Thank goodness for Kinkos. About once a week we get a call from a customer who’s just purchased a PDF document from our online
Knowledge Store, just can’t open it properly for some reason or another (usually an antique Mac). So we go online to Kinkos.com and use their KinkosNet service to have a copy printed out at a Kinkos near that customer and then hand-delivered to them.
However, there are a few drawbacks to using Kinkos you should know about:
1. It’s a rotten, horribly confusing Web site. In fact Kinkos employees have told me, “Oh yes isn’t it awful?” Expect to spend at least 30 minutes figuring the darn thing out the first time. (Later it can take as few as 5 minutes)
2. Kinkos offers two different services (both at Kinkos.com) which make little sense to me. PrinttoKinkos can accept credit cards and uploaded documents online … BUT your only delivery option is via pricey Fedex to your own address. KinkosNet can accept uploaded documents online and will hand-deliver for free to a local address near whichever Kinkos on earth you choose. BUT KinkosNet won’t accept online payment, and the stores are very, very leery of taking credit cards on the phone. (You have to fax over a signature and sweet-talk them into it.)
If you’re selling a single document at a low price, then all of this service may not be worth it to you. However my average
pricepoint is over $100, and I’ve learned that if we can please a first-time customer, they will return and buy, and buy, and buy again. So now Kinkos is our Knowledge Store’s New Best Friend.
BTW: Why not just print up a bunch of hard copies ahead of time and have them waiting to ship to problematic customers? It’s definitely cheaper and easier than KinkosNet — but only if you can pretty accurately predict demand ahead of time, and only if the document won’t change much (some of our PDFs update every few
months), and only if you have the rights to do so (some of the products in our store are from other publishers). Still, for those emergency onesy-twosies, Kinkos is a great solution.
He shoulda been a reporter… Michael Herman sent in another update, now post Xmas, that gives real insight on the Xmas eCard rush. “From December 1 – 25, there were more than 77,000 ecards sent from our site. More than 40,000 of those cards were sent from the 21st – 25th. Our previous monthly high was 33,000.”
“It appears our strategy of encouraging people immediately before the holiday was successful. Card senders can also specify what
day the card will be sent to the recipient(s), as some other sites offer. We advertise that feature more than most other sites
do. It’s a strong selling point to tell the potential sender that they won’t have to miss another birthday or holiday again as far
as emails go. Some people even use it as a reminder service as they send cards to themselves to remind them of things to do. The recent changeover of a number of high-profile eCards sites to charging for sending eCards also most likely helped our traffic as well.”
ContentBiz just hired a new Tech Editor, Alexis Gutzman, to start Jan 2nd and so I, Miss Nothing-better-to-do-on-a-Friday-night, surfed over to some key Primedia sites to sign Alexis up for news and info on our Brill Media-run competition. And gosh, Primedia’s server is down so if you want to get into sites like
MediaCentral.com or CircMan.com, you haven’t got a chance. Always fun to see the competition looking lame.
BTW: If you have tech questions related to the content industry then shoot them to Alexis at Alexisg@marketingsherpa.com and maybe you’ll give her an idea for an upcoming story.
At exactly this time, on this day, a year ago — the Friday before Christmas — I found myself standing in the aisle of a neighborhood bookstore grinning like crazy.
Partly this was due to the fact that it was the very first moment of personal-time (besides sleeping) I’d taken since the early fall of 1999. There I was, out of the office in broad daylight! It made my head spin.
But a bigger part of my smile was because of Sherpa. That afternoon in the hardback fiction department of the Dupont Circle Crown Books Superstore, I suddenly, consciously realized how happy I am to be doing this. To be the lucky one who gets to call you guys up on the phone, make friends, learn about all the smart marketing tactics you’re using, and then to share your stories with the whole community (now 100,000 of you!) who read us each week. It’s a lovely job.
Today I poked around the Web a bit, checking out other columnists’ views of 2001. “It was tough” they said, “It was awful.” “Heaven forbid 2002 should continue to be like this.”
Well, yes it was a very hard year. Lots of friends and readers lost their jobs. Several competitors who I admired fell by the wayside. And Sherpa, like most online media companies, had to work harder with fewer people. This morning I wondered if I wasn’t getting burned out from it all. I told a Web designer on the phone, “Sometimes I can’t bear to hear the word ‘dot-com’ anymore.”
