Google Wave Demo (Email, IM & Social Media in one)

Just watched demo on the Google Wave. Very impressive. Can’t wait to try it! It takes the best features of online communication – social media, instant messaging, and email – and integrates them into a seamless stream of communication rather than the traditional back and forth, piling on of messages. Watch the video to see how it works.

5 Tips for Effective Email Copywriting

The quality of email content is one of the core factors in determining whether an email marketing campaign succeeds or fails. But successful email copywriting is an art — rather than a science — making it different from most other forms of business writing. To start out on the right path, consider these 5 tips for effective email copywriting:

1. Focus on the subject line. The subject line may be the shortest piece of content to write, but it’s one your campaign’s most critical elements. The challenge is to create excitement for a special offer, provide enough information to be clear about purpose and convey a brand’s essence – all in 50 characters or less.

When writing your subject lines:

Create a sense of urgency. Include timely information to encourage subscribers to open the email.
Include the most important information first. It’s essential that subject lines don’t exceed the character limits of email servers. But prioritizing the vital information first will ensure that, in case the subject line does run over, the primary message will be conveyed.
Look to others for inspiration. Read newspaper and magazine headlines for ideas. Consider the email campaigns that you receive. Which ones were you intrigued enough to open and what can you deduce from those subject lines?
Go with what works. Look to your own past successful email campaigns and replicate the subject lines that produced the highest open rates. Also, test out different subject lines within the same campaign to discover what generates the best response.

2. Include a mix of promotional copy with informational copy. Even if the goal of a campaign is to promote a new product, announce company news or introduce a special offer, complement that information with non-corporate information. For example:

Supplement a new product announcement with a thought leader interview from a supporting industry.
If a seasonal offer is being promoted, include tips or a checklist pertaining to that particular season.

3. Involve your readers. Consider the success of blogs, forums and social networks. Those interactive channels are effective because users feel involved and engaged. Build off that premise with email copywriting by keeping subscribers engaged and making them a part of the content. Consider including:

Reader polls
Reader case studies
Q&As with customers
User-generated content

4. Make the call to action crystal clear. With too many calls to action, email marketers run the risk of confusing or overwhelming subscribers. When customers are presented too many options, they may be less likely to purchase. Instead, focus your calls to action and limit the effort it takes to act. Consider these quick tips:

Rely on size and placement position to emphasize the call to action.
Write call to action copy that tells subscribers exactly what they can expect.
Use copy that reinforces to subscribers that taking action will be quick and easy.

5. Put yourself in your subscribers’ shoes. When it all boils down, an email campaign will only be successful if it addresses subscribers’ needs. Email marketers should look at their campaigns from subscribers’ perspectives. What’s important to them? In a ClickZ blog post on email copywriting, Pat Friesen talks about the importance of understanding an audience:

Visualize subscribers, whether they are mothers of young children or a corporate executive.
Picture where subscribers are reading the email copy, whether it’s on a computer at work, on a laptop at home or on-the-go from a mobile device.
Imagine the distractions subscribers face when reading email copy.
Beyond simply visualizing subscribers, study their open and click-through patterns, and consider their demographic information. If you’re still unsure of what subscribers want, use a reader survey to ask them.

Define ROI of Social Media

Social Media renders everything you know about measurement obsolete. The definition of reach has changed, the definition of success had changed.

The answer isn’t in how many you’ve reached, but how those you’ve reached have responded.

Once you have reached the audience, take a look at how they engage and make decisions as it may have changed.

OLD: Awareness > Consideration > Preference > Trial > Purchase
NEW: Find > Observe > Participate > Engagement > Purchase/Act/Link/WOM

To get started, set goals for Social Media. Examples of goals are:

-Marketing/leads/sales
-Mission/safety/civic engagement
-Relationship/reputation/positioning

To reach those goals, what do you need to measure? Paine recommends following the 7 Steps to Social Media ROI:

1. Define the ‘R’ – what are expected results
2. Define the ‘I’ – what’s the investment
3. Understand your audiences and what motivates them
4. Define the metrics (what you want to become)
5. Define your benchmarks
6. Obey the Rules
7. Analysis

Email Deliverability 101

     

For those of you interested in learning about email deliverability, check out this quick tutorial >> http://www.constantcontact.com/display_media.jsp?id=19t   

A few highlights include:

Return Path Deliverability Statistics:
- Average 20% blocking rate for those not using an Email Service Provider (ESP)
- Average < 3% blocking rate for those using an ESP* (like Constant Contact, which is what I’m using now; also used Eloqua in past)

*At leading ESP’s, there is usually a team dedicated to working with major ISPs to maintain low / no blocking rates

Note: Constant Contact provides consistently a 97% deliverability

TO AVOID SPAM FILTERS

WORDS TO AVOID: Sale, Free, No Charge, Click Here, Offer, Register Today, Must be 18…

DESIGN ELEMENTS TO AVOID: All Caps, Red Text, Excessive punctuation, Excessive use of symbols, Low ratio > text to images, white versus colored backgrounds

