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Blog posts in Internet marketing
How to integrate email and mobile marketing
May 16, 2012
Over the past year, the marketing world has seen mobile become a key tool for marketers with the channel being further integrated with others, such as email. With this in mind, marketers must ensure that their email campaigns are formatted so they can be easily viewed on mobile devices, including smartphones and now tablets.
A recent review by Forrester found that only 4% of email campaigns broadcasted had a deliberate consideration as to how the email would render on a mobile device. Much more needs to be done with mobile in mind so that marketers aren’t missing some fantastic opportunities. After all, many of us are now checking email more frequently by smartphone than ever before.
The opportunity to grow your mobile commerce by communicating directly with recipients who are more likely to make a purchase can’t be ignored. The majority of smartphone users are younger and more trend-conscious, making them key targets to take advantage of m-commerce. In December 2011, it has been estimated that £1.64billion was spent via mobile devices alone, which according to Forrester will grow to 7% of all ecommerce by 2016.
The key to creating relevant mobile experiences for your recipients is quite simple. By following best practice advice you can optimise your messages for smartphones:
- Create text only versions of your emails and provide a link to a web page within the email header.
- Decrease email file size to less than 100kb so emails will display quickly on mobile devices.
- Fit content to mobile screens — this is different to reducing the file size. To do this you can either design messages with the appropriate pixel width requirement or by using cascading style sheets (CSS) where multiple HTML styles are created so content can automatically adjust to different mobile device display sizes.
- Shorten subject lines — mobiles truncate long subject lines, so be sure to get your point across quickly in around 30 characters.
- Use mobile-friendly calls to action — unlike the above points, which adapt your existing emails to look good on mobile devices, marketers can also tap in to the immediacy of mobile use with specific campaigns for recipients. For example, retailers have seen success with deal-of-the-day email offers and mobile specific calls to action such as click to call and download app.
- Add finger space around links — the average adult finger is 45 pixels wide so allow 10-15 pixels more for finger-clicking space to avoid people tapping on the wrong link.
- Link to mobile-optimised or specific landing pages — traditional web pages are often to cluttered and slow to load for smartphones. You are able to streamline content for needs, for example directions to stores and one click purchases for your registered users.
Using these steps will immediately improve the relevance of your email campaigns but to leverage long-term opportunities and benefits of m-commerce and mobile marketing, you should also be analysing your customer lifecycles to determine when to send your broadcasts to influence key touch points. This will instigate the desired action and behaviour at these crucial decision points.
This post originally appeared on the DMA UK Email Marketing Council blog. Simon Bowker is UK managing director at eCircle.
How to use website analytics without breaking the law
May 14, 2012
Are you interested in how many people visit your website, how they get there and what they view?
I bet you are, we all are.
The intelligence provided to us by solutions such as Google Analytics is incredibly important in building a relevant, focused resource that turns website visitors into buyers.
However, from 26 May 2012, UK businesses using the cookies that enable us to track this valuable marketing information will be breaking the law. Full details of the changes and implications are detailed in the IT Donut Cookie Law Guide.
If you’ve not already prepared your website for the changes what options do you have to keep on the right side of the law?
Total compliance
Achieving total compliance means gaining “opt in” consent from UK website visitors prior to using cookies. This can be achieved by adding a message and opt-in button in various places on your website.
Problem solved?
Well yes from a compliance point of view, but not from a marketing point of view. When the UK Information Commissioner’s Office changed their own website 90% chose not to opt in. That’s a sobering figure for anyone interested in how visitors find and use their website. A 10% data sample is useless for most purposes.
An option to have total compliance without opt-in consent would be to use an analytics provider whose software does not use cookies, such as eVisit Analyst.
Non-compliance
The other extreme is to ignore the issue entirely.
You could continue to track users using cookies in the hope that the ICO isn’t going to chase every small business and fine them all the maximum £500,000 allowed under this legislation.
Bit of a gamble though, don’t you think?
Plus, are your prospects and customers going to trust you if they can see that you are blatantly breaking the law?
This brings us to a third option.
Partial compliance
There is a glimmer of hope for businesses that want to keep their analytics data without offering opt-in consent.
