MeritDirect Co-op

If you're attending the MeritDirect Co-op this week, and want to chat about your Multichannel Forensics project, send me a message via e-mail or via Twitter.

Better yet, come to my session at 3:00pm on Thursday. You'll learn all about how Micro-Channels are playing a key role in the Multichannel Forensics projects I'm working on ... and you'll learn how to save money and increase profit in your online marketing and catalog marketing activities. What's not to like about that?!

Ralph Drybrough, JoAnne Carrier, and the rest of the nice folks at MeritDirect do a solid job. I feel fortunate to be able to share my findings with the audience on Thursday!

MeritDirect Co-Op Wrap-Up

Few things I've done have generated as much interest and feedback as the talk on Non-Traditional Online Customer Acquisition at the MeritDirect Co-Op. Thanks to Ralph Drybrough for putting on a unique conference, a conference that is about delivering value for the attendee, not about creating value for the folks putting on the show.

Much of the chatter surrounds the story I told about selling our home in forty-eight hours. Here is a link to The Cascade Team, the real estate agency that uses online marketing, business intelligence, and a huge discount on fees to gobble up market share and move homes in a sluggish economy.

We spoke with the owner on Saturday. He simply cannot keep up with the need to hire new staffers. When new employees see how he uses data to make decisions, he tells me the employees are floored. You'll probably think that their website isn't beautiful, and that's fine. We spend too much time working on beautiful sites. They work on moving homes using business intelligence.


Many of you expressed interest in the concept of using copy as a customer acquisition tool. Few folks ever talk about copy as an important element of the conversion process. It is important!

If you don't use copy to increase conversion rates, you may as well use copy to gain intelligence.

For instance, take a look at the article from Friday. Look closely at the two links that I used to allow you to download the presentation.

Notice anything odd?

Each link points to the same presentation.

The link that says "if you weren't in attendance, download this version instead' has been clicked five times as often as the link for folks who attended the session. In other words, folks who did not attend the session want to learn what was presented.

Many online marketers thoroughly understand this stuff --- but for most of us who aren't thoroughly immersed in using copy as a conversion tool, we have opportunities.

Online copy marketing (here's a new acronym for you --- OCM) is different from blogging, different from SEO. Blogging is all about the writer, or all about the community --- no wonder it doesn't drive sales increases for most brands employing the strategy. SEO is often a niche led by technical experts and web analytics gurus, audiences that are critically important, but not audiences that capture the fancy of the "C-Suite" leader.

Online copy marketing is different. We identify the topics that drive audience engagement, then we modify our message to be even more relevant to the audience. The process takes A LONG TIME, no quick fixes here. The process allows us to acquire customers the old fashioned way, via a relevant relationship that benefits the customer.

We'll explore the topic in more detail in upcoming posts.

MeritDirect Co-Op Slides: Non-Traditional Online Customer Acquisition

For those of you who were in attendance today and asked for digital copies of the presentation, here you go: Non-Traditional Online Customer Acquisition.

If you weren't in attendance, download this version instead.

Thanks to all of you who stopped by to say hello at some point over the past three days, I really enjoyed meeting so many enthusiastic direct marketers!

And for those of you who quizzed me on my position about best practices, I'm not against best practices, I'm against blind adoration of best practices without testing what is appropriate for your brand. I did enjoy the discussion!

Do You Make A Living Blogging, Book Conversion Rates, Social Media Stuff

I purposely wrote a bunch of separate posts about ACCM to see what you were most interested in. Here are the top three articles.

• ACCM 2008: Social Media
• ACCM 2008: Lehman's Country Life And Lenser Marketing
  
• ACCM 2008: Encouragement

You consistently enjoy good news and applications of social media to the retail and catalog world, don't you?!


Speaking of metrics, you might be interested in learning what happens when you sell your own books to the public.

• Folks who click on the Amazon links of the Multichannel Forensics and Database Marketing books convert at an approximate rate of 4.5%.

