BizTech Magazine: Dressing for Success

Dressing for Success hasn’t changed. Regardless of Industry or the size of your company, maintaining a level of professional dress never goes out of style. Even the super creative Ad Agencies with their very relaxed atmospheres should pay attention. Those who know me well, know I am just as creative in a suit as I am in a pair of shorts. While I am all for a fun and creative work environment; there is a fine line to be careful not to cross. A relaxed attitude or atmosphere if not managed well can deteriorate into chaos and hurt business. So, I restate the old line of “Everything in Moderation.”

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The All Time Top List of All Top Lists of 2007

Now that I have your attention. A friend of mine, Alan Levine, just posted the Top 0 List of 2007. This started a thought of all the lists out there. These lists of the Top 10 Must Have Electronic Gadgets for 2008, or the Top 25 Ad Agencies of 2007, The Best 25 Places to Work in the Valley and and so on. Who makes these lists? What makes these lists valid? IF we aren’t on the list, does that make us inferior? Well, not counting The Best Places to Work List, many of these lists are simply fluff to fill newpapers or magaizines. Who really cares about the top gadgets of 2007? Do I need to trade in last year’s gadget for this year’s gadget? My inner Guy voice says YES, but that is beside the point.

What if I disagree with the All Time Top 25 List of Movies? Then what? Is my opinion then devalued? Of course not.

Now the Top News Stories of the year makes for an interesting read and creates a nice summary for the year. But again, how did these stories make “The List.”

I think Alan is on to something with his Top Zero List. I for one need a break from all of these Best of Lists. Instead of following the rest of the herd, I will instead take some advice from a fellow marketer, Seth Godin and look for a Purple Cow.

Understanding Email Campaign Analytics

Here is the final piece of the Email Campaign Strategies series. Hopefully you found it useful, as I have pulled much of the information and put it in one spot for you.

Making sense of open rates, click rates, and email stats

Executive Summary:

First, I want to set expectations as a foundation so you can understand the numbers, just like offline direct mail, email has a low return. The typical conversion range for email campaigns (once opened / the offer is clicked) is 1% to 2% on the low side typically and 20% to 30% on the high side. An opt-out rate higher than .1% drives up the cost of lead generation and is an indicator that the messaging needs to be changed. Emails that are timely, attractive, and compelling with a great mix of informative content and promotional offers will see great results.

Those who are new to email marketing are fascinated by all the tracking they get with their email campaigns. Unlike print or traditional direct marketing, you can actually track how many people opened your email campaigns, and see exactly what they clicked.

Watching your campaign stats is great fun (ok, so I’m a nerd), but it’s all useless if you don’t understand how they work, and what you should be doing with them. So let’s go over the basics of email campaign reporting.

How We Track Clicks

Here’s a little technical information for you. Let’s say you place a link in your campaign that points to your website, and you want to track how many times it was clicked. Any email marketing service will save your link in its database, and replace it with their own “redirect link.” The redirect link basically routes people to their server first (where they track the click) and then quickly sends them to your original intended destination. The redirect happens instantaneously, so the entire experience is seamless and invisible to your subscribers.

 

Click Tracking Can Raise Red Flags

Some email programs (like Mozilla Thunderbird) will display warnings when they see tracked links in your email. They do this because many scammers send emails designed to look like they came from a trusted source (like your local bank) but when you click their link inside, they “redirect” you to a website designed to steal your password. Because of these “phishing” scams, some email programs don’t like any redirect scripts. In general, they are not a problem so long as you avoid creating links where the description is the URL.

Coding links like this will NOT set off alarms:

Please visit <a href=”http://www.our-website.com”> our website </a>

In this example, whenever we add redirect tracking links, there is no mismatch between the actual URL of the link, and the description.

In your HTML email, you don’t have to worry about the URL being changed, because your recipients will only see the “Visit my website” part of the link, while the redirect code stays behind the scenes. But in your plain-text alternative emails, there’s no way to hide the URL behind the code. It’s out in the open for all your subscribers to see.

Tracked Links Are Ugly In Plain-Text Emails

When you track a link in an HTML email, nobody sees the redirect link behind the scenes. They just see, “click here.”

But in your plain-text alternative email, you can’t hide your link code. You can’t make text like “Visit our website” clickable like you can in HTML email. For example, when you want to point people to your website from a plain-text email, it’ll have to look like:

To go to our website, visit this URL in your browser: http://www.mywebsite.com

If you were to activate click tracking in plain-text email, it would look like this:

To go to our website, visit this URL in your browser: http://www.mcsv.net/cgi-bin/redir?id=xyz345

Some of your recipients would be suspicious about that “mcsv.net” redirect URL, so they won’t click. It’s for this reason that a lot of our users choose not to track clicks in their plain-text emails.

