Coming in 2006 to a browser near you…

Impact Interactions is updating its web site utilizing a content management system so that we can bring you the latest best practices from our work. Together with our blog, we hope to increase the information flow that can help you make a difference online in 2006!

We’d like to thank our clients and our partners for a fun and successful 2005. We’re looking forward to helping you meet your goals in 2006!

For our colleagues in the online interactive space, we invite you to join our successful organization. We are looking to hire new consulting staff in 2006 to keep up with our growth. We’ll be posting job descriptions here and on our new web site in January.

For those of you who are simply interested in staying current with the best online interactive practices, the Impact Interactions Roundtable will be held in April 2006 in the San Jose area. More details to come as we’re working with our members to arrange the details. If you are not a member and would like to become one, please contact us or leave a comment.

We are working with one of our partners to add a second roundtable event covering online marketing strategies as well. This event is tentatively scheduled for Atlanta in early April. We’ll cover topics such as email strategies, interactive lead generation, strategies to drive customer satisfaction higher, database marketing, improving online ROI, reporting and analytics, and the latest tools available to meet your online visitors’ needs. Stay tuned for more details…

Thanks for a great year everyone! Let’s make 2006 even better!

Mike Rowland
President

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Why Metrics Matter: Google’s Ten Golden Rules

In an interesting article in Newsweek, titled Google: Ten Golden Rules, Google’s Eric Schmidt and Berkeley Professor/Google Consultant Hal Varian describe Google’s thinking on managing knowledge workers. While a lot of this is common sense (communicate frequently, assign teams to projects and have them sit next to each other, hire by committee, and our favorite cliche “eat your own dogfood”) what stood out to us is the following point:

“Data drive decisions. At Google, almost every decision is based on quantitative analysis. We’ve built systems to manage information, not only on the Internet at large, but also internally. We have dozens of analysts who plow through the data, analyze performance metrics and plot trends to keep us as up to date as possible. We have a raft of online “dashboards” for every business we work in that provide up-to-the-minute snapshots of where we are. “

It is very easy for marketing staff to get overwhelmed with data and to ignore it. But to do so is perilous. And most marketers understand that… However, what is missing in many cases are clear methods for analyzing the success of a marketing project or program. We are constantly asked to help clients build the types of dashboards mentioned above. When we present the ideas that metrics need to be success metrics and not static measures of traffic, we are often faced with blank stares across the table…After educating our clients, most see the light and begin to use their data as a competitive tool instead of as a scorecard. But it takes time and effort on the client’s part to get there.

Think about the success that Google is achieving in almost every area it undertakes. Do you want your firm to experience the same success? Of course you do. But are you willing to learn the quantitiative side of marketing in order to make better decisions? That is the million dollar question. Everyone has a story about their company throwing millions of dollars away on a project that didn’t produce expected results. Was that due to poor planning or poor execution? The only way to know and then get better is to use quantitative analysis up front and then measure, measure, and measure again throughout the project.

Those that follow the trend of “that’s a cool idea” or “I saw that competitor A did this” will lose. Only those who can use their data to drive results higher will win. Which group does your team belong to?

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Internet Advertisting Costs Dropping?

There is a very informative article on eMarketer today regarding the indexes for online advertising and email list rentals. Reporting the results of several indexes for the online ad world, the article “Are Internet Ad Prices Slipping” gives mixed data points for marketers.

According to Fathom Online and Media Post’s November 2005 study:

• Paid Search Keyword Prices fell 10% for Consumer Services ads and 6% for Consumer Retail products.
• Paid Search Keyword Prices rose 14% for Travel/hospitality ads and 4% for Finance/Investment ads

Worldata reports the costs for rented email lists is slipping as well with Permission based B2B email lists dropping 2%, Newsletters dropping 3%, and Permission based B2C email lists dropping 2%. (With the poor response rates of these offerings it is amazing that any competent marketer still uses these on a regular basis. See our article on how Cisco drove registrations through the roof for actual response rates using rented permission based B2B lists.)

According to a Deutche Bank/Media Post study, paid search costs/click actually increased 10%.

