Convince and Convert Blog: Where Social Media and Email Collide

This recession is looking worse than Sylvester Stallone all roided up for that recent Rambo 14 (Rambo goes to the buffet for the Early Bird Special with some pals) movie.

It’s going to be bad. But for social media, it just might be the best possible circumstance. Here’s why:

1. Smart Buying

Consumer confidence is at an all-time low. We’re not exactly rushing to the nearest mall to make discretionary purchases. But because money is tight, we’ll want to make sure we make the best possible purchase when we do make them. 

Enter social media. 

Traffic is of course up for sites like Yelp, Amazon, Trip Advisor, DPreview.com and other review sites because of the impending holiday season. However, I believe sites that enable consumers to benefit from the experiences of prior customers to continue skyrocketing long after the holidays are over. 

If we’re going to part with decreasing dollars, we’re going to make sure it’s a good product first. 

2. Shared Angst

This recession is the first piece of long-lasting major bad news that has occurred in the social media era. Certainly the Iraq war qualifies as bad news, but it’s day-to-day impact on Americans has been mostly negligible, except of course for those served and their families. (Thank you for enabling me to live in a country where I can make a living writing blog posts and telling people how to do social media and send good email)

The ins and outs and ups and downs of this recession and its impact, duration, and cause are going to be a major topic of conversation in this country for two to five years. 

Enter social media. 

You can Tweet using the #recession hashtag, or send a friend a bowl of soup via a Facebook app. Seriously, we’re going to use social media to discuss and micro-analyze our deteriorating economic condition because it’s faster, more customizable, and in many cases more honest than real media.

I can talk to real people at a local restaurant about the recession, but then I’m only getting the local perspective. On Twitter, I can get the perspective of most of the country. That’s why social media will be the recession’s barber shop.

3. You’re Grounded

First the gas crunch. Then, the “if you want oxygen on your flight, it’s $20″ routine. Now, the recession. 

Companies are going to cut back on travel considerably. 

Enter social media.

The conferences and symposiums of the roaring 00s are going to be replaced by Webinars, Webcasts, UStreams, SlideShare and other forms of digital information exchange that will dominate the bummer 10s. 

If I owned a conference company, I’d be working like crazy right now to figure out a virtual delivery component, because given the quality of freely available content online, it’s getting tougher and tougher to justify an in-person experience. 

What do you think? Do you agree that the recession could actually help social media?

Welcome. If you like the content here, consider susbscribing to my RSS feed. You can also find me on Twitter @jaybaer

A long-standing “success metric” in email marketing is the unsubscribe ratio. Like telling children that their pet fish is “just sleeping” the “unsubscribe ratio” is a euphemism.

Your unsubscribe ratio is the percentage of people who receive your email that have gotten so tired or frustrated with your program that they simply can’t take it any more. They’re fed up with your lack of relevancy, your frequency or some other shortcoming, and they’ve taken the extraordinary measure of actually clicking links and buttons to make you go away.

Unsubscribe rates have actually declined in many cases, but don’t get all cocky. It’s not because email programs have become more relevant to consumers, they’re just clicking the “spam” button, instead of using the “unsubscribe” link.

When you think about the frustration level required to actually unsubscribe, it’s disheartening that unsubscribe rates of 1 customer in 200 are often considered acceptable. If a similar number of customers walked out of a retail store yelling “I can’t take this anymore. I’ll NEVER come back,” a lot of attention would be paid to it.

Unsubscribes on Line 1

Hiding unsubscribes on a spreadsheet diminishes what it actually means for your brand. A few bright ideas to shine a light on unsubscribes:

1. For e-commerce companies, instead of tracking unsubscribes as a raw number, track the total value of all prior purchases made by unsubscribers, and put that dollar amount on the spreadsheet.

2. Each time a customer unsubscribes, send an email to the the CEO or CMO.

3. In addition to providing a CAN-SPAM mandated unsubscribe link, offer your customers an unsubscribe phone number where they can call or text message, and an unsubscribe Twitter account. Once unsubscribers start creating content instead of just hash marks in Excel, your organization will start paying attention to the cause, not the ratio.

I’m In. Who Else?

Effective immediately, I’m going to pay more attention to unsubscribes myself. At the recent Marketing Profs Digital Mixer, Gary Vaynerchuk said he is investing major resources into having team members telephone unsubscribers. I can’t go that route because I don’t have phone number for my subscribers, but wherever I can I’ll be emailing people that drop me on Twitter or via RSS.

And it’s already proving interesting. I emailed a gentleman from Norfolk who unfollowed me on Twitter (you can get unfollow notifications by using Qwitter). The text of my email is below.

Keith -

Hi there. I received a notification that you’ve unfollowed me on Twitter.

I want to do everything possible to serve my readers and my community. It would be fantastic if you could give me a sense of what you didn’t like about my tweets, or what you would have liked to see more of in them.

Thanks in advance for your feedback. It’s truly appreciated, and I hope to win you back someday.

Very best regards,

(@jaybaer)

JASON BAER
Convince & Convert
Social Media & Email Consulting
——————————————–
Blog: www.convinceandconvert.com
Twitter: @jaybaer
Ear: (602) 616-1895

Within 5 minutes I received his reply:

You were removed during a clean up of folks that did not follow me back. Twitter stills shows that you are not following me.

A perfectly reasonable explanation, and one I preferred to “your content sucks.” And now, we’re both following one another. It’s a success story.

