Category: Direct Marketing

If you’re a regular reader of our blog, then you know that we love Google’s Insights for Search product.

Yes it’s good for supporting all kinds of marketing-related decision making because it shows search volume patterns across regions, categories, and time periods to name a few. This can help you find your customers, gauge seasonality, and determine which product or service category your customers put you into.

But you if you really want to have fun with analytics (and who doesn’t?!), there’s lots of potential with Insights for Search. For example, we were wondering where in the world we would hide out if we were Tiger Woods. Insights for Search to the rescue. Turns out a whole bunch of places aren’t that interested in him in the last 30 days, or for the entire year of 2009, so lots of safe places. Note to Tiger: avoid most of North America, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa.

And while we’re at it, what’s up with Santa Claus in KY, WV and Indiana? And really, people in Montana, North Dakota and Wyoming aren’t all that interested in Netbooks? Okay this could go on forever. Now go have some analytics fun yourself! 

In direct marketing we’re big proponents of using customer testimonials to help close the sale. We’ve posted about best practices, the merits of using testimonials in print vs. on the web, and bloggers as product endorsers.

It seems only fitting then, to remind our readers that the FTC has issued new guidelines on using testimonials and endorsements in advertising. These new guidelines take effect on December 1st.

The fine folks over at MarketingSherpa have summarized the 6 key areas to be aware of with the new rules, as well as other useful links on this topic. If you’re a straight-up marketer who treats your prospects like they are intelligent beings, then these new regs won’t likely impact your marketing plan. If you’re not, well, you can view this as a chance to improve.

In yesterday’s Forrester newsletter, they referenced one of their research studies, “Profiling The Multichannel Consumer”. On its own, this sounds like a rich study, with one of the big conclusions is that some online shoppers are simply “window shopping”. Implication being: growth potential lies in converting these window shoppers using techniques and offers specifically aimed at lowering the barriers to purchasing amongst this segment.

But wait, there’s more!  Listed within the related research documents, there is another little gem: “Coordinated MultiChannel Campaigns”. The executive summary for this report states that less than half of online advertisers coordinate web design and search with their advertising creative. 

One of the reasons we brought all of our companies together under one umbrella called SolutionSet is to answer this challenge for Multichannel marketers. We’re calling for an end to silos, of disconnected marketing efforts, of disparate strategies and fragmented executions. These pitfalls only serve to confuse the intended recipient of your marketing, and ultimately supress sales. In this economic environment, we marketers must do everything we can to strip away barriers to purchase.  Sometimes that begins at the top  - with unification of strategy, messaging, creative, execution and measurement across all channels in order to cause a focused, consistent message that drives transactions.  

Online shoppers have taken a cue from  Count Laszlo Almasy from the movie The English Patient. They promise they’ll be back. And the outcome for shoppers seems to be more successful than it was for poor Almasy. From an article in yesterday’s Marketing Charts email:

According to a study by McAffee, nearly two-thirds (65%) of online shoppers who “abandon” their shopping carts actually come back after a day or more and full convert on a purchase.

So many of the shoppers who “abandon” are really just delaying. Which means your promotional strategy might require another look. For example, you might not remarket to “abandoned” prospects with discounts if really all they’ve done is delay their (full-price) purchase. Testing this premise is probably worth the time and effort.

As far as why prospects delay purchase, the study posits a few reasons: basically they all add up to prospects needing more time to consider their purchase (price, reliability, need) before committing to buy.

When taking that into account, your remarketing test might include a couple of cells that look like this:

1. Do nothing

2. Remarket with value/reliability messaging

3. Remarket with discount

Oh, and it is worth mentioning that the study also showed that the McAfee “trustmark” at checkout converted more buyers. This is not surprising, we find that lowering the barriers to purchase - one of them being security of transaction - is a “must do”.

Some results data from the Mother’s Day campaign for 1-800-Flowers.com has been released. Yay! We love results! From InternetRetailer.com:

E-commerce-enabled ads for 1-800-Flowers.com delivered a significant lift in sales per impression over traditional banner ads during the Mother’s Day campaign…The special shopping-enabled ads contributed to a 41% rise in sales per impression for the ads when compared to regular banner ads during the Mother’s Day shopping period.

Assuming they’re not pulling the wool with “sales per impression” metric, that’s an impressive lift. With results like that, the new display ads with “buy” buttons look like they might deserve a spot on every internet retailer’s testing plan.

In our business July means only one thing: Santa is coming to town. If you’re not already planning for holiday, get your sleigh in gear! Even an easy-to-execute, quick-turn marketing tool like email needs some holiday planning love. For some inspiration, check out this holiday email planning primer from DMNews.com.

