Convince and Convert Blog: Where Social Media and Email Collide

Paid search management vendor Covario said today that PPC spending was up 52% in Q1 2008 versus 2007.

52% is a big leap for an already red-hot digital marketing tactic.

But perhaps more interesting was the finding that Google took in 85% of the paid search spend in the first quarter. (No wonder Yahoo! rushed into their arms after Microsoft blew them off). This points to a big inefficiency in PPC in general. If Google has 71% of the search market based on total number of searches, but 85% of the PPC budget, then substantially more people are spending substantially more dollars in Google than necessary.

Google’s Popularity Means You’re Overpaying

It’s not a mystery why paid search is up 52% and Google has 14% more spend share than eyeball share. In a down economy, marketers want to minimize waste, and Google PPC is the closest thing to a sure bet that’s easily available. (see previous post on digital marketing’s prominence in a recession). Marketers figure that if they have to retrench and focus on results and ROI, Google’s the place to go. But, if everyone is thinking that (and it appears they are), then the price for a click on Google PPC will continue to rise quickly to the point that profitability and ROI are impacted.

I suggest monitoring your average cost per click carefully to see if this trend is impacting you or your clients.

Don’t Dismiss Yahoo!

On a related note, this 85% Google share very much undervalues the importance of Yahoo! to many successful PPC programs. In many cases while working on client projects with Mighty Interactive, we saw Yahoo actually outperform Google. This is especially true for certain brands, as Yahoo’s users skew more female and less technical than do Google’s (and MSN’s users are even more female than Yahoo).

So, if the Google gold rush is pricing you out of the market, swim upstream and put some dollars in Yahoo and MSN where the clicks are cheap and your competition has fled. Similar Posts That You Might Enjoy

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$15.9 billion. That’s what eMarketer projected was spent on U.S. online advertising in 2006. For a dose of perspective, that’s more than was spent on local radio ads, cable TV ads, billboards, and B-to-B Magazines like Solid Waste & Recycling.  In truth, online advertising trails only network television, local newspapers, and consumer magazines in total ad dollars spent.

What this means is that unless you run a Mennonite supply company, if you didn’t advertise online last year, chances are good that you’ll do so in 2007.

When you get into the online ad game, it’s important to realize that while it can work wonders, it’s not immune to the laws of marketing. Online ad campaigns can and do suck, and when they do it’s typically because one of the three critical mistakes was made. Let’s see if we can avoid that tragic scenario.

No Call to Action

People don’t want to click on your ad. The fact is, if the viewer wanted to be on your Web site, she would be there already. Instead, she is on some other Web site, and your challenge as a marketer is to get her to stop what she has chosen to do, and pay attention to your message.

And attention isn’t usually enough. What you really want is for the viewer to actually click on your ad. The critical mistake is to not explain the specific benefit of clicking. To get a person to instantly shift from their planned behavior to an unplanned behavior solely through the power of suggestion is not easy. Before you sell your services, you first have to sell the click.

Make sure all of your online ads have a distinct and concise call to action, and wherever possible keep the call to action present throughout the ad (don’t just show it on the fourth panel of the animation). Show your proposed ads to friends. Ask them to describe the benefit of clicking in five words or less. If they can’t, get back to work on your call to action.

No Post-Click Plan

Once someone clicks on your ad, you’ve won the battle but not the war. Don’t hang the “Mission Accomplished” banner in your office just yet. Far too many online advertisers still send clickers straight to the home page or some other generic place.

For maximum effect, send clickers to a special landing page or microsite that ties directly to the banner, with the same look and feel, messaging and offers. Remember that online advertising is a series of steps with the banner being first, and the click being second. Don’t overlook the third step which is driving clickers to act through a clear and persuasive post-click experience.

To this end, you should also distinctly measure post-click behavior using a Web analytics package. Since a click by itself doesn’t make you any money, make sure you’re measuring how many of those clicks translate into sales, leads, calls, etc.

