Top Five Ways to Improve Online Sales for Subscription Sites

I just got the transcript of MarketingSherpa’s Selling Subscriptions Summit 2007 back from the typists. Across the 19 speakers, five specific “what really works” tactics stood out:

Take-away #1: Split your testing team (and budget) into two pieces
It’s not enough to test, test, test anymore. The top marketers split their testing teams and budgets into two differently focused testing types.

Josef Mandelbaum, CEO of AmericanGreetings.com, said he divided his testing team between two goals: to test small items that add incremental value and to test big ideas that could have a huge impact.

“Incremental changes may not have the big bang, but you’ll never get the big bang without incremental changes,” Mandelbaum said.

Scott Butler, vice president of marketing for Blockbuster.com, agreed. His team performs careful multivariate testing of offers and landing pages but also makes sure to test a handful of big ideas that could radically change marketing tactics or materials. “Usually it’s your multivariate testing that will deliver the 5%-10% incremental lift, but it’s the blue-sky testing that can get the 30%-40% increase,” Butler said. “You can discover a new control, a new champion that beats everything else.”

Katie Davis, director of marketing for software firm Citrix.com, advised attendees who test paid-search campaigns to set up a separate testing fund outside of formal pay-per-click (PPC) spending. This way, you can test new approaches without taking money (and results) away from your existing PPC budget.

Take-away #2: Convenience sells (a lot)
Whether you’re creating products or coaxing existing customers to complete tasks, such as updating their credit-card information, there’s huge value in reducing your customers’ pain.

ForeclosuresDaily.com, a subscription-based service for real-estate investors, has grown its service 3,000% since 2004 by aggregating publicly available foreclosure information. Instead of investors’ having to comb through filings at courthouses around the country, ForeclosuresDaily.com does the work for them, aggregating new filings to a searchable online database.

Zacks.com found similar success introducing stock trading recommendation services with prices starting at $995 annually. “In other words, our customers are telling us, ‘We’ll pay you if you do the work for us,’ ” said vice president of marketing Julie Lohmeier.

Tom Higgins, vice president, Books 24×7, explained how his team integrates their online database of copyrighted training materials and b-to-b books with corporate customers’ intranets, making it easy for managers and employees to use the system. And by demonstrating heavy use among customers’ staffs, the company has achieved a staggering 98% retention rate.

The “make things easy” mantra also applies to your online forms. Canada’s online video rental service Zip.ca tested five options to replace its long, detailed online registration form but found the best lift — a 75% increase in trial registrations — when it simply broke that long form into five easy steps. Customers are “okay with more clicks as long as it’s simple,” said Chris Emergui of Bam Strategy, the agency that helped Zip.ca with its testing.

Take-away #3: You can make affiliates and Web 2.0 influencers work for you
Although some attendees raised questions about the value of affiliate marketing when selling subscriptions, several presenters discussed ways to make affiliates a powerful resource.

Peter Figueredo, CEO of affiliate marketing company NETexponent, described three instances in which his firm helped publishers, including “The New York Times,” tap into affiliates to help promote subscriptions. But he warned that many publishers make a big mistake by not managing those resources as closely as they do other marketing channels.

One important tip is to protect your brand with simple tests, such as making sure your affiliates have adequate privacy policies. Figueredo said his team rejects 80%-90% of affiliates that apply because they don’t have a privacy policy in place. “Getting a couple of cheap orders through the channel isn’t worth it if your brand is damaged.”

Marketing through Web 2.0 channels such as blogs and social networks can be effective as well — but only if you target the right members of that community. You don’t want to work with just any blogs, said Greg Jarboe of SEO-PR. You need to target those that have the most influence within certain communities, what he called the “opinion leaders.”

But the technique requires a new approach, not just recycling existing press releases or other direct marketing materials and hoping bloggers will pick them up. Jarboe’s case study outlined an outreach effort and conference call with carefully selected bloggers to promote breaking news from the Windows Secrets newsletter. That meeting and the handful of blog articles it generated helped the publication surpass its previous record for new subscriptions in a week.

“You should take most of your PR materials and direct mail and burn them before you enter into the Web 2.0 world,” Jarboe said.

Take-away #4: There’s no consensus when it comes to copy length
From the very first presentation, attendees debated whether long marketing copy or short calls to action were more effective. Ari Gersen, Web marketing director for Boardroom, said his team relies on long marketing letters and detailed promotional copy because the company’s newsletter subscribers have proven themselves to be readers.

But he admitted that he came to the job eight months ago with a different opinion. “I came in talking about shorter landing pages and got my butt kicked. The truth is, we test and test and test… If it’s really good copy, it’s going to sell.”

By contrast, AmericanGreetings.com’s Mandelbaum said his subscribers don’t read long copy; therefore his marketing team relies on short messages that are heavy on color and graphics to highlight key features.

Zacks.com split the difference: Lohmeier said that members of the marketing team were big believers in long offer letters, but the company had decided to test short e-mail postcards that sent prospects to a longer landing/buy page. The postcard e-mails/long landing pages delivered four times as many orders as the long e-mail messages.

Other presenters touted the usefulness of video to replace long marketing copy. Brad Fallon prepared to launch search-marketing content provider StomperNet by promoting free educational videos that he encouraged affiliates to share. “No one’s going to forward a long sales letter,” he said, “but if it’s a video they’ll forward it all day long.”

Likewise, ForeclosuresDaily.com created a Flash video of CEO Mike Kane touting the benefits of the service, which appeared on the site’s free trial registration page. “You can’t believe how much this affected our lead flow,” said marketing director Dustin Matthews. How much? Leads increased 110% after the Flash video was added.

Take-away #5: Staff up in the right places
Everyone, it seems, would love more resources for his teams. But where to spend the money? Marketers had some ideas:

* Search marketing expertise is in high demand, but finding a good search guru is perilous, said several attendees. The good ones often leave to start their own search marketing firms, leaving you in the lurch.

* Blockbuster.com is looking to hire a blog/viral marketing manager, but that’s an even rarer skill than search expertise. “We’re having a heck of a time finding someone for this position,” Butler said.

* When it comes to the most valuable potential hire, several cited an old-school choice: a good copywriter. StomperNet’s Fallon hired one at a cost of $30,000 a month but said the ROI was obvious given the $12 million in sales the move helped generate. And Zacks.com’s Lohmeier said hiring a veteran, award-winning copywriter was essential for the company’s recent postcard e-mail/long landing page tests: “Copy is king.”

Anne Holland is content director of MarketingSherpa, a research firm publishing case studies and benchmark data for its 237,000 marketing executive subscribers. For your own copy of the transcript and PowerPoint slides from the Selling Subscriptions Summit, go to: www.sherpastore.com/transcripts.html.