MarketingSherpa Blog

Here’s another eye-opening session at the MarketingSherpa Selling Online Subscriptions Summit in New York City. Michael McCurdy, Director CRM, and Leslie Semegran, Director Online Marketing, TheLadders.com, talked about maximizing customer lifetime value.

TheLadders.com is a site for jobseekers looking for $100K+ jobs and recruiters. They offer subs for a month, six months or a year. And they found that six-month subscribers have a 29% higher lifetime value than monthly subscribers and that annual subscribers have a 39% higher lifetime value than monthlies.

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Day one at the recent MarketingSherpa Selling Online Subscriptions Summit in New York City offered some impressive takeaways. Take the “Landing Page Optimization Case Studies” session by Flint McGlaughlin, Director, MarketingExperiments. Two key takeaways:

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Starting a blog is easy. Keeping a blog going for more than a few months is hard. If you are one of the relatively few, the proud, the multi-year bloggers, you should give yourself a gold medal for sustained effort above most people’s capacities.

However, is your hard work really paying off as much as it could?

Very few blogs are optimized for success. Here are the top 5 action items I’ve been testing on a side blog of my own that you can use to improve your blog today — easily, cheaply and quickly.

#1. Add search capability

Blog visitors love to search your blog for posts and content that directly interests them. A search box is a fantastic engagement device to get more page views and more engagement.

After I tested adding a search-this-blog box at the bottom of my own personal blog’s homepage, the search results page became the second most popular page on the entire blog!

Google is just one of several providers offering free blog search tools that you can add to your blog’s template with a few mouse clicks. I’m not even remotely technical, so if I could do it, you can, too.

#2. Increase your “older posts” hotlink size

Most blog templates feature an “older posts” hotlink that appears at the end of the page, so when visitors have read a page, they can click on it to keep going. If your blog doesn’t have this link, add one to your template immediately. If your blog has this link already, enlarge the point size. I made mine as big as the headline type so it could catch the eye.

Sure, some people will click on hotlinks on your blog navigation column to go to other pages, but a heck of a lot won’t. Adding prominent “older posts” link at the end of every page gets you more page views per visitor. More page views means more engagement.

#3. Offer an email subscription

Drives me nuts — I discover a blog I adore, but it only offers an RSS feed. Like the majority of Internet users, I don’t routinely use or check an RSS reader, but I do routinely check email. If I really like a blog, I would vastly prefer to be pinged via email when a new posting goes up. Otherwise, no matter how much I enjoyed that blog, the chances that I’ll remember to revisit it are slim.

Feedburner is one of several services that allow you to add an email opt-in box for your blog quickly, easily and, best of all, for free. Once you get more than 1,000 opt-ins or so, you may want to graduate the list up to a formal email service provider. This way, you can control the template and look of the email sent, as well as have more access to your list and mailing stats.

#4. Use keyword analysis to inspire more posts

You should be tracking basic blog stats by using free analytics tools, such as Google Analytics, or by tying your blog into your main site’s analytics software. While it’s fine to see how many visitors you get, the most useful report is actually the keyword analysis report.

There, you’ll find a list of the terms that visitors used in external search engines (Yahoo!, Google, MSN, etc.) to find your blog. Sometimes, the list will be an unhappy surprise — lots of visitors may be coming in because of a keyword that occurs in one of your posts that’s not truly reflective of the topic you write about. For example, I once mentioned “Serbian Women” in a headline and now get quite a lot of traffic from what appears to be men looking for love … not quite the readership I had in mind!

Use the list to see which terms you already have traction with. If they appear to be generating useful, relevant traffic, then increase your use of those keywords in other posts, especially in headlines. Obviously, don’t overstuff your keywords, but using a favorite term or phrase over several posts can’t hurt.

#5. Include a contact hotlink in your sig
If you want readers to contact you, perhaps because you offer consulting or other personal services as your line of work, don’t hide your contact information! I’m startled by how many bloggers hide their full name and contact info under a generic “About Me” button somewhere on the nav bar.

Don’t force visitors to seek that button out and click on it for answers. Instead, include a brief sig and even a “Contact Me” hotlink as your “name” at the end of each post.

This is something you can set up quickly in your blog template without any extra cost.

Good luck and let me know how it goes. Got more blog improvement tips for your fellow Sherpa readers? Use the comment box below!

Google’s hegemony over the worldwide search market is undeniable. Consider the recent report from comScore that estimated Google’s share of the European search market at 79.2%.  I think “dominant” is an apt description.

But the more interesting data point from this report is who came in third for European searches: Yandex, the Russian search portal. It bested Yahoo! and MSN to crack the top three, based on its strong pull in Russia and Eastern Europe, where English is less widely spoken than in other parts of Europe.

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You’re a publisher still looking for a podcasting strategy. Or you’re worried about making a big investment of time and resources.  You could be sitting on a heap of readily available audio content: Interview recordings your editorial team has made for its print articles.

Reporters typically gather way more information than they can fit into their stories. If those interviews are on tape, you can cull some of the best anecdotes and other information that never made it into print and edit them into podcasts that are relevant to your audience.

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Coca Cola cups were displayed prominently in front of judges Randy, Paula and Simon during the last season of American Idol. It’s consumer product placement, of course, and it’s growing.

