The big 5

Every now and again we find web content that really strikes a chord with us for a number of reasons. Here are five web sites or news articles that we think will have an impact on the direction of online marketing, digital marketing, content marketing and web development.

What do you think?

Sonny in iRobot is one step closer?
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-26366888

How much has marketing REALLY changed?
/http://www.unmarketing.com/2014/02/26/are-tradeshows-still-worth-it/

Are you a LinkedIn zealot?
http://www.inc.com/bill-murphy-jr/9-ways-to-be-less-annoying-on-linkedin.html

Dead links? OR live?
http://www.internetmarketingninjas.com/blog/link-building/links-dead-long-live-links/

The crest of the wave in 'paper' marketing
http://www.arcreactions.com/transparent-plastic-business-cards-2/

Making Gif’s Work in Online Marketing

Making Gif’s Work in Online Marketing

For some marketing devices you can put a decade to the campaign by the images they use. 3 color block images – the 50’s, photos of beach with a pink sky filter – the 70’s, heavily photoshopped images – the 90’, but what about today’s online marketing images? When people look back at the Teeny decade they will be able to identify us by … the Graphic Interchange Format. 

If the 21^st century has somehow passed you by, a Graphic Interchange Format is also known as a Gif. According to a reliable team of Calgary Web designers, a gif is a series of photos that are strung together in cycle so that it looks like the image is moving, almost like an animation. Remember the ‘flicker books’ you did as a kid where you drew a series of horse pictures on the corner of book then flicked through rapidly to look like your horse was moving? Same thing, only way more technical.

The Gif has swept through popular culture like a plague where it has been used to impress, express and progress stories, life events and new happenings. It seems its part of human nature to be drawn to moving images, especially those that are clever and intriguing. They can be added to signatures, posted on social media and shared around the globe. It is a great way to get noticed. 

A savvy online marketing professional (are we back to that reliable team of Calgary Web designers?) would have to ask themselves – Is there a way to use Gif’s in online marketing that works? The answer to that is: Yes, there is. And BOY! Does it work!

The ecommerce company Blue fly found that by including a Gif in an email campaign drew in 12% more revenue. An LA based evening wear retailer also did a test and sent out two identical emails, except one had a single frame image taken from a Gif, the other had the full moving Gif. There was a 26% increase in click through rate for the animated Gif over the single image. It’s defiantly worth making a Gif and seeing if it works for you. 

Here are some guidelines to help you make a success of your online marketing: 

Small is Beautiful

Try not to make your images exceed 100kb is size. If it’s too large a file to upload people will delete before they even get a chance to see it, and with 48% of emails opened on mobile devices you need to make sure your Gif accommodates mobile limitations and slow networks. Don’t be tempted to save space and have a ‘Download More’ button in your email as it’s unlikely to be clicked through for a Gif and steals the effect. 

The best practise for a Gif enhanced email is to keep it a 40mb in total and use that space to tastefully accentuate your marketing in a subtle manner. You want to impress, not over power. 

File It Right

If you’re looking to keep your Gif small use the HTML format in your email, or JPEGS for a photo. Use a GIF to condense and animated story or a teaser with a call to action.

GIFS are not a small sized image but are preferred over video or Flash as they are smaller to include in an email. Don’t be tempted to make anything too complicated for email marketing, simple graphics involving colours or lines work well and speed up the download in your email. 

Less is More

Be dignified with your Gifs. Choose a one that will lead the client to a call to action or highlight the important part of your message. If you are using online marketing to promote products, then a simple GIF can highlight the images and create interest quickly and easily. You just don’t want to light up your email like a Christmas tree. Just one, or at a push, two per email. Always leave them wanting more. 

Test, test, test

It’s important to test the final email to make sure there’s no hidden code making it bulkier than it needs to be. To cut down the size, email software company Responsys (not a reliable team of Calgary Web designers, but the next best thing …) recommends updating the file to share as many images between mobile and desktop version as possible, and swapping foreground images for background images that are only loaded from the server when visible.

Whatever your skill at Gifs or email marketing it’s worth getting a good understanding of both and using them to raise the bar on your online marketing to a whole new level. If you haven’t tried either before – do it! You haven’t got much to lose – and an awful lot to gain for little or no outlay. Welcome in the 21^st century and WOW it with your totally cool, beautifully produced, marketing Graphic Interchange Formats.

