Manhattan Marketing Maven

Yahoo! Screws 40,000 Online Merchants --- Then Stonewalls

The Yahoo Stores platform crashed on Cyber Monday screwing 40,000 online merchants. Yahoo has no idea why or won't say what happened but "deeply regrets" the outage.

And you thought the big Cyber Monday news was the $700 million in online holiday sales or my incredible subscription offer! But here's a classic case of a corporate step-sister self-destructing by both technical misdeeds and customer service and public relations bungling. Here's the first part of the story:

Sometime early Monday, exactly when is in dispute, the store crashes. The Yahoo Store is essentially a huge shopping cart that smaller merchants hitch their websites to. The consumer can't tell exact where their favorite online store and the Yahoo functionality link up. 

Customers browse, shop and load up carts. When they try to check out --- ZAP. Nothing happens. The merchants who pay monthly and per-transaction fees anted up for their customers to be frustrated and to miss the big anticipated ka-ching. The error message presented on computer screens gave customers the impression that their favorite merchants hadn't properly anticipated the forecast Cyber Monday traffic. So  the merchants paid Yahoo! not only to lose money but to be painted as idiots in the eyes of their customers.

Meanwhile Yahoo didn't tell the merchants what was happening.They had to find out on their own, usually because their email accounts and 800 numbers were going crazy. A few tech savvy merchants figured out that an earlier version of the shopping cart actually did work, so they took a giant step backward to try to save the day's receipts. Some shared this trick with their friends. This naturally led others to conclude that bugs in the upgraded cart caused the crash; a notion Yahoo will neither confirm or deny. It also bred conspiracy and cover-up theories about the origins of the crash.

After 6, 9 or 15 hours, depending on who you believe, of outage and outrage the giant shopping cart was back in business.

Now the story gets really interesting ....

Rich Riley, the head guy in Yahoo's Channel Division, acknowledges the problem when its raised by reporters. He said "We continue to investigate the cause of events" and asserts "we are moving mountains inside Yahoo to see why and how this happened and to take steps to try to ensure it doesn't happen again. We deeply regret the inconvenience this caused to both our merchants and our shoppers." No real information.No acknowledgment of culpability. No expectations of explanations or redress. Just corporate speak. This guy clearly learned his craft from the Bush team.

As you might image the aggrieved merchants go nuts. So Yahoo issues an e-mail through its merchant contact channels saying " By now you've heard about the problems that occurred with checkout manager yesterday."  Can you image the screaming and cursing this little bit of wordsmithing provoked? The e-mail goes on with the fantastic assertion "This team is dedicated to your success. Like you we push to have these situations resolved as quickly as possible." Do they live on the same planet as we do? Does some drone in Sunnyvale think a single sentient being is buying this act?

Fast forward to 48 hours later. I get on a call with my Account Manager, the guy at the bottom of the food chain who sounds like he's about 14 years old. He stonewalls. He recites the script and weathers a moderate amount of bashing. Again no admission of responsibility. No information. No promise of when, what, why or what they're gonna do about it.

So we are left to our own imagination to speculate about what happened and why Yahoo feels it can ignore and abuse its customer base. Does anyone believe that Yahoo, the former darling of Wall Street, doesn't have technical back-ups, the ability to figure out what happens in their own infrastructure or a modestly competent crisis PR plan? Do Jerry Yang and Susan Decker even know they have a Merchant Solutions Group?

So left with a void in information and responsible corporate behavior, I propose to fill it with rank speculation. Here are a few of my guesses:

1. Yahoo Stores is a Bastard Step-Child. The ass-end of the Yahoo empire is staffed by the losers and cast-offs from the other, real or important units. This gang of geeks, zods and left-over nerds are using technology from 2001 that even third world countries rejected. Since the total; revenues of all 40,000 merchants is less than afternoon's worth of ads served, nobody knows or wants to know because nobody cares.

2. Somebody Big is Covering Their Ass. Its a software screw-up that layers of incompetent managers are scrambling to cover-up, explain, side-step and otherwise distance themselves from. There's probably an ambitious, rising, wunderkind asshole generalist manager behind it who over-ruled the gearheads and now is madly scrambling to assign blame before it catches up with him or her.

