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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So, factoring in the new sales through a follow-up programme into the overall campaign cost we have a really staggering conversion rate...

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

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

Be bold.

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

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

Be seen

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

Be relevant.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So there.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I blew the dust off my copy of Jakob Nielsen’s Prioritizing Web Usability and, as usual, I have been reminded of lots of vital design principles.  There are a few books that I dig into on a regular basis simply because I seem to take away different business benefits depending what I’m obsessing about with clients at the time:  I have been doing a lot of work on a web site re-design and so was lapping up all the lovely stuff about page load times, content above the fold, and aiming for readable fonts not font size rules (more of that in another blog soon).

I know that Danish Jakob has his detractors who say that he dogmatically insists on fast page load times in a world of fast internet and even faster browsers (have you tried Google Chrome yet?).  However, most of what he says is good common digital sense and all the other usability folk tend to concur with his principles, If nothing else it re-assures us that common-sense design principles have been validated by people like Jakob and in Steve Krug's excellent Don't Make Me Think!: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability 

Anyway, whilst thinking about Denmark’s contribution to digital thinking I was reminded that Soren Kierkegaard, an 18^th century Danish philosopher, came up with an interesting view...

“Life is lived forward but understood backward”

So indulge me whilst I attempt a “Danish web usability and philosophy mash-up”: Jakob is an advocate of the “iterative web site design processes” and believes that you need to try things, review them and improve them otherwise you will not get anywhere.   In the testosterone-fuelled world of 21^st century digital marketing this is now called “rapid iterative design” and comes complete with its own intense seminar programme...

Kierkegaard, were he alive today, may suggest that only by delivering different web experiences will you learn which ones work best, so the Danes, 100 years apart concur on the best way to deliver business results.

But the Great Danes are not the only ones who ascribe to the "live life forward" approach:  The evergreen Jim Sterne coined the rather jaunty “TIMITI” (Try It, Measure It, Tweak It) model many years ago and is still a great believer of testing, measuring and optimising.  In my digital marketing training courses I regularly flash up a quote from John Caples from way back in 1932 who said:

“In planning an advertising campaign the first step should be to clear the decks of all opinions.  The next step should be to find a scientific method of testing”

So maybe the answer to all digital success lies in the work of Kierkegaard.  We could even link his "live life forward but understand it backwards" to the "aggregation of marginal gains" concept to deliver a new philosophy for digital marketing.  For the record, Kierkegaard was not a marketer and would probably not have made a great web-master. Apart from his “Live life forward” quote his next best soundbite, referring to the inaccessible nature of most of his writings, seems to have been:

“The task must be made difficult, for only the difficult inspires the noble-hearted”

Funnily enough, there are a few sites out there that seem to design by that philosophy and so maybe he could have cut it as a web master after all.

In case anybody else is grappling with the same problem this appropriately brief post gives you some inspiration from others who have tried...

I have made this letter longer than usual, because I lack the time to make it short.  Blaise Pascal

Omit Needless Words.  William Strunk 1918

Omit Needless Words.  Steve Krug 2000

Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts.  William Strunk

Get rid of half the words on each page, and then get rid of half of what's left  Steve Krug

In protocol design, perfection has been reached not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.  Antoine de Saint Exupéry

So there.

So perhaps digital marketers should adopt the job title of "Performance Director" and we should set out to find, and improve, hundreds of different things to have a gold-medal-winning impact on our business.  The really good news is that, unlike elite cyclists we have loads of big and quick wins within our grasp.  So, rather than committing to a gruelling training regime, why not set out on a journey of digital optimisation?

Let's look at the micro and the macros to see where marginal gains make a big difference.  First up, driving traffic.  My thanks Mike Rogers of Optimize for this case study but it just shows how powerful a series of marginal gains can be in overall performance.  The beauty of Google Adwords is that everybody has just 95 characters to get their message across so those that use their characters wisely will enjoy the rewards.  Let's see how changing a few words drove click-through rates up...

The Aggregation of Marginal Search Gains delivers 15% more traffic

The real beauty of this case study is that Yell.com gets more traffic for less cost...the Google Quality Score in PPC, where you pay less for more successful ads, means that you end up with a lower cost per click and your ad gets shown more often meaning even more traffic.  Gold Medal Mike Rogers!

Having managed to drive more people to the site for less, lets look at the macro end of marginal gains.  Email marketing is still a land of sub-optimised marketing and with a little effort pulling the right levers you can make a massive impact on campaign performance.  Below is a scenario for an email marketing campaign.  Let's pretend we're a BtoB organisation and we want to generate 40 registrations for a seminar.  Our campaign metrics may look like this...

