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“Brand identifiability is under the advertiser’s control and is a key consideration in ad design,” note the authors of a recent research report on the effectiveness of visual ads. But because of rising “media noise” due to competing advertisements and “active ad avoidance by consumers,” it has become challenging for firms to grab attention, they note.
To clarify what’s working these days, the study focused on two key areas affecting brand recognition:
- Feature complexity was measured by noting an ad’s jpeg file size, which is determined by the amount of detail and variation in the three basic visual features across an image—color, luminance and edges.
- Design complexity focused on six general principles: quantity of objects, irregularity of objects, dissimilarity of objects, detail of objects, asymmetry of object arrangement and irregularity of object arrangement.
Here is the short version of what they found:
- Feature complexity hurts brand attention and the viewer’s attitude toward an ad.
- Design complexity helps attention to the pictorial and to the advertisement as a whole, to ad comprehensibility and the attitude toward an ad.
The authors suggest that designers…
- Keep feature-based “visual clutter” to a minimum: White space is still important; brands still need to be showcased.
- Make design elements more complex: patterns on a shirt; one large object in front, smaller ones in back; objects with differing shapes, textures, colors—to keep things visually interesting.
Keep it simple, with complex touches. As advertisers compete for the attention of an image-saturated audience, a simple overall format with complex elements to draw the eye in may be the best approach to making a brand message stick.
Source: “The Stopping Power of Advertising: Measures and Effects of Visual Complexity” by Rik Pieters, Michel Wedel and Rajeev Batra.
See what Shadowbend Studios can do to help you with your Graphic Design needs…
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“Even in an increasingly real-time Web, email remains a critical channel to embrace for B2B marketing success,” says Maria Pergolino in a post at the MarketingProfs Daily Fix blog. “However, it’s a channel that’s poorly treated due to our excitement at the extreme ROI potential.”
Sloppiness can impair deliverability and damage your bottom line, Pergolino warns. To avoid that fate, consider tactics like these that ensure your messages continue to reach their intended recipients:
Create a compelling welcome message. According to Pergolino, many companies neglect this action, which is a critical component of any email marketing program. “It is essential as it sets the tone for what readers can expect,” she explains.
Keep your list squeaky clean. The presence of unknown users, inactive addresses and spam traps can do serious harm to your deliverability rate. “Focus on eliminating these addresses from your current list,” she advises, “and add steps in place to keep your list clean, such as quarantining new data, making it easy for customers to provide updated information, considering a confirmed opt-in, and vetting new data sources carefully.”
Authenticate yourself as a sender. The benefit of authentication is that it identifies you “as a legitimate business as opposed to someone involved in spamming or phishing scams.”
Organize your infrastructure. Work with your ESP and IT departments to identify and resolve problems as soon as they occur.
Send ultra-relevant messages. “Take the time to listen to your audience,” Pergolino advises. “Learn their behaviors and motivations; do this through both qualitative and quantitative methods.”
Know your readers, and help them know you. You’ll get the best results from your email marketing program by making sure your messages reach intended recipients who like receiving them.
Source: Daily Fix.
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While most experts will say there’s no such thing as the perfect time to send your email offer or newsletter, conventional wisdom holds that Tuesday—generally speaking—is the best day for a campaign, and Friday the worst.
“The theory behind the rule of thumb makes sense,” notes Caroline Ruggiero at the Marketo blog. “[E]mail too early in the week and people are too busy with their actual work to open or focus on your message. Email end of the week and your message will get buried in a barrage of messages everyone has to dig out of come Monday morning.”
But her own preference for browsing work email on Sundays made her wonder if Sunday could be the new Tuesday for email marketers. Although the weekend is a time to unwind, she explains, “it’s also a time to catch up on newsletters, lower-priority messages, and feeds without the distraction of, well, work. I am absolutely more open to reading marketing messages in this quieter, more relaxed setting.”
There’s some evidence that she’s not alone in her habit:
An AOL survey found that 62% of respondents checked their work email over the weekend.
According to a Pew study, two thirds of Americans do work-related research at home.
The only way to know whether your B2B audience reads email on weekends is—of course—to test it. “Perhaps,” says Ruggiero, “your key target might be guilty of indulging in some Sunday work email, just like me.”
Sunday might work. Don’t just assume that weekdays are the best time to reach your customers. If you check your email over the weekend, it stands to reason that they might, too.
Source: Marketo.
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“To say that Gilt.com is on fire may be something of [an] understatement,” says Rohit Bhargava at the Influential Marketing Blog. “The site, which features daily special sales of luxury products at discount prices is on track by some estimates to pull in $400 million in sales for the 2010 calendar year.”
