ROI calculations and credibility with executives.