Should I Include the Price?

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A question that pops up is whether a price should be advertised right off the bat or on a second level that people have to navigate to.  The answer to this depends on space limitations, price appeal, and communication vehicle. But as a guiding rule pricing should be included unless it’s a complex product, service, or offer where pricing is not easily outlined.

For something simple like a banner ad or a social media update a price likely shouldn’t be included unless it’s a selling point.  The reason for this is purely functional, there’s not enough room to focus on anything but incentives to click.  However the landing page should display pricing clearly if possible so that users aren’t frustrated in finding it.

For website pages or detailed communications the answer is yes, unless it’s a complex product or service where pricing models would be unreasonably complex.  It’s frustrating for users to see a straightforward offer or product and not see pricing.  Furthermore it becomes a headache for the site owner because they will be flooded with, “how much does x cost,” questions.

Basically the answer is to include a price as soon as it’s feasible.  If you are offering something simple and have a defined price it’s best to include it early.  Your audience is going to want to see pricing so it’s better to be direct rather than make additional steps that can appear like it’s trying to be concealed.

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Online and Email Marketing: There’s No Magic Bullet

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I’m often asked, “What should I change in my approach?”, or “What best practice should I adopt to improve performance?” I always struggle to answer these questions for 3 reasons.

The first is that it’s usually asked before I have a chance to understand the online and email marketing campaigns. The second reason is because the answer is always different for different people/companies. The third is that there is often an assumption that one thing will revolutionize the online and/or email marketing which usually is not the case.

The first 2 reasons are just circumstances of reality. But the third is a pitfall that leads to frustrations when expectations are unreasonably high. Sure, there are some common mistakes that can be easily corrected, but generally great online and email marketing campaigns evolve from a series of small improvements. It’s rarely a quick change that causes a major improvement.

Even when we read/hear/experience stories of drastic improvement, it’s rare that these major benefits are retained immediately. Rather there is a drop off that stabilizes as the change is integrated into ongoing efforts.

Email and online marketing is a marathon, not s sprint. Don’t look for a magic bullet that will dramatically improve performance but rather focus on continually making small improvements. If your effort is consistent over time you’ll see that your online and email marketing campaigns have become best-in-class without even noticing the change.

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Multimedia Strategy: Video – Host or Post

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Video is becoming more and more prevalent on websites.  And why not? If done well it can be a powerful marketing tool.  But what is the best way to get your video content online?  There are two options host or post.

Posting to an external site has advantages:

  • Easy to upload video
  • No bandwidth costs
  • Lots of traffic
  • Easy to share (embed, email links, rss feeds, etc)
  • Serves as a pseudo social media platform

But there are also some disadvantages:

  • Videos are watched on their site, not yours.
  • No link benefit if people embed/share your video
  • Limited analytics to understand user engagement, video bounce rate, etc
  • Tend to be lower quality
  • Ads appear on your content
  • Limited length/duration
  • No custom branding

So taking pros and the cons I tend to use a hybrid strategy.  For shorter length video where highest quality is not a concern put them on a video sharing site (like youtube).  Everything that’s on youtube can be embedded into your site.  This provides the benefit  of uploading video using their pre-set tools and the extra exposure online.  When embedded on your own site you also gain better tracking and can brand the page to ideally suit your online marketing campaigns.

If high quality, duration, or limited compression is a concern, always host the video on your own site.  This is necessary because the video sharing sites won’t support it and  time consuming work-arounds are necessary which make it an inefficient strategy.

Using this method is a way to get some of the benefits of hosting and posting while minimizing the limitations.

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Open Rates to Expect from Your Email List

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It’s a common question, “What’s a good open rate for my emails?”  While every email campaign is a little different and campaign goals can skew these numbers open rate often come down to one variable, email list building practices.

Double Opt-Ins are the most intensive way of building a list.  People have to opt-in and then confirm that opt-in via email.  Lists built in this way have a focused audience and usually subscriber fatigue or email address expiration causes non-opens.  Double opt-ins often have a high open rate, anywhere from 40% – 60%.

For email lists that are built on an opt-in basis open rates are usually around 18% to 20%.  Opt in is usually done online but offline additions can also be added from sign ups at events or gathered by the business development team.

Purchased or found lists often have the lowest open rates, typically 8 – 10%.  These are lists where the email marketer buys, rents, or finds addresses and the recipients have not specifically requested their particular communication.

So as a general rule that’s a breakdown on what to expect from open rates.  Open rate success often directly correlates to the quality of the list it’s being sent to.

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Website Maintenance: Make an Index

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Many times we get too close to our own websites.  We know right where everything is because we put it there.  The problem is that what makes sense to us, often doesn’t make sense to visitors.  An easy way to ensure that items of a similar type are easily found is to make an index page.  When a site has an index page for a single topic then it serves to be a single point of contact that visitors can use to find the individual thing they are looking for.

Recently I was reviewing a client’s website.  We were in the process of updating it to support marketing efforts.  My client was heavily involved in doing events designed to give a sampling of how they help companies which converts some of the attendees to customers.  In fact, this was such a large part of their marketing matrix that they ran an event every two weeks.

