SIPA Marketing Conference Sharefest: Keep Miami Alive!!!

MIAMI -- You know what they say. What happens in Miami, stays in Las Vegas. If you got as much out of SIPA's 24th Annual Mid-Year Marketing Conference as I did, then you didn't drink nearly enough.

The chairmen of the event, Randy Coon and Greg Martz of The Motley Fool, put together a diverse and valuable program. We'd like to keep the conversation going. Please use this blog to post quick notes on what you learned, observations you made, or merely to hurl insults at others. Tell us what you liked. Post questions and we'll see if we can get you an answer. If you have trouble with the site, there is next to no hope for you. But send me an email anyway.

Surf's Up: Riding the Online Wave from Acquisition to Renewal was excellent. Thanks to Randy, Greg, Patti, Janine, Katie and all the speakers.

Email: Revolting and Beautiful and Powerful if You Get it Right

David Daniels, VP and Research Director at JupiterKagan Inc. and Jeanniey Mullen, Senior Partner at OgilvyOne Worldwide. Below is coverage of their presentation today, although you won't realize that for a couple paragraphs. And you can compliment my page composition skills later. Also, I just realized that Mr. Daniels might think the headline was written to describe the photographs. That was not my intention. Please bear with me. --Tom Hagy

MIAMI -- I live in Pennsylvania, probably near a swamp. In the summer there are these pesky bugs that swirl around your head with one goal and one goal only: to fly directly into your eyes and drown in your tears. I now wear goggles during the summer months, a fashion accessory that is getting raves in the neighborhood.

These bugs are almost as annoying as the volumes of email I get. That is probably because of the volumes of email I send. But my stuff is really important. Like this blog.

Apparently I am not alone. Well, at the moment I am extremely alone, and finally figured out how to work the air conditioner here at the Loews Miami Beach Hotel. It’s now 40 degrees here in room 803, much better than the 30 degrees of the last two days. If I’d woken up this a.m. spooning with a polar bear I would not have been surprised.

Oh, right, I am not alone. We all get tons of email, and companies who send them, smart ones, are finding ways to integrate and improve email communication with customers with admirably profitable results.

Jeanniey Mullen of OgilvyOne Worldwide and David Daniels of JupiterKagan Inc. closed the SIPA marketing conference here with some useful context, techniques and best practices to use email and related devices to have a significant impact on brand advocacy, customer loyalty, e-commerce sales, viral marketing and offline sales.

Some fun factoids. According to the JupiterKagan research cited throughout the presentation, consumers get about 274 personal emails a week and another 304 at work per week. 70% percent have two accounts. 8% perform email triage via their handhelds.

Email is still the #1 online activity, but it is decreasing, according to Mr. Daniels.

“Email bankruptcy” is a movement for those of us sick of email – like Moby – and just want the world to start picking up the phone again. And some of us would prefer you leave a message under our windshield wipers.

For email subscriptions, 53% of people unsubscribe because the content is irrelevant, 40% because the sender is sending too much, too often. An unknown percentage just doesn’t like your smirk.

Bills. 25% of people are now suppressing their paper billing statements in favor of email statements. That goes up to 33% if you make over 100K, a reason to ask for a raise if I ever heard one. There is no difference according to age here. I have begun suppressing bills in all media.

Understand this: people actually opt in because they trust your brand. But before you start designing your emails, focus first on how you acquire your email addresses, how much data you want, where you will ask for the information, how you handle it. Get that right first.

Portability. Thanks to handhelds people seeking instant gratification can now get it, at least when it comes to email, information, and commerce. Earlier this year 10% of those polled made new purchases this way, a number that just jumped to 18%, according to Mr. Daniels.

Improving renewals. Ms. Mullen noted her work with one publisher revealed that their renewal rates were 97% higher among readers who opted in for email correspondence.

Text messaging. For you thumb jockeys out there, note that 27% of those polled use TXT more for personal use than email. Ms. Mullen cited as an example an airline ad that encouraged people to send a text message to the customer with their email address to get something for free. She saw this ad while waiting for her bag at an airport. Maybe next they will ask for a TXT to get the bag within 8 hours.