In their “Guidance on the rules on use of cookies and similar technologies” Version 2 13th December 2011 the Information Commissioner's Office writes:
“In practice we would expect you to provide clear information to users about analytical cookies and take what steps you can to seek their agreement. This is likely to involve making the argument to show users why these cookies are useful. Although the Information Commissioner cannot completely exclude the possibility of formal action in any area, it is highly unlikely that priority for any formal action would be given to focusing on uses of cookies where there is a low level of intrusiveness and risk of harm to individuals. Provided clear information is given about their activities we are highly unlikely to prioritise first party cookies used only for analytical purposes in any consideration of regulatory action.”
However, this shouldn’t be seen as a reprieve. UK businesses have already been given twelve months’ notice to get their sites ready which ends when the law becomes enforceable on the 26th May 2012.
Partial compliance could be achieved with three steps:
Step #1
Complete a cookie audit of your website as outlined in the IT Donut Cookie Law Guide.
Step #2
Add a prominent link to your detailed privacy policy with a full account of the names and nature of the cookies used. The policy used on the UK Information Commissioner's Office website is a good example and contains a link to a website explaining the nature of cookies and how to remove them. A further example is available at aboutcookies.org.
Step #3
Create a written action plan for total compliance to follow if necessary once the enforcement decisions and process become clearer after the 26th May 2012.
To sum up
The interpretation of these changes and their enforcement will become clearer in the coming weeks but the implications are certain. Taking no action will not only mean you’re breaking the law but risking valuable trust.
To keep your website analytics you’re going to need to make some changes to achieve either partial or full compliance.
What stance will you take? Please join me in a discussion in the comments.
Robert Peters is a Small Business Advisor and Director of Fresh Eyes Consultancy.
Integrating Facebook with your main store
May 08, 2012
Both large and small companies have set up storefronts on Facebook and it is claimed that thousands of companies are making significant revenue on the platform, principally with products that are more viral — like books, movies and entertainment. However it is still early days and as yet there have been no huge successes, but the potential makes it worth experimenting.
Taking credit
The vast majority of the $5 billion per annum consumer spend on Facebook is related to games. Indeed, a lot of this commercial activity uses Facebook credits. Credits are purchased directly in an app with a credit card, PayPal or mobile phone payment. This virtual currency is used to purchase goods in games or apps where Facebook takes a 30% margin.
Facebook does however offer a real opportunity to complement an existing ecommerce store. If prospects were already aware of your store and your products they would type in your web address to their browser or find you in a search engine. Facebook enables you to promote yourself even before they are actively searching for what you offer.
You need to be able to easily take the contents of your store and sell stock from your Facebook fan page. That way, shoppers browse your products directly on your Facebook storefront. This creates a familiar and secure shopping environment that helps to turn shoppers into buyers. With Facebook's built-in features that enable social sharing and commenting, shoppers can easily share products they like, driving further traffic to your Facebook store.
Integrating the two stores
The actual process of setting up a Facebook shop is straight-forward. A number of ecommerce solutions now allow the creation of such stores, and can enable you to manage a Facebook store and your own ecommerce site, from one single control panel.
Managing your online commerce in this way helps you to keep on top of your orders and stock otherwise you can soon find yourself selling products you no longer have and creating additional administration and disgruntled customers.
What’s more, purchasing goods on Facebook becomes a social experience and is a great way of promoting your shop and products to a wider audience.
Make it worth their while
The challenge is to build your fan-base so that there is something in it for them. Social networks are about sharing information so you have to make sure your shop is selling either niche products or has enticing offers to ensure the conversation is about you rather than another Facebook store.
It’s worth offering specific incentives to encourage Facebook users to like your page and spread the word about your products to their friends. Try giving them access to exclusive offers if they click the ‘Like’ button.
Having won followers, you then need to keep your fan page alive with fresh content as there is no bigger turn off than a Facebook page that has not been updated in months. Keep sales messages to a maximum of 20% of your content with the remainder providing real value to your followers with industry content, seasonal ideas, news, humour, tips and tricks.
Simon Armstrong is the marketing manager of Actinic. Download Actinic’s free white paper on Selling on Facebook.
What are the lessons of Marketing_Guy-gate?
April 19, 2012
If you’ve been following the Donuts on Twitter this week, you’ll have witnessed a fascinating exchange between our very own Rory MccGwire (CEO of BHP, publishers of the Donuts) and a marketing consultant called Nigel Copley (aka @Marketing_Guy).
In short, since 2010, Nigel has been copying large swathes of content from Marketing Donut and passing it off as his own on his blog site. It’s a word-for-word cut and paste job, complete with our images, but minus any credits of course.