So we outlined which events were coming up and made a list of 6 events for the quarter.  I jumped on my client’s site to see how each event was promoted.  I found 2 of the events that were featured on the homepage.  However the other 4 were MIA.

So I called my client and asked whether the events had pages on the site.  He assured me the events were there and walked me through the navigation.  Two of the events were available through banner ads but the ads cycled so they were only available 25% of the time.  It turned out one event never had a link set to it.  The sixth one was available through a buried link on a calendar document.

I was a dedicated visitor and I needed a guide to find the events I knew were there.  How many unmotivated visitors that don’t know about the events do you think made it to the event pages?  As you’d expect, very few.

The solution, make an events index page.  We placed an events link on the primary navigation so that it was easy to find what was on the calendar regardless of where a visitor went in the site.  The index page provided a handy list to site visitors as well as my client so that there was a simple reference of upcoming events.  Furthermore, promotions could point to the index or the individual event page depending on what’s most appropriate.

It’s a simple thing but one that can be lost as a site grows.  Make sure that any important category of your site has an index page so that visitors can easily get to the information you want them to see.

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Online Marketing: Don’t Mistake New for Better.

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I was recently informed by a client that they needed to step up their social media presence because “email is on the way out”.  That was a shock to me as most of my clients (this one included) see a nice return on their email marketing investment.  In fact, industry wide email marketing boasts a leading ROI among online marketing efforts with $42.08 generated from every dollar spent.  In short, my client was mistaken.  He’d made the error of thinking “new” was “better”.

Social media seems to be the new “new”.  It’s one of the first things out of people’s mouths when internet marketing comes up.  And I don’t mean to pick on social media, it’s a valuable tool.  It just shouldn’t be put on a pedestal above older communication channels that still outperform it.

An older example is when CSS layouts were first appearing.  Many companies rushed to update their pages for the new “standard”.  The problem was that many of the web browsers weren’t quite up to speed in rendering these sites so web developers had to create multiple versions for individual browsers.  That made developing the site significantly more expensive.  The difference between jumping on CSS layouts when it was new and when browser support increased was potentially tens of thousands of dollars.  At the end of the day there was no difference between a tabled layout and a CSS layout to most users but the early adopters could revel in the “newness” for a short period of time.

Neglecting other marketing channels to do what’s “new” can be very problematic when resources are shifted to a new media that does not perform as well as an older one.  It’s like trading a dollar for a quarter, it might be shinier but there’s no financial upside.

Of course I’m not suggesting that you let your online marketing stagnate into a tried and true rut.  Innovation and new technology will come up and many times it should be adopted.  But focus on effectiveness not newness.  When you keep track of what’s performing best it keeps the allure of “new” out of your decision making.  Online marketing is about increasing awareness of a company, driving opportunities, and ultimately having a positive impact on the bottom line.  Newness is hard pressed to affect any of those things on its own.

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Social Media: I like You . . .

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Remember in elementary or middle school when you were told that someone “liked you”?  That tended to be the most consequential thing a young teenager could hear.  If liker or likee worked up enough they might speak a little bit.  Then what happened?  Other class mates might be abuzz with the new “couple” but very little tended to actually happen between the two people in question.  That’s a social media like, it makes you feel good but at the end of the day it’s not worth much.

Liking or following does not mean someone is really interested in your company, let alone an advocate.  A second tier to social media marketing should shoot for real engagement and conversion.

An example of good social media can be seen in most video game launches today.  First they send out announcements, trailers, and teaser material typically with links to social media pages.  This starts a trickle of “likers” but only dedicated fans are committed to buying the game at this point.

As the game gets closer and pre-orders are available it’s common for sweepstakes or exclusive downloadable content to be made available.  The dedicated group obviously takes advantage of these offers but many fringe “likers” then begin to be drawn in.  Both the committed followers and enticed followers are likely to buy.

Finally at release the marketing switches to last chance/release celebration.  This is designed to pull in anyone on the fence and create a sense of urgency.

Imagine if the video game company just put out information on the game and were satisfied with the people that liked them.  They’d miss out on a substantial market segment and generate little revenue that wouldn’t have happened organically.

I often site this example to business people and they scoff and say, “People don’t get pumped up over our product or service like they would a game.”  To some extent that’s true, it’s hard to imagine most business clients rabidly looking through marketing material for promotions or anxiously awaiting a service release date.  But that doesn’t mean that the structure can’t be similar.

Use social media as an information platform so that you’ll get “likers”.  But don’t fool yourself in to believing that’s an achievement.  You have to use social media for a second level of engagement.  Most companies have valuable content or offers that can take the social media audience to a new level.  Tracking who and how many people take advantage of those offers provides a more concrete metric of social media marketing effectiveness because it’s a sounder foundation.  Not a meaningless “like”.

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Monitor Bounces: Email

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Like websites, there’s a temptation to look at the positive metrics rather than improving negative ones.  Bounces from email is a great indicator of list health.

