Then I began thinking that, just like some children these days, digital marketers have too many toys to play with.  We should play more often with the fantastic tools we have or we should be using our imagination to make the most of them. 

Display Advertising - Just add imagination

What do you see when you look at a 728 x 90 Leaderboard display ad - just some pixels (a digital Lego Brick?) or a wonderfully flexible and creative marketing format?  

Here are some games you can play long into the New Year with your digital ad inventory:

• Frequency capping – it’s amazing how many campaigns still get deployed in a wasteful, sub-optimal way...work out how many times people need to see an add before it wears out, and make sure your ad budget goes further by serving it to somebody else
• Format testing – so they didn’t click on a leaderboard, so re-assemble the pixels into a sky or an MPU and measure the impact of format on response (interactions or clicks...you choose).
• Contextual targeting – find out from publishers how they can deliver ads based on page content and do some playing (testing).  The click-through rate uplift should pay for the incremental costs and your conversion rates should grow too.  
• Behavioural targeting – make 2010 the year that you unwrap individually targeted ad deployment.  It will mean that you can alter your creative to suit people who are in different stages of the consideration and purchase funnel, based on what they have been viewing and clicking recently.

Email recipients are like snowflakes - every one is different

What do you see when you look at an email address?  Just another name to blast a standard message to?  The wide-eyed marketing child will see some wonderfully exciting opportunities to create imaginative messages that make email more interesting for the customers and more successful for you. 

Here are a few traditional email marketing games to get you started...fun for all the marketing family:

• Acquisition tools – if you’re renting data, ask the list owner what variables they hold and then deliver different versions of the same message.  For BtoB that should be different subject lines, opening paragraphs and calls to action based on “job function” or “industry sector”.  For consumers you may know their lifestyle and affluence from geo-demographic variables that list owners like Acxiom hold...have different propositions for less affluent and older prospects or use a different creative for young professionals.  Let you imagination run free!
• Conversion - as digital marketers we sit on the most valuable real-time prospect data so let’s get it out of the toybox and play with it.  Who clicked on an email link but did not complete a successful outcome?  Who looked at deep product pages on your site but did not buy?  These re-marketing campaigns should deliver 4-16 better conversion rates than one-size-fits-all messages so start building them.
• Retention – send different message programmes to your newer customers, or have a different tone of voice for purchasers of specific products.  Build “personas” (imaginary friends?!) to help with your tone of voice, imagery and calls to action.
• Re-activation – how do you know when you’ve lost a customer?  Probably when they’ve not bought for a specific time period.  So develop a “win back” programme with the first message triggered by a “date of last purchase is more than 60 days".  And be relevant...”we’ve noticed that you have not bought from us for a little while....” is a good start.

Fuel your imagination – get reading!

It’s good to know that even digital marketing kids can find pleasure in moveable type. When I was growing up the “must have” book was the BBC’s “Blue Peter” annual.    This year you ought to be asking Santa to bring you the wonderfully comprehensive “Web Analytics 2.0” by Avinash Kaushik.  Weighing in at more than your festive turkey, with 450 pages that gives you just over a page a day for all of 2010! 

But aside from being a real “value for money” present, this book encourages us to explore our world of data.  It’s partly a “how do they do that” book (go on, admit you’re not really sure how “multi-tabbed time on site is calculated, are you?), but it’s also an activity book along the lines of “what shall we do today to make sense of our marketing”.  With information covering pure web analytics, analytics for search, email and social media and links to further reading it is as near to a “Boys Own Annual” that digital marketers can get.

So there you have it.  Some ideas for kindling your imagination in 2010.  And we’ve not even touched on multi-variate landing page testing, search marketing or social media experimentation...better leave some of those for your birthday!

Here's wishing you a peaceful Christmas and an imaginative New Year. 

Web Analytics 2.0 shows us how to move from shovelling  buckets of meaningless "clickstream" data around our organisations to developing a love for true insight.

In short he encourages us to move towards adding qualitative data to our limitless supply of quantitative data in order to really understand what people are doing on our sites.  We must learn to use our hearts as well as our minds.

