The Evolving Internet Marketer

The Best Time to Send Email

I’ve now seen 2 email marketing authorities in the last 2 days cite 2 case studies saying that the best time to send your email marketing missives is on Tuesday. Marketing Sherpa & Mail Dog Papers (published by Mail Dog Manager) both described case studies where a Tuesday morning mailing provided the highest open rates. Mail Dog’s report also found that “Subject lines with a strong call to action out performed a subject line with shorter characters.” Hmmm, what an interesting concept, give your subscribers a compelling reason to open your message. Sounds good to me…

Want to Know the Best Place to Place Your Google Ads on Your Web Page or Blog?

Google provides a handy ‘heat map‘ to help you determine ideal ad placement. Take heed to their caution that user needs should come first. They didn’t come to your site to read ads (I assume). They came because they thought there’d be useful content. Keep that in mind in determining the balance between displayed ads and your content.

Read Google’s answer…

Keep Your Eye on the Prize on your Web Site’s Landing Pages

Dr. Ralph Wilson, internet marketing guru extraordinaire, in the January 22nd edition of Web Marketing Today reminds us that the more tightly we focus our landing page on the task at hand (sell something, get a lead, sign up a subscriber) the better our conversion rate will be (Conversion rate = # of desired actions taken/# of page visitors). Dr. Wilson also cites a MarketingSherpa study that states that every link or element on your landing page that doesn’t support your conversion goals detracts from them. Good stuff on improving your landing page’s conversion rate & worth a read.

Online Retailers Need to Drink Their Own Kool-aid®

Mark Sanborn is a hall of fame speaker and the best selling author of The Fred Factor and You Don’t Need a Title to Be a Leader. He’s also a friend and client. He has a new web site and, in addition to his books and training products, he makes several free resources available. One of them that I highly recommend is called The 10 Commandments of Customer Service: 150 Ideas for Improving Service.

Diamonds, gold & rubies abound in this customer service treasury. For example every e- or retailer needs to embrace Idea #47:

Flight attendant: “Sir, would you like the chicken or the beef for dinner?”

Passenger: “Which do you recommend?”

Flight attendant: “Neither. I don’t eat this food.”

Question: Does the flight attendant not eat the food because it is bad, or is the food bad because the flight attendant doesn’t eat it? When you don’t use your own products or services, you lose touch with the customer’s experience.

If you haven’t walked a mile in your customer’s shoes, eaten the food you’ve served them or drank the Kool-Aid® you’ve poured into their mugs then I guarantee you that you are leaving a ton of sales by the trailside. (In a 2006 survey of online shoppers, Marketing Sherpa discovered that nearly 60% of these shoppers abandoned their shopping carts. Deludedly enough, online retailers guesstimated their abandonment rate at 20-30%, less than half of the actual number!).

How many times have you been frustrated by an on or off line shopping experience due to byzantine checkout procedures, missing-in-action or clueless sales associates or impossible to locate products? Do you find yourself wondering who would design such a travesty? I find myself wondering who the owner is and asking myself if they have ever shopped there themselves. Shopping cart abandonment is a significantly larger issue in the online world where it is so much easier to click to the next etailer’s site than get in your car, hazard traffic and cruise the lot for a parking space that’s not halfway to Toledo.

So what do you do to improve your customer’s experience?

First, drink your own Kool-Aid®… At the most basic level, you shop your own site. And then you shop your competitor’s and if you prefer the competition’s experience that’s a big, red flag right there. Even if your happier with your site’s results than your competition you still need to be looking for new and better ways to improve the customer service you provide. Jeff Bezos, founder & CEO of Amazon.com, allocates time every day to come up with several ideas for improving his web site. The man’s a multi-billionaire yet he’s obsessed with providing an ever better experience for his customer. Hmmm. Maybe that’s why he’s a multi-billionaire.

Second, have a Kool-Aid® party… invite your employees, friends, neighbors, golf partners, kids’ friends and anybody else you can think of to shop your site and give you candid feedback. Establish some basic scenarios and see how easy it is for them to accomplish. Sit back — quietly, no intervention — and observe. Give ‘em a few bucks or buy the beer and pizza. It will be one of the best investments you ever made.

Third, don’t fixate on perfection… Try something, measure the results (so many great tools for this; Google Analytics is a great place to get started), if it works, improve it, if it doesn’t, do something else. The web is an instant feedback mechanism. With just a few tools you can tell what’s working and what’s not quickly and for relatively few dollars.

