Author: Jeff Larche

With a background that includes direct marketing and customer relationship management (CRM), Jeff Larche brings an unusual approach to his work. What these other two disciplines have in common is database marketing, and they continue to strongly influence his work as marketing technology leader.
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Email newsletters still excel at customer retention and cross-sales

With all the recent noise about new online communication tools such as user-generated content and pushing content through RSS, we shouldn’t forget that some tried-and-true tactics aren’t going away any time soon. Take the the opt-in newsletter, particularly one that is customized to a recipient’s specific interests and tastes.

I challenge you to name an online tactic as powerful as a well-done opt-in email newsletter to draw visitors back to a web site or drive sales across a company’s complementary product offerings. This technique truly has legs.

Sure, it’s easy to see where email newsletters work in categories such as online fashion apparel and leisure travel. After all, is there anyone who hasn’t opted-in at one time or another to a travel site’s “hot deals” email?

But a truly enduring marketing tactic has the ability to surprise us – to show up and shine where we’re least expecting it. The email newsletter certainly has done this for me.

To my knowledge, one of the most effective opt-in newsletters around is in a category of services that no one ever wants to use. That category is healthcare.

Private Health News provides private labeled emails that a hospital or other care provider can use as a way to deliver news about its own offerings. What makes this newsletter so effective is the the fact that consumers truly appreciate receiving it. That’s due to theses two factors:

  • The content is customized
  • The content is trustworthy

Consumers sign up for it by visiting the site of the provider (let’s say it’s “General Hospital”), and then selecting topics of interest. This customization makes the newsletter unique to each households’ needs, with a selection of over 25 health topics from Blood Pressure to Breast Cancer, Sleep Disorders to Stroke Rehabilitation.

When the newsletter arrives, it reports the latest research, originally seen in articles from over 350 prestigious healthcare publications. The publications include the Journal of the American Medical Association and Lancet. Interspersed with the news — which, mind you, is tailored exactly to a recipient’s current health concerns and interests — are brief bulletins and ads about General Hospital events and offerings relevant to that topic.

For instance, along with a Men’s Health article there might be a notice of a free prostate cancer screening held at the hospital in three weeks, along with a link to the place on the General Hospital site where you can sign up or get more information.

I first met Dan Ansel, the president of Private Health News, six years ago at a healthcare marketing conference in San Diego. When he described his fledgling product to me, I immediately saw how this was the part of the puzzle I was struggling to deliver to my healthcare clients.

Dan’s product was a way to ensure that the valuable minority of consumers who visit my clients’ sites – and care enough about their families’ health to be proactive – can receive, every month, several excellent reasons to come back for more information. In other words, it was a way to retain prospects and patients, and to cross-sell to them wherever appropriate.

Has it worked? My experience and those of my clients says it has. What’s more, Dan has made sure to periodically survey newsletter readers, to get the user’s perspective on its effectiveness. Here are a few of the results of his latest survey, which had a sample size of 10,157 newsletter subscribers:

  • 99% consider the health information in their newsletter valuable, with 25% saying it was “very valuable”
  • 75.6% have the health issues to which they subscribe or are making decisions for loved ones with those health issues
  • Respondents are making healthcare decisions for an average of 3.3 people
  • 67% indicate a new awareness of the provider’s services as a result of receiving their newsletter
  • Over 13% have used these services because of that awareness

That last metric is the one that always blows me away. Every time the survey is conducted, more that one out of every ten people surveyed said they used a hospital’s services because of awareness they gleaned from the newsletter.

If only half of those people are telling the truth, that means over 600 individuals in this relatively small sample went to the provider of the newsletter for a possibly very profitable high ticket item, all thanks to an email newsletter.

I’ll be returning to the wonderful marketing double whammy of customization and credibility in future examples of online marketing excellence. But I’m not sure any other online technique I’ve encountered has the same high level of ROI as this surprising opt-in newsletter that sells people services they would prefer to never think about getting in the first place.

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Boomers aren’t immune to the branding power of user-generated content

User-generated content (UGC) is a major force in influencing buying behavior among the young and habitually online. That’s irrefutable. But this morning a friend who is neither made the argument that its power ends with that generation. He said that bloggers and such don’t reach people like him – and that’s a serious problem for marketers like me.

He said his generation (the very recently retired) possesses the most disposable income of any age group, and also has plenty of spare time to spend that money. It’s a huge and important audience, and one completely lost to anyone who puts too many eggs in the UGC basket. He almost had me convinced. Then, nearly in the next breath, he completely blew his theory.

This all happened over an early morning coffee. My friend explained that he was recently looking to buy a sailboat. I’ll call this friend “Pete” (although I don’t know why I’m disguising his real first name, since he says he doesn’t read blogs).