5 Ways to Write an Email That Sells

5 Ways to Write an Email That Sells

We all have a love/hate relationship with email campaigns. Some of us avoid our mail box for as long as possible knowing that it will be full of emails from companies touting their wares – and that’s even before you have looked in your spam filter! That is until that one email that comes in that REALLY applies to you and your needs and makes you very excited to use the knowledge you’ve gained and move forward in some way. Online marketing can seem like a double edged sword – on one hand it’s accessible and not too difficult, on the other - hard to be good at. It’s this love/hate relationship that causes nightmares for anyone who has to create an email that sells, but it really shouldn’t be something to be afraid of. 

Why do people still use email campaigns if most of them have a negative attitude toward them? (Delete, delete, delete) Let’s a take a look at a few figures about email campaigns and see exactly what kind of a reputation they deserve.

The ROI on a marketing email is around $44.25 for every dollar invested. That’s HUGE! That makes an email campaign economical and quantifiable.

Those who read brand emails spend 85% more when shopping. That’s another MASSIVE gain. Do I really need to say more? Email campaigns are cheap and work! That’s why you see so many of them in your mailbox. 

So how do you maximize your email campaign and make it into a lean, mean, marketing machine?

SEGMENT

Optimize your copy for your real life contacts. Segment your email list to make sure you are targeting the right audience. It has been reported that the average person is bombarded with over 5,000 advertising messages each day so if you continually send out online marketing that is of no interest to your chosen demographic you will condition them to hit the delete button as soon as they see your email address in the ‘From’ line. You can segment your lists in many ways such as stage in the buying cycle, interests, industry, company size – absolutely anything that allows you to target your email to someone who is highly interested in what you have to offer. 

According to HubSpot, eMarketer did a survey and found that 85% of marketers segment their lists in the following ways, and got the following increases:

That’s twelve good reasons to segment your lists. 

CONTINUITY

Do not fall into the trap of thinking that if you put an eye catching ‘Everything Must Go’ offer in the subject line, then only offer a 10% discount off selected items in the body of your email that people will be fooled into opening all your emails. They may open it once, but after that they will be unlikely to open one ever again. Build trust with your clients by offering value in your email and representing it honestly in the subject line. People are very wary of spam and consider most emails as spam until they prove themselves otherwise. 

Make sure you always offer value in your subject line and continue it through your email in a professional and confident manner. You don’t want your client to only read that email, you want them to open all your future emails too. 

MAKE IT PERSONAL

The segment you have sent the email to may contain thousands of contacts but you email mustn’t intimate at that. You need to make it professional, yet personal, and one of the best ways is to write it in the ‘second person’. Write like you were speaking to friend. Use their name at the beginning if possible. Make it seem like you already have a relationship of trust. 

If you are writing to a generic company name such as a ‘Calgary Graphic Design Agency’ and do not have a name or contact, still use the second person. Try to not have the name appear anywhere in the text as referring to your customer as a ‘Calgary Graphic Design Agency’ may be true, but is also patronising – a bit like meeting them in person, knowing their name but calling them ‘Human’ all the way through. ‘It was nice to meet you, Human’, is no way to win friends and influence people.

Use phrases like, ‘If you need….’, ‘You’re probably wondering why…’ or ‘We will be there to help you through the whole process’. This sets the tone of being interested in your customer – and not the sale. 

INFORMATION

It’s always a good idea to keep up with what your competition is doing but when you compose a marketing email, it’s essential. Look around and see what others are doing, how they are doing and evaluate how it is being received. Make sure you do the same with your campaigns too. Don’t be afraid to follow a template that works and keep using it until there is a need to change. Take some time to evaluate everything about your email campaign and keep a note of it. After a few successful ones you could find that you have a formula that hits the mark every time. 

KISS YOUR SUBJECT LINE

Any information on useful tips for writing an email campaign will tell you how important your subject line is – you know that! Think about the emails you chose to open before you read this article – what made you open them? One thing other useful email tip articles may not cover is the importance of the length of the subject line. You have to always think of ‘KISS’ when writing the subject line – which is Keep It Short and Sweet. The question is – how short? 

