Archive for the ‘Email Marketing’ Category

10 Marketing tips to help you Cash in on Black Friday and Cyber Monday

Published November 21st, 2012 Advertising, Ecommerce, Email Marketing, Mobile, Paid Search, Social Media 4 Comments

 

There are only 2 days until the biggest shopping day of the year and 5 days until the biggest online shopping days of the year, Black Friday and Cyber Monday. To help you out, we’ve put together some marketing tips to help you cash in last minute.

1. If you don’t have an app, make sure you have a mobile friendly site

 

  • 51% of smartphone users are more likely to purchase from retailers with a mobile-specific website, but only 4.8% of retailers have a mobile site (Microsoft).

  • U.S. mobile commerce sales grew 91% in 2011 from 2010 to $6.7B and are forecasted to grow to $31B in 2015 (eMarketer).

  • Mobile commerce can drive in-store sales. 46% of those who use smartphones to research products make their purchases in stores (Google).

2. Make your store and its merchandise easy to locate

 

If you don’t have an app, make sure your mobile ads have the information customers need to find your store.

 

  • If you have an app, Include a way for customers to locate your nearest store.

 

3. Add value to your customers in store experience

 

  • Add a section on your app where customers can see your specific in store deals.

  • Make sure your app is capable of scanning a bar code or QR to find that product on your site. If you don’t have this option, some customers may use Amazon’s app to do this and buy your product elsewhere.

 

4. Send Push Notifications

 

Engage with your customers while they are out and about by sending push notifications about the latest deals, steals, and must haves. With the tools from Urban Airship you can send location based messages, segment your notifications, and send rich push.

 

5. Have a Black Friday and Cyber Monday tab on your app, section on your site, or newsletter/flyer

 

Who doesn’t love a sneak preview?

  • Have a place on your app where customers can find Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals

 

 

  • If you don’t have an app, make sure your ad text attracts customers to your site

 

 

  •  Send out a flyer that has a few of the deals you’ll be offering

 

 

6. Create a sense of Urgency

 

Pretend as if you are never going to have this type of promotion or deal ever again.

  • Include terms such as “Today Only” “Hurry, Sale Ends Soon”

  • Amazon takes this one to the extreme by using a count down timer!

 

7. Think Price AND Value

 

Everyone loves a bargain, but sometimes it is more gratifying knowing that you got something of high value for a significantly lower price.

 

 

8. Make an offer no one can refuse – Which means you’ll need more than 1

 

If your business allows, include more than one offer. With something for everyone, there will be no need for shoppers to go elsewhere!

 

9. Execution

 

According to last years statistics, 9am – 1pm and 5pm – 9pm where the hours that generated the most revenue.

 

 

10. Don’t just sit there – be proactive!

 

  • Offer hourly deals and promotions

  • Adjust ppc bids and budgets to make sure you’re capitalizing on your site traffic

  • Use up-to-date remarketing and ppc ads with Black Friday and Cyber Monday text

Understand how online advertising and offline purchasing work together.

 

The majority of consumers find comparing prices and product research the most convenient part of mobile shopping (JiWire), and 41% of those who use their smartphones to help with shopping make a purchase directly on their device (Google). This means you may be spending more on clicks and seeing less return than expected so keep in mind that shoppers who clicked on an ad and did not purchase, could have purchased in store. The impact that online advertising and media has on offline purchasing is enormous and is expected to grow significantly every year to come.

So go and get the word out, Hashtag #blackfriday and #cybermonday on twitter and Pinterest. Use Instagram and Facebook to broadcast your deals. Send emails as frequently as you can. …and if you don’t have time for any of this, make sure you encourage your customers to do it all for you!

 

 

3 Awesome Ecommerce Custom Segments for Google Analytics

Published May 30th, 2012 Analytics, Ecommerce, Email Marketing, Mobile 13 Comments

Before joining SwellPath, I knew a bit about analytics from my old digital agency, I was actually one of the best at it there. But, after coming to a true analytics agency, I realized how much I really did NOT know. One of the first things the analysts here showed me was that unless you are making your own custom segments, you will never be able to do a dive deep into the web data and find true insights about the visitors looking at your website.

There are plenty of posts on what custom segments are and how to use them, so I’m not going to go over a tutorial on that, but what I’m going to show you are 3 practical custom segments for Google Analytics* that you can use for your online store.

NOTE: If you are using another analytics platform that has the ability to segment besides Google Analytics, you can still use these as well, but you will have to figure out the syntax on your own.

