4 ways every marketer can make their email marketing mobile-accessible
Return Path’s recent research shows over 125% growth in accessing email via mobile devices in 2011. 77% of mobile email users check their email before they even get out of bed (I’m guilty of that one). On average, around 25% of email readers are viewing your emails at least once on their mobile device.
While email marketers are increasingly concerned about how their emails are prioritized in inboxes, the mobile factor has been sneakily increasing its impact. Mobile email readers generally perform “triage” (as IBM called it): they scan for senders and subject lines they need to open immediately and then they open certain emails to decide whether to read, scan or delete. Email rendering issues can be the difference between whether you’re email is read or deleted and chances are, you haven’t considered rendering issues your mobile users may be having.
It’s time. We email marketers have to start making our email marketing mobile-accessible.
4 Quick Tricks for Email Marketing Mobilization
Whether you’re a novice email crafter or an expert coder, here are 4 tips every email marketer can use to make your emails more mobile-optimized.
Avoid stacking links – especially text links. Our thumbs are about 30×45 pixels and not always that accurate. Give at least a 10 pixel wide area around text links and make buttons large enough to avoid driving traffic to the wrong link.- Think like a journalist. Shorten subject lines and keep the best bits in the first 4-5 words. Keep your articles to snippet-length and let readers click through for the full piece. (Bonus: this means you get to track what they read!)
- Images in your emails are automatically resized in various mobile devices in an attempt to make your email easier to read. Preview your email on a couple mobile devices for readability, for example, if there is any text embedded your image, is it still legible when it’s auto-sized?
- Use navigation links (like anchor links) to help readers on a small screen jump from a table of contents to their article of choice and back to the top. (Remember link spacing rule #1!)
BUT (big but), as our friends at ReturnPath say, “Don’t discount the desk!” Remember that – for most industries – the other 75% of your email readers are still sitting in front of a pretty big screen at their desktop. Test, test, test to be sure that your email design is performing the best it can for both mobile and desktop customers.
NOTE: Bossman David Cacioppo takes another popular stance in email creative design: design for mobile first. Meaning, design your emails for 300 pixels wide, especially if you know your audience checks most frequently via mobile, like our friends at Freelancers University.
State your side… Which do you think? Design with mobile in mind vs. design for mobile first?
New Google AdWords Matching Behavior Could Have a Big Impact
On April 17, Google announced new matching behavior on AdWords for Exact and Phrase Match keywords.
So what does that mean in the world of pay-per-click (PPC) marketing? For one, it means that PPC campaign managers everywhere will no longer have to create variations of Exact and Phrase Match keywords, like these:
- Including both singular and plural
- Including misspelled versions
- Including versions with all “stems” (-ing, -er, etc.)
- Including a version with and without accents
- Including abbreviations of words
This change, which will be rolled out over the next few weeks to all Google AdWords advertisers could have a big impact, especially for campaigns that already had all of the above variations built into their campaigns. For example, what once were long-tail, cheap keywords will suddenly have some new competition due to this change in matching behavior. This means the Cost-Per-Click (CPC) will likely go up for these low volume/high quality keywords, and some of the “slam dunk” opportunities we once enjoyed will be gone. The impact on ROI is going to be interesting to watch, to say the least.
The Search Terms report is going to become even more important to monitor and use to create Negative Matches to help keep the quality of your pay-per-click traffic at an optimal level. If you’re not familiar with that report, here’s a quick rundown:
To access your Search Terms report, first log in to your AdWords account, then click on the Keywords tab. Next, go to the ‘See Search Terms…’ button that is located just below the graph (shown below). Click on ‘All’ to view the actual queries that users have typed in to trigger your ads.
This report is great for finding valuable long-tail keywords, as well as creating Negative Match keywords to help improve the quality of your PPC traffic. If you haven’t already, now ist he time to get familiar with this report.
For those who still want absolute control of their keywords, don’t worry! This option can be changed in the campaign settings section (it will be located under ‘Advanced Settings).
I’d love to hear feedback from other paid search marketers as we watch these changes roll out and see how it’s impacting paid search campaigns. It’s hard to gauge whether the positives will outweigh the negatives: It’s going to help us increase ad exposure to smaller lists, but we still (always) have to know exactly what keywords are triggering the ads.
the importance of SEO early in your website relaunch
This is an excellent case study from our friends at SEOMoz: The client did everything right with 301 redirects on their website relaunch. Maybe a little “too right” and ended up having to be flexible and make some quick fixes. Even when the SEO team and developers implemented everything perfectly, there were still issues and unknowns.
