MarketingSherpa Blog

Allen Wyatt at Vital News just went through more than 8 days of hell with his merchant account processing online payments for ebooks he’s selling — and he gave me permission to share some details with you.

– If you have a merchant account through Retriever (who are one of the biggest processors out there), be aware that they have told Allen “accounts through them can only be issued for physical products.” Which means online subscriptions, PDFs, ebooks, ASPs, etc is verboten.

Allen’s initial application to them more than four years ago said he’d be selling downloads online, but somehow no one at Retriever noticed. Now that they have, they’ve cut his account off extremely abruptly.

Until a couple of months ago, we had a Retriever account too – so this makes my blood run cold. It could have happened to us….

– Someone using a series of IP addresses starting with the numbers “202” (such as 202.81.61.18) has been submitting large quantities (500 per day or so) of fraudulent orders on Allen’s site — and other etailers I know say it’s happened to them too from the same IP address block.

Luckily for Allen, Authorize.Net, who he uses for online processing (in conjunction with Retriever), caught all the fraudulent charges and declined them. Their fraud department was very understanding and did not think less of Allen for being the target of a scam artist.

– Unluckily for Allen, Retriever didn’t catch all the fraudulent charges and processed some of them – which tied up funds on the poor (innocent) card owner’s account. Retriever’s fraud dept also definitely took the view that Allen was guilty-until-proven- innocent of causing the fraud, despite his long-term account with them. So he had to go through 8 days of hassling to get the cash from his legitimate charges, which they apparently held onto as a punishment.

– Allen’s advice (aside from avoid Retriever), “First, if you are being hit by these Indonesian fraud folks, don’t be passive–be proactive. Call not just your gateway (Authorize.Net), but call your CC processor, reseller, or bank and start screaming. All the time your decline-to-approval ratio is going up, flags are going up at the processor and you increase your likelihood of being shut down.

Second, don’t assume that you can sell downloadable product just because your reseller tells you that you can. Get it in writing.

Third, consider not putting all your eggs in one basket. You might consider multiple credit card merchant accounts. That way, if one of the accounts is shut down through no fault of yours, your business doesn’t get shut down at the same time.

Note from a reader – “What’s a barrier page?”

It’s the page or pop-up that appears when a site visitor attempts to go further than they are allowed to go without either registering and/or paying. It’s your barrier to the subscribers/registrants-only stuff. It’s also your most power sales tool. They are trying to get to your content at this instant – so, tell them why they should pay for it.

Patrick Hurley over at Salon just wrote in, “I know you’re always in the market for new intelligence. We’re raising our prices and have announced it via a daily ticker in our edit well counting down the days until prices increase (you’ll see it if you log on http://www.salon.com/ and scroll down the edit well).

“So far, it’s really getting prospects off the dime and moving new subs, especially for July which is generally quite sluggish. As the days wind down, I think we’ll continue to drive strong demand. Come August 1st we may then “extend the deadline a week by popular demand” to eke out some more subscribers who want to be grandfathered under the charter pricing. Then we’ll roll out the new rates see how (in)elastic our pricing is.”

Very smart — I remember from my days of sub marketing that those price increase specials always worked well. Another great tactic to tack on it to announce a hot new premium the day after the special ends… something to distract them from and add value to the new price. You can offer it to the folks who bought cheaply prior to as a 30 cent upgrade too.

Barrier Pages Really Matter. I’ve been screaming about this for years (see past 3 years of Blog archives) and sometimes felt like nobody in the subscription sales world was listening (the last time WSJ tested the creative on their barrier page was …never.)

The people who do test – such as CarFax, MIT Tech Review, AmericanGreetings.com, eDiets – show significant leaps in conversion rates. It’s a no brainer – you find out what works and do more of it.

Now MyFamily.com has seen the light. They tested tweaking creative on their barrier page (which they call their “deny page”) and raised subscription sale conversion rates 64%. MediaPost is all excited about this.

Well, I’m happy for them, but DUH! Come on you sub sites – this is 101.

http://www.mediapost.com/dtls_dsp_news.cfm?newsId=211972

I just learned something cool from our new B-to-B reporter Srikumar Rao (you may know the name — he used to write on marketing
for Forbes.)

Srikumar said he’s seen B-to-B email campaign data that shows the recipients who click last, convert at a significantly higher rate than the quicker clickers.

His theory is that if someone has taken the trouble to save your email message in their in-box for later reading, they are probably a more qualified sales lead. Even if it takes them a week or two (or even longer) to finally click through.

