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Straight From The Digital Highway

November 5, 2009

Email / Eblast Marketing Statistics

Filed under: Email - eCRM,Google,Marketing,Microsoft,Statistics,Yahoo! — Tom Kingsley @ 2:34 pm

The next time you want to do a little email marketing, you might want to ask your marketing company about bout a few things beyond “delivery and open rates” and here’s why. Your marketing company should be taking the time to get to know your business and more importantly, getting to know your clientele and what makes them “purchase” your services; after all your hiring experts to help you make more money, right?

For starters does your marketing company know the toughest inboxes to reach? If not, my graph below will show you.

Percentage of Non-delivery Rates in the United States by ISP

Cox 8%

USA.net 11%

RoadRunner 12%

BellSouth (AT&T) 14%

NetZero 14%

Yahoo! 15%

AOL 16%

Comcast 17%

MSN / Bing 20%

Hotmail 20%

Gmail 23%

Here are three fundamental things to always keep in mind.

1. Know Your Cliental

You have lots of data but you must make it work for you in order to be successful. Every time you make contact with a client you must take the opportunity to learn a little more about them so you can continually refine your future messages to create more proactive and personalized interactions in the future. When you think about it, there really might be a reason to send an eblast targeting a specific country, state, zip code, age, and education or income level. Remember that demographics can be sliced and diced hundreds of ways. You are simply relying upon the experience of your marketer. Less experience will most likely mean more mistakes that equates into costing you money because you are spending money marketing to an audience that might fit your demographics are even care about your products or services.

2. A/B Slit Testing

This allows you to increase conversion rates, challenge assumptions, and solve problems.

How does it work?

You take a database of people that you want to send information to and split them into two groups: Group A and Group B. Then you send each group a message that is slightly different from the other so that you can see which message creates a more positive reaction. When done on a regular basis, this will tell you how to better communicate with your customers and more importantly, what you need to do to get them to make additional purchases.

3. Manage Relevance

When sending email to clients, prioritize the information and be careful that you don’t inundate your customers with insignificant communication. Make sure it serves a real purpose.

For more information contact Teknowerkz, were the people gets it and the same people who will put this to work for you.

October 23, 2009

Social Network Power Struggle: Large Corporate vs. Small Business and the End Consumer

Filed under: Facebook,Marketing,Social Networking,Statistics,Twitter — Tom Kingsley @ 12:49 pm

The loyally of today’s consumers is not the same loyalty that we knew growing up. This is because information is quickly exchanged; therefore companies have somewhat less power because of technology and ease of communication. Conversely, technology allows companies to respond quicker to the demands of the consumer based on analytic trends thus helping them regain power. In a nutshell the adage “in today, out tomorrow” is very true, even for the online market place.

When marketing your company you need someone who understands the difference between online trends and “your analytic data“. Even more important, this person needs to be able to interpret it as well as cross-reference it.

I need to stress that there is no simple answer or shortcut for online marketing. As with any marketing campaign, it all takes some degree of energy, time and money. I have also found that for the most part this is the same in everyday life, at least in my experience.  Those who take all the shortcuts are the ones complaining in the end because of any number of negative outcomes.

I prefer to take action with strategic marketing campaigns. I don’t like to waste time speaking to audiences that really don’t care about my message. It’s a waste of energy, time and money. This becomes especially important with limited budgets.

Lets look at some updated statistics for the two most popular social networks:

Facebook

  • More than 300 million active users
  • 50% of our active users log on to Facebook in any given day
  • The fastest growing demographic is those 35 years old and older
  • More than 70 translations available on the site
  • About 70% of Facebook users are outside the United States
  • They are more likely to be married (40%), white (80%) and retired (6%) than users of the other social networks.
  • Facebook users the second-highest average income, at $61,000, and an average of 121 connections.

Twitter

  • They’re more likely to buy books, movies, shoes and cosmetics online than the other groups.
  • They’re more likely to be employed part-time (16% vs. 11% average)
  • have an average income of $58,000,
  • have an average 28 followers and 32 other Twitterers they’re following.
  • They’re not particularly attached to the site, though — 43% said they could live without Twitter.

