February 21, 2001
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B2BMarketingBiz From MarketingSherpa.com
*************** Feb. 21, 2001; Vol. 2, Issue 8
Please forward WITHOUT cutting.
Free subscriptions at: http://www.b2bmarketingbiz.com
1) News: How BizBuyer.com's Resurrection Affects Marketers
2) Case Study: How AMSOIL Strengthens Dealer Relationships
and Gets 20 Times ROI From its Web Site
3) Interview: Judith Remondi of RMS Direct Explains How B-to-B
Email Marketing Is Different from Direct Mail Marketing
4) More News Headlines
**********
NEWS
**********
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* How smarterwork's Acquisition of BizBuyer.com's Assets
Affects B-to-B Marketers
Many B-to-B marketers were saddened when the plug was pulled on
BizBuyer.com by investors late last December. The site might
not have been perfect, but it was a useful sales tool for
marketers who used it to reach small-medium sized companies
purchasing online. Luckily last week, B-to-B services
outsourcing company smarterwork acquired BizBuyer.com's
assets, including the name, URLs and membership list.
We contacted smarterwork's US President, Lisa Yarnell, to find
out what this would mean for marketers wishing to reach
BizBuyer's members. The acquisition happened so quickly that
not all of the details have been sorted out yet. However,
Yarnell assured us of the following:
- BizBuyer.com's brand is "absolutely" not going away. The
URL currently points to an interim page, which will be
upgraded in the near future. The site (and phones) will then
be cobranded with smarterwork.
- smarterwork is very interested in talking to any B-to-B
marketers who would like to work with BizBuyer.com on a
revenue-share basis as business development partners, or
simply as a "straight-line traffic feed deal."
- Cautious of members' privacy rights, smarterwork has asked a
third-party email facility to send all BizBuyer.com members an
opt-out message to see if they'd like to be transferred to the
new service.
- Yarnell is not yet sure which BizBuyer.com offerings that
didn't overlap with smarterwork's will continue to be sold;
however she is removing BizBuyer.com's $2,500 sales minimum
and adding reverse auctions.
- BizBuyer.com's larger customers will also be offered
smarterwork's account management services. Yarnell says,
"small companies want to work on our site. Larger companies
don't want to do that. They want an account management
service where we select the providers, complete the work and
turn over the whole finished project."
Interested in partnering with smarterwork and/or the new
Bizbuyer.com? Contact Yarnell at lisa@smarterwork.com or
203.618.1188.
http://www.bizbuyer.com ; http://www.smarterwork.com
**************************************************************
CASE STUDY: How AMSOIL Strengthened Dealer Relationships and
Got 20 Times ROI From its Web Site
**************************************************************
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CHALLENGE
Ed Newman, Marketing & Advertising Coordinator for
AMSOIL Inc., makers of "The Original Synthetic Motor Oil",
found himself in a bind familiar to many B-to-B marketers hoping
to expand online. Newman's product is a famous brand that is
sold via a network of authorized dealers. Newman knew it
would be possible to use the Web to sell direct to the end-
user, but he didn't want to circumvent or in any way upset his
dealer network. So he sought ways to use the Web to
strengthen dealer relationships instead.
CAMPAIGN
From the very start, when AMSOIL launched its first
small site in 1996, the company decided on a dealer-focus.
Newman says, "Everything we do goes back to the dealers,
helping the dealers, motivating the dealers, giving them tools
and lead generating for them."
By 1997, that initial small site, which had been developed in-
house, was generating about 100 sales leads a month that
AMSOIL carefully redirected to its appropriate dealers. By
mid-1998 that figure had climbed of its own accord to about
200 leads per month.
Then in the Fall of 1998 AMSOIL tested a completely unrelated
marketing campaign via direct response ads on cable TV. It
didn't do so well. Newman says, "The 60 second spots ended up
costing us about $15 per lead, the 90 second spots cost $7 a
lead. The only real cost for our Web site was $50 a month to
host it, so we were paying just cents per lead that it
generated." However, the TV campaign had an unexpected
benefit. Although AMSOIL's URL was not mentioned in the
spots, during the two months they ran, site traffic jumped
dramatically, producing more than double the normal number of
sales leads. AMSOIL decided to dump DRTV, but move ahead with
Web development.