Awesome Ecommerce Custom Segment #1 – True Mobile Email Visits

Mobile…it’s kind of a big deal. With literally everyone and their mother with iPhone and Android smart phones, more and more visitors are coming through these devices to your site . What you might not realize is that a large proportion of them are coming through because of your email campaigns. I know, crazy right? People reading their emails on their phone, no one does that. What’s funny is that a lot of ecommerce stores I talk to have no idea how many of these types of mobile visitors are coming to their website, and have no insight into what their web behaviors are. What I even find more disturbing is that they are often thinking that their email campaigns are tanking, but in fact they are doing quite well…for people who are clicking through on their laptop or tablet. So how can we find out? Custom segments of course! First, I’m making it very easy for you folks who have Google Analytics, just make sure you are logged in to your GA account and then click this link —-> Mobile Email Visits Custom Segment. Presto, you now will be able to use this segment right away and can see how I made it as well. Now that you have the segment in your account you can also copy and edit it. Try changing the option form “incude” to “exclude”, and look at your email campaign reports, you’ll be amazed at the differences in your email performance in terms of site engagement and conversion.

I’m going to go on a bit of a tangent here, so my apologies in advance.

NOTE: If you are currently using the premade GA advanced segment “mobile visitors” please realize that you are getting a very distorted view of your “mobile” users behavior. This segment lumps visitors on mobile phones and tablets together. Some people might disagree with me, but personally, I don’t feel tablets are mobile devices and it is a mistake for them to be put under the same category as smart phones. These 2 types of devices provide completely different user experiences. Honestly, I find a tablet more in common with my laptop than my phone. I never see people on the train or bus looking at their tablet, it’s always their phone. A smart phone requires surgeon hands to navigate non-optimized websites and  the Hulk could easily check out his favorite Reddit posts on a tablet (The Avengers is awesome by the way!). Again my apologies for the rant, it’s just how I feel and I think that segment in Google Analytics is very deceiving.

Awesome Ecommerce Custom Segment #2 – Non-Branded Search Visitors who Buy your Stuff

For those of you who know this one already, my apologies, but it really is one of the best custom segments out there at measuring the effectiveness of your organic and paid search efforts. Often people like to make this segment and lump all conversions, which is great, Avinash is right, micro transactions should not be ignored. Since most Boss people are bottom line folks,  let’s have a segment that measures true ROI for your inbound marketing channels to make them happy.

Setting this one up is tricky and will require some work form your end, and this Non-Branded Search Visitors Who Buy Stuff segment won’t work without some tweaking on your end. I’ve tried to annoatate it as best as I could, so once you load into your GA account, please input the correct letters in the right places and you should be on your way. Please note that this is just for your company name, really basic (doesn’t cover mis-spellings) and uses regular expression terms. If you don’t know what regular expressions are, I suggest reading up on it (http://bit.ly/Kn0d7Q). It’s very geeky, but once you get it, you can do some really amazing stuff.

Now, with a little elbow grease, you should see what non-branded terms are driving revenue to your store.  Also, you should be able to ask deeper questions about your non-branded campaigns and what keywords and campaigns are performing in terms of the bottom line and not just conversions. (NOTE: Google Analytics information is always different than what Ad Words is, so the numbers will be a little different, so please pay attention to the keywords and not the discrepancies in numbers). Remeber, feel free to copy and edit these segments, as this is another one to switch around the “include & exclude” feature to see for example; non-branded visitors who did NOT purchase. Some primer questions you can ask yourself when you’re looking at the data:

  • What pages are receiving the majority of traffic?
  • Does one page have a much higher traffic amount and  exit rate than another?
  • Are there consistent winners and losers month over month?

TIP: Look at the pages report in site content and look at the exit rates. You can easily tell leaks for people not familiar with your brand by which types of pages are causing them to leave. Also, make some time to go through every report in GA with these segments, because there are all kinds of goodies in the data you could find.

Awesome Ecommerce Custom Segment #3 – Visitors from Transactional Emails

Unless you’ve been living under a rock the last 4 years, I’m hoping that you know what a transactional email is. If you are responsible for an ecommerce store and do not have a transactional email strategy, please contact Alex Williams over at Trendline Interactive, so you can stop leaving easy money on the table. For those of you who have a nice transactional email strategy; are you remembering to put proper campaign tracking on all of your links? This is very important, as this segment relies on you making sure you are tagging your marketing channels appropriately.

If you don’t know how to track campaigns in GA, here’s Google’s tool (http://support.google.com/googleanalytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=55578). Here’s a text example for you on what this tag should look like:

http://YourWebsite.com/?utm_source=Transactional_Emails&utm_medium=email&utm_content=Review_Offer_Link&utm_campaign=Order_Confirmation

After you have tagged all of the links on your transactional emails (easier said than done), you can create custom segments around these audiences. I’m just going to give you a simple custom segment for transactional email, but hopefully you should be able to take it from there and create some really cool segments yourself.

