How to comply with the Can Spam Act, as well as adopt best practices.

Few catalogers would dispute that e-mail marketing is one of the most cost-effective methods for communicating with customers. And in this day and age, it’s also one of the most hotly contested. Indeed, the e-mail channel is fraught with legal, technical and marketing challenges.

This article provides suggestions for keeping your e-mail program legal and ethical, and it offers tips on increasing the chances that your e-mails make it to your customers.

The Can Spam Act and You

In December, President Bush signed the legislation known as “Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Market-ing Act of 2003″ or Can Spam. The law, which went into effect Jan. 1, prohibits:

• - false e-mail headers,
• - deceptive subject lines,
• - harvesting e-mail addresses via automatic or improper means (e.g., e-mail addresses listed on Web sites, “dictionary attacks”), and
• - sending e-mails through open relays.

The law also mandates that commercial e-mails contain:

• - a functioning return e-mail address that enables recipients to opt-out of future e-mails from the sender (sources listed in “For More Info” on pg. 38 can offer more specifics on this particular provision);
• - the postal address of the sender (a P.O. box or mail drop won’t do); and
• - an indication the message is an advertisement (as yet, there’s no requirement to use the word “Adv” or some derivative of it, although there may be in the future). For recipients who’ve opted in to get your e-mails, you need not denote the messages are commercial in nature.

The Act also requires compliance with certain marketing practices aimed at wireless e-mail accounts. And Congress has mandated that the Federal Trade Commission study the implications of a do-not-e-mail registry similar to the Do-Not-Call Registry.

As The Direct Marketing Association notes in its white paper on the Can Spam Act: “These requirements on commercial e-mail [do] not apply to ‘transactional or relationship’ e-mail messages, such as e-mails about account balances, memberships, subscriptions or other ongoing commercial relationships that are not primarily solicitations.” (To get a copy of the white paper, see “For More Info,” below.)

Consumers can’t sue spammers, but ISPs (e.g., AOL, MSN, Yahoo!) can sue those using fraudulent techniques. Additionally, the Act allows for fines and jail time for violators.

As noted, the law may do relatively little to stop spam altogether, because it doesn’t ban spam outright. To repeat: Can Spam does not prohibit e-mailing individuals without their prior consent. But you must comply with specific provisions regarding notification and what’s included in the messages.

What does Can Spam mean to legitimate e-mail marketers? It offers welcome relief on two fronts. First, the Act preempts a patchwork of 37 inconsistent state e-mail laws, simplifying compliance. Second, the law offers no provision for individuals to sue mailers, thus reducing risk for legitimate e-mailers.

Although Can Spam doesn’t prohibit unsolicited commercial e-mail, current best practices suggest catalogers must hold themselves to a higher standard. Legitimate e-mailers never send unsolicited e-mail. Period. Indeed, leading catalogers eschew e-mailing anyone who hasn’t directly requested to get that cataloger’s e-mails. That means no e-mail swaps and no e-mail rentals.

Take-away tips:

• - Only e-mail those who’ve requested your messages.
• - Never use deceptive subject lines.
• - Include clear opt-out provisions.
• - Never fake e-mail headers.
• - Include your postal address.
• - And sleep a little sounder at night, knowing that while Can Spam won’t reduce spam in your own inbox, it does lessen the legal risk to your company.

Get Delivered, or How to Avoid ISP Filters

Consider this scenario: You work for a catalog that follows best practices for e-mail marketing. Your e-mail list is 100-percent opt-in. Your marketing messages are never deceptive. All of your messages include clear opt-out instructions, and opt-out requests are honored promptly. Your customers asked you to send them e-mails, because they find your messages interesting, and at appropriate intervals you send them the information they asked to receive. In short, you consider yourself a “white-hat” e-mail marketer — the antithesis of a spammer.

Imagine your frustration, then, when large portions of your campaigns routinely are discarded as spam by software filters running on ISPs and your customers’ computers. If you aren’t a spammer, why aren’t your campaigns getting delivered?

This deliverability conundrum vexes all legitimate e-mail marketers. A recent Jupiter Research study found deliverability to be the top concern of e-mail marketers, with 31 percent of those surveyed citing ISP blacklists and corporate filters as their greatest worry. In contrast, only 8 percent of marketers surveyed cited anti-spam legislation as their biggest concern.

