Terry Jukes - President of B2B Direct Marketing Intelligence, LLC

What is the state of your e-commerce system?

Recently I’ve been involved with a project that involves researching what leading B-to-B and B-to-C catalogers are doing in the area of e-commerce systems. Specifically, what, if any, systems they’re using to conduct search engine optimization (SEO), pay per click (PPC), e-mail programs and online ordering. The project has been a real eye opener due to the fact that there doesn’t appear to be any established best practice. As a group of direct marketers, we appear to be “all over the map.” Most of us are struggling with staffing implementation and have no idea how to evaluate our results. Here are the kinds of things I hear:

* “E-commerce is complex and ever-changing, we just can’t seem to get ahead of the learning curve”;

* “We can’t find the experienced staff, our team keeps changing….”;

* “We’ve learned there’s not one person called ‘e-commerce director’ who can do it all like the ‘circulation director’ can on the mail side”;

* “The minimum staffing and investment required seems to keep growing each year”;

* “We don’t know what we don’t know and wonder how that impacts us”;

* “We have a hard time finding out what ‘best practices’ in all the different e-commerce areas really are”; and

* “We have several vendors helping us in the different areas — SEO, e-mail, PPC, online ordering, etc. — but we can’t seem to tie it all together.”

Sound familiar? I think most companies are doing an OK job in this area of their business, but nowhere near as well as they’re doing with circulation, purchasing, product development or catalog production … areas where skills and best practices have been honed over many years.

I’m not sure there’s a good answer to many of these issues yet, but the first step for any direct marketer is to properly understand the questions and issues before they go searching for the answers. Where does your company stand on these issues? In future columns I’ll convey what I’m able to discover.

Have a comment? Please provide me with your feedback at tjukes@b2bdmi.com .

Terence Jukes is president of B2B Direct Marketing Intelligence Inc., a strategic consultancy based in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., that services clients in the U.S., Canada, France, the U.K. and Germany. You can reach him at www.b2bdmi.com or (954) 566-4451.

Test Private Customer Sales

Like you, I receive many mail offers that just don’t grab my attention. If it looks like a “mass mailing,” I don’t perceive it to be relevant. In this age of variable printing and personalization, there’s really no excuse not to be testing various personalized offers. One such proven offer is the private customer sale.

This involves digging into your customer file to find what products your customers have bought in the recent past, or what products they’re likely to buy based on past buying behavior. With this information, you’re able to send a personally addressed mail piece (letter, postcard, catalog, etc.) offering them some benefit (money off, two-for-one deal, percentage off, etc.) for ordering those products again.

This private offer, tailored to each customer, should be sent with a heading to grab their attention, such as “Because you’ve been a good customer ... .” It’s not just throwing out a discount.

Depending on the product offered, it also might include a “time to reorder” message, which can be positioned as an additional customer reminder service. It should be personally addressed (e.g., “Dear Terry …) so customers quickly recognize it’s an offer tailored to them. Make it relevant and meaningful, and whether or not they buy at that moment, at least they feel the company making the offer isn’t wasting their time and is thinking about them and not the masses.

Even better is if you can print a picture of the product on the mail piece. Also, add some form of customer information that makes customers feel you value them, such as “orders placed year-to-date.” This helps to explain why you’re now extending this good deal.

You may remember that the old Viking Office Supplies perfected the execution of this idea more than 10 years ago. Since then, technology has delivered even better personalization and print on-demand functionality. We also have e-mail today, which makes the execution of a private sale much easier.

So, when was the last time you made your customers feel special (and boosted sales) with a personalized, relevant and private offer? If you’d like to share your experience, please e-mail me at tjukes@b2bdmi.com or click on the “Post a Comment” mechanism below.

Terence Jukes is president of B2B Direct Marketing Intelligence Inc., a strategic consultancy based in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., that services clients in the U.S., Canada, France, the U.K. and Germany. You can reach him at www.b2bdmi.com or (954) 566-4451.

Good or Bad? How We in B-to-B, too, Have Trained Our Customers to be Last-minute Shoppers

I’ve heard a number of nervous comments from B-to-B direct marketers who rely on seasonal products or end-of-the-year sales peaks. Everyone seems a little concerned as their order curves are behind last year’s — in some cases more than 20 percent behind. I’m not worried … yet. Here’s why:

Over the past five years or so with all the advances we’ve seen in technology, there’s been a continual shortening of production and delivery times. What used to take four to five production days, now takes one to two. Shipping and delivery times also have been cut, due to advances made by the likes of United Parcel Service and Federal Express. In most cases, we as a group have underpromised and overdelivered. And that’s good.

