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.

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.

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.

Changes at Webmaster Central

Google is improving the functionality of the data that is being made available at Webmaster Central.

The information provided now includes up to 100 complete phrases used to link to a site, not simply the individual keywords. Phrases are aggregated by eliminating capitalisation and punctuation.

This kind of information has always been available, but not directly from Google. Webmasters now have fewer excuses for not attempting to take stronger control over linking text.

This information is distinct from the long tail of keyword phrases used by people in their organic searches but there are tools - like Hittail - which collect the phrases people use in their organic searches to find your site and report them as an aggregated list.

What will 3-D Secure Enabled actually change?

I suspect that the major change in this experiment will be to business models based on capturing card details for subsequent processing by a Virtual Terminal. 3-D Secure Enabled requires transactions to be live and for the cardholders to key their pin numbers into the Bank's system as part of the checkout process.

That will mean some changes in the online eCommerce world where a surprising number of transactions are handled indirectly, rather than in real-time. The good news for etailers is that it should reduce the level of fraud and charge-backs, but it may mean some ingenuity on the part of existing partners to ensure that everyone is happy in the new environment.

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.

What should we spend the money on?

Sagefrog carried out a survey last year of 100 marketers in North America and discovered that the activities that respondents reported as having the lowest ROI were:

• Direct mail
• Advertising

It's easy to understand why marketers feel negative about Advertising, it is difficult to justify print advertising and there is no guarantee that the beautifully crafted ad will even be read. Direct Mail on the other hand is much simpler - lower cost to develop and simpler to test. It's odd that a technique which has a long history and which is still developing major revenues for some organisations should be regarded so negatively by this group of respondents.

The survey results can be downloaded from Sagefrog.

Putting SEO specialists to the test

What does the word globalwarmingawareness2007 mean to you? Probably not much unless you are a Search Engine Optimisation specialist putting your skills to the test in the current SEO World Championship.

To be eligible the winning domain must be registered on or after 15 January 2007, it must contain a banner or link to the competition site and the site must comply with Google's Webmaster's Guidelines. The winning site will be the one that scores the highest aggregate search engine ranking position in Google, Yahoo! and MSN for the keyword globalwarmingawareness2007 on 1 May 2007 (roughly 15 weeks after the competition began).

Yet more stock photo sites

Here is another tranche of stock photo sites. As before, I have listed sites which have their own image databases rather than image search sites. I have tried to exclude sites which have overly complex licences or onerous terms of use.

http://www.freemediagoo.com
FreeMediaGoo.com was created for developers by developers. They provide a way for developers to gather assets that can be used in print, film, TV, Internet or any other type of media both for commercial and personal use. The content is royalty free. No need for links and no limits to the number of images that you can use.

There are 10 directories set out with 16 thumbnail images to a page which are fairly quick to browse. This is a simple site to navigate.

http://tofz.org/index.php
This is a more idiosyncratic site, based largely on cityscapes and metropolitan images. It is the work of a single photographer - Jeremie Zimmerman. There are 23 directories, some of which have sub-directories.

You can freely distribute copies of images, modified or not, for a fee or for free providing that you:

• attach the Creative Commons licence, in its entirety, to the copies or indicate precisely where the licence can be found
• attribute the author of the originals

http://free-stockphotos.com
There are no thumbnails which makes this a more awkward site to browse, but keyword or category search is possible. Use of the images for personal or commercial projects is free but the source - Free-stockphotos - should be attributed and (preferably) a link back to the site provided.

http://www.freephotos.com/
There are over 2700 photos already categorised and another 800 or so are 'in the queue'. Usage of images is absolutely free and doesn't require attribution of the source or a link back to the site. Registration is required for download and the site has a very comprehensive classification system.

http://aarinfreephoto.com/
There are 950 images on the site. Images are the work of a single photographer - Aarin Yu. Images are free for use. The site offers images that are free for personal and commercial use. Images may be downloaded for use in a web site, print ads, brochures or any end products.

Use requires attribution irrespective of the medium. The copyright information will need to be legible. If these images are in use on a website, a link to AarinFreePhoto.com is required.

http://www.geekphilosopher.com
There are about 65 directories. GeekPhilosopher provides royalty free stock images, wallpapers, and desktop backgrounds. Currently, the collection categories include free photos of children, people, sports, fruit, vegetables, eggs, fun and different, medical, airplanes, flowers, outdoors, sky, sunsets,clouds, stars and planets, water, domestic animals, butterflies, insects, grazing animals, birds, horses, famous paintings, music, texture, tile, and paper.

