We've recently helped two online retailers take their foreign brands global and penetrate the US market.

The process of "Americanizing" a foreign brand typically takes 6 to 12 months, but with the US accounting for almost 30% of the world's GDP, it's well worth it.



There are 4 common strategies for penetrating the US market:

Acquisition

Royal Bank of Scotland. This company built up a strong retail market share in the US, not under the RBS brand, but through a series of acquisitions of regional (not national) banks.

Unique Customer Experience

IKEA. IKEA offers a furniture retailing value proposition and experience unparalleled in the US market. IKEA's location selection expertise and their established global supply chains enable them to offer an exceptional category-killer customer experience.

Low Overhead

ING.*The Dutch bank converted its weakness (no retail branches in the US) into a strength. Taking advantage of its low no-bricks-and-mortar cost structure, ING was able to offer generous rates on certificates of deposit.

Channel Partner

Dyson. The British home appliance maker earned a break when it managed to get a Best Buy buyer to take one of its vacuum cleaners home to test. Best Buy became the first US retailer to stock Dyson vacuum cleaners--other US retailers invariably follow Best Buy's lead.

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Since most companies don't offer a unique customer experience and don't have the big pockets to use the acquisition path, here at SPI, we favor a combination of the "Low Overhead" and "Channel Partner" approaches.

Our US Market Penetration action plan typically involves four steps:

Phase 1 - Test Market Reception

Use existing online-marketplaces (Amazon, eBay, PriceRunner etc) to list company products and test demand,prices,competition with minimal upfront investment

Phase 2 - Build brand recognition

Launch a dedicated US website and use Social Media Marketing to tell the brand story. Start driving all traffic to the brand site.

Phase 3 - Online Marketing

Email Marketing, PPC, Affiliate Marketing and Media buys, driving massive traffic to the brand site.

Phase 4 - Full-blown Traditional Marketing

TV, Radio and Offline media campaigns

Great video that explains Social Media in plain English:



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SPI's Social Media Marketing programs are designed to help unknown brands become recognizable, build a cult following and most importantly: convert all the buzz into business.

Quick note to give a Big Thank you to Gabe Elliott at Yahoo Search Marketing Solutions.

Gabe is our dedicated account manager at Yahoo Search, a Content Network expert, ninja PPC account manager and an all-around great guy to work with.

SPI has been working on consolidating a little over 200 client Yahoo Search accounts, into a single master account, as well as utilize Yahoo Search Marketing API for better bid management.

Gabe's attention to detail, relentless proactive follow-ups and API help, has been instrumental to this effort.

We expect to complete the migration process within the next few weeks.

If any of you SEM professionals out there, are still not taking advantage of Yahoo's reach, you're simply missing out!

In our experience, once you narrow down on the right type of traffic, conversion rates with Yahoo are generally higher.

I was helping a new SPI client today, migrate their email campaigns and email database from Constant Contact to the SPI Email Marketing system.

Constant Contact is a great entry-level "Shared Email Marketing" system.

You can get up and running within a few minutes and spend a low $15/month for a list size of up to 500 recipients.

Similar solutions include: JangoMail, AWeber, EmailBrain, ActiveTrail and others. All are "Shared Email Marketing" system.

What is a Shared Email Marketing system?

Much like "Shared Hosting" in the web hosting world, a Shared Email Marketing system is running multiple Email Marketing accounts on a single server, sharing the machine resources and in most cases - sharing the outgoing IP Addresses.

Sharing IP Addresses means once a rogue Email Marketing client sends a campaign to a bad list and gets the IP Address black listed, your email deliverability will immediately suffer and you're not even going to know about it.

Email sending rate limits

Due to the nature of how a Shared Email Marketing system works, the Email Service Providers (ESP), fanatically try to protect their limited outgoing IP addresses reputation, by applying rate limits, list size limits, forced list re-validation and restrictions on list acquisition.

Our client was attempting to send out a small 8,000 campaign to existing customers. All email activity was abruptly suspended in their Constant Contact account, with these two messages:





The benefit of a Dedicated Email Marketing System

A dedicated Email Marketing system, like SPI Email Marketing, provisions a dedicated server, dedicated set of IP addresses, unique email domain, reverse DNS lookups, DomainKeys and optional whitelisting, per every single client account.

The end result is greatly improved delivery rates and more freedom to apply your own philosophy when it comes to marketing to your customer base (As long as you're not spamming).

If you are no longer using shared hosting for your website, it's time to consider dedicated service for your Email Campaigns as well.

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eNom, the second largest domain registrar in the world, went down today - Saturday January 31, 2009, at around 3:30pm EST and has been down for the last 3 hours.

At least 10 million domains have been affected by this outage.

From the blogosphere

Reports have been popping all over the blogosphere and twitter -



What does this mean?

When your domain registrar is down, no users are going to be able to access your site, unless they know your site's IP address.

Your registrar's domain servers are charged with converting YOURDOMAIN.com to an ip address your browser can connect to.

eNom has 5 distributed domain name servers. The idea is that if one DNS server is down, the others pick up.

Unfortunately as of this writing - all 5 eNom DNS servers are down.

A better domain registrar?

eNom's tag line is "The most reliable DNS array in the industry".

Strange as it may seem, this statement may still hold true.

eNom is great. We've been fans of eNom for the past 5 years.

We also have domains with GoDaddy and NTT/Verio. If you pull-up uptime reports for the three registrars, you'll find that over the last two years, every single one experienced some form of outage with their DNS servers.

Bottom line is - no matter how big you are, "shit happens".

Hard drives die. Servers crash. And routers stop routing.

The solution is not looking for "a better" hosting company / domain registrar / server platform etc. Everything crashes eventually. The real solution is acknowledging things will fail and planning accordingly.

Avoid website outages

To avoid your website going down when something like this happens, you need to avoid any single point of failure.

Here at SPI, whenever we do web hosting, we use a multi homed architecture, where your site is replicated across at least two separate ISPs.

On the DNS level, we recommend using secondary domain registrars for all client domains. Yes - you can have your domain name setup with more than a single DNS service.

Michel wrote a step-by-step how to setup a secondary domain server guide, last September.

Contact us today and we'll gladly help you set this up for your website / domain, so that you avoid any single point of failure and stay up, no matter what happens.

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