Typical deliverability problems

Q1. What are the main problems the email marketer needs to be aware which can lead to their email being blocked?

There are two main areas for B2C e-marketing:

• Emailing solution setup technical factors
• IP address reputation, content and HTML factors

The technical factors are controlled by the Email Service Provider or your IT department if you run your own mailing solution. The IP address reputation is under direct influence of the email marketer’s actions and should be of primary concern, after which content and HTML factors are next most important.

B2B e-marketing is not so dependent on IP address reputation, rather content and HTML factors play more of a role.

Email deliverability solutions

Q2. …And what are the best solutions to these problems?

For the solution to technical factors pick an ESP with proven track record that understands and will manage these items for you:

• Forward DNS, A and MX records.
• Matching reverse DNS
• SPF (sender policy framework) and DKIM
• SMTP matching HELO
• Monitoring of abuse@ for all domains
• ISP and third party feedback such as SpamCop
• Whitelisting
• Frequent blocklist checking
• SURBL monitoring

Marketers don’t need to understand the details, but that’s a good checklist.

IP address reputation is really a case of your life in their hands. If users hit the ’this is spam’ button on their email client your reputation is damaged and your future ability to deliver is put at risk. The prime tool to manage this are feedback loops.

Reputation issues are inevitably the result of poor targetting, lack of relevance and emailing too frequently. This means a great solution to creating a good reputation and hence great deliverability is to only send relevant emails. Well targetted emails are not only appreciated by users and give best results but also are easier to deliver.

Extra care is needed when using third party lists. Just having legally collected data is not enough to ensure you don’t hurt your reputation. Emails sent from third parties are very often viewed by users as spam. Users often don’t remember they agreed to selected partner or third party mailings, may be in the sign up process this was not clear enough or simply they don’t associate the email with the permission they gave. Particularly if the third party mailing makes no reference to the brand at time of opt-in.

Another way to help manage IP reputation is to use multiple IP address for different mailings and consider the pros and cons of using dedicated or shared IP addresses. Both have their strengths and your ESP should be have to give you guidance on the benefits of each and best approach.

Now let’s turn to HTML and content. To ensure your HTML is valid and email client compatibile use an HTML coder who is experienced in email HTML. General website coders are not normally aware of email client restrictions. It is unfortunate that even today email clients are very fussy about the HTML compared with web browsers.

New HTML should be tested in test email client accounts or use an inbox snapshot testing tool. These are available thorough the solution of many ESPs or via third party services.

Spam report feedback loop tracking

Q3. I find that many email marketers on my courses are unaware of the reports available from webmail providers like Hotmail of emails which have been reported as Spam.

Which webmail providers support feedback-loop tracking and what is best practice here?

The feedback loops for spam complaints is deliverability gold dust. AOL and Windows Live (Hotmail) have been providing this for sometime and after some delay Yahoo have finally fully launched their feedback loop facility. There is also a handful of primarily USA serving ISPs (Comcast, Excite, United Online, Road Runner and USA.Net) with feedback loops.

Best practice is to unsubscribe all email address from which a spam complaint is made. Some ESP solutions will do this automatically for you.

If spam complaint levels are consistently high then an analysis should be made of the complaint email address to look for common factors. For example, are they all old addresses, from a common data source, have been poorly engaged? If there are common factors then proactively unsubscribing other email addresses which share common factors before they complain is a good approach to improving deliverability. The final approach that can be taken is to construct a campaign to re-request email permission. If it’s not given then don’t email further. Whilst this does reduce list size, its only removing those who are likely to complain and don’t want to hear from you. Thus deliverability and list quality are improved.

Email deliverability tools

Q4. Which tools should you look for when selecting an email service provider which help with assessing and improving email deliverability?

Use a solution that provides spam complaint levels. Whilst high unsubscribe rates often go hand in hand with high complaints there is no substitute for having the real complaint figures.

Better solutions will give you the complaint level for each campaign. This is a big advantage. An overall average across campaigns will not allow you to zero in on your trouble areas. You will be left wondering which of your emails and what list data are causing problems. Reporting of the actual email addresses for complaints should be available to allow further issue analysis.

Look for solutions that offer inbox delivery confirmation checking, whereby campaign emails are automatically sent to seed addresses and confirmation is made that they arrive to the inbox. Some ESPs offer this but if not there are also third party solutions.

You or your ESP should also be using Windows Live (Hotmail) Smart Network Data Services (SNDS). This adds to the feedback loops and gives direct reporting of the IP reputation calculated by Hotmail and further data such as number of spamtrap hits. These are email addresses the ISPs leave on the internet but are not optin addresses. If they get emails from you to these addresses they conclude you are sending spam by definition.