80% email recipients hit > Report Spam button > without even opening the message

Your audience will look at the “From Name” & “Subject Line” and decide to open the email, delete or report as SPAM

Use whatever is most recognizable to your audience (company name, acronym of company, or your name etc…)

Also use a clear subject line that’s to the point for improved open rates

Visual elements within (HTML emails) appeal to readers

Make sure you stay consistent with both your logo/branding and color palette/look & feel – people respond better to what they recognize

Bare minimum > communicate with email list on a quarterly basis

Regularly remove emails with hard bounces (non-existent, undeliverable) as well as consistent soft bounces (mailbox full, vacation, auto-reply)

ISPs DO notice this activity and flag you if persistent attempts are made

Hard bounces recommendations:
1. export emails to find out why bad (i.e. typos, etc…)
2. remove if non-valid emails (will hurt your deliverability)

Stick with a consistent “from” email address – so if added to safe sender list you are a recognized sender

Hope this information provides some value.  If you have other ideas, please share.

HubSpot is Cool!

Wow!  A friend of mine recently introduced me to HubSpot, an inbound marketing system that, in one centralized portal via an easy to use interface can help you quickly set-up, manage and get metrics on your online efforts including SEO, Blog, Landing pages and more… to ensure maximum ROI.

“HubSpot inbound marketing software helps your company get found by the qualified prospects that are looking for the products or services that you sell in search engines, blogs and the blogosphere, and social media.  Once these qualified visitors are on your website, HubSpot helps you convert more of them into leads and paying customers through landing pages, lead intelligence and marketing analytics.”

HubSpot has been featured in the Wall Street Journal Online, MarketingSherpa, PC Magazine, AdAge, and MarketingProfs.  I definitely think it’s something worth checking out www.hubspot.com >>

Search, Find, Qualify, Try and Buy (WebCentric Customer Lifecycle)

What is meant by a “Webcentric Customer Lifecycle”? 

Below I’d like to share with you an interesting exchange I had with Reed Overfelt, COO of a “very cool” Online Creative Agency (MuralVentures.com).  Thought it provides incredible insight…

Q. MarketingLAUNCH.com: Do you believe – or not believe – in web forms (i.e. complete form for white paper, pre-recorded demo, etc…)?  Sounds like you are against this method of lead capture.  Since marketing campaigns’ success are mostly based on how many qualified leads produced… how do you address that?  Or do you feel ROI on campaigns should strictly be focused on FREE trials, orders, etc…  Lot’s of debate on this – would love an “expert opinion”.
 
A. MuralVentures.com: Excellent question! The key challenges with white papers and pre-recorded demos is your customers don’t trust them.  The reality is USER generated content has fundamentally replaced company created content. 
 
A recent Universal McCann study found that only 14% of Users trust company created content, whereas 78% trust recommendations made by other consumers.  
 
So, what’s a marketer to do!?  

Our job is to drive qualified leads to the sales teams.   

1. You have to ensure your target customers can find you -using personas (defining target customers), custom URLs, and highly targeted landing pages.
2. You have to ensure you answer their burning questions in 12 words or less.
3. You have to give them the info they need to self-qualify; that you have a potential source/solution for solving their burning problem (i.e. super, super, super high quality, interactive demos supported by user generated feedback!)
4. You have to ensure when they are ready to raise their hand (i.e. buy!), they can do so immediately (i.e. click-2-chat or click-2-call > 24 hrs a day or at min. 6AM to 9PM in all 4 US time zones).   

These are the Search, Find, Qualify, Try (i.e. demo), and Buy steps of the MuralVentures WebCentric Customer Lifecycle.    

Getting a customer to this final step – particularly click-2-chat -  is the #1 priority for a good online marketing campaign.  

We did some research for Microsoft, 80% of their most qualified leads for their ERP and CRM business (i.e. complex product sale) now originate from Click to Chat!  Over 60% of these leads closed within 90 days.  60%!  That is HUGE! 

 ————-

We’d like to hear from you.  Share your thoughts on this idea!

Personas: Put a Face on Your Customer

Highlights

• Personas are developed to represent different user types within a targeted demographic that might use a specific product offering. 
• Personas are most often developed as part of a user-centered design process for creating software, online apps and interactive web sites.
• Personas include the goals, desires, and limitations of the user, which are considered when designing the product or web site. 
• Personas are useful in helping to guide decisions about a product, such as features, interactions, and visual design.
• A user persona is a representation of the goals and behavior of a real group of users extracted from actual data (see below). 

Benefits

• Provide a human “face” so as to focus empathy on the persons represented by the demographics.
• Help team members share a specific, consistent understanding of various audience groups.
• Abstract data about certain groups can be put in a proper context and can be understood and remembered in coherent stories.
• Team members’ solutions can be guided by how well they match the needs of individual user personas.
• Features can be prioritized based on how well they address the needs of one or more personas.