This content includes articles written by our in-house editorial team, by freelance journalists and also material provided by our band of experts — experts who have earned their reputation thanks to their skills, knowledge and integrity. I’m just saying…
By naming and shaming Nigel on Twitter, Rory galvanised lots of support and finally managed to persuade him to delete the content. Rory’s blog on Law Donut tells the whole vivid story.
But what does this very modern marketing saga teach us?
- The value of online content. It proves that Google loves fresh, high quality and relevant content — which makes other people’s content irresistible to some people.
- The importance of sharing content. Lots of websites, including the Donuts, publish valuable content provided by guest bloggers. Sharing your expertise is good for everyone. Copying content and passing it off as your own is not sharing, it’s plagiarism.
- Social media shines a very bright light. It’s hard to hide on social media. If you want to expand your sphere of influence via your blog and social media, you’ve got to be prepared to face criticism in this very same realm.
- Social media builds reputations and can destroy them. If you make any mistakes in business, there’s a good chance that word will quickly spread on social media sites. This episode highlights the power of the crowd on social media networks.
It’s good to report a happy ending to the saga. And we hope you keep reading and enjoying our content — on our websites!
Rachel Miller is the editor of Marketing Donut.
Keeping up with Google's changing search algorithms
April 19, 2012
There’s some new writing on the wall regarding how search engines rank website and blog pages. The changes being hinted at seem designed to cut a swathe through content engineered to benefit search engine robots first and foremost, rather than the actual user.
Content that’s engaging for users is likely to become more and more important. Content written primarily for search engines, full of long-tailed key phrases designed to enhance organic search rankings, is something which is more likely to be penalised than rewarded by search engines.
SEO (search engine optimisation) has been, up to now, about improving content for the benefit of search engines. However, with new changes looming at Google HQ, engagement and relevancy factors are set to become the benchmark for organic, as opposed to paid, ranking purposes.
This doesn’t mean that all SEO is going to go out of the window. You still need to pay attention to aspects of site/blog set-up that contribute to making your content searchable. Armed with a little knowledge and some common sense it’s quite possible to improve SEO for a website or blog.
Let’s consider some of the criteria search engines take into consideration when deciding which piece of web content appears higher up the rankings than another. Search engines like Google use algorithms to determine how pages are ranked for organic search. Algorithms are just mathematical checklists that Google applies to web content to reach a conclusion as to quality. The higher a quality score, the higher the ranking potential — or so the theory goes.
Here are a few suggestions you can implement to help maximise potential for meeting quality criteria.
1. Pay attention to details such as making sure you have descriptive titles. Otherwise, how are the search engines going to know whether your content is relevant to a search enquiry?
2. All images need to have an alt tag. These are descriptions that make images visible to people who are using screen readers to access information and also to search engine robots who don’t have eyes!
3. Clear and straightforward site navigation helps, so it’s easy for people to find the information they’re looking for as quickly as possible. This has implications for drop-down menus, which become necessary if a site is particularly large.
4. Having a site map can help with navigation. However, it’s no good hiding the link to the site map at the bottom of the page, which is a common oversight.
5. Grammar and spelling are important. We all make mistakes. However, a site with little obvious care and attention to the basics will not score well for Google quality.
These the basics. Now we can now turn our attention to the actual words on the page. According to Matt Cutts, head of the web spam team at Google, their engineers are currently working on ways to seek out and penalise search-engine engineered content in favour of good, relevant, quality content that is going to be of value to the user. The idea is to level the playing field, which will help many small businesses who lose out in favour of big business with big budgets for ongoing SEO work, usually based on maximising results through use of key phrases.
In the not too distant future we’re likely to see a swing back to the old “content is king” approach, with more reward being given by Google to pages with engaging content, relevant to the user, rather than content generated with emphasis based on SEO performance.
So, now I get to stand on a little soap box of mine called Google Analytics. This shows you how users are interacting with your website/blog. The analytics results give you an indication of where to improve your content, to encourage better engagement. A word of caution — success should be based less on how many people visit a page and more about how long they stay on a page and where they go next.
Encouraging visitors to visit other pages on your website is part of the key to getting search engines to regard your site as being one of quality. If people are using your site as more than a “one-page-stop” then that’s some indicator for quality scoring.
Quality scoring by search engines for organic search engine ranking is what’s underpinning the current work in progress at Google. For that reason, if you haven’t got Google Analytics working on your website or blog I cannot recommend highly enough that you do something about that ASAP.