The future of deliverability

Q5. I remember a few years back, that Bill Gates said we would see the end of spam in two years, but of course this didn’t transpire. What are the prospects for the future deliverability. Are we going to see more of the accreditation / authentication schemes? Are these popular, do you think they are worthwhile?

But then neither could Gates predict the release dates for any Windows version. To be fair to Bill, Hotmail (Microsoft) have taken steps to put his words into action. Authentication schemes such as SPF are a great step forwards. When all legitimate mail servers adopted this standard a big step forward to spam reduction will have been made. It is already used as a scoring factor by the major ISPs.

Thus the authentication schemes are important and should be used. The accreditation and email certification schemes are important for deliverability as you cannot normally use these schemes if you have a deliverability issue. Thus you are already by definition a good citizen and getting to the inbox to be allowed to join in. They do help however with trust and perceived authority of emails, resulting in increase in open and click rates.

The legal definition of spam has little to do with the ISPs and users definition of spam. If you act like a spammer in the eyes of users and ISPs then you will be treated like a spammer and safe arrival in the inbox will suffer.

Whilst deliverability does warrant much care and following the best practice is important it is given its unfair share of attention. The real money being left on the table is in message relevance and effectiveness optimisation. It is disappointing the amount of energy and even basic testing that is typically being put into these areas compared with the amount of concern displayed by marketers about deliverability.

Q1. 1. What are the main differences in successfully writing for web compared with print

[Answer: Anne Caborn, Co-Founder Content Delivery & Analysis]

There are a number of key differences but there are two critical ones when you’re talking about web (as opposed to email). The first is you are having a conversation online. It’s auditory both in terms of delivery speed and interactivity. It’s not inert text on a printed page.

And this interactive experience involves highly motivated users who are searching out what you have to say on a given subject: such as do you stock the widget I’m looking for, or do these red spots mean I have measles? This isn’t idle chit chat.

Therefore the currency of the conversation must be useful: yes, we stock widgets in these colours at a cost of £x; here’s a quick symptom checklist for measles along with useful phone numbers for all night chemists and out of hours doctors’ surgeries.

Our recently published research on Online language pathways illustrates what searchers expect as they transition from searching to scanning as they arrive on a landing page.

The answers contain more than the minimum requirement posed by the question. Online you can only create the website-side of the conversation but you have to anticipate the totality of your users’ needs. Good conversation is all about listening.

The second critical difference is the point of origin for the conversation. You don’t start it, the user does. Online is a very active environment and people go online to get things done: book holidays, buy goods and services, get information.

So online content is a reply-focused medium. Anyone involved in visualising content for web should start by posing this question: Do we ‘sound’ as if we’re responding to user needs or simply pushing out what we want to say? Save the push for your brochures.

While still conversational, there are exceptions in the case of email, for example, when it comes to the initiation point. You may well have a clearer idea of where you are in the conversation, ie you’re sending an email confirmation in response to an online purchase. You may also initiate a conversation by sending someone their regular copy of an email newsletter they signed up for. (But don’t forget they asked you to send it in the first place.)

Q2. What are the secrets of keeping your web copy customer-centric rather than copy-centric?

[Answer: Anne Caborn, Co-Founder Content Delivery & Analysis]

If you constantly have user-usefulness and reply-focused communication front-of-mind you’re a long way there.

If you’re a content creator it can be very useful to read your content out loud, particularly if you’re still establishing the style and Tone of Voice for a new website. Do you sound warm, friendly, engaging – human?

It’s also worth looking at the processes needed to set up to control content creation, commissioning and assessment. I recently put together a SMART benchmarking tool to assess how well this process works.

It’s also important to think about customers as real, flesh and blood people, with all the inconsistencies and foibles that come with that. We’ve been developing a persona-scenario approach for clients. This involves defining a series of personas engaged in real-life activities as they touch on a website or email programme, it’s about the context of what we do as well.

Q3. How should you deal with writing for multiple audiences on the same page, e.g. male/female, different company sizes, different levels of seniority in a business.

[Answer: Anne Caborn, Co-Founder Content Delivery & Analysis]

This is tricky but not impossible. Technically you can distinguish returners and registered users from new and unknown users. You may want to serve up elements of conditional content based on what you know.

But even without technology’s helping hand you should be able to address this. After all, if you invite people to a dinner party you don’t expect them all to be landscape gardeners called Rodney. Conversation thrives on multiplicity.