How Email Open Tracking Works

The email company places a tiny, invisible graphic at the bottom of your HTML email (people in the email marketing industry sometimes refer to these as “web beacons”). Each time your HTML email is displayed in a recipient’s inbox, that unique graphic for your campaign gets downloaded from the email company’s server, which we track as an “open.”

Web beacons only work in the HTML version of your email. That’s because you obviously can’t place any graphics into plain-text messages. If you track a click from plain-text, we also register that as an “open”).

Web Beacons Won’t Work Unless Images Are Turned On

A lot of email applications block images from being automatically displayed in HTML email. When an HTML email is initially loaded, you’ll see placeholders where all the images should be. Users have to click a button, or right-click to turn images on. This is a privacy measure that’s becoming standard in most email programs. They do this because some spammers could theoretically use web beacons for “evil” by tracking whether or not your email account was alive (and then send you more spam). With these privacy measures in place, it gets extremely difficult for email marketers to accurately measure their open rates. Unfortunately, you will just have to take your open stats with a grain of salt.

Typical Email Campaign Stats, and What They Mean

Let’s go over some typical email campaign stats, and how to use them.

Total Recipients

This one’s pretty obvious. It’s basically the size of the list of recipients you tried to send the campaign to. Not all deliveries will be successful, though…

Successful Deliveries

Some emails bounce back, or get blocked by email firewalls and spam filters. The “successful deliveries” is a quick number showing you how many of your emails actually got through to your recipients.

Bounces

When you send a campaign, you get bouncebacks. In general, you can expect about 10% of your recipients to bounce back your message. Anything more than 10% total bounces, and you’ve probably got an old or dirty list. There are two types of bounces you should know about. A “Hard bounce” basically means you sent your campaign to a bad, “undeliverable” email address. Maybe the person closed down their account, or got fired. Whatever the case, you shouldn’t send anymore emails to that address, or the recipient’s email server will start blocking you. We instantly remove hard bounced emails from your list for you. The other bounce type is a “soft” bounce. In general, a soft bounce just means the recipient’s email account was “temporarily unavailable.”

We should keep a close eye on bouncebacks, because in general, they’re an indication of the overall “health” of your lists.

Total times email was opened

This is a stat with lots of “wow” factor, but don’t let it get to your head. Your email might have been opened 10,000 times, and that sounds really cool. But what if it was just one guy (a guy with way too much time on his hands) who opened your email 10,000 times? That’s pretty extreme, but you get the gist. It’s not a totally useless stat. For example, if you sell banner advertisements in your email campaigns, then an open is an impression, and you want to show total impressions (even if one of your recipients is a whacko).

Recipients Who Opened

This is a more accurate stat. It tells you how many individuals opened your campaign. So if two (very sad, very lonely) people opened your campaigns 500 times each, that would be 1,000 total opens. This stat would show, “2 recipients opened” which is a lot more useful to email marketers.

Average Times Email Was Opened

This stat just gives you a general idea of how many times each recipient opened your campaign. Literally, it’s your total opens divided by recipients who opened. 1.5 or 2 is pretty average. Anything more than that, and your email newsletter must be pretty interesting!

Total clicks

This is the total number of clicks your email got. It’s handy in determining how much overall web traffic you’ll get to your website after a campaign is sent. For instance, it might be nice to know that “after every email marketing campaign I send, our website gets about 600,000 visits.”

Recipients who clicked

This number tells you how many people clicked on some link in your campaign. Let’s say you sent your campaign to 5 people. 4 of them click a link in your campaign once. But one of the recipients is our weirdo from the examples above, and he clicks your link 500 times. This “recipients who clicked” stat will show you that “5 people clicked something.” Your “Total clicks” stat, on the other hand, will show “504 total clicks.”

 

 

Clicks by URL

This is one of our favorite stats. It tells you exactly which URLs in your email were clicked, and how many times. Use this stat to learn what kind of content your subscribers prefer. For instance, do they respond better to whitepapers and research articles, or special offers and promotions?

Unique Clicks

This stat counts how many times your recipients clicked on links inside your email campaign, minus any duplicate clicks. So if some weirdo clicked on 2 different links 500 times each, we tell you that you had 2 unique clicks.

Forwarded email

Maybe your recipients forwarded your campaign to 1,000 friends. This stat will not tell you how many times those friends opened your campaign but does give that person the option to be added to your list. It’s a nice measure of how “viral” your campaign is.

