Website Design, Marketing and Analysis

Affiliate Programs and State Taxation: Amazon.com vs North Carolina

2009-06-22T14:25:00.001-07:00

A new bill has been proposed in North Carolina that could affect many online sites running affiliate programs, pitting the state against Amazon.com and other online commerce sites that run such programs. The bill would require sites with any affiliate presence in the state to collect and pay state sales tax on applicable sales delivered in that state.

It comes as no surprise here, with deficits reaching the billions at the state levels, that efforts to audit returns of all kinds, and clamp down on any so-called loopholes, will intensify at the state, local and federal levels. Nothing says cash-flow like back-taxes, penalties, fines and new revenue sources applied via court decisions and legislative mandates.

Anyway, current law states that any company with a physical presence in the state must pay state sales taxes on sales to people within that state. New York, in 2008, passed a law similar to what North Carolina is trying to enact currently - a law that says that any Affiliate of the company located within a state can be considered a physical presence, even if the physical presence is simply a blogger's home or business serving up Amazon ads (or insert your favorite web commerce site here).

To me, this seems ludicrous. For anyone understanding the nature of most affiliates, they derive a small payment for referring people to the main sites when those people buy from the site. There are many benefits to the programs, as it helps with viral messaging and promotion, improves linking and thus SEO factors, and provides both a nominal increase in sales to the main site and revenues to the supporting promoter.

On the negative side, however, are fairly decent support costs, accounting costs, and the like. If this case is won in favor of the State of North Carolina, it would mean a significant rise in these costs for all sites trying to run Affiliate programs within the state, especially in accounting and reporting costs, as they would be required to collect and file tax returns and checks in the state, soon to be all states if this is allowed to continue. To those of us who have filed such returns, they are time consuming and banal. Not only would costs rise to all consumers in the state due to the taxes added on to each order, but the costs of administering the reports and auditing them would also rise.

The small, fractional amount of revenue and other positive factors that an Affiliate campaign can bring to a site would very soon be overshadowed and overwhelmed by the costs of administering the program; as a result, all players would loose. No longer would affiliate programs be run in the site (since the costs to administer them would be too high), so the state would loose critical personal income of it's citizens from the program, and they would still loose the sales tax that they are hoping to get (though I'm sure they'll back-tax some of it). Even if the programs do continue, Amazon claims that the higher costs with the taxes will make it uncompetitive with other sites, and overall sales will suffer, meaning lower tax revenues on the Federal level (not to mention North Carolina citizens would have to pay more for the products).

It is no wonder Amazon is threatening to pull its Affiliate program from North Carolina. It isn't worth the cost; and for smaller sites who want to run such programs, a bill like this would be a death knell. More effort needs to be made for win-win, rather than lose-lose, especially for the smaller sites who need all the help they can get in this day and age. We can only hope that legislatures across the country get the message - the prize may look big and juicy, but at what cost do they eat the apple?

Source: Why Does North Carolina Hate Amazon?

Email Marketing Do's and Don'ts, Follow up

2009-05-21T07:58:00.000-07:00

Just a follow up to a post I did a few months ago about coding practices in email marketing. Recently I was sent a advertorial that included a white paper on proper email code practices with some other very helpful tips in it, for those who want to create their own email marketing campaigns (or to give to the technical department and marketing departments). Bad design and bad code will result in bad results; it's just that simple.

There is something in this 17 page e-booklet for both techies and marketers. It even has a section in it that discusses color preferences by sex (male/female) and age, something I've always been interested in and will probably do a post on soon. Blue's and greens seem to be the common ground, just as a quick insight!

You can sign up to get the white paper here:
http://www.lyris.com/lunar/1193-email-survival-guide.aspx?source=1575

Lyris, the company authoring the white paper, is one of the major players in the email marketing space. They do some very nice work, but also come with a price tag. If you don't have government-bailout type budgets for your email marketing campaigns, you can use the white paper to help design your own campaigns, or you can let us give you some help here at Creative Technology Marketing & Design, where we can put your lists to work for you for much less than the competition!

