NYNY Solutions

Does your organisation distinguish between online sales and telephone sales? If so, why?

I believe many companies that are able to sell their products online almost consider a telephone sales an inferior result - proof that the almighty webshop wasn’t up to the task.

Well, in some cases it’s probably correct (a lot of webshops really are crap wrapped in HTML).

But in general I think it’s a negative notion, born in the light of online marketing back in the 90s: “if the customer finds you online, you should be able to sell online, if he finds you offline, it’s OK to sell offline.”

Back then not everyone had online access, companies might even have separate online and offline sales and marketing organizations - each clawing for results. If your company is stuck in this mindset, you might be hurting your sales.

Instead, I think it’s important to take a look at what a good telephone sales rep is able to generate, compared to your webshop. Look for positives:

• Are phone conversion rates much higher than online CR?
• Is it easier to generate upsell on the phone?
• Are phone sales complete and confirmed once the customer hangs up?

But how to generate cost-efficient traffic to your money-making phones? Time to try a pay-per-call setup like TradeDoubler’s td Talk?

Maybe, but start by looking at your own website first. Are you actively displaying telephone numbers next to your webshop? What are you telling customers - should they call, when and why?

I think the first and most important realisation is - it’s not a failure to get sales on the phone, instead of in the webshop.

I just wrote a description of our services to a partner who wanted to know how to describe what we do. Here’s what I wrote first:

/…/ A typical project setup that we’ve done for European Travel companies, Hosting companies, Software developers, Retail companies, Consultancy companies, etc - is something like this:

1) We identify what they want to do with their website, some sell stuff online, some use their website as a showroom, some want to attract resellers, some want to reach people with information, etc..

2) We determine how to track performance - if there are no tools in place, we will advice and assist in selecting and implementing

3) We review the website(s) - sometimes they are just not up to the task, and often they are far from optimised. We can take part both on a technical and commercial level, including e.g. Search Engine Optimisation

4) We make and execute a marketing plan for the website, combining a wide range of systems and techniques such as Search Engine Marketing, affiliate networks, viral marketing, permission marketing (e-mails), press releases, campaign-sites / localised sites, banner advertising, etc. Offline elements would also be considered if relevant/necessary. Stepping outside pure marketing - we could also work on finding regional/national partners, etc.

5) We monitor the results of the activities and make ongoing adaptions, revising targets in cooperation with the client.

- If more assistance is required than we can handle ourselves, we subcontract, anything from software and web developers, to designers and media bureaus. /…/

Well, it’s correct, and probably quite informative, but it just sounds complex. Here’s my second version:

NYNY Solutions can market your company effectively on Google and other search engines. We do all the work for you, and your programs can start and stop instantly, so there is no overhead cost and no risk.

No question about which version is more to the point. I think I just proved to myself that less is more, also in b2b.

Own up, for the best part of the millenium, you’ve thought about e-mail marketing the same way you do about your odd cousin from the country, the one that stares at sheep in an unhealthy way.

It’s just not as fun as search, is it? Well bu-huu.

E-mail is here, you have to deal with it.

Yes, your newsletter program may feel waaay less cool to work with compared to logging in to AdWords for the umptenth time to check your CR.

Yes, your newsletter program is more work, your average e-mail needs more content than a new AdGroup text… plus, your subscribers actually expect things from you.

But, since e-mail IS here, you might as well do your best - and whatever you do, don’t burn your subscriber base just because you got bored with it.

Why? Well, besides the fact that it’s probably profitable right now (I’ll help you find out if you don’t know how), here’s another pretty strong hint: Today, everyone you know is in at least one SEO project, right? If you just think about the absurdity of every half-assed company churning out a million static SEO pages, it’s pretty obvious this insanity will come to an end sooner or later. Then you need to be prepared, because all of the organic search traffic will suddenly no longer materialize, and you and your competitors will all be bidding each other to death in AdWords. Now, if only there was some other way of reaching qualified leads - some forum where you will have the univided attention of your leads and be able to strengthen your relationship with them…….. (yes, it’s e-mail)

So, out of love, technology or panic, e-mail marketing WILL soon be reborn - we will refer to it as Digital Direct Marketing, or Permission Marketing 2.0, or something cooler than “the newsletter that Jane sends on Tuesdays”.