This article is a great tool to show your team how important it is to bring in an SEO voice early and often in every website relaunch project, even if you’re not changing your domain name and even if you’re not planning on doing ongoing SEO efforts.
Check out this must read for anyone involved in website relaunch projects, from your internal project managers to your website developers to the department head:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/uncrawled-301s-a-quick-fix-for-when-relaunches-go-too-well
If you have questions after reading or just want to talk to an SEO Strategist about the benefits of SEO during website relaunch and what to expect – both time and money – reach out to us at expert (at) emfluence (dot) com.
top 9 coolest things I saw at SXSWi 2012
Last year, I came back from Austin thinking people got it right when they called South by Southwest’s Interactive festival (SXSWi) “Geek Spring Break.” This year I felt like maybe “Disney World for Geeks” was a better fit. All the well-known characters from the Tech world were there. Souvenirs and tchotchkes were out of control, and around every street corner: something completely mind-blowingly cool and innovative.
Last year, I blogged my favorite SXSW finds from Frog Design’s Showcase to The Ice Cream Man (who made a reappearance this year) to Chevy as king of the geeks. This year, I’m not sure who I’d crown king (though Chevy was a front runner again), but here are easily the 9 coolest things I saw at SXSWi 2012:
1. HP/Aurasma’s Augmented Reality Technology. Easily the one I’ve talked most about. I even snagged a video of the Augmented Reality demo. This is augmented reality to a new level. Based on the entire grid of a picture (and not a QR code or other visual signifier), the animations from this tech can actually leave their original “box” entirely. IronMan flies off his movie poster and steps in front of you to talk to you about the movie premier. And of course, all interactions end with a link to a (mobile!) website for more information. *Golf clap well deserved.*
2. 
PepsiCo’s Adaptive Advertising Technology. As an Ad geek, this one really sang to me, too. Walk by the large screen and the adaptive ad tech knows how old you are, male or female and if you’re actually looking at the screen. It serves up ads based on who the attentive audience is. Hopefully this means a future of more relevant ads as we walk down city streets!
3. AT&T Charging Lockers. Sure it’s a simple concept, but this solves one of the big worries of SXSW. You’re always looking to charge up, but the nearest outlet may not be near your chair or near the activities you want to participate in. With the clever locked up outlets, each phone can be safe and charging for as long as you can stand being away from it!
4. AirBnB’s Surprise Airport Super Service. AirBnB – a sort of Craig’s List for renting apartments in other cities – treated their renters to swanky limo pick up from Austin Airport. They didn’t promote it much before the event, but it was hard to miss the drivers in their uber-colorful garb upon arrival, holding signage. Hop in the limo and drift into downtown Austin while answering trivia questions and riffling through complimentary gift baskets, just like at the fancy hotels.
5. Chevy. Chevy, once again, nailed it. Not only did they offer a charge up lounge with outlets galore, fully branded in Volt imagery, they did it all without the expected salesman pressure. They also offered test drives of a very sexy new Camaro and opened a live DJ table on the trade show floor with speakers thumping from a hatchback. And my favorite – “Catch a Chevy” when the cabs in Austin are all taken. Toss your hand out and catch a free ride from a hand-picked Chevy driver. You may have to talk cars while you’re in, but a free ride in Austin is like gold.
6. Bing RFID-tastic Party. Bing’s Party Lot just off the main downtown traffic was a blast for plenty of reasons: free food truck grub, free refreshments, lots of fun partner and charity activities, boomin’ music. But the new shiny thing there was using RFID (digital “swipe” technology) for EVERYTHING. If you RSVP’d, you pick up your RFID bracelet and tap it against a big white box to check-in. You tie the bracelet to your Facebook page and voila: your every step is posted like a rolling reality show. It bordered on obnoxious. I finally dis-allowed the app after the party pics photographers tried to tag me in what I affectionately call my “wet rat” look. (It POURED down rain in Austin the first 3 days of the show.)
