Month: February 2009

E-mail Permission Marketing: it works!

In 1999 Seth Godin wrote an incredible book called “Permission Marketing” (you can check out part of “Permission Marketing” for free at Amazon or could read the entire first four chapters if you e-mail me at damian [at] idaconcpts [dot] com,  and yes, I am authorized to forward the first three chapters of this book via e-mail, as long as I don’t make any profit out of it).  Seth is a truly great author and you should check him out.  He’s such a good author that he often gives out  part of his work for free (as in the case of “Permission Marketing”) or even complete books.

The concept of permission marketing is best exemplified by the smart use of e-mail.

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Use of permission marketing from Skitch.com.

Recognize this little checkbox? Every time that you are interested in an online service or product and you need to register to be able to use it, the makers will ask you this question.  Do you want to hear from us? This little question is very powerful because you are already engaging in a conversation with your users.  You’re letting them know that you want to keep in touch with them and likewise you are asking them, if they are ok with it.

Now, I understand that you might challenge this proposition:  people are ok with an organization reaching out to them.  Well, consider this survey from eMarketer:

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Do you notice the change in user trends about e-mail messages from companies from 2005 to 2008?  People care about these e-mails because 1) they are REGISTERED, 2) they checked the little “it’s ok to contact me” box during registration,  3) the e-mails that they are receiving are personal, relevant, and ANTICIPATED messages (the three pillars of Seth’s permission marketing), and 4) they can choose when and where to check these messages.

“It’s about me, it’s about what I’m interested right now, and it’s delivered in a format that I want to get it.” – Seth Godin (“All Marketers are Liars” presentation at Google, 8:41)

The beauty behind e-mail permission marketing is that people do not have to be interrupted, they choose when to review the information (if, at all).

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However, any organization can mess up this priceless, golden permission that its users have provided by abusing this permission and turning its e-mail messages into impersonal, irrelevant and unanticipated.

In conclusion:

  1. Provide your users a check-box during registration so they can decide whether or not to give you permission to contact them.
  2. Make your e-mail messages personal (ask for feedback, provide various channels for communication, thank them for giving you a job), relevant (tell them about how you are making their experience better, tell them how other users got in touch with you and they made a difference in the new release) , and anticipated (bi-weekly, monthly).
  3. Don’t abuse the permission your users they have given you: NEVER sell your e-mail list to other vendors, ALWAYS provide the option for 1-click, easy unsubscription, and ALWAYS respect if they decide to unsubscribe from your e-mail list.

Thank you for your time.  In the next post I will discuss about web metrics of permission marketing e-mail campaigns.

"Google Devalues Everything It Touches" – Wall Street Journal Chief

I have chosen this title for today’s post from an article by Tom Foremski at the SiliconValleyWatcher because it touches my experience with Google Adwords both for a real state broker’s website  in Guayaquil, Ecuador and a Mac photo software developer here in Hawaii.

The gem from this article is the quote:

Mr. Thomson (Managing Editor of the Wall Street Journal) said, “Google devalues everything it touches. Google is great for Google but it’s terrible for content providers.” He said that Google doesn’t distinguish between the quality of the content around which it serves up ads, it is concerned with quantity rather than quality.

I have to agree with Mr. Thomson on this comment because Google Adwords currently lacks a lot of features that are necessary to truly create ads that are segmented towards specific niches.  I know that this last statement might be challenged very quickly by talented SEO experts.

Let’s take a look at two cases, one positive and one negative.

Positive:

Visits to srbienesraices.com from August 1, 2008 to February 13, 2009
Visits to srbienesraices.com from August 1, 2008 to February 13, 2009

As it becomes quite clear from the graph above, having included a Google Adwords CPC campaign into srbienesraices.com was a great idea because it create up to 20 times more daily visitors.  More than 80% of the site visits were provided by this campaign and the bounce rate from these visits was not that much higher than the bounce rate, about 40%, of direct traffic during the same time period.  Once the CPC campaign was finished, the number of daily visitors drop back to previous levels (this means that extensive A/B Testing is required! However, that is beyond the objective of today’s post).

Google Adwords was able to drive visitors to a small website for a real state broker in Guayaquil, Ecuador because the concept of the website was simple:  1) visitor wants to buy real state in Ecuador, 2) visitor can take a sneak peek at some properties (very few pictures are uploaded ON PURPOSE), and 3) visitor have to contact real state broker to get more information.  The funnel strategy is plain vanilla.

There are no visitor requirements.  Neither technical  (e.g. browser type, operating system) nor demographic (e.g. age, income).

So what happens when technical details and demographic are included?

Negative:

I cannot go into specific details of my Google Adwords campaign at my past position at iLovePhotos but I can tell you that when you add technical and demographic requirements for your visitors from a Google Adwords campaign, things are not that smooth.

For example, if I am targeting a male in the 18-25 year old range that uses Firefox on Windows Vista and that is interested in photography, I am at a serious disadvantage with Google Adwords. Remember the quote from Mr. Thompson above:  Google is good for quantity, not quality.  Google Adwords will allow me to target a lot of people (I had about 3 million ad impressions during a 2 week period) but the number of clicks from the people with the technical and demographic characteristics that I required was about 0.0026%).

A/B Testing of ads? At Google Adwords I did plenty but there is no way I can customize the ads to target users with specific types of browsers or operating systems (if you know how to, then contact me at damiandavilarojas [at] gmail [dot] com right now).  The only way that I see around this is to do extensive research on the demographics and technical background of the users at specific websites and then target these specific websites using Google Adwords.

In conclusion, Google provides useful customization options such as region, ad location and target content but still lacks more ad segmentation features.  If you have a very simple funnel strategy and just require quantity of users with very few (or no) demographic and technical  requirements, then go ahead use Google Adwords!  But if your funnel strategy is more complicated and/or your users have specific technical and demographic requirements, then  you will have a tougher time using Google Adwords.  Google Analytics is doing a great job at advance segmentation, how long is it until Google Adwords catches up?