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Project Management Tips For PPC

June 24, 2010 By Leave a Comment

projectman Project Management Tips For PPC

Whether we work for ourselves, or we work as part of a bigger business, we should always be accountable for what we do. Clients, bosses, and bank managers will always want to see us demonstrate that we are working steadily towards achieving goals.

Project management has become a specialized task in it’s own right. Dedicated project managers delegate tasks, ensure people complete those tasks, and generally keep projects on track. However, project management should permeate all we do. We’re all project managers, especially those of us involved in long and complex tasks, like PPC campaigns.

The principles of project management are simple. A complex task is broken down into a series of manageable, measureable steps leading to a desired outcome, achieved in an acceptable timeframe. If we manage ourselves – or others – well, we free up time, and save ourselves a lot of grief.

Here’s how to manage a PPC project:

Define The Outcome

Whether you’re dealing with a client, or undertaking your own project, you have to know exactly what you’re aiming to achieve.

Write the objective down down, as clearly and succinctly as possible. If a client is vague about outcomes, it’s best to push them to get clarity at this point. Once a project is underway, it becomes difficult – and time consuming – to change course.

Define The Process That Delivers The Outcome

Once you have an outcome – a destination – defined, you should now plot a high-level course showing how you’ll get there. If the project is short i.e. a day or two, then your don’t really need to define a process. However, if the project takes a while – and most PPC campaigns do – then a process becomes important, because the client will want to see you demonstrate that progress is being made.

The benefits of having a clearly-defined process is that it shows the client what is involved, and when things are likely to happen. It reassures the client that things will happen in an orderly, accountable fashion i.e. there is less chance of being surprised, and that the client is in control of the process.

For example, a PPC process might look like this:

  • Establish and define objectives
  • Create written reporting plan, setting out milestones. Client to approve reporting plan and milestones.
  • Report on each milestone. Client to review and provide feedback at each stage.
  • Deliver final milestone. Provide final project report.
  • Sign off

Break The Project Down Into Steps

Climbing a mountain begins with a single step. And then another. And then another. Eventually, we’ve scaled the mountain.

Likewise, a project is made less intimidating if broken down into a series of small steps. The client doesn’t need to know each technical step. However, the steps lead to each milestone.

The benefits are two-fold. One, a complex task becomes a lot more manageable. Two, reporting is built into the process. Clients almost always appreciate progress reports, which also provides you with an opportunity to seek valuable feedback and clarification.

Say What You’ll Do, Do It, And Tell Them You’ve Done It

If you do what you say you’ll do, even if it’s a small thing, you will build trust.

Sometimes, it’s easy to think that because you know what you’re doing, that the client will automatically perceive it. This isn’t necessarily so. Demonstrating competence, at regular intervals, is often required in order to build trust.

Integrate Feedback

No matter how well we plan at the early stages, there will always be tweaks and adjustments that need to be made.

By integrating multiple opportunities for feedback, we can also alter and add steps we may have missed, or didn’t define clearly enough.

Focus On The Next Step

After the first step, comes the next step, and so on. At each stage, we keep the client informed, integrating feedback, redefining and adding tasks as necessary. Each stage leads us closer to our goal, and everyone is clear about what needs to be done, and what the outcome will be.

Repeat

Repeat the steps/reporting/integrating process until the desired outcome is achieved.

Tips:

Consider making the first milestones easy-wins, especially if the client is new. This helps create trust, which may be needed if other milestones become difficult.

Make a note of which tasks require other people, and get buy-in from them as soon as is practicable. In many ways, other workers are like clients in that they benefit from feeling they have an element of control.

The more complex a project – especially projects that require multiple people to hit time targets before others can start – the more useful project management software becomes, however a lot of project management software is simply overkill for PPC.

No surprises – for anyone icon smile Project Management Tips For PPC

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Holistic Marketing Optimization: What’s more likely to show up on Twitter?

June 23, 2010 By Leave a Comment

On our June 30 web clinic, Flint McGlaughlin, the Director of MECLABS Group, will be discussing the Compounding ROI of Sequential Conversion Rate Increases: How one company took a small gain and multiplied it tenfold.

As we prepare the content for that web clinic, I wanted to get the perspective of Andy Mott, Senior Manager of Research Partnerships at MarketingExperiments. As his title would suggest, Andy manages Research Partnerships with some major, enterprise-level companies.

As he is on almost every topic from email copy to Jacksonville Jaguars’ draft picks, Andy was fired up about holistic marketing optimization and what marketers who feel lost in large organizations can do to really make an impact…

Marketers can get excited about one-off successful tests that show huge gains. And rightly so. But in next Wednesday’s web clinic, we’ll be focused on teaching how to take a step back, look at the big picture, and drive even greater ROI. That’s hard enough for a small ecommerce site. But what does that mean to a marketer in a Fortune 500 company?

buck 300x207 Holistic Marketing Optimization: What’s more likely to show up on Twitter?Andy Mott: In some ways, the average marketer has a bigger challenge than a CEO. The goal of a CEO is simple – make more money. You might argue that CEOs should have a wide range of goals from satisfying all stakeholders to running oil rigs that don’t explode, but the end result of all those decisions boils down to one clear place – the bottom line.

However, once you move down the chain of command from the CEO, things get a little more murky, don’t they? And when you finally find yourselves in the deep, dark trenches of the marketing department, it becomes clear why holistic marketing optimization is so difficult.

Most marketers aren’t given the simple task of “make more money.” Sometimes their compensation is driven by secondary or tertiary goals that actually conflict with their colleagues.

So there are too many cooks in the kitchen and they’re not even cooking the same meal?

AM: Well, beyond just individuals with conflicting goals, many large marketing organizations, have entire siloed departments that are working towards (because they’re getting compensated for) different goals. For example, the email marketing group is hyper-focused on open rates and clickthroughs because their bonus depends on it. And then you have branding, product group A, product group B, the search marketing agency, the creative agency…

And then the battles begin. All these different groups end up throwing more elbows than Kevin Garnett grabbing a rebound, fighting for space on the homepage and engaging in turf wars over who should be in control of the optimization cycle.

If you’re shaking your head right now agreeing with Andy, feel free to use that tweet button in the upper left to share your most frustrating experiences.

AM: I’d love to hear what marketers out there have to say. Here’s my story. I was working with a major company that had several divisions and layers with (much like an unoptimized landing page) competing objectives.

The technology organization had a set of benchmarks for different back-end aspects of a product. Each aspect had to meet an individual benchmark. Essentially, the focus was on separate checkboxes and not the big picture. After all, the customer didn’t interact with separate backend pieces, the customer just knew how the overall product worked.

One aspect of the product did not meet its individual technology benchmark, but the impact on the overall product performance that the customer would notice was minimal (less than 1%).

Now, there was a fix that would ensure that this piece met its benchmark. However, the fix would mean that that 1% of customers would not be able to use the product at all. They would install the product and be met with a totally blank screen.

So, essentially, either 100% of customers would feel a less than 1% impact (and probably not even notice). Or, 1% of customers would feel a 100% impact – the product just wouldn’t work.

So what do you do in these situations? How do you take a holistic approach when different groups and organizations differ over the right thing to do? Who should decide?

AM: The answer is very simple – the customer is in charge. And you, the intrepid marketer, must be their advocate.

“Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more.” That sounds great, Andy, but it’s easier said than done. I hope you have a Henry V-style motivational speech in you, because speaking truth to power is one of the most difficult things any person in any organization will ever be asked to do.

AM: And, I would argue, the results are just as predictable as they are dire, from oil-covered pelicans to plane crashes that wipe out the entire leadership of Poland. The people higher up in an organization tend to have all the power yet are the farthest away from where the rubber meets the road and the impact of the actual decisions.

So how do you decide when to stick your neck out and how do you protect yourself to make sure that, even if you’re wrong, your head doesn’t roll?

AM: Here are the main points I try to keep in mind:

  • What’s more likely to be tweeted? – So, from the story I just told you, what do you think will be more likely to be tweeted? Marginally slower load time? Or a program that you took the time to download, and then when you try to run it, your screen is totally blank?
  • Emphasize the value of sequential conversion rate increases – Sure, if you’re in charge of search marketing and you optimize your patch, you’ll see a gain. But what if you took a holistic approach? What if, as an organization, you optimized the PPC ads, the landing page, and the shopping cart or lead gen form? The total ROI increase would be so much more beneficial for the entire organization. Focus on the value to the entire team.
  • Just recommend tests – Every marketer likely has a slightly different opinion about what makes the best headline. Or copy. So go back to the simple principle above…the customer is in charge. You don’t have to fight for your idea over someone else’s. Just propose a test. And that way, the customer will tell you with his actions what works best.
  • Share the credit, take the blame – This is just one of my maxims in life. I learned it from Dwight Eisenhower. Or perhaps John Wooden. Or maybe it was Harry S Truman. You see my point. Every true change agent leads the charge by focusing on the benefit to the team over the individual. You don’t just want to be able to make a difference in your career. You want to make a habit of it. And while you’ve probably mitigated the downside risk with the testing suggestion above, something can always go wrong. Other organizations (and superiors) will trust you more next time if you don’t try to pass the buck.

OK, Andy, I like the practical advice. But you can’t overlook the fact that what you’re asking is still very hard to do. Isn’t this what the President has been criticized for lately? All common sense and no emotion?

For this blog post to work, it needs to be an inspirational blog post that will be posted in every marketer’s cubicle in the nation. Where’s my Braveheart moment? “They can take our marketing budgets, but they can never take our freeeeedddoooooommm!!!”

AM: I am seeking to inspire every marketer to speak up for what’s right against the tide of inaction, inefficiency, and incompetence that can define the modern-day large corporation. But I will do you one better Dan. I’ll see your Mel Gibson quote, and I’ll raise you one. I will leave you with one of my favorite quotes, from a man that optimized an entire nation…

The Man in the Arena

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”

– President Theodore Roosevelt

Related Resources

Compounding ROI of Sequential Conversion Rate Increases: How one company took a small gain and multiplied it tenfold

The Business Case for Testing: How one marketer convinced her business leaders to start testing and drove a 201% gain in the process

Embrace Your Inner Sleazeball: How to gain enterprise approval for the marketing resources you need to succeed

Photo Attribution: Marshall Astor

Holistic Marketing Optimization: What’s more likely to show up on Twitter?