Fourth, steal Your Competitor’s Kool-Aid® Recipe… If you see somebody doing it better and it’s not copyrighted or patented, adopt it for your site. You don’t have to be the master innovator, just the master executor.

Keep Your Content On Topic

A post by Janine Popick, CEO at Vertical Response, on 10 things you should have on your marketing to-do list for 2008 reminded me of the importance of focus when blogging, sending your email newsletter (ezine) or any other customer-focused communications.

Her first item says,

1. Use a Calendar – iGoogle has a great one where you can use alerts to remind you to write your copy and send your communications. Bonus? You can also share it with others so that they know exactly when you’re planning to launch.

I’ll amend Calendar to Editorial Calendar. Unless you write current events types of blogs or ezines then you should develop a publication plan that details what you’ll write on, when and how often. The narrower you can focus your communications the easier it will be to target the interests and needs of your most important customers. You’ll also have an easier time attracting the attention of search engines for the areas in which you have the greatest expertise (assuming that those are what you’re writing on). What a vicious circle, eh? Better search engine placement = more customers. Not a bad pay-off for introducing a little discipline into your communications.

Use analytics to track the response to your topics and fine tune your message based upon the attention paid by your visitors and subscribers. Services like Vertical Response for email communications and Google Analytics for web site visitor analysis can be invaluable in helping you determine what matters – and what doesn’t – to the audience your trying to reach.

Your Customers Are Online, Why Aren’t You?

Are your customers online? Are you? Check this list of Who’s Online from the Pew Internet & American Life Project and if your customers are online and you aren’t then you’d better figure out how to rectify that situation!

Sizing Up the Blogosphere or “How Big is It?

I originally reported the following data on the growth of the blogosphere as part of a post I was writing about a year and 1/2 ago. As sometimes happens, it got stuck in draft world and I never completed it. A couple of items recently came to my attention that motivated me to revisit this…

The first was the report I cited yesterday from businessandblogging.com that spoke of the million small business blogs out there and the tremendous, cost effective, marketing opportunities blogs provided for small business (referencing a New York Times article on the topic.

The second was my curiosity about how big the blogosphere has become. I zipped over to Technorati to take a peek at the number of blogs they’re tracking:

Currently tracking 112.8 million blogs and over 250 million pieces of tagged social media.

…

The World Live Web is incredibly active, and according to Technorati data, there are over 175,000 new blogs (that’s just blogs) every day. Bloggers update their blogs regularly to the tune of over 1.6 million posts per day, or over 18 updates a second.

Compare this to the data below from April 2006 when Technorati reported tracking over 35 million blogs with 75,000 new blogs created each day. So just in the last 20 months we’ve seen an 321% in the number of blogs tracked and 233% in daily postings.

(They say baseball is awash in steroids. I think that the blogosphere is juicing big time! How soon before Congress calls hearings to investigate the real story?

The blogosphere, social media, podcasting, vidcasting,/YouTube … all interconnected channels for business of all size to get the message out. In this wired and wireless, information-flying-all-over-the-place, low cost and no cost of production world it’s inexcusable not to be using any or all of the above to promote your message!

My Original Post

By the end of 2004 blogs had established themselves as a key part of online culture. Two surveys by the Pew Internet & American Life Project in November established new contours for the blogosphere: 8 million American adults say they have created blogs; blog readership jumped 58% in 2004 and now stands at 27% of internet users; 5% of internet users say they use RSS aggregators or XML readers to get the news and other information delivered from blogs and content-rich Web sites as it is posted online; and 12% of internet users have posted comments or other material on blogs. Still, 62% of internet users do not know what a blog is.