NOTE: There was a study done about 3 months ago showing that 46.1% of tweets (user posts) on Twitter are useless nonsense.

Twitter is best suited for retail pursuits based on the demographics. However, this does not mean that it will not change in the future. I just don’t see it as a driving engine for the educated executive.

Facebook is definitely a contender. It has a large base that is international and the demographics are moving in the right direction for a diverse educated audience. However, as with any social activity (online and off) it requires “continuous work”.

There is one other item that I need to address pertaining to social networks. You may have scene TV commercials that say visit us at Facebook.com/honda or what ever company. You must remember that these companies have multi-million dollar budgets “per month” and what works for them does not always transfer over to another company with a smaller marketing budget. This does not mean that we should not look at what they are doing; we should but we need to perform research to see how we can benefit from such marketing channels and what the probable outcome will be.

Social networks, as we know them have proven to only have a shelf life of a few years. For example: MySpace had a shelf life of 3.5 years. In 2006 it was the most popular social network. Facebook quickly took control of the social scene in first quarter of 2008. Consequently, MySpace laid off 30% of its workforce in June 2009 and now only employs 1,000 people.  Wait for it…. the adage “in today, out tomorrow”.

So what do you do to market your company?
There are ways to reach social network ad space without going directly through the social networks and having to pay their premium costs and that’s why there are experts out there like Teknowerkz who can do this for you. For more information please contact us.

September 6, 2009

Commercial Email a.k.a. Email Blast Tips

Filed under: Uncategorized — Tom Kingsley @ 11:25 am

August 24, 2009

Commercial Email a.k.a. Eblast Tips

Filed under: Email - eCRM,Marketing — Tom Kingsley @ 8:31 pm

We are quickly approaching Q4 – the holiday season. This is the time of year where a lot of companies make it or break it on the P&L. Don’t worry; this is not about what you already know. This is about marketing your company within the boundaries set forth by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) from what is known as the CAN-SPAM Act.

I put this article together because I am amazed that people still do not realize that commercial advertising is actually regulated.

First, let me paint an ugly picture for you then I will tell you how to avoid the pitfalls in three simple steps. “Each violation of the CAN-SPAM provisions is subject to fines of up to $16,000, plus there are additional penalties for email violations”.  Do you see your profits going down the drain faster than the economy in the past 3 quarters? Now that you know the fines are serious, lets take a look at a few things to get you on the right track.

What is the Federal Trade Commission (FTC)
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is the governing body for consumer protection in the United States.

What is CAN-SPAM
“The CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 (Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act) establishes requirements for those who send commercial email, spells out penalties for spammers and companies whose products are advertised in spam if they violate the law, and gives consumers the right to ask emailers to stop spamming them.

The law, which became effective January 1, 2004, covers email whose primary purpose is advertising or promoting a commercial product or service, including content on a Web site. A “transactional or relationship message” – email that facilitates an agreed-upon transaction or updates a customer in an existing business relationship – may not contain false or misleading routing information, but otherwise is exempt from most provisions of the CAN-SPAM Act.

TIP’s

1. Really, get to know your agency. After all, they are responsible for your online identity and the wrong agency can damage your reputation or, get you banned from a search engine and possibly fined or even worse all three.

2. Ask your agency; do you know what CAN-SPAM is?

Advise:
If not, walk away, read Tip #3 and Tip #4

3. You hired an agency to produce and send your Eblast. Does this relinquish your responsibility for the Eblast if the agency you hired does not follow CAN-SPAM regulations?

Answer:
The official position of the Federal Trade Commission is that they take these types of issues on a case-by-case basis. The FTC lawyers will get involved and examine the evidence then make a decision as to who is responsible if complaints arise.

Outcome:
This can cost you money either way. The cost of a lawyer protecting you and your company or regulation fines OR worst, both.

