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Top 2 Easiest (& Most Overlooked) Ways to Improve Email Responses — New Data

June 12th, 2006

Your house list, customers and prospects who’ve eagerly asked to hear from you, is one of your most valuable marketing tools.

However, MarketingSherpa’s research has determined that one of the most significant factors in response rates is the age of an individual email name’s opt-in.  If an individual signed up for your list fewer than 60 days ago, they are vastly more likely to open, click and convert for additional offers. 

(This makes sense, because it’s always been true for print direct mail names, but it’s still good to know real-world studies have tracked the recency factor in the email world as well.)

So, if you want a high-performing list, you must focus on two activities, aside from overall email best practices:

#1.  Place an email opt-in *form* near the top of your home page

When visitors come to your site, you should try to get as many of the truly interested prospects as possible to sign up for your list. Multiple site analytics and usability studies have shown two critical factors play into getting more sign-ups, including:

-> Put your email offer above the fold because the vast majority of visitors won’t scroll down.

-> Include a form field for email address immediately rather than merely asking visitors to click on a hotlink or button to go to another page to sign up.

This spring, MarketingSherpa’s research team conducted two observational studies to determine how well typical marketers were following these two critical rules. The results were mixed. Of 100 ecommerce sites visited (such as Amazon), 79% placed an email registration form above the fold on their home page.

However, of 200 online publisher’s sites visited (such as WSJ.com), a mere 49% placed an email sign-up offer above the fold — and of those only one in four used a form. The others simply gave a hotlink to click on to sign up. Given that online publishers depend commercially on the strength of their email lists, these results are fairly pitiful. 

#2.  Send all newbies a special welcome

As noted above, multiple MarketingSherpa partnered studies have found that new names are far more involved in your email than folks who’ve been on your list for a while. So, best practices would be to take advantage of this heightened interest by sending the new names something special. 

Some companies, such as Dutch Gardens, send a special Welcome promotional offer as soon as a new shopper signs up. Other companies, such as Travelocity, send a carefully crafted series of welcoming messages, all designed to convert a new opt-in into a faithful customer. We’ve got anecdotal evidence, via a series of MarketingSherpa Case Studies, showing these sorts of new-subscriber campaigns do extraordinarily well. 

 

So, for our two studies this spring, we signed up for email at the 100 ecommerce sites and 200 online publishers sites and then watched our research mailbox to see what would arrive. Sadly — and somewhat shockingly — very little did.

Only 3% of ecommerce sites we signed up at sent us anything with a promotional offer — defined as a sale, a product offer or a newsletter. 71% sent some type of non-promotional form letter, often a subscription confirmation or text-only thanks note with no offer or engaging links. 26% sent us absolutely nothing at all for at least 14 days, if not longer.

The 200 online publishing sites we tested had extremely similar numbers. In that case 75% of sites we opted in at sent us some type of welcoming note — but it was a “weak” effort, a “you have been subscribed” form message with no other involvement device to bring the recipient back to the site, and back to interacting with the brand right away.

My suggestion based on this evidence? Go to your own site(s) and sign up for email.  Then watch what arrives in your in-box. See if it would move you to take action, to buy something, to read something, to return to your site…

If it would not (or if nothing arrives at all), then task your email creative team with creating, testing, and tracking the results of a welcome series that is more powerful. And then sit back smiling at the comforting knowledge that you’re probably five steps ahead of your competition by doing so.

Useful links related to this article

MarketingSherpa’s Email Marketing Benchmark Guide:
http://www.sherpastore.com/email-benchmark.html?8966

MarketingSherpa’s vendors:
http://www.marketingsherpa.com/vendors.html

New Study Data on What Professionals Read Online — Press Releases & Blogs Whup Trade Journals

June 5th, 2006

In 2006, from November through February, researchers for Outsell Inc (a research firm much like MarketingSherpa) interviewed 7,000 professionals in corporations, government, healthcare and academia to find out:

o How much time they spend searching and reading info for their job: 12 hours per week, up from 10.9 in 2005.

o Where they search and read that info: They look first at search engines just like everyone else with a computer on the planet. 

I was expecting both those factoids.  However, the rest of the study’s findings surprised me quite a bit.  Here’s the shockers, plus how your marketing might be affected by them:

#1. Press releases online (especially in sites such as Google News, YahooNews and MSN News, which is where most executives find and read them) have overtaken trade journals and their respective sites as the top information source for knowledge workers.

