DMS ’10: Community Key to Self-Serve Movement
Community is key to building self-serve and upsell opportunities, believes MerchantCircle‘s Darren Waddell. Waddell along with Agendize‘s Alexandre Rambaud spoke on the “Self-Service — It’s Closer Than You Think” panel at the DMS ’10 conference yesterday.
MerchantCircle works with 1.3 million businesses (half of which use it for their Web presence), and self-serve is at the heart of everything it does. Self-serve needs to be central to what the company does from an operations standpoint as it has just 30 MerchantCircle employees serving those 1.3 million merchants. Increasingly, the secret in MerchantCircle’s sauce is probing those merchants to participate in a social approach to get SMBs to participate online and create content. That social aspect, Waddell reports, is much more effective in engaging merchants than contacting them on the phone or via e-mail. When merchants are engaged and creating content, they start talking about MerchantCircle. That in turn engages other small businesses, even competitors, as well as users.
Right now Waddell’s typical merchant is spending roughly $70/month with MerchantCircle. Self-serve isn’t the way to extract $1,500 a month from advertisers. Don’t incent SMBs with dollars, he said, but rather with ego.
Rambaud discussed Agendize’s strategy of pushing the self-serve movement further into the marketplace by working with an estimated 20,000 agencies in the United States. Among Agendiz’s customers are 34 directory publishers in 25 countries. In particular, he sees the freelancers and smaller agencies as driving the implementation of a self-service platform. Key pieces to that are making the platform intuitive, easy to sell, easy to implement and workflow compliant.
“When we can do it and it’s intuitive, we all love self-serve,” said Rambaud. “When it starts to be more complex, we prefer other people to do it. For SMBs, maybe 5 [percent] to 10 percent can do a lot by themselves, but this is where I think there is room and opportunity for self-serve platforms.”
Thanks for writing up the panel, Bobbi!
One point I really wanted to reiterate here is that more than just being Agendize’s current strategy, I think self-service represents a HUGE opportunity for YP publishers to leverage these freelancers and agencies. The IYPs have so many products to offer and by turning them into self-service solutions for these freelancers and agencies to use, they can create a massive indirect sales channel. They did this in the past with CMRs, and with great success! Now they should do it again, only online.