Lets take a simple example - that old favourite of "Engagement".  Marketers run so many analytics reports to get a fix on engagement that the lights in most offices regularly dim.  And the bad news according to Avinash is that you will NEVER be able to measure how much people are enjoying themselves on your site just with the click-stream data.  For instance, to paraphrase Avinash, 2 people visit your site and spend 10 minutes looking at 12 pages.  Both  happy right?  One loved your site, but the other was frantically trying to find some content and gave up after 10 fruitless minutes - you will never ever ever know this just from your data.  By adding some qualitative data (an on-site survey?) we have more chance of finding out how satisfied, not engaged, these 2 visitors were.

So Avinash takes us on a journey to show us where we should be using our hearts to make sense of data.  On our way we look at the need to move away from once a week reports to continuous streams of  meaningful data;  we are constantly reminded that customers, not marketers, are the best people to inform us what our site should look and feel like; and we are taken on a guided tour of the mountainous areas of competitive insight and told how to mine it profitably.

But this book does so much more than just change the way you think, critical though that is.  It shows you what buttons to press to make your reports more actionable, tells you what sites to look at when considering additional solutions and gives clarity to virtually all the web analytics jargon terms.  Some of the content will be familiar to regular readers of his blog (like the excellent explanation of multiple-tab time on site calculations!) but that makes this even more of a reference book for all our analytics needs.

As you may know I am a huge fan of testing everything that we do in digital marketing and so the chapter titled "Failing Faster:  Unleashing the Power of Testing and Experimentation" took me around all my favourite sites in the digital marketing landscape:  A/B testing, Multi-variate testing and some really sound advice about where to start and a few quick wins to get you in the mood!  Here is my favourite slide that I use to introduce the issue of testing in my courses...I'm sure Avinash would not disagree!

Avinash shows us that web analytics is woven into all our digital marketing activity - from search to site usability and email campaign analysis to off-line integration.  I even spent a rewarding few minutes simply reading the sub-heads and being reminded of things we ought to be doing all the time: 

• Segment or go home
• Five Rules for creating a Data-Driven Boss
• The Key to Glory - Measuring Success 
• Context is Queen
• Failing faster - unleashing the power of Testing and Experimentation

So there we are.  Web Analytics 2.0 is a digital marketing book that takes you from thinking differently to doing better, packed with explanations about the things we ought to know about (or showing us how wrong we have been!).  It comes with a CD brimming with Podcasts, Video and Powerpoint material as well as lists of additional resources.  He even finds time on page 400 to mention Non-line Blogging as a resource people may want to use!  It's taken me 2 weeks to work from the start of the book to the end but it's been a fantastic journey...and at over 450 pages you may want to pack a lunch before you set off! 

First up, a bit of a brand reputation challenge. Imagine you are the brand police at Farrow and Ball, manufactuers of beautiful, traditional paints.  Everything is rosy (Rectory Red or Ointment Pink?)  in the marketing garden – natural search in Google for brand terms looks fine, as it does in Bing and Ask.  But have they tip-tied into the scary world of YouTube and looked at their brand reputation?  If they had they will see a dark grey cloud (Off-black, or perhaps Studio Green?) hanging over them.  For the rest of us we can sit back and chortle with delight as some young digital consumer shatters their reputation in front of over 400,000 brand searchers.

So, how about generic searches?  What happens when your next customer decides that YouTube might hold some handy hints and tips on buying things...like car insurance?  Could you have a group of consumers talking about your products, your competitors’ and market aggregators?  How about a few client testimonials, and how about re-purposing favourable reviews from other videos or TV shows?  Add some of the increasingly-easy video optimisation techniques and maybe you can steal a march on the competition.  Hats off to CompareCarInsurance for getting up and running with this strategy, but have a watch of the "Auto Insurance" clip if you've ever had to insure a young male driver...it's very, very funny!

So we now know that search and reputation management is much more than just checking your ranking in Google.  Now we have the challenges of real-time search tools and the sheer pace and volume of brand monitoring on sites like Twitter and Facebook.  But what about all the other search engines out there?  On my digital marketing courses I encourage people to check their brand on Delicious, StumbleUpon, Reddit, Digg and all the other social networking/bookmarking sites.  Aggregate together all the generic and brand searches not being done on Google and Bing and there should be plenty of traffic there to keep you going into 2010. 

And finally, two things to consider with on-site search.  Firstly, how do you use on-site search data?  It could give you some clues about navigation...if lots of people have to search for something maybe it needs to better signposted, or maybe you’re not using the same words as your customers to describe a product/service.  Secondly, what are your in-site search results like?  Try typing a competitor’s brand and see what you get back...could you offer them your alternative product rather than return a “no results found” page?  Or pretend you are Larry and Sergei and build your own search rules to make sure the best results (most profitable, most in warehouse?) come to the top of  your in-house results page.