99% of B2B buying is about covering your butt!

2009-05-20T14:31:00.000-07:00

Business to business purchasing, according to the rational model, is a step-by-step, rational decision making process. NOT TRUE, according to a new study by Enquiro Research. The study reveals that people are a little more personal-centric and organizational centric rather than, from a step back, rational on a purely rational level. Not a surprise here, since it is long known that we all have that survival mechanism, survival first at the personal level, then at the organizational level.

The study of over 3,000 business buyers suggests that B2B buying is driven largely by attempts to control personal and organizational risks. In fact, according to the authors, “99% of B2B buying is about covering your butt.”

Insight from Business.com, Ben Hanna

Understand Business Buyer Risk
For low priced, low risk offers and products, there isn’t much to do here. For higher priced goods and services, the story is a little different. One option: become an approved vendor through teaser offers! Many times, even with a great product and support of a main contact, sales go to “approved vendors” who often get preferred treatment, preferred information and final say or a final offer. Light versions, free versions, trials and more can get your product and company in the door. It will give you a much stronger position in the future with the company.

Traditionally our recommendations are for our customers to really bring out on their pages risk-reducing factors, such as free technical support, return or repair policies, warranties, return policies, and such. It still amazes me how much companies will put excellent protections and benefits that reduce risk in place, then be very reluctant to publicize them. “What if people knew and abused it?” is a typical response, as well as “that shouldn’t be the reason they buy – we have a great product, that should be enough!”. I’m hoping that this study will help bring out the importance not just to have these policies, but to promote them, and promote them up front.

Some ideas on how to sell better to the risk-adverse:

Use Search Marketing to Drive Word-of-Mouth

What this means is to take your advertizing and gear it towards getting more (and favorable) reviews and comments, word-of-mouth, to related bulletin boards and forums that are targeted to your audience. For people who haven’t heard of you before, they are looking for others like that who chose your company and the reasons they bought or signed up; identifying with others like them, not just the messages *from* the company, but from real, new (or also existing) customers.

Match prospects with happy customers that come from similar risk profiles

Consider linking to customer reviews or forum conversations from your conversion pages

For sales to primarily large companies, consider using reverse IP lookup to lookup the company and show whether you are an approved vendor or other relevant offers on the landing pages.

What does this have to do with site design or online marketing? Almost everything! If you aren’t addressing the primary needs and concerns of your targeted traffic right up front, in the first page and often "above the fold", you are giving money and business away!

If you would like a review of your website and landing pages, to see if there are things you might be missing or maybe should test to improve returns, please let us know here at Creative Technology Marketing & Design:

http://www.creativetechnologymarketing.com/contactus.asp

Perfect Search Engine Ranking Results

2009-03-26T08:06:00.000-07:00

Why do rankings sometimes report differently from one query to the next, or from one computer compared to another?

Search engine results pages (SERPs) display results based on a variety of factors, including time, geographical position of the connecting IP address (where your computer is located), the browser used to do the query, browser settings, cookies, and more. For just one example, Google uses many proxy servers around the world to distribute their indexed results, and these are often updated at different times with the latest indexing results (see a list of about 122 currently active server clusters at 40 Google Data Centers (C-blocks) for an idea of the warehousing of data at Google).

To think that page rank will be the same for a site when Googled from California as it is from Germany, for example, is not really a valid comparison.
Further, the results may change due to the dynamic nature of the updates, changing even within minutes, however this is usually only occasionally due to major index updates, which happens maybe once a month or less.

Web position reporting is not an exact science, even though it is controlled by computers. Go figure. However, it is possible with a good search engine optimization plan and quality web design and optimization to rank well, and stay high in rankings, even with all the flux in the system.

So if there are slight discrepancies between the results you see one morning at the office and the SEO report you received from the SEO agency, don’t be too surprised. There is really no such thing as perfect search engine ranking results.