• Folks who click on the Lulu link for Hillstrom's Multichannel Secrets have a 7% conversion rate, to-date.
  

This brings us to the "Do You Really Make A Living With Your Blog?" question I fielded, oh, I don't know, maybe 177 times at ACCM. This social media stuff, coupled with Google, drive an unusual and interesting funnel of activity. Since I started writing the blog in 2006:

• I wrote more than 800 posts, and three books, driving ...
  
• ... nearly 100,000 visits to The MineThatData Blog. Forty percent arrived via natural search (Google), forty percent are from various links on the internet (mostly other bloggers, businesses, and organizations). The visits yielded ...
• ... close to 1,200 subscribers. The average subscriber reads one out of every two posts I write, about 200 per year, 240,000 annual article reads in total. These articles are part of a relationship-building process, ultimately yielding ...
• ... between six and twelve projects a year that are fully or partially attributed to the blog (and books I've written).
• My Total Marketing Cost = $1,100 over two years. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to calculate the ROI, does it?
  

Two things, folks.

• If I can do this, anybody can do this. I'm not doing anything special here.
  

• It is amazing that more businesses, crazed over reducing expenses in a sluggish economy, don't do this ... especially in the B2B world.

The funnel I illustrated in this post will be the primary focus of my talk on Non-Traditional Customer Acquisition at the MeritDirect Business Mailer's Co-Op and Interactive Marketing Conference. My talk is scheduled for 10:00am on Friday morning, July 11.

The Marketing Digital Divide

I am coming around to the idea that a "Marketing Digital Divide" is happening all around us.

I like to read the point of view of many different marketing folks. This morning, this article arrived via Google Reader, from Andrew Chen. Andrew didn't gain his experience in the catalog industry. His marketing skills were honed in Seattle and Silicon Valley, during the internet era.

His article is titled '10 Obvious Strategies To Ruthlessly Acquire Users". Here are the ten strategies that he outlines.

1. Email/IM features for invites and content
2. Blog/MySpace widgets
3. Auto-invite for email, social networks, etc
4. Auto-embed for blog widgets
5. A/B tested signup pages
6. Smart adwords buying
7. Viral referrals
8. SEO/landing page generation
9. Push through RSS/Email, etc.
10. Reduce user "drag" through the entire funnel

Do the phrases "Instant Messaging", "Widgets", "MySpace", "Social Networks", "Auto-Embed", "Blogs" or "RSS" appear anywhere on your list of customer acquisition strategies, if you're a Multichannel Cataloger or Retailer?

Remember, Andrew calls these "obvious" strategies. Imagine what his list of less-than-obvious strategies looks like.

How many of my loyal readers, direct marketers with decades of experience, view these strategies as "obvious"?

This is the essence of the "Marketing Digital Divide". A generation of marketers are honing skills in a realm most Multichannel Catalogers or Retailers cannot envision. It seems to me that the "MDD", as I'll call it, is accelerating. And if you don't practice any of the items Andrew outlines, it becomes harder and harder to see them, to understand what is being done.

This might be a great time for Millard, or Mokrynski, or MeritDirect, to reassign job responsibilities to small number of individuals. These individuals could focus on Andrew's list. These folks could test Andrew's proposed strategies with progressive Multichannel Catalogers and Retailers willing to experiment. These individuals could spend time with "Web 2.0" folks, if you will, folks who are practicing these activities --- and then transfer the knowledge back to progressive Multichannel Catalogers and Retailers.

The Marketing Digital Divide isn't too big to cross, yet. With postal reform bearing down on catalogers, with Google dominating the online advertising space with their acquisition of DoubleClick, it's a great time for our list industry to build out solid Web 2.0 divisions that help transfer skills across the Marketing Digital Divide (MDD) to Multichannel Catalogers and Retailers.

What are your thoughts? Does the Marketing Digital Divide (MDD) exist? Are catalogers and retailers falling behind?