…And Boy Are My Arms Tired!

…as in “I just flew back from Dallas”….

Sorry I haven’t posted in a couple days — I’ve just returned from a conference for fundraising professionals in Dallas. We were out there promoting the company to the association and nonprofit
executive attendees.

I also owe some gratitude to John O’Leary who wins the award for the first commenter of this blog. He responded to my post on Commerce Bank’s taglines and website. Thanks for your response John. I’m sure that Commerce Bank provides excellent service and I appreciate your bringing that to everyone’s attention. I was simply questioning the way they attract new customers. I’d be interested in knowing what percentage of new business comes from referrals like yours — if they have evangelists like you out there, then they almost don’t need to spend money on fixing their website. Almost. But either way, extra points to you for quoting Landeau on this blog.

This brings up an interesting point: have you ever stopped to think about how valuable a customer referral is to your company? The customer referral is an extremely strong promotion tool and is an important piece to a good viral marketing campaign. Think about it: viral marketing is basically facilitating your evangelists’ desire to talk about how wonderful your company is. The trick is to enable these customers in a way that doesn’t harm the credibility of their referral.

I have some more stuff to talk about from Dallas (including “Texas Edition” Ford Trucks, flying on American Airlines, and Lance Armstrong’s speech that I heard yesterday) but will have to post those thoughts in the coming days. Stay tuned.

No Stupid Fees, Just a Stupid Website

This post was going to be about Commerce Bank’s advertising tag line that they’re currently using. For those of you who don’t know Commerce Bank, it’s a small bank that mainly serves various locations on the east coast. I’ve seen their ads in passing before, but yesterday as I was riding the Metro home, I caught a glimpse of their tagline. It read:

“Commerce Bank. No more stupid fees.”

This was going to be a great topic — I was going to praise (or put down — I hadn’t decided yet) their ads on here and invite the readers to help me find other ads that really break through the norms of advertising. I was researching the bank before I started my post…

…and then I went to Commerce Bank’s Website. Wow. I knew then that this post had to be about the sorry presence that they maintain online. Here, right now — go check out commerceonline.com.

See what I mean? So the first thing that sticks out on this website is the fact that it looks like it was created in 1997. You remember websites back then — full of javascript-enabled banners and “fun” elements that made the page completely overwhelming and distracting? You remember the use of a severely limited color palette?

Well this site has all of that going on. It’s kind of sad, actually — Wikipedia reports that Commerce Bank does more than $1 billion of annual revenue. This leads me to question if they realize that they’re turning away vast amounts of people by having a website like this. I almost wonder if the marketing department over there in New Jersey has forgotten about their website while working on the *stellar* new ad campaign that I saw yesterday.

Once a website is online, it has to be maintained in order to continue to reflect your company warmly. Sticking with an antiquated design scheme or not searching for broken links can severely hurt your company’s reputation with a website visitor — which really is the whole reason you have a site in the first place.