Dan Spellman ( My Two Cents )

Searching for Green Jobs

    

I walked upstairs today and found my son replacing a burnt out light bulb. 

    

This blog post could end right here – the fact that I found one of my kids doing work around the house seems impressive and noteworthy enough.  But he was on a mission.  He wanted to replace it with a low energy CFL bulb. 

    

It appears that he is not alone in his quest to do what is right for the environment.  While researching vacation plans this last week, I read a blog post by Thomas Berger about Travelocity’s Green Directory.  “There are about 250 hotels on the list”, reports Berger, “including some affordable chain options like Fairfield Inns, so being green need not be just for the well-off.  If you’re interested in making your travels a little greener, Travelocity might be able to help you out.”

    

The public’s awareness of environmental issues continues to grow.  On March 28^th we will all have the opportunity to participate in another Earth Hour where the aim is to “reach more than one billion people in 1,000 cities around the world, inviting communities, business and governments to switch off lights for one hour”.  Soon after that, we will be celebrating our 39^th annual Earth Day on April 22^nd.

    

    

    

    

With this increased awareness comes an increased demand for environmentally responsible products and services and the Federal government hopes to help with the upcoming stimulus package.  “To accelerate the creation of a clean energy economy, we will double our capacity to generate alternative sources of energy like wind, solar, and biofuels over the next three years”, stated President Obama in his first weekly address today.  “We’ll begin to build a new electricity grid that lay down more than 3,000 miles of transmission lines to convey this new energy from coast to coast. We’ll save taxpayers $2 billion a year by making 75% of federal buildings more energy efficient, and save the average working family $350 on their energy bills by weatherizing 2.5 million homes.”

    

Ambitious plans, and some say, plans that can’t start soon enough.  “Unless quick action is taken, the U.S. risks losing millions of green jobs to other nations that offer a more serious and sustained commitment to growing its green economy”, fears Neal Lurie.  “For the U.S. to be competitive in a carbon-constrained world, the renewable energy and energy efficiency industries must be a critical economic driver.”  

         

It’s time to change the economy, one light bulb at a time.

    

Until next time,

    

Dan

    

    

    

Some People Just Don't Get It

     

A colleague of mine recently showed me an email he received from Wal-mart that touted a new customer benefit they are offering:  Site-to-Store Express.

    

We all know that the most powerful word in marketing is “FREE” – but Wal-mart just doesn’t get it.  Their new offer allows customers to pay only $29 and receive a year’s worth of benefits.  You might ask “what are these benefits?”  The answer is “not much”.

         

The terms and conditions for this offer state, “We estimate that S2S Express customers will generally be able to pick up S2S Express eligible products from the store within three to five business days (plus processing time) from the date the order is placed. Walmart.com does not guarantee delivery of S2S Express products within the estimated time or by an estimated delivery date.”

    

A few questions:

    

·        3 to 5 business days . . . really?

·        How long is “plus processing time”?

·        “Walmart.com does not guarantee delivery . . . within the estimated time”?

     

Let’s face it, free shipping (on qualifying orders) is becoming the standard on the internet.  I think it’s safe to assume that customers would expect a company the size of Wal-mart to not only offer this service, but to also deliver it faster than 5+ days.

    

Why not just swing by your local Wal-mart store and walk down the aisle and save yourself the $29 annual fee?

    

Until next time,

     

Dan

     

     

     

     

Search Engines – SEM. SEO, Blogs, Videos and More

    

I had an interesting discussion this week about universal search.  As companies work to increase their Return On Advertising Spend (ROAS), it becomes apparent that acquiring new customers on the web is not only about buying terms on the main search engines.  In fact, Google is working hard to pull multiple types of content into their search results, which means, as e-marketers we need to be concerned with results from podcasts, social networks, blogs and video.

    

As you know, I have incorporated a number of videos in my blog posts.  I’ve even created a few of them myself under the header of “60 Second” video.  While I have received a fair number of views on them, I certainly haven’t leveraged them across the web.  Quite simply, it’s a pain to push them to multiple outlets like YouTube, Howcast, Myspace, and Metacalf.  Creating a compelling video is difficult enough, but “getting the word out” is sometimes even harder.

    

If it’s true that necessity is the mother of invention, UC Berkeley has done its’ fair share of parenting on the web.  One offspring of the university’s graduate school Business Plan Competition is TubeMogul.  “TubeMogul allows anyone with a video who wants to post it online to upload to TubeMogul which will then upload your video for you to twelve [and growing] sites at the same time including Google Video, Yahoo! Video, Revver, Crackle, YouTube, AOL Video, StupidVideos, MetaCafe, Blip.tv and Viddler” reports Paige Donner.  “It also offers tracking services, marketing and advanced services to those who want to streamline the process of broadcasting their online videos.”

    

The company has a great start and is well funded by a $1.5 million investment from Knight’s Bridge Capital Partners.  In fact, Howard Lindzon, creator of the Wallstrip video, is the lead investor.

    

 

    

Watch TubeMogul Tutorial: Upload and Deploy Your Videos in How to Videos  |  View More Free Videos Online at Veoh.com

    

    

As the role of video continues to expand, it becomes imperative to not only develop and distribute compelling content, but it becomes necessary to have the metrics and associated analytics to understand what’s working . . . and what’s not.

    

“Our goal at TubeMogul is to solve problems for content creators.  First, we make it easy for content creators to deploy video to multiple sites in one shot.  This saves content creators time and often increases the size of their audience” states TubeMogul’s CEO Brett Wilson in an interview with Colin Devroe.  “Next, we bring all of the available analytics back into TubeMogul and give the content creator an aggregated view of their video’s consumption along with easy to use reporting and data export tools.”

          

Best of all, TubeMogal is free. 

    

Try it out and let me know what you think.

    

Until next time,

    

Dan

    

    

    

 

A New Year’s Resolution – Improved SEO

    

As the holidays come to a close and we begin to take stock in the calories and credit card bills we have encountered over the past month, it is only natural to make a vow to improve.  Unfortunately, the ritual of making New Year’s resolutions is only surpassed by the tradition of breaking them.

     

You could resolve to improve your diet, or stop smoking, or to start an exercise program . . . but past history tells us that these would be short lived.  A resolution that may not be as popular (but would be more realistic) would be to improve your SEO (Search Engine Optimization) ranking.  I know that at first glance, this idea may not seem very exciting but what did you expect from a blog focused on eCommerce.

     

It’s true that making the resolution to improve your SEO results will require a fair amount of effort.  But today, I’m going to focus on something easy – a simple way to track your progress.

     

Finding the right tool to help you track your SEO ranking is imperative, and fortunately, the folks at SEO Book have provided one.  Using their Firefox based Rank Checker, you can easily track the natural search rankings for any term on the Google, Yahoo and MSN search engines.

     

     

     

     

In order to leverage this tool, you need to focus on a select number of terms.  A great way to do this is to review your internal search results and identify which terms your customers find relevant and helpful. 

     

As you set up the Scheduled Task function of Rank Checker, be sure to run the selected terms for not only your own website, but also your competition’s sites.  That way, you will be able to accurately benchmark the effectiveness of your SEO efforts.

     

Until next time,

     

Dan

     

     

Would They Print It If It Wasn't True?

Remember when CNN changed the world by reporting news events as they were happening?  It was the beginning of the end for the newspaper industry.  However, now even cable news organizations are “old school”.

    

Who is reporting the news?  We are . . . on Twitter.

    

Today, CNN reported that “at least seven passengers were still hospitalized Sunday, a day after Continental Airlines Flight 1404 veered off the runway at Denver International Airport, skidded into a ravine and caught fire”.  But in the entire news report, they never mentioned Mike Wilson.

    

Mike was on flight 1404 and reported the incident as it happened on his Twitter account.

    

·        “. . .  I was just in a plane crash!”

    

·        “Ugh ... My glasses fell off in the mass exodus getting off the plane .. Can't see very well”

    

·        “This was crash #2 for me. Maybe I should start taking the bus.”

    

·        “Can't see much, but that's the crash site. http://twitpic.com/ut2c”

    

·        “Continental keeping us locked up at the presidents club until they can sort everything out. Won't even serve us drinks.”

    

·        “You have your wits scared out of you, drag your butt out of a flaming ball of wreckage and you can't even get a vodka-tonic.”

    

Changes in technology have given everyone a camera (via their cell phone) and a news outlet (via their Twitter account).  Want to learn more?  Just ask the experts at Wikipedia.

    

Until next time,

    

Dan

    

      

The Best Kept Secret

With all of the noise on the web, it’s hard to get your message noticed.  Let’s face it, in today’s economy, being the “best kept secret” isn’t a great marketing strategy.  Creating “buzz” is difficult, and when a potential customer does give you a few seconds of their time, you need to capitalize on it.

     

While you certainly need to spend time optimizing landing pages and crafting compelling promotions, you also need to focus on developing your brand image – and using video is a great way to do this.  

    

     

    

     

I’ve come across a few sites lately that are great examples of using video to showcase their brand or to drive their message.  These websites are hosting their own videos as well as using the power of YouTube to promote their message.  Two great examples are Terracycle and Greenpeace.  Check them out and let me know what you think.

