“Hey, dude – where ya been?”
“Being the bear.”

“Huh?”
“Being the bear… getting into the heads of consumers to understand how to maximize a concept I have for mobile direct marketing. And I believe I have validated what I thought all along about direct marketing; It works best if you become an advocate for your target audience and take the role of broker – works great – avoids falling into the trap of treating targets like TARGETS and becoming just another spammer.”

“So how’s that work exactly?”
“It’s very much like old-school relationship-based marketing.  Understand the needs and desires of the consumer; make it a personal goal to make your target consumers happy with the solutions you bring them (treat them like friends who you would not take advantage of for a buck); establish a dialog; network your consumers into a brand community (not a social network – there is a difference); and let the consumer drive the relationship.”

“Yeah – sounds familiar – why is this any different?”
“Technology!  The problem with an old-school relationship model is that it won’t scale very far – you can only personally service a small group. And it often relies on established branding. That’s OK for Avon Ladies and Amway salesmen, but it doesn’t work for the majority and it cannot grow indefinitely.  The real key here is not the underlying principal (although I have convinced myself it’s a necessary component)… the key is implementation.  And that’s what I’ve been working on.  Email marketing is fundamentally dead.  Not that it never works, but really… when was the last time you got big, predictable return on an email campaign that wasn’t already leveraging a special relationship with the recipients?  And God forbid you resort to telemarketing.  But direct marketing requires the ability to reach out and touch, and successful direct marketing requires that you are touching the right person at the right time with the right offer. And the “dialog” has to be mostly automated.  Once it reaches critical mass it’s a self-sustaining reaction – no real “lead gen” function to worry with.  That’s why I’ve been focused on mobile - it’s becoming the most reliable touch point and the next generation of consumers is a blue ocean opportunity for anyone who figures out how to do it right.  Gotta go – this bear smells barbeque.”

Been awhile, eh?  I know.  But I didn’t have too much to say – so much happened (good and bad) in the 4th quarter of last year that blogging seemed like an unfruitful activity.  But the holidays were good (always are) – I’m still plowing through the video games.

I had to get some other stuff out of the way – professionally – and I am now working on some new ideas/technologies in direct mobile marketing.  It’s going to be way cool but I cannot talk about it much.  I’m sure there are lots of people working on such ideas so no need to lose any edge I might have.

Talk soon.

The post office is raising rates again. This article by Chris Hosford at BtoB spells out the impact on direct mail in no uncertain terms -  essentially, “doom“.

It’s a crying shame that our postal service has to work this way.  I don’t have a well-thought-out suggestion for how to fix that problem just yet, but I do have some words of advice (again, no revelation here – just that I’ve been thinking)…

When it comes to marketing, direct mail is cool.  It can be very effective when done right or a huge waste of $$ and resources (read: trees) when done “wrong”.  Even people such as myself who don’t respond to spam (digital or otherwise), marketing ploys or pretty much any kind of impression to a significant degree cannot resist at least looking at a really good piece of print.  Whether it’s a postcard or a brochure or a take-out menu or a (temporarily) free magazine… most people respond to visual stimuli.  And that gives the marketer those extra few seconds, minutes or even days to make the impression or solicit a response.  I know that although 99% of all the physical mail that I receive goes right into the trash or the recycle bin, a visually appealing or personally relevant anything will sit on the counter or table or reading chair for at least a day – usually to be sure I am not being too hasty in immediately discarding it.  In contrast, the white postcard from by Ophthalmologist reminding me to update my prescription goes into the recycle within 2 seconds – despite the fact that his postcard is both personalized and extremely relevant.  Obviously it requires all 3 factors to make the print piece stick.

So the take away from that train of thought is that direct mail done right is still worth doing, but blanketing the world with generic (for lack of a better description) direct mail is no longer a reasonable marketing approach (neither is blanketing with generic email, but that is at least still inexpensive).  As I said, no revelation here… and others are saying the same thing (Personalized URLs for Direct Marketers).

It’s one of the big “in” trends happening in marketing. And it’s about time. Think about it – if you believe in the “theory” of impressions and you believe that relationship building is ultimately more effective and higher ROI than (e)mail blasting huge lists of potential prospects, then it’s a no-brainer to realize that you should use every means of achieving these goals. The latest trends in direct mail / print are DVP, one-off printing, PURLs, personalization… the latest trends in online direct marketing are guess what – Targeted Content, tailored experience, PURLs (2.0) and personalization. Two sides of the same coin for sure.

