The Direct Approach

Learn To Trust Your Instincts

2009-05-04T07:48:00.007-04:00

Recent personal and professsional experiences have inspired this post, which may slightly resemble a rant.

One of my dogs underwent knee surgery a couple of weeks ago to repair a torn cruciate ligament; when my husband and I picked him up, we knew right away something wasn't right and he shouldn't have been released from the vet's. But it was a weekend, and we were told that everything we were concerned about could also be normal in a recovering pooch. Our guts kept telling us something was wrong, and sure enough when we finally saw the surgeon again several days later, he took one look at our dog and agreed with us. Our poor guy had to have a second surgery and ended up suffering needlessly for several days.

On the professional front, I've been comparing some advertising results for a client for several different sites. While I've previously discussed the difference between clicks and click-throughs and why you will see discrepancies, sometimes the discrepancies jump out at you enough to question them.

This is the case with one particular site. The client's tracking system and the vendor's show very different numbers for clicks and click-throughs, as high as 150% or more when you start to break down the data week by week. A discrepancy of this size immediately set off alarm bells in my head... and my client's.

We've been back and forth with the vendor numerous times, and after iniitally discounting us, they are now taking us seriously. Given this is the only site of many we're on showing this discrepancy, it's clear that something isn't working. Whether it's the client's or vendor's tracking system remains to be seen, but both parties now agree that this must get resolved because something is amiss.

The moral of this story? Trust your judgment. You have good instincts when it comes to things you know - like your website. If something doesn't feel right, question it. Keep on doing so until you feel satisfied with the answers you're receiving. My husband and I should have pushed more (and sooner) with our dog, but we were out of our element - we didn't know enough about the subject, so just trusted what others said. At the end of the day, he's our dog, we know him best, and while we may not have known what exactly was wrong, we knew something was, and it turns out we were right.

The same can be said for my client who knows the number of click-throughs they normally get from advertising campaigns, and the types of discrepancies they normally see between their tracking system and a vendor one. They aren't giving up until this is sorted out because the discrepancy is large enough to make or break this campaign (on this one site) for them. It will determine whether or not they advertise with them again in the future. So until we know for sure, we're going to keep digging and keep questioning.

As G.I. Joe says.. "Knowing is half the battle."

Photo Credit: Stuant63; Flickr

Why Shorter Newsletters are a Win-Win for Everyone

2009-04-23T10:38:00.009-04:00

Skimming a new site that launched today - Association Jam - which basically is a niche Digg-style website for associations and non-profits (a brilliant idea from the folks at Wild Apricot!) - I found a favourited post discussing three trends that beg for shorter emails.

While the post is geared towards non-profits, the points raised really are transferrable across almost every industry.

In this age of information overload, microblogging (i.e Twitter) and other social media tools, email newsletters need to be freshened up. Gone are the days of creating long-winded newsletters with all the articles and information right there in the body.

Newsletters should be short and provide clear direction for what action you want people to take. They should also provide options; while you can segment your audience and send targeted newsletters to certain groups (clients vs. prospects, etc.), it doesn't mean everyone is still interested in the same articles or information.

Writing your newsletter topics like Twitter posts or Facebook statuses - giving a description in small chunks with a link to view more for those interested - is a way to not overwhelm your audience.

As Kivi pointed out in her post, "everyone has a desire to achieve inbox 0 these days," so the less overwhelming you can make an email, the better. The easier it is for people to click through on a link and then take some sort of action (like bookmarking or sharing the story) brings your newsletter in the social media age and provides valuable insight.

If you're tracking your newsletters, links, word of mouth mentions (using alerts and searches and so on) you'll be able to see how far and wide some of your newsletter articles go. This will help you get a better sense of what kinds of articles you should be including in your newsletter and ultimately make your newsletter even more attuned to your subscribers.

How to Optimize Your Online Ad Campaign On a Budget

2009-04-14T12:09:00.005-04:00

Often when the topic of optimizing your online advertising campaign comes up, you might think of it in terms of changing or tweaking the actual ad creative which can sometimes be costly.

Here's three tips for campaign optimization that don't involve creative changes to help keep things fresh and your budget in check.

Using your Analytics systems, check click and conversion metrics for:

1. Best performing sizes
Sometimes certin sizes or types of ads may perform differently than you expect. For example, box ads may be placed at the top, middle or bottom of the page on the site. If you know your ads are on the bottom, there's a chance that the box ad may not perform as well for you as another ad unit (or vice versa). Shift impressions to the ad unit that performs the best from a combined click-through and conversion standpoint. Keep in mind not all ads units will cost the same price, so you will need to weigh that in your decision but if you notice a signficant enough difference in response rates, fewer impressions with more conversions wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing.

2. Best performing placement
While Run of Site or homepage placements may be cheaper, perhaps they get lost in the noise and don't get the kind of click-through (or conversion) rates you're seeing for more targeted placements (on the same site). Really review each placement to see if there is a difference. The more targeted the placement, the more it often costs. Maybe your ad gets great response rates without the targeting - shifting those impressions to ROS would end up stretching your dollar and your campaign as you could potentially run your ad longer. But you'll never know unless you're tracking individual placement responses for both click and conversion rates.

3. Frequency caps
Unless you're sponsoring a placement, running a roadblock or have 100% share of voice, you may want to consider capping the number of times a user can see your ads. This can be particularly effective when you have ROS placements or are running on sites that get a lot of repeat visitors. Working with your agency or the site, get them to place a cap between 3-5 views per user on your ads. Over time, compare the click-through rates and see if they increase, you might be surprised at what you find. I've had clients who have suddenly seen their click-through rates jump enough to continue running advertisements with the site in question. You'll want to use your analytics system to review results and you may need to play with that 3-5 range to find the number that works best for you. Frequency capping shouldn't cost any extra money and it's a way to improve the life span of your campaign, and potentially reach more unique eyeballs.

Some of the above mentioned optimizations are difficult to do if you have just sent one creative tag for tracking purposes. It's important to think about all the different ad placements and sizes on each site up front and to create separate ad tags for each one before the ads are trafficked to the website.

While this creates more work up front, it will allow you to track your campaign accurtely and really learn which site, placement, size or execution is working for you. Relying only on site reporting may not give you the most accurate results as every site and ad server may track things differently. You'll want to make sure you're using one tool to benchmark and compare the data equally.

You'll often notice that when looking at the data, the results vary by site. This is to be expected and as a result of minute differences in visitor profiles and behaviour. You should make sure that before making any blanket decisions you have looked at the data by site as well to make sure any performance generalizing statements you make aren't the result of one or two sites in particular.

Understanding what works well for each site will help you run the right kind of ads to the right kind of audiences, thus increasing your clicks and your conversions, without spending huge sums of money.

Photo Credit: Woodsy Stock.Xchng

How To Use Filters In Google Analytics To Remove Your Own Data

2009-03-20T08:11:00.007-04:00

The following guest post is from Rajeev Edmonds, also known as mintblogger. His blog was one of my favourites long before I got to know him through the Authority Blogger Forum. His vast technical knowledge of what you can do with Google Blogger and Google Analytics definitely surpasses my own. Today he discusses how to properly use filters in GA to exclude your own internal data (among other things). Enjoy!
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Are you happy you've met the traffic goals at the end of the month? Hold on, the data displayed on your Analytics dashboard also includes the internal traffic (visits from staff/internal office network) on your web site. You may have hired some web developers living on the other side of the globe working on your web site. What about their visits while they work on your site? Their visits are also counted in your traffic. So, are you getting the true picture of actual number of genuine visitors coming to your site?

Here comes the role of filters that can be used to exclude visits from specific sources on your web site. Power users are able to harness the true power of filters with the help of custom regular expressions. In our case, we will see how to exclude visits from selective sources so that they do not count in our traffic statistics.

Excluding visits from a network

Let's assume your company has two offices in different locations. One network has the IP range of 3.67.232.1 to 3.67.232.189 and the other has the IP range of 10.17.115.1 to 10.17.115.137. Now you want to exclude all visits from these two networks to get a better estimate about the actual number of visitors coming to your web site.

To achieve this, simply create a filter as shown below. I'm assuming you are currently in your Analytics dashboard.

1. Go to Analytics Settings -> Filter Manager -> Add Filter.
2. Give an appropriate name to the filter (for exp: ABC Inc Internal Traffic).
3. Select 'Exclude all traffic from an IP address' from the drop down list of Filter type option.
4. Now for first IP range our regular expression will be:

^3\.67\.232\.([1-9][1-9][0-9]1([0-8][0-9]))$

For second IP range, the regular expression will be:

^10\.17\.115\.([1-9][1-9][0-9]1([0-2][0-9]3[0-7]))$

For specifying more than one range, we have to separate both expressions with a '' pipe symbol. So the final expression becomes:

^3\.67\.232\.([1-9][1-9][0-9]1([0-8][0-9]))$^10\.17\.115\.([1-9][1-9][0-9]1([0-2][0-9]3[0-7]))$

Write this regular expression in the IP address field. If you find it difficult to create these expressions for your IP range, here is a handy tool to create regular expressions for a given IP range.

Note: In Google Analytics, the maximum allowable length of a regular expression is 255 characters. If your company has large number of networks, you have may have to create several filters to accommodate all IP ranges.

5. Next, you have to select the web site profiles on which this filter should be applied. Select the sites from the left side table and click Add >>. Click Save Changes to complete the filter creation process.

Now all visits from these networks will not be counted in your traffic and you will be able to get a better and clearer picture about the actual performance of your web site.

Excluding visit from a single IP

To reduce the complexity, I'm not discussing about excluding traffic from dynamic IP addresses. The process of excluding traffic from a single IP is same as shown above. All the steps are the same except the regular expression. Suppose, you want to exclude all traffic from IP address 10.31.119.45.

The regular expression for this IP will be 10\.31\.119\.45

Regular Expression Primer

The table shown below will help you in experimenting and creating your own regular expressions.

? -match zero or one of the previous item
. (dot) -match any single character
() -remember contents of parenthesis as item
- -create a range in a list
* -match zero or more of the previous item
-or
^ -match to the beginning of the field
$ -match to the end of the field
[] -match one item in this list
+ -match one or more of the previous item
\ -escape any of the above

If you are hungry for more, here is an excellent tutorial to learn regular expressions for Google Analytics. So what are you waiting for? Go ahead and use this extremely powerful feature of Google Analytics.

Omniture to Add Twitter Tracking Options to SiteCatalyst

2009-03-16T08:15:00.006-04:00

I'm probably a little late to the party on posting this news, but because I've not always been kind to Omniture, and since I think this could be a great new tracking tool, I've got to share it.

A recent article in Internet Marketing News states that Omniture is going to start tracking Twitter conversations for their customers.

From what I gather, it will work similarily to something like Google alerts, allowing you to create a report alerting you to talk of simple words and phrases. It can be set up to send real-time alerts to email or SMS services so that you can be well aware as to what people are saying about your brand as it happens.

What I like about this is that it can be incorporated into their reporting, allowing you the user the ability to take it all in context. You can compare the number of conversations (good or bad) that occured on a given day or time, against the number of traffic you get from the Twitter site.

Not only are you now beginning to get a one-stop shop for all your tracking and monitoring needs, as the article further points out, users will have an unlimited number of keywords to track, which means besides your brand, you could track your competitors as well. Gathering almost real-time intelligence and being ready to jump on any kind of feedback that occurs is vital in such a competitive market, and kudos to Omniture for being the (one of - if not the) first to attempt it in this capacity.

What an Ultrasound Can Teach You About Your Data

2009-03-10T11:39:00.007-04:00

As per my last post, yup, I'm pregnant, and it's funny how going for something as simple as an ultrasound can trigger an idea for a blog post.

You see, I'm 21 weeks now and already had my second-trimester ultrasound at around 19 weeks. Unfortunately, the baby played shy and they didn't get a good enough view of all the things they needed to, so I had to go back for another ultrasound. What a difference a couple of weeks make! The baby was much more developed, and thankfully much more cooperative.

Now you might be wondering what redoing an ultrasound has to do with your data - but I promise you there is method to my madness.

You see, perhaps you've just launched your site, or a new campaign, and you eagerly go in to your analytics system and check your data. Perhaps the early results you look at suggest things are going swimmingly - or pehaps they suggest the opposite.

Just like my first ultrasound was a little too early to get really good pictures, sometimes a first look at your data can be too early to know the full story. The first data check can give you an indicaition of how things are going, but maybe you haven't given the data enough time to mature and tell you that story.

If you're doing an advertising campaign, then chances are you will get a good sense of how things are progressing sooner rather than later, but if you've just launched a site and perhaps don't have a huge marketing budget to promote it, you might need to wait a little longer. You might find the first check shows minimal results, but then a mention somewhere gives you an unanticipated traffic boost.

Here are five simple tips to better analyze your data:

1. Set timeframes for data checks (daily/weekly/monthly - depends on what it is you're doing and how much traffic you anticipate) and create benchmarks or goals for each data check.

2. Don't be afraid to adjust the set goals once you've got some results under your belt.

3. Loweing your goals isn't a bad thing if that's what it calls for - but try to find the answers as to why you need to do so (too aggressive, unrealistic, smaller niche, not getting as many ad impressions as originally thought, etc.)

4. Look for a story - Data always has a story to tell, good or bad. You just need to look hard enough to figure out what that story is and how it is relevant to your site or business.

5. Learn from the results. Don't just look at them and leave them alone, optimize where you can, or if you can't optimize currently, write out points for the future of what you will do differently (or keep the same) based on the results.

Photo Credit: Konr4d; Stock.Xchng

Analytics Explained for Mom Bloggers

2009-03-05T20:35:00.008-05:00

For those of you who don't yet know, I'm actually expecting my first child this July. Which means that I'll soon be a part of another community, the powerful network of mom bloggers.

I've already started dipping my toe into the waters of mom blogging by being a bi-weekly contributor to the Baby Bargainista Column on Eden Spodek's Bargainista Blog.

And last week I was interviewed by Mom Blogger extraordinaire and co-host of the Profitable Mommy Blogging podcast, April Tara

We discussed the basics of web analytics, everything from defining what a visitor is to how to understand your stats and evaluating traffic to your blog.

While aimed at mom bloggers, it really is applicable to anyone trying to understand the world of analytics, especially those relatively new to blogging or web analytics.

You can hear the whole 40 minute show here and because we ran out of time, be sure to check the site in the next few days for my follow up guest post, giving my thoughts on Google PageRank and Alexa.

Clicks vs. Click Throughs and Why You Need to Understand the Difference

2009-02-26T10:00:00.008-05:00

If you run advertising campaigns, you should be receiving reports from the publisher's ad serving software/company showing you the number of impressions your ad received, as well as the number of clicks.

This information can be valuable to you as you decide whether or not to proceed with additional ad campaigns with said vendors. But what is a click, really? For vendors and ad-serving comapnies, a click can include the following:

1. People who click through to your website
2. Spiders/bots/webcrawlers trolling the net to index information and links
3. People who clicked on your ad (by accident) and realized that wasn't the action they wanted to take and closed things down before actually visiting your site
4. Fraudulent click activities - which end up being a combination of automated clicking devices/ip addresses who never make it to your site

As you can see there are a lot of instances where a click may not be an actual click and may be inflatign your results. This is where the click-through comes in.

A click-through is exactly what it sounds like - someone has clicked on your ad and landed on your (campaign landing) page.

It can be kind of tricky to get this information, as it requires you to have your own tracking system in place that allows you to place your own click tags in your ads (as well as those from the ad serving company/publisher.) It also requires you to have the ability to place tracking code on your site to tell when someone has clicked through from an ad.

Generally speaking, if you sit down with your IT and marketing teams, you should be able to figure out a way to do this - especially if you are using some sort of paid tracking software/system.

Did you know that the variance between clicks and click-throughs can differ as much as 30-50% in some cases? Every tracking system will be different and there will always be discrepancies between data sources, but normally you look for a less than 10% differnce.

Paid Search advertisers seem to have the lowest data discrepancies, and that is because they have long since instituted double tracking and didn't stand for the difference between clicks and click-throughs, especially because paid search is billed on a cost-per-click basis. This forced serving companies/software systems to pay attention and fix the discrepancies quickly in order to avoid losing money.

However, in banner advertising, most programs run on a Cost per Thousand (CPM) impressions basis, so it's advantageous to the publisher to show lots of clicks and not worry about fixing any potential discrepancies. For anyone who is running banner advertising campaigns on a CPC basis, I strongly recommend you ensure there is a second tracking option in place for you to compare the numbers.

Perhaps it's time to stop and take a second look at your advertising campaign and see how it's really doing.

Photo Credit: iamwahid; Stock.Xchng

A Recap of Tweetdeck's Latest Update: Version 0.21.5b

2009-02-16T07:00:00.002-05:00

I'm a huge fan of the Twitter application Tweetdeck . Tweetdeck essentiatlly helps organize the often chaotic social networking site to save you time. It does this by allowing you to keep track of your followers by putting their tweets into digestable groups, among other things. One of the biggest challenges of Tweetdeck was the amount of API it sometimes sucked up if you tried to do too much in the interface and weren't managing the number of API calls you asked the application to make in an hour.

The latest version 0.21.5b not only provides measures to address these API concerns, but adds an entire other layer to the time-saving features offered. Included below is a list of the major enhancements that I've been able to notice with this version. To see these in action, check out this great video tutorial by non-proft social media consultant John Haydon .

Besides the Direct Message, Reply and Retweet options, the biggest, most notable change is that when you mouse over someone's avatar, the 'fourth icon' is now named Other Actions. If you choose this icon, a fly-out navigation menu appears giving you the ability to:

* Email a tweet to somone (Using the default Microsoft email of course)
* Translate the tweet (I clicked on this and nothing happened - so assume it's for non-English tweets)
* Untranslate a tweet (Again nothing happend when I clicked this - but to assume again, I imagine it's to undo what you translated)

Other items in the Other Actions drop down include the ability to follow or unfollow someone, Search, View the tweeter's profile, Mark as Read, Delete, Favourite and Add to a Group.

Being able to view the profile and add to a group without the extra clicks should save a few API calls and in general makes the interface that much easier and faster to use. What will save even more of those API calls comes from some new options in the Settings tab. You now have the ability to open profiles in web pages vs. in Tweetdeck - again to save API calls. I think this is really quite brilliant.

Other new setting options include:
* Choose how many tweets to keep in a column (automatically set at 500)
* The ability to hide direct messages after you've sent them or tweets you've marked (when you restart the system)

The other big news that hashtag users will love, is that when you reply to someone who used a hashtag, Tweetdeck now automatically picks up the hashtag and puts in the reply for you. This is just another wonderful time saving measure (and will avoid some typos I'm sure).

I'm thinking there are a least a couple of other new items, so feel free to let me know what I might have missed in this list.

More Omniture News - A partnership with WPP

2009-02-09T09:15:00.001-05:00

Without turning this into an Omniture only blog, it's hard to ignroe additional events/news happening at the company these days.

An article in DM News talks about the recent announcement of a parternship between Omniture and the WPP Group.

Besides WPP investing 25 million into Omniture - which in my opinion is a much-needed investment if Omniture hopes to try and keep up with Google, or shake the recent troubles it's had with unhappy customers and latency issues - there will be an integration of several WPP/ 24/7 Real Media products, like Open AdStream.

This merger recognizes that neither company can afford to let the likes of Google take away their business. It also helps eliminate some of the clutter and duplication amongst web analytics platforms and companies.

It means more sharing and collaboration of tools and technology, which in the long run only benefit those using those applications. It's much better than what either Omniture or Google was doing in terms of buying up companies and technology as it means there are two companies each with their own stakes and reputations on the line if this doesn't work. I think it means everyone will try harder to please the other and again, means those using any of the products should win in the long run.

Of course, I'm sure there will be some interesting techinical glitches along the way, but I find this a very positive annoumcent all around.

Tracking Systems Are Only As Good As The Data They Capture

2009-01-30T10:30:00.004-05:00

Being able to know what visitors to site are doing, and how they behave are really quite important statistics for major companies. Especially if they are able to make changes on the fly and boost conversion rates based on the (near) real-time information that's available.

In fact, most companies pay big bucks for that. Being able to get this real-time data is one reason why free systems like Google can't compete. But what if those systems you pay big bucks for suddenly stop spitting out real-time data? What if it takes a couple days (or longer) for that data to appear? That would make daily optimization nearly impossible.

Well, this is what is happening to those customers of Omniture at present. And as a user of Omniture for a client of mine, I can attest to the fact that data sometimes disappears, or doesn't exist for several days, and then suddenly does as though it was there all along and you just didn't look hard enough.

It makes testing campaigns very difficult, especially when you're trying to give the go-ahead for an ad to go live.

An article in Forbes last week shows that my client isn't the only one facing this challenge. Which is good and bad news. It's good news because we've usually been made to feel like we are the only ones with these issues. The bad news? Poor Omniture; they are really heading up the creek without a paddle.

In a time where Google is heavily ramping up their free systems, and companies are looking to tighten their belts, Omniture can't afford to be losing or misplacing data - even for short periods of time. It doesn't give them much of a leg to stand on when clients ask why they have to pay so much for their services.

I also feel like it raises a few more questions including:

1. Are we expecting too much from data systems?
2. Makes me wonder about those who pay for tracking systems - especially huge sums of money. These troubles kind of make free look good... Don't they?

