MarketingSherpa Blog

As of November 15th, everyone who buys keywords using the Overture system (formerly GoTo) will also appear in Yahoo. According to a Yahoo news release, Yahoo will clearly mark which search results are paid placements through Overture, and set them in a special area on the Search results page.

What this means: If you buy paid placements through Overture, these auctioned prices will probably rise in the short term as marketers get excited about dominating Yahoo eyeballs. However, some marketers have already noted that keyword buys get lower click rates when they are clearly marked as “paid” vs. sort of appearing to be regular “pure” search results. So, watch your numbers on the back end carefully to make sure you’re not overspending on what may now be less valuable media.

Side note: Since these days many search engines don’t list you — no matter how optimized you are — unless you pay a basic site submission fee, the line between what listings are paid and which aren’t is growing very fuzzy. The fact that companies that invest in top-quality search engine optimization and positioning services get far better placement than the average site, also means this line gets fuzzy. In the end, will any listings be “pure”?

BTW: SherpaBlog reader Sanj just sent in the tip that there are some great discussions going on about the whole Yahoo/Overture deal at WebMaster World today.

Lots of folks email asking how they can lower the amount of spam they get. I’m no tech expert, but one suggestion might be to have your IT department post an email address on a public page of your Web site that’s there simply to catch spammers who send spiders to harvest emails from Web sites. Perhaps have it be for a faux executive or something — but make sure all the real email addresses are above it so no “real” enquiries use it.

Then have IT catch all the mail that starts coming to that address and use it as a comparison pool for mailing coming to other addresses. Anything that’s a duplicate is almost certainly spam and can be zapped before it clogs your inbox. You IT dept can probably write a program that compares email without having a human being actually sort it.

Are you a B2B marketer using ads in trade magazines that collect sales leads for you via their “bingo” cards inserted in each issue? Turns out some very uncool spam vigilantes are abusing bingo cards — whenever they get spammed, they in turn sign up the spammer as a sales prospect who’s checked every box on the bingo card requesting info from advertisers. Then the spammer is inundated with direct mailed pitches from all those companies.

Sherpa reader, Tony Manso of PhotoLibrarian.com is a reformed one-time spammer who got slammed this way. Typical of many marketers new to online, when he started marketing he naively gathered a bunch of prospect’s email addresses he found online, not realizing that you should get personal permission before you email people.

Then, as he says, ” By the time I got out about 30,000 emails I had gotten numerous phone calls and emails from angry recipients, got booted by my web host, got booted by my isp, listed on a “known spammer” list, and for the next 2 months I received a stack of postal mail about a FOOT THICK EVERY DAY from just about every company in the country that sends free information about their products.” Self-titled ‘spam cops’ had sent in the bingo cards in his name from dozens of tech trade magazines with every box ticked.

Manso continues,“It’s been over 2 years since that spam run and I’m still getting direct mail from some of the vendors. I literally had to call each of these companies and tell them to stop sending me stuff that I didn’t ask for, since the postage on most of these packages I was getting was over $2.00 and I can’t even begin to imagine how many hundreds of “spammers” these things are being sent to. Incidentally, when I called the companies who were sending me postal mail, EVERY ONE OF THEM told me that I was like the 100th person they talked to that week who said the same thing to them.”

Action item: if you are a b2b marketer who could be affected by these uncool vigilantes who are abusing the opt-in information request forms in trade magazines to slam spammers, you should contact your ad sales reps today and make sure publishers put a system into place that only sends you leads when a few of the boxes on bingo cards are marked. If every box is ticked, it’s likely a con, or a worthless tire-kicker prospect. Don’t let publishers foist no-good leads on you.

In Seth Godin’s newsletter today, he advised marketers and media buyers to ask email newsletter publishers what their open rate was, before buying an ad. (An open rate is the percent of people who open an issue, instead of deleting it from their in-box. Only HTML newsletters can track this. Text-only can’t.) In fact average open rates should be included in the media kit, but they almost never are. An open rate of 50% or above is highly respectable. The 50% won’t always be the same people — you know, sometimes you read your newsletter issues, and sometimes you don’t have time, or the headline doesn’t appeal to you. So if you advertise in a newsletter repeatedly, over time you’ll reach a larger portion of the readership than the average open rate as different people read different issues.

I would give you a link to Seth’s newsletter here, but he doesn’t post it online. (He emailed me that he’s working on it.) You can subscribe to his free newsletter here.

