MarketingSherpa Blog

For the past few years I’ve had countless marketers and Web usability experts tell me, “Make sure your site pages are thin so they load quickly. People will leave your site rather than wait even an few extra seconds.”

Now there’s a new trend, it’s not just about thinning your page load, it’s about thinning your navigation options.

Most site revamps these days seem to be about taking stuff off, rather than adding stuff on.

In fact two of our Case Studies this week are about sites with few options. One site (MiningGold.com) only has a single option. You can click to buy, or you can click to leave. Another site (GoodysOnline.com) got rid of all of its impressive bells and whistles to focus on a simple offer for a discount coupon.

In a way, many companies’ home pages are becoming less like all-encompassing corporate doorways, and more like direct response reply cards.

Has your site gone skinnier? Let me know.. AHolland@MarketingSherpa.com

In the meantime, here’s Sherpa’s best stories from the past week:

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CASE STUDIES:

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#1. How to Go From Zilch Coverage to 200+ Media Interviews in 18 Months

Can you imagine if you called up the reporters who cover your marketplace, and they all said they’d never heard of you, or they thought you’d gone out of business?

That PR nightmare is exactly what happened to MAPICS, a 20-year old software firm serving manufacturers. Learn how MAPICS fought back, grabbing column inches from competitors like Oracle and SAP.

No, MAPICS didn’t stage any dramas or launch any revolutionary new products. Instead they relied on rock-solid PR best practices that you can emulate in order to get more press attention too: http://www.b2bmarketingbiz.com/sample.cfm?contentID=2197

#2. Goodys Chain Stores Test Emailed Discount Coupons

If you’ve been considering emailing discount coupons to your customers to see if you can drive some brick and mortar store traffic, absolutely check this Case Study out.

It includes some stunning metrics regarding average shopping cart size. We worried discount coupons might cannibalize normal sales. We were completely wrong: http://www.consumermarketingbiz.com/sample.cfm?contentID=2199

#3. Selling eBooks & Subscriptions to Consumers Online: 5 Hard Lessons from a Get-R*ich-Quick Publisher

It’s easy for we “serious” marketers to sneer a bit at the guys selling “how to get r*ich on the Internet” stuff. But, don’t you ever secretly wonder if there’s something you could learn from them? No matter how traditional and snooty your company is?

During the course of our research to create this Case Study, we learned five lessons that have already helped us out tremendously. Now it’s your turn. Yes, includes some (very) useful metrics: http://www.contentbiz.com/sample.cfm?contentID=2201

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PRACTICAL KNOW HOW:

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#4. Anne’s Marketing Column: How to Sell Your List – Part II

In Part II of this special report for email list owners, you’ll find:

-> 7 Tips on how much money you can make renting out your list

-> How to pick and compensate a list manager

-> What’s the difference between a manager and a broker

-> How to make sure no one spams your list

Also includes a link to Part I (in case you missed last week): http://www.MarketingSherpa.com/sample.cfm?contentID=2198

#5. AOL’s EVP of Strategy Lon Otremba on Now That the Pop-Up Party’s Over…

Short but sweet. In this quick interview, AOL’s Lon Otremba suggests a few ways online advertisers can still get pretty good response rates, without relying on annoying interruptive spots: http://www.greatmindsinmarketing.com/sample.cfm?contentID=2202

#6. How to Plant Stories in Target Marketing & Inside DM

More than 45,000 direct marketing professionals read Target Marketing Magazine or its sister newsletter Inside DM. Check out our interview with Editor in Chief Hallie Mumert to find out how to influence her so your story reaches them: http://www.marketingfame.com/sample.cfm?contentID=2200

Dow Jones, a company which has now admitted it’s paid for strippers(http://www.nypost.com/business/25970.htm) to help close ad sales deals, announced today it no longer wishes to pay for a anyone to be
Publisher of WSJ.com. Neil Budde is doing the “other opportunities” dance, and nobody is being hired or promoted to step into his old
shoes.

http://online.wsj.com/article_email/0,,SB1037991863714387948,00.html

Thanks to Barbara Kaplowitz for sending me a link to this unusual co-op marketing campaign from TheEconomist.com and Oracle. She just got an emailed offer from TheEconomist.com (who apparently have no idea filters will hurt you if you use the word “f^ree” repeatedly in a broadcast message) that says that Oracle have
offered to pay for an Economist.com $69 subscription for her.