    

Until next time,

    

Dan

    

   

BMA Breakfast

 

I had the opportunity to commute downtown today.   Normally, I take my 90 minute commute through the Chicagoland area every morning.  Today, however, I was able to take the train downtown to catch a BMA breakfast event to learn more about SEO / SEM.

    

The room was full with a cross section of Chicago area marketing experts who were eager to learn more about Search.  While some of the attendees were relatively new to paid and natural search, it is always good for those of us who have been around for a while, to reinforce what you already know . . . such as:

    

·        Always use meta tags on your images

·        Paid Search (SEM) and Natural Search (SEO) strategies create synergies on the main search engines

·        Social Media for your business helps your natural search rankings

·        Everyone uses Google – make it work for you

·        Optimizing search is like trying to hit a moving target – there is always more work to be done

    

It was refreshing to take my team downtown to learn more about search.  For a limited investment, I was able to keep the group focused on one of the most important aspects of web marketing.   Hopefully, you are finding ways of keeping your team engaged as well.

     

Until next time,

    

Dan

    

     

Building More Doors

    

Running a successful marketing campaign is similar to building a house.  If your promotional offers were the rooms of the house, you need to ask yourself, “do I have enough doors leading to these rooms?”  Without a sufficient amount of traffic coming through these doorways, even the best promotions are doomed for failure.

    

One way to create traffic is to optimize your natural search results.  There are a number of blogs offering tips on how to improve your site’s SEO results and one you should read is the Search Marketing Blog from Engine Works.  In this blog, Kent Schnepp suggests that “by adding internal links to your content you can potentially improve your rankings and get new content quickly indexed.”

    

“Linking, both internal and inbound”, says Kieran Hawe of Webtribution, “are core to SEO success.  Hawe suggests developing a “comprehensive linking strategy that focuses on cross-linking within a website, within a network of websites and from external relevant websites.” 

    

This way, as the main search engines crawl your site, they are more likely to index your key pages.  “If you think about it from a robots perspective, the more links on your site that point to a given page, the more important it must be”, says Ray “Catfish” Comstock, a search expert with Business Online.  After all, if your not going to promote your site’s content, who will?

    

While there are a number of different areas to cross link within your site (within blog posts, on product pages, in the footer, on the sitemap, etc.), “the most important principle”, advises Dave Chaffey, “is to include key phrases used by searchers within the anchor text of a hyperlink to point to relevant content.”  Chaffey goes on to recommend reviewing your sitemap to ensure the anchor text in the links is customer centric rather than product centric.

    

Building this “house” of relevant content is an ongoing process.  Not only must you create additional compelling material for your current and prospective customers, you need to continually improve the sites’ SEO capabilities.  This is definitely the case after you upgrade your site.  “After a redesign”, suggest SEO authors Jennifer Grappone and Gradiva Couzin, “be sure to run a link validator on your website to be sure that those internal links have all been updated properly.” 

    

When it’s all said and done, your success will rely upon the ability for potential customers to find your products or services.  Therefore, you have to ask yourself “have I build enough doors?”

          

Until next time,

    

Dan

   

   

Big Idea In A Tiny Package

    

If you have a Twitter account, you know that you have a limited number of characters per post.  As micro-blogging continues to grow in popularity, bloggers need to find ways to keep their “tweets” under 140 keystrokes.

  

If you want to reference another website, you could end up wasting your post by including a long web address.  This is where Tiny URLs come to the rescue.  You have probably seen references to them as you scan the web.

  

“TinyURL was created as a free service to make posting long URLs easier, and may only be used for actual URLs.”  Check it out by visiting TinyURL.com or by using the widget below.

  

  

Enter a long URL to make tiny:

  

  

Until next time,

  

Dan

  

  

This Too Shall Pass

    

We’ve seen it coming for a while now.  In the last few weeks, the economy has taken center stage as every news cast and talk show tells more stories of how home values have fallen or 401k balances have dropped.  In the midst of all this turmoil, many businesses may be planning to reduce their expenses by cutting their marketing budgets.

  

But, in the words of Lt. Nick Holden, “In confusion, there is profit.”  It’s one of my favorite scenes from Blake Edwards’ 1959 movie Operation Petticoat and I think it provides a great lesson for us today.

  

Most of your competitors are pulling back on their marketing spend.  While astute marketers should focus their resources, this contraction in marketing spend actually provides an opportunity to gain market share.

  

If you have been fortunate enough to build a strong business relationship with your customers, you may be able to both protect that relationship with current customers as well as extend it to prospective clients.

  

While I have been discussing this topic with colleagues over the past few months, it was an article in Deliver Magazine by Meg Mitchell Moore that prompted me to write this post.  Her article pressed the point that “a recession might be just the time to increase marketing spending, thereby taking advantage of listing competitors and capturing the attention of cash-strapped consumers.”

  

No doubt that in order to survive during the next 12 to 18 months, you will need to be competitive with your pricing.   The question is, can you provide additional value to your customers and if so, can you successfully tell that story?

   

On his blog, Achieve Your Success, Terry Brock recently had a great interview with Jim Cathcart.  Cathcart explains that while you need to be providing incremental value to your customers, you need to keep in mind that the “value is always determined by the recipient, not the giver.”

 

    

Although we have seen gasoline prices fall during the past few weeks, Moore lists Meijer, a Grand Rapids based retailer, as an example of a company providing value to their customers.  Founded in 1934 and #19 on Fortune’s 2008 Top Private U.S. Companies, Meijer is a regional Superstore (Michigan, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio and Kentucky), that sells groceries, apparel and even gasoline.

  

In order to provide value to their customers, the company “offers you the opportunity to know when the price of gas at Meijer is going to go up before it actually increases at the pump.”  The Meijer.com web site continues, stating “by registering your cell number into the Meijer Gas Alert program, you agree to receive text messages from us that will notify you in advance when Meijer gas prices are going to increase.”

  

The key is this, as the economy begins to cause your competitors to talk to their customers less frequently, you have the opportunity to enter the conversation.  If you can successfully articulate your value proposition, you may find the Lt. Holden’s axiom to be true.

  

Until next time,

  

Dan

  

  

Just Spell It Out

    

Increasing SEO activity is an inexpensive way to drive traffic and sales.  Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is comprised of a number of techniques used to increase the Natural Search referrals from Google, MSN, Yahoo and the other major search engines.

    

While the major search engines will send spiders to crawl your site, it is best to spell out exactly what areas you want crawled and what areas you want left alone.  The best way to do this is to create a robots.txt file.

    

“All search engines, or at least all the important ones”, states Thomas Brunt, “now look for a robots.txt file as soon their spiders or bots arrive on your site. So, even if you currently do not need to exclude the spiders from any part of your site, having a robots.txt file is still a good idea, it can act as a sort of invitation into your site.”

    

A robots.txt file (notice it is plural with an “s”) helps spiders understand which parts of your site to crawl . . . well actually, it helps spiders understand which parts NOT to crawl.

    

The robots.txt file is a text file that you place in your main directory that instructs spiders to NOT crawl certain parts of your site.  The idea is that by doing so, you will reduce the amount of “drag” these crawlers put on your site and therefore, ensure that your sites response time stays at its’ peak.

    

An example of how it would be placed in your domain file would be as follows:  http://www.YourDomainName.com/robots.txt  

    

Remember two things:  (1) it is the plural form of “robots” [not just robot]; and (2) it needs to be in the lower case and not Robots.TXT.

    

Setting is up can be very easy.  It is just an ASCII file.  You can use your Notepad to create the page (Start / Programs / Accessories / Desktop).  The format you need is like this:

    

User-Agent: *

Disallow : /Name_of_Directory_to_NOT_Crawl

    

You can find examples by adding “/robots.txt” to most popular sites (for example, check out how Lowes does it by clicking here).

    

But here’s the real tip.  While the robots.txt file is really meant to keep spiders from crawling specific pages, it is a great opportunity to add links to your sitemap. 

    

Check out how Amazon does it (click here).  If you track the site map provided, you will find that Amazon allows the spiders to find every SKU page within 3 clicks.

1) http://www.amazon.com/sitemap_index_4.xml

2) http://www.amazon.com/sitemap_page_4044.xml.gz

3)  http://www.amazon.com/10-Wally-Joiner-Autographed-Baseball/dp/B001H9R37Q

    

Following the 3 click rule, Amazon ensures that they will receive improved natural search results for each item – even this baseball that is autographed by Wally Joiner.

    

Until next time,

    

Dan

    

    

    

Change Is Coming . . . Again.

 “I want the rest of you cowboys to know something:  there’s a new sheriff in town and his name is” . . . Google Chrome.  I was watching the movie 48 Hours this last week, and it dawns on me that this line from Reggie Hammond could be Google’s new slogan.  When companies like Amazon and Google enter new markets, the competition has reason to worry.  How do you think things are going over at MapQuest now that Google Maps has 360 degree photos of basically every street in America?

    

Google Chrome, an open sourced web browser, is still in the beta stage – but it’s beginning to make an impact.  Right out of the gate, Chrome is posting a market share of over 1% as reported by StatCounter.com.  While that may not seem like much, it is a crack in the dam, and with the power of Google behind it, you need to check it out.