What the CRTC Can Learn From Email Marketers

2009-01-28T08:20:00.010-05:00

Back in September when Canada's Do Not Call List was announced, I wrote a post outlining some of the major issues that I (and other marketers) saw with it, including the vagueness of the wording itself.

What has actually happened though is probably the biggest backfire in the history of Backfires. Many news outlets, including the Globe and Mail, have reported that those on the list - myself included - have actually had our names and numbers sold to scammers.

You see, it's rather easy to get the list. All marketers have to do is register online and pay a small fee. When they register, as long as they know the format for a business number and the other information they ask, they are immediately accepted. There's NO cross checking that takes place. No confirmation before the list is downloaded.

This means anyone, including those who aren't Canadian - and can't be processed since this is a Canadian law, that applies to Canadians - can get the list and use it to call people.

Which is, unfortuntely, exactly what's taking place. If you take a look in the hundred or so comments you see with the article, you'll notice that most of these calls are ones we all get, the fog-horn cruise and those with call-display numbers of 1234567890.

The problem? It's obvious the CRTC didn't put any checks and balances in place to stop this kind of thing from happening. Again, if you read through the comments, you'll notice several people mention things like seed numbers, data checks and data cleansing - without releasing the information.

This last idea is really the way things should have been handled in the first place. It's the way respectable email marketing is run, so there's no excuse as to why it couldn't work here.

The way it works is that (after all the non-disclosure agreements are signed), the mareketer sends their list to the CRTC, who then 'scrubs' it against their Do Not Call list and sends back the 'cleaned' file. Now, this is the most rudimentary way of doing this. Technology has advanced so much that many of the email companies (and some major computer companies with giant lists) allow online data scrubbing to occur in a secure environment where humans don't actually touch/see the data.

GASP what a concept! If the CRTC had done their homework, or talked with vendors who offer this service, they would see how easily this could be done and is currently done here and in the U.S., where it's the law to have an email DNC and for suppressions to take place when renting lists.

Now Canadians who were told to register in good faith for this list, have no choice but to continue suffering the fate of illegimate marketers phoning them whenever they please.

Photo Credit: Jazza Stock.Xchng

Knowing When to Admit You're Wrong

2009-01-12T08:45:00.001-05:00

It's not often that someone will come right out and say - "You know what? I goofed, I made a mistake, I'm sorry and here's what I'm going to do to fix it."

Yet Vicki Flaugher of SmartWomanGuides.com did just that recently. She sent out an email to her newsletter subscribers that was quite honest, sincere and very apologetic.

The sad news, unfortunately, is I quite apparently stink at newsletters. I have had numerous technical difficulties that have made many of you not receive the newsletters or for them to arrive jumbled. Perhaps you never got one. The problems have been overwhelmingly disappointing to me.

Being a SmartWoman sometimes require you to recognize when you've been whipped. So, it's official - I give up. I am temporarily suspending publication of the SmartWoman Newsletter.

She then went on to outline a plan of how she planned on fixing things, and how a subscriber could continue to get their SmartWoman 'fix' by following Vicki on Twitter or tuning into her radio show on Blog Talk Radio.

Full disclosure: Vicki is a client of mine and I am helping her revamp the newsletter. We talked about setting expectations and about the fact that anyone subscribing to her newsletter was probably wondering what had happened to it. However, we're just in the beginning stages of working together and I didn't tell her to send out that note. Vicki did it all on her own and I was truly impressed when it showed up in my inbox.

I think Vicki's note went a long way to earning credibility with subscribers. It let them know she was aware there was a problem and that her standards wouldn't let it continue any longer. She made a commitment to her subscribers to no longer send out the newsletters until she was confident in them again.

That showed her subscribers she cared about what material is sent to them, and ultimately about the content they received. Being someone who wants to empower the female entrepreneur, Vicki recognized that she could share this learning experience with her readers, and everyone would end up walking away more fulfilled.

Photo Credit: mai05; StockXchng

Holiday Stats Reveal More Than You Realize

2009-01-05T12:03:00.005-05:00

If you're a non-retailer who is not paying attention to your December traffic, then this post is for you. It will tell you why this is the most important time to pay attention to your stats.

Unless you are a retailer, many companies/sites don't often look at their website stats/usage in December as they might find it slightly depressing because numbers are down. Now, this is a big generalization, but is usually the case for non-retailers (if you're a non-profit you're counted with the retailers for the sake of this post since gifts often include charitable donations).

The question is, who comes to your site if you don't have something to sell as a gift (online)? Your loyal customer/reader. The people who come to your site during the holiday season are doing so for one of several reasons.

1. Perhaps they don't celebrate the holidays for religious reasons

2. Perhaps they are tired of looking at Christmas things and want to take a break

3. Perhaps they visit your site often and are the types of customers/readers/visitors you try to attract all throughout the year

Didn't think about that did you? People who come to your site over the holidays are likely the people you are trying to reach all year long. So without the clutter of accidental visitors, take some time and study the paths they take on your site.

What content interests them the most? Are there any patterns or trends you can see from this period and then what about year over year during the same holiday season? You can even compare it to the rest of the year to see how/if that differs and if there are any interesting conclusions you can reach.

Looking at this data just may give you some information to use to base the website decisions for 2009 you're probably fine-tuning at this very moment.

Photo Credit: Kitsos13; Stock.xchng

Why Campaign Visitors Need Their Own Path

2008-12-16T08:31:00.000-05:00

When a prospect lands on your website from an advertising campaign, do you send them on the same path as any other visitor to your website? If you do, you need to think again.

Visitors to your site (especially) from online advertising programs have different mindsets than visitors who come to your site because they are regulars, or took the time to search for something they were interested in which brought them to your website.

Here's what you need to know about (online ad) campaign visitors.

They were in the middle of doing something else first. It was great you caught their attention with your ad and they landed on your site, but remember this: They didn't start out looking for your ad.

Your ad was a distraction from the original task they wanted to complete.

They want to go back to whatever it was they were doing previously, as fast as possible.

You need to understand and accept that.

You do this by making it as easy and painless as possible for them to complete the task you want them to do.

If you were to compare stats between someone who came to your site from an online ad campaign vs. someone who didn't, chances are you would quickly come to see the following:

Campaign visitors are unlikely to go more than 1-2 pages deep on your site, whereas non-campaign visitors are more likely to explore your site and its pages.

Keep this in mind, you need to determine the single-most important action you want an ad campaign visitor to take and focus on helping that user complete that task. Giving them too many options complicates the process and makes it easy for them to bail before getting past step two, so they can get back to what they were doing before.

Anything you can do to speed up the process of completing the step you want them to take (say subscribe to your newsletter) and help them get back to their previous task, will be well received. Chances are they will come back to explore later when you're not just a distraction.

Photo Credit: CanadaKick; Stock.xchng

Twitter Tips Are Like Cottage Cheese

2008-12-12T08:07:00.005-05:00

I’m very excited to announce the first guest post on The Direct Approach – especially when it’s none other than non-profit social media guru John Haydon. John’s a long-time Social Media Consultant and the publisher of CorporateDollar.Org

Twitter tips are like cottage cheese - they should always come with an expiration date.

The viral nature Twitter makes any attempt to differentiate your organization - whether you are a non-profit or a fortune 500 company - with the latest tip obsolete in a matter of days.

So, instead of seeking to differentiate your organization with tactics, go back to your strategy. Understanding the difference between tactics and strategies can unlock a wealth of ideas about using social media.

Here are five ideas from my recent discussions:

1. Use Jott.com, a voice-test translation service to post tweets with your cell phone. It will allow you to stay in the conversation while you pick up your kids from school.
2. Buy a cheap graphic design tool and make your avatar “pop”. I use photoshop elements because it's easy to use and only cost me $49.
3. Include an "interesting fact" on your background - not one about your non-profit, but about you. The folks you converse with will want proof that you’re human. Don’t be scared.
4. If you choose to use an autoresponder (using tweetlater.com), make it human, useful and about the person following you.
5. Create a second Twitter account, to use as a broadcaster about your non-profit.

The take away?

Make up your own Twitter Tips - remember, success depends on who leads, not who follows :-)

Web Analytics - A Few Key Definitions

2008-12-10T19:42:00.009-05:00

I spend a lot of my day focused on data and analytics, and trying to determine the "why" behind actions taken in an online environment. I often forget that not everyone spends their time the same way I do, so I thought I'd take a moment to define a few key analytics measurements and describe when/how they are used or calculated.

Bounce or Exit Rate: The percentage of people who your website from a particular page. They may or may not have completed any actions (or visited other web pages).

Single Access Rate: The percentage of people who visited a particular page and left from that same page and did not complete any actions. This is most useful when looking at campaign landing pages or your home page.

Click Through Rate: Usually used with ad campaigns, a statistic that helps identify the number of people who clicked on a particular link, divided by the number of people who saw it. For ads, it's usually clicks on the ad or link, divided by the number of impressions (or eyeballs). It can also be used on a page to determine the number of people who clicked on links on a particular page divided by the number of total page views of that page. Can be confused or often interchanged with conversion rate.

Conversion Rate: The number of people who completed a desired action based on the total potential audience that could take such an action. For example, if you had 100 people come to your homepage where you really wanted them to register for your newsletter, and 10 people did, your conversion rate would be 10 per cent. This metric often gets confused with click through rate or can be interchanged. In my honest opinion, a conversion rate has to do with actions, or task completion, not just clicking on a link on your campaign landing page. However, if you don't have a newsletter, or perhaps your product is not one people can buy online, this is where many people may use clicks on a specific link also as their conversion rate.

What you might consider in that case is a specific path or journey that you want visitors to take. Ideally, you want them to visit more than one page on your site. Using a path analysis report, you can input the pages that you want people to visit and you will be able to know how many people took that specific journey. To get your conversion rate in this instance, you take the total number of people who took that journey and divide it by the number of people who viewed the page where your journey would start.

Are there any specific metrics that you're not too sure how they are collected, what they showcase or when best to use them? Let me know and I'll be happy to explain them as best I can.

Photo Credit: scataudo; sxc.hu

It's Not Your Brand They Hate - It's Your Actions

2008-12-01T10:00:00.002-05:00

A good friend and I got into a conversation a while back about actions and people. It's not people we like or dislike, it's their actions. It really got me thinking how that can be extended across to brands and products too. If consumers say they don't like you - it's often not your product or brand (unless you really do have a lousy product), but the actions taken on behalf of that product or brand by marketing and advertising campaigns, or people associated with the company.

Let's look at this whole Motrin kerfuffle as a shining example. Motrin is the same product it always was, however, now there are swarms of mothers out there who say they will not use the product again. It has nothing to do with how good or bad the product is; it has to do with a choice that was made to run a specific advertising campaign. Because of this action, it has changed the perception people have of the brand and their feelings towards it.

If you think of the traditional marketing/advertising brief, there's usually some sort of question around, "What do we want the consumer to think/believe after seeing our ad/product?"

And then there are questions around brand perception, asking what people currently tend to think of the brand or product.

If the folks at Motrin were to fill this out now vs. before the campaign, the answers to those questions would look a whole lot different, and if I lived under a rock, I wouldn't know why a good many people have the perception of the brand it now seems they do.

Wouldn't it be interesting to understand why people think the way they do? What "action" took place to put those thoughts in someone's head?

What would happen if you broke down the actions that your company has taken over the last two to five years and started writing down the perceptions of your brand, company or product that people had before and after each action? Yes, I know there are focus groups and brand perception studies that do this now - but do they go to the next level?

What if you began tracking the perceptions against more than ad campaigns - anything you've done (donations, social media presence, etc.) - and began looking for patterns to understand what kinds of actions generally changed consumer's perceptions - whether it be for good or bad... or indifferent.

You could suddenly start making a case for doing - or not doing - any number of things because of how your consumers *should* react (Note: no such thing as a sure thing).

It's not just about asking why, it's about understanding how and why your actions affect others.

Photo Credit: Ralph Atkinson

Get Clicky - Web Analytics Software

2008-11-29T10:00:00.001-05:00

There's been a lot of talk of Google lately and how their Web Analytics is (IMHO) going to take over the world one day. However, I know many people who don't find it very intuitive or user friendly.

Here's an alternative that's deemed great for bloggers and small sites: Clicky

Clicky is a web analyzer that works great with any web site, even Ajax and Flash sites. It was originally targeted towards smaller web sites and blogs because it tracks a high level of detail on every visitor, and these types of sites find this information very interesting.

With many of the same reports as Google, what Clicky offers is a good user experience - especially for those not all that savvy with web analytics. The reports are easy to navigate and use language and terms that are recognizable to all, no matter the level of web analytics knowledge you have.

A gutsy move is that they seem to use a lot of Google tools - such as Google Maps to overlay and show their visitor data, making it apparent that they know where their limits are.

One Clicky feature lets you "track custom data on a per session basis for your visitors. The most common example of this is to automatically name each visitor to your site so that they are identified in your stats by more than just an IP address."

You can then begin to understand what certain visitors are doing on your site. This is something that could be useful to bloggers and small sites, but definitely not plausible for large companies who have a lot of visitors coming to their site.

To be honest, I find it a little Big Brother-esque and I'm not entirely sure what our privacy commissioner up here in Canada would think of this. It seems a little intrusive to me when it's done on an ip address level. I guess it's no different than cookie tracking, though.

They say you can also use it to track ad campaigns, which could be very powerful, but again would only be manageable if you had a small campaign and lots of manpower time.

The downside before you rush out there, Wordpress bloggers, is that Clicky currently isn't recognized as a trusted provider to Wordpress, so the customized tracking is not available as an option if your site is hosted there.

While Clicky has a free service, most of these options are not available with that package, and in fact require you to sign up for the pro level, which is the third level up. It's only $11.99 per month though, so when you compare it to something like Omniture, that's a drop in the bucket.

Personally, I'm a Google gal; that's just my preference when it comes to free tracking tools, although there are other really good ones out there too like Quantcast, and PMetrics to name a couple.

If you find Google Analytics is not for you and you're willing to pay a small monthly fee, Clicky just might be for you.

See a short tutorial posted by a Clicky user on youtube below, or just GetClicky.com for yourself.

Why You should avoid using CSS in Your Emails

2008-11-24T11:28:00.004-05:00

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) are great to use when builing websites or blogs, but no matter how much you want your email newsletter to look like its own mini-website, you shouldn't use CSS in your email design.

Just like every browser is different and contributes to general wonkiness of how things look or function sometimes, every email client is different too.

Popularilty of Blog software that provides you a do-it-yourself approach means that sometimes designers aren't creating email newsletters any more. Don't get me wrong; it's great to see that we've come far enough that this a simple newsletter isn't so scary anymore. It's just time to give a friendly reminder on the difference of website and email design.

While many email clients are beginning to see the light and make alterations to provide CSS (especially inline) support, there are many high-profile ones that don't yet seem to offer this capability (Outlook 2007, Gmail, etc).

Currently, avoiding CSS use in your email newsletters (and many deployment companies won't accept creative with CSS) is the recommended approach. However, there's a group that is hoping to change this one day.

The Email Standards Project is about working with email client developers and the design community to improve web standards support and accessibility in email. The project was formed out of frustration with the inconsistent rendering of HTML emails in major email clients.

Don't believe that CSS shouldn't work in email? This organiation has kindly tested a sample across a variety of email clients to show what works and doesn't work as expected. You can view the screenshots here.

This is one reason why it becomes important to have test accounts and send out test emails with each and every one of the email clients on your newsletter list. Once your newsletter is designed, send out test emails and see how it looks to each client. Determine if you can live with some of the strange nuances that are inevitably going to show up, or whether you should try something else instead.

How to Measure Reach and Quantify Your Social Media Campaigns - Part Four

2008-11-21T10:38:00.006-05:00

This is the last post in my series – How to Measure Reach and Quantify Social Media Campaigns. It’s essentially a listing of tools that you can use to help you monitor and manage all the different streams.

These tools are all free, and it is noted that there are some services out there that you can pay for who will do this for you. This list is intended to help out those folks who either don’t have a budget to pay for monitoring, or for those who still need to convince the budget holders in their organization that social media does/can work and that you need to be more involved.

I’ve tried to also stick with sites that for the most part you don’t need to be heavily involved with/active to and can easily grab the info you need without spending a lot of time there.

Tweetburner: Shortens urls and tells you the number of times a url you shortened was clicked on.

Twitt(url)y: Twitturly is a service for tracking what urls people are talking about as they talk about them on Twitter.

Twitter Search: Lets you search for any conversations taking place based on urls, keywords, or Twitter handles.

BUDurl: This service takes Tweetburner one step further, it allows you to shorten urls and track them across any media.

Google Analytics: Use it to tell what social media sites people are coming from and use the Grease Monkey Plug in to understand what people are doing on your site to promote it outside.

AideRSS: Enter the url of your feed (if you have a blog) and it will return information about the posts, including which how many times they are shared on a variety of social networking sites.

AddThis: If you have an account with AddThis, they will tell you how many times someone used the AddThis feature.

Xinureturns: lets you find out how your (campaign for example) micro/website is doing. Just type in the url and you’ll get tons of stats ranging from search engine optimization (SEO) to social bookmarking and more. Good to look at how your competitors sites are doing too!

Feedburner: Allows you to see how many people are subscribing on average to your feed if you have a blog or podcast. It also allows some simple tracking to understand what people are clicking on and where visitors are coming from and going to.

Technorati: Allows you to see who’s talking about you in their blogs, or find out who is linking to your blog.

Google Blog Search: As above, but I find more comprehensive.

Blog Catalog: As above, but has additional features for sharing and rating.

Blogscope: is an analysis and visualization tool for the blog world, developed by the University of Toronto, allows you to search on keywords to find out what’s happening in the blog world (great for product searches) and when activity spiked.

Google Alert: Create alerts for your name, company, product, campaign and keep track of what’s being aid where.

TweetBeep: The Google Alerts for twitter : Keep track of conversations that mention you, your products, your company, anything! You can even keep track of who's tweeting your website or blog, even if they use a shortened URL (like tinyurl.com).

Spokeo: This is a bit more personal and kind of big brother like. Spokeo monitors 41 different social media sites (and growing) and reports what your friends are doing on each), I’m not sure how to use this effectively for companies yet.

I’m sure I’ve missed a few, so I’d love to hear what other tools you use to help you keep track of what’s going on in the social media space when it comes to your company, product or campaign.

UPDATE: @jowyang tweeted this article this morning with additional monitoring tools that might be of interest! Enjoy, there are a couple of really good ones I indeed did miss.

Photo Credit: Juliaf; Stock.xcng

How to Measure Reach and Quantify Your Social Media Campaigns - Part Three

2008-11-17T22:34:00.011-05:00

Over the course of the last two posts I've established what should be measured and how to go about getting the data. But now you're likely overwhelmed at the ton of numbers you’re left with.

Let's look at your total Reach number, which is the total number of conversations, shares and site visits. For the sake of this post, we'll use the following numbers:

Conversations: 200; Sharing: 300; Site visits 1,500;
Total Reach: 2,000

Remember, this doesn't include any banner-ad visitors or any other measures, just the three identified groups.

Now, what did you spend on your social-media campaign? Well, let's see. What's the social-media campaign? What kinds of things are included?Direct Costs for media (such as Facebook; not banner-ad related, but would include any costs for blogger pitches)
- Agency costs
- Creative costs (Facebook, Twitter profile, website, video, etc.)
- Cost of internal hours for coordination
- Cost of hours for Facebook, Twittering and media monitoring
- Cost of hours for report analysis
- Cost of hours for responding and interaction
- Percentage of product-sample cost (Yes, some of the offline samples should be included as you want people to go online and talk about their sample. You'll have to gauge accordingly based on online product-sample costs for blogger pitches, but I've used 60% here.)
Let's say we're looking at $100,000 as our total cost of these items. Take your total cost and divide that by the total number of people you Reached. It cost you $50 per person you Reached.

Keep in mind this number may be a little bit higher as your total Reach number may not be a unique number since we can't confirm if someone conversed, shared and visited the site. If you want to look at it from an overly cautious way, you can then take the 2,000 Reached and divide that by three (which gives you about 667 or something else if you believe in superstitions). Your cost per person Reached would now be $150. These are two very different numbers, but it's a range that you can begin to use for budgeting.

You'll need to work something out that's right for you based on what you think people are doing or what the numbers tell you. If you have more people sharing than visitors to your website, I'm going to guess that you can safely assume people are doing at least two of the three items.

The point of the matter is that the Reach Formula should be defined campaign to campaign, and that it should evolve depending on the social nature of what is actually taking place.

Eventually, you as a company should be able to benchmark and create your own personal average, and perhaps as an industry if this were tracked. There are some hard numbers that you can put beside it, but for right now, each campaign is different.

If you can go a step further and determine the number of people who took an action that you wanted as a result of getting to the page, you would have your total conversion number. Perhaps you also had a way for people to purchase offline if they quoted a specific code that was only given out in a video... Say you have a conversion rate of 20% of those who landing on the landing page - that gives us 300 conversions and a cost of $334 for each person who converted.

Now, how does that compare to what your company pays for each new customer acquisition (i.e. what is your customer worth in the long run, and therefore what are you willing to spend to get that customer in the first place?)