According to Bhargava, smart marketing has played a critical role in the company’s success—and you might learn a thing or two from techniques such as these:
Setting the stage with amazing photography. High-quality images create a compelling visual experience for Gilt.com customers. “More than that,” he says, “the images are changing every day, which demonstrates that there is fresh content all the time and that the site will be worth visiting again and again.”
Nurturing an atmosphere of exclusivity. While there are ways to skirt the rule, new customers may only join the site when invited by an existing customer. “It doesn’t pay for them to actively prevent people from becoming members,” notes Bhargava, “but they work hard to make their current members feel as though they are part of an exclusive club.”
Creating a sense of urgency. When online shoppers place items in shopping carts, they have only 10 minutes to complete the purchase before an item returns to the virtual shelf. “The aim,” he explains, “is to limit the amount of time you can hold onto a product that someone else may want to purchase.” But it also converts browsers to buyers with lightning speed.
With 2 million members, Gilt.com is doing something right—meaning some of its techniques might work for you.
Source: Influential Marketing Blog
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Marketing experts often tell you which features your website absolutely must have. But for a post at the HubSpot blog, Kipp Bodnar created a list of items you should delete as soon as possible from your site. Here are a few items that deserve immediate elimination:
Complicated animation. There’s little upside to Flash-based wizardry that hinders the visitor experience and impedes search engine optimization. “Perform a test,” he advises. “Remove your animation for a set period of time and see how it impacts metrics like lead conversion and time-on-site.”
Industry jargon. Whatever your specialization, you start to assume everyone understands industry-specific language. This is a mistake. “Look through your website and highlight terms that are not commonly used outside of industry circles,” Bodnar says. “Delete the highlighted words and replace them with more common explanations.”
Images. Every website needs images—but you might have too many. Excessive images slow download speed when visitors click on a page, and search engines consider this a negative factor in page rankings. “Websites that have been around for a while can often collect lots of images, and some of them no longer go with the content of the site,” he explains. “Keep some images, but go through and remove all images from your website that don’t help tell your company’s story.”
“Contact Us” forms. While you must provide contact information, Bodnar believes a generic contact form is more likely to attract spam than qualified leads. He suggests landing pages with dedicated forms for specific offers: “For example, if you have a form connected to a free assessment, you clearly know that submissions from that form are related to potential customers who want a free assessment.”
Sometimes less at your website is more—both for your customers’ user experience and search engine optimization.
Source: HubSpot
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In a post at Email Marketing Reports, Mark Brownlow presents a screenshot that looks like a page from a 19th-century novel: lengthy paragraphs filled with sentences of uniform length.
That, he notes emphatically, is not how your email messages should look.
“In fact, you wouldn’t read the words if that was an email,” he says. “The wall of text is a barrier that few will bother scaling. No matter how good the writing, how valuable the information, how trusted the source, response is sacrificed because the paragraph length demands more reading effort than some are prepared to commit.”
It’s all psychological. The same information that looks ponderous in two paragraphs appears easy-to-digest when broken into five paragraphs. In other words, the rules you learned at school about fully developed paragraphs simply don’t apply to online communication.
Here’s what you need to do:
Write paragraphs that occupy as little as one line but don’t exceed six lines. “This … issue becomes more pressing as screen displays narrow, thanks to the spread of smartphones, netbooks and other mobile devices,” Brownlow notes.
Reduce the sense of monotony by varying the length of your paragraphs and sentences. “Throw in the occasional one-line paragraph or a three-word sentence and you may annoy your English professor,” he explains. “But you give the reading landscape contours and diversity. The content looks like a melody of words, not a dirge.”
Write the words and the music. Engage your readers with lyrically arranged text that gives your message visual appeal.
Source: Email Marketing Reports.
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At least once a day, writes Joe Pulizzi at the Junta 42 blog, he receives an email asking how much content marketing (print and online) should cost. The short answer: It depends.
“Look at it this way,” he says. “I can pay $12 dollars to play eighteen holes of golf at a Sandusky, Ohio, golf course.” The course is poorly maintained, drinkable water is scarce and you’ll have to walk since the golf carts are notoriously unreliable. “I can also pay three-hundred dollars at Pinehurst in North Carolina,” he continues, where the course is immaculate, knowledgeable caddies abound and you might see a celebrity.
Which course he chooses to play will depend on his goal. “There are times for each situation (just like content),” he says. “If I just want to swing the club, the $12 course is perfect. Exactly what I needed. If I want an experience, or want to share an experience with someone else, I may take the rare occasion to play Pinehurst.”
In other words, a situation might call for “cheap” content, or it might call for “premium” content. “Just like playing golf where they both have 18 fairways and greens,” says Pulizzi, “500 words is 500 words. What happens with those 500 words is where the price difference comes in.”
So if you hire someone to write 500-word blog posts for $15 or $25 a pop, you’re going to get $15 or $25 blog posts—written quickly, with minimal research or editorial oversight. A solidly researched piece that has gone through a traditional vetting process will cost more.
