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.

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.

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).

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.