My suggestion: Now more than ever, consider posting your knowledge-offer promos such as white paper, article and webinar offers as press releases through the wires.  Here’s a basic how-to blog I recently wrote on the subject — it’s a bit 101 but good as a starter:

http://www.marketingsherpa.com/sample.cfm?ident=27447

#2. 47% of study respondents were reading “real content” such as news and e-books on their wireless handhelds regularly.

My suggestion: Great excuse to get yourself a variety of handheld devices and expense them to your company!  Consider them your testing platform for all email newsletter templates and campaigns plus your significant Web content that might be accessed by a prospect or customer via handheld.  Then use the results to have your design team redesign everything to look better on the “third screen.”

BTW: If your prospects are unusually heavy mobile users– such as doctors, young adults and field sales development reps — then consider this a high priority.

#3. The average respondent was reading nine (9!) blogs on a regular basis.  And these weren’t blogs for personal info — these were job-related. 

My suggestion: Add hotlinks (copywritten in suitably bloggish fashion) to your press releases to your company-written blogs.  Also make sure your blog can be read via handheld device.  Best way — add an email opt-in form to the blog as a standard part of the page template and then start emailing out updates to your opt-ins.  (Don’t rely on RSS feeds alone, there’s a big population of professionals who don’t use them routinely.)

Plus, if you are in a tight vertical niche, start investigating blog sponsorships.  You may only hit a few readers per media buy, but they could be incredibly qualified candidates for your goods and services. 

BTW: Sorry no, we don’t accept sponsorships to this blog.  So that wasn’t a plug in any way, shape or form for your business 😉

Until next week.

Anne

Internet Users Increasingly Fed Up with Registration Forms: Data & Suggested Solutions

September 26th, 2005

It’s not often that you find teens and their parents agreeing on nuances of Web surfing. But indicators I’ve been watching for a few years now reveal that everyone in all age groups and most industries are absolutely fed up with filling out forms online for complimentary offers (sweeps, white papers, etc.).

No, they do not want to give you their email. Or their phone. Or their name and address. No thank you not very much indeed!

breatheinteractive Media Director Erin Greenwald noticed this trend emerging in the teens and young adult category 18 months ago when she told me, “Younger people are very reluctant to give data. People are just frustrated with spam, and this is a demographic that’s online a lot. They’re constantly being bombarded with forms and profiles to fill out.”

This summer open source software firm Red Hat tested removing the registration forms in front of its white papers. Director of Marketing Communications Chris Grams told me, “We found, in our estimation, it makes more sense to open it up in most cases. If we do not put a capture form in front of it, let’s say we’ll get 1,000 people to view it. If we put a capture form there, we’ll get 50 people to view.”

Some marketers wonder if they can beat the anti-form trend by “adding value” to the offer. Example: to entice email newsletter sign-ups, offer a complimentary eBook as a bonus. However, as The Motley Fool told me they discovered in tests earlier this year, the extra offer can actually depress responses. (With the bonus offer they got a 2.99% sign-up rate versus 4.50% sign-up without it.)

Fact #1. Typing contact info is a boring pain everyone can live without

We’ve done multiple case studies showing, if you pre-fill a form so prospects don’t have to type their name and address, your conversion rates will double plus responders will be cool with answering a few more qualifying questions. (Of course this only works for prospects who will not be disconcerted by seeing their info pre-populating a form from you.)

Fact #2. It’s about control

By registering, consumers are giving the marketer control over them again. They are no longer quite as in charge of what information they see, and when. With forms, the paradigm of Web surfing has switched so the marketer is in the driver’s seat to some degree — and consumers don’t like it.

Typical data: ThomasNet’s Industrial Purchasing Barometer study released in August revealed “industrial buyers are growing increasingly frustrated with the lack of privacy they are experiencing online.”

Although 90% of industrial buyers shop online, they are increasing demanding “anonymity when they search for products online, and in many cases, that desire for anonymity is not being respected,” ThomasNet noted.

