Non-Line Blogging

By way of validating my thoughts about email working brilliantly, here's proof that it can make you shedloads of money in a recession...

I emailed a link to my blog to the lovely people at Howies asking them if they could share any feedback on the success of their email.  Without giving away too many trade secrets here is what their marketing man, Ruben said...

We literally made the decision to go to sale on the Thursday morning, and by Friday lunchtime, it looked like we were on for the biggest single day in Howies history!

Way to go, Howies.

And if you really want to know, this is the jumper I bought that helped make a little bit of retail history in Cardigan Bay.

I am Course Tutor for the Institute of Direct Marketing's “Email Marketing – Beyond the Basics” for the next 2 days and it was a delight, as always, to hear John Ashton from Screwfix share some thoughts, this time on “email marketing in a recession”.   He waved a copy of today’s Sun newspaper and it was filled with BIG discounts from BIG retailers – 20% off at Marks & Spencer, 25% off at Debenhams and 6 pages of offer-driven ads from Argos.  In the face of all this, he warned, email marketers need to respond.  Here are 3 of his observations that every marketer should act upon: 

• Know what your customers are thinking – tap into forums, send them surveys and make sure you are in touch...are they deferring all spending plans for 6 months or just until Christmas.
• Remind people that you won’t be going bust – if it’s true.  Whilst other suppliers are engaged in ever-more desperate measures to get sales, maintain your dignity.
• Focus on existing customers – if they have loved you in the good times they may well be prepared to love you through the bad times. 

Interestingly, earlier today I dipped into an article from Lyris entitled “In this economy, its survival of the fastest”.  Here’s a thought from them:

“Don't assume the plan you created in September is still relevant. It isn't. Right now, any survey on future purchasing intentions that's more than a week old is probably obsolete.”

Now what is spooky about all this is that as John was speaking I received an email from Howies a company I have bought from before, that seemed to echo all the things he and Lyris were telling us we're supposed to do.  As a result I spent £50 with them 10 minutes later so maybe I should share the email they sent...talk about precient! (here’s the email on-line) 

So, there is an email marketer who got my £50 in a recession by being relevant, engaging and timely. Let's hope they thrive in a recession - as well as Screwfix.  And just as a compliment to John at Screwfix, here is a screenshot of a fantastic "persuasion device" he's put on their home-page...an offer with a countdown clock!  Who said we can't be a little bit cheezy as well in a recession if it makes the till ring? 

What will you do with the 97% of visitors who won’t “convert” on your website today?  You know, the hundreds of people you’ve paid lots of money to get to your site?  Probably nothing – unless you have worked on your registration strategies.  Here is the quick and easy way to convert more of your hard-earned traffic for a really low cost... 

Some companies are recognising that they are wasting money on driving traffic just to harvest a small percentage of sales:  There are probably a lot of non-customers who will soon be customers, but sadly with your competitors because you can't get back in touch with them.  Avinash Kaushik in his excellent blog illustrates this with his usual elegent simplicity...

This suggests that as people move around your site they are seduced by your marketing and may gradually become tempted to convert.  But quite often there is no chance for people to register their interest and you cannot re-market to them. No email address means no future contact that you can initiate and there's nothing you can do.  What a waste.  How frustrating

That therefore means that we have a chance to introduce a second tier into our conversion programme, taking some of the non-converted customers and working hard at getting them to part with some personal data.  I've taken the liberty of amending Avinash's diagram to explain this.  It is not unrealistic to expect 5% or even 10% of your most qualified prospects to want to enter a permission-based email marketing programme.

Without this view we only have one way to convert visitors, so let's pretend we are looking at people who have arrived at our site via a premium search term.  Your only way to value them is via conversion rate...

All your acquisition marketing is invested into the “converted” visitors and they carry a hefty £16.70 cost per sale.  However, what if we could work really hard on converting some “suspects” into “prospects” so we can build a file to re-market to...

Now, let’s be realistic and assume that in the next week we can convert 20% through a follow-up email (or better still an email programme).  Now we can pick up sales for peanuts...

So, factoring in the new sales through a follow-up programme into the overall campaign cost we have a really staggering conversion rate that is almost 40% less than...

If we can create a “value exchange” that gets 10% of interested visitors to part with an email address we can therefore increase sales and reduce cost per sale for a campaign. This means that you can probably afford to pay more per click and generate even more sales or make poor-performing media cost-justify.  And all it needs is a couple of days working on your registration strategy.

I will talk about this in more detail in my next blog but for now here are 3 really quick wins for kick-starting your registration programme, all relating to the visibility of the registration form

Be bold.