Total unsubscribes

If any email campaign stat is capable of bringing a tear to your eye, this is the one. We’ve seen average unsubscribe rates of less than half of one percent. Anything above that means you did something to make a lot of people very angry at you.

Total abuse complaints

You know when you get a piece of junk email, you click that button in your email program that says, “This is junk” or “Report Spam”? Every time you do that, a report and copy of that email is sent to your ISP. Your ISP then sends a little warning to the sender that says, “too many more complaints, and we’ll block all future emails from you.

It’s normal for about 0.04% of your list to report your campaign as spam (yes, even if they know you, and even if they gave you permission to email them!). If you get anything above 0.1%, major ISPs like AOL will start blocking future emails from you.

 

Post Email Campaign Checklist

What to do after you send your email campaign

The main thing to remember is to evaluate your stats after every single email campaign you send. Use them to determine “what’s normal for us?” and then whether or not things are trending better or worse over time.

Below are some questions you might ask after each campaign you send. Use your Vertical Response campaign reports to find the answers…

Post-Campaign Checklist

• How many emails failed to be successfully delivered? If an abnormally high number of emails bounced, read through some email headers to find out why.
• Did people click on the links I wanted them to click? If so, did my cash register go “cha ching!” or did I lose my sales somewhere in the website?
• If people didn’t click on what I wanted them to, how can I change my next campaign to improve my click rates?
• How many people normally unsubscribe from each of my campaigns? Did this campaign result in more or less unsubscribes than usual? Do you know why people are unsubscribing? Have you setup an online survey link in your opt-out confirmation screen and email? Look through those results as well.
• What was my open rate for this particular campaign, and how does this compare to my “normal” open rate? Did anything change? Why?
• Is there any particular day/time that seems to work best for my campaigns?
• Are people still opening and clicking now, or has activity pretty much died down?

How much money did this campaign cost me? Did/will it pay off?

The Right Subject

Getting the Subject Line right.

One of the most important elements of your email communications is the subject line. Next to the “from” address, the subject line will determine whether or not your email gets opened. Writing a great subject line is no small challenge. You only have a few words to make it compelling, urgent, and specific—without sounding overly “Cheesy”, Sales Pitch or misleading your readers. Here are some tips that will help you write subject lines that get great results.

1. Keep it Short and Sweet — Do your best to keep your subject lines under 50 characters, including spaces, as most email clients display 50 characters or less. A recent study done by email monitoring company Return Path showed that, “subject lines with 49 or fewer characters had open rates 12.5 percent higher than for those with 50 or more,” and that, “click-through rates for subject lines with 49 or fewer characters were 75 percent higher than for those with 50 or more.” Want to have better open and click-through rates? Keep it short and sweet!

2. Be Specific — A vague subject line is a waste of real estate. A great example of this that I see often is monthly newsletters with subject lines like, “The Green Thumb Newsletter: June 2007.” This tells the receiver nothing about what they will find when they open the email and gives them very little reason to do so. A better approach for a newsletter like this is, “The Green Thumb: 3 Tips for Summer Gardening.”

3. Write it Last — Many email marketing services (including Constant Contact) prompt you to write your subject line first, as you are building your email. I encourage you to come back to it when you are done with your email content. It’s important to determine all the elements of your email first and then look for the most compelling topic to highlight in the subject line. When you are done with the body of your email, read it over and pick the “nugget” that will entice your readers to learn more by opening.

4. Take Some Time — Don’t just dash off your subject lines. Considering how important they are, take some time to think about them and write several (3-4) before choosing which one to use. Once you have a few subject lines you like, run them by a friend or colleague and see which they think is most compelling.

5. Test It! — When you have two strong—yet different—subject lines, test them. Split your list in half and use a different subject line for each group. After a number of tests like this, you will have a very good idea of what works for those on your list. And as always, the better you know your audience, the more effectively you can communicate with them.

Now that we’ve established some of the “do’s” for writing great subject lines, let’s dig deeper and look at some approaches you can take to make them powerful and compelling.

· Ask a question — One of the best ways to get a reader’s attention is to ask a question. But—like a trial lawyer questioning a witness on the stand—make sure you get the response you are looking for. “What’s the best way to grow your business?” is a great subject line for business owners. After all, what business owner wouldn’t want to grow his or her business? Or let’s say you run a health club. An email with the subject line, “How can you lose 5 pounds in one month?” would certainly be compelling. It’s important that your question be relevant to your audience.