And how does this compare to what you would normally pay per person to see your message? When you factor in all the associated costs and not just media?

Compare it to the numbers you just created - where does it fit in? Now you should have some pretty compelling numbers one way or the other to either suggest why you need to spend more money or time on the medium, or why you need to improve what you're doing. Or perhaps it's proof that your customers just aren't quite ready for your brand to be in the space.

If the latter is the case, it's not necessary to abandon ship right away; it just might be time to better understand how they want you to interact with them in this space.

The final post in this series will be links to many tools used in the measurement/monitoring of the space now, and will likely be heavy on the Twitter links. If you have any links you think are worth mentioning, please let me know and I'll be happy to include them.

Photo Credit: JuliaF; Sxc.hu

How to Measure Reach and Quantify Your Social Media Campaigns - Part Two

2008-11-14T15:30:00.000-05:00

Part One of this post identified the three main elements that are required to create a Reach formula. I’ll now discuss how to get at each of these numbers.

Conversations/Metrics
This needs to be done through the use of tools and alerts, a lot of searching and a lot of man-hours, at least until someone can automate it. Pick a timeframe to start from, like around a campaign launch, for example.

a. Twitter Search allows you to create a feed for a particular name/comment/word, etc. Don't just think about your Twitter handle here; think about your brand and how customers and clients refer to you, including the name of your campaign or product.

b. Google Alerts Rinse. Repeat as above. Except I find you need to be more specific with this one.

*NoteOnce the first two are set up, it should be a little easier to get that information. For the next two, you will need to pick a timeframe to start from, otherwise you can search a few years back in some cases. Make sure you also copy down the links of the blogs on a separate worksheet.

c. Blog Searches. There's a variety of tools such as Google Blog Search, Blog Search Engine and the Blog Catalog are good examples to start with. You can also use Technorati, but personally I don't find it picks up a lot of things, though it should make the list.

d. Facebook and Myspace: Search for your company or key products. Look for groups listed that have to do with your company or product (and omit internal ones).

Open your spreadsheet and start adding up numbers for each of the four areas within this metric. Include everything in that timeframe and/or related to that campaign or product - even if it's negative, it's still conversation. You can make notes somewhere of the negative stuff and go back to it later to determine how best to address it.

Now that conversation is out of the way, let's look at:
Sharing

Add This is the most simplistic of measurement tools to track where your users are sharing your articles, but it requires the people sharing to use those buttons on your site.

A much more complete option that doesn't rely on people using the share buttons on your site is my new favourite plug in for Google Analytics - GreaseMonkey. Yes the downside is you must have GA and Firefox. I can't sum it up any better than this:

"Not only will it pull the social media metrics right into Google Analytics Content Detail reports automatically, but the icons are interactive."

Depending on which analytic system you use, there may be a plug in for that, or one not too far on the horizon - because you can't beat this in my humble opinion...

Again, grab the information for the entire time frame and total up the number of shares and enter that into your spreadsheet.

Now it's time to play with your Analytics some more.
Visits to your site from a social media site

Make a list of all the social media sites - or sites you consider to be social media.
Then make another list of words found back in the conversation phase that are outside of your traditional SEM budget (this part will get harder as you should be adding in any keywords that your customers use to your SEM campaigns). Now lastly, take your blog list and go through the spreadsheet with all the blog links.

Once you have all that in front of you, it's time to do some digging and report pulling in your analytics system.

a. Find out how many visitors came to your site from each of the social media sites you listed

b. Find out how many people came to your site as a result of the non-SEM keywords (or you can also look at organic traffic for keywords that you're bidding on)

c. How many people visited your site as a result of one of the blogs that talked about you?

Each of those three main areas, conversation, sharing and visits, should now have subtotals. Add them all together and there is your “magic” Reach number. It's not perfect and it's not exact, but it's a pretty good and hopefully impressive picture to paint for your bosses.

The third post in this series will discuss how to begin to quantify these results and determine if your social-media campaign worked - including comparing it to Reach versus your other marketing tactics. I might even be so bold as to offer a formula for ROI calculations, so stay tuned.

Photo Credit: JuliaF; Sxc.hu

How to Measure Reach and Quantify Your Social Media Campaigns - Part One

2008-11-13T08:45:00.000-05:00

This is part one in a series of posts on how to effectively measure Reach and begin to quantify your social-media campaigns. It sounds complicated, looks long and a lot of work. It is. But it's also not as hard as you think because the key here is around social-media campaigns; a time frame, not forever, so theoretically you shouldn't have mounds of data to go through - and if you do, the short answer is your campaign was an overwhelming success.

A special h/t to @JeanAnnVK who asked me this question and forced me to put to paper what I’d been thinking about for a while.

In short, Reach is a term often used by marketing folk to understand how many people saw their campaign. Media planners use a measure of Reach/Frequency to let clients know what they will get for their marketing dollar.

I think it's time that Reach came to play at the social-media table.

Reach as a Formula

The way I see it, there are three main parts to Reach in social media
1. Conversations/Mentions
2. Sharing
3. Visits to your site from a social-media site

A brick and mortar visit is great, but as most in the offline world will tell you, that's really hard to gauge without coupons and promotions, and you can't count on it being reliable.

So how do you get this magic number?

Part Two of this series will discuss and detail the three pieces of the puzzle in determining what your Reach is.

Photo Credit: JuliaF; Sxc.hu

New Website Launch: Butterscotch.com

2008-11-06T09:29:00.010-05:00

Hot off the Twitter presses and described as HGTV meets TechTV, Butterscotch.com is not for techies - it's for the average person who has an interest in technology but doesn't quite get the uber-geek terminology we all use.

"Butterscotch.com is aimed at moms, dads and children who love technology but sometimes think it's too techie. We're here to help people who buy the latest gadgets and then scratch their heads over how to use them to their full potential." - Andy Walker, Executive Producer, butterscotch.com

.With social networking sites like Twitter, going mainstream, it's clear that even your grandma is (going to be) wanting to understand a little more about this stuff.

With a team of individuals on board including Amber MacArthur, I don't see how this can be anything but a brilliant success.

Check out the first episode of "On Deck 1", What is Butterscotch.com below:

Increasing Subscribers is More than Offering Incentives - 5 Tips for Improving the Sign-Up Process

2008-11-05T08:43:00.013-05:00

Marketing Sherpa's 2009 Email Benchmark Guide said to increase opt ins, you should offer real benefits to your potential subcriber. Previous Benchmark Guides have also said that If you can improve your opt-in conversions on your website by 25-40% - which are not uncommon result during design tests - your list will grow significantly and those new names will provide your highest email campaign results.

Incentives can range from special pricing, to promising not to share personal information, or offering a free download. Incentives may increase an individual's interest or intent to sign up, but that won't translate into real numbers if the process is complicated or time-consuming.

Here's five best practices to consider before you begin offering the world to your potential subscribers.

1. Always tell users where they are in the sign up process
** Provide Breadcrumb trails and/or steps/length of time required to complete the form.

** Keep initial registration to one page if possible.

2. Validate email addresses before displaying thank-you pages
** It ensures the user is interested in signing up and not just in getting the incentive offered at the end (which is more a bonus for you).

3. Identify errors to users in a clear and easy to find fashion
** Suggest reasons for the error and show how to correct it.

** Ensure this is placed in an an area where the user is going to be able to locate it easily (i.e. don't put it at the bottom of the page, or make me work to find it).

** Offer suggestions - or even little information buttons next to the required field to show the user how you want them to fill it out - it'll make everyone happy.

4. Speak the user’s language
**Use familiar phrases and concepts when asking for information and ensure consistency in terminology use to avoid user confusion.

** Don't use internal lingo for processes and forms or even short form. If I've never been to your site before - how would I know what you're referring to?

5. Determine what is mandatory and what is optional
**Personal questions – e.g. income, should be considered optional to increase sign up rates.

** At a minimum, ask for first and last names, email address and some sort of geographical question (i.e) country.

** Optional questions include: demographics, interests and asking for secondary email address.

** Ask for more detail once they are a subscriber.

** Approx. 1/3 of users will change their email address every year so giving them an option to edit/add their information on your site is extremely important.

There's many sayings that could sum up this post - such as you can lead a horse to water... The point I'm trying to make is that it doesn't matter how many incentives you have, that's the easy part. First you need to make sure it's easy for people to actually sign up otherwise it doesn't matter what your incentive is.

If this were a top-ten list - what else would you add as a best practice to follow?

Do You Know What Colours Work in Your Advertising?

2008-10-30T15:01:00.007-04:00

Have you ever wondered what colours would look good in your ads? Do you know what the colours behind your logo or brand mean?
About.com has great content explaining what colours mean. Next time you're sitting in your creative director's office you can thoughtfully ask them if they used the colour orange to stumulate emotions or to bridge a gap and see how they answer. Good test to see if they know why they did what they did!

Not sure what colour to make that starburst in your ad? Take a moment and check out COLOURLovers

COLOURlovers gives the people who use color - whether for ad campaigns, product design, or in architectural specification - a place to check out a world of color, compare color palettes...

Because ads are about visual stimulation, colour is/can be very important to your audience. You should be testing a variety of colours in your marketing campaigns to determine what colours perform best for you. Do the same colours perform well both in off and online for you? Have you tested it even?

It's important to understand the role that colour plays in your marketing/advertising efforts and ensure any findings are incorporated in each and every one of your briefs - and how that differs by tactic - if it does.

Photo Credit: November Fresh by Raeanne

Email Marketing Influences Online Purchasers

2008-10-28T12:19:00.007-04:00

In an increasingly troubled market, I think it's important to focus on marketing that works - or at least provides results or great ROI. Email is one of those tactics that is often overlooked or dismissed because of all the spam out there. However, despite all of that spam, people still rely on email marketing. Receiving promotional emails is consistently one of the top-three influencers for online purchasers - based on stats released in a study from eMarketer this past April.

Now of course as you can see in the results, the size of influence depends greatly on age and location, but with that in mind - isn't it time you re-evaluated your email marketing strategy to see if you're providing value as well up/cross selling where you can?

Notice I said providing value first. Value is key to keeping your subscriber numbers up. If you provide value, you can build a relationship and establish some form of credibility with your customers (or potential customers), which means when those promotional emails come out, they are more likely to influence those purchasers.

Google Analytics - Not Just a Toy Any More

2008-10-24T09:00:00.001-04:00

The big excitement in the web analytics world this week was Google's announcement of the changes that took place to their Analytics Software recently.

You can read more detail in some of the posts that have since spawned here and here.

What's most interesting about this is how the big guys must be shaking in their boots. Let's not forget, Google is still free. With these enhancements - especially the advanced segmentation features (I'm drooling), suddenly Google has just entered the major leagues.

Analytics tools like Omniture and Web Trends have been charging tidy sums of money for these kinds of services for years and now they are free.

Let's not forget that the ability to custom reports, more complex data extraction (API) and fun "dancing" bubble charts have always been the claim to fame for some of these companies. It's been their unique and differentiating factor from Google. They could give us something Google couldn't. And implementing these things were so complex that they required huge internal tech team coordination and support staff/client care reps whose job it was to keep you so confused that you didn't think you could live without paying for their services.

Now don't get me wrong, I'm not saying the pay-for analytics models don't have a place or that they aren't any good. In fact, many of these tools still have their own unique factors and still offer much more robust services than Google does - which for the biggest of biggest clients - is definitely required.

But these companies will need to get better at explaining why it costs so much for their services and why you need them vs. the freebie.

For companies - it will become increasingly important to create vendor RFPs designed to understand and evaluate which service or company can best deliver on your analytics objectives and needs.

Looks like times are changing - and with the current economic crisis, I'm inclined to think a lot of the small-mid sized companies are going to be looking long and hard at which analytics system best fits their needs.

Why You Need to Understand Where Your Website Visitors Come From

2008-10-22T19:32:00.010-04:00

Where do your visitors come from? I mean really come from - and I'm not referring to backgrounds or locations. I mean how do they get to your site? It definitely wasn't magic (although we all like to think so now and again).

More likely than not some form of search (paid or organic) is going to be the largest source of traffic. If it's not you have bigger problems that won't be helped byt this post.

But what about after search? What is the biggest source of traffic? Is there one site that stands out on a regular basis? Or perhaps it's a matter of "bookmarked" or "typed" urls (which is basically people opening up their browser and either manually typing in your website, or selecting it from their favourtites).

Whatever that source is - do you give it a second thought? What do you do with that information?

Do you look to see what people do once they land on your site from that particular source? Do they convert? Do they view specific content? What are their habits? Are there any patterns you can identify to help you either provide better content, help them convert or improve your overall marketing experience?

Say they come from website X - should you go spend all of your ad dollars on website X? Maybe. Maybe not. Why wouldn't you spend all your ad dollars on that site? Well back to my earlier question of what do people do when they come to your site? Did visitors from site X convert? Did they do so at a higher or lower ration as compared to your site's average conversion rate?

If you answered yes, then you definitely might want to consider checking out some sort of relationship with that site (if you don't have one), after you investigate what it was that caused your traffic spike and sent people to your site in the first place.

Once you have that information - you can use it to better understand why people are coming to the site, what they are looking for and how you might work with that site owner/pubisher to create valuable content (which can also be in the form of ads) that will continue to not only drive traffic, but keep site X's conversion rates at the same (or higher) levels.

If the conversion rate for visitors from site X was lower than your site's average conversion rate - the question you have to ask is, is it worth it to go spend money and advertise on that site for more traffic that doesn't convert? Perhaps. Again once you know why or how visitors are coming to your site from site X, you can then determine if you think there's a way to improve that conversion rate.

If for whatever reason you decide you don't think you can improve the conversion rate then perhaps you should look at focusing your ad dollars elsewhere - maybe there's another site out there that is providing you less traffic, but a much higher conversion rate. Wouldn't you rather spend your money focused on converting more of these individuals than by driving large numbers of unconverting traffic?

It's not enough anymore to say "Wow site X drives lots of traffic, let's advertise there." Pathing tools available within any analytics system (even the free ones), if set up properly, can start to give you a better understanding of visitor behaviour and help you make more informed advertising decisions, which should increase your ROI and... and... and...

Photo Credit: afreeta; Stock Xchng

Online Ad Measurment: The Shorter the Better

2008-10-20T19:35:00.001-04:00

There really is a reason why publishers insist on animated ads stopping after 15 seconds.

Now I'm not speaking about video ads (with play and pause buttons) which apparently do work better with 30-second clips as per some study results, instead I'm talking about your traditional banner ads that are flash - or video (but look more like flash).

Many sites won't even allow ads more than 15-seconds in length for a variety of reasons including band-width, file size and demand on their resources, but there are some that do (although I think you'll be hard pressed to find any major sites accepting these lengths).

Working with a client on a US-based brand awareness campaign for B2B services, I was reviewing the previous fiscal year online advertising results. I found that a Fall '08 campaign saw expandable ads with some of the creative (flash) at 15 seconds, while others were closer to 30 seconds. The only difference between the two versions were how fast the animation occurred and how smooth it was.

When it came time to refresh Spring creative, the client's agency made sure that the ads were no more than 15 seconds and that the animation and transition of frames were very smooth so as not to run into the same types of problems that they had previously.

Comparing, results, the biggest thing that jumped out at me was that Interaction rates (the proportion of ad viewers who interact with an online ad by rolling and expanding it) jumped by 4% and brand interaction (the amount of time someone was exposed to your brand with the ad expanded) raised by a full second.

The overall theme of the campaign was the same, while it did have a visual refresh (images only), the overall concept was identical, including the wording of the ads - even how the user was asked to expand and interact with the content and how the company referred to themselves. I also checked ad placement, since in some cases accidental roll overs can be included in these rates - the ads were placed in the same sections, and used the same ratio of various ad sizes.

The only real difference was the content itself once interacted with was the main change in the ads, but a user would not know this until they expanded the ad.

I was tasked with explaining why there was such a large difference with the two ads. I had one of two theories:

1) The imagery used was either much more powerful and eye catching, which definitely may be part of the equation

2) The ads simply got to the punch line quicker. Instead of taking nearly 30 seconds to ask someone to interact with the ad, the new ads took no more than 15 seconds.

My money is on the second theory. I'm sure imagery could have had something to do with things and potentially caught someone's eye better than the previous campaign, but what kept the attention and encouraged them to expand when the copy was the same? The fact that the user was asked to interact sooner rather than later

When you think about it, 15 seconds is a massive time difference to a user browsing web content who didn't actually come to the site to see your ad in the first place.

Knowing that you have 10 seconds or less to keep someone on your website, you can apply the same theory in principal to your ads. We know users haven't arrived at the website to see your ad, so it makes sense that you have a little longer than that 10 seconds to capture a user's attention since they first have to spot your ad before you can capture their attention.

My personal recommendation? If you're trying to encourage in-ad interaction make sure that request comes around that 12-second mark for optimal rates. That being said, it's important to remember that testing to determine what works best for your company is always recommended.

Photo Credit: Daino_16; Stock Xchng

What Happens When You Make Subscribers Work

2008-10-16T19:50:00.000-04:00

What happens when you make subscribers work? They get angry.

I can't tell you how frustrating it is to receive an email that I no longer want and realize I can't unsubscribe from without jumping through hoops. Making your email subscribers log in to an account (if they can even remember the appropriate information), find the preferences area so they can then determine what they might be subscribed to - just so they can unsubscribe, takes a whole lot of work.

I have an email account that I rarely check simply because it contains email subscriptions that I can't seem to unsubscribe from because I signed up years ago and quite frankly no longer remember the passwords to get into those accounts. And there seems to be no easy way to figure out how to unsubscribe: sending emails back didn't work.

Sure, I could probably click on the "forgot my password" link and go from there, but honestly - my time is valuable (to me) and that's a whole lot of work just to tell you I don't want to hear from you. In fact, it really makes me quite annoyed. And an annoyed subscriber or customer is not usually a good thing.

It doesn't matter how big your email list is, it's quality over quanity. If you have a large list of annoyed subscribers who can't get off, surely your list isn't valuable to you. If your list isn't valuable to you, then neither are the people on the list. If the people on the list are not valuable to you - then what are you really saying about your current or potential customers/clients?

It's not about keeping subscribers at all costs. Sometimes people just don't want to subscribe any more. If you force me to stay on your list, rest assured I'm going to remember that in a negative way by, say, not giving you my business or telling my friends about it. How's that for Word of Mouth Marketing?

Moral of this post? Please! Make it easy for people to not only sign up to your newsletters (or any other content), but make it just as easy for them to unsubcribe. Feel free to give them the option to tell you why you they want to unsubscribe but don't make it impossible for them to leave you.

Remember that old cliche - if you love something let it go, if it's meant to be it will come back? You can apply that here too.

Photo Credit: Incurable Hippie; Flickr

Colour Me Pink - For October

2008-10-09T09:36:00.004-04:00

Just like most bloggers, I too have gone Pink for October, albeit I am a little late to join the pary.

Any cancer cause is an important one.

What started out as a joke between co-workers, has turned into a wonderful marketing/fund raising/education/awareness program that is taking over the web.

In 2006, the first year for this, 1,500 sites went pink, and 3,000 last year. With the power of social media, there should be thousands of pink sites already, however, I'm listed as the 667th entry.

It's important though for sites that go pink to sign up so they can track their success.

In order for this to get more and more powerful each year, it's important to have the data to back it up and to be able to try and understand where and who they are reaching - a neat little graph on the sign up page shows over 70% of those of us who have signed up are women. But many of my pals on Twitter who are promoting this are men, so I'm left to wonder how accurate the stats really are, since I know there are thouands of sites already pink?

Moral of the post? It's fun to go pink, but to be effective, don't forget to actually count yourself in this worldwide event.

5 Questions to Ask Yourself When Looking at Seasonality Trends

2008-10-02T08:57:00.009-04:00

Are you using your analytics system effectively? If you only think about business when you're reviewing the numbers, then the answer is no.

As the leaves begin to turn colour this year, I find myself thinking back to where I was and what I was doing last year at this time. Let's see: I was engaged and was just striking out on my own from the comfort of a regular paycheck into the whole world of freelancing/consulting. I spent a lot of time wondering whether or not I'd made the right move.

That seems like a lifetime ago. I have zero regrets about my decision to freelance, and am still loving it, but I'm officially married now, have a whole new set of family members, added a kitten to the hubby plus two dog family we have, and spent a whole lot of time renovating our home, which is a whole other tangent for some DIY blog....

Seasonality is a trend that many marketers talk about: how did you do year over year? It's a great question and an important one - but one that sometimes has to be taken into consideration against several other factors.

Sure, you go into your analytics system and can pull data for the same date ranges from last year and this year, and look at the numbers. But what does that tell you? It's just numbers.

You need to look at the numbers in context to what was happening at that time and what was different year to year.

1. Were there any major staffing changes (especially on the web/marketing team or even agencies?)
2. Did you have any product launches?
3. What about marketing campaigns? Did you use the same vehicles? Same time frames? How different was the message and/or the campaign itself?
4. For social media, how were you using it last year versus this year (or were/are you?) Were you even aware of how your company/product was perceived in this regard?
5. What was going on in the world?

At first glance, this last point doesn't have much to do with your business - yet it absolutely has everything to do with your business when you think about it. What happens in the world, even locally, can affect the behaviour of your customers.

