10/20/2009

A Message from Jim Gilbert of Gilbert Direct Marketing:

Over the years I’ve been super vocal about my dislike for the U.S. Postal Service and its less-than-forward-thinking bureaucracy. When it slammed direct marketers with a 20 percent postal increase back in 2007, I went (pun intended) postal on it in my Catalog Success Magazine Column.

Earlier this year after it announced its summer postage sale, I was optimistic. But once I looked at the fine print (i.e., how much you had to mail to qualify), I was critical then, too.

I try to be fair in the offering of my opinions.

Therefore, I have to applaud the USPS for its announcement last week that there would not be a postal rate increase in 2010 for dominant classes.

For those of you not aware yet, last week the Postmaster General sent out a memo announcing no 2010 rate increase, which has spread around the internet faster than a scandalous YouTube video goes viral. That memo can be reviewed here.

I know, I know: Postal rates are already ridiculously and restrictively high, but at least mailers can build their 2010 mail plans without having to cut circ from marginal lists and housefile segments.

But along with my kudos to our Postmaster and the USPS, I also want to put them on notice. Here goes:
Dear Mr. Postmaster General,
You’ve started a trend here. Between the postal summer sale and now this offer to keep postal rates stable in 2010, catalog and direct mailers believe that you may actually be interested in working to our benefit. We look forward to the next postal sale, and hope that the USPS opens it up to smaller mailers to take advantage of. We truly hope that you’ll continue to stop thinking like a bureaucracy and encourage more mail volume with innovative special offers and such.

But we’re also wary. Direct marketers are wary because the USPS holds a great deal of power and leverage over us. The last substantial postal rate increase nearly put us under with rate increases of 20 percent-plus. What was the USPS thinking? That move single-handedly drove more and more mailers into the online world. If we were to do the math, we believe the increase in postage actually caused your revenues to go down due to less mail in the mailstream.

Remember this Mr. Postmaster General: Every penny more it costs us to mail means we need to generate about two cents more per catalog and direct mail piece mailed just to breakeven. In this economy, we need every opportunity we can get to mail profitably. We’re struggling to stay alive and keep our workers employed and our customers satisfied.

Keep up the good work, Mr. Postmaster. Please continue this trend.

Sincerely, 

The Direct Mail Industry

PS. I encourage all of you who have read this article, to please send your letters to the Postmaster General (or just copy mine and send it). Make your voice heard! Remember, the squeaky wheel gets the grease.

Postmaster General’s Address:
The Honorable John E. Potter
Postmaster General
U.S. Postal Service
475 L’Enfant Plaza, SW

According to the “Revolutionizing Website Design” report from digital marketing agency Oneupweb, Web users expect a lot from shopping sites, but their focus is on the fundamentals that facilitate purchasing.

Clearly presented pricing and shipping information, for example, is the most important feature of e-commerce sites, followed by indications of credibility and trustworthiness. Visual appeal and functionality like cost calculators and search were also relatively important. But advanced features such as live chat and social hooks were important to but a small minority of respondents.

While Facebook “like” buttons may facilitate viral sharing of product pages, online retailers concerned with conversion rates, failed transactions and shopping cart abandonment will have other priorities.

Experts found those problems were relatively big ones for e-commerce sites. Task completion failure rates were higher than on travel sites, business-to-business properties or higher-education Websites.

Further, while e-commerce abandonment rates were relatively low compared to the other categories studied, their failure rates were highest.

iPerceptions found in 2009 that while overall task completion rates on e-commerce sites were high, they dropped significantly when visitors went to the sites specifically to buy. Those just looking to learn about products were better able to accomplish their goals and ended up better satisfied.

Also in 2009, Web performance monitoring firm Gomez reported that just one or two bad experiences could turn online shoppers off forever, making these usability concerns a priority for online retailers.

A survey of small businesses by e-mail marketing company AWeber found the most common tactics implemented last year were tweeting e-mail newsletters and sending out blog entries to email lists. Fewer than four in 10 small businesses were engaging in those activities, and only about 1/4 of them had email sign-up forms on their social profiles or links within email messages to follow them on social sites.

Many more small businesses have plans for the coming year, and more than three-quarters consider integration of e-mail and social at least somewhat important. A majority plan to allow users to sign up for e-mails directly from social media sites like Facebook. This tactic allows e-mail marketers to grow their lists —cited as the top benefit of integrating social and e-mail by one-third of respondents— by allowing consumers to use their channel of choice and sign up on their own terms.

Almost half of small businesses will include “follow us” links in their emails, and about 44% will include share options in their messages. Just 13.1% of respondents had such options last year.

According to aresearch studies, including a social sharing option in an email increased their clients’ click-through rates from an average of 7.2% to 8.7%, and including as many as three different sharing options boosted the rate to 11.2%.

Keyword density is significant because search engines use this information to group a site’s theme, and to determine which terms the site is related to.

The ideal keyword density will help get higher search engine positions. Keyword frequency needs to be balanced properly (too low and you will not get the optimal advantage, too high and your page might get flagged for keyword spamming).

Keyword Cloud is a visual representation of keywords used on a website. Keywords having higher density are presented in larger fonts. The keyword cloud is also known as tag cloud. These tags are used on the web site and generally displayed in alphabetic order. It is based on the way that a search spider views the page. It is better to use keywords on the beginning of the webpage. And then the keywords list should be used throughout the website to raise your rankings. Idyllically your most important keywords should appear in larger fonts at the start of the keyword cloud.

Keyword Density Analyzer is helpful for serving webmasters and SEOs reach their best possible keyword density for a set of key conditions. Keyword Density Checker will crawl the set URL, extract text as a search engine would and examine the density of the keywords. Keyword Frequency Checker will investigate your chosen URL and return a table of keyword density. In an attempt to mimic the meaning of search engine spiders, it will clean out common stop words (since these will probably be ignored by search engines).

If your website is in any way a for-profit site you certainly have competitors and if you embed a YouTube video in your website you’ll end up introducing your prospects to your competition through YouTube’s convenient “related videos“. Worst of all the introduction will take place on YOUR website. The other fall back about using YouTube’s embed code is that if your visitors click the video once it has started playing they will click-thru to the video’s page on YouTube. That’s a huge visitor distraction, especially after you worked so hard to get them there!