Advantages of Personas

Personas are said to be cognitively compelling because they put a personal human face on otherwise abstract data about customers. By thinking about the needs of a fictional persona, designers may be better able to presume what a real person might need. Such conclusions may assist with brainstorming, use case specifications, and feature definition.

• Personas are easy to communicate and help others absorb customer data in a palatable format.
• Defining personas helps various cross-functional teams have a shared vision and understanding of the real users in terms of their goals, capabilities and contexts.
• Personas also help prevent “self imposed design” when the designer or developer may unconsciously project their own mental models on the product design which may be very different from the actual target user population.
• Personas also provide a reality check by helping designers stay focused on the design of cases which are most likely to be encountered (i.e. frequent target users verses infrequent cases).

Include Actual Data 

In most cases, personas are synthesized from actual data collected from interviews with users. By feeding in real data, design teams avoid generating stereotypical users that may bear no relation to the actual user’s. 

For each product, more than one persona is usually created, but one persona should always be the primary focus for the design.  These persona users are captured in 1–2 page descriptions that include behavior patterns, goals, skills, attitudes, and environment, with a few fictional personal details to bring the persona to life.

7 Top Tips in SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

Interested in being in the top of search engine rankings when someone’s looking for your product or service? (Uh - yea!?!?)  Assuming you do, then you’ve got to use SEO strategies when designing your web site and posting content. It doesn’t happen naturally, it’s about planning and placement.  So what are a few of the key proven techniques you may ask? 

Sally Falkow has written an excellent post called, “How to Get on Page One of Google.” Below are many of the highpoints:

1. Get a domain name that contains a top search term for your product or service
2. Include a mix of rich content including video, text and images
3. Make sure your site architecture is bot-friendly (bots are the computers that search the Internet for content); a good start, be logical in your structure, use keywords in your headers, support your content with like content, make links relevant and more (note: no frames or tables in your page design).
4. Have a blog on your site
5. Generate keyword-rich inbound links (critical and challenging)
6. Have a database of content for people and search engines to search
7. Issue search-optimized press releases (using an affordable tool like www.prweb.com). A  well optimized press release can achieve page one placement in Google even though your website does not.  And if you add links to the release, when it gets picked up on other sites that link will add weight to your inbound links.
8. Include RSS feeds on your site (RSS feeds are a method of content syndication).  RSS provides fresh content -with links- and gets spread across the web, bringing new niche traffic and inbound links to your web site and if you’re lucky, page one visibility in Google. (Check out Press-Feed.com to create an RSS feed.)

This hits the highpoints, but read on for more on SEO Optimization >>

Remark-able Stuff Spreads (Seth Godin)

In a world of too many options and too little time, our obvious choice is to ignore the ordinary stuff. Marketing guru Seth Godin spells out – why, when it comes getting our attention, bad or bizarre ideas are more successful than boring ones. And “early adopters”, not the mainstream’s bell curve, are the new sweet spot of the market.  (View Video below to learn more)

15 Steps to Marketing Your Business

Below are 15 steps to creating a marketing plan around your business.  These are a few basics to get you started. 

Step 1: Target Market – Determine who your ideal target client (market segment) truly is.

Step 2: The Product Service Package – Develope your full suite of products and services that align with market demands from product, pricing, placement and promotion.

Step 3: Differentiate and Dominate – Develop and communicate your CORE marketing message.  Understand and communicate what your value is -and that which sets you apart from the rest.

Step 4: Give Them An Image – Communicate using a complete marketing package to ensure all messaging and visuals are in alignment.

Step 5: Develop Your Story – Create meaning by telling your story so that it resonates with your audience.

Step 6: Marketing Materials – Develop marketing materials that educate and stand out; simplicity is key.

Step 7: Web Site – Develop a content-based business web site; make sure it aligns with top search engine optimization guidelines. 

Step 8: Business Advertising – From web to print including free listings, paid advertising, sponsorships, partnerships and more, every sale starts with a lead.

Step 9: Direct Mail – A solid lead generation tool when your market segment is highly targeted and your messaging and offer resonates with your audience.

Step 10: Public Relations – Create news around key milestones within your business. Write and release PR messages via Blogs, online news wires (i.e. http://www.prweb.com) and more to gain media attention and expert status.  Look online for templates. Follow SEO guidelines.

Step 11: Referral Marketing – Building a systematic referral marketing machine such as an Affiliate Marketing Program or Agent Referral Program.

Step 12: Search Engine Initiatives - Generate leads from the Internet including Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Search Engine Marketing (SEM), Pay-Per-Click (PPC), Search-friendly PR and more.

Step 13: Blogging for Business – Develop a Business Blog and communicate… with your customers, the media, prospects, partners and more.

Step 14: A Selling System – Turn prospects into clients and clients into partners; automate your sales process as much as possible with leading (and affordable) automation tools; be clear on how to manage each stage in the sales cycle.

Step 15: Marketing Automation – Automate and extend your marketing with technology tools.