Damian Davila – Page 46 – idaconcpts.com

Are you deceived by your email campaigns?

Measuring the success of your permission e-mail campaigns is often oversimplified. Marketing managers are often happy to see rising open rates and click-through rates. (If you have no idea on how to measure the click-through rates of your e-mail campaigns, here’s an easy tutorial using Google Analytics). The problem of being content with just measuring open rates and click-through rates from our e-mail campaigns is that we are victims of the brochure mentality.

What’s the problem with the brochure mentality?

The brochure mentality is the mindset that tells us that as long people get our brochure, open it and browse it for a while; somehow they will get “aware of our brand” or that they will “eventually act on it”. Notice that how exactly the readers of a brochure become aware of the brand or act on it is not really defined, it is just left to, yes you got that right, pure chance.

I am sure that newsletter services and talented newsletter writers will challenge the above statement. But think about it for just a second. When discussing with a graphic designer or an e-mail newsletter, how often do you discuss about the actual objective of your e-mail campaign defined in one sentence and whose success can be tracked with one simple measure?

I am not talking about how many people click on your “read more” link or how many people open your “Labor Day Blowout Sale!” e-mail. I am talking about how many people actually end handing you cash in exchange for the product or service that you offer.

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:

Define business objectives and how e-mail fits into them.

I just quoted the first step out of 4 to emphasize the importance of this concept. If you’re a frozen yogurt shop, are you in the business of selling frozen yogurt or are you in the business of making people open e-mails? If you’re a humane society that protects animal rights, are you working hard towards increasing the number of people adopting stray dogs or are you working hard that people click on a YouTube video of a sad dog looking for a home?

Before jumping into e-mail (and social media, for that matter) campaigns, you’ve got to have a clear idea of what objectives you want out of it. A clear one sentence objective that can be tracked with one measure.

Here are some great real life examples that I have encountered during my online marketing practice:

Bake shop: Sell my daily excess inventory of red velvet cupcakes, about 14, before they spoil.
Online coupon service: Generate 5 paying customers during a week.

Not so fast, monkey!

There are several e-mail newsletter services that work great (e.g. MailChimp), but before you sign up for any of them, do your homework. Even though some offer free trials, hold off signing up for them until you have figured out your one sentence objective whose success can be tracked with one measure.

Helpful Links:

Social Media Marketing Making $en$e

In June 2009, I posted a slide show presentation trying to answer the question “Does Digital Media Advertising Make $en$e?“, which used some examples such as Google’s Picasa and Skitch to provide insights into this topic.

Does Digital Media Advertising Make $en$e?

Recently eMarketer released the results of a survey of 211 participants indicating their use or plan of using social media marketing.

Of those 59% who responded that they social media marketing is currently part of their marketing activity, more than 50% indicated that Facebook, Twitter, blogs, and online videos are the core of their social media marketing strategies. From those that are planning to implement or are not using or not planing to use social media marketing, it appears that they seem to be stuck on trying to answer the question: “Does Digital Marketing Make $en$e?”

I would like to point out a couple of important problems that become clear with the results of the survey above:

No funding for social media budget: If you’re not willing to set up a budget for a marketing campaign, how are you expecting to create leads for sales or actual sales? The GIGO concept applies here. If you’re putting in $0, you will most likely get $0 in return. Yes, setting a Facebook Page is free, but you do need to spend a bit of targeted advertising to reach to more people. Yes, it’s free to set up a LinkedIn Group, but you do need a business account to be able to view more search results and get more InMails.
There’s no established way to measure social media: Are you kidding? It’s the same way that you measure any marketing campaign: How many leads or sales did your marketing created! (This of course, depends on what type of organization is running the campaign: it could be calls to an 1-800 number, or downloads of a registration form for a seminar, or registering to receive a newsletter). All you need is a strong web analytics package such as Clicktracks or Google Analytics.
Don’t know enough about social media: Then what are you waiting for? Employ a couple interns to decipher what you don’t understand to you. If you don’t have the time to find out, then pay somebody to find out for you. Note: don’t invest in a marvelous web analytics or social media optimization package without having properly trained staff in place. In social media marketing (as well as in web analytics), follow the 90/10 rule: 90% of your social media marketing expenses should be in the people and 10% in the equipment/software. 2 employees well educated in web analytics can achieve far more than 1 software.