No Creative Testing

One of the reasons for the explosive growth of online advertising is its easy measurability. It’s simple to determine how frequently a banner ad is clicked upon (the click-through rate) and to not use that critical information to improve your results is like signing a top free agent running back but keeping the same bad offensive line…

Like Britney Spears offspring, once you have one banner ad, it’s comparatively easy to create another. Consequently, when making online ads don’t make just one. Build three to five ads each with variations of graphics, offer, call to action and other factors.

Run all of your ads in rotation and carefully monitor the results. If one or more ads disproportionately yields more clicks than the others, ask your ad sales representative to allocate the impressions solely to the best performers. Even small changes can have a meaningful impact on click-through rate.

Also, if time and budget permits, test “rich media” versions of your ads. “Rich media” includes all the new-fangled ad formats like Flash, Pointroll, video ads and audio ads. Basically, any online ads like feature video, audio, complex animation, or fly across your screen are categorized as rich media.

While these ads can be a bit bothersome, one man’s annoying is another man’s successful ad campaign. Rich media ads are becoming more and more numerous because they work. A recent campaign for one of our clients tested traditional animated online ads against rich media versions, with the rich media ads delivering approximately 400% more clicks.

These days, the Internet is a lot like Hollywood in its mentality of conformity. I’ve taken my kids to at least a dozen movies about some form of animated creature in the past year. It’ll be “The Adventures of Lichen” soon if execs just keep playing follow the leader.

Go against the grain and try a rich media campaign. See www.pointroll.com for a good library of samples.

Riding the wave of Internet advertising growth is exhilarating, and it’s rewarding to see clients have success with this emerging medium. But the worst fate that could befall the industry is for first-time online advertisers to fail and lose faith in this unique and effective marketing tactic.Similar Posts That You Might Enjoy

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As I write this, hundreds of thousands of businesses are competing to convince people that their Web site is online nirvana – the beatitude, not the band.

But, given all the other marketing tactics available, why has pay per click search marketing gone from nowhere to a $3 billion dollar industry this year, and $5.5 billion by 2009 (according to Jupiter Research)? What makes search so special? It works like a Sheriff Joe chain gang.

You’re fishing where the fish are. If someone takes the time to go to Google and search for “online horse classifieds” it’s a near certainty that person is interested in buying or selling a horse.

Search marketing is hardly a secret anymore, however, and with the flood of new competition for even the most bizarre search phrase (“phoenix coffin sales” has four paid advertisers on Google), search marketing success requires more than a credit card and a pulse these days.

There are many figurative dials to twist to improve your paid search marketing campaign: search term selection, ad copy, bid strategy, etc. Each of these alone or in combination can impact your pay per click results. But these pre-click adjustments are a relatively minor component of your success when compared to post-click factors.

The typical Web site visitor spends a little less than three minutes on a site. The typical Web site visitor coming from paid search spends approximately 20 seconds. This means that the prospects you’re paying Google to bring to your site on a pay per click basis have the attention span of a preschooler after a box of Twinkies and a Kool-Aid chaser. Search engine users know that there are many more links ostensibly about the same subject waiting for them as soon as they click the back button to return to the search results. Consequently, they won’t spend much time surfing around your site.

To overcome this attention deficit problem, don’t send visitors from paid search to your home page or any type of general page on your site. The page that prospects are sent to after clicking a link is called the “landing page” and specificity is the key component. Always send visitors to the most specifically appropriate page that directly addresses their search query.

For example, if you’re bidding on the search term “Etnies blue skateboard shoes” don’t send visitors to your home page. Don’t send them to your main shoes page. Don’t even send them to the Etnies brand page. Send them to a page that is exactly what they have already said (via their search query) they are looking for: Etnies blue skateboard shoes.

Avoid the urge to clutter up your landing pages with different products, messages, offers, and other seemingly informative flourishes. Doing so is the equivalent of the drive-through employee asking me if I want a hot apple or cherry pie with my burger. If I wanted a pie, I would have ordered a pie. Similarly, if I wanted an Etnies T-shirt, I would have searched for an Etnies T-shirt. I want shoes, and as a site owner you’ve got 20 seconds to convince me you’ve got precisely the shoes for which I’m searching.

Of course, many sites do not have existing pages that are of a singular purpose that could be used as landing pages. Here are the critical elements to creating high performance landing pages from scratch:

1. Immediately convince the visitor that you have what they need. If the search phrase is “Phoenix Coffin Sales” make sure the landing page has a prominent headline including that phrase.

