September 2006

A lot can go wrong between the time you submit a job to your printer and when it comes back to your door.

Some mistakes are unavoidable. Even if your monitor is exactly calibrated and your printer uses best practices for color management, no printing press can accurately produce the millions of colors available on a monitor. Monitors use projected light created by combining Red, Green and Blue projections sources. Printing presses lay Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black (K or Key so as not to be confused with blue) on a reflective substrate–generally paper. CMYK has a color gamut of about 20,000 colors. Even presses that uses a six color process can’t produce over 100,000 different colors.

What’s avoidable are the very common mistakes related to layout. Mistakes like forgetting to add a bleed, putting your text too close to the edge or failing to understand how a fold lines up. Mistakes like forgetting that the mechanical tolerance of the cutting and folding processes are about 1/32nd of an inch at best. That means the cut and fold could be a total of 1/16 of an inch off under the best of circumstances.

Do yourself and your printer a favor. Design a piece that looks great even when everything goes wrong.

Dave Morgan had a great piece today on Online Spin about emerging trends among traditional brand advertisers, “These days, all marketers want measurable results related to sales objectives from their advertising and marketing expenditures, particularly online.”

Dave hits one nail on the head. ROI metrics and accountability are addictive. This kind of data seductively leaves the decision making to the return and takes the risk out of marketing investments. Unquestionably, advertisers will continue to strive for ROI measurability and online marketing is more appealing to ROI based decision makers.

Marketers who believe they can accurately quantify the impact of their online advertising, whether SEM or Brand, do so at their own risk. Every analytic system I have ever used is flawed; the assumptions and methodologies inherent in each approach creates measurement error.

One critical element to watch out for is that ROI for keyword search frequently appears as brand search.

• Customers will find you searching for keywords and then return searching for your brand or some variation/misspelling of the brand.
• Customers will find you on one computer and return via direct navigation or brand search from another computer to purchase.
• Customers will enter the URL’s in the search box instead of the address bar (perhaps as high as 15% of users) so direct navigation shows as brand search.
• Brand searches are frequently latent conversions from keyword searches.
• Depending on the cookie setting of your analytics system, you may or may not capture this first touch.
• Referrer data isn’t always preserved through caches and browsers. Firefox users on MSN, for example, will show up as direct searches instead of tagged with a natural search keyword.

I just finished a three month contract for a startup. Despite deploying sophisticated, redundant analytic systems (Google Analytics and ClickShift’s Statistical Bid Management, only half of the orders in the first three months were tracked and many were reported as direct navigation or searches for the brand.

You might expect this for a mature brand with a large repeat customer base, but it defies logic for a startup that was still only using CPC for marketing. Since we had a small data set, I was able to research the orders individually and attribute the source and term for each record in the customer table.

You wouldn’t want to try to repeat that method with 10,000 orders, but the result was a 200% increase in the reported ROI for the CPC campaign. Individually or combined, the analytics systems didn’t produce accurate enough data for decision making.

The only way to really understand ROI from each channel and search term is to find ways to get a customer to login as quickly as possible, while the referral data is as fresh and accurate as possible. Incorporate that referral/source data directly into the Customer_Id table and import all sales information into internal systems to produce the ROI measurement.

If you do not have an initial source associated with a customer record, make it a goal in every customer interaction (survery, customer service call, etc.) to obtain that information. This allows you to accurately attribute revenue to the marketing investment and track every additional touch point that generates a visit regardless of source, medium or computer. With that kind of data on hand, you have a baseline to begin to understand the value of each advertising channel. Then your ROI based decisions can be good ones.

Always act with integrity to maintain your reputation and your brand. One reason to be fair and honorable in your dealings with customers and employees is the amount of damage an angry person can do to your brand. This damage can vary from complaints to the BBB and your credit card processor to posting negative reviews and feedback about your site. Negatives like this can really taint a site.

In the extreme example, the negative reviews can actually overwhelm the company’s own brand in search engines. Take the case of a now defunct SEO company called Traffic Power. They flourished briefly during the two years or so when a link farm could drive Google SERP. They acquired some enemies from their questionable practices as well as sued some people who made disparaging remarks about them.

