Sunday, March 14, 2010
Boxcar Marketing has been busy in the trenches lately as we worked to re-launch the Namaste Publishing website.
Namaste Publishing is a small, financially successful Canadian publishing house with a worldwide presence. Known as the publisher for leading authors like Eckhart Tolle, Namaste has a solid reputation for publishing transformative, leading-edge books on self-help, spirituality, alternative health and personal transformation.
Namaste’s original website was built using flat HTML files and grew over the years as a disconnected collection of sites and blogs under Namastepublishing.com and various subdomains. Without standard navigation between interior pages, the site was difficult to navigate, and the key ecommerce functions required unnecessary steps to purchase products in the store.
Screenshot of the Original Design
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Namaste’s online presence needed a radical reinvention and expansion. The team wanted a deeper long-term engagement with their community of fans, authors, spiritual leaders and staff. The project required a full re-branding and entire re-experience and re-interpretation of what publishing meant for the company.
Screenshot of the New Site Launched March 11, 2010
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A re-design is more than just design.
Boxcar Marketing started with a month-long strategy session to convert Namaste Publishing’s business from a traditional publishing company to the leader of a global spiritual community. Jordan Behan of Tell Ten Friends Marketing Co. and Boris Mann of BMann Consulting and Bootup Labs contributed their expertise during the strategy sessions and subsequent social-media training sessions. Once the team established the goals of the project, we sent out an RFP to various vendors.
Namaste Publishing’s goals were:
- To support and engage readers in an ongoing experience that deepens and adds richness to their understanding of the written materials.
- To dispel the distance and ‘one to many’ dynamic between author and reader.
- To distribute spiritual and inspirational information through new methods that are engaging, easy to understand, inspirational, fun and engage a wide audience.
- To expand the commercial viability of the already-profitable online store without compromising the intentions and integrity of the informational and community aspects of the website.
As for technical requirements, Namaste wanted an easier system for publishing their content (events, blogs, store products), a more user-friendly online shopping experience, and support for online and offline groups that form around Namaste’s publications (book studies and interactive courses).
In order to reach these goals the project was divided into 3 distinct but interdependent phases:
Phase I: Re-Experience
Namaste Publishing and Boxcar Marketing worked with Todd Sieling of Corvus Consulting on the information architecture, user experience, and interface design. Key to this phase, and taking the design lead, was Lift Studios, who provided the brand redesign (logos, business cards and other identity) and worked closely with us on the website redesign and desired user experience.
Phase II: Store Renovation
Boxcar Marketing’s experience with publishers and online marketing primed us for taking the lead on the product page requirements that would remake the online store and improve usability for customers. (A separate case study on this phase is coming.)
Phase III: Community Expansion
Namaste Publishing’s connections to the global spiritual community are extensive and they wanted to build social web tools within the Namaste site, as well as actively participate in other online communities where their fans and customers gather.
Throughout the project Boxcar Marketing and Namaste Publishing established practices for building and managing online communities, handling digital and print online sales, establishing online courses, such as The Journey to Higher Consciousness, promoting events, such as Namaste Radio, and incorporating the publisher and author blogs.
Boxcar Marketing, along with our expert partners, did extensive workflow planning, which translated to detailed wireframes that drove design and development decisions. But, of course, we would be nowhere without the guidance and amazing work of our Drupal development team from Raincity Studios. Raincity Studios turned our designs and user experience requests into the dynamic, fully functioning website we launched this month.
Truly a group effort, thank you again to Todd of Corvus Consulting, the design team at Lift Studios (Haig, Cam, Frederick), the development team at Raincity Studios (Erik, Francis, and many other behind-the-scenes folks), and the inspiring team at Namaste Publishing (Constance, Howard, Mary, David, Lucinda, Nora and Kathy).
The accomplishments of this small Canadian publisher knows no bounds. The Namaste Publishing team are my inspiration. Thank you for a wonderful project!
(And like in any Oscar speech, any oversights in the shout-outs are mine alone. If I’ve missed you, please announce yourself!)
Thursday, September 03, 2009
Ion Interactive held a landing page optimization webinar in August, where they highlighted the differences between organic landing pages and campaign landing pages. These differences are important to keep in mind when creating and optimization your own landing pages.