3. Because they Can. Beaten and humiliated by Google, subject to continuous takeover rumors and direction less compared to Microsoft, Yahoo lashed out at the weak and the dependent to pump itself up and inject a dose of adrenalin into its collective ego. Knowing that tens of thousands of little guys have no choice and can't afford to abandon them, Yahoo decided to shower its love and attention in the form of abuse. 

This is a great example of why Yahoo must and will die. Their response to the technical and customer issues is a veritable step-by-step numbnuts playbook; prime evidence that the internal disorganization and politics exposed in Brad Garlinghouse's "Peanut Butter Memo" last summer have not been rectified or addressed. Everybody and nobody's in charge and the rest are asleep at the switch. And soon those harmed will bring a monster class action suit against them and later make their way out the door.   

An Amazing Cyber Monday Deal

Here's an amazing customer-centric offer to my readers from Boris Mordkovich.

Get 67%OFF a one year subscription to SEARCH MARKETING STANDARD by using  the coupon code HOLIDAY67 before DECEMBER 10 and clicking on this link

https://www.searchmarketingstandard.com/subscribe.html

But wait -- there's a charity tie-in! For each reader who parts with $4.95 (the discounted price) Boris will give $1 to Toys for Tots. Is this a deal or what?

You get the publication, you get much smarter about search engine marketing. The kids get the toys and they stop whining. There's free shipping and free parking. And Hanukkah is still to come. 

So dear readers, help me prove that I'm not just pissing in the wind. Help Boris get rich and help those kids get those toys. CLICK EARLY and OFTEN.

How To Use E-Mail Marketing to Kill Off Your Customers

I live in Army/cargo pants.So the 10% Thanksgiving sale offer from Gr8gear really resonated. Until I tried to make a discounted purchase.

I got the e-mail, noted the times when the coupon was valid, pre-shopped for my pants and waited 24 hours. I get to the site, click in my stuff and quickly rack-up more than $50 dollars in goods to qualify for the discount deal. I put in my info and the shopping cart won't take the data. I try again and again. No deal.

Then I notice a red sentence peeping out of the black background that reads -- "Coupon code cannot be used on specials or closeouts."

I check the cart. Both sets of pants we're marked down from 29.99 to 22.99, I check the offer e-mail. Not a peep. The right nav bar tells me my pants are to sellers -- not closeouts. I'm stunned. I'm shocked. I'm really pissed off. I've now invested 20 minutes to buy stuff I crave and my warm feelings have turned to anger and resentment.I've gone from repeat customer to angry antagonist with zero sympathy for the marketer that didn't do his/her job right.

Wanna kill off your repeat buyers? Send them e-mail offers that they can't cash in on !   

Perspectives on the Pathetic Pitch Process

I sat through 5 sequential pitches this week and was dumbstruck by how ineffective the process is in helping buyers learn what agencies can do for them. The artifice of the stand up pitch was unproductive, pitiful and pathetic.

Maybe in a world where finding a relationship is so difficult, I should have expected dysfunction but having been either a pitchman or a decision-maker so often I surprised myself at how awkward and flawed this familiar process is. Given how they meet and match, its no wonder that clients and agencies divorce at rates exceeding the collapse of individual relationships.

If we are deconstructing the process let's start at the beginning with mismatched expectations. Clients identify agencies that look like they can do the job. The usual criteria are industry experience, service to like clients, previous gigs with competitors, contacts between the two sides; usually somebody knows or previously worked with somebody and agency brand awareness and reputation. My team constructed a list mixing big guys with specialist boutiques and floated a middling RFP to solicit the basic credentials.

What we really wanted to find out was:

1. Can these guys really help us? Can they use their skills to move our needle not just do their usual act?

2. Will they really get to know us and our schtick or will they just apply a template approach and hope for the best?

3. Can these guys think about our business the way we do? Will they help us realize our goals?

4. Do they know anything we don't? Will we like being with them? Do they fit our style and pace?

On the flip side agencies are looking to find clients that will pay top dollar at healthy margins on time, help grow the agency's reputation and bag of tricks, keep the agency team interested and engaged and not be too much of a pain in the ass.

The agency guys really want to know ...

1. How much do these guys really know about what we do? Can we genuinely make an impact or will be just be somebody's bitch? Will they rely on our advice versus telling us what to do?