Filed Under: Marketing, Optimization Tagged With:

Should You Outsource PPC?

June 22, 2010 By Leave a Comment

outsourceppc Should You Outsource PPC?

Should you hire an external PPC consultant? Or can you do the job better and/or cheaper inhouse?

Large companies – companies with over 1,000 people – typically have less need to outsource than smaller companies. Existing in-house teams can often adapt in order to provide extra services, with a little extra training required. Smaller companies typically benefit the most from outsourcing, as the overheads for each added employee can be considerable. However, the decision whether to outsource really comes down to a cost benefit analysis, regardless of size.

Which option would suit your company best? Let’s take a look at the issues.

PPC Outsourcing:

Consider the following:

Data security – PPC data is valuable. If your business is driven by marketing, particularly internet marketing, then how comfortable are you with this data being in the hands of a third-party?

Control – If the internet marketing function brings in a significant chunk of your business, then your choice of partner is critical. For some, the risk cost will simply be too high.

Incentives – ensure that the performance incentives are appropriate. For example, some PPC agencies bill a percentage of spend. The problem with this model is that it encourages high bidding for clicks, which are only ever likely to increase. The incetives should align with your business case. Be sure to implement a means of tracking PPC traffic to measurable business goals.

Low Spend – small campaigns are relatively straightforward to manage in house if you have existing marketing resource i.e. spending in the thousands per month. The function is typically a part time role, and the time cost can be minimized further by using third-party semi-automated campaign management software and tools.

A PPC agency starts to make sense when the monthy spend is in the tens of thousands and higher, as such campaigns can quickly become complex and/or can be regularly optimized to drive down total campaign cost. We’re talking about good PPC agencies, of course. There are plenty of lousy ones. Which brings us onto…

Management Overhead – third party suppliers need to be managed. They need to have objectives set. They need to report on a regular basis. Performance needs to be monitored. This is also true of inhouse PPC management, of course, however the proximity of an inhouse employee, and the fact they’re engrained in the culture and process, often makes this function easier.

Business Knowledge – any marketing function needs to be closely aligned with business goals. Tyically, PPC managers work on multiple accounts and have a tendancy to focus on numbers, as opposed to wider company objectives. This remoteness can make external consultants less effective than someone who lives and breathes your business and culture each day.

PPC Inhouse

Expertise – PPC management is specialized and ever changing. This requires on-going training and adaptable employees who can wear hats of both marketing and technical expertise simultaneously. PPC agencies are specifically geared for this task.

Lack Of Resource – PPC takes time, and your existing employess may not have it. PPC invariably grows more and more complex, especially if the return on investment grows. Whilst it’s easy to manage basic campaigns – low budget/low numbers of keyword terms – it can become time consuming to manage large campaigns. PPC agencies use economies of scale and specialized tools that may not be readily available elsewhere.

Poor Results – If you’re new to PPC, then you may not have adequate benchmarks to quantify performance. An external agency may have years of experience in your market sector, and be able to provide a wealth of market data.

High Costs – not only is there the cost of hiring extra staff, there is the opportunity cost of having that staff not focus on something else. Obviously each businesses cost structure is unique, but generally the bigger the PPC spend, the more value you’ll get from outsourcing to a good agency.

Summary

Consider inhouse PPC if:

  • You require high levels marketing/business integration.
  • The function can readily be absorbed using available staff and management resources
  • The level of complexity is manageable. Typically, campaigns in the tens of thousands per month featuring thousands of keywords are best managed by a dedicated specialist.

Consider Outsourcing PPC if:

  • You have a high level of spend i.e. in the tens of thousands per month and above
  • You don’t have readily available resources
  • The PPC function is not a mission critical part of your marketing mix.
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Web Team Roles, Web Developer: What exactly does a developer “develop,” anyway?

June 21, 2010 By Leave a Comment

This is the second in a series that examines the various roles which might be present on your company’s Web team and how those roles affect the implementation and success of your marketing campaigns. Today’s installment addresses the Web developer.

In my last article, I gave an overview of the Web designer role. Today I am looking at the yin to the Web designer’s yang – the Web developer. Often, the casual observer will have the most difficultly drawing a clear distinction in a corporate Web team between the Web designer and the Web developer. They are both conversant in Internet jargon. They can both have direct access to Web pages and ancillary systems that affect the website. To confuse matters more so, in some organizations, they are the same person.

So if the Web designer is primarily responsible for the overall design of pages and graphics, what exactly does the Web developer develop on the site? In short, Web developers develop applications. An application uses business logic to manipulate data or customize the visitor’s experience. To put it in simpler terms, “developer” usually refers to a programmer – someone who enjoys building complex rules to drive and maintain systems.

programmer 300x292 Web Team Roles, Web Developer: What exactly does a developer “develop,” anyway?“Web developer” pseudonyms

  • Web Application Developer
  • Web Engineer
  • Multimedia Programmer
  • Web UI Developer
  • Software Engineer
  • Web Programmer
  • Software Developer

In your company, this role might be
lumped in with

  • Web Designer
  • Webmaster
  • Software Engineer

What they probably can do for you

  • Create, alter, or troubleshoot custom applications – especially those which require database access
  • Connect data gathered onsite to internal databases or third-party applications (e.g., lead generation forms)
  • Develop scripted widgets from scratch (Javascript, Flash)
  • Install or configure some software on the Web/application/database servers
  • Secure applications against hacking vulnerabilities
  • Optimize sites for performance (except optimizing graphics)
  • Formulate direct queries against a database

What they probably can’t do for you

  • Translate your specifications into a visual representation of the site/page
  • Create site graphics
  • Create Flash animations from scratch
  • Perform complete site redesigns

What you need to know about Web developers

The shortest path to a successful Web-based marketing initiative often requires the tandem deployment of a Web designer and a Web developer.

Web designers typically handle the elements that are most evident to the end-user – they are decorators who ensure that the house is attractive and tastefully furnished. Web developers will often handle the elements that are just assumed to work by the end-user – they are the general contractors who ensure that the plumbing, lighting, and heating are installed and working properly.

Developers can be extremely literal in their interpretation of your requests – to a fault. If the “Buy Now” button is supposed to lead to the shopping cart, you may actually have to spell this out for them. And although it may feel like a lot of unnecessary work on the front end, you will find yourself actually saving significant time over the length of the project if you take the time to document everything in detailed specifications before it even begins.

Developers thrive on good specifications. They will appreciate your effort and will probably be more proactive in working with you if they see that you have made the initial effort to properly define your request. Continually changing the specifications throughout the project and communicating these constant changes via email, instant messages, and verbal chats could cause the developer to plot your early demise.

Understanding all of the “what-if” scenarios of your marketing application is crucial to sound Web development. Designing an application is somewhat similar to building a house. If you know that the house requires a three-car garage, that’s easy to build into the initial foundation.

If you decide, halfway through the project, after the foundation has been poured and the walls have been framed out, that the house now requires a three-car garage, it may require that the developers actually rip up the whole foundation and start from scratch. This will surely cause the developers to create new, unflattering names for you.

It’s easy to confuse the Web developer with the Web designer (or to squeeze their roles into a single person) because the developer can, technically, do most of what the designer does – but the developer can’t do it well. Most developers can create graphics – ugly graphics. Most developers can do overall site designs – Spartan site designs.

Web developers are often available to perform Web-based tasks that don’t rise anywhere near the level of true application development. They might be asked to make basic copy edits, to swap out simple graphics, or to create new pages that are simply different versions of existing pages. This is all fine – to a point.

Developers who have true programming skills but are confined to nothing more than janitorial duties on a site probably won’t stay around for long. Serious developers want to build applications and they will seek out opportunities that allow them to delve deeply into business logic.

Related Resources

Web Team Roles, Web Designer: Are you trying to buy bread from the butcher?

Technology Blind Spots: How human insight revealed a hidden (and almost missed) 31% gain

The MarketingExperiments Quarterly Research Journal, Q1 2010

Photo Attribution: deltaMike

Web Team Roles, Web Developer: What exactly does a developer “develop,” anyway?

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Web Team Roles, Web Designer: Are you trying to buy bread from the butcher?

June 18, 2010 By Leave a Comment

When I view the Internet marketing landscape through the lens of an IT professional, I routinely come back to a fundamental conflict – most companies have at least two teams which are responsible for the performance of the web site.

2774342841 8aebbf62b6 b 300x219 Web Team Roles, Web Designer: Are you trying to buy bread from the butcher?One team – the IT team – is responsible for the functional performance of the site. The other team – the marketing team – is responsible for the business performance of the site. Unfortunately, the performance of these two objectives are frequently misaligned.

Marketing professionals face distinct challenges to launch and maintain Web-based initiatives. They must constantly quantify business returns through the website, yet they frequently do not have the tactical (technical) tools at their disposal to make this happen.

This means that they must routinely coordinate their initiatives through the IT team. Aside from the traditional hurdles of culture and jargon, marketers can also be stymied by an expanding and splintering list of roles that may be present in any company’s “Web team.”

I have often seen marketers spin their wheels because they direct their requests to members of the Web team who are either ill-equipped or, in some cases, forbidden to fulfill the marketer’s request. Like a shopper who asks a butcher for a loaf of bread, the marketing team too often finds itself directing its requests to any member of IT who will listen – and then becoming frustrated when those requests are ignored or the final product fails to live up to the marketing vision.

For this reason, I believe it may save some headaches if we spend some time simply defining the typical roles in corporate Web teams. More importantly, you should know that every role on the IT team represents certain skills that could drive the success of your marketing campaign – or sabotage it before it ever gets off the ground.

So over the summer, I’m going to blog about these roles to help you get the most value from your IT resources. In this first installment, I’m going to address one of the most generic and misunderstood roles on a Web team – the Web designer.