An email campaign that has a low bounce rate (under 10%) is often a well built list that is regularly maintained.  The benefit of this is that it usually reflects audience engagement.  Poorly built lists can see bounce rates approach 50%.  This is typically a sign of poorly compiled lists or a build up of bad addresses over an extended period.

Monitoring your bounce rate has a few benefits:

  • It let’s you know if your list quality is acceptable (going over 20% bounce rates is a sign of trouble).
  • It makes maintenance a recurring task so that bad email addresses can be removed.  This often saves money on your email list provider as the list or emails sent gets smaller.
  • It gives an idea of true audience so if your list begins to shrink then efforts to boost subscribers can be launched.

Don’t just focus on the positive metrics like opens and clicks.  Keeping an eye on who isn’t getting your email communications can be as informative as knowing who does.

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Monitor Bounces: Websites

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When reviewing website performance we tend to gravitate toward the positive interactions.  These are the metrics we hope will be high: visits, clicks, conversions, etc.  However it can be equally important to measure the negative interactions, opt outs and bounces.  By keeping those numbers low we increase the opportunities that the positive interactions have.  Bounces specifically can be important for uncovering site performance because it’s a direct indicator of how visitors react to our content.

Website bounce rates are when a visitor lands on a webpage and then leaves.  As a general rule a 50% bounce rate is average.  After all every visitor to your site has to leave from somewhere so non-existent bounce rates just don’t happen.  If bounce rates get down in the 20’s% range or less, then you have a high converting page.  This often only happens on landing pages where people come for a certain thing and have to complete a single item to get access to it.  Rates higher than 50% can be a signifier of problems with the pages content.

A word of caution when analyzing bounces, make sure to take the page content into account.  There’s an art to analytics as well as science.  Some pages will be prone to bounce rates and it’s not necessarily a negative sign.  A blog post, video, or article page are good examples.  This is even truer when promotions are sent out advertising these things.  It’s reasonable to expect that the majority of people that land on these pages will view the content that enticed them there and move on.  Some subset will likely click on to something else but the lion’s share of visitors will get what they came for and go.  A higher bounce rate on these pages should be expected.

By default many analytic programs will display bounce rates in a time layout (i.e. bounce rates by day).  This is helpful if a certain campaign is going on for a set amount of time.  However, pulling bounce data by page is often more useful for overall site analysis.  The reason for this is that the pages can be sorted by highest bounce rates.  This will bring your worst performers right to the top of the list.  Then you can move down the list and see which poor performers are expected to have a higher rate and which should be performing better.

Once the list of poor performing pages is compiled, it’s a matter of reviewing those pages and updating the content.  There is something that visitors expect to get from this page but aren’t.  Trial and testing is needed to modify the page so that it’s suiting visitor needs.

Think of your site as having a party.  Having a lot of people show up is a good start.  But if they all peek in the door and head somewhere else it’s not going to be much of a bash.  Bounce rates are a great way to find the pages that are turning your visitors off.  Use that information to make pages enticing and draw visitors in.

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Multiple Technology Platforms for an Email Marketing Contact Management System

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It’s hard to find all inclusive tools.  Some times the features in one system do a certain task well while another technology is better suited for something else.  This is often true in email marketing, especially for small and medium companies.  There’s no inherent problem with using multiple database or list platforms.  However a lack of planning and organization can cause administrative nightmares for running a cohesive email marketing campaign.  Set a contact management system for your email marketing program that ensure data is shared across all your list management technologies.

The first task is to simplify technologies.  Get the number of necessary technologies down to the smallest number possible.  It’s extremely rare that there would be more than two technologies involved:

  • An email marketing specific platform that specializes in templating, some list management, automated sending, and opt-out/opt-in compliance.
  • A database platform with advanced sorting/queries, reporting, and dynamic contact management.

There are add-ons to popular database platforms for email marketing.  If the add-on suits all of your email marketing needs then they can be an ideal solution.  Some are better than others but there is usually a sacrifice in functionality or accessibility with these add-ons which is impractical for certain email marketing campaigns.

I’ve yet to see an email marketing platform that has a robust enough list management system that it can double as a company database.  Email marketing platforms fulfill a niche role and most of them do it well.  Don’t try and hammer it into a function it wasn’t designed for.

Let’s assume that add-ons aren’t available for your database technology or that the add-on doesn’t have all the necessary functionality required.  That leaves two distinct technologies in your contact management system.

The trick to making your contact management effective is a recurring update process.  In some cases that can be automated which is ideal.

Other times automation is too complex or too expensive to implement.  In those situations, a schedule is vital.  Basically, a person or people need to fill the role of automation.  This often is not a daunting task.  Contacts can be held in the database and advanced sorting allows for very specific criteria to be met.  Most database programs make exporting data easy and most email marketing systems make importing data into usable groups simple.  This provides a simple exchange of information so that both technologies are on the same page.

The only time this process becomes problematic is if the schedule is not well planned out or the timing is not followed.  Managing your contacts is critical to all marketing efforts.  Sacrificing functionality is a poor option.  So if you find that you need to have more than one technology in your contact management system, ensure there is a plan to keep them synchronized.

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