Even if you “feel” that you don’t need any online presence at all, do probe further into fulling supporting your reasons. Don’t be surprised if you find that at the very least you must take care of your presence that happens from search engine visits.

If done properly, social media marketing makes $en$e.

Web Visitors Flock to Career Sites

For career sites, there’s no business like the recession business!

With the US Bureau of Labor Statistics reporting an over 9% unemployment rate in June 2009, it appears that job search sites will continue to show an accelerated growth during this economic recession.

On August 6th, 2009 eMarketer reported that more than 65 million visitors have rushed to job search sites in June 2009. Most of the top 10 career service and development websites in the U.S. (ranked by unique visitors) have experienced double digit percentage increases in the number of unique visitors from June 2008 to June 2009.

June 2009 data from comScore pegged growth in unique visitors to career resource sites at 10% over the previous year, with seven of the top 10 sites seeing at least double-digit increases. More than 65 million visitors checked out career sites in June.

“The top three sites in the category—CareerBuilder, HotJobs and Monster—have maintained their leadership positions for several years now, but there are also a few upstarts in the industry making some noise,” said Jeff Hackett, comScore senior vice president, in a statement. “Certainly with millions of Americans reevaluating their careers right now there is opportunity for continued growth and innovation in this segment of the online marketplace.”

What are the most common search terms at career sites? Here’s the list:

These job search terms are closely aligned with the job categories of the list of over 3 million jobs that can’t be filled, released by Fortune back in February 2009.

Among all the excitement from career sites, there appears to be no discussion about this fact: the combined number of page views from the top career sites wasn’t even close to that of Craigslist back in 2007.

— craigslist.org — monster.com — careerbuilder.com

According to data from Compete, lately Monster has been able to start getting closer to the number of unique monthly visitors of Craigslist, however it’s important to remember that Craigslist doesn’t operate the large marketing and advertising expenditures that Monster does. Furthermore, the other 3 sites that showed healthy numbers of unique visitors from June 2008 to June 2009 (Careerbuilder, Indeed, and Hotjobs) have a long way to go to reach the monthly unique visitor numbers of Craigslist and Monster.

Latin America leads the recovery in advertising spending worldwide

In June 30, 2009, we reviewed at idaconcpts that talking about Latinos as a group is difficult because this group has so many commonalities with various ethnic groups, that trying to seggregate websites between Latino and non-Latino is a strategy that spells disaster.

According to Dr. Korzenny from the Center for Hispanic Marketing Communication at the Florida State University, when compared to other ethnicities, U.S. Hispanics appear to consume more digital content. Therefore, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Latin America is part of the recovery in advertising spending worldwide.

Even though the total advertising spending in Latin America is much smaller than that in North America, (ranging from 18% to 21 from 2009 to projections for 2010 and 2011 by eMarketer) savvy marketers, Internet startups, and companies in general, should be aware of 3 obvious trends:

1. Latin America holds the key for a better understanding of the Hispanic market in the U.S.

According to the Immigration Informaiton Source website, in 2006, 47.2 percent of immigrants reported Hispanic or Latino origins. Therefore, it is not a suprise that Business Week’s Douglas MacMillan reported that of marketers that target minority groups, 95% tailor messages to Latin Americans. However there is still much to be learned about the field. Click here for an insight into how to approach the U.S. Hispanic market.

2. According to eMarketer, Hispanics make up 12.3% of the total US Internet population in 2009, and that number will increase to 13.9% in 2013.

3. The U.S. Hispanic presence in the Internet is not only going to increase in quantity but also in quality as Hispanic U.S. Internet users are poised to have the highest purchasing power.

E-mail Marketing Open and Click-Through Rates Worldwide

Welcome back!

Back in March 2009, we reviewed how to measure the click-through rate (CTR) of your e-mail permission marketing campaign with Google Analytics, so I believe it would be very useful to now provide you a benchmark to compare your collected CTRs. For Internet startups, these will be critical benchmarks.