I’m astonished — according to research firm IDC, the corporate world is embracing instant messaging with a fervour. Just 5.5 million businesspeople used IM in 2000 (probably all interns and webmasters), this year the number has increased nearly four-fold to 20 million business users. IDC expects that to climb sharply to 60 million next year, and 120 million the year after as it hits the corporate mainstream.

Roughly 50% of Americans use instant messaging from their home computers now, so this makes sense.

I see this as an exciting opportunity for a B2B marketer to break through email clutter and get their message out in a whole new way. Advertising via instant messaging… perhaps offering a branded “instant alerts” service for stock changes or a personalized biz headlines service … Or maybe just having your customer service/tech support reps be available through IM to show how responsive you are for the customers who buy big ticket items. Way cool.

Does your online shopping cart need so many pages? Research shows that you lose a percent of buyers with each additional page you make them go through in the cart check-out process. I just sent a challenge to our own Web designer to see if things could be combined in a graceful fashion so that there are fewer pages. I suspect a lot of carts are designed by developers for whom page count isn’t anywhere at the top of their minds, because they are busy thinking cool techy thoughts instead of customer-centric ones.

>Here are two examples of one-page carts, admittedly for single products (it’s tougher when you have a store with more stuff), that might inspire you:
The Sporting News magazine subscription
A book sold by Reader’s Digest

Forrester which publishes pricey “expert analysis” on best practices in digital marketing, really sucks at doing it themselves. Last week I needed a quick factoid on email marketing stats, so I popped over to Forrester’s site, where they BROKE all the rules of offering B2B content, such as white papers or sample research on your site. The rules are:

Rule #1: Make it easy to find your white paper or free sample offer from your home page

Rule#2: Don’t put too big a barrier in front of the sample. Some experts, such as the folks at Bitpipe, recommend you place no barrier at all because some prospects would rather read your content before volunteering their name – and you could lose them forever. Many other B2B marketers say you can put a barrier, such as requesting the person’s name and email, before the content. But for heaven’s sake don’t ask for complete address and other non-essential questions because it will GREATLY lower response.

Rule #3: Whenever asking for an email on a form, always put a link to your privacy policy right next to the box (not miles away at the bottom of the page) because that also increases response.

Rule #4: Stick a link to your privacy policy to reassure people on the bottom of all other important site pages. At the very least stick a link to it on your site map!

Rule#5: When a prospect wends their way through your home page, past your barriers, to the promised “Sample” or “White paper”, put something of value there. It doesn’t have to be more than a few pages long (in fact people like reading short executive summaries online), but it does have to make the time they already spent getting to it worthwhile. A single, two-sentence, paragraph describing the report along with contact information for your sales team is not gonna do the job.

Now that Forrester has a new head of marketing, we can only hope this improves. (Quick note to her — if your high priced analysts look like baby-faced kids, then stick some glasses on them or something to make them look older in the site photo. I used to market high-priced research, and it made a difference to the 50-something execs who approved purchases at most companies.)

Want to know where journalists look for news and story ideas online, so you can put yourself in front of their eyeballs? Many journalists rely on two useful links Web sites built just for them. They are: JournalistExpress and The Journalist’s Toolbox.

Just got a phone call from a Sherpa site visitor who wanted to know how to find a good consultant for a DRTV (direct response television) campaign. Naturally I told him to contact the Electronic Retailing Association, which is the association for the DRTV industry. I didn’t have their number handy so I just told him to go to their Web site at “Retailing.org”. He said, “Oh ok, I’ll go to Retailing.org.com.” I said, “No, it’s .org!” He replied in a confused voice, “You don’t need to add a dot com?”

This conversation was a wake-up call for me. Here was an American businessperson who certainly surfed online (after all he got my number through our Web site), who didn’t know URLs don’t require a dot-com. I don’t think he was neccessarily stupid, I think it’s that we in the industry take basic knowledge like this so much for granted that we forget about civilians. And to be successful online, you have to design your site (and URL) to be easy-to-use by the lowest common prospect denominator. Does this mean alternate URL endings such as .tv and .biz and .net are far less valuable than .com? Yepper.

Online surfers are getting savvier and savvier to pop-ups these days … learning to click them closed before they even see the full creative. So I was charmed by a pop-up that appears when you leave the hb4u.com Web site. Not only does it load fairly quickly to stop the closing click, but the headline forestalls you by saying, “WAIT! Before moving on…” Very clever because it acknowledges that that’s exactly what people are doing, and then speaks directly to it. Perhaps something to test.