Mailchimp did a survey on their customer and tested over 200 million subject lines in emails and rated their success. The results? Here they are: 

As you can see, the shorter the subject line, the higher the open rate, and the higher the click through rate. When reading those statistics I wondered what kind of an email subject line was 4 characters long – how about, ‘Open’. Would it work? Try it and find out. 

If you want an online marketing that is cheap to run and very effective, then you need to start a ‘love/love’ relationship with email marketing. With a little practise you can make it work for you, just be sure you have the right tools and have done all your preparation – your success rate will thank you for it.

Whatever Happened to the 4 P’s?

Whatever Happened to the 4 P’s? 

For decades the watchwords for savvy marketers have been product, placement, price and promotion. The four P’s of marketing were the ONLY guidelines for a complete industry and they were slavishly followed, scratch that, and insert ‘Obsessively followed’ in its place. I have to admit there were some fantastic uses of the four P’s that were works of genius, but they all followed the same rules. As a marketer we have to ask ourselves, ‘How relevant are the four P’s to today’s market?’ 

With the advent of the digital age EVERY industry has changed. No longer do people wanting to buy a car pour over Thursday’s nights ‘Weekly Herald’ classified ads or call the theatre to know the times of the latest movies, even medical professions use the internet for information and education, so as the audience has moved to a different way of searching for products and services the marketers need to move to follow them – and then over take them. You can’t lead from behind. So it’s really time for us to let go of the 4 P’s, and roll in… the four C’s of digital marketing. 

CREATE

The key of digital media is the art of creating EXCELLENT content. Content is King. Success in the digital marketing arena relies on creating great content – and a lot of it. Is it easy to maintain work of a sufficient quality to keep people engaged? No, not really, and extremely time consuming, but it has to be done to cut through the white noise of the internet that threatens to drown you out at every junction. Doesn’t sound that hard? Just bear in mind the average attention span of a person these days is 7 seconds – that’s one second less than a goldfish… you’ve got to grab them – and you have less than 7 seconds to do it in.

Digital advertising has opened up a whole new arena in marketing creation. There is a huge range of devices that can be incorporated into digital advertising – video, animation, audio, image, image manipulation – the list goes on. It’s a wonderful opportunity to create something truly engaging by using mixed media marketing and blazing a trail for others to follow.  The marketing concepts are truly limitless. 

CURATION

Curation is one aspect of digital advertising that is vital but sometimes overlooked in concept meetings. Forget what the word curation conjures up – a museum worker tortoise shell glasses and a mustard colored vest won’t help you here. The art of curation is being able to pull information out of the material and get it organized for use and reuse. This needs to happen on two levels. Your chosen demographic needs to be able to draw out the important information that leads to buying behaviour from the marketing you produce and then be able to save it for use and later reuse. There are so many options for curation that the campaigns can be limitless, the challenge is how to get your customers to find them and motivate them to use them. You really don’t have a choice of whether you use social media or not, just a choice of how well you use it. 

Digital marketing also needs to be able to auto-curate a campaign. Nearly all digital platforms have the ability to accept any format so anything you create for one digital campaign can be used on another. This is essential for company branding and company image. It has never been easier to upgrade or extend a marketing campaigns range by creating, storing and organizing the right media. 

CONNECT

One aspect of marketing that is new to the digital age is the interrelationship of all the different social media platforms. It used to be that you could dominate one area of marketing, say commercials, and that would carry your marketing in other areas, but this one stream dominance no longer washes with a tech savvy audience. 50% of the world’s population is under the age of 30 and 53% of those would rather lose their sense of smell that their technology. Did you also know that Grandparents are the fastest growing demographic on twitter? If you don’t have a strong presence across all digital media and social platforms your chosen demographic may already be in front of you and pulling away quickly. 

Digital media connects people. Digital marketing connects people to people and to the products and services they need. It also connects all the different media together to affect your audience and to create a buying behaviour. Mixed media marketing is the way forward, connecting marketing media to the people. 

CULTURE

Marketing is no longer an experience these days – it’s a culture. People log onto social media and cyber space and browse for something to do. The influence of social media on daily life is huge. People cook by it, educate themselves by it, relax by it but most importantly shop by it. The figures bear that out; 53% of people recommend products on Twitter and 93% of all purchases start on the internet. That is not as surprising as the fact that 90% of people trust social media shopping recommendations when only 14% trust advertising. The digital age is now a culture, so your mixed media marketing needs to adapt to that fact and work with it. It’s the difference between success and failure.

