I suspect many of you are now familiar with The Long Tail strategy first coined by Chris Anderson in 2004. Essentially, the notion suggests โselling less of more.โ I view it as the 80/20 rule in reverse, and itโs often the topic of heated discussion between direct marketers and their accountants.
The strategy focuses on the inherent competitive advantage of a B-to-B (or B-to-C, for that matter) catalog company stocking as many items as it can in order to compete with retail stores or โnet gnats,โ who pick off your best-selling items and sell them online at a discount. A retail storeโs space is
Suppose you want to test your homepage. Pick two areas: your strapline and your โwhy shopโ box. Then indicate those regions in the HTML source with invisible JavaScript snippets. This takes a few minutes. Next, load different versions of each region into GWO. Weโll assume youโve picked three different straplines (the slogan beneath your logo) and three different graphical โwhy shopโ presentations. Strapline Variations: โ Merchandise breadth: โThe Widget Superstoreโ โ Established and trustworthy: โYour Trusted Widget Source Since 1984โ โ Post-sale support: โHelping You Choose, Install and Enjoy Widgetsโ โWhy Shopโ Variations โ Guarantee: โ110% Satisfaction Guarantee โ Your Order and
This article assumes that insights gained from Web testing lead to effective print catalog presentations. That is our โBig Assumption.โ If you disagree, skip to the next article. No hard feelings; see you next month. Still reading? Good. There are two decent reasons to accept this Big Assumption. First, the Web is so prevalent that the demographics of Web shoppers are pretty much the same as the demographics of all direct shoppers, making the Big Assumption reasonable. Second, the Web offers catalogers their first chance to do real testing. While many catalogers think theyโve been testing for years, they really havenโt been
Are you on top of todayโs hottest ideas in free and paid search? Here are 14 easy-to-implement ways to get your site to the top of everyoneโs results. Each could support a full article in its own right, so Iโve also provided additional links to help you dig in further. Free Search Engine Optimization (SEO) 1. Social media sites drive links; links drive rankings. Get familiar with Digg (digg.com), StumbleUpon (www.stumbleupon.com), Netscape (netscape.com) and Reddit (reddit.com), because these social-media sites can drive huge traffic. More importantly, that traffic leads to numerous inbound links, which are the rocket fuel powering your organic rankings.
As the influence of search engine giant Google, and to a lesser extent Yahoo! and MSN, continues to grow, many multichannel marketers have been left to wonder if there are any other avenues to reach an online audience. In a recent whitepaper from search engine marketing and optimization services provider MoreVisibility entitled Marketing Strategies Beyond Traditional Search, author Amber Frensley provides several ways to effectively market to your audience through less-traveled roads. Here are some options she advises trying out. 1. Contextual advertising. This involves advertising your product/service on such digital media as Web sites and mobile phones, primarily on a cost-per-click basis.
Identifying technical buyers is only part of the equation; marketing to them is the tricky part. In a webinar presentation last week from Kellysearch.com and Enquiro Research, presenters Gord Hotchkiss, president and CEO of Enquiro, and Phil Manning, marketing development manager at Kellysearch.com, provided their thoughts on how to most effectively market and sell to the B-to-B community. Below are some of the top tips picked up during the session. 1. Segment the technical buyer. Manning referenced the technical buyer as an individual whoโs planning to make a purchase of $1,000 or more in the next year of one of the following: software, hardware,
Below is a comprehensive list of all the articles published in Catalog Success magazine in 2007. If you would like to view stories by issue date, click here. You can also use the Article Archive to search by keyword or topic. CATALOGER PROFILES Cover Stories Chinaberry: โReinventing the Wheelโ by Paul Miller, January After 5/Surf to Summit: โKayaking and Cocktailsโ by Paul Miller, February Patagonia: โShiny Happy Peopleโ by Matt Griffin, May Garnet Hill: โA Natural Issueโ by Carolyn Heinze, June Fair Indigo: โPlaying Fairโ by Paul Miller, August The Nailco Group: โMore Than Skin Deepโ by Carolyn
People who buy and hold domain names for the purpose of eventually reselling them for a profit are called โdomainers.โ Itโs now big business, particularly given the Internet trend of โgoing localโ and the rush to own local Internet real estate. Think โAtlantaDoctors.comโ or โMidtownChineseFood.comโ as two hypothetical possibilities. Minneapolis-based investment bank Piper Jaffray & Co. estimates Internet local ad spending will grow from $5 billion to $25 billion in the next decade.
Each B-to-B cataloger should be a domain-name acquirer in its own market niche for three reasons.
1. Make sure you own the domain-name real estate related to your brand, product
According to STORES magazineโs inaugural Favorite 50 survey, conducted by BIGresearch, consumers are drawn most to Web sites that offer a variety of choices. Topping the publicationโs rankings for customersโ favorite online retail companies was Amazon.com, whose broad product array connects with consumers. Following Amazonโs site was another site full of possibilities, eBay.com. The rest of the top 10 is below, followed by a list of all catalog companies ranked in the top 50. 3. WalMart.com 4. BestBuy.com 5. JCPenney.com 6. Target.com 7. Kohls.com 8. Overstock.com 9. Google.com 10. Sears.com The following catalogers were also on the list (followed by actual rank): LandsEnd.com (13),
As a cataloger/multichannel marketer, youโve long understood the importance of double-checking all aspects of your marketing programs to make sure everything is in order. No doubt, you visit your printer when youโre on press to monitor print quality. You do bindery checks to inspect book assembly. You likely use mail decoys to confirm delivery. You also probably โmystery shopโ your own company to monitor your call center and shipping teams. You surely double-check your printing and postal invoices for accuracy. The same attention to detail applies to online marketing. As paid search marketing grows in importance and consumes a larger share of catalogersโ