In emerging markets, gaining a large subscriber base is extra adventurous. Jared Blank and Vikram Shegal at tripmela.com is doing this right now. I think they aim at becoming the Indian version of travelzoo.com - well, I hope they succeed.

I’ll keep thinking about new ways to battle e-mail inertia.

There’s one thing that unites travel search engine (TSE) companies and Google. I wish it was the turnover. It’s not, but at least it’s the business model, and that’s something.

[pause for effect]

Both companies are selling shovels.

Business through search engine advertising currently shows very attractive ROMI figures, it’s still pretty new and fresh and helps managers perform Management - “We must be on Google”. It’s an easy phrase to remember, and it sounds cool in meetings.

So, it’s the Klondyke gold rush all over again, and the gold-diggers are lining up.

Googles advertisers are gold-diggers. So is a TSE’s. Some prove very successful, some moderately so, and some absolutely not at all.

And yet we’re selling the shovels for the same price to all of them. Or in the case of Google - selling the shovels to whoever pays the most. Regardless of the details, we really don’t care how good each individual buyer is at digging gold. we should, however, care a great deal about how good the buyer collective is at digging gold, because we live in symbiosis.

And that’s the thing of the thing. Although we are depending on our buyers’ success, we still don’t move in and try to be extra nice to a particular client. Why? Becaue we’re shovel peddlers and this is what differentiates us from being consultant gold-diggers, or rent-a-gold-digger’s. This is what we must not sway from, if we want to be successful in the long run.

A gold-digger should be able to make rational assumptions about the market space, and regard our service as neutral and unbiased - any gold-digger’s money is worth as much as the next one’s, and everyone get’s the same kind of shovel and the same kind of warranty. Without this, we are invevitably starting to take sides, and we are no longer selling shovels, but helping to dig.

So how do we figure out if the shovel-peddler & gold-digger setup is going to be a sustainable setup ?

First, there must actually be enough gold around, for enough gold-diggers to live and tell their success stories. As long as the barrier of entry is low, and gold is abundant, gold-diggers with pocket calculators will do their math and figure out up to what point it makes sense to enter the shovel store. We will have more and more gold-diggers lining up to buy shovels.

Second, there must be enough shovels (if you haven’t figured it out yet, a shovel in this analogy is a click or a visit to a website - but, nota bene, not orders. A shovel is not gold, it’s what you dig with to find gold) and the shovels must be effective tools for gold-digging.

For a TSE, the analysis consists of trying to determine conversion rates and profit margins at airlines, online travel agencies, hotel chains, and other types of companies (gold-diggers). A blinding flash of the obvious is we need to have a solid idea of at what price our customers break-even when buying an incremental visit to their sites. We need to estimate the total market size and growth potential, and figure out the quality of our traffic. We can’t do much about the market, but we can focus on improving both quality and volume of traffic.

We need to be skilled gold-diggers but dedicated to staying in the store.

Finally finished the last pages of The Long Tail, by Chris Anderson. I’ve been harrassed for months for not finishing it by a Hjalmar Gislason, a good friend who told me ages ago to read it.

In the book, Anderson explores the underlying mechanisms causing a shift from “hits” to “niches”. E.g. where a physical record-store may display a few thousand different CD’s, an online store like Amazon may offer hundreds of thousands, and a digital distribution system like iTunes may offer virtually any song ever recorded, still profitable.

The abundance of choice, ease of finding, sorting and getting peer-to-peer recommendations - are all factors that dramatically steer consumer behaviour away from mainstream hits and deeper into different niches.

I don’t expect to attend a single conference the next 2 years without seeing at least one slide with “long-tail” jammed into it somewhere. It’s the buzzword of the day, for sure.