Quite often the registration is a sad forlorn box tucked beneath the fold of the home page.  Ironically, once people leave the homepage they are probably more engaged and would have been likely to register...had they been able to see the registration form. 

MarketingSherpa is using a cookie-based “Roadblock Registration” at present so that every single visitor will see their email registration.  It may scare a few people off but it may also dramatically increase conversion rates...test it yourself and see what impact it has. 

Be seen

One client I worked with recently only had a registration form on the home page.  By placing the form on 4 pages they generated 4 times more email addresses straight away.  It’s that easy.  Failing that, have it on the primary navigation so that it is visible on each page.  Once you understand the immense value of prospect registration you will probably give your form access to much more valuable web site “real estate” at the expense of other weaker content. 

Be relevant.

Working for the fashion brand Kangol a few years ago we worked hard on making the “value exchange” relevant to where people were on their site journey.  It was not hard and it made the experience more relevant and boosted registration rates by 10% for every page...  

• If you were on the “Find Nearest Store” page the copy was “Want to hear when new stores near you stock our products?  Sign up for our emails”. 
• If you were on the “Spotted wearing Kangol” pages the copy was “Be the first to know what Kangol stuff the stars are wearing – sign up for our emails.”  
•  If you were on the “Products” pages the copy was “Hear about new products as soon as they’re launched – sign up for our emails” 

So, think strategically about why you should gather “non-converted” prospect details and work hard on making the process as efficient as possible.  Next blog we’ll look at what the US market calls “reciprocity” but what we in the UK still refer to as “bribery”...what ”value exchange” will make prospects part with their valuable personal data. 

Typical.  Just when you think you've cracked this Blogging lark, up pop a load of commentators saying that its all over. In November’s edition of Wired magazine the story is headed " Twitter, Flickr, Facebook Make Blogs Look So 2004".  Paul Boutin makes the following observation:

“Thinking about launching your own blog? Here's some friendly advice: Don't. And if you've already got one, pull the plug.”

Oh dear.  His point is that the blogosphere, “once a freshwater oasis of folksy self-expression and clever thought, has been flooded by a tsunami of paid bilge”.   The serendipity of googling a subject and finding independent writers with a genuine passion for a topic is now a distant memory, Boutin claims.  These days, if you “scroll down Technorati's list of the top 100 blogs and you'll find personal sites have been shoved aside by professional ones. Most are essentially online magazines: The Huffington Post. Engadget. TreeHugger. A stand-alone commentator can't keep up with a team of pro writers cranking out up to 30 posts a day.”

In November’s .net magazine Jason Calacanis, the founder of human search engine Mahalo has..

“...recently quit blogging altogether.  When it started, it was a very authentic conversation and I think it’s now more about marketing, promotion and link-baiting”. 

So there.

And in the UK Hazel Blears, the Government’s Communities Minister had a pop at bloggers at a political conference the other evening:

"Until political blogging adds value to our political culture, by allowing new voices, ideas and legitimate protest and challenge, and until the mainstream media reports politics in a calmer, more responsible manner, it will continue to fuel a culture of cynicism and despair."

But can they all be right?  Is there still a place in our lives for blogs and why should some of us continue?  Here are a couple of reasons why they are wrong.

Firstly, blogs still represent a fantastic digital marketing tool.  There are the Search marketing benefits – lots of lovely, frequently-updated text that robots love to crawl, lots of interlinking so that sites share their “google-juice” and lots of honest keyword phrases that consumers use when posting reviews (and when searching for products and services).  Here’s what Seth Godin says in Meatball Sundae...

"Let me be superclear here:  A post on a blog anywhere in the world could very well rank higher in a Google search than information on the same topic on your company’s web site. Which means your point of view disappears and the point of view of some blogger comes across instead.”

But secondly I think that the positioning benefits of blogging are even more important.  On my digital marketing courses I love to goad people into considering why a corporate blog is a fantastic idea.  First thing is to ask people if they have access to blogs at work – many people have their links to the blogosphere surgically removed by their weasely IT and HR teams...how un-trusting is that?!  Next up I show them blogs.sun.com and that great tag-line

Once they’ve picked themselves up off the floor and wiped the tears of laughter from their eyes, we try and dissect why this is such a brilliant positioning technique:  What words spring to mind about Sun’s corporate ethos?  “Mad” and “Reckless” soon gives way to “Transparent”, “honest”, “trusting” and “credible”...the kind of sentiment marketers cannot buy.  