AMSOIL's newly renovated site opened August 1999. The cost
was under $30,000. Newman says, "It's not full of bells and
whistles. There's no Flash that would be cool to have."
However, a record number of 2,400 visitors came to the site
the first week it opened, 2221 of which visited the site's
store, 95 of whom placed orders.
Heartened by this success, in February 2000 AMSOIL reached out
to enable dealers to sell from its online store. Newman
explains, "We contacted all the dealers who had Web sites and
had them link to our site. We gave each a unique ID number so
when people went to their sites and then came to the AMSOIL
site, the right dealer would get automatic credit for any
orders or leads generated. So, we had a gigantic funnel effect
from all the dealers promoting their own sites." AMSOIL also
started a program to sell and host sites for dealers who
didn't already have them.
AMSOIL fulfills all site orders from its 14 warehouses while
giving the appropriate dealer full credit for them. Newman
says, "We don't want to create the impression that we're
bypassing dealers. We let them know we're always supporting
them. They reciprocate with loyalty to us."
RESULTS
Newman says, "Our internet strategy has worked
fabulously. We generate in revenue more than 20 times what we
spend and have only just begun. We've spent so little, and we
can easily see selling five million dollars worth of business
in the not too distant future. We haven't seen a plateau
yet."
So far 165 dealers have chosen to have AMSOIL create and host
sites for them, and approximately an additional 800 have Web
sites that link to AMSOIL's site.
The site's visitors have continued to rise. In January 2000
the site got about 21,000 visitors and 65,000 pageviews. In
January 2001, the site got more than 65,000 visitors and
240,000 pageviews. These visitors are definitely generating
business. In just one weekend this February, the site
received 165 cash orders averaging $120 each.
You can understand why Newman is gung ho about his plans to
extend AMSOIL's Internet marketing. He says, "The opt-in
email marketing plans (two newsletters just waiting for the go
ahead) will be extremely useful to extend the reach of what we
are doing." He also hopes to create an extranet sharing real-
time sales information between AMSOIL, its warehouses and its
dealers someday soon.
http://www.amsoil.com
**************************************************************
EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW: Judith Remondi of RMS Direct Explains How
B2B Email Marketing Is Different from Direct Mail Marketing
**************************************************************
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Judith Remondi is that rare bird, a traditional B-to-B direct
marketing expert who also thoroughly understands the
challenges of email relationship marketing.
As the President of RMS Direct and a former leader at Harte-
Hanks and Epsilon Data Management, she's advised many Fortune
500 clients. B-to-B MarketingBiz contacted her to get some advice
on the differences between direct mail and email for our
readers:
Q: Once businesses have permission from clients and prospects
to email them, how often should they email their list?
Remondi: I'm a very, very big proponent of testing. Not
enough marketers do testing. You should test how often it's
appropriate to be sending folks emails. They will tell you
very quickly if you are sending too many!
Ask them, 'How often would you like to receive emails from us?
Quarterly? Monthly? Once every two weeks?' It's the best
way to understand -- and also to make customers feel like you
really care what they feel.
If you're not flat out asking them this, you really do have to
be careful that you're not inundating them. I have companies
that over-email me. I start just to delete them
automatically. Then their email becomes just like direct mail
where you are just throwing it in the trash every time you get
it. Email still has a much higher open and read rate -- but
there is a fear among marketers that email will eventually
become like direct mail.
Q: On average, what's the best frequency for B-to-B customer
emails?
Remondi: There's no hard and fast rule about number of emails.
Average numbers are not useful.
You want to test if you email three times a year are you
getting higher response rates then five-six times a year?