At the same time, however, customers have come to depend on our good performance. They now feel secure in ordering B-to-B holiday cards, gifts or year-end employee awards in early December! There was a time not so long ago when if you sold these kinds of products, your season was made by Thanksgiving — or it wasn’t going to happen.

That’s changed. By my estimates, you now have until Dec. 15th or so before your holiday season or end-of-year business is over. That’s because we’ve trained our customers to procrastinate.

Remember this for next year. You might want to put a little more emphasis on messages such as “early-bird discounts” or “order early to guarantee selection.” Maybe you’ll breath a little easier in late November.

Can you relate? If you sell these kinds of products/offers, I’d like to hear if you agree. E-mail me at tjukes@b2bdmi.com .

Terence Jukes is president of B2B Direct Marketing Intelligence Inc., a strategic consultancy based in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., that services clients in the U.S., Canada, France, the U.K. and Germany. You can reach him at www.b2bdmi.com or (954) 566-4451.

How to avoid the dreaded "delete" key.

Each morning as I open my e-mail, I sit with my index finger perched on the delete key. I suspect I’m like many others. Today’s e-mail environment has trained us all to be “vicious deleting machines.” We scan every sender and subject line looking for someone we recognize or something of value, and if we don’t find it ... zap, it’s gone. How long do we take to scan and delete what we don’t recognize? I take about one second, maybe less. It helps that I get lots of training each morning — I’m relentless. The volume of unwanted e-mails is now so high that we’ve become experts at deleting it in a nanosecond. No e-mail “gets a break.” I bet most of us have even deleted e-mails that we wanted just because we failed to recognize it in the one second we give ourselves to scan it. So what’s my point? It’s simple. Unless you have a clear sender and subject line that communicates in one, two seconds max, your e-mail is dead! Gone. Poof. Zap.

So, take a good look at what you’re sending and how it arrives in the recipient’s inbox, and ask yourself, “Why shouldn’t the recipient delete my e-mail?”

Here are some of my instant delete cues.

1. A sender I don’t recognize. Here’s one from my inbox this morning: Bidz@jeg0otaxot.com . Apparently they were selling jewelry! (Why me?)

2. A sender field that has been truncated in some way. Obviously it was too long in the first place.

3. Anything from “Sales@” or “Customer Service@.”

Now here’s what I do open:

1. Anything sent from a real person. “JoeSmith@” gets my attention even if I don’t recognize the name immediately.

2. A subject line I’m interested in, particularly if it’s service-oriented. For example, “Renew your car insurance” or “Your order #123456 has been shipped.”

3. Offers in the subject line that interest me, especially if they’re relevant, timely or seasonal: “Take 15 percent off any order today only” or “Free S&H for our best customers” or “Free personalization of your holiday cards.”

What I see today is an inordinate amount of poorly crafted sender lines and subject lines. I suspect, given what I’ve seen, many B-to-B e-mailers are leaving this critical creative responsibility in the hands of their IT departments or e-mail providers.

So, once you’ve conquered the deliverability issue with your e-mail campaigns, make sure you get the sender and subject lines right. Remember, you only have one second to reel in the recipient or else you’ll suffer the wrath of the trigger finger on the delete key.

Got an e-mail you want to send me for my opinion? Go ahead, I dare you.

Terence Jukes is president of B2B Direct Marketing Intelligence Inc., a strategic consultancy based in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., that services clients in the U.S., Canada, France, the U.K. and Germany. You can reach him at www.b2bdmi.com or (954) 566-4451.

How many one time buyers do you have?

Too often in our acquisition efforts we get caught up in the excitement of initial response rates and the rolling out of successful tests. While getting that first order always is exciting, we must be careful not to judge any acquisition program by first order alone. Too many of us have customer files that are 40 percent, 50 percent or even 60 percent one-time buyers. Even if you’re lucky enough to prospect at a marketing gross profit (incremental gross margins exceeds marketing costs), few, if any, businesses make money on the first order.

