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.

I have to say that this industry and market are at a minimum “interesting” and most of the time exciting. The heavy trend toward performance-based engagements is one I personally really like, and it’s making things happen. The burden becomes a combination of being able to accurately predict performance (e.g., figuring out worst cases and expected cases so that you can gauge appropriate level of effort / cost to be put into any activity – typically campaigns) and of good relationships. I have always believed that good business relationships are the key to success in this industry. The other approach is just about being the gorilla in the space and doing huge amounts of business, but ultimately that wins only by virtue of size not quality or margin.

For a marketer to own a space – a brand community, a market segment, whatever – they have to fully align with the people in that space, and doing that requires a real strategy and some serious thinking – and relationship building. In support of that, teams who provide support to those marketers need to do exactly the same and share the marketer’s goals. This creates a virtual entity that works together to make the marketer successful… and in a performance based eco-system this means everyone succeeds because the marketer’s success generates revenue for everyone.

I’m sure I’m preaching to the choir, so I don’t need to continue this thought – just wanted to point out that Things Are Happening and over the next few months closing out 2009 you can expect to see some “shake up” and activity – part of which I will be involved with – and I am very excited about it.

*** Need help “cracking a nut” on something in your market space? Let me know. Maybe I can help you form that virtual team to take your marketing strategy and success to the next level

I know this is somewhat self-serving, but I would not mention it on my personal blog if I did not believe in it…

OnDialog (which provides the best landing page and PURL solution going) has 2 “secret” special deals going this month (which is actually the end of OnDialog’s 2nd quarter – so it’s an end-of-quarter drive – you know how it goes):

(1) 2-for-1: Any standard Professional or Enterprise annual license deal will give you 2 years for the price of 1. Considering the power of OnDialog and the rate at which we expand features and functions to give users increasingly more power and automation for their Internet marketing… that’s a deal and a half.

(2) Deferred Billing: For Agency customers signing an annual contract, OnDialog will actually defer the start of billing until the Agency signs up their first client for an OnDialog campaign. In the current economy, this is a great opportunity to get your hands on some powerful Internet marketing tools with virtually no risk (eliminating up-front expense and OnDialog is SaaS – no infrastructure costs, either). So an agency can sign-up, “practice”, get superb OnDialog customer support (I make sure it’s that way) AND have no license expense until they achieve sell through to a real client for a real campaign. By that time, those Agency customers will be not only ready to execute but will gain all the benefits of OnDialog’s high productivity and performance, flexibility and reporting. There are also other new features dedicated to Agencies that you should inquire about (e.g., dedicated hosting, branded client logins for creative review and reporting, custom revenue reporting, etc.).

If you have been waiting – now is your chance (now that it is no longer a secret). Take advantage of the fact that everyone needs to do more with less, and OnDialog is willing to collaborate on that front.

Just contact OnDialog Sales. Here’s the website and here’s the contact number: 1-866-830-6635

I am SO far behind on posts.  Are blogs really all that useful anymore?  I’ve been unbelievably busy the past few months (which is a great thing in most respects).  Recently did a webinar on Personalization and Optimization.  If that is a topic of interest for you, please take the time to view it here: Integrated Personalization and Conversion Optimization.

Although all that information (and a ton more) is in my head and I apply it every day, it still took me some time to put it into slides in a succinct form. There really is a lot more to it than it seems, and a large part of my interaction with customers and partners is educational in nature.  But I think I successfully created a “Personalization 101″ deck, so now I can move to the next one

My apologies again for the long stretch between posts. I have a huge backlog of information and new threads to post, but the priority for March and April was traction, getting our “OnDialog powered with SiteTuners” beta program off to a rocking start and servicing new customers. Our “quarters” have been off by 1 month ever since we started, so in essence we just wrapped up Q1 of 2009, and it was worth all the extra effort that went into it – Q1 rocked. Now I’ll have a bit more time to get back to educating, evangelizing and strategic planning.

I am attending eMetrics in San Jose, CA this week. This time it’s about what I can learn rather than what I can contribute, but I’m also here to support Tim Ash’s message on landing page optimization (SiteTuners now being a strategic partner of ours).

One thing that is quite obvious over the past year with regards to “metrics” and analysis is that it’s quite popular. I believe this is the case because people in this industry (marketing in general) want to believe that there are “scientific” answers or at least guidelines for what works and maybe why it works. I personally believe that simply isn’t true in any universal sense, and any useful lessons-learned are fleeting – because everything changes all the time… your audience changes (as individuals, as a collective, in composition, in expectation, in sophistication), technology changes, the “impressiveness” of your impressions change with time, culture, saturation, comparison, etc. and the cost/return on various techniques changes. Essentially, the volume of the unknown never really shrinks – “facts” just move back and forth across the boundary from predictable to unpredictable / known and unknown – sometimes too fast for any “scientific” measurement to capture accurately in order for you to take advantage of said measurement. So while analysis can be very useful (despite all that change), it can hold you back – what are you doing pro-actively while you are waiting for the results of analysis? And what if you are analyzing the wrong metrics? It can be a real trap.

