From obsessed Facebook users to so called social media socialites to marketers, everybody wants to find out what is popular on this social networks.

Finally, thanks to Chitika, Inc. they all can put down the magical 8-ball and have some guidelines.

Founded in 2003, [...]]]>

What do Facebook users want?

From obsessed Facebook users to so called social media socialites to marketers, everybody wants to find out what is popular on this social networks.

Finally, thanks to Chitika, Inc. they all can put down the magical 8-ball and have some guidelines.

Who is Chitika?

Founded in 2003, Chitika (pronounced CHIH-tih-ka), is a full-service on-line advertising network serving over 2 billion monthly impressions across more than 80,000 websites.

How did Chitika find out what Facebook users want?

For advertisers and media buyers, Chitika is a channel for targeting on-line consumers and qualified buyers. For all publishers, Chitika is aplatform for earning daily ad revenue.  They performed a study based on a sample of 287,090 impressions across the Chitika advertising network.

What do Facebook users want?

Yesterday was my birthday.

Yay!

I received gifts!

Yay!

I received one great birthday gift via e-mail and I felt like the kitty going “nom nom nom”.

I received one terrible birthday gift via e-mail and I felt like the kitty going “nooo it are my birthday”.

Yesterday was my birthday.

Yay!

I received gifts!

Yay!

I received one great birthday gift via e-mail and I felt like the kitty going “nom nom nom”.

I received one terrible birthday gift via e-mail and I felt like the kitty going “nooo it are my birthday”.

Here’s the story of one company that sucks at doing birthday themed e-mails, and another company that got its stuff together.

The Bad Birthday E-mail

Hey, nice cake picture!

So nice that Macy’s remembered!

FREE SHIPPING! That rocks!

Until you read the fine print:

Due to size and/or weight, certain items bear a shipping surcharge, which will still apply. When shipping to multiple addresses, only shipping to the first address will be free; Standard Shipping will apply to all other addresses. Free Shipping offer cannot be applied to purchases being shipped to Alaska, Hawaii, US Territories or APO/FPO addresses.

Hey Macy’s but I live in Hawaii!

What’s the point of sending me a gift that I cannot use?

You might argue that I could save the free shipping code to use it on a future purchase, however the expiration date is April 30, 2010. Less than 60 days is too short of a time frame for me to make a purchase at Macy’s.

Learn from Macy’s failure: If you segment your mailing list by a specific field (e.g. date of birth) make sure to double check (make that triple check!) that the e-mail is applicable to all members of that segment.  This “free shipping” e-mail promo shouldn’t go to registered Macy’s users with mailing addresses in Alaska, Hawaii, US Territories and APO/FPO addresses.

The Good Birthday E-mail

Hey, nice gift picture!

So nice that Nature Made remembered!

FREE POINTS! That rocks!

NO RESTRICTIONS! Woohoo!

IT ONLY TAKES 1 CLICK TO GET MY GIFT!  Even better!

Nature Made has a program called Wellness Rewards that lets you earn valuable rewards when you use Nature Made Vitamins and Supplements. You bank the Wellness Rewards code sfound on Nature Made bottles and packages and then you can earn rewards including coupons worth up to $7 off Nature Made products, exercise DVDs, pedometers, etc.

Learn from Nature Made’s success: Birthday e-mail promos don’t have to necessarily be an instant monetary reward, as long as they are highly relevant to the interests of your target audience (I have banked so far 2,735 points at the Wellness Rewards program). Make the gift/offer actionable and automatic after 1 click. No fine print, no restrictions: it’s a birthday gift!

Another company that is doing great e-mail newsletters is Shutterfly with its product, Wink.

eMarketer projects $443 million will go toward in-game advertising spending this year in the US. But marketers should take note that women make up a substantial portion of the audience for that advertising.

Video gaming has grown increasingly popular among older players, other demographic groups [...]]]>

Ladies, grab your Wiimote!

eMarketer projects $443 million will go toward in-game advertising spending this year in the US. But marketers should take note that women make up a substantial portion of the audience for that advertising.

