“Conversion rates of commercial email campaigns increased an average of 16.1% in the fourth quarter of 2010, compared with the same period a year earlier, for the strongest conversion rate (2.9%) in two years, according to a new study from the Direct Marketing Association and email marketing company Epsilon Data Management.”

Via B2B Online. Read more.

Email Optimization: 5 Ways to Improve Results

Dr. Flint McGlaughlin of MELCABS share 5 insights from over 10,000 email optimization tests on landing pages and emails. The number one insight: Emails should sell clicks, not products.

Via MarketingSherpa. Read more.

“According to a new report from Exact Target and CoTweet, data from “The Social Break-up” indicates 18% of email users say they never open email from companies, and 77% of all US online consumers say they have become more cautious in the past year about giving their email addresses to companies…. Relevancy has become a baseline requirement for consumers, and they are quick to judge companies when their email programs fail to live up to this standard.”

Via Center for Media Research. Read more.

Interesting facts from the Direct Marketing Association’s recently released 2011 Statistical Fact Book include:

• Midday, between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m., seems to be the best time to send emails.
• Friday is the most popular day of the week for sending promotional retail emails according to the Fact Book. However, b2b marketers may have better luck spreading out their emails over a series of days or considering weekend emailing.
• Subject lines of 35 characters or fewer have higher click-through rates.

Via BtoB Online. Read more.

Court lifts ban on using competitors’ name in search ad

“In a ruling that could affect a large swath of search marketers, a federal appeals court on Tuesday vacated an injunction banning a software vendor from using a rival’s name as a keyword that triggers pay-per-click ads.” No one is saying it’s a good search tactic, but for now it looks like you won’t be infringing on trademarks.

Via Online Media Daily. Read more.

Lessons From JC Penny’s, Overstock And Forbes:

Three Tips to Avoid Violating Google’s Webmaster Guidelines: 1. Avoid using hidden text and/or hidden links. 2. If you buy links, be very careful. 3. Keep an eye on duplicate content.

Via Search Insider. Read more.


Infinite options; finite resources

There is no lack of places to spend your marketing time and money. The key is to separate the productive options from the mere distractions, and then tackle the most productive options in order.

It helps to keep in mind the two most important results of your marketing efforts:

1. Drive more traffic (prospects) to your website, and

2. Turn more of that traffic into paying customers.

If you’re facing a marketing opportunity that doesn’t do one of these two things, you don’t need to give it anymore thought. Just cross it off your list.

But that still leaves a number of places to focus. How do you choose among them?

Website first

As I write this article, the website is still the heart of any good marketing effort. Most – if not all – of your leads and prospects will land on your website while they’re making a buying decision. It’s where they first get to know you. Multiple 3rd party studies have proven this to be true.

If you haven’t given much thought to your website lately, now is a good time to do it. Take a look at your bounce rate. If your website is driving most of your visitors away, fix that first.

Traffic second

Once you know your website is doing a decent job of holding your visitors, you can comfortably drive more traffic there. Work on this until you have a sufficient level of traffic to begin supporting your sales goals.

How much traffic is enough? That answer depends on how many new customers (for an ecommerce site) or new customer opportunities (for a lead generation site) you need to produce. I recently wrote a how-to article about this for the Cranking Widgets blog. You can read it for help on figuring out your traffic requirements: How to Be Certain You’re Spending Marketing Money Wisely.

Conversions third

Websites and traffic generation are the blocking and tackling of a good marketing program. Conversion optimization – moving more visitors and prospects to take the action(s) you want them to take – is where smart marketers begin to run up the score.

Once you’ve got your website and traffic generation humming along, you can focus ere. Get better at converting visitors to prospects and prospects to customers and you’ll quickly see the effect on your bottom line: more customers and lower acquisition costs.

The message: Avoid distractions

Distractions can kill your marketing budget. Few things really make a difference in getting paid. Focus on those. 1) Drive more traffic to your website and 2) Do more with the traffic you get.

It’s been a while since I’ve written about squeezing the most from your incredibly important website. More on that in the next article.

Meanwhile, how do you avoid marketing distractions?

Links to Overstock.com web pages dropped from near the top to page five or six for dozens of common searches as Google penalized the company in part for encouraging college and university websites to post links to its pages.

This is the second move by Google in two weeks against a large retailer for allegedly violating guidelines. Earlier this month, the New York Times reported that Google lowered the ranking of links to J.C. Penney Co. in response to tactics employed by an SEO consultant on its behalf.

Via WSJ Online. Read more.

Google changes SEO algorithm – again

Changes in the mysterious algorithm by which Google determines organic ranking of website pages are common place. But some are bigger than others, and Google’s recent change – aimed at so-called “content farms” is a biggie.

Via BtoBonline. Read more. And WSJ Online. Read more.