Look more for trends and approximate positioning – being in the top results for a main keyword or phrase can mean significant results to your bottom line. A recent report I read claimed over 75% of clicks go to Organic search results, compared to only 25% to the Pay-per-click ads that are above and on the sides of most SERPs these days.

Myers-Briggs Meets Astrology & Website Optimization

2009-02-12T17:11:00.000-08:00

So often, when we are presenting the idea of landing page design, email marketing design, or in fact any collateral design to a client, we present the idea of appealing to different humanistic personality traits that people (and customers) have in common.

Typically this is discussed in terms of Myers-Briggs Personality Type Indicator (MBTI) terms, where traits are broken down into:

Extraversion (E) and Introversion (I)
Sensing (S) and INtuition (N)
Thinking (T) and Feeling (F)
Judging (J) and Perceiving (P)

These four dichotomies are indicative of the dichotomies in relating to the world we have as people, and help define what (and when) things will appeal to the prospect or person.

Design is about appealing to those dominant traits in people that are most likely to both convert the largest number of prospects and to appeal to the most dominant types targeted for your product and service. Sometimes that means having "something for everyone", sometimes it means understanding key triggers and presentation to key personality types.

Of course, this is well known (MBA 101), and not exactly revelatory, however in practice it is often forgotten. Terms like "ENTJ" and "ISFP" and how to appeal to them are lost on most people. That's why the other day I came across a statement by an Astrologer who was in the process of re-designing their regular newsletter (Mark's Power Peek, C.A. Brooks, 1/24/09 - www.12house.com). In speaking of personality types, she spoke to her audience, and put it in terms that many may find easier to understand than "ENTF" -

"Mark and I have been talking [about ...] redesigning the "Power Peek" section of the weekly newsletter. We will be trying out some new ideas and some new formats. In the Aquarian spirit of cooperation we'll try to have something for almost everyone - practical and sound advice for the solid earth signs, comfort and maybe a little pampering for the emotional and sensitive water divas, intellectual, inspirational and occasionally clever information for the mental air signs and 'just give it to me quick and straight' for the I'm in a hurry fire balls. And remember, don't get too attached to the format (Aquarius's middle name is detachment) because it's going to evolve and change."

While the terminology may be different, the result is the same. Design that appeals, through different design elements, to a large and diverse audience. That remains as true today as it ever has been, and one of the key focuses for Creative Technology Marketing & Design web optimization services.

If you are interested in your own personality type based on the Jung / Myers-Briggs types, try taking the test at HumanMetrics. It is fun and informative!

References:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myers-Briggs_Type_Indicator
http://www.jwelford.demon.co.uk/brainwaremap/persth.html
http://www.myersbriggs.org/

Email Marketing Case Study - Nuance Software

2009-01-06T08:21:00.000-08:00

This is a short case study on Nuance software, showing industry email marketing practices to help your business reach your goals and communicate more efficiently and effectively.

We analyzed a successful utility software company, Nuance Communications (NUAN), makers of DragonSpeak and OmniPage, as created and implemented by Digital River (DRIV), the leader in software ecommerce, to see what they were doing, to see what we could learn from their campaigns. What we learned from the Nuance campaign was varied. As they are not as much of a channel driven company like NovaStor, they focused primarily on a large discount for end users as the primary benefit for purchasing. It was definitely an end user campaign, and not a partner campaign.

See the Sample Nuance Emails, Information and Schedules

Nuance used a lot of variation, appealing to all sorts of personality types and preferences. Copy was long, short, and even in between. It looks like it was a quarterly promotion, ending on the last day of the quarter. This allowed for a good series of emails (11 total on promotions), some of which were copies of an email sent previously with a different subject line. In fact, only 7 distinct email creative’s were created though 11 distinct emails were sent for the promotion.