We all know the Internet is drowning in spam. No doubt your own inbox overflows with pitches for herbal Viagra, septic tank cleansers and Nigerian bank scams. The Can Spam bill estimated 50 percent of all e-mail sent today is spam. Last June, Microsoft put the figure at 80 percent.

To combat this flood, ISPs and consumers have installed filters to identify and discard spam. These software programs use various techniques to tag it, including: black lists of IP addresses of known spammers, keyword lists of spam terms, collaborative filtering and more. While intended to stop spam, these filters also routinely toss requested commercial e-mail. How frequently? It’s hard to tell. Of six major catalogers interviewed for this article, all admitted they were unable to determine the fraction of their campaigns lost to the filters, and none were willing to speak on the record.

Keith Wardell, CEO of the e-mail services bureau Exmplar, suggests that a routine mailing to a clean opt-in list typically might lose 10 percent to 20 percent of the circulation to blocks and filters. Wardell warned this rate can soar to more than 50 percent if the campaign triggers a spam filter at a major ISP such as AOL, Yahoo! or MSN.

In earlier times, ISPs provided bounce messages to mailers when filters tripped. Today, ISPs route the suspect mail into bulk folders or discard it outright without offering feedback to the mailer.

Following are three methods to determine if your e-mails are reaching your customers:

Seed accounts. E-mail seed accounts are the online equivalent of postal mail decoys. Catalogers add a handful of e-mail addresses they control to each campaign. The seeds are sent randomly throughout the mailing, and the mailer monitors these accounts to determine if the message makes it to the inbox.

Most of the seeds should be in the AOL, MSN and Yahoo! domains. The list also should include some seeds behind corporate firewalls, and in the .org, .gov and .edu top-level domains.

Obtaining, mailing and monitoring seeds can be inconvenient and laborious. While traditional postal mail-monitoring firms are planning to offer e-mail deliverability tracking, currently there are no established stand-alone vendors providing such a service. So you must develop e-mail decoy programs internally, or rely on your e-mail service bureau for seed tracking.

Communicate with the ISPs. All of the major e-mail service bureaus, and even some larger mailers themselves, develop direct relationships with technical liaisons within the large ISPs. These relationships are essential to high-volume mailers. Of course, the personal approach is difficult for smaller catalogers who execute their e-mail campaigns in-house. Knowing whom to call at each ISP, getting through to that person, and being trusted by him or her can take considerable time and effort on your part.

Look for inferences from other mail metrics. Most mailers use secondary metrics to monitor deliverability. E-mail that isn’t delivered is, of course, never opened or clicked. If your open rates, click rates and opt-out rates plummet, you may infer that large portions of your campaign were blocked.

However, using proxy metrics to estimate deliverability is an imprecise practice; e-mail metrics notoriously vary from campaign to campaign. And relying on secondary metrics to estimate deliverability reveals potential problems too late to do anything about them.

Four Steps to Increase Your E-mail Deliverability

1. Determine how much of your mail gets delivered. Review your deliverability tracking with your e-mail vendor, or establish a tracking program in-house. Establish seed accounts at the major ISPs to determine if your mail reaches those inboxes. Install popular spam-blocking software on these seed accounts to determine if common spam-detectors route your campaigns to the trash.

2. Mail only 100-percent, opt-in, fresh housefile e-mail addresses. Nowadays, think hard before renting third-party consumer e-mail lists, swapping e-mail lists and appending e-mails to your postal file.

3. Avoid mailing stale addresses. Contact your e-mail housefile at least monthly. Customers routinely discard free e-mail accounts, and ISPs suspend such accounts after several months of inactivity. Some ISPs recycle suspended accounts into their spam-detection programs. E-mail into those inactive accounts, then, may suggest to the ISPs that the mailer is spamming. Bulk e-mailing customers to whom you last sent commercial e-mail more than 10 months ago could lead some ISPs to block your entire mailing.

4. Ensure your e-mails don’t resemble spam. To avoid tripping front-end or back-end filters, avoid spam-like copy in your headline and e-mail body copy. Words such as “free,” “money” and “Viagra,” and using excessive or irregular punctuation generally are considered tipoffs to spam. To review recently sent spam from across the Internet, check out http://groups.google.com/groups?as_ugroup=news.admin.net-abuse.sightings

E-mail Service Bureaus

Given the complexity of today’s e-mail issues, you probably want to simplify your marketing by using an e-mail service bureau. Should you use an external vendor to send campaigns or handle e-mail in-house?

