Yahoo + Tumblr: Keep Calm and Follow Your Sales Plan

Google grabbed headlines last week and sent a wave of worries through the oceans of SEO strategists with its Penguin update. Marissa Mayer made Monday morning mighty interesting (and we thank her for the alliterative opportunity) when she announced Yahoo would purchase Tumblr.

What should you do about it?

Probably nothing.

Since deals between online news/content/media companies are rumored online before they’re announced online and then (over-) analyzed online, it’s easy to watch the deals (online!) and feel left behind.

Here’s the good news: the real world still exists. We have proof that sales, and longterm, lucrative customer relationships, are made in the real world every day.

We’re not in Nate Silver‘s league, but we’ll go out on a limb and guess that the Yahoo/Tumblr deal portends important changes for less than 1% of US businesses.

The rest of you can keep calm and carry on with your sales and marketing plans. That is, as long as you’re following a content program that’s right for you. Not sure? Don’t even have a content program? (gasp!) We can fix that in a flash.

Here’s the really good news: making online sales and marketing work for you – meaning, using basic search and linkbuilding principles to increase your sales and capitalize on ecommerce opportunities – doesn’t require you to have Nate Silver’s statistical prowess or Marissa Mayer’s rockin’ blog animations. Most of our clients have come to us knowing nothing about web design, analytics, or social media. Some of them still don’t – and yet, they’ve all seen their sales go up. That’s the beauty of JointSourcing. You run your business while we handle your sales and marketing – using the most appropriate tools at the most appropriate times. Or, you run your business while you learn how to manage those tools yourself. Either way, it works – because we’re as interested in increasing your sales as you are. Seriously. We won’t freak out on you.

~Diane Stresing

E-Mail Campaign A/B Testing – We Have Two Winners!

A recent A/B e-mail campaign test pitted a multiple product image mailer against a single-image mailer. The experiment resulted in a dead heat!

Sales Renewal creates holiday-themed emails for the Concord Flower Shop – about six per year. Typically, the emails feature nine to 12 floral arrangements with multiple options for the recipients to click through to the website and purchase. (The image, the description and a “Select” or “Learn More” button are all hyperlinked to the products on the site.) The results consistently compare favorably to Constant Contact’s benchmark standards for opens and clickthroughs, and either meet or exceed the industry standards.

For Valentine’s Day, after discussion with our client, we prepared an e-mail campaign to test our standard design against a more simple, single-image mailer. Since multiple factors can affect an email’s results, we kept the remaining controllable factors – subject line and time of day sent – the same. We also attempted to remove any list bias by dividing the list via random number selection.

Well, the results are in, and both emails win! Some highlights of the test:

• Both emails resulted in an equal number of direct sales
• The single image version generated more clicks
• The multi image version generated a higher conversion rate (percent of clicks that led to a sale)
• The single image generated higher sales dollars

How will we use these results? Other than understanding that people tend to wait until the last minute to buy their holiday flowers and that sending an email – no matter what the layout – is helpful in getting them to make their purchase (most of the sales came on February 13 and February 14), we now have two strong formats that we can use for future holidays, ensuring we can keep the recipients engaged and our communications fresh and varied.

Are you using e-mail as part of your online marketing efforts? Are you testing your format? Subject line? Time of day and day sent? Let us know the results!

– Audrey Trieschman

Searching for Love, Locally

Is it possible we scooped The New York Times? Well, not exactly. However, we must point out we’ve broached this subject before – and we also know from personal experience – when you’re searching for a local florist, you want a local florist. Unfortunately, a quick search online may not deliver what you’re after.

Times readers dished up a few tricks for getting a local florist – not a floral wire service – in an article last week. But we’ve got an even better idea, for florists, and it is: get found!

When you want to get found, by folks looking to find you locally, we humbly suggest you look to us. Why?

Ask The Concord Flower Shop. The locally-owned business ended its contract with Teleflora in 2009 and hasn’t looked back. In fact, same-month sales have been up for each of the past 34 consecutive months! Up how much? Concord Flower Shop is seeing an average increase of 45% each month.

How can an independent business afford the services of a sales and marketing technology firm that gets results like that? That’s the beauty of JointSourcing and its shared risk/reward model. And we’ll save that for another time.

If you’re in a hurry to find out more, we’d love to hear from you.

Until then, we’d like to remind you that if you didn’t pick up flowers for Valentine’s Day, you probably should. Which means it’s time for you to find a local florist.