Here’s one thing to keep in mind when you’re devising your multi-step email campaigns.

Timezones.

One of the best ways to learn about effective and current techniques for marketing is to be on the lists of the top marketers! Sign up for their online email lists and even their offline lists if you can. Watch, learn and adapt for your own needs.

Best of all, it’s virtually a free marketing education.

One thing that I have noticed from a couple of recent campaigns is how timezones can affect the impact of your message.

Case in point: just today I’ve had a product offer close with a time-specific deadline — 5pm Eastern Standard Time in the USA.

(That’s a great “urgency” tactic — cutting off an offer at a very specific time, and sticking to your plan, not leaving the offer open!).

But… at 5pm EST it is 7am AEST in Australia — Australian Eastern Standard Time. Speaking for myself, that’s not generally a time of day that I’m online.

So… in this email campaign, there were two “last minute” email reminders… one sent out 8 hours before the deadline, and another 4 hours (”240 minutes”) before the deadline.

For me, the emails arrived at 11:32pm and 3:12am. Both arrived well after I was in bed asleep (around 10:30pm). By the time I saw them, it was 8:25am this morning — nearly 90 minutes after the offer had closed!

In this case, the Australian and New Zealand time zones are probably at the worst point on the clock compared to US EST.

Now that’s not to say that these 2 emails were the only 2 messages I received: I also received a “Only 2 days left” reminder and also the launch email 5 days ago — this was only a 5-day offer.

That means, in this 4-step email sequence, I missed seeing half of the sequence at a suitable time to act on the info as I was tucked away in bed sleeping.

The important issue here is sending out your emails when the majority of your audience will be seeing them. For this case, the number of Australian and New Zealand readers would be far smaller than the number of US readers… although I’d guess there’s still enough of us to be a reasonable market.

Because of the quality and expertise of the marketer involved (copywriting expert Clayton Makepeace), I’m certain he would always be testing that kind of offer, and would actually reach the majority of his list at a suitable time.

How well do you know your list? Are you creating deadlines that make sense to the majority of your list members? What if you knew where your list members lived and could personalise the offer and closing time based on that information?

The only real way to find out would be to ASK them, as even email addresses don’t necessarily reflect where you live. For my mailing lists, I use a gmail.com address — so it doesn’t readily give away that I live in “.au”. And friends of mine in Melbourne use yahoo.co.uk free addresses — and they’re 10 hours ahead of London time.

So, if you want to get that information… a short online survey (and maybe an incentive)… and suddenly you might have more of your list seeing your offer at a time of day when they can respond!

Sunday, 7:44pm: on another blog of mine, I wrote about the file extension “mgmf” in an article titled “What Kind Of File Is That?” — as .mgmf files were something I hadn’t come across before (they’re a file used in the mind mapping software MindGenius).

Monday, 8:48pm: a user in the UK, searching for “mgmf file” visits my site to see this article.

Twenty five hours and four minutes after it was posted, traffic was already arriving.

As I have stats software, I was able to look on the Google UK site to see where my site was in the results.

A PDF file was number one and I was number two — so in effect, I was the number one website on UK Google within just one day.

I’ve mentioned before that I don’t use this blog to “monetise” my traffic — although this result here shows how Google treats fresh information in a blog, and how it can provide you with traffic literally a day later.

I even ranked ABOVE the site of the manufacturer of the software, other than for a single PDF document on their site.

Worth keeping in mind as part of your online traffic strategy!

Here’s the screenshot I took so you can see the top of the results:

UPDATE

Within another 8 hours, we were number one in the results on US Google for “mgmf file extension”… and had traffic that way too!

UPDATE 2

It’s happened AGAIN. On 29th August, I posted an entry about the TinyURL service — and had a visitor to the site on 1st September, typing in “tinyurl get destination” go Google in the US — I was number one in the results on US Google out of 156,000 results.

Ranked below me on the page are much more well-known sites such as 37Signals, New York Times (blog), Perl.org, Podcast Directory and Spamcop.net.

One of the good online business lessons I’ve learned from publishing a blog is the increase in site traffic we get on a daily basis.

At DMK, our blog isn’t geared towards “hard selling” any products. In fact, if you look at our Rates page, you’ll find that with a pretty full schedule, we don’t generally take on too much new work at any time. As well, we’re really only running this blog in a one-way communication format, as we don’t currently open posts for comments. The anti-spam plugins are quite effective these days, but for this blog we’re still comment-free for now.

It’s been a bit over 2.5 years now since starting with blogs — nearly 12 months directly on this site, plus 30-odd posts from a previous blog now retired. Having the WordPress system well in-hand means we’ve got to the point where I can watch the blog stats quite closely on our daily visitors: we use a great (free, open source) plugin called Slim Stats to give us some great info on our site activity.

Blog posts definitely increase our site traffic. Sometimes, we start getting traffic to a blog post within an hour or two of publishing the post to the site. We can see the search terms of course that we rate highly for (we get lots of matches for “DMK” in various Google, Yahoo, Live.com and other search results from around the world, most often in the top handful of results).

