Non-Line Blogging

I was recently asked at short notice to stand in for a speaker on Mobile Marketing at the Central and Eastern Europe Digital Marketing Conference in Budapest.  As luck would have it, the speaker's table had a bottle of Pepsi on it and gave me an extra 10 minutes worth of content.  On the bottle label was a QR Code and so I talked enthusiastically about how this technology can drive traffic to web sites for free.

In short, a QR code can hold a huge amount of information but all most of us need it to do is carry a url.  Then, anybody with a smart phone that has the software installed can take a picture of the code and open up our destination site.  Cost of creation of QR Code?  Nothing.  Cost of printing on label?  Nothing. Value of free traffic to your site? Priceless!

I've been following the development of QR codes for several years and whilst they are big in Japan, they do not really seem to have caught on in Western marketing culture...until this morning.  There I am, munching on my super-food muesli flicking through the daily paper and out pops a full page display ad with...a QR Code!  

To be honest, I'm not wildly excited about what Siemens has to say about "Climate Change and Energy Supply", but they did take me from an off-line display ad to a mobile web site in seconds, for no effort.  I'm also just a little more engaged.  And I think Siemens is a bit cooler than before thanks to my multi-channel customer journey (how sad am I?)

So, what are the opportunities for QR codes?  Well, they should probably augment all ad copy that currently just has a url...why ask people to go to a long site address when you can whisk them there in seconds by mobile? That means we can deliver them to deep url's and not just easy to remember/type urls. 

How about store windows taking people to a "Voucher download" page?  Or they should be on all direct mail collateral. And packaging, and exhibition stands...and posters.  Business cards?  Company Cars?!

Then there is the art and science of building landing pages;  how can we harvest personal data from the visit?  What should be the call to action? How do we measure success?  In truth, the volumes from this activity will not be overwhelming, but for the tech savvy segment of your prospect pool this may be cool enough (and easy enough) to tip them over into becoming customers. 

So, we've a long way to go with QR Codes, but what an exciting journey.   And for those of you wanting to play with me in the land of QR, here is all you need to begin:

• Create your QR Code web url - it's free and easy at this site
• Or if you want a Vcard - Nokia have a jolly clever tool for that (accept their T's and C's before use)
• Scan it using QR Code smart phones - here is Nokia's range
• Or download the software

That's it - just to get you started, here's my QR Business card.  And just for the record, even I'm not geeky or sad enough to have my Facebook url printed on a T-shirt, but if that's your bag, this company will do that for you.  Happy QR Coding!  

Here are a few thoughts about "Non-Line Marketing" that I pulled together with Chris Combemale, my Co-Founder of The Email Academy... 

As these difficult trading conditions continue many organisations are looking at ways to reduce their direct marketing costs without adversely affecting sales. One quick win has been trying to migrate customers from expensive off-line channels to cheaper on-line ones; speaking to people through email, at about half a pence a message, is a more attractive than saying the same thing through direct mail at maybe fifty pence a message. This cost-differential (email is 100 times cheaper than direct mail) means that email is a much more forgiving medium - your conversion rates could be half as good through email but still be 50 times better off in terms of cost per sale!

However, there is a business risk involved in this channel migration. If you ask people to “tune out” of nasty, expensive, un-green direct mail then you put pressure on your email marketing to perform. In my experience over the past decade across Europe there are very few client companies that have optimised their email marketing strategy and execution to make this risky channel migration pay. So I was delighted to read a case study from Marketing Sherpa today that suggests some steps all companies can take to reduce risk AND increase sales.

To summarise, an independent travel agent encouraged people to opt into their email programme to reduce the costs of servicing customers – all good so far! But in order to stimulate sales they decided to run a multi-channel campaign. With some simple data appending on their prospect file (adding life-stage and income variables is easy if you have a post-code), they selected the most affluent prospects for the campaign, as well as targeting all existing customers. They then used a combination of direct mail and email to promote personalised offers, with a range of on and off-line calls to action.

Here is the personalised post-card, with a "reminder" of the previous transaction in the heading.

And here is the email message, with the same "reminder" of previously-enjoyed holidays... 

 
Now here’s the good stuff...

“The team noticed that those who received both the print and email communications were twice as likely to visit their personalized web pages.

- 6% of those who received only email visited their webpage
- 12% of those who received both email and direct mail visited their webpage

That doubling in response also translated to twice the conversion rate and twice the revenue from customers who received both communications, as opposed to customers who only received one communication.”

http://www.marketingsherpa.com/article.php?ident=31299

The conclusion for me is clear. Our customers live in a multi-channel world and as marketers we need to embrace “non-line marketing”...using channel-neutral planning to harness all direct channels to engage with people. Humble direct mail can be used to re-enforce on-line messages and drive prospects to web sites in much the same way that email can be used to drive footfall to physical stores. And when we use both these channels in well-planned, targeted campaigns we enjoy conversion rates far beyond that which each channel achieves on its own. That’s heartening news for the direct marketing industry!