“Web designer” pseudonyms

  • UI Designer
  • Multimedia Designer
  • Technical Web Designer
  • Web Producer

In your company, this role might be lumped in with

  • Web Developer
  • Graphic Artist
  • Webmaster
  • Web Content Manager

What they probably can do for you

  • Translate your specifications into a visual representation of the site/page
  • Site/page mock-ups
  • Converting designs into static pages (HTML)
  • Installing and configuring third-party widgets (Flash, Javascript)
  • Creating site graphics
  • Creating Flash animations (except those containing full-fledged application logic)
  • Manipulating and optimizing existing graphics
  • Manipulating style sheets (CSS)
  • Making basic copy edits to existing pages
  • Installing tracking snippets into pages (Google Analytics)
  • Configuring content via a CMS
  • Ensuring that sites/pages are standards-compliant

What they probably can’t do for you

  • Creating, altering, or troubleshooting custom applications – especially those which require database access
  • Developing scripted widgets from scratch (Javascript, Flash)
  • Installing or configuring any software on the Web/application/database servers
  • Securing applications against hacking vulnerabilities
  • Optimizing sites for performance (except optimizing graphics)
  • Formulating direct queries against a database
  • Writing extended, professional copy

What you need to know about web designers

“Web Designer” is one of the most generically overused titles on corporate web teams. Marketers often take it to mean “the person who kinda does everything on the website,” but then they are disappointed to find that this person can’t actually do everything on the website. Be careful that you don’t simply throw out the “Web designer” moniker every time you feel that you need to have anything accomplished in a Web-based environment.

The average Web designer would prefer that you place the emphasis on the word “designer.” They are most comfortable in graphic manipulation tools (Photoshop) or What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) editors like Dreamweaver.

They usually skew more towards the artistic side and less towards the technical side, although they should be comfortable enough in a Web environment that they can translate any of their designs into a working page of HTML. They are adept at all of the stylistic elements of a page – meaning that they should be extremely fluent in CSS and Javascript (to the extent that Javascript affects the presentation of the page itself). In more enlightened marketing organizations, there are one or more Web designers who report directly to marketing.

Most web designers have either minimal programming skills or none at all (HTML and CSS are not programming languages). To put this into technical terms, the web designer may not be capable of building applications with tools like .NET, C#, PHP, Java, Objective C, Flex, or SQL.

Unless you are certain that your Web designers have specific experience in the area of application development, do not ask them to build anything that requires detailed logic or database access. Web designers with actual programming skills tend to be weak on design and strong in programming, or vice versa. The designer who actually writes strong, effective code and creates pleasing, artistic designs is a rare bird who should be kept around at all costs.

The artistic skill of a Web designer is a key asset, but one that can spoil your marketing campaign if it is allowed to run free of any guidelines or constraints. For example, if your Web designers do not specifically have training in the Offer/Response-Optimization process and they are given free rein to design landing pages, you could end up with offers that are absolutely gorgeous yet stunningly ineffective.

If you are embarking on a significant site launch or redesign, do not wait until the eleventh hour to pull the designers into the discussion. Ultimately, the strategic direction of a site must be reflected in every aspect of that site – including such mundane elements as font, palette, and graphics.

If you spend three months planning your site in a vacuum and only involve the Web designers at the exact moment when you want to commence creation, don’t be surprised to find that the designer’s product does not adequately communicate your strategic vision.

Related Resources

One-to-One Marketing at Four Levels: Strategic ways every marketer can enter into an online conversation with customers

Technology Blind Spots: How human insight revealed a hidden (and almost missed) 31% gain

The MarketingExperiments Quarterly Research Journal, Q1 2010

Photo Attribution: magerleagues

Web Team Roles, Web Designer: Are you trying to buy bread from the butcher?

Filed Under: Marketing, Web Design Tagged With:

How Printing Postage Online Can Save Your Business Money

June 17, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Open Source Marketer recently had the wonderful opportunity to interview Eric Nash, Director of Online Marketing for Stamps.com. This was a great interview that allowed us to discover all the benefits of their service and get a good idea of who would best be served by printing their own online postage.

We recorded and transcribed the whole interview, so you can watch, listen, or read all of the good information.

Enjoy!

Charles & Toff
OpenSourceMarketer.com

How Printing Postage Online Can Save Your Business Money

Interview Transcript

Charles: Like I said, tonight our special guest is Eric Nash. Eric is the Director of Online Marketing for Stamps.com. He’s been with them since 2006 and he’s been involved in online marketing for the past 11 years. He is a veteran in the online marketing space.

At Stamps.com his attention is focused primarily on customer acquisition and he’s responsibilities include paid search, SEO, affiliate marketing, display advertising and social media.

So he’s going to have a good bit that he can share with us tonight about the stamps.com program and about how as an affiliate you can promote some of the offers they have.

So, Eric thank you for being on the call with us tonight.

Please visit website to view premium content

Eric: Hey thank you for having us Charles.

Charles: I really appreciate you taking time out to spend with us.

Eric and I met at EBay on Location Dallas last month and I was very interested in what he had to say and how Stamps.com was going the extra mile to make things easier for people who are shipping products online.

I like to say that they are manufacturing time. We can’t get lost time back. It’s one of those things that we can spend, but can’t earn.

So Eric, we really appreciate you being on the call with us.

Eric: Yeah, we’re looking forward to it. I can’t agree with you more about small businesses who spend a lot of time and wear different hats. Hopefully our software is a great option to them to save time and hopefully save money.

Charles: So you talk about Stamps.com being software. I’ve been to the Stamps.com website, tell us a little about how Stamps.com is different compared to the post office.

Eric: Absolutely, so Stamps.com is online postage software. It brings all the services that the post office has right on to your PC.

You can print all the different types of mail classes. You can print them using your existing printer. You can print them on to an envelope, on to a regular sheet of paper, such as a shipping label and attach it to the package or even onto an adhesive label that you can attach to the package.

Anything from postcards, to packages, to newsletters where you can print it out from your own PC, it’s a huge time saver.

Once you print it, we have features in the software that allow you to set up a carrier pick up so you can have a postal service employee come and pick up a package if you’re sending a bunch of them out.

Or, once you print it you can drop it in a regular mailbox or give it to your letter carrier.

One huge benefit the USPS has compared to everyone else is that they are usually dropping mail off usually to every business every day. So as you print your postage you can give it right to the letter carrier and let them take it back with them.

Really what it does is eliminate the need to go to the post office and wait in those lengthy lines.

Certainly everyone’s aware of USPS’s financial problems over the last year or so and they’re talking about closing post offices and closing more of them in the next few year. So, those lines will probably only be getting longer.

So, our service really helps you eliminate the time consumption that happens when you’re driving to a post office as well as standing in line or waiting in line there.

Charles: Okay, so really your printing official postage then?

Eric: Absolutely, we operate under a license from the USPS. We aren’t the actual postal service. We are a public company that was started way back in 1996 when the Internet boom started.

We were actually the first PC postage provider that was approved by the USPS. They often will call online postage “PC postage”.

We currently have 400,000 paid subscribers. Many of them have been with us for many years and that covers both regular small offices who are just using our service to print letters and print certified mail or special services like that.

About forty thousand of our customers are ecommerce shippers that are actually shipping packages and using priority mail, express mail, or even media mail or parcel post some of all the different mail classes that are there.

Charles: Okay, that is a lot of people using PC postage as you said. What would be the target consumers for Stamps.com? Are they just in for the business class or what are they looking at?

Eric: You know, for the most part we target small businesses, really anybody who has 20 employees or less. But we do have a lot of consumer cross over. Sometimes people who are living in rural areas where the post offices are quite a ways away, they use the service quite a bit. Obviously people who are tech savvy and are sending lots of mail out and they’re sick of waiting in line, they use our service.

We also have a chunk of people, who are elderly people who are sending lots packages to grand kids or family members and have to go to the post office a lot, but they aren’t necessarily a business, they’ll use our service too.

But the bulk of our customers are a small business that are looking for a better way to print postage. They don’t want to get a postage meter and pay the high cost of leasing a postage meter and they’re sick of driving to the post office to drop off their packages or their mail or even buying stamps at any retailer and then playing stamp lotto saying, “Well this feels like two or three stamps”.

Charles: So okay, as a business owner do I still have to have a scale? Is that what I hear?

Eric: You know, you definitely would need to use a scale especially if you are shipping a lot of different weight envelopes or packages. The cool thing is we actually give you a scale when you sign up for our service.

There is a small handling charge, but we give you a 5lb. digital postage scale. It’s connected to the computer via USB cord. So as you weigh your envelope or package in that scale, the weight is automatically imported into our software.

So for package shippers who are eBay sellers or something like that who are having to manually input lots of different information, whether it be the weight or the size, this is one extra step that is eliminated.

Of course there is always an opportunity to mistype something or mistype the weight. So this USB connected scale would eliminate that need. You don’t need to do it manually, the scale will automatically imports that data right into our software.

To people who may need a higher or bigger scale that can handle more weight, when you do sign up, there is an option to take the credit of a 5lb. scale that we will give you and apply that credit to either a 10lb. scale or a 25lb. scale. So we give you that options too to increase it and apply the credit we are giving you for free.

Charles: That is a good deal. Back in the day when I shipped products as an eBay seller, I had to go out and get a scale. It just seemed like a no-brainer. It was always a guessing game and I didn’t want to do that. It seems like those scales were $50 dollars a piece or something like that? 

Eric: Yes, there are a bunch of different types and bunch of different ratings for each scale. Ours is pretty much the standard. If they’re looking for heavy duty shipping scales and needed it down to the nitty gritty weight, ours is probably not going to do that but it certainly will get you past the basic stuff.

It will certainly be applicable for 99% of small businesses out there who are shipping, so it’s a good deal and it’s free. Shipping and handling charges for it are right around $8 depending where you live in the US.

It’s a free scale and it’s yours to keep afterwards, even if you don’t like our service, you can keep the scale and continue to use it.

Charles: Okay, so tell me about the package you mentioned that includes the scale and the service. Tell me how that works? How do I sign up for the program and what will I get?

Eric: If you sign up the program, we offer a 4 week, no risk, trial. So this means you can try our software, the full version of it for 4 weeks and if you don’t like it and all you have to do is cancel the service and you won’t be charged a thing.