But you do need to know who all your dinner guests are. This helps with positioning and those all important conversational gambits necessary to get the communication flowing.

First of all, flesh out these multiple audiences using a persona or scenario-based approach. Look for points of overlap and mutuality and then for points of differentiation. Can you use a pathway page to send different audiences on different journeys? A prime example of this is a financial website splitting audiences into financial advisers and investors.

Then look at how you use the page real estate – all of it. Most content creators focus on the juicy paragraphs in the centre of the page. Be aware of the ambient texts, such as driver text links to other pages, supporting right hand panels and even your labelling.

Your core vocabulary should reflect your largest possible audience, so should be warm, friendly, engaging, but slightly vanilla in approach. Use driver texts, ambient texts, labels and navigations to show the breadth of your offering and to ‘talk with’ small segments individually. And don’t forget images. These can be powerful creators of user empathy (they can also put people off… big time, if used thoughtlessly).

Q4. Could you point to a couple of outstanding examples of web copywriting (links please) with a short critique.

[Answer: Anne Caborn, Co-Founder Content Delivery & Analysis]

This is a trick question right? My first impulse is to send you towards a couple of sites we’ve been working on recently and where we’ve overseen content training or commissioning. Then your readers can crawl all over them and say why the hate them. I’m a vulnerable soul and might never recover.

The site we have been heavily involved in that I would like to point you to hasn’t gone live yet. But the project was great from our perspective because the orgnisation got CDA in right at the outset. We helped them visualise the content, the shape of the site itself and its functionality, the organisation’s relationship to digital content per se (and what needed to change about that) and the processes needed to sustain the content going forward.

A site I love is Innocent Drinks. It’s visually creative and the Tone of Voice is spot on for the audience. They deliver a slightly-wacky-but-wholesome approach without losing any clarity or usefulness.

Q5. What would you see are the trends in copywriting for the web?

[Answer: Anne Caborn, Co-Founder Content Delivery & Analysis]

The most important thing right now? It has to be auditing what people previously thought was unauditable. Online we can measure so many things: who visits what page, where they go next, now many people opened our last newsletter and what links they used…

But it’s always been assumed that ‘experience’, ‘delight’, ‘satisfaction’… were soft, subjugated qualities of online content, that could only be teased out using focus groups and surveys and were difficult, if not impossible, to benchmark across multiple sites.

But CDA are taking a broad, unfettered approach to Web 3.0. There are some interesting conversations going on and we’re currently working on a project which will begin to pull content and the experience of content into a measurable framework.

The other really important trend is that organisations are taking back copywriting as an activity. What they’re more interested in is using companies like ours to help them visualise why they are talking with website users and how to best configure that experience.

Keyword research

• Searches performed will differ, analyse keyphrases which attract visitors to your mobile content. Unfortunately, there are no reliable search keyword tools at this time. Some indication of search behaviour is available through related search terms on Google iPhone Suggests and Yahoo! mobile’s related searches.

Notifying the search engines about your content

• Notify Google about your mobile content using a mobile site map. See:
  • Google Webmaster Tools Mobile SEO Note 1
  • Sitemaps for Mobile SEO
• Check for crawling issues on the mobile site using mobile diagnostics: of Google Webmaster Tools. Remember that Google Mobile has it’s own User-Agent: Googlebot-Mobile, so ensure this is not disallowed through Google Mobile.
• Location-based search is more common on mobile, so ensure your business has registered its locations in the Local Business Center and then they will then be included within maps.

On-page optimisation

• The browser title is still one of the main ranking factors so make sure this contains relevant, unique keyphrases for each page. The use of keywords within headings
  

  and
  

  is also important.

External link-building

• Owing to the lack of links from other mobile sites, links from main / desktop sites are still the main factor here
• Submission to mobile-specific directories may help generate backlinks
• Featuring your mobile site in reviews of mobile sites can help generate links in the main index and mobile index.

Internal-linking

• Remember that the anchor-text used in internal linking is important for indicating the importance of a page, so ensure navigation labels reflect significant links.

Mobi Thinking has a detailed guide on SEO for mobile

Example Webcasts

As with other webcasting services, Bright Talk offers two main webcasting services:

1. Video webcasts – example MessageLabs sponsor webcast on The Register
2. Audio webcasts, voiceover slides with dial-in over phone – example Alcatel-Lucent on Conversational Marketing – Reaching Youth with Technology – these are most common since more cost effective to setup based on a Powerpoint voiceover.

You need to register to view the channels and there is a free-entry level service to trial the concept and technology.

