Archive for September, 2007

In a meeting in NYC this morning, I heard an interesting stat that I thought I’d share. Joe Salesky, CEO of ClairMail said this: “Selling multiple products is the key to retention. If you only sell 1 product to a customer, that translates to a 15% retention; 3 products = 80-85% retention.”

Interesting to be here on 9/11 and a Tuesday. I’m going to the WTC area tonight after work…..

Here are some thoughts on getting into Web-marketing for insurance. These thoughts are from a presentation I made to a Japanese utility looking to get into insurance marketing.

Establish a 3-5 year Web development and marketing strategy:

Phase 1

• Simple sites, simple promotions
• Niche sites, product focused
• Simple enrollments in guaranteed/simplified issue products

Phase 2

• Marketing communications with the customers
• Affiliate marketing, link strategies
• Social networks – driving buzz and dialog about needs and solutions
• Leverage the products in Phase 1

Phase 3

• More sophistication in products

But above all, make sure (#1) the products are competitive, (#2) marketing is aggressive, and (LASTLY #3) the Web site is excellent.

Personal note: Last weekend I was out in Denver for my niece’s wedding. Here’s a picture my daughter shot at the wedding of me with my sisters and brother. Nice shot!

My wife called me from her cell phone… out with my daughter shopping for a dress. “Find out when The Gap closes and call me back.” No problem — I’ll check The Gap Web site for the store hours. So I go to TheGap.com.

First problem: ‘Store Locator’ is no where in sight. Time is short… running out of time. Ahhh… there it is in the footer. Geez, good place for it. Clicked on that and the page does this herky-jerky move (which causes me to immediately lose confidence in the page) and I end up with a window with a tab for the US that says “Select a store” and “Please enter the information below:” But there was no place to put my zip code or anything. (See if the same thing happens to you.) So I figured it was a Mozilla issue and went over to IE. Same issue. Geez… nice site design guys! Forget it, I’ll try Switchboard.com before my wife calls me back frantic. Shoot, the location is not listed in Switchboard..

So I go back to the window with the Store locator and I notice on the far right of my screen a little, mini, scroll bar — totally missed it the first time around. When I scrolled down, there’s the spot to enter my Zip code and Search.

Now who the heck designed that tasty bit of functionality? Funny thing is, as I write this post from my office environment with a higher top-to-bottom desktop display resolution, the issue is not an issue — everything looks very usable… still a scroll bar but the Search button is in view. So apparently someone didn’t test the site for laptops or lower-resolution environments. But why have the scrolling thing there in the first place? It’s a simple bit of Search on a zip code.

Oh well…

Favorite picture from the weekend:

Houghton College soccer player executing sweet scissor-kick (click to enlarge)