    

Why, because if you are running a web site, you need to understand how you site renders on this new browser.   “Personally”, says Mark Miller, Senior Technical Lead at iPower.com, “I'll install it to see how it renders web pages, and to play around with the Gears technology.”  Others, like Mark Burgunder, Webmaster at Avanti Hosting, believes it will take market share from Internet Explorer and Fire Fox.  “I have some clients now that already associate the Internet with Google, so a browser from Google will seem logical to them.”

    

“Chrome's screen footprint is very streamlined, which should make it attractive to users of mini-notebooks and other small portable devices” states Mark Long of Newsfactor.com.  “The browser's speedy engine is also likely to be attractive once it arrives in the mobile space.”

    

So load it on your PC or Mac and check it out – some of your customers already are.

    

Until next time,

    

Dan

    

    

Tag - You're It!

Competing online certainly isn’t getting any easier, nor is it getting any less expensive.  But there is a cost effective way to showcase your products through Natural Search.  Sometimes referred to as SEO, Search Engine Optimization allows Google, Yahoo and MSN to use crawlers to determine what content is on your site and rank it accordingly.  

   

       

   

   

   

There are a number of different SEO strategies, and one of them is using a Tag Cloud.  A Tag Cloud is a type of metadata that “helps describe an item and allows it to be found again by browsing or searching.”   Originally developed and used on Flickr, tag clouds not only allow search engines to rank your web site, but they also allow people to quickly identify similar content as they browse your site.

   

I’ve found an interesting site that will generate a tag cloud for you automatically.  You should check it out.  Tag Cloud Generator will take you through four easy steps.  You can manually create your tags or allow Tag Cloud Generator to do it for you.  Once it is done, you can copy the HTML code directly into your site.

   

   

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Until next time,

   

Dan

    

   

   

   

Nothing Horrible About It

 

This past Summer, during the Writer’s Strike, Joss Whedon pulled a few friends together and made a musical about a would be Super Villain. At first glance you might think that Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along-Blog would be a bust – but you would be in the minority.

Entertainment Weekly reported that the blog “was viewed over 2.2 million times in its first week”. You see, Joss Whedon is not your ordinary “creative type”. His credentials include being “an Academy Award-nominated and Hugo Award winning American writer, director and executive producer”. When he teamed up with Neil Patrick Harris, Nathan Fillion and Felicia Day, he created something special.

If you grew up enjoying Monty Python, you’ll enjoy this musical comedy.

So why include this topic in my blog? Simply put, if you have any doubt about the validity of the fourth screen ( 1- Movie Screen; 2 – Television Screen; 3 – Computer Screen; 4 – Mobile Screen ) you need to download this on your ipod. I guarantee you will become a fan.

“Whedon's gambit” reports Variety, “is the most high-profile example of a movement under way among Hollywood scribes to harness the marketing and distribution power of the Internet for their own creative (and moneymaking) ends, sidestepping the major studios and networks in the process.”

Check it out. You may even want to buy a Captain Hammer (he is a “corporate tool”) t-shirt.

Until next time,

Dan

 

 

The Kids Are Going Back To School - Are You?

    

As Summer draws to a close, the kids know that school is just around the corner.  I can remember when September was a 4-letter word (Sept).  It meant that your free time was over and you could no longer sleep in each and every day.

    

My wife and I try to instill the notion that the world is a competitive place and it makes a difference what grades you get.  Learning separates you from the pack.  The more you learn, the more opportunities become available to you.

    

Even as we get older, the same wisdom holds true.  We attend seminars and read books in order to keep up with what is happening in the world around us.  But as the world becomes more hectic, free time becomes more precious.  I’m not sure about you, but I need to work evenings and weekends just to keep up.

    

One chunk of time each day that I can devote to learning is during my commute.  Coming to work and heading home each day constitutes a fairly large amount of time.  I’ve listened to my share of books on tape and talk radio.

    

Lately I have been listening to my ipod.  In fact, there are a number of great podcasts available that focus on a multitude of interests.  I’ve listed the contents of my ipod below.

    

·        Yosemite Voices

·        The McKinsey Quarterly Podcasts

·        The [b] School Blog

·        Small Biz Tech Girl

·        Make it Green Girl

·        Coffee Break Spanish

·        Harvard Business Video IdeaCast

·        Get-It-Done Guy

·        GeekBrief.TV

·        60-Second Science

·        Free Line Report

    

The world seems to be changing extremely fast.  I’m writing my rough draft for this blog post in Microsoft Word.  As I do so, the software is telling me that it doesn’t recognize such words as “podcast” and “ipod” . . . . it seems like everyone is having a hard time keeping up.  What's in your ipod?

    

Until next time,

    

Dan

    

    

    

     

Thanks For Sharing

    

When I was younger there were only three networks on TV and each one worked very hard at creating new shows each year.  Today we have hundreds of channels to choose from and each one struggles to create content that speaks to its audience.  In all of this comes a rise in talk shows and reality TV.  While TV.com may feel that The View is the top rated talk show, Starburst feels differently.  

    

Through the work of Dan Meth and Mark Vitelli, Channel Federator has changed the way Starburst advertises to their customers.  Nite Fite is now a weekly series and is available on iTunes, YouTube and the Channel Federator site. 

    

    

    

    

Every company has a different persona and Starburst is definitely targeting a younger crowd.  Check out their videos and keep an eye on Penalty & Lloyd.  They are changing both the world of advertising and the world of talk shows.

    

In the words of Lloyd, “thanks for sharing”.

    

Until next time,

    

Dan

 

 

 

 

Don't Get Too Close

    

On my way home today I stopped for a quick Chicago Dog at Portillo’s.  I’m not sure if you are familiar with this restaurant, but if you’re visiting the windy city, stopping at Portillo’s is a “must”.

    

Dick Portillo started the chain of restaurants in 1963 with a small trailer.  Over the years he won a number of “Silver Platter” awards and built 45 locations serving Hot Dogs and Italian Beef.

    

    

While the restaurant has a great theme centered around a 1920’s Speak Easy, the way they handle their drive-thru business is worth mentioning.  Customer service is something that is becoming harder and harder to come by in today’s economy.  As slow sales cause companies to cut back, Portillo’s has placed employees outside to take orders and collect money as you wait in line.  In fact, they feel that there is no reason to wait for the customer in front of you to have their order filled if your order is ready to go.  They will have an employee walk your order to your car as you wait in line . . .  so “don’t get to close”, your order may be ready sooner than you expect.

    

If you are out of town, you may not be able to use their drive-thru, but you can order online.  Check them out at www.Portillos.com – you’ll enjoy it!

    

Until next time,

    

Dan

   

   

Performing "Email Triage"

   

One of the sessions at the IRCE focused on email strategies.  The three speakers, Stefan Pollard, David Dwek and Lynnette Montgomery, had some great advice on how to manage the deliverability of your emails and increase your conversion rates.

    

It seems that we are all receiving way too much email these days.  Email has become the communication channel of choice and unfortunately, not all the communication can be considered value added.  Not only are we receiving unwanted advertisements in our personal email in-boxes, but even at work, co-workers seem confused about the difference between “reply” and “reply-all”.  When did email take the place of instant messaging?  Although I’m not that old, I do remember the days before email . . . when you either picked up the phone and called someone or walked over to their desk and spoke to them in person.

    

“An average person gets 274 emails a week in personal email,” states Pollard.  In order to deal with the flood of information, people are using “triage” methods to identify important pieces of mail.   By eliminating emails based solely on the senders name and/or the subject line, a vast number are never being read.  Pollard reports that 64% of people never look in their bulk folder and that 79% hit the “report as spam” button when they don’t recognize the sender.

    

This creates two problems.  First, ISPs will use spam complaints to determine if a sender is reputable or not.  With a general goal of having less than 1 spam complaint per 1,000 messages sent, ISPs are keeping track of what recipients feel are unrecognized, unexpected and unwanted communication.  “It is really about what the consumer wants,” states Charles Stiles, former Postmaster for America Online.  “Even if they asked to receive the email, if they don’t find value in it, then it is not a good email.”

    

The second problem is managing customer’s expectations.  Dwek believes that you not only need to allow customers to have the ability to easily unsubscribe from your email campaigns, but that you can learn valuable lessons when they do.  By building an effective email administrative center, you can allow customers to choose which emails they want to receive and which ones they want to opt out.  Through an effective opt out process, you can request free form text answers to better understand what is causing the customer’s decision.  With this knowledge, you can develop stronger email campaigns and adjust the frequency of the communication in order to drive higher open rates and stronger sales.

    

Until next time,

    

Dan

    

    

    

What I Did On My Summer Vacation

      

I just got back from a “vacation” at Camp Napowan.  Each year our Boy Scout Troop spends a week earning merit badges.  Over the past 7 days, our Troop earned badges in a number of different areas including Wilderness Survival and  Life Saving. 

     

You would think that after traveling into central Wisconsin and spending 7 days / 6 nights sleeping in tents and enjoying the sunny weather, I would be completely rested and recharged.  However, being responsible for 14 boys ranging in age from 11 to 16 years old is a little like herding cats.