Organic Landing Pages:
- Are pages on your site.
- Need to appeal and work for everyone.
- Should be focused on the lowest-common denominator.
- Should be optimized for global, organic traffic.
- You have little control over the message.
- Work with closed-ended experimentation.
Campaign Landing Pages
- Are pages that are created for a specific purpose.
- Have a specific message and receive specific traffic.
- You have total control over the message, placement and the link behind the message.
- Should be optimized for your highly targeted, campaign-specific traffic.
- Need open-ended experimentation to get better conversion rate and quality. You need to test, learn, and adapt.
Campaign landing pages need to be hyper-local. You should be developing different, context-specific landing pages for different campaigns, different groups, different search engines, and different traffic sources.
For example, if you were advertising for a French language-learning series you would need to have a different message for your three different audience groups:
Students who are learning French because they’re required to: “Ace your French exams”
Travelers who want to learn French for a fuller travel experience: “Experience France as only a French speaker can”
Business People who are short on time: “Business French in 10 minutes a day”
Because your different audience groups would all buy the product for different reasons, the landing page that you direct them to should reflect their different needs.
For more on landing page optimization watch the webinar.
Monday, July 20, 2009
Do you have a strategy in place to increase your website’s search ranking? Need help? SES San Jose is a search engine strategies training and conference series that will teach you how to optimize and market your site within search engines.
Who Should Go?
Marketing Managers
Creative Directors
E-Commerce Managers
Brand Managers
Business Analytics Directors
Media Buyers
Media Planners
SEO Specialists/Consultants
PPC Analysts
Webmasters
Web Developers and Designers
IT Project Managers
What Will You Learn?
How search engines rank web pages.
How to optimize your site to out-rank competitors.
New methods of link building to keep your brand in front of your customers.
How to increase traffic via organic listings and avoid “spam” penalties.
How to optimize and rank better with pay-per-click campaigns.
How to improve user experience and increase conversions by testing and tuning landing pages.
How to track your performance and maximize ROI using analytics software.
Details
SES San Jose runs August 10 to 14, 2009 at the McEnery Convention Center. The conference runs August 11 to 13. August 10 and 14 are training days. A three-day pass for August 11 - 13 costs $1995 - save $200 when you register before July 24. For more information visit the SES San Jose site.
Register here.
Wednesday, September 24, 2008
Based on Guerrilla Consulting’s 7 Sentence Marketing Plan, I have been thinking about how the 7 Sentences can be modified for online marketing plans.
Free download Sample Marketing Plan & Roadmap from includes the 7-Sentence Marketing Plan.
At the BookNet Canada session “Defining Success: Accountable Online Marketing for Book Publishing”, I was asked about how I start creating an online marketing plan and if I think about the tools first.
I always have the tools in mind (Twitter, Facebook, Delicious), but I start with the 7 Sentence Plan, which really is about the business goals.
1. The purpose of the marketing plan is [specific, measurable goal here].
2. The target audience is [Who does this campaign need to reach? Where are they online?].
3. The niche in the marketplace is [What’s special about this book, how is it different, what are its benefits, competitive advantages?].
4. My identity is [Who and how are we representing ourselves online? Is the author blogging and commenting and the publicist doing the research? Is the publicist representing the author and the house? Are we using our Facebook profile, website, blog?].
5. Our tactics and strategies are [list here the tools, based on what’s going to work best for the target audience].
6. We will devote [percentage or amount of time, people, money] to this project.
7. We are measuring [specific, measurable goals here] and we understand the value of our goal conversions to be [enter values here].
Couple of competitive tools I mentioned:
* MarketLeap.com
* Compete.com
* Google Insights Search
Tuesday, September 23, 2008
3 Steps to Measuring the Success of Online Marketing Campaigns
Presented Sept. 18 as part of BookNet Canada and ABPBC’s Defining Success: Accountable Online Marketing for Book Publishing
If you’re not measuring the results of your marketing efforts, then you are wasting money. Here are 3 steps to planning, measuring and improving online campaigns.
Step 1. Establish measurable indicators (or KPIs, key performance indicators) for every marketing effort.
