Transcript
Hey Folks. My name is Charles Lumpkin. Today we are going to talk about Direct Mail. I’m not going to talk about all of the different varieties and things you can do with direct mail. And I’m not talking about mass Direct Mail campaigns. I’m really talking about Lumpy Mail.

I got this tip from Perry Marshall. If you haven’t heard of Perry Marshall – he is phenomenal. That’s where I learned some of the first stuff about pay per click marketing. So kudos to you Perry Marshall. It’s the concept of using a package in the mail to go directly to someone’s heart and really connect with them. We construct campaigns online that are for large audience. What I’m talking about is a very small, very targeted audience. It can be one person or one hundred people. You want to create a package that reaches out and touches someone.

You want it to be something that is just jarring. Something that is completely unexpected from what you’d normally see on a day to day basis and that cuts through the clutter of everyday life. It needs to cut through all the marketing messages that we see everyday. And it says “I made a campaign for YOU, specifically.”

I’ve got another friend here in Atlanta called Matthew Sweezey. And he helped us along with several other people to create a direct mail campaign to send to surrogacy agencies. These packages were a stork box. We had some custom design all four sides of the box as if you were looking at the stork from different angles. Then when you opened the box you see the stork beak comes out and it’s holding a sac that looks like a baby. And it was filled with fortune cookies. Maybe that could have been something better – it was cheap at the time. It was a very pointed and directed campaign. Its not like this is the 150th marketing message you’ve seen today. This is the marketing message that was made for YOU today.

I’ll give you another example. One time we created another package that was sent to the same audience. It was a box and when you opened it there was a balloon inside of it. The balloon would come out of the box and attached to it we had our sales letter there that explained why they needed to be members of a community that we had. In fact, one lady said, “this is the best piece of marketing that I have ever seen.” And that is the reaction that you want. You want to reach out and touch someone. Lumpy mail campaigns are a very powerful way – especially if you are trying to do a sales effort into a small audience.

My name is Charles Lumpkin. You can find more of me at CharlesLumpkin.com.

Thank you.

Transcript
Hey Folks. My name is Charles Lumpkin. I appreciate you spending some time with me today. We are going to talk about a second optimization technique for Contextual Advertising campaigns. It’s called the Scale Method. Instead of peeling sites out of a campaign we are just going to refine what we have in a single campaign. This is used mostly with mass-market campaigns that we talked about in a prior video. Which means that you are going to grabbing a lot of different web sites from a lot of different places.

What you do in the scale method is not peel the sites out. Instead of looking for sites that convert well you are going to look for sites that convert poorly. And you disclude them from being shown in the contextual advertising campaign. So the campaign still continues to go and cast the net and you are essentially cindering off the pieces of the campaign that don’t work. That’s the scale method and it tends to work better with mass-market campaigns where you are trying to get lots of volume and run lots of tests at one time.

Thant’s an important tip and I hope you take that straight to the bank. My name is Charles Lumpkin and you can find more of me at CharlesLumpkin.com.

Thank you.

Transcript
Hey Folks. My name is Charles Lumpkin. I appreciate you spending some time with me today. We’ve already talked about what a contextual advertising campaign is and we’ve talked about the two different methods to set one up. Now we are going to talk about how to optimize these campaigns. The first method is the net-to-site inclusion method. What’s important to understand here is that you have to set up your own analytics. You cannot rely on Google’s reporting to tell you which sites are being shown. You’ll see one these reports [from Google] and it will say that you showed on this site and 67 other. And you are like what are the 67 others – I want to know.

So you have to set up your own analytics. A great program to do this is Tracking202.com. Those guys make several products and their awesome. It will show you exactly which sites the traffic is coming from. What you do then is take the sites and understand that any particular site performs really well. You take that site and peel it out into a separate campaign. In fact you disclude it from the contextual advertising campaign. And you’ve got a site inclusion over here. So a content campaign and then a site inclusion campaign. So peel it out from the contextual campaign and specifically target that site in the site inclusion campaign. You’ll then need to remove the site from the contextual advertising campaign.