We give you $5 in free postage to use during that trial so you can basically sign up this afternoon, go in there and print a couple of stamps if you want, print postage right onto an envelope, print it right onto a shipping label. We are giving you $5 in free postage to use it and try it.

Our software will let you import your address book from Outlook, ACT, or content manage software like Lotus or Corel, or any kind of software that you are storing your address in. You can import that all in and you can literally start printing postage within a few minutes of signing up with the service.

We will also send you out a welcome kit that will contain a bunch of different types of shipping labels. We also send you some free postage vouchers, so if you like our service and feel you want to continue with it, you can become a paid subscriber.

By the way, the cost per month for the subscription services is $15.99/month and when you become a paid subscriber you can redeem a $10 postage coupon the first month you pay the bill, as well as the second month. So really the first month and second month come with free postage, which technically brings the cost to $6.99 a month.

Basically we are giving you $5 free postage upon signing up to use in the trial and you can get an options to get 2 additional $10 postage vouchers to use. Of course we are giving you that free scale upon sign up as well.

We are trying to make it easy and hopefully people will see the benefits of avoiding long lines at the post office. There are all this kind of features that we offer for shippers and those sellers on eBay as well.

We have integration to import your data from eBay right into our software and we offer all the different kinds of mail classes.

One huge thing for eBay sellers is the ability to print international postages. Our first class international, which is in a very low cost form of shipping class. So we offer different features for people to use and hopefully they will continue to redeem and use the free postage.

Charles: There are three points that are really important, one is when you said you can avoid the long lines at the post office. So I can print the postage from my computer, but do I still need to go to a post office?

Eric: No, actually you don’t need to. You print the postage, whether it is on an envelope or a package. If you are using an envelope you can give it to your regular letter carrier as they pass by to drop off the mail. You can give them your letter and they will take it back with them.

For packages, you can schedule a carrier pickup to come to your office or home and actually pick up a package. That services is free as long as you are shipping with either priority mail or express mail.

All you need to do is ship one package via priority mail or express mail and they’ll come and pick up. Let’s say you had one package that was priority mail and twenty others that were parcel post, or media mail, which are both cheaper classes. They will come to pick up the 20 parcel post with that one priority mail package for free as long as you are sending a priority mail or express mail package.

So it’s really eliminates the need of even go to the post office and wait in those long line. If you need to add special services such as certified mail or delivery confirmation, all that stuffs can be done straight through our software, including package insurance and all kind of different options.

Some other cool features that our software provides is we offer the ability to hide the postage value on a package or on a shipping label.

So for eBay sellers or really any ecommerce seller who is shipping via the USPS, you may charge a shipping and handling charge because you have a box, tape, storage cost, and all kinds of handling fees. Sometimes a buyer may get a little upset if they are paying $5 or $6 handling and they notice the postage cost is only $2 or $3 dollars.

The ability to hide the postage value eliminates that problem. They basically see the exact same shipping label and they get the package just as they normally would, it’s just the actual postage value is not printed on the shipping label.

Charles: That’s a really good point. If you can get the product to somebody and fulfill your end of the obligation, then there’s no real value in having a conversation about the postage.

Eric: Yeah, unfortunately the buyers forget that there are handling charges and costs and fees. You have to buy a box, tape, and bubble wrap. They seem to think that’s all just the cost of doing business and forget about it.

So, that hidden postage can really eliminate some headaches. In terms of eBay, your seller ratings are really your bread and butter, so it’s important to keep those positive and in good standing. The ability to hide the shipping value on the postage is one less headache you have to deal with.

Charles: Yeah, and talking about headaches. Going down to the post office is not a fun thing.

From my experience with selling on eBay, you never knew what the day was going to be like. You never knew how many orders you were going to get and you wanted to ship out order as quickly as possible. But, then you tried to minimize your exposure to the post office because it is such long lines and there isn’t any value there.

I could see how I would lead off every day’s shipping with at least one package that would afford me to schedule local pickup. That way I would be assured that I could schedule something. That would be great, especially with just the time spent.

Eric: Oh yeah, let’s say you have an employee who drives packages to the post office every day or even a few times a week. That’s time is spend driving to the post office, money spent on gas, waiting in line, and that gives the employee time to stop off at the 7/11 to grab a coke.

That’s a lot of time lost and loss of efficiency that you’re losing as a small business owner. Time is huge, so by eliminating that issue and that hassle of having to drive and drop off and wait in long lines at the post office is just tons of cost savings as well as being more effective.

If you are a small business owner or entrepreneur who is wearing ten different hats in a one man operation, Stamps.com offers the ability to be much more effective. You can focus less on standing in line and more on tasks that require your focus to make your business a better run business.

On top of that we offer a lot of different things that you can’t get at the post office. We have postage discounts on priority mail and express mail. Up to 14% on priority mail and 5% on express mail. You can’t get that at the post office. The USPS provides those discounts only to the PC postage providers.

We also have address verification, if you happen to mistype an address in the delivery address, like adding an extra number or you enter the wrong zip code in, our software will verify that address in real time with the USPS main database.

It will come back to you and say we notices a problem with this address, it’s not a valid address, can we change it to x y or z. It will give you some different option for you to choose. That just helps you to be more efficient.

If you’re a package shipper you don’t want your package sent back to you, which can hurt your seller rating and make it take more time to get the package to the buyer. So, it’s just one extra benefit that we offer we feel is a huge benefit.

Charles: Yeah, I’d say the only thing that’s worse than standing in line to mail a package, is standing in line to mail a package twice.

Eric: Yeah, and usually that second time you’re going to have to send it a little faster mail class. So, you’re going to spend even more money and that’s eating right in to your margin as a small business owner or entrepreneur. So that’s never any fun.

Charles: One of the things you mentioned earlier was international shipping. I’m really interested in this because I know that I shipped to Australia and that was incredible. The shipping on that was more expensive than the products themselves. Is that the same with Stamps.com or is there something different there as far a international shipping?

Eric: Yeah, you can ship international. We make it very easy.

The international market on eBay is growing 3 or 4 times faster than the domestic markets. So, a lot of the eBay sellers are interested in shipping international, but they’re a little hesitant because there are a lot of things involved. You have the customs forms and the price and all that.

So, we offer the ability to ship any type of mail class, whether it be priority mail international, express mail international.

More importantly we offer the ability to ship first class mail international and that’s a huge thing because if you’re shipping a small priced item, whether it be eBay, Amazon, or your own shopping cart and let’s say it’s only $15 dollars. To ship that via priority mail, even the cheaper priority mail flat rate, you’re going to pay possibly upwards of $26 on regular priority mail international or even on the flat rate small box it would $12.78. That same product would be $10.76 on first class mail international.

So, if you’re selling a small item, you don’t want to be paying double or triple the amount to ship that item. Having lower shipping cost just makes you more competitive certainly in the eBay space or even a regular shopping carts.

So first class mail international is the most cost effective means of shipping via all shipping carriers include UPS and FedEx.

If you’re a seller and you’re able to send your product via first class mail international, you’re going to see a ton of cost savings. That’s really cool and very important.

Along with that our software includes customs forms, built into the software. It’s integrated right in, so as you input your delivery address, that delivery address is going to be imported right into the customs forms.

You’ll still be required to state what the product is and declare the country of origin. That’s something you will have to do no matter what. The fact that we import the delivery address just saves more time and reduces the possibility of error.

Additionally, we also include the country restrictions on products that can be shipped to a country. Every country has it’s own list of restrictions in terms of what can be shipping in to it. They are very unique items.

Sometimes it’s no gold or silver can be shipped or any precious metal or stones such as diamonds. Other times, it’s animal bi-product that can’t be shipped in, for one reason or another. So our software is hooked up to the USPS mailing database.

Those restrictions are changing all the time, so our system is able to import any changes and show you what the existing restrictions are. So, that’s a huge benefit that’s another time saver.

Saving time is obviously a huge message that we are trying to relay here along with lots of discounts and the ability to save money as well. Hopefully we can provide that to small business owners and entrepreneurs.

Charles: You said something about Amazon. Are there hooks or pieces that are Amazon specific?

Eric: Actually that’s a great new feature that we’ve just added. We’ve added a lot of new shipping features over the last twelve to eighteen months.

Really the main feature has been the ability to import data from the main ecommerce market places. So eBay being one huge ecommerce market place, Amazon also.

Now the one catch with Amazon is it has to be an Amazon Pro Merchant account. Amazon has two types of accounts when you’re a seller. Amazon Pro Merchant allows third party API access. So that’s how we are able to access into that.

Basically ecommerce sellers are selling on eBay, or they have their own shopping carts, and they could be using Amazon as well or even some of the newer market places such as Etsy or Bonanzle. What we want to provide is a one stop shipping solution for all of you USPS shipping.

You basically connect your Stamps.com account with an Amazon account or an eBay account, or on Etsy or Bonanzle you can can connect right to PayPal and you can basically import your sales order data right into your Stamps.com software.

That gives you the ability to batch print. Let’s say you have 100 orders in a day, you can print all the label right there. Or you can choose with labels you want to print.

Some people sell and package everything on Tuesday or Thursdays and drop everything in the mail on Wednesday or Fridays. Other people prepare their packages for the East Coast or the West Coast at different times of the day. We give you the ability to print all your label, some of them, only by store, or you can print just your Amazon sales in the morning, print all your eBay sales in the afternoon, and print all your own shopping cart sales at night.

Depending how you want to prepare your package shipping, we give you full flexibility to print and more importantly get the data into the Stamps.com software to make it easy to print.

Additionally we also post back tracking details back into eBay and Amazon. The fact that the customer is going to see the tracking details posted back into the account is a huge benefit. They know the package is on the way. They see the tracking information. They can click on it and get all the relevant info that they need to see when their package is going to be delivered.

Charles: So you’re saying that when I’m in the software and I print the software, I put the label on the box, it shows up on Amazon as being shipped.

Eric: Correct. Once you print that label, it’s going to produce that tracking number for the delivery confirmation and then post that back to your Amazon account as the package is being shipped.

Charles: That’s very handy. I can see the value in that because, let’s say you have ten orders that you’re shipping out. Now they are all automatically updated.

Eric: Yeah, absolutely.

Depending on what service you were using prior, you would have had to go back and do that manually. That would give you more opportunity to make an error.

