This morning when I was surfing news sites for ideas for our site redesign, I saw the first news on the World Trade Center attacks.
We won’t be publishing Sherpa today. It would be crass to talk about marketing at a time like this. The phones are silent in the office, because we are in downtown Washington DC and nobody can get through. Lots of people are emailing over though to check on us. Thanks — we’re all fine here.
I’d like to add one note to applaud the Webmasters at CNN. They’ve done a fine job this morning to keep their site up and running so that people can get access to the news. They quickly took down their regular site, and replaced it with a “lite” version, so that it would tax the servers less, and allow more of the public to access information on the attacks. Good work in a time of stress.
Several other email publishers have said they won’t be publishing today either – including Silicon Alley Daily and Lockergnome.
I’ve received several dozen emails from subscribers in the US and elsewhere saying they fully approve of our not publishing today. Subscriber Michael Allen of Knelson.com was one of several Canadian readers to send special notes to us Yanks, “Please send our condolences to the major loss across the United States.” Thanks to everyone who sent notes. It means a lot to us.
I continue to obsess over best practices in landing pages. And frankly I think every marketer who is doing a campaign online or off that includes a click through should be obsessing right along with me.
The key problem is choosing which offers (or links) your campaign landing page will include. Too many and you’ve lost them. Visitors go wandering off. (Reason #1 why you should never include your regular site navigation on a specific campaign landing page.) But, if you offer just one you may lose some conversion power too. What if they are interested, but your offer isn’t quite right?
Offers to test — free stuff vs. informative stuff. Newsletter opt-in vs. limited time ecourse opt-in. Highly detailed product information vs. quick-summary in bullets. Got any input? Tested any pages yourself? Let me know at AHolland@MarketingSherpa.com
We won! MarketingSherpa just won this year’s Tenagra Award for “Best Publication Focused on Internet Marketing.” (We tied eMarketer for it. Wow. eMarketer. They rock.) Prior winners include Iconocast, ClickZ, Nua and Industry Standard.
I couldn’t make it down to Houston to accept, but Sherpa Expert Board Member Don Skarzenski who is attending the show graciously agreed to accept the award on our behalf. Here’s my little speech which he read to the crowd:
“Almost 1,000 Internet marketing and advertising professionals from companies as disparate as Oil of Olay and Amsoil Motor Oil, have helped create MarketingSherpa by allowing us to share their marketing stories and secrets with the rest of the world.
Every week we call about a dozen marketers and ask, “What’s really working for you online?” Their honest answers have made valuable reading — and I’m not sure we deserve much credit for that beyond pestering folks with phone calls!
As you probably know, it’s been a very tough year for everyone in online publishing. Particularly those serving the marketing field. An award like this one means a great deal to us at Sherpa. It says, “Stick it out!” And we will.
Thank you.”
I’m not the only one who sometimes has trouble practicing what I preach. This week I received form letters at two of my email accounts from Chris Locke asking me to join his opt-in list at Topica.
Thing is, Chris is most famous as one of the authors of the Cluetrain Manifesto, a book which preaches strongly against stuff like emailed form letters. So now he’s sending them to me to urge me to join his list so he can preach some more against them. Way to go!
“As many of you know, things have changed a bit at the Standard since you received your last newsletter….. If you were a subscriber to any other Standard newsletter, you have automatically been added to the Intelligencer list.”
Ya know, if I had wanted a weekly tech business news ezine from The Standard, I darn well would have checked that box when I signed up for the newsletters there that I really did want to get. This is really spam-like. At the very least, definitely opt-out which these days is getting fairly shady (not to mention illegal in some countries.)
Plus, I can’t imagine that it will do advertisers any good. Sure they’ll get a higher “reach” officially — but I’ll bet the open rates and click throughs for subscribers like me who were forcibly added to the list are really low. Some people will say, hey stop whining you anti-spam purist! Just unsubscribe. OK. (But it still makes me think The Standard’s corpse has started to stink.)
Talk about emarketing chutzpah! Online surveying engine SurveyMonkey.com tells visitors to “compare us” and then gives hotlinks to 39 competitors from Active Websurvey to Zoomerang on its pricing page under the headline “The Best Value Anywhere.”
I’ll bet this tactic turns out just like the typical 100% money-back guarantee offer. People see it, are reassured enough to buy, but then never take you up on it because they are too lazy to. Inertia rules.
Hey SurveyMonkey! Can you say, “Brass balls”?
[Note 12 hours later: SurveyMonkey’s President Ryan Finley just wrote in, “Thanks for the plug! Not sure if I agree with the “brass balls’ part…but hey, I consulted with my girlfriend and she agreed. :)”]
You gotta enjoy the quotes on search engine optimization firm TranscenDigital’s Web site:
“There’s no reason for individuals to have a computer in their home.”
-Ken Olson, 1977
“The Internet will catastrophically collapse in 1996.”
-Robert Metcalfe (inventor of Ethernet)
“The telephone has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication.”
-Western Union executive, 1876
Does your own Web site reflect your marketing expertise? This is a particular problem for agencies, consultants and folks like me who write about Web marketing. I get so busy that my own site is sadly abandoned.
Today I was working on the second draft of a new Sherpa report to come out shortly entitled, “Top 10 Online Marketing Mistakes: Every Company Makes at Least One of Them.” The going was slow because I kept on breaking off to contact Sherpa’s Web developer who’s working on our site redesign right now. “Hey!” I’d email, “Here’s another thing you have to change in our specs.” Turns out while I’m “smart” enough to write a report on the topic, I wasn’t smart enough to avoid making some of the mistakes! (It’s not good enough to know, you have to apply.)
At the same time I kept getting peppered with emails from readers of our SherpaWeekly which came out today. Turns out there was a typo in a key link. Dumb, dumb, dumb. It’s those little, eminently-avoidable mistakes that trip me up every time when I’m in a rush to keep everybody happy. (Sound of my head thunking on my desk.) Rushing = bad. Thinking first = good. So how do you apply that to, um, “Internet time”?
