Marketing with Technology and More

Email Success Secrets when Images are set to off

Send out an effective email marketing message is not as easy as it used to be.  At SubscriberMail we have just completed a survey of executives and 63% of them have images turned off as the default on their email clients.  What this means for marketers is that despite all the effort you go to in order to make the message look great in the inbox, it is often lost when it arrives.

The SubscriberMail team has learned many great ways to optimize your messages, and today we released a new whitepaper titled The Great Suppression: Five Strategies to engage audience members when images are Suppressed by Mail Clients.  You are welcome to download a complimentary copy.  As a matter of fact, you may want to check out our entire White Paper Library, filled with great email content.

Google AdWords Marketers - Beware! Phisher's are Out There

I think I am pretty savvy when it comes to on-line purchasing.  The last thing I thought is thatI would ever fall prey to is a Phishing scam, but Phishers are crafty. 

As a business we are regular Adwords users on Google.  I had not used them in a while, so I reactivated a somewhat dormant account the other day.. A day later I ger an email telling me that my account information is not up-to-date, and that I need to correct it.  Diligently I clicked in the message and went to the site that the email pointed me to adWRods.com .  When I spell it out, it is obvious, but without the emphasis, it is easy to go to a bogus site.

When I arrived at the site, it looked just like the Google site, and I readily provided the requested information.  The last thing I would want is our Google campaign shut down because my credit card information was obsolete.  Fortunately, the latest versions of the major browser try to give you a heads-up.  In my case, I received a message that made me look closely at the URL.

I was like they fly in the spider web.  Once I was caught, I was doomed.  Phishers are creative and ingenious.  You have to be diligent every time you provide credit card information.  The identity you save may be your own.

Cool Little Service for Web Marketers

I found a great new little service that will help any marketer working on Search Engine Optimization.  Yoocrawl crawls any web site and provides you with all of the related data to a site.  Check out the IP addresses, outbound links, list of keywords, titles,etc.  This is all data you can search for by reading the code and checking for the ip address, however, this little tool does it all in one place...for free.

Navigating to success

My daughter is in college, and is working on a project for one of her classes.  She is working on a presentation for her speech class about the effect of web design on consumer behavior.  She sent me a copy of the speech outline and one of the key items in her talk really hit me as it relates to web interfaces:  “Shopping patterns and consumer behavior are not just random acts.”

This is basic marketing, but it is amazing how often major organizations forget about this.  From experience I know that the challenges related to user interface design is that many organizational factions get involved and everyone has a perspective.  What you often end up with is a design that looks like the elephant that was described by six blind men. 

Never forget that in most situations, people come to your web site with a specific goal in mind.  Very few will end up there by random chance.  Don’t design a website or email message from your perspective as a marketer, but from the perspective of the visitor.  Marketers are so used to push marketing that sites are often designed from the perspective of “here is where we want to push you” or “this is what we want you to buy”.  When you do this with little regard to ease of navigation, your website is doomed to underperform.

A great example she uses to illustrate this is walmart.com.  Just visit the site and move your mouse around.  There are so many navigation components that you can easily get lost.  Her research indicates that on an average day, the number one retailer in the world has .2 percent of all global internet traffic (compare this to Amazon, whose daily reach is as high as 5 percent).

In addition to these points, as a father, it is wonderful to see your daughter have such insight – she makes me very proud.

A Real Crappy User Interface

I’m not much of a gambler, but from time to time it is fun to visit a casino, especially if you don’t put too much on the line.  Over the weekend I had an opportunity while on a trip to Missouri to visit one of the famous Riverboat Casino’s.  I’ve come to enjoy the game of Craps.  Of all the games in the Casino, if you play correctly, your odds of winning are only slightly lower than the house.
Craps however has a problem.  It suffers from a horrible interface design (at least from the user’s perspective).  For many years, I would walk past the craps table seeing it as the most complicated game in the Casino.  In fact, nothing could be further from the truth.  It is probably one of the easiest (next to slots).  The table layout and vast array of bet options set out on an extremely complicated playing field scare away many potential clients.
As I looked at the layout, I realized that what was wrong with the Craps table is exactly what is wrong with many web sites.  They are laid out to make sense to the house (or in the case of the interface, the designer or site owner) to the detriment of the player (or visitor).  Analytics can show you part of the story, but you can never really tell how much business poor interface drives off. 
In the case of the Casino, there is an upside.  By complicating the interface, they create all types of low payout bets that favor the house and quickly drain a players wallet.  In the case of your website, there is no upside.  So take a fresh look at your user interface and see if it favors the house, or the player.  Unless you own a casino, if it doesn’t favor the player, unlike the world of gambling…you lose.

Retailers Who Don't Add Value - Crushed by The Web

Sometimes the impact the web is having on the world of retail is painfully obvious.  I haven’t been in a Circuit City in some time, and based on my experience today, my guess is that neither have too many other consumers.  Great web experiences at web sites like Amazon, B & H Photo and many others turned this big box electronics retailer into a sad looking shadow of its former self.

If you look at the pictures that I took, you can see that the store is no longer filled with the latest and greatest electronics gadgets.  In fact, the only real reason I could figure a consume might want to venture there is to see how a particular televison looked, or to hear a set of speakers (my guess is then many shoppers might actually purchase it elsewhere).  There was no one with any knowledge to help you.  The display’s were sad and falling down.  In a word, Circuit City has done nothing to add any value to a trip into the store.