· Be a tease — A clever subject line can be enticing. When it’s done right, reader curiosity is piqued. They want to know more—and they open your email. Writing a “teaser” style subject line requires some creativity, and the content needs to deliver on the teaser. A company that sells high-definition televisions could use the subject line, “You’re not going to believe your eyes” as a teaser to introduce a new addition to their product line.

· Tell it like it is — Often, what works best is to say exactly what you want your reader to know. Examples of this straightforward approach are, “Sale on all sweaters this weekend,” “Master jazz pianist plays live this Friday” and “The seven secrets of a profitable business.” This “just the facts” approach works especially well when you can appeal directly to your audience’s interests. It also is the best approach to use when you send a newsletter.

· Remember “WIIFM” — When a person gets your email, the first thing they consider is “what’s in it for me?” (WIIFM). They have a decision to make. Do they open your email, leave it for later, or delete it? If there isn’t something about the subject line that lets them know why it’s worth their precious time to see what’s inside, then the choice will be clear. Delete. Keep WIIFM in mind when creating every aspect of your emails, including the offer, content, images—and most definitely the subject line. It’s all about them. They know that. Just make sure you know it too!

· Get personal — The more you can make each contact feel that you are speaking directly to them, the more effective your communication will be. Whatever style of subject line you use, you can make it personal by using the word “you.” Professional copywriters know the secret of using this powerful little word. Look around at advertisements, mail, and email you receive, and you will see it’s true. Incorporate this copywriting secret when you write your subject lines and you’ll understand why the pros do it—it gets results. A few examples are “Find the right swimsuit for you,” “You can save 50% on travel” and “You’d look phenomenal in a custom-tailored suit.” (Note: “you” is ideal, but “your” works too!)

Not sure which approach is right for you? Try them all, then show a friend or colleague to get their feedback. Pick the one you believe will be most effective for your audience. Whichever approach you choose, it’s always worth spending the time and effort required to write a great subject line. Because if your readers don’t open your email, they’ll never have the chance to read the important message you’ve created for them inside!

An Offer You can’t Refuse

Here is a continuation of the Email Campaign Strategies.

Give them an offer…

Take action. Isn’t that what you want your readers to do when they receive and read your emails? You may want them to buy a product, pay for a service, come to a special event, or volunteer for your organization. Whatever your goal may be, you are looking for a “direct response” from them.

When you email the people on your list, you engage in some level of “direct response” marketing—marketing that requests an action on the part of the recipient. One element of good direct marketing is an offer that engages the reader (or watcher, or listener) to take action.

Why is the offer so important? The 40/40/20 rule of direct response marketing says that the success of a campaign (in this case, an email communication) is based 40 percent on targeting the right audience, 40 percent on the offer you make, and 20 percent on your creative execution (including copywriting and design). This month’s article reviews different types of offers—and the common characteristics of all great ones.

Offers that Prompt an Immediate Sale

The first question to ask yourself before you consider what to offer is, “Is my product (or service) one that I can sell directly?” Do you sell a product that people can (and will) pick up the phone or visit your website to buy immediately as a result of your email? If you sell jewelry, clothing, pet supplies, a workshop, or a host of other products, then, yes, you can expect direct sales as a result of your email. Also, if you want to get people to sign up for a special event (fundraiser, golf tournament, summer camp, etc.) then you can expect a direct response as well.

In these cases, the appropriate offer should sweeten the purchase; it should super-charge your readers’ desire to buy or sign up now. In a perfect world, it also creates a sense of urgency. Examples of direct sell purchase offers are “Buy One, Get One Free”, coupons with a percentage off, or giveaway items with a purchase…”Buy $75 worth of ACCO office products, and receive a High Performance Chrome Stapler from Swingline.”

If you need to promote a special event, you might offer an “early bird” discount or provide a price break for multiple registrations. Giveaways also work well for events. Some example offers are, “Sign up for the China Bistro’s Rock n Roll Marathon run and receive a free t-shirt” or “Purchase the Advanced SEO Course with the Advanced SEM Course TODAY and receive a 25% Discount from the SEO Institute.”

Offers that Identify Interest and Generate Leads

If your products or services require more consultation and nurturing before someone decides to buy, then the two-step lead generation approach is right for you. With this method, you make what is known as a “soft offer” with the goal of engaging your receivers, building their trust, and moving them closer to an eventual sale.

Example offers include a white paper—a brief article about a topic that is of interest to your readers and helps educate them about topics related to your product or service. For example, if you are a public relations consultant, you can offer a white paper on the “10 Tips for Getting Great PR.” Or suppose you are a nutrition counselor, you can offer a white paper on “The 7 Healthiest Foods You Can Eat.” Other offers include a free consultation or a free sample of your product…”Call today and receive a free 2 lb. bag of our new organic dog food.”