4. Hire an agency who knows what CAN-SPAM is. Contact Teknowerkz for details and how we can help you with your online marketing needs.

For official particulars on the CAN-SPAM Act, visit the Federal Trade Commission website. Also, consult a lawyer before you traverse the complexity of government laws and regulations.

August 14, 2009

Google Quality Score

Filed under: Google,Marketing,Search Engine — Tom Kingsley @ 3:18 pm

Do you know that Google has a Quality Score that affects your AdWord bids OR did you not even know that Google has a Quality Score? If not, then this is a  high level look inside our world to help you better understand why it is so important to have an interactive agency that really understands Search Engine Marketing.

Google has what is known as a Quality Score for AdWords aka: Pay-Per-Click

What is a Google Quality Score?
The AdWords system calculates a “Quality Score” for each of your keywords. It looks at a variety of factors to measure how relevant your keyword or phrase is to your ad text and to a user’s search query.

Quality Score helps ensure that only the most relevant ads appear to users on Google. Relevant ads tend to earn more clicks, appear in a higher position, and bring you the most success.

A Quality Score is calculated every time your keyword matches a search query – that is, every time your keyword has the potential to trigger an ad. A keyword’s Quality Score updates frequently and is closely related to its performance.

What Determines Quality Score?

Quality Score is broadly determined by three main factors:

  1. Click-Through Rate (CTR)
    • The historical Click-Through Rate (CTR) of the keyword and the matched ad on Google
    • Your account history, which is measured by the CTR of all the ads and keywords in your account
    • The historical CTR of the display URLs in the ad group
  2. Relevance
    • The relevance of the keyword to the ads in its ad group
    • The relevance of the keyword and the matched ad to the search query
    • Your account’s performance in the geographical region where the ad will be shown
    • Other relevance factors
  3. Landing Page Quality
    • The site should have relevant and original content
    • Be transparent and explicit about the nature of your business; how your site interacts with a visitor’s computer, and how you intend to use a visitor’s personal information
    • An easily navigable site with quick load times and a minimum of pop-ups or pop-under

Note: Your Quality Score also affects your bid rates. The higher your Quality Score, in addition to other metrics influence’s how much a bid actually costs. In essence, if you have a higher quality score and your competition has a lower Quality Score, then you are rewarded with a lower bid rate. The result is that you can market longer because you are efficiently utilizing your marketing budget by having a lower cost per bid because of a higher Quality Score.

Don’t worry if this sounds little confusing. This makes plenty of sense to the marketing team at Teknowerkz and we can put this to work for you. We knows the in’s and out’s of online marketing. In addition we can provide you with advanced analytics to show the bottom line results of the campaign. Yes, I am talking business lingo: Profit and Loss (P&L), the bottom line – no technobabble.

Contact Teknowerkz we will be happy to help

August 6, 2009

iGoogle has new Open Social Gadgets that let you play and collaborate

Filed under: Google,Search Engine,Social Networking — Tom Kingsley @ 8:55 pm

Google rolled out a program today in Australia enabling developers to create “social gadgets” that permit sharing, collaboration and groups on the iGoogle homepage. The social gadgets will come to the US and other markets in the future, but the timeframe has not been set.

Jeff Regan, iGoogle engineer said “As part of the iGoogle team, we are committed to connecting users to the information that is most useful and important to them in an easy-to-use and customizable format. So I’m excited to tell you about a cool new feature to help users get more out of their iGoogle page.

Google released 12 new social gadgets, so there’s something for everyone. If you’re into reading news or watching videos and want to share interesting findings with your friends, you can now easily do so with gadgets like GoComics, YouTube, or News.com.au. If you enjoy playing games, add favorites like Chess, Who Has the Biggest Brain, or the New York Times Crossword gadget. And if you’re a productivity guru, try out our new social To-Do gadget — we can only provide the gadget, the actual productivity is up to you!”

The important thing to keep in mind is that this is a completely new program that just rolled out today and sure there are lots of non-business related items like the comics and crosswords, but this is the breeding ground for new cutting edge development. Rest assured, you can expect to see lots of developers jumping aboard to develop much richer applications that will be better suited for business use.