7. Google Village! This was my Disney Land. Watch Jess turn into a 5 year old child, begging to play all the games. From the Maps House where you can update your own street corner back home to the Google Playhouse where you can “Android-ify” yourself (and print stickers to take home), this was an outrageous presence by Google. They actually bought out 4 houses (entire houses, people) on a block and themed out the insides for the week. All the latest tech was out in gorgeous display, my favorite being their new mecca for all things media: Google Play.
8. Send a Coke. Inside one of the houses in Google Village was a nice gal in a Coca Cola t-shirt with an unassuming laptop/webcam and a fairly large screen television. On the TV: a Coke machine… in New York City. I didn’t get it. Then I saw a SXSW’r step up and record a 20 second video message with the webcam. Someone walked by the Coke machine in NYC and touched the “Play” button. The share-a-smile type video plays for 20 seconds and ta da! Out pops a free Coke for the NYC’r! They record a message back, effectively giving Coca Cola TONS of content for crowd sourced ads, but also bringing life to the old Coke adage “Have a Coke and a Smile.” This was a good one for warm fuzzies.
9. What Women Want Panel + The Ice Cream Man. This one eked out a mention only because they bribed me with ice cream… and it actually tied into their panel. The flier screams What Women Want! Turns out, according to sifting through all the data of Twitter, the thing women say “I want…” most about? Ice cream. Clever, right? What do men “want” most? Cars. Yeah, shocker.
So all this tech and innovation… is SXSW a “must attend” or has it jumped the shark? There’s a lot of marketing there and a huge increase in attendance but no shark jumping just yet. It’s still definitely the place to be for anyone who loves the world of technology. It’s where the biggest names and the newest startups all go to launch and/or show off. And since the ticket is only $750 (at most) and just about all of your food and beverage for the week comes from the rockin’ sponsors, it’s one of the most “cost effective” conferences you’ll go to all year.
The best experiences at SXSW are free. You just have to get down there to see it.
top 12 takeaways from SMX West
Search Marketing Expo (SMX) West took place last week in downtown San Jose, California at the McEnery Convention Center. This was “the biggest and best SMX show ever” according to Chris Sherman, Vice President of Event Programming for SMX. I agree! This show featured honest conversation, open sharing, and interaction between experts and novices alike.
Deciding which sessions to attend was tough – there were many great options. I focused heavily on SEO, with some local search and social mixed in. Here are the top 12 takeaways I brought back to Kansas City with me.
- Bing will not trust your sitemap if you have more than 1% inaccuracy with it, meaning of 100 URLs, you can’t have more than 1 bad or broken link in it.
- REL=”publisher” and REL=”author” tags must be used on blogs, site content articles, etc. It is really important to build up author and trust rank.
- Bing doesn’t like canonical tags that point to the same page you are on. However, the consensus was that best practices include canonical tags on every page, even if it is to the same URL in the event that query string parameters are indexed, etc.
- Use the rel=”prev” and rel=”next” canonical tags – they work well and there’s no excuse not to use them for pagination.
- Rel=”alternate” is a new construct to read more about and use properly. Maile from Google covered it and did a great job. Now it is on search experts to use it properly for international or multilingual sites.
- Bing Webmaster Tools’ API includes almost all your information (they leave out a couple non-critical items)! Make good use of it. It might even integrate into Google Analytics. Duane Forrester from Bing hopes so at least.
- If you’re not already, it is time to start experimenting with rich snippets and markup if at all possible. The case studies of those who had done it all attested that it helped their rankings. This is the direction the search engines are going!
- Get Neil Walker’s slides (tweet @theukseo to request). His presentation included a ton of great CTR and other data of interest for organic search positions within the SERPs
- Bing’s brand new keyword tool supposedly rocks. Plus, it’s powered by organic search data, not paid.
- Bing’s webmaster malware include alerts both on sites that you link to or that link to you, in addition to your own site’s alerts. It doesn’t list the external websites, so you may have to do some research on your own.
- Read up on the 40 new algorithm changes Google recently made. Especially take note that anchor text isn’t a discount in the value of anchor text as a ranking factor (according to Tiffany Oberoi from Google), but she didn’t rule out it involving text around the anchor text.
