eMedia Daily

Convincing Management for a Website Overhaul

Overhauling a website can work wonders for a business. However, convincing upper management that a fix is worth the investment might take some persuasion.

Here’s the strategy one marketer used to convince higher-ups to fund a full overhaul. The changes resulted in a 482% lift in SEO traffic, website conversions are up 43% and their cart abandonment rate dropped 20%.

Read full article from Marketing Sherpa

My Highlights:
Step 1: Conduct a 3rd party site diagnostic.
Step 2: Identify quick fixes with big benefits.
Step 3: Monitor Results

Posted in The World of Work, Website Design | No Comments »

CMS Wire

I recently discovered CMSWire - a site to get current news about changes in Content Management Systems. They also offer a job board to look for work in the internet world.

While the site is fairly new, they’re developing strong, interesting content. I’ll be keeping an eye on it.

Posted in CMS | No Comments »

Online Video Ad Standardization

The Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) is set to publish new guidelines for online video ads on Monday May 5th. The group has been taking suggestions and input from industry members on proposed guidelines for a month.

The guidelines do not prevent new online video ad formats from developing in the future, but they may cut down on proliferation of forms, which can frustrate consumers and make the business of selling ads more difficult.

Read more from eMarketer

Posted in Advertising | No Comments »

Study finds e-mail marketers not so sophisticated

More than 60% of marketers operate at “basic” or “intermediate” e-mail marketing levels, according to a study by Alterian, an enterprise marketing company.

Alterian on Tuesday released the results of an online assessment it conducted to measure the level of sophistication of more than 700 marketers, agencies and marketing service providers’ e-mail campaigns. It included an in-depth look at how marketers personalize, automate, segment, track and report on e-mail campaigns.

Alterian ranked respondents in one of five categories: basic e-mail marketer, intermediate, advanced, expert and pacesetter. Only 5% qualified as an expert, and none achieved the level of pacesetter. Thirty-two percent were operating at an advanced user level, while most (59%) fell into the intermediate category. Four percent were at the basic user level.

From B-to-B

Posted in Email, eMail Marketing | No Comments »

Is Your Traffic the Right Traffic?

In a recent post from Seth Godin, he points out 75% of traffic bounces from a site within 3 seconds. That’s most of the traffic that is generated by digg, stumble upon, and even google.

Brag all you want about high traffic numbers, but quality traffic is much more important than the 3 people who leave your site immediately. The quality traffic that you generate is more likely to be engaged with your content, and keep coming back, leading to referrals, etc. They’re going to become your customers, if you’re a retailer or ecommerce site.

Read more about Silly Traffic.

Posted in Analytics | No Comments »

Google Analytics Benchmarking

Google Analytics announced on Wednesday a new benchmarking service as part of its free web analytics program. From the announcement:

By providing data sharing options, we hope to provide you with transparency, control, and new services based on your preferences.

The service will allow you to benchmark your traffic performance among others in the industry who are using Google Analytics and decide to share their data.

For more details on sharing data with Google Analytics and how you can benchmark performance, visit FAQs for the Google Analytics Data Sharing Options.

Posted in Analytics | No Comments »

Will Yahoo “Shine”?

Associated Press
Yahoo Inc. on Monday launched a site for women between ages 25 and 54, calling it a key demographic underserved by current Yahoo properties.

The site, Shine, is aimed largely at giving the struggling Internet company additional opportunities to sell advertising targeted to the key decision-maker in many households. Yahoo said advertisers in consumer-packaged goods, retail and pharmaceuticals have requested more ways to reach those consumers.

Amy Iorio, vice president for Yahoo Lifestyles, said internal research also shows women are looking for a site to combine various content and communications tools.

“These women were sort of caretakers for everybody in their lives,” she said. “They didn’t feel like there was a place that was looking at the whole them — as a parent, as a spouse, as a daughter. They were looking for one place that gave them everything.”

Yahoo is entering a market already served by Glam Media Inc. and iVillage, a unit of General Electric Co.’s NBC Universal. It is Yahoo’s first site aimed at a single demographic, although other Yahoo sites like Finance and Sports already draw specific audiences.

