I remember a day back in the late 90s when I advised my then-boss — hey we’ve got to buy as many domain names as possible!!! There was a sense of a landgrab. Rush to get your share before somebody else snakes them away from you.
Boy have things changed. These days I get approached by at least a domain-name-owner every week asking, “Hey wanna buy some names?” Even though the names they have to sell are related to our business, we never buy them anymore because we’re all about building one focused brand now, instead of zillions. (Hey, it’s hard enough to build one, let alone zillions.)
If you are enticed by a domain name offer — for example reader Barry Kluger just wrote in that he’s selling some useful B2B domain names such as HighTechPortal.com and FarmPortal.com (see a complete list here) — ask how much traffic the URL is currently getting just from folks typing it in to see what’s there. Then adjust your bid accordingly.
If you are sending a campaign to a particular email list or placing it on a specific Web site (vs. run of network), it’s absolutely worth asking the list/site owner for creative and offer advice. We’re about to launch an email campaign for a new Sherpa report to a partner’s list, so I asked the partner if she had advice on what works for her audience…. and her reply made a huge difference.
For example, we were just going to include a link to our store page for the product, but she said about 20% of her list are more likely to order if we include a phone number, even though they may order on the site instead. She also advised us that her list prefer longer emailed letters than average. This type of advice is gold, and you can only get it if you ask for it. Funny thing is, according to list and media owners I chat with, hardly any marketers ever ask for it.
Did this year’s stay-at-home Thanksgiving affect content sites in the US? I sure noticed a difference. Last year Thanksgiving was one of our *best* days ever — we got the highest rate of new subscribers in a single day that were not linked to a specific promotion ever. MarketingSherpa’s 2000 traffic logs revealed that thousands of marketing and content professionals fled familial togetherness around 2pm-9pm ET on Thanksgiving day. They went online and subscribed to Sherpa instead.
However, this year it was one of our lowest days for new subscribers, and traffic was far down as well. The only thing I can figure is that since fewer people traveled, the average marketing pro was surrounded by fewer, potentially annoying family members. It’s a crackpot theory, but it’s mine.
http://www.marketingsherpa.com
Reader Debbie Weil writes in, “A survey last week in my e- newsletter WordBiz Brief reveals that 30 percent of respondents DO PAY for online subscriptions to e-newsletters or Web sites. The question was not, “WOULD YOU PAY” but “do you currently pay to subscribe.” Pubs and sites subscribed to included the Wall Street Journal Online, John Audette’s Adventive discussion lists and Hoovers.com. Whereas 70 percent do not pay for anything.
Respondents are from 3,500 subscribers to WBB, one-third from outside the U.S. (primarily UK, Australia, Canada).”
http://www.wordbiz.com
The Pew Internet Project recently released survey results on the free-to-paid content front. Of the 233 Americans they reached in a telephoned survey who said they had been asked to pay for access to a Web site that was previously free, 12% anted up and paid for it.
You’ll note that other media (noteably Reuters) who covered this news focused on the negative side — the 88% of consumers who didn’t pay (yet.) However, you can take it from me, this news is HAPPY DANCE TIME. The average conversion numbers we’ve been hearing from previously free online publishers have been in the range of .05%-10%. This is already higher than the average sales figures for content offers sent through direct mail (such as a direct mail offer for a magazine) that get from .02-2% generally, depending on pricing, demographics, marketing prowess, etc.
I’d also like to make a point – yet again – that you’re probably bored of hearing from me, because I tend to hammer it in. Online paid content marketing is in its INFANCY. And in general, the copywriting skills, offer tests, pricing tests and all-around marketing savvy I’ve seen exhibited by the average econtent marketer have not come up to par with their offline peers.
(Perhaps partly because there are far fewer proven marketing campaigns to steal ideas from.)
So, when Pew says 12% of 233 people they talked to have already paid for content online that used to be free, you should see this as the beginning of a real success story.
(You can download your own PDF of the 6-page report here:
http://www.pewinternet.org/reports/toc.asp?Report=48 )
I’m zipping off for Thanksgiving travel now, but wanted to first congratulate Judy Richardson of Unicast (the folks who make SUPERSTITIALS (TM) possible) for emailing me the Best Pitch this Month:
Judy noticed that I’m speaking at @d:tech (the big emarketing show coming up in two weeks) so she pitched me on mentioning her company in my speech. She even had ideas about an angle that would work for my speech, and offered backup data if I needed any.
I gotta say, that is super-clever. Get third party endorsement from show speakers — clever….
As I take off for the Thanksgiving Holiday, I give thanks I’m not a site doing price testing in a limited marketplace. One new-ish site — which shall remain nameless — is rapidly becoming infamous for “shady” behavior in publisher/content owner circles.
By traditional marketing rules, the site is not behaving shadily at all. You used to be able to price test, and cut different deals with different content owners and nobody would be the wiser. But in these days of industry email discussion groups, instant messaging, and everybody having worked with each other at some point in the past … when you offer different deal terms to different people, they find out. Ooops.
Hint to the unwise (you know who you are) — price and % test in large marketplaces where everybody doesn’t know each other and already commonly share info of this nature.
Sending out a special Sale offer email?? Consider staggered drops. About an hour ago clothier J Jill, sent its entire opt-in list of customers and site registrants, a 50% off sale email notice. Their Web site, never the fastest loading gun in the Web, slowed to a crawl and even started losing orders as the shopping cart system couldn’t cope. The customer service rep I called on the phone said, “Oh yes, a whole lot of people have called in complaining about the Web site over the past half hour. I wonder why?”
(Yes, the email marketing department had forgotten to warn customer service that a big campaign was going out. I can’t shake my finger too hard though, having been flogged on more than one occasion by my own CSRs for the same sin.)
B2B marketers who use direct marketing tactics to gather leads for their sales department have done staggered campaigns for years now, because the sales team can only handle a certain number of incoming leads per day. Now it’s time for B2C email marketers to copy that trick.
Since we first did a Case Study on the then-ground breaking Ford Explorer rich media ad on Yahoo six months ago (little birds flew across the screen to eat bird seed and then an actual truck appeared to burst out of the your screen at you), the grand experiment has become almost situation normal. Late this evening when I popped into Yahoo’s home page, a giant lemon floated across my screen to splash in a button ad full of “diet coke”. I don’t know if it made a sound doing so, because hardened by various Flash-based ad agency sites, I turned down my speakers to “silent” weeks ago.
Is it spam when somebody sends a unasked for commercial message to your eFax account??? eFax, once a favored investment of the UK’s Prince Charles, has been sending a new unsolicited commercial message to me, from people who obviously rented their list, about once a week for the past few months. The latest installment duplicated the look of an old Rhode Island newspaper, but strangely all stories on its’ front page all seemed to recommend the same hardly-known stock. Hey, even if there are a few old ladies and pensioners who are naive enough to be taken in by a scam like this, what are the chances that they would also be savvy enough to have an eFax account instead of a fax machine?
[Update: Please see my December 3rd update on this story!]
