Tom Lindmeier’s Blog @ MarketPlanB

Here’s a little food for thought on the power of a smile. I was tuned in to the subject by reading Smiles Really DO Boost Sales by Roger Dooley at NeuroscienceMarketing.

Offline retailers teach and encourage sales and service personnel to smile because of the conventional knowledge that it is effective. Advertisers have also leveraged this concept by portraying the smiling faces of happy people who celebrate life as the standard formula for creative development.
But with all these laughing people, it becomes difficult to differentiate your brand when everyone is happy and having a good time. This has resulted in some interesting developments when marketers attempt to raise the bar:

1. A proliferation of advertising that is nothing but a great joke with memorable visuals (gets noticed but there is a lack of brand recall).
2. Advertising that is positioned to be not happy or humorous so it can differentiate. This is typically used for upscale brands with imagery of beautiful people dressed in black who are exiting a Mazaratti before entering a seaside mansion. These people never smile except for an occasional upturn of one corner of the mouth when they are bemused.

This causes me to assert that there is a media generated perception of two types of people.

1. The common mass of humanity that whoops it up all the time.
2. The uncommon folk who are very cool, affluent and sophisticated. Snooty people are apparently not a happy lot but they don’t care because the masses are jealous of their affluence.

Online marketers don’t need to deal with this silliness because the bar is yet to raised in this channel. Most websites don’t smile at all (I performed a random check of 10 websites found 2 smiles) and are thus missing out on the easiest and most basic branding and conversion tool available. Unless you have a reason not to smile, I suggest you get cracking. Here are a few suggestions:

• Place a smiling photo and quote from your spokesperson or president on your home page.
• Incorporate models to demonstrate your widgets.
• Find opportunities to insert smiling imagery into your non-product pages.

By the way… Why do the photos and avatars of marketing bloggers lack a smiling face? Is it the perception that people who smile are not as sophisticated as those who don’t? I suggest that you get over yourself and post a a new photo with a smile.

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The most entertaining moment of the week came when I was viewing comments on a marketing blog (I forget where). The comment read:

“Somebody please read my blog, damn it!”

I laughed and laughed. But also I have to admit that this hit home. I just started this blog in August and am not pleased with the traffic counts. Though I do recognize that it will take awhile to get noticed and I need to be a little more patient.
The eye opener is that writers in the online marketing arena face an obstacle found nowhere else in the blogosphere. Great original content, sound SEO execution and a focus on building relationships with other bloggers may get you noticed with most vertical topics, but it’s not enough if you’re writing about online marketing. The competition is too fierce because of the SEO expertise. To make it even more difficult, individuals who blog from their home office have to compete with the more numerous resources of the marketing firms that dominate the top rankings.
So how do you compete when the only time available for blogging is in airports, at a lunch break or after the kids are put to sleep?
My approach will be not to focus on traffic or compete for rankings. I’ll get over myself and not let ego get in the way. I have enough of a community that posting new content on a regular basis is worthwhile. This blog has not found its legs yet. I have found that I need to find a tighter niche to differentiate the content. Meanwhile, I’ll also refrain from begging for more visitors…

Here’s the link if you’d like this tee from NoPityShirts.

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I don’t use the spam filter on my email program because I like to monitor best practices in email campaign planning, design and content. Why am I seeing that on any given day, as many as 40% of these emails have dead opt-out links? These emails are not from spammers, they are opt-ins from recognizable and sometimes major brands!

I know that this is not intentional, I suspect that it arises from a lack of discipline during testing procedures. If you’ve seen a sharp decrease in your opt-outs, I can guarantee that it is from a glitch in your opt-out system and not a result of your wonderful offers and outstanding creative.

If you want to assure that a prospect or customer will despise your brand, a dead opt-out is a very efficient method to get this accomplished.

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Once you make the decision to redesign your website, it seems that everybody in your organization wants to get involved and join the committee because this is fun stuff. This is both good and bad. Good because there is value to insights from different points of view, bad because the process of collaboration can muddy the waters and bring implementation to a grinding halt. It’s too easy to plan a redesign that goes far beyond the intended scale and consequently results in a blown budget and time line. Worse yet, poorly managed collaboration will prevent great results.
So how we do we collaborate, create a great website and not miss our deadline by 6 months?

1. Add 6 months to the schedule (just kidding). But if you’ve never gone through a redesign and you’re constructing a time line, build as much wiggle room as you can get away with. You need to plan for a fluid process that allows changes in direction.
2. Objectives are king. If tactical proposals interfere with the objectives, they are not considered unless an agreement is reached to change the objectives.
Here’s a sample list of objectives:

• Improve the depth of user experience while maintaining speed and ease of use
• Streamline the checkout process
• Enhance the user profile process for behavioral targeting
• Allow more comprehensive merchandising opportunities in the navigation and site search
• Improve the branding experience while maintaining speed and ease of use
• Build a more comprehensive administrative tool that frees the programmers from updating the site
• Complete on time and within budget