Video gaming has grown increasingly popular among older players, other demographic groups and particularly women. This fact is a wake-up call for video game developers, as they are now focusing more on casual gaming.  The leader in this trend is the Nintendo Wii and this strategy has paid off as  in a study of U.S. Next-Generation Video Game Console Usage, for the Nintendo Wii, the % of total minutes used by female gamers is higher than that of its male counterparts in the 25 – 34, 35 -44, 45 – 54, and 55+ age ranges.

According to eMarketer, in addition, 29% of total PC game players were women ages 25 to 54, the largest percentage of any group. Women ages 55 and up were 17% of the market, the third-largest behind men 25 to 54. Older women spent the second-highest number of minutes playing.

“Even with the increased competition from mobile and social network gaming, the console gamer segment added the most new participants to its ranks in the last year,” said Anita Frazier of The NPD Group.  Many of those new participants are women.

Although consoles such as the Wii, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 have Internet playing capability, most game play (62%) is still offline.

Think the highly advertised World of Warcraft is the highest played PC game in the U.S.? Think again. Solitaire (yes, you heard right: Solitaire) is the highest played PC game in the U.S. with 7,750,623 unique players in December 2008, dwarfing the 1,104,334 unique players of World of Warcraft in the U.S. in the same month. In PC gaming, the games that come prepackaged with many PCs (Solitaire, FreeCell, Hearts, Minesweeper and Pinball) are the ones with the most players.

What implications has this on marketers?

Do your homework!

Learn from Nintendo and become aware of casual gaming and the increase of female video players.  2 good places to start are:

1. Meet the Digital Mom
2. Digital Mom: A two-part report from Razorfish and CafeMom

I [...]]]>

Since February 2009, I’ve been talking about permission e-mail marketing here at idaconcpts.com because it turns regular e-mails into personal, relevant and anticipated messages.  An important part of the work of online marketers is polling because it provides greater insights to our questions and allows us to have better, more educated decision-making.

I have used Surveymonkey in the past and it works great but I have found that LinkedIn Polls allows polling to become more personal, relevant, and anticipated.

LinkeIn Polls is one of the applications that LinkedIn launched in October 2008 and as all of these applications they are free but require you to have a registered account with LinkedIn.

To access LinkedIn Polls you need to first add the application to your LinkedIn profile:

Creating a LinkedIn Poll is very simple and intuitive:

You can submit your poll to either your 1st degree connections or a target audience of professionals in the U.S (this option is free for premium subscribers).  I would recommend to stick with the first option (targetting your first degree connections) because this makes your poll personal (“Hey Mike can you take a loot at this?”), relevant (“Susan, your input is important to me because I know your expertise in marketing while we worked together), and anticipated (Linkedin is a site for networking!).

An important caveat is that LinkedIn Polls is only as good as your networking power is already at LinkedIn.  However, don’t believe that I’m just talking about having several contacts, I’m also referring to the number of groups and associations that you belong to in LinkedIn.  If you’re active in several forums, you can get a lot of responses, and more importantly long threads of valuable qualitative data.

If you do have lots of contacts, LinedIn Polls has made it easy to segment by location and/or industry:

One of the most attractive feature of LinkedIn Polls is that it makes segmentation of your poll results a snap.  It provides attractive bar graphs by job title, company size, job function, gender, and age.

One could easily argue that LinkedIn Polls needs options for cross-tabulation ,like Surveymonkey does, and further options for segmentations, but I strongly believe that this application is a great way to gather data fast and to create actionable bar graphs that you can e-mail to your colleagues.  More importantly it follows the fundamentals of permission e-mail marketing by making polls more personal, relevant and anticipated.

The number of U.S. online video viewers is growing.

Video ads had the highest click-through [...]]]>

Word-on-the-street: Video ads are a savvy strategy for marketers because the number of online video viewed has been steadily growing, as reported by eMarketer, and has a high click-through rate when compared to its alternatives.

The number of U.S. online video viewers is growing.

Video ads had the highest click-through rate of all online ads in Europe during October-December 2008.

Even more, there is talk that online video ads should perform better than its alternatives during recessionary times.  Erik Sass from MediaPost reports:

While not exempt from recessionary trends, it probably won’t suffer as badly as traditional media because it’s more cost-effective — but it’s still going to take a substantial hit, according to the lead speakers at OMMA Hollywood on Monday morning. Still, there are some glimmers of hope that certain recessionary trends have already bottomed out.