Many of my U.S. clients who are either in the financial sector, or have their stocks traded, are noticing a lot more activity on their sites right now. And as much as I'd like to take credit for that, it has nothing to with any marketing campaign; it has to do with what is taking place in the markets and the current financial crisis, which is an important distinction to note when we go back and look at data from last year - or what we plan to look at next year.

It's also a key thing to factor in when setting benchmarks: how will some of these things affect the goals and KPIs you set for your business in the coming year?

Here's where you can use your analytics system to your advantage - most systems give you the ability to make notes or add little flags so you can keep track of any major changes. Here's where many companies fail at using this option effectively. They use this only for business or marketing changes, or in some cases don't use it all, because they think they know or will remember any major changes.

Making notes in the system that correspond to major political changes or happenings, major disasters or even changes that affect your local community if your business isn't national is just as important as noting site redesigns or marketing campaign changes. In fact, noting significant staff changes is not a bad idea either.

The more data you have the better, the more you might be able to start understanding the "why" behind certain things and not just state the facts. There’s a story behind every number, and using your analytics system to look at the bigger picture can help you discover what that story is.

Photo Credit: Ralph Atkinson

Canada's New Do Not Call List - Not So "New."

2008-09-29T08:13:00.009-04:00

We all have stories about that "pesky" telemarketer. My story is about "Boris" who wanted to call and offer me moving services one week, then disguise his voice and offer us cleaning services (I think). If you live in Ontario, you'll likely remember this. Everyone I know in Toronto was called by him at some point!

It's stories like these that excite Consumers about Canada's newDo Not Call List launching today courtesy the Federal Government and the CRTC.

However, this list is not exactly new though. There actually has been a Do Not Contact list around for years, which included a do no call portion, run by the Canadian Marketing Association.

The problem? No one really knew about it unless you knew someone who was a marketer.

There are some key differences and potential advantages with this list now:

1. If you registered with the previous list, only Canadian Marketing Association members were required to use it.
** This meant that non-CMA members didn't have to run their telemarketing lists through this database and could still call you.

2. The federal government is running this one.
** Previously, if you didn't run your list through the old database, there really wasn't anything that could be done to you, at least now you might get some sort of penalty.

3. Promotion. As this list is run by the government/CRTC, there is funding behind getting notice out to the general public about this list and how to register.
** Previously, being an association who ran this list, their primary service was to the members of their association, not the general public, so promoting this list to the public one could argue, was not at the top of their priorities.

Just because you're registered on the list though, doesn't mean you won't get calls. Here's a few things to keep in mind:

1. The list does expire. You will need to register your number every three years.
2. The following groups can still call you even if your phone number is on the list:

-registered charities seeking donations
- newspapers looking for subscriptions
- political parties and their candidates, and
- companies with whom you have an existing commercial relationship; for example, if you have done business with a company in the previous 18 months––such as a carpet-cleaning company––that company can call you.

This last portion is key and I think something already been misconstrued by the media. There is so much hype about "barring telemarketers" from calling you, but as you can see above, it's going to be very easy for companies to use one of the loopholes.

For example, do you remember every company you've had a relationship with in the last 18 months? And what is a relationship defined as?

Now, keep in mind the rules say that these "exempt" companies must also keep their own DNC list and add people to those lists within 31 days when asked. So the onus always comes back to you the consumer to keep on telling people not to call you.

Consumers can get more details about the listhere or can register as of today by going towww.dncl.gc.ca.

The list is being touted as the best thing since sliced bread, but it's really not going to make that much of a difference. Don't get me wrong, the idea behind the list is great, the changes to the management of the list are a step in the right direction, but there are far too many loopholes which will make it very difficult to actually govern.

Oh and those guys like Boris who use the phone book as their list? They'll still call you.

Photo Credit: Picaland; StockXchng

Roadblocking the Way to New Online Ad Measurement

2008-09-28T22:07:00.000-04:00

All forms of banner advertising should be measured with the same yardstick.

That statement couldn't be further from the truth, yet more often than not, this is how things are done.

Roadblocking is not a new term, it's been around in the television space for sometime now and refers to an advertiser buying all of the ad placements within a given media space. In this instance, we're referring to an advertiser who has purchased all the impressions / ad placements on the same page of a particular website during one specific time frame.

Roadblocking is good for things such as campaign launches and general brand awareness as it gets your message out to the masses since it takes over every advertising spot your audience might see as they visit that site/web page. Click through rates for these types of ads are generally found to be low because the impression levels are so high.

Generally speaking, a roadblock has a leaderboard and a skyscraper and a box or rectangle of some kind.

To calculate click through rate for banner ads, you divide your total clicks by your total impressions. So if you get 3 million impressions as part of your roadblock campaign and 100 people click through, your click through rate through rate percentage is 100 divide by 3 million.

Which is completely incorrect.

It should be 100 divided by 1 million.

Each time an ad is shown that counts as an impression. If your ad is showing at the same time as another one of your ads in a different size on the same page, that's also an impression for that ad - which now gives you two total impressions, for one person or set of eyeballs. And if someone were to click through on one of those two ads, that should be a 100 per cent click through rate.

Why?
Because it's physically impossible for someone to click on both ads if served at the same time, yet standard click through rate measurements don't take this into account.

As you evaluate your next online ad campaign, consider these two things:
1. Did you run any roadblocks?
2. Do you know if your ads ever appeared together on the same page at the same time?

If you answered yes to either of these scenarios, then you're actually calculating your click through rate based on a physical impossibility and it's time to see how these banner ads are really doing. You might just be surprised by what you learn.

Photo Credit: iboy_Daniel; Flickr

Email List Rental - Education Still Needed

2008-09-23T22:41:00.007-04:00

I read a great post the other day from Marketing Sherpa about email list rental. Unfortunately the link which is supposed to be open until the 25th of September, seems to have been taken down early. That'll teach me for procrastinating.

It talked about 10 questions to ask and 5 mistakes to avoid.

A quick Google search yielded a similar article with the "10 Golden Rules of Thumb, which is also worth the read.

It got me thinking though that there really isn't enough education about email list rental out there - sure there's lot of talk about email marketing in general, but not the list rental practice and the pros/cons of it all.

Having been a former list broker in another life and still knowing many, education is the number one job of any email list broker - which I will say there is a lot to know and it really depends on where you're wanting to mail into because every country and even state in some cases has it's own SPAM laws so you need to make sure you know this stuff and a good list broker will.

But I digress... Email list rental has been around for years, yet it seems like it constantly gets a bad wrap and that there are so few marketers actually using it to their advantage, or even properly for that matter.

So in light of the inspiration behind the Marketing Sherpa articles, I've compiled some links below that you might find useful. Feel free to add any I've left out. But go ahead - and educate yourself, you might just be surprised at what you learn.

1. Canadian Marketing Associations's Guide to Emarketing
2. Federal Trade Commission's Can-Spam Act for Commercial Emailers
3. One of my previous posts:Email List Rental 101
4. The difference between buying and renting a list

How to Create Pivot Tables and Why Marketers Should Use Them

2008-09-18T08:38:00.000-04:00

I love Pivot tables, yes, love them. They really are a marketer's best friend - once you know how to use them. They make a great tool that will help you organize and then slice and dice data in several different ways for analysis.

Sure you can use traditional methods and sort or filter data, but if you have a lot of data, this can be cumbersome and confusing. A pivot table is a great visual refernce that can be created quickly and most importantly very easily if you know what you're doing.

Many companies use pivot tables, but I'm specifiaclly talking about how to create pivot tables using Microsoft Excel. Pivot Tables aren't something often promoted and aren't the easiest things to figure out initially. But once you know how to use them, you'll look like a pro.

Once you have your data in a spreadsheet (presumably exported from a tracking system) with your data in columns, with appropriate named headers you can begin. Preferably, it's best not have any other data in the document that you don't want in the pivot table. Don't worry about any formulas like CTR that you might need, you can insert those later in an instant.

Click into the top left hand of the file (i.e A1). Now from the data menu, find and select your pivot table option:

You will next be presented with the format screen. Standard options are ok, so just click Next. You will now be asked for your data range. Ideally if you've followed these steps, all you need to do is click Next. However if you have other data you don't want in the table in the document. Reselect your povot table range. Note: If you are not in the uppermost left corner to start, the program often can't recognize what you're trying to do and may give you an error message.

Now you're asked where you want to put this file - in the same sheet, or a new one. Make sure you choose the new sheet, otherwise as you play with the data, you may run into issues with your original data. Don't click Next just yet! You'll want to set up (or partialy set up) your layout. Once you clicked the layout option you'll be presented with a screen that looks like this:

On the right-hand side you will see your column headers, these are fields that can be dragged and dropped into various field layouts. I've used an example for online advertising here. Ideally if I want to look at how my ads did per site, I will drag and drop the "website" field into the "Row" area. From there, I'll be choosing the data I want to see in the data column. I've chosen and dragged impressions there now. Now I click OK and then finish. And voila, I get something that looks like this:

I can now see how many impressions I've had by website. But what if I want to see impressions and clicks? Simply drag the clicks box over to the data area. Hmmm This doesn't look right does it? It's stacked it on top of one another. How do I lay it out in columns? You will need to click on the "name" of the column header (in this case, "Sum of Clicks") until you see the "movable" four-way arrow. Drag and drop. As you pick up the column, you will notice a little "ghost" box appear that looks like your current pivot table layout. The blue area shows where you are proposing to move your field to. You want to move it so that it is in "subhead" box on the right hand side.

Now that looks better. Any other fields you drag and drop over will follow that order/layout so you won't have to do that each and every time.

What if I need to determine what my CTR was and I don't trust my own math/cutting/pasting/manual function skills? Never fear, you can add formulas here, that will repeat for all the data in your column without having to manually do anything once you've entered it in the first place.

Using your Pivot Table Tool Bar, click the Pivot Table drop down menu until you see the Formula option, from there, choose the "calculated" option on the flyout menu.

Follow the instructions, give your formula a name - like CTR, then choose the metrics and formula you need - for example clicks/impressions. Click ok and your new column should appear with all data calculated for you. If it doesn't appear, you'll notice that it is in your pivot table field chooser box and you can simply drag it over.

Ok - great, so what you say? I can do this with a data sort and manul adds. Of course, but what you can do now - especially if you had a lot more data to work with - placement on page, targeting options, etc etc - is drag and drop various fields to show the data's performance. For example, maybe I don't want the "row" area to have "websites" as the filter option. Perhaps I want to see which ad size did best? And Maybe I want to view which ad size did best by which vendor -well I'll now add vendor as a second option to the "row" area and voila, I have each ad size showing which publisher ran what and how it performed.

I can now start to optimize my media plans with my agencies/media teams/publisher based on how something is performing pretty quickly and efficiently. I can mix and match different combinations without having to change formulas or layouts.

What I can't do is format the pivot table itself - otherwise the formatting would mess up every time I wanted to change it. So you'll need to get the combination you want, and then do a simple copy and paste in another worksheet and format for size, colour, shading etc as you see fit.

In terms of the column names, the default is "sum of" so that you will get totals, you can change the "field name" to remove sum within the pivot table, but I prefer to do it in the worksheet as I format other areas. The reason is that I can also choose my field settings, in case I need to show averages of my data, counts or other functions for those numbers.

As you can see, I've barely touched the basics here on how to create Pivot Tables, there's all kinds of customization and tips/tricks you can learn. I suggest watching the Demo from Microsoft itself.

Pivot tables are a wonderful way to sort and filter your data easily which allows you to look at your data in many different ways. You can really use it to start looking deeper and trying to find patterns or trends, even seasonality comparisons.

Put simply, pivot tables hep make the world of data analysis a lot less scary.

TweetBurner, a Multi-Tasking Marketer's Best Friend

2008-09-15T23:07:00.004-04:00

I came across a fabulous new tool today called TweetBurner that does two things at once for you. It is a url shortner and a tracking system.

Given I discovered this through another site, you can read the post - which also has a short video tutorial on how to get started on The Black Tech Report. I want to talk about the benefit of TweetBurner.

The beauty of this tool is that it now adds in a measurement function to this thing called Twitter. Sure Analytics systems can tell you that people arrived on your site from Twitter, but to really be able to analyze which links in which tweets are the most popular? This is a marketer's dream come true. It's also the quantifiable reason that you can use to tell your boss or cient they should be on Twitter.

It can even be positioned as a test - and once you know what people are clicking on (or if they are not) you can make a decision on how to proceed with Twitter usage and/or have a better understanding of what is engaging your customers (or potential customers).

Sure the number of followers is a great metric, but besides a popularity contest, what does it really tell you? Just because I follow you, doesn't mean I read all your updates. With Tweetburner you can easily combine the task of shortening those way-too-long-for-Twitter urls and tracking user engagement at the same time.

I can't wait to give it a try.

The Stories that Analytics can tell you

2008-09-11T08:54:00.000-04:00

What do visitors do when they visit your website. Where do they go? Do they start an applicaton form or register for something right away? How much time do visitors spend on your website? Do they come back often?

These are all stories that an analytics system can tell you and these are important questions to answer if you want to determine what kinds of content should be on your site.

If people are not registering, or there are small numbers registering you need to ask yourself why that is. It's one of two reasons.

1. They haven't found your registration
2. The content isn't compelling enough to encourage subscriptions

So how do you figure this out?

Well you look for the angle, the hook, the story your analytics system is telling you. Can you understand exactly why? Maybe, maybe not. But what you can do is dig deeper.

Hopefully your analytics system employs a fall out path reporting structure, if it does, this may become your best friend.

You can use thise type of report to determine exactly where in the process people are falling off. Once you have an idea - or several ideas, you can begin determining how to fix it. Is it a particular page - a particular set of questions? Maybe it's whether something is mandatory (income field for example), or a way a question might be worded.

You can begin testing several different scenarios out and seeing what improves registration rates. In some cases you may see results right away, in other cases it make take time and several different tests before you begin to see an improvement, but again your analytics system will be able to help you compare the previous results to the new results and look not only for improvements, but other changes that might take place as a result of these changes.

That old cliche - Knowing is half the battle - works well here.

Photo Credit: Ulrick / Stock.xchng

Looking Beyond the Click Through Rate

2008-09-05T08:00:00.003-04:00

I'm often asked how do you know if an online ad was successful? Well many times you don't know for sure. You can make some assumptions based on what was important to you and your organization at the time you created the ad, to measure or gauge the effectiveness it had at meeting the goals you set.

For example, if the number of people seeing your ad and coming to your site is important, than click through rates are an important metric for you. BUT in this day and age, with click through rates falling faster than Chicken Little can yell the sky is falling, that's probably not your best metric. After all what does it really tell you? Okay, so someone came to your site. Big whoop.

Did they do anything? Did they sign up for anything? Did they accidentally click and wind up on your site? You don't really know that do you? And there isn't really a way to find out unless you hunt down and ask those people specifically.

So how can you tell if an ad was effetive or worked?

First - ask yourself the question of what you expect/want people to do when they see that ad online

Once you have that figured out you can start to devise a measurement strategy around that specific goal (or goals).

It might include things like signing up for a newsletter - so you would track how many people signed up (not just arrived at the newsletter page) after viewing the ad, this would likely need to be done by using a cookie or something along those lines and can/should be worked out between your ad serving company and your IT department.

If you took it one step further and had mirrored tracking links set up for each creative execution, size and even publisher (perhaps placement even), you'd be able to analyze how each version performed and determine if big boxes or leaderboards in creative A worked better and which sites got you the most registrations - or perhaps had the best ROI based on cost of media/number of subscribers.

Suddenly you can now tell a story to your stakeholders, your sales people and so on. You now know what is beginning to drive those subscriptions. Just think if you started testing the colour of the ad background, the placement of the click here etc. what you could learn about your advertising for a fraction of the cost of a print ad test.

A story is much more compelling than a click through rate. A story (usually) has a point, if not at least a beginning, a middle and an end. A CTR is just a number.

It's also OK to have different measurement goals for different campaigns - or even multiple goals that are all measured with completely separate benchmarks. Using the same yard stick to measure everything you do doesn't really work for much of anything - especially online advertising, so isn't it time you shook things up and looked beyond the click through rate?

Photo Credit: miamiamia Stock.xchng

The New Age of Viral

2008-09-03T21:10:00.000-04:00

Wathcing the Olympics brought up something that I'd been thinking about for a while now. We keep hearing clients ask us how to make campaigns viral - which as we all know you can't "make" something viral, but you can provide the tools to help people share what they see on the web or elsewhere.

However in my opinion, I think "social media" has really evolved this whole concept of sharing and taken it one step further, Case in point the 2008 Oympics.

My husband and I were out for dinner one night recently and discussing how much I had enjoyed watching the Oympics while I worked - from my computer. I was one of those who streamed it live from CBC (approximately 300,000 streams per day though final figures aren't in) and then "tweeted" what was happening as it happened.

Another case in point is the 2008 US Presidential election and what live tweeting for example is doing to spread the word about these things. For example I have to thank my fellow tweeters @conniecrosby and@typeamom for keeping me posted so I could kick my hubby off the tv in time to hear the Republician VP candidate speak tonight.

It's things like this that have made me realize how much things have changed and yet how they've stayed the same. If you have something that is worth talking about or worthy of being shared - it will be - that's never going to change. What has changed now is the scale and the pace of how fast it can be shared and your or your client's ability to react to how fast something does get picked up.

This is why it's vitally important to make sure you have someone in your company monitoring all of of these tools and sharing devices - you need to know in hurry if something went well or didn't go well. What is the public saying? I guarantee you tonight that Palin campaign folks are keeping track of what is being said on Facebook and Twitter and I'll bet already have the speech writers retorting certain points that have been brought up.

No longer does anyone have the luxury of just putting something out there and seeing where it goes. You no longer need to pound the pavement to know if people are talking about it. Open your eyes and turn on your computer you'll find out if you're being talked about.... I mean just think about Youtube and what ends up there on a daily basis.

Photo Credit: svilen001/www.sxc.hu

Coming out of Hibernation

2008-08-25T07:47:00.003-04:00

Time really does fly. It's hard for me to believe that I've been married for a month and a half and that the summer is almost (gasp) over. I feel even worse when I realize how little attention my blog got. However, I know I made the right choice for me by putting my blog on hiatus for a while.

Sure I have a bunch of people yelling at me right now about lost subscribers, Google Juice and so on. But that can be rebuilt, like friends, if my subscribers are loyal, they will follow again when they know I'm updating. I took the time for me to develop as a person and start a new chapter in my life.

I'd rather have lost the traffic than put out a product/post that was quite simply crap. I've had some time to reflect over the summer and have a few posts in the back of my mind waiting to come out.

I plan to start the fall on a fresh note and really focus my blog's attention more towards email marketing and analytics, the areas where I truly believe my passion lies. Sure a social media or search or (name the niche) type online marketing post may pop in here and there, but for the most part, I want my relaunch after "coming out of hibernation" to be something that provokes thought, discussion and more importantly, provides honest advice and tips/tricks to maybe, just maybe help you better your email marketing or analytics programs.

I've answered the age old question of whether or not I'll change my name profressionally and I think I will as quite frankly I have too much else on the go to think about which name to use when :) - so start thinking of me as Mrs. Rebecca Atkinson from now on.

Hope everyone had a happy, healthy and wonderously joyous summer. You can always email to get a link to pictures from the wedding and honeymoon at rebecca dot muller at rogers dot com (email will be last thing I change).

Officially on Vacation

2008-07-06T23:09:00.002-04:00

Thanks to everyone for their Twitter messages and emails letting me know it's okay to have a life - especially when blogging is for fun and not for the job.

This is just official notice of my hiatus until early August when I come back to blogging as a married woman.

Thanks for all the well wishes and to those who've asked of course there will be pictures posted including those from the Canary Islands during our honeymoon for you to see just not on the blog. Send me a note and I'll send you a link.

Enjoy the rest of July everyone!
-Rebecca

Guest Posters or an Extended Summer Vacation?

2008-06-17T08:01:00.003-04:00

It has been on my mind for some time that I have not been posting as often as I want to or had been. I didn't have a schedule, but I generally found I tried to post at least three times a week; more if I had lots to say.

However, over the last month or so I've not posted anywhere near as much and if my Feedburner stats are any indication, you the audience are leaving me because of it.

I think I have some very valid reasons for not posting as much - Among other things, I happen to getting married in about three weeks from now. Between trying to make it to the finish line for that, and trying to tie up projects before the wedding and impending honeymoon, there hasn't been a lot of spare time. To make matters worse, my fiance and I really wanted to finish some major home renovations we had going on before the wedding, so for the last three months every additional spare moment has been spent gutting and rebuilding our office, as well as a bunch of other projects. We have about two more small projects left and at this point we're thinking we bit off a lot more than we can chew since we're both pretty burnt out.

So long story short - readers I ask you, do you want to see some guest posters? Or would you be okay with my blog taking a vacation during the month of July? If you want to see guest posters - would you be willing to post?

While I try to stick to web analytic and email type topics, this blog has been known to branch out into several areas of online marketing and advertising - so if I think your subject matter is good and relevant to the readers of this blog, then I'll be happy to have it posted.