2. Every client says they want creativity. 80% buy plain vanilla. Are these guys in the risk-taking 20 percent and if so why?

3. How bureaucratic or process-driven are these guys? How many can say "no" versus how many and who can say "yes"? How much will they annoy, de-motivate and generally mess with us?

4. Can they pay the freight, will they nickel-and-dime us to death and are their pockets deep enough or flexible enough so that we can develop cutting edge new stuff on their dime?

So into the conference room go two teams sitting around a table, collectively focused at a projected slide, occasionally looking the other side up-and-down wondering about haircuts, decolletage, accessories, VPL and nasal accents desperately hoping for something good to happen. Here's what generally happens:

Big Guy Blabs. The senior agency person commands the presentation by leading the pitch and answering or parrying most questions. The senior person usually has the uncanny ability to put off the senior clients in record time.  Everybody understands the ego at-play as much as they understand that the two scared, silent young ones wearing cheap suits sitting in the cheap seats will actually end up servicing the account after all the blovating is done.

Big Idea Bombs. The agency bets the farm on a out-of-the box idea or a pedestrian idea that clearly indicates they don't understand the first thing about the client's business. This rhetorical Hail Mary pitch falls flat and the air goes out of the room like a tire with a fast leak. After its clear to both sides what a bomb the big idea has been neither side can wait to get out of the room.

Bad Mix. The sides hate each other on sight. There is no mystery, chemistry or fantasy. Its like being at a bad freshman mixer. You feel like you're in the wrong place. You can't imagine being seen much less working with people who look, talk, act, think like those guys. You are viscerally and emotionally put off by the number, quantity and oddity of the fashion don'ts and fatties set before you. 

Bullshit Blab-a-Thon. The agency works through the slides and invites questions by saying , " We want this to be a dialog. We want to be your partners. So ask us anything along the way. Feel free to interrupt us so we can really talk about the things that matter most to you."

The clients then ask questions. With each pointed question, the agency parries. By the third one you realize that the agency never answers the question asked. Instead like a weaselly politician the agency uses every question to reinforce or restate its key copy points. The more pointed the questions; the mushier and more evasive the answers. The more they blab, the more you can feel your blood pressure rising.

Process Parity. Every agency has a process. Usually it has a not-so-clever name and from 5 to 9 steps. It is presented in hushed and reverent tones and granted the potency of a magical formula handed down directly from Merlin. According to the agency, this sacred process insures blinding insights into customer behavior, exceptional creative that will make products fly off the shelves, unparalleled ideas that will forever change your market and unlimited success for this campaign and anything else the process touches. But whoa to those who don't follow or embrace the process. Like Old Testament sinners those clients who don't embrace and genuflect to the process are condemned to bleakness, doom and the same old shit.

Bashing Competitors. Agencies are fundamentally insecure. They position their strengths in ways that bash the unseen and often unknown competition by saying things like " We're specialists. You wouldn't go to a GP for a complicated lung operation would you?"  Or the say, "Your business is part of our DNA. We're not a multi-functional, multi-national conglomerate where you'll be treated like a pimple on an elephant;'s ass." Or they promise "We have the breathe of experience, contacts, skill and economies of scale that those little guys can never deliver. We're smarter, faster, cheaper and better." 

By attacking the unseen competitor, the agency makes the prospective client feel like an idiot; as if he didn't consider size, scale, experience in selecting potential agencies or as if he randomly picked names out of the phone book or rounded up the usual bunch of suspects. When each agency fires pre-emptive strikes into the darkness it feels like the last time you broke up with somebody who didn't want to break up with you. They assure you that you'll never find anyone else as good and that you'll be condemned to sit alone in a dark room masturbating for eternity. Its a pitch that never really works.

The next time I have to hire an agency, I'm going to define a problem we face in the business and a needed outcome. Then I'm going to put both teams in a room for 90 minutes and see what they come up with. This should give me both a feel for agency credentials and chops as well as a realistic chemistry and compatibility check. It will be messier and a lot less formal but it will spare me hours of torture. 

Sherpa's Updated Landing Page Handbook Has Landed

The Landing Page Bible has been updated with inputs from 3800 marketers whose opinions plus research plus self-reported data have been expressed in 54 charts, 114 examples and 273 wire-bound pages. Its a veritable cornucopia of best practices. Huzzah!