Many marketers work in a multi-channel world because their customers use different channels to engage with them.  One of the biggest challenges is tracking the off-line to on-line marketing experience; getting people to go on-line is not hard as we can shout "visit our website" in our ads and give them the web address.  But how successful are those campaigns, and how do we attribute on-line success to off-line campaigns?

One option is to create "vanity urls" that we expect people to remember and then type correctly, never mind just googling (or Binging?) the company and campaign key words.  The result is that many successful outcomes will end up being attributed to Mr Google simly because people can't be bothered to type things into address bars any more! If you want a comprehensive run-down of all the multi-channel tracking options then Avinash Kaushik has several posts that cover it admirably.

Here are a couple of examples from the world of retail.  

One quick (old and quaint?) way is to simply stick up a poster and ask people to email somebody.  It ticks most of the registration boxes...its quick, uses universally accessed media and has a simple "value exchange".  You could have different email addresses for regions of retailers, or for different incentives and there is no marginal cost of acquiring a new contact. Its easy to measure the success of these tactics and develop better versions over time. Maybe texting in your email address to a short-code number could tap into a medium that people may hold in their pocket/handbags rather than relying on people jotting down an email address on a scrap of paper and finding it when they got home.

However, Facebook has muscled it's way onto my High Street (Reigate, Surrey, England) with an altogether more robust proposition.  A clothes retailer has created a Facebook group (free, takes 10 minutes), has built a simple value proposition (20% off if you join our group), and now has the chance to push people back in store AND develop a longer term relationship.  In these difficult recessionary times I applaud any retailer who is brave and smart enough to look at exploiting a multi-channel relationship. And with the lovely people at Facebook still blasting out emails to your group members for free, its a pretty cost-efficient way to beat the credit-crunch.  

Back in 2005 I wrote a White Paper for Internet World Exhibition titled "Direct Marketers Will Inherit the Digital World".  We would shift, I grandly claimed, from "one size fits all email" and "brochure-ware" web sites to a world of personalised, relevant, timely dialogue.  Underpinning all of this was a sound understanding of gathering, mining and using data.  As companies fight to stay afloat in 2009 I would venture to suggest that the ones with a database of customers, prospects and web visitors will have more chance than most of surviving and here's why...  

It's not getting any easier or cheaper to drive traffic to your site and so you need to be working hard at making them register when they arrive.  It's then much cheaper to draw them back through the RSS/email route, so building a "prospect database" is critical.   Now with a pool of prospects you can use email and RSS (or phone or direct mail?) to convert them.  All you have to do is work out how to convince people to register and every day you will harvest a list of red-hot leads! So let's look at the business case for building the best possible registration process on your site in more detail...   

Registration and Acquisition

In an earlier post I looked at how the really smart companies are working hard on getting expensive new site visitors to part with some personal data, giving you another chance to market to them.   If I'm paying a dollar a click and 1 person in a 100 converts that's costing me 100 dollars a customer.  If I can get 20 of them to register and through follow-up emails get 2 more of them to convert I've made 3 sales at 33 dollars a customer.  No contact details, no control, no more sales...unless you're really lucky and they come back by themselves.  Too risky!

Registration and Retention

I've written plenty recently about the need to stay close to your customers in the bad times and how valuable email marketing can be...even generating the best sales day in one company's history.    Suffice to say, DONE WELL, email has the capability of getting you new clicks, leads or sales for a fraction of the cost of "traditional" sales routes.  Put simply, if I needed to generate 1 more sale to stay afloat today I could pay 100 dollars to Google (see above);  but wouldn't life be better if I could email "abandoned "Product X" shopping carts " or "people who clicked on the "Product X" link in an email", or "people who opened but did not click on the product X special offer" email, or even mail people who "bought Product Y because it goes well with Product X".  Cost of mailing 100 people?  One tenth of a cent.  Cost per sale with a 1% response rate? One tenth of a cent.     

Get it right! 

I have spent the past 20 years of my life getting terribly excited about databases.  I now feel it is time to share what I have learned so that more companies will make it through 2009...it's that powerful!  So, as my "Magnum Opus", I will use the next 2 posts to share the best web registration techniques I have seen. We'll pick off "The Business Case for Registration" now and then move on to the finer skills of "Visibility; Value; Ease" later.  So before we start knocking up web forms we have a few BIG battles to fight internally

Do the Math...

Trouble is, a registration form is seen by many people as a big fat waste of prime web site real estate.  That means you need to work out the VALUE OF AN EMAIL ADDRESS or a REGISTERED SITE VISITOR in order to convince people to get the registration form on the best part of the high traffic pages. 