Make sure they are measurable! For example, saying “we want to increase sales” is not something you can measure. Many factors influence a person’s decision to buy. Sales are an indicator of success but the exact marketing effort that led to a sale is not measurable. Sending out a postcard and driving people to a specific URL is something we can measure. How many people came to this page. Further to that, if the page has an online form, how many people completed the form. These 2 things are specific and measurable.
A specific, measurable goal might be:
* visiting a certain webpage
* signing up for a newsletter
* completing an online form
By using free tools like Google Analytics you can precisely track how many people complete your goal and where they came from.
Step 2: Determine your cost per conversion.
A conversion is any time that someone completes a desired action. It doesn’t have to be a sale. A conversion is the completion of a measurable, specific goal.
Your cost per conversion is the amount of money you spend divided by the number of conversions you achieve.
If your campaign involves mailing out postcards that direct people to a specific URL with an online form, your goal is getting people to fill out the form. The campaign costs $500. You track the number of online form submissions and receive 50 submissions.
Cost per conversion = $500 / 50 submissions
$10 per conversion.
If your campaign involves sending out an email newsletter that directs people to a specific URL with an online form, your goal is still getting people to fill out the form. The campaign costs $200. You track the number of online submissions and receive 16 submissions.
Cost per conversion = $200 / 16 submissions
$12.50 per conversion
Now that you have this information you can make some better judgements about how to spend your marketing dollars. With the cost per conversion, you can see that the postcard generated a better (cheaper) cost per conversion than the email newsletter, even though the total cost of the postcard was more.
Cost per conversion helps you determine the actual cost instead of just looking at price. (It is like the cost per pound when buying meat.)
Step 3: Determine the Value
To determine if your marketing effort is worth the money or a waste, you need to determine the value of your activities.
Is it worth it to spend $12.50 to get one person to fill out an online form? Maybe yes, maybe no. It depends on the context. If the form is an order form for a product costing $100, maybe yes.
The value per conversion is $100. The cost per conversion is $12.50.
With both sets of numbers in hand, you can look at all your marketing efforts and decide where to allocate your resources: people, time and money. Don’t stop just at the online marketing activities, look at the offline marketing activities.
It drives me mad when online is asked to justify a spend but offline is not. In these scenarios, you’re wasting money. You are making decisions based on gut instinct and experience. We have experience doing x, y, z and it makes us feel good. It’s safe.
Safe can also be a waste of money.
When a conversion is not related to a sale, how do you set value?
Create a point system. You’ll assign an arbitrary number, but it works as a comparative measurement. You always want specific, measurable goals.
1 person opening and reading your email newsletter = 5 points
1 person viewing a specific video = 5 points
1 person signing up for a newsletter = 10 points
1 person creating an account on your ecommerce site = 100 points
Looks arbitrary, but it works.
If you run Campaign 1 and have 300 people viewing a specific video:
300 people * 5 points = 1,500 points
If you run Campaign 2 and have 200 people sign up for your email newsletter:
200 people * 10 points = 2,000 points
The $ value of each campaign is unknown, but we can see the relative effectiveness. Instead of saying, “we should do more of Campaign 1, it drove the most people”, we can see that Campaign 2, although it drove fewer actions, these actions are of higher value.
Before spending any money, always consider what your specific, measurable goal is worth. As long as you can measure relative effectiveness, you can evaluate whether you are wisely spending money.
Armed with the cost per conversion and the value per conversion, you can make a lot of sense out of the results data. You can easily determine which marketing activities are most effective.
Having trouble figuring out a point system?
Understand the relative value of your online and offline activities. Start with your gut instincts, set the arbitrary numbers, and, as you collect accurate, specific and measurable results, refine those arbitrary numbers into actual dollar values.
For example, if your gut tells you that in-person networking events generate a value of 10 points, but posters only generate 5 points. Then you have the beginnings of a scale.
Posters = 5 points
In-person networking = 10 points
If you and your marketing and sales team can agree that online networking and social media is equal to in-person marketing, then online networking is 10 points. If your team is skeptical, then you can negotiate. If online networking is of greater value than posters but lesser value than in-person networking, agree to give it 8 points.
From chaos to order.
Posters = 5 points
Online networking = 8 points
In-person networking = 10 points
Here is how I’d pair off some common online and offline marketing activities. You have to determine the value order and points based on your business context, but you can use these pairings to help those who operate on gut instinct, or those with little experience online, begin to create a point system.
