“You learn more from failure than you do from success but the key is to fail early, fail cheaply, and don’t make the same mistake twice.” – Former Proctor & Gamble CEO, A.G. Lafley

We love this philosophy because it has so many important lessons – “always try new ideas,” “make sure you have data to learn from,” “be smart about how you allocate budget” and on and on. And while this philosophy helped Proctor and Gamble go from a 15-20% success rate with new products in the 1990’s to a 50% success rate more recently, it is not an approach that only the biggest companies can afford.

So, what does this have to do with Food, Beverages, Email and Social Media? Cost-effectively using online marketing to build a successful food and beverage brand, of course!
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Web page optimization delivers 192% increase in trials to monthly wine publication.

In 2004, wine connoisseur, Neil Monnens, noticed a funny thing about wine – there was no consistency in price across wines with the same ratings. In late 2004, he started publishing WineBlueBook each month to provide a simple wine buying guide that offers an at-a-glance breakdown of how one wine compares to another in terms of quality and price.  WineBlueBook’s goal is to make wine drinking and wine buying more accessible to everyone by helping consumers find quality wines at every price point. Continue Reading »

Website sales & signup rate increase 851% for global fashion trendsetter, Halé Bob.

Halé Bob, a Los Angeles-based clothing company globally known for its unique style and celebrity clientele, employs its website as a key strategy in servicing its global client base, but the website itself was not producing the desired customer relationships or revenue impact. Some factors included: declining revenue during 2008-09 recession; most people leave the site without engaging; Poor performance from online marketing.

Thrivepoint Solution

Thrivepoint implemented Thrivepoint Engage™ – its proven marketing optimization solution – to:

• Completely map the conversion funnel and identify new engagement opportunities;
• Engineer design and message test to increase sales and signups while decreasing abandonment;
• Align online media, paid search and social media with the new strategy;
• Implement SEO on each page to increase organic traffic.

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In the last post on Line of Sight Marketing, the focus was on capturing website visitors contact information for an email marketing program. In this post, we explore how advertising buys that are intended to prospect for new customers can employ line of sight marketing without requiring the user to register or login.

One of the key tools in an advertiser’s toolbox is the “cookie.” Cookies are a common component of most website tracking and online advertising targeting systems and are defined as: “A message given to a Web browser by a Web server. The browser stores the message in a text file. The message is then sent back to the server each time the browser requests a page from the server.”

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One of your most important assets is your customer list. Managing this asset effectively is as critical as managing your finances or intellectual property. One of the most important things you can do with your customer list is to retain a ‘line of sight’ with each customer.

Line of sight marketing implies that the conversation with the customer is continuous and uninterrupted. When the line of sight is broken, the connection with the customer is over and the customer must be ‘found’ again or replcaed before restarting the conversation.

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Financial institutions are failing. Fortune 500 marketers are cutting budgets. Inflation is increasing. Consumer spending is uncertain. Trade deficits are rising.

The news is filled with dire headlines and seemingly worse news everyday. The market appears to be moving to a more conservative state. Through all this, you still have a business to run and grow. Here are five best practices for your marketing to help you come out ahead during an uncertain economy.
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Unlike TV or yellow pages or other advertising media, a website’s unique and powerful advantage is its ability to create an opportunity to interact and engage your customer in a converstaion. But the site has to be set up to have that conversation and as the website owner, you exclusively hold the burden of carrying a one-sided conversation long enough and in such an engaging manner so that the visitor wants to join in. In other words, it takes time, trust, credibility and a host of other factors for a website visitor to make the leap from anonymous visitor to prospective customer.

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