In March, we had visitors from Australia, the US, Great Britain, China, Malaysia, France and 24 other countries to our site. That traffic was weighted slightly in favour of our blog posts and categories over our regular content pages, although not by much.

Case in point: last Friday-week, I posted the article “The Only Time To Bid Early on eBay” - today, on our stats, just over a week later, I can see that a US-visitor has typed in “why do people bid early on ebay” into the US Google, and we’re result number 4, after USA Today, Yahoo! Answers and eBay Forums. That’s a pretty good ranking and puts us in with some rather reputable publishers — and, here’s a lesson in itself — our blog post title is a big help in arousing curiosity for a web user to click on our link in the search results to read what we have to say.

Now, we’re not actually “monetizing” that post — it doesn’t link to an eBay information product, nor does it present a page with Adsense Google ads. For our purposes, we’ve kept away from that opportunity for now. But that post is definitely helping bring good traffic to our website.

I can nearly tell you every time when Ab King Pro run an infomercial ad on tv in Australia — because there are several times per day when people come to our site and read the post that refers to this exercise product — and their search terms indicate they’re online looking to buy the Ab King Pro machine. When I last looked, searching on “abkingpro.com.au” only resulted in 2 matches — one for our post and the other for the company selling the actual machine — and people visit our page after seeing that result list. (Marketing lesson there in testimonials, third-party reviews — although our post doesn’t actually talk about the machine, just one of the selling techniques in the infomercial).

Same for something like Microsoft’s Expression Web: on a search results page full of links positively reporting on the software was my lone post, that, in the brief text match on the results page, included the text:

“I see Microsoft have launched Expression Web, a web building tool stepped up from Frontpage (ugghh!) program. Here’s 2 reasons why I’ll never use it:”

That, of course, was relevant and interesting content for the person searching, so they clicked the link and came to my site to read my two reasons. Whether or not those reasons applied to them, I was able to get their click and their traffic. There are, of course, psychological marketing lessons in that activity to take note of!

I’m sure our ranking is rewarded by having blog entries and regularly updated content. That content starts to bring traffic from the day it is added.

I can see daily that our blog posts are definitely a traffic-building component of our website. There is plenty of opportunity to make sure you make the most of visitors arriving at your site this way, especially if you do have something to offer them (newsletter, product, consulting etc). We don’t yet capitalise on that kind of opportunity, but see how blogs are a powerful business tool in getting great search result rankings.

One of the most fascinating marketing “tactics” I see online is what I would describe as “Claytons urgency” — the fictitious urgent deadline or limitation you create when you don’t really have such a need.

Do you remember those Claytons ads from the 1980s? Or is that just an Australian thing? Claytons was “the drink you have when you’re not having a drink.” Having just checked it out on Wikipedia, there is a definition for Claytons… yes, it was only an Australian/New Zealand marketing campaign.

(While you’re at it, check out Wikipedia’s list of Australian words. Then you’ll understand the title of this post!)

But I digress. Back to those marketing “tactics.”

Let me say upfront that I think this tactic has a purpose. Of course, urgency, limitation or exclusiveness has a legitimate role as a form of sales influence. A 1-day only sale, for instance, implies special offers available just for 1 day. If you went back to the store a week later and the same offers were available, the store’s next 1-day only sale would have less impact, as you wouldn’t believe the offer was only limited to 1 day, based on your experience of the previous event.

The same applied to urgency and limitation. They’re great ways to help create a buying frenzy. I have used those tactics successfully — and legitimately — in sales campaigns for clients.

What “fascinates” me is online is seeing this psychological tool of influence (read Cialdini if you need to for some fantastic references) abused by online marketers. This primarily happens in two ways:

1. Seeing the urgency tactic be abused with false “order by” deadlines

Here’s one common example: you land at a product sales page, and, for instance (seeing as it is), let’s say it’s Tuesday, 22nd August 2006.

Reading down the sales letter, you see the following: “The price is $XXX but only for orders placed up until midnight on 23 August 2006.”

“Wow!” you think to yourself, “lucky I visited this page now! If I don’t order by tomorrow night, I might miss out!”

The offer screams out to you “order now” because there’s a possibility that you will have to pay more — or the offer won’t be available — after midnight tomorrow night.

However, just about every instance I see of this tactic in use is a false deadline. If you visit the page again on the 23rd August, the new “deadline” is midnight on 24 August. The date keeps changing according to whatever day it is that you’re reading the sales page.

Now, for a naive internet user, this tactic isn’t obvious. But once you’ve seen it in action, and are aware of it, the influence of this tactic diminishes significantly.

And this is where I think marketers go wrong. Although I can’t cite an exact reference, I remember reading of an airline survey where passengers believed (not all of them, but enough to take notice) if the seat tray table was dirty, then the engine maintenance was probably shoddy too (attributed on various websites to Tom Peters, but I can’t find it for now).

So, once you’ve “discovered” this dirty little marketing tactic, you are less inclined to believe it is being used truthfully.