This goes back to my premise that we have to move beyond “a URL with your name in it” or an email that merges your first name into the salutation (I’d put in a “rolling my eyes” emoticon if I remembered what it is) as having any real relevance… PURLs as URLs are not in and of themselves of any real value – at least not much longer. However, PURLs that link through to a fulfillment of the “promise of the PURL” (e.g., PURLs 2.0) are both relevant and powerful – for both parties in the relationship.

Since we as a culture have always been the kind of people who like to send postcards while on vacation and like to receive them from others – more the former that the latter of course – direct mail done right still works and it always will. Digital online is great; it’s fundamentally inexpensive, expansive and accessible to anyone. But there is a huge amount of noise and clutter which makes it very difficult to stand out. Print pieces of any kind have to be much less distinctive to get a glance (ergo an impression), and a good print piece is something that you will leave sitting on your kitchen counter or desk for weeks – just because you liked it. That’s an impression. And it’s a controlled one which means it’s measurable which means you can determine if it really works for you and then optimize continuously.

So… now we put PURLs on print pieces, bring the visitor to a complementary, personalized, relationship-building experience on the Internet and bingo – a new opportunity. Then comes the art of nurturing individuals and building communities or brand fanatics or advocates or whatever is of shared value to both parties. And we call it Cross Media Direct Marketing. And it’s fun.

I’m talking about this and some of the latest technologies and techniques involved at the upcoming GoA conference. Hope to see you there.  It’s in Miami, FL if that helps your decision process

You should probably re-read the prequel post on Selling Perishable Inventory (I’ll wait).  By way of review… the previous post makes the point that a deep understanding of your target audience is critical to effective last-minute sales of “perishable inventory” (i.e., any thing that you sell that has a drop-dead sell date beyond which you forever lose the opportunity for revenue on that thing).  A really good example is tickets to a sporting event (but there are thousands of other good examples).  Empty seats at a game means lost revenue.  Forever.  Period.  If you know your target audience, there is a good chance you can throw out last-minute offers to the right people or organizations and get them to fill many of the soon-to-be-empty seats at Tuesday’s game.  You just need the right offer at the right time to the right target and you can make the sale.  That requires knowing who the right target is and what the right offer to that target should be.

This post is about how to start on the path toward reaching and maintaining that state of omniscience when you don’t know much and don’t have much to work with.

There are two fundamental aspects of getting started – (1) a set of “tools” and (2) a process.  The high level version of the process looks like this (discussed in a previous post):

As for tools, I advocate the approach pictured here:

The diagram above shows a trio of tools that collectively (and cost effectively – in the end you need good ROI – always) provide a platform in which you can create a continuous closed-loop dialog with target audiences.  The key parts are as follows:

• CRM (or equivalent) where you can organize target data – anything you know or learn about them as well as “relationship” status information.  A good CRM is flexible, easy to use, easily customized, provides features for segmentation and export of leads, contacts and accounts and will help you organize and track campaigns.  There are not that many really good CRMs.  I personally prefer using on-demand (SaaS) CRM because the benefits are many and the drawbacks are few (now that there are enough of them to make general integration a non-issue).
• Email Service Provider (or equivalent) through which you can effectively send potentially large volumes of email containing dynamic/personalized content with hyperlinks back to offers and information/links for opting out of future email (be courteous if nothing else).  A good ESP stays off of black lists, provides SPAM evaluation/feedback of your emails prior to sending, allows for dynamic content insertion through both rules and “mail merge” and provides metrics on the parameters of your mailings (e.g., sent, delivered, opened, linked-back, opted-out, etc.) – in a timely manner.
• A Dialog Tool that will make it easy to build landing pages and/or microsites that you can use for “online dialogue”.  This tool needs to be very flexible and capable so that you can do a lot very efficiently, track everything that goes on (for later analysis), apply PURLs, extensive personalization and targeted content and build a profile (and rapport) over time for a set of high-value relationships (e.g., the local fan base of a sports team, repeat givers of a charitable organization, frequent flyers, etc.).  There are not many such tools, and my obviously biased opinion is that OnDialog is the best (certainly for the price and the level of support you get).  And since I am the CTO, I can pretty much make sure it stays that way   I’m glad to expand on this, but I don’t want to use this forum to sell products as much as ideas – the ideas are free (and hopefully valuable anyway).

