June 26, 2000
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*** MarketingSherpa.co.uk ***
Practical News, Gossip & Tips for
Internet Marketers in the UK
June 26, 2000 - Vol. I, Issue 6
1. NEWS & GOSSIP: Holiday Wizard (.co.uk or .com?),
BarrysWorld, Zzap.com and Etail 2000
2. CASE STUDY: QXL – Building a Pan-European Dot-com
Brand
3. PRACTICAL HOW-TO: MarketingSherpa.co.uk’s Top 5
Guidelines for Successful (Non-Annoying) Email Marketing
4. EVENTS
SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT: Mark your calendar for Campaign
Cocktails 26, July at Havana Club. All
MarketingSherpa.co.uk readers will get a free glass of
champagne and free tapas! More details soon …
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NEWS & GOSSIP
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* Dot-com or Dot-co-dot-uk? Holiday Wizard Conducts
Straw Poll
They’re wised-up at Holiday Wizard (a provider of UK
holiday ideas and brochures) - while they promote the
company as a ‘.co.uk’, they own the ‘.com’ too. But
they thought that ‘dot-com’ might be becoming a generic
term for Web sites in general, so, despite being a
mainly UK oriented site, they were considering a switch
over to the ‘.com’.
Good thing they asked people first. Having spoken to
lots of people in the know (like MarketingSherpa.co.uk,
for instance) they’ve decided to stick with the
‘.co.uk’. Why? Well, the responses, broadly split
50/50 each way, showed that while the ‘.com’ clan
appeared to base their preferences on fuzzy feelings
alone, the ‘.co.uk’ crew had facts to back them up -
like how ‘.coms’ don’t appear as UK sites in many search
engines. They had research to quote too – like the
recent study sponsored by BT and Siemens which indicates
that 60% of UK consumers prefer ‘.co.uk’, as opposed to
.com (19%). Apparently a .co.uk is considered more
trustworthy...
Holiday Wizard: http://www.holidaywizard.co.uk
BT/Siemens study: For info, contact james.sherwood@lefevre.co.uk
* Etail 2000: Where Have All the Delegates Gone?
Psssst! Want to hear a secret? Don’t tell anybody, but
World Business Research (WBR), organisers of Etail 2000
at The Cumberland Hotel last week weren’t exactly over-
the-moon about attendance at the event. Our roving
editor had a good old natter with the folks at the
registration desk, and they let it slip that, although
on paper there were 200-or-so delegates, no more than
about 50 or 60 were around at any one time.
So what happened to everybody? WBR blame the location –
apparently in central London it’s too easy for people to
nip in and out (unlike, say, Geneva, where WBR recently
had a captive audience of delegates who’d flown in
especially). But maybe there’s more to it. Maybe we’re
seeing the early symptoms of E-tail conference overkill.
Our editor had the uncanny suspicion at Etail 2000 that
everybody else had popped off to Oxford Street for some
good, old-fashioned RE-tail therapy...
World Business Research: http://www.wbr.co.uk
* We Are Not Amused: Barrysworld Magazine Ads Cause Consternation
Irreverent-depictions-of-cultural-icons campaigns -
don’t you just love ’em? It’s such fun trying to spot
who’s going to be offended next, and by what. This
time, the offending ad is part of a £1.2 million
campaign produced by Focus Creative for online games
company BarrysWorld aimed at UK gaming and Internet
magazine readers. The image: our lovely Queen Mother
(with green teeth – we don’t know why). The caption:
‘How do you rate your life expectancy?’ Several
publishers have ‘expressed concern’ over campaign as a
whole, and Dennis Publishing, who produce PC Zone, has
refused to run the Queen Mum design altogether.
Bang go the knighthood chances then. But that’s kind of
the point: the irreverent ads are intended ‘to highlight
the dynamic character and anti-establishment nature’ of
the company’s identity, according to Sales & Marketing
Director Geraint Bungay. And as we all know – if you do
something controversial (and ruffle a few strategic
feathers), absolutely everybody starts talking about
you. If you’re lucky anyway…
BarrysWorld: http://www.barrysworld.com
Focus Creative: http://www.focusltd.dircon.co.uk
* Yea/Nay: Zzap.com
We got an invitation from Zzap.com this week to review
their ‘amazing new e-commerce site for electrical
products’ produced in association with Rage Software and
boasting ‘World Class Animation’. Would it have World
Class Merchandising to match, we wondered? Since Zzap
were claiming to have made shopping on the net ‘a piece
of cake’ by ‘pushing technology to the max and bandwidth
to the edge’ (uh-oh!), we simply HAD to find out...