The only thing she has to do to get this site subscription is click on the link and hand over her email address with permission
to be added to Oracle’s email list.

They do not want the offer to go viral so unless you are Barbara, the offer will not work for you, but you can view the landing page
and privacy policy.

This is a very clever way for TheEconomist to get some sponsor dollars by in effect offering a co-reg. It is something other subscription sites might consider, as long as your universe is big enough that you are not scared silly of cannibalization.

However, as Barbara noted in her letter to me, “Have to admit, the really daunting privacy policy at Oracle made me consider not
accepting the deal.” If Oracle had added some benefit copy about why it’s cool to be on their list and/or at least given a non-
legalese-summary of their privacy policy, they would have done better with this campaign.

Also, it does make me wonder about the value of the list. Oracle is such a big broad company offering so many products, that I’m
not sure what they are planning to send these new o^pt-ins that is targeted and valuable enough content for the Company to get a
decent email readership % rate. We shall see.

http://www.economist.com/subscriptions/oracle.cfm

For the past few years I’ve had countless marketers and Web
usability experts tell me, “Make sure your site pages are thin so
they load quickly. People will leave your site rather than wait
even an few extra seconds.”

Now there’s a new trend, it’s not just about thinning your page
load, it’s about thinning your navigation options.

Most site revamps these days seem to be about taking stuff off,
rather than adding stuff on.

In fact two of our Case Studies this week are about sites with few
options. One site (MiningGold.com) only has a single option.
You can click to buy, or you can click to leave. Another site
(GoodysOnline.com) got rid of all of its impressive bells and
whistles to focus on a simple offer for a discount coupon.

In a way, many companies’ home pages are becoming less like all-
encompassing corporate doorways, and more like direct response
reply cards.

Has your site gone skinnier? Let me know.

Search Engine Optimization is finally a mainstream marketing vehicle.

In the early days of the SEO industry, the “experts” sounded disturbingly like those guys on infomercials for real estate investment with no money down. The sleaze factor of the early SEO industry (hard-sell, get-rich-quick) has had a long-term impact on the perception of SEO by mainstream marketers (and agencies) with major brands.

A press release from iProspect today announced that they had just renewed two major brands, FordDirect and Sharp Electronics, for two years contracts. Since we wrote the Buyer’s Guide to SEO Firms, I know that most SEO firms are still providing services on a month-to-month basis.

What a two-year contract tells me is that major brands are catching onto the idea that SEO is an infrastructure issue, like security, metrics, and hosting. While the industry still has a long way to go to reach respectability in the eyes of many (as long as Christine Hall keeps coming into my mailbox, true respectability will be elusive) clearly, two-year contracts say that SEO is a permanent part of the online marketing mix, and a permanent line in the marketing budget.

Over the past few weeks I have heard the same exact comment from every single B2B marketer I’ve spoken to about what makes the difference in sales in these tough times:

“Get back to every incoming email really, really quickly.”

Not within 24 hours. Not within sometime this business day. Within a handful of minutes. Half an hour max.

The point being to catch that customer or prospect while they are still on their computer, while they are still at their desk, before they get distracted, and most importantly, before your direct competitor (who prospects probably emailed 20 seconds after they emailed you) gets back to them first.

Very often the first company to respond gets the sale.

Which is why I’m bummed by survey results announced by Jupiter this Monday that out of 227 US companies contacted via email, 23% didn’t bother to respond within three days. Three days!

That kind of behavior hurts *all* of us, because it trains people to not expect an answer when they email a company. Do we really

want to train our customers and prospects to not bother to contact us via email? Do we really want to throw away sales?

This week our Tech Editor Alexis Gutzman reports on some more disturbing news for email marketers. Seems that consumers are reporting opt-in lists as s*pam. Her column is below.