TIP: One of the first things you should look at is your campaign report and see what transactional emails are driving the most visits and conversions. After that, have fun, see if there are certain geographic locations or products that are pushing revenue more than others. It’s really surprising how transactional emails done right, can bring in a consistent revenue month over month.

This is just the beginning of the adventures you can have with custom segments. I hope these are a good starting place for you, and help you find answers to some of those tough questions that come down from the top. Let me know in the comments if you have any questions, and please feel free to share any custom segments you have made.

Like this post? Follow Charles Voloshin on Google+

Standing Out In The Noisy World Of Facebook

Published June 1st, 2011 Advertising, Email Marketing, Social Media No Comments

It has been recently discovered that 92% of marketers (SocialMedia Examiner) use Facebook as a marketing tool – this makes it by far the most popular social network among marketers by a wide margin, with Twitter falling in second with an 84% adoption rate.  It’s of no surprise that Facebook has begun reaching saturation in its country of origin, as the massive social network now counts just over half the US population as members. So what does this mean for businesses?

For businesses Facebook represents an unprecedented marketing opportunity that transcends traditional middle men who connect companies directly with customers. The only way to benefit from your social media marketing through outlets like Facebook is by standing out in an increasingly noisy world.

When it comes to the consumer behavior, numbers do not get better. According to a new research by digital consultancy Beyond, 23% of consumers prefer receiving information from brands via Facebook, instead of a brand’s website (21%) or company blog (3%). This movement is encouraged by marketers who do not doubt anymore promoting their Facebook page instead of the official site. For example in recently, certain brands such as Orangina and Sony sign their TV commercial with a “facebook.com/nameofthepromotion”. Other brands such and Ben&Jerry have announced they will simply stop emailing, using in the future Facebook newsfeed instead.

Even with minimal time investment, when done properly, your social medial efforts will increase exposure for your business as well as helping you rise in search engine rankings. While Facebook is becoming the biggest relationship marketing tool for brands, it seems like that instead of increasing traffic to the company website, Facebook is actually absorbing it. This leaves marketers across the globe wondering whether their brand websites will disappear and if there will still be a need for an official website in five years.

Does this mean we should start ignoring company websites? Most definitely not! The dependence between Facebook and websites will increase, but especially from a global point of view – there really is life beyond Facebook. Only promoting a product in one social platform decreases the possibilities to reach all the potential audience out there. Most of the world is still not on Facebook and having seen the rise and fall of various hot, “world changing” platforms it would not be the most brilliant idea to kill the only secure place brand has in the Internet – the official webpage.

From SEO perspective, using only Facebook Page would drop search engine results considerably, pushing brand lower in ranking and decreasing amount of quality leads.

It also should not be forgotten that a marketer is still the master of his own website, controlling its structure, organization, design, content, SEO, marketing operations, customer data etc., while Facebook Page is defined…well by Facebook. Do brands really want to become fully dependent on Facebook and its rules, allowing it to control, restrict and have their say on the content, design and campaigns? I do not think so.

To stop the trend, start using Facebook to drive traffic to the official website. For example, create a Facebook competition/campaign which requires going your website, announce you will publish the competition winners in your official website, tell your fans about a special offer they can download from the website etc. It is also possible to integrate e-mail marketing with social media, increasing brand’s own customer database.

Facebook is just another way to promote an official website. More importance you give the platform, less power you have over your own campaigns. Do not let tail wag the dog.

 

Real-Time Analytics Solutions

Published December 18th, 2009 Analytics, Email Marketing, Social Media No Comments

Real-time web analytics reporting is more critical than ever for many organizations. It’s not realistic to wait 4 hours, or even 1 hour, to see how visitors are consuming fresh content, navigating new product sections, or generally browsing, on many sites. With the recent changes to Google’s search results, integrating real-time social media content, the transition from launch (or post, or release, or whatever) to tracking and refining, has been shortened even more. But even before the social media revolution, marketers have wanted to get real-time data when an email campaign is sent, a microsite is launched, their product is featured on Oprah, etc.

So how do you monitor your website in real-time? Omniture will provide you with some real-time data, likewise with WebTrends, but it isn’t complete. Google Analytics provides you with none (though I see this changing in 2010). So you need to employ a different analytics solution for this need. For enterprises, this might not be for your entire corporate site but maybe just your blogs. For smaller organizations, this may be something you want on your whole site. Regardless, here is a quick breakdown of three popular real-time web analytics offerings, and what I like about each of them.