           

At least I was able to get away from the office . . . well, not really (My wife would tell you that I brought every piece of electronic equipment I own).  In order to encourage more dads to spend the week at camp, Napowan has gone wireless.  Yes, the Trading Post now has wi-fi.  Throughout the day you see a number of dads working their BlackBerrys or Motorola Qs to access emails.  You see dads heading to the Trading Post with their laptop bags as they keep up with what’s going on in the office.

    

While it may seem strange to be splitting your time between answering emails and building campfires, by adding these services, the Boy Scouts are ensuring more parents are able to be a part of their son’s Summer Camp experience.  All in all, we had a great time and I was able to be a part of something that my son will remember for the rest of his life.

     

Until next time,

     

Dan

     

     

     

Thumbs Up

    

Last week I attended the Internet Retailer Conference and Exhibition.  There were several productive meetings with presentations covering customer acquisition, social marketing, rich media and site design.  Several of the presenters were industry experts who have gained their experience by developing and managing some of the fastest growing sites in North America.  Other presenters have developed their expertise by providing the services to the largest web sites.

    

Accompanying the first three days of the conference were several hundred vendors who were available to explain how their products or services could be of benefit in the areas of SEO / SEM, m-commerce, web design and various other areas.

    

I’ve noticed a change over the past few years as more and more vendors are using thumb drives to distribute their marketing materials.  Not only do these devices allow marketers to provide rich content to prospective clients, but they also cut down on the weight – a benefit to the sales people who ship them to the events and a benefit to those of us who carry a cross-section of marketing materials back home.  It’s common practice for sales people, who work these shows, to offer trinkets embossed with their logos.  Offering a free thumb drive allows them to provide something of value (thumb drives are cool) that people will use over and over again.

    

Thumb drives (also known as USB Drives, Flash Drives or Jump Drives) are portable storage devices that plug into any of your USB ports on your computer.  They are compact and can hold a vast amount of data ranging from 64 MB to 32 GB – that’s a lot of storage space.

    

When using thumb drives to distribute your marketing materials, you should provide content in both rich media and PDF formats.  By leveraging video and Flash applications, you can craft a compelling message about the benefits of your product or service.  At the same time, by providing the same information in a PDF format, you ensure that everyone will have the ability to access your information regardless of their computer specifications.

    

Keep an eye out the next time you attend a trade show and let me know if you are seeing the same trend.

    

Until next time,

    

Dan

    

    

OK - Just Drop It!

     

In the next few weeks I will be attending the Internet Retailer Conference in Chicago.   Each year, Internet Retailer puts out its Top 500 Guide, which lists the leading retail web sites.  For the last few years, Amazon.com has captured the top spot and will do so again this year. 

     

With an active customer base of over 76 million customers worldwide, Amazon remains the powerhouse to benchmark against.  With a product selection that is way beyond the initial “bookstore” mentality, inventory carrying costs could be a formidable burden for them.  However, “third party sellers”, reports Andrea James, “account for 30 percent of the units sold on Amazon.”

     

The art of drop shipping product “is a supply chain management technique in which the retailer does not keep the goods in stock, but instead transfers customer orders and shipment details to wholesalers, who then ship the goods directly to the customer.  The retailers make their profit on the difference between the wholesale and retail price.”

     

By engaging in this method of order fulfillment, retailers are able to increase their assortment of products and thus appeal to a larger base of customers.  Manufacturers are able to sell their products through a larger network of suppliers - and both parties are able to minimize their inventory carrying costs.

      

Entering the world of EDI communication can be daunting and if you want to know the difference between your EDI-850 and EDI-856 communications, Christopher Alexander gives a very good explanation in his recent article titled “What is EDI?”.  Ultimately, you are going to want to have a person dedicated to helping you not only set up your drop ship capabilities, but someone to manage it going forward. 

       

What does Staples, Sears, Kohls and Costco all have in common?  Along with prominent listings on the Top 500 Guide, they all use CommerceHub to help transmit and track their drop ship orders.  Finding the right third-party partner can be the difference between a small boost in sales versus having drop shipping constitute substantial component of your overall merchandising plan.

     

The web is built for companies like Amazon.  Being able to offer a broader selection to a wider audience are the defining characteristics of the Internet.  By leveraging your vendor’s inventory through drop ship processing, you can compete with the #1 retailer on the web.

    

Until next time,

     

Dan

    

     

    

Something To Chew On

   

The old advertisement told us that 4 out of 5 dentists chewed Trident Gum.  What it didn’t tell us, was that the last dentist was busy online updating her MySpace page.  “A recent study by Ipsos Insight found that one in five adults has visited a social networking site,” reports ClubSymantic.  “Some sites, such as Growing Bolder and Eons, cater specifically to people 50 and older.”

   

If your goal is to build a corporate blog that your customers find interesting, the first step is to ask them what’s on their mind.  “Send out a survey”, states Lee Ericson, “asking customers where they go for information about job-related issues.  What are their favorite blogs, online publications, organizations, and associations?”

   

Many times, the conversation may have already started.  If so, specific sites are already generating traffic as the community begins to center around a select number of key influencers. 

   

Key influencers are people in the community whose opinion matters.  Every writer aspires to have Oprah recommend their book to her community of viewers.  The same is possible in your community of customers.  Individuals who have a large network of contacts and whose opinion is held in high regard, can influence the actions of the community.

   

An easy way to find these key members of the community is to use Google Blog Search or Technorati.  With a little research, you can quickly identify highly trafficked blogs that deal with topics of interest to your customers.   The next step is to enter the conversation yourself.  No-one knows your business better than you, and by establishing yourself as an active member of the community, you begin to establish credibility and build an audience.

   

Until next time,

   

Dan

   

   

Are You Talking To Me?

   

That is the question our customers are asking us.  Are we talking to them?  Are we relevant?  Too often we answer that question from yesterday’s perspective.  As we communicate with our customers we follow the traditional path.

    

But the path has changed.  Using yesterday’s marketing techniques is becoming less and less effective.  Certainly there are still a large number of customers who respond to this type of communication.  However, each new customer who enters the market place is a digital native.  They do not respond to the established marketing messages the same way.  They require a dialog.  Sometimes it is a dialog with us and other times it is a dialog with their peer group.  “They don’t care about your ad,” writes Sarah Perez, “they care about what their friends think.”

    

    

    

    

With the dramatic growth in social media, change is required to remain relevant.  Not only are the Generation Y customers utilizing blogs, message boards and RSS feeds, it is becoming more and more common for Boomers to join the online community.

    

So the question remains, are you shifting toward the new media in a meaningful way?  Or are you simply repackaging your message and running the risk of becoming obsolete?

    

Until next time,

    

Dan

    

    

    

    

Get Off The Dime

    

As a consumer, you are exposed to massive amounts of advertising every day.  You hear it on the radio as you drive to work.  You see it on billboards, on busses and on T-shirts.  You receive it in the mail, in your email and on your favorite websites.

      

      

Do you remember any of it?

      

      

Odds are that a majority of the marketing materials you see go unnoticed.  In the old economy, this equated to wasted marketing dollars by the companies who were trying to get your attention – trying to change your buying habits.  Some would argue that these costs are still present in the new (ecommerce) economy.

      

      

But I disagree.

      

      

In the old economy it took a substantial investment in time and money to create and place a billboard advertisement.  It is not easy (but it is definitely expensive) creating a television commercial.  Let’s face it, in the old economy you had to be careful and judicious with your marketing dollars.  Now, as marketers transition from the old economy to the new economy they bring with them these same practices.  They believe that taking measured and deliberate steps to create an online marketing campaign (on their site and in their emails) is a “best practice”.

      

      

But I disagree.

     

      

Online, life moves at a different speed.  If the people who view your web messaging don’t “hear it” they remain only consumers to you . . . and potentially become customers to your competition.

      

      

Change your message.  Change it often.  Use your web analytics tools to quickly identify which messages are being heard and which are not.  You now have the opportunity to refine your marketing strategy in real time.  Don’t wait to make a change.  Get off the dime.  Online, you must adapt in order to survive. 

      

      

“Learning is not compulsory . . . neither is survival.”

      

      

Until next time,

      

      

Dan

      

      

      

      

One Clear Voice

    

Being able to establish your place in the market is imperative for survival – but being able to define a brand that resonates with your customers is imperative for success.

    

“Corporate branding is a serious undertaking which entails more skills and activities than just an updated glossy marketing facade with empty jargon” explains Martin Roll from Venture Republic.  Brands must be able to create a “dialogue with an authentic voice.”

    

This ‘authentic voice’ is transmitted through your website.  Not only are you having daily conversations with your customers, but they, in turn, are having conversations about you.  Therefore, your brand messaging must be clear, consistent and relevant. 

    

         

    

    

Keeping a consistent message over time has proven to be difficult for many companies.  The Blake Project, a strategy consulting group, describes successful companies as those businesses that have a “rigorous attention to the brand’s position.”  Over time, however, that attention can wane and companies can stray from having a single, focused brand position.  “The next thing you know, you’re about to come down with a bad case of brand schizophrenia.” 

    

Once your brand lacks focus, you lose your ‘authentic voice’ and then, you lose your customer’s loyalty.

    

Until next time,

    

Dan

    

    

    

    

Unplugged

Ever been “off the grid”?  Sometimes it’s healthy to get a little R&R from the day to day activity on the net.

