A recent topic of conversation among my team has been about the best time to send email blasts.

As we all know, it’s typically considered best practice to send marketing emails earlier in the week and earlier in the day.

I was reading a blog post recently that said a better way to gauge how your own audience will respond is to look at your site traffic patterns. The idea being that when the most people are visiting your site is when they will be most receptive to a message from you.

To that end, I’ve taken a look at our traffic patterns for the month of April (attached). You can see that our best traffic time is on Tuesdays at 9 am EST. So theoretically, this would be the best time to send email blasts.

Two Caveats:

- Of course, this is only looking at one month’s traffic, so it would require some testing to validate it, but I think it’s a safe bet.

- These are global numbers. Obviously this is an inopportune time to reach the Asian market, if that’s your target. If you’d like to see what the best time is to send to a specific region, select it from the drop-down box in this spreadsheet.

Recently a friend, who is an amazing print designer but new to online,  asked me how to make a large image appear in the body of an email. It was a request from a client of his, to send out as an ad to prospects. Email marketing has become so complicated that I felt I should give some additional, unsolicited advice. I didn’t want to overwhelm him, but I wanted to cover the most important elements of a good email campaign. Below is my response, did I leave out anything you think is critical?

Hi [friend's name removed],

You need to create an HTML file to reference the image which should be hosted on a web server. Then the HTML file should be sent out throughher email marketing service provider.

A couple of other things to keep in mind:

- Most email programs incorporate image blocking technology. So if you send the entire message as an image, a large portion of her audience may not see it. If you can recreate the image with the important parts of the message as HTML text instead of an image, she will get a better response. Additionally, an email that is one big image may set off spam filters and many people may not even get it. More info here:

http://www.mailchimp.com/articles/how_spam_filters_think/

and here:

http://www.campaignmonitor.com/blog/post/2559/current-conditions-and-best-pr-1/

(This one’s a little old, blocking has increased since 2007, so the chart of email clients is off. However, the tips are still good.)

- When creating an HTML file for email purposes, it’s important to consider the audience. Certain email providers and software programs interpret HTML differently so something that looks good in Gmail will not look the same in Yahoo or in MicroSoft Outlook. It’s best to keep the HTML simple and not get too crazy with CSS. When using CSS it’s better to use inline-styles over linked style sheets. More info here:

http://www.blogopreneur.com/2008/10/17/css-styles-that-work-with-email/

- If she is sending this to multiple people, she needs to comply with CAN SPAM legislation. The policy requires among other things that a person receiving the email have the ability to opt out of receiving future emails from that company. This is typically done in the footer of the email. More info here:

http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/edu/pubs/business/ecommerce/bus61.shtm

Good luck. Let me know if you have any more questions about it.

T

I’m not much of a bandwagoneer, and I’m reluctant to give up even more of my life to the internet, so I’ve been aggressively avoiding social media sites for years. I know, it’s crazy considering my career choice, but I just figured I’d dive into it when work required it. Well, work required it.  Early this year, I spent my free time chasing after the bandwagon. Here are some quick tips that I picked up along the way.

Everyone’s already talking about social media… constantly. So I won’t go into a lot of depth.

When getting involved in social media, it’s important to establish goals first. Our goal was to communicate with clients/prospects and to drive traffic to our content.

It’s also important to know what social media platforms your audience uses and devote your time accordingly. You can spend a ton of time making the perfect ning page and then find out you’ve set up shop in a ghost town.

I decided to devote most of my time with twitter, facebook and linkedin. After spending some time on all three I realized our sparse resources were best spent on LinkedIn. I set up a twitterfeed and facebook rss feed reader to get our content out there and updated on a regular, automated basis. I still thank people individually for friending and following us, but LinkedIn is where I devote a little time each day.

The absolute most important thing to remember when starting a social media campaign is that people have their bullshit meters on high alert. If you walk into every chat, every tweet, and every friend request shilling your product, you will be a lonely social mediarite quickly. I’ve not been in it, but I bet it’s tough digging out of that hole.