To be sure, the decision process can be complicated. Smaller marketers with e-mail files of less than 100,000 names often use basic off-the-shelf tools and send e-mail themselves. Because of smaller quantities, slower mailing velocities and modest marketing budgets, internal solutions make sense for smaller mailers.

But catalogers with larger files typically outsource e-mail delivery. The cost of actually pushing out e-mail is near zero. A good e-mail service bureau offers value through its expertise in deliverability, account management, marketing strategy, test execution and segmentation.

There’s a growing trend among the largest e-mail marketers to bring their e-mail delivery back in-house. As this requires investment in software and dedicated resources, this option makes sense for mailers spending more than $75,000 annually in e-mail service bureau fees.

Conclusion

For legitimate e-mail marketers, Can Spam offers welcome relief from much of the legal risk during the last few years. However, in the long run, legitimate e-mailers should hold themselves to much higher standards than Can Spam requires. Indeed, best practices dictate sending mail only to 100-percent, opt-in housefile names.

While the legal concern has lessened, deliverability concerns have increased. ISPs are blocking more and more e-mail, and many requested marketing communications to opt-in names are being discarded as spam. Whether internally or externally, track if your e-mail reaches your customers as intended, and work with your service bureau, ISPs and copywriters to increase the odds that your e-mails are delivered.

For More Info

For a copy of the Can Spam Act, visit: www.spamlaws.com/federal/108s877.html. A PDF version also is available for download from the site.

The Direct Marketing Association offers its members the white paper “The DMA’s Analysis of Can Spam Act of 2003.” The paper offers a succinct look at the law’s major provisions. Contact (212) 790-1500 or visit: http://www.the-dma.org/

Alan Rimm-Kaufman, Ph.D., is president of the Rimm-Kaufman Group LLC. Vist him on the Web at www.rimmkaufman.com

Introduction

Aaron Montgomery Ward mailed the first catalog in 1872, and catalogers been working to perfect the art of selling from the printed page ever since.

Savvy catalogers understand the factors behind successful print design: cover imagery, page count, product density, copy, institutional, design, typography, color, paper, trim, and so forth.

The web, in contrast, is in its infancy. The graphical internet dates back to only 1991. The leading online firms are not more than ten years old: Yahoo launched in 1994, Amazon and Ebay in 1995, and Google in 1998.

It isn’t surprising, then, that many catalogers are more experienced creating strong print pages than strong web pages. This article offers four suggestions for improving your online presentation for human visitors.

(We’ll address optimizing your design for web “spiders” and “bots” in a subsequent column — stay tuned.)

Focus: What is the primary purpose of the page?

The most serious common problem with catalogers’ web pages is lack of focus: pages attempting to do too much.

An informal analysis of several leading e-commerce web sites revealed that a typical product detail pages averages over 100 links.

Think about that number: visitors face 100 choices on where to click next.

The problem isn’t link quantity per se; the problem is not providing sufficient visual clues as to which of these 100 links is most important.

Seth Godin discusses this in The Big Red Fez (recommended): when everything is marked important, nothing is seen as important.

Increasing Page Focus

Here’s a recipe to increase the focus of your pages.

Consider every page on your site as a direct-response ad with a single primary objective. The objective must be getting the visitor to complete a specific measurable action, such as pushing a certain button, clicking on certain links, or completing a form.

Typical objectives are “go deeper into the site”, “request a catalog”, “add to cart”, and “complete order”.

Different pages can have different objectives, and one objective may correspond to multiple links (for example, a home page would have multiple “go deeper” links), but each page must have only one primary objective.

The hard part is selecting which objective is most important for each page. Different constituencies within your firm will lobby hard for different objectives:

“The home page must stress catalog request.”

“The product category pages must pitch service subscriptions.”

“Make sure product detail pages promote cross-sells.”

“Make the ‘more info’ links more prominent.”

“The home page should urge visitors to call.”

And so forth. Don’t be swayed!

Each Page Has One Primary Objective

Catalog requests, promoting services, cross-selling, selling through information centers, and driving phone calls are all reasonable and important objectives.

And these objectives are appropriate primary goals for appropriate pages. (When a visitor reaches your catalog request page, for example, “get catalog request” is the correct objective, and secondary marketing objectives should not distract.)

But the primary goal of a home page isn’t typically “catalog request”; it is “go deeper into site.”

