How Things Change (Not Really)
August 13, 2009 at 9:46 am
I’ve been doing a fair bit of networking recently and have noticed a rake of new Internet Marketing companies about. Some position themselves as social media marketing specialists. Others focus on just search. There even seems to be a mini-industry around events aimed at PR and advertising people teaching them how to Tweet, Blog and take part in social media! I believe there’s plenty of room for everyone because budgets are moving over to digital and with the exciting opportunities that emerge day by day, there’s sure to be plenty of work to keep everyone busy.
What I’ve been reflecting on is how I market my business now as opposed to 2003.
- In 2003 I set up Brightspark as a pure Internet Marketing Ireland provider. Services offered were search, pay per click and email. Much of my time was spent making the case as to why budgets needed to be allocated to internet marketing. This was not long after the dot com bomb which was built on the mantra of ‘build it and they will come’.
- By 2005, Google had IPO’ed and everyone who came to Brightspark wanted a ‘website and a number 1 on Google’. I had added in website design to the Brightspark mix because I had found in many cases I was working on driving traffic to sites that failed due to poor design. I had a lot of conversations at this time about why a number 1 on Google was not necessarily the best bang for a (limited budget) buck. Business blogging and repackaging blog content in the form of emails for marketing were often a strong alternative.
- Web 2.0 dawned in 2006 and we were on the case. For corporate Ireland, this didn’t mean an immediate switch into App-land. But Brightspark made a point of incorporating blogs, links to Flickr, and other social apps into as many sites as possible. We were responsible for the creation of Ireland’s first social networking site aimed at Spanish speakers – created on the Ruby on Rails platform. You could say this was the start of social media marketing. At this time there was a huge appetite for blogging training and writing for the web training. Corporate Ireland had switched on to the importance of content. By now, design focused on the user experience was included in all of our websites.
- Today we are blessed with such a wide variety of tools. The industry has matured and specialisms have emerged. Web design has come down significantly in price thanks to Wordpress. And it’s increasingly difficult to find examples of really bad sites when preparing for the various training courses I offer. Before I presented people with a list of services on offer. Nowadays it’s much more tailored to the individual company’s needs. No, that’s not marketing speak, it’s true! Most internet marketing strategies begin with listening. A quick scoot around Twitter and the blogosphere to find out what people are saying about a brand, a company, or in the absence of that – a need. And then come up with an online strategy that will reach out and engage.
If I was to summarise what I’m doing now, it’s less about offering services from a menu - more about listening to the company and having a conversation with the management team about their vision for the business. Our job is to know what’s hot online and to advise on what will work and what won’t work for a particular business. We work with clients to help them to translate their business vision into something that will work well online, generate a return on their investment, and make us all happy.
There you have it! The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Tags: Blogging Training Ireland, Business Blogging Ireland, Email Marketing Ireland, Internet Marketing Ireland, Search Engine Optimisation Ireland, Social Media Marketing, Web Content Writing, Write for Web Training
It Is Broke, So Let’s Fix It
June 25, 2009 at 9:23 am
I’m a proud supporter of the Email Standards Project; a project born out of frustration with the inconsistent rendering of HTML emails in major email clients. Due to the lack of standards in email clients (ie. Outlook, Gmail, etc.) when we create email marketing templates we are very restricted with what we can do to make them render well in every client. The Email Standards Project is a community effort to improve the standards and make life easier on us and better for clients.
There’s a big push on right now – and we’re looking at you Microsoft!
Microsoft has just confirmed that it intends to use the cripplied Word rendering engine to display HTML emails in Outlook 2010.
- This means for the next 5 years, we will have to continue to use tables for layouts on email designs.
- We’ll continue to be afraid to use CSS like float and position and background images are still a big no no.
- That’s not even considering the long list of bugs and quirks that break the simplest of layouts.
For many people out there in corporate-land, Outlook IS email. It would make life so much better if Microsoft took the big step of addressing the problems that are inherent in Word rendering. If you’ve ever tried to copy and paste text from a Word doc into, say, Wordpress and you see dodgy looking code… that’s the good ole Word rendering killing the beauty of your work.