3. Hold their hand. You’re asking a prospect to quit researching and commit now. Provide testimonials, guarantees and other content on the landing page that reduces perceived risk.

The concept of landing pages may seem Machiavellian, but it’s evolutionary marketing. It would work offline, too, if such a thing were possible. If I was in the market for a brown corduroy jacket (hint, hint) and I could go to the Brown Corduroy Jacket Store without the annoying distractions of passé black jackets, socks, belts and their ilk, the chances I’d walk out with a jacket and an Amex receipt would be pretty high, indeed.

So, faced with increasing competition, spend your resources to customize the post-click experience of your prospects, and you’ll take your paid search program to the next level of success. Similar Posts That You Might Enjoy

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What does the Internet have to do with your print, TV, radio, direct mail and other traditional tactics? Plenty.

Along with the oft-cited belief that half of all marketing dollars are wasted lies a corollary, which is that the traditional components of most marketing plans are evaluated using less than scientific means. In many cases, the perceived success or failure of a traditional marketing tactic such as a magazine ad is based on the random, coffee-breathed feedback offered by Lance, the knit-tie wearing sales associate that stops by your cubicle each morning to give you a blow by blow of each customer interaction. The one big sale Lance was able to make last month was to a woman who mentioned seeing your magazine ad. Thus, Lance advocates an eight-page full-color insert in the next issue since it’s obviously the best possible advertising vehicle.

In addition to Lance’s unimpeachable research, you may ask your customers via some sort of survey where they first heard about you. Numerous studies have shown these queries to be unreliable, as people either check the first box on the list, or whichever media they tend to consume most frequently.

So, what we advocate is the use of Web analytics to determine effectiveness of traditional marketing tactics.

With Internet access surpassing cable television in terms of consumer penetration rates, increasingly prospective customers consume traditional marketing messages first, and then evaluate your company via your Web site before determining whether to progress along the purchase cycle.

Consequently, as long as your traditional marketing consistently references your Web site, your online presence is a reliable surrogate and aggregator for your complete marketing program.

Here’s how to use it to figure out what works.

Public Relations

PR results have always been tough to measure. Historically, column inches of press coverage are multiplied by advertising costs for the same amount of space to derive a value. But that has no bearing on actual effectiveness of PR in driving awareness or sales. We log all media placements our PR division makes for clients by the date the articles ran and by publication. We also create a list of search terms that relate to each article.

Then, we look at the client’s Web site analytics to see traffic patterns after the articles ran, and measure visits from corresponding search terms.

For a recent client for whom we placed an article in the Wall Street Journal, we saw a 1000%+ increase in Web traffic, including many visits directly from wsj.com, and a spike in visitors using search terms mentioned in the article.

Marketing Mix

Similarly, to determine the relative impact of different pieces of the marketing plan, we create spreadsheets that plot when all traditional marketing activities occur such as TV and radio buys, billboards, direct mail drops, newspaper and magazine ads, etc. Then, we add a line graph that show Web site traffic, leads, and sales (if applicable) along the same timeline.

Anytime we see a spike in Web site results, we see what marketing tactics were ongoing at that time, and use that data to help determine which activities are most successful at driving results.

Message Impact

I’m not anti-focus group, but relying solely on research that asks people what they would do in theory puts a lot of artificial conditions on their buying behavior. After you’ve had a couple beers and if the light is just right, even the Pontiac Aztek looks pretty good.

We prefer when possible to mix focus group type theoretical research with measuring what people actually do in a low cost environment that gets results fast. We create a series of online banner ads that contain a distinct potential marketing message for the product or service, and then launch a quick online media buy that puts those ads in front of likely customers. Within just a few days patterns emerge that tell us which messages are salient. The trick to this approach is making sure that the ad creative is extremely similar except for the message itself. You don’t want to interpret a message as powerful, when it’s actually the photograph of the cigar smoking beagle in the one ad that is getting the attention.