Pull out a control group to test against, to find out at what
frequency does response rate fall. I have clients who can
mail 10 times a year and I have other clients who can only get
away with three times a year. It depends on your company and
your product.
I always tell my clients, I'd rather see you under-emailed
versus over-emailed. As soon as you reach the point where
you've over-emailed them, you've lost them and they'll never
come back.
Q: What's the best format for a customer email campaign? HTML
or text?
Remondi: I get that question a lot. Obviously HTML looks a
lot nicer and more companies are using it. However, we are
still at the point where some people don't have the capability
to read it, and some big companies stop it. I always send out
email with a choice. You can either open it up in text or
HTML. The more choices you give your prospects and customers
the better.
Some will go for the text option and others for HTML. Every
marketer out there would like to see customers go for HTML
because you can use graphics. But most people are still
reading text. They want it to download fast, they want to
look at it onscreen and be done with it, and move on to their
next email. People are just overloaded. As machines become
faster and faster, you'll see more HTML.
Q: How long should a customer email newsletter be?
Remondi: You have to be short and sweet. What we tend to do
is weigh things down with too much content. You spend all
this money and energy putting together a very heavy newsletter
and a tenth of it gets read!
You need to focus on some short, very powerful messages that
are really going to grab somebody. Think of the image of
pulling somebody through his or her monitor. You really want
to get them hooked. You want to have some great sound bites
in that newsletter.
I've worked with companies like IBM, Lotus, Motorola and 3Com.
Big companies tend to think, 'As long as it's from us, they're
going to read all this stuff!' That's not the case. People
have very little time. The challenge is to make quick,
powerful statement messages and do it consistently.
Once again I keep bringing people back to the fact that once
you lose somebody, they're not likely to come back. Direct
mail is different. For example I get certain catalogs all
year. Sometimes I throw them in the trash, but that doesn't
mean next time it comes I'm not going to read it. Direct mail
is like that. They may not respond now, but in 3-4 months you
may mail them again and they'll open it up.
It's NOT so with email newsletters! Once you have gotten the
person either disinterested or angry or irritated about
something you've done, it's 99.9% certain that they'll never
open another one of your emails again, regardless of whether
they need it or not. You have to consistently draw their
attention in newsletters or it's over. It's just like
changing the radio station.
So, in many cases email is much more challenging than DM.
Plus, everything's getting faster. People will leave you more
rapidly if they are not interested in what you are saying.
You think you have three minutes for them to read your message
-- you actually have three seconds! That's putting tremendous
pressure on marketers.
Q: Integration is the hot thing in B-to-B marketing right now.
How should B-to-B marketers be integrating their email messages
to customers and prospects with their direct mail messages to
customers and prospects?
Remondi: Many companies are having a hard time integrating
Internet marketing into their other media. One of the reasons
is when they first started email marketing, they set up an
email marketing or electronic marketing department. So, you
have a group that does DM, a group that does email, and
perhaps another group for telemarketing.
Especially in large companies it's very difficult for one hand
to talk to the other hand. Instead, all of these groups are
working on stuff simultaneously. A customer may get a phone
call on Monday, a direct mailer on Tuesday and an email on
Wednesday. That's overkill.
A lot of companies need to set up systems that allow them to
see 'Oh we just sent out an email piece, we'd better wait a
week before we send the DM out.' I'm seeing change gradually,
but the systems to do it are still pretty new, even in
Internet time. It's also very time consuming and takes a lot
of work to set the systems up.
I have one Fortune 500 client who have set up such a system
across media. They made parameters for the number of
communications that can be sent to any given customer in a
number of different sales segments during any given quarter.
Depending on which segment they fall into, they'll get
anywhere from 2-8 communications per quarter including phone,
fax, email and mail -- the point being all of those media are
connected. It's not just the email marketing group saying,
'Yeah we can send six emails a quarter' and not look at what
the other groups are doing.
All of this sounds very intuitive. But I think very few
companies are actually doing it right now.
NOTE: To contact Remondi, email jremondi@rms-direct.com
***********************************
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