Should your B-to-B site start with a Flash intro page? Many experts say “No.” While Flash is a very useful tool — especially for online product demonstrations and presentations — business sites could hurt their results by forcing visitors to sit through a Flash introduction. Some visitors with older browsers can’t view Flash. Others (especially repeat visitors such as favored customers) are annoyed by constantly having to watch it to get to their destination.
What if you compromise by offering a “skip flash” option on your front page? The problem is, you’re still forcing someone to opt-out of Flash. The visitor has to wait for the page to be loaded, choose their option, click “Skip Intro” or “Non-Flash” and then wait for your home page to be loaded. While this may take less than a minute, most visitors only give a site 15 seconds before deciding whether to stay or go.
Chuck McLeester, VP Strategic Planning of B-to-B agency Roska Direct councils against Flash introduction pages because of visitor impatience. He says, “You have to deliver people the items they want within 2-3 clicks. If they have to go through more than that, you’ll probably lose them.” Is your lovely Flash intro really delivering so much value that it’s worth losing visitors for? Probably not.
A West-coast mailing list processing company is offering a new service — they append email names to business names and addresses. Although this is legal, the process makes spamming possible which could be incredibly harmful for the naive business marketers buying the service.
When we called the company to find out where they were getting these business executives email information from, they told us they had about 25 sources whose names they wouldn’t reveal, but yes many were trade magazine publishers. It’s common practice for trades to rent out snail mail lists and even phone numbers, so perhaps these publishers don’t realize the damage they are inflicting by also renting email names they’ve collected from subscribers. Folks, renting email lists is COMPLETELY different from other lists. You are setting yourself up for negative repercussions if you are doing so without clearly stated permission from each subscriber and without triple checking the purpose for which each renter will use the name. If one of your subscribers gets spammed because you rented out their name, they could blame you. And emotions run very high when it comes to spamming these days.
So, from now on be sure you strip out email addresses BEFORE you let any lists or databases out of house.
People are making more international telephone calls right now, it seems. Apparently, it has something to do with that big sports thing going on in Australia at the moment. In order to exploit this, and knowing that, for most people in the UK, such calls are jolly expensive, online telephone company Quip.co.uk are currently offering a 30-minute international call for one penny to anyone who registers at their Web site.
How’s it doing? So far so good, says Quip’s Tricia Tomiyoshi-Marsom – hundreds of new users signed up on the first day before any marketing took place (thanks to good old word-of-mouth). In fact, the promotion should have ended yesterday but it has been so successful that Quip have decided to extend it for a further week.
Of course, what’s REALLY important with promotions like this is how many of the new users it has encouraged come BACK after they’ve had their (almost) freebie.
This week’s Faux Pas comes to us from the US of A. We hope you don’t mind – it’s such a BIG Faux Pas we couldn’t possibly have let it slip by without telling you…
eCountries (the ‘Global Business Network’) is a B-to-B publishing and e-commerce service that has recently launched following several months of previews. Just prior to their launch, eager to publicise the forthcoming big day (as you might expect), eCountries sent an email to over 500 of the top Internet executives worldwide. Can you guess what they did? That’s right – they put every single email address in the ‘To’ field, totally forgetting about that handy little ‘Bcc’ option. Well, we’ve just three words for them – mistake, mistake, mistake…
Did any of the aforementioned top Internet executives complain about this breach of privacy? Most heartily!! And, as if to add fuel to the fire, the complaints were seen by everybody on the list too! We hear it was some days before eCompanies had the heart to approach the list again, this time with an embarrassed apology…
Imagine our surprise, when in the women’s room at NYC’s Bendix Diner yesterday we were confronted with a poster from RCA’s Blackberry Wireless Email saying, “Got a free hand? You could be sending email.” Of all the public places that dot-com posters could adorn, we figure that women’s restrooms are among the only foolproof venues where advertisers could segment by gender. So why did RCA decide on creative 100% aimed at men for this media buy? For those of you who may have better ideas, the poster-placing firm’s number is 212.685.7981.
Synquest.com’s expert consultant Vince Wicker told me a story that made me shudder: Apparently some Net market makers find that no matter how much they spend to register new customers or members to their site, new users often visit once or twice and then “fall off the map.”
It then costs marketers an average of FIVE TIMES as much to reacquire the same customer! Lesson learned: don’t splash out for new customer acquisition until you have content and functions that will keep them engaged, and a retention plan in place to keep them coming back.
Underwear war broke out at this month’s First Tuesday event (www.firsttuesday.com), held at London’s Vinopolis on May 2. During a lively discussion about the future of E-tailing in Europe (with a bizarre recurring theme of ladies’ smalls), the event revealed that a certain leading high street retailer has its knickers rather in a twist about selling online. Morris Helsgott, MD of Marks and Spencer Ventures, got caught with his pants down.
Trying hard to sound positive –as a prime mover in the company’s Internet investment arm should– he was prepared to predict only a ‘very, very small’ future for E-tail which, he believes, will remain unprofitable, succeeding only where complemented –and funded– by an offline strategy. This rather gloomy view of the B2C environment on the part of M&S won’t have gone unnoticed by the majority of those present. Marks and Spencer’s attitude towards online selling might have appeared a little less negative (and, who knows, a sale or two may have been clinched) had somebody thought to provide an address for the M&S Web site, but it was not to be. Just for you, however, the site’s URL is: http://www.marks-and-spencer-gifts.co.uk/index.html