Online ad spending will probably fall 8%-9% in 2009, according to Dr. Paul Kedrosky, an economist and the editor of Infectious Greed, a financial blog — but that looks good compared to the rest of the media.

So, how is it possible that online ads are so great and recession proof?

One plausible explanation is the law of reciprocity by Robert Cialdini, in his book, Influence: Science and Practice (New York: Harper Collins, 1993).  Basically, the law of reciprocity boils down to this:  “a person can trigger a feeling of indebtedness by doing us an uninvited favor”.  Consider this example from Cialdini (p. 29):

For instance, the American Disabled Veterans organization reports that its simple mail appeal for donations produces a response rate of about 18 percent.  But when the mailing also includes an unsolicited gift  (gummed, individualized address labels), the success rate nearly doubles to 35 percent.

Online video ads are a form of entertainment and people are willing to be entertained.  An IBM study reveals that almost 60% of its study respondents said they were willing to provide to advertisers some personal information about themselves in exchange for something of value, such as access to high-quality music videos, store discounts or airline frequent-flyer points.

Therefore, the success of online video ads lies in the law of reciprocity.

The funnel strategy [...]]]>

On the last post, we discussed about E-mail Permission Marketing Fundamentals and how to get started with your e-mail permission marketing campaign.  Why? Because E-mail Permission Marketing: it works! As promised, I will talk in this post about “How to Measure the CTR of Your E-mail Permission Marketing Campaign with Google Analytics“.

The funnel strategy of your permission e-mail is that people:

1. Actually receive your permission e-mail.
2. Open your permission e-mail.
3. Click on the link you want them to click.

How do you measure that?

Simple, you need to use the Google Analytics URL Builder to effectively and efficiently “tag” your link.

Here’s what the Google Analytics URL Builder looks like:

Let’s take for example eMarketer.  This company sends daily e-mail updates to people who have a) visited their website, b) are interested in sampling their market data for free before signing up for it (and of course paying for it!), c) have signed up to read the free updates, and d) have provided the company permission to send them daily updates via e-mail.  I cannot be more specific about the importance of asking them for permission.

Here’s how they do it:

Notice that there’s no checkbox for the newsletter itself because it is very explicit that the person viewing for the page is signing up for the newsletter.  However, notice that there is one checkbox for people who don’t mind receiving news about webinars, event announcements, whitepaper offers, best practices guides, and research briefs.

eMarketer sends The eMarketer Daily: The First Place  to Look as a daily e-mail newsletter.  Here’s how it look like:

As you can see, there are plenty of links on this eMarketer newsletter but for simplicity I will focus on the boxed link in the picture above.  Let’s imagine that the URL of this link is http://emarketer.com/latestadclickcount.

Here’s how we set up the target URL with the Google Analytics URL Builder:

Let’s review the fields:

1. Campaign Source: Input newsletter because we are talking about an e-mail permission mareketing campaign.  I indicate that this is the newsletter #25.  Is not mandatory to number them, but I would suggest to do so.  It’s important to segment your referrals so you can see what e-mail newsletters are more effective.
2. Campaign Medium: It’s e-mail.
3. Campaign Term: In this case, we are paying for keywords.
4. Campaign Content: Another source to further segment your e-mail campaigns.  However, in this simple case it is not necessary.
5. Campaign Name: I am assuming that this campaign is part of the “CTR products” campaign because the ad talks about CTRs of online banner ads in Europe.  eMarketer could be interested in tracking the number of people who click on this article to measure the interest on white papers that discuss CTR optimization techniques, CTR softwares, CTR reports, etc.

The resulting link is http://emarketer.com/latestadclickcount?utm_source=newsletter25&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=CTR%2Bproducts.  eMarketer would use this link as the link on its newsletter.

That’s it! Now eMarketer would have to just wait for the reaction of its The eMarketer Daily recipients.

Once people start clicking on the target link, Google Analytics will start measuring the clicks.

Here’s a sample referrals report:

Google Analytics will report the clicks on the link coming from “Other” sources.  The “Other” category will lump all clicks on links optimized with the Google Analytics URL Builder, so that’s why it’s important that you make smart use of the different fields that this tool offers you.