Then, just a few minutes ago I remembered that moment in the bookstore. So, I took a quick look inside — and there that smile was. Big and fat. I’ve got the best job in the world. Thanks to you guys for making it possible. 🙂
Michael Herman at ChristianityToday.com which I mentioned in my Blog on the 19th, emailed in good news, “Just an update, we’ve averaged between 800-1000 eCards sent per day this year, but yesterday was incredible. We had more than 10,000 cards sent yesterday alone. We have been mentioning the eCards in our newsletters recently, but we hadn’t even sent out our email newsletter to our newsletter list yet. We decided to wait to strongly promote suggesting eCards this weekend for those who just didn’t get around to sending ground-mail cards. We hope to see great returns on that as well.
“Another thing is that we’ve averaged 5,500 names opting in to our newsletter list for every 30,000 cards sent over the past year. It’s been an excellent source of growth newsletter subscribers. We pay Dayspring (provider of the ecard system) a flat rate + a fee depending on the volume of cards sent if we exceed a certain amount. Essentially, there’s a minimum + volume charges. But we’ve definitely seen it as an excellent indirect revenue generating tool and awareness booster for our site as a whole.
Robin Gurney of British SEO Firm DVisions just emailed me in response to my Blog on 404 Not Found files (see a few weeks ago). DVisions cleverly uses their 404 page to boost their marketing efforts by offering a free newsletter subscription and free downloadable white paper on 404 pages on it. Check out this clever page (and maybe steal an idea from it for your own site) here.
Results released today from a ConsumerReports.org site poll that took place Dec 11-13 revealed that of the 2806 poll-takers, 86% had not yet finished their holiday gift shopping. Here’s where it gets interesting — of these 86% shoppers, a whopping 51% indicated they would definitely be buying gifts online.
Why does this excite me so? Well, while it seems obvious that consumers taking an online poll on a Web site featuring purchasing information would be willing to shop online, it’s actually not. In fact research from other firms in previous years showed that many, many more consumers were willing to use the Internet as a shopping research tool versus an actual place to shop. So, that 51% is pretty darn cool news.
Good news – ConsumerReports.org’s paid subscriber base has continued to climb precipitously through the late fall. As of today they announced that they have “more than 700,000” paid Web site subscribers. Does this mean we could see them pop the million mark by next Christmas?? Well, their continued, sustained growth is impressive. Plus you should bear in mind that this non-profit organization has achieved this with almost no marketing budget so far.
Billions and billions and billions served. I just found out that the famous yellow Classmates.com banner (which we did a Case Study on a while back), has been served up online since 1997! In dog years that’s 35. In banner years that’s since about December 25, 1 AD.
Mark Grimes, President of e/y/e/s/c/r/e/a/m interactive inc. emailed me tonight, “Just an FYI, eyescream built the ‘classic’ Classmates banner in 1997, the B/W photograph is the founders (Randy Conrad’s) spouse’s picture. We tested the exact same banner (among other things) just with a white background change, and the yellow background was three times as effective in clickthroughs AND conversions.”
In case you’re wondering which is Randy’s wife — she’s the smiling girl with the blonde hair. Now hundreds of millions of people have clicked through on her high school photo to meet her. It’s a freakish kind of celebrity, but hey.
In a just released press release, Suresh Reddy, CEO of USA Greetings, reports that since other eCard sites such as BlueMountain and American Greetings have started charging minimal subscriptions, his still-100% free site’s impressions have quadrupled, and will grow to an estimated 74 million this month.
It’s a great story angle, except for one thing. Reddy doesn’t explain how much of this month-to-month quadrupling is due to the normal holiday season surge, and how much to competitors going paid. The Company’s been around since 1998, so presumably he can guess at it.
Anyway, like most eCard sites, USA Greetings makes a significant portion of it’s revenue from syndication and licensing rights. This is a marketplace I personally expect to grow steadily in the coming year, because eCards are a powerful, cost-effective viral marketing tool for niche Web sites. I’ve heard of sites as different as OilofOlay.com to ChristianityToday.com having tremendous success with them. Generally they are specially created for the client and then paid for on a CPC basis.
[Note: on Dec 20th Jupiter Media Metrix released the following figures on USA Greeting’s competitors – Hallmark.com increased 71% to 415,000 average daily visitors; and Egreetings.com increased 63% to 287,000 average daily visitors.]
