Marketing – Page 44 – Phil Bernstein's Advertising, Marketing, and Sales Training Blog

Using Radio To Get Customers to Your Web Site — 7 Proven Techniques

Many of my long-time customers are now, finally, using their web sites as selling tools. They often ask how they can most effectively drive prospects to their sites, and convert them to customers. Here are seven techniques, based on education and trial-and-error in the field:

1. Have one call to action in the ad — a command to visit your web site. Having both a phone number and a URL will hurt your results. If the listeners have to make a choice of actions, it gives them a reason to hesitate, and a significant percentage will do nothing at all. Copywriting guru Dan O’Day taught me this at a seminar, and my experience has confirmed it.

2. The success of your URL will depend to a large extent on how simple, and how memorable, the address is. You’ve got a better chance if it matches the company name exactly, or if it’s a natural expression of the value proposition. If there are hard-to-spell words, or people have to think about it at all, you’re in trouble.

3. Insist on “dot com”. “Dot net” or “dot biz”, or other suffixes, will lower your response because people remember Dot Com no matter what they actually heard.

4. If your URL is hard to remember or spell, consider using the radio station site as a “short cut”. Most stations promote their web sites heavily these days, so listeners are trained to go there already for news, entertainment, and contests. You can put a banner on the site, and then the call to action is to go to the station site and click on the banner. For example, “Go to K103 dot com and click on the VanderVeer Center logo.” CAUTION: banners are often sold in rotation. To get the results you need, you must make sure that the banner is up on the site 100% of the time.

5. Many stations have a search box on their web site. An alternative to the banner is to buy a keyword, and use that as your call to action. “Go to K103 dot com and type in the keyword ‘Botox’. That’s K103 dot com, keyword ‘Botox’.”

6. Make sure your site is set up to capture customer information for later follow-up. If people come to your site, read a few things, and leave, you may never get them back. Offer some value in return for their email address — a free report, coupon, or other premium that would convince them to tell you who they are.

7. Once you have the information, follow up quickly. Your prospect will find other things to think about if you let time go by. An email autoresponder can help you automate the process.

If you’re a Portland area business owner or manager, I can help you set all this up. After all, it’s what I do.

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Request your free copy of my white paper, The Seven Deadly Advertising Mistakes and How to Fix Them here.

Got a question? Call me at 503-323-6553.

The Gardenburger Mess — How Not to Handle a Crisis

It started last weekend, when small signs at Burgerville outlets notified customers that the chain was temporarily taking Gardenburgers off the menu. The story picked up steam when Burgerville placed a huge order with a small local meatless-patty manufacturer. Now, it’s exploded into public view as grocery giant Fred Meyer announces that it has pulled the product off its shelves.

From the outside, it appears that Kellogg, owner of Gardenburger, has done its best to keep the whole thing quiet. By attempting to sweep the issue under the rug, Kellogg has guaranteed an extra level of public attention — and done enormous unnecessary damage to Gardenburger’s reputation.

The story is still developing, but here’s how it looks right now:

1. More than a week ago, Burgerville workers unpacking the product noticed something they didn’t like. Burgerville officials contaced Kellogg, weren’t sastisfied with whatever they were told, and pulled the product. To its credit, Burgerville announced the change to its customers with signage at the stores.

2. A few days later, Burgerville announced that they would carry a different meatless burger — the first public indication that this problem might be a big one.

3. Later in the week, Kellogg announced a “voluntary withdrawal” of Gardenburgers, but refused to say why, beyond a vague statement that food safety was not an issue.

4. Kellogg apparently didn’t bother to mention any of this to the FDA. Charles Breen, the agency’s regional director, found out by reading about it in the Oregonian.

5. As of the time I write this, concerned customers who visit Gardenburger’s web site will find no information at all about the problem.

It is often the case (see Nixon, Richard) that when there’s bad news, a cover-up will make things much, much worse. Kellogg has lost their opportunity to have some control of the information flow.

This is in sharp contrast to Johnson & Johnson’s prompt and aggressive outreach following the Tylenol deaths of the early 80’s. Gardenburger should follow J & J’s playbook — tell the public exactly what the problem is and what they intend to do about it. The unnecessary damage they’re doing by remaining silent will haunt them for years.

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Click this link to subscribe to Portland’s Finest Advertising Blog.

Request your free copy of my white paper, The Seven Deadly Advertising Mistakes and How to Fix Them here.

Got a question? Call me at 503-323-6553.

Taking Responsibility: SuperBookDeals Screws Up, Amazon.com Steps Up

If your business is a brokerage, where it’s up to another company to actually perform once you put the deal together — or if you’ve ever just referred a friend somewhere and regretted it afterwards — you’ll sympathize with Amazon.com. Their “Marketplace” is essentially one big brokerage/referral program — “We don’t have the item you’re looking for, but these guys do.”

Unfortunately, sometimes “these guys” mess up. And even though you didn’t cause the problem, your good name is on the line. This post gives the whole sordid tale of my dealings, via Amazon.com, with an outfit called SuperBookDeals — an online store that got it wrong and really didn’t care.

By necessity, Amazon, who must deal with millions of customers, automates as much as it can. They have standard procedures for dealing with Marketplace order disputes, and the procedure normally takes several weeks.

But, I was delighted to learn, they also have an Investigations Team, staffed by real human beings. You’ve got to complain loudly to get to them, but once you do, they’re empowered go take care of business.