This last weekend I had the opportunity to “unplug”. Being the father of two Boy Scouts, I’ve spent a number of nights camping. Today, for instance, I just got back from an annual trip to Galena, IL.

For the last 54 years, on the last full weekend in April, over a thousand Boy Scouts make an annual trip take part in the Grant’s Pilgrimage Parade.  My kids have been in the parade a number of times and they have always had a great time.

While I had planned on blogging about building a powerful online brand, I’ve run out of time - perhaps next week.   Instead, I’ve seen the stars on a cold clear night, heard a wild turkey in the pre-dawn hours and eaten food cooked over an open fire . . . food prepared by boys that have been playing in the mud and haven’t properly washed their hands (this is why Moms don’t come on Boy Scout campouts).

Until next time,

Dan

Spreading The Word - Corporate Blogging

It is becoming more apparent that in order to manage the brand, companies need to be actively involved in social networking.  People are out on the net and they are talking about you.  The trick is to get your advocates (customers) talking about you.

   

One way to help facilitate this type of discussion is to start a corporate blog.  “More and more companies”, writes Mitch Joel, “are looking at the power of corporate blogs”.  In Joel’s latest post, he does a great job outlining the seven basic types of corporate blogs: 

   

·        Industry

·        Idea Storm

·        Individual

·        CEO

·        Departmental

·        Parody

·        Customer Service

   

But, as with anything you do, even this type of customer contact needs to serve a purpose.  If your readers (customers) don’t find your blog interesting, what good have you done?

    

Did you see Jake McGee’s post about the Graco blog?  In this post he outlined several key components of a successful corporate blog.  First and foremost it must have good content.  “The Graco blogging team clearly understands that they’re here to connect with parents,” writes McGee, “and what better way than to talk about parenting?”  Along with the content, the Graco blog  makes it easy for customers to interact and become involved in the conversation.  They keep the content fresh by enlisting a number of bloggers rather than relying upon a single individual.

    

Spreading the work load among several people certainly has its advantages.  However you need to enlist volunteers rather than draftees.  Otherwise you run the risk of being exposed as shown in this news excerpt from Barely Political.

    

    

    

         

Until next time,

    

Dan

    

    

    

    

Keeping It Simple (RSS)

Because of the nature of my work, I run across a large number of websites that I want to keep track of for future reference.  In fact, I have well over 100 site addresses tucked away in various folders in my “Favorites” file.  Within this collection of sites, there are a few that I reference on a regular basis.  But even with this smaller list, I still have a hard time keeping up with all the content posted each week.

    

By setting up an RSS feed for this smaller collection of sites, I can quickly scan the contents to see which blog posts I need to read.  RSS stands for “Really Simple Syndication” and is a method for collecting and organizing web content from blogs, newspapers and websites.

   

In this edition of My Two Cents – 60 Second Web Update, I give a brief overview of RSS.  While you may or may not be familiar with these feeds, they are offered on a number of web sites that you visit regularly.  In fact, look to the right of this post and just below the daily cartoon you will see a square orange icon.  This is the RSS symbol.

    

    

    

Using an RSS feed to syndicate information is not just for blogs and podcasts – it is quickly becoming a standard ecommerce marketing tool.  “If you are interested in great electronics deals”, explains the Wal*Mart website, “you could subscribe to our Rollbacks feed for electronics.  Then whenever we roll back the price of an item, it is automatically added to the feed and it will show up when you view the feed, or it can show up as a short headline in your RSS reader that will link to the appropriate Walmart.com page.”

      

Take a look around your favorite sites and check for the RSS icon.  You’ll be surprised how often you’ll see it.  Best of all – it’s FREE. 

      

Until next time,

    

Dan

    

    

Return to Sender

After my last blog post ( How High Can You Bounce? ), I had a couple of people comment on the difference between a Landing Page Bounce and an Email Bounce. 

    

An email bounce is when your outbound marketing message is returned undeliverable.  The Email Experience Council (EEC) explains that “emails can bounce for more than 30 reasons:  the email address is incorrect or has been closed; the recipient’s mailbox is full, the mail server is down, or the system detects spam or offensive content.”

    

All of these “30 reasons” fall into two categories – a hard bounce and a soft bounce.  “A hard bounce” explains Brian Anderson, Director of Web Marketing for Staples’ Quill.com business division, “can be defined as anything to the right of the [at] sign and a soft bounce is to the left of the [at] sign.” 

    

In other words, a hard bounce is undeliverable due to an incorrect address or a mail box that no longer exists.    A soft bounce is a temporary problem usually due to either the mail server being down or the mail box being full.  Either way, you can resend a soft bounce but should not resend a hard bounce. 

    

Reagan Taylor, email marketing consultant, gives some guidance on how to address bounces and other email issues as a regular contributor to Sundeep Kapur’s blog, Email Yogi.  She has some good advice – you should check it out. 

    

Until next time,

    

Dan

    

    

    

How High Can You Bounce?

There are a number of web metrics you need to track in order to run a profitable web site - one of these is your Bounce Rate.  Avinash Kaushik has written about this metric a number of times and explains that “it is easy to understand, hard to mis-understand and can be applied to any of your efforts.”

    

In this post I’m launching my first edition of my "60 Second Update" video blog.  Here I’ll give a quick look at understanding your bounce rate and how to calculate it.

    

    

    

    

    

    

While you will definitely want to focus on your highest trafficked landing pages, Kaushik suggests also measuring this metric as it relates to your Referring URLs and Paid Search Terms.  By doing so, you will be able to identify “where you are wasting money and what content on your site needs revisiting.”

    

Until next time,

    

Dan

   

    

    

Turn Out The Lights

I don’t know if the lights went out in your house last Saturday night, but they went out in mine.  My wife had told me about Earth Hour earlier in the week.  I actually forgot about it until around 7:15 p.m. when I happened to be checking my Linkedin account and saw a question posted asking why Google had gone “black” for a period of time.  Conrad Warre posted an answer stating “Google turned black today as a gesture to raise awareness of a worldwide energy conservation [effort]”.

    

While Google acknowledges that simply turning their screen black does not actually save any energy, they “believe in doing [their] part to help combat climate change”.  “Further”, their web site states, “we think the ‘lights out’ idea’s individual-centered nature is something that millions of people worldwide can participate in.  In short, we really like it.  So we did something about it.”

    

It started last year when the World Wildlife Fund worked with the city of Sydney, Australia and convinced the Harbour Bridge and Opera House (along with millions of Sydney’s citizens) to go dark for an hour. 

     

Well, we turned out the lights and, to the initial complaints of our children, played board games by candle light. It turned out that everyone had a great time.  I won’t tell you that I’m the most environmentally conscientious person in Chicagoland, but I’m trying.

      

You can visit www.WorldWildlife.org/Climat to find out how you can make a difference throughout the year to fight climate change.

    

Until next time,

    

Dan

    

    

    

Driving Sales In Our Own Backyard

“The Internet”, says Kerry Miller, “has made it easier for even the smallest companies to go global by reaching new markets all over the world. But many companies continue to overlook the opportunities that the Web creates right in their own backyards.”

    

Last week, my blog post (¿Cómo se escribe “more sales”?) dealt with the opportunities available to web sites that choose to market to the Hispanic community.  A recent report from The Media Audit, a Houston based media survey firm, stated that the number of Hispanics shopping online has moved from only 27% five years ago, to over 41% today.  In fact, their data shows that over 23% of these shoppers make five or more purchases in a year and over 12% of them make an average of one purchase per month.

    

Knowing that Hispanics are the fastest growing group in the U.S. and that their online penetration is quickly increasing, you would think more companies would refine their messaging to target this group.  However, a study done last year by Common Sense Advisory, a Massachusetts based research firm, found that of 102 top U.S. retail web sites, only 18 of them contained Spanish-language content.  When contacted in Spanish regarding customer service issues, only half of these 18 sites responded in the same language.

    

If you’re concerned about your companies ability to handle translating your entire site into Spanish, don’t worry.  As long as you set appropriate expectations with these customers, you can translate your customer service pages and select emails first.  As your Spanish speaking customer base grows, you can increase the investment. 

    

You should take advantage of the fact that this segment of potential customers is extremely brand loyal and you have the opportunity to distinguish yourself from your competition by marketing to them in a culturally relevant way.  With a small investment in translation services and a select group of bi-lingual customer service representatives, you can establish yourself as the company of choice.

    

Until next time,

    

Dan

    

    

¿Cómo se escribe “more sales”?

In a troubled economy, we are all searching for additional sales opportunities.  As it turns out, there may be a new market closer to you than you realize.  The Hispanic population is the fastest growing segment in the country.  For those companies who are prepared to market to these customers, new sales opportunities abound.

    

In a recent blog post, Oren Harari covered the topic of how the global economy is effecting us here in the States.  While there is certainly a lot of opportunity for us outside our borders, a majority of companies have yet to realize the sales potential of focusing on this market segment here at home.

    

A number of companies are eager to help you translate your web site into Spanish.  One such Company is Language Line Services.  Language Line recently merged with Lingo Systems.  The company offers phone and video based services, document translation and face-to-face interpretation.