Some key focuses were ‘time-limited offer’, ‘savings’, and ‘money-back guarantee’. Most emails also had quotes and testimonials used throughout the campaign, at different levels of emphasis. They did have a few emails which featured at different levels bonus bundles, including bundles of their own software and ones with 3rd party software (the kind of software you find in the $9.99 bin at the software store). There was also the attempt to bring a topical presence to these messages, such as holidays and sports events.

One thing I do not quite get it that every single subject line was about saving money - either a % discount or a fixed $ after the start of the quarterly promotion. While I can understand that is the major value proposition as seen from the vendor side, it seems that most marketing thought these days points to selling benefits and feelings more than features and pure $ savings. Maybe we are wrong, but a few subject lines like "Make your life easier and feel more organized" or "Be more productive and Save $" if you must include a 'save' in every subject line might see recognizable improvement in open rates, or potentially new openers.

Formats included the long letter format, medium/short letter format, graphical with 4 feature bullets and some text (optional) and 3 other benefits highlighted. There were normal text-format emails with wider (675 pixel) templates and smaller (550 pixel) widths.

One nice feature was the ability to click a link and see a summary of how and when Nuance/DR acquired the email address for the campaign. It builds trust and traceability to the campaigns (see the bottom of the Nuance case study samples online).

We believe Nuance did multiple formats and messaging for two reasons. The first is as a test of different messaging designs and appeal, the second is to appeal to the broadest cross section of customers. Just as there are many personality types, there are many different designs that appeal to different types of personalities. Some want the quick, direct bullet approach; others want more information and a more folksy type presentation. By hitting all the bases, there is the widest coverage for personality types.

Messaging – try to hit main messages almost every time:
Ø Time Limited Offer
Ø Big Savings
Ø Money-back Guarantee (No-Risk)
Ø Use Quotes/Testimonials/Awards
Ø Use Bundles to Increase Offer/Value Perception
Ø When Applicable, Tie In Topical References

Design – Use multiple designs for widest appeal:
Ø Graphical design with 4 bullets in 1 section, 3 larger in another
Ø Long Letter Format from an Authority Figure
Ø Medium/shorter Letter Format from an Authority Figure
Ø Textual Data-sheet Type Emails
Ø Small Fonts (even titles are not as large as could be)
Ø Main Message Above the Fold

Frequency – stagger timing, topical, finish strong:
Ø Varied time between emails (between 2 weeks and 2 days, never the same interval twice)
Ø Quarterly Special Offer (giving ample time to convert)
Ø Start Slow for Existing Customers (no more than 1 every couple weeks at first if a Customer, more if on a time limited immediate offer to potential customers)
Ø Push at the end (9 emails in the last 35 days)

See the Sample Nuance Emails, Information and Schedules

If you are interested in learning more about Creative Technology Marketing and how you can realize greater sales and improved communications using their list server, autoresponder and email marketing expertise, please contact us. White-hat, permission based inquiries only please.

Internet Search Beats the Yellow Pages – Finally!

2008-11-10T13:12:00.000-08:00

In 2008, more people found information on local businesses on the Internet than those looking in the print Yellow Pages.

It’s a workout lifting them. 11.4 pounds; that’s how much the four yellow pages books weigh in the cabinet under the phone. There are two Verizon Yellow Pages books (one large one and a smaller, condensed version), a Yellow Book, the original Yellow Pages, and finally the AT&T Yellow Pages. Stacked, they are 7” high.

One thing they have in common is they are all old and dusty. I’m not sure we have ever used them - in fact, one is from 2006 and still has the original Lawyer ad stuck to the cover! Being of the Internet generation, long ago our business and even my family converted to online search. We have long assumed, if a company was worth doing business with, it was on the internet.

And now, according to the latest TMP Directional Marketing Research Study, others finally agree. According to its second annual Local Search Usage Study conducted by comScore, 2008 marks the shift, as 31% of consumers looking for local businesses used search engines (with Google commanding a 60% share – up to 80% and more for many areas and demographics), versus 30% looking through the yellow pages. In 2007, 33% of respondents used the print Yellow Pages, versus 30% search engines.