I spoke to Tim McAtee, a senior research analyst at Sherpa. This puppy was his first project since joining Sherpa from NeoOgilvy in August. A typical stat guy with a background in online media at StarCom, Tim spared me the trouble of padding through all those pages by cutting to the chase and calling out the key take-aways from this $497 report. Here's his POV:

1. Keep it Simple. A landing page should offer only 2 choices: convert now or later. Strip out the navigation and force the visitor to act. Make the forms simple.Don't get too nosy. The more you ask for; the greater the abandon rate. Create individual landing pages for each e-mail and each keyword. A templated page that expresses your brand and orients the visitor but is specific to the keyword or keyword phrase searched or the e-mail contents or offer yields the best conversion results.

Usability trumps design. Citing Craig's List as an example. Tim argues, based on the accumulated data, that less is always more. The ideal landing page marries a simple interface to complex but unseen technology. Imagine the continuing internal battles they've had at Google to keep the home page as simple and effective as it is.

2. Keep Testing. Evidently testing new stuff always yields better results than sitting on your laurels or your duff. In fact the simple, cheap tests get the biggest percentage increases and uplifts while the costly multi-variate tests often yield a much smaller or incremental improvement in performance. 

Incremental A/B testing, done on the DM model, where individual components are tweaked and measured in isolation over time works and works well. But Tim is impressed with marketers who carve off a discrete hunk of traffic and test something totally different because he sees evidence that the bigger the test risk, the bigger either the likely payoff or flop.   

Genuine Customer Engagement

People throw around the term "customer engagement" but as we begin holiday 07 businesses will have a chance to truly engage customers --- on the phone. Many will miss out by emphasizing, monitoring and measuring the wrong things.

Despite the Web, we are still a phone-based culture. Sixty plus percent of catalog shoppers still buy by phone. And the magical qualities of the disembodied voice communicate understanding, empathy and suggest alternate ways to get things done much better than the fastest IM device with the most expressive icons or emoticons.

People buy people first. The second transaction involves goods or services. In many cases the voice on the phone is the only human representation of a brand that shoppers encounter. That's why its so important to prep your phone team to anticipate customers needs and behavior.   

With that in mind, here are 6 tips for Customer Service Representatives (CSRs) to maximize engagement and holiday sales:

1. Smile. Facial expression is communicated in the tone and timbre of your voice. The shape of your face positions your cheeks and your larynx which affects how you sound. As creatures this is one of the signals our limbic brain uses to discern friend from foe. A smile and a relaxed attitude come across on the phone and invite interaction.

2. Listen for urgency and intent. Talk is made up of words and feelings. Often the pace, pronunciation and parsing of the words communicate more than the words themselves. Customers dial 800 numbers with all kinds of things on their minds. Usually the feelings come across long before the words catch up. Listen for the signals because it will cue CSRs how best to respond.

3. Listen for content. A percentage of the American population are direct and straightforward. Some of us think these people are blunt or even rude because unlike the rest of us, they actually say what they mean and communicate their needs clearly. But since this segment is a minority, we often don't take their presentation at face value. If you are a CSR or are running a retail business change your ear settings and default to this customer type. You'll save yourself a lot of confusion and sell much more faster.

4. Ask Questions. A huge number of shoppers have a hunch and need a hand. This is especially true during holiday shopping where many people are shopping for others, some of whom they don't know all that well. If you ask the right questions, you can genuinely help them which usually translates into selling them something. Don't be bashful about the line of questioning. Ask "who is this for", "how much do you want to spend", "how will they use/like it", "what are they like" or "what do they like"? then shut up. Listen closely to the answer and map whatever you have to whatever they need.

5. Talk Back. Shoppers crave help and validation. If they ask you a semi-personal question answer it. If they ask where you are or what the weather is, tell them. Shopping is a social experience. If she isn't doing it in a mall with a girlfriend, she's doing it on the phone with you. Participate and join in. If she isn't comfortable with you, she's not going to buy from you.

6. Resolve Everything in 1 Call. Don't focus on talk time. Focus on making customers happy in one call whether its finding the right stuff, managing a return, answering a question or responding to a complaint. If, by the luck of the draw, they get to you they want you to help them and see the issue through to a happy conclusion.