- it’s a Flash site, so it takes centuries to load (as
you might have guessed from above brag);
- lots of clicking is needed to get to anything remotely
useful (like a navigation bar or, call us old-fashioned,
a picture of something that’s actually for sale);
- rather than make the graphics small and unobtrusive to
leave room for decent-sized product photos, they made
the product photos small and unobtrusive;
- there are links to things they don’t even sell. We
clicked on the ‘Toasters’ button, and were told ‘There
are no results for your search. Try going back to the
control [sic.] panel and try another search.’
We didn’t bother. We did, however, look for a link to
Zzap.com at zap.com (for anyone who’s ended up there by
mistake). There isn’t one.
http://www.zzap.com
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CASE STUDY: QXL.com
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* QXL - Building a Pan-European Dot-com Brand
QXL.com always intended to be ‘the leading Internet
auctioneer across Europe,’ says CEO Jim Rose. And
they’re doing pretty well so far: they’ve built up the
largest pan-European online auction community, currently
conducting C2C and B2C auctions in umpteen different
countries – that means umpteen different languages and,
EMU or not, umpteen different currencies. So – how does
a UK-based firm set about conquering Europe?
CREATIVE: QXL.com enlisted the help of business
solutions provider Syzygy in the middle of last year.
Between them, the two companies decided that the key to
successful European expansion would be branding. For
starters, Syzygy, devised a distinctive new logo – now
used in all on- and offline transactions, the logo was
designed to complement the ‘fun but trustworthy’
reputation that QXL.com had already established. But,
as everybody should know (we’re constantly amazed by the
number of people who don’t) branding means more than
just putting your logo on stuff. Syzygy also overhauled
the company’s Web interface, and more fully integrated
its different auction models, making the site cleaner
and more user-friendly, and enhancing the overall
customer experience. Best of all, using a highly
adaptable and scaleable templating structure, they
integrated an interface design, information architecture
and navigation (that means launching new sites, in new
languages and new currencies, across Europe with the
same QXL.com branding is an absolute doddle – Ed). The
new, improved QXL.com was launched in September 1999,
heralded by an advertising campaign across Europe.
RESULTS
Pretty spectacular. The new site gained
‘unprecedented traffic’ almost immediately. The number
of new users rose dramatically, and the number of
registered users by 80%. User loyalty also grew –
repeat purchase rates doubled in the three months after
re-launch to over 70% and, at 16.5 pages and 16.1
minutes on average, user sessions began to outscore even
Amazon’s. And of course QXL.com just loved the new
scalability that Syzygy’s template allowed, helping them
to become No. 1 European eBusiness site in tons of
important studies.
COST: The sort of service provided by Syzygy doesn’t
come cheap, and QXL don’t really like to be specific.
But we have it on good authority that they forked out in
excess of £100,000...
QXL.com: http://www.qxl.com
Syzygy: http://www.syzygy.net
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PRACTICAL HOW-TO: Successful (Non-Annoying) Email Marketing
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NOTE: Yes, please forward this newsletter to your
friends and colleagues, providing you forward the entire
thing (not just bits of it.) Also, please tell your
friends in no uncertain terms they should sign up to get
their own FREE subscription today, so you don’t have to
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Subscriptions at: http://www.marketingsherpa.co.uk
* MarketingSherpa.co.uk’s Top 5 Guidelines for
Successful (Non-Annoying) Email Marketing
Email marketing is rumoured to be the next big thing in
the UK Internet marketing field. But many marketers are
concerned about email marketing’s harmful potential.
Will it just annoy people? Are people already sick of
getting ‘too much email’?
Here are MarketingSherpa.co.uk’s top 5 guidelines on the
subject:
1. Lists:
The importance of using ONLY opt-in lists cannot be
overstated. These are lists of people who have
specifically requested to receive information on a
specific topic via their email inbox. Remember the Data
Protection Act: spam is illegal. Therefore, every name
on the list should be someone who will be absolutely
delighted to hear from you. The most responsive opt-in
lists are ones which your own company has gathered from
current customers and interested prospects. By
‘gathered’ we mean collected by openly asking people if
they would like to be on your list to receive email – as
opposed to collected by going through old customer
records and simply harvesting email addresses! That
would be naughty.