Andy (Parkinson, our CEO) and I sat down yesterday over lunch at Paco’s Tacos to talk about the best market for one of our new services (more on that in a future post).

At Andy’s suggestion, we first made a list of qualities a good target market for this service must have. It’s not a long list. Clients need money to spend on marketing. They need a sufficient amount of traffic to their website. They need a product or service to sell. And it helps if they are not technologically savvy or the do-it-yourself types.

In less than 20 minutes, while eating lunch, we identified and rejected a half dozen potential markets, finally hitting on two that offered the most promise. Ten minutes later we had a plan for finding and creating customers. The bill came and we were done.

That thirty-minute exercise gave us focus and kept us from wasting money and time chasing after the wrong targets – or worse – having no target at all. It’s essential when you’re expanding your markets and / or your product offering; but I suggest taking a good look at your ideal prospects before jumping into any marketing program even when you’re not introducing anything new.

After all, markets change and it’s easier than you might think to be chasing the wrong prospects. I’ve seen it happen with some of our best clients.

Look around you

Your existing client base holds a wealth of information about who makes a good target prospect. If you take the time to identify the customers who are most profitable and easiest to work with and figure out what they have in common, you’ll have a remarkably accurate portrait of your best prospects.

Not surprisingly, it’s better to do this with data – not just with anecdotal evidence from your sales force or account management teams. Really. Take the time to pull the data and analyze it.

If you’ve never actually done this exercise before, you might be in for a surprise. I’ve had a client tell me their customer base was primarily Fortune 1000 pharmaceutical or oil & gas companies only to find when the numbers were run that the bulk of their business was coming from regional insurance companies. And a client who believed their sweet spot was companies with more than 5000 employees when in reality their best customers have 500 to 2500 employees. And a client who thought corporations provide the bulk of their business when actually academic institutions do. And so on.

These clients weren’t lying to me. They just hadn’t taken a real close, objective look at the customer base lately. Things change, and when you’re involved in it day-to-day the changes are often not so noticeable.

It’s important to look at the numbers, identify your most profitable customers and find out what they have in common – industry, annual revenue, number of employees, geographic location, number of purchase orders they write a month – whatever is appropriate to your product or service.

Now you’ve got a good, clear idea of what types of companies make your best customers and you’ve taken the first step towards describing your ideal prospect. You’ve also probably found some good places to target a marketing effort.

But don’t stop here.

Our buyers are individuals, not companies.

Now that you know the types of companies that make up your ideal customer pool, take a look at the individuals to whom you sell.

Again, what do they have in common with each other? Here’s a quick checklist of things to consider:

• Job title
• Age
• Sex
• Education
• Number of years of experience
• Achievements
• Associations
• Primary language
• Resistance to risk
• Decision-making style
• Professional challenges
• Values
• Goals

Roll all of this together to create a profile of your ideal customer. That’s a pretty good place to start to describe your ideal prospect. Doesn’t it just make sense to go after more of the people who make you most successful today?

Instead of worrying about a detailed marketing plan, get your essentials in order and then get going.

What do you need for really great marketing? That’s easy.

• A market
• A message
• Some goals
• A website
• Action

Who is going to buy your product or service?

Key word: “buy”. Successful companies no longer sell. We help buyers buy. This requires diving deeply into who your buyers are, what problems or opportunities they are facing and what’s keeping them from solving those problems or jumping on those opportunities.

Why should they buy from you?

Our buyers have options. In most cases they don’t have to buy from us. As marketers we must figure out what makes us the best option for the buyer. Then we must communicate it – at the right time, at the right place, and in the right way.

Where is the finish line?

Someone once said “If you don’t know where you’re going, you may never get there”. Similarly, if you don’t know what your marketing needs to accomplish, you could burn a ton of money heading in the wrong direction.

Setting marketing objectives is easy once you realize there is only one reason for marketing’s existence: to help increase sales. Start with your sales objectives and work backward from there. We’ll show you how to do that in a future article.

Your home online

Every company needs a website. That might sound like a terribly broad statement, but it’s true. You’re reading this blog so I’ll leap to the assumption you want productive marketing. You need a website – a good one.

Don’t fool yourself into thinking websites don’t matter and you might as well go cheap. Your website is critical. It’s your online sales force, working for you 24 / 7. It’s often your buyers’ first encounter with your company.

Act with confidence

Now we get to the good part. With the other elements in place, you’re well prepared to take action. Go get visible. Generate leads. Turn them into customers. Have some fun.

That’s easy, right? Don’t worry. It’s not as hard as you might think. Stick with us and we’ll share what we’ve learned. We’ll even keep learning together.

… Google is baking “friends” activity on Twitter, Flickr, and other platforms (other than Facebook) into the top search results users see. In some cases, “The social search element will change a page’s ranking — making it appear higher than ‘normal,’” reports Search Engine Land. “The ranking impact will be different based on how strong your connections are, and different people will see different results.”