If you want to gain friends and followers and group members, share your knowledge. Give away free content. Start conversations that matter to people. Be generous, link to others’ content, give free advice. Once you’ve made some friends and people feel comfortable, then you can mention your product. But again, try to avoid the hard sell.

I have to admit that once I became involved in the social media world, I was surprised at how quickly and easily it worked. It certainly won’t replace any of my standard marketing tools, but it’s a good addition.

Some links that helped me:

6 ways to simplify social media updates

5 Tips For Getting More from Facebook

5 Tips for Getting More from LinkedIn

50 Ideas on Using Twitter for Business

4 simple rules for generating traffic from forums

3 Social Media Aggregators That Bring It All Together

This post is the business-side equivalent to “Growing audience through print and online collaboration.”

Many publishing businesses are finally seeing the light when it comes to print and online sales. Maintaining separate  sales groups encourages internal competition (the bad kind), cannibalizes  profits and delivers poor results to clients. Having an integrated sales team, or at least a sales team that’s incented to play nice together is key to success in the new publishing universe.

Once the playing field is even, a sales team can sell each product on its individual merit. Selling packages of products that work in conjunction with one another will increase the amount of revenue generated per sale, improve the client’s ROI and earn repeat business.

Here’s an example of a common sale by one or more reps selling different media for the same company:

An advertiser buys ad placement that will appear in several issues of a magazine.  He knows the ads will be seen by a percentage of the readership. It’s largely a branding exercise and may or may not work, but it’s a calculated risk. The advertiser also buys a banner campaign on the magazine’s web site. While the ad has the same look and feel as the print ad, that’s where the similarity ends. The ad links to his web site and at the end of his campaign, someone tells him how many times the ad was seen and how many clicks it got.

There are separate costs associated with advertising in each publication, there are some times even separate sales people who service the account. At the end of his campaign, the advertiser isn’t really sure if he got his money’s worth. Is a .5% click through rate good? He got more traffic to his web site this month, but to what magazine ad can he attribute the traffic? In the long run, the advertiser may decide to cut one or more items from future ad buys. “Maybe I don’t need that banner ad.”  “Maybe one print ad is enough”

Now let’s look at the same buy but sold and planned in collaboration:

The advertiser runs a series of print ads offering a free widget for those who visit a specific url. The url changes for each print ad. The publisher creates a splash page and the redirects necessary for the print campaign. The splash page is linked to from the magazine web site.

Banner ads run on the magazine web site with a similar look and feel to the print ads and link to the splash page as well.

The splash page reinforces the message that appeared on the display ads. A form on the splash page collects user data, and a tracking code placed on the page collects other information. The page is optimized for search and includes keywords that relate to the campaign.

The advertiser pays one package price with the different campaign elements broken out on the invoice. At the end of the campaign, the advertiser receives a detailed report including: the amount of traffic that came in from each print ad; the number of clicks from display ads; the amount of organic search traffic that reached the page; the number of total unique visitors to the page; the average time spent by those visitors; and a database of contact information from those who filled out the form.

If the sales rep(s) has done her job, the advertiser will understand the branding value of the campaign. With the report, the advertiser will receive more concrete numbers and leads to help evaluate the campaign.

Campaigns that include multiple media sources perform better, and leave a longer lasting impression with the audience. Supplying these kinds of results to clients encourages future ad purchases and more robust relationships. In the current economic climate, which of the two publishers above will the advertiser choose to drop when his marketing budget gets cut?

Every couple of years a different company announces that it will launch a new technology using bar codes to help market products. This year it’s Microsoft’s turn.

I agree that it’s pretty neat that you can store loads of  information in a bar code. I just haven’t seen a good case for consumers. It would be a real win for Microsoft if people ran around stores scanning bar codes just to see all the clever marketing ploys. But in a consumer culture that’s getting increasingly adept at avoiding advertisements on all media, it seems extremely unlikely that people will seek it out.