The primary goal of the product detail page isn’t typically “cross-sell”; it is “add to cart.”

For each page, determine its primary objective.

Emphasis The Primary Objective Through Clear Design

Once you’ve determined a page’s primary objective, use clear web design to emphasize that goal.

Using Godin’s web-visitor-as-monkey metaphor, make sure each page has a single “banana.” Emphasize the primary objective using distinctive color, size, shape, and position.

Rather than increasing the emphasis on the important, de-emphasize the less important. A page’s primary objective needn’t be marked up with garish red, huge-and-bold, or (horrors!) <blink> tags.

Instead, select a softer color palette for the entire site, and reserve strong primary colors for the key action. Surrounding the key element with additional white-space also increases its emphasis.

The Across-The-Room Squint Test

Here’s a quick check to evaluate if a page’s primary objective is visually obvious.

Print the first screen of that web page in color. (The primary objective link must be “above the fold,” as only committed visitors scroll.)

Have non-design folks view the color printout from several feet away, where text becomes illegible but design and color are still clear.

Viewers should identify the primary objective instantly:

“Well, I can’t read too well from back here, but I’d bet you want visitors click that red rectangle on the far left.”

Suggestion: To increase sales, increase your page focus. Make it clear where you want visitors to click.

Operations: Emphasize your strengths

As a successful catalog company, you know how to take calls, answer questions, ship products quickly, handle returns, and solve customer problems.

These are tremendous strengths, and your pages should ensure shoppers become aware of them:

• Provide your 800 number clearly atop every page.
• On your “About Us” page, describe your friendly and skilled phone staff and short-hold times.
• Promote your live web chat, your fast email response speed, and your impressive shipping speed.
• Offer customer testimonials and emphasize your high levels of customer satisfaction. (Advice: don’t tout your own excellent service; use objective third-party scores, like BizRate.)

Suggestion: To increase sales, promote your service and fulfillment strengths.

Speed: Faster is better

Fast-loading pages get used more often.

Consider Google.

Google offers excellent search results, but an equally important key to Google’s success is its blindingly fast speed. (Experiment: run the same query on Alexa, MSN, Yahoo, and Google and note response times.)

Establish a concrete targets for reducing your site load times over the next quarter.

Monitor the speed of the home page, a typical product category page, a typical product detail page, and a typical on-site-search query. Make sure your timing tool uses sampling to obtain fair estimates, as response times vary with internet load, server load, and database load.

Benchmark load times for key competitor sites, too.

Speeding Up Your Site

To speed up your site, first analyze where the time is being spent.

If your database-driven pages are slow, optimize queries, add indexes, or cache common results. If that isn’t enough, upgrade software, hardware, and distribute database work across multiple servers.

If the whole site is slow, consider faster web server software, hardware upgrades, and investing in additional servers.

Make sure your server has multiple fast connections to the internet, and consider caching services like Akamai or Savvis.

Speeding Up Your Site II

Gain speed by transmitting fewer bytes.

Use smaller images where you can, optimizing image resolution for web presentation. Use Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to reduce HTML bloat. Move common CSS and client-side scripts off the page into their own files, so browsers can cache them.

Make sure all image tags include HEIGHT and WIDTH tags, so browsers needn’t wait for images to begin rendering.

Use HTTP content compression to shrink your pages. While this technology is common at dot-coms, a recent study by Port80 indicated only 4% of Fortune 1000 websites use this effective technology.

Insist your designers, service reps, and management team spend time using your site through an AOL dialup. Though DSL is increasingly common, your site must be responsive at dial-up speeds . and your broadband users will also appreciate your speedup efforts.

Suggestion: To increase sales, make your site faster.

Usability: Follow norms

In 1999 Jakob Neilsen offered his insightful “Law of Web User Experience.”

This law observes that your web users spend most of their time on other web sites.

Accordingly, deviating too far from web norms confuses your users and harms sales.

Stay abreast of current web norms by keeping notes as your surf and shop online. Monitor leading websites. Monitor your competition.

If you see many sites using a certain visual or navigation convention, consider using the same convention.

For example, the following are becoming e-commerce norms:

• Place the site search button in the upper left
• Provide “bread crumbs”to keep visitors from getting lost
• Use “tabbed” displays to simplify pages
• Use home-page thumbnails to promote categories (vs. products)
• Use standard link decoration
• Design for 800×600 pixels.