That will make sure that you’ve got one campaign that is super highly converting web sites that work really well for your product or service. And then you’ve got your net that is casting out and getting all of these different websites and testing them in for you.

That’s an important tip and I hope you take that straight to the bank. My name is Charles Lumpkin and you can find more of me at CharlesLumpkin.com.

Thank You.

Transcript
Hey Folks. My name is Charles Lumpkin. I appreciate you spending some time with me today. We are going to talk about the two methods that you might use when you are setting up ad groups around contextual advertising campaigns. There are two methods. One is the mass-market method and the other is the tight method.

Let’s talk about the tight method first because it is probably most applicable to most of your campaigns. The tight method is making sure that when you set up the campaign that the ad groups have keywords that are very very tightly related. If you are talking about “photo umbrellas” – you might include “white photo umbrellas” or “black photo umbrellas.” You want to make sure that you are not brining in something like “camera” into the mix. It will totally mess up the context. What Google is trying to do is create a sense of context around the keywords that are in that particular ad group. If you throw something that is kind off a non sequitur or a bit unrelated it’s going to mess up the context. It will mess up where you are going to be able to show. That’s the tight method. Make sure that you campaigns and ad groups are very tight. And that’s probably going to work for most of you especially in niche markets.

The other is the mass-market method. In the mass-market method what you are actually doing is constructing keywords. Its best if you know what you demographic is and understand what kinds of things that your demographic has interest in. This is really powerful. If you have a mass-market product this is very powerful. What you want to do is understand the topics that those people might be interested in. Let’s say that you have a mass-market product that would apply to 25-50 year old males. Say somebody who watches Mythbusters. What you do is construct a campaign with keywords like “mythbusters” or other kinds of things that you know are intrinsically going to have a lot of volume in them. So it goes out there and casts a wide net. You are trying to get an audience. Then you can use some of the optimization techniques.

But they are two different methods. One is mass market and you are going for a large broad audience and you are stating what they are interested in topically. The second is keeping things very tight around the products and services you are trying to sell.

That’s a tip. Two tips in fact. My name is Charles Lumpkin. I hope you take that straight to the bank. You can find more of me at CharlesLumpkin.com.

Thank you.

Transcript
Hey Folks. My name is Charles Lumpkin. I appreciate you spending some time with me today. We are going to talk about Google contextual advertising. It’s also known as the Google content network. Others also have it. MSN has one. I believe Yahoo has one as well.

In contextual advertising, it’s essentially those ads you see on other people’s sites. It’s not in the search results. It is in other people’s sites. It says “Ads by Google” on the top or bottom. I think even CNN has it.

Contextual Advertising is when Google is trying to match the context of what a web site is with what the context an advertiser’s campaign. For instance, we have a photo umbrella here. It would be having a website that is all about photo umbrellas, stands, cameras, etc. Then you have an advertiser that is advertising on keywords like “photo umbrellas.” And Google is trying to match the context and make sure that what the user is seeing is actually a relevant ad.

When you are doing your content campaigns, the number one thing that you want to make sure that you do is split the campaigns out from your search campaigns. When you set up a search campaign, by default Google has contextual advertising turned on. You’ve got to make sure that you turn that off. That will screw up your results in a bad way. What you have to do is create a separate contextual advertising campaign and make sure that you have search turned off. This will ensure that you have two clean buckets that you can run a different way. They are completely different methods of running a campaign.

It is a very important tip and a very important thing to do. My name is Charles Lumpkin and you can find me at CharlesLumpkin.com.

Thank You.

Transcript
Hey Folks. My name is Charles Lumpkin. Today I want to talk to you about Customer Lifetime Value. Or as us insane marketers call it CLTV for short. CLTV is a very important concept to understand. I’m going to shoehorn as much as I can in about two minutes here.