Organizations that are not in commercial business can use the two-step lead generation approach as well. To create interest in an upcoming class or workshop, a church may offer a brief article or a podcast on a related topic to engage its members and pique their interest in the event.

Three Attributes of a Great Offer

When you’ve decided on your offer, run it through this checklist to make sure it is as effective as it can be.

1.      Does your offer have a high perceived value? “Perceived” is the key word here. The good news is that an effective offer doesn’t have to cost much at all. It just has to be something of value to your audience. If you are a professional dog trainer and send an email to your list of people who each just got a new puppy, a valuable offer would be the downloadable article, “How to Train Your New Puppy.”

2.      Is your offer easy to understand and take action on? Have you gotten a direct mail piece or an email that had an offer that was so involved, so convoluted, that you just said, “forget it!”? You don’t want people to be overwhelmed and forget your offer. Make it simple. Don’t add a lot of conditions or steps. If you can, stick with one step…call this number, click here to download this whitepaper, type in this discount code, or register here.

3.      Is your offer relevant to the product, service, or event you are promoting? A great offer isn’t just good for the person who receives it; it’s good for your business or organization too! Especially in the case of lead generation, you want your offer to tie into the product you’re selling, event you’re promoting, or service you’re providing. That way, it will help advance the sale, or—better yet—inspire your audience to take immediate action. A white paper or a “10 tips” list are both great examples of this. They keep your reader focused on areas in which you are an expert and can be of further help to them.

Think of the 40/40/20 rule when you prepare your next email. Remember, 40 percent of your direct response success depends on your offer, so it’s well worth giving some careful thought to what you want that offer to be. Also, have some fun testing different offers to see which ones get better responses. This will help you understand what your audience values.

Do you remember going to the grocery store as a kid and begging mom to buy you that box of Lucky Charms—just so you could get the toy inside? That was the power of the offer in action! Somehow the toy was never as exciting as it appeared to be, but you were eating Lucky Charms that next morning.

Take a lesson from the cereal aisle and create an offer your readers won’t refuse.

5 Steps to Test your Email Campaign

What if you could make a slight change to one of your emails and get a 20 percent lift in opens or a 10 percent increase in sales? You would do it in an instant. But how do you know what element to change? That’s where testing comes in. Email marketing makes it easy to quickly test important elements of your email—at very little or no extra cost. With testing, you can find out what factors influence the success of your email. Follow these five steps to create an effective, measurable test.

Step One: Decide What to Test

Because testing with email is so easy, it’s often tempting to test many elements all at once. You should start by testing just one. Why? If you test more than one element in the same email, it is challenging (and sometimes impossible) to determine what exactly influenced the response. Here are some easy and telling tests to start with:

Subject lines - Create two different subject lines for the same email communication. For example, a boutique owner just added a home and garden section, and she wants to get the word out to her customers. Here are the subject lines she’ll test.

Subject line #1: New! Home and garden section added

Subject line #2: Get what you need for your home and garden

Long versus short copy - Is less really more? Create a shorter version of your current newsletter with teasers and links to your website. Or create two versions of a promotional email. Keep one very short and to the point and make the other a little longer by adding additional, useful information.

Special offers - Create two different offers. For example, an online bookseller wants to get rid of last season’s bestsellers. He sends the following offers to see which one gets a better response.

Offer #1: Buy 3 books and get 1 free

Offer #2: Buy 3 books and get free shipping

Other tests could include the time of day or day of the week you send, with an image or without, types of calls-to-action, and the placement of a call-to-action button or link. I’m sure that you will come up with other areas you would like to test as well.

Step Two: Decide How to Measure Success

What will you measure to determine success? Possibilities include website traffic, response to an offer, sales, opens, and click-throughs. Whichever you decide on, be confident that you can attribute an increase (or decrease) in the area you measure directly to the email you send. The easiest place to start is with your email campaign opens and click-throughs, data that your email marketing service provider makes available to you.

Step Three: Determine How to Divide Your Email List

When it comes to who you will send your test to, you have two options. You can either split your entire list in half and test one against the other or take a random sample and do a pre-test.

A pre-test is an excellent way to find out what works before sending the email to your entire list. This knowledge can greatly improve your overall response rate. It also protects you from sending a poor performing email test to a large portion of your list—and wasting your efforts. To pre-test, choose a random sampling of 100 people from your master list, then split that in half and send each half one of the two test campaigns.