- Having social buttons on a site is not cool if the buttons don’t get interaction. In fact, this could hurt your rankings if they exist but don’t ever get clicked. The absence of click data signals the search giant that the page is unpopular or unworthy of clicks. This is great insight from Rae Hoffman-Dolan (@sugarrae).
solving problems and seeing success in Google Places
Last week, I had the privilege of speaking on a local search panel titled “Solving Problems and Seeing Success in Google Places.” On the panel, we presented recommendations for dealing with human support at Google places, tips from an agency perspective, and a look at case study information from my work with Houlihan’s restaurants. Download my Google Places panel presentation slides for more information.
For live blogging coverage and comprehensive recaps from great industry sources, see Search Engine Land’s pages linked below for rundowns of each day, including multiple live blog recaps for many of the sessions from great sources.
Here are the sessions I attended and recapped in my notes. They all offered a differing level of takeaways based on experience.
- Getting Personal, Part 1: How Google & Bing Personalize With Social Connections
- Getting Personal, Part 2: How Google & Bing Personalize With Search History & Geography
- Solving Problems and Seeing Success in Google Places
- Don’t Panic! A Hitchhiker’s Guide To Surviving SEO Changes
- Keynote with Susan Wojcicki, SVP Advertising, Google, Inc.
- Real Answers For Technical SEO Problems
- Schema.org, Rel=Author & Meta Tagging Best Practices
- Making Data From Google Webmaster Central & Bing Webmaster Tools Actionable
- Duplication, Aggregation, Syndication, Affiliates, Scraping And Information Architecture
- SEO Essentials For Migrating Websites
- Ask The SEOs – Open Q&A Forum
- Ask The Search Engines – Open Q&A Forum
If you have any questions on the notes, reach out to me on twitter any time at @coreydmorris.
dear Pinterest, with love – a marketer’s introduction
I look down at the clock on my computer. Wait, what? No way… I’ve spent two hours on Pinterest?? Not possible.
But it’s true. The first time I finally understood the buzz about with Pinterest, two hours passed like 10 minutes. I’d actually tried to love Pinterest a few times before that but just didn’t get it. What’s so addictive about it? How can people spend so much time on it…? The short answer is: it’s pretty.
For those who haven’t perused it yet, Pinterest is an online corkboard of sorts where you can pin images of things you like or want to save for later. Pinterest is an easy way for users to visualize and categorize content.
So why is it blowing up? I believe that Pinterest’s secret sauce is that it built a rabbit hole for users: From one pin, you can see all other pins in that category, from that board or from that pinner. My personal favorite is browsing browsing all pins from gq.com or another website I’m a fan of. But more than that, it’s a beautiful website. The design of the website itself makes it easy and fun to pin. And it’s one of the first social medium focused (almost) exclusively on visuals.
So, who uses it? Crafters, moms, foodies, wedding dreamers, fashionistas. Yes, guys use it, but not very often yet. And if you’re a Midwesterner, you’re even more likely to love it.
In my case, I’m into food (understatement of the year), travel and fashion. My boards are a collection of photos that represent that. I can go back and glance quickly at things that make me happy. That’s the draw of Pinterest… for the user.
But this is marketing blog! What the heck do I do with a bunch of online pinboards as a marketer?
Maybe nothing! (Are you relieved?) For now, Pinterest has pretty specific niches. If you’re not in one of those niche industries, don’t waste your time… yet.
Here’s your checklist; 3 ways to tell if you should consider Pinterest:
- You have an eCommerce website. Be sure that your products all have pictures large enough to be pinned (anything smaller than 300 pixels seems to be too small for Pinterest to pick up – do some testing to be sure). If you don’t have pin-able pics of your products, someone who resells your products will. The biggest eCommerce opportunity on Pinterest is that each pin is one click away from the page it came from, meaning one click away from a sale on an eCommerce site. Make that as easy as possible and link to other products they may be pin-terested in.
- You have a product in the fashion, food, travel, craft, wedding or “mommy” industry. If you have a product in any of these categories, it’s worth actually creating a Pinterest profile for your brand. Share not only your products, but ideas on how to use them best. Post an entire outfit suggestion, not just a shirt or pair of pants alone. Share recipes from your website with a drool-worthy photo of the final dish.
Fun tip: Adding your product to this Gift Ideas Mecca is as easy as putting the price right in the description. Anything with a $price in the description will auto-magically show up under “Gifts.” See how Chobani Greek yogurt and RentTheRunway do it for good examples.