The study also found that the next top places to find local business information was Internet Yellow Pages Sites (19%) and Local Search Sites (11%). If you add all the Internet enabled sources together, they add up to 61% of all consumers looking up local business information online!

It is easy to see why. In today’s information age, even word definitions are done with online dictionaries rather than the Webster’s of our fathers, and they are done for free without chopping down any trees!

It is easy to infer, as well, that the biggest users of online search are the young, the internet savvy middle aged, the more affluent across the demographic, and the more affluent baby boomers. That’s quite a desireable cross section of consumers!

The Benefits of Online vs. Print Yellow Pages Advertizing:

Your business gets a much wider exposure - there is only ONE Internet, and many more people have access
No trees are harmed online, nor are fuel prices an issue
Ads, information and offers online can be changed quickly and often
Online search is faster and more efficient, saving time
When searching for a Dentist, you don’t get bombarded with Lawyer ads (relevancy)
Websites often cost significantly less to create than a Yellow Page ad, and you don’t have to renew with each printing
Online advertising allows targeting of multiple keywords and phrases, for wider exposure
Online websites can retain customer information and be used for follow up marketing and sales

Can you think of more reasons? Let us know - we'd love to hear them! There are almost too many to list.

If you don’t have a web site, your business is certainly missing a large potential audience and countless sales. In today’s environment, simply advertising in the newspaper or print yellow pages just doesn’t keep companies competitive.

If you are wondering how to get your business started on the Internet, or how you might get more business and exposure out of your current Internet presence, Creative Technology Marketing & Design can help. The Internet is increasingly important to grow and thrive in today’s business environment; your business can't afford to be without a site and strategy!

New Email Coding Practices

2008-10-06T14:55:00.000-07:00

There have been some changes with some of the email clients lately (Hotmail, AOL, and later others), an issue that results in a blank email being received by a client and displayed with blank content. If you viewed the source, it would be just empty placeholder code. It isn’t that the email ended up in a junk email folder or was blocked in any way, at least the programs didn’t have the usual “the graphics in this email have been blocked” or any of the tradition spam filter and protection treatment. They showed up with a subject, but no content.

After some testing, we found that the email clients have started to block the <style></style> calls in the header; not just by blocking the styles, but by failing to read any code past the <style> code in the <head></head> section of the code.

The solution is to design the emails with in-line style calls, rather that defined styles. This is now not just a factor in improving email deliverability (see Best practices for Coding HTML Emails, by Dustin J. Czysz for a great article on the subject released last month), it has now become a requirement for deliverability. Any content management system (CMS), or other HTML templates and editors (even Adobe Dreamweaver) that work with style sheets in the header will no longer work for creating emails, without an extra bit of manipulation.

Eliminating completely the <style> tags in the header section of your email will help the deliverability of your content considerably, and get your message across.

This change will affect quite a few publishers, as putting styles in the <head> section has long been the standard for web editors and templates of all types. However, what is best practice in website design is no longer true in email delivery (not that it ever has, it just is more so today than even the hodgepodge standards previously).

The Monetary Value of Load Time

2008-08-07T11:22:00.000-07:00

Google made it official (or as official as Google gets) - there is a real monetary cost associated with internet pages that "load slowly", meaning they take a long time before displaying fully. It's always been a problem, something you could see in the bounce rate statistics, however it was usually just one of the many factors involved.

Now Google is about to launch a new initiative to incorporate page load times into the "QualityScore" that it assigns in its Adwords program. When that happens, larger, slower loading pages will have to pay more to keep the same positions in the ad results, or will have to accept less views and/or lower rankings.

