Gaiam enriches customers’ lives. Here I attempt to enrich their marketing.

It is unknown how I found them, or why I signed up to their email list 42 days ago.

But after seeing their ad on Bloglines, I decided to see what that newsletter entailed these past 6 weeks and added a cursory website perusal on top.

I soon noticed Gaiam could do

… More Than 5 Painfully Easy Things To Rapidly Enrich More Lives.

There’s a splash of email marketing, a dose of SEO, and a hint of conversion optimization. Like usual, you’re mileage may vary, but I’d be willing to bet your sales increase when you realize

Full of robots your email list is not.

So why treat me like one? Do you see any variation in these promos?

That’s about 6 weeks of straight up discounting, indicating 2 things:

Gaiam’s email marketing druid doesn’t want me paying full price ever
No one notified her that information-based emails garner more eyes and sales than straight hucking

But discounts are cool, si?

Which is why with great haste I opened that 16th discount offer, permitted gmail to display images (hassle), clicked the information-famished banner, and feasted my hungry eyes upon

… The homepage (?)

No targeting whatsoever.

Hopefully because that particular discount expired.

Other promos took me to better targeted pages, but I sense a chance to standardize the practice.

An extremely unscientific test reveals banner ads are also (un)supported with untargeted squeeze pages, though PPC pages appear somewhat more tenderly loved.

Some say you’ll win some and lose some, but Gaiam could easily be winning more here. And just like landing pages, URL structures ideally

… Work for you, not against you.

Many URLs begin with /category which needlessly dilutes them
In addition to length and distance from home page, not all URLs contain meaningful keywords
Also looks like there are multiple URLs for the same product

Plus, category pages are adorned with real-estate sucking images instead of sales driving headlines or video. Definite growth prospects with minor design tweakage.

As I was cruising this site, I began to wonder

Who are these shepherds of enrichment?

It was hard as hell to find out.

Hidden in the footer, the About Us left me with more questions than answers and reeks of corporate compost. I still don’t know who you people are.

I can’t help but believe Gaiam to be filled with delightful souls carrying forward a compelling story. But we may never know.

Or maybe we will. And that’s the beauty of web marketing - all of this CAN be done, measured, and built upon in a matter of hours.

And maybe they’ll sign up for twitter, too, where they can connect up with troves of yoga loving and life enriching cats around the world. If they go that far, might as well prominently display it on their blog, right below a newsletter sign up form.

Gaiam: keep rocking. We need you. For more ideas, here’s more.

(PS - Still working on the best way to insert screen shots and link to larger images. Sorry for that.)

Mementum