Step Four: Test, Measure, and Declare a Winner

Once you have everything ready, send your test emails. The great thing about email is that you get your results quickly—within a 24 to 48 hour period you will know which email communication got a better result (it takes weeks when testing with direct mail). Declare your winner, send that email to the remaining members of your list, and watch the results come in.

Step Five: Have Fun and Keep it Up

Did I mention that testing is fun? Make a guess of which version will win before you send, and see if you are right. What’s amazing about testing (and what proves its incredible value) is that many times the results are not at all what you expect.

Let your customers, clients, or members tell you, through their actions, what they respond to best. This method is an excellent and trustworthy way to improve your emails. Test often. You might be surprised every time!

E-Mail Campaign Strategies

After working with Email Campaigns and going through many resources to test, refine, and test again. Here is one method to see if your Email Campaigns are achieving their desired results.

You’ve probably heard the saying, “beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” When applied to email marketing, a more appropriate variation might be, “relevancy is in the eye of the reader.” You know that your email communications need to be relevant to the interests of your readers. But how can you discover what information they consider relevant? Open and click-through rates give you some idea, but that’s only part of the story. There’s only one way to get the specific feedback you need from your readers—ask them.

Asking your readers for their feedback on your email communications will give you valuable insights that help you achieve better results including more sales, additional website visitors, and higher open and click-through rates. You will also show your contacts that you are interested in what they think—that you understand your email communications are about them (not you).

The simplest way to get detailed feedback that is easy to evaluate is to send a brief online survey. You can use a number of services to conduct online surveys, including Constant Contact.

When you prepare your survey, think about what aspects of your email communications you want feedback on. Then, think about the questions you need to ask to get the insights that can help you make improvements. Here are some key areas to focus on:

·         Overall satisfaction — Before you get into the details of your email communications, start out with a general question that gets a “gut” reaction from your contacts. Here’s an example:

On a scale of 1 to 5, with 5 being excellent, how do you rate our newsletter?

·         Most valued sections — Understanding what your readers value most in your current emails will help you focus your energy and effort. If there is a section of your emails that your readers don’t find helpful, you may want to remove that section. If there is an area you find they really enjoy, you can explore ways to expand it and make it even better.

Here’s an example of a question that a human resources consultant could ask her readers:

Please rate the following segments of my newsletter:
(Ratings: Extremely Valuable, Valuable, Somewhat Valuable, Not Valuable)

• • Articles
  • Industry statistics
  • Question and answer section
  • Customer profiles
  • Job listings

·         What you’re doing right—and what you can improve— This is perhaps the most important information you can gain from your online survey. Ask your contacts how the newsletter helps them, what they appreciate most about receiving it—and why. In a different question, ask them what you could do to improve your newsletter. When these types of questions are open ended, your contacts have the opportunity to share their valuable thoughts with you, in their own words.

·         Day and time of day to send — Ask your contacts for their preference on when they want to receive your emails. You may find that there is a better day and better time for you to send your communications.

·         Frequency — How often do your contacts want to hear from you? Maybe you are sending too many email communications or not enough. Considering your readers opinions in this area can lead to better open rates and less unsubscribes.

• Reader information — While the main objective of your survey is to get feedback on your email communications, you can close out with a few questions that find out more about who your audience is. Stick to one or two questions that reveal demographic information that is important to your business or organization. You can also use the responses to segment your contact list.

You can create an online survey that addresses these topics and questions in just minutes. And the responses will start to roll in right away (online survey responses usually come in within 24 to 48 hours of when the survey is sent). Once you get your responses, spend some time looking them over and reading the comments. Here are a few questions to ask yourself.

• What do people like about my newsletter?
• What are areas that need improvement?
• What did I learn?
• What are three things that I will do differently as a result of the feedback I received?

Answer these questions and you’ll have the valuable insights you need to take your email communications (and your business or organization) to the next level. By asking the people on your list for their feedback, and understanding what matters to them, you will create email communications that are relevant and successful.

New Year’s Resolution

Here’s an Idea! We are all very aware of the New Year’s Resolutions. We have all made and sometimes even kept our New Year’s Resolutions; whether it was to quite smoking, eat healthy, start exercising etc. But I wonder how many of us have actually made a New Year’s Resolution for our company or the department that we manage? Personally, I have never been with an organization that created or at least made public a New Year’s Resolution for a Division, Department or the entire Company. Surely I am not the first person to think of this… or am I? Nonetheless, I am sure there are several New Year’s Resolutions to choose from. You know your organization better than anyone else. I would like to share one idea though. Here we are going into 2008, and maybe you have been thinking your organization could use a little shaking up, or a fresh start, or simply a change. Have you looked at your internal processes and how they effect your efficiency or effectiveness and even your profitability? If so, just consider the following Internal Process Proposal:

Internal Processes Proposal

 

Before any processes or re-direction can be created, it would be a good idea to create a foundation for everything else to build upon for all future growth. Ideally, a strategic plan with long term and short term goals should be created with periodical milestones. Without a very clear and concise vision of where we want to be and a mission of what we do or how to reach our vision, how do we know when we are doing what is right or when we are off track?