The benefits of webcasts

Q1. Your company, BrightTalk, focuses on webcasts rather than podcasts? Why is that, what are the benefits of webcasts?

[Answer: Charlie Blackburn, Co-Founder BrightTalk]

In the next couple of years webcasting will become as critical as email and websites for B2B marketers. The economic downturn will accelerate webcasting adoption as businesses look to get smarter and drop less tangible marketing in favour of cost and operationally effective techniques. We recently launched www.brighttalk.com for businesses to reach their communities, free of charge, and these innovations are changing how businesses use online webcasting.

Businesses rate webcasting highly for a couple of reasons:

• The most important is that webcasting is brilliant for engagement marketing. Our marketing clients love the fact that they can have longer conversations with customers and prospects, all on an ‘opt-in’ basis.
• The second reason webcasts are popular is that they are easy to use. brighttalk.com uses Adobe’s Flash streaming technology and, rather like the BBC’s new iPlayer, you just need to click on the webcast for it to start playing. Flash is a great technology, it works on Apple Macs and PCs, and users don’t need to download software each time to watch the webcast.

You are incorrect to say we do not provide podcasts. Podcasts are usually just different versions of the same content for an audience who prefers to consume the content on a mobile device. Clients can, and do, choose a podcast version of the webcast if it is important to their audiences. The main reasons that podcasts, as a standalone format, haven’t taken off is because they are not live and interactive, and this is a critical weakness.

Which sectors do webcasts work well for?

Q2. Are there any sectors where webcasts work especially well for engaging an audience, or where they don’t work so well – what are the success stories? Is it true that only ultra web-savvy geeks will view webcasts

[Answer: Charlie Blackburn, Co-Founder BrightTalk]

Webcasting is a powerful technique that is applicable across sectors.

If you look at the webcasts being run this week on brighttalk.com you will see range of topics from Teen Marketing, Procurement Savings and Complex Decision Making.

I don’t know the presenters personally but they don’t sound like geeks to me! You are right to point out that webcasting started in the technology sector but by making it free we are seeing rapid adoption in many sectors.

The best webcasts we run will attract over 2,000 registrants. The cost effectiveness and time saving is massive, and we know people are hungry for useful knowledge.

Integrating webcasts into a marketing campaign

Q3. How can webcasts best be integrated into a marketing campaign – how should be they promoted online and offline during a campaign so that the audience engages with them?

[Answer: Charlie Blackburn, Co-Founder BrightTalk]

Webcasts are best used as an integrated part of regular marketing campaigns.

We are seeing BrightTALKTM channels being embedded in social media tools such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, industry blogs and company websites. The other main tool is email, which if delivered to targeted audiences, is still highly effective.

Tracking webcasts

Q4. What information can you provide to clients on how well their webcasts are working? What does success look like?

[Answer: Charlie Blackburn, Co-Founder BrightTalk]

Clients are looking for proof that their customers are engaging with them. Webcasting is highly measurable. Engagement is measured to the nearest second, and clearly attributable. People are happy to register for live events, so we can tell clients which customer or prospect engaged with them.

Clients are finding that when they mix qualification information together with behavioural data, such as someone attending an online event for 30 minutes, then they have very good intelligence to share with Sales. Marketing is successful where it provides highly qualified leads for Sales.

Choosing a provider for webcasts

Q5. When selecting a provider of webcasting, what should marketers look out for? What are the mistakes you have seen made.

[Answer: Charlie Blackburn, Co-Founder BrightTalk]

Webcasting has moved on from the days when it was only available as a managed service, so we would recommend the best way to pick a provider is to try it out. BrightTALK Starter Channels are free on brighttalk.com and we have made them simple to use.

The other way to gauge a provider is to watch some of the content. The Youth and Technology channel is a great example of what you can expect.

The most common mistake people make in selecting a webcasting company is to try and use webconferencing technology for running online events. It’s a bit like still using a VHS tape recorder to tape programs on Sky rather than using Sky Plus (or TIVO for your American readers). You could do it but there are much easier tools on the market.

Some argue that linkbaiting is an unnecessary term which just means “great content”. But I like it since it focuses marketers on what is genuinely useful or engaging content.

One of the first posts explaining the term linkbaiting was by Nick Wilson who identified these six hooks:

• News hook
• Contrary Hook
• Attack Hook
• Resource Hook
• Humour Hook

Nick’s hooks were designed with blog posts in mind, but my 10 options build on these to describe types of linkbait for commercial or not-for-profit organisations.

