Murray Kenneth's Catalogue & e-Commerce Blog

Building a successful online brand with content

 
How a retailer of adventure luggage attracts high-converting traffic with search-friendly content (and has a lot of fun in the process)

When I met him in June at the Internet Retailer conference in Boston, he’d just spe nt a week on a 500-mile off-road expedition putting a brand new Land Rover LR3 through its paces in C olorado, courtesy of Land Rover Lifestyle magazine.  By the time you read this, he’ll have just arrived back from a three-week expedition to a remote corner of Namibia.  All this, while running a successf ul and growing retail brand back home in Montana.  How does he get away with it?  Well, put sim ply, Jim’s business is Adventure.Like his father before him, Jim Markell was a parachute rigger in the marines.  Day in, day out, paratroopers quite literally put their lives in his hands every time they jumped out of a plane.   Today, he applies the same perfectionist’s appreciation of quality materials and attention to detail to manufacturing and retailing the Red Oxx range of premium adventure luggage.  Needless to say, every piece has an unconditional lifetime guarantee.
 

Building a content-rich landscape

I was already a fan of his product range thanks to an introduction from a colleague in the US, but now I’m an admirer of his marketing strategy too.  Why? Because Red Oxx uses content not only as the cornerstone of a successful, long-term, sustainable search strategy, but it positions this content at the heart of a wider marketing strategy in a manner that leverages its effectiveness exponentially. More on this “holistic” approach later, but first a summary of the tactic.
 

Over several years, Red Oxx has been publishing informative articles of around 800 words, framed around particular keyword phrases developed using tools such as Wordtracker or Keyword Discovery.  Importantly, the focus is deliberately on longer keyword phrases of three or four words, thus avoiding the most popular and competitive phrases.  They’ve found that the fourth word in a keyword phrase can add the extra degree of specificity that results in significantly higher click-through and conversion rates.
 
For example, when the airlines changed the rules for carry-on luggage post 9/11, there was a surge of interest in the subject from travellers worldwide.  It was also a subject of particular interest to Red Oxx, who make a range of bags based around these regulations.  Keywords phrases were researched and informational content was crafted, generating a surge of traffic to the site and a very short payback on the effort employed.  So successful was this particular campaign that it still generates top 10 organic rankings for certain keyword phrases and a steady stream of high-converting traffic more than six years later.
 

Swimming with sharks as a marketing strategy?

Where the example above was a somewhat opportunistic tactic straight out of the guerilla-marketing handbook, the next example epitomizes a slow burn and sustainable content strategy that has become the mainstay of the Red Oxx approach to generating qualified traffic from search.    It’s based simply on understanding their customers - what sort of people they are, and perhaps more importantly, what sort of people would they like to be.  By tapping into these aspirations with content that allows the merchant to interweave their brand and product, there is an opportunity to create the content-rich landscape that the search engine robots really appreciate.
 
Take swimming with sharks.  Hammerhead sharks to be specific – on Cocos Island, 300 miles off the Pacific coast of Costa Rica.  Yes, it really exists (I spent five eventful days there once, but that’s another story), and it’s one of the world’s top Scuba destinations where you’re guaranteed to see more varieties of shark in greater quantities than you might previously have thought advisable or even possible.
 
So Jim and his cousin Shawn took a trip there a couple of years ago with a company specializing in live-aboard diving trips.  They came home with some nice pictures, a bit of video, and enough words to create a series of four 800 word articles for the Adventure Journals section of the Red Oxx website.  Of course, no detail is spared when it comes to describing the choice of kit bags to take along for the ride – but the content is nevertheless compelling: detailed, well written, keyword rich, and supported by some visually appealing pictures and video.
 
The articles were all written in-house, and then optimized for search by an agency at a cost of around £250 each.  The cost of adding the supporting video content was probably less than £1,000.  The articles rank more highly than the website of the dive company that took them there.  Even with the cost of the trip factored in, it paid for itself within a year and, two years on, continues to pull in a steady stream of traffic with those high-ranking four word phrases (try “costa rica cocos sharks” and you’ll no longer be surprised to see a retailer of adventure luggage at number 3 on the first page).  The expectation is that it will continue for many years to send qualified prospects to the Red Oxx website at no additional cost – but this is not the only benefit.
 