Some people are shipping 20, 30, or 40 packages as day. They are going back in and entering 40 different tracking numbers in the account, it is easy to make a mistake.

So this is one less item you have to do on your long list of items that you have to do as a small business or entrepreneur.

Charles: Yeah, and you definitely have to do that. You can’t just leave that person in the dark by not communicating back that their package has shipped. Certainly you can do it, but it doesn’t create a good user experience.

Eric: If you look at eBay, shipping is two out of the four items that are on a sellers DSR. So one is communication and speed of shipping and the other is cost of shipping and handling. So having the ability to see the shipping should help you get better seller ratings overall.

Charles: I believe a customer’s perceived speed of shipping has to do a lot with how fast they get that notice. If they get that notification within 30 minutes to an hour, depending on the situation, then it’s shipped and in their mind it’s done.

Eric: Yeah

Charles: That’s a great thing compared to saying a few days later that your package shipped.

Eric: Yeah, whenever you buy something you always want it right then and there. Having to wait is the one aspect of buying things online is that you have that shipping time. So, the sooner you can get that product in the buyer’s hands the better the buyer feels and the better ratings you will get and hopefully the buyer will be more likely to buy from you again. It just helps everyone out when shipping is very speedy and the communication of the shipping is right there.

Charles: Good deal. I hope that everyone on the call can see the value of this and understand that Stamps.com is going the extra mile to give people the opportunity to try out the service. And they’re putting different pieces of the puzzle together like the free scale and free postage which makes it effortless. Plus all the pieces that we’ve talked about like being able to avoid the post office and getting discounts on postage and things like that. All I hear is value, over and over again.

So I think the next part that I’d like you to give us some insight into is the affiliate program that Stamps.com offers.

I know we have affiliates in our community who are either looking for new offers to promote or we have people who have blogs or business sites and they’re always looking for additional things to offer their audience that will add value to the conversation and will provide them will compensation as well.

How Printing Postage Online Can Save Your Business Money

So tell us a bit, if you will, about the affiliate program.

Eric: Absolutely, our affiliate program has a great CPA. The program itself is managed through the Commission Junction network. The CPA is a $50 CPA from Stamps.com.

Basically we are paying you $50 just for someone to sign up to our service.

When someone signs up they do have to put in their credit card, but the person won’t be charged if they cancel within the four week trial.

We’ve been pretty much a four bar program and had a period where we were a five bar program within the Commission Junction system. For the most part we’ve been a pretty rock solid four bar. Our earnings per click (EPC), a common metric in Commission Junction for three months has been 66.50. So it’s been a pretty good CPA. It’s had pretty good performance for us.

People who have blogs about entrepreneurship, or small office and home office, or home based businesses, or even network marketing could use the program. People who are trying approach Avon sellers or Mary Kay sellers, anybody who’s going to be shipping lots of products out, we are a great alternative for.

Also sites that are focused around those topics of small business, or B2B, or home office / small office, or home based business, we work great as just a banner or a button on the side.

We’ve seen a lot of growth in the coupon sites in the last year or year and a half since the economy kind of tanked. There has been huge growth in coupon sites and deal sites. So, those have worked very well.

A good chunk of our volume comes from people who are doing paid search. We don’t allow you to go direct to page, but if you build out your own page, we certainly allow you to bid aggressively.

We have a few restrictions on paid search, but not too much. We’re pretty aggressive in general about letting you do kind of what you want to do. We don’t allow any type of incentivized marketing, so you’re not allowed to give away prices or anything to get people to sign up.

We do like social media marketing. Some people are using Twitter, Facebook, and all the new types of marketing out there. We still allow you to do that.

We have all different types of banner sizes. More importantly if you see something you need that we don’t have, we can make it on the fly. We have a creative team internal and they can make any type of banner you need very very quickly. Usually within a few hours, we can get that out to you or we can upload it to the Commission Junction system.

We don’t allow email unfortunately for affiliates, but that’s something I’m always fighting and pushing for with our legal department. So far we haven’t been able to get that approved. I’m hoping some day we will.

Really if you have a site that’s targeting small business or even just business software or tech software, I’d like to invite anyone to give us a shot and give us a try.

We have a pretty good program, lots of different creatives, lots of different sizes, and a pretty aggressive offer for the customer to sign up. It just equates to money in the affiliate marketers pocket.

Charles: I just like the fact that you mentioned that someone can cancel within that first four weeks and the affiliate still gets paid. Is that correct? Am I right?

Eric: That is correct, so long as they are a real person. Keep in mind that some affiliates can get pretty aggressive in what they’re doing. So you can’t just grab a telephone book and start entering names.

As long as it’s real quality traffic, absolutely. We’re just looking for people to try our software and see how it works. We’ll give you a $50 bounty basically if that person signs up and is a new customer. They can cancel and they never have to pay a cent to us and we’ll be paying you. But, the person does have to be a real live person.

Charles: Yeah, that’s one situation where you want everyone to win. Even though the affiliates still get paid, they still need to attract the right traffic so that they’re getting the right conversions. That’s definitely something to keep in mind.

If you’re an affiliate and you’re looking at this offer and your thinking this is pretty good, don’t just see the dollar figure. If you’re audience is interested in this and it’s related to your topic, it’s something that you already talk about, and it’s a close match then that’s going to be a win for everybody.

The customer’s going to get the value they’re looking for, your going to get the affiliate commission and then of course, Stamps.com will be encouraged to continue with the program or at least have similar offers. When something works for most companies they rarely change it.

Eric: Yeah, we’re right there with you. We are looking for good affiliates to produce good solid leads.

We have lots of affiliate contests. We have all kinds of promotions. If you’re an affiliate and you have been in the past and you’ve become dormant for what ever reason, we do all kinds of promotions and contests to kind of get you back interested and put our offer back live.

We’re constantly trying to help motivate affiliates and get them to get our offer live and hopefully get them to generate signups for us and in turn revenue for them. I’m an affiliate marketer myself so I certainly know of trials and tribulations of affiliate marketers and what they have to go through and how hard it is.

So, we are looking for good affiliate marketers to join our program and hopefully promote us and get some good solid traffic.

Charles: Affiliate marketing is a dynamic field and to have something like this where the offer is out there, the product is solid, the payoff is good, and if done properly then everybody wins. That’s definitely the way to go.

You mentioned that your creative team can do banners for you and things like that. Once your signed up to the program through the program using Commission Junction, is that something you’d go through the affiliate manager to request or how does that work?

Eric: Yeah, so we have probably over 70 banners in various sizes.

Charles: Yes, it’s really impressive. You have lot of selection out there.

Eric: Yeah, but everyone has different needs and requirements, so in the event that someone needs a different sized banner or even a custom banner that might have a certain message on it, we can certainly make that for them.

Sometime affiliates want to have it color coded to their site, or a special headline. Anything like that we can create and either send it to them direct and then they can just use a regular link off of another banner or if it’s something that other affiliates need, then we can post it into the CJ system and let them grab it from there.

We have coupon codes that are active in the Commission Junction system. Unfortunately our Stamps.com platform isn’t very flexible for coupon codes for affiliates so we are not really able to make unique custom codes for a coupon site. But we are able to make coupons that are more generic and you can grab those and use those.

Like I say, any type of banner that you need or any size, or any specific message that you’re looking for we can definitely create.

As an example, we’ve had a service that was focused on sending military mail or developing care packages for people who are serving in the military and they wanted our banners to focus on sending mail to APO/FPO (Army Post Offices and Fleet Post Offices for the Navy).

Since our software does allow you to do that, we created a banner for that affiliate and sent it out to them and it just focused on sending mail to APO/FPO. They posted it on their site and they have done really really well with it. It has been a great opportunity for us because we’re getting great leads for people who could really use our service. We gave them the ability to not just put a standard banner on there were people might not understand what it is or it might not communicate the right message. They had the option and ability to put a custom targeted message to their audience and like I said it’s worked really really well for us. So, we’re very happy and interested in doing that for other sites as well.

Charles: That’s a really good point. It’s the exact same product, but by having that APO/FPO on there it eliminates that fine grain friction that may make someone wonder whether or not it’s going to work for them. It just greases the slick to help them to make that decision. That’s a great tip. Nobody understand military shipping by default. Having been in the Marines, the first time I ever saw APO/FPO, I know I didn’t know what that was.

Eric: Yeah, and the USPS is the only authorized carrier to ship an APO or FPO. They are starting to open up some options for FedEx and UPS, but really it’s the USPS the only option currently. It gives you the ability to easily send mail to those who are serving in the military. It’s a great option.

I think on that particular site, they had been part of our affiliate program and they they really didn’t do very well because people didn’t know Stamps.com and they weren’t looking for it. But, then boom they changed the creative, which wasn’t under our suggestion. They came to us and we think we have this great idea and this is what we are trying to show.

So we said that sounds great, let’s make it. I think within 6 hours we had the banner back to them and they were able to post it. I don’t recall how fast it was, but it was pretty quick there after that we started seeing a huge increase in activity. So that made me a believer in making custom banner content and being a lot more agile for our affiliates. So, that worked our for us.

Charles: Yeah, that’s a great story. Well I think we are coming close to the hour mark, so I want to make sure that we have the opportunity to open up the floor to question and see what kind of feedback we get. Christopher are you still on the line with us?

Christopher: Absolutely, I’m happily chatting about bacon moon pies.

Charles: Chatting about bacon moon pies. I knew I could count on you.

Christopher: Absolutely!

Charles: So, do we have anything that we need to address at the moment.

Christopher: Looks like I’ve answered just about everything. We are good to go, but I actually had a question. How does your software work with Quickbooks or something along those lines.

Eric: That’s a great great question because we just released a Quickbooks integration about three or four months ago. Quickbooks is obviously the biggest accounting software out there.

Now for people who are using Quickbooks and have all their data stored in there and want to print invoices. They can now download an add-on or a plugin. They go to our site, click the link, and it loads the add-in into their Quickbooks software. Basically what that does is adds Stamps.com to their file menu to print US postage.

