Tag: Online Communication

A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words, But Which Words are You Saying?

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Pictures (and multimedia) can be worth a thousand words.  Just make sure that the images used in your online marketing are the ones you want to say.

Years ago most images on a website (at least professional ones) were analyzed, if not labored over.  The reason was that every page counted and just the right image was necessary to make the most of the sites marketing potential.

With the explosion of social media and link farms there is a lot of new content hitting the web.  And as you’d expect when quantity spikes, quality often plummets.  Social media and content management tools have been great in opening the web up to anyone who can use the internet.  Unfortunately this lack of restraints can lead to too much content being produced in a low quality manner.

Of course for many applications a low quality doesn’t matter.  No one is going to criticize a poorly shot photograph from vacation that someone places on Facebook.  However, if you are representing a company or organization, that will reflect poorly.

For example, I get Tweets from a company that regularly posts poorly shot and often pointless photographs of events they hold.  The people in the photos are never identified and aren’t recognizable because these snapshots are usually taken too far away.  In short they are pointless.  The company would be better served in buying stock photos of groups of people looking at speakers.  At least the photos would be well composed.

Don’t get trapped in the quantity trap. Take the time to only create and release quality materials that are pertinent to your audience.  There is a lot of drive now to maximize the use of social media and build links.  Both of those are admirable goals but only if the content being created is up to par.  After all, dumping a lot of poor quality or pointless material onto the internet might generate a few clicks but your credibility will gradually erode.

Search Engine Optimization, Site Conversion, Social Media, Web Maintenance ,

Define Success for Your Online Marketing

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It’s common for people to use general metric standards as a guideline for success when analyzing online marketing data.  This can lead to real problems with their campaigns because it doesn’t take into account individualized goals.

Each webpage, email communication, or social media post needs to have a clearly defined metric for success rather than being analyzed on general metrics. General metrics like visitors, open/click rates, or post views can be misleading on the effectiveness of online marketing.  This data is informative but should not be the measuring stick for most online marketing initiatives.

In upcoming posts we’ll look at three separate areas of online marketing and general metrics that people use to measure success.  We’ll then outline how in many cases the general metrics are feeding false assumptions.  The three areas we will focus on are:

  • Email Marketing
  • Website
  • Social Media
Email Marketing, Internet Marketing, Social Media , , , , ,

Is Your Call to Action Luring Visitors In?

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A good call to action is a Siren Song.  Your target audience shouldn’t be able to resist its lure.  However, many times websites calls to action are a dud.  They ask for a lot and provide little in return.  Make sure that your call to action is appealing to your website target so that conversions are consistently generated.

The first hurdle to making a good call to action is knowing your audience.  If you make “gut calls”, then you don’t know your audience.  Instead do some testing on calls to action.  Create landing pages for as many as three calls to action.  Make the layout and language as similar as possible.  Then send it to test audiences that fit your target profile.  That will illustrate what calls to action are appealing and which draw little interest.

The second step is to test and track layout and content.  Some changes will vastly change visitor’s perception of an offer.  For testing purposes it’s best to make small changes and see how that affects the metrics.  After the first test is complete, make another small change and see if that improves conversion.  This can be a tedious process but it ensures gradual improvement rather than guesses that may or may not help the call to action.  A layout and content that clearly communicates the call to action and the benefit to the visitor is the critical to ensure that visitors take advantage of an appealing offer.

Just remember that unlike a siren song we want to serve our visitors needs, not dupe them into dooming themselves.  Make sure that your call to action is sustainable for your business and you can deliver on the promise the call to action makes.

Internet Marketing, Site Conversion , , , , , , ,

New Year’s Resolution – Evaluate Your Online Marketing Programs

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Once we get into a system for email and online marketing that works for us we can get lazy and blindly stick with it.  As 2011 begins it’s a good idea to challenge what you are doing.  If you don’t regularly review your web and email marketing performance, start now.  If you are regularly monitoring results, check your trends over a longer period of time, at least into the previous year.

Are your initiatives performing as well as they had? 

If so, great, you might tweak some things here or there but at least you confirmed that you are doing well.

If not it’s a good time to reevaluate your initiatives and either revamp them or at least give them a facelift.

It’s a clichéd resolution but make sure that online marketing initiatives are in good shape.

Email Marketing, Internet Marketing , , , ,

Email Subject Lines – Be Direct

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Jakob Nielson wrote a great article on email usability.  There is a lot of good points but I wanted to focus on his section about subject lines.  As a rule of thumb, if you have doubts on what the subject line should be . . . be direct.

There is a great example in the article of a subject line that the ad or marketing people probably loved.  And with good reason, it’s a witty one liner.  It just sucks as an email marketing subject line because it doesn’t give recipients a clue as to what the email is about.

In marketing and advertising it’s easy to be swayed by our cleverness.  The problem is that almost all email recipients don’t have time for clever.  They get too many communications to want to revel in advertising wit.

Make subject lines to the point and open rates will be better.  Our testing typically shows a 10% – 20% decrease in opens if a question or tag line is used in the subject line vs. a direct subject line that summarizes the email content.  The same is true for subject lines that are too long, so don’t attempt both direct and witty.

Tell recipients what you want to talk about.  The email is the chance to tell them again with more detail.  Finally the web landing page is a chance to tell them a third time and give them an opportunity to act on it.