Realising the holistic benefits

As I hinted earlier, the real benefits start to kick-in when your content becomes part of a wider strategy for your website. Dovetail with your email marketing in a way that reinforces your brand and supports your merchandise offering.  Allow your content to intertwine with your product pages and vice versa.  Your overall site search visibility will improve as people link to your content or click through from search results pages.
 
For Red Oxx, this strategy has delivered consistent and profitable double-digit organic growth.  It does no paid search.   It never sacrifices margin by discounting products in order to generate sales.  It no longer needs to tour the circuit of specialist consumer exhibitions (although they still do, mainly to gather ideas for fresh content).  Customers themselves generate a significant amount of content in the form of product reviews and travel diaries.  Jim even boasts of impatient email subscribers demanding to know when the next bulletin is being broadcast so they can read up on the latest Adventure Journals!
 
Of course, where merchants selling commodity products may struggle to achieve similar success, Red Oxx is a brand that is made for this strategy.  They make a unique range of products with a great story, and sell them to a booming market niche made up of voraciously inquisitive customers with money to spend. Notwithstanding the caveats, the Red Oxx story provides food for thought for any small online business, not least being this: if your brand is your passion, creating lots of keyword rich content can be not only fun, but perhaps the best long term investment you can make in your website.
 

Take-away points

• If your brand has a good story – tell it
• Write for the person you customer would like to be
• Research the long keyword phrases that will provide the sweet spot
• Create a content-rich landscape to boost overall site visibility
• Think holistically about your content

 Article licensed for publication with Creative Commons “Attribution” terms.

First published in Catalogue & e-Business, September 2009

The 'SEND' button can be a fickle friend during a downturn

Measure email 'success' with care or risk squandering your list

When a merchant struggles to meet it's sales plan, resisting the 'send' button on another email broadcast can be devilishly hard to do. Relatively fast and cheap compared to catalogues, where’s the harm with frequent email offers? Let's explore the answer with one merchant's true story from December that should give you cause for reflection.  Watching the sales roll in, they overlooked costly consequences.

But before I begin the case study, let's jump ahead to the key learning points:

1. Be careful what you measure when evaluating your email marketing programme. If you only measure aggregate sales driven by email to determine effectiveness, the 'send' button can be a tempting but fickle friend. Pressure to achieve sales targets or maximize a seasonal opportunity drives up the frequency of email offers. But remember: an "It's working, keep sending!" mentality has consequences that must also be measured.

2. Measure email results with an eye towards maximizing the lifetime (i.e., long-term) value of each address. That presupposes that you'll have a *relationship* via email, which in turn assumes you'll even be able to get your emails delivered to that person in the future. If you're not regularly measuring deliverability and assessing receptivity (both explained below), with a similar kind of attention that you give to measuring sales, then watch out for a painful surprise.

Now back to the case study:

A multi-channel retailer with a bit over £1M in website sales conceived of a 'deal of the day' promotion to be delivered via email in the run up to Christmas. Their list consisted of customers or opt-in subscribers who had historically received 1 to 2 email offers per month. As usual, those email addresses received two offers at the start of the month. Then over the next 22 days, an additional 12 email offers arrived.

Each offer featured a product or category prominently, with a special price that expired at midnight or within the week. Each offer's details appeared both as text (HTML) and again as a tasteful graphic, with the text version present in case the recipients' email settings blocked images from being displayed. Subject lines conveyed urgency and opportunity. Sometimes two or three additional items received secondary placement. All in all, a professionally planned and executed campaign.

Near the top of every message appeared an invitation to opt-out of email offers with a red "click here" text link. While this always appeared at the bottom of every message, the additional placement at the top demonstrated the retailer’s concern about the potential frequency overload.

Let's check results:

* Email was the merchant's only 'source' of e-commerce traffic and sales that showed a gain over the prior year (other sources being organic search, catalogue direct referrals, etc. as measured by Google Analytics). On the way to a +30% gain over the prior December's sales driven by email meant smiles all around the office and a continuing confidence in hitting the "send" button.

* In fact, sales from email helped the company grow year-on-year sales by 10%. Exclude the major contribution from email and sales would have contracted by nearly an equal amount.

