AshPointLane.com

Some great insights on the mobile marketing front today from eMarketer. According to new research from the DMA, mobile users are more then twice as likely to respond to an offer via SMS than they are via mobile email.



eMarketer was quick to point out that this does not make text messaging the solution to all our mobile marketing challenges and highlighted findings from ExactTarget's 2008 Channel Preference survey.

"But even text messaging is not about to replace other marketing mainstays such as e-mail or direct mail. In fact, only 1% of US Internet users surveyed in February 2008 by ExactTarget (2008 Channel Preference Survey) picked text messaging as their channel of choice for opt-in communications. Instead, the medium is better-suited for targeting specific audiences, and as part of multichannel campaigns."

We will highlight more of our findings specific to SMS in an upcoming whitepaper on the subject. In the meantime, mobile marketing of all forms becoming increasingly common--and SMS and mobile email each play critical roles. In order to help clients serve "on the go" subscribers, ExactTarget recently announced the launch of text messaging capabilities. Managing these two critical mobile touchpoints--along with voice messaging--out of a single platform gives ExactTarget clients the ability to contact subscribers across all three mobile touchpoints in accordance with their individual preferences.

Some evidence suggests top internet retailers are eager to frequently redesign their website’s, but not so eager to perform optimization and testing. It’s easy to understand why upper management loves redesigning websites. It’s tangible, it’s exciting, and it often comes with a load of lofty promises of future ROI. Website usability on the other hand, is not quite so tangible and easy to grasp. It’s not drastic, but rather slow and steady.

In a perfect world, a website redesign might never be necessary. After all, a redesign implies someone wasn’t monitoring the performance, and tweaking and optimizing as needed. However, inevitably the topic of a redesign will come up. Here’s 8 questions to ask yourself before embarking on a website overhaul project.

1. What are the problems with the current site? - Why are you thinking about a redesign in the first place? Make sure you answer this question with fact rather than feeling based reasons. You may be tired of the look and feel of your website, but what do your customers think?
2. What do your customers say about your current site? - What feedback are you getting from your current customers? Your customers may not be professional web designers, but even a novice can point out a bad website. In order to get feedback, try taking some surveys or polls from your site visitors.
3. What is the purpose of this redesign? - Try to avoid vague objectives such as “the site needs to be updated” or “because we do it every year.” Is your goal to improve conversion rates? Reduce bounces rates? Increase search traffic? Ideally, your redesign goal should be inline with the overall purpose of your website. Be sure to set measurable goals that you can easily revisit after the launch.
4. Can these problems be fixed with optimization rather than a full redesign? - Just because your search engine rankings need improvement doesn’t mean you must redesign your site. Maybe it can simply be fixed for a fraction of the cost. It’s easy to over react to a problem and assume everything needs to be scrapped, when it can be optimized instead.
5. How will the redesign affect my search engine rankings? - Too often, SEO is an afterthought of a website redesign. While SEO is certainly not the only consideration when considering a website overhaul, there are many search related ramifications of a site redesign. Make sure you understand how these changes can impact your search traffic before you begin a project.
6. Have you considered the opportunity cost as well as the financial cost? - Depending on the complexity of your website, site redesigns can take a significant amount of time. During this development time, will the current site be neglected? In my experience, its very difficult to focus on maintaining and optimizing an old website at the same time you’re building a new one.
7. Will it be hard for my customers to relearn my new site? - Nobody loves change. Will customers be confused by the new layout? If the changes are drastic, expect the learning curve phenomenon. In other words, things may get worse before they get better.
8. How will I judge if the new website has succeeded? - This is perhaps the most important question of all. If it’s not asked and answered properly, you may get stuck in an endless cycle of website revisions, never reaching a goal because the goal wasn’t defined in the first place. Be sure to answer this question before you launch the new site. Are you prepared to switch back to the previous design if the site is a failure?

As you can probably tell by now, I’m a big fan of website optimization vs drastic, sometimes unnecessary website overhauls. Don’t get me wrong though, there are certainly times when a situation warrants a complete redesign.

What has been your experience with optimization vs. redesigns? Under what conditions would you justify scrapping a design and starting over?

Need a second opinion on your website? Palmer Web Marketing's website review services will give you the insight you need.

I recently received an email from a major company outlining some changes to the way they’d be sending me emails.

They outlined the recent attempts by fraudsters pretending to be them and told us how we could recognise that the emails were from them.

One of them which made great sense to me was that the email would always be to sent to us with our first name in the email, such as “Dear Alex” instead of “Dear Customer”.

It’s a very simple method that really could boost your recipients confidence in your mails and also help in preventing any of your recipients being scammed.

Other helpful links of personalisation fields:

Email Segmentation for Small Businesses

Managing Multiple Sources for your e-mail file

And whilst you’re there, go to no man is an iland to view a recent series of posts about personalisation.

In this series I will be looking at certain industries and judging them on their email marketing campaigns, from sign up to design and customisation – all will be judged.  The first industry up is the record labels.

I’ve always found the music industry to be an interesting area to assess.  Mainly because they always seem to use the same channels of marketing and have always been criticised for there lack of innovation when it comes to marketing methods.  Let’s see how they actually fare…..

Sony BMG

From what I can see, there doesn’t seem to be any main newsletter function, definitely no obvious sign up area.  What they seem to have gone for is an RSS feed route instead. 