Until next week, Anne

P.S. Many readers wrote in about my Blog last week to say, “I wish my NPR station would use the Internet more during fundraising drives.” Here’s a resource you can send your local station manager to in order to encourage that: http://www.webpledgetools.org

P.P.S. You can reach me at anneh@marketingsherpa.com, but if you need help with your subscription or questions about anything in SherpaStore, you’ll get a faster response from our Customer Service Manager Donna Pfledderer at service@sherpastore.com or (919) 975-1705. Thanks!

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CASE STUDIES

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#1. How Flexcar Gets a 72% Marketing Email Newsletter Open Rate

If your company operates in multiple locations, or has multiple product lines, or multiple buyer demographics, then you really should be considering publishing several different email newsletters.

But, who has time? Flexcar decided instead to create one ultra-personalized newsletter that adjusts itself to each subscriber. That may sound complicated (and expensive) but it’s really not. Check out this Case Study to learn how you can duplicate their success on a small budget: http://www.consumermarketingbiz.com/sample.cfm?contentID=2192

#2. Five Tactics Briefing.com Uses to Sell Subscriptions to Individual Investors Online

This Case Study has one very big stealable idea for a way to improve your Web site results. Read it and then test it out for yourself.

Most Web site changes lead to incremental growth. You change a bit of copy, or the color of a button, and voila .005% more of your visitors buy something. Which is to be celebrated. But once in a blue moon a single improvement makes a profound difference to he bottom line. Briefing.com found one that meant some visitors were four times more likely to buy. Learn what it was: http://www.contentbiz.com/sample.cfm?contentID=2194

#3. How to Retain Business Clients by Using Regular Emailed Surveys

Almost everyone surveys their customers occasionally to find out how they are doing. Business cleaning company Jani-King is n an incredibly competitive marketplace, so they decided to survey monthly.

How do you get clients to answer a survey that frequently? This Case Study provides great advice. Best bit: Jani-King’s emailed surveys are in the body of the email itself, so recipients don’t have to click over to a Web page to answer them. http://www.b2bmarketingbiz.com/sample.cfm?contentID=2191

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PRACTICAL KNOW HOW

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#4. Alexis’ Tech Column: Cloudmark Test Results Disturbing for Permission Emailers

Do you think your email campaigns or newsletters are safe from being filtered into the “junk” folder – or being reported to spam blacklists – because you are a pure-as-the-driven-snow permission marketer? Sorry, Alexis has some bad news for you… http://www.emailsherpa.com/sample.cfm?contentID=2196

#5. Anne’s Marketing Column: How to Sell Your List – Part I

Seems like everyone is trying to make an extra buck these days by renting out their email list. Worldata’s Jay Schwedelson says, “We’ve seen exponential growth of the number of list on the market. 18 months ago there were 3,000-4,000. Now it’s literally close to 20,000.”

But lots of those lists are “garbage” and many are selling for bottom-of-the-barrel pricing. Here’s useful advice on how to put your list on the market the “right” way — so anti-s*pam advocates won’t hate you, and so you actually make a decent profit: http://www.emailsherpa.com/sample.cfm?contentID=2195

#6. How to Get Mentioned in The Marketing Report

Thousands of B2B marketing and sales executives read the print subscription newsletter ‘The Marketing Report’ twice monthly. Want to get your name or story in front of them? Find out how from our interview with Editorial Director Pieter VanBennekom: http://www.marketingfame.com/sample.cfm?contentID=2193

#7. How to Combine Location Videography + Focus Groups: Rubbermaid’s 5 Steps for Market Research

When Rubbermaid’s Commercial Products Division wanted to research new ideas for the restaurant marketplace, they realized focus groups alone wouldn’t do the job. They needed action footage of real kitchens. If you’re involved in location-related market research, check out this interview to get tips on combining video and focus groups: http://www.greatmindsinmarketing.com/sample.cfm?contentID=2190

Over the past few weeks I’ve heard the same exact comment from
every single B2B marketer I’ve spoken to about what makes the
difference in sales in these tough times:

“Get back to every incoming email really, really quickly.”