RSS. 7% of those polled adopted RSS, but this leans more toward guys in the 35-44 age range. A good example of this is Travelocity RSS and Blackberry RSS.

Social Sites. 18% of the online population now use these sites for networking. They also use them for fun and seeing if they are more successful than their high school friends. But enough about me. 50% of people 18-24 years old use these sites more than email for communicating; 32% of those 25-34 do so.

Note how social networking capability can facilitate discussion and how Microsoft, for example, is aggregating your conversations to understanding user behaviors. For example, the speakers noted that 80% of people start discussing their weekend on Wednesdays after 6 p.m. and then start talking about something different on Saturday at noon, about when I am getting out of bed.

18% of people will forward promotional email. When I have done it, it was usually emails like the ones that promised I could enlarge my pancreas. I don’t even want to know why. You have a lot more credibility if someone else, a friend, forwards your email to a friend. The power of viral communication is compelling.

Customer service. 90% of customers call customer service when something is wrong and 40% aren’t satisfied after that first call. Following up with email that is valuable, timely and relevant can keep the conversation going and improve customer satisfaction. The speakers noted the use of video helps tremendously in this regard. It keeps your readers’ attention. They noted how IBM sent out a video of Ned and Gil trapped in a server maze. It was funny, viewed a ton, and got customers engaged.

Good to know. Conversations happen inside and outside the inbox. People talk, text, and actually discuss you face to face. “The opt-in is worth as much as your best customers’ spending history,” Ms. Mullens said. Your reputation, actual and reliable delivery of your email, rendering of the email itself (good looking? Who cares. Can they view it?) and relevancy (will they care?) – are critical to effective email communication.

10 Points to Build Your Email Newsletter Experience

1) Put top search words in your email copy.
2) Drive opt in via all media channels.
3) Integrate email with media launches.
4) Let social networks carry your message.
5) I missed #5 because the guy next to me wanted to tell me about his high school rock band.
6) Ensure your message renders correctly on a range of devices.
7) Prepare a mobile landing page.
8) Leverage subscriber behavior.
9) Leverage partners to grow lists.
10) Test test test!!!!

Please share anything I might have missed, confused or misspelled. If you have #5, please tell him to call his wife. And by all means, PLEASE INSULT ME if that helps you make your point.

Shiny Pretty Relevant Things. Technology Changes, But Apparently We Don't.

MIAMI -- When you go to a Web site, your eyes are darting all over the place. They jump from shiny objects to shiny objects, to attractive objects, to things that might help you, to things that are just interesting, to things on your mind, maybe even to things relevant to what you’re doing! Like that’s going to happen.

You might think you’re concentrating on one thing or another but in just a second your eyes have pinballed around a Web page about a million times and even found your favorite two or three places to land.

Bill Barnes, co-founder of Enquiro Search Solutions Inc., makes a living out of turning that spastic ocular activity into money. With customers like Google (GOOG), Microsoft (MSFT), Yahoo! (YHOO), IBM (IBM) and LexisNexis (my employer), he has a lot of experience to draw on.

Mr. Barnes spoke during the SIPA Marketing Conference here today. I won’t attempt to capture his talk completely. Let’s be honest. I am not getting paid for this, and my fingers are now frozen. While I am in Miami, my air conditioner thinks we’re at the Equator.

Mr. Barnes summarized your Web mission for you. Make sure there is a connection between intent and content. Understand what someone intends to do when they sit down at their computer, and make sure you help. He showed “heat maps” of various Web sites, showing red zones, where most eyeballs landed, and light blue zones where fewer landed, and zones with no color where . . . . I think you follow. This kind of data is invaluable. He can show how the top left of the page is truly hot hot hot! But that the top right still can draw 30% of your visitors. He emphasized that hot spots are blogs, video (and audio), press releases and images. He encouraged you to get relevant content of this type on your site and make sure it is tagged to draw search engines.

Personalization rocks. Even if appearing low on a page, he showed how personalized content – content based on understanding your user – draws eyeballs. He showed how eyeballs tend to move down first, which is good news for content even below the fold, and then back up again, but not necessarily all the way to the top. So the middle can be tops. Mr. Barnes found that personalized results can increase clicks fourfold! To extrapolate, a photo that is relevant to the search and personalized would be a great eyeball magnet just about wherever it is on the page.