    

  For your own personal growth, you may want to learn the language yourself.  I took a year of Spanish in High School and “kick” myself for never having really studied the language.  Now I am going back to school to take a few classes from my local community college (who knew that after 15 years after completing my Master’s I would again find myself taking night classes).  If you are thinking about brushing up on your Spanish you may want to try Coffee Break Spanish.  It’s available as a free podcast on iTunes.  You should check it out.

    

Until next time – hasta pronto!

    

Dan

Go Jayhawks!

Are you getting ready for March Madness?  At the end of this coming weekend we will all be able to work on our brackets - but you still need to get set up. 

   

   

You may be planning on using one of the many web sites to track your bracket during the tournament, but you should also get set up on ESPN360.  Check it out and you will find that you will be able to keep an eye on multiple games at the same time.  It’s very cool.  Right now I’m two college basketball games, a rodeo and a soccer game.

   

   

While you’re at it, set up your own MyESPN page.  It is still in the Beta stage and they are looking for your help.  You can use it to track your favorite teams.

   

   

Don’t forget to sign up for the ESPN Tournament Challenge.  You can fill out 10 brackets and have the chance to win $10,000!

   

   

Until next time,

   

   

Dan

The Next Wave

Over the past year, I’ve come to depend on my Motorola Q.    Previous to that, I had a BlackBerry that allowed me to keep tabs on my email.  As all of you know, we have become inundated with emails.  Ten years ago we were able to run successful businesses with weekly meetings and the occasional memo.  Now I seem to always be in meetings and always reading emails.

    

    

Mobile devices such as the Motorola Q or the BlackBerry Curve are very cool and allow you to access the internet, view maps and keep on top of your emails.  I was speaking with a friend the other day who said he used to believe the BlackBerry was “top of the line” until he got his iPhone.  Leave it to Apple to change the world again.

    

    

The point is this . . . the world is changing – again.  Remember back in the late ‘90s when you were reading articles about Amazon and hearing people question if that business model would really work?  Guess what – it does.

    

    

We have talked before about how Yahoo! is building an “open environment”.  These changes, in both software and hardware, are the beginning of the next revolution. The question is, what are you doing to prepare your website for these opportunities? Will you take advantage of this change or will you miss the next wave?

    

    

Until next time,

    

    

Dan

    

    

Know Your Customer

The old adage about knowing your audience is especially true when dealing with your current customers.     After you have taken the steps (and investment) to develop a relationship with your customers, you need to ensure that you are maximizing it – both from your perspective and from your customer’s perspective.

   

It’s true that identifying the correct metrics is crucial to measuring your success, but identifying what motivates your customers is crucial to your ongoing success.     Over the years I’ve heard almost everyone talk about one-to-one marketing, but I’ve rarely seen it.     While true one-to-one is difficult to achieve in the consumer (B2C) marketplace, the opportunity to deliver a tighter, more relevant experience is very possible.

   

By evaluating your customer’s order history, you can begin to distinguish patterns that separate them into various buyer types.  We are all familiar with measuring RFM (Recency, Frequency and Monetary Value) from a print perspective, but how can we group web customers in such a way that we can strengthen our relationship with them?     Two different ways to do this is to (1) focus on where the customer is in their lifecycle, and (2) focus on the customer’s product preferences.

   

By focusing on the customer’s lifecycle, you can modify your communication with them as they move from Try-er to Buyer .     You will also change your message as you see them begin to drop off your active customer base.     The earlier you can identify their decrease in activity and re-activate them the more successful you will be.

   

You will also need to adjust your messaging by your customer’s preferences.     Most websites offer a variety of products: sometimes it is content and therefore, focused on selling clicks or page views, while other times it is merchandise and therefore focused on ecommerce sales.     Ultimately, we are all trying to extend the customer’s experience by making our content more relevant.     By understanding what motivates our customers and grouping them accordingly, we can identify product or content opportunities that the customer will be more likely to find relevant and compelling.

   

The idea of “same like you”, where you identify products or content that other similar customers found interesting, is a successful way to expand the customer’s share of wallet with your website.

   

Unless you are selling muumuus, one size does not fit all.     Knowing that, how can you expect your marketing message to be relevant to your entire customer base.     Understanding when and why your customers are interacting with your website is the first step in developing this relevant marketing message.     How are you categorizing your customers and how are you adjusting your messaging?

   

Until next time,

   

Dan

   

   

Going Mobile

“I'm going home
And when I want to go home,

I'm going mobile”

    

When Pete Townsend wrote these lyrics, he wasn’t thinking about Yahoo! Go 2.0 Mobile Service.  But with Yahoo!’s announcement at CES last month that they would be making their mobile platform open to developers and publishers, it seems we will all be going mobile.

      

I’ve gone ahead and set up my phone with the 2.0 version and will upgrade to the 3.0 version once it is available.  “Unlike the 2.0 version,” Fred Aun of TechNewsWorld reports, “which was limited to mobile-optimized services created by Yahoo, the new Go is an open environment.”

    

Yahoo! has created a software development kit with guidelines for creating, testing and submitting widgets.  You can check out the guidelines and begin reading their blog.

    

Although the 3.0 version is still in Beta, they have just opened their testing servers for you to launch your widgets and check them out.  “Once you are ready to distribute your Widget to Yahoo’s large mobile audience, submit it to the Widget Gallery so people can find and use your Widget.”

    

“I'm an air-conditioned gypsy
That's my solution
Watch the police and the taxman miss me!
I'm mobile!”

    

Until next time,

    

Dan

    

      

Get a Bag

Valentine’s Day is coming up and I’m starting to see red shaped hearts all over the place.  Now, after having been married for almost 20 years, I should be shopping for a nice piece of jewelry and attaching a note in a heart shaped card.  However, I have the urge to buy my wife something green.

   

   

Why?  Because green “says I want you. Love you. Need you. Like red never could.”

        

          

I remember back in high school when my buddy Mike bought a couple bags of M&Ms, emptied out the contents and then placed the green ones into one of the bags.  The urban legend was that green M&Ms sent the “right” message.  Apparently, Mike was ahead of his time. 

   

   

While looking through the Sunday paper, I came across a coupon for bags full of Green M&Ms.  Over the years we have enjoyed the M&M personalities come to life in various commercials, but lately there has been a new girl in town . . . and she is sexy!  Apparently, Ms. Green may be “hot”, but she melts for no-one.

   

   

The people at Mars have done such a great job creating the M&Ms brand, these characters have become a part of the American culture.  Keep an eye out for how they continue to tell the story of Ms. Green.

    

    

   

   

Until next time,

   

   

Dan

   

    

An Ounce of Prevention for Website Design

It seems to me that there are two different types of Website Usability that a company can employ. The first is to capture customer feedback (both potential customer and current customer) and incorporate it into your site’s design. The second is to build your site without this input and obtain usability feedback via your customer’s spending . . . or lack thereof.

    

    

I’m amazed at the number of times I hear of websites making changes without getting any substantial input from customers. Leveraging information obtained from outside sources is easy to do if you have sufficient funds to incorporate data from companies such as Usability Sciences, BizRate, or Omniture.  However, if you are a small company and can’t afford these services, at a minimum you need to enlist help from current customers through email surveys. You will be surprised to learn how many customers will accept the offer to provide feedback to a well run (home grown) survey program.

    

    

Ultimately you will receive the customer’s opinion of your website design. If they find it difficult to navigate, or your internal search results are not helpful, your customers will go elsewhere. Remember, your current customers are your competitor’s prospects.

    

    

Until next time,

    

    

Dan

    

    

Understanding the Numbers

Tracking your web metrics is not enough - you also have to understand how to leverage the results.  Avinash Kaushik focuses his blog, Occam’s Razor, on how to understand and leverage these metrics.  As one of the leaders in defining “web analytics”, Kaushik’s latest post asks the question, “is conversion rate enough?”

    

      

The standard focus of your Marketing or Web Merchandising department is to maximize conversion.  But is this always the correct target?  Maybe not.

    

    

What if your goals did not always prompt you to maximize conversion.  At first glance, you might think I’m nuts.  But, if you’re trying to run a profitable web site, you need to factor in basic “margin management”. 

    

    

You will always have a stronger conversion rate with your opening price point (OPP) merchandise.  However, if you only use these products and, therefore, focus on driving your conversion rate, you will find your product mix will adversely affect your bottom line.

    

    

Developing a promotional strategy that finds the balance between driving conversion and maximizing margin is paramount.  You need to identify the differences in your customer base in order to do this.  Your acquisition strategy may lead you to promote a larger balance of your OPP merchandise to try-ers (see Defining Success), whereas your retention strategy will lead you to up-sell current customers to higher margin products.

    

    

Until next time,

    

    

Dan

    

    

Maybe It Is Easy Being Green

It’s no surprise that environmentally friendly products are beginning to find more “shelf-space” across the web.  The number of blogs and web sites dedicated to this cause seems to be growing at an exponential rate.  Even some of the larger retailers are getting into the act.

   

   

GreenBiz.com reports that the Retailer Industry Leaders Association (RILA), a group of 55 retailers that account for over $1.5 trillion in sales, “aims to develop cleaner and greener business practices while making sure customers and policymakers recognize the progress made by the group.”