Is there an analog to this from which we can learn something useful to help break out of the trap? Glad you asked, and the answer is, “yes”…

In business we have a couple rules of thumb that for the most part have been proven out – (1) K.I.S.S. – keep it simple stupid (you have no doubt heard this one many times) and (2) Fail Fast – nothing wrong in failing as long as you keep the negative impact of that failure to a minimum… in other words it’s perfectly fine to “experiment” when you simply don’t know the answer, but you have to experiment intelligently so that you do not also get caught in that trap.

The underlying concepts here are about progressing despite a lack of information on which to make decisions – don’t over-think things, keep moving forward and constantly adjust your course as you learn. Think of the “right direction” not as a straight line to a specific end point (that’s what’s always moving) but more as a general direction with some degree of latitude. You start in the middle of a circle, and you can reach the outer edge by heading in any of an infinite number of directions from 0 degrees back to 360 (which is 0 again . But the edge is not the target; some moving point on the edge is the target. So you can expect that your path of success is bounded by a sector (a “wedge”) of the possible directions (say +/- 15 degrees from straight ahead). As long as you continually adjust your direction toward the moving target you will never be too far in error of what is “best” at that point in time. That is proactive progress as compared to looking to the past for knowledge to be applied to the future – that can take you in a wrong direction – look forward, move forward, look again, move again, repeat. That approach is very different than one based on analysis of the past.

Bottom line – analysis is (a) “cool” and (b) sometimes very useful… but if you base your next forward step purely on looking back at previous steps you can often turn in the wrong direction or hold a straight course that really needs to veer a little right or left.

That’s all very abstract, so in my next post I will be more concrete about at least one way in which you can be proactive rather than reactive and why you will want to do so. Gotta go learn.

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).

If you need to beef-up your cross-media campaign effectiveness, checkout OnDialog.

This falls under the category of “observation not revelation” although it’s possible that I’ve thought more about this recently than you have – and so there could be some added value to the reader.  In any case, sometimes you just have to write this stuff down as IF it is a revelation – just because at the time it comes to mind it strikes especially hard.

After coming home from the office today (notice I did not call it work because what I do is fun) I was sitting outside in shorts, t-shirt and no shoes – enjoying the weather.  I looked around and realized that there was still snow on the ground in my yard… that’s how fast the weather has changed here on the east coast.  Yesterday cold, today I’m in shorts.  It struck me funny that things do change so rapidly and that lead to my thinking about how much and how fast change has come in my industry and the market and the world.  Last year at this time I was just barely into the swing of determining how to best manifest a new generation of marketing automation technology and now it’s in the hands of customers (w00t!).  And not a moment too soon – the state of the economy has made it necessary for everyone to do more with less.  Technology has in large part always been the “solution” to that problem, and so we are not slowing down.  In fact we have accelerated several areas of our product road map in response to the increased demand by customers and partners to enable greater capability, productivity and ROI (an unfortunately over-used term – but it ultimately comes down to that).  Which got me thinking about the driving forces in our industry…

I’ve been talking a lot lately with customers and partners about 2 things – optimization and personalization.  Two sides of the same coin.  When you know who you are “talking” to, you personalize the experience to make it more relevant and satisfying; when you do not know, you optimize statistically to maximize effectiveness across the broadest space you can reach.  These are both techniques for optimizing the effectiveness of an impression and the cumulative effect of multiple impressions.  I consider statistical optimization (e.g., multi-variate testing) to be “surface” optimization (broad appeal) and personalization to be “deep” optimization (individual relevance).  Doing both well is essential to maximizing your effectiveness.  And if you are in marketing or sales or branding or corporate image building or any of dozens of similar “impression” based functions, you MUST optimize.

My company started out focused on the deep optimization – PURLs, personalization, micro-targeting, etc. but quickly realized that was only half of the “game”.  And being the competitive types that we are (i.e., entrepreneurs, over-achievers, hard-core video gamers, sports fans, even a gambler or two) we could not let the challenge go unanswered.  We had the great fortune to align ourselves with the leading experts in multi-variate testing and optimization which has enabled us to integrate expert knowledge and advanced functionality into our product offering so that we can now provide our customers with the best of both worlds – advanced optimization and deep personalization.

So… whether you do high volume online fulfillment through affiliate traffic or high value relationship-based direct marketing (online or print or cross-media which is where it’s at) – we have the tools you need.  But everyone says that about their products, right?  So don’t take my word for it because you wouldn’t anyway – try to prove me wrong (and in trying to do so you will prove me right – you will be hearing more about this very soon through formal channels.  I mention it here because I’m proud of what we have accomplished and what have planned for the future.  And I am looking forward to revolutionizing this industry and the customers it serves.

I love my “job”.

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

Finally, right?  I’m constantly apologizing for being lax in posting… I did not “grow up” as a blogger so this side activity does not get top priority when scheduling my day.  It should get more attention, though, and maybe that’s my better New Year’s resolution.  The perennial “lose weight and get in shape” resolution I took care of last year (and I am really glad I did – so if you have not, go ahead and really do it this year to set the stage for an awesome 2010 for you).  Anyway… back on topic.

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.