Then they can start printing postage with all their data inside their Quickbooks application without ever leaving Quickbooks. So, it’s a really exciting new feature that we added here recently and I think it’s going to work our really really well for businesses who are using Quickbooks. It’s one more time elimination.

Previous to the integration you had to toggle between Quickbooks and the Stamps.com software. That gave more of an opportunity to make errors and it’s time consuming to have to toggle back and forth.

But, now you’re able to print postage or shipping labels, or even buy postage. Really if you have a Stamps.com account, which you are required to do to print postage with Quickbooks, you never even need to leave Quickbooks or even sign in to Stamps.com, other than the first time you connect your Stamps.com account to the Quickbooks software. Once you do that you never have to log back in to Stamps.com ever again.

Charles: That’s great!

Christopher: Also I had another question that I was curious about. I’ve got tons of regular office supply that I’ve already purchased. I heard you say something about printing off the labels. Are there special labels that I have to buy? Is there anything, I mean, can I go down the street to Staples or Office Depot? Can I get all my stuff there?

Eric: Yeah, for the most part. There are a couple different options. If you’re printing shipping labels, you can pretty much use a huge number of adhesive labels by any of the main brands, such as Avery labels. They are probably one of the biggest ones out there. We support 50 to 100 different shipping labels. You can always just print them on plain paper and tape the label right on to the package.

Also, we support thermal printers. So people how have a thermal printer, we support those as well. In terms or postage, you can print postage right on to an envelope, including window envelopes. A certain type of window envelope we know about, you can put in your printer and print right on them.

If you’re going to print stamps, we have a proprietary stamp called a net stamp. It has some USPS hidden watermarks on that and that’s what allows the USPS to know that it is a valid stamp. You can’t print a postage stamp onto a regular label. It has to be on this unique stamp. But, I do believe they do sell those as well in Office Depot, Staples, and Office Max. I believe Avery sales a generic brand for that.

Of course we also sell it too. But, you can always print postage right on to any envelope, on regular paper, and pretty much almost any shipping label. There are some exceptions, but for the most part any adhesive label.

Charles: Eric, for those special situations, do I have to go to the website to order those or can I order those through the software? How does that work?

Eric: Yeah, that’s one of the things that we give you in your welcome kit when you signup. But we also have a store that is right inside the software, or you can use the web based version of it. You can go there and buy net stamps.

We also offer what’s called a photo net stamp, which gives you the ability to include either a logo or a photo of a product or an item right onto the side of these net stamps.

So, that’s really cool for people. Realtors seems to use them a lot. They put their head on there so that everyone can see their head. Or they will do the house of the month or hot sale, just listed type item.

Some restaurant will do a picture of the month and feature a desert or something like that. Out here in LA where we are based, the movie studios have been using a lot of the photo net stamps to promote a movie coming out. Say Shrek coming out October 10th. They’ll put the date the movie is being released or the stars photo or something like that.

It’s an additional benefit you can do to customize your envelopes or mailing going out. It gives you the ability to kind of stand out in the mail.

Charles: Yeah, anything that helps you to stand out is a good thing.

Eric: Absolutely! No only that, our software allows you to print a message on a shipping label. So you could put something simple like a thank you, or it could include a promotional message like an end of season sale, or back to school sale coming soon.

Most people put in their website or have a special offer address. It gives you all kinds of cool customization of the label.

Also, if you’re printing on a regular shipping label, you can import your company label on that too. So, your logo would be on the shipping label. And that’s either on a regular piece of paper or on an adhesive label.

Charles: So what I hear is that not only does this thing save you time, save you money, and makes life easier, but it also opens up some opportunities that might not have been there before as far as being able to do additional promotions or customize and make yourself stand out from everybody else. That’s fantastic because we all need a little bit of edge, whatever edge we can get.

Eric: Absolutely. It gives you an extra communication means, basically. If you’re shipping lots of packages everyday, why not put some type of message on there alerting your customers to more opportunities.

Charles: Well good deal. Man, I feel like this has been an hour packed full of good information. I appreciate you Eric, spending the time with us educating us on this whole thing. I know I’ve certainly learned a lot and I hope that everyone who’s on the call has learned at least on thing new that they didn’t know before.

I’m not sure if you noticed before but I have a link on the screen to the offer you mentioned before where people will get the free scale and free postage. You can check out everything Eric’s been talking about and get a sense of how the service can work for you and help improve your business.

Eric, I want to thank you again for spending the time with us and I want to let everyone know that if they have questions about this after the webinar, they can always hit us up on Twitter.

They can also join the Facebook fan page to continue the conversation over there.

As always, you can post questions in the Member’s forums. Everyone gets the benefit of seeing the question and then maybe someone can jump in and provide the answer if they know it and then everyone gets the benefit of the final answer. It’s a great resource. If you haven’t used it yet, be sure to log into Open Source Marketer and post your questions in the Member’s forums.

Thank you Eric. I just want to remind everyone that Eric is the Director of Online Marketing for Stamps.com and he has spent the last hour with us just filling our heads full of information and letting us know how we can improve our businesses so we can do a better job of making money.

So, Eric thank you very much.

Eric: Sounds good Charles. Thanks for having me. I enjoyed it. I especially enjoyed talking about the affiliate marketing. It’s always fun to talk about marketing, internet marketing. Thanks for having us.

Charles: Yes, there are lots of great opportunities out there and I definitely think that Stamps.com is one of them, so thanks for sharing that with us.

Eric: Alright, thanks so much Charles.

Thanks for reading the transcript from this interview. More interviews and videos can be found inside the Open Source Marketer Member’s area.

Leave your questions below about anything we covered.

Charles & Toff
OpenSourceMarketer.com

Learn how to build and market your business online using open source tools.

How Printing Postage Online Can Save Your Business Money

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What Else Can I Test…On My E-commerce Or Lead Generation Website?

June 16, 2010 By Leave a Comment

“What else can I test?” This is one of the most comment questions we get asked at MarketingExperiments. Perhaps only after… “What should I test first?” and “How do I test?”.

Before I help you determine what to test next, you must honestly determine if you really have exhausted your own test ideas. Testing is both a meticulous and iterative process, so there are no short cuts. There are no silver bullets. If “Page Z” is the most effective web page possible (most effective at the moment, since the universe is most certainly not static), then you need to test A, B, C, D…and so on in order to get to Z. By going directly from A to Z you will miss small subtleties and large revelations that would have influenced your design of page Z.

In order to exhaust your test ideas, there are two important stages to consider in a testing process:

  • Radical redesigns
  • Fine tuning

A shrewd procedure to adopt as you begin testing is to “Go radical, then fine tune.” This can apply to landing pages, home pages, shopping cart processes, etc. It’s an effective way to gain decisive knowledge in a short period of time.

Radical Redesigns

An intelligent test design includes a hypothesis that one page will respond very differently from another. By testing radically different strategies, your test will elicit much clearer and decisive results.

So what radical redesigns should you test? I suggest that you develop treatment pages that are a categorical shift from your current page. An example of a radical redesign may be:

  • Divergent messaging (“set up free access” instead of “register”)
  • Free trial instead of pay up front
  • New layout
  • New color scheme
  • One-step checkout instead of a three-step process

In other words, once you get your testing budget approved, I implore you not to start with a button color test. Sure, a green button may be better than your current grey button, but you have to ask when designing the test, how much better is it? Test elements that you are confident will have a noticeable difference. Even if it’s negative, at least you will learn your grand new idea is actually not grand and you shouldn’t bring it up in front of the board at the next quarterly meeting.

Radical redesigns should save you time as well. In terms of time efficiency, the worst thing you can do when testing is design a test where only minimal difference in behavior is possible.

Fine Tuning

After you’ve ruled out the radical designs that don’t work and you feel you’ve arrived at your best strategy, then it’s time for some fine tuning. This includes:

  • Tweaking the headline
  • Small copy changes
  • Button color/copy
  • Order of your bullets/New bullets
  • Images

However, you must consider one caveat when testing small elements on your web pages – it can be extremely time consuming. Finding the perfectly worded headline, then determining what color the button should be, then identifying if your primary image should be a man, woman, group… tested individually, fine tuning these elements could comprise hundreds of tests.

Multivariate tests are a way to test multiple small changes simultaneously, thus speeding up your optimization schedule to increase profits as quickly as possible.

Nowadays multivariate tests are easier and easier to conduct. So I’d encourage you to use them to your benefit as you begin the fine-tuning process. Choose a set of variables (headline, image, button), then choose their corresponding values (button: green, blue, red), and launch the test to determine the best combination.

What Else Can I Test?

Now that I’ve given you the background necessary to determine where you fit in the testing-optimization cycle, let’s revisit that juicy “What else can I test?” question.

Today, I will discuss a few strategies to consider for both e-commerce sites and lead generation pages. I will make a few caveats though.

First, these should not be the extent of your testing. These are just a few quick examples to get your brain percolating with test ideas that may deviate just a tad from the norm.

Second, some of these ideas might be quite radical, so I would proceed with caution if you decide to execute something similar.

Third, not every idea works for every site, company, industry, etc. You have to test to see what works for you. And you have to continually test because the Internet, the economy, and customer preference are all constantly evolving.

E-commerce – shopping cart

So often I go to an online clothing or electronics store and see, very prominently displayed, that I have no products in my cart. Well, I sort of know that because I just got here and have not added anything. Really, what’s the point of telling people “you have 0 items in your shopping cart”? It seems quite pointless when you think about it.

shopping cart What Else Can I Test…On My E commerce Or Lead Generation Website?What if you used that space more effectively?

You could code that area of the page to communicate value or promotions whenever nothing has been added to the cart. Adagio Teas is a great example of this. They communicate in this space that you get free shipping with orders over a certain amount and that if you order within the next XX amount of time that your products will arrive on XX day. Two great pieces of information that are much more valuable than knowing I have zero products in my cart.

E-commerce – dynamic navigation menu

The things you can do with a top or side navigational menu these days are incredible. Bye-bye to the days where you just clicked on a category or chose a sub-category from a simple dropdown menu. This space can be used in place of category pages. It can be used to promote new products or items on sale. You can use it to guide visitors to the most popular areas or even to sections that are most profitable to you.