Ten types of linkbait

1. Advice. For example, “How-to guides” create value. www.howto.tv have created an entire business around these videos, but How-to’s can just be a list of practical steps to help with any process. You need to show credibility for your advice through links to other respected websites, customer reviews, research or highlighting your own credentials.

2. Viral campaigns / Humour. Any marketing campaign with a strong viral element should attract links if it succeeds. Make sure these aren’t wasted if the viral is hosted on a standalone site. Link back to the main company site with topical links and when the campaign ends, setup a 301 redirect back to the main site. www.willitblend.com has attracted 30,000 backlinks.

3. Controversy. A lot of political commentators generate many backlinks by courting controversy in the blogosphere. In the US, “Andrew Sullivan’s blog”:http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com is one of the most popular .

4. Reviews, comparison and evaluation. Save others time by reviewing. Amazon purchased camera review site DP Review (http://www.dpreview.com) which has over 500,000 backlinks for several reasons: audience is one, saving affiliate commission is another, but targeted backlinks to the main Amazon site could be another.

5. Applications and tools. Online services which solve problems will naturally generate links. Currency converter XE.com has around 1 million IBLs. Downloadable tools and plugins can be helpful too.

6. Blogs. Companies who add a blog to their main doain will gain more backlinks as bloggers link to individual posts, but they may be insignificant. For example the blog of fashion retailer ASOS (http://blog.asos.com) has only a few thousand IBLs, but the main site has nearly one hundred thousand. On the Econsultancy site there are almost as many links to the blog home page as the http://www.e-consultancy.com/news-blog as the main site home page.

7. News. Unique takes on news can help generate links, e.g. be first with breaking news, follow a niche or add humour. All of these can also be done through a blog. Technology site The Register does this well. It is has 800,000 links to it’s home page.

8. Rich media. Images, video, webcasts or podcasts can create links from different sources. Here are some great examples for SEOs creating presentations.

9. Community – polls and surveys. We know from the success of social networks how web users love to relate to others similar to themselves. Short-of-creating a community, there are other actions you can take on this like using polls and surveys. These can work really well for generating links from all types of online journalist, especially if they hook into Nick Wilson’s five hooks. These can be a one-off or you can use a series of surveys.

10. Top 10 lists. Or Top 20, Top 100. Lists like this one seem to be popular since they are easy to digest and people can work through them like a checklist. It can be a top 10 of sites, experts, tips, any of the hooks. If you build your top linkbait from other sites or bloggers then –those you flatter will often want to link back to you.

Best practice in linkbaiting

1. Make it easy to link to your linkbait, either through providing code or social media widgets
2. Think carefully about how you title and introduce your linkbait – an intriguing title will often encourage visitors to click through when they see the link on other sites – so you will gain direct traffic too.
3. Provide a home for your linkbait. Aaron Wall places his linkbait on a subdomain to collect all the different tools he has developed which increases the chance that visitors will link to it.
4. Develop different types of linkbait which will appeal to different audiences, for example journalists and media site owners, casual bloggers, pro-bloggers, the diggerati, partners, etc.
5. Review your web analytics top entry pages for returning visitors to see which content is most popular for your existing users and create more content like that
6. Review the balance between IBLs for the home page against the site overall. For example, the register has over 800,000 homepage links but nearly 2 million overall. If the number of links for your home page is similar to the site overall it means your probably not doing a good job of creating other types of link-bait.

Further reading on linkbaiting

Danny Sullivan has this compilation of articles on linkbaiting

It’s refreshing to see Ruth debunking many of the myths of SEO such as reciprocal links are 100% bad.

Given my interest (and my readers’) interest in SEO, in this interview we focus on best practices in Online PR for Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) through generating backlinks to a site focusing on a specific theme.

Online PR campaign essentials

Q1. What would you say are the key ingredients for an online PR campaign where the main aim is to increase the number of quality links for SEO purposes?

[Answer: Ruth Brecher – Managing Director Underwired PR] It is of course desirable to have as many links as possible going to a site in order to boost rankings within those search resources where one of the ranking algorithms is ‘link popularity’.

However, since we started doing online PR at the end of 1994, we have found that it is perfectly possible to obtain excellent rankings for client pages where link popularity is not a primary issue – i.e. new sites and sites where no online PR has taken place and so where few links exist.

In actual fact, I cannot think of a single occasion in 14 or so years where the primary motivation for running a reciprocal links campaign has been to boost search rankings! I’ve referred to ‘reciprocal’ links rather than simply ‘backlinks’ here as when we run these sorts of campaigns, we generally advise that clients offer a ‘thank you’ to fellow webmasters by way of a reciprocal link.