 

Mission and Vision

 

A Vision statement of no more than 2 sentences that sets a goal in the present tense and is lofty enough to make us stretch while at the same time not impossible. The statement should be something that inspires and everyone can easily remember and know if they are following it in their daily tasks. An effective vision statement describes a clear picture of the organization that leaders want to build. It serves as a guideline for organizational changes, such that each change is designed to add up to that end-point. It explains to staff where we’re going, and why near-term changes (the steps along the way) are worthwhile. And it motivates change by saying, “The bar is raised. Maybe we were OK by past standards; but compared to this vision, we must change.”

An example would be “Company X exists to provide excellent business solutions which meets our clients’ goals and exceeds their expectations.”

 

The reason for a present tense statement is simple. Consider this statement: I will quit smoking. Now how strong is that statement compared with I quit smoking?

A Mission statement states how we reach the vision. Again keep it short. Since we are divided into three distinct areas of concentration, we could have a mission for each group. When missions are defined group by group, they focus staff on their respective customers (be they external or internal) and their products or services. They build customer focus, entrepreneurship, empowerment, a sense of identity with end results and pride in the value of one’s work. They also enhance teamwork by defining internal customer-supplier relationships. Once these statements are created, they need to be posted in the office as a constant reminder of our commitment to them.

An example would be “Company X is an industry leader by using streamlined business processes, current technology and maintaining top talent who are committed to our clients.”

Hierarchy

The structure should be aligned with the desired culture to generate involvement. That is achieved by employing the following strategies:

• Transfer power and decision making authority – empower the employees
• Provide employees opportunities for education
• Allocate appropriate resources to allow employees to do their jobs
• Maintain the environment that contributes to creativity, collaboration, the sharing of information between everyone, especially good news and big deals (like renaming the company)

Organizational Culture

An environment that cultivates creativity, collaboration and fun needs cultivation. This is a fine balance though, as it can undermine professionalism and productivity if not well managed. New job titles should reflect the duties and responsibilities of the role without confining the role. They should free the person to be more and reach higher. A small company can not afford to fall into the trap of “That’s not my job.” There should be career paths identified and successors lined up and trained/mentored to be able to step in as people leave positions. One position to assure these processes will stick and drive the desired change could be a VP of Operations.

Where do we start?

Performance Excellence – (taken from the Disney Institute)

Performance Excellence is defined by three areas:

• Vision – Share it and align everyone to it
• Involvement – Get everyone in the game, Buy-in
• Organization – Set Processes and Structures

Leadership Excellence + Employee Excellence + Client Excellence = Financial Results

The Leadership / Employee Accountability Matrix illustrates the relationship between the two dimensions of success: Business Results and Leadership and Employee Behavior.

Align leaders around the vision and prioritize behaviors and actions and those leaders will be able to create and maintain the desired culture through their modeled behavior. Essentially the message is that results don’t matter if no one wants to work with you, conversely if everyone loves you but you don’t deliver results; this is just as bad.

By focusing on the desired behaviors and actions it leads to client loyalty and enthusiasm which brings financial results.

Leadership Behaviors

Exhibits Desired Behavior, Poor Results

Exhibits Desired Behavior, Great Results

Another way to define this is Differentiation. Those who deliver consistent results reap the rewards and those who don’t… Bottom line, it serves as a strong motivator for most people. The culture if not by design, it will be by default. The desired culture should be operationalized. This is done by:

• Setting and presenting expectations up front
• Maintain consistency in processes
• Set up employees for success
• Back up our vision/mission with genuine action
• Maintaining the culture is the #1 priority
• Communicated constantly
• Supported by the environment
• Hire attitude over aptitude
• Celebrate successes in a big way

Service Standards - (taken from the Disney Institute)

Service Standards is the Promise to our clients and a purpose for our employees. A major aspect of the success culture which differentiates us from our competition is exceeding expectations, attention to detail; presenting a WOW factor that helps us stand out from our competition and gives clients a reason to choose us and stay with us.