May Must Reads

2008-06-11T22:01:00.003-04:00

Well I must say I'm terribly behind in getting these up. Unfortunately when blogging is just a personal thing, it's the thing that gets put at the bottom of the list when one gets busy. Between a hectic work schedule some sick pets and planning a wedding, there simply hasn't been enough time in the day to focus on my blog. I want to give a huge thanks to everyone who helped me out with this post and sent links and suggestions, much appreciated. Without further ado - here's the must reads of May as myself and readers saw it.

1. Help a Reporter - Get Free Media Exposure courtesy of Wild Apricot. While this post focuses a little more on a PR/Non-profit angle, it's still a great read with many points to remember for anyone trying to market something.

2. What is Gateway blogging? Read Remarkablogger's post which is a 101 on the methods and techniques to help further your business's objectives through blogging of course.

3. Chris Garrett's post on Understanding New Media Tactics and Interactions is an excellent post - I can't sum it up any better than he has with this quote

Understanding where certain tactics fit can be the difference between going nowhere and going viral.

4. A new featured blog for me this time around is Justin Foster's Brand Milita blog. The post that stood out for me this month was all in the subhead which captured my attention and kept me reading until the end.

The worst thing you can do to an idea is to do a poor job of communicating it.

Doesn't that grab you? Read on.

5. It seems like the theme of these posts this month are going back to the basics on some things, so what better way to round out this month's top-five than by having you read this post from freelancer Kristen King explaining Advertising for Dummies - Why proofreading is Essential for Business Success.

Until next month...

Blogger's Choice - I Want to Hear from You

2008-05-26T11:26:00.003-04:00

Yes you. I want to know what you think!

May has been an incredibly busy month for me both personally and professionally, so I admit I have not spent as much time as I'd like to have staying in touch with the blogosphere.

Given the end of May is fast approaching and I need to start putting together my May must read posts on Web Marketing topics, I'm going to do something a little different this month and ask for reader input.

What was your favourite post you've read this month? Drop me a comment, or send me an email at rebecca dot muller at rogers dot come and I'll compile them together and post for June 2.

NOTE: shameless self promotion not encouraged unless this is truly the best blog post you've ever written

All entries should be in by June 1.

Happy blogging and... Thanks a bunch for your help.

Photo Credit: Rebecca Muller with a guest appearance by Maddie, a.k.a Twitter Kitty

Security Logos Increase Trust and Conversions

2008-05-13T08:30:00.000-04:00

One of, if not the biggest issues for website visitors today is security. We all wonder how secure is the data we give the website we're visiting - especially if it involves making a purchase or even a donation.

Personally, I look for two things:
1. The little lock in the bottom right-hand corner
2. The url being secure (https vs http).

However, I'm a webbie and the average internet user likely doesn't do that. So what do they look for? A logo. Remember that saying a picture is worth a 1,000 words? Well it looks like it's worth a lot more than that on a website.

A Marketing Sherpa case study presented on May 6, 2006, reported a security-logo test performed by Petco, a national pet supply retailer. The test involved varying the placements of the VeriSign (Hacker Safe) logo across its website to gauge differences in conversion rate gains.

The test outcomes produced the following results:

1. The logo in the lower left corner of the navigation bar resulted in an 8.15 percent increase in conversions.

2. The logo below the footer on the lower right increased conversions only 1.76 percent.

3. The logo on the upper left between the search box and the navigation bar increased conversions 8.83 percent.

The size or spend of the average order didn't change, but by keeping the logo in the upper left-hand side, the number of total orders was nearly 9% higher, thus increasing revenue for what essentially is man-power time and already considered paid for as part of someone's salary (because they pay for Hacker Safe services already).

There's even a quote on the Hacker Safe website from the American Red Cross citing their online donations went up by 14%.

I've even seen some studies (which I can't find) that showed an increase when a logo is placed, but the pages are not actually secure (obviously wasn't me on that website). I definitely don't recommend placing a logo and not making the pages secure because that just opens up a whole can of legal and privacy issues.

What made me write this post is the fact that this study is almost out-dated (approaching two years old) and yet as I think back to the numerous sites I've visited recently - both non-profit and traditional B2C, I really don't remember seeing a logo and in fact have had to check the old-fashioned way of looking for locks and secure protocols.

With these kind of conversion numbers I am really surprised marketers are not taking notice and following these steps to increase trust.

Companies want to build trust with their customers and prospects, and consumers are telling us what they want to see, yet we're still not listening. I gave an example of how I interact with sites and what I look for, but take that marketing hat off for a second and think about what you look for. Have a conversation with your friends and colleagues and ask them what they look for. Chances are you'll all have similar answers. Time to go check your website to see if you do those things.

Remember - marketing and common sense really do go hand in hand sometimes. If you act like a consumer, chances are you'll be able to make some general usability improvements to your website that will improve your overall conversions just by taking off that marketing hat every now and then.

Photo Credit - www.scanalert.com

Customer Service Matters Every Time

2008-05-09T11:42:00.005-04:00

I haven't posted in a while and there's a good reason for that - I've had a very sick dog on my hands and between trying to work and take care of her, my blog took a back seat for a while.

After two weeks of illness and not enough answers to our liking, my fiance and I decided to switch vets and within 24 hours of doing so, we had answers. Our dog had pancreatitis and had the original vet run the proper tests, listened to us as we described symptoms - or even asked questions perhaps they would have diagnosed it too. Because of the lack of listening skills or caring on the part of our original vet, our dog will end up being sick and needlessly suffering for several weeks instead of what could have been one to two weeks with the proper care and attention.

What angered me even more, was when they called to confirm that her records could be sent to the new vet - they didn't even bother asking why or what the problem was, let alone if she was feeling better.

In a time where competition is rampant and customer loyalty matters more and more each day, you need to pay attention to your customers and clients and address concerns as soon as they arise.

You need to listen
You need to ask questions
You need to be able to sense when they are not happy with your product or service

And most importantly

You need to ask your customers why they are leaving so you can learn from your mistakes, grow and improve upon your services and offerings in the future.

Referrals are the biggest source of patients for vets and after this experience you can believe I won't be referring anyone there. In fact pet owners are a tight-knit community and when there's a sick pet they all band together. So this means all my pet-owner friends now know this story and not a single one of them will be referring any one they know to that vet either.

No matter how big or small the service offering, no matter whether it's offered to humans or pets, the moral of this post today is that yes indeed, customer service matters every time.

April's Marketing Blogosphere Must-Read Posts

2008-05-02T10:09:00.001-04:00

It's that time for the top-five must reads (in my own personal opinion) from around the blogosphere for April 2008. Most of the posts I've highlighted this month offer some great advice and tips for how to improve your skills in various social media tactics. So without further ado...

1. BuzzLogic's take on the Media Post Study that said influencers seem to have less "clout." Read how they dug a little deeper and found some flaws in the logic

2. The gender debate continues over on Dave Fleet's blog. "Is there a gender bias in the social media scene?"
Read along as Dave muddles over his position on the subject.

3. Want to know why you are having a harder time getting your articles noticed on social bookmarking sites? Read How we killed social media

4. Struggling to understand why you're not getting too many comments on your blog? Business blogger Michael Martine metaphorically answers that question for you in his post: Jazz blogging - it's the notes you don't play.

5. Many people don't realize there are many types of blog posts out there, and each of them has or meets different objectives. Interactive Freelancer Caroline Middlebrook teaches you about six different types of posts and when to use them in this fantastic post.

The funny thing this month? I had most of these already picked and saved by the second week of April. Talk about a lot of great content this month.

Page Names Matter - Even in Web Analytics

2008-04-22T08:13:00.007-04:00

If you're using any kind of web analytics tool (which if you have a website you should be!), one of the most important things you can do is to tag your pages with page names that are relevant and easy to identify - rather than using or inputting urls.

By doing this, you'll make it easier in the long run on yourself and your marketing company/person/agency.

Sure your current team may understand everything inside out and can tell you what campaign landing page every little coded url actually is; which fine and dandy for now. But every organization goes through things like employee changes, campaign changes, even site redesigns or changes of analytics platforms. When there's a changing of the guard so to speak, you lose all of that knowledge whether it be a person or system change. Suddenly there's a steeper learning curve for everyone involved when you have to decipher or decode what the previous system or person created and how it might actually have been done.

Having your pages listed by page name, helps consistency and allows for proper comparisons of apples to apples as your web team, marketing team and even IT teams will always be on the same page. This also means less time spent, which should equal a more productive team in the long run.

If you're worried that this hasn't been done yet and you're not sure how fast you can get someone to retag/name all of your pages, another option to consider is having a legend created and documenting how pages were tagged, what the rules were and how to decode things. That will help especially if you ever change the analytics system you use, as just like people, most tools have different ways of interpreting and creating the same reports. Either way, this is likely something good to have on hand as you never know when you might need it.

Why You Should Always Include Source Identifiers In Your Email Marketing

2008-04-17T08:03:00.004-04:00

Have you ever received an email that indicated you were receiving this email because you asked to? which you promptly looked at and said "Um when and where?" And then hit delete because you didn't believe, or remember signing up for the email? Enough said. That's the number one reason why you should include source identifiers in your email messages. And if you're a responsible marketer you are already doing this. But perhaps you could improve your statement slightly?

Reminding someone exactly why they are receiving the email right off the bat (as in at the top of the email) with very specific information builds credibility and trust. If you tell me that I am receiving this email because I asked to when I went to xyz website or abc magazine then I am more likely to believe you (if you're not lying and have a credible website/brand name; but that's a whole other can of worms). Just think when getting physical mail in their mailbox, what's the first thing most people do? They look to see who the sender is. If they know the sender, they are likely to open the mail sooner than that from someone they don't know (I'm generalizing here of course).

If you need a better reason than the one I just listed, then know this - it's best practice - and beyond that, it's required for Canadian Marketing Association Members:

The identification of the sender and source of the e-mail must be clearly and obviously specified. Whenever possible it should be placed in that part of the e-mail that is visible without scrolling. Requiring that both the marketer and the source of the e-mail must be clearly identified gives consumers greater ability to control the amount of e-mail they receive.

For more information on Canadian email best practices, please read the CMA's Guide to Email Marketing.

Why Marketing and Exercise Have a lot in Common

2008-04-15T07:40:00.007-04:00

Yesterday I started a 90 day workout - called P90X .

Outside of trying to sell you the supplements and equipment, one of the things the Intro video does mention are the forums that you can register for/visit. These forums allow you to talk to other people who are doing the program, and in some cases perhaps those who start at the same time as you. It got me to thinking how exercise and marketing are kind of similar in some ways.

Exercise is about motivation (at least for me). I need to be motivated (I am getting married) and I need someone to push me (I have a next door neighbour who I am doing this with); but it made me think of how exercise can be like branding.

1. Many consumers need a reason (motivation) to use/try/purchase a particular product.

2. Many consumers will follow what their peers are doing and if someone they know says they like it, or want to try it, they just might give it a try too.

3.As a brand even if your product is good, you need to persevere and continue to get your message out, just like I need to persevere to ensure I follow this 90-day workout plan.

4. If the consumer sees results with the product, they are going to continue with it, just like if I notice my clothes fitting better, it will help me stick with this program.

5. Having a place to go to discuss the product with others helps spread the word and learn more about the product and it's benefits - such as with the online forums or community that this workout program has built.

Perhaps exercise is good for more than your health. If marketers spend some time thinking about how the two are alike, it becomes easy to get both your marketing program and yourself in better shape.

Photo Credit: Stock.xchng/lusi

Should You Care About Click Through Rates Still?

2008-04-09T09:55:00.006-04:00

The Click-through rate has always been considered an important metric in online advertising. It essentially tells you how many visitors came to your site from a particular online marketing effort (e.g email newsletter).

It used to be that it was a highly regarded metric and deemed one of, if not the most (debatable), important metrics you had to measure the effectiveness of your online campaigns.

But what does a click-through really mean? It means someone came to your site. Okay. So what? What then?

1. Did they leave?
2. Did they buy something?
3. Did they spend a lot of time on the site? If so, what pages were they most interested in?
4. Do you even know what they did?

It is no longer enough just to look at your click through rate to determine if your campaign is a success. You need to ensure that you tie all of your marketing efforts in with some kind of analytics tool (e.g Google Analytics is free) so you can understand "beyond the click."

So a home page takeover ad drove hundreds of clicks - did that mean anything? Some say brand awareness. If everyone stayed and perused the site after clicking, perhaps, but if everyone immediately left - staying on the site for less than 10 seconds, is that really brand awareness? Maybe, but was that the objective of your ad/campaign?

I'm not saying the CTR is no longer important, it's obviously an important part of the equation as it gives you an idea of the audience size you're dealing with.

But from there, you need to ask yourself "Self, What did I want people to do once they got to my site?"

Use your analytics tools to find out if they did indeed do whatever it is you wanted them to do, and from there you can judge the true effectiveness of your online advertising campaigns.

It's time to stop judging your online campaigns in a silo. Work with all your marketing teams and advertising companies to fit the pieces of the puzzle together and start to tell the story beyond the click through rate.

Photo Credit: stock.xchng/telly

Personalizing Emails - What You Need to Think About

2008-04-04T10:28:00.015-04:00

Email personalization is a great topic for discussion. In fact, it's one so huge, that one could probably write a novel, so I will try to stick to the basic points and not get off topic (too much).

First of all, I think many people often confuse segmentation and personalization. These two words do go hand in hand, but should not be interchanged as though they mean the same thing. Here's some quick definitions from Dictionary.com.

Segmentation
Division into segments.

Personalization
To make personal, as by applying a general statement to oneself.
To ascribe personal qualities to; personify.

Can you do one without the other? Sure, but will it be effective? I don't know.

As I was researching for this post, I read an article from Carl Bloom and Associates that quoted MarketingSherpa's Ann Holland on the topic of personalization in emails:

Ann Holland of research publishing firm, MarketingSherpa, writes, “any personalization is good personalization.” In her company’s newest report, “Email Marketing Benchmark Guide 2006,” the publisher reports that 70% of marketers are personalizing their email campaigns by using the recipient’s name in the body of the email. Even this simple form of personalization yields higher open rates and click-through rates.

I have to wonder about this yielding to higher open rates and click-through rates (I can see the CTR). If I have my preview pane on, fine; perhaps I can see that my name is in the body. But if my preview pane is off, how do I know the email is personalized? I have to think that there are also other factors at play in terms of the coincidence in higher open rates. But I digress.

Here's a great example of personalization gone bad, shared by rjleaman as a comment from an earlier post of mine Three Ways to Improve Your Email Marketing:

...if you're going to 'personalize' your pitch, make sure your mail-merge program does what it's supposed to do." I remember getting a donation request from a major charity that seemed to regard all Atlantic Provinces as one -- so all references to "at home, right in your own community" ended up being about a city in an entirely different province. Did I feel moved to donate?

This is an example of a company that likely personalized, but didn't segment their database properly or simply didn't know their Canadian geography. Either way, if you're going to try and make your emails personal and touch the reader, you better make sure you get your facts straight, otherwise it goes from personal to ignorant in a hurry.

Segmenting your data and sending customized content that is therefore personalized to a specific audience is an excellent idea, and if done right, can definitely improve your overall emarketing ROI, and even improve time management skills.

It also works well for event organizers who have the same event going on in different cities at different times. If you've segmented your database correctly, you can send one email that has variables for time/date/location information so that your event registrants can have all of their details in one handy-dandy little place and you haven't risked carpal-tunnel syndrome and several hours of your volunteers’ time by asking them to send out one email per city.

However, personalization everywhere is not the key for everything. Many people who sign up for things often put a first initial or initial dot last name. So if you are trying to send out a nicely personalized email to Dear First Name, think again. Better check your data before you get the kind of email that drives me batty. Last time I checked my name was Rebecca, not R.

Spend the time to go through the data and look for any names with two or less characters.

You do want to check the difference between first initial dot and say Ed or Al don't you? No? Okay, then at least do a blanket catch-all form of personalization for people whose first name field has two or less characters (or better yet - how about none?)

I also think that it is important to differentiate personalization in comparison to the type of email marketing. If you're doing a rented email list, I have to say, personalization probably isn't the best thing to do. After all, wouldn't you be creeped out if a marketer you didn't have a relationship with was suddenly sending you a very personalized email?

If as a brand you have valued/trusted relationships (or at least think you do) with your customers, then by all means personalize your emails; it might make me feel warm and fuzzy and more likely to click through because you are in fact talking to and not at me. But as a prospect, you won't earn my trust if you send me an email claiming to know about me and my personal likes and dislikes.

Moral of this lengthy post? If you want to personalize your emails, put together a plan of action. Determine who/how and where personalization will occur, and most importantly, think of all the silly, obvious goof-ups you get (a la Dear Donald Duck) and put provisions in place to deal with them. After all you don't want to be that company, do you?

Photo Credit: stock.xchng/kveselyte

The Marketing Blogosphere - Must Reads from March

2008-03-28T10:16:00.013-04:00

March came in like a lion and out like a lamb while everyone was preparing for April Fool's it seems. Here's my favourite March posts from the blogosphere.
1. Chris Brown, author of Branding and Marketing reviewed an interesting tool that helps you to get the most out of your headlines. It assigns scores to your headline based on its emotional, intellectual and spiritual appeal. Here's how to Improve your Readership by Measuring your Headlines

2. Considering a mobile marketing strategy? Then, Phil Barrett's post on the CMA blog - 7 Things you Should Know about the Mobile Web is a must read.

3. With new tools and trends today that are going tomorrow - do you wonder,
What will be the next Twitter by Ian Muir over on Media Bulls Eye It's a good review of several tools including Friend Feed as marketers are already trying to figure out the "What's next?"

4. Sharon Hurley Hall's Adding Glue to Online Relationships is an excellent discussion for those with virtual clients.

5. Brian Tenehouse on the CMA blog again (two months in a row!). This one has nothing to do with web marketing, but deserves to be here because it's fun and a great reality check. I have to admit I couldn't "Name that Spot"

What I love about some of these posts - is that I first found out about them on Twitter, so thanks to my fellow Tweeters who keep posting these, and please keep sharing great finds.

Three Ways to Improve your Email Marketing

2008-03-27T14:45:00.015-04:00

I receive a number of business and consumer email newsletters, some of which I open as soon as they come in, others that I file away for later reading or because there's something useful I think I might need down the road, and many of which I often delete without reading unfortunately (I'm sure I'm not alone in these habits either). Here are three simple things to think about that, if done right, could help improve your email marketing efforts and hopefully have your newsletters fall into one of the first two categories above when they land in your customer’s inboxes.

Segment Your Data

Not everyone is the same, and not everyone wants to read the same information. If you know enough about your customers and prospects, segment your data and send out separate newsletters with content that speaks to a certain type of audience. If you can't do this for whatever reason (time, resources, budget), try at least using different subject lines that speak to a certain article or topic covered that each different audience group would be interested in – even if there's no difference in newsletter layout or information.

Set Benchmarks For Your Company, then Compare Them to the Industry Standards

What is it that you want people to do when they read your newsletter? Buy something? Click to the site? Visit an ad? Determine your newsletter’s objectives and then review your previous stats against those objectives. Determine your average statistical numbers for those objectives and set your own benchmarks. Then worry about what your competitors and the industry say. Once you have your own affairs in order and know what is "good" for you, you can then set up to improve – and you never know, perhaps you'll find you're doing better than you realized. In any case, the important thing is to learn. Walk before you run.

Write Shorter Copy

Yes, people are busy, and yes, studies show people tend to skim or scan versus read every word on a web page, but in my opinion, that's not the "main" reason you should write shorter copy. Don't you want people to visit your website? Write little snippits that make it easy for scanners, and entices people to click through to your website. After all, you have other great content or reasons you want them to stay on your site and surf around, right? Right. If you give your readers everything in the newsletter, there's no reason for them to really click through to your website, now is there?

*Photo Credit: simonok/Stock.xchng

What Your Data Can Do For You

2008-03-25T09:10:00.006-04:00

Having some sort of Website Analytics on your site is one of the most important things you can do and should be one of the first things you ensure is implemented (in my opinion).

But once it's there - then what? It captures data, lots of data, so much so that it is very easy to be overwhelmed by it all and not know what to do with it.

First thing first - figure out what you want the data to do for you. Data can tell many different stories and provide valuable insights to how people interact with your site.

Before you look at the data, create a list of questions you have about your site. Then set about creating reports that will (hopefully) provide information at the very least, if not full-fledged answers to those questions so you can begin to tell the story of your site.

Here's a few simple questions to get you started.

1. What are the top five most popular pages on my site?
2. What are the lowest trafficked pages on my site?
3. How long do people spend on my site on average, how does that compare to the time spent on the top five pages?
4. What's the average user path someone takes on my site (this should be a sequence of pages that are visited in certain order by multiple people)
5. What is the one thing that people do most on my site (this would be for sites who have interactivity of some sort - anything from shopping carts to contact us links)?

Once you get answers to these five simple questions, you can see that you will already have the beginning of a story to tell about what happens on your site. Once you start getting familiar with the basics, you can start layering in deeper questions by playing with various settings in your analytics tools (e.g. comparison to certain time frames).

Understanding data and your site analytics is only scary and overwhelming if you let it be. If you start with small manageable chunks, you'll see that you don't have to be a rocket scientist to understand what takes place there.

