Larry Chase: Online Marketing, past, present, future
With 70% of marketers believing the UK recession will continue well into 2009, RedEye talks to online marketing guru Larry Chase about how online marketing has changed and what marketers should expect in the future.
The Past
Larry, thank you for agreeing to let RedEye “interview” you! You’ve been in ecommerce since 1993… what did you do before, and how did you get into this game?!
I was a brand copywriter on Madison Avenue. I wrote TV spots, print ads, radio, you name it. I worked on blue-chippers like VW, Seagram’s, Chivas Regal, the company that’s now Verizon, ATT, IBM, Xerox, et al.
I was bored with package goods. But there were stories in high tech, which is why I shifted out of B-to-C and into B-to-B high tech.
My interest in high tech brought me to the Internet. The first time I saw the ‘Net, I knew it was the next big thing…
During the intervening 15 years, what do you see as the biggest differences between ecommerce experiences in 1993 and what you see today?
There was no ecommerce in 1993. I recall it was a big thing when you could actually fill out a form online. That was huge. Before then, you could only browse and click on buttons and links. The early websites were either dummy-simple or way too complicated. One had you using the horizontal scroll bar to see the whole home page. It was nuts.
Ecommerce has gotten much more sophisticated in recent years as online marketers take on the mantle of direct response. The ecommerce interfaces show that, too. The cross-selling and upselling techniques on shopping-cart pages is a good example. Sending email promotions based on your buying patterns is another example. Amazon now lets you buy via cell-phone texting.
You’ve worked with many large and small companies over the years. Have you got any examples that really shocked and impressed you?
One of my first clients was one of the most impressive people I’ve ever met. His name was Dave Rae, and he has sadly passed on. Dave had a quick mind and saw opportunities that others passed over.
In the mid-90s, he saw lots of unoccupied hotel rooms in the U.S. He bought massive amounts of room nights and launched HotelDiscounts.com. He sold those room nights at a good profit but still at a deep discount to the hotel’s regular rack rate.
Aside from seeing this niche, he allowed me to do some pretty jazzy stuff for the times. We bought out keywords for the entire travel category from the major search engines of that day. Keywords like “reservations” “hotel” “airline” “tickets” “rent a car” brought response rates that approached 20% at some times.
He let me run with a breakout campaign that was called “the trip from hell” that invited people to post their nightmarish travel stories. The campaign was a huge hit that drew thousands of posts and garnered lots of media attention to boot.
It was the first time “hell” was used in an online advertisement and was copied many times thereafter by other advertisers, as in “the job from hell.”
The Present
Who, in the world of email and also online marketing, do you admire and why?
I continue to be impressed with Amazon’s advances. Talk about user-generated content. They were really the first to harness it with user reviews that help you decide whether to buy this book or that.
I like Hotels.com, because they know that for such a purpose you may just have questions and want to buy from a live person on the phone, so they give you that option. I’ve used that option.
Even though Circuit City here in the US has declared bankruptcy, I’ve always been impressed with the breadth of their site. They may have been the first to offer a 24-minute in-store pick-up option on the site. That practice was seized on this past holiday season by many other retailers, who advertised the website order with store-side pickup option in TV commercials.
Not only do you as the customer save on shipping, but it also builds store traffic, boosting sales noticeably on the premises. That’s a win-win for both store and customer alike.
Many see you as an “online marketing guru!” How do you feel about that?
Hmm. Well, the term “Internet marketing guru” is used a lot nowadays. Many are self-proclaimed. The funny thing is so many more people know very little about this fast-growing, fast-moving discipline. So, self-proclaimed gurus are often mistaken for the real deal. I know many of my SEO expert friends, like Mike Grehan, point out that lots of folks are practicing 1999-era SEO, and their clients have no way of knowing, short of doing it themselves.
If you’re an Internet marketer who needs to differentiate yourself from the Johnny-come-latelys, I’d feature your bona fides prominently, with measurable results listed wherever possible. I remember around the year 2000, many people built careers on working for companies, backed by VCs, that never made any real money. They had these impressive-sounding resumes but no results from having worked in a slew of companies that went belly-up when that VC money ran out.
What tips do you have for any of our younger online executives or managers who are reading this and are looking to move their careers forward in the channel?