If you choose to rent lists, be very, very sure they are
opt-in lists. Otherwise you certainly will annoy some
recipients and do real damage to your brand name.
2. Subject Lines:
As you know, many spammers use flashy subject lines --
‘FREE!’ and ‘NEW!’ and other exclamations in block
capitals. Therefore, you’ll find that, while some copy
might work perfectly well in print ads for your company,
it will make you look like a spammer online.
This puts a real burden on you as a copywriter --
because your subject line must be compelling enough for
someone to click on... without resembling spam. You
really have to get inside the heart and mind of your
prospect to do a good job. And even then you’re only
guessing. Your best bet is to test at least two
different subject lines when you do a broadcast email.
One of them will be a clear winner in terms of response,
and point the way for your future creative. In fact
here at MarketingSherpa.co.uk we consider any broadcast
email sent without a test to be wasted money.
Final note: ‘News from [insert company/brand name here]’
is NOT a compelling subject line!
3. Message Text:
Although email marketing is much closer to direct mail than any other
marketing channel, classic direct mail
copywriters sometimes have difficulty making the
transition. Their favourite type of long copy doesn’t
work in email marketing.
When recipients open an email marketing piece, they
don’t want a long, pleasant introduction. They simply
want to know, ‘What’s this about?’ and ‘Where do I click
to act on it?’ And, if it’s not obvious, they also want
to know, ‘Where did you get my email address?’ They
want to know all this within the first screen, without
scrolling down.
So, your message should go straight to the point and
include a hotlink IMMEDIATELY whilst maintaining a
polite, non-spammy tone. After that you can put in a
short paragraph or two of descriptive sales copy. Next,
close and offer a way for recipients to get off the
mailing list if they choose to. Keep your entire note
shorter than two pages. If it’s longer, people will
print it out to read it... and lose your lovely
hotlinks!
Final Note: Set your word processing application to 11-
point sized Courier text, 55-60 characters (4 ¾ inches)
across. This way you’ll see how your copy will appear
to the recipient as you create it!
4. Frequency:
You have two challenges when choosing frequency -- if
you email people too frequently they will get annoyed
and stop opening messages from you; but, if you email
people too seldom they’ll forget that they opted-in in
the first place, and they may think you are a spammer.
If you are sending the same message each time, you
probably shouldn’t send any more frequently than
quarterly to the same list. If you are sending
different messages or newsletters, test both monthly and
two-monthly frequencies to non-customers, and
fortnightly and monthly frequencies to customers. A
few companies have been successful with daily messages,
but these are all extremely short and enjoyable messages
such as ‘Joke of the Day’ or ‘Your Horoscope’. Most
companies doing this are careful to offer several
alternate frequencies -- twice weekly and weekly for
starters.
5. Text vs. HTML:
You may have heard the news from America that HTML email
marketing is beating response rates from text-only email
by 100% or more. However, at this time
MarketingSherpa.co.uk does not recommend that UK
companies roll out massive HTML campaigns without
enormous caution and testing. The average Brit has
lower bandwidth, and a lower tolerance for being online
for a long time than the average American (especially
while it still costs money). This situation will change
and we’ll keep you posted.
Resources List:
“Nine Things to Know About Permission Marketing on the Web” by Seth Godin
“Poor Richard’s Guide to Email Publishing” by Chris Pirillo
To purchase, visit MarketingSherpa.co.uk’s online bookshop at:
http://www1.fatbrain.com/FindItNow/Services/home.cl?from=DDH932&store=1
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EVENTS
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* Setting Up Your New Media Business
One-day workshop intended for anyone in the process of
setting up a company providing new media services, or
who has recently done so. June 29th 2000, London
http://www.nmk.co.uk/settingup.cfm
* The Industry Cocktail
Ideas exchange! Come and talk with professionals from
the world's leading Internet and New Media industries,
you never know what you might learn or who you might
meet. June 29th 2000, London
http://www.theindustrycocktail.com
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MarketingSherpa.co.uk INFO
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