Earlier this July 2009, eMarketer just released a list of e-mail marketing open rates worldwide, by industry and list size for the second half of 2008.

But before I show you these e-mail marketing open rates, let’s review some e-mail permission marketing fundamentals that you must gather:

Number of e-mails sent
Number of opened e-mails
Number of bounced e-mails
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:

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

Once you have your open rate and CTR, now you can compare them to these benchmarks provided by eMarketer:

How well do you rank against these open and click-through rates?

Gamer Girls Give Consoles a Go

Ladies, grab your Wiimote!

Gamer Girls Give Consoles a Go - eMarketer

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:

Talking about Hispanics as a whole group is difficult

I’m a big fan of The e-Marketer Daily newsletter and on 06/26/09 I received two very interesting articles on the presence of U.S. Latinos on the web. The first one is titled Hispanics Online: No Mas E-Barrios and the second one is Looking at Hispanic Behavior Online.

The first article provides some interesting stats on Internet use in the U.S. by race/ethnicity.

Hispanics make up 12.3% of the total US Internet population in 2009, and that number will increase to 13.9% in 2013. The U.S. Hispanic presence in the Internet is not only going to increase in quantity but also in quality as Hispanic U.S. Internet users are poised to have the highest purchasing power.

Among marketing organizations, the competition to grab the U.S. Hispanic buck is intense. Business Week’s Douglas MacMillan reported that of marketers that target minority groups, 95% tailor messages to Latin Americans, 76% target African Americans, and 38% focus on Asian Americans, according to a survey released in November by the trade group Association of National Advertisers (ANA) and marketing agency Mkgt. That’s up from 86%, 60%, and 35%, respectively, in 2003, according to the research.

This has a lot of implications for online marketers who want to be culturally sensitive, while being cost-efficient at the same time. The main problem, as Dr. Felipe Korzenny, Director of the Center for Hispanic Marketing Communication at the Florida State University, states, is that:

Hispanics have a lot of commonalities, and it’s OK to talk about a group that has these sorts of common roots and interests. It doesn’t work well to try to segregate people. I don’t think it works to say, “This is a site for Hispanics and this is a site for others.”

Forcing Hispanic U.S. Internet users into Hi5 (the most popular social network in Latin America and no, it’s not Google’s Orkut, that’s in Brazil) and Myspace versions in Spanish is not the correct strategy. It’s all about personal choice, let the user decide what’s best for him or her.

That is the reason why MySpace has both—I mean having people having two sites, one in Spanish and one in English—but that doesn’t mean that the Spanish-language site is for Hispanics only, or that the English-language site is for non-Hispanics only. There’s a lot of overlap.

Mixed context in English and Spanish that is triggered by contextual cues appears to be savvy strategy, according to Dr. Korzenny. The good news: when compared to other ethnicities, U.S. Hispanics do appear to consume more digital content.

However, making any generalizations about U.S. Hispanics is always a mistake. The easiest example: location, location, location.

If you use the same strategy in Miami, FL, that you used in Dallas, TX, you shouldn’t be surprised to get mixed results. While U.S. Hispanics do share some commonalities, consider that Texas has a more predominant Mexican presence, while Florida has a more predominant Cuban and South American presence. Put it this way: imagine if you were to use Canadian slang to target a British and Australian audience, would it make sense? After all, they all speak English, right? That’s the most common mistake of companies that purchase one-size-fits-all, prepackaged marketing solutions.

Marketers should never throw out the window marketing fundamentals when dealing with U.S. Hispanics. There is no easy answer. Only one thing is certain: do your homework, research, research, research.

Amazon Associates gives Hawaii the boot!

Yesterday I received an e-mail from the Amazon Associates Program informing me that my Associates account has been closed as of June 30, 2009. Here’s the e-mail itself:

Important Notice from the Amazon Associates Program - Posteingang - 'Yahoo! Mail'

Despite efforts from Hawaiian Amazon Associates throughout April 2009 and May 2009, Amazon decided to pull the plug on the Hawaiian Associates program.

The Motley Fool reports on a similar move of Amazon in North Carolina.

What do you think?

How well do you rank against these open and click-through rates?