– 77% of respondents have a “Don’t call us, we’ll call you” philosophy online

– 56% of respondents do not want vendors to contact them until they have made the initial contact

– 81% of respondents said they would not return, or would be unlikely to return, to a website that reveals their identities to suppliers

– 21% do not want to be contacted at all

Does this mean I’m saying that you should remove all registration forms and cease offering newsletters, etc.? No, that’s silly. However, I am saying that perhaps marketers have to relax a little on the registration front.

Are, indeed, registrations so incredibly valuable to you that you are willing to forgo the brand-building power of simply placing high-quality content openly on the Web where it can be seen by prospects who want to see it?

We’ve all acknowledged an ad that’s viewed but not clicked on still has power to influence the marketplace. Plus, we all know the evangelist impact of consumers and bloggers telling the world about great content they’ve discovered. (More than 60% of white paper downloaders pass copies to colleagues.)

Perhaps, for some campaigns, it’s enough to have gotten the highest quality message out to a broad swath of your marketplace, instead of limiting yourself to the 3%-6% of people who are willing to fill out a form in response.

Free vs. Fee: Latest OPA Data

November 17th, 2004

OPA’s latest online content sales report is out here..

With data from comSCORE (who track what people actually do online, not what publishers say they are selling) Jan-June 2004 content sales were $753 million. It’s a 14% increase over the same period in 2003.

Bear in mind, this does *not* include the vast majority of B-to-B content sales (comSCORE has a very hard time tracking anything sold to a micro, vertical or niche audience) nor does it include porn.

According to a separate study from the Internet Advertising Bureau, online advertising dollars shot up 35% in Q3 to $2.43 billion. To our knowledge this data is self-reported by the publishers who sell ads. So it’s not nearly as accurate as comSCORE stats.

Anyway, OPA says the point is the gap between online ad spends and content purchases is widening. The ratio will be something like 10 to 1.5 in favor of ad spends supporting content online.

I say, hey, at least everything is growing.

— Brian Blum

New: 90-Days of Search Usage Data & What it Means for Your Marketing Plans

September 23rd, 2004

Most marketers are so obsessed with their own search rankings (i.e. where your site and ads show up on search engines), that they may not always think about search from the other side — how what people are looking for is also constantly changing.

Mike Grover the Marketing Director over at CMP TechWeb’s just sent me results from the past 90 days of hundreds of thousands of actual visitor searches on their sites. These are the top search terms that aren’t company names:

Sept 2004 non-company-name terms
1. RFID
2. Outsourcing
3. VOIP
4. ERP
5. Web Services
6. Linux
7. Spam
8. sp2
9. Spyware
10. Wireless

August 2004 non-company-name terms
1. RFID
2. VOIP
3. Outsourcing
4. ERP
5. CRM
6. Linux
7. Salary Survey
8. Spam
9. Web Services
10. Wireless

July 2004 non-company-name terms
1. VOIP
2. SPAM
3. LINUX
4. Outsourcing
5. ERP
6. Wireless
7. Spyware
8. CRM
9. VPN

You can see that the concerns and interests that the mainly IT-pro population on CMP TechWeb’s sites really changes over in short periods of time. It makes me think:

– You need to be able to create white paper and webinar offers on a super-speedy schedule to get the most results as the painpoints of the marketplace alters.

– Ditto for changing ad copy and landing pages. (Luckily this is easier online than in print/DM.)

– If you’re budgeting for 2005 search ads based on 2004 key term traffic data, your numbers are gonna be off. This stuff is in flux. Mike also gave me a 90-day list of the company names most searched for, and you can see real differences here too. I bet it has more to do with who’s running heavy ad campaigns and/or product launch announcements. So, yeah, non-search PR and ads do affect search traffic.

If you are planning a big non-search promo, you should budget for your name-related search traffic to rise accordingly too. (And then email me to tell me by how much — I’m very interested in relations between campaigns.)

September top companies searched for
1. SAP
2. IBM
3. Cisco
4. Oracle
5. Peoplesoft

August top companies searched for
1. SAP
2. EDS
3. IBM
4. Peoplesoft
5. Cisco

July top companies searched for
1. Cisco
2. SAP
3. IBM
4. Oracle

Alarming New Trademark Infringement Data on Search Ads: Top 100 Brands Not Protecting Trademarks

August 20th, 2004

I’m not sure why, but such is the nature of PR people that they almost never include clients’ URLs in press releases or emailed story pitches. So I frequently go to search engines to find somebody’s client’s site, and see if we should write about them.