- You are a curator of a lifestyle, for example a magazine, a TV/radio/blogger personality. Pinterest’s specialty is gathering people and pin-boards around a collection of like-mind people, things and places. Not sure what to pin to get started? Check out the industry that fits you – women’s apparel, home interior, cooking – and find pins and pinners you really like. The easiest way to start pinning is to re-pin the great stuff other people pin.
Ok, you can tell I love it. So between you and me, what could Pinterest do better? The mobile version of their site makes me want to throw things (Pinterest uses a lot of bandwidth for all those images) and even the web version can be funky in the wrong web browser. The smart phone apps don’t do much yet. You can’t upload a new pin easily via mobile, so new pinned content is still growing slowly.
And though we geeks may try (see: email marketing and infographics), I don’t think Pinterest is useful for B2B just yet. Just like with any new social medium, it isn’t a fit for everyone.
But if you’re into crafts, food, travel or any of Pinterest’s hot topics, do yourself a favor and give it a 30-minute test drive. Don’t give up after 5 minutes, there’s more to see. The more you know about it as a user, the more ready you’ll be to utilize it if/when it’s relevant to your job as a marketer.
Want to chat more Pinterest? Catch me on Twitter @bestofjess or comment here with your thoughts!
the importance of bidding on your own brand in ppc
Like any industry, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can be abused when practitioners bend the rules. This is ominously called “black hat SEO.” While it’s not likely you’ll encounter actual dark arts in paid search (aka pay-per-click or PPC), now and then you’ll see a tactic that tries to trick the game in order to win rankings. This is one of the biggest reasons you should be bidding on your brand keywords and trademarking your brand.
Sometimes protecting your trademark is as easy as asking. For example, the Big G—Google—reviews claims and then removes anyone bidding on and advertising for trademarked brands. Their process works, but it means you have to keep a vigilant eye on anyone bidding on your name or brand trademarks. Especially if you sell to resellers and affiliates this is extremely difficult to enforce. There are tools available to monitor these poachers more easily. Try AdGooroo Trademark Insight, The Brand Protection Agency or the emfluence Brand Protection Tool to start monitoring ads for your brand trademarks.
In addition to protecting your trademark, bidding on your brand can increase revenues. I recently saw this with a client who started bidding on their brand words only after they saw a competitor was bidding (poaching).
I noticed the offending ads during some research, and I did a double take. Not only was someone bidding on the client’s brand, they were sending traffic directly to the client’s website. There weren’t even diverting traffic to an outside site! There was no affiliate code in the URL, so there was no way to identify who built the ad. They also appeared to be running the same ads and keywords on Microsoft adCenter.
By running ads on the client’s brand and sending traffic to the client’s domain, the official ads for the client are effectively blocked because the offending party was there first. Even though our client provided official and more accurate ads, they’d been blocked by a company that put up so-so advertising leading to the client’s website.
I contacted the client, who had no idea who the phantom advertiser might be. They asked their affiliates, but found nothing. I also contacted Big G, hopeful for a fast fix, but as I suspected, Google wouldn’t take action without a trademark claim (fortunately, this client has one for their brand).
As I waited for the claim to be processed, I wondered: Can anyone bid on any brand keyword and create ads saying whatever they want linking to the brand’s true domain? I submitted my question to Google, and got a non-response.
What I’ve gathered from this case: you can create an ad for any company, send traffic to their site, and say whatever you want in the ad. BUT, a company/brand can file a claim to force you out as long as they’ve trademarked their brand. If they don’t have a trademark, you could run that faux ad indefinitely. Think of the possibilities!
(Please note that all of these examples are tongue-in-cheek. All three of these companies are smart and bid on their own brand!)
This isn’t likely to happen to most companies. We’re talking about spending money on a very strange tactic that really holds no value. But it’s interesting that anyone could do this to any brand as long as they aren’t breaking any editorial rules. It’s basically a way to block someone from being able to run ads on their brand, which may not qualify as evil, but is certainly annoying.