   

   

Wal-mart, which is a member of the RILA, has taken steps to have their vendors develop greener packaging.  Not only is this good for the environment, but it’s also good for Wal-mart’s bottom line. 

 

   

In fact, as I write this blog post, the bottle of water I’m drinking is promoting their reduction in packaging and its’ related environmental benefit.    Ice Mountain’s new bottle “looks and feels different because it is purposely designed with an average of 30% less plastic to be easier on the environment.”

   

   

While more and more people are showing that they are eco-conscience by using canvas grocery bags and switching to compact fluorescent light bulbs (CFL), many are asking what impact they can make on helping the environment.  InterCall offers a Green Quiz that will help you “test your knowledge and learn simple ways to be green at work.”  Through GreenConferencing.com, InterCall is using this quiz as a means of identifying prospective customers by offering to plant a tree for each quiz taken.  Although the promotional period has ended (12/31/07), you will find the quiz informative and fun to take.

   

   

GreenLights offers an interesting way to calculate the benefits (environmental and financial) of switching to CFLs.  “If every American home replaced just one incandescent light bulb with a CFL, we’d save enough energy to light 2.5 million homes a year and prevent greenhouse gases equivalent to the emissions of nearly 800,000 cars.”  Check out their savings calculator by clicking on the image below.

   

   

With the additional information on the web helping consumers learn more about how they can make a positive impact, and the business community realizing that reducing their carbon footprint can be profitable, I think we will begin to discover that only Kermit will find it difficult being green.

    

    

Until next time,

   

   

Dan   

    

    

Hey Buddy, Can You Spare a Dime?

I recently saw an article in USA Today about Peer-to-Peer Lending (P2P) online.  Cathy Chu reported that  “Celent, [consultant to the finaincial services industry] projects that $5.8 billion in peer-to-peer loans will be made in the USA by 2010, an 800% leap from the amount this year.” 

    

         

Now I know it’s been a while since I’ve been in a finance class, but I was under the impression that determining risk and the associated interest level was a complicated process.  But apparently the market for unsecured loans has become part of the web 2.0 social economy.

    

    

The number of sites offering to facilitate these transactions appears to be growing.  Whether it’s Zopa, Lending Club or the upcoming Loanio, finding or making an unsecured loan is as easy as googling “peer loans”.  In fact, Lending Club has a presents in Facebook and several advertisements on YouTube.

    

    

    

      

I watched Larry King this week and his guest was Suzi Orman.  If you have ever watched her, you will find her message to be fairly consistent, “reduce your personal debt and increase your savings”.  With the reportedly large amount of credit card debt that the nation is now struggling with, I wonder how this new financial marketplace will effect the economy.

    

    

What do you think?

    

    

Until next time,

    

    

Dan

    

Who You Callin' a "POTUS"

Living in suburban Chicago means that for certain holidays, my family and I must make the trip back to Kansas City.  As we made the trip last week, we traveled across the state of Iowa – the first battle ground in the race for the President of the United States (POTUS).

    

I thought it would be interesting to see how the Presidential Candidates used the Web 2.0 philosophy to drive their message to the people. In addressing this topic, I decided it was time to hone my video blogging skills and put together the first video edition of My Two Cents.

    

    

    

      

Although I accomplished the task, I must admit, this video post is both rough and dry . . . there appears to be a lot of work needed for my audio and segment transition skills. I’ll keep you posted on my progress!  :)

    

    

Until next time,

    

    

Dan

    

    

Learning is Not Compulsory

I’m reading Seth Godin’s new book, Meatball Sundae, and I am seeing some similar themes as outlined in Oren Harrari’s  book, Break from the Pack.  Both illustrate that in the new marketplace, you must  not  only differentiate your offering, you must also differentiate the delivery of your message. 

    

    

As the customer becomes bombarded with messages through email, social media and a multitude of websites, you need to generate creative marketing messages in order to stand out.  Godin explains that “innovations have not only created new ways to spread ideas, but have also made some of the old ways far less effective.”

    

    

As we try to adjust our message to be relevant in this changing medium, Harari warns that we run the risk of simply being a “me too” and fail to truly differentiate ourselves in not only how we promote our message, but also in the substance of what we have to offer.  He believes that delivering both good service and good products is not enough. 

    

    

The business environment today is one of websites and drop-ship (3^rd party logistics) networks.  The guy down the street, who runs a business out of his basement, is competing with the big players.  From the customer’s point of view, they can’t tell a difference.  If the guy down the street has a sister-in-law or cousin who is a website designer, your company (as it lumbers through its monthly “go-to-market” process) could actually be at a distinct disadvantage.

    

    

Who doesn’t offer Free Shipping? 

 

         

         

Who doesn’t deliver in 2-3 working days (if not next day)? 

 

    

         

      

    

Who doesn’t claim to have a 100% Guarantee?

      

   

    

      

Web 2.0

    

    

Every time I read someone’s blog or listen to a webinar, I hear of the importance of driving the web 2.0 experience.  As web merchants, not only do we struggle to keep the product data accurate and meaningful, create promotions that resonate with our customers and ensure the day-to-day activities of our websites are under control, now we must provide a fuller, richer customer experience.

    

    

Streaming media, customer reviews and blogs are quickly changing from being differentiators to simply being the cost of doing business.  In the last five years, we have stopped being “broad-line retailers” and started being “long-tail e-tailers”.  Now we must take the same steps with our marketing message. In order to compete, we must embrace the emerging social and rich media in order to ensure our message is heard.

    

    

The well known quality guru, W. Edwards Deming, once said "Learning is not compulsory . . . neither is survival."  What survival techniques are you learning in order to compete in today's Web 2.0 environment?

    

      

Until next time,

    

    

Dan

Grab Life by the Beans

Did you see it in today’s newspaper?  Juan Valdez will be a guest star on Nip/Tuck.  Well, I might have some facts wrong on this.  However, it appears that Juan will be getting a makeover. 

   

   

In today’s Tribune, I saw an article that stated Juan would soon be “younger, more vigorous, more eco-conscious”.  About time something has been done about him.  When I was a kid, I wasn’t afraid of monsters under my bed, I was afraid of Juan Valdez creeping into my house and making coffee.

    

    

Apparently this isn’t the first time that Juan has tried to target a younger crowd.  In the 1990’s, Juan  was part of the “grab life by the beans” campaign which focused on the “surge of espresso bars which brought with them a new generation of younger coffee drinkers.”

    

    

Juan will have a hard time getting in touch with today’s younger crowd.  While it isn’t difficult to find the closest Starbucks, even here, Juan is under pressure.  Starbucks offers a wide range of coffees from all around the world – and now with the economy having problems, Starbucks seems to be struggling.

    

    

    

It will be interesting to see how the National Federation of Coffee Growers of Columbia leverage the Juan Valdez brand on the Internet in the coming months.  Although I’m not personally invested, I don’t consume ANY caffeine, I’ll keep my eyes open for the way Juan builds excitement on the web.

    

    

Well, I’m running low on my Diet Mountain Dew (does that have any caffeine?).

    

    

Until next time,

    

    

Dan

Keeping Up with the Competition

It appears that everyone had a great Cyber Monday.  ComScore reports that online sales jumped 21% over prior year.  It sounds like the soft economy is not hampering the online sales this Holiday season.  However, the question we should be asking ourselves is “how well did our competitors do?”.

    

    

A great way to keep track of your competition is to use Alexa.  This web site allows you to view the traffic generated by any website.  By using this site, you can track your competitors over time.  Here I’m taking a look at the leaders of the Office Supply category and it appears that Staples is continuing to win.

         

    

Everyone is putting their best marketing efforts out there.  I’ve seen two different offers from Amazon recently.  The first was to promote their next day shipping capabilities by offering a $5 Instant Savings when you selected Free Next Day Shipping.  While this seems it would be a very expensive promotion, this is the second time I have seen them offer this.  Therefore, you would have to assume that this is effective for them.

      

The second offer from Amazon was to leverage the excitement over the Black Friday and Cyber Monday Offers and to stretch them over the following week. They sent out an email allowing prospective customers to vote on a series of offers and then followed up with the customers as these items went on sale.

   

    

As we move through December, we can track our competitors by following their emails and home page promotions and then measuring their success through Alexa.com.  But the truth is, the 4th quarter has been planned and put into place months ago.  The next step is to take these learnings and weave them into our Spring and Summer planning.  We all know that Amazon continues to set the pace in both traffic and sales.  By taking a look at their promotional offers and cadence, we can benchmark these against our own plans and measure the corresponding success in the coming quarters.

    

    

Until next time,

    

    

Dan

    

Making Holiday Dreams Come True

Every year my brother would comment that “this was the best Christmas ever”.  In the retail world its been a few years since we have been able to say that.  This weekend the season begins (officially – actually the stores, and some neighbors, have had their holiday decorations out for quite some time).

    

    

Since shopping is a social event for many of us, there has been a lot of talk this year about building this aspect into our web sites.  Lisa Wehr gives a few examples in her article Deck the Halls with Blogs and Videos: Improve Your Holiday Sales with Social Media.  Lisa is not alone in this observation.  I’m sure you have seen various cool applications that help customers enjoy themselves while on a given site. 