It’s not always easy to find the link even then because so many marketers are buying paid ads against their competitors’ names. So, there you are looking for Acme Company and five of Acme’s direct competitors spring up to coat the results screen.

So I was extremely interested to hear about new study results from an outfit called NameProtect®.

This month, they analyzed the paid search ads that appeared on Yahoo! and Google against the trademark terms associated with America’s top 100 brands (as ranked by Interbrand and BusinessWeek.)

– 92% of the top 100 brands’ had third-party ads appeared in search results against their names.

– Of these paid search ads, 98% included the actual brand name in the ad. So the trademarked brand name was in the text of the third-party ad. (This is a critical factor in determining whether the sponsor is violating trademark rights.)

– 45% of the ads were for directly competitive and potentially unlicensed offerings. Others were for related offers.

– Just 7% of the paid ads were placed by the actual brand owner.

So, the big brands are currently not protecting their trademarks very aggressively in paid search. I guess big companies move more slowly than nimble competitors. However, I’ve heard the courts don’t tend to look favorably on brands who have a history of leaving their trademark out defenseless and unprotected in the cold competitive world, even if it is the brave new world of search.

Time to call legal and get those cease-and-desist letters flowing!

Top 15 Best Online Database Publishers Named

July 13th, 2004

Today InfoCommerce Group announced their picks for the top 15 “Models of Excellence” innovative database and directory products.

Worth noting: these were chosen by editors who like the interactivity and editorial quality and not by business analysts who like the bottom line. So, while I’m sure some are profitable, others may be great stuff that doesn’t make a dime…

* All Media Guide (www.allmediaguide.com), a detailed and current database of all movies, music and computer games.

* CoStar Property Professional(www.costar.com), a database that contains detailed information on commercial buildings.

* The Engineering Search Engine, (www.globalspec.com), which couples a high-end buying guide with a vertical search engine.

* eStat Database (www.emarketer.com), an aggregation of statistics on e-business and online marketing.

* EuroInfoPool(www.euroinfopool.com), a common interface to the official corporate registration databases of 12 major European nations.

* HighBeam Research, (www.highbeam.com), an online research engine for individuals that fills the gap between free search engines and high-end information services.

* HotelGuide.com, (www.hotelguide.com), an Internet database of hotels that allows direct reservations by consumers.

* ImageAtlas,(www.globexplorer.com), a database that correlates detailed aerial and satellite photographs to latitudes and longitudes.

* O Series Software, (www.vertexinc.com), a program that allows corporate users to centrally administer sales tax, use tax and value added tax collection.

* Physician Quality Reports(www.healthgrades.com), which provides background information and ratings of nearly 600,000 individual physicians.

* Realtors.com (www.homestore.com), a database of more than 2 million homes for sale nationwide at any given time.

* IMDB (www.imdb.com), a one-stop database of more than 375,000 movies.

* TripAdvisor (www.tripadvisor.com), a comprehensive travel search engine and directory.

* WAND Online Directory, (www.wandinc.com), a multi-lingual product taxonomy, including more than 1 million distinct product attributes.

* Technology Marketing Reports, (www.wendovercorp.com), a powerful database that offers directory style contact information on companies that purchase IT products and services.

New Data: 40% of consumers zap cookies weekly — popular sites' monthly uniques may be inflated

April 22nd, 2004

If you’re an online ad media buyer, an e-retailer concerned with conversion data, or anyone else who analyzes site stats for a living, unique visitor counts are a critical metric.

However, various adware-zapping programs are putting your stats in danger.

Greg Harmon of Belden Associates who’s run readership surveys for more than 40 US newspaper sites told me he began to wonder why nearly every single site’s log files only showed three average visits per user per month when, according to nearly 70,000 survey answers, on average readers visit a particular newspaper site 24 times per month.

If true, the discrepancy meant only 20% of the uniques the log files reported were actually uniques. The rest were repeat visitors who mysteriously appeared to be newbies.

People switching between work and home computers accounted for about 25% of the discrepancy … not enough to be the main answer.

So, 60 days ago Greg decided to add two questions to surveys he was running for three newspapers — one in Virginia, one in Illinois and one in California. Figuring that adware-stopper downloads are now probably in the hundreds of millions, He asked survey takers how often they cleared their cookies.

