Editor’s Corner:
PUSHING OUR WAY INTO THE YEAR 2000: DOT-COM’S MUST GO DIRECT COM

I think the lessons we’re learning from the recent studies covered in this issue reveal the same point over and over again: If you want to drive traffic to your site, you’ve got to put the link you want clicked on right under a person’s nose, preferably in his or her e-mailbox.

Other studies, that I haven’t included in this issue, have shown that few people recalled radio and television ads for dot coms. Most could not write down a URL heard in a broadcast commercial. Only a small fraction remembered a URL well enough to visit it later, after turning off their TV or radio. Print ads didn’t seem to do that much better.

Okay, that’s the first reason. Next, banners don’t seem to draw people’s attention as much as they did in their early days. Primarily, I think, because surfers have learned to stay on track and focus on what they’re doing. "Institutionalized ADD" – which is what I call clicking here and there and ending up in the Topkapi museum in Istanbul instead of your original destination is so time consuming. Surfers have put virtual blinders on and keep their attention to the center of the screen.

The old adage – close ‘em where you find ‘em is what applies here. If you want to direct eyeballs to your site, find the eyeballs that are already online and lead the way. Banner ads can’t do that as effectively as e-mail because banner ads are constantly competing with the rest of the page for the viewer’s attention.

E-mail, on the other hand, is prime real estate, exclusive real estate. This is a person’s private space online where he or she receives what is most meaningful as the e-Buyers Guide.com survey to confirm.

As more marketers use direct promotional e-mail, however, the fear is that response rates could and probably will be driven down. And therein lies the challenge – to create e-mail marketing campaigns that are irresistible, that demand attention and response. It’s going to mean playing around a lot with technology and creating offers that are appropriate for online audiences. It’s not enough to mimic what you’ve done in the mail in an e-mail campaign. And the product you market better be worth the reader’s time. If all you have are 6 or 7 seconds in the print world before your marketing piece is dumped, you have even less time with an electronic audience. The delete key is much more therapeutic than the waste basket.

E-mail is about more than text and graphics. Seamless applets are making the insertion of audio and video clips easy. Even my mother-in-law figured out how to send us an audio message. E-mail marketing will evolve into sending out an entire production number! And it will always beat out other promotional channels. Because it’s personal, it’s private, it’s push technology!