Not bad, but not good.  However, let's get the Performance Director in and work on each element: 

• Hard bounce rate...use email repair software to re-build basic errors (missing "@" sign, invalid Top Level Domains etc).  Moving forward, use validation scripts in your web registration form (see Flybe for "best in breed").
  
• Soft bounce rate, use Spam checking software, make sure you are working with your broadcast partner to identify possible Spam blocks at ISP or Corporate firewall level.  We will never get 100% deliverability, but we should be aiming for 90%.
  
• Open Rate.  Test "From Fields" with different names, use industry or region personalisation in the subject line and work on the appearance of the preview pane by getting exciting text in the first 6 lines not a great big fat banner that will be disabled in virtually all email clients.
  
• Click-through rate.  Through segmentation and cunning use of personalisation give the illusion that this email has been crated just for the recipient.  Similarly, work on your "persuasion architecture" and sell the benefits, provide clear cals to action and introduce pace, excitement, fear, uncertainty and doubt!
  
• Conversion rate.  Pre-populate the landing page or, better still, register them in one click by taking them to a confirmation page.  Certainly don't take them to an empty form with acres of fields to fill in.  Repeat the reasons to register and keep the pace to make sure people don't get cold feet at the final stage. 

But Google changed all that with their minimalist home page.  Seth Godin in Purple Cow recounts how, in the early days, somebody kept emailing the Google web manager with the homepage word count every time Larry and Sergey added another button...some people care about your site.  Google created the perfect homepage based on the key "successful outcome" of getting people to search: 

• The search bar dominates by its location and size..check out Amazon's new "big" search bar to mimic this
  
• There is little other content to distract us, so we can find wally quickily and easily
  
• The cursor is winking accommodatingly in the search box when the page loads, making it ergonomically easier 

Anyway, just when we thought it would be good to remove the clutter from our home page we now have to do Web 2.0 design things or we're going to fall behind.  So now everybody is building sites with some of these key components:

• Icons or cartoon characters 
  
• Rounded edges for all images and boxes
  
• Shadows and/or reflections where at all possible
  
• Short sentences, simple words 
  
• Mid-Atlantic cool tone of voice - talk about "stuff" (Amazon had a "where's my stuff" button in 1998 so that's not new) 

So now, wherever you go in crowded, competitive markets every site is looking like every other. A quick whizz around the car insurance market and the layout, look and feel are all similar...they may even all be sharing the same "get a quote" button.

So navigation is being liberated from tabs and these little icons are taking over key pages.  Although the UK insurance market has shifted towards this homogenised navigation technique there are still some very very nice executions out there that we can strive towards...here's one of the nicest I've seen from Starbucks...

  

In TravelMole today it was announced that the two biggest brochure publishers "are being forced to merge because of the dramatic fall in the number of brochure packs and high street travel agents".  In the face of adversity Paul Markland, MD of the publisher BP said “Let’s be upbeat – travel agents and brochures are a valuable part of the holiday sales chain and will be for a long time to come.”  Well, yes and no...

In some decisions you may need old media to help you, and holidays is probably one of those.  So lets say that we are excited about a camping holiday but need to sit down with the family and agree where to go.  Sounds like a job for the Eurocamp web site to me.

In a couple of clicks we can choose what bits of the brochure to download and after parting with an email address we have a personalised PDF brochure.  Not only that, Eurocamp have my contact details and can link that to the preferences I selected from the brochure page.  We win - we have a brochure to help us choose where to go.  They win - qualified lead that can be chased by email.

So the man from BP was right, and brochures are going to be part of the holiday sales chain for many years to come.  But it won't involve going into a travel agent, or getting a thick paper brochure, or bringing home hundreds of pages you'll never ever to look at...which is why his demand for brochures has dropped from 12 million to 7 million in 5 years along with a 25% decline in Travel Agents

So, in 20 seconds we can take a "1 size fits all" message and begin to drop in field values to show we care...click "add field", select your field, click "add to body" and Voila! The downside is that you need to be discerning about the way you play with these tools...the internet is a demanding medium, your inbox is a more personal space than your doormat and we're tired of cheesy direct mail personalisation tricks online.

So, I chuckle when good old VistaPrint take cheesiness to a new level with theis subject line...

In the wrong hands personalisation technology is a dangerous tool.  Slapping first names into subject lines may be worth testing, but it can do a huge amount of brand damage when people think you are trying too hard to weasel your way into their lives.  Maybe its a case of "Less is More", and you should look at all the field values you hold and see whether dropping casually into the subject line "post town" or "product purchased" or "hotel location booked" provides more engaging, tempting, successful campaigns.  You'll never know unless you try.