Clicky

Spy on Clicky


I’ve written about Clicky before as a low-cost analytics solution, and it is pretty cheap. You can get a base level package for just $9.99. We use Clicky on this site and we love it for its ability to breakdown the pathing that specific visitors took through our site. This can be done in real-time or historically. I literally can look at the Visitor report, see what organizations are on my site, and then see what paths they’ve taken, and what source brought them to the site. So, if your reading this shortly after I’ve posted it, I’m probably looking at your network (your ISP or organization name) of the corner of my eye on my extra monitor. If your with a Fortune 500 company, chances are I’m watching the path your taking through my site. Can you see the sales benefits we get from Clicky now? Deployment of Clicky is straightforward and it has some cool “event tracking” type capabilities that can be leveraged.

chartbeat

chartbeat - SwellPath.com


Admittedly, I’ve only been using chartbeat for about a week, but I really like it. The interface is a simple yet effective dashboard. Instead of looking at standard analytics metrics and reporting in real-time; it defines its own reports and metrics, ones that are more relevant to real-time needs. For example, page density and whether visitors are idle, reading, or writing (dependent on your CMS). It also integrates Twitter conversations and incoming links into the dashboard. Chartbeat also runs about $10 a month (for up to 5 sites) and has a 30 day trial for you to check the product out.

Woopra

Woopra Dashboard


I was a big fan of Woopra at first, but I don’t really use it as much as I used to. My biggest problem with the product was that it isn’t web-based, but required an installed application. That aside, it also has a great dashboard, and more comprehensive reporting. It also features the ability to chat with any visitor currently on your site. I haven’t employed that in a real business situation yet, but I have played around with it a bit. Most folks tend to think that Woopra is great for monitoring, and covers the same bases that chartbeat does, so if you’re looking for that type of solution it is worth checking out. Woopra has pricing plans from $5 a month up to $180, based on number of pageviews, so it seems more focused on pursuing larger customers. So if you’re enterprise level, it definitely is worth checking out.

Alternative Value in Paid Search Traffic

Published August 5th, 2009 Analytics, Ecommerce, Email Marketing, Paid Search, SEO, Social Media No Comments

When analyzing paid search traffic the central focus is obviously on conversions, the sale, lead gen form completion, or whatever the primary conversion event is. But this shouldn’t be the only focus, and you shouldn’t calculate the value of your paid search activity entirely by conversion rate or ROI. Here’s some other ways you may find value in paid search, and some ideas for calculating that value.

Usability & Conversion Improvement

What does paid search traffic have to do with usability? Look at it like this: paid search traffic is a random sampling of visitors that have strong purchase intent, or strong intent to learn about your offering. Those that don’t convert, as a group, provide insight into what is “not working” with your site. You should be able to ask and answer questions like these:

  • Are these visitors bouncing at high rates? If so, you need to start testing out some different landing pages, or take a good look at your offering.
  • If they aren’t bouncing, are you tracking specific events on your landing pages? Implement event tracking on any key potential actions on your page and see if visitors are engaging at all.
  • Beyond the landing page, are they navigating to other pages or areas of your site? Why are they not finding what they came for on the landing page? What are the common paths their taking, and where are they exiting?
  • Are they using your site search field, and if so, what keywords they searching for? Are they getting results? How do these terms and results relate to the original paid search keyword and landing page offering?

Answering these questions will initiate a process focused improving conversion. Use unconverted paid search visitors as a “focus group”, and look into your analytics data for their “responses” and “feedback”. You’ve paid for them to visit your site, get value out of their behavior and actions.

Email Sign-ups, Catalog Sign-ups, & Social Media Follows

Let’s suppose I’m shopping for vitamins. I’ve decided I need to start taking ginko biloba supplements again to combat the lack of sleep that seems to come with running an interactive marketing agency. Disclaimer: I have no idea if ginko would help with this, or of the actual health benefits of this product, it is just a good example. So, I normally buy my vitamins and supplements at VitaminShoppe.com or Trader Joe’s or some other grocery store. But I decide to price it out and buy it on the internet, so I search for “ginko biloba” on Google. I see a paid search ad for Vitamin World and I click through. After researching their products a bit, I decide I’m a little skittish about buying this new addition to my diet on the internet, so I’m just going to buy it at Trader Joe’s the next time I’m there. Failed PPC conversion for Vitamin World right? Maybe not, before I exit, I notice the two links highlighted in the image to the left: Email Specials and Request a FREE Catalog.