Advertising (radio, print, direct mail) • Online advertising (email ads, banner ads, search ads
Articles in print (circulation numbers) • Articles Online (unique visitors to site)
Marketing messages with telephone hold music • Email signatures
In-person networking • Online networking
Posters • Web badges and widgets
Press releases • Electronic press releases
Letters to the Editor • Blog comments, Online reviews
Referral program • Online affiliate program
TV ads • YouTube videos
Word of Mouth (real world) • Word of Mouth (virtual world: blogs, forums, wikis, email forwards)
September has been a month of conferences. First the Internet Marketing Conference, then Defining Success: Accountable Online Marketing for Book Publishing hosted by BookNet Canada and the Association of Book Publishers of BC, and this Friday
ExpressionEngine Roadshow.
As a speaker (and chatty soul) at each of these conferences, I have talked to a number of people struggling with the same question. How do you define a successful internet marketing campaign? Most understand why they want to be online but are having trouble showing success and getting budget dollars.
The first step is to dispel myths held by those gripping the pursue strings.
- Just because it is online, does not mean it is free.
If you want successful internet marketing campaigns, you have to put money, people and time into them.
Even using free tools, you still need to invest the time in using that tool properly.
- People, process and technology.
You do not have a successful campaign without all 3. The tools and technology are available to do really great things, but the tools are only as good as the people using them.
- Plan. Measure. Improve.
You cannot express success without agreed upon metrics.
- As a company, you have to understand the cost of the campaign and the value generated. The cost is easy to measure.
It is the assignment of value that we often overlook.
How much do we value the new email subscriber, the new Facebook member. What do they mean to our business? How do we measure these indirect benefits across
all campaigns so we know if the email newsletter is actually of greater value to the business than the blog or the twitter feed?
- Sit down with your team and define the value of each marketing action (online and offline). Even set arbitrary numbers to use as a baseline until you have historical data.
Internet Marketing Is Hard and Only for Kids.
Internet marketing is not hard. Doing things you have never done before is hard.
Solutions Research Group produced a report last June (2007) to
show the age groups of Canadians visiting social networking sites: places like Facebook and MySpace.
- 70 percent of 12-19 year olds visited a social networking site within the last month.
- 72 percent of 20-29 year olds
- 44 percent of 30-49
- 29 percent of 50+
That means 23 million Canadians are online. 8 million are in Facebook. The numbers are huge!
Corey Rollins and I live blogged the Internet Marketing Conference (September 11 and 12) for TechVibes. Links to our posts are below:
General Interest
IMC: Keynote Address by Eric T. Peterson.
Author Eric T. Peterson says that if it is worth doing, it is worth doing analytically. Why web analytics is important and what it means to your business.
IMC: Social Media Marketing Success Stories.
Capulet Communications on 5 social media tools.
IMC: Best Tips and Conference Summary.
A quick review of key points from the conference.
IMC: Shannon Ryan on Engagement Marketing.
A really short post with 5 tips for engagement marketing.
IMC: Enterprise 2.0 by Jon Husband Wirearchy Network.
Why hierarchy does not work in a wired world.
How-To
IMC: Usability Testing Without the Lab Coats by Andre Charland from Nitobi.
3 tips for usability testing.
IMC: Engage Community With Your Brand by William Azaroff of Vancity.
Excellent case study on how Vancity Credit Union used social media to create an online community.
IMC: Expert Panel Tips on Writing for the Web.
Monique and an expert panel talk about writing copy for landing pages, email newsletters, multilingual sites and more.
Search Marketing
IMC: HubSpot Website Grader.
A quick measurement of how well your website performs from a search and social media perspective. Test your own site.
IMC: Search Optimization Panel.
An expert panel on search optimization. What makes them tick and ticked about SEO practices.
IMC: Tool Demo on SEO Browser.
Really short post on SEO-Browser.com. Know what a search engine sees when it comes to your site.
Measuring Success
IMC: Website Monetization.
Why defining goals, assigning value and measuring is worthwhile.
IMC: Monitoring Website Performance by Anil Batra of Zero Dash 1.
A great presentation by Anil on why people waste their time tracking statistics that are interesting and what they should be measuring.
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