It might not be flashy, but in email marketing the subject is your first chance to say something. Make sure it sets recipients up for the email’s content, not leave them guessing about what a clever subject line has to do with anything.

Email Marketing, Site Conversion , , , , , , , , ,

Email Marketing: What’s in it for . . . Them?

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As a broad guideline, at least 50% of your email communications should have a clear benefit for your recipients.  A higher percentage is fine, a lower percentage will often result in list fatigue and opt outs.

This seems like a simple equation but it gets complicated when email marketers confuse what benefits them and what is a benefit to the recipients.  So here is a sample of “for them” and “for us”:

For Them:

  • Valuable information – This can be research papers, articles, audio or video tips, or directories to other information but it has to be quality content.
  • Product or service discounts – This can be a special offer to the recipient base or coupons but it has to be a legitimate offer that is simple to take advantage of without strings attached.
  • Request fulfillment – This should be a direct response to a request typically resulting from targeted list segmentation.  For example, if a person specifically asked to know when new items come out in a certain product line, then an email highlighting that item is for them.

For Us:

  • Product or service launches – These emails talk about us.  Of course they should be written to highlight the value to recipients, but it’s still about us.
  • Untargeted promotions – A store wide sale isn’t a specific offer to a select list.  Hopefully it will garner recipient’s interest but it’s an open promotion that recipients may or may not be interested in.
  • Events – Events are another step in engaging or closing prospects and benefits us.  Even if your event has valuable information or entertainment (which they all should) and is free, the event is more about us than recipients.
  • Surveys – Surveys are always asking for recipients’ time which is valuable.  We reap the benefit of their responses so unless there is an easily redeemed reward, a survey is for us.

As a general rule, if the email’s primary goal is about moving prospects further into a sales or marketing funnel, it’s about us.  Of course that is what almost every email campaign is about in one way or the other, but we need to provide a give and take.  It’s perfectly reasonable to promote your products, services, or events, just make sure that recipients don’t get flooded with too much about you and very little for them.

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Transition into Multi-Faceted Online Communication With Social Media

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For years there were essentially two forms of online communication.

  • Website –  A one-to-many media passive media
  • Email – A one-to many or one-to-one proactive media

The two have the potential to work seamlessly together.  Websites are always available and easily accessed by any interested party.  It casts a wide net.  Email could proactively promote specific initiatives or be targeted to ideal.  Furthermore email could drive traffic to the website for targeted conversions.

Of course there were subsets of online communication like ads and link sharing but technically those fall in the website category.

There is now a third major platform developing:

  • Social Media – A one-to-many, one-to-one, or many-to-many media

Social media is opening up a new kind of communication and it’s quickly becoming one that isn’t optional.  On the surface it appears to be a clone of email, a one-to-one or one-to-many scenario.  However, as it develops social media is becoming a many-to-many communication device.

Of course social media started out as a one person communication platform.  Basically it emulated email.  You could do blast communications or personal messages.  However, as “like it” and “retweet” features become more prevalent we find that groups of people are serving a role of spreading your message.

Websites and email is not going away any time soon but neither is social media.  If you are running online campaigns and have not ventured into social media, it’s time to start.  Not only are users expecting to have an option of receiving communications through popular social media systems, but the systems are opening up a new many-to-many media that can be leveraged for viral communication.

Email Marketing, Internet Marketing, Social Media , , , , , , , ,

Website User Needs Can’t Be Presumed

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Site owners often tell me things like, “Users are going to love this feature” or “This tool is perfect for what our visitors should be doing.”  My response is usually, “Is that what testing has shown?”  The reason I ask this question is because many site owners make decisions on gut feel.  After making the gut call, many of them will lament/blame, “Users are really missing the boat with this, here’s all the great things they could be doing . . .”  Your users are not you, so don’t presume they feel just like you.  Do some testing to ensure that a feature or tool you are developing is something users desire.

Doing a short reality check on how well your presumptions match up with user needs is worth the effort.  In a recent conversation with a site owner, he was complaining about an event matrix tool that he had launched for his users to track events of interest related to his site’s content.  He was sure that every user would want to use it.  After spending significant time and energy, he discovered very few users had an interest.  He could have saved some time and/or developed a more desirable tool if he had done a reality check before investing in the tool.

Testing doesn’t have to be a giant undertaking, though for large sites or in depth campaigns it needs to be thoroughly planned.  For smaller sites it is less in depth.  Testing can be a sample of people that visit your site and provide feedback on how they use the site and what they’d like to see.  It can also be a user test session where a person uses the site and the site owner observes how and what they use.  This is sometimes more valuable, as actions will speak louder than words.

Here are the primary things to look for from the tests when deciding  if the feature you feel is great, actually cuts the mustard with users:

  • Navigation – A great tool is worthless if people can’t find it.
  • Usability – Users have to be able to easily use the feature or tool.  Make sure it is intuitive so that users will stick with it and get the maximum benefit.
  • Functionality – The feature or tool better do what you claim it will.  Setting expectations that aren’t met will harbor resentment.
  • Communication – You won’t have a lot of time to highlight your feature or tool using online communications.  Spend some time boiling it down to its most basic benefits so you can concisely generate interest.
Site Conversion, Web Maintenance , , , , ,
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