Lesson learned: it’s important to bid on your own brand words and phrases to keep poachers from doing it for you.
study shows paid search ads drive in-store traffic
by Roger Sikes, emfluence SEM Specialist
Online marketing is full of perks. One of the biggest benefits is the ability to track results so accurately. We can measure exactly how effective our online marketing campaign was at driving online sales. But what about the influence it has on offline sales? Of course we know it happens. But we can’t always measure the exact results, especially since in many cases a retailer’s products can be purchased both online and offline.
Enter RevTrax, a company that offers a marketing analytics platform, who recently released a 2-year study that focused on the offline impact of paid search.
The study tracked purchases converted from a paid search ad. Each user that clicked the ad arrived at a landing page with a barcode and online coupon code unique to their visit. The coupon was used in-store, and the specific code told the researchers which ad they clicked online to receive it.
The conclusion of the study? For every $1 of ecommerce revenue driven by the ads, retailers saw another $6 from offline sales. Pretty great, right?
So, what can we take away from this?
For starters, just because the results of this study showed that PPC drove a large amount of revenue offline, it doesn’t mean that is true for everyone. While it’s safe to say there is an offline benefit to your online marketing efforts, it may not happen at a $6 offline to every $1 online kind of pace.
Maybe your online sales from PPC aren’t where you want them to be, but it’s entirely possible that your PPC campaign is driving more revenue than you initially thought. If you have physical locations where your product is sold, make sure that site visitors can easily find their nearest location from your PPC landing page. Also, track how many people use a search engine to find a store. That won’t tell you how much revenue your store got, but it can give you an idea of how many people visited your store because of your paid ad presence. There’s value in that.
A simple way to determine the influence your PPC strategy has on your offline sales: Conduct your own research and ask your customers. When they visit your business, tempt them with a freebie or some sort of discount for answering a few questions.
- Do you use search engines to find more information on our products/services?
- How often do you visit our business/shop for our product?
- On average, how much do you spend at [business/product name] on each visit?
Remember, keep it short. The key data is going to be whether they use search engines while doing product research, the frequency they visit, and how much they usually spend. From there you can begin to understand the value your PPC campaign has in regards to your offline sales. Chances are, the value is there!
Still not sure of the value in online marketing for offline sales? Check out this blog post by fellow emfluencer, Carolyn Anderson.
how do search and social intersect?
How being “Liked” impacts rankings
By Corey Morris, SEO Strategist
Facts:
- Search engines have hundreds of variables that dictate the ranking of pages on the web for specific terms – this is what we know and try to address in SEO.
- People interact on social media sites and marketers use the sites to engage with customers – this is where we are with social media.
- Search engines have proven their interest in social signals with recent updates (ex: Google’s “Search, plus Your World”).
How do search and social intersect?
That’s a question worth considering, especially in light of the fact that our search team is often not the same as our social media team. There is a lot of good reading out there related to social media strategies. Engaging customers, driving site traffic, spreading viral content — all have the potential to attract new links to the site. This is a quality, content driven focus that works well. However, this isn’t tied to a direct relationship between social activity and rankings.
Important but often overlooked: How social and search directly intersect in terms of algorithm variables that impact ranking. Google and Bing (and thus Yahoo!) have different social signals built into their algorithms to allow social media popularity to impact rankings. Google uses the +1 button to determine the social popularity of content and Bing uses the Facebook “Like” button. As of now, Google does not have a partnership with Facebook and officially does not use Facebook data. Bing, however, does have a direct connection into the “fire hose” of Facebook data.
Advantage comes when opportunity knocks. How do we make sure we take advantage of this opportunity? We need to add Google +1 and Facebook “Like” buttons to any page on our site that makes sense. In some cases, this could be a page with video content, product pages, the home page, or every page on the site. A company or marketer doesn’t even need to have any type of social media strategy or presence on Google+ or Facebook to do this. Simply follow the instructions for adding the buttons to your site and get people to click them. Clicks of those buttons are tied to the “Likes” of the individual that clicks in their own Facebook account or Google+ account and the site gets credit.
Your homework for taking advantage of social’s impact on search engine optimization:
- Add the +1 and Like buttons to content on your site.
- Get clicks on those buttons, using your current or new marketing channels to get the word out.
- Monitor the impact on your rankings for terms related to the pages you have lots of clicks on.
- Celebrate!
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Wednesday April 18th 2012, 2:03 pm 
Wednesday April 04th 2012, 1:16 pm 