Not within 24 hours. Not within sometime this business day.
Within a handful of minutes. Half an hour max.

The point being to catch that customer or prospect while they are
still on their computer, while they are still at their desk, before
they get distracted, and most importantly, before your direct
competitor (who prospects probably emailed 20 seconds after they
emailed you) gets back to them first.

Very often the first company to respond gets the sale.

Which is why I’m bummed by survey results announced by Jupiter this
Monday that out of 227 US companies contacted via email, 23% didn’t
bother to respond within three days. Three days!

That kind of behavior hurts *all* of us, because it trains people
to not expect an answer when they email a company. Do we really
want to train our customers and prospects to not bother to contact
us via email? Do we really want to throw away sales?

Last weekend as I was cleaning up the kitchen, I had the radio on to my local NPR station’s pledge drive. Usually they pull in a celebrity of some sort to help them raise money. A famous musician or radio personality. Guess who the celebrity guest was?

Their customer service email guy.

He was great. He talked about various emails he’d gotten from people who loved the station and wanted album information. He frequently mentioned how he always emailed them back, “Why don’t you make a contribution and become a member?”

It was clear from the way the regular announcer treated the email guy that the station considered him a real celebrity. Someone who enough listeners had a personal connection with that they would dig in their pockets and donate.

It makes me think, now more than ever your customer service department has your brand reputation in the palm of their hand.

Our Senior Reporter Catherine Getches submitted a new Case Study on McDonald’s Chipolte this week that completely illustrates the power of the email guy. It’s the first Case Study below.

Anyway, here’s a round-up of the most useful info the MarketingSherpa gang put out over the past week. Enjoy.

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CASE STUDIES

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#1. McDonald’s Chipotle Restaurants Revamp Site & Email Campaigns to Maximize Viral Pass-Along

�It looked like a heavy metal band’s site,” Chipotle’s email manager Joe Stupp describes the restaurant chain’s Web site before its big revamp this summer.

Even with a bad site, they got a heck of a lot of visitor email. So they focused their revamp and subsequent email marketing campaigns on taking advantage of it. If you copywrite email marketing campaigns, you’ll enjoy the sample copy in this Case Study. If you’re in charge of email customer service, you absolutely have to check this thing out.

#2. Oakwood Uses Advanced Web & Email Tactics to Survive the Recession on a Smaller Marketing Budget

Before the recession hit, $500 million corporate temporary housing industry leader Oakwood already had an 8,000-page Web site and an email newsletter. So when business got tougher, Oakwood’s marketer had to go beyond Web marketing 101 to improve sales on a smaller budget.

If you depend on your Web site to generate sales leads, this is a useful Case Study for you. Yes, there are some tactics (and cool metrics measurements) that companies of any size can take advantage of. Click here.

#3. The Onion – How the Web’s Most Beloved Humor Site Stays Profitable

So many independently owned Web sites have gone under in the past year, that many fans of The Onion worried it might topple too. Never fear. The site is profitable and staying strong.

Although our Case Study is a fun read (hey, it’s The Onion after all), it also includes some genuinely useful info on online ad sales that might help your own site improve. Enjoy.

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PRACTICAL KNOW HOW

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#4. How Hewlett Packard Doubled its Own Site’s Sales with Web Analytics

Seth Romanow, HP’s Director of Worldwide eBusiness Research & Metrics, oversees the gathering and analysis of a profoundly huge amount of data from HP’s site. Then once a week he gets together with his analysis team to make little tiny incremental site changes based on this data.

Over the past year, these little changes have doubled the site’s visitor-to-buyer ratio and added millions to HP’s sales. Not bad. Learn how Romanow’s team has done it.

#5. Alexis’ Tech Column: Refer-a-friend from Plain-Text Email?

Yessiree! Thanks to lots of readers helping her test solutions, our Tech Editor Alexis Gutzman has found the way to include a refer-a-friend link email that works *without* forcing email readers to click to a form on the Web (which many don’t feel like doing.)

Her solution is detailed here (note: if you’re a typical marketer your eyes may glaze over, we suggest you forward this link to your tech dept.)