Is Google going after Facebook and Twitter and the other social networks to have social world dominance? Probably not, but they are definitely getting on the bandwagon after they failed to recognize the value of the social networking a few years back.

One thing seems for sure is that we don’t actually know how successful social gadgets will be but the best-case scenario is that it will become the missing “social center” that has not taken root within Google’s ecosystem including Orkut, Google’s actual social network.

As we move forward into a climate filled with open social developer’s, iGoogle could and most likely will evolve into a hybrid-Facebook like experience with a community, applications, status updates and so on. The major difference will be the ability for developers to morph the community it into what they want it to be and if that is a signal of things to come, then the other social networks will almost be sure to follow if they want to be a player.

Here are some screen shots provided by Google:

Google1-20090806

Google3-20090806

Google4-20090806

July 22, 2009

Magazine Advertising Costs

Filed under: Marketing,Search Engine,Statistics — Tom Kingsley @ 6:39 pm

The writing is not on the walls, but rather the bottom line in the Profit and Loss (P&L) statements that magazines are not doing so well. The print industry says, “it’s the economy”. However, I will go out on a limb and make the statement “it may be something else”. Lets take a look at what it costs to advertise in a few random mainstream magazine selections, then you can decide for yourself where you would put your hard earned money to market your business.

Magazine Color Layout # of Times Published
 Cost
Allure 1 page 1 x $111,740
Bazar 1 page 1 x $97,915
Cosmopolitan 1 page 1 x $215,900
Elle 1 page 1 x $128,050
Essence 1 page 1 x $85,350
GQ 1 page 1 x $118,500
InStyle 1 page 1 x $138,600
Self 1 page 1 x $141,480
teenVogue 1 page 1 x $98,320
Vogue 1 page 1 x $128,220
W 1 page 1 x $78,660

The numbers in the chart above were pulled directly form the magazine marketing kit this afternoon. Click on the Magazine title to directly view the magazine media kit URL.

Now lets take a look at the results of high marketing costs.

Magazine percent change, September '08 to September '09

Magazine percent change, September '08 to September '09

What does this mean for companies who rely on print to advertise? Less visibility, which in turn means less revenue. So what can they do? I would recommend that companies in this dilemma diversify their marketing portfolio much like a stock portfolio. In a nutshell, this means don’t put your eggs all in one basket.

At Teknowerkz we have a multitude of options from Advanced Analytics, Digital Advertising & Branding, Web Development, Email / eCRM, & Emerging Media to help your company target your audience. The best thing about us is that we are completely digital and this will keep your astronomical print advertising costs down to earth, thus allowing you to market longer to the audience who will make purchases from your company. Contact us to learn how we can help you.

Yesterday, I blogged about  the Five Year Marketing Forecast and how Interactive marketing is more effective, and traditional advertising less effective, per dollar spent. You can read that article here >

July 21, 2009

Google Wave – A Real-Time Communication Platform

Filed under: Google,Search Engine — Tom Kingsley @ 6:05 pm

With all the new technology additions that appear online almost daily, did you ever wonder how you would manage your online life in the years to come? Well Google is thinking about it while others are trying to figure out what search is.

Google is testing a new product called Google Wave. In nutshell, Google Wave is a real-time communication platform that combines aspects of email, instant messaging, wikis, web chat, social networking, and project management to build one elegant, in-browser communication client. You can bring a group of friends or business partners together for an online discussion or share files.

Google Wave has a lot of innovative features and here are a few:

Natural language Processing:
Google Wave is utilizing a cutting edge technology known as Natural Language Processing. This is a subfield of artificial intelligence and the most powerful feature that Google Wave offers. This technology can autocorrect you’re spelling, even going as far as knowing the difference between similar words. It can also auto-translate on the fly.

Open source:
The Google Wave code will be open source, to foster innovation and adoption amongst developers. Those of us who prefer open source to Big Box Software know the advantages and also know that this is really were the innovations happen because of the collaboration.

