Author: David Dalka

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Internet Retailer 2006 Workshop Summary: E-mail Marketing

Don Zeidler, Director of Direct Marketing, The W. Altee Burpee Co. (afterwards I asked him about his title and if I could assume that he was in control of both marketing in both offline and online worlds – not disjointed parts – he said yes – I suspect this will become increasingly commonplace in the future)

Mathew Seeley, President Cheetahmail, an Experian Company

Mark Friedman, Chief Digital Marketing Officer, Warnaco Inc.

Deliver Relevance in E-mail – this is critical as we get into message overload and this panel argued that means segmentation.

Not all customers are the same, so don’t treat them that way.

Basic segmentation – Demographic, Geographic, A/B Testing

Types of campaigns to test – Win Back, Loyalty, Servicing, Operational, Remarketing, Life Cycle, Renewal, Transactional

Thank you notes after purchase have a high ROI

It’s the little things that matter:

Ask Them

Grow Your List

Keep Your Creative Fresh

Welcome, Birthday, Thank You Message

Integrate Call Center, POS, In Store Kiosk

You don’t have to get all of the data at once. Start slow, ask for more data later.

Email authentication –

ISP feedback loops – example – MSN Smart Market Data

Be aware of new services like Sender Score Certified – a service of Return Path

In the final analysis, if you don’t send relevant messages to your customers, someone else will and you will lose out!

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Yahoo! Soft Launches Shopping Blog

At last week’s Internet Retailer conference, Chris Saito, Senior Director of Yahoo! Shopping, announced the soft launch of Yahoo!’s new shopping blog. During the conference I saw a few examples of interesting blogs driving sales or people planning to launch blogs (my favorite was a company that found a customer that had blogged about various products they sold for several years in a place nobody read it and they bought the content from him on the cheap and will post it, you guessed it over the next four years!) After Chris wrestled away a guy trying to pitch a 7th generation tagging idea or something like that, I was able to have a nice conversation with him for a few moments about Yahoo! and the role of shopping within Yahoo!

I’ve watched it for a week now and it seems to have a nice random posting by several people and I really like that it has a suggestion e-mail. I get the del.icio.us tag, the e-mail send and the blog via 360 (nice cross-sell). The clear addition of a print button is a bit puzzling to me, wouldn’t that encourage people to print the item and buy it offline elsewhere Chris?

Please let me know how it progresses. Thanks.

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Internet Retailer 2006 Workshop Summary: Site Search

Site Search: The Web’s In-Store Merchandising Tool
– 20-40% of online shoppers use search to find products (Forrester)
– 47% of searchers give up after one search

Insight: Users don’t care about searching, they care about finding. As such, search is one part of a “findability system”. Certain domains tend to be more searchable like books, CDs, jobs, clothing, etc.

Label – Best Practices
– Optional – better if button says “Search” rather than “Go”
– Filters and directionally suggestive

Input Field – Best Practices
– Eye catching and appropriate size
– Clearly visible, high contrast
– Do not put more than one input field per page

Button – Best Practices
– Non-optional
– Action-oriented wording
– Right next to input field
– Standard form element or image
– Make sure enter key works

Filter – Best Practices
– Only if it’s necessary, very useful or very commonly used
– Make options available
– Concise wording
– Limit number of advanced filters due to confusion

Be careful about going against common practices, titles, etc.

Simplicity is vital, do not clutter up the system!

Edwin Watts Golf – showed exponential growth in sales from simply fixing the search box – rags to riches story.

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The Motley Fool Suggests Google is “Killing the Internet”

So far this month there have been two noteworthy pieces written about click fraud and related issues.

Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban blogs that click fraud is “FAR greater” than imagined. Quite an interesting read and one coming from a wealthy Internet pioneer to boot. It’s clear that he has a strong opinion on this subject.

The second article is from The Motley Fool and is entitled “How Google is Killing the Internet”

While I encourage everyone to read the article thoroughly, here are some interesting quotes from Seth’s article:
“Markets don’t correct without competition and information, and I don’t think there’s enough of either here to make a difference. Yet.”

“I don’t know the answers — or even all of the questions. But if this problem is as bad as some fear, it could eventually put a major crimp in Google’s entire revenue model, if not the entire pay-per-click business. I would argue that the explosion of link farms and spamblogs is pretty decent evidence that the click-fraud biz is not only alive and well, but also thriving at the expense of all of us. Except Google. For now, anyway.”

It’s interesting to see such high profile articles or blog posts on these topics. It will be interesting to see where this goes from here.

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Google Reputation Management Issue

Before I begin, I want to be perfectly clear that I appreciate Google for it’s recent efforts to integrate blog comments into search results. It is both interesting and not something that can be perfected quickly.

However, I’d like to illustrate fully an example of where this is a concern for me and others whom may not even know about it until it creates a problem. This issue revolves around blog comments not made by an individual that show up in the description fields when Googling one’s name. Please review the following example web page that explains the ‘Google Reputation Management Issue’ before reading further. It’s important that you visualize what I’m saying both proceeding.

These days, it is now common practice for people to search for information about individuals on a search engine before a business discussion or a job interview. Due to the nature of these searches and the types of important decisions being made off of them, it is critical that they be accurate. If it isn’t, miscommunication or even disaster can strike. Due to this search engines have an ethical responsibility to present search results that are an accurate presentation of reality.

Let’s examine my case, on May 16th, I posted a comment in response to Josh Kopelman’s Blog entry regarding “53,651”. The following is what I posted in response to his post: “Great post that reminds us of the importance of true customers and looking past your inner circle.” (please see screen shot on other web page)

However, the Google description tag reads: “Posted by: David Dalka | May 16m 2006 at 11:29AM. Hey Josh, you said it! As one of your first investors in Infonautics wasn’t that the pre-www? …” (please see screen shot on other web page)

At present, I’m neither a investor of this level nor a millionaire. What if someone did not click through to read the real web page? Would they have likely formed the impression that I was an investor in Infonautics? The possibility certainly exists. Where this would be a larger concern is if the post after mine was not professional or even worse contained hate or spam links to porn sites. This would not be good.

So I’d like to please ask all web companies, not just Google, to take extra care in the future before putting releases in the live environment that could affect an individual’s reputation due to inaccurate presentation. Stated another way, “beta software” usage which only hinders an individual is OK, while the public release of “beta results” is discouraged as it can cause significant reputation damage. Thank you for your attention and support of this important issue and making the Internet a more accurate place. 

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Indy 500 Television Coverage

ABC USA television had an interesting new way to show commercials during today’s Indy 500. During the commercial breaks they continued to show the content of the program! The race was on the left side in a slightly smaller box than the commercial on the right side. In addition, right above the commercial the organization’s logo was prominently displayed.

I wish to applaud this innovation as it creates a stickier experience for the user with out content interruption while creating a new opportunity for branding with the logo for the advertiser. This is clearly a place where concepts on the web are migrating to new mediums and was very interesting to see. I don’t know if it would have struck me as interesting as it did without the things I’ve been learning about search engine marketing.