This is a simple concept that most managers understand, but there is a good deal of subjective decision-making that makes it all the more important to cite the “objectives are king” mantra and follow through. A good way to deal with tactics that fall outside of the objectives is to list them as enhancements to be considered at a later date so participants don’t feel inclined to sabotage the process.
3. Keep a core group of no more than 3 individuals to engage in the day-to-day decision-making and limit access to the remainder of the group while keeping them informed of progress on a week-to week-basis. The process of building wire-frames and design of the look-and-feel needs to remain within this small group. If the President and VP’s are part of your committee, you may want them to examine the design before it’s forwarded to the engineers to avoid blowing your budget. Seth Godin also addressed this issue with a different bent in his article How to Create a Great Website.
4. Go ahead and invite the committee, key vendors and experts outside your organization to participate. Just make sure they’re in the front-end of the process. Then they need to go away until the user testing phase.

5. Expect that user testing will expose an enormous list of problems and additional demands for more features. If you don’t have a thick skin, you’ll need to get one. The ability to manage criticism at this point will make or break you. Prioritize the list into 3 categories: 1) Must fix now, 2) Enhancements for later, 3) Sorry, we’re not going there. Do the must fix now and get on with implementation. You can come back always come back and tweak after you go live.

I invite you to share stories on site designs.

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Here’s the media center interview about the site redesign I developed at Junonia that was shot at Internet Retailer in San Jose. I think it went well except that I paused with an “ahh” about a million times. You’ll see the reference on the right navigation under Junonia and “Tod” Lindmeier (misspelling).
Follow this link: http://www.internetretailer.com/IR2007/media_center.asp This will not not open the video, you’ll need to select the link to view it.

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When I started to engage in behavioral targeting several years ago, I was quite wary because I had seen so many instances of bad execution. (This topic is in primarily reference to “on-site” targeting, not media buys). Customized messaging based on user activity metrics is a fantastic tool if you are providing value. If you are not providing value the negatives will irreparably damage your customer relationships.

So here’s my list of the three worst mistakes…

1. Collecting consumer information without permission is a sure-fire way to get trashed. You need to build an opt-in program and provide full disclosure of your privacy statement. Don’t even consider a program that is not permission-based.
2. The value of “You purchased this, therefore you may want to buy this” is dubious. Cross-sells and related items when users are on the site are highly effective. But if you return later with product recommendations you are likely out-of-context and therefore more likely to annoy rather than provide value. Case in point: I purchase textbooks for my daughter on Amazon.com. I have been receiving silly book recommendations related to her text books for some time now.
3. “Let me know when this item is on sale.” You need to focus on closing the sale now. If your merchants or product managers find out you’re doing this, they will kill you for degrading margin. Notification of sales and other promotions via RSS and email works, but don’t apply on-site targeting to individual items at the time the user is on your site.

The good news is that improvements in technology and best practices have made behavioral targeting a very lucrative tactic. Enormous co-op databases are waiting to be tapped. Depending on your product line, tactics that focus on 1st time visits, cart behavior, geographic, page views, time on site, and item back-in-stock will likely work for you.

My recommended vendor: Sitebrand.

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An article by Dori Molitor in The Reveries titled Ka Boom Ka Ching speaks to the power of the most powerful demographic: female boomers.

“Boomers are the largest, the wealthiest, the
highest spending, and the fastest growing segment
in the U.S. In the next ten years, the 50-plus segment
will grow by 96 percent, whereas the 18-49 age
segment will remain essentially flat.
In terms of sheer numbers, this 50-plus age segment
represents an opportunity. More importantly,
it controls all the money — 70 percent of U.S. net
worth, 50 percent of discretionary spending, and they
spend 2.5 times as much as younger consumers on a
per capita basis.
And yet, marketers are fixated on the traditional,
25-45 year-old head-of-household, with 1.2 children.
By and large, they see the 50-plus market as “old
geezers.” As a result, a generation of 80 million people
is under-served and misunderstood.
The overwhelming majority of boomer spending
power resides with women, who make 80 percent of
the purchasing decisions.”

Keeping this fact in mind, I did some research to determine if there is any quantitative research on the online purchasing behavior of female boomers and came up empty. This is very potent data that E-commerce marketers could use to drive conversion. My instincts tell me it’s much more powerful than the Yahoo study on “Passionistas”.

Note: I did find one study from Jupiter Research on European Baby Boomers, but it was not entirely relevant.

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Yahoo has invested in new study that highlights what we already know. Recently released and titled Empowered “Passionistas” Influence can be Harnessed, it maintains that tapping into consumers passions gives advertisers powerful advocates.

Excuse me, I don’t believe that the term “passionistas” is any more concise that the term “enthusiasts”, that has been bantered around for a number of years. Or am I missing something? Is this a new demographic that is even more rabid than the enthusiasts? Andy Sernovitz and his Word of Mouth Marketing book is one of the more recent that define this concept and highlight how companies get enthusiasts to spread the word and his is not the first. I have no problem with the Yahoo study and applaud them for it. They should however, reference ideas that drive the study. I’m surprised the term hasn’t made its way into Wikepedia yet.

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