Value is a function of cost savings and increased revenue.  A UK high street bank put the value of an email address at well over £200:  Imagine over a 5 year lifecycle being able to "turn off" paper statements and direct mail in exchange for electronic communications...that would be about 20 mail campaigns a year at about 50 pence a pack...£10 a year and £50 over 5 years.  Then factor in the ability to cross or up-sell one product, maybe based on triggers from web content viewed, or speedy executions of topical campaigns...a single £50 up-sell every other year and BINGO...an email relationship is worth £200.  I can think of no better use of a 200x200 plot of your web pages than building a registration device and earning £200 every time somebody converts.

Another way to look at VALUE is through the OPPORTUNITY COST.  If you did not have a registered site user to ping with a "we've got new content you like" message, how would you go and find another visitor?  Probably by paying for it.  But if you want page views, or daily visitors, isn't getting last week's visitor back for not much money better than paying lots for a new one this week?  So you could begin to model the revenue generated and traffic costs saved by, for example, getting 15% of last weeks visitors back through some RSS/Email pull technique. 

So, how much is an email address worth to you?  And how much would you pay for somebody to create a web profile, or sign up for RSS feeds from the site?  You can just do it on cost savings..less Ad Word clicks and affilaite PPC deals, less direct mail, less outbound telemarketing.  An electronic relationship is virtually free!  And then factor in all that ad revenue, or those incremantal sales just by drawing people back for fractions of a penny.  Once you have a basic fix on these you will be able to determine the right registration strategy.

Be Bold.  Be Brave.

I'd like to finish with what I think are the most exciting, amd maybe the most successful registration devices...roadblock registrations.  Some companies have done the math, had the big arguments with the "customer journey princess" and decided that everybody who comes to their site gets a great big, in your face, REGISTER NOW screen.

I love this one from Marketing Sherpa.  It is dripping with reasons to join, it is short to complete, and if you don't like it then you can just step on through.  But here's the business analysis...I recon they know the "value of an email address" and they will also know from their analytics the following key data:

• Total Roadblocks Served
• Total Email Adresses Gathered
• Total Roadblocks clicked through
• Total Bounces.

They could get even smarter from here, understanding what source gives the highest bounce rate (so we can choose not to serve to these people) and then allow more people through to the site where other registration devices will be lying in wait.

For instance, here is a lovely one from Trip Advisor.  They serve a registration page that is contextually relevant to the content you are looking at.  Not quite a roadblock, but not a passive bit of web real estate either.  Given the relevence and low-impact nature of the solicitation, this could be deployed successfully all over the site, reaping yet more registrations

So the conclusion here is that you cannot afford NOT to get good at registration.  You need to do some big sums to work out the value of these registrations and then you have the option of being really bold to make it happen, safe in the knowledge that everything can be monitored and amended.  Armed with the knowledge that you need to get good data gathering, my next post will break the experience down into the 3 critical "customer experience" components of visibility, value, and ease.  In the meantime, watch out for sites trying to seduce you into registering! 

I can retire a happy man.  After 4 years of effort, my humble one-man band site is top in Google for the most important search term in my competitive market that is full of search savvy marketers.  Googling "digital marketing training" in the UK or globally yields Non-Line Marketing as top banana. 

Of course that statement comes with a raft of qualifications.  First up, I may not be there tomorrow (as I wasn't there yesterday), and I am not even there all the time today.  Maybe Google is giving everybody 15 minutes of search fame to keep us happy in these recessionary times, but in truth it is seeing whether people validate their search algorithm by clicking on my link.   Second, it has taken 4 years to navigate to the top of the page by following all the usual tips about key word density and consistency and linking and so on.  Thirdly, I built the site 4 years ago with a clunky design package and it's looking a dated site that doesn't render well in today's larger screen resolutions automatically, so my quality score will suffer as people click back to the search page.  And also, the "Description" meta tag I crafted is not being pulled from my clunky design and so I am not compelling enough to encourage more clicks.

Anyhow, for the moment I am up there with the Big Boys, looking down on the IDM, E-Consultancy, CIM and even the mighty Dave Chaffey!  But I won't be there for long. 

So in the meantime I have a new site ready to roll - I've been building it over the past few months and its got all the Web 2.0 bells and whistles every digital consulting Johnny needs..shiny buttons, drop shadows, acres of lovely white space.  Trouble is, once I switch to the new site I'm probably going to wave goodbye to my new found "Topagoogle" status.

Yes, the tech brigade say that it is easy to use the right re-directs to carry all the old stuff to the new, (here is Dave Chaffey's thoughts on the 301/303 debate), but I've just seen what has happened to E-consultancy...they launched their lovely new site a few weeks ago and have dropped out of the search rankings for key training phrases.  Two months ago e-consultancy was top for all digital training searches but the new site has let pip-squeaks like me into the rankings. 

So, in the immortal words of The Clash, "Should I stay or Should I go".  Stay, with a naff site, or go, and lose my "Top Banana" status? 

You'll know I went when I drop off the edge of the search cliff!