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Archive for the ‘Email Marketing’ Category

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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