You can think of CLTV as a series of payments. Any particular customer – you are going to get your first time purchase. If you are a retailer, oftentimes, you’ll have programs, like email and such, that will ensure that you get some purchase on down the line from at least a subsegment of those customers.

So outside of that first purchase you have some value that is being extracted from your customer base over a period of time. From a lead gen or subscription site perspective. You need to figure out what schedule of payments is. You are going to take that and shoehorn it back into your acquisition. Now here is where the big boys get big. This is an important thing to understand. You can take that CLTV and leverage it to acquire new customers.

Where you’ve got competitors out there who are just able to monetize and acquire customers on that single first purchase. Even if you have equivalent margins and you have CLTV and they don’t. You can leverage part of your CLTV. Not the whole thing – you need to make some profit. You can leverage that to acquire new customers. If you are gonna pull it back all the way to the actual bid and how much you can afford to pay for person, you need to take the present value of those future payments into today. Add that value to the first purchase – then you’ll have a complete picture of customer lifetime value and it will help you dominate your competitors.

My name is Charles Lumpkin. You can find me at CharlesLumpkin.com. Thanks for your time.

Transcript
Hey Folks.

My name is Charles Lumpkin. Today we are talking about autoresponders. An autoresponder is essentially an email series. Someone will sign up for your email list. Let’s say that is the conversion element on your site. They get signed up into a series where they get 5, 10, 2, or whatever of. It allows you to present different parts of the messaging.

I did this one time in the pregnancy vertical. We had already done a survey and already understood precisely what the problems people had. What the questions were in people’s heads. We understood the psychographics. And so what we did was construct an email series that answered each one of these questions in consecutive order. It’s a really powerful way to help guide people through complex situations or complex sales processes and nuture leads over a period of time.

Now there are a couple of places that you can sign up and send out these email. So I’m going to pimp a local form here called MailChimp. If it’s less than 300 people you can use the product for free. Which is awesome. Clearly the more emails you send, the more you are going to have to pay them. But email is phenomenally ROI efficient channel. I think it is the most efficient Internet marketing channel there is. There are also others. Aweber.com is also a very popular one. If you are getting into larger lists and more enterprise stuff you can hang out with someone like MailChimp.com or you can hang out with someone like SilverPop.com, who is also a local company. These are all excellent ESPs and they offer different advantages.

So think about doing an autoresponder series to help nuture people from a point of “I’m not sure that I want to purchase.” Through answering their questions. To “I clearly want to purchase.”

Thank You.

Transcript:
Hey Folks. My name is Charles Lumpkin. I want to talk to you today about Web Analytics and a common problem that I see and I want to relate it to a little parable. Oftentimes you’ll see people that have multiple analytics system installed on their site. I’ve worked for people who have as many as five different kinds of analytics systems installed on their site. Even with two this becomes a problem. Why? Because the way web analytics work. Each package works in a different manner. They all measure things differently. Conversions are measured differently. Unique visitors are measure differently. There is some sort of standardization among them, but you’ve got a lot of variation there.

So what does this mean? When you are running marketing programs – which one are you looking at to optimize your results against? Oftentimes you’ll at one and the other is slightly different. And you’ll start making decisions that are contradictory.

I had a teacher in a high school – Mark Tayloe. I had gotten in trouble that year and I came back. And he gave me a sheet of paper. He always handed out sheets of paper in class with sayings – every single class period. I think I got two of them that year. And one of them was “a man with two watches never knows the time.” And I was thinking “Ok – so what does that mean?” And actually I kind of know now. You can’t have two different analytics systems that you are comparing against because you start to second-guess yourself.

So if you must two analytics systems or more installed, only pay attention to the results from one. And optimize the results of your marketing campaign against. Take that as a tip. My name is Charles Lumpkin and you can find more of me at CharlesLumpkin.com. Thank you.