Ginko Biloba on Vitamin World

You know how the story ends: I sign up for a catalog, end up visiting a Vitamin World store in my local mall the next time I’m there, and become a lifetime customer worth hundreds and hundreds of dollars to the company. So, that’s best case scenario. But the gist of it is, Vitamin World is making an effort to keep the “conversation” going with me. While I’m not a big fan of the Email Specials link, I love the big call to action on the catalog request link. Beyond catalogs and email, you might also track if visitors are clicking through to your social media profiles. Track these actions specifically for y0ur paid search visitors and develop a value for them. This may be a more complicated equation if you have advanced analytics and direct marketing programs in place, where you can track multiple touch-points and segment customer types based on product categories; or something as simple as calculating the estimated value of an email recipient, then applying that to number of signup conversions you have in your PPC account. Now, obviously you can track these as conversions in your PPC account, but that can muddy up your PPC data. Using analytics to track the goal, and segmenting your PPC traffic out for analysis is usually a better option.

Keyword Testing & Strategy

I’ll tiptoe around this, because I’m definitely not the SEO specialist (or PPC for that matter) around here but the gist of thsi is that you can use your PPC account to test and refine your SEO strategy. If certain PPC keywords are limited in their conversions, but result in high-levels of engagement or some other key performance metric, you may decide to integrate them into your SEO strategy and target some pages for them. This is somewhat of an extension of the usability and conversion improvement section, but with an obvious focus on SEO and the value of certain keywords.

In conclusion, don’t write off your failed PPC conversions. You paid for those clicks – get some value out of them any way you can. This might mean putting in some sweat in the form of analysis, testing, or development, but those costs will likely be recouped over time, because you will never convert 100% of your search traffic.

Reengage Your Email Subscribers

Published February 8th, 2009 Email Marketing No Comments

Recently we began managing a client’s email marketing program and as I reviewed the history of their account, I noticed that lists had been created based on opens of previous emails. In fact, several thousand subscribers hadn’t received an email because they had not opened the email prior to that. I cringed when I saw this, knowing that surely a few click-throughs were missed by leaving out that group, and possibly valuable conversions.

It’s necessary to quickly review how “opens” are tracked, and how to derive value from the metric. Opens are based on whether or not a subscriber downloads the images contained in your email. Consider the following scenarios:

  1. Subscriber reads the subject of your email in their email client interface, and is inspired to visit your site because it reminds them of a need they have (congrats, you really nailed it with the subject). They eventually delete the email from their inbox list without ever even previewing it. The subscriber visited your site and maybe even converted, yet no trackable image was downloaded, no “open” was recorded in the email marketing application. The email isn’t credited with an open (or click-through or conversion).
  2. Subscriber opens the email in their client “preview pane”, reads some copy, and then clicks through on a link. The email gets credit for the click-through, but not the open. Some email programs may automatically credit the open if a click-through occurs, thus reconciling this subscribers interaction. However, consider this scenario if the subscriber just went and typed your URL into their browser.
  3. User seees the email on their Blackberry, makes a note to later visit your site for a need they have. Finally makes that visit 2 days later. No images downloaded obviously, so no open and also no click-through, but a visit and possible conversion.

You get the point: you’re likely getting responses to your emails that aren’t being recorded as opens or click-throughs.

So how do you use the open metric? It is all about trending. Once you have an established your email marketing program, you can begin to look at how this metric rises and falls from one send to another. If you have a more sophisticated email marketing program (or some other way to split your list), you can begin to A/B or multivariate test and then compare the open metric for the various groups.

Now, tracking and metrics aside, what if your subscribers simply aren’t responding your email messaging? Don’t drop them from your regular sends! There are a number of tactics you can use to try to get a better response, and there is limited risk in keeping these folks on your list. First, a couple of tactics that might work.

It may be time to implement an option with your signup and settings that allows the subscriber to select how often they want to be contacted. This obviously requires a bit more effort in regards to list and campaign management, but may be effective for your subscriber base.

Another segmentation tactic may be subject matter; are you sending your male and female customers the same email? Are you sending your skiing subscribers the same email as your snowboarding subscribers? What about those in warm-weather climates vs. those in cooler-weather climates? How about teens vs. Gen Ys? You get the point: targeting these groups even with just the subject line might have a significant effect on response.

Another tactic is to make your emails more engaging. Easier said than done, but well worth the effort if varying subjects and content are tested systematically and efficiently.

The gist of it is: don’t give up on subscribers. They haven’t given up on you, they just are bored with what you’re saying, or they’re having a hard time hearing you through the noise in their inboxes. Rather than segmenting them out of the conversation, think of what you can say to get them back into it.

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