The Thinking Inbox

Its been a couple of weeks since we have blogged about feature updates. The reason is we’ve been busy creating new features and enhancing exisiting ones. One of the most requested and useful features that we rolled out last week is the “Comparative Reports.” This is an excellent tool for trend analysis and overall report generation because an aggregate/average report is generated as a part of the comparative report.

This feature can be found under the “Report Viewer” section of the navigation pane. You will have to create a comparision report and save it before you will be able to view a comparision report.

As can be seen in the snapshots above, you can choose to either compare reports for mailings sent in a given date range or you can choose to compare individual emails.

Once a comparative report is saved, it will show up in a table as can be seen in the snapshot above. To view a comparative report simply click the magnifying glass icon under the “View Report” column.

If you are a user of Publicaster and have any questions about the new reporting feature feel free to call your account manager or email support with any questions and we will get right back to you.

Okay, so now you have developed Targeted Landing Pages (Tip #1), and you’ve tested different versions of your Landing Pages to find the one(s) that perform the best for you (Tip #2).

But are you tracking your Ultimate Conversion Goal so you know exactly which Keywords are working for you, and which ones are the dogs? The Ultimate Conversion Goal is simply the way in which you ultimately define the success of your overall program…most often Sales. After all, the only reason you are building an email prospect list is to get them to buy, right?

It’s very important to track this all the way through to the final Sale if you want to be sure you don’t waste your money….and instead just line Google’s pockets, again!

Quick example: You have found a Landing Page that converts equally well for two keywords, contributing equally to your ever growing email prospect list. But are you sure that both keywords, and the subsequent leads they produce, lead to an equal number of sales?

I can almost guarantee they won’t! But unless you track it, you won’t know….so you’ll end up throwing an equal amount of your media budget to both keywords…when what you should be doing is ramping up the keyword that is leading to more sales, and scaling back or testing another way to boost the lower performing keyword.

You’ll be surprised to find that a small change in the keyword used to find you may lead to a large difference in Sales conversion. There are many reasons for this, not the least of which is the mindset, or psychology behind typing the keyword into Google in the first place! You may never understand exactly why it happens, but by tracking it you can take full advantage of the fact it does happen!

….figure out why it’s happening second….figure out how to make money from it first!

Google offers a tracking code for this, or you can tie in your own Analytics tool if you prefer. Worst case, to get started, just track it manually somehow…it’ll be time well spent until you formalize your tracking system…

The last tip talked about the importance of using Targeted Landing Pages when designing a Lead Generation program using paid search.

I mentioned briefly that one of the benefits of online marketing was the ability to easily modify landing pages so they can be repurposed over and over again efficiently and at a low cost.

This brings us to Tip #2 - Finding the Perfect Landing Page!

Because it’s easy to modify a landing page, you should take advantage of this and test different targeted pages to see which performs better for you for the same keyword or group of keywords. There are fancy terms used like Split or A/B testing, or Multivariate testing, but the bottomline is you are simply changing something in your landing page to see if it changes your results!

It’s best to try changing one variable at a time, rather than mess with several aspects of your landing page, because you won’t be able to attribute the change to one specific thing. You will be very surprised at how much of an impact (positive or negative) one small change can have…something as simple as a single word, font size, link placement, color, image size or placement, etc. All of these small changes can have a dramatic impact.

Given how easy it is to test different pages, it’s very smart marketing to include this testing in your program. Without it, you’ll never know for sure how good your potential Conversion Rates might be!!

….if you’re not converting as high as you could be, then you’re just throwing money away!

This is one of those topics that may be elementary to some, mystifying to others….but either way it’s an important topic for email marketers.

Seems logical that all email marketers would want to deliver a Multipart email to optimize delivery and performance, yet a surprising number of companies choose not to include the Plain Text version.

Quick Review: Multipart email format allows you to set up both an HTML and a Plain Text version of your email. The goal being to ensure that anyone who can’t see HTML will still receive a Plain Text version.

With Multipart format, however, if you don’t provide a plain text version of your email when you set it up, and a recipient can’t get an HTML version (ie., Blackberry, Treo….) then they won’t see anything but a blank email….not something companies want to have happen.