With Shine, Yahoo plans to expand its offerings in parenting, sex and love, healthy living, food, career and money, entertainment, fashion, beauty, home life, and astrology.

Will the new Shine bring the target market to Yahoo? It seems to be the answer to the ever-popular Yahoo Sports channel, that offers free fantasy sports leagues, updates and more. Shine’s home page incorporates easy access to your Yahoo Mail, bring traffic to your blog, and view the latest headlines from key topic areas (Fashion + Beauty, Healthy Living, Entertainment, Parenting, Love + Sex, Work + Money, Food, and more).

I think the key element to this is the conversational element - the “Chatter” section that highlights blogs from Shine members. To get into gender stereotypes, men like to compete - thus are drawn to the fantasy sports leagues. Women like to share information and communicate - so maybe “Chatter” is jst what they need. We’ll see.

Posted in News | No Comments »

Integrated eMail Communications

When you’re visiting the grocery store, do you see separate departments, or do you see the store as a whole? I, for one, don’t think “I need to go to the cereal aisle,” but rather “I need to get cereal.” You’ve probably also experienced the frustration when one store is divided in that way, so that you can’t purchase jeans and a purse from the same cashier. Instead, you must do 2 separate transactions with 2 different cashiers at 2 different locations in the store.

The same is true when visiting websites, and receiving emails from companies. Most people do not think of the customer service department that retrieves your password as being different from the order confirmation system, or the system that sends you promotions.

However, when email marketing communications are fragmented into silos, as described by Tricia Robinson-Pridemore in “Sending from Silos?” the user experience isn’t all that it could be. Centralizing your email messaging creates a better experience for your reader, as you can manage the number of messages that they receive, and build your brand through using the same language and style. It also allows you to build a better picture of your reader - which messages the read and respond to, and which are disregarded. With this, you can build even better marketing campaigns.

Integrating email communications certainly won’t be easy for most companies. However, the value that it brings to the table in the long term makes it well worth the effort.

Posted in Email | No Comments »

Sculpting Google PageRank

Many people use Google PageRank as a key factor for how well their site is performing in Google. While its true that PageRank is the starting measurement for placement in Google, its important to pass that PageRank throughout your site. Stephan Spencer for MarketingProfs writes that appropriate use of the “rel=nofollow” tag can strengthen the links to your internal pages, thus increasing the page ranks to the pages that really need it.

The use of the “rel=nofollow” tag seems counter-intuitive at first. The goal is to use it when linking to pages on which you don’t care about their ranking; pages like “Contact Us” and “Privacy Policy” are examples of times that you would want to use the “rel=nofollow” tag. Another great way?

Imagine an e-commerce site with category pages that contain three links to every single product page—the product name as a text link, the product image thumbnail as an image link, and the words “View Product” as a text link. You could nofollow the image and “View Product” links and funnel more PageRank through the much more contextually relevant product name-based text links. Amazing, eh?

Read more from MarketingProfs

Posted in SEO | No Comments »

eMail and Blackberries

Many marketers have been seeing a steady decline in open rates, which seem to have peaked in 2004. According to the Email Marketing Metrics Report from MailerMailer, this can be correlated to the increase of image blocking by email programs.

In order to register an “open” of an HTML email, a 1px by 1px invisible image embedded in the HTML must be displayed. When images are blocked by default, that image is not displayed, and thus the open is not registered by the tracking server.

The number of hidden opens increases even more when you consider the growth of email on handheld devices, such as Blackberries and Treos. Some handheld devices, such as older model Blackberries do not render HTML at all, rather either displaying the raw code, or displaying the text-only version (if available). Other models, like the Treo, will block images by default to increase rendering time.

How to overcome these obstacles to open rates? First, do not use open rates as a defining benchmark of the success of a campaign. While still an important metric, click rates and conversions are much more important.

MailerMailer also recommends these steps for dealing with handheld devices:

1. Create a mobile-phone version of your newsletter optimized for a phone’s screen. Include only a small version of your logo for images. The rest of the content should be easy-to-read text that can be scanned quickly.
2. In the mobile-phone version, include a link to the full edition of your newsletter so readers can peruse it on their desktops.
3. When users sign up to your newsletter, give them the option to receive the mobile-phone edition.

Posted in Email | No Comments »