It's just as well they have a good brand ...

I was talking to a couple of people last week about an e-commerce website. Rather, I was listening, they were complaining. One person had stopped using the site completely while the other customer had recently contacted the Help Desk in order to overcome a problem during the checkout process which prevented them from completing a purchase. In a few moments, the Help Desk had identified the cause, described it as "common" and straight away emailed a 2 page set of instructions for resetting the browser. Browser reset, the purchase went smoothly, but how many customers would have had the patience to work through a 2 page email to find the five lines that related to their set-up?

In manufacturing that kind of solution would be laughed at. If you know you have a problem in a process then you fix the process, you don't develop a work-around for the customers. If this site has a problem with cookies then it needs to redesign the way it uses them. Asking customers to follow a 2 page email and decipher which instructions relate to them can't be regarded as a good approach. And the site that is having these problems? Tesco. It's just as well that it has a good brand, because any normal e-commerce site wouldn't be able to sell much at all with this kind of defective functionality.

The power of reviews

Recently I bought a new electrical appliance. It came top in a (2 year old) Which consumer survey and they were completely unequivocal - it outperformed the brand leader by a healthy margin against virtually every criterion that they tested it against.

Next stop eBay. I saw the item on sale, placed my bid and won. So far, so good. I had seen an impressive review, decided what I had wanted to buy and got it at a great price. But then, the little green demon curiosity took hold and I Googled to see if there were any reviews other than the Which survey. There were, and I began to read ...

Disaster. The first few were unfailingly negative and said that the Which survey didn't know what it was talking about because it hadn't used the product over a sufficiently long period. I looked further afield to see whether these opinions were a flash in the pan or reflected the consistent mood in the market. Eventually I found some more recent reviews and they were unstinting in their praise of the product so I feel vindicated at last that I have made a decent choice.

This information is a potential problem for manufacturers. They need to be aware of what people are saying about their product because there is a risk that negative reviews will impact adversely on their sales. Perhaps their site should link to some of the positive reviews so that they take advantage of independent praise to help offset the effects of any negative press which may exist.

Travel companies have taken this idea rather further - there are consistent claims that they have written some of the supposedly independent positive reviews of holiday destinations and hotels which appear on the web. I'm not advocating that - I'm a consumer, too.

Now I'm just waiting for the postal strike to end so that I can begin my own extended duration consumer testing. I'm just hoping that it's a positive experience.

What does a product recall cost?

At the beginning of July, I noted that finding a low cost supplier in a far off country wasn't guaranteed to keep input costs low. Maintaining quality over long supply chains is difficult.

Mattel is a business that is learning the lesson the hard way. Here the problem is not simply the cost of the recalls themselves, but also the damage to Mattel's brand - reputational risk is often talked about, but the real costs are very difficult to estimate, particularly since it can take a long period for the full impact to emerge.

The customer contact problem

While on holiday I met some people who don't use mobile text messages - they claimed not to know how to access them on their phones. That can be a problem for an organisation which may assume that because it has a customer's mobile phone number, it can use it to send text messages that will be read.

Customer contact is strongly in the permission marketing area and if a customer hasn't given you permission to use a particular contact channel then you may well be wasting your time. The message may not be seen or worse, be filtered through a veil of annoyance that the company has used a channel that the customer finds irritating. It's no surprise that so many people sign up with the mail, fax and telephone preference services. They do it because they don't like the approaches, or they don't like the channels.

What is the customer experience?

The other day I called 118 118. For those of you outside the UK, that is one of a number of directory enquiries companies who provide details of business and private telephone numbers. I knew the name of the company I wanted to call and their address, but it didn't help. I didn't find out their number until I got back to my computer and looked them up on their website.

I don't imagine that many potential customers would try to find them through directory enquiries, and it wouldn't matter if they did, based on my experience. My point is that they haven't put themselves in their customers' shoes and tried it for themselves. If anyone in the business had a similar experience then I'm sure that they would have done something to get their number properly registered with the directory enquiries companies.

Not that they are exactly hurting on the telephone front. Last week I asked them what their incoming call volume was and they told me that it was running at about 150 calls per day - not bad for a micro business!

Here I am, where are you?

I got an email from someone the other day which said, more or less, "Here I am, where are you?", it then went on to describe some work that the writer wanted me to do.

The email was from the Managing Director of a high street brand that I had done some work for a couple of years ago. I had facilitated a 2 day workshop for a cross-functional management team and although I had excellent feedback from them, nothing seemed to happen as a result. I followed up several times over the next 3 months but it went very quiet.