Your Visitors Don’t Think About Your Products As Often As You Do

We could extend Neilsen’s law to note that most of your web visitors spend far less time thinking about your products than you do, and are far less fluent in your terminology than you are.

Be kind to these visitors: avoid industry jargon (or link to explanations); explain important concepts; provide information layers for both the novice and expert shopper.

Establish a program of periodic usability tests to watch how typical users use and comprehend your site. Such tests need not be elaborate or expensive, and can reveal common stumbling blocks in your page design.

Tip: hire a firm specializing in web usability for your first few rounds of testing to learn the ropes, then train internal folks to conduct and analyze usability sessions.

Suggestion: To increase sales, follow web norms.

Conclusion

These four suggestions will help improve your web page design.

May all your pages have clear focus, emphasize your strengths, load quickly, make sense to your visitors — and enjoy great conversion this holiday season!

Introduction

The web is full of hidden treasures tucked away in odd corners.

The trick, sometimes, is simply knowing where these interesting spots are.

For this article, I polled catalogers and e-retailers for their suggestions of lesser-known online resources, information sources, and new ideas related to e-commerce.

The resulting list of 19 links is somewhat eclectic. Hopefully, they’ll trigger a new idea and help with your web marketing.

Search-Within-The-Book And Beyond

www.a9.com

Amazon’s beta search engine, A9, is interesting for several reasons: it remembers your recent searches; it searches Amazon’s “search within the book” database; and the A9 toolbar provides a diary feature so you can save notes on any webpage you visit.

Site Traffic Stats, Gratis

www.alexa.com

Surprisingly, many online retailers aren’t yet familiar with Alexa, a search portal owned by Amazon.

The site claims superior search results via user feedback through their toolbar.

More interesting than the search, however, are the free traffic stats for various websites.

Though the site runs slow at times, and though the traffic estimates are imperfect, Alexa enables you to view statistics and trends across the web, letting you see how your site stacks up against your competition in terms of traffic, speed, and inbound links.

The Rise Of Blogs

www.blogger.com

Freedom of the press takes on new meaning with the arrival of “blogs”, an abbreviation of “web log”.

Blogs let writers publish online with little technological hassle. Blog content ranges from personal diaries to political commentaries.

Now blogs are going corporate: some brands create external blogs to communicate with their customers — for example, Google’s GoogleBlog.

Businesses blog to establish themselves as experts in an area — for example, Hippablog by lawyer Jeff Drummond, discusses medical privacy.

And some employees blog about their employers — for example, marketer John Porcaro’s take on his employer, Microsoft, at johnporcaro.typepad.com.

Feed Your Marketing Brain

www.reveries.com/coolnews/

Cool News of the Day — not to be confused with the movie fan site, Aint It Cool News — is a a daily email newsletter about interesting things in the world of marketing.

Though it focuses on brand advertising and consumer-packaged-goods marketing, direct marketers will find useful ideas here.

Names To Numbers

www.dnsstuff.com

Ever encounter something odd with a web address?

A well-known site disappears, an email to a good address bounces, or a customer tells you your site is down — when it isn’t?

Often the problem can stem from DNS, the system that maps a web name (for example, www.yahoo.com) to its corresponding web location, or “IP” address (66.94.231.98 ).

The DNS Stuff page provides a bevy of free tools for quick DNS checks.

Warning: this site is somwehat technical. Pass this link on to your IT staff when things seem awry.

Good Experience

www.goodexperience.com

Mark Hurst’s focuses on the challenge of providing good customer experience in his email newsletter.

(On the flip side, he also chronicles poor design of things, places, and websites at thisisbroken.com.)

As the consumers’ expectations of web site design and performance continue to rise, usability is becoming increasingly essential to a web site’s closing ratio.

Keep An Eye On This For Me, Please

www.google.com/webalerts

At your request, Google will search itself for your selected query, emailing you new results daily or weekly.

This free beta service is a great way to monitor your brand, your competition, and key ideas in your industry.

New Metaphors For Search

www.grokker.com

While this web search tool requires a large download, and while the free trial is only thirty days long, and while the program isn’t as fast as one would like, Grokker’s graphical approach to search is fascinating: you surf from high level topics (represented as colored balls) down into sub topics (represented as balls-within-balls), eventually down into actual web pages.

This program is a hybrid blend of a knowledge-mapper, a meta-search engine, and a smart browser.