Utilising The Power of Twitter
Outlook 2010 is still in beta and Microsoft has announced they want to hear your feedback on this decision. Let them hear it! It’s time for the email marketing and design community to rally together and encourage Microsoft to embrace web standards before it’s too late.
20,000 individuals sent a message to Microsoft since yesterday via Twitter. You can see all those lovely smiling faces here. This has forced Microsoft to respond – kudos for the speed of response, but a little sour in my opinion by trying to diss the Email Standards Project as “not representing a sanctioned standard or industry consensus in this area.”
If you are involved with email template design – either as a designer, client, or indeed recipient, please take the time out to add your voice to the throng. If Apple and Yahoo are happy to work on standards, why not Microsoft? If MS came to the table, it would be a huge benefit to everyone in the community.
Tags: Email Marketing, Email Marketing Ireland, Email Standards Project, Microsoft Outlook 2010
Email Marketing Results For Ireland
May 13, 2009 at 2:29 pm
I’ve been in this game for quite a long time. And it occurred to me recently that I’m sitting on some pretty interesting data about email marketing results achieved for Irish clients. I’ve decided to share.
A Couple Of Things To Note:
- I’m deliberately keeping them vague so as to protect identities of my clients.
- These are the kind of results you’d expect to achieve with lists of up to 3,000. If you’re using lists with larger numbers than that, that are less cleaned, you might expect to achieve slightly different results.
Email Marketing Results For Ireland
I’ve been managing email campaigns for Irish clients since 2003. The following is a summary of results for campaigns going back to April 2007.
- Two full years of data – I’m no statistician, so didn’t have desire to go back further
- Clients ranging from B2B, B2C, not-for-profit
What is the average open rate?
You’ve got two types of lists here – those who know their list very well and those who know their list not so well. Please note that clients are always asked to confirm that they are legally compliant on the lists they supply.
- Know list well + personalised: 35.6%
- Know list well + non personalised: 28.0%
This proves that people are more likely to open your email if you address it to them.
- Know list vaguely + personalised: 22.1%
- Know list vaguely + non personalised: 22.0%
When people don’t know you that well, it doesn’t matter if you personalise or not. You’re going to get slightly less than 1 in 4 opening.
What is the average click rate?
- Know list well + personalised: 41.6%
- Know list well + non personalised: 30.5%
Conclusion: people are more likely to click links in your email if you’ve engaged them by addressing it to them.
- Know list vaguely + personalised: 26.5%
- Know list vaguely + non personalised: 34.0%
Conclusion: if you’re sending to a list you don’t know well you’re better off sending it without personalisation.
The Initial Buzz
In our experience, there’s often a fall-off in open and click rates for service companies after the initial send. When managing email campaigns, we’re more interested in the average click and open rates from the second send onwards. It’s easier to identify trends when you exclude the initial send. But for ecommerce sites, while open rates stay more or less the same, clicks rise. If you’re an ecommerce site and you’re not actively emailing, you should!
The Importance Of List Cleaning
We’re always banging on about the importance of list cleaning. See here for more info.
It’s worthwhile to look at your bounces every couple of sends and either convert them back to live email addresses or remove them from your list. What’s the point of marketing to people who are ‘dead addresses’? Some clients partake of this service and the results are really positive:
- Open rates on lists that have been cleaned increase by 6.8% from the first send to the second send.
- Click rates on cleaned lists still go down from send 1 to send 2 by 11.2%.
I hope this information is helpful to you if you’re planning to introduce email marketing to your marketing mix. Or if you’re a competitor and you’re having a look, I hope these excellent results sit up and make you take note! I believe that we achieve higher rates than average on our client campaigns because we offer a complete email marketing service:
- Planning – based on what we know works
- List building
- Layouts that work
- Design that begs to be opened
- Copywriting that makes even the dryest content sing
- Template construction that breaks the balls of most email clients
- On time delivery
- Reporting – that comes from an inherently nosy place. I love to get to know your lists through their actions!
When you can have all this for the same price as licensing someone else’s software, it’s a no-brainer to go to Brightspark.
The results above are available to download for the pdf lovers out there. Feel free to pass around.
Tags: Email Marketing Ireland