Blogging continues to move into the mainstream as a.) more folks blog and b.) more folks read blogs. According to a phone survey of over 7,000 people conducted by the Pew Internet & American Life Project…

• About 57 million Americans are reading blogs, up from around 39 million in 2004.
• 12 million Americans write blogs up from 8 million in 2004. As an aside, Technorati reports that they are tracking over 35 million blogs and that over 19 million blogs continue to be posted to 3 months after creation. Further they state that 75,000 new blogs are created every day and the blogosphere continues to double every 6 months (from State of the Blogosphere, April 2006 Part 1: On Blogosphere Growth)
• 84% of bloggers are under 49 and 54% are under 30. They tend to be avid consumers and heavy internet users.
• Bloggers are passionate about what they write. Only 7% state that their principal goal is to make money from their blogs. Most blog to document & share their personal experiences while a substantial percentage use their blogs as a teaching tool…

Access Pew’s Reports on Blogging…

A Million Small Business Bloggers Can’t Be Wrong

Not according to Liz Fuller at BusinessandBlogging.com in a recent post citing a New York Times article on the topic (Blogging’s a Low-Cost High Return Marketing Tool). I like the spin Liz put on it…

Political (Marketing) Oversight?

The upcoming election has engaged me as no other that I can remember. Maybe it’s because of my disgust with the status quo or the fact that we seem to have more, and better, choices than we’ve had in some time. The fact that both a woman and an African American have a legitimate opportunity to become president has definitely contributed to my interest.

As for who I’m going to vote for, that’s not important and I haven’t made up my mind yet anyway. What is important is that, for the first time, I’m interested in committing to a specific political party. You see, while I’ve always voted, I’ve always been unaffiliated. A radio commentator recently convinced me that by being unaffiliated I’m really diluting the impact of my vote, particularly in the early stages.

Although a registered voter for 32 years, I had no clue how to affiliate myself with a specific party. No problem, I thought, I’ll simply go to the party’s website and find out there. Guess what? While both major parties in Colorado (my home state) provide links to the voter registration form, neither party addresses how to become affiliated (if un-) or how to change affiliations (if the other). I’m sure it’s a simple process but, seriously, don’t you think that either the Republicans or Democrats would address this fundamental process? What’s worse, in my view as a marketer, is that neither party had any obvious information on WHY their party is the right choice. They offered all sorts of direction for getting involved and a fair amount of, “what’s wrong with the other guys,” type of info but nothing readily obvious that said this is what we believe in, this is why our candidates are the right choice, this is why you should be a _____________.

It’s as though they assume that you’re only going to visit their site if you’re already a member of that party. Huh? Believe me, I can’t be the only one who’s gone to a political party’s site looking for information and answers.

It’s basic marketing folks. In this age of sound bites and insta-punditry don’t you think that a major role for the parties should be to provide substantive education to the electorate as to the benefit that their party affords and the differences that make them unique? I will say that the Dems provide slightly more information than the Republicans – who have very little (’coming soon’ is not a party plank, is it?) other than a 9 page PDF containing 7 pages of not very specific content with little direction as to how to obtain more detail. But the Dems house their information in a section labeled “About Your Party” and the key, substantive document available is the 2006 Colorado Democratic Party Platform. Uh mm, isn’t it 2008? And, gee, if you aren’t my party yet, why would I even look there?

My suggestion: Assume that at least some of the visitors to your sites are going to be information seekers and provide them that information along the lines of:

• What’s a Democrat/Republican
• What makes our party different
• What are the major issues of the upcoming campaign (local/national) or legislative session (local/national) and how does our party’s position differ from the honorable opposition’s – Don’t be a jerk and demonize the other folks but provide solid, objective (as much as possible) reasons on why you differ and why that’s important.
• How do I join…

Basic, fundamental questions that any ‘buyer’ needs in order to make an informed decision. After all, it’s not as if there aren’t enough prospects out there with roughly 1 out of 3 Colorado voters unaffiliated. After looking at each party’s site, I’m really not surprised.

For more:

1. http://coloradodems.org
2. http://www.cologop.org

Use Transactional Emails to Create More Sales

What’s a transactional email, you ask? Well it’s an email message that you send to a customer as a result of a transaction – an order confirmation, a shipping notice, thank you for buying/subscribing/registering etc.

maildogmanager.com reminds us to …

Mind our Ps and Qs when it comes to transactional emails… Here’s a list of the tips they offer for using your everyday, transactional messages to best advantage:

• … keep the subject line strictly transactional
• … transactional content must stay at the top of the email and be most prominent
• Jazz up the typical plain text email with nice formatting including HTML graphics …
• Add a few soft sell promotions … towards the bottom, including tie-ins to your existing promotions, email newsletter and more
• … add links to bring them back to your website or a place to contact for more information

Thanks to Mail Dog for reminding us that we should never pass up an opportunity to promote our products and services and what better place to market than under the rosy aura of a successful transaction…