Everyone and Every One counts

As you build your email list and your social media currency, it’s easy to view individual audience members as less than critical, because another subscriber could be just minutes away. Don’t fall for it. You don’t have to be the very best to succeed in a wired world. You just have to care the most. And I’m going to try to out-care my competition. How about you?

What Are You Doing to Out-Care the Competition? Comments, Please

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.

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.

You’ve heard it all before, right? Circa 1998. The Internet, with its 24×7 hours and minuscule overhead is going to put American retailers out of business. It’s just a matter of time before operational efficiencies triumph over brand and physical location, and quaint stores disappear faster than Diamondbacks’ pitching.

Well, it didn’t quite work out that way. The wisdom of online purchase and subsequent shipping of 50-pound bags of dog food doesn’t seem as sage today as it did then. Anyone want to buy a sock puppet for cheap?

But, even though the initial exuberance of the e-commerce revolution didn’t pan out as anticipated, the survivors of the bust and their progeny are powering a second Internet boom – and this time they’re doing it right. According to Business Week, nearly 60% of all public Internet companies posted a profit in the 4th quarter of 2003. Not exactly the sure thing of banking or utilities, but the financial metamorphosis of the still-standing dot coms over the last four years is staggering.

From a consumer e-commerce perspective, many of yesterday’s leaders are today’s leaders, but now come with a cherry on top called profits. Amazon.com, eBay.com, ticketmaster.com, dell.com, and the online arms of brutish retailers like Wal-Mart and Best Buy are collecting large chunks of the $53 billion Americans consumers spent online in 2003 – roughly equivalent to the gross domestic product of Peru.

Like evidence against Michael Jackson, the big e-commerce players get stronger every day. Their historic focus on goods that require low touch involvement by purchasers (media, electronics, appliances, tickets) – makes buying their wares online as easy to digest as gringo-ized Mexican food. But at the heart of the new Internet revolution is the next wave of e-commerce players that are shaking down industries previously thought to be impervious to the transformational effects of Web-based purchases.

The ground is vigorously shaking under the feet of businesses that feature significant amounts of consumer research and information exchange. Look at real estate (anyone not research a home purchase online?), travel, mortgages and loans, insurance, and even golf with its proliferation of online tee time reservations. They’re all categories where traditional players are being forced to compete with nimble online insurgents that can provide instant results for consumers while also offering lower costs by slashing commissions.

But perhaps the most amazing aspect of this Internet renaissance is consumers’ willingness – eagerness even – to buy expensive, considered purchases online – a notion deemed as ridiculous as Carrot Top just a scant few years ago.

To steal directly from Chris Rock, it’s a strange time indeed when the best rapper is White, the best golfer is Black, and the biggest seller of automobiles is eBay Motors. That’s right, a Web site that started out as a collection of PEZ dispensers sold $7.5 billion worth of vehicles world-wide in 2003. It wasn’t long ago that a primary debate surrounding the upside of e-commerce was consumers’ fears about providing credit card information online. Now, you can buy (with PayPal natch) a 2004 Bentley Continental GT for just $198,500 on eBay.

The phenomenon doesn’t end at cars. Blue Nile sold $129 million worth of diamonds online last year, and Phoenix-based Equine.com sold $40 million worth of horses. Attention parents: if your child is bugging you for a pony, your excuse is going to look pretty flimsy when the fruit of your loins logs on to equine.com and finds no fewer than 131 Shetlands, starting at under a grand.

This dramatic rise in online luxury purchases is a result of a confluence of factors. First, the Internet is main stream. According to research firm eMarketer, 67% of U.S. adults will be online by 2005 – more than have cable television.

Second, it’s perhaps no coincidence that we’re called Internet “users”. Sites like amazon.com have provided great experiences on relatively low dollar purchases for tens of millions of people, and these smaller buys serve as gateway drugs that result in larger and larger purchases – as long as the customer experience remains positive.

On a related note, the preponderance of major players in the online vehicle, jewelry, and horse businesses have invested significant resources into comforting user interfaces, reliable software systems, bullet-proof Web servers, and unflagging customer service that glues it all together. They may not be the biggest companies in each industry, but their online operations have a pervasive air of legitimacy that coaxes credit cards out of wallets and onto Web sites.

Joe Schubach, owner of Schubach Jewelers in Scottsdale is an example. While Schubach retains a small show room in an upscale office building, the vast majority of his revenue comes from his six well-designed online stores. He’s no Blue Nile, but the schubach.com enterprise oozes professionalism, and that’s what separates the e-commerce winners from crazyhectorsworldofgems.com.

Third, the dramatic rise in broadband connectivity has enabled high dollar online retailers to provide a litany of product data across a variety of media types. Equine.com allows sellers to showcase their stallions with photos, interactive slide shows, video clips, and more. Most eBay Motors listings contain no fewer than 25 photographs of the vehicle from every conceivable angle, including some you’re not likely to see again even if you bought the car. (Checked your glove box hinges for scratches lately?)

This kind of wall-to-wall visual information goes a long way toward blunting the “am I going to get what I paid for” syndrome that can occur with any purchase not made in the flesh. And unless you’d like to go out for a bite to eat during download, viewing those 25 photos on a dialup connection is impractical at best.

It’s a trend that’s not going to abate. Sales of the kind of vaguely nice but palpably cheesy sport coats worn by car and jewelry salesmen will be plummeting soon as more and more Americans get comfortable buying their most treasured possessions in just two dimensions. And as the Internet becomes truly ubiquitous in the coming years and access via every imaginable device becomes commonplace, we will hit our nadir as a society when we can buy a horse from our cars, and a car from upon horseback.