Choosing the right title for white papers and webinars can mean the difference between catching your prospects’ attention and being overlooked in a sea of competing ecommerce content. For some ideas on creating titles that get attention, check out the homepage of the popular social bookmarking site Digg.com.
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.
Online video producer Jim Kukral, of JFK Services, has some interesting thoughts on YouTube and Google Universal Search.
Search competition is not as strong in YouTube as in Google, Jim says. For example, searching “refinance mortgage” in YouTube returns 964 results. Searching in Google returns 11.6 million results. Some other examples:
There’s a lot to be said for marketing to one of our closest neighbors, Canada – especially when their economy (and dollar) is strong, and ours remains weaker.
There is plenty of opportunity for B-to-B marketers targeting Canada. I discovered this opportunity while doing research for a special report on marketing to Canadians.
The Internet is changing everything – even pillars of American culture such as political campaigns.
Just look at what’s happened to presidential politics. Sen. Barack Obama has all but seized the Democratic presidential nomination – a feat he might not have accomplished without online fund-raising, social networking and Google ads.
“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 …”
Shifting alliances and partnerships in the credit card industry create big headaches for sites that use recurring billing. And it’s time to break out the aspirin again.
I just finished helping to select the winners of the 2008 MarketingShera Viral Marketing Hall of Fame, and I learned viral campaigns are strange beasts.
They’re not as straight-forward as AdWords accounts or press releases. It doesn’t seem to matter how much time and money you invest–you must appeal to the fickle whims of the Internet.
Higher cart abandonment and bounce rates may be a sign of the gloomier economic times for eretailers. Both rates are up, according to a new report from MarketLive, Inc., which compiled data from almost 100 eretailers.
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