Of course, this is only the tip of the iceberg and as you start playing with your analytics tools, you should consider reviewing the tutorials they may have available, as I've only scratched the surface here of what your data can do for you.

*Photo Credit: lusi/Stock.xchng

Ask Your Customers if You Should be in the Social Media Space

2008-03-19T13:21:00.010-04:00

Ever wonder how you know if your company should be taking part in the latest and greatest Internet Marketing trends like Facebook, Twitter and other social media/networking sites and tools?

Well, there are a couple approaches you could take. First, you could just try it and see if it works. The only problem with that is getting into these ventures can be costly and very time consuming so it's not exactly the recommended approach.

Research is your friend. Sure, there are lots of sites/companies out there that give market research (like Emarketer) and facts and figures on these trends and tools, as well your general target audience. These can be great indicators that you should be looking more heavily into these types of things.

Your best bet? Just ask your customers. The people you want to reach likely have similar likes and dislikes to those of your current customers, so why not mine those customers for information?

The general market research you're bound to find online is going to give you basic information — for example, the number of people who have Facebook accounts. But just because they have an account, doesn't mean they use the site to its full potential or that this is a viable place for you to be advertising.

Create a survey that could be put on your site, or included in your e-newsletters that asks your customers about their habits.

* Do they spend time on social networking sites like Facebook?
* If so, what do they do there? Do they play games, participate in groups?
* Do they actively follow people on Twitter?
* If so, how many people do they follow and how many followers do they have?

Asking deeper questions allows you to understand exactly how they use these sites and tools, which gives you the answers you need when you're deciding whether or not to partake in these types of advertising and marketing opportunities. This information will lend itself to marketing strategies that provide the proof you need to get that elusive sign-off on marketing budgets to get your company in this space.

The more information you have, the better informed your marketing decisions will be, which should ultimately lead to better marketing plans, and better ROI.

Get Cracking at Adding Tools for Sharing to your Campaigns

2008-03-18T11:59:00.014-04:00

I saw this great TV commercial the other day that reminded me of a Twitter conversation taking place about mismatched socks spawned from blog posts by so you wannabe a Domestik Goddess and Bargainista.

What was the commercial? It was an ad for the Egg Farmers of Ontario. You can view it here. I loved the ad, even though I'm not the target market (moms). I immediately wanted to share it with my Twitter pals having the sock discussion but realized that the ad didn't have a url, which meant I could only share it, if I could find it.

I was quickly able to guess that it was probably from the Get Cracking website, which is some good branding by the way — don't change your url.

Once I arrived at the site, I was able to see that the ad was there and learned that they were trying to engage mothers by asking them to share their thoughts: "As a mom, what does ‘it's okay to be real’ mean to you?" and to provide their favourite "real" moments.

What a great campaign with legs for a fabulous viral aspect. Unfortunately, it hasn't been set up for success.

Sure there are some boxes where you can forward the pages to friends. But where was the url in the TV ad? Relying on people's memories is not the best thing to do. Why didn't the TV ad engage and excite viewers to visit the website and share their stories? That's such a great drive to get traffic to the site — and continue the momentum of a great commercial. Talk about a missed opportunity.

The other major things lacking from this campaign are social media tools. The video should have links right in it to embed into popular applications like Facebook YouTube and even book-marking sites like Digg. You should be able to forward the video from the video player/page itself rather than from a link further down the page once you've answered the other questions.

You can’t make something viral (as many of my industry peers and I say over and over again). But it makes it a lot easier for something to passed along if you provide the tools that make the sharing experience seamless and integrated.

Oh, and my favourite line from the commercial? “Mom, you don’t have to fold the napkin fancy; I just roll it into a ball.”

Listening To Your Audience

2008-03-14T16:03:00.005-04:00

All too often marketers and agencies tell people what they should think or who they should target. It's not often that you find marketers and agencies who listen to what the people say and then create something based on what's happening on the Internet. Which in this day and age of social media is something we should all be doing more of.

Recently Mediapost highlighted a company and agency that did just that though.

In December DogCars, a site dedicated to reviewing cars from a pet-friendly angle, announced that Honda's Element was DogCar of the Year.

Honda and their agency took that bit of information and created an ad campaign that shows the car's features from the perspective of a dog (and it's owner). The multimedia campaign includes print, online, tv and video . A massive undertaking to spend on what some might see as a small percentage of the population (which being a dog owner myself I think is actually larger than most imagine).

They've even created an interactive website targeted to Pet lovers of every kind to showcase the car's features. Unfortunately it doesn't work so well in Firefox, but that's a whole other can of worms.

It's about time companies and their agencies really started scouring the web (among other places) to see what is being said about their brand and learn when to jump on a great opportunity band-wagon when they see one.

Well done Honda.

The Canadian Tire Saga Continues

2008-03-14T14:31:00.000-04:00

UPDATE March 14/08: A $100 gift card arrived today via registered mail. Am I still disappointed? Yes at the overall experience. Am I going to look a gift horse in the mouth? No. This shall be the last post on this subject. I am appreciative of the gift card, just not as appreciative of the service received to get to this point. I am curious though if everyone received this card, which if so - I must say is a nice show of goodwill. Or perhaps I was one of the loudest complainers. Who knows. If anyone else experienced this, I'd love to get an update - or even a comment/response from someone on the CT team.
***************
March 12/08
I think everyone must be getting sick of this - I know I'm starting to be, but I promised an update and as much as I'd like to say this story has a happy ending, I've been unfortunately disappointed yet again.

For those of you following me on Twitter you'll know that I received an email from a business analyst at Canadian Tire who came across my blog posts and wanted to help. I was pleasantly surprised, it was obvious he cared about my experience with the brand and wanted to try and change it, even though he didn't have anything to do with the gift registry program.

We exchanged a few emails and he even went so far as personally contacting the gift registry manager to send them the original emails I'd sent along with my blog posts. He told me someone would be getting back in touch with me shortly. I was starting to think that perhaps the world was good again and that there had been some sort of little glitch somewhere that was going to be fixed. Most importantly, I was starting to feel valued as a customer again. Companies need more employees like this guy who contacted me. I applaud him. He's been the best experience I've had with the brand to date.

I then waited, and waited some more. Then late Friday afternoon(more than 24 hours after my initial conversation with the business analyst), I received in my inbox two automated emails that thanked me for each of my original emails and advised that due to a high volume of emails someone would be in touch with me soon. I was then provided a tracking number, a 1800 number and it was signed "Canadian Tire Customer Service Representative." Underneath that, they had included the special coding for what type of automated message to send me...

2-English - Auto Response Message (From Jan 4th and beyond)

Those who understand email marketing know you should either turn that notification off, bury it by using multiple hard returns, or put it in white text or something so your reader doesn't see it. Sure deflated my earlier feelings of being a valued customer to know that everyone who sent a note after January 4th got this message.

I then immediately got a third email that was from the Associate Marketing Manager for the gift registry. It again thanked me for my emails, said my comments were forwarded to the team and indicated that it was a difficult decision for them to make, but they felt it was no longer feasible to continue the registry program. It then told me my gift was being mailed and it would arrive by the end of this coming week.

Disappointment set in. No phone call, no explanation as to why it took so long for auto-responder emails to arrive, and nothing that really addressed what I've expressed in my posts. And then to make matters worse, the email was signed with a first initial and last name only and that was it. There was no, please call me if you want to discuss or here's how to reach me. It was cold. It wasn't warm and friendly or personal. I now realize it too came from a generic email address. Big mistake. You're telling me the Associate Marketing Manager doesn't have a real email address and responds to me from a generic registry email? By not including their actual first name, or contact details I have to wonder if it was actually written by someone else instead just pretending to be a more senior person.

I responded to the email (not having realized I was simply sending to another generic email addy) asking questions about why there was a delay in the emails and if there was a glitch in the system or what it might have been so I could explain this to my blog readers and hopefully make good of the situation. I sent this email on Monday. I've yet to hear back and there's no other contact information in the email for me to reach this first initial, last name manager.

Given the fact that the emails came one after another within minutes of each other - I have to wonder what the problem actually was? A broken email deployment system that hadn't been checked? Or perhaps it's a manual deployment every time someone responds. If so - it certainly isn't checked on a regular basis.

At the end of the day, they (Canadian Tire) just don't get it - it's not about the gift anymore (though I really wouldn't be averse to that snowblower). It's about making me feel like a valued customer. I may be a homeowner and consequently started forming my brand opinions years ago, but there are many others who at this important life-event stage are just forming relationships with brands and companies. Relationships that could last a lifetime. People who are the future of Canadian Tire's business and to treat us with cold, impersonal emails that don't actually explain or address our concerns in a timely fashion is just plain wrong.

As a proud Canadian I try to support Canadian companies when I can, however, I like most others, enjoy being treated like a valued customer who matters to a company. In this case, I feel like nothing but a number and outside of this business analyst, don't feel like the company cares whether I give them my business or not. So if you really feel that way Canadian Tire, I'm happy to shop elsewhere.

How to Improve the Customer Service Experience (or Third Time is not the Charm)

2008-03-05T15:57:00.007-05:00

Rather than make this a rant-and-rave post (which it is, no matter how you slice it), I'm going to try and make this productive for other marketers.

This is an update to the series of Canadian Tire posts regarding the company’s decision to close its version of a gift registry — Celebration Station.

I've blogged before that company representatives had indicated I would receive a gift 2-4 weeks after confirming my address with them. It's now been more than six weeks and there's been no gift and no further communication. This despite two attempts to contact them via the email address provided for gift registry questions. I even pointed them in the direction of my posts and indicated that I had readers asking for updates.

Quite frankly, I'm appalled at their lack of communication. So if you plan on removing a service you offer your customers, here are a few points to remember:

1. Have a detailed plan in place about how you're going to go about removing the service and what you're going to replace it with (if anything), and detail how you plan on addressing it to your customers.

2. Chances are if someone hears you're going to discontinue something, that is when the product/service will be in full demand. So if you plan on offering a gift or some form of tangible apology offer to your customers, make sure you can fulfill them by adding 40% to your calculation of the number of items you think you need. If you have extra, it can be a great chance to hold a contest for your customers — or even employees for the number of complaints they are likely to have to deal with over this decision.

3. Appoint one person to take point on all communications received (phone calls, emails and monitoring of social networks and blogs etc.) Have a team designed to deal with anything that comes up and prepare a contact strategy that includes a time line for getting back to individuals — and stick to it.

4. Consider changing your telephone on-hold messaging to address concerns customers may have with this change in your offering. Create automated email responses to be sent back to those customers who send you an email. State the time lines you've created (and yes, buffer slightly) for getting back to people so they know their email didn't get lost in some cyberspace vacuum.

5.Care. Care what people are saying and make sure your staff cares too. If neither you nor they do, then you have bigger problems that can't be addressed by this post.

All in all, if your customers think you care about them and their feelings, chances are they are going to be a little more accepting of issues you might have meeting promises you've given them. They may not like it, but I have to say that if I had any communication from Canadian Tire in all of this after the initial “so long, we're closing” email, this probably wouldn't be my third blog post about the situation.

The Marketing Blogosphere - Must Reads

2008-03-03T15:54:00.007-05:00

It's hard to keep track of the numerous blogs and newsletters we all read to stay abreast in this industry, so I thought I might start putting up a few posts that were must reads for me, each month. By all means, feel free to let me know if I missed something, as I'm always interested in finding and reading new blogs.

They should ideally be marketing (digital) focused, but given that we all have many other interests - feel free to add something that is really great outside that realm as long it is something you feel you just have to share.

Here's Februrary's list (in no particular order).
1. The Decline (and rise) of the Creative Brief from Bryan Tenenhouse over on the CMA's Blog

2. Joseph Jaffe's post - A classic bad pitch is a great pick me up for those days when you need a good laugh.

3. The rhetorical question of Kelly Rusk from Sitebrand's Persuasive e-Marketing Blog asking Why is customer experience lost in email marketing?

4. For a new twist on the PR/Social Media debate that's never going to die, check out Brian Solis's post asking: Should PR Agencies Blog?. Make sure to read the comments on this one definitely.

5. I admit this is probably one of my favourite blogs so choosing one post per month willlikely be hard - but given this is a blog.. Number five rings in with Jeremiah Owyang's post The Importance of Blogging.

Happy Reading.

*h/t to Tamera for pointing me in the direction of Jeremiah's blog.

Ford Canada's Online Social Networking Community

2008-02-28T10:52:00.006-05:00

MediaPost's Marketing Daily enewsletter contained an article today about Ford of Canada's newest "brand ambassador" campaign.

It's the company’s biggest marketing push in six years and is all about online community and user-generated content. Fordpoweredbyyou.ca is essentially a discussion/board forum that allows you to share and discuss content on three main areas: technology, environment and design.

It’s also included links to the most popular social networking sites (Digg, Del.icio.us and Facebook for easier sharing with peers.

Since I'm marrying an automotive journalist, I have to say the site definitely grabbed my attention and I will be very curious to see what the other half says about it tonight when I show him (unless he already knows).

Ford has made it quite clear to users that it wants this to be a site for them, while still understanding the cardinal rule of social networking is to facilitate and participate in the conversation as well. The statement on the home page appears as follows:

WELCOME TO FORDPOWEREDBYYOU.CA This site is powered by you – literally. You are the engine that drives it – and your ideas, dialogue, and opinions are the fuel. True, the chassis is built by us, Ford of Canada. But we’re handing over the keys. It’s not our site. It’s yours. You talk. About design, technology, and the environment – areas where automotive culture merges with everyday life. It’s what our powered by you contributors will write about, sparking dialogue and debate. We’ll listen, and occasionally participate, but from here on – the discussions and debates on this site are all powered by you.

One thing that I think they could have done better with the site is the Members’ login area. Currently the sign-up process is very simple (which is a plus), but doesn't require you to confirm which country you live in. Yes, this is .ca domain, but that doesn't stop you if you're not a Canuck from visiting the site. I'd like to have seen Ford spend just a little more time (only a couple more questions) understanding who its audience/members are so it can make sure when it needs to facilitate conversation, it knows how and whom to speak to precisely.

The only question in my mind is sustainability. Ford will be launching six weeks of television spots promoting the site, as well as airing them on the Ford.ca site. It also has large print and online advertising buys (a great integrated campaign in my opinion). However, my question is after this splashy launch - will there be enough to keep the conversation going?

I'm going to be watching this one in my rearview mirror for sure.

Canadian Tire Keeps Losing Points in the Customer Service Department

2008-02-25T14:36:00.000-05:00

A few weeks ago, I wrote a post about my experience with Wedding Registries, specifically how Canadian Tire has closed theirs down and what a royal pain that was to me (and I'm sure so many others).

As a consolation, they were to send me a "gift" within two to four weeks of me confirming my address with them in their system.

I've been eagerly waiting to see if they read my post and I will magically have a snowblower delivered to my front door. However, it's been five weeks now and I've not seen hide-nor-hair of a gift, let alone any communication about said gift.

It's not about the gift anymore, but now about how I've been disappointed yet again. First I spend hours of my time creating the registry only to find out within a week that it was all for naught. Then they tell me they are going to send me something for my troubles within two to four weeks and don't deliver.

If you set expectations for your customers, it's important to ensure that you can actually follow through on your promises.

I'm not sure whether they had more registries than they realized, or whether everyone immediately confirmed and they can't handle the demand. Either way, they have my email address and could send a note to me just to let me know.

Keeping your customer apprised of any delays or changes in the expectations you've set for them is as important as anything else you'll do. It will stop people like me from posting about my bad customer experiences with your brand.

Email Analyst Review - How to Gain a Competitive Edge

2008-02-22T11:51:00.013-05:00

Ever wanted to know how many times your competitors were sending out emails and what their subject lines were — without having to sign up for every one yourself? And then spending countless hours going through them all, charting them and trying to find patterns and differences so you could improve your own newsletter?

Well now you can have someone else do all of that for you. Email Data Source founded in 2003, by Bill McCloskey has created the Email Analyst, a proprietary software tool that tracks millions of email marketing campaigns and then compiles useful stats and data to save you typing out spreadsheet after spreadsheet at 2 a.m. to determine how many times your main competitor has used the word “free”, or emailed on a Tuesday.

Bill was kind enough to give me a full walk through of the tool earlier this week, and although I didn't get to play with it myself, I was able to see just how robust and user-friendly their product is.

With more than five million emails in their database in over 200 different market sectors from the past five years from more than 400,000 lists, there's a whole lot of data there to use.

How it works:
Unique email addresses sign up for any and every email list they can find (including third-party, as well as a company's own in-house newsletter for customers). This allows Email Analyst to track how each email address is then used over time. For example — if company XYZ then sold that email, or if only company XYZ emails that address. Talk about valuable information to be able to understand who sells email data (which as we know in Canada is a no-no and of course against best practices in general in other countries). Do I hear list brokers salivating everywhere?

Alexa stats are then layered in to understand if after an email campaign has been sent, if that specific company's website received a spike in traffic. Which then means you can start to establish patterns based on delivery, traffic spikes and offers. How brilliant!

There are three main product offerings that Email Analyst has:

Compare
The Compare tool allows you to purchase competitive domain stats and view the email activity solely on your competitors. Useful for small shops that are not as worried with how they stack up in the industry.

Search
The Google of email tools. You can search for almost anything you can think of — keywords in subject lines, content, domains, companies, etc. — cross-reference and download information (for example how many times has company X used the word free in their subject line) into a useful report that you can then take to your boss to prove why you should be doing more emarketing and how you might be able to improve your ROI.

Prospect
The Prospect tool was the original product from which the other tools have been developed. Since it has been around the longest, it is the most robust and pretty much allows you to do everything stated above — but to then dissect it across market sectors, and each list for understanding of opt-in status (and name selling).

Pricing ranges from $2,500 to as much as $16,000 for all the bells and whistles per year, but is likely worth its weight in gold in terms of the man hours it would take, if you did this yourself.

As you can probably tell from the tone of my post, I'm absolutely in love with this product. And with a hefty blue-chip client list, including JC Penny, HP, UPS, Ogilvy, Exact Target and Doubleclick, I'm obviously not the only one. However, there are a few downsides, so to be fair, there are two main cons I saw, which actually boils down to one if you're a U.S. marketer.

1. While they are working on expanding into Europe and Canada, at this time there are few to no Canadian companies in the database.

2. While you get to see if there was a spike in traffic after an email was sent, or how many times a certain word was used, you won't be able to see if it was delivered to an inbox vs. a junk mail folder, or what the open click-through rate would be (which would be a great violation of competitive intelligence).

So keep in mind that just because your competitor used the word “free” eight times in the last year and saw a spike in traffic, you don't know if their list has 10 names or 10 million names, and whether it had a 20- or 80-per cent delivery rate, or a 10-per cent open rate and the list goes on.

This is definitely a great tool to help give some competitive advantage and insight, but just like any tool, should never be used as the only tool, or in a silo, and should be used in conjunction with other marketing efforts.

Overall, I give Email Analyst a mark of B, but that's just because I can't really use it for my Canadian clients right now. Bill, if you get more Canucks, you'll be upgraded to an A.

First Impressions Mean Everything

2008-02-14T12:36:00.007-05:00

The reference in this post might only be relevant to those of us who live in cold weather climates, but the lesson reaches across every continent.

As I was trudging through the snow today, I found my mood disintegrating with every bit of unshoveled sidewalk I walked upon. Within ther city of Toronto, there's a by-law that states everyone must clear their sidewalks within 24 hours of a snowfall.

Correction Note: It's 12 hours actually - thanks to whomever pointed that out. You can read about it here.

You'd hardly know that was a law in my neighbourhood and I wonder how it's even reported or enforced in the first place. Forget the law even, it's just the nice thing to do. They say first impressions are everything and with only a casual wave here and there, my impressions of many in my community are not great after today's expedition.

It got me thinking how this can be used as a metaphor to compare against a consumer's experience with your brand or website.

I had a task to do today and it was hampered by the fact that it was extremely difficult for me to get from point A to point B. If I wasn't intent on completing my "task," I would have just given up.

Many visitors to your website are there for information, but often they are there to complete a task (even if they don't realize it at first); whether it be sign up for a newsletter, or puchase a product. If you make it difficult for someone to do this, it's likely they won't go through and complete the task - especially when you have a plethera of competitors out there waiting to turn your prospects into their prospects.

The first encounter many people have with your brand may be on your website, which means that it is important for you to stop and think about the kind of experience you want them to have. Make it detailed, not just "I want them to like our site and find it easy to use." Everyone wants that. What specific experience do you want them to have, what do you want them to think about your brand after visiting your site for the first time, or the tenth time? Hold on to that thought and evaluate your current site and any future updates you make to the site against that.

If my neighbours had thought about the experience they wanted to have when they walked through the snow today, then I might have had a better experience myself; perhaps the sidewalks would have been shoveled and I wouldn't be in such a cranky mood right now.

Email List Rental 101

2008-02-08T15:19:00.001-05:00

Email marketing can be a very effective tool for an organization. It can encompass many things, including list rentals for prospecting.

There are two main types of email lists available. The first being that of a contest, survey or sweepstakes. These types of lists are good if you have an offer that is highly incentive-based.