Like Kartoo, Grokker offers an interesting early glimpse of new metaphors for organizing and finding information online.

The connection to online retailing?

Many e-retailers have found organizing products into useful hierarchies surprisingly challenging, yet critical for success in site search, guided navigation, and shopping feeds.

In a few years, search metaphors like Grokker may enable web retailers to offer their visitors easier ways to surf their merchandise and find complementary items.

The Invisible Web

www.invisible-web.net

For all their power, search engines do a poor job at indexing the so-called “invisible web”, the rich domain-specific databases hiding behind government, industry, and academic portals.

To access these databases, you first need to know which site to visit, then run your query on that site.

This site helps you find these databases, and is thus a useful gateway for government statistics, government regulations, and industry data.

Visual Search

www.Kartoo.com

Kartoo is a visual meta-search engine, which runs a query against several search engines and presents the results in a graphical map.

You can see excerpts from the various pages by hovering over them, allowing you to scan many sites without having to click-through to them.

While free visual search isn’t yet fully baked, and while the server-side Kartoo isn’t as sophisticated as the client-side Grokker, Kartoo is an intriguing early glimpse of how search may evolve over the next few years.

Retailing News Served Fresh Daily

www.smartbrief.com

This short daily newsletter keeps you on top of major happenings in the world of retail.

Easy to skim each morning, the email consists of short synopses linked to original articles from various newspapers and magazines.

Email Privacy Made Simple

www.sneakemail.com

When you’re worried a website might not use your email address responsibly, or when you wish to sign for a competitor’s email newsletter anonymously, Sneakemail.com offers free disposable email addresses.

For example, if I didn’t want to entrust you with my real email address, I could ask you to mail me at rguag5t0221@sneakemail.com, and it will forward to my real account.

Because you create a new email for each use, you can determine the origin of any spam to that address and easily turn it off. You can both send and receive from these anonymous email addresses.

Basic service is free; full service adds features for $2/month.

The Wisdom of Nielsen

www.useit.com

The sad truth is many e-retail websites are difficult and unpleasant to use, resulting in lower sales per visitor.

Jakob Nielsen, founder of the “discount usability engineering” movement for web testing, publishes his ongoing insights in his bi-weekly “Alertbox” newsletter.

Past issues are archived on his site. Rate your site against Nielsen’s “Top Ten Web Design Mistakes of 2003” checklist.

Squeaky Clean HTML

validator.w3.org

Challenge your web team to get your site’s HTML as clean as possible.

Well-formed HTML works reliably in more browsers, renders faster, and is preferred by search engines.

The World Wide Web Consortium is the organization responsible for official specs for the web, and they provide free HTML validation programs on their site.

Caution: few web pages are truly compliant to spec. You may need to wade through many minor warnings to find real errors, but it is worth it.

Advertising Games

www.postopia.com

Can you sell breakfast cereal via video games?

While game-based marketing would make sense for very few catalogers, Post’s advertising/game portal is an interesting visit for online marketers.

Kids play free video games here, and the games reference Post brands and logos. Kids collect token codes from Post cereal boxes to get game hints or extra powers.

Though no fan of sweetened cereal for breakfast, I find the marketing here excellent. The brand messaging is restrained, and the games are fun. (My six-year old recommends “Waffle Boy”)

Looking Back Into History

www.archive.org

The folks at the non-profit Internet Archive have stored 30 billion (!) web pages since 1996.

The site offers a powerful search engine to see what a website looked like in the past.

For example, visit the Yahoo! homepage as of October 1996 at http://web.archive.org/web/19961017235908/http://www2.yahoo.com.

The site is great for monitoring changes in your competitors’ websites, and also provides a fascinating historical view of the web’s rapid evolution.

Who Goes There?

www.whois.sc

The whois database provides registration information for web domains.

You can use these data to find out, to some degree, who owns a domain and where they’re located.

Whois data is a good way to find contact information for sites harming or competing with your site.

The whois interface at www.whois.sc is particularly comprehensive, providing registrant info, an image of the homepage, related domains, meta tags, DMOZ links, and reverse IP information.

Basic service is free, small fee for advanced features.

Wiki Wiki Wiki

c2.com/cgi/wiki?WikiWikiWeb

“Wiki” means “fast” in Hawaiian. Ward Cunningham choose this appropriate adjective for his web-based “open editing” collaboration software.

“Open editing” means any visitor can change web page content and site organization.

