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Blog > 2010 > June

Email and Loyalty – Your customers are not loyal to you!

Posted on June 22nd, 2010

It’s a hard concept to get your head around – it’s a sad truth. How do you encourage your customers to spend more with you? How do you get that share of wallet?

Once you have dealt with the fact that your customers are no longer loyal to you – the first thing you need to do is demonstrate your loyalty to them.

If a customer has signed up to your email list – particularly when spam is in the press, then you have to reward that activity by giving them something.

An Example
Time limited offers given before the general public has a massive impact on your bottom line.

Next time you go on sale – try giving your email customers exclusive access for a week.

It works.

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How to make Personalisation work

Posted on June 22nd, 2010

There are well documented studies in direct marketing demonstrating uplift in response as a result of personalisation. A lot of the principles outlined in the paper world cross over to email. What differs?

The boxes to the left show what advantage email has over paper based direct marketing. Email and direct mail are first cousins on a key point: the more relevant the message, the higher the likelihood of a sale. The difference with email is that everything happens faster, response is quicker and the notion of customer loyalty is amplified.

Personalisation is the key to relevance. Moreover, it’s faster, cheaper and arguably more effective than direct mail.

So what are your email personalisation options?

  1. Personal information – First name, Surname.
  2. Demographic information – male, female, age bracket, income level.
  3. Nominated preferences – When a customer registers for an email, the preferences they provide.
  4. Intention data – Customers click behaviour on the email. You can use this to personalise when you mail them the next time.
  5. Spending data – Actual spending online. This allows you to repeat sell, up-sell or cross sell depending on what they have done.

Almost everyone collects preference information. Very few people use it. More importantly – preferences change.

Intention data is measurable online and is really the crystal ball you have into where your customers are likely to spend their money. Very few people use it to personalise. It’s cheap and very effective.

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Focussing on Subject lines improves revenue

Posted on June 22nd, 2010

Having been in online marketing for some time you will have been involved in one or two rounds of creative amends. What strikes me is that we spend hours and hours pouring over creative work, refining lines, layout and so on.

Then you think about the subject line.

Consider the two examples on the left. Example 1 has an open rate of 30%. Example 2 improves opens by 7%, as a result you have brought in an extra £11,200. Not much – but if you continue to improve, you will see the difference month on month.

“Give me 2 different subject lines that are radically different”

Now, we bet if you gave the challenge to your ad agency to continually improve their open rate by 7% increments each time – They could do it. They should know the guidelines for winning subject lines, so no need to go into it here.

In our view, subject line testing is the tip of the iceberg in terms of how you can optimise your email marketing. We hope you see that. If not, you’ll hear from us soon enough.

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Google Adwords Sitelinks

Posted on June 22nd, 2010

Ad Sitelinks is a relatively new feature launched for Adwords customers towards the end of 2009. It allows advertisers to include up to 4 additional links in their ads once triggered. The obvious benefit here is increased relevance. If used effectively, the inclusion of additional links should make paid search listings more relevant to a wider range of users.

Aside from this, it could also be argued that commanding a greater proportion of page 1 real estate could help to strengthen your brand. Ads will always appear above the natural listings and can now compete with non paid results in terms of relevance.

Despite this, the uptake has not been as great as was originally anticipated. In order for these ads to trigger you must be bidding for position 1. This presents challenges for many businesses as position 1 is often not the most effective position to sit in terms of ROI. Whilst it is generally accepted that Sitelink ads will improve click through rates, very few clients have been able to report improved ROI / conversion through the introduction of these new ads. The general feedback to date is that Sitelink ads have boosted traffic volumes through improved CTR’s, but have proved costly, with conversion rates suffering.

The challenge here is how to use this feature most effectively. Recent performance data suggests they only offer real commercial value if employed to improve the user experience for a searcher. For example, top level generic searches for goods / services may convert better if you offer an extra level of detail to the searcher before they link through to your site. So for a product it might be a range of models. If you can refine the search before delivering traffic on to your site then you could see improved performance.

Google have limited the use of Sitelinks to date, only making it available for ads with very high quality score. Therefore, the problem for many advertisers is that they only qualify to use these ads on brand terms. It is not easy to affect performance of brand ads as typically the decision to buy has already been made. It’s likely this policy will be relaxed in the near future, but until then it is difficult to see general uptake increasing.

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The Gentle Art of Affiliate Recruitment

Posted on June 22nd, 2010

Affiliate recruitment is arguably the most important part of managing an effective affiliate program. If only it were the easiest.