The second main type is known as product, customer or subscriber lists. These are individuals who have indicated a specific interest in a company's goods or services, and in many cases have paid for a service from the company. These companies have worked hard to maintain relationships with their customers and will want to ensure your offer is highly relevant to their subscribers.

If you're looking at email list rental for your organization, here's some important things you need to know.

1. Buying Email Lists
If someone offers to share data with you or sell you a list of email addresses, run far, far away. Best practices across the globe state that data should never be released. The correct terminology is therefore email list rental — you are renting the list from the list owner, who will send the offer out on your behalf.

2. Opt In
Whether the box is pre-checked, or unchecked and someone has to check it themselves, or whether it's double or triple opt-in with multiple follow-up emails sent — lists that are permission-based in nature are the types of lists to look for. Unsuspecting individuals who receive email offers that they didn't ask for, call that spam. Learning how the list is gathered is key to determining the potential quality of the leads.

There's an entire debate we won't get into here about pre-checked vs. unchecked boxes in terms of permission, but in general, laws and best practices state that either of these methods indicate at least some form of implied consent, and that is okay. You may feel differently about the subject, hence the importance of finding out how the list owner collects their names and confirms consent for third-party offers.

3. Source Identifiers
When the list owner sends out the email (with your creative that you send them) there should always be a header (or footer, but preferably a header) identifying why a person is receiving the email and reminding them how they can unsubscribe. Being open and honest with list subscribers shows them that this is legitimate and something they agreed to receive. We've all received those emails that simply tell us we're receiving this because we asked to, to which we all immediately offer a few choice words and hit unsubscribe. Receiving an email with a special offer in it because I subscribe to xyz website, newsletter or magazine is going to make me more likely to read the rest of the email/offer, and in fact, be open to it if it interests me. If I have to spend time searching for why I am receiving the email or how to opt out, you can rest assured, I'm not going to pay any attention to what's in the offer itself.

4. Best Practices
Whether you're renting Canadian, American or lists from other countries, it's always best to familiarize yourself with local best practices and laws. For example, the U.S has something called CANSPAM, a law outlining the requirements for sending marketing material via email; and Canada has the PIPED Act, a law covering the use and disclosure of personal information (under which even a business email address falls). Industry Canada has also created a set of best practices to follow when doing any type of email marketing.

5. Use a Broker
Email list brokers specialize in the email industry and will do all of the work to check out the lists’ credibility for you. They typically sign contracts with list owners ensuring their compliances with laws or best practices and will have inside knowledge of which lists might perform better than others for your offer. Most list owners give a commission to list brokers for brining them business, so ideally it shouldn't cost you any more to rent a list from a broker, and in fact saves you manpower since they do all of the heavy lifting for you.

If you're looking for a good broker (especially in Canada), I'd recommend Cornerstone Group of companies.*

The above points are just some of the things to look at when considering email list rental, however there are many, many more factors to a successful campaign. These include your offer, your creative design, the subject line and how list owners and their deployment houses handle relationships with their ISPs. I'd be writing a novel if I got into all of those, so look out for more email marketing 101s in future posts.

* Disclosure note: I have to disclose the fact that several years ago, I did work for Cornerstone — in their email list brokerage group for over three years; so perhaps I am a little biased, but I do have insight into their processes and having worked with other brokers since over the years, have always and will always continue to recommend their services over any other brokerage firm.

What Web Analytics Can Tell You About Your Website

2008-02-05T10:52:00.000-05:00

Understanding the behaviour of visitors to your website is of utmost importance if you want to engage them and foster prospect growth. There are many analytic programs ranging from free (Google Analytics) to fairly expensive (Omniture) that you can implement, it just depends on your organization's needs and site complexity.

If you have a pretty simple site, then using a free tool, especially to start, is a great idea to gain insight.

However, if your company has a website with multiple data streams, interactive content, or online tools (shopping carts, etc.) then something more sophisticated is required, and once implemented properly, well worth the cost.

While you might have one of these systems in place already, are you using it to your advantage? Here's the most important thing (in my opinion) that you need to be thinking about when reviewing your web data — especially for the first time.

Top Exited Page(s)
Look at the stats to determine which page on your site is the most exited. Is it a registration or some other type of task completion page? If so, that may signify a problem with the layout of the form, or what type of information you ask. Perhaps the form is too long, or you ask too much personal information in the mandatory questions?

Perhaps it is the thank-you page after a user has completed a task. That tells you you're likely doing something right since more often than not, people are completing the task you set aside for them.

Once you know where people are leaving your site, you can start to figure out the why and make changes. Analytics programs are able to track the changes such as page exits in certain time frames, and many programs allow you to institute an event flag (marketing campaign, website update, etc.) so you can check and compare pre- and post-stats. This is invaluable as it allows you to test and learn and see improvements that occur over both the short and long term.

One Interactive Marketer's Take on the Superbowl Ads

2008-02-04T13:43:00.001-05:00

After viewing the Superbowl ads, I share many fellow marketer's disappointment at the quality of the ads. The use of blatant stereotypes, typical sex, even gross and disturbing concepts led to a pretty sad showing of ads this year. I have two additional comments to make outside of what everyone else has been saying:

1. The use of urls
It seems that for the most part, adding urls to ads was an after thought and they were tacked on to the last frame in tiny font. I counted three companies(and I admit I may have missed one or two), two of which were internet-based (Go Daddy and Sales Genie), that actually verbally mentioned or pushed audiences to their website.

It seems the advertising agencies forgot that consumers tend to be busy and multi-task, often doing more than one thing at the same time - including surfing on the internet while watching tv.

Advice: Create short, simple - but memorable urls (that stick in consumers minds). You'll have much more of an opportunity to leave a lasting effect outside of the millions of dollars spent on the ad. Once the game is over, people may talk about the ads (as we marketers do), but in order for them to remember past the ad and engage with the brand, it's important to leave them a strong trail of breadcrumbs that will help them do so. The internet is the perfect place to continue the engagement or awareness you hoped to start with the television ad; so use it to your advantage.

2. Proofread your microsites
One of the urls I decided to visit after viewing one of the spots was NFL.com/superad, a campaign that derived from a contest held solely for NFL Players. The stories/spots are well done, but unfortunately, something stopped me dead in my tracks and I just couldn't continue viewing anything else on the website.

Can you play spot the typo below?

Need a hint? Look at the word after 240 NFL.....

Advice: Proofread, proofread, proofread. Blatant typos like the one showcased above, absolutely discredit your brand and make your marketing efforts look rushed and amateur.

*Screenshot taken from: www.nfl.com/superad at 1 p.m. EST*

Scrabulous leads to Scrabufoodulous

2008-01-31T09:53:00.000-05:00

As a self-proclaimed "foodie," one of my favourite blogs/sites that I frequent is Serious Eats. What is it?

A food blog focused on sharing food enthusiasm through online conversation, blogs, and video. Our combination of community and content brings together compelling original and acquired food video and spirited, inclusive discussion about all things food-related.

Given my love of cooking and passion for the interactive space in general, I think this is just about the best website out there.

But I digress. As someone addicted to Scrabulous on Facebook I happened to notice a brilliant twist that the folks at Serious Eats have taken on this popular application. Scrabufoodulous allows players only to use food-based words while they play the game. Now obviously it can only be monitored/challeneged by those playing the game, but I'd be all over trying that that if someone wanted to challenge me to a game.

Of course this whole point could be moot if indeed Scrabulous goes by the wayside because of the whole cease and desist thing...(read previous post)

However, in my eyes this just adds another reason for Hasbro to Save Scrabulous.

Sony Understands the Importance of Relevancy

2008-01-29T08:19:00.000-05:00

Just read a great case study on Jeremiah Owyang's blog on how Sony created a successful Facebook campaign with the Vampire widget.

I'm so happy something like this was profiled. It goes to show what all of us have been saying until we're blue in the face. If you make it relevant, people will notice and particiapte.

It's unfortunate that relevancy is still so often overlooked. Just because Facebook, or any other form of social media or any digital channel for that matter is popular at the moment, doesn't mean your brand should jump on the band wagon.

Take your time and think about your target audience. Understand how you can interact with them in a way that is meaningful and adds value to what they are doing.

As Jeremiah says:

Sony didn’t beat the 3 million existing users with heavy advertising (and I’m sure RockYou wouldn’t have let them) over the head, instead offered value by giving away prizes, and tied in a movie that already existed.

If you can understand your audience, and I mean truly get in their head space, then you've won half the battle of marketing your products and/ or services.

Understanding your audience and determining what they would be interested in will open many doors to marketing strategies and tactics that will add value and (hopefully, if implemented properly) will end up providing your consumers with a positive brand experience.

Well done Sony by the way....

The Home Based Business Website

2008-01-25T15:32:00.000-05:00

I have friends who have started selling Avon and Pampered Chef. Each of them have sent me emails letting me know about their websites, which the company has provided some sort of boiler-plated template system allowing for "easy creation" and then it is hosted on their platform.

I find it great that the companies provide tools such as this to their consultants/ sales teams to be able to promote themselves. The problem though is that the way the sites are set up, it generally doesn't allow for them to be very user friendly, or for that matter search engine friendly.

Sure it's great to have a website, but what if nobody comes to it? Or once they get there, it's not easy to navigate through the page? Without knocking the efforts my friends have made to get their sites up and running - since I am still amazed at the number of companies out there who don't have a website - these sites really aren't going to win them any awards. They don't (nor should they) claim to be online marketing experts, since that's obviously not their business. So why should they know how to build a great website that is optimized for search and would be talked about by their customers because they were so easy to use. That's a job for the company in my opinion.

As a home-based business, you struggle enough to keep yourself afloat and promote your wares, let alone the countless hours of administration that you need to do, having to further promote yourself and redo a website to make sure people can find you should not be on your list of to dos.

These individuals are spending their time selling a company's products and as that company, you've taken the time to make your website look nice and friendly for search engines as well as usability so shouldn't you offer the same type of service to those who are in essence kind of like your brand evanglists? (I'm making a big assumption on the above statement, since in reality not everyone actually knows how to do this, or does it, but that's theory we should, or aim to, practice).

Maybe they aren't going to have as extensive a site as your company, but why not make it easier for them to get business? People who have these little ventures on the side often have other committments (whether a job or family) and generally don't have as much time to devote to understanding how to market their (or your) business online. Sure if they become successful, this may become their full-time job and they can then afford to hire marketing help, but until that day it's always going to be a stuggle and companies need to step up to the plate and provide more support than they are presently doing.

I have two suggestions for companies like this:

1. Hire someone (unless you have experts in house) to write some 101s on how to make the software/ templates/ tools you have provided more search engine friendly and usable (so that once they have people on the site, they can keep them there) and provide that as a tutorial to your consultants available for download before they build their website.

2. Create some tools and education maaterial for simple online marketing tactics(explain paid search, social media/ networking, affiliate marketing and (legal) email marketing) that are designed to drive traffic so that these individuals can set themselves and their website up for success.

In the long run everyone benefits, given the pyramid structure of most of these businesses, the more sales/ income brought in from your sales consultants, the more revenue you as a company make.

Side Note: As I am generalizing a lot here and making some assumptions, if anyone out there does know of one of these types of companies that offers this type of "training" let me know as I'd like to show someone whose got it right.

And to my friends whom I've talked about here - you know you've got an open offer on my end for advice any time you want it, I'm definitely not knocking your efforts and in fact am quite impressed you took the time to create a website in the first place.

Don't Take Away My Scrabulous

2008-01-23T18:14:00.001-05:00

Okay, so I'm a little late to the party (I read a lot of blogs and it sometimes takes me a while to catch up) but I can't believe that I might lose my beloved Scrabulous application on Facebook.

Out of all the apps I have (and yes I have a few), that is without a doubt, my favourite. There was a lot of buzz last week about this (hasbro and Mattel has issued a cease and desist) and you can read where I got the news here, and here. I do suggest reading them as there are quite a lot of comments and good ideas that I won't rehash or pass off as my own.

I will say I agree with most of the comments regarding the fact that this application has definitely made me remember my love of Scrabble and easily allows me to play multiple games with my friends on our own time without having to be together. It's great brain exercise.

Wired then posted yesterday that unless an 11th hour deal was reached, the app would probably get closed down last night. However, I just logged in to check (and get my daily dose) and found it alive and kicking. But the question is for how long?

Yes I know it looks kinda like Scrabble, yes I know it's probably an infringement of some sort - but as everyone else has been saying - surely there's a better way to go about this other than putting 600,000+ users out of a past time?

I Twitter a Confession

2008-01-23T16:41:00.000-05:00

Back in November, I wrote a post about Twitter and was having a very hard time wrapping my head around it's usefulness.

I must confess, I've been spending some time with it and think that I might be turning into a convert. Sure there are a lot of social tools out there, and Facebook allows you to share items and status updates with your friends pretty easily; but what I've found is that while Twitter seems to do the same thing, it does it in a different fashion. With only 150 characters (including spaces) to update what you're doing, it's a very convenient way of sending quick updates to friends and colleagues on various things you're doing in your day.

I liken it to the new grapevine for the technological age. I hear about new blog posts people have enjoyed and/ or posted. I also find it's been helping me prioritize which articles from the numerous industry newsletters I should read first. It's also been great at keeping me in the loop with other happenings within the industry and across the globe.

In general, I have to say I feel, well, more connected.

I struggled in my previous post understanding how this could be considered a great marketing tool. And I think I finally figured it out. Like anything, Twitter is not a tool that should be used on its own, but if used as part of an overall marketing strategy to the right audience, I actually think it could really work. Now in terms of specific ideas I have - I won't give that away, afterall, being in the business myself I think I might have to save those gems for my clients. :)

Here's a few quick tips on how to make the most of your Twitter experience (keeping in mind I've only been a Twitterer for a short while).

- Explore the Twitter tools and applications available and incorporate Twitter into your daily life, such as your blog or Facebook.
- Use a different update program. Rather than simply staying logged into Twitter's website, download one of the many add ons that allow you to update on the fly (like Messenger). I currently use Twitterfox for Mozilla.
- Import your address books to allow you to easily find friends and colleagues who use the service.
- Once you start following people, look to see who they are following (not in a creepy, stalkerish way) to look for those you might want to network with.
- And Lastly, don't be afraid to update your status often and/ or begin conversations with others - about things that might be relevant to all of you.

Happy Twittering.... Oh and and if you want to, go ahead and Follow Me.

All I Really Wanted was a Snowblower

2008-01-22T10:27:00.000-05:00

Of all the newsletters and blogs I read, it's amazing that the one thing giving me the most fodder for my blog posts is my wedding. Perhaps I'm just self absorbed :)

With five and a half months to go, my fiance and I have been creating our registries (as those who have been reading my posts know). We settled on The Bay and were debating Home Outfitters when that decision was made for us based on a bad experience.

One thing you have to realize if you haven't created a registry before, is that (at the Bay) they give you a scanner and you get to run around the store and zap everything you want; which was fun for all of five minutes and then completely overwhelming. On another tangent, the Bay really needs to work on their online registry system. I wish I could add or delete items online, unfortunately all you can do is change quantities. After that you either have to go in store, or email the registry consultants and ask them to do this for you.

So needless to say, I decided to look for a place where we could register online and add to our registry from the comfort of our couch and laptop. Being a good fiancee myself, I thought some place with tools would be good. So I checked out Home Depot, only to find out you can't create a registry online there. BOO. So my fingers typed in Canadian Tire's website and you could not only create your registry online but add and delete items as well. YAY.

I had fun adding items and was pleased as punch to tell my fiance how much I'd thought of him, adding a new lawn mower, a snowblower and various other tools for our many home improvement projects on the go.

Once he reviewed and deleted some of the things I'd added - after asking exactly what home reno projects I had in store for him once we were officially hitched - we sent off announcements of our registries through our wedding website (thanks Wedding Bells) to friends and family.

We were quite happy to have checked one more item off our list of things to do. Then, on Friday afternoon (less than five days after I created our registry), I get an email from Canadian Tire, advising me that unfortunately they are doing away with their gift registry program after May 31 and anyone who has an event after May 31 (which mine is) will have to close their registry. But if I confirm my address with them in the next two weeks before closing my registry, they'll mail me a gift for my understanding.

My understanding? I don't have any. I spent (read: wasted) hours of my time creating that thing and they are doing away with it just like that? Now I can see if perhaps I had made my registry months ago - but within one week? That's just bad customer service.

The right thing to do would have been to say that anyone who had registered to this point would have their regsitries honoured and that anyone adding a new event up to May 31 would be allowed to do so. Or maybe a personalized email or phone call apologizing for the fact that they let me create the registry in the first place. I'm pretty sure this wasn't a snap decision, so it would have been nice to have a little warning, or not be allowed to register period - and couch it in being down site maintenance or something of that nature.

Anyone from Canadian Tire, if you're reading this, please either rethink this and reinstate all of us who are now put out, or send me a snowblower as my gift...

Update: Home Outfitter's Post

2008-01-21T15:36:00.000-05:00

Okay, so while I am still disgusted and don't think a used panini grill should have ever made it's way back onto store shelves. I feel a little better about my experience and have an update on this post

I returned the grill Friday night to the store, where it was obvious that a staff memo had gone out about inspecting product and what had happened. Staff were not sure what to say to me, and called over a manager, who profusely apologized and went to get the new grill they'd set aside for me. They immediately opened the box and checked the product so I could see it hadn't been used and was satisfied with it. The manager then gave me a little box of Christmas cookies they were trying to sell off.

Not a grand gesture, but a gesture none the less and appreciated. I still don't think anyone should ever have had that experience, but perhaps I won't be so hasty in my decision to no longer shop at Home Outfitters. After all, I am now a registry short.. Look out for the post explaining why I am now suddenly down one registry coming soon.

An Affair with Technological Flair

2008-01-17T09:05:00.000-05:00

So I've just finished picking myself up off the floor and am trying to control my giggle fits. I think I can say I have officially seen everything now.

Have you ever wanted to break a date but not know how? Have you ever wanted someone (your significant other) to believe you were out of town or working late so you could partake in some other activity? Well, if you live in Toronto, now you can.

Toronto Alibi is a service that provides "solid alibi solutions that enable our clients to do what they want, when they want, in a discreet, confidential manner. Our service can help prevent short term indiscretions from destroying long term commitments.."

I dove deeper into the site and couldn't get over what I found. It's so wrong (in my personal opinion), yet such a brilliant use of technology that I can't help but wish I'd thought of it first and had no conscience; because I think I'd be rolling in money about now.

Want to tell your significant other you have to go out of town on business, but want to make sure it's legit? Well use the Hotel and/or Flight/Hotel service and they will email you an itinerary you can share. It will even provide you with a phone number to leave at home so that when your honey calls in, a qualified operator answers the phone with the correct name of the hotel and transfers you to the room (which conveniently gets sent to voicemail). You would then get a text or email message letting you know to call in and check your messages.

The list goes on with call-in sick services, simulated employment, break a date calls and my personal favourite - the "Fake-A-Friend" service.

Our "Virtual Pal" service can be that friend or co-worker that backs up any story you want. An agent from Toronto Alibi can come to your home with fishing gear or golf clubs and make any scenario believable. Your "Virtual Pal" can even call you at pre-determined times with any story you want, from any number you want, in order to add validity to any alibi. "Virtual Pal" ensures that your personal affairs stay private.

After reading that, I had images of customizeable avatars dancing in my head and showing up at my front door.

The caveat for this service though is that "All services provided are within legal limits. Toronto Alibi will not provide alibis for criminal activities."

With prices starting from just $15 to get a phone call to break a date and fake-a-friends starting at only $75, I can only imagine that this will take off and do quite well. It honestly boggles the moral side of my brain though, that's for sure. However, my fiance and I are having a whole lot of fun with this. After showing him the site, he lets me know he has to go on a press trip (he's an automotive journalist) to none other than VEGAS at the end of the month. I've already had hours of endless fun teasing him about this. Good thing we have a solid and trusting relationship, or I might develop a case of paranoia.

Home Outfitters Just Lost One Bridal Registry

2008-01-15T13:36:00.000-05:00

For Christmas this year, we bought a friend who doesn't cook much, a panini grill from Home Outfitters.

Due to the business of the holidays and a death in our family, we were not able to deliver the present until just last week. A few days later, I get an email from my friend letting me know that she opened the grill to use it only to find that it had been used, not cleaned and put back in it's box. And somehow returned and put back on the shelf for me to purchase.

I don't remember the last time I was so disgusted by something. I don't necessarily blame Home Outfitters for this, but you would think they might check the merchandise to see if it was all there? Apparently it was quite obvious from the outside of the grill that it had been used, so if they had checked it before putting it back on the shelf surely they would know. Or perhaps they did, and some employee didn't care enough to let someone know. I don't know and I'm not making accusations. We don't even know if the darn thing actually worked.

However, when I called the store I purchased the grill at to find out if I could still exchange it. I wasn't met with any kind of shock, or apologies. In fact I was transferred around and then finally told that they had one left and could put it aside for 48 hours. I tried to explain that it was a gift for a friend and I would have to see my friend and get the product and then get to the store. My friend lives on the other side of the city in comparison to the store, and I don't drive.

Sighing reluctantly, the clerk indicated she'd put a note on the box and try and hold it until the weekend, but couldn't guarantee anything.