Real-time:
In most instances, you can see what someone else is typing, character-by-character.

Embeddability:
Waves can be embedded on any blog or website.

Applications and Extensions:
Just like a Facebook application or an iGoogle gadget, developers can build their own apps within waves. They can be anything from bots to complex real-time games.

Wiki functionality:
Anything written within a Google Wave can be edited by anyone else, because all conversations within the platform are shared. Thus, you can correct information, append information, or add your own commentary within a developing conversation.

Playback:
You can playback any part of the wave to see what was said.

Drag-and-drop file sharing:
No attachments; just drag your file and drop it inside Google Wave and everyone will have access.

Well Deserved Credit:
Google Wave was the brainchild of a team based out of Sydney, Australia. The core team members are two brothers, Jens and Lars Rasmussen, and lead project manager Stephanie Hannon, all of whom were involved in Google Maps previously. Google Wave was announced today at Google’s I/O Developer conference, although the product will not be available to the public for several months.

July 20, 2009

Five Year Interactive Marketing Forecast

Filed under: Marketing,Search Engine,Statistics — Tom Kingsley @ 8:15 pm

According to a five-year interactive marketing forecast by Shar Van Boskirk at Forrester Research:

1. Interactive marketing is more effective, and traditional advertising less effective, per dollar spent.

2. While budgets for online have decreased, they decreased less than other traditional marketing budgets.

3. Of the marketers that Forrester surveyed, they agreed with the statement “we will increase budget for interactive by shifting money away from traditional marketing.” Only 7% said they have no plans to increase our marketing budget.

4. Digital marketing is no longer experimental. Now it looks more like traditional advertising is inefficient, relative to digital.

5. More than half of the marketers surveyed said that effectiveness of direct mail, TV, magazines, outdoor, newspapers, and radio would stay the same or decrease within three years. In contrast, well over 70% expected the effectiveness of emerging media channels like social media, online video, and mobile marketing to increase.

    The result is that digital, which will be about 12% of overall advertising spend in 2009, is likely to grow to about 21% in five years. Along the way overall advertising budgets won’t grow much.

    This means media is in trouble, or at least in the middle of a transformation. For example, online video ads, which will be about $870 million this year, will grow to over $3 billion in 2014. What will this do to networks plans to put more of their shows online in places like Hulu. How will it accelerate some newspapers plans to become more and more centered around online?

    And it means that social “media”, which will account for $716 million this year between social network campaigns and agency fees, will generate $3 billion in five years. And this doesn’t even count displays ads on social networks (which are in the display ads category.) Of all the parts of digital marketing, social network marketing one is poised for the most explosive growth.

    The bottom line
    Traditional marketers have been and are scrambling to figure out how the digital marketing world works. Some think the transition from traditional to interactive is a simple task while others know it’s an uphill climb. The consumer must be aware the cost of the learning curve will be on their dime and not the ad agency – they will make their money no matter what.

    The question I leave you with is:
    Do you want a traditional marketing company “learning” and “advising” you on the best avenues to market your business online, or do you want the experts who live in the digital world and who have a successful record to advise you. Contact us with your questions and we will he happy to help.

    July 14, 2009

    How Much Money are Facebook and MySpace Making? Social Network Revenue Projections

    Filed under: Statistics — Tom Kingsley @ 5:12 pm

    On July 2, 2009 I put a placed short article on the Teknowerkz blog talking about “Online Ad Spending Overseas to Hit $25 Billion by 2013” Today I have some more information specifically targeting Facebook and MySpace social network projections.

    According to eMarketer projections; MySpace revenue in the US will total $495 million this year, down 15 percent from last year but still significantly ahead of the $230 million in domestic revenue they expect Facebook to generate.

    Worldwide, MySpace will pull in $520 million in total sales, with the internationally stronger Facebook reaching $300 million. The firm projects that Facebook will surpass MySpace in revenue by 2011.

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