Who knows, maybe they’ll get it right. Maybe they’ll give away something cool that makes it worth the effort. Or maybe they’ll sink a ton of money into another Cue Cat.

(Funny how Forbes doesn’t mention the failed product in their Microsoft story).

Everyone knows that Google Adwords is a great marketing resource. It’s cheap, it’s effective and it’s targeted. But it ain’t easy.

Search optimization with Google can feel like a Sisyphean punishment, but in the long run, once you’ve established best practices, you’re good for a while.

Figuring out Adwords is even more challenging. Adwords are displayed based on a complex rating system that Google more or less makes up as it goes along. Human input on top of algorithm, determines your campaign’s fate. And if you don’t take the time to get it right, you’re ads simply won’t be delivered. Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s great that they’re keeping  the spammers and the perverts out, but it’s frustrating to spend so much time nurturing just one segment of a campaign.

Ad placement depends on the quality of  the keywords you select, the text in your ad, the optimization of your landing page, the amount you bid on the space and some times a hands-on review by a Google employee.  Understanding that no two Adword campaigns are treated equally, here are my 5 tips for moving in the right direction and hopefully taking some of the pain out of the process:

1) Be honest with yourself and honest with Google: Be selective and targeted with all of your Adwords decisions. This is a job for a scalpel, not a shotgun. Be sure your ad, your keywords and your landing page relate in a meaningful way. Don’t try to trick Google by adding a bunch of irrelevant keywords or making claims that aren’t true. It’s also debatable at the moment whether you’ll get away trying to buy a competitor’s name as a keyword. I’d err on the side of caution and avoid it.

2) Use multiple keywords to target better and pay less: Say you’re a Ford dealer in Boston. If you want to run an ad, you might consider bidding on the keyword “Ford” or “Truck”. But that wouldn’t capture the audience you’re looking for. If someone types “Ford” into a search engine, they’re probably looking for Ford’s corporate site. You’d be competing with every business in the world who wanted to appear when someone searched Ford and you’d probably spend a small fortune on worthless clicks. However if you cluster your keywords and used “Ford trucks Boston”, you’d not only save a lot of money, but people performing that search are probably the ones who are actually looking for you.

3) Checking and changing often – but be careful not to wreck your good numbers: Because of all the variables that go into displaying your ad, it’s understood that you’ll want to do some testing and make changes. You need to tweak your ad copy for better clicks, add and subtract keywords to display with better frequency, raise and lower your bid to save money and get better positioning. Follow your metrics and continue to make those changes until you find your sweet spot, but be careful. If you edit too much and add the wrong keywords or price yourself out of the bidding, it may take a while to recover a spot you once held.

4) Landing pages matter: It should go without saying that if your landing page isn’t any good, the fact that you got someone to visit it doesn’t really matter. But because Google looks at it to determine your ad placement, you need to take an even harder look at it. Your landing page should be geared toward your customer, it should use keywords that are relevant to those that are associated with your ad. It should have a clear navigation to other sections of your site as well as other SEO-friendly things like page title, alt tags on images etc.  The url structure of your page should make sense too, so be cautious when using internal marketing codes in your url. Spending the extra time to get it right is worthwhile, especially if your commercial effort gets you organic search optimization.

5) Read “Winning results with Google Adwords” by Andrew Goodman: I bought the second edition and Google changed the rules again shortly thereafter. Most of what’s in the book is still valid though. A lot of what I’ve shared in this post is tempered by what I learned from Goodman. He’s a little long-winded in spots, but it’s worth the time if you’re planning on spending any serious money with Google.

