Reading Adobe’s Digital Marketing Blog (Part 2)

Avoid “anticipointment”: bridging the gap from ad to site

Ads and web site work together – don’t just invest a ton in one medium
Marketeers fall easy into the ad trap because it’s easier than creating an usable, engaging web site
People expect that the click from the ad will be of even more value than the ad
Online Marketing Value Chain: Basically Customer Lifetime Cycle

Click ad, engage deeper in the landing page
Make their way through conversion opportunity
Become loyal customer

Most of these steps will be on the web site!

Creating a Successful Lead Nurturing Strategy, Part III: When Should I Call?

Call within 5 minutes of the initial contact
Call early at morning or late in the afternoon
Call on Wednesday or Thursday – I personally tried this against Monday and Friday and it was highly effective
Call them up to four times and send one email in the first 24h
Test these tactics

Creating a Successful Lead Nurturing Strategy, Part IV: Your Long-Term Strategy

The main is not to sell but to maintain a relevant conversation
Offer relevant and personalized content – recent study showed that most content simply sucks, so watch out

Email – automated, personalized and relevant; reports, tips, guides, best practices
Phone – Follow up; provide deeper information, answer questions
Direct mail – reinforce what you’ve talked about; again personalized and relevant

This process should be repeated maybe once a month

Optimization Is Greater Than the Sum of Its Parts

Testing & Targeting are greater than just once
however often they are siloed
Start with testing and segment the results
This helps you to find better content for targeting

Building a Business Case for Optimization

Biggest problems are processes and politics
They hadn’t ownership over the site

Testing generates positive ROI!
Optimizing landing pages increases off-site ROAS (Return On Ad-Spending)
Test to fail faster – some of your assumptions are probably wrong
Dig into analytics, segment and provide insights

The Collaboration of Testing Ideas

Include other people and departments in your testing
Often people in development, IT, creative, etc. have ideas – just ask them
Test Ideas:

Test different landing pages: home page, product page, internal search, etc.
Reinforce ad text/graphics on the landing page/multipage setup
Test ads
Test incentives for submitting to your email database
Test emails
Build a story with the ad and following pages
Test different viral/referral elements: coupons, vouchers, …
Test different forms

Test % Off vs. $ off
Test your CTA copy, size, color, style
Test scarcity on offers
Test different copy approaches: informative, funny, benefits oriented, etc. and analyze segment behavior
Test signs of trust: security message, shipping info, return policy, etc.
Test geographical targeting
Test simple content vs. rich media
Test content vs. no content

Test free shipping vs. % off vs. $ off vs. guarantee vs. …
Test promotion tresholds: 10% on $50 vs. 15% on $100
Test different internal search results – hand picked, automated, editor picks, big brands, cheapest first, best selling first, highest rating first, etc. and segment(!)

Strategies

Understand your goal – what are you’re trying to improve?
Start with the bottom in your funnel – it’s easier to get more impact
Try to understand why alternatives work better
Try to improve one theme at a time, e.g. decrease registration drop off, copy style, etc.
Focus on big things: product shown, pricing, primary copy, images, offer, CTAs

Five Times to Test: 1 — When you need to optimize beyond the click

Data without analysis and communication is not very useful
Even then without taking action, it’s practically useless
Often lots of money is invested in driving traffic but less in converting the traffic
Example: large business $100MM PPC budget, less than $200k for optimizing landing page/website
Mark Typer, Wunderman: 15% Optimization, 85% Ad spending

Five Times to Test: 2 — To resolve internal disputes

Do you have a dispute? Just test the idea
Similar things can work different on different websites, e.g. CTA wording

#74.0/111: My Life in Advertising

What is it about?

This book is actually two. My Life in Advertising, the autobiography of Claude C. Hopkins and his famous publication Scientific Advertising. In this post I will review My Life in Advertising.

What can I learn?

Fun is subjective: Claude C. Hopkins was raised in a highly religious household. His mother forbid him seeing plays or playing cards, because she believed that these are diabolic activities. Therefore, he looked for other activities and began cleaning at his school and distributing fliers. He said: “The only game I’ve ever learned is business.”. It’s his occupation and recreation.

Simple, natural ads with a coupon: His most successful ads followed this scheme. Firstly, he said that he was raised as a simple man, so he could only sell to other simple man, which were the majority. Secondly, the ads were natural, i.e. no lies, no marketing speech. Often he described how something was created and built a campaign on this obvious fact. For example, he created a campaign for Schlitz Beer in which he described how everything was cleaned twice a day and the bottles were washed four times. This was industry standard but nobody ever used it in an ad before. Thirdly, he inserted coupons for free samples because he wants to decrease the prospects risk and truly convince them that the product is excellent.

His great mistake: There is a chapter called My Great Mistake where he talks about don’t starting a company on his own. Many of his former scholars, i.e. which learned from him how to create great advertising, started their own companies and succeeded. He said that he never had enough self-confidence. After many years working for other people and agencies, he finally decided to start his own businesses which were successful. However, he thinks that this isn’t an advice for the majority. Everyone should decide on his own where he fits and what he wants.

Conclusion

I truly enjoyed My Life in Advertising. This is an other vintage classic from 1927 and most observations are still true today. It’s interesting how he worked his way up from a fruit picker. Then decided to get a degree in accounting. There he realized that accounting is just a overhead and costs will always be minimized. Therefore he started to switch to the money earners, i.e. into advertising. In the last chapter he wrote that he helps juvenile delinquents to love work as he do which is impressive for this time. All in all a great biography. Recommendation.

#56/111: Permission Marketing

What is it about?

How do you advertise? Seth Godin differentiates between interruption marketing (e.g. banner ads, TV ads, magazine ads) and permission marketing (sending information directly to people who accepted to send your information).

What can I learn?

Leverage interruption marketing: Permission marketing is often a bit mis-defined. It’s not about stopping your advertising, it’s about using it better. You have basically two options in advertising: a) You try to make a sale directly or b) You try to get the permission to give them more information. Seth recommends b) because it’s a less expensive step for your prospect (giving away their email vs. giving away twenty bucks) and you have a less expensive channel for frequent information (sending emails vs. buying magazine/tv ads).

Build trust: After the first step is done, it’s time to nurture your prospects. If you aren’t a big brand, you probably want to build trust first. Send them some relevant information: Articles, Top X Lists, How-to instructions, etc. After some time, you can sprinkle advertising in your emails. However, if you actually sold to them, don’t stop providing relevant information. This will increase your customer lifetime value.

Conclusion

At first, I was a bit unsure about actually reading this book, because I read Purple Cow by Seth Godin and wasn’t really impressed. Though, this book is impressive. Seth Godin wrote it in 1997 and it was incredible visionary. Today, it is unsurprisingly a bit outdated though the basics are still useful.