As you budget for your content marketing, remember that you’re going get what you pay for.
Source: Junta 42.
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In today’s marketplace, the customer is in control and companies are being held to a whole new level of accountability, Paul Chaney notes in an on-demand seminar at the MarketingProfs site. Today’s skeptical consumers are downright resistant to advertisers—and “the pressure is on to improve targeting to achieve relevance and minimize waste,” he says.
What’s the best way to connect with today’s picky consumers? Through social media, Chaney says—even if it’s the last thing on earth you want to do!
In the seminar, Social Media Slowpokes: It’s Not too Late to Connect With Your Customers Online, Chaney offers great guidance for social-wary marketers, including step-by-step tips for engaging customers on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. Among his practical instructions:
Facebook: Set up a personal Profile; develop a Fan Page to pull supportive customers in; create and advertise Events; form Groups to engage in ongoing conversations; move into creating and running ads; effectively use the “Like” button.
LinkedIn: Create that all-important Profile first; import contacts to find existing LinkedIn members among them; use LinkedIn Answers to demonstrate your expertise; pull in your Twitter and blog feeds.
Twitter: Monitor what is being said about your company, products, services, industry and competition; gather valuable feedback about products or services; offer proactive customer service; promote events; drive traffic to your website or blog.
By following step-by-step how-to’s, even the most reluctant among us can develop an effective social-media presence, Chaney argues. And in today’s digital marketplace, staying anti-social is not an option, he concludes.
Slow and steady wins the race. “Be easy on yourself,” Chaney advises reluctant social-media marketers. Take one step at a time—and, to get off to a great start, “buy a state-of-the-art mobile device.”
Source: MarketingProfs.
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“One click between email message and e-commerce is so ingrained for all of us—as both buyers and marketers—that it’s almost nostalgic to think of using email solely to promote offline purchases,” writes Stephanie Miller in an article at MarketingProfs.
But that’s exactly how Scotts Miracle-Gro—a company with no direct online sales channel—uses its email-marketing program. During the registration process, subscribers provide their grass type and postal code; then, once each month during their region’s growing season, they receive a Scotts Lawn Care Update newsletter with content tailored to their needs.
According to Kip Edwardson, the senior manager of Interactive Marketing at Scotts, the company’s newsletter has a clear mission: to take the guesswork out of product selection for any lawn in any season in any location.
“We’ve learned that knowledge equals revenue,” Edwardson tells Miller in the article. “We are guiding them through the lawn-care lifecycle, and that education encourages them to not only buy more product but to feel confident and gratified by their purchase. We take very seriously that customers gave us a permission grant, and we want to provide something of value.”
Subscribers can also register for Consumer Information Alerts that offer advice on coping with adverse weather conditions or anything else that might harm their lawns.
“We cull through our call center, retail feedback, and website for spikes in activity—say, a freeze in Florida or heavy moss in the Midwest,” Edwardson explains. “We then proactively alert subscribers and the retail-store managers in those regions with tips on how to address the issue.”
A good email program can grow more than subscriptions. Scotts gives its in-store sales a significant boost by offering real help to customers via its email messaging.
Crumbs from the Scone
In an article at MarketingProfs, Dean Rieck says a direct-mail campaign might be just what you need to drive targeted online traffic to your website. “According to the 2009 Channel Preference Study by ExactTarget,” he notes, “direct mail influences 76% of Internet users to buy a product or service online.”
Here are some of Rieck’s tips for successful integration in your print/online campaign:
- Give direct-mail recipients a good reason to visit your website. Tempt them with an offer for a whitepaper, a free seminar or a coupon. “It must be something they want,” he notes, “not just something you want them to see.”
- Remember that they have to type the URL into a browser. Email subscribers who want to learn more simply click on a link; in a direct-mail campaign, however, they must enter the Web address manually. “The shorter and easier it is to spell, then, the easier it will be for people to visit your page.”
- Provide clear instructions in your call to action. If you’re offering a $100 coupon for participation in a customer survey, tell recipients exactly where they should go to take the survey and claim their coupon. “People are more likely to respond when you specifically tell them what to do,” Rieck says.
- Drive traffic to a landing page created for the direct-mail campaign. When you have a specific call to action, send customers to a page that facilitates that specific action. “By creating a unique landing page and driving people to that page, you can control the message, track response, and collect information for follow-up and future direct marketing efforts.”
Old and new media aren’t necessarily oil and water—when blended properly, they can pack a potent punch.
Source: MarketingProfs.
“Brand identifiability is under the advertiser’s control and is a key consideration in ad design,” note the authors of a recent research report on the effectiveness of visual ads. But because of rising “media noise” due to competing advertisements and “active ad avoidance by consumers,” it has become challenging for firms to grab attention, they note.