This evening Amazon issued me a full refund, and also gave me a credit to cover the postage costs I incurred.

Today’s customer service lesson — even if it wasn’t your fault, take responsibility for making it right. Your reputation depends on it.

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A Free Tool to Calculate Your Ad Budget

Courtesy of Roy Williams, The Wizard of Ads. Rather than just taking a set industry percentage or range, this method requires some actual thought, and some research on your part. Here’s the basic point of view:

The purpose of advertising is to increase the exposure of a business beyond what’s provided by its physical location. An extremely high Cost of Occupancy (rent) for a landmark location is often the least expensive advertising available. Businesses who save money by investing in weak locations always have to advertise much more heavily.

Find the calculator here, and an explanation of the thought process here.

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Click this link to subscribe to Portland’s Finest Advertising Blog.

Request your free copy of my white paper, The Seven Deadly Advertising Mistakes and How to Fix Them here.

Got a question? Call me at 503-323-6553.

Can a Blog Post Resolve a Service Issue? A SuperBookDeals Experiment

When I was a kid, my mom used to listen to Jack Carney’s show on KMOX Radio in St. Louis. Carney was the biggest personality on the biggest radio station in town, and he did endorsement commercials for a camera shop. My mom went to that store and… I can’t remember the details anymore, but she felt she was treated poorly.

She called the radio station, managed to get Carney on the phone, and told her story. Within 30 minutes of that conversation, the store manager called my mom and offered to do whatever it took to make things right.

In the age of the internet, can a blog post accomplish the same thing? We’re going to give it a try. Here’s the story.

I ordered a book from Amazon.com — actually from one of their “Marketplace Partners”, an outfit called SuperBookDeals. Here’s the book I ordered:

When the envelope from SuperBookDeals arrived, here’s what was inside:

Can we agree that it’s not even close? And that anyone who reviews my Amazon order will confirm that I ordered the Ellington book?

Okay, good. Let’s continue.

I emailed SuperBookDeals and told them of the mistake — their mistake, by the way. I received an email asking for the ISBN number of the book I received. I sent them the proper number. Here’s what I got in reply:

Thank you for contacting us. We are sorry to hear that you received the wrong item. Please return the item(s) to us via USPS Media Mail with delivery confirmation, along with your full name, order number, reason for return, and a copy of the receipt for return postage, and we will reimburse the cost of return shipping. Please send the item(s) to:

SuperBookDeals Returns

Ref: [transaction or order number]

5520 Brick Road

South Bend, IN 46628

Upon receipt, we would be pleased to process a refund or order a replacement from the publisher, which would take approximately 1-2 weeks to be delivered to you. Please let us know whether you would prefer a refund or a replacement copy (if available). We apologize for any inconveniences this may have caused, and we appreciate your patience in this matter.

In other words, to correct their mistake, I have to write out a letter with a bunch of information they already have, take the book to the post office, shell out the postage myself, include the receipt with the book (God forbid I try to make an extra fifty cents in the deal), and wait for them to receive it via (extremely slow) Media Mail. Then, and only then, they will send me the book they should have sent me the first time.

I objected — both to them and to Amazon. I’m willing to return the book, but while they’re waiting for the wrong book to come back they should be sending me the right book. Eventually, I received another email from SuperBookDeals:

Thank you for contacting us. We do apologize for the confusion and that you received the wrong item, as we did indicate in our email below, to please return the wrong item via USPS Media Mail with Delivery Confirmaton and we will be happy to reimburse you for that cost. Once you have done that please email us with the delivery confirmation number and we will be happy place a new order to send you the correct item. At that time if you could also email us with us the cost of the return shipping we can start the process to send you a refund check for that amount. Again, we do sincerely apologize incorrect item sent.

Okay, better. Not great, but better. I dutifully wrote the letter, brought the package to the post office, put the receipt in the envelope, mailed the thing, and then sent the delivery confirmation number to SuperBook Deals.

And got this reply:

Thank you for your response. At of yet we have not received your return merchandise. The delivery confirmation number you provide is invalid. Please provide us with the correct delivery confirmation number. Once we have that number or the book we will immediately ship out the correct book. If you have any further questions please contact us. Thank you!

No, no, thank you, SuperBookDeals, for screwing up my order and treating me like I’m trying to pull a scam.

I now have to go back to my office, find the delivery confirmation slip, and see if perhaps I missed a number on the 20-digit delivery confirmation slip. Is it possible I got the number wrong? Sure it is. And by golly, SuperBookDeals isn’t going to fix their mistake until I jump correctly through every single hoop they’ve set up. Rules are rules, after all.

So here’s the experiment:

Now that this rant is up in the blogosphere (and a separate, shorter rant is on Amazon’s Customer Feedback), will it affect SuperBookDeals in any way?

Will a Google search of SuperBookDeals put the post on the front page?

Will SuperBookDeals find the post on their own? Will Amazon? Will either of them care?

I’ll report back.

UPDATE 5/19/08 This morning, I photocopied the delivery confirmation slip, created a pdf, and attached it to an email to SuperBookDeals — my hope was that this way they would have proof that I’d sent the book, and there would be no question as to the confirmation number. Late in the day, I received this message in reply: We are not allowed to open attachments please include the information in the email. Thank you. I have complained bitterly to Amazon.

UPDATE 5/21/09 Amazon took care of business. Details here.