While online marketing’s share of the overall marketing mix will continue to expand for the foreseeable future, it’s important to think of the Internet as more than an advertising vehicle. Those online ad dollars can be used to inform and improve the results of your traditional programs as well.Similar Posts That You Might Enjoy

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Once upon a time you could send and receive email without incident. Like leaving your doors unlocked or eating medium-rare hamburgers, the glory days of email were blissfully free of hassle and worry.

Email has literally transformed the way we communicate. 31 billion emails are sent every day in North America, according to research firm IDC. But despite its speed and a Paris Hilton-esque ubiquity, email is under siege.

IDC says spam now accounts for 38 percent of all email, up from 24 percent in 2002, and the smorgasbord of increasingly crafty email viruses and frauds is causing a great deal of agitation among the populace.

“People are getting fed up with all this spam nonsense, and when you’re scared to click on something for fear of getting scammed, that’s not good,” says Kevin Maxwell, Product Manager for Scottsdale-based anti-spam service SpamElimination.com.

Millions of Americans now use some sort of spam blocker, whether personally purchased or installed on their behalf by their ISP or the company IT guys in the basement. These spam blockers can be very effective by “reading” email content and other technical attributes and then filtering presumed spam to a special folder or refusing to deliver it altogether.

The trouble is, spam blockers don’t have a lot of nuance to them. Like civil war medicine, it’s very much an “if in doubt, cut it off” mentality. This results in up to 20 percent of legitimate, permission-based email being undelivered, according to Michelle Eichner, who heads the Scottsdale office of Pivotal Veracity, an email deliverability management company.

Between the spam filters and the fact that people aren’t as intrigued by email as they used to be (I want to “check this box for information and special offers from us and our partners” about as much as I want a case of monkey pox), true email marketing success can be as unlikely as an Emmy for “The Swan.”

So what’s a marketer to do? First, pay attention to the deliverability of your email program. If you don’t know what your open rate and click through rates are, find out. It’s possible that your well-crafted email is falling on deaf inboxes, because your URL has been blocklisted (bad) or blacklisted (really bad), or that the text or graphics in your emails are getting them filtered out, especially by big ISPs like AOL.

Second, and perhaps most importantly, send emails about which people give a damn. The days of “batch and blast” are ending. All the spam filters and Pivotal Veracity research in the world won’t save you if nobody cares whether they get your email or not.

Today’s best email marketers are taking the time to learn about their customers’ habits and desires, and sending targeted, personalized email that matches those attributes. Most companies are still sending the same email newsletter to their entire list, and whether the recipient is a 55 year-old woman who smokes a pipe and plays foosball, or a 23 year-old male needlepoint whiz, the contents of the email are exactly the same. It’s a shotgun approach that necessitates generic messages and offers, and generates results that can be good, but rarely great.

The best emails, the ones you actually look forward to receiving, are those that are designed especially for you. My wife raves about the monthly email from babycenter.com that talks about what your 36 month-old should be doing developmentally (eating dirt, evidently), and I’m especially fond of my “your fantasy football team is losing again” messages from cbssportsline.com.

We’re using new technology from Exact Target, to help clients easily create simple profiles of their customers by importing attributes like name, gender, zip code, and other data, and then broadening the profile by inserting survey questions into each email newsletter. Each month, we know more and more about who has subscribed to this email and what they want from it, and can then tailor the content of the email accordingly.

Like paint-by-numbers for Internet geeks, Exact Target enables us to create multiple versions of copy and photos and automatically inserts the right one when the email gets sent. So, at the same time, one subscriber gets the coupon for pipe tobacco, and another gets a free trial offer for Cat Fancy magazine. Remember how impressed you were when you got your first Amazon email with that famous “people who bought this also enjoy that”? This is the evolution of that idea..

Called “dynamic content” this personalized approach to email marketing is likely to be the norm before long, especially for online retailers and other ROI-driven emailers. But it has applications far beyond e-commerce. We’re working on a pilot program for the Phoenix Convention & Visitors Bureau where people interested in visiting Phoenix check boxes that match their interests (dining, horseback riding, pro sports, art galleries, etc.) and within seconds receive a dynamic content email brochure that includes information and special offers matching their interests.