They’ve segmented the feed as well, so you can choose which information you want to receive:

Label News

Artist News

New Releases

Forthcoming Gigs

I quite like the idea actually, though I would’ve preferred it if they had given me the option to choose which artists I wanted to find out about.  I can see people tuning out of the stories as they receive countless stories about Avril Lavigne and Alicia Keys when all they really care about is what’s going on with Kings of Leon and Editors.

If they had have implemented an email marketing campaign though, just think of the possibilities.  You choose which artists you want to find out about and receive some all information about them.  Better than that though, say Sony BMG sign up a similar artist to your preferences, they can introduce them to you; opening up the potential of all those subscribers.

Positives

• Choice of news categories to subscribe to
• Use of RSS feed
• Nice layout with easy to subscribe function to RSS

Negatives

• Haven’t utilised email subscribe function on site
• Unwanted information will also be included in sign up to RSS due to lack of filtering options

EMI

It was a mission within itself finding the right website.  When I did finally get the right one, the newsletter sign up was very easy to find.  Right, Sign up time…

They asked all the right questions that could allow them to have a well segmented and personalised email campaign.  Post Code, Birthday ( I’ve made up one to see if I receive any personalised emails in the next few weeks to celebrate my birthday) and favourite artists.  All good, well done EMI!

Positives

• Easy to find subscription area
• Good use of personal data capturing in sign up process
• Gave choice of artists I want to know about so no unwanted emails

Negatives

There is nothing particularly wrong with the sign up process.  Nice and simple sign up that asked all the standard questions.  Nothing outstanding, but nothing bad either.

Universal

Like EMI, they have instantly got a link to the sign up form and was very easy to find.  All questions very similar, except that Universal have opted to include text message marketing in their form, we’ll see how that goes…

Choosing which artists I like is really awkward.  Instead of radio buttons, we have a list and some instructions to hold CTRL whilst you select your artists.  Something like that could lose them sign ups or at the very least mean they don’t get quite as much information as they could do as people just give up and not select all their favoured artists.  This is just a small gripe though.

I found myself quite surprised at how many artists I like on this label actually so have quite a comprehensive list of people that I’m expecting emails from.  The final section of the signup is probably the icing on the cake though.  A tick box stating the following :

“Please keep me updated with info on any new artists from Universal Music, that are similar to the ones I have selected above”

This is something that I thought would’ve been great for the Sony BMG page.  Luckily, it looks like Universal are going that extra mile and have put some consideration into the sign up process.  Hooray!

Positives

• Easy to find subscription area
• Good use of personal data capturing in sign up process
• Gave choice of artists I want to know about so no unwanted emails
• Opened up potential to new music exposure with opt in tick box

Negatives

• Inconvenient artist selection process
• The whole side of the site for the sign up process seemed very dated.

And fighting for the Independents: Ninja Tunes

Once again, very easy to find mailing list link but ninja tunes fall massively short on the data collection front by only asking for email address and which parts of the label you want to hear about.

Positives

• Easy to find subscription area
• Choice of label areas to sign up to

Negatives

• Poor level of personal data capturing

Checking the Inbox

Oh dear, they have really fallen short here.  I go to check my inbox to see the confirmation email and find that two of the labels haven’t even sent me a confirmation email.  The one label that did (Universal), decided that I have to click through 15 emails confirming that I want to receive the news from those artists, one by one.  Now I understand that this is quite helpful as you may have accidentally added an artist you didn’t want but this is a laborious task of confirmation that if I wasn’t doing this, I wouldn’t have bothered clicking through all this.

And the winner is:

Well Round 1 goes to Universal.  Despite some annoying flaws, they have taken the early lead with the effort put into the whole process.  They are also the only company that have adopted the double opt-in process.  This isn’t over though as round two has now commenced; bring on the emails!

Building customer confidence in your brand is vital to converting first time visitors to your website. This post will highlight 3 customer confidence building tactics I recently discovered.

Who Just Ordered Feature

We all know testimonials are a proven way to boost confidence in your products. Email marketing company Aweber has found another way to leverage the well-known social proof buying trigger. Aweber’s Who Just Ordered feature shows, in-real time, the first name, city, and state of customers who have just signed up for their service.

This innovative feature counters one of the major draw-backs of online shopping, the lack of a shared shopping experience with other customers. For example, if I’m in a department store, I can easily see where people are going, and what they’re buying. On the web, I cannot. We all want to know we’re not the only one buying something. (I’m not the only one who sneaks a peak in other people’s shopping carts, right?)

Showing Press Recognition & Awards

While many online stores have a press page buried deep within the site, few retailers actually brag prominently about recognition they’ve received. Romanicos Chocolate, on the other hand, highlights awards they’ve received on their homepage. This is a great tactic to raise the value of the brand in the eyes of a first time visitor. Even if a visitor has never had an interaction with your company before, seeing other well known brands or people endorsing your products helps your website’s credibility.

Shipping Assurances

Questions regarding shipping and fulfillment can cloud a customer’s mind and become an obstacle for ordering. “Where does it ship from?”, “How long will it take?”, “What method will it ship?” are just a few of the common questions. For me, there’s nothing worse than placing an order, and having the retailer sit on it for days before they ship it. Kids Bargains assures customers with an ad on their homepage that orders ship quickly. Such a reminder is perfect for deadline sensitive customers who need their order by a certain date.

Seen any other tactics used by online retailers to boost confidence? Please share them in the comment section below.

Need help boosting the confidence of your site visitors? Get 3 recommendations from Palmer Web Marketing.

Need a second opinion on your website? Palmer Web Marketing's website review services will give you the insight you need.