Black liquor, for the uninitiated, is a byproduct in the creation of pulp from timber that will later be made into paper. This substance is captured used to power the mills that make the pulp. Because it is a byproduct of trees being torn to shreds, it is a 100% pure biofuel. (This is not to imply it is 100% environmentally friendly).  In 2004 Congress passed a bill giving a  tax credit to companies that add a percentage of plant-based fuel to the diesel they use to power their businesses.

Seizing an opportunity, paper companies began to add a small percentage of diesel fuel to the black liquor already powering their mills.  At very little cost, these companies began to save millions in tax deferment. The loophole remains open, but Canada and other papermaking countries have become more vocal in their complaints of government subsidies and unfair trade practices. Congress is having another look at the legislation and President Obama has even spoken on the need to amend the situation.

The black liquor issue has generated a lot of buzz among paper makers and has probably helped keep the industry afloat during recent economic hard times. Watching the metrics on our site, we could see the importance of the issue among our audience. Every story/blog/poll/etc. we ran on the topic was gobbled up.

My first thought was do something to capitalize on this. We took all of the coverage we could find in our archives and did a write up on the whole mess with links back to all of our old stories. Within a matter of days, we had quadrupled the traffic on the papermaking section of our site. This was another quick win, that reused existing material and generated a ton of traffic.

The next step is a bit more difficult – selling sponsorships around this content to monetize the effort. Our advertisers supply the paper industry worldwide. And even though the traffic is there, it may appear tainted since U.S. papermakers are the only ones benefiting.

So how do we do it? I’m open to suggestions.

It’s just not exciting any more. Six years ago, sure. I was eating it up. But now I want to do video and social networking and widgets. Unfortunately, there’s no denying it. Email works.

My colleague Arthur Cohen, director of audience development at RISI puts it this way,

“I get about at least 50 emails in my work inbox every morning. That’s less than some email stats indicate—75, or even 100. I bet your professional inbox is at least as cluttered. So what’s to love about this time sink? Nothing at all. But if I can craft a message that grabs you through that swamp and makes some big bucks for my company, I feel the love all right, you betcha. But wait—there’s more; if you’re good at your craft, it’s the best ROI in town. Come to think of it, what’s not to love?“

Arthur’s right of course. The last marketing campaign I ran included the following:

Flash Banners (x2) : 19,169 impressions : 0.16% CTR*
Video Banner : 14,248 impressions :  0.20% CTR
Google Ads : 364,934 : 0.03% CTR

email: 28,351 sent : 5,104 opens : 1,103 unique clicks : 21.61% CTR**

*Click through rate based on clicks/impressions. **Click through rate based on clicks/opens. I generally go by opens rather than sent because it’s a more equatable to a page impression.

This was a rush campaign that was put together in a couple of days and only ran for 2 weeks, so the overall results clearly aren’t stellar. But you can’t sneeze at the email number.

Another more long-term campaign I’m running has seen similar results. I’m promoting free subscriptions to the digital edition of my company’s magazine. The Google and banner ads slowly trickle in subscriptions. The print ads are harder to quantify, but at least they’re good for branding. Again, the email blasts are killing. Every time I send one out, I get another thousand subscriptions.

Over time, I will have exhausted my lists and won’t be able to get such high numbers with each blast, but it’s certainly done well the last five times.

My last recent example is an enewsletter we use to promote content on our site. We’ve got  a pretty good list established for this weekly newsletter and we have a very strong open rate. Over the last several months, we’ve seen this email become the single biggest traffic driver on our site. It’s great, whatever we feature seems to become the hot item on our site.

Yes, I’m resigned to using email until it stops working, but I don’t have to like it.

I don’t know about you, but I almost never log out of a web site. Sure, if it’s my bank or something else really sacred, but otherwise, I just navigate away or close the browser tab.

Seriously, does anyone log out?

Apparently a bunch of people who use my company’s subscription content site do.