Some recent stats by Nielsen show the growth.  And it’s not tiny. Product placements grew 6% during the first quarter of 2008 alone. And product placement of the Top 10-featured brands on primetime network TV have grown by 52% so far this year when compared to last year.

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So, you want to sponsor a NASCAR racing team? “Think big and start small,” says Bob Parsons, CEO and Founder, Go Daddy Group, Inc.

Parsons sponsors winners. He started in late 2006 as an associate sponsor of Danica Patrick, who recently made history by becoming the first woman to win an IndyCar race. Go Daddy later sponsored the Indianapolis 500 itself.

Now Parsons has moved into NASCAR by sponsoring another proven winner, Dale Earnhardt Jr. Earnhardt will drive a Go Daddy car in six nationally-televised races. That equals lots of TV time for Go Daddy.

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Search marketing tools are great. They provide answers in an industry where answers are scarce. The thing about tools, though, is they are not always accurate–and the tools themselves can make the problem worse.

At least that’s what I got from a conversation with Wil Reynolds, Founder, Seer Interactive. Wil and I discussed some great SEM tools and how to use them (most of them are free). We also touched on some data flaws he sees while researching.

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Marketers often face skepticism within their companies when they embark on a new brand launch or corporate rebranding effort. Non-marketing types, particularly engineers, tend to think of branding as one of those fuzzy, feel-good exercises that don’t really have an impact on their jobs.

So, I was intrigued by a unique approach to this problem adopted by the marketing team at NetApp, which recently unveiled a new brand identity. (You can read more about this project in our Sherpa Case Study,(here).

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When your CFO casts about for recessionary cost cutting, replacing human beings with automated recordings and online account centers, replacing paper with email, it seems like an awfully intelligent step. And, it may be … for this quarter. But, you’re risking future profits.

Why? People are not made out of electrons. Not yet, anyway.

Human beings make brand loyalty and additional purchasing decisions based on their impressions of your brand. Those impressions are based on sensory experiences. If the only sense you appeal to is an electronic one, your brand’s grip on their loyalty will be fleeting. Sound, touch, smell and taste beat vision by a landslide; especially, words or numbers on a screen versus relevant images (not stock photos).

In addition, the experience of talking to a human being on the phone, even briefly, resoundingly beats the sensory and emotional impression of an automated audio system giving recorded information (however personalized). A real human being’s live voice touches customers on levels that no recording ever can or will.

When you cut costs by going electronic, you’re cutting those strong sensory impressions. You’re putting a wall of frosted glass between your customer and your brand.

How do you prove the value of real human beings and print materials to your CFO? The answer — try to wring permission for a test cell. Take one segment of customers (making sure it’s a true cross segment with no unusual aspects that could skew results versus your normal demographic) and start doing business the old-fashioned way. Offer them a human being to call via direct dial; send them the occasional printed letter and/or catalog.

How do you reach out via multiple senses while keeping your business “green”? The key is in alternating experiences — mix in a few snail mail letters with your routine email series rather than switching whole hog from one to the other. And, of course, use ride-along opportunities as much as possible. If you have to ship something real-world, such as a fulfillment package, make sure personal letters, etc., are included in the package to share postage and reduce the total amount of mail sent.

Also, don’t waste your print-and-postal splurge on generic marketing that make as much sense in email. Use print for highly personalized offers and/or for highly detailed communications that require so many pages of information that it’s more convenient in print.

On the phone rep front, it may not be possible to have them work virtually from home, but you can encourage carpooling and use of public transportation with cash incentives. One of my old companies even paid for a public bus shelter outside our building so we wouldn’t get soaked or freeze while waiting.

Then, naturally, detail these green-friendly measures on your website and other ‘about us’ communications.

Last, a little story to help you see how moving from electronic to print may help the bottom line:

Years ago, MarketingSherpa used to offer our Benchmark Guide and Handbook customers their choice of print versus PDF. However, I began to wonder if the PDF-only accounts were as brand loyal and likely to buy again as the print-buyers. Our Web team checked PDF download stats. Turned out that as many as 40% of customers who purchased PDFs never got around to downloading them, despite reminder emails! Unless everyone downloaded and reviewed the Guide they’d bought, how could we count them satisfied or expect referrals or future purchases?

So, I bit the bullet and started sending every single customer *both* a PDF and a printed copy. I didn’t raise prices, aside from adding an at-rate postage charge, because I didn’t think it would be fair. However, I did watch carefully to see how renewal, referral and account lifetime sales rose over the next 12 months. Results were outstanding. In fact, overall sales went up nearly 60% the next year.

Are we hurting the environment? I don’t think so. I’m pretty sure that most people printed out their Guides when they got the PDFs anyway. I’m also pretty sure many printed Guide owners tend to share them — letting colleagues borrow their copy. That’s something you can’t do with Sherpa PDFs without breaking copyright and the law.

At about the same time, we also began extending our customer service phone hours to include both US East Coast and West Coast business hours so customers would be more successful at reaching a human being when they called. Again, the effort paid off in terms of more satisfied customers and longer term accounts.

Pretty soon after that, a business publication rated me as “The Most Influential Woman in Online Advertising” for that year. Made me laugh — much of that Internet influence was gained because we strengthened our offline impact.