Makes sense.

In these days of email overload, I think many recipients are performing a sort of triage-system for incoming mail. You delete the crud quickly, you answer the easy stuff right away, and then you save the requires-thought stuff for later.

What it means for marketers: make sure you leave your landing page (aka splash page) and also anything powering your email’s HTML images up for as long as possible. Not just a few days.

Also, don’t measure campaign success based on 24-hour response. The really good replies may not have begun to come in yet.

BTW: Got any data from your own campaigns on this? Lemme know and maybe we’ll write about you!

Even if you’re not remotely considering adding Google AdSense ads to your site, here’s a very fun tool — you just pop in your URL and it displays the sorts of ads that would appear on your site.

In my case, I’m not adding AdSense to our sites, because in my niche (corporate execs) brand is a critical thing. A few lame ads targeting a slightly off demographic could make visitors think we’re for people “not like them.”

Or, maybe I’m just a control freak.

BTW: You could use this tool to scout out potential advertisers to sell directly to…..

http://about-adsense.com/adsense-web-tool.html

Just got off the phone with Jason Brown who is the most bubbly, hyper, positive Brit I’ve ever met. He’s also the associate publisher over at Windows & .Net Magazine. They launched interruptive “Rockblocker” site ads about two and a half months ago, and I wanted to know how things are going.

The ads are the kind where a user has to click to get anywhere else — you either click to say yes I want to see more about the advertiser, or you click to say, Heck no, I want to see the content I was trying to get to.

It’s a particularly risky maneuver in the IT marketplace because IT guys hate advertising and loathe commercialism. Which is why none of the typical big IT advertisers such as Microsoft said they would touch it with a ten foot pole when Jason’s team first pitched them.

Jason himself was nervous – he prepped the site customer service team to be ready for a deluge of angry emails. His goal was to keep it under 2,000 emails – if the anger went over he would pull the campaign. They anxiously stood by … and only four users emailed in out of the million uniques who saw the first campaigns.

The tests averaged a click rate in favor of the advertiser of more than 20%. The ad sales team called clients triumphantly — and landed 16 new roadblock accounts in 60 days. That’s got to be some kind of sales record for a new campaign format on B2B sites. (Note – yeah, I know it’s not a new format on B2C sites… but B2B is a different universe.)

http://www.winnetmag.com/

Michael Banks Valentine just emailed me that the Google AdSense Terms of Service forbid publishers carrying AdSense ads to reveal click throughs or revenue figures. So for you folks who’ve already sent me your data – never fear I won’t reveal it. (But I will check if I can run a survey to reveal some data in aggregate.)

According to an article in Direct Magazine, subscription site Date.com has redirected 60% of its email marketing budget into other online tactics to acquire new subscribers because they feel filters are eating too many of their promotions to 3rd party lists.

They don’t say why filters are targeting them so much — but I’ll bet it’s a combination of the fact that their copy probably contains innocent words that may be common to spammers (such as dating), and that some rental lists on the B2C market are mis- represented as permission based, when they are actually junk names and thus would be filtered more.

Anyway, here’s the funny part of the story — while Date.com’s marketer tests various online ad tactics to raise sub sales that email formerly brought in, the company is covering part of the revenue shortfall by putting their own email list on the rental market. And, it’s so successful (after all these are direct response buyer names with lots of fabulous demographic selects) that they are considering also putting their snail mail list out there too.

Online sub site revenue tactics look more and more like offline sub product tactics every day. I know plenty of B2C print sub newsletters (Boardroom Reports, etc.) who’ve depended on list rental income for profits over the years.

http://directmag.com/ar/marketing_datecom_moves_away/index.htm

Michael Mazel over at Google just sent me a link to this happy publisher carrying AdSense ads case history he wrote up. In it the folks at InfoPlease reveal they are making more with Google AdSense ads than they were as members of general online ad networks. https://www.google.com/adsense/infoplease

Which is fine… but you should realize general online ad networks have been paying diddlysquat for ages now, so anything is better than that.

I’ve been asking around about the profitability of AdSense ads and heard very different stories — ranging from under $1 CPM to $20CPM for publishers. I’ve also heard some folks say the ads are amazingly well targeted to their niche, and others say the opposite (such as an ad for healthcare pros that appeared on a kid’s site.)

So the jury is still out. I think we’re all hoping the kinks work out and this is a great program in the long run. In the meantime, email me your experiences! AHolland@MarketingSherpa.com