Pete loves to sail, and it’s clear he’ll never have a better opportunity to live out a lifelong dream than right now. So he started shopping last month for a 36-to-40-foot used sailboat. The length of a boat dictates a lot about what it has and how you can use it, so every foot or so is an important consideration.

He excitedly told me about his search for, and eventual purchase of, the ideal boat — one that’s reliable, fits his lifestyle and is at a price he can live with. In his explorations, he found a promising model, built by a good manufacturer. It was a 36-footer and seemed to have it all. Then he did what anyone with an internet connection and a favorite search engine would do. He checked the boat out online.

He didn’t go to user groups or blogs. But they came to him. When he typed in the name of the boat along with words like “problems,” he found four or five accounts of a defect that was big enough to be a deal-breaker. Worse, it was a problem that the manufacturer had not yet publicly acknowledged or tried to correct. In fact, when Pete went back to the broker with this knowledge, instead of the broker taking the problem seriously and trying to negotiate a solution that wouldn’t kill the deal, he got defensive and then angry. Naturally, Pete walked.

The story ends happily of course. Pete found his boat, a 39-footer, and it sounds wonderful. I hope to travel down to see him and his wife this fall or winter, and hopefully join them for a sail.

As you might guess, Pete’s new boat wasn’t built by the same manufacturer as that 36-footer, and it wasn’t purchased through that same pugnacious broker. The sale was, however, facilitated by mostly anonymous boat owners who cared enough to share their frustrations with the internet world.

We all know UGC is influential, but we may underestimate its reach, for the following reasons:

  1. Thanks to search engines and the ubiquity of web connectivity, this type of persuasion finds people at pivotal moments in their purchasing activity, regardless of their age or their inclination to regularly read blogs or other UGC.
  2. Conversely, a surprising number of people do regularly read UGC — at least 2 out of every 5 web users. I say at least 2 out of 5 because the latest research on blog readership gives that proportion, and blogs are a subset of total UGC*. And this new statistic is no idle guesswork. According to a recent phone survey by Pew Internet American Life Project, conducted with over 7,000 people, 39% of U.S. internet users read blogs. That’s a really big number.

Those statistics mean that roughly 57 million Americans would say they read blogs if they were surveyed today on the phone.

As for Pete? If he was one of those 7,000 surveyed, he’d have said he never reads that type of content, and never will. But the truth is slightly different. A search engine will likely point him to UGC again. It will happen the next time he’s considering an important purchase.
 
*I define UGC as the freewheeling “public” content on blogs, discussion groups, folksonomies and wikis (most notably Wikipedia, the site I just used to define folksonomies).

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Are you handing too much control over to search engines?

We have to stop thinking of our home pages as the main point of entry to our sites’ contents. That distinction is slowly trending toward the search results pages of major search engines. In his excellent Mine That Data!, Kevin Hillstrom reviews his own site’s traffic statistics, and then poses some questions for your business site:

Assume twenty percent of your traffic arrives via a search engine. You have essentially given control of one-fifth of your business to Google, Yahoo! and MSN. How do you feel about that? … How do you regain control of your business if that percentage significantly increases, or if the search engines decide to use an algorithm that sends less traffic to your site? Online retailers need to think hard about how much control they have ceeded [sic] to search engines. On the surface, the traffic that comes from search engines seems like it is all incremental business. I highly doubt that it is.

His point is excellent. This search traffic should not be perceived as incremental icing on the cake, unless you are quite comfortable with the idea of handing control of these visits completely over to the search engines. If you aren’t being proactive about taking strategic search engine results pages as your own (through search engine optimization), this steady flow of traffic could be diverted tomorrow to your key competitors.

The stakes can be considerable. Since search engine visits have been shown to convert more often to customers, compared to visits from other sources, losing this flow of traffic could be devastating to your business. If you don’t have a search engine optimization plan in place yet, start one now. It’s not a guarantee that you’ll be protected from the caprices of a search engine’s ever-changing algorithms, but it can reduce the risk to your bottom line.

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An online ad tip from an eye-tracking expert

I’ve just returned from a fascinating afternoon of presentations on internet marketing best practices, put on by the Chicago Technology Executives Club. One of the speakers, Bob Schumacher PhD, of User Centric, discussed his company’s work doing consumer eye tracking analysis of web sites.

Specifically, they looked at ads. They attempt to learn where on a major site’s web page (examples: weather.com or imdb.com) are ads being noticed, and where are they being overlooked. By measuring the time people linger over certain ad units on certain web site pages, User Centric is helping to more fairly judge the branding power of online ads.