Good news bad news… From our perspective it appears that B2B pay per click campaigns are getting more expensive as organizations are learning how to use these tools to drive lead generation traffic. B2C marketers are facing an already crowded page and are using other tools to differentiate themselves since they do not want to appear on the second or third page of search results. (For example many consumer oriented advertisers are launching features such as the short movie clip or the flash intro on Yahoo’s home page.)

Internet advertising is still a no brainer. Tailoring your mix to include options other than paid search is important as the B2C marketers continue to show us. B2B will eventually learn the same thing and move to more interesting and effective ways to advertise online.

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Online Research Drives In-Store Buying

Shocking news from the CMO Council’s report Impact of Online Research on Off-Line Retail Buying Dispostions & Outcomes:

“The Internet has eclipsed radio, TV and magazines as a source of influence on in-store retail consumer electronics buyers, according to The CMO Council’s RetailFluency Report, which details the effect that online research has on retail buying inclinations and outcomes conducted offline. Findings from a poll of nearly 350 shoppers exiting BestBuy, CompUSA and Circuit City stores in four US markets suggest that Internet research helps solidify brand awareness, increases product influence, and can drive in-store traffic.”

The timing of this study and its conclusions are really a non-event when you consider the impact that online communities have made on consumers’ impressions regarding consumer electronics and many other products. Published October 19, 2005, it could have been done in 2000. Those of use that work to help companies build online relationships with their customers preach that the relationships result in not only online purchases, but also offline as well.

For example, Cabelas had a fantastic online community that discussed everything there is to know about fishing, hunting, and outdoor equipment. A lot of customers prefer to shop online since they are not near a Cabelas retail store. However, when we were involved in building the community and looked at the registration data a few years back (2000), we noticed a large number of members from areas around the stores themselves had registered. These folks were using peer-to-peer interactions to learn more about Cabelas products before going to the stores and buying…

So, the impact of the CMO article is limited in many respects except one…. maybe coming from a well respected group of marketing executives will allow the non-believers out there to understand that the internet store does not always cannabalize in-store sales…

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Looking to the future with DowJones Online…

In today’s Wall Street Journal, DowJones Online’s advertisement on the future of Advertising Online caught my attention. (How’s that for breaking through the clutter of information thrown out in each and every daily newspaper?) The Future of Advertising series is very interesting with many good facts about broadband usage, web habits, and demographic information.

Specifically the section Walking the Walk from Number 7:

“It’s not about the technology, but relationships. All senior executives should be comfortable with the role that this ever-growing and fragmenting Digital channel plays in their communication strategy.”

That’s what we’ve been saying for more than three years and we couldn’t agree more. When senior executives get comfortable with the reach and potential that digital communication strategies deliver and forget about understanding the technology, organizations succeed in meeting customer needs and building higher customer satisfaction ratings. When they aren’t comfortable, the traditional turf battle between IT and Business (marketing, customer support, etc.) take over. It is up to Senior Executives to prevent the type of silo conflicts that we run into so often today.

Take a look at this series. It’s free and a real eye-opener as to why executives must look forward instead of remaining complacent with their current online efforts.

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Building a Stronger Internet Strategy

We’ve been working with a client on a roadmap for meeting customer needs next year and in the future. Not futurist work, but rather work on revamping the offerings to meet current demographic trends on using the internet. The overall goal is to do this while clearly and concisely getting this client’s message and offer to its site visitors with an objective of driving them to action.

We’ve seen many companies take on the task of building a site only to make small adjustments over time rather than to rethink their overall strategy and move forward in meeting their visitors’ needs. For example, how many sites that were created in the late 90s for dial-up still remain that way despite the fact that 53% of internet users are now using broadband? Too many consumer-based sites are working hard (and spending a lot of money) to improve the site from a dial-up perspective when in fact, the largest growth group of internet users (eg Baby Boomers) are never going to use dial-up.