I was casually browsing our sites popular pages in Omniture a few weeks ago and was surprised by how many page views the log out page was getting. It’s a simple page, with nothing on it:

Log out page - Before

So I figured we should slap an ad tag on there and see what happened. I had a good feeling the ad would work well there because: a) I could make it huge. b) It was going to pretty much be the only thing on the page. c) It would appear when people were finished with our site, a seemingly perfect time to catch them between tasks.

Log out page - after (ad is a mock up for illustration purposes)

So far, it seems to have worked! It’s still early, but the ads delivered on this page are outperforming display ads everywhere else on our site.

It pays to watch metrics trends. This was an easy win that took practically no time or resources to pull off. Do you have a log-out page, just sitting there doing nothing?

This post is the editorial-side equivalent to “Growing revenue through print and online collaboration.”

Exasperated publishers, who must continually lay off staff and reduce their book size, are grasping at  straws like micropayments for web site content and whizbang digital editions of print products. These efforts aren’t entirely without merit. The whizbang digital version of my own company’s magazine has attracted many subscribers and racked up tons of page views over the last few months. Unfortunately, it has not brought in much additional revenue and will not be the future of our business.

The problem in the publishing world isn’t a lack of new product ideas. The problem is compartmentalization of existing products. Instead of using the strengths of each publication to support the others, most publishers look at their print publications and their web sites as  separate entities. While content is often shared (usually published first in print, then added to the web), it is generally accepted that each medium will have its own readership, advertisers and even staff.

Current print to online publishing model

The strategy seems to be that whoever we can’t reach with our print product, we’ll get with our web site. It’s true. There’s generally only a small amount of overlap between print and online audiences. But is that because people who read print don’t go online? Or is it because there’s little point in reading both versions when the content is the same in both places?

My goal is to break this self-fulfilling prophecy and instead, take advantage of both vehicles to not only tell our stories but to develop them as well. People read print and online differently, online is for short bursts of information, interaction, animation and sharing with friends. Print is for ponderous, in-depth elaboration and glossy, tactile photo spreads. People enjoy both experiences and use both in their daily lives. They will use both versions of your publication provided they have reason to.

Combined use of both mediums to one end

For example, imagine the development of a typical feature story in a magazine. Research and data are collected. Experts are interviewed. Photos are taken. Over the course of several days or weeks, the information is refined and formed into a package that can be published in a future edition.  Later that finished piece is published on the corresponding web site. Then the whole cycle starts again. Little is done to promote the upcoming piece, there’s just a hope that people who like the magazine’s content will continue to like it and continue to purchase the book/visit the web site and read it.

Now imagine developing the same feature using the strengths of each medium.

While collecting research and data, the writer creates a blog entry describing the upcoming feature to be published in the magazine. She writes about anticipated conclusions and asks advice on people to interview. She adds a poll to find out more about what her audience thinks and to enhance her data. She asks her readers to submit any photos or video that could help her tell the story.

Later in the process, the writer posts a rough draft of the story online. The draft helps give readers an idea of what’s coming in the print product and invites them to share their opinions. These opinions can be added to the magazine story as quotes or as a sidebar of readers’ thoughts. When the final story publishes in print this time, it is more nuanced. It has reader interest baked in and has given online readers a reason to pick up the print version.

The final story will eventually find it’s way online again, accompanied by all of the photos and other material that wouldn’t fit in the printed piece. But that’s not the end of the cycle. While developing this story, the author had an idea for a related story. In the printed piece, she included a sidebar sharing the idea with readers and asking them to share their opinions on the idea by reading her next blog entry. This is not a generic refer to visit the web site. It’s a calculated call to action that will not only help the author develop more content, but helps make the audience feel a part of the story.

Ultimately, these practices can help an audience find value in both products by making them a partner in the creative process, rather than a mere observer.

I became intrigued by this idea while working with Tim Windsor at The Sun.  We were building bthesite.com – a blog that aspires to be the starting point of Baltimore’s daily conversation.  I’m now instituting this approach at RISI, I’ll keep this blog updated with our progress.