Dan Ariely, behavioral economist and author of Predictably Irrational, made a highly enlightening and entertaining presentation on the flawed nature of the human decision making process. Using examples ranging from magazine subscriptions to organ donor registration forms, Ariely shows how the wording, selection, and arrangement of choices can have a massive influence on the outcome:

Shar VanBoskirk over at the Forrester Blog for Interactive Marketing Professionals has put some numbers behind the somewhat vague statements we’ve noticed some of our marketing colleagues making of late. These statements go something like “television and radio advertising are dead” and “interactive advertising will displace everything” and so on.

We like hearing our esteemed colleagues opinions, but you know what we like more? Facts. So thanks Shar for posting the data from your presentation at Forrester’s Marketing Forum. From the source:

Direct Mail and print are suffering the most loss to interactive tools. According to our survey, 40% expect to cut direct mail budgets, while 35% will decrease newspaper spend and 28% will slash magazine money in order to spend in interactive media.

We believe that DM 2.0 requires a mix of connected offline and online direct marketing strategies and tactics to drive transactions. When direct marketers focus solely on “in the mailbox”, they’re missing the opportunity to continue the story online (closer to the point of sale, on a marketer’s website), and they also miss the opportunity to reach their prospects across all channels. We’re happy to see that marketers are planning to move the direct mail money around, to include both parts of the equation.

The full Forrester report will be available in June.

With unemployment rates reported at 8.5% in March (the highest it’s been since 1983), it’s a sobering time for business and a back-to-basics time for marketing. Everywhere I turn, experts are touting a return to simplicity in order to weather the recession-storm.

Several months ago, when some of us may have still somewhat been in denial about whether we were even actually in a recession, I came across a great banner ad for JELL-O on a consumer magazine website. The ad messaging made no bones about times being tough:

Even when you’re on a budget
You can still feel rich
and chocolatey too.

While consumers are watching their food budgets and heading back to basics (NPR reports that cooking lessons are on the rise, with more people trying to prepare meals at home), businesses also need to spend smarter by focusing on fundamentals like ROI. And there’s no better way to watch the numbers than to focus marketing dollars on digital, where click-throughs, test pages, and conversions are clearly quantifiable.

It’s true that necessity breeds ingenuity, and SolutionSet has the right blend of digital marketing experience and creative design to do a lot with a little. It’s what the Haggin Marketing family calls “BrandActional.”

One of our clients wanted to update their site in an effort to drive more conversions, but needed to justify the cost of making site enhancements. We engaged with them and installed user tracking software (ClickTale) to be able to quickly (and at low-cost to the client) track and understand how users were interacting with their site. This exploration coupled with reviewing and analyzing their site analytics allowed us to come forth with recommendations that were based on data and user behavior, making it easy for our client to prove the need for these optimizations. The end result was that we were able to suggest straightforward site enhancements that would lead to the client’s end goal of more conversions and ultimately positively impacting the bottom line.

[Thanks to Paige Kobert for providing the above ClickTale success story.]

In the last few months, I’ve been reminded (several times) that bringing brand and technology together sometimes means creating marketing materials that funnel people to the web sites and interactive tools we spend so much of our time and energy creating.

More often than not, that means conceptualizing, designing, and building banner advertisements that drive people to these web experiences that we’ve shed blood, sweat, and tears over.

Oftentimes, our banners need to compete with a ton of visual distractions. Capturing an Internet user’s attention has become a big challenge. Thus, you need to incorporate the best-possible banner ad designs to make your ads attractive enough to compete for your target audience’s attention.

Obviously, creativity plays a big role in successful banner advertising. Developing that catchy headline, or just the right balance of colors and photography can go a long way towards effectively reaching your target audience.

But, before you can do any of that, it’s important to remember some of fundamental banner design guidelines.

Things to remember:

1. What is the objective? Are the banner ads an exercise in Branding or Conversion?
2. Where are the media placements?
3. What are the site-specific specifications (e.g. unit size, file size (k-size), frames per second (FPS), and maximum animation length)?
4. When in doubt, the Interactive Advertising Bureau (iab.net) is a good place to start.

Tips: 

1. Ask for an action.
2. Know your audience.
3. Keep it simple.
4. Emphasis the benefits, not the features.
5. Optimize source files in native applications.
6. Use words that attract or capture an emotion.

Before you know it, you’ll have created very interesting and effective ads that will drive millions of people to interact and experience the web sites that you’ve poured hours of your time and thinking into.