I’ve seen this holy trinity of marketing tools work extremely well.  Your initial investment in a best-of-breed (on-demand) solution is relatively low compared to what you can choose to pay (if you have more $$ than sense) for a single-vendor marketing suite.  And the ROI is relatively big (even huge).  And it’s easy to expand and grow from this core once you have your marketing machine “well-oiled”.

I’ve also recently read posts and forum discussions which indicate that it’s becoming a necessity, no longer a luxury, to have such tools and to learn to use them well for both online and print marketing – the merger of the two plus the use of PURLs is becoming the gold standard.  Then you can add on social marketing and mobile presence and reach anyone, anywhere at anytime with any offer.  As long as it’s the right offer at the right time, you will make the sale.  I make it sound so easy… because it is… at least the mechanics.  The difficult part is understanding your targets and using that understanding to build fruitful relationships… more on that coming up soon.

I borrowed the term “PURLs 2.0″ from Margie.  I wouldn’t have coined that myself as it falls into the category of not-so-exciting-artificial-concept-versioning terms.  However since someone more qualified than I has laid claim to it, I’m glad to use it – it’s simple and appropriate.  It is also highly relevant to the continued merger of print marketing and online marketing (which some experts are now calling “direct marketing” because they are both “direct” – just not physical/print).  Makes sense to me.

So the trick is making clear what it means to be “2.0″ or “3.0″ of any concept or technology (look at the wide variation in “web 3.0″ definitions… btw, I know what it means).

Here ya go:

PURLs 2.0 is the fulfillment of “the Promise of the PURL”.  The promise of the PURL is personalization (and by extension, relevance).  PURLs 1.0 as they have manifested in hyperlinks and URLs on print media are for the most part just a URL with the target’s/recipient’s name in it somewhere (there are various syntax’s and preferences – name in front, name at the end, FirstnameLastname, Firstname.Lastname, Firstname_Lastname, etc.).  That was initially an “interesting” aspect of receiving a URL – but now it’s old hat.  Every spam email you receive calls you by name – it’s technologically trivial and now semantically meaningless.  PURLs 2.0 – the fulfillment of the PURL promise – goes beyond the URL to provide “true” personalization at the landing (i.e., landing page, microsite, web site) or even in the printed media (one of the new trends in variable printing).

True Personalization is many things, and I believe they are all necessary as part of the promise fulfillment.  Some of these are technically “easy” to achieve and some much more sophisticated and (IMO) separate the simple PURL tools from the powerful ones:

1. A unique URL intended to be used by a single individual.  The alias (the personal name part of the URL) should be allowed to be anything that the sender deems appropriate or effective (and that can construct from data at hand). Everyone is (should be) familiar with the personal URL that contains your name in some form. But an alias could include your company name (especially appropriate if you represent a B2B relationship to the sender), your state, part of your phone number, your favorite color, whatever. This sort of flexibility in creating the personalized URL has at least 3 benefits I can think of right off – (1) it allows for the most appropriate URL for the target, (2) it allows for creative separation of possible collisions (manually, but that isn’t always a bad thing) and (3) it allows for more creativity (if all purls are firstname-lastname then they begin to lose their distinctiveness and relevance. Even when using just names, there are various ways to ensure that John Smith 1 and John Smith 2 are distinct.  Some people just use the incrementing number (e.g., JS1, JS2) – I think that’s sloppy – at least inelegant (it certainly does not impress me if I get a personalized URL with my name distinguished only by a number on the end) – and potentially confusing in that one time it’s a discriminator between Joe 1 and Joe 2 and next time it’s a counter for the number of “purl” offers you have been sent (which I also think is a bit weak, but if it works for you and your audience, then go with it until it no longer works as well).  A much better way to easily differentiate PURLs from one another is to provide a corresponding PIN or security code (the PIN you type in at the landing, the security code you enter as part of the URL itself). You can also ask for some other discriminator at collision time, but anything that is an associated data value (e.g., email address) is also easy to guess (e.g., of little value in protecting privacy).  There are additional privacy/security benefits to this which I will mention below, but let’s move on.
2. Personal salutation (you’ve probably seen this) – “Dear Samantha” or “Dear Ms. Simpson” or whatever level of greeting makes sense for your targets (and it could be different across your segments/individuals – I know for a fact that most doctors prefer to be greeted like, “Dear Dr. Simpson”.
3. Personal data – any prior knowledge about you should be already reflected in page data – e.g., pre-filled form fields.  This is still a fundamental aspect of a good PURL (2.0) – it’s a convenience for the visitor to not have to type information you should already know.  Which brings up a point… a PURL based solely on knowing a name and email address is weak at best.  It CAN be an acceptable start to a dialog with a new prospect, but only once.  After the first encounter, you had better be using every bit of information you have to improve the experience.
4. Targeted Content – here’s where it really starts to get good.  Given even a small amount of knowledge about someone will put them into a segment or demographic group or something that means something to both you and them.  A PURL 2.0 experience will include targeted content (copy, images, forms, rss feeds, etc.) that maps to that segmentation.  Targeted content will typically be unique to “groups”, not individuals.
5. Personal Content – when targeted content becomes unique to an individual we start calling it “personalized content” or “personal content” or “account content”.  A good example of individual-unique content could be a status report about that person’s account with your business.  This is not unlike something you are very used to – a shopping cart.  If you fill a shopping cart at Amazon.com for example it will still be there – unique to you – next time you login.  That sort of personal content is a combination of cookies and back-end data, but by using a PURL that is unique to the visitor (and reusable across multiple visits) you can achieve this without cookies.  Not using cookies is the better way to go if you can because it separates the user from their browser/device so that the PURL alone is sufficient for accessing the entire experience.
6. Personal Privacy – last (for now) but not at all the least in PURL promise fulfillment is personal privacy.  I’ve indicated that it is a best-practice to pre-fill form fields (personal data) and provide personalized content based on the PURL… so what if someone “else” wants to access that data for nefarious purposes or simply out of curiosity?  With an unsecured PURL, it is actually trivial to do – manually (guessing PURLs) or automatically (configuring a ‘bot to discover PURLs and pull back personal information from them).  You should never assume that you know to what degree a target considers their information private nor that casual acceptance of your privacy disclaimer indemnifies you from responsibility in this regard.  SO… privacy requires a secured PURL.  There are several ways to provide this as I indicated above (e.g., PINs, security codes, passwords).  Which type or types you use (they can be combined) is up to you based on the kind of relationship and experience you need to provide.  Here are a few examples: (a) a simple landing page as part of an email campaign can use an embedded security code – it’s still just a click-thru; (b) a simple landing page as part of a direct mail campaign might opt for the PIN number so that both the URL and the PIN are easy to type correctly thereby making access easy for the visitor; (c) a microsite intended to be used frequently over a long period of time – e.g., a relationship nurturing site or partner information “portal” – should use (visitor created) passwords because they are stronger security and familiar to anyone who uses a computer or the Internet.  In conjunction, you should use SSL on any web presence which potentially needs to protect privacy – just to be diligent.

Got all that?  Not so complicated, but there are very few tools in the Internet Marketing space that allow you to do all this easily and cost-effectively.  My company, OnDialog, makes the best tool available for PURLs 2.0 – and as CTO and customer success manager I intend to keep it that way.

I have spent a good bit of time recently promoting the revived, revised and rejuvenated concept of Dialog-Driven Marketing.  This topic was the key underlying theme behind my Dreamforce presentation a few weeks ago.  Since most full presentations don’t readily lend themselves to blog “nuggets” I am in the process of parsing out the key concepts and discussion points to do that.

This is a bit cart-before-the-horse since I have not actually had a dialog on dialog (yes, that is the title of the post presently waiting in the wings) to lay the foundation for what dialog means with regard to Internet Marketing. But I will do that shortly.  If the muse strikes while I’m writing this, I could actually do that post first – they are usually a unified discussion, but too lengthy combined to be a single post.

Here is one of the nuggets…

The primary function of dialog as a key marketing technique should simply be to drive further understanding of targets.  It has some great side-effects such as building affinity and “trust”, but the immediate value is understanding.  Better understanding of your target(s) increases your ability to provide “the right message at the right time to the right audience”.  When you execute that formula well, you make sales (whatever it is you’re selling – can be a product, a service, an idea or a presidential candidate).  And the great thing about dialog and execution based on dialog is that it feeds itself in a repeating cycle – constantly improving (at least it should constantly improve; there does need to be some discipline and diligence about it).  That cycle looks more ore less like the diagram below:

Obvious, right?  Maybe not to everyone (we’re busy people after all), hence my desire to get the word out .