And what about that apology of a search box on your site?  (Yes, mine’s a weeny one too). A year ago Amazon made its search box HUGE because they noticed that Google had a big one, and people liked that.  Go to some of the younger, fresher sites and the top of the page is dominated by the search box.  It’s just another one of the web design trends that you may be wise follow.

So, search is much, much more than a bit of Googling for many of your consumers, and there are big, quick wins waiting to be taken.  Nows the time to improve your reputation and visibility for brand and generic terms on Google, Bing, Yahoo, YouTube, Metacafe, Wikipedia, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Digg, Delicious, Stumbleupon, Reddit and then you get stuck into the next 100 search engines! Good luck!

We seem to be obsessed about hurting people’s feelings.  We’ve been brought up in a culture that says too much email is a bad, bad thing.  But we've probably never tested "how much is too much", and we've never established the risk of people un-subscribing against the reward of incremental success.   I've tried to model it as a couple of graphs...

In this graph we see 2 campaign options...maybe invitations to an event, or follow-ups to a quote enquiry.  If we only send 2 messages to people (the lighter columns) we end up "converting" only 40% of all those people who could be convinced into buying.  However, if we kept hammering away at people with more messages we may convert the remaining 60% by the 9th message.  Makes us feel un-comfortable, doesn't it?  That's because we intuitively feel that the un-subscribe rate will increase.  But will it really?  Have we tested it?  Can we graph it?  Will it look like this?

The darker columns indicate our best guess of what will happen.  We think that by sending out 1 message few people will un-subscribe, but by sending out 2 or 3 the sky will be blackened with people hitting the "un-subscribe" button, and by message 9 we will probably have deliverability problems for ever.  Yet the reality (lighter columns) could be that even after 5 messages half the people are still "in the market", and only by message 9 do we reach un-subscribe saturation point.

Let's take a campaign opportunity - one where we have a "window of opportunity" to get somebody to buy/register.  Insurance quotes are a great one for this model...people get a quotes from a few companies and make up their mind about which company to go with in about 10 days.  Here's what we do as marketers...

• We send out a quote confirmation on day 1
• Then 2 days later we send out a quote chaser.
• That's it.
• Silence.
• They choose a competitor on day 6
• They stay with them for 3 years
• What a wasted opportunity.

Now, what if we found reasons to get back in touch with people?  What if on day 3 we told them that we had a competition for all new insurance customers?  And on day 5 we told them that they could possibly save more money on the quote as you had taken on another under-writing company..or you just offered them another 20% discount?

• 3 more messages
• 30% more customers for 3 years
• A few more un-subscribes...probably people who were never going to be customers anyway
• More sales - very low risk
• What are you waiting for?

Some examples to inspire - and re-assure

Please don't think that by simply hammering people with the same message more often you will be more successful.  Try and think of engaging ways to re-position the call to action.  Be interesting.  Do a few different things.

Abandoned Registrations

This is a great opportunity to turn up the message frequency to get people to complete a "double opt-in" join process.  I was told by a fried that, as I have a lovely pet dog, I should sign up to Dogster.  I went through the web bit, but never quite got around to the email activation bit.  So I was locked into their "email opt-in reminder programme"

What I like about this is the need to chase people to complete the registration process.  Not one chaser, but 5.  Not one subject line, but 3.  Question marks and exclamation marks!  I converted on the last one...maybe there would have been a few more had I resisted.  And, as this is the only excuse I'll ever have, here is a picture of my faithful hound, Dylan.

Registered but not Purchased

Here is a lovely BtoB example of contact density.  I received 10 emails from the same company for the same event with the same call to action - "please come to our event".  But it was spread over a 5 month period, and they used a variety of angles to seduce me into registering.  Here they all are...

Nice variety of subject lines moving from "be better at your job" through to "have a wonderful time with loads of fun people" through to "make sure you get a bed for the night".  In essence it is saying "please come to our event".  Sadly I didn't, but that's because I was busy not because the email failed to convert me.

Frequency + Engagement = Results?