Through an interactive offering of interesting and fast offerings (think short attention span theatre), we are reinvigorating the site to meet the very defined needs. Classic example of staying ahead of the wave instead of being washed up onto the beach…

Sometimes, doing things the old way doesn’t make much sense in light of the flow of new data coming in…

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Putting a $ Value on all that Content…

For those of you who do not subscribe to MarketingProfs.com, you should if only to learn the interesting ways Marketing Managers are measuring their websites for value and success. In his article “Killer, not Filler” dated 9/5/05, Gerry McGovern discusses how the 80/20 rule applies to content viewers and the costs per page to maintain a large site’s content. Gerry’s quick example is all it takes to understand why web marketing teams need to be concise and clear in providing content…

“Let’s say your Web site has 5,000 pages of content. Let’s say that the total cost for publishing each page is $100. Thus, the total cost is $500,000. Let’s also say that you have 100,000 visitors over the lifetime of these 5,000 pages. Let’s say that the top 20% of pages get 80% of visitors (which is very common, in my experience). That means that 1,000 pages are getting 80,000 visitors, and 4,000 pages are getting 20,000 visitors. The “cost” per page for the top 20% of pages is then $1.25 per visitor. The cost per page for the bottom 80% of pages is then $20 per visitor.”

How would your site look if you did this type of analysis. Pretty similar I’d venture to say…

From a marketing perspective, how much additional money are you spending to support weak pages of little interest to visitors/prospects/customers? What is your opportunity cost of providing all of these pages to your visitor versus maintaining the top pages or assets and removing the lower ranked assets? Do visitors get lost in your content?

When you are marketing online, you must remember that visitors are fast with the mouse to move to another site if they don’t quickly find what they want. Instead of supporting a library, consider supporting only the non-fiction area. It’s cheaper and will improve your user satisfaction with your site.

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The Number One Reason B2B Websites Fail Is…

As part of my ongoing search for best practices that can help our clients succeed, I often find case studies that appear to be success stories on the surface but are actually reinforcement of the main problems corporate websites encounter everywhere. For example, a company will tout its client achieved an ROI of x% by installing its software and will have a quote from the IT department. Fine and dandy, but where does this fit in with the overall corporate objectives for the company? This is what so many folks miss…

One of my colleagues, Danny Flamberg has an excellent post on his blog Manhattan Marketing Maven titled Internal Politics Limit Global Websites. These issues plague almost every organization that we deal with. In fact, we spend many hours working with our clients to bridge this divide to get IT and the business organization to work together by breaking down the silos and focusing only on measurable, achievable objectives that allow both teams to share the credit for the win…

To summarize Danny’s thoughts on why internal politics defeat so many otherwise smart business decisions concerning using the website to achieve success, consider the following:

1. Everybody or Nobody is in Charge. In typical matrixed organization IT owns the plumbing and Marketing owns the content of the corporate website.
2. No Clear Objectives. Many global firms have a website for its own sake and cannot articulate what the site is supposed to do or where it fits into a selling, a communications or a messaging strategy. As a result it becomes a White Elephant thrashing around consuming time, money and resources in search of a mission.
3. No Process Integration. Few organizations place the website into a sequence of events or a contact strategy designed to leverage the strengths of the digital medium and link them to pre or post human-to-human interactions (in-person or by phone) or connect them to the natural steps in a deal flow. This short changes both the website and the corporation because it minimizes the chance to leverage combined assets to achieve company goals.

Thanks Danny, I couldn’t have said it better myself.

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Dell – Not Prepared? Amazing!

The past two weeks have been very interesting indeed. Surfing my favorite blogs, I came across rants about Dell ignoring their online support forums because of very vocal criticism of their offline support services. The critics were hard on Dell about the product quality and poor after purchase service when internal components needed replacing. [You can read about it here (Jeff Jarvis) and here .]

The pressure mounts and what did Dell do? They pulled the plug. No fight, no discourse, no plan. What does this tell us?

Simply put, you must be prepared for criticism of your products and services online. If you are not ready, it will appear that the wave is high and you can’t swim through it. If you are ready, you can manage it and not let a mountain build out of a molehill. Dell wasn’t ready for the bloggers who criticized them, despite having great software and moderators who were active every day.