The other great thing about this is that it translates easily from concepts to practice and can be executed using even “simple” techniques/technology – very effectively and very affordably (read: ROI, baby).  And there is a natural growth path from the simple to the in-depth.  My News@11 post that has been pending for quite some time is all about that… so, I guess I have at least two pending posts to get done quickly after this one.

P.S. I failed on that last point… the Thanksgiving holiday was a great mental break (still worked, but it was customer-success stuff, and I was working at home and at really odd hours). And since Thanksgiving we’ve been slammed – the good kind of slammed – end of year campaigns, sales, customer success activities… I’m still ready to do the postings – others are now going to intervene.

This is obviously something I have to reiterate as often as I can.  It’s important, certainly business-changing and potentially business-saving…

Treat SaaS (software-as-a-service) like a partnership.  SaaS is not like acquiring other software and it isn’t like other out-sourced services.  And if your (so-called) SaaS provider treats you like any other software vendor would, then look for a better one.

Here’s the deal… A good SaaS product will be wholly under the control of the provider.  If you are ever asked what the difference is between SaaS and other on-demand software models (e.g., ASP), this is the right answer.  An ASP can provide you with on-demand “stuff”, but more than likely it’s someone else’s “stuff” or far enough removed from the on-demand component that customer influence of features and functionality (not necessarily performance) is difficult or impossible.

SaaS is different… SaaS offerings are for the most part a service and a product of the provider (at least that’s mostly true at this point in time – there are those who are trying to change that paradigm under the guise of making it better – I am not in league with them).  This means you can and should expect to be able to dramatically influence the offering to better fit your needs.  And the SaaS provider should react quickly, decisively and happily. Yes – happily – because improvements in their offering driven by customer needs are almost certainly applicable to other customers (current or prospect) which makes a better offering and a stronger competitive position.

In a SaaS world, updates can and routinely are made on a bi-weekly basis.  Sometimes it’s just bug fixes or security enhancements or simple look and feel mods; sometimes it’s full-on new features of great value to the user.  These great improvements often come from a very long roadmap of possibilities that is constantly added to, reviewed, re-prioritized and evaluated.  Customer feedback is the second most important driver behind the priorities assigned to both fixes and features.  The first is addressing critical deficiencies when they are identified (often before customers discover them if the QA process is solid).

When searching for and evaluating SaaS products, make sure to consider this.  You probably won’t find a perfect offering for your needs… but you should be able to quickly influence a good offering into becoming a 90% or better solution, and frankly that’s easier than compromising on your needs for an extended period of time.  Your time is valuable.  In this economy look for partners.

…is easy IF you know your targets well enough to send the right offer to the right target at the right time.  Even when they don’t buy, they will appreciate that you gave them the opportunity and they will listen to your next offer as well.  The problem with Internet marketing is when the target stops listening.

Perishable = Limited Time.  Perished = Lost Revenue.  If you are trying to fill seats at a sporting event, dinner seats in a restaurant, hotel reservations, airline tickets, movie tickets, raffle tickets… you get the idea,  then you have two opportunities to do so.  The first is the broad offerings you have out there all the time (including the periodic “special”or sale) – you exist, people know you, sometimes they buy.  The second is the “critical” period immediately before you lose the opportunity forever.  Both opportunities benefit from customer understanding, but that second one is the one that demands it most.

A customer “profile” to support highly effective time-critical offers requires either a detailed history that can be analyzed or an on-going dialog with customers.  The latter is the approach that is needed today.  And it isn’t that difficult to do.

We call it “dialog-driven marketing”, but this is different than what used to be called dialog-driven marketing (which was really just good “database marketing”).  Dialog is an explicit two-way street, not a combination of a one-way push message and a back-channel data collection for profiles.  It needs to be something close to real dialog – engaging for the customer.  Why?… because an on-going dialog, even when terse and asynchronous (e.g., using personalized/targeted landing pages or micro-sites), does a few things for the relationship that are critical including: (a) data sharing valuable to both parties (read: “sticky”), (b) building a level of “trust” and (c) keeping up with change (everything changes, all the time).  There is nothing better than a customer who proactively updates their contact information because they want to hear from you.  You also need to be able to very efficiently take advantage of “opportunities” in a very timely manner (the nature of perishable being, “for a short time only”).  This also means understanding the inventory so you can create matched pairs of target desire with available supply (I cannot help you with that part of the puzzle at this time).