If you really want to see how well capitalizing on the four C’s of digital marketing works, take a look at this Calgary Marketing company. They own it like a boss! It’s time to take ownership of how the market is changing and lead from the front. Its’ easy – when you know how.

5 Important Rules You Need to Use on Your Next Email Campaign

5 Important Rules You Need to Use on Your Next Email Campaign

One of the ultimate weapons in any business marketing armoury is the humble email campaign. Even though it has been around for many years, and has been wildly overused by some companies, the email campaign is still a highly effective at reaching out to your chosen demographic and influencing them. The problem that this success has created means that you can no longer sit down at your desk, tap out an email, hit send, then sit back and wait for the world to come and knock at your door waving their money. Any corporate branding agency will tell you that brand development is the key to any successful business marketing strategy and that anything that leaves your company has to further to brand. 

We have got together with Calgary’s best and most effective corporate branding agency and come up with 5 ways you can breathe a little more life into your next email campaign and cut through the white noise of the inbox that is simply superfluous junk mail.

One Size Definitely Does Not Fit All!

Before your hands hit the keyboard to type your marketing masterpiece, think about your email lists. If you want to reach out to people and be effective, make sure your lists are up to date. If you have purchased a list make sure it is relevant to your market, demographic and company image. Nothing screams ‘I am spam’, louder than something that has no relevance whatsoever to the person receiving it. Your email campaign has a large element of brand development about it, so develop it by contacting people who care. 

How do you eat an elephant? 

One bite at a time. And what does that have to do with your Pulitzer Prize winning email campaign? Apply the same principle with your email address database. Everything is much more manageable and achievable in organized sections. Once you have a relevant database, whether it’s a cleaned up one you purchased or one you have captured from your own web site and social media, break it down into bite sized pieces. Organize it. Group together by industry, company size, interest, product interests, seasonal demand – absolutely anything that allows you to make your list more relevant to THEM as a consumer. Some company’s may fall into more than one list and others only appear on one, but whatever list they are on – make sure they want, or can use, your product or service. Trim out the old or irrelevant and discard; save them if you want to, but why keep email addresses that will not buy? Is this time consuming? – yes. Painful? – that too. But this one act of relevancy will pay dividends in your open rate and your success rate. You can’t afford to ignore it. 

Therein Lies the Treasure…

Make sure your email campaign is full of great content. Don’t go to all the trouble of organizing, writing and dispatching a huge email campaign if what you have got to say is weak or boring. Make every word count! Attract them with your company image and lure them into your delicious web of products and service with your enticing words. If you aren’t able to ‘wow’ them in three seconds – employ someone who can. Nowhere will this pay off more than in the subject line. If your subject line bombs – so will your email, and if you’re going for brand development that is not the way to succeed. Corporate branding strategy was not built on failure. 

Don’t be 2 dimensional about your email campaign either. A major household company sent out an email and got a MASSIVE 82% conversion on it. Imagine an 82% success rate! How? They simply put a .gif image in it. Think outside of the in-box. Video, animations, teasers can all be sent in an email campaign and may just be the ‘wow’ factor your customer is looking for. 

Follow the Game

Whatever system you use to administer your email campaign make sure it provides you with metrics. You need to know what works, and more importantly, what doesn’t. Test the effectiveness of a campaign, try something new, follow the same old pattern – it really doesn’t matter what you do (as long as you keep up your company image), but always track its success. You need to continue building your brand and generating leads and the only way you can do this is to know what is effective for your company. Boring as number crunching the bottom line may be – it’s still the bottom line.

Give Yourself a Promotion

Use social media to promote your email. Create a buzz about it before it goes out, post teasers, ask questions - whatever device you need to create anticipation. You want people to open it so use twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, Google+ or any other platform available to whip up a frenzy before it comes out and it will ensure that its read. It’s also a good idea to include links to help people post the content on social media at the end of your email so that you can get your customers promoting your product on their own social media. Brilliant! 

Never be afraid of designing an email campaign as all it takes to create an online marketing storm is a little bit of planning, a little bit of work and a lot of exciting thinking. Work at giving the people that elephant one bite at a time. You know they want it. Think about it. You can do it – I know you can.