By these measures, the email programme showed brilliance in conception and delivery during a very tough retail period. And that's where the retailer was focussed:  on a measure of aggregate sales driven by email offers.

So let's look closer and identify other consequences:

* Click through rates (meaning the # of human clicks on links within each email offer) declined from 7% to 5% to 3% to 1.5%.  This demonstrates a decline in interest or unwillingness to really "open" the message.  (By the way, conventional measures of "open rates" are rubbish since the advent of the message preview window. Clicks are what matter.)

* Subscriber list size declined 5% as a result of unsubscribes. People were taking up the offer at the top of the message to 'click here' and end the bombardment.

* The list contracted another 5% due to 'bounces'. This can mean that 'soft' bounces due to full mailboxes turned into 'hard' or permanent bounces due to sufficient frequency of re-sends during a certain window of time. 

* ISP's noticed an increase in the rate at which recipients (the ISP's customers) flagged the messages as spam. Combined with the higher than normal bounce rates, some ISP's took action. One, the 4th most important ISP on the retailer’s list, temporarily blacklisted the merchant. This meant all messages were sent to junk mail and not delivered to recipients. Another ISP, Gmail, flagged the retailer with a "watch" status, meaning it was on the verge of being blacklisted, a fate from which it's hard to recover with that particular ISP. And those are just the ISP's the merchant knows about.

With hindsight, a seemingly successful programme may have weakened the brand’s ability to market effectively by email over the long-term. In my opinion, I would never wish to see a decline in the size of a list.  I would prioritise a focus on maintaining click-through rates that are above average.  As a result, I believe that sales growth will naturally follow.

Put yourself in your customer’s shoes.  She’s probably signed up to 10 or 20 email lists, depending on how prodigious a shopper she is.  We’re all vying for her attention, and a share in her discretional spending.  Unless she’s an ultimate fan of your brand (yes - they do exist, and you should make the most of them), surely it’s common sense that her attention span will diminish in inverse proportion to the number of messages you send her – until eventually she doesn’t even notice what they’re emailing about?  The tragedy of this scattergun strategy is that when you finally email your customer with something she genuinely is interested in, she may well have hit the delete button before she even noticed.

The risk of too frequent *broadcasts* is email list fatigue and contraction. And you won't know what too frequent is for your customers unless you can really measure it. Moreover, you risk the reputation of your server and business, should ISP's decide not to deliver your messages. So you'd do well to measure 'deliverability', too.

Since 2006, my companies have relied on an email marketing platform from E-business Coach that measures the health of my programme in these ways. See the list nearby for important questions to ask your email service provider, or to ask when evaluating a new one.

Here's one way in which I would have handled the campaign detailed above differently.  After the 2nd in the flurry of email offers, I would have filtered the list according to the actions of the recipients themselves. Did they click on a link, giving a true measure of whether they opened the message and paid attention? If yes, send them a subsequent offer. Measure. Repeat.

This kind of email campaign becomes an exercise in "narrowcasting" as compared with universal "broadcasting" to the whole list. An email campaign sustains and strengthens a retailer when it encourages customer relationships by narrowcasting relevant offers at an "appropriate" frequency. The current retail climate is the perfect time to use such a strategy, given that there are many retailers who will find it difficult to resist the send button over the coming year, and tax our patience in the process.

What do you think? Please write in to share your assessment or suggestion for handling this retailer’s email campaign. What would you do differently given the chance?

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Can you measure these essential aspects of your email programme?

Ask your email service provider, or the next one you evaluate:

1. Can I measure the rate at which my messages are delivered to the top (50, 100, or more) ISP's?

2. Can I test that deliverability before I send the final version of my message.  In other words, can I test deliverability without sending to my own list?

3. Can I measure click-through rates, or the number of times a link in the message was clicked?

4. Can I identify specifically which link each recipient of the message clicked?

5. Can I easily develop a follow-up recipient list tailored to those email addresses that show having clicked on a certain link?

If you’re capable of running an email campaign with those capabilities above, you're well on your way to making email a sustainable driver of web sales, come good times or bad.

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© Murray Kenneth 2009
First published in Catalogue & e-Business