Topics, Trends and Techniques from Brooks Bell Interactive
Month: January, 2010
How Jessica Biel Got My Money: Why Vogue's Email Acquisition Tactics are Smart and Effective
I swear, I’m not easily manipulated by celebrity endorsements. So when I recently received an email with the subject line “A breakthrough moment” and saw that it was from Jessica Biel and Vogue, I will admit to having several snarky thoughts. (For anyone who has endured the movie “Stealth,” you’ll understand why.)
My snark doesn’t extend to Vogue, though. I’m a former subscriber and have always admired the magazine’s content, design and overall quality. So I took the time to read this email, and I was very pleasantly surprised.
Not everyone can see your stuff.
First rule of smart email marketing: don’t assume. Not everyone will have images turned on, so if you want your message to be clear, be sure to design the email in a way that the images enhance it, not drive it. Vogue did a nice job with this.
Not everyone wants to hear about Jessica Biel’s fabulous life.
Why You Should Stop Using Internet Explorer
On January 12, 2010 Google added a long-winded post to their blog titled, “A new approach to China.” In this blog post, Google details attacks made on “dozens of U.S.-, China- and Europe-based Gmail users who are advocates of human rights in China.” While I won’t go into the details about Google’s new approach to China, I will point out one detail that struck me as interesting. It has been found that an Internet Explorer malware vulnerability was used in the attack– particularly Internet Explorer 6.
You may be asking yourself why anyone still uses a browser released in 2001 when the most recent version of this browser (Internet Explorer 8 ) has been out since March of 2009. Read the rest of this post »
Purchase Path Audit: Walmart.com
Whether it’s big or small, it’s so important for an e-Retail business to have an awesome purchase path. Even on a site like Walmart.com, where the well-known branding is a strong factor, a weak page on a path can cause the consumer to feel wary about his or her purchase. On my most recent visit to Walmart.com, I noted the successful (and not so successful) elements of their purchase path.
Step 1: Log in
This first page in the path is what you see when you click “Check Out” from your shopping cart. A Verisign security logo resides at the top right-hand corner, which is a great reducer of consumer anxiety. The progress bar at the top continues to remind the user where he or she is throughout the path.
The relative simplicity of the page makes it a pretty quick read, but it could be quicker. The small line of text and excessive white space in the left-hand column (which tends to be valuable real estate on a web page) interferes with the read path. To quicken the read of this page, the “Sign in” and “Create an Account” boxes should be moved to the top of the page. The point of the page is to get the user to sign in, so why not make that the first thing the user sees? Finally, to reduce the anxiety of entering personal information, the Verisign security logo should be placed as closely as possible to those form fields. Read the rest of this post »
Living Your Core Values
BBI went through the best practice of defining our company’s Core Values about two years ago. Since then, they come up in conversations and meetings, but do we really live them?
We held our first “Company Update” of 2010 earlier this week. In this company-wide meeting, all employees got to hear from Brooks about our results from 2009 and our goals for 2010. As I thought about the meeting and its content, it was great to see how our 2009 goals and results reflected back on our Core Values of Expertise, Curiosity, Authenticity, Accountability and Happiness. You may have already read about our Core Values on our website but here’s how we tie it all together:
Expertise
We want to be the best at online direct response marketing.
We had a goal last year of providing each employee with 100 hours of training. Admittedly, we fell a little short of our goal, but we did establish a learning culture. We started off 2009 deepening our understanding of Marketing Experiments’ Conversion Formula. We also immersed the team in Google Analytics, with the majority of our team earning their certification. We also had our team read Tim Ash’s Landing Page Optimization.
To beef up our team on the analytics side, we added Naoshi Yamauchi to our staff as Sr. Manager, Web Marketing Analytics. With Naoshi’s extensive experience with Omniture, we’re better equipped to help our clients with their web analytics needs. Ask your client strategy manager how we help one client tie together data from Omniture with data from their ESP and SEM firms!
Clarity: The Best Way to Optimize Email Response
As if the the raw energy that Dr. Flint McGlaughlin, Director of Marketing Experiments, brings to his presentations weren’t enough, what he is says makes perfect sense. It really is tough to ignore. And impossible to not nod your head in agreement.
“Clarity Trumps Persuasion.”
These are the words the “Doctor of Optimization” (A title coined by Stefan Tornquist who is a research and testing rockstar in his own right) repeated over and over here at the opening session of the 5th Annual Em@il Summit in Miami this morning. These are the words that make up the core factor in the “Email Messaging Optimization Sequence”. And it is these words that are the key to optimize email response.
Here is the “Email Messaging Optimization Sequence” as shown on the Marketing Experiments website. I highly encourage you check out the certification courses Marketing Experiments offers for more in-depth explanations.