Of 3,500 answers, about 40% said they cleared cookies at least once a week. And, these weren’t geeks. The median age was 40, and 2/3 were women.

Greg is putting together a PDF with some initial data on this. It will be ready Monday, and he told me you can get it by emailing him at gharmon@beldenassociates.com

I also called up David Barlin over at I/PRO who conduct site traffic audits. He told me he agrees, you should never rely on site log counts to determine true uniques, especially if you’re a media buyer fretting about reach and frequency. I/PRO has developed an algorithm to run against reported site stats to determine true traffic. Interesting…

So, annoyingly, the world’s most measurable advertising medium is now, thanks to increased cookie-wiping, harder to measure remotely accurately.

Useful links related to this Blog:

Interesting article in Editor & Publisher on Belden’s data:
http://www.mediainfo.com/eandp/columns/newspaper_2point0_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1000492257

I/PRO & BPA Int’l info on the new Agencies for Interactive Audits program:
http://www.ipro.com/pdf/agencies_launch.pdf

Belden Associates
http://www.beldenassociates.com

Permanent link to this Blog column on our site:
http://www.marketingsherpa.com/sample.cfm?contentID=2678

Survey Data on Consumers Paying for Music Online

August 26th, 2003

Burst Media online ad network just sent me a release with lots of fun data and pie charts from a survey they did of 6,300 consumers
who download music for free online. Fun data points:

– One in five (22.0%) respondents “would pay” to download copyrighted music from the Internet. 38.5% “would not pay” and
39.5% are “not sure.” The segments most likely to say they are willing to pay to download music from the Internet are college graduates (27.4%) and households earning $50,000 or more (29.9%).

– Interestingly, male downloaders are more likely than female downloaders to say they are willing to pay to download music from the Internet (20.7% versus 12.2%).

Note: Burst does *not* allow Web sites offering free downloads of copyright protected music into its network.

http://www.burstmedia.com/release/advertisers/online_insights/august_2003.pdf

Early Results Data – Zacks.com Tests Postal DM

July 16th, 2003

Steve Reitmeister who heads up Zacks.com (who do online subscription sales for a lot of print newsletters on personal investing – see link to my case study on their tactics below), just gave me permission to share this note with you:

Too often all of us “Online Savvy” marketers rely so heavily on email because it is so cheap, so fast and has such great ROI. All this is true. But given the tremendous rise in email, many people are becoming “detached” from the medium.

What’s my point? We are starting to re-introduce a little bit of direct mail back into the mix as we are finding that it stands out more in this world of email overload. Here is my best example:

We recently tested sending direct mail pieces to current subscribers [originally sold via online] to entice them to upgrade to the annual subscription. The notion being that a commitment to annual subscription of $200 right now instead of $20 per month deserves more umph! on our part. And direct mail being more “REAL” gave us that extra umph.

Unfortunately we did not do a split test, but know from previous efforts that the response was superior. Here are the basic #s:

In the past we have emailed customers to upgrade to annual from monthly. We generally get a 1% conversion rate. But when we did the direct mail we got a 3% conversion rate. So lets say we were talking 1000 messages each.

1000 emails = cost of $0
1% conversion
10 new annual subscribers.
@ $200 per
$2000 in revenue
$2000 in profit

1000 direct mail pieces = cost of $500 (simple 2 page letter, stuffed in envelope @ 50 cents per)
3% conversion
30 new annual subscribers
@ $200 per
$6000 in revenue
$5500 in profit

For those who do ROI on % basis I guess the $2000 looks great against cost of zero. But I will take the latter any day of the week. Given the success of this I am also having my B2B group do more initial solicitation of prospects via direct mail with handwritten envelopes. I believe it will stand out more than the 100 solicitation mails they get on a daily basis.

Too early to say success rate, but my gut tells me it will be hard to go wrong.”

My note: Based on the Case Study I did on B2B subscription seller HCPro recently where they revealed DM gets subs that renew better than email sales, I would say Steve is onto a good idea.

Zach’s Case Study:
http://www.contentbiz.com/barrier.cfm?ContentID=2313

HCPro Case Study:
http://www.contentbiz.com/barrier.cfm?currentID=2376