The same is true for the housing charity Shelter’s blog from their CEO – it is not there to make you set up a direct debit and donate, it is there to show that Shelter is an organisation committed to fighting homelessness and Adam Samson’s blog talks about the work he does with the media, with the legal profession and with local and central Government.  It gives Shelter a brand position and a strong voice in a crowded marketplace.  Not bad for a blog.   

The other day I was trying to develop a “media displacement” model to justify blogs; if we all have the same amount of waking hours to consume news as a few years ago, what is it that would get thrown overboard to make way for reading a blog and the answer could well be, in a business context “trade magazine articles”.  I attempt to munch my way through Marketing, Marketing Week, Precision Marketing, New Media Age every week and also dip into monthly magazines like Marketing Direct and Revolution.  Yet a lot of the stuff is already several days out of date, some of it is not relevant to me and a lot of it is certainly not “best of breed” digital thinking. 

So ignore some 24 year old trade rag journalist trying to find an angle on a search news story and head for some of the great Search blogs out there for the really valuable content (look no further than Matts Cutts for SEO).  And for web analytics we should all be subscribed to Avinash Kaushik’s excellent blog that is better than any month old magazine article. 

So there is still a place for serendipitous search that yields a rich vein of independent thinking in digital marketing...despite what uber-cool Wired journalists think. And if anybody is reading this, I rest my case. 

It doesn’t take much to tip rational people (like me) into making emotional decisions.  One word did it for me the other day.  Walking past an optician’s shop I noticed (when I was close enough) a sign saying “Appointments Available Today”.   What was it about the word “today” that injected pace, excitement and a positive response from me?  Five letters on a sign and I’m a customer.  “KERCHING”.

I deeply enjoyed reading Brian and Jeffrey Eisenberg’s Call to Action: Secret Formulas to Improve Online Results book and love the passion with which they talk about “persuasion architecture”.  It’s the little things that can make a huge impact on a customer journey, they say, and come up with countless strategies for improving web page successful outcomes.   In an earlier blog I talked about the value of short, succinct copy in digital marketing.  I also blogged about the “Aggregation of Marginal Gains” and how lots of little improvements can end up with one whacking great big business win.  So, armed with these 2 pearls of wisdom I have been impressed with a few little touches from our friends at the world’s favourite airline. So let’s fly.  “Cabin Crew, doors to automatic and cross-check...”

Recently the British Airways site has improved, although there are still a few painful moments as I’ll share in a minute.  However, it’s the small things they have been doing that I like (and fall for).   On a recent trip to Helsinki I was checking in on-line and up popped an up-sell.  “Upgrade this flight for £138.50” they enthused.  So I did.  “KERCHING” went the BA cash register.  How easy was that?  It goes to show that if you don’t ask, you don’t get.  Can’t we all learn to adapt that simple technique to increase average-order value?

Not only that, I loved the way that they took me to a page with the “riff-raff” fare crossed out and “Club Europe” now proudly displayed as if to confirm my new-found social status.  It’s not often that we get to play with “strike-through” fonts but this time it persuaded me that my action was a wise one. “Hello” Executive Lounge and “Goodbye” Post-Purchase Dissonance.

Later that day I had to book another flight and I was seduced again by the BA Persuasion Team.  Just recently they have unleashed into the booking process every salesman’s 3 greatest friends – Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt.   Looking at my fare options I was persuaded to take a positive action and generate a successful outcome for BA.  All because of 64 characters...

The word that hurt the most?  “Disappointment”.   How would I live with myself if I let this golden opportunity slip through my fingers, I wept.  ”KERCHING”

So, BA recognises the value of using every single character to their advantage and I’ve been taken for almost £400 as a result... not bad for a day’s work in the persuasion architecture team.  But there are 5 characters they still use to humiliate me.  Sometimes in my breathless haste to book a flight I miss one of their mandatory check boxes.  No chance of an “Ooops” Message or a “Sorry something didn’t quite work out there” Message, or even a “we sneaked an extra tick box that you missed” Message.  Nope.  It’s an “Error” message.  And of course it’s in red font just to ram the point home.  With an exclamation mark!   Might be enough to put me off one day, just as the 5 characters in “Today” made me become a customer for another company.   Maybe not quite as appalling as Ford's £1 million Error Message but it makes you think about every single letter, doesn’t it?

As a post-script to this blog I just came across another use of strikethrough font - the hugely impressive Avinash Kaushik used it at the end of his latest blog to display to everybody that a great offer (to upgrade to Clib Class Google Analytics) was at an end.  Oh Woe those who dithered - the offer is crossed uot before your eyes...take action next time it presents itself or you too will be disappointed.