While this sounds like a recipe for chaos, Wikis are receiving favorable coverage in the business press as low-cost, flexible tools for corporate knowledge sharing.

My firm recently installed Kwiki a simple free perl-based wiki on our intranet. Installation took under 10 minutes, and we find it a useful tool.

Open Source Encyclopaedia

wikipedia.org

The Wikipedia is an open-source encyclopedia.

As the name suggests, it is implemented as a Wiki. That is, the site has over 300,000 collaborative articles on all subjects, written and edited by volunteers.

The articles are generally of high quality.

This site may interest online marketers for three reasons — it is a vivid example of open source principles in action, it shows the power of web communities, and it is also a very useful encyclopedia.

Conclusion

Hopefully one or more of these sites are new to you, and will spark a new marketing idea.

Was your favorite site omitted?

I’d welcome receiving your suggestions on additional lesser-known web resources useful to e-retailers.

This article was written in 2004. Check out our blog for newer content.

Many catalogers are enjoying great results from paid search marketing.

In an earlier article, I presented tactical suggestions for winning at paid search.

This article answers 8 strategic questions about this new channel.

What is paid search marketing?

Paid search marketing consists of placing ads for your products or services on search engines and on content sites across the internet.

These ads are typically small snippets of text linked to your merchandise pages. You pay when someone clicks through to your site from the ad.

Cost-per-click (CPC) fees range from 5 cents to several dollars per click, with an industry average near 35 cents.

Leading search marketing channels include Google, Overture, and Inktomi (now Overture Site Match).

There are additional smaller channels, and new large channels anticipated soon.

What sort of catalogers do best at paid search?

Paid search works best for catalogers with fair pricing, good websites, and strong brands.

Paid search marketing also favors retailers with focused merchandising.

Merchandising depth increases the odds you win the click, and the odds that click yields an order.

Here’s an example.

Two ads, compared

Consider two recent ads on a Google search for “wine glass”:

Stemware - Free Shipping
Bohemia, Riedel & Ravenscroft.
Wine glasses, barware and decanters.
www.bestwineglass.com

Pottery Barn Entertaining
Find all your home essentials &
easy home updates at Pottery Barn.
www.PotteryBarn.com

Pottery Barn is a great company — I’m a satisfied customer.

For this search, however, the lesser known brand appears more credible.

Their URL and focused copy suggests Bestwineglass.com lives and breathes wine glasses. Of these two ads, Bestwineglass.com likely enjoys the higher click-through rate.

Further, the visitor to Bestwineglass.com finds 47 different glass options, versus 12 at Pottery Barn. Because of this four-fold advantage in selection, it is likely Bestwineglass.com enjoys higher conversion on this phrase.

Pottery Barn’s overall merchandising strategy makes sense: broad selection garners more business overall than niche merchandising.

For paid search, however, merchandising depth beats merchandising breadth.

What sort of products sell best at paid search?

To work well in paid search advertising, products must have sufficient web search traffic and sufficient margin dollars.

They also need to be products that can be sold via short text descriptions, and products that customers understand.

Consider the little-known pet oral hygiene category. The phrase “dog toothbrush” receives fewer than 2 searches per day (as reported by Overture), and these items sell for under $10.

While such products might participate in a larger campaign, dog toothbrushes will never play the starring role in any search marketing campaign.

People don’t search for things they don’t know

Paid search is also a poor choice for introducing new products that consumers do not yet understand.

One retailer shared his excitement over a novel polarized sun visor for car windshields. This unique product includes a small disc the driver aligns to block the sun. The item sells well via its catalog presentation, where a photo, a diagram, and a copy block illustrate its advantages.

Like the dog toothbrush, however, this sun visor is too unusual to be a paid search hero product.

Do paid-search acquired buyers have good lifetime values?

Catalogers often report search-acquired buyers have somewhat lower future values compared with non-search-acquired buyers.

This is probably because search-acquired customers are more web-savvy and more likely to comparison shop than typical direct buyers.

I suggest placing search-acquired names in distinct key codes when preparing mail tapes for your merge-purge, and carefully tracking future sales into these cohorts.

For larger catalogers who commonly acquire customers below first-order break-even, I recommend more cautious paid search acquisition spending.

Don’t bet that typical future purchase rates will hold; make sure you gain a sufficient return on the first order.

How should I track and monitor my paid search campaigns?

Running paid search campaigns without solid tracking is like flying an airplane blindfolded.