As B-to-B direct marketers, we’re in the business of establishing long-term customer relationships where customers order again and again. Getting the second order often is more important than getting the first. When you evaluate your acquisition programs based on the second order, they most likely look very different. One order is a test or trial; two orders and you have a customer. That said, I encourage you to do the following.

* Conduct your mailing analysis based on the second order, not just the first. Compare how your conclusions change between the two.

* Exclude that profile or segment that repeatedly gives you only one order.

* Feature a customer welcome package and a second-order incentive that you mail in the first order shipment.

* Make sure your offer doesn’t attract primarily “one-time-only” customers. Discount offers, for example, tend to attract price shoppers, who’ll quickly move for a lower price unless you do something beyond price to keep them.

* Look for multibuyer status on prospect files. If the names buy direct from other companies, chances are they’ll buy repeatedly from you, too.

* Don’t load your file up with inquiries or one-time buys, particularly if the name/customer is obtained online.

* Examine any differences you have in your multibuyers based on how you acquire the names. Chances are names from unqualified online sources won’t perform as well.

* Call your one-time buyers. Find out why they haven’t ordered again.

Above all, remember this: Your business only will survive and prosper if your entire acquisition program is geared toward finding and keeping multibuyers. Tell me this: What percentage of your 12-month customer file has only ordered once?

Terence Jukes is president of B2B Direct Marketing Intelligence Inc., a strategic consultancy based in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., that services clients in the U.S., Canada, France, the U.K. and Germany. You can reach him at www.b2bdmi.com or (954) 566-4451.

How well do you really know your competition?

When visiting client organizations, I’m often surprised at how little they really know about their top three or four competitors. I’ve always assumed my competitors are very smart businesspeople and, as such, wanted to know everything they were up to. I recommend putting into place programs that provide a steady stream of information on competitors.

You can accomplish this by appointing a marketing person in your company to be competitor X, making it his or her job to research all competitors and to begin thinking like those competitors. Then hold a group marketing/merchandising meeting where your competitor representative gives a presentation on what competitor X is doing. It’s a great exercise, particularly the questions and insights that come from your team after the presentation.

Here are a few things you should do as you collect competitive intelligence:

1. Establish a regular buying program from your competitors. Order something on the same day of each month. If it uses sequential order numbers, you’ll learn how many orders were processed in the elapsed time period.

2. Engage a customer service rep (CSR) in friendly conversation. You’d be stunned at what a CSR will tell you in an attempt to get a sale or please a customer.

3. Set up a rating system to evaluate the competitive ordering experience and review that with the marketing team as you open the competitor’s shipments.

4. Make sure the competitive orders are challenging. Include personalization, custom production or other more difficult options.

5. If the company has its rental list on the market, track its buyer file over time, looking for growth and retention trends.

6. Seek out a competitor’s exhibit at a trade show and engage it in conversation about what’s new and how things are going.

7. Never pass up an opportunity to interview an applicant who’s worked for your competitor.

8. Search the business networks, such as LinkedIn.com, by company to see who’s out there who’s worked for one of your competitors. They might be worthwhile candidates for positions at your company.

9. Have someone visit its location. You can learn a lot from just looking at the building, talking to the receptionist and even counting cars in the parking lot.

Remember, all’s fair in love, war and gathering competitive intelligence. Don’t forget, they may be researching you, too, so begin to take defensive measures.

Terence Jukes is president of B2B Direct Marketing Intelligence Inc., a strategic consultancy based in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., that services clients in the U.S., Canada, France, the U.K. and Germany. You can reach him at www.b2bdmi.com or (954) 566-4451.

Are you really doing enough to improve your offers?

Direct marketers today spend an inordinate amount of time on media, lists and creative. While these all are important variables, sometimes we need to remember the most important variable of all is what you’re offering. We tend to get carried away with the excitement of new media, the infinite details of our circulation plans, and the development and testing of various creative packages. But all these things mean nothing if we don’t have an offer the customer wants.

Our offer-development skills seem rusty to me. All too often the extent of our offer development is deciding between offering a 10 percent discount or free shipping. Just look at the similarity of all the offers you see today. Who’s really offering anything truly new?

Offer development isn’t easy. It requires innovative, creative team-thinking and risk taking. It also requires complete organizational support, including the folks in product development, IT, marketing, sales and distribution. Here are seven pointers on how to find your next BIG offer.