The images in the database comprise both original photographs where Geekphilosopher owns the copyright - those images are free for use except redistribution - and other images which include public domain and expired copyright images.

http://www.bigfoto.com/
bigfoto.com, is a royalty free photo agency offering free use of low resolution images (with link or attribution). Some images are available in high resolution and in those cases, specific terms of use would need to be negotiated with the photographer.

http://www.freeimages.co.uk/
Over 2500 original royalty free medium resolution stock images in 58 galleries. Terms of Use are straightforward for personal and commercial uses - credit to the site and, if possible, a link. Prohibitions include resale of the original image and sub-licensing.

What makes a great eCommerce website?

Creating a successful eCommerce website requires the same kind of tried and tested approaches as those used in sales letters. So what are those techniques?

• develop a focused approach to a targeted audience (pre-writing preparation) - that focus will help you to develop the right kind of copy and it makes testing simpler because you know what type of audience to test it on
  

• grab their attention using a combination of powerful headlines and sub-headings which they can use to navigate their way through the site
  

• hold their interest by reminding them why they are on the site (to solve a problem) and give them teasers about the solution or product that you are offering
  

• develop trust - often the biggest hurdle for budding copywriters – building an interesting and emotionally-compelling story that can get through built-in lie detectors that readers have developed and make them trust you, as well as convince them that you have the right solution or product

• demonstrate your credibility using testimonials although if you are already high profile in your market, talking about your background by mentioning specific achievements (facts and figures) will work as well

• make your offer by setting out the pricing, the main product, the incentives and so on

• close the sale. The “Call To Action” must be absolutely clear – there's nothing worse than going through all the effort of writing a carefully constructed sales letter than to have your reader leave at the end because the close isn't doing its job
  

UBPs and ad copy

Remember Andy Bounds? He is very good at reminding us that everything we do as sales and marketers has to be tested in a world populated by buyers who look at the world differently from us. He believes that the copy has to meet the buyers' unique buying points (UBPs) rather than our selling points.

So where does the buyer want to see the price in an ad? Different ad producers tackle the problem in different ways, some people:

• put the price in the headline
• set out the price in the opening paragraph
• leave the price until the point they are asking for the sale
  

It's obviously important to get this right, so let's start to look at an ad from the Andy Bounds perspective. The price is not a benefit to a buyer so emphasing price in the headline could alienate some buyers before they find out how wonderful the product is. Of course, if the product is a staple where the price is well-known then a low price could make a compelling headline providing it detailed the saving rather than the price itself.

Putting the price in the headline makes a number of assumptions:

• the buyer is aware of the normal price for the product
• the buyer will find the discounted price attractive rather than suspicious
  

Using the UBP approach, it makes more sense to focus on the benefits that the buyer will enjoy from the purchase - what they are left with after the product or service is delivered.

If the benefits are really compelling then the price can be introduced after the buyer understands what the purchase will do for them. It's at that point that the buyer makes a decision based on their individual value proposition - are those benefits so attractive that they overcome the price that you have just disclosed? If they do, then there is a good chance that your buyer will close the sale.

Even more stock photos

Another collection, all based on sites which have their own image databases and clear Terms of Use:

http://www.photocase.com
Images may be downloaded for private use and for commercial and non-commercial purposes as a component of "new independent graphic works" or within "an editorial context". Independent graphic works for the above purpose are new works created by the downloader and integrating the subject photograph such as collages, Internet pages, print products and advertising media. Download credits are earned daily (1 per day but expire at day's end), and may be earned by uploading images or by cash payment.

http://majesticimagery.com/
Majestic Imagery has over 450 images in 18 categories. Registered users are welcome to download and use images within graphics projects on a royalty free basis. The sole stipulation is that credit is given to the photographer and the Majestic Images site through a back link.

http://www.cepolina.com/freephoto/
This is one of the larger private image databases and consists of over 5000 images which relate to a wide range of topics which can be searched by keyword, by geography or by colour. Terms of use include private and commercial uses providing the source is attributed and there is a backlink to the site.

