Paid Search and Your Brand

Moderator Barbara Coll of Web Mama (and president of the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization), Kevin Lee of Did-it, Kevin Ryan of Wahlstrom Interactive and Fredrick Marckini of iProspect have spent so much time on the road together speaking on the same search marketing panels in recent years, their patter has the delivery of a troup of vaudeville performers. For a bunch of über-geeks, there were plenty of laughs. (Chris Bowler, of Agency.com's iTraffic division, also spoke on the panel, though he was new to the team so - although he provided ample insights - he did not partake in the insult humor of the rest of the group.) Nearly every seat was filled for the Tuesday afternoon session, the last day of the show.

"Wait a minute," I hear some of you thinking (yes, I have ESP), "branding through search? Give me a break!" In fact, the panelists made a powerful case that search had an important role to play with branding. In fact, the session was so dense with different observations and opinions (not to mention potty humor and inside jokes), I'll just bullet-point some highlights:

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Email Best Practices, or, Top 10 Ways to Get Me to Sit Through Top 10 Lists

This seminar took the form of "10 Big Ideas in 10 Minutes," times four, beginning with recommendations for growing your email list (below) and being followed by tips for optimizing the customer interaction once you have their permission to contact them. In general, the key takeaways are to provide compelling content to your customers, a streamlined process if they answer the call to action, and thoughtfulness when planning your contact strategy (i.e. not adding extra messages or sending additional, poorly-targeted emails just because it's cheap and you can). The Q&A also revealed some helpful tips about good timing (midweek), good measures (Avanti Lalwani from Land’s End recommended both buyer and email interaction statistics, such as subscription, unsubscription, click-through, conversion, recency of conversion, etc.), how to get through spam filters (trial and error…maybe not what you wanted to hear), and the best way to obtain snail mail addresses (offer to mail them free stuff).

The moral of the story is that best practices have to be used for brands to stand out and capture a customer’s attention. And now, Andy Sernovitz's Top 10 tips to grow your email list:
10. Trade ads, links and content with other email newsletters.
9. Shorten form: ask only for a customer's email address; after you have the opt-in, then make it optional for them to give more information.
8. Ask for email everywhere on the website, not just on the homepage.
7. Improve call to action: need a compelling reason for customers to give you their email address.
6. Brag about privacy concerns.
5. Get rid of the "partner email request" checkbox.
4. Use bait to get sign-ups: people are more likely to follow a link to a download than to a sign-up form.
Sub-tip: for sweepstakes, pick "boring" prizes only interesting to your target: opt-ins will go down, but more of them will be qualified leads.
3. Get the "viral basics" right: make tell-a-friend easy to use and compelling, and measure usage of that function.
2. Offer multiple lists: customers self-segment by interest and get content that’s more relevant to them, and are more likely to stay on at least one list.
1. Make it worth reading: Content is king, and it always will be.

Ladies, Oh How They Love the Internet

Interesting session on marketing to women. The panel had a few substitutions. Here was the final line-up:

• Moderator: Toby Elkin, Executive Editor, Mediapost, who recently wrote an Online Minute on the subject of Women Online
  
  
• Todd Anderman, SVP of Sales, American Greetings Interactive
  
  
• Michelle Edelman, Dir of Strategic Planning, Ogilvy & Mather, Chicago
  
  
• Jeanie Caggiano, Leo Burnett
  
  
• Neil Perry, independent marketing consultant to clients including McDonald's

One highlight that makes this blog post worthwhile is news of this study from Yahoo, "Real Women, Digital World: The Untold Story of Women and the Web" (download PDF). I haven't had a chance to read the study yet, but some other highlights from the panel include the following observations:

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