1. Always start by looking for your customers’ “points of pain” that relate to your core offering. When in doubt, ask customers what they worry about or what “headaches” they have. You may be amazed at what you find out.

2. Work with those customer problems in the context of your base offering and develop solutions that may involve product, information, pre- or post-sale services, outsourcing, warranties, etc.

I know a seller of specialty industrial water pumps whose customers were having trouble training their installers and maintenance crews. The seller produced a line of training materials and videos featuring its products to assist customers’ training efforts. Recognizing the need, the company launched a separate training business.

3. Look for opportunities to bundle your product and service with other complimentary products or marketers.

4. Look for ways to get a third-party endorsement to your offer and access to a new channel of distribution. For example, I knew a company that sold human resource compliance materials endorsed by various state chambers of commerce. In addition to providing an endorsement, the chambers provided member mailing lists and internal communication vehicles to help promote the product offer. Many associations will do the same for a product or offer they believe in. And, of course, they receive a commission on the sale.

5. Look for ways to provide pre-sale educational content and post-sale services such as warranties, reorder reminders, trade-ins or recycle programs. Think not just about selling your product, but also about the customer’s entire life cycle in the use of your product.

6. Some of the most powerful words in direct marketing are “new,” “unique” and “guaranteed.” Find ways to make your offer have all three of these things.

7. Spend at least half of your marketing brainpower and time developing and testing new offers, whatever they may be. Ultimately it will pay off much more than that 10 percent- or 20 percent-off discount offer will.

Have a new offer-development story you would like to share? Please do so by hitting the “post a comment” button below or e-mailing me at tjukes@b2bdmi.com .

Are You Asking for a Referral When Taking an Online Order?

When we make really good offers to customers or prospects and they buy, that’s the moment to ask for a referral. After all, they want their friends and business associates to get the same great offer they just got, right? Below is an example from www.photostamps.com, which has a great idea and offer. Please scroll down, click on the postage-stamp-size image and note how the marketer makes it so easy for me to give it a referral e-mail address or two. The only thing that’s missing is the ability for responders to upload their personal distribution list.

The better you make your offer, the more e-mail referrals you can get. After all, don’t we all have “online shopping friends” who delight in e-mailing us when they find an “unbelievable deal” on the Web? One friend of mine recently e-mailed me when Spirit Airlines had a $5 airfare to San Jose, Costa Rica. (Crazy, but true!) It was a real deal! My “Bargain Betty” Internet-shopping wizard friend took great delight in e-mailing hundreds of her closest friends and associates about the deal. She maintains a distribution list just for such occasions.

Create a Buzz

I’m sure this is what Spirit Airlines had in mind when it came up with the lost leader offer. It wanted to create a viral, online buzz. And it sure did thanks to all the “I can’t wait to tell you what I got!” shoppers out there. (By the way, I had never even heard of Spirit Airlines until that day.)

So test this: Come up with an unbelievable offer — good for one day only. Think of it as an online, B-to-B version of Kmart’s famous “blue-light specials.” And it must be drop-dead good. Try to do more than just discount yourself into oblivion. “Buy this and get that” offers are good. So, too, are bonus offers on newly launched products, much like Spirit Airlines did with its new route to San Jose, Costa Rica.

Always Make it Easy

In all your online promotions, make sure it’s easy for your readers to tell their friends fast because offers like yours won’t last past, say, midnight. You get the picture. The value is in the referrals and making a splash.

Let me know how you make out, and if anyone from www.photostamps.com or Spirit Airlines reads this, I would love to hear your feedback.

Terence Jukes is president of B2B Direct Marketing Intelligence Inc., a strategic consultancy based in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., that services clients in the U.S., Canada, France, the U.K. and Germany. You can reach him at www.b2bdmi.com or (954) 566-4451.

Are Your Mailings Irrelevant or Just Plain Stale?

Lately I’ve noticed I’ve been getting repeat mailings from large B-to-B office suppliers — and they all look the same. It probably doesn’t help that Office Depot, Staples and OfficeMax have similar corporate colors. They all seem stuck in their “10 percent or $10 off” offer, or some version of it. To make matters even more boring, the mailings always seem to be in one of two or three standard formats. You know the ones: large postcards, #10 solo or folded flyer.