We suggest a methodical approach for finding affiliates. Choose the most searched for keywords that relate to your product/service. As a starting point, type these keywords into Google and 1 other major search engine. Approach the affiliates that appear on the first 2 pages.

  • Make a phone call if possible
  • Follow up with a personalised email
  • Make your email message intriguing so it is opened
  • Follow up a few days later by phone or email

Keep following up until the affiliate responds or applies to the program. They are busy people, usually busy building websites and pages for the merchants they are already working with and making money from. This leads to your second challenge…activation!

Just because an affiliate has signed up, doesn’t mean to say they have placed any of your links on their site. Again, it is a case of communicating regularly, recapping the benefits for them and keeping your program front-of-mind. In some cases, it may be necessary to give them a further incentive to implement your links.

Ultimately, the more affiliates you have the more revenue you will make. Give yourself the best chance of recruiting and activating new affiliates.

In our simple scenarios on the left, it is easy to see the preferred route you should take.

Have a look around our website. Learn about what we are about – call us – we would like to talk to you about how we can help you maximise your affiliate revenue. We have the skills and experience to take your program to the next level.

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Monitoring Affiliate behaviour to minimise fraud

Posted on June 22nd, 2010

The vast majority of affiliates play by the rules and drive high quality, qualified traffic to your website. However, there are always one or two that will try and cheat the system.

Ultimately, this activity means you end up paying for sales you would have got anyway and/or your brand is tarnished.

The most common ‘cheat’ is buying a merchant’s trademarked words on the PPC search engines. With Google it is possible to have an automatic block in place but this can take time. The other PPC engines will rarely refuse to sell your trademarked keywords which leaves the door open for others to do so.

The first thing to do is have a very clear PPC policy in place on your affiliate sign up pages and also email your affiliate base regularly to remind them. This makes your position clear.

Secondly, and more importantly, monitor your top 10 – 20 trademarked keywords (including miss-spellings). Just because there is a policy in place doesn’t mean to say all affiliates will abide by it!

Any affiliates found abusing the policy can be warned and then removed from the program if necessary.

There are lots of other ways affiliates can try and beat the system. See the feature box on the left for more. It is important to keep a close eye on the figures to look for anomalies and also visit affiliate sites regularly.

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Developing Creative for the Affiliate market

Posted on June 22nd, 2010

Often due to time pressures and budget restrictions it is tempting to re-use existing generic creative that ou have used for an online media campaign.

This, in our view, is a mistake. By making a few, inexpensive changes to your existing creative you can make it ‘affiliate friendly’. But what does this really mean?

Think of affiliate websites as pure direct response mechanisms. As such your creative should have bold, simple messages with a strong call to action. Think about the animation and the number of frames – finish your animation after 1 or 2 loops with a strong sales message.

It is the goal of affiliates to have their users stay on their site for as little time as possible. By baring this in mind, you can help them achieve this goal and maximise your revenue as a result.

In our very simple example to the left, by lifting click through rates from 0.05% to 0.10% there is a £5,000 lift in revenue. Much more than the cost of altering your banners.

Creative is the tip of the iceberg in terms of how you can optimise your affiliate program.

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On-page factors are they now becoming more important again ?

Posted on June 22nd, 2010

We all know that back in the early days of Search Engines on-page factors had a big effect on your sites ranking placement in search results; but then got abused with lots of black-hat SEO practices. So Google cemented their inbound links as votes idea, where the link pointing to your page (taking into account relevance, trust, authority, type etc.) was the most important factor in getting your site ranked above a similar competitor.

However, they keep having to refine how they judge the quality of those inbound links to avoid link sculpting practices where the inbound link is not a true vote of relevance/quality/interest, but of self-interest and probably in some way paid for.

So after their last Algorithm tweak what have Google done to get back the relevancy of their search results? Gone back to increasing the importance of on-page factors is what. The last update not only added back weight to traditional on-page factors but also changed the way Google see “Long-Tail Searches”. These are the multi-word searches that are now being given extra weight and importance.

So both these factors means that your site needs to properly optimised for search engines. With correctly structured page titles unique to each page, good use of headlines and keyword density in the on-page text. Your site should be content rich, diverse, and be updated regularly along with a good internal linking structure to tell the search-bots what the page is about and what pages you consider important.

So links are still very important, but what gets linked to is now not to be ignored, which is good news for the site visitor since good SEO usually means a good user experience!

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