Via MediaPost News. Read more.

Bing search share up; Google down

Microsoft’s Bing search engine captured 13.1 percent market share, grabbing an entire percentage point from Google, which dropped from 66.6 percent through December to 65.6 percent through January.

ComScore said Bing, whose share climbed from 12 percent in December, enjoyed its greatest single-month boost since its inception in June 2009, when the service started at 8 percent.

Via eWeek. Read more.

New rotation in Adwords lets you optimize for conversions

Google has announced a new rotation option that shows the best converting ads more often. Google’s default setting shows the ads with the highest click through rate most often. Best conversion rate makes more sense. However, you’ll need to factor this into your ad testing plan.

Via Inside Adwords. Read more.

Longer headlines available on Google

Google has begun changing the placement of the first description line for certain ads that appear above the search results on Google. For some ads where each line appears to be a distinct sentence and ends in the proper punctuation, description line 1 will be moved to the headline and separated by a hyphen. As a result, some top placement ads will have longer headlines. Search agencies report increased click-through rates with the longer headline.

Via Media Post. Read more.
Via Inside Adwords. Read more.

If someone paid me my hourly rate equivalent (HRE) for all the time I’ve spent researching, pondering, debating and writing marketing plans that a) sat on a shelf, b) were outdated the minute they were published or c) never got finished, I’d be back in the 1990s.

But I’m smarter now. I know a waste of time when I see one.

When we first started Clicks ‘n Conversions, we did some marketing plans; but they were shorter than the hundred+ page tomes of yesteryear. And as the plans got shorter, they began to be more useful.

I agree planning isn’t totally without value. I wasn’t the first one to think of this, but the real benefit of planning is the discussions it inspires.

When you create a marketing plan, you force yourself to look at key elements of your business: what you’re going to sell, who is going to buy, how you’re going to get them to buy it, what and how you’re going to charge for it and how you’re going to get it to them.

This is good.

But it’s easy to let the plan and its planning stand between you and taking action. You know you’re caught in this trap when you say or think things like:

• That sounds like a good idea. Let’s look at it again when the plan is finished.
• We need to schedule an off-site meeting to kick off the marketing plan.
• No one here knows how to do a marketing plan. We’d better bring in a pro.
• It’s September; time to get started on next year’s plan.

The world’s shortest marketing plan

Part of the blame for excessively long plans, I think, goes to the many books and templates for generating marketing plans. Often, the templates themselves run upwards of 30 pages. I like to think this is because they are generic and must address every conceivable option known to man and not because the authors really believe a marketing plan needs to include all that stuff.

As Kelly Odell pointed out in a blog article some years ago, marketing templates may have their greatest value in showing you what you don’t need to worry about.

Kelly also first introduced the template for the World’s Shortest Marketing Plan, which was later revised by Guy Kawasaki in the World’s Shortest Marketing Plan version 2.0. Click here to get the template.

Take smaller steps

Nowadays its better to plan a little, test a little, adjust a little, review.

Elaborate marketing plans delay action and never really get used. Avoid that trap and you’ll get to the good part much faster.

Next article I’ll write about all you really need to figure out to have an awesome marketing program.

Meanwhile, what do you think about marketing plans?

Fortunately, it’s no longer necessary to waste money on marketing. It’s well within every marketer’s reach to understand the who, what, where, when, how – and even why – of your customers and their buying habits.

Unfortunately, an unspeakable number of marketers still burn money.

That needs to stop. (Unless it’s your competitors who are doing the burning.)

We have the tools to identify where we want to go and let our buyers and potential buyers keep us on track. The problem is that marketers (being people) tend to get distracted by the latest fad and claims of easy wins or they are stuck doing things the same old way because it worked in the past.

Time to wake up and take control.

The path to winning more customers efficiently is tough but pretty straightforward. First and foremost, remember the job of marketing is to improve sales.  If someone suggests a marketing program that doesn’t make a direct, measurable contribution to sales, just say no. Later, when you have all the leads you need, you can play around with branding for the sake of branding.

Our goal with this Clicks ‘n Conversions blog is to share what we’ve learned – and continue to learn – about marketing that works. You don’t need tons of money or a huge staff or a fancy agency to do great marketing. You just need to focus.

In upcoming articles we’ll show you how to get ready, get found and get more customers for your marketing dollars. We’ll also show you how to make the best decisions, take the right actions and avoid distracting, money-sucking detours.

Just as technology and the internet have empowered buyers to drive their own decision-making process, marketers too have much to gain by using the tools and tactics available to them. We’ll show you how we use those tools and tactics to build powerful marketing machines for ourselves and for our clients. We’ll show you how you can use them too.

If you want to crank up your marketing efforts, get better results and save yourself some dough, subscribe to our blog and follow along with us. Be sure leave your comments, too.