6. My Marketing Column: Testing Emailed Transactive Offers

According to early tests conducted by Kim MacPherson over at Inbox Interactive, adding transactive offers — i.e. buy now forms that people can fill out in email instead of having to click to your site — can double your sales. Which is a pretty powerful reason to consider testing it yourself. More details, including a FlowersUSA campaign sample and my reality check here.

#7. Top 3 Ways PR People Annoy the Heck out of Journalists

This article contains a few home-truths from the journalist’s point of view about why PR people are hard to work with. Chances are your company commits at least one of the sins mentioned. Here’s your chance to stop it and make journalists love you.

Until next week!

Anne Holland, Publisher

MarketingSherpa

Last weekend as I was cleaning up the kitchen, I had the radio on
to my local NPR station’s pledge drive. Usually they pull in a
celebrity of some sort to help them raise money. A famous musician
or radio personality. Guess who the celebrity guest was?

Their customer service email guy.

He was great. He talked about various emails he’d gotten from
people who loved the station and wanted album information. He
frequently mentioned how he always emailed them back, “Why don’t
you make a contribution and become a member?”

It was clear from the way the regular announcer treated the email
guy that the station considered him a real celebrity. Someone who
enough listeners had a personal connection with that they would dig
in their pockets and donate.

It makes me think, now more than ever your customer service department
has your brand reputation in the palm of their hand.

I’ve known Kim MacPherson since we both worked at the same big
publishing company, wore suits every day, and sat around in
formal meetings trying to convince offline executives that “e”
was worth investing in.

Kim went on to write the bestselling book ‘Permission-Based Email
Marketing That Works’ and to found email-focused agency Inbox
Interactive. I went on to found MarketingSherpa. Both of us now
wear jeans to work on a regular basis. 🙂

Sometimes it seems like all I ever hear, think, or write about
these days is email deliverability – s*pam filters, bounces, etc.
I needed a mental break. Yesterday afternoon I called Kim up
to ask: What’s new in email marketing that can help response
rates besides improving deliverability?

She said, “Transactive offers embedded in the landing page.”

In other words, sending your order form complete with credit card
input form in the body of an email so that recipients can order
straight from email; without having to click through to a
landing page on your Web site at all.

Kim says, “We’re just testing it now with clients. We did a
side-by-side with Ancestry.com. We sent identical emails only
one had the form built in and the other required a click. It
looks like the form can double conversion.”

Why?

“You’re really capitalizing on that impulse buyer. The less
clicks you make a prospect go through the better.”

The bad news is: Just like everything else that isn’t plain
text-only, this will not work for all email clients. I don’t
have an exact list of what it will and will not work for yet, but
you’d better assume that wireless/PDA, Lotus Notes, Eudora, and
most AOL users are not worth mailing this to.

Plus, it doesn’t work if your recipient isn’t plugged into the
Net at the time they decide to respond to it. Lots of email
users at home still download their mail, turn off the connection
and then read it.

Kim isn’t sure what they’ll see when it doesn’t work – probably
an error message. I’ll bet you can customize that techie-written
error message to be more user-friendly and get some saved sales
that way.

Kim adds, “You definitely have to plug the fact that this is a
Secure Email.” Enough users have been conditioned to believe
their credit card info can be stolen in mid-send otherwise.

(BTW: Alexis says this is a big myth, yeah it can happen but
thieves don’t bother with onesy-twosy email catches when they can
crack an entire e-store database to get zillions of numbers at
once. I say, myth or not, as a marketer you have to reassure
people or that sale is gone.)

If you’ve tested putting transactions within an email send us
your notes on how it worked out (and if possible a campaign
sample) so we can talk about it in the future. Contact our editorial director Tad Clarke at tadc(at)marketingsherpa(dot)com

Useful links related to this article

1. Sample of a FlowersUSA transactional campaign
http://www.transactis.com/clients/flowersusa/creative3/creative.html

2. Kim’s book and company
http://www.emailmarketing101.com
http://www.inboxinteractive.com

3. The technology behind Kim’s transactional tests
http://www.transactis.com