The moral of the story has to be, don't bore people to death with follow-ups but have patience. If they really liked what you did then you won't be forgotten.

Lorem Ipsum

If you have ever been involved in the design of any collateral then you have almost certainly seen the dummy text which is used to provide an impression of how the text would appear in the design layout without allowing the reader to become overly distracted by the content.

I had assumed that this material was garbage pseudo Latin, but it seems that I was wrong. It has a distinguished provenance. According to Richard McClintock, a Latin professor in Virginia, it comes from sections 1.10.32 and 1.10.33 of "de Finibus Bonorum et Malorum" (The Extremes of Good and Evil) by Cicero, written in 45 BC. It seems that I have been exposed to historic literature far more frequently than I had thought. If you would like to learn more, then Lorem Ipsum has a more detailed description of the source text with translations by Rackham. It also has a true Lorem Ipsum generator which it claims is unique since it does not rely on the repetition of text blocks and contains no padding text from other languages.

Copywriting the Halbert way

Having noted the death of Gary Halbert in a previous post, I thought that it might be worthwhile to reflect on why his style of copywriting worked. Halbert himself didn't think it was much to do with the quality of his writing. He said that it was the quality of the ideas that was important and he used to spend at least 90% of his time on thinking about what he was supposed to be selling and less than 10% on the writing itself. On that basis, Halbert should probably be revered as a marketeer or a super salesman rather than a copywriter.

The thing that he looked for was a hungry audience. He didn't mean people who were literally hungry of course, he meant a group of buyers who were desperate for the product or service he was promoting. If he could identify that audience then he knew that he could sell. His gift was very often to identify an aspect of a product which had been overlooked by other people which could confer real benefits to that hungry audience. He was, in his own words "an ideas man" who could generate value for a business both on the top line and the gross margin. Read some of his newsletters to get a flavour of how he helped to redefine business models for some of his clients.

He appeared to be a robust character who enjoyed telling the unvarnished truth, but that was probably a persona for public rather than private consumption. He was obviously a complex man who straddled the old and the new and tied them together by understanding that, at root, the buyer was untouched by the technology. His ability to tie in an advertisement to that buyer was what made him famous. His influence is significant and I have no doubt that many of his ideas will be stolen and used again and again.

A sale is a very fragile thing

The headline is a quote from Gary Halbert who died on Easter Sunday. Halbert was internationally respected as a copywriter and managed the later years of his life as a mentor and trainer of people trying to develop their own skills.

Like many people, I became aware of him through the Gary Halbert letter which contains several hundred newsletters, begun by him during the 1980s and selling at that stage for about $185 per year. A lifetime subscription to the newsletter sold for about $2800. The point is that people paid over that money willingly because they admired the content, but also the style. Halbert's sales letters are masterpieces of carefully drawn, highly effective prose. If you want to look at a master writer developing a variety of themes then this is a great place to start.

The thing that makes Halbert stand apart as a copywriter in recent years was in his understanding of reach and channels - he knew that for the copy to do its job, it had to find its audience, and he was very inventive at getting his copy in front of plenty of eyeballs. A talented writer and one well worth celebrating.

Link building

Everyone wants to build their site traffic. There are a variety of ways of building traffic, but organic search results offers lower cost traffic than pay per click advertisements. Pay per click advertising offers other benefits, but that is a post for another day.

People understand that links are important in building their organic search traffic, but they tend not do much to actively manage their links. The very best type of links are one-way inbound links, but the quality of the site providing the link is important too.

Actively managing links takes time and it relies on a series of activities. Many sites don't tend to do these things but they are vital unless you believe that link building should be left to chance or that the investment is a diversion which gets in the way of the day to day business.

These activities include:

• research, which sites do you want to target?
• classifying possible links, can you use any facts to help you decide which of these target sites deserves special attention?
• developing an outline link request letter for webmasters which should be personalised to their site and describing why a link will benefit both them and you
• testing the letter on some sites which are less important to you
• developing an escalation process, in case they don't respond to your initial offer

I'll be developing these ideas over the next six weeks or so.

Kempton Park on Saturday

One of my clients has a horse running in the 2:55 at Kempton on Saturday. I won't mention the name of the horse because I wouldn't want any of you to complain about the quality of my racing tips. The reason for the post is that this hobby has become a business sponsorship. The silks which the jockey wears are in the company colours and the website address is clearly shown. I would never recommend a business to indulge in this kind of sponsorship, but as it is an investment that is going to be made anyway, why not try to take a business benefit, too?

