Imagine attending the Direct Marketing Days NY conference at Javits, and finding out that the thumping music, whirling characters and international crowd are there for Licensing Show, not the lettershops and list brokers.
But whatever DMD Days doesn’t have, it can claim to have a corner on e-commerce.
This was not always so: for years, as the direct mail world was being challenged and, in some cases, replaced by online marketing and sales, the Direct Marketing Association continued to focus on postal hikes (still an issue) and the future of telemarketing (ditto). But in recent years, every session has at least some online component. The General Session addressed social networking and one panelist warned that, if eBay/Paypal and Google/Checkout limit sharing buyers names with the vendor, social networking becomes more important as a way to reach an audience. At another social media session, speakers had many stats (social media websites comprise 12% of internet traffic and influence one third of internet purchases) and recommendations: Get users to bookmark your site in Google, as it pulls up contextual sites; add Swickis to your site; add social bookmark links to your website. (For a list of bookmarks, go to www.toprankblog.com/ tools/social-bookmarks/).
As direct marketers are trained to provoke response, every session had its hook – in one, the moderator had the audience snap pictures of the panel, add a caption, and email or text the photo to him. The best captioned picture would win the owner $500, courtesy of the DMA. In another, a panelist’s book (Search Engine Marketing, INC.) was given to an audience member whose card was picked from the large plastic bag. In one of the most enlightening panels, audience members were invited to have their websites critiqued by Aaron Kahlow, of Business Online (www.BusinessOL.com), and the audience.
In preparation, Business Online presented their principles of website creation, based on a recent usability study. While some of the principles are more obvious, others were not:
1. Describe the site’s purpose on the Home Page. Show, rather than tell the user where they can go, and how to get there. Group information into meaningful chunks. (If users can’t identify what a site is, or can do in four seconds, they leave. If there are more than seven chunks of information on the Home Page, users get lost.)
2. Design so that the reader can scan the page. Use bulleted lists, groupings.
3. Include the company name on every page, to help orient users. The header page also enables on-page SEO.
4. Use descriptive link text, eg. don’t say “to Learn more,” but “Learn more about Publishing Trends.” It’s good for SEO rankings.
5. Give clear indicators in the shopping cart process: 64-70% of users abandon the shopping card because the process is too long and/or too confusing. High shipping costs are another major reason.
To sum it all up, “Users don’t want to think; they’re focused on their task.”
For information on the DMA go to DMA.org. For information of its upcoming seminar on search engine marketing go to DMAsearchcertification.org.