So what have we learned from all that?  Maybe you can ramp up the number of times you reach people by email during "windows of opportunity"...abandoned shopping carts, abandoned registrations and "non-purchased" segments.  We have to do it in a creative, engaging way otherwise we look and sound like spammers.    But if we get it right there should be little collateral damage as the only people who might un-subscribe could be the prospects who were not right for you anyway.

One final thought...as more people tune in for Google alerts, what is the "frequency" defaulted to?  

Daily.  

Just goes to show that we don't mind getting an email a day if it is relevant.  Maybe now is the time to test reaching people just a little bit more often.

For several years marketers have been talking themselves out of using "FREE" or even "Free" in email subject lines.  "We'll end up with a bad reputation and blocked by ISP's for ever", they cried.  More and more marketers joined the chorus until even their colleagues in Finance would stop them in a corridor and say

"I was playing golf with my accountant friend Jack and he said we should never use "Free" in our subject lines".  

So, Mr Finance Director, just suppose you compete with Argos in the UK e-commerce market and into your inbox come the following email...

The Argos e-commerce team seem to know more than others about email delivery and, since "Free" is one of the most powerful motivators in our language I hope they are reaping handsome rewards for their know-how.  So, how are they doing it?

In short, the deliverability war has moved on from simplistic "content filtering" and is now based more on "consent" and "reputation".  I won't go into a big lecture on all that right now, but here is what you really ought to know.

1.  Consent - Get people to add you to their address book will ensure that emails you send (from the same address) will by-pass local Spam filters on clients like Outlook and web-based systems like Yahoo and Windows Live Mail.

2.  Reputation.  Do the right things - don't re-mail un-subscribes, or blast out lists with a high bounce rate, or send dull messages that nobody will respond to.  They will tarnish your reputation and organisations like SenderScore will share that bad reputation with ISP's and business mail hosting service providers.

For reference, Spamassassin does indeed have a "naughty boy" point for using the word FREE in the Subject line, but it is only a single point and is only 1 of several hundred rules that are run against all your emails.  However, there are worse tests to fail but thankfully people in Finance don't know about them.  Wouldn't it be a great day if somebody came up to you and said:

"I was playing golf with my accountant friend Jack and he said we should check our messages for X-IP Headers as they attract almost 3 times more points than using the word "Free".

Here are some of the Spamassassin checks you may want to get excited about, but you will never know what score triggers filtering, or what % of a total process is made up of the Spamassassin elements so it really is a blunt tool for precise filtering from the marketers' perspective.  (you can find them all here but it still won't give you any clues as to how many points your message needs to get delivered - it will vary every day and for every in-bound filtering system); first up is everybody's favourite with the word FREE, then I have shown one of many tests done on the "header" of your message, and finally one to show that even filtering tools now factor in some kind of reputation checks...you can start off with MINUS 100 points if you have all the Authentication tools in place.

So, how do you know if its safe to use FREE?

Well, the first thing we can do is know our Reputation as others will see it.  Head over to Senderscore and read all the lovely stuff they have written about reputation-based filtering.  Then find out your own reputation score by doing the following...here'e the results for Argos.

First, find out your sender IP address - its somewhere in the message headers.  This is where it is in Outlook 2007

Then copy the IP address and pop it into the FREE (!) Senderscore Reputation checker (you will need to register to see more detailed information).  This will give you your reputation as others see you:

So, with a 70 out of 100 overall reputation score, a 100% delivery rate and a "Low" risk it is quite likely that most ISP's will allow most Argos messages through without getting excited about the words and pictures they use.  And with powerful motivators like "free" in there, I hope they are enjoying wonderfully high click and conversion rates.

Just to validate my thinking here is one from deep in my Gmail Spam folder...with a 5 out of 100 its got little chance of getting into my primary inbox regardless of the words

And finally, just like a personal credit record in the financial services world, sometimes having no reputation is as bad as having a poor reputation.  Here is a lovely email that made its way into my Junk Mail folder

...and here is the reputation report from Senderscore, showing that little or no activity gives them too little information upon which to base their opinions:

So, to summarise, don't hang on to outdated, over-simplistic email filtering rules.  Get good at managing your reputation and take a few "risks" once you know that your message has a good chance of being delivered.  Keep testing campaigns to check delivery into Outlook, Lotus Notes, Yahoo, Gmail and Hotmail and if all seems good, keep filling up those subject lines with presuasive words!  Way to go, Argos!!