The race is a 2000 Guineas qualifier, and it is the horse's first real attempt at running a mile. It has done very well at 7 furlongs in the past but this may be a trip too far. The race is live on Channel 4.

PPA and click fraud

Advertisers will like Pay per action adverts because they will pay out only when an action is completed. In the current experiment, advertisers can define what the action is (for example, a newsletter sign-up or a sale). It should eliminate the incidence of click fraud too, because the action has to complete before the advertiser has to pay Google. That's where things may start to become more complex.

If the desired action is a sale then at what point does the advertiser pay Google? At the point that their card acceptance service registers the payment from the customer? When the product or service is delivered? What happens if the advertiser pays Google for a completed sale and the customer subsequently asks for a full refund? If these issues can't be handled automatically, then Google may fall out of love with PPA very quickly.

PPC or PPA?

Pay per click has been with us for a while and it has proved to be highly popular with web marketers. It offers immediacy, targeting and test data. What it hasn't done up to now is offer every advertiser low cost. Some advertisers find that Pay per click advertising is highly expensive since they find themselves paying for clicks which don't convert into sales or relationships which can be exploited subsequently.

Google is experimenting with Pay per action advertisements. During the experiment, these will be available only on Google's content network, but because they focus on advertiser-defined actions they may ultimately prove to be even more popular than Pay per click ads.

While the experiment is in beta, there are some additional limitations for advertisers wishing to take part:

• U.S advertisers only
• You must have conversion tracking (or be able to implement conversion tracking code) on your website

Advertisers will have to think through just what an action (a sign up for a newsletter, a sale of a book or another product, for example) might be worth to them and that will no doubt mean that bid prices for sales actions could rise sharply which will do Google's share price no harm at all.

I can't wait to see this experiment roll out beyond the content network and then into Europe. This looks as though it will be a very exciting innovation.

What is the purpose of your website?

There is a point of view that the main point of website is no longer to simply sell a product or a service but to begin a relationship with the visitor. As a concept I'm not entirely convinced by this since it is difficult to test, and the essence of the proposition is that it won't be testable for a period.

The idea of changing the purpose of a website from one which sells to one which develops a relationship is that a site which is attempting to develop the relationship is more interested in giving the visitor something than it is in selling a product or a service. Normally the things being given away are in exchange for an email address and the list which develops becomes the focus of an extended email campaign which may include additional free materials in order to cement the relationship further.

The idea is that by getting the visitor to commit to a free gift, you have achieved significantly more than the average website which has no way of capturing any information at all about its visitors.

The core of the argument is that permission marketing like this allows the website operator to provide the mailing list with a wider and more comprehensive view of the products, services and value that he/she can add to potential clients without actually attempting to actively sell anything. It's because this is so difficult to test that I have difficulty with it - if a sales effort fails it could be either that:

• the relationship isn't sufficiently mature and the sales offer will be more successful at some point in the future
• the offer wasn't well presented and wouldn't be successful, irrespective of how mature the relationship is
  

That confusion seems to me to get in the way. Give things away by all means, but don't allow low response rates to promotions to become confused by assumptions about the maturity of relationships. If a promotion fails then take a hard look at the offer. Test it if necessary on a subset before mailing it out to the entire list. Use that research to tune the offer further.

Permission marketing is a great way to build a list, but I'm not convinced it is the way to really build sales. To do that, you need to qualify prospects and that is a very different way of developing the offer.

Copywriting thoughts

Read, read and read again!

Don't just keep a swipe file of advertisements or PR copy to raid when you have to create a new piece of copy, read the material to try to understand what works and what doesn't. If you use the swipe file simply to provide you with crude templates then it is almost inevitable that your resulting copy won't perform quite the way you expect.

Good copy relies on you being truthful about the product or service to the target audience that you want to keep, it doesn't rely on using psychological trickery or deception in order to force people to make a purchase from you. Writing to an audience that you want to keep will help you keep the writing more focused and readers will qualify themselves better, too. Then, when the product or service lives up to the descriptions in your copy, you can expect that you will benefit from word of mouth and referrals to support your campaign.

Marketing Business Services

The big word in marketing Business Services has always been reciprocity. Business Services firms work with intermediaries to put them in touch with work and the reciprocity principle - you scratch my back and I'll scratch yours - has been a major feature of the partner relationships that have developed over time.