This does not have to be the case for retail in the digital age.  In fact digital and retail can easily go hand in hand.  One of the stellar examples in this category is Abt Electronics (full disclosure, SubscriberMail handles distribution of Abt’s email marketing messages).  If you ever are in the Chicago area, make time to visit their retail location.  It is a case study in value-added retail sales done right.  They have partnered with many of their manufacturers to create world-class display areas where you can see appliances and electronics in action.  Every time I go in the store, it is expanding.  It is a fun place to visit, you almost don’t want to leave.  Their web site, and electronic communications is top notch too.

So, the digital road will be littered with the bones of the likes of the Circuit Cities (I don’t give them long).  Visit their web site, and even that is complicated.  The retail future belongs to the brick and mortar value add retailers like the Abt’s and the innovators on the web like the Amazon’s.  Where does your company play?

Data Point - Reviews on the Web

Back in December I blogged about what I called The Power of The Customer’s Voice.  Reviews on the web have completely changed consumer’s buying process.  In data just published by eMarketer, this phenomenon is confirmed. 

According to the data, assembled by PowerReviews and the etailing group, nine out of ten consumers read online reviews at least some of the time before making an on-line purchase.  Additionally, most consumers check multiple reviews.

I’ll Trade You My Steve Jobs for Your Bill Gates

I have been remiss in writing about a great web-based marketing tool. Not because I didn't want to tell you about it, but because it took me a while to become comfortable with the concept.  When I first heard about it, I found it a bit on the creepy side.

The tool is called Jigsaw, and is an online list compilation service with a difference. The difference is that the compilation process is based on trading and buying business cards. 

I used to work in the list compilation business. In those days we combed through phone directories to build lists of businesses and consumers (a practice that still goes on today). The problem is one of accuracy.  A phone book is only a snap shot in time. As soon as it is printed it is already out of date, so anyone who rented one of our lists could count on a fair amount of bad data (we didn’t sell it that way of course). 

As I thought about Jigsaw, I realized that it is nothing more than a list compilation service, only one that is much more accurate.

The basic concept is simple. It is designed to be a business card exchange system. If you give me your business card, I can log onto my jigsaw account and enter your information. If you are not already in the system, I get "points” for entering your data. If you are already in the system, but your data is incorrect, I also get extra points for correcting it (and the person who put in the inaccurate data loses credit).  If I want to find a contact, I simply go to the Jigsaw CRM type interface, enter any sort of select parameters such as:

• Search for a specific person
• Search for a specific business
• Search for all people in a specific business in a specific area

When I find who I am looking for, I download the contact, and I am charged “points” for the contact.

It is easy to argue that when you give your business card to someone, you are not expecting it to get entered into a database. The reality of the world is that your name is being compiled all the time in many ways, this is just a new way of doing it.  The benefit to the user of the product is that you are able to get very accurate information on key contacts within companies that you are looking to connect with.  The data includes correct names, addresses, phone numbers and email addresses.

To use Jigsaw however, you don’t have to be willing to surrender your data.  The company allows you to purchase data also by buying points.  What I have found great about the product is the accuracy.  Of course accurate data also requires that it be used in a responsible manner, so my hope is that Jigsaw will continue to monitor how the product is used and reinforce responsible usage (ie. don’t download a  list and then spam it).

Sometimes They Just Don't Get It

A friend of mine owns a fairly large company. To maintain his anonymity, I won't name the industry. However, he has a tremendous opportunity to relay information that his firm a vast amount of knowledge about on a topic that is very hot, in an email format. I took a look at his site and the sign up form and, bottom line, it stunk.

I called him and said, ", you are missing the point here, this is not about creating a marketing survey, or generating a lead with the most information on it so that your salespeople can call with a depth of knowledge (which data shows they are unlikely to do anyway). This is about starting a relationship. There will be time to do other things later”. He got it - he said, "let me have my marketing person call you."

Today they called. You know how it is when someone makes you call someone you really don't want to talk to, but have to? That is how this call went. She had to be polite, but no matter what I said, I realized she did not want to hear it. I got responses like, "that is interesting, I will have to take that to our committee." The bottom line that I tried to convey to her was that her opt-in form is buried 3 levels into her website, and in order to receive her "alerts," a subscriber must to answer 6 questions (including if they are prepared to deal with this specific situation and who her salesforce should contact in my organization to discuss this issue in more detail). I forgot to mention...all of these are REQUIRED fields.

This is a smart marketer, however, sometimes no matter how smart they are, they just don't get it. An email signup form is not a bingo card. It is too easy to move on when the questions get too personal. It is merely an opportunity to start a relationship. As Humphrey Bogart said in Casablanca, “…this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”

Another hot technology had TEDsters Jaws Dropping

Well, maybe it is a bad title, but it is very cool technology.A company called Aliph is demonstrating a hot new headset called Jawbone, that is sure to be the fashion accessory of the well dressed technoratti.  Pictured here on company CEO Hosain Rahman, this is no ordinary bluetooth headset.  It has a special microphone system that uses noise cancellation (I always wondered if Bose could do it for headphones why someone could not do it for headsets), and amplification of sound conducted through your actual jawbone to create a cellular call that can be heard and cancels out background noise.  The design is by Yves Behar, and the packaging would  make Steve Jobs proud.  I tested a unit, and it worked great, I will give you a full report after I have tried the real thing on my Blackberry.  From what I have heard from those who have one, I'll love it.

If you want one, consider placing an order.  According to what I heard at the booth, there is already a waiting list for the next ones to come out of production.