This targeted approach requires some effort, but is the email equivalent of a one-to-one conversation, rather than the yelling through a megaphone at a crowd method previously utilized. And if it forces companies to send increasingly relevant and personal email, maybe there’s a silver lining to the spam craze (beyond the wide availability of body part enhancing patches, of course).Similar Posts That You Might Enjoy

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In comparison to their human counterparts, Web sites have certain advantages as sales representatives for your company. They work 24×7, don’t complain about the commission structure, and don’t expense $273 for dinner with “Paul” the imaginary new business prospect. But otherwise, Web sites are generally terrible salespeople.

Nearly all Web sites have (or should have) visitor action as a central goal. Whether that action is a purchase, filling out a lead form, signing up for an email newsletter, or a combination of these or other activities, enticing visitors to ACT not just READ, is the end game of online marketing – and one at which most sites consistently fail.

The percentage of your site’s total visitors that actually take a desired action during their visit is called the site’s conversion rate, and a multitude of Internet research pegs average conversion rates at 2-5%.

Just imagine what would happen if your sales force closed only 2% of the calls they made. In most companies, a close ratio in that neighborhood would result in a humiliating verbal flogging at an early morning sales meeting, followed closely by a strong hint manifesting itself in the form of a $5 off coupon to Harriet’s House of Resume Polishing.

Even more damning is the fact that the people visiting your Web site are there for a reason. By their very presence, they have indicated their interest in your product or service. They didn’t enter a random set of characters into their browser to see what might happen. Consequently, your Web site’s pool of prospects might actually be MORE pre-qualified than your sales team’s. So what gives? Why can’t most sites close more than 5% of their prospects?

There are three primary culprits.

First, despite the excessive use of hair products and occasional personality disorders, professional salespeople have one critical skill that most Web sites lack entirely – listening. In a conversation with a prospect, salespeople are trained to listen to what the prospect says and probe for need. Only when needs have been identified do well trained salespeople offer solutions to meet them.

Web sites are often exactly the opposite. The entire “conversation” is not a conversation at all, but a monologue. “This is what our company does. These are the services we offer. These are the benefits of those services.” No acknowledgement of customer need. People act because they have a problem or need, and believe you can solve it. Frame the issue from their perspective, and you’ll be able to more succinctly and directly explain why you’re the solution.

The second problem is that Web site owners dramatically overestimate depth of visit. A March, 2004 study of thousands of sites from Web site analytics company Onestat.com found that more than 80% of all Web site visitors view three pages or fewer. This has massive implications for home page design and content organization. To increase conversion rates it’s imperative that your site diagnose visitor need, deliver evidence of being able to meet that need, and encourage action within the first two pages. Don’t waste your most valuable real estate – your home page – by including on it a worthless animated sequence or other corporate welcome statement that doesn’t address need or encourage action.

If the primary objective of your site is to get people to request your free brochure about your new weed killing spray, include a large button on your home page that says “Overrun by weeds? A weed-free yard is within your reach. Click here to see how your weeds could be singing the blues by this weekend.” Corny? Yes. Effective in getting prospects to request the brochure? Yes.

The third problem is a fundamental lack of understanding that unlike in-laws and Supreme Court Justices, you’re not stuck with your conversion rate. Now that Internet advertising is hot again, companies are constantly looking for ways to increase their Web site traffic, not realizing that the least expensive way to improve results is to re-architect the site itself to boost conversion rates. If you better your conversion rate by 100% – a very achievable objective in many scenarios – you’ve effectively doubled your marketing budget.

Certainly, there are principles that are universally true, including those included here. However, when you’re ready to get serious about conversion rate improvement, the only way to do so is to test your theories. Work with your team or a consultant to create several versions of your home page. Try new navigation labels. Build multiple lead generation forms. The only way to truly optimize results is to test until you’ve found the Web site recipe that makes the tastiest casserole for your company.

Is it easy to optimize conversion rates? It’s not too difficult to improve them by ridding your site of obvious problems. But a complete optimization strategy and tactical plan can indeed be tricky. But, unless you have a large unused cubicle farm and a platinum account at monster.com, it’s a lot simpler to test new Web site options than to try a fleet of new salespeople.Similar Posts That You Might Enjoy

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