A client of ours, AARP is ready for criticism. They face it every day in various forms. By taking a stance on Social Security or Prescription Drug Benefits, AARP starts the conversations that sometimes build into harsh criticism of AARP, its leaders, positions, etc. But unlike Dell, AARP plans for the criticism and actually manages through it. The idea is that AARP should control where the discussion takes place (meaning their web site) instead of a third party with unknown loyalties, ties, etc. In fact, AARP presented on this very topic in our 2002 Online Executive Roundtable.

This is what totally shocked me about Dell. To not have this type of plan in place, Dell has made two serious mistakes:

1. The conversations about Dell’s quality will now spread and take place on sites and blogs where Dell cannot see the qualitative content and quantitative metrics related to their quality. So they will either guess at how many customers this impacts or will make a bigger mistake and ignore it all.
2. The customer satisfaction ratings for Dell may fall because they are alienating a group of customers who used their interactive service and truly benefited. Dell needed to address these critical customers and then manage the situation. Many customers and prospective customers will not read through the critical posts and then go to the posts that could answer their question. Instead they will read the criticism, see no response and then they will bail out. These same customers who used the self service online forums and notes will now call the 800 number, wait, hopefully understand the person on the line in the call center, and then try and troubleshoot the problem. This will alienate customers and even in the short run increase support costs driving earnings downward. (Because what’s cheaper, self service and customers helping customers or running a call center in India?)

So, the best practice to learn from all of this is to make sure you have the resources and a plan to deal with the inevitable crisis on your site. Don’t do what Dell did. Manage through don’t shut out your other customers.

If you’d like to learn more about online criticism and how to manage it to your advantage or if you’d like to learn more about AARP’s Roundtable Presentation, please contact us.

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Building Online Relationships With Prospects

There are many marketers who will tell you that a high priority goal for their department is to build strong relationships with their prospects (and customers) using online methods. These same marketers will then give you all the details about the wonderful content available on their site to help prospects. You’ll hear about cutting edge blogs, podcasts, and webinars. They’ll tell you about their latest customer success videos and award winning newsletters. But there is a problem.

Marketers remain too focused upon the features of the relationship rather than the relationship. An analogy would be the teenager who believes that by driving the right car, he’ll be able to date the most popular girl in school. Just like that doesn’t work in real life, it doesn’t work in online marketing either.

Your relationship starts the minute a visitor hits your site. In the B2B world, these visitors have a very specific reason for visiting your site. So, how do you treat them? Most sites offer an inviting interface and solid navigation. Some offer a ton of relevant product content for free. But many require a full registration to obtain even the least valuable content. Would you ask a visitor to your office to show you a driver’s license before giving them a product brochure? That is what has happened to online B2B marketing. But there is a better way.

We know from our experience interviewing customers and prospects for clients that many are willing to provide basic information to companies in exchange for something of value. But there is a fine line here. Basic information exchanges are moving towards large registrations instead of matching registration data required with the value of the information requested. Think of it this way, when you are looking for a new car do you want to fill out a credit application before you take the car for test drive? Of course not, but you would be willing to introduce yourself to the salesperson by giving them your name, the type of car you are looking for, as well as any options you might be interested in.

So why do companies ask visitors to provide information such as budget, timing of purchase, company revenues, phone number, street address, etc. at the initial stage of the relationship? This practice builds a database of worthless contacts as the imbalance in the relationship gives the visitor an incentive to provide false information. Just as aggressive relationship building in a bar by Leisure Suit Larry gets him more fake phone numbers than real, your database will fill up with poor data wasting valuable corporate resources and time.

Best practices that we’ve gained from our work suggest that your initial registration should be simple and limited to about six to eight fields. This initial registration data should be used to help your marketing team send campaign related materials and invitations to registered members rather than used to qualify prospects for selling. IF (and its a big IF) your registered members come back to the site repeatedly, you should sell them on the benefits of enhancing their profile in order to receive additional valuable information specific to their needs. Once you have those enhanced profiles and better understand the needs of your members, you can cross correlate that data with transactional data (online and offline) to develop a solid lead your sales force will thank you for.

Too often, marketers want to get engaged and married to visitors before a good courtship. Like real world relationships, online relationships take time and commitment from both parties to work and grow into lasting profitable relationships.

If you’d like to hear more about this with specific examples of companies that are doing it right and a few that are not, please contact us.

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