I hung up the phone feeling quite annoyed. What happened to customer service? Where was the "Oh my gosh, I am so sorry you had that experience, we will do whatever it takes to make this right; of course we'll hold one for you until you can come in, or we'll find one at another location for you."

What Home Outfitter's doesn't realize from this experience is this:
1. I'm a blogger and am now telling the world (or at least those who read my blog) about this horrible experience.
2. I'm getting married this summer and was in the process of setting up my registries. If that's the customer service they are going to give people, I don't want to have a registry with them as I don't want my friends and family getting that same kind of experience. Both my fiance and I have agreed, we don't need anything from Home Outfitters if that's the kind of products and customer service people receive.

Once I exchange this gift, it will be a long time before I ever step foot in a Home Outfitters again, if I ever do.

NBA Player Goes Hi-Tech for a Laugh

2008-01-10T12:34:00.000-05:00

I was watching the news last night and saw a little clip about Chris Bosh (Toronto Raptor forward) and the video he made about voting for him for the 2008 NBA All-Star game.

At first I thought it was somewhat pretentious to make a video like that - but then I saw it. And I laughed. I realized he'd done it not necessarily to garner votes, but as a way to have fun with his fans and really to poke fun at himself. Without giving too much away, it's a take on a familiar scenario we've all seen and that everyone can not only identify with, but laugh over.

It really made me sit up and take notice. Here is someone embracing technology and reaching out to his fans. When you get to his site, it's rich with interactive and social media content, including podcasting, a blog and forums. Now granted I know all of it doesn't come from him and I'm sure he has a web team to help him out, but I definitely applaud the effort given I've never personally seen this kind of thing before from a sports figure at least in North America.

Bosh even wrote a post about the video in which he says

"When I had the idea, I knew it was going to be very funny, but I didn't think that everyone would like it."

Talk about an understatement it's been all over the news and on major sports shows inclung Inside the NBA.

From reading the post, I think Bosh just might be getting his ducks lined up for a second career in case things don't work out with the Raptors. He tells us all to keep a close watch out for more videos as he's got ideas for more down the road. The other nice thing? He points out the writing comes from him and that he does get a little help from his friends (including acting).

It's refreshing to see a sports star that is down to earth. Well done Chris Bosh.

Don't Underestimate the Importance of a Good Website

2008-01-09T10:47:00.000-05:00

People often talk about the internet as a research tool for comparison shopping of cars and electronics, but I recently went a step further and used it to research private care nursing agencies for people with Alzheimers and was both surprised and somewhat disappointed by what I found.

My fiance's grandmother was in the final stages of the disease and had been in a nursing home for several years. It became apparent to us and the staff at the home, that she needed more care than what they could provide her. Rather than moving her to a palliative care wing in a hospital, they suggested supplementing her care with that of a private nursing agency to ensure all of her needs were met.

Not having done this before we had no idea of where to turn. After a phonecall to the Alzheimer's society of Canada, we were pointed in the direction of the Toronto Dementia Network Website. While not pretty, it is was very functional and relatively easy to use and at that, gets a B for its attempt Search Engine Friendliness.

From this site we were able to locate a listing of agencies in Toronto that offer nursing services for people with dementia. Considering the amount of agencies we found, we needed a way to narrow things down. Being a web marketer, the first thing we decided to do was determine if they had a website. Any agency without a website - or with a single splash page was immediately taken off the consideration list.

I look back on that now and think that perhaps that was somewhat cold, but knowing how many people use the internet as a research tool in this day and age, I have a hard time using any service that doesn't have a website.

Once we culled that down, we ended up going through each site in more detail and kept narrowing things down based on the amount of information on services provided relating to Alzheimers care that each agency offered.

Once we had it down to a couple of choices, then came the phone calls. Two of the three agencies just referred me back to their website for any questions I might have which I thought was pretty bad customer service since I had already mentioned I'd been on the site and had questions.

One agency in particular though Homestead Care Providers not only shone through in terms of the most information on their website, but when I called they took the time to listen to me and answer all of my questions, including many before I even asked them. Within minutes of hanging up the phone with them, I received a personal follow up email thanking me for calling them and providing a recap of the information we talked about for my reference.

First impressions - in terms of websites, customer service, and simple things like follow up emails go a long way and I think too many people forget that. Homestead had all three of those in spades for us. The service we received from them for my fiance's grandmother was exactly as advertised and all of the personal support workers were absolutely compassionate and caring. It meant a lot for us to know that someone was with her during her final hours, someone that truly wanted to make sure she was as comfortable as she could be and that we were always kept up to date and informed.

Besides this being a glowing recommendation for the people at Homestead Care Providers (in Toronto), this post is about the importance of a website including two key things:

1. Make sure it is set up to be picked up by search engines.
If you don't know how to take care of that - find companies that provide discounts for not-for-profit or other essential type services. Any web marketer with a heart should offer discounts to help companies like that - especially those they have personal connections to.

2. Remember truly is the web is the number one research tool out there, use it to your advantage.
Put as much information on your site as possible about your services, (and in thise case) your staff training and of course what sets you apart from your competitors.

Time to Get Munked...

2007-12-14T09:22:00.000-05:00

Anyone who has seen my recent Facebook status knows that I am probably a little more excited than an adult woman should be over the fact that Alvin and The Chipmunks movie is in theatres today. If you've seen the trailer, then you know what I mean.

After seeing the trailers/commericals, I noticed a phrase - Get Munk'd. Seeing that - it gave me an idea, and I thought wouldn't it be brilliant if getmunked.com was an actual site for the movie? How brilliant would that be? So I checked... And it is. It's a pretty funny little microsite that I won't give away and suggest you check out for yourself.

The main site does link to this microsite as well. The good news is that both sites are great for the entire family. There's a lot of somewhat cheesy games and activity sheets - but the kids will love them. Also, there's tons of multimedia stuff - you can view the trailers, tv commercials, download ringtones and so on.

There's no real point to the site - other than to promote the movie and that is okay. It's a good way to spend 10 minutes of your day and not mind in the slightest (and perhaps your kids will be there longer if they get hooked on the games). I highly recommend at least checking out the Get Munked site though, as it is really well done.

My only problem with all of this? The url for the main movie site is promoted in the trailers... but nowhere in the tv commercials is the site, or even the Get Munked site promoted anywhere - which is such a miss in my opinion. The microsite is so fun and has so much potential to be viral (outside of the main site) that it should be much more heavily promoted. Given I only saw the commercial promoting the movie yesterday and it comes out today, it seems to me like there could have been a lot more room for pre-marketing efforts. Perhaps there was and I live under a rock, I don't know. Either way - check out the trailers and the sites - they're just plain old fun.

Dewmocracy a Don't

2007-12-13T10:36:00.000-05:00

When I see a tv commercial solely promoting me to go online for some interactive experience, I almost always check it out because I am always looking for great interactive campaigns. Moutain Dew has a new commercial out pushing folks to Dewmocracy.com.

The commercial is pretty intensive, action-oriented and looks like it cost a bundle to film. Anyone spending that kind of money to push people online gets my interest. The idea behind the campaign is to help create the next Mountain Dew including the flavor, color, name, logo, label, and tagline. Sounds pretty cool.

Unfortunately even though they've likely spent more money creating the website than the tv commercial (which says a lot), they really fall short on a few things.

The user experience is lousy right down to have white type in yellow fields as you try to register. Have you tried reading white on yellow? Yup - you can't see it to know if you actually typed anything correctly. I then had several other bizzare user experiences. When I selected my country as Canada, it automatically refreshed and provided me an error message that I had not identified my province. Of course not - hadn't got there yet! Province came after country on this form. Once I finished registering (leaving the pre-checked box to receive some updates on the contest) the thank you page confirmed for me that I had confirmed no email subscriptions (pardon?). I went back to check and yup, the box was still ticked, so who knows if I am signed up or not. I then got an additional "information profiling" page which asked me to provide an alternate email address. Hey wait a minute - I already gave you one, why do I need to give you two? Apparently, they say it's in case the first email address I gave them was incorrect in any way they could make sure I still get the newsletters I subscribed to (wait, I thought they just said I hadn't subscribed to any?)

Registration finally complete, I log in and get to view the longer version of the movie which is pretty cool from an action standpoint I must admit, until you hit the cheesy ending where the token native guy tells you, "You are the chosen one" and finishes with you replicating a Nestea commercial ending in my opinion.

On to the game itself. Well let's just say I didn't get very far and gave up. Now when I say didn't get very far, well I was on the site for a good 40 minutes with my frustration growing each minute. And I was still only in the first chamber of 7!

Here's the objective and overview right from the site itself:
Your journey will take you through seven Chambers, where you will meet mythical characters, answer questions, and play games.
Upon entering each Chamber, you will be tasked to create a specific feature of the next Mountain Dew. For example, in the first Chamber, you will select your Drink’s flavor.
Creating the individual features of your Drink will be the first task of each Chamber. Once completed, you can wait for the next Chamber to open or can continue exploring the world of DEWmocracy by playing a series of games.
Your decisions in the first three Chambers will lead you to join 1 of the 3 Teams that will ultimately create the next Mountain Dew. After the 3 most popular combinations of features are determined, you’ll be aligned with the Team whose drink most closely matches your own.
Once aligned with a Team, you will be responsible for creating the logo, label, and ultimately the tag-line of the next Mountain Dew. Each Team will vote on which Drink candidate from those submitted by all Team members will be put forth for a national vote.
Points earned in the game get you higher visibility for your drink, increasing its chances of being selected as your Team’s candidate. Accruing the most points does not directly result in your drink being one of the 3 final selections.
In the final Chamber, your team will vote to determine the Drink candidate that you collectively would like to bring into the real world.

I never got out of the first chamber, several (pointless) games and a lousy navigation experience frustrrated me beyond no end. If I finished a game and was trying to complete another task, but accidently clicked on the game again, when I chose to go back or end the game (since I'd already played it), I lost all the points I'd accumulated playing the game in the first place. How was that fair?

Overall, I think the premise is interesting, the graphics are amazing and this must have been one hell of a thing to program - credit where credit is due.

However, there definitely wasn't enough thought put into user experience, connection of the games to the storyline or QA. Yes you can log in and go back and play the game more later, making this somewhat like an RPG game, which again is kind of cool for those into such games. The problem is it seems like it is going to be something you would have to play for hours on end to actually finish entering the contest and help make the next Mountain Dew.

Maybe that was the objective, find a way to limit the number of entries. If so, they've done it in spades. If the objective was to create a fun, creative, engaging and interactive way to enter the contest, they somewat missed the mark. While the idea is creative and definitely interactive to the max... The fun (at least for me) goes out the window with each user experience gaf that occurs and honestly the length of time it took to get pretty much nowhere with fairly pointless games.

I do have to mention one other cool thing though - the loading graphic is in the shape of a Mountain Dew bottle. I thought that was clever.

Final thoughts - it is obvious that the folks at Pepsi spent a lot of money on this and are serious about interactive for all of their brands. Unfortunately it's a bit too much flair and not enough focus on the things that make people feel they've had the best interactive experience with your brand.

Toronto's Recreational Program Registration - User Experience Nightmare

2007-12-11T08:47:00.000-05:00

My sister recently asked me if I could her register my nephew for his next swimming classes with the City of Toronto. Registration occurs between 7 and 8 a.m. and needs to be done over the phone, or online.

As she works at a hotel and that is a pretty busy time in the morning it's nearly impossible for her to take care of that. My brother-in-law is usually in transit to the daycare at that time so it's not like he can take care of that either.

She warned me it was going to be difficult - advising the phone line would be very busy and it would be hard to get through and that I might have to have my redial fingers well oiled. Given my occupation, I asked why we didn't just do it online. She indicated that the last time they did it online, he didn't actually get the class they wanted (some sort of system glitch) and all you can do is register, it doesn't actually confirm if the class still has space - even if it accepts his information.

So the good aunt that I am, I began promptly calling at 6:55 thinking I'd beat the rush. Well apparently me and every other parent in the city. By 7:50 when I still hadn't got through, I began panicking - what if I didn't get through - my poor nephew - what would he do???? I decided to try the online system just to see what I could find out and maybe use that as a last resort.

Well too bad the website was down. The City's website had actually crashed and wouldn't load - I assume from too many people trying to register. I was shocked. Thankfully they must have kept registration going, because at 8:15 I finally got through and after being on hold for another 15 minutes finally got him registered.

The whole thing just made me think of what a joke the system is and wonder where our tax dollars - including the ones that are paid towards these programs - are going.
I might be dating myself if I say I remember when programs such as swimming lessons used to be free... Now it's about $50 for somewhere between 5 and 10 classes (still not bad, but if you ask people to pay for something, perhaps you should offer better service...)

How does the city expect working parents to call and register at 7 a.m. in the morning when there aren't enough phone lines to keep them on hold, let alone the fact that it is not even an automated process. Then there's the website. How could the City of Toronto not have enough of an infrastructure in place to handle the number of people coming to the site. As my nephew is 6, and my sister has been going through this process for years, you would think they would have learned by now.

I don't understand what the point is of trying to offer an online service if you can't actually offer it when people try to use it. The whole process just seems completely ridiculous and unconvenient to me, but then again it is the City of Toronto, what else should we expect?

Email Image Etiquette

2007-12-03T11:09:00.001-05:00

There is nothing that drives me more crazy then not being able to read email - especially from companies or people I would like to.

As someone with multiple emails, various newsletter subscriptions go to different email accounts depending on which email I used most frequently at the time of signing up. All of my Marketing Mag emails go to my Hotmail account for example.

With Hotmail's new (updated nearly a year ago) email platform, viewing images in email is difficult - especially if you have previously added the sender to your safe sender list before they rolled out the new platform.

Last week, I received their email about the 2008 Call for Entries. Not only did it break the subject line rule of adding certain punctutation in it (it had not one, but two exclamation points!), but I actually couldn't and still can't read it because it is simply one giant image.

Because I added Marketing Mag to my safe sender's list years ago, I can't add them again and there is no little button that allows me to "view or download image" in this email. Currently, Hotmail has it set up that once you add new emails to your safe sender's list, they will then download images automatically for you.

I have tried everthing from forwarding the email to another account (but since the original image was blocked, it doesn't come through)to switching back to "Classic." No luck.

The only line in the whole email I can read is the line for how to remove myself, which I guess I am going to have to do and then sign up again just so I can read their emails.

If they had simply added a second line of text that said "Having trouble viewing? Click here" and it took me to a hosted version of the email, no problem. Unfortunately they don't have that and I have wasted more than enough of my time trying to read this message. In fact to read it, I need to view source, find the image/html code so I can copy and paste it in my broswer and then voila. Really, how many people are going to know that and/or take the time to do that????

Two key take aways here.
1. Don't make your emails one large image - chances are you going to piss a lot of people off who aren't going to be able to read your message.
2. If you insist on breaking email etiquette like that, please add a text link that allows me to click out somewhere to view the darn hosted html version of the message

The only reason their subject line made it through to my inbox was because of the fact that I had added them to my safe sender list moons ago. However what good is it that the email made it through if I can't even read it.

I am disappointed in the fact that the Marketing Magazine in Canada doesn't understand email marketing best practices.

I am also disappointed in Hotmail for not giving people the option to view images if they so choose. And if there is an option - will someone please point it out to me because I've checked all the obvious places and it doesn't seem to exist.

The Worst Kept Secret and Biggest Disappointment

2007-11-27T21:15:00.001-05:00

Facebookto remove 'is'... or so we were told. The news leaked out in a Wired story and was picked up across the world. And it seems it was removed for about all of three hours (I don't have personal experience - but that's what the various FB groups are saying) and has been back for days.

Why is this such a disappointment? Not because it's still there (well, okay maybe a little...), but because no one from FB has responded publicly - that I can find - either on the site or in any of the stories or blogs that wrote about this.

There are at least 20 groups on FB asking to remove this, including one with over 100,000 members. I suppose that's not a huge amount when you consider FB has millions of users, but it boils down to FB ignoring their loyal customers.

Social media is about engaging and interacting in conversation - FB is one of such tools that has helped people do that in spades. However, by ignoring this and talking about all the other wonderful updates the site made, it's simply hypocritical.

I'm addicted to FB myself, but have lost a lot of respect for them over this. Why create a tool designed to share information (as well as making connections) when it is obvious after this that the creators are not actually open to sharing with those who use their site?

What Ad Blockers Mean for Web Advertising

2007-11-21T09:06:00.000-05:00

I've been sitting on this post for a while, considering how to weigh in. I think I always knew what I was going to say, but wasn't sure if it should be said. Then I realized I think most of us feel this way and it has been said before and will continue to be said - just not heard very often.

BANNER ADS SUCK. Call it display, web ads, whatever you want to call it, but at the end of the day with click through rates falling and a host of other more inventive ways to get your message on the web, they are just more noise than they are worth.

To effectively create a banner ad, you need to consider multiple things, placement on the page (i.e. please stop putting Calls to action at the bottom of skyscrapers.. you don't see it unless you scroll - and really whose going to scroll to look at an ad? It's not the reason you went to the website in the first place), audience, and even the website itself amongst other things.

Unless you know your media buyers ensured little to no duplication in terms of the number of units that might show up at once, you'll want to make sure each format you have will be designed differently so that even though it's the same message, you will have more chance of it being seen. Otherwise you'll look like your product just wallpapered the site you're on with one ad in three different sizes. Boring.

Getting your creative team, or agency to create ads like that, takes a lot of time and a lot of money. It's not like a simple resize of a print ad, each ad unit needs to be created to its own spec and size. Seems like a lot of work for click trhough rates of 0.2-0.3% or lower (okay - or higher if you do more interactive ads, but then double the cost and time required to produce).

So then comes in the portls and sites who argue about the benefits of branding and the millions of eyeballs that saw your ad. But what if they didn't? It used to be if your ad server indicated an impression served it meant that at the very least you had a potential eyeball.

Not any more - ad blockers are becoming more and more popular and should be becoming a big concern for advertisers, publishers, agencies and the industry in general.

According to an iMedia Connection article on this, more than 2.5 million people have already downloaded the AdBlock Plus plug in for the FireFox browser. It means that they can surf the web the way they want without any ads.

This should be a big concern for media buyers and advertisers who are forced into CPM buys. How do you know that you're really paying for impressions that were truly served and not blocked? When determing response rate - how do you look at your CTR and determine if it's truly accurate? What if 5-10% of your impressions were never served because of an ad blocker? That would change everything.

Personally, I think this is a good thing for the industry for a few reasons...

1. It will force publishers (especially some large major Canadian portals) to start lowering their CPM prices and look at other pricing models for advertisers.
2. It will force the industry to find new ways to measure banner ads and determine their effectiveness.
3. Publishers will be required to find new, more relevant ways of creating advertising and sponsorship packages in order to bring in the bacon from advertisers.
4. It will force advertisers and their agencies to be creative and to start looking beyond the banner ad and into things like content integration, social media and other relevant ways to reach their consumers and target audience online.

My New Favourite Site

2007-11-19T11:16:00.000-05:00

I may be a marketer - but I too am a consumer - and as a result of both those things I have to give credit to one of the most brillant sites I've come across in a long time.

Ihatedoorknocking.com is nothing more than a marketing ploy - but one that couldn't resonate better with its target market if it tried.

As a homeowner, I often get those knocks on my door asking to see my gas bill to ensure I am getting the "discount" on my utility bill that I should be. Give me a break - share my personal information and account number with some stranger? I don't think so. This site takes that experience and pokes fun at it in every possible way.

You can print door hangers and watch a few comical videos on how to get rid of door knockers. My favourite is the turning of the tables using the second most annoying door knocking example out there (the third one down).

I don't remember the last time I laughed so hard at a marketing campaign.

I first heard the commercials on the radio several months ago and confess though I'd always been meaning to go to the site - I didn't get there until today. However, they were so memorable that not only did the url stick in my mind all this time, I told several people about the commercial and the site without even having visited it. That's word of mouth marketing if I ever experienced it.

When you get to the site - it's very obviously sponsored by
RiteRate, an online energy utility company. However, it is not shoved down your throat and nowhere on this microsite can you get a quote. If you're interested, you can click through to their site and get one. Yet the entire time, they encourage you to "stay a while" on the microsite and "have some fun." The site has tons of little goodies including "tall tales" told by door knockers, knock-knock jokes, the top-ten list of good door-knockers (including the kiddies who trick or treat and cookie-selling-Girl Guides), and of course the ability to report door knocker sightings in your neighbourhood.

This is a great example of branding as well as subtle marketing that allows the consumer to come to you. They've taken the most annoying aspect of selling gas and turned it into a statement about their brand and their respect for customer service. By not including a quoting engine on their microsite they are staying true to their statement that the customer should take all the time they need to make an informed decision. I am not a customer of RiteRate (yet), but one of my other browser windows currently open is their site so I can get more information - because after working so hard to prove they offer more than just a price difference to me, I definitely deserve to 'hear' them out and see what they can offer.

The only thing I would do to improve the site - add more interactivity. Allow users to create and upload their own videos of how to get rid door knockers. Also, instead of just posting door knocking alerts, allow people to email these (and share the site) to their friends and neighbours. This has great legs for a wonderful viral campaign, but requires the user to work at creating this, something I 'knock' them for.

Kudos to the creators behind this idea and site though - absolutely brilliant.