An example taken from an ad, courtesy of Adverlicio.usDuring the Q&A session, someone asked Dr. Schumaker what lessons he has learned about building an online ad that gets attention. Significantly, he had only one fact he could declare with certainty: Ads where someone is looking straight back at you attract a great deal of attention. Every time. All other techniques were more hit-and-miss, in his experience.

I share this tip at the risk of helping to trigger a trend in sites that scrutinize me as I check the sports and weather. But it’s too promising a technique to ignore.

According to carefully controlled eye tracking heat map results, following this suggestion can improve the odds that even if your ad doesn’t get a click, it will at least deliver some amount of brand value.

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All I Really Need to Know About Social Online Communities I Learned Peering Over My Wife’s Shoulder

My wife Julie is a gifted humorist. She is also a good and loyal friend to those she has welcomed into her life. These qualities have served her well, especially since several of her friendships have been forged exclusively online.

Dr. Deborah Tannen, a sociolinguist, has written and lectured about the wide chasm between the way men and women tend to communicate. In her book devoted to the subject, which predates the whole Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus book franchise of the 90’s, she says that you can ponder whether it’s nature or nurture or a little of both, but the fact remains: The genders use language very differently. Men tend to use language as a weapon — as a way to establish and defend hierarchy while getting work done.

[brief interruption in writing]

Sorry, I’m back now. My wife called me into the next room to read something on her computer, a comment that was posted on her favorite online community.

It made her guffaw, and I admit, the comment was a pretty imaginative riff. A friend she’s never met was lampooning one of her comments posted earlier today. She’s now firing off a public reply. And so it goes.

As I was saying, Dr. Tannen reports that generally, men use words as ways to divide, or at least categorize, while women tend to use them to build consensus and — well — community.

Both linguistic techniques have their merits. But one approach definitely helps in the service of intimacy, and I never would have imagined that so much intimacy — non-sexual in this case – could be nurtured so remotely.

The knowledge my wife has about online communities was acquired slowly, one post at a time, while responding variously to discussion threads on the forum board of an ageing rock musician’s official web site.

I have a theory why she connected so quickly and deeply with a few of the board’s members. It is, after all, a forum associated with a revered singer-songwriter, someone who is known for both literate lyrics and catchy but often intricate melodies. 

This man’s music attracts artists and writers from many age groups, and these folks particularly have responded well to Julie’s droll observations and quips. They enjoy her company for many of the same reasons that her “non-board” friends do.

Take this example from earlier today, a comment she posted in a thread where newer members are welcomed into the fold by board veterans when they have racked up a certain quantity of posts. This post is directed to “Tom” (no real names here), but readable by the rest of the community:

Congratulations, Tom, on your thousandth post! Now you’re eligible for our prescription drug plan. Just don’t take as many as John!

How different from the work-oriented dialogs I engage in on the forums that I frequent!

I’m sure John loved the attention of Julie’s post, as did Tom. And although these two members aren’t female, it’s no coincidence that it was two women from the board who have enjoyed her posts enough to begin first an emailed correspondence, and then frequent phone calls. This summer one of these online friends traveled 800 miles to meet Julie and the other friend. They greeted each other like old buddies, and had a wonderful time visiting and sharing. The relationships continue to deepen on the board.

So what has Julie taught me about a social online community? These are her lessons for me so far:

  • The closest (non-sexual) relationships seem to grow among women. I use as further evidence the activity on SecondLife, a metaverse that I wrote about in May, and that attracts a surprising number of women of Julie’s generation.
  • Similar to a successful cocktail party, an online social community will be more of a success if the mix of women to men is fairly even. I suspect that in both, the women tend to keep the men around.
  • To continue the analogy, it helps if you have the same level of courtesy and empathy that makes for good cocktail party conversation. Maintaining a fair level of sobriety also helps.
  • From a marketing perspective, online social communities have loyal readerships that are willing and eager to endorse products and services they like. Julie has passed along to me several viral ad URLs she’s learned about on the board and thought I’d enjoy. This forum is currently buzzing about the movie Snakes On A Plane. I’m hoping they’re being ironic.
  • Finally, these freewheeling forum threads keep the site’s Google AdSense advertisements fresh and varied. One ribald thread attracted ads focused on hemorrhoid medication for three days. No one was asking for help of this type, but the embarrassment factor makes this type of product perfect for online advertisement. The fun context of the discussion might conceivable even lower consumer defenses and encourage clicks on the ads (does anyone have statistics to suggest this is so?).

Dr. Tannen says that men tend to not want to talk about work when they come home. It’s the wife who usually transgresses, with questions like: How was your day? What Dr. Tannen couldn’t know is I continue my work education at home, every time I ask Julie, “So what’s new on the board?”