The alternative is to choose to send an HTML Only version, rather than a Multipart version. With an HTML Only set-up, those users who can’t receive HTML format emails will instead receive the HTML version stripped of all HTML formatting. In essence they will see a modified Plain Text version consisting only of the pure text left over from the HTML version before it was stripped down….

It’s not the best option to choose, but in most cases it’s better than sending a blank email.

What’s the lesson here?

The best choice is Multipart format, but if adding a Plain Text version isn’t in your plans, then consider sending an HTML Only format to increase your odds for success!

HTML editor bottom toolbar (Full Screen button highlighted)

Scroll the Add/Edit Email Message screen all the way to the bottom where you can see the HTML editor’s bottom toolbar, shown in the snapshot above, and click on the toggle full screen button and the HTML editor will take over the entire staging area in the right frame! The bigger your screen the better your experience will be.

As always, please let us know you feedback, the good and the bad.

Yes, Publicaster gets smarter How many times does it happen that you have to get an email our immediately and in the hurry you forget to add the “optout” tag? I bet it has happened to you. Now Publicaster will warn you if you do not include an opt out tag while creating/making changes to your creative. It then gives you an option to add a tag before saving or continue saving, in which case it assumes you manage your lists outside Publicaster.

This is just our little way of reminding you when you forget to add an opt out tag in your email. Publicaster is a powerful tool and with that power comes great responsiblity. Use it well

According to a recent article in Marketing Sherpa, 69% of Outlook users employ some type of email preview before opening it. They discovered that many heavy emailers (themselves included) do not take this feature under consideration when designing an email. Basically, the first 3 lines of text in your email are displayed in Outlook’s auto-preview as well as many portable electronic devices that read email.

The trick is to make those first 3 lines compelling copy. Try to avoid putting administration text first like: “Click here to view this email with images” or your issue date and issue number. Also, try and make this text as intriguing as possible. It will be competing with other email to get read, so consider standing out with CAPITAL LETTERS or text symbols to catch the eye:-)

Try viewing some of your own designs in auto-preview and see how compelled you are to open them. Here is a link to good and bad samples to help model your next design.
http://www.marketingsherpa.com/cs/epreview/study.html

We saw that most of you were including a “View this email in a browser” link on the top of your email creative. So we thought why not make it a Publicaster feature to make it as easy as possible? And so we implemented this feature:

Publicaster 6.0 HTML Editor

This feature can be accessed by going to the HTML editor and inserting a Publicaster personalized tag called “View Email in Browser”, as shown in the snapshot above. You may ask what is the advantage of adding that link using Publicaster? The answer to that is that when Publicaster adds that link using Publicaster’s “View Email in Browser” tag, it creates a personalized link to the creative on Publicaster’s server such that, the recipient will see all personalization, opt out link, forward to a friend link, etc.

It is also a great thing to include this link as part of the text-only version of your multipart email messages. In fact you can make all of your text versions of emails like this:

****************
You have received a HTML email message from [Your Company Name], but it appears that your email client is set to read messages in plain text.

To view this email in your browser, go to:
[~ViewInBrowser~]

To stop receiving emails in the future, go to:
[~Optout~]

*****************

That’s it! By simply copying and pasting the above text in yout Text Creative Editor in Publicaster, you will not be sending blank multipart messages to your text only readers.

Hi to all Thinking Inbox readers!

My name is Dipesh Mamtora, and I lead the development team at Blue Sky Factory. I have been with the company for over three years. I will be blogging about all the cool (yes cool!) development work we do here at Blue Sky Factory, but most of my posts will be about feature updates/upgrades to keep you up to date.

As most of you know, we recently launched version 6.0 of Publicaster and already released many minor/major feature updates. This will be where we post the latest and greatest information on the new features and point releases that we make. Publicaster is set to have many additional features roll out over the course of 2006. We look forward to your feedback!

Anyways, I hope this will help all of you Publicaster users discover the new features and encourage you non-Publicaster users to check out our product soon!

Dipesh

You requested and we heard…Publicaster now has a built in SPAM check tool, which does an analysis on email as opposed to just the creative. The SPAM check tool can be accessed by simply clicking the SPAM check button on the Email Library page, under the Email Set-up section on the navigation bar.

Email Library Page View