Here’s a teaser for the medium and advanced users of Google Analytics: Once you start using the Google Analytics URL Builder, you can created Advanced Segments to do all kinds of fun segmentation of your data.

So, once you find the total number of clicks on your target URL, you can calculate the CTR of your e-mail permission marketing campaign.

Remember: 

Click-through rate (CTR) = number of clicks / number of e-mails opened

I hope that you enjoyed this post. If you have any questions, please leave a comment for this post and I will reply to you within 24 hours.

Thank you for your time!

Disclaimer: I don’t work for eMarketer. I don’t receive any fees or payment for talking about them. I just really like their product.

: )

So, you’ve created a great product or service and [...]]]>

Thank you for the response via e-mail and comment post at idaconcpts.com about last week’s post regarding E-mail Permission Marketing.  If you’re still interested on the free copy of the first 4 four chapters of Seth’s Godin Permission Marketing, please e-mail me at damiandavilarojas@gmail.com.

So, you’ve created a great product or service and you have users lining up to register online for your product  or service so they can use it.  You have provided the option to received personal, relevant, and anticipated messages; and guess what? they are choosing to do so by clicking on the checkbox!.  Excellent! You cannot believe that people are interested in you and you  send out your first e-mail…and…now what?

This week I’m going to discuss, the basics of the “now what”: the E-mail Permission Marketing Fundamentals.

Let’s take a look at what Avinash Kaushik has to say on this (Web Analytics: An Hour a Day, p. 220):

Before you start your analytics, it is important to understand, at least at a high level, that there several important steps to the process of executing e-mail campaigns:

1. Define business objectives and how e-mail fits into them.
2. Identify core criteria for e-mail campaigns (what, why, how, when, and so forth).
3. Create and execute campaigns (mine your e-mail list, scrub it for do not contacts, create the right text or other type of offering, and send it to your e-mail vendor).
4. Analyze your campaigns.

Email analytics can focus on both ends of this process:  defining objectives and criteria as well as campaign analysis.

As you can see, planning is 90% of any e-mail permission marketing campaign.  You cannot expect results, if you don’t have an idea of what good results are.   The most important part is that you have to figure a return-on-investment (ROI) for obtaining 1 unit of your desired goal (e.g. one download of a software, one download of a flyer on how-to-stop smoking, one call to one 1-800 number, one view of a blog post, etct).  That’s the ultimate goal that you want to set up first before anything.  How much are you willing to spend in order to get 1 unit of your desired goal?  Once you set that goal, write in 60 font size, print it out, and hang it somwhere visible in your working space.  This will guide your overall e-mail permission marketing campaign.

However, before getting to the specifics of calculating the ROI, we need to establish the fundamental metrics.  Remember, walking before running.  In the case of an effective permission e-mail, you can only have up to 2 goals, for example:  a) click here to learn more about my great website, b) click here to download my great free mp3, c) click here to make an appointment, etc.

The funnel strategy of your permission e-mail is that people:

1. Actually receive your permission e-mail.
2. Open your permission e-mail.
3. Click on the link you want them to click.

In order to track these results, you will need the following metrics.  Kaushik suggests that you use an e-mail vendor, however I will assume that your operation is pretty small and does not exceed a couple thousand e-mails.  At that level, there are only a couple fundamental metrics that you need to worry about.

1. Number of e-mails sent
2. Number of opened e-mails
3. Number of bounced e-mails
4. Number of unsubscriptions ( You MUST provide this option! Remember that we are doing e-mail permission marketing. No permission = no e-mail.)

With these metrics you will determine:

1. Delivery rate = (number of e-mails sent – number of e-mails bounced) / number of e-mails sent
2. Unsubscribe rate = number of unsubscriptions / number of e-mails delivered
3. Open rate = number of opened e-mails / number of emails delivered
4. Click-through rate (CTR) = number of clicks / number of e-mails opened

That’s it, nothing more, nothing else, to get started.  I believe that even with little or no experience, you should be able to calculate everything except the CTR.

I will disccus the specifics of setting up the measurement of CTR with Google Analytics on the next post.

Thank you for your time.