In order to keep costs down and rankings (and returns) high, webmasters and landing page designers are going to have to pay real attention to the factors that go into page load times. The two main factors include:

1. Server / Platform speeds and Internet connectivity. While the typical IIS or Web Service uses very little computing horsepower, some systems have become bogged down with other applications. Some content management systems require quite a bit of computing power in order to run optimally, and often are dependant on large databases (and connectivity of those databases) to provide content. If these systems aren't optimized, or if the connection between your servers and the internet is not up to snuff, you can have serious load time issues.

2. Page size (in bits and bytes). In the old days of 9600 baud modems, optimizing for the internet was second nature for webmasters. Today, with all kinds of content management solutions and document types available seamlessly on the internet, combined with relatively saturated broadband access for most internet users, the focus has tended to be more on content and less on optimization. The days of optimizing a .gif graphic to 32 colors to save 10KB are just about gone, but if designers get too careless, it can cost them. Ideally, all pages should be no more than maybe 60-80KB. Watch for heavy pages on your site - optimize graphics, minimize code-heavy widgets and templates, and don't forget to test the end results.

Google says they are doing this because they recognize how long load times diminish the customers overall experience, and of course they are all about the customer experience, always trying to optimize that factor. Of course, incomplete page loads also means Google doesn't get any money for the transaction, which doesn't help their experience either!

Whatever the reason, at least for landing pages for now (I'm sure page load times will become an integral part in future organic search rankings soon as well), old school optimization is still the best practice. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

The Google Trifecta Webinar

2008-07-10T10:40:00.000-07:00

I attended a Google Webinar on Tuesday, one that was billed as discussing how some of their latest releases all interconnected and worked together. The three tools were Google’s Webmaster tools, Google Analytics, and Google Website Optimizer. Their stated reason, at the end, is so that we can be better webmasters, better web designers, and better marketers, which in turn of course means they are better integrated so as to improve both their organic and paid services, which of course means more meaningful results to their users.

In the end, it ended up being more of a brief overview of the three services; for those of us who have been using the services in Beta, much less in the released versions, there wasn’t a lot new. However, there was one nice tidbit I had been looking for the past few days – a graphic that depicted the relationship between the services in relation to the environment as a whole. They showed it as 3 gears, and the visual makes sense. While they don’t really touch each function much, it is in each of the services to drive the others, and any one without the other would be just a loose gear spinning.

The base, and the driving factor, is your visitors. There are more ways of driving this than the graphic depicts, but for the basics of website design, not including any outside marketing or campaigns, Google’s Webmaster Tools does a pretty good job in making sure your site is clean and indexed on Google. It also gives some insight on why a site or page may be ranked higher than others (showing some of the ‘link juice’ that powers any given ranking).

I guess if you get one juicy insight during a presentation, it is a good presentation. After trying to figure out how to portray in a visual format the interactions of the different segments of web, and Google services, development, I think the gear analogy is a pretty good one. Not perfect, but better than most.

Their presentation, The Google Trifecta Webinar, can be found here:
http://w.on24.com/r.htm?e=113541&s=1&k=CB05AB57071FCC9968D5BAE69762C198

The Basics of Web Marketing and Design

2008-07-07T14:43:00.000-07:00

The Basics of Web Marketing and Design

Though I have been in Internet design and marketing for many years (14 years now to be exact) this is my first attempt at a personal blog. I think the basic premis of the this blog will be fairly widely defined within the online design and marketing field, with I hope closer looks at design appeal and functionality, search engine optimization (both organic and paid), analysis (mostly targeted to Google analytics), website optimization, and other marketing efforts and campaigns.

As a background, I currently run a design and marketing firm in Ventura, California (http://www.creativetechnologymarketing.com/) where we help companies from large international corporations to local restaraunts and other businesses maximize their return on investment online and ongoing marketing campaigns. I have a Master's in Business Administration from California State University, Northridge and a Bachelor's in Business from the same. I am a member of the Web Analytics Association and am a Google Adword's certified individual. I started programming computers in the 7th grade, but business has always been my main interest, and my passion is the application of technology to business.

I hope you will find the blog of some use, and encourage feedback. Thanks for stopping by!

Christopher