When visitors hover over the tabs on the Clinique site, they see a user-friendly menu that lists areas to dig deeper into the site. This type of menu allows your site to direct people to areas beyond simple sub-categories. In Clinique’s case, you can navigate to trends, tools, gifts, etc. Below these options, there is also plenty of room to promote free shipping, new products, or even an offer for a skin consultation.

clinique What Else Can I Test…On My E commerce Or Lead Generation Website?

Lead generation – technology

So often you arrive on a lead gen page that has the same old boring form. Name, email, phone, address…on and on. Well, I say spice it up a bit! There are many simple development techniques that can make your forms more user-friendly and also more visually appealing.

Here is an example of applying jQuery Expose to a form field. The form initially looks pretty run-of-the-mill:

jquery 1 What Else Can I Test…On My E commerce Or Lead Generation Website?And then when you click on one of the fields:

jquery 2 What Else Can I Test…On My E commerce Or Lead Generation Website?You may not be able to notice, but the entire page becomes lighter and highlights the singular objective you want the visitor to accomplish. This focuses the visitor’s attention on the form and hopefully away from any links, images, and most importantly that “red x” at the top right of the page.

Lead generation – Focusing attention to the middle of the page

One popular way of focusing attention to the middle of the page these days is the modal popup, or entrance popup. If you’re reading this blog post, you’ve probably seen it when you enter MarketingExperiments.com

Although it’s a popup and sometimes annoying, the reason why this strategy works for many people is that you eliminate all the distractions caused by copy, links, ads, images, and other shared real estate a homepage usually has, and forces visitors to look at one thing. Hopefully it’s something that is impactful to the business.

Question: What if we executed this “idea” completely differently? What if we made a complete paradigm shift? The following is a PPC landing page in which we tested the “idea” of the entrance popup (page anonymized):

lorem ipsum form What Else Can I Test…On My E commerce Or Lead Generation Website?[click image to enlarge]

The page looks like an entrance popup. It eliminates distraction like an entrance popup. It focuses the user’s attention on one objective like the entrance popup. But, it’s NOT a popup.

The text, images, and background colors have all been dimmed to place primary focus on the central objective. I know this is an extreme example, but if used judiciously, this strategy can be very effective.

Our test treatment received a 19.6% relative increase over the control. And what did the control look like? It was almost the same design but without the pseudo “entrance popup” strategy.

I hope you received some value from these test ideas. Stay tuned to the blog for more ideas from the ongoing “What else can I test” series to hear new ideas from many different researchers in the MarketingExperiments lab.

Related Resources

What else can I test … to improve my lead generation rate?

What else can I test … to reduce shopping cart abandonment rate?

What else can I test… to increase email clickthrough rate?

What Else Can I Test…On My E commerce Or Lead Generation Website?

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Social Media Case Study: Facebook plus integrated marketing helps raise $950,000

June 14, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Recently, I wrote about a case study that included excellent use of integrated marketing and social media – Facebook Case Study: From 517 to 33,000 fans in two weeks (plus media coverage). The MarketingExperiments community of marketers wanted to get a deeper look at the details, so I figured, why not go straight to the source?

Brenna Holmes, a senior online account executive and strategist at Adams Hussey & Associates (AH&A), was the digital brand strategic advisor on this campaign for her client, the California State Parks Foundation (CSPF). I asked her many questions from our audience along with a few of my own…

Let’s start with your role in this campaign. Social media operations is a huge challenge in itself. We’ll get to what you did in a moment. But first, how did you get it done?

Brenna Holmes: In the case of this urgent campaign, not only did I serve as an advisor, I also helped with implementation for all things social – optimizing their existing Facebook fan page with the custom welcome tab and many personalized Facebook Markup Language (FBML) widgets. Later in the campaign, I started and managed their Twitter account.

CSPF is a very small and tightly knit organization. Their Director of Membership, Greg Zelder, and Director of Communications, Jerry Emory, are my daily contacts and it was (and is) in collaboration with them that we got a full-scale multichannel campaign up and running within one week of learning of the Governor’s proposed budget cuts.

The first thing that catches my eye about this case study is the quick, large Facebook fan page growth that led to positive media stories. But when you explore this success a little deeper, it’s not just a case for social media marketing, but integrated marketing as well. Can you give us more details on how you used multichannel marketing?

BH: At AH&A, we LOVE multichannel integration. As a direct mail fundraising shop that has expanded to include pretty much in-house everything (online, telemarketing, creative, production, and analytics), practically every campaign we plan has multichannel components.

And this case was no different. CSPF had been a direct mail and telemarketing client of ours for many years, but 2009 was the first year that my department began working with them.

Actually…the budget cuts issue made us start our contract a month early! Within 48 hours the organizational website was redesigned to accommodate an Action Center, daily homepage updates, graphic social media sharing links, and embedded YouTube videos made by both the organization and passionate supporters.

The Facebook “Friend Get a Friend Campaign” was launched the Tuesday after Memorial Day weekend, May 26, (which is when the Governor’s proposal was released) via an update to CSPF’s original 517 fans.

The update explained the imminent threat parks were facing and put a deadline – Friday, May 29 – and a goal – 5,000 fans. “This year’s cuts are ten times as bad, so we need ten times the fans on Facebook.”

Once supporters became fans, they were presented with an action item asking them to visit CSPF’s site to sign an email petition to the California legislature and Governor Schwarzenegger. We also set up and managed CSPF’s paid online advertising on both Facebook and Google to drive supporters to become fans and/or sign the petition. All this Web outreach was supported by an aggressive email petition and donation campaign to the house list and partner organizations in California.

The online campaign was mirrored in direct mail with three “urgent grams” that were in people’s mail boxes by the end of the week – one to high-dollar donors ($1,000+), one to all other members, and one to prospects. All three pieces netted funds and raised more than $200,000 in just over a month. Telemarketing was also excellently leveraged – existing campaigns were halted and new scripts were implemented, raising more than $88,000 in the first two weeks of the campaign.

That whole week in May, Foundation staff members were being interviewed and the story was picked up by SF Gate, Huffington Post, LA Daily News, Frommers, etc. They even made it onto Digg! By early June the Facebook growth was being referenced in mainstream news articles and on other environmental and California-based nonprofit Facebook pages.

Were these other channels used to primarily promote Facebook over the CSPF website?

BH: Facebook was never promoted over the website. Facebook promotion was always either in conjunction with site promotion (general “Find Us on Facebook” links) or as a secondary ask (“Thanks for taking action! If you are on Facebook, click through to join the conversation”).

Other than the specific “Friend Get a Friend” outreach on Facebook and some of the Facebook ads, we were primarily driving supporters to the online Action Center to sign the petition, make donations, and later on, print Save Our State Parks signs and upload their photos from the SOS weekends of action.

join cspf Social Media Case Study: Facebook plus integrated marketing helps raise $950,000

When people visit the CSPF Facebook fan page for the first time, they see a pseudo landing page that encourages them to become a fan or go to the CSPF website. I love the landing page, it’s a very clear way to communicate with your audience about the actions you’d like them to take (instead of just showing your wall to new visitors). Why did you decide to send users to a pseudo landing page instead of the wall?

BH: I’m a big fan of introductions, and maximizing the personalization of user experiences online. It’s a pet peeve of mine when sites (Facebook or other) don’t recognize that I’m new to the site.

So much of the online experience can be controlled from the backend to give a more customized experience. In my opinion, it would be silly to not take advantage of that with something as simple as a welcome tab.

We are trying to put the most efficient but comprehensive view of CSPF out there so people can absorb it in the seven seconds we have before they decide to click elsewhere. A cluttered (or worse barren) wall just doesn’t give the right first impression in my opinion.

And the Facebook landing page doesn’t solely encourage them to become a fan, it gives them other options as well.

There are three asks. This allows supporters to choose how they want to interact with the Foundation. The easiest is, of course, to “Like” the page. Then if they want to do more they can take action or join. The vast majority simply “Like” the page and move onto the “Wall,” but we have seen some petitions and new memberships coming in from these source-coded links.

This campaign helped raised several hundred thousand dollars for CSPF. (Congratulations!) How much came through Facebook, and how much came because of the other channels you used?

BH: Unfortunately we weren’t as proactive in source coding all the links on Facebook as we should have been from the very beginning, so the majority of donations do not show as coming from Facebook during that first burst of activity. However, we do know that 60% of our page connections are self-professed annual members.

In late July/August, we launched a social-media-only campaign promoting the Frequent Visitor membership level ($125 to get an annual parks parking pass) on Facebook and Twitter. Social media allowed us to quickly take advantage of the Parks Department halting annual pass sales for almost two weeks. In that campaign, CSPF gained over 700 new members from social media at the $125 level.

I can also tell you that while the entire integrated campaign earned $950,000, almost $300,000 was raised online and 46% of that came from supporters new to the e-file (either joining as annual members or by giving non-membership issue-based gifts). The e-file also tripled in size as the fan page grew and paid membership grew by 10% in the first two months.

We are much more meticulous about this now and see a steady stream of new memberships, renewals, and issue-based gifts coming in from both Facebook page promotions and the Facebook ads. (Stay tuned for this November’s  Yes For State Parks ballot issue get-out-the-vote work on Facebook.)

What was the budget and team size? Social media seems very labor intensive, very manual.

BH: The online team size was only four of us – me, my vice president for strategic brainstorming, along with Greg Zelder and Jerry Emory at CSPF.

CSPF is on a monthly retainer with us, which includes all work except creative development. We have a larger offline staff that works closely with CSPF to get all the other pieces rolling and now CSPF has added another Web person internally to help out, but during last year’s campaign it was all hands for Greg and me in getting the online pieces up and running and properly maintained.

Social media is labor intensive, but if you have an urgent issue like this one, you drop everything to get it done and done as well as possible the first time around.

What is your follow-up plan for all these new Facebook fans that you have engaged?

BH: I’ve been managing the fan page for over a year now and it continues to grow. CSPF has, on average, a 15.5% month-over-month fan “connection” growth.

CSPF’s Communications Director is very hands on with the content generation and they post at a minimum of twice a week – a “feel good park story” every Tuesday and every Thursday there is a post for the new World’s Best Bike Commute blog that chronicles Jerry’s bike commute across the Golden Gate Bridge.