This is because we are firm believers in ‘first principles’ in terms of online behaviour; the web was necessarily based upon people co-operating and providing links from their site to other resources and visa versa.

Our own stats and others have illustrated that including links such as these on a site has no detrimental effects in terms of ‘syphoning off’ traffic from the host site and has the added benefit of offering site users good and useful sources of other information which can only add to their online experience.

Dave Chaffey Thanks Ruth, it’s good to see you debunking that classic myth of SEO that reciprocal links are 100% bad…

Identifying suitable link partners

Q2. How do you go about identifying suitable link partners? Can you give any tips?

[Answer: Ruth Brecher – Managing Director Underwired PR] The type of link partners that are deemed desirable is decided on after receiving an audience and objective briefing from the client. After we have looked at what it is the client is trying to achieve and who their target market is, we then start the process of researching potential target sites.

This will include looking at sites which do similar things or are in a related field to the clients’ own (although are not in direct competition) – the search tends to begin with inputting appropriate keywords into a search engine and then taking a look at what exists.

Additionally our research will also take into account who the competition is, what they link to and along the way the research then evolves into taking a look at which sites are regarded well by peers, which are positively reviewed in various resources and how current their information is. I’d say that it’s useful to take the following into account when identifying potential target sites:

• Look at sites which are complimentary to, but do not compete with, the client site
• Look at what the competition links to
• Assess which sites are well-regarded in a particular field
• Ensure that any site targeted does not contain a lot of outdated material – i.e. that the content looks to be refreshed relatively frequently, thus making it more likely to be attracting interested traffic

Measuring results from online PR campaigns

Q3. How do you measure the effectiveness of an online PR campaign? Can you give some examples including the type of metrics you feedback to clients?

[Answer: Ruth Brecher – Managing Director Underwired PR]

An online PR campaign can consist of SEO, reciprocal link-building, specialist directory entry, competition promotion, viral seeding etc.

Ultimately success is measured against the performance criteria set out in the brief – for example, at one end of the scale it might be clicks, at the other it might be return on monetary investment.

For example, for Virgin we’ve managed campaigns that have achieved a monetary return of £26 for every £1 spent; for Logitech we promoted a video with a call to action to visit a unique URL which resulted in over 250,000 Quickcams being sold).

We’ve recently created a PR campaign for New Media Age that in its second week has had over 2,000 people entering the Digerati-n00b League Challenge – though it remains to be seen how many subscriptions (the final metric) will be sold as a result.

Using video and podcasts for online PR

Q4. How effective do you see rich media like online videos and podcasts for link-building. It seems these may get links to YouTube or iTunes or wherever they are hosted, but few links back to the company site, even if they are embedded in a page.

They are generally a hygiene element for the sake of completeness, but blogs like this one certainly play an important part in for example promoting the New Media Age Challenge!

Benefits of using a full-service agency

5. Today, many SEO agencies have staff or teams specialising in online PR. What benefits can a full-service digital agency like yours bring?

It’s really simple: by having a team of people, all of whom are specialists, working for a single commercial goal, you get a lot of people in a room deciding on a strategy that isn’t limited to one of each promotional element.

We often decide not to do x but concentrate more on y – and we often switch emphasis mid-way along a campaign in order to optimise the results. After all, our goal is to get the best possible end result, not get the best result possible using specific technique #4, which gives a full-service agency the latitude to deliver results using the most effective means, not just the one or two they are most expert in!

Dave Chaffey Thanks for the interview Ruth – englightening! On this last point, there’s a great discussion on E-consultancy around where responsibility for Online PR campaigns should lie

How does advertising in Feeds work

1. Let’s start with the basics. How does advertising in RSS feeds work for the Feed subscriber? What are the typical options for creative?

Bill Flitter, Pheedo:

RSS is the plumbing that connects users to the content they like and has provided the freedom to aggregate content anywhere on any device. This streaming of content, or lifestreaming, is a compilation of one’s interests aggregated in a central experience preferred by the consumer.

The outcome in today’s distributed media world is fragmentation of both the content and the consumer. Stitching together and making sense of the user behaviour with the content off the site poses new challenges.

Brands successfully leveraging RSS and distributed media understand the power of the medium.

They realize RSS is about people not the amount of page views. It is not a tonnage buy but micro-targeting.