I even read a sales letter this month where the deadline was “midnight tonight (no rotating dates here…)” — however, the next day, the deadline of course was still “midnight tonight”!! No deadline at all, but at least it was a bit more upfront (and cynical) about the use of rotating dates.

Most often they have a secondary “benefit” for a lazy publisher: the date never needs changing, as it updates automatically depending on the date you’re viewing the page.

Want to see one of those dates? Normally, if you view the HTML/source code of the web page, you’ll see some little javascript tool in action that makes this date happen. Some scripts aren’t very good though: the date can sometimes be way in arrears, or, better still, be set to the timezone of the webserver. That often means that if a “same day” date is used, it can be the day prior for those readers like us here in Australia that are way ahead (+10) of Greenwich mean time.

And some dates are set according to the reader’s computer clock — here’s a funny tip: set your clock to be years behind (eg 21 August 1982) — and see the date suddenly appear decades out of date. That’s a guarantee the publisher is not only hoping you’ll believe the false deadline, but they’re not very smart about testing to eliminate silly potential errors like this one.

A better way is to use something like PHP, as the plain text is all a user sees — so they might find it more believable. But a re-visit the next day will still give the game away.

So how is this stupid tactic being countered by “smart” sellers?

Well, they’re upfront about not having a false date. They point out a “real” deadline and thus attempt to create a real sense of urgency. In 2006, this tactic is growing in popularity in some very successful marketing campaigns. And it looks (from observation) to be working.

2. Creating a deadline but extending it anyway

But that’s where some marketers get caught out: they want MORE sales beyond their self-enforced sales limit (eg 1500 copies, 200 students only, 450 seminar seats). So they “invent” legitimate-sounding reasons to extend their limit.

This extension probably works best with reproducible products, but it still diminishes the overall effect of creating urgency through limitation/access.

I guess if the sellers are really clever, they’ll assume (a) existing buyers won’t re-visit the sales page anyway, as they have already made their purchase; and (b) they’ll make sure they remove the email address of those people who have already made a purchase from their further emails regarding that product’s newly extended deadline.

I know of one such sales project this month, where the product was “limited” to just 1,500 sales. In such cases, a countdown figure is often used to show sales progress towards the limit — eg 1500 1182 986 711 533 311 copies left!

But in this case, the limit was reached, and the order page was still left open. Hundreds of extra copies were “accidentally” ordered — what a psychological tool — “hey, the limit has been reached, but I can still access the order page, so I’d better do it RIGHT NOW”.

And the sellers explanation? Well, sheesh, we can’t tell who made it into the original 1500 orders, and who ordered in the extra 400-odd lot: so you can all have a copy (gee, aren’t we nice?).

They can’t tell? You mean their order system doesn’t email them with new orders, and those emails don’t have time/dates on them? Or, their weblogs can’t tell who was on the order page (and their IP address) at what time — to the second — on their server?

Is this a new tactic that is just a dressed up 2006 version of the rotating javascript date?

So suddenly that order limitation of 1500 is nearly 2000. But it gets even better: the sellers explain that their printer probably has to do a print run of 1000 to make the print quantity viable, so they might even release an extra 500 or so copies for sale.

And when the product is worth around US$1800, it starts to add up.

This attempts to imply: hey, you missed out the first time, and this offer was so popular that we too in nearly 30 percent in extra orders by “accident”. So if we offer more, you’d better be quick and grab your copy.

Does the sell-out of a limit that was only created for psychological influence then allow the seller to find “excuses” to keep making more money?

However, would you believe the same publishers next time they have a limit of 1500 copies, but really sell 2500 copies?

Another part of this strategy was the release of the recording of a teleseminar for just 24 hours. Four days later, it was still online (and, 3 days after orders had closed and the product “sold out” — there is still a working link to a working order form on the sales page that accompanies the teleseminar recording).

I have seen this tactic used more than once in the past year. Order limits and deadlines are extended beyond a stated limit, probably both out of laziness or the quick opportunity to make more money by just ignoring the self-imposed limit.

As a seller, you probably have to weigh up the trade-off between having angry buyers who were “sucked in” by your false limit, or the revenue of the extra sales. No wonder it is used: it probably works and the extra revenue is worth it. And the buyers of the original “limited” item are either none the wiser about the extra sales, or can convince themselves that there is a legitimate reason that the extra sales happened.

It’s like excuses for being late to work, or a meeting, or school: they will start to wear thin eventually.

But at the same time, I think the tactic is disappointing. It’s another way of abusing the trust of your customers or potential customers: so that any time the tactic is used by that seller or other sellers, its effectiveness is reduced.

Trust-building? No. Fair dinkum? No. Sustainable? Not really… unless you’re always banking on new customers, and not the far better strategy of customer retention.

As I just read on Tom Peters’ site, here’s a very apt quote:

“Nothing is as fast as the speed of trust.”
– Stephen M.R. Covey

Here’s to this type of marketing approach becoming a “Claytons markeitng tactic.”