• Identify the words or phrases
• Define what the standards look like
• Prioritize the standards
• Communicate them constantly

Once defined, next is to explore the delivery of quality service. Three areas where quality service is implemented:

• Employees – all levels
• Environment – involving the words, symbols, office space and décor
• Processes – internal and external

Internal Communication

Internal communication should be very easy. There is no reason why everyone is not aware of plans, projects, or events that affect the entire company. One thing that is very important at any stage is Candor. It saves time and money. This should not need any elaboration.

Now for a Project Flow Template

Project Flow - (taken from the book Extreme Project Management)

This is the overarching process that is wrapped around our internal processes

 

Vision – Who needs what and why? (The client interview)

• Identify and agree on the objective
• Identify the target audience
• Identify the benefits and risks of the project for the client
• Identify factors or scenarios that may effect the the project
• Identify Functional Requirements and features prioritized
• Identify outcomes
• Identify a WOW factor

Who attends – PM, AM, AE, Client

Speculate – What will it take to get it done?

• Identify the team
• Plan the deliverables
• Identify the timeline
• Identify requirements
• Perform research/analysis/user experience
• Identify milestones and how success is measured

Who attends – PM, AM, AE, Director of Software Dev., Creative Director

Design – Build the thing.

• Build wireframes
• Create comps with UI involved
• Review comps with the PM? and programmer (so the programmer can provide appropriate feedback)
• Provide 3 final designs to client for approval
• Send final ok’d design to programmer if needed
• Code the backend
• Test

Reevaluate – Test it. What worked, what didn’t. The Final Goal of project is the client’s desired result not the planned result.

Document Workflow

Now that our culture is on track to being operationalized; we can create the internal processes that support them and our future growth. Some important processes involve documenting our efforts and procedures. Examples include:

• Document workflow and review process standardized on PDF.
• Documenting programming code to remove guesswork when working on someone else’s code.
• Documenting processes and procedures so no one person can hold the company hostage.

Conclusion

The High Level Processes proposed in this document are not new. These processes have been tested and are used by other successful, well established organizations. The good news is you do not need to reinvent the wheel. Once these processes are set and eventually become part of the culture, you will have the infrastructure in place which not only supports the desired culture but also supports your continued growth.

The Case for Web Standards and SEO is Still Alive and Well

The Case for Web Standards is still alive and well and more important than ever. For those who know me, know I am a follower of Jeffrey Zeldman. When I was a web page developer, back in the early days of CSS, database connectivity, and when Flash was still a Macromedia product and on version MX and Actionscript was on version 2, I was a champion of Web Standards.

Today, I haven’t coded a web page in some time. Static has given way to Dynamic, Rich Media Data Driven websites. AJAX, is no longer just a kitchen cleaner. Some developers I have worked with suggest it can replace Flash in some respects, creating animated navigations etc. They are now finding ways for it to work more smoothly with SEO practices. What is AJAX?

ASP.NET AJAX is a free framework for quickly creating efficient and interactive Web applications that work across all popular browsers.
With ASP.NET AJAX you can:

• Create next-generation interfaces with reusable AJAX components.
• Enhance existing pages using powerful AJAX controls with support for all modern browsers.
• Access remote services and data from the browser without tons of complicated script.
• Serve as an alternative to Flash
• Take advantage of the improved efficiency and ease of use in Visual Studio 2008, with its built-in support for ASP.NET AJAX, improved JavaScript support, and a new Web page designer interface.

Back to the topic at hand - Web Standards.
Web Standards and SEO are as important and relevant today as when they were introduced. We are still talking about putting relevant content on your site to drive traffic. That has not changed. Using recognized Web Standards and W3C complience is an important practice that all developers should be utilizing and marketers should be aware of.

It is not extra work to the developer; it will save work in the long run and deliver ROI, just as adding the Analytics code on every page. If pages are created this way from the get go, it just becomes part of the workflow. After all, Developers still need to create pages that are compatible with different browsers and versions and show the layout and design as it was intended as well as being able to be read by search engines, and browser readers for seeing impaired (read Designing the Obvious, and Don’t Make Me Think).

This all ties together. Creating sites that utilize Web Standards, Usability Standards, and relevant content all work together to assure your site is Optimized for your audience, the Web and the Search Engines.

The one member of every target market that many companies and agencies overlook is the Search Engines. If a page is not optimized, it will not show up when the other members of your target market search for it. If you don’t care about traffic to your site and online conversions etc. then shut down the website.

So tell me again, how Web Standards and SEO are not important.
To learn more about Web Standards check out this related article on Better Living Through XHTML