My advice is this:

1. Create great content that is relevant to the user you are trying to attract.
2. Virally-enable the content for easy sharing
3. Create the content so it is digestible in micro-chunks
4. Determine the right amount of content flow to keep users engaged
5. Consider the whole experience when evaluating success (vs. just clicks)

I encourage brands to create a lifestream (a.k.a brand stream) of their own. A brand is a living, breathing organism. A brand is about the people who make up that brand. So therefore, a brand has life. Content in a brand’s life might include press releases, product reviews, blog postings, pictures of the company picnic, whitepapers – mostly likely all the things they already have but not centralized.

Cisco is leveraging brand streaming as a lead nurturing technique. They created a feed of content that includes video, press releases, customer stories and product updates as a way to connect with their potential customers.

Marketing Effectiveness of Feeds

Q2. And now marketing effectiveness. Which audiences will this work for? Is it true that it’s mainly for business-to-business audiences – say advertising in a feed or an IT trade publication? What about response rates – with display advertising averaging 0.1% for traditional formats can RSS feed ads perform better? Any success stories from your clients?

Bill Flitter, Pheedo:

Advertisers who are truly taking advantage of the RSS architecture want to keep their success a secret.

We see engagement rates as high as 10%. Engagement is a compilation of the number of clicks on the content, word-of-mouth activity created, subscriptions to the content, and post subscription activity stitched together into a digestible metric.

As the users taste for content consumption evolves so to does how marketers evaluate success. We need new standards of measurement. Only measuring CTR tells a partial story. Marketers should ask questions like:

• How valuable is it for a user to recommend a product?
• How do you measure that physical action of forwarding a piece of content to someone else?

We virally-enable all our content assets to increase the possibilities of sharing and report that activity back to the advertiser. We also provide the same analytic tools to advertisers that we provide publishers. This gives advertisers a detailed look into how their content is being consumed.

Advertisers range from what you would expect, IT to consumer technology companies. However CPG companies, auto makers, and movie studios who target moms and general consumers are taking full-advantage of the benefits of on-demand content tailored to the individual.

What about the lack of RSS feed adoption? What are the growth figures

Q3. What’s your view on the adoption rate of RSS feeds? It still seems to be a niche for me – great for journalists replacing press releases or web savvy types keeping up with developments, but it’s still at an early stage of adoption isn’t it?

I only see 1 feed subscription for every 10 email newsletter subscriptions on my blog – and that’s for a reasonably tech-savvy audience. How does expenditure on Feed advertising stack up against display ads or paid search response volumes? Surely response volumes are too small for it to be worthwhile for most companies?

Bill Flitter, Pheedo:

I find many articles are cynical about the value of RSS feeds for marketing their own services or for advertising in third party sites.

Last year, our publishers realized a 250% growth in their distributed traffic. 2008 is the year of syndication and aggregation. It is the year, where RSS realizes its inflection point. Advertising in RSS feeds will become a necessity as the feed becomes the main interaction point with a publisher.

For example, some of our top consumer tech and news publishers see more traffic in their feeds than on their site. That is amazing. An Avenue A study indicated 53% of online users are consuming RSS. Universal McCann found that RSS grew 153% between Q2 ’07 and Q2 ’08. That is faster growth than social networking and video consumption.

Publishers are not the only ones who need to create feeds. Brands who want to participate in a user’s lifestream will need to create feeds to stay stop of mind with their consumers. And many are. According to AvenueA/Razorfish, 40% of Marketers used or piloted RSS feeds in 2007. This up from 10% in 2006.

Q4. Comparing feed advertising to email marketing, what can you offer for targeting against subscribers’ individual preferences and profiles – isn’t the problem that 99% of feeds don’t require opt-in and profiling before sign-up?

Bill Flitter, Pheedo:

Prior to starting Pheedo, I had a successful email marketing company that I sold in 2001. But we saw response rates drop and legal issues making it difficult just to communicate to customers. I thought there had to be a better way to get consumers what they want. Pheedo was born out of this need. It was the best of both worlds. Brands received a communication channel and consumers had the control they desired.

Advertising in RSS Feeds is still considered new media. The average CPM in 2007 was $5. Rates have increased 28% in 12 months as media buyers have come to understand and appreciate the potential of reaching the content aggregators and broadcasters. Because RSS is a more personalized medium and therefore highly targeted, expect rates to be competitively priced and more inline with premium inventory rates.

Future predictions for feed advertising

Q5. A brief, single, but not simple question to end. How do you see feed advertising evolving over the next 1 to 2 years.

Bill Flitter, Pheedo:

From a publisher’s perspective, RSS has gone through three macro stages.

