Ideas and Concepts from Damian Davila
Dear Readers of idaconcpts.com,
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Thank you for your support and I hope that you enjoy reading the excerpt of this great book.
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Damian, Founder and CEO, idaconcpts.com
Back in May 2009, I wrote a review of the application LinkedIn Polls available on LinkedIn and how LinkedIn Polls can be used to do some great permission e-mail marketing polling.
I strongly believe that this LinkedIn 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.
On this post I wanted to provide an example of how we can use LinkedIn Polls not only to meet the fundamentals of an e-mail permission marketing campaign but also to gather useful qualitative data from your respondents.
Continue reading “Keeping in Touch with Classmates via Facebook”
Welcome back!
Back in January 2009, I ran a post about Facebook Ads because I believe this is a great online marketing tool. This post was titled “How to target your audience using Facebook Advertising” and it touched on how to get started with an online ad.
At the end of February 2009, Facebook launched Pages as a way to allow businesses and brands to strengthen their online image on Facebook and increase the potential interaction with Facebook users.
A Facebook Page looks very much like a regular Facebook Profile and there are several organizations and business that have one.
For example, here’s the AT&T Facebook Page:
…and here’s the Facebook Page from my MBA school, the Shidler College of Business:
The difference between a regular Facebook profile and a Facebook Page is that instead of becoming a friend of a brand/organization/company, you become a fan. A well-thought feature is that brand/organization/company CANNOT add friends. This is a great practice of permission marketing because it forces users to really think whether they want to become a “fan” or not of a brand/organization/company. Therefore, the “fan” gives permission to the brand/organization/company to contact him or her, making communications personal, relevant and anticipated (the 3 pillars of permission marketing).
This is all fine, but why is the title of this post called “How to target your audience using Facebook Pages”? The answer is: Facebook Pages gives you key insights into the gender and age range of your fans. Yes, there are other nice features like number of pageviews, comments, video views and more, but the key insight is gender and age. Below is a screenshot of Facebook Pages Insight:
Having the age range and gender of your bulk of fans will allow you to tweak your Facebook Advertising campaign.
Thank you for your time and best of luck in your permission marketing campaigns!
Apparently, the Japanese seem to think so. Via the eMarketer Daily, I found that according to Marsh Research, 84.4% of adult Internet users in Japan have felt at least once that the Internet is “scary.” Here is the breakdown: 
Now, why do they consider the Internet scary? 
Notice that at the top of the list appears “when lots of pop-up windows opened”. Have you been a victim of a “rickroll”? Definitely annoying. Extreme use of pop-up ads is what Seth Godin refers to as interruption marketing. You’re interrupting the natural flow of the user experience to say “hey, buy this!”. Remember that ads or communications can only be effective if they are relevant, personal, and ANTICIPATED. You need to employ permission marketing (another Godin term). I believe that the only way to a marketer can make a pop-up ad relevant, personal and anticipated is through the use of a tool such as 4Q from iPerceptions. Here’s a 10-minute video explanation of 4Q by Google Analytics Evangelist, Avinash Kaushik.
Here’s an example of how 4Q looks like at the CIO website:
Using permission based marketing initiatives, we can all make the Internet a less scary place. If you want to learn about how to get started with E-mail Permission Marketing, here’s a primer. Once you have read about it, you can learn about E-mail Permission Marketing Fundamentals.
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 damian [at] idaconcpts [dot] 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:
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:
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.
With these metrics you will determine:
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.
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.
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:
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).
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:
Thank you for your time. In the next post I will discuss about web metrics of permission marketing e-mail campaigns.