Let’s assume for a minute that you are not Expedia and therefore don’t have years of customer history to mine in order to make last-minute offers to high-value targets (in this case for airline seats or hotel rooms or travel packages)… how do you get started?  News @ 11:00.

(This is not about solving Rubik’s Cube, but I think you will like this…)

In my business we incorporate many different aspects of Internet marketing spanning everything from the math and science of optimization to broad theory about the social nature of humans.  FUN!  One of the pseudo-theories we help customers with relates to optimizing landing pages.  Yes – even the “humble” landing page has huge potential as a sales and marketing tool and thereby must be take very seriously – especially as it pertains to optimization.

Landing page optimization alone spans concepts from the subjective appeal of “art and architecture” to the mathematical analysis behind sophisticated multi-variate testing; so there is really nothing about good Internet marketing that is truly simple.  Partly because everything is constantly changing and partly because the “devil’s in the details”.  You cannot ignore the details for very long.

To open up the subject of landing page optimization, I use an analogy that I am going to share with you here.  I am sharing it because I believe that on the surface it’s an easy to grasp “model” and could well help you (or your customers) get over the initial mental hurdles of how to create better landing pages.  Why landing pages?  Well… believe it or not there are still many sales and marketing people who do not use landing pages (now days that should be as shocking as saying that there are those who don’t use email – seriously).  Just as importantly, many who do use landing pages don’t use them well (that should not be shocking).  A landing page is one of those conceptually simple “tools” that can be very powerful in the right hands and virtually useless in the wrong ones.  And landing pages are fundamentally inexpensive (unless you pay big $$ to an agency to create/tweak a single page or if you wait weeks for your IT/creative department to deliver one – but you can correct those mistakes).  An effective landing page means good ROI (you remember ROI, right? . They are also easy to create and easy to apply.

Warning: tough love coming your way – I know that most sales and marketing professionals don’t believe that landing pages are easy to create because “underneath” they require arcane technology like HTML, CSS, Javascript and Flash – hence the tendency to pay too much and wait too long for one.  But I can show you how to build a very nice landing page from scratch in less than a day with modern tools that do not require you to understand HTML (or those other technologies). So get over it and take control of this simple but powerful tool, ok?

However… creating a “killer” landing page requires a level of sophistication.  If you are a landing page “expert”, you can do this in your head and it appears to the outside world as creative genius.  If you are like the rest of us, you need a more deliberate and explicit approach.  I believe this model is such an approach because it helps delineate the various ways you can proceed for improving any landing page…

Consider landing page optimization analogous to solving a Rubik’s Cube (the classic 6-sided one). Like a Rubik’s Cube, there are 6 “sides” to optimizing a landing page.  And you arrive at the final solution through a series of deliberate maneuvers rather than random attempts (you can try the random approach, but the odds of success are low).  The six “sides” of landing page optimization are as follows:

• Content - What to place on the page (you already knew this – this is where you started your thinking) including content that you did not “create” such as echoing the keywords the visitor used to navigate to your page (if they found you by way of organic search and not some 1st order direct link).
• Layout - Where to place content (yes, it matters a lot).
• Horizontal - Mapping your page to the origin(s) of the first impression… this can be a referring site, a referring search engine, an online advert, a magazine ad, a newspaper article, a piece of direct mail, a “piece” of email, etc.  The point is that you need to know what brings visitors to your page(s).
• Vertical - Mapping your page to segments of the market/target audience.  Essentially, basic segmentation.  You not only need to know how visitors come to the page but who/what they represent to you and what “relationships” exist or might exist between you and them.
• Testing - Just what it sounds like – A/B/C testing, Multi-variate testing, focus group testing, etc.
• Personalization - Last but by no means least… using PURLs (personalized URLs), individualized content (e.g., pre-filled form fields, a personal salutation), good manners (e.g., a thank you response page after the visit, a thank you email follow-up) and (micro)targeted content (e.g., directly relevant content that is displayed at view time based on what you know about the visitor – personal data, demographic mapping, geographic mapping, target market, etc.).

That last one – personalization - is one of my favorite aspects of optimization because we have entered the age of “Dialog-Driven Marketing” for which personalization is essential.  Oh, and it’s very effective

Start with this.  See where it leads you.  Let me know what else you need to know.  I will follow-up on this with more on several of these topics, but this is a foundation you can actually “run with” if you are at all interested in improving your Internet marketing results.