1. Awareness (2005) – what is it and why do I need it.
2. Analysis (2006/07)– now that I have it, how much do I have
3. Monetization (2008) – wow, I have a lot if, I need to create ROI

The 4th stage will be ROI Impact. Publishers/Brands we are working with today, are just now sitting at the table and realizing they need to put together a strategy around distributed media. They want to understand the full RSS ROI impact for their business.

Over the next few years, the user experience will become more ‘rich.’ RSS will be their main connection with the content they like. It will include social features and medium-specific advertising. Rich media ads will be redefined in RSS.

One of the nuances of RSS and the reason Pheedo exists is standard ad delivering techniques like iframes/javascript are not included in the RSS specification. This also leaves out flash and rich media ads as we know them today. We are developing new RSS specific rich-media ad types that achieve the same end result but are constructed differently. For example, our proprietary FeedPowered ‘rich-media’ ad platform delivers real-time information to RSS feeds based on some targeting criteria. Users can interact with the ad beyond just clicking on it and landing on the advertiser’s website. They can subscribe to the content, share it or save it for later. It delivers text, audio or video feeds.

• Visit Pheedo RSS Advertising Solutions

This month there is also a great case study out of how Lovefilm uses structured testing to improve it’s results .

Principles and differences between AB and multivariate testing

Q1. Can you outline the principle of multivariate testing and how it differs from AB testing. What types of pages is most commonly used on?

Mark Simpson:

A/B testing is a valid way to increase the performance of the page. However, whilst A/B testing provides a clear indication of consumer response to actual content, the process takes several weeks.

Reverting to the top performing content at the end of the trial is no guarantee of sustained conversion uplift: a range of factors from seasonality to competitive offers and offline influences can and will change consumer response in real time. And this is where multivariate testing comes into its own.

The basis of multivariate testing is to statistically define the best converting version of a web page or series of pages in real-time, taking the guesswork and gut feel away from website design and replacing it with an accurate measure of what works and what doesn’t for real visitors to websites, while also enhancing the opportunity for creativity and experimentation.

Multivariate testing allows much more ground to be covered and gives a higher probability of increase as you are looking at the relationship between variants in test areas of a page as well as the winning content in each test area. It is possible to cover months worth of A/B testing in a single multivariate test and achieve better conversion uplift results.

At Maxymiser we have tested on a multitude of pages. There are obvious start points like landing pages and entry pages, however, product pages, and results pages provide an equally valid testing arena. Lately we have seen some of our greatest returns for clients on registration and checkout processes, where we see uplifts directly hitting the bottom line.

Benefits from AB and multivariate testing

Q2. What performance uplift is possible? Can you share any results from clients who have agreed to this?

Mark Simpson:

Over the course of the hundreds of tests we have done we have shown that anything is possible as, even the most basic content changes, such as changes to button colours, have proven to deliver significant conversion uplift.

Across the tests we have implemented for clients we have seen uplifts from a few percentage points up to hundreds of percent increase in conversion metrics, however as a rough guide addressing the check-out process will typically deliver an improvement well in excess of 30%, whilst changes to registration processes have delivered over 50% improvement.

The key to success is designing proper, well thought out and well structured testing schedules.

Click here to see examples of multivariate testing results on the case studies area of the Maxymiser site.

Multivariate testing mistakes

Q3. What are the biggest mistakes you think are made when companies start running these types of site optimisation experiments for the first time?

Mark Simpson:

Prior planning is key in running any tests, picking the right conversion metric(s) to optimise to, and the right areas of content to make a difference to those conversion metrics.

Understanding multivariate testing and tools like automated optimisation helps in getting the maximum out of the technique while limiting business risk.

Advantages compared to Google Website Optimizer

Q4. With Google Website Optimiser freely available, what are the benefits of using paid for tools such as yours? Are they only for the largest companies?

Google Website Optimiser is a great tool, indeed we are authorised consultants for it and have used it for simple tests in the past.

The benefits of using paid for tools can be numerous dependant on the structure of the site and design of experiment.

For example, testing multi-step processes, dynamically generated content, optimising to multiple conversion rates and having the safety net of thorough QA and account management are but a few.

Choosing a supplier for AB and multivariate testing

5. If I’m selecting a provider to run these types of optimisation projects for me, how should I select the best tool and company? What should I look for?

• Look for flexibility – in methodology and integration to make sure the tool you pick can quickly and easily be set up to run with your content and systems.
• Get the provider to prove their expertise, look for relevant clients, testimonials and case studies.
• Scalability is key – both in the number of tests and also the technological solutions, when you start getting results from multivariate testing it will not be long before you start looking at segmenting your audience and targeting based on behaviour.