You look at them and say, “Oh, that again,” and toss it. It got me thinking about the opportunity we as B-to-B mailers have to vary our offers and presentation based on what we know about our customers. I believe your offers will go farther with more of the following:

1. A mailing that recognizes I have a purchase-channel preference. When I buy office supplies, for example, I like to visit the nearby Office Depot store. When I buy music or movies, I do it online.

2. A mailing that recognizes I’m a small-business man and don’t have a large need for certain products. I recently got a 200-plus-page, hard-cover catalog from Peachtree Business Products. As vice president of a condo association, I purchased some parking tags from this company more than a year ago. It’s unlikely I’ll ever buy anything else.

3. A mailing that recognizes what I buy repeatedly. It would be nice to be reminded what fax toner, laser toner and photographic paper I buy when I’m about to run out (based on my past purchase frequency) so I don’t have to remember that stuff myself.

4. A mailing that doesn’t call me a woman. Yes, when you have one of those names that either sex can have, like Terry, you’d be surprised how many times I get called a girl. Not very appropriate. That’s why I always use Terence when buying direct. But even that doesn’t work all the time for some strange reason. Wouldn’t it be nice if places where I shop could remember I’m a guy!

5. A Web site that allows me to customize the homepage based on what I want from that company. I’d want to know what I’ve purchased before, how much I’ve purchased in total (American Airlines acknowledges me every time I sign on to its site for flying a zillion miles in my life).

6. A company that keeps all my personal imprint information — logos, artwork and photos — and reminds me it has them periodically, so it’s easy to order greeting cards, business cards, stationery and all other personalized items.

7. A mailing that informs me of new products, content, trends, etc. — but only the stuff I’m interested in. If a multichannel merchant looks at my past purchases, it’ll see what kind of business I’m in and could surmise how it might help me.

It’s not too much to ask, is it? Can’t we use our data to create real intelligence and personal, relevant and well-timed marketing communications? Please let me know if you agree or disagree.

What portion of your e-commerce marketing efforts should you outsource?

I see a dilemma growing in our industry. It involves balancing which e-commerce functions should be kept in-house vs. those that should be outsourced.

Before we answer that question, a little historical perspective is in order. First, take note that five years ago, most of us thought e-commerce was a lot less complicated than it’s turned out to be. Right? That said, the next five years will bring increasing levels of complexity in e-commerce.

I also want to point out that most B-to-B companies I know have gone through several e-commerce employees/teams and/or organizational structures. As the function has evolved, we’ve struggled to keep up with the staffing needs. And this “people change” has, collectively, cost us dearly.

Furthermore, finding and recruiting truly experienced and talented e-commerce leaders with relevant direct marketing experience is the hardest staffing job in our companies today.

So, where does that lead us? The “enlightened” companies I work with and see in the marketplace have come to the following conclusions:

* e-commerce will not get simpler; it’ll probably become increasingly complex in the years ahead;

* recruiting and keeping e-commerce leaders will not get easier or less expensive;

* the e-commerce learning curve is steep and constantly changing;

* e-commerce isn’t a core competency any more than catalog printing or telesales is a core competency; and

* Mistakes in e-commerce have both a real cost and, generally, a larger, lost-opportunity cost.

If you don’t believe any of this, you can stop reading right now. But if you agree as I think you should, you’re one of the “people with vision” in our industry who realizes that some limited number of e-commerce functions (e.g., keyword development, online product presentation, online testing, etc.) need to be handled in-house by qualified staff. But the vast majority of e-commerce functions (e.g., SEO, pay per click, podcasting, content production, video development, etc.) are best handled by an experienced vendor who performs the same function on behalf of many clients.

It’s this collective execution that facilitates learning, efficiency and effectiveness, while reducing risk. Five years from today, only the largest B-to-B direct marketers (sales greater than $100 million) and/or those running multiple catalog titles will perform the majority of their e-commerce functions in-house. By that time, these companies will have staffs of 20 or more employees and very large budgets to handle e-commerce. Smaller companies will be forced to outsource most of their e-commerce functions.

Terence Jukes is president of B2B Direct Marketing Intelligence Inc., a strategic consultancy based in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., that services clients in the U.S., Canada, France, the U.K. and Germany. You can reach him at www.b2bdmi.com or (954) 566-4451.