He strongly advised having a site map image for any site. He suggested doing an image search on your company right now and see where you pop up. Again, make sure the images are relevant and tagged, and preferably original, not from clip art.

Adding images to press releases is a good technique, as is including company stock symbols and linking to Google’s stock page. See the third paragraph of this post for how it's done.

Optimizing video is important since it is not picked up automatically by search engines. Put your video on YouTube, Google Video, MetaCafe, Yahoo Video, etc. Then, get people to comment on your video, he said, and while you’re at it, comment on other companies’ videos.

Get your bloggers to comment on your companies’ activity and press releases, even if you have to separate yourself from employees by letting them blog on their own.

Get as much interlinking in your site and with other sites as possible. He strongly recommended creating a FaceBook for your company now.

Study the key words people are plugging into your site as great customer feedback.

OK, that might be the worst summary I have done today. Or in my life, although the bar is pretty low. I invite Mr. Barnes to please respond to this, either to elaborate, correct or just complain about me.

He offered a free white paper white paper on the subject at http://www.enquiroresearch.com/. I am sure that’s better than what you’re reading right now. He also had great things to say about research performed by Nielsen Norman Group. Check it out.

Web Analytics Must Focus On Outcomes

MIAMI -- Avinash Kaushik kicked off the 24th SIPA marketing conference with a session that promised to prove that Web analytics were more life changing and less boring than you might think. Let me just say that Mr. Kaushik is anything but boring, as a speaker anyway. Please. I have to limit my comments to what I know. With a healthy mixture of wisdom and, get this, facts, plus humor and, my favorite, irreverence, he was a great start to the program.

Here are my quick takeaways on location if, that is, I can survive the hyperactive air conditioning unit in my room, which apparently was made fun of by other air conditioners as a child and is now overcompensating. It's about 30 degrees in here.

Web analytics are a must, and must be accompanied by intelligent humans who can study them and find actionable lessons. “Tools are just tools. You must have people to analyze the data.” That is where insights come from, he said. Mr. Kaushik was surprised at the number of companies and executives who “deliberately don’t want to be smart” and ignore this concept. This is especially true, he said, since Web analytical tools, good ones, are cheap or even free.

One of the great things you can get is a list of multiple outcomes, like your visitors’ likelihood to purchase or whether they would recommend the site to someone else. Reports can be generated that display trends in a digestible way, too, so even a CEO can understand them.

He emphasized the importance of making sure reports focus on outcomes. “Reports can be 15 words. You don’t need a Ph.D. thesis,” he said, “I don’t give a crap!” He noted that one company was generating 200 Web reports. He stopped sending them. No one noticed. Why? Because they didn’t say anything that was actionable or could help people in the company move forward. Companies should give people a bonus for drawing meaningful conclusions from data! Make sure reports are focused on outcomes. Deploy techniques like advanced visitor labeling. “Reporting is not analysis,” he said.

Web analytics allow for experimentation and testing. Many companies let the HIPPO decide, which means the Highest Paid Person’s Opinion. “And this is why most Web sites suck,” he said.

Capturing the voice of the customer is another benefit. “I like surveys a lot,” Mr. Kaushik said. Ask two or three questions, as long as one is “Why are you here?” and another one is “Were you able to complete your task?” You want to find out why people are doing on all these crazy things on your site, then tweak your site to make it easier to do those things. Understand these things first, he said. “Is your site sexy or cool? Who gives a crap?! Fix this first!”

Mr. Kaushik said competitive intelligence can be generated easily through Web analytics. For example, noting that 80% of people on the Web start with a search engine, you need to understand what words are driving traffic to what sites. Understanding that fact will enable you to drive traffic.

Microsoft and Google both have free Web analytics tools. There are sites that allow you to test different page layouts. See Skype for a free Web site optimizer to help you do this.

Web analytics can provide “true customer centricity” to help understand why the bulk of your repeat visitors are coming back, and what they are doing. You might find the main reason they are coming is not the main solution you provide.

“Make customers happy and the money follows.”

For more go to his blog, Occam’s Razor at www.kaushik.net/avinash.