Acquiring Google Analytics is free and getting it installed on your site or blog is too, if you have the skills to do what’s necessary. If not, it shouldn’t cost you much to get a developer to get it installed for you. The trick is to make sure the Google Analytics account is set up in your name, not under the name of the web developer.
Another simple thing you can do to improve engagement is to provide links on pages, or blog posts, to other content on your site. Doing this presents the user with instant information, without them having to go back to the main point of navigation.
If your user can be encouraged to explore other pages then that’s considered a “tick in the box” by search engines. So, it’s not rocket science to grasp that compelling content and clear navigational links are a really good idea to get in place.
Links from other sites (back-links) pointing at content on your site provides search engines with more ticks as to the quality of your site — and that includes social sharing. You need to establish a presence on social media, if you haven’t already.
If you have a Twitter or Facebook account, or any other social media channels you’re working with, but don’t have social sharing buttons on your site/blog yet, then get them or lose out. Every time a user shares your content it’s another tick for quality. By “liking” or sharing web content a user is applying their own quality rating. That’s what Google wants to see — approval of content by content users.
There are still a lot of businesses who are kidding themselves that they can manage quite well without social media. I’m afraid that for many businesses, they are likely slowly to slide into oblivion in organic search engine results because their web content will not be generating those increasingly important social signals.
Perhaps the most important fact to take on board is that your web presence should be viewed as a constantly evolving medium. A quick fix, then ignoring it in favour of offline tasks is no longer an option if you expect to see online results that are not just a flash in a pan.
Change, when it’s good, is about improving things for the better and I think the proposed developments in search algorithms are to be applauded. I shall be interested to see how things develop. Watch this space.
Sue Collini is director at Website Wings.
Read more on producing valuable content for your blog and website to improve search rankings:
Designing a website that builds trust
April 12, 2012
Remember the days when buying online was a scary prospect? Buying from the likes of Amazon and eBay is second nature to us now. That’s great for those big brands but if you’re a small business with a relatively low brand awareness at this stage, how do you build trust online with your target audience?
If you’re a small business selling online, here are some things to consider to help you build trust with your customers:
Design and photography
Website design is so important First impressions really do count on the web and you will be judged by the experience you provide online. You’re asking people to trust you with their credit card details and hand over hard-earned cash so make an effort.
If you are taking payments online, use a trusted payment gateway that people recognise, such as PayPal or WorldPay. Ensure that your phone number and address is easy to find and provide guarantees on returns, delivery and make sure terms are very clear.
Investing in a professional website design will go a long way — your website designer will use different techniques and approaches to not only make the design appealing but persuasive too. And remember, your customers are mobile so you should be too!
Your website is your shop window and it’s open 24-7. You wouldn’t put creased merchandise on your mannequins or dusty old stock on the shelves so why skimp on photography? Quality photographs can go a long way to building trust and will make all the difference to your design so use a professional. (Would you get a friend to do your wedding photography just because he’s got the latest Digital SLR?)
Professional copywriting
Writing copy for the web is a skill and essential to ensuring building a rapport with your customers and winning their trust. Typos and poor grammar do not do you any favours and it’s incredible to see the number of websites who commit these cardinal sins.
Getting your messaging right and really speaking to your target audience is crucial. We are creatures of language and power of words is long-lasting, I can't emphasise enough how important it is to invest in great copywriting.
Social proof
If you have built up some case studies or testimonials, they’re worth their weight in gold. Adding pictures or creating a video demonstration are ways of showing that your business really exists and isn’t some “fly by night” operation. Putting a face behind the brand will really go a long way. You’ve heard it before, “people buy from people!”
Don’t be put off or afraid of using product reviews or enabling your customers to provide feedback online. Any negative feedback is an opportunity to improve and it’s how you respond that counts.
Make it personal
Social websites like Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and Pinterest offer more ways for people to get to know you online. Leverage these tools to show your personality and build a rapport, remember it’s a two way process. Today is all about brand story and building relationships, it’s essential to make an effort online and create dialogue.
On a final note, remember to test, analyse and evolve. Use information from websites statistics but ask customers for feedback too — if you can be objective you’ll be well on your way to achieving your goals online.
Sian Lenegan is the founder of Sixth Story, a website and graphic design company based in Birmingham.
Read more about website design on Marketing Donut:
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