    

    

I came across one on Office Depot last week that was very creative -  Strange Little Office Beings (SLOBs).  With a Boris Karloff style voice over and a copy writer from the Grinch Who Stole Christmas, Depot has been able to create a very interesting rich media environment that I suspect is getting a fair amount of traffic.

    

    

When I first came across the SLOBs, they were highlighted in the main ad panel of Depot’s home page.  Using flash, they were able to create an eye-catching piece of marketing.  However, when I returned to the site earlier this week, it appears that it was pulled from the main home page ad and is now relegated to a small banner ad on the main category pages.  I wonder if they chose to pull the ad from this premium placement due to slow sales or if it was part of their prep for Cyber Monday.

    

    

   

    

The Big Weekend

    

As companies prep for the big weekend, they are using their home page space to preview their offers to the public.  While most of the country is focused on eating a turkey meal with all the traditional dishes, I will be going online to place my orders.  Many of you will go out on Friday to fight the crowds and try to get that great deal on the ipod or laptop (even though there is only a limited number of these items at each retail outlet). I will simply be going online.

    

    

    

Well, I wish you the best in your holiday shopping experiences and in your holiday sales numbers.

    

    

Until next time,

    

    

Dan

Defining Success

Increasing online sales can be driven via several different tactics.  You will always focus on bringing more people to your site in an effort to increase your customer base.  Maximizing paid search, optimizing affiliate marketing and leveraging off-line marketing are just some of the tasks that e-marketers face every day.  At the same time, the web merchant focuses on developing promotions, improving conversion and building up-sell opportunities.

   

Another required task is to focus on your key customer groups in order to increase their awareness of your entire product selection.  This approach, focusing on Category Penetration, attempts to increase the number of categories that your customer purchases from your site, and thus, increase their order total and lifetime value.

    

To be successful, you need to sell more stuff to every customer who comes to your site.  However, your greatest opportunity lies with your loyal customer base.  Everyone knows that retaining a current customer is always more profitable than attracting a new customer.  The same can be said for increasing the average order amount for these two groups. 

    

New customers are “try-ers”, and your focus should be on building a buying pattern with them to the point where you are “top of mind” for your product categories.  This may take 2 or 3 purchases before these customer move from “try-er” to “buyer”. 

   

Your existing customer base has already developed that buying pattern.  With this group you are focusing on expanding the selection of products that they purchase from you and increasing the frequency of purchases.  RFM (Recency, Frequency and Monetary Value) is the secret to success that we all learned in our 101 marketing back in college. 

   

Once you have developed an understanding of how your customers break down in the RFM hierarchy, you would want to determine the penetration by product category for each group to determine if additional promotional offers should be developed for different customers.

    

As you make these promotions available over time, you need to develop a method for understanding their effectiveness.  One method that I prefer is to calculate the Average Order Contribution by product category.  This metric is very similar to calculating the Revenue per Book ($/bk) that you have used in determining catalog effectiveness.

   

With $/bk, you are really determining the interplay between the catalog’s response rate and the average order amount.  Both of these metrics can be optimized independently, but in the end, you will find the Revenue per Book the key metric.

   

            Response Rate = Number of Orders / Number of Catalogs Mailed

            Average Order = Total Revenue / Number of Orders

            Revenue per Book = Total Revenue / Number of Catalogs Mailed

    

As you move from your print media to your web site, you will want to track the effectiveness of your marketing materials in a similar manner.  Here you may be reviewing your email or affiliate efforts.  You can calculate the Revenue Dollars per Delivered email ($ / Delivered) or the Return on Advertising Spend (ROAS) for your affiliate efforts. 

   

By digging deeper, you can gain an understanding of how each product category is performing overall.  This is where the Average Order Contribution comes into play.  When you are determining which products receive the premium spots on your Home Page and/or in your emails, you need to understand which categories perform the strongest and if these are improving or declining over time. 

   

By tracking how much each product category contributes to the total average order amount, you can gain insight to how effective past promotions have been for category.  Again, as with the $/bk calculation, the Average Order Contribution is a combination of two other metrics: (1) the Percent Penetrated; and (2) Dollars Penetrated.

   

            Percent Penetrated = Orders with Category (A) / Total Orders

            Dollars Penetrated = Category (A) Revenue / Orders with Category (A)

            Average Order Contribution = Category (A) Revenue / Total Orders

   

As you track the Average Order Contribution Trend over time, you will be able to identify those time periods where your marketing efforts have produced exceptionally strong results as well as when your efforts have fallen below the trend line.

    

Once you have identified these periods of interest, you can investigate the specific sources (or lack thereof) of sales.   Did the stronger results occur because you sold more products to your existing customers (you can identify this by tracking your Dollars Penetrated results) or because you expanded your sales to more customers (you can identify this by tracking your Percent Penetrated results).

    

These calculations will help you identify which promotional periods are succeeding and help you understand the related base components.  Once you understand these factors, you will be better prepared to determine which marketing messages are effective and which one are not. 

    

Until next time,

    

Dan

Jump in the Deep End

Running a successful business can be a “sink or swim” proposition.  Once you have “jumped in the deep end” you have to create enough promotional excitement to get customers to enter your site (store).  Just because they visit your site does not mean they are going to make a purchase.  A merchant’s job is not only selecting the right products and building a strong assortment, in the end, it is all about driving top line sales dollars.

 

Unless you are entering a brand new category, the first step in understanding your business model is to review the history.  Past successful (and unsuccessful) campaigns will show exactly what your customers want from you.  By understanding margin percentages and sales velocities of your products, you can reconstruct the financial model that your company needs to meet its’ budgeted targets.

 

While the marketer in you will be focused on driving people to the store through building a promotional cadence that showcases your compelling offers, the merchant in you will determine which items receive prominent placement on your web site and/or printed material.  By this time you have already completed the initial negotiations with your vendors and have obtained additional marketing funds from them to enable a win-win situation for selling their products on your site.  You should have also done enough competitive shopping to identify those products that have an elastic demand curve and those that have an inelastic demand curve.  In other words, some items react negatively to price increases (you must match the market) while other items do not (you can increase prices to stretch your margin results).

 

At this point, you may be able to envision your Econ I teacher from your college days.  If so, I’m putting you to sleep – sorry about that.  But here is the exciting part.  Prices have been set and the promotions put into place.  As customers come to your site and begin purchasing, you will begin to identify your favorite items.  Which products are your favorites?  The items that sell the most. 

 

Keep Your Head Above Water

 

All good merchants are both “left brain” and “right brain”.  While you need to be able to identify changing trends in the marketplace (in order to adjust your product assortment), you also must understand the sales information coming from your data warehouse.  Your margin rate will be pulled up or down (usually down) by the weighted average effect of your sales efforts.

 

This is why it is important to understand the past sales history.  Your margin rate will not be calculated on a straight average across all your products.  Your “loss leaders” and “profit drivers” sell at different rates per order.  Therefore, you must take into account the sales mix across your product assortment.

   

The next step is to determine how you want to handle the promotional markdowns from your marketing efforts.  This decision may be driven by the capabilities of your finance team.  While the effect of some promotions may easily be tied to the exact products that they drive, a number of promotions must be applied across either specific customer groups, product categories, or the entire business. 

Understanding how these promotions drive your business will enable you to make the necessary changes to your merchandising plan.

 

In the end, you can't be worried about getting all wet.  Allow your creative side to generate the excitement needed to draw customers to your site, while enabling your analytical side to manage your margin.  By understanding these metrics, you can drive the needed sales and margin results to ensure your success.

 

Until next time,

 

Dan

Too Much ( or ) Too Little

Take a look at 3 or 4 of your favorite sites. When you look at their home page or emails, do they appear busy, noisy or too crowded?  I recently had the opportunity to give my two cents on this phenomena at the September Shop.org event in Las Vegas.  Lauren Freedman invited me to be a speaker on her Merchandising for Conversion panel (check out Lauren's web site at www.e-tailing.com).

During my presentation, I spoke about how at Quill.com we have found that a tighter promotional message (fewer ad cells on our home page and in our emails) have lead to higher sales results - both overall as well as within the categories that did not receive exposure.

I know I'm not alone.  After my presentation I had several other Web Merchants and e-Marketers come up to me and express similar concerns about trying to "push" too much content onto these key pieces of marketing real estate.

The Flip Side

It's strange that we can struggle with some areas of the site being over-crowded while we lack enough substance on the interior pages.  Too often the creative energy on these interior pages fail to match the same level as found on the home page.  Unfortunately, as we all know, the home page is not the only landing page on the site.  All too often customers come to our sites and never see the home page due to a less than compelling experience on the landing page (one page view and then they leave).  The lack of promotional excitement on these interior pages is compounded by the fact that the actual "sales experience" happens on the SKU page.

The Solution

Try testing a tighter promotional message against the standard bombardment of offers found in your normal email.  From my experience, I have found that the key metrics will almost always point to the more focused messaging format - Less can be better.

To solve the problem of not enough content and/or promotional excitement on your interior pages, you may simply have to apply the right medicine.  A friend recently forwarded a link that may (or may not) hold the answer.  Check out www.WhoNeedsDesigners.com - it may take the sales pitch a few minutes to load but I think you will find it informative.

Until next time,

Dan