Crumbs from the Scone
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.
Crumbs from the Scone
“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
Crumbs from the Scone
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
Crumbs from the Scone
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.
Crumbs from the Scone
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.
Crumbs from the Scone
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.
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.