Sometimes this was driven by professional ethics, when a particular group of professionals felt that they should not accept commissions for introducing work to another firm or give commissions on work that was introduced to them.

What has kept reciprocity alive is probably something much more Darwinian. Organisations work more positively with a small group of intermediaries where they understand the obligations clearly. Trying to develop similar relationships with all intermediaries would be counter-productive because of the amount of energy that would be required to support all the relationships. Broader partnership marketing has to be financially based. Where reciprocity gains over broader based partner relationships is in the more detailed understanding and trust which can be conveyed to clients.

Eye tracking gives us clues on how to write for the web

In late 2005, Nielsen/Norman conducted an eyetracking test with 255 people in New York City. Sessions with each test subject lasted about one to two hours.

The study helped to highlight how people read web pages and illustrated some interesting differences in the way males and females scan the screen differently.

Here is one of the key findings:

An original press article should not be used on the web - Rewriting & reformatting can increase recall.

Rewriting a dense text resulted in higher comprehension and retention than the original newspaper article.

The original version was revised to increase white space, make the main idea concise, remove unnecessary images, shorten lines of text and adding a graphic for each element in the article.

The eyetracking data highlighted the length of time that readers spent looking at each area of the screen. Readers spent a longer amount of time (about one minute) viewing the original version of the content but remembered 34 percent less than those who received the reformatted story. In both cases a greater amount of time was spent looking at the left-hand side of the page.

Readers find it difficult to read large amounts of dense text on screen unless it can be made memorable in some way. Take this into account when constructing copy and test wherever possible the readability and clarity of what has been written.

BTW, this post has been constructed to follow those guidelines, so make sure you remember what you have read!

Increased level of security planned for eCommerce

The future of online payment processing is coming under significant debate, both nationally and internationally. In the UK fundamental changes are happening. The major clearing banks are attempting to make online banking and credit / debit card clearance significantly more secure. This is both to reduce the current levels of fraud but also to give normal customers the confidence to spend more money online.

In order for online retailers to process Maestro cards from 1st July, 2007 all merchants will be required to be “3-D Secure enabled”. Inevitably this change will cause teething troubles.

For those of you not yet fully aware of “3-D Secure”, the process is actually quite simple; as part of the website checkout process, at the point when you seek to authorise payment from the customer's payment card, the customer is taken to a pin / password entry screen. This screen is hosted on their own card issuer’s servers. The customer will then need to enter the correct password (like a PIN number). If the wrong password is entered then the transaction will be rejected and the merchant will not get the authorisation of the order. However, if the password is correct the customer will be returned to the shopping site to finish their transaction.

While this promises a reduction in the level of charge-backs levied against suspect transactions, online retailers need to make sure that their sites will be compliant by 1 July.

Get the right headline for your readers

I have just read an interview with a copywriter called Gary Bencivega. He tells a story of writing headlines for investors. One of his clients sold gold and silver coins and bullion. In this case it was an ad for silver. The headline ran for many years, “Why the price of silver may rise steeply”. He suggested that the agency should test a headline that sounded stronger, bolder, more confident such as ‘Why the price of silver will rise steeply’. He wanted to make it sound as if the writer believed what he was predicting.

Testing the new headline showed that the original was better. “Why the price of silver may rise steeply” outperformed “Why the price of silver will rise steeply” by about 200% despite having the same body copy in both versions. He found it difficult to understand why “may rise” worked so much better than the more forceful “will rise”.

Finally he concluded that it was the disbelief factor. Most investors are knowledgeable and thoughtful. The promise of something that is unknowable such as “will rise”, makes readers conclude that the writer didn't know what he/she was talking about. By building in a little bit of understatement at the headline stage, investors got pulled in to read the whole of the copy.

How important is the brand?

In Rain's 2007 report on lead generation, there was an interesting insight on the importance of brand in the sales process. Brand matters: 65% of well known companies report themselves as being good or excellent at lead generation while the comparative figure for less well known organisations was 44%. If you are well known, whatever lead generation tactics you employ are likely to work better.

So what does that mean? It could be that branded companies are overemphasising their abilities at lead generation, but that sounds unlikely. It could be that less well known organisations less gung-ho in their self evaluation but that sounds unlikely too.

The Executive Summary - 6 Lead Generation Insights - can be downloaded from Rain at no charge.