I recently read an article by Anna Talerico entitled "A simple road to more personalized site experiences", where she urges companies to segment visitors as they come on their landing page. She goes on to say that "you [merchants] can't get out there and talk to each person who clicks through your site, so let your landing pages do the talking for you". 

While Anna may be correct in the fact that segmentation increases customer conversion I strongly disagree with her statement that you can't talk to everyone out there.

One of our customers achieved a 20% conversion to sales ratio in our last field trial meaning that for every 100 digital sales calls made, 20 people walked into the store and bought something with the offer we delivered. How'd they do it and what does it say about the ideal Micronotes customer? 

First off, we were able to get the appointment. Entrepreneurs and flush trust-funds owners notwithstanding, most people have either time or money -- but not both meaning those with the most spending power tend to have the least time to interact with marketers.

I'm excited to announce that Tom Burgess, founder and CEO of Third Screen Media, has joined our advisory board as marketing practitioner. Tom is a serial entrepreneur in the internet marketing space with extraordinary customer-side communications talent. Micronotes is pioneering an entirely new way of marketing with our "digital sales call" technology and it's great to have Tom; entrepreneur, executive, and avid sailor -- aboard to help us navigate.

I asked Tom why he joined our board and here's what he said, "Micronotes is a pioneer in a new marketing paradigm that is focused on bringing benefits directly to the consumer.

We've just completed our second field trial with real brands and real bill-payers using our KulaQ technology which enables marketers to conduct mass-scale one-on-one MicroInterviews with opted-in bank bill-pay customers; and automatically make the right offer based on that interview. If you'd don't understand what a MicroInterview is, please go here.

KulaQ represents a new form of targeted outbound marketing based on a very old idea; namely, "Advertising is salesmanship mass produced. No one would bother to use advertising if he could talk to all his prospects face-to-face." Morris L. Hite, Advertising Hall of Fame.

I am pleased to announce that Drazen Prelec, Digital Equipment Corp. Leaders for Global Operations Professor of Management, has joined the Micronotes Advisory Board.

Professor Prelec's research deals with the psychology and neuroscience of decision making (behavioral economics and neuroeconomics; risky choice, time discounting, self-control, consumer behavior).

Banks earn most of their profits from fees. The whole fee thing feels a little like a shell game to me. The bank advertises free checking and online bill-pay but, in fact, those services aren't free to the bank so -- it follows logically that they can't be free to the consumer.  So, the cost of "free checking and bill-pay" is moved from one shell to another which, of course, gets lifted whenever I, or someone else, stumbles on any of the tripwires the bank has set up to recover the actual costs of "free checking and bill-pay." 

Actually, I don't know -- I haven't found that number just yet.

We had a board meeting Monday with not 1, not 2, but 3 MIT Professors in attendance; Glen Urban, Drazen Prelec, and Nelson Repenning. We were talking through the data from our most recent field study which, again, yielded an average offer acceptance rate of 66% and cost per action of about $5 (table below).

We just completed our second field trial of our KulaMula cash-back bill-pay system with 5 consumers brands who collectively conducted 852 20-second interviews with about 150 bill-payers.  The results for both brands and bill-payers were extraordinary with average offer acceptance rates well above 50% -- meaning that more than 1/2 of the brand-offers presented, after customization, were accepted by bill-payers.

I am pleased to announce that Glen Urban, David Austin Professor of Marketing at MIT, has joined the Micronotes Advisory Board. Glen Urban is a leading educator, prize-winning researcher specializing in marketing and new product development, an entrepreneur, a prolific author, a sculptor, and a sailor. He has been a member of the MIT Sloan School of Management faculty since 1966, and was Dean of the school from 1993-1998.

A couple of weeks ago I gave a talk at a technology roadmap conference of Credit Union Executives. I've done a fair amount of work on technology roadmaps and appreciated the difficultly my audience had in answering the question, "what's the core value driver in the credit union industry and how is it measured?" One astute executive answered, "About half our customers care about superb customer service and the other half care about our loan and deposit rates."