Greg and Jerry are also very good at posting from their mobiles to keep the page updated with pictures and information from the many live events CSPF holds throughout the year. Ideally I’d like to see a daily update to Facebook, but current staffing constraints at CSPF won’t allow for it. We are currently also working on some fun new content that will only be viewable after supporters “Like” the page.

How much are Facebook fans really worth? Are they very valuable? Or do they just “Like” something because they saw that their friends did?

BH: We find CSPF’s fans VERY valuable, whether they are the active donors or not, many are very outspoken evangelists for the cause. We are actually undertaking a much more robust tracking regime to identify the most engaged Facebook connections so we can do some additional personalized outreach.

Lately, the words Facebook and privacy seem to go hand in hand…

BH: We haven’t had any issues regarding privacy so far. Everything we do is on an opt-in basis and we are very proactive in answering fan questions – even going so far as to help a fan organize her newsfeed content so as to not be “overwhelmed” by our updates.

There are now a plethora of invites to social causes on Facebook. How does one cause really stand out from another?

BH: This is no different on Facebook than in other direct marketing media. Donors and activists have more choices of where to spend their time and money now than ever before. You stand out by staying engaged and listening to your base. Encourage them to be part of the process and they will extend your voice a thousand times over.

Can for-profit marketers use the same tactics you describe?

BH: I think that many of the tactics are the same whether the organization is non- or for-profit, and we “steal” concepts from commercial organizations ideas all the time. Typically the defining issue is cost, since corporations tend to have larger marketing budgets than nonprofits they could conceivably get even more value from social media like Facebook.

For the budding social media marketers out there… what applications have you found to be most valuable in engaging Facebook users?

BH: Custom FBML wall widgets and tabs are a must – like the welcome tab and our Get Involved menu of options. If you have a blog, sync it up with the Notes RSS. Sync your YouTube uploads and add as many of the newly released social plug-ins to your website as feasible. You want to engage supporters where they already live online.

I originally found this case study in the brand new Social Marketing ROAD Map Handbook. If you’re looking to improve your social media marketing, you might benefit from the Handbook’s case studies (in addition to the one I covered above, there are ten more in the Handbook).

Related Resources

The MarketingExperiments Quarterly Research Journal, Q1 2010 (Social Media Marketing begins on page 51)

Social Media Marketing in Four Steps

Develop Your Social Marketing ROAD Map Strategy

Social Media Case Study: Facebook plus integrated marketing helps raise $950,000

Filed Under: Facebook, Social Media Tagged With: ,

Google Caffeine: Use social media and quality content to get a jolt for your site

June 11, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Earlier this week, Google formally announced the completion of its new web indexing system cleverly named Caffeine. According to Google, Caffeine provides 50% fresher results for web searches than its last index and is the largest collection of web content the search giant has ever offered.

caffeine Google Caffeine: Use social media and quality content to get a jolt for your site

Our old index had several layers, some of which were refreshed at a faster rate than others; the main layer would update every couple of weeks. To refresh a layer of the old index, we would analyze the entire web, which meant there was a significant delay between when we found a page and made it available to you.

With Caffeine, we analyze the web in small portions and update our search index on a continuous basis, globally. As we find new pages, or new information on existing pages, we can add these straight to the index. That means you can find fresher information than ever before—no matter when or where it was published.

– Carrie Grimes, Software Engineer, Google

This is great for those of us who use Google to search and find relevant results to our most common inquiries. Results will become timelier, more social and rely more heavily on keyword strings, ultimately providing more useful results as newer content can be indexed much quicker and from a much larger base of sites.

Is your SERP spot threatened?

When Google says “fresher” results, what they’re saying is that ranking principles have not changed, but rather rankings are (and will become) more dynamic, shifting to display the latest and greatest (and, therefore, hopefully best) information as a result of being able to reach deeper and more frequently into the Web.

But what about website owners who have come to rely on the steady ebb and flow of organic traffic that a high Search Engine Results Page (SERP) position provides?

Many website owners who have long enjoyed a top spot, or even a high spot, have suddenly found their sites displaced, resulting in a massive dip in organic traffic. And to make matters even more vexing, the position your site is in this month will likely be different from where you find yourself next month.

Which is not entirely new, right? Anyone well-versed in search engine optimization (SEO) knows that it is a never-ending battle. The difference is, ranking improvements and demotions may happen even quicker than before because content that you and your competitors are creating will have a more immediate impact within the results. So if you thought SEO was a wild ride before, hang on.

Of course, your main goal should be to deliver value to your customers and audience. After all, ranking is only a means to an end. And since Caffeine should do a better job of measuring that value, it might start putting some distance between those who do provide quality content and those who are merely gaming the system.

Caffeine makes it more difficult, although not impossible, for sites using black hat SEO tactics to reach and/or maintain a position at the top of the rankings for long periods of time. And while I believe SEOs will always find new ways to game the system, I think Google has made a step forward in terms of providing better-quality results.

How to get a boost from Caffeine

So if you can’t rule Google SERPs by just throwing up an automated page with repurposed content, what should you do? Here’s my advice to website owners who rely heavily on organic traffic:

  • Continually look for opportunities to expand or update the content on your site for improved keyword targeting
  • Re-evaluate your current keywords and always look for opportunities to expand and capture more long-tail keywords
  • Build a site that contains clean code and  a clear site structure
  • Look for opportunities to capitalize on social media as real-time results become more integrated with search results
  • Monitoring your competitors will be paramount as new content brought in by them will be indexed quicker than ever.

So fresh and so clean

I think this transition to providing “fresher” results was inevitable as competition from Bing and the massive growth of “real-time” information from social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook have created a need for better, faster, (stronger), search engine results. And from a conversion standpoint, I’d argue that this move could ultimately prove to be more beneficial to ecommerce sites that provide high-quality content, because “fresher,” more relevant results also means more qualified traffic.

Of course, cleaner, less manipulated results will have huge benefits to searchers and real, quality sites alike. Remember that both you and Google are on the same mission: provide the right page to the right user. Oh, and don’t be evil.

Related Resources

Search Marketing: Tips on mastering the latest innovations in this mature category

PPC Innovation: How will Google’s new lead capture extension affect your pay-per-click campaigns?

Optimizing PPC campaigns to boost conversions, ROI

Photo attribution: The Official Google Blog

Google Caffeine: Use social media and quality content to get a jolt for your site

Filed Under: News Tagged With: , , , , ,

This Just Tested: How 1:1 marketing achieved 21% more clicks and 60% less unsubscribes

June 8, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Over the past couple of weeks, our content and production team has been mulling through research from multiple companies, trying to find the best experiments for today’s web clinic. It’s always exciting trying to find the right illustrative research that will serve our audience. In the midst of this, a very interesting case study came across my desk that I just had to share with our blog community.

The experiment came from the research library of ThinData 1:1 and was with a large airline that had a strong online presence. They had the goal of improving the level of user engagement (through higher click-through rates and lower unsubscribes) for their customer newsletters. They wanted to test a 1:1 marketing approach and see how much impact a personalized conversation with customers would have.

The Original Newsletter (click-to-enlarge)

AC2 150x150 This Just Tested: How 1:1 marketing achieved 21% more clicks and 60% less unsubscribesFirst, it will be helpful to see what the original newsletter looked like. There are a few key things to note:

1) The goal of the email was to create enough interest on the part of the recipient to get them to click through to a specific flight offer.

2)  Every element on this email was sent generically to large subscriber segments and included offers without any reference to a recipient’s personal preferences.

3) The only (and it’s debatable) 1:1 marketing technique that the original email design included was the name of the recipient.

The 1:1 Marketing Strategy

One-to-one marketing conversation requires a couple of key ingredients, one of which is insight about your customers. So, to understand their customers better, this company created a “customer preference tool.” This tool took previous behavioral/purchase data and mapped out preferences in five key areas (destinations, airports, hotels, etc.). It also gave customers the ability to update their preferences for each of these areas.

So once they had some solid insight about the preferences of their newsletter recipients, they were ready to start a better conversation.

The New Design (click-to-enlarge)

AC1 150x150 This Just Tested: How 1:1 marketing achieved 21% more clicks and 60% less unsubscribesA new email template was created to customize content according to the five key preference categories of the customers. In fact, the tool was inserted at the top of the email and functioned as a table of contents for the email. It also gave recipients a portal to their own preference center to make any changes.

The rest of the email was organized by an algorithm that gave higher placement to offers with higher preference status to the email recipients.

Instead of displaying all possible offers for a category, offers were filtered according to the preferences of the recipient.

Overall, the new email design created a 1:1 marketing conversation that matched the specific motivations of the recipients.

The Results

As mentioned in the title of the blog post, the results were impressive. For a large company that no doubt had already spent time improving these newsletters, they were able to increase the click-through rate generated from the emails by 21%. And this came by subtracting, not adding more links within the email. The new design also decreased unsubscribes by 60%, which the marketers interpreted as a big thumbs-up from their subscriber base.

Overall, the results of this test underscore the value and potential impact of striving to have a 1:1 conversation in our marketing campaigns.

What does this mean to you?

Ideally, you would have as much information as this company had about their customers, and if it were a perfect world, you would have unlimited technical development capabilities at your fingertips. Well, most of us don’t live in that perfect scenario and creating a true 1:1 marketing campaign like this company might seem a bit out of grasp.

Here’s the good news, 1:1 marketing has a path leading to it and everyone is somewhere on that path. And every marketer, regardless of company size, can improve the conversation they are having with their customers. Today on our web clinic, we will look at the strategic things that marketers of any level can do to improve their 1:1 marketing campaigns. So join us today as we talk about this case study and more during our free web clinic: 1-to-1 Marketing at Four Levels: Strategic ways every marketer can enter into an online conversation with customers

Note: To give credit where it is due, I’d like to point out again that the case study mentioned in this post came from the research library of of Thindata 1:1. Thindata 1:1 is a training partner of ours that provides one-to-one marketing automation solutions. They have done some interesting research in the area of one-to-one marketing and I would encourage you to check them out at www.thindata.com.

This Just Tested: How 1:1 marketing achieved 21% more clicks and 60% less unsubscribes

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