http://imagebase.davidniblack.com/main.php
High quality photos, but a relatively small database organised in 5 categories. Usage is free for personal and commercial use providing the photographer is attributed and there is a backlink to the site. There are some excluded categories, but this is one of the simplest licence agreements that I have come across.

http://www.woophy.com
A large collection of over 232,000 images organised geographically. Usage is free for personal and commercial use for low resolution images - further rights need to be negotiated with the owner of the image. Several search types are possible including country, city and keyword.

http://yotophoto.com/
Yotophoto has indexed well over a quarter of a million Creative Commons, Public Domain, GNU FDL, and various other 'copyleft' images. Images are free to use for public and commercial applications. Because of the large range of sources, licence conditions vary and it is important to check the terms of a specific image before use.

http://www.creatingonline.com/stock_photos/
Free stock photographs and a premium image area. Free photos may be used in both personal and commercial projects, subject to the Licensing Agreement. No linkback or credits are required, although a link back to the gallery would be appreciated.

http://www.amgmedia.com/freephotos/
A number of free stock photos which are free to use for personal and commercial projects providing you give credit to the photographer: Ernest von Rosen.

More stock photos

Continuing from the last post on where to find some royalty free stock photos, here is the next batch:

http://amazingtextures.com/
This site has about 850 free stock photos which are grouped in 21 directories. The key theme is texture. Exploration of the site is free and registration is required to access high quality images.

http://www.nps.gov/archive/yell/press/images/
This site features 12,000 public domain images of the Yellowstone National Park. Terms of use are limited to crediting the source or the photographer.

http://www.freephotosbank.com/
Free Photos Bank has 9 directories which you can browse as well as a number of other free resources. Terms of use include commercial contracts but preclude the resale of the images.

http://freedigitalphotos.net/
FreeDigitalPhotos has thousands of royalty free stock photos for commercial and non commercial work - use within a site requires a link back, but not necessarily on the same page. Users should attribute the source and not claim the work as their own. The images are not for resale or download.

http://www.artfavor.com/
Several hundred royalty free photos - some of excellent quality which can be used for non-commercial projects.

http://www.burningwell.org/
1400 photos in the public domain which can be used for any purpose.

http://visipix.dynalias.com
Use of the images is restricted to 50 in any publication and use must include attribution of the photographer and Visipix. There are additional exclusions, but they are not onerous.

Stock photos

In a couple of previous posts I have mentioned Stock xchange and Stock xpert as well as Every Stock Photo and Morguefile. Chris was looking for an image today and couldn't find anything in the normal places that we look. I decided to do a little more research to put together a more comprehensive list. I have excluded picture search engines in favour of sites which have their own photo database since the copyright and terms of use are clearer.

This will probably go over several posts since I will restrict the number of sites to between 6 and 8 per post.

http://www.nationsillustrated.com/
About 7300 photos for personal and non-commercial use. Landscapes, people and a few wild life shots all of which are categorised geographically. Some genuinely stunning images.

http://www.designpacks.com/
Design Packs offer free, high quality image collections that can be used in both personal and commercial web design projects. Each collection features a group of 15 images that share a common theme. They have created a number of collections. New sets are added periodically. Downloads are limited to a whole theme rather than individual photos.

You are permitted to use their photos to design as many projects as you wish, including commercial projects. Resale of the images is not allowed.

http://www.pixelperfectdigital.com/free_stock_photos/
Approximately 4400 stock photos categorised in broad groups. Terms of use are for personal and commercial use providing the commercial use does not include resale of the image. There are also a series of additional exclusions.

http://www.pyed.net/eye/
Photo repository has about 300 royalty free stock photos arranged in 9 albums. Registration is required to download high quality images and attribution is required when using an image as part of a web project but the terms of use are not onerous.

http://www.diwiesign.com/index
If you want pictures of corrosion or peeling paint, this may be the site for you. All the images are royalty free for personal and non-commercial use, but read the disclaimer and terms of use before you download.

http://stockcache.com/gallery/
Stock cache has a small stock photo library (about 1000 images) which seems to be organised in 13 directories.

http://www.unprofound.com/
Free for personal use and commercial uses which don't include resale of the images. Directories are organised by colour.

http://www.piotrpix.info/
Piotr.Pix is an image database providing free high-quality images. You can freely use pictures in your personal, charity projects or any non-profit project. About 2000 images in the library, arranged in 7 directories.