Stay close to the money. Always, always, always be able to make a straight line between your compensation and how what you do makes money for the organization. More and more, we live in a performance-based marketplace, where each and every one of us has to justify our paycheques.
Even as the publisher of my own Web Digest For Marketers email newsletter, I have to make sure the advertisers who sponsor my newsletter get enough qualified sales leads to more than pay for the ad itself. This cold-eyed focus on the money is extraordinarily useful in tough times when every threepence has to be justified.
What can we expect to see in your Web Digest For Marketers email newsletter in 2009?
Each year we test new topics out to see how popular they are. In ‘09, we will continue to make each issue a drill-down into a specific slice of Internet Marketing, such as “Successful Mobile Marketing Examples and Resources.”
Another sneak peak into something new is Favorite URLs of Internet Marketing Gurus. We’ve got a few more “hotskies” planned. But, to stay on top of them as soon as they’re announced, you’ll want to subscribe :).
What makes an email newsletter successful?
I think a successful newsletter has to telegraph the excitement of the people producing it. If the editor or publisher just keeps pumping out tired, listless content, the readership will fall away quickly, and your list will go down to nothing. Primo content gets passed along and syndicated.
What are your top 3 tips for improving conversion?
1. Increase the type size.
2. Set benchmarks so you know if your changes make things worse or better.
3. Use your call to action more than once on a page, not just at the end of your copy and page.
What advise would you offer a B2C email marketer to improve their email strategy this year?
If you can constantly make course corrections, or throw in the towel when it’s obvious something has stopped working permanently, than you should be okay.
It seems to me change is happening now at an accelerated rate. The only thing that will change about that is the speed will continue to increase. You need to develop an instinct for what is worth your time and testing, and what is a dry hole that goes nowhere. Going down too many dry holes has incalculable business opportunity costs that are best avoided.
The Future
This industry has come a long way already in a short time – can you paint a picture of what it might look like in another 15 years?
If you think the Internet is interactive now, just wait. With increased computing speed and bandwidth, video viewing and transmission will take off like a house afire.
Voice recognition will transform access for many people who are keyboard-shy. You’ll be able to do searches by phone. You’ll have ubiquitous connectivity. And, unfortunately, people will pay more attention to more and more screens, rather than actual people in their immediate proximity. I say this partly tongue in cheek, but already I do see the degradation of social skills and some basic F-to-F common courtesies.
Online conferencing and distributed workplaces, as well as distance learning, will be much more commonplace and cost-effective making it less necessary to have everybody under one roof. This will give them the ability to save on real estate.
More people will work out of home offices making them lonelier but saving them money on wardrobe and cleaning bills. This is what I refer to as “Pajama Nation.”
What do you see as the critical trends for the next 12 months?
I think there will be more consolidation of media outlets. Some will be traditional media outlets buying online media outlets so they can see from the inside out how a successful online media outlet operates.
Social media continues to grow and not make money but captures more eyeballs. Social media isn’t new. It’s as old as talk radio, where the audience entertained the audience. The old US TV show “Candid Camera” is another example, where the media outlet serves as facilitator or conduit between audience members.
People have always found other people interesting. Reality-TV shows are also like social media, except it’s more obvious how to make money on ads in TV than it is online. The ads in most social media outlets are way too intrusive and, therefore, not welcomed, which makes them ineffective or even counter-productive. It’s sort of like saying, “We interrupt this phone call for a word from our sponsor.”
RedEye is only seeing a gradual merging of online and offline marketing. Do you perceive any shift currently or in the near future, or is online and offline so different that they will never be happy bedfellows?
I remain skeptical that the traditional agency model can successfully merge both online and offline disciplines together, even though that is what’s best for the client.
I came from Madison Avenue into the Internet in 1993. The agency types I left behind are very different beasts from the Internet marketing folks that have gathered online. Internet marketing folks are geekier (I mean that in a positive way).
If you’re going to succeed in Internet marketing, you have to know your stuff and keep learning as the medium evolves, users change, and new technologies like mobile, social media, and slicker behavioral marketing techniques mature.
And finally, does Larry Chase have a New Year resolution?
My New Year’s resolution is to be more flexible. One needs to be adaptable in order to thrive in tumultuous times. Heck, the Internet is and always will be tumultuous.