Instead of silencing their critics, the lawsuit lit up the blogosphere, rallied the SEO community and generated thousands of back links to the story on SEOBook. The top ten SERP’s on Google for “Traffic Power” are currently dominated by websites dedicated to informing customers about the dangers of Traffic Power. The number one site is called Traffic Power Sucks. Traffic Power is in bankruptcy.

Most companies don’t have to worry about pissing off the top names in SEO or someone taking the time to create a site dedicated to telling people, for example “This Brand Can’t be Trusted” or P……….com is owned by a crooks. Only a mistreated former employee or a really angry customer would do that. Rarely is the anger sustained long enough to go to the effort of purchasing a domain like www.P………Sucks.com and optimizing it to control a brand.

What is far more likely is that an unhappy customer or former employee might spend a few minutes each day clicking on paid links for a particular company. For example, the search term of postcard printing brings up sponsored adds that cost between $5 and $15 dollars per click. If the spurned customer or jilted employee is angry enough to get their friends and family to do the same thing, pretty soon the ROI of the campaign can get be put in doubt.

So marketers and business owners, act with integrity in all of your dealings and your brand will prosper.

2.4 GHz PHONES SHOULD BE OUTLAWED

For the last few months, I have been battling with intermittent connection problems on my network. After hundreds of hard reboots on my router (which restored the connection for 10 minutes at a time), tweaking my settings (which did nothing) and enduring the complaints of my wife (and a neighbor who piggy backs my wireless connection), I was at the end of my rope. Suddenly, I remembered that the network at my father’s house occasionally made clicking sounds on his cordless phone. We fixed the problem by turning off the SSID broadcast from his wireless network. I realized that my problem began about the same time I purchased a new phone for my office. I reached over a couple feet, unplugged the offending phone and 30 seconds later, my network problems disappeared.

It would be easy to consider this a lesson relearned and an $80 dollar phone that needs a new home, except that 2.4 GHz cordless phones don’t have to be in your house to cause network problems. They are much higher power than WiFi devices and can wreak havoc on a large section of an apartment complex, a nearby business or on a half a block around your home. Here is a very technical description of WiFi Interference Problems.

Law makers should immediately make it illegal to sell any device that interferes on the WiFi spectrum in light of the widespread adoption of WiFi, the huge investment in the standard and the difficulty in overcoming interference, shouldn’t that bit of spectrum be protected? There are cordless phones on the 900 MHz and 5.4 GHz frequencies that don’t interfere, so it’s not a question of cordless phones versus wireless networks. At minimum, a warning label should be required that screams in 48 point type, “THIS DEVICE MAY DISABLE WIRELESS NETWORKS OPERATING NEAR BY.”

As a marketer, here is a great opportunity! Providing a solution to a problem that people are not aware of, while creating a little fear and uncertainty about another product, is a very effective way to get a consumer to make a decision!

If you sell 900 MHz or 5.8 GHz phones, raise the price above what you charge for 2.4 GHz phone. Print up some labels that say, “WON’T INTERFERE WITH YOUR WiFi NETWORK” and then below that, include “2.4 GHz devices may interfere with WiFi networks” and attach the labels to the 900 MHz and 5.4 GHz phones. Now, run a promotion for a great deal on 2.4 GHz phones and watch the sales for the 900 MHz and 5.4 GHZ phones jump while your 2.4 GHz phones stay glued to the shelf collecting dust.

Contests are a great tool for direct marketing. I’m not talking about vacation cruises, product give aways or million dollar sweepstakes with brightly color balloon and slowly fading celebrities. While those are time tested and apparently effective promotions, they are not particularly interesting or original…. and I don’t have anything clever to say about them.

I am talking about contests that challenges people to do something creative that involves your product or service and lets the winner be judged on merit. The creative task engages the recipients imagination and makes them think about you while they think about what they could do to win.

A contest that stimilates the imagination on content instead of on the prize. Challenge people to come up with the most unusual application of your product, an off the wall picture, a great slogan or even a video. You not only get a great response, you also get free creative consulting!

A simple example is the calendar design competition recently run by client of mine. The call for entries asks designers to submit a page for a calendar for next year. The only prize is being included in the calendar! They sent out 2,000 invitation and received 50 entries within three weeks! As soon as they pick the winners, they will print calendars and mail it to thousands of more designers.

Guess who the real winner is!