Your tracking system needs be able to track every click, order, revisit, and subsequent order at the most granular level of detail. Good tracking systems also reconcile the click counts for which you are billed against the visits your site actually receives.

Tracking extends beyond your online systems: I suggest providing your phone agents a dedicated catalog code to assign when callers indicate they found your company via web search.

While callers will not (and should not be asked to) recall the specific placement or wording of your ad, you can allocate this generic spill-over revenue proportionately across your tracked results.

Good reporting systems offer simple dashboards to monitor your overall marketing effort, as well as detailed reports supporting in-depth analysis.

Look for reporting systems which offer flexible categories and subcategories for summarizing results. Advanced systems support easy A/B testing of ad copy and destination URL, and provide statistical confidence estimates to distinguish testing signal from noise.

Should I leave search marketing to my affiliates?

Some retailers delegate their paid search efforts to their affiliate marketing partners: a simple, no-fuss solution.

This strategy suffers three weaknesses.

First, it inserts two levels of intermediaries between the retailer and the search advertising channel — the affiliate and the affiliate network — both marking-up the true cost of the advertising to generate their profit margin.

Retailers or their search marketing manager can buy the same advertising directly from the search venue at cost.

Second, affiliates have no interest in sharing marketing insights with the retailer: the affiliate aims to buy low advertising low and sell it high, and has no incentive to share how they are driving sales.

Indeed, when retailers dig into the details of their affiliate programs, many find their affiliates are driving much their sales via advertising on the retailer’s own brand name, a monstrous exploitation of the retailer.

The “black box” nature of the affiliates’ campaigns deprive the retailer of valuable marketing insight.

Third, retailers do not control their affiliates, and thus cannot execute campaigns or tests at will. Retailers managing search internally, or working with a search management firm, can drive the marketing effort to support corporate goals.

Should I handle search internally, or outsource it?

Retailers with small search campaigns typically manage them in-house. Small programs don’t generate enough earnings to justify outsourcing them.

Retailers running medium to large search marketing programs find maximizing the channel requires two key ingredients: smart technology and smart people.

Retailers can develop rudimentary tracking and reporting technology internally, rent systems from ASP providers, or use a platform offered by their search management firm.

The right choice for your company depends on the availability of your IT resources, functionality and ease-of-use desired, and the relative costs.

Who manages your search campaigns?

A smart search marketing analyst can wring huge improvements from a search campaign.

Such a person — or, sometimes, people — must understand your merchandising, your value proposition, and your economics, and be skilled in the nuances of online marketing and the various search venues.

Strong reporting systems empower your analysts. They should earn their salary by thinking, analyzing, and discovering; not wasting hours chiseling out crude reports using dull tools.

When choosing to in-source or outsource analysis, the right choice for your firm depends on the availability of in-house online marketing talent, the incremental return gained via better marketing, and the relative costs of in-house salaries versus management fees.

How much should I spend on paid search marketing?

Search marketing is an ideal direct marketing medium: it supports low-risk tests and aggressive rollouts of profitable campaigns.

Many retailers start with a small test of a few thousand dollars. After a successful test, e-retailers seek scale: the next question is “how much advertising can we buy while still meeting our ROI target?”

This figure illustrates the quantity versus quality tradeoff for a niche B2C cataloger for whom my firm manages search.

The smoothed graph plots revenue (defined as online sales directly tracked to the search marketing effort) and marketing income (defined as online revenue from search, less cost-of-goods, less variable costs, less advertising) against search marketing expense.

Balancing sales and earnings

After testing a portfolio consisting of very large number of search terms for this client, my firm bucketed the ads by deciles based on efficiency, as measured by advertising-to-sales ratio.

This graph suggests the retailer gains maximum marketing income when spending near $7000 on search advertising per month (A).

The plot offers other options available to the retailer for trading-off revenue and earnings (B, C).

More advertising increases revenue, but once beyond break-even, additional spending cuts into profits.

This particular retailer opts for a strategy near B, investing some but not all of their earnings for more revenue.

Once you determine your tradeoff between advertising cost, sales, and profits, you can scale up your marketing spend and still meet your marketing goals.

Some large retailers spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on search advertising monthly, and do so while hitting their ROI targets.

Conclusion

Paid search is one of the most exciting customer acquisition opportunities for catalogers available today.

If your firm is not yet using this new channel, run a test to see if paid search can work for you!