Ad Firm Tracks Consumers Across Media

For years, marketers measured the reach of their ads one medium at a time. For TV, it generally was Nielsen; for radio, Arbitron; newspapers and magazines report circulation figures; while the Internet shows hits and page views and other traffic data.

But there haven't been many ways to measure an ad campaign across all of these media at once.

A small media research company called Integrated Media Measurement is trying to bridge that research gap with a new technology that measures consumers' exposure to the audio in ads on television, radio, computers, mobile phones, DVDs and inside a movie theatre -- using a consumer's cellphone.

NBC Universal

NBC is among the networks using the cellphone-based data to track how people watch shows like 'Saturday Night Live.'

The Internet's ability to produce evidence on the effectiveness of ads -- such as how many people viewed an ad and whether or not they clicked on it -- has led to something of an industry obsession with new forms of measurement. The financial crisis promises to make marketers even more reluctant to risk money on ads, especially if they can't keep score on how effective the spots are. Meanwhile, media fragmentation continues, as big-tent events like the Olympic Games and the Super Bowl are consumed in more and different ways.

"People don't know how to measure the multimedia world we live in, so any piece of the puzzle is helpful," says Brad Bortner, principal analyst at Forrester Research.

IMMI embeds its software into the cellphones of the company's 4,900 panelists. The software picks up audio from an ad or a TV show and converts it into its own digital code that is then uploaded into an IMMI database, which includes codes for media content such as TV shows, commercials, movies and songs.

IMMI's database then figures out what the cellphone was exposed to by matching the code. Cellphone conversations and background noise are filtered out by the software, IMMI says, since there is no "match" in the IMMI database.

To get a handle on the effectiveness of a given ad, IMMI's data can show, for example, when a panel member is exposed to a movie trailer on TV and whether that same consumer later goes to see the movie. Similarly, IMMI data can show if a panelist watching a promo for a TV program will later watch the show, either on TV or online. IMMI thinks it can expand that idea from films and TV shows to consumer products like shampoo or toothpaste. It is testing its technology with a national grocery store chain.

NBC Universal

"We follow the same person from end to end," says Tom Zito, IMMI's chief executive.

IMMI isn't the first company to attempt this kind of measurement, but past efforts were stymied by the costs of creating a large-scale panel. IMMI's use of cellphones means that consumers don't have to labor over diaries or push buttons, says Mr. Zito, who worked for years as a journalist and rock critic before launching a number of Silicon Valley start-ups since the mid-1980s.

IMMI is still a tiny company, especially compared with competitors like Nielsen Media Research. The company's 4,900-person panel has teenagers and adults in just six major markets -- New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Miami, Houston and Denver. IMMI panelists are paid $50 a month or receive free phone and data service in exchange for making the cellphone their primary phone, and carrying it with them at all times.

But the San Mateo, Calif.-company has managed to attract the attention of movie studios and broadcast networks like General Electric Co.'s NBC Universal and Walt Disney Co.'s ABC. NBC has used IMMI data to track how people watch shows like "Heroes" or big sporting events like the Beijing Olympic Games.

While the technology isn't perfect, IMMI is helping NBC answer questions about how viewers watch its programming, says Alan Wurtzel, president of research at NBC. "I'm convinced the handset will be the way we will measure media going forward," he says.

Still, IMMI is unlikely to change the way marketers develop ad campaigns. Mark Loughney, vice president of sales and strategy research at ABC, says that IMMI's panel is still too small to make long term decisions. "For now, it's a supplement, not a replacement to what we use," he says.

IMMI also doesn't measure outdoor or print ads, or Internet ads that don't use audio.

Find television listings at LocateTV.

But the company is already getting the attention of big competitors like Nielsen, which teamed up with IMMI to sell a service that tracks ad exposure in places like bars, health clubs, hotels and the office. Walt Disney's ESPN and Zenith Media have already signed up for the service.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122394454320231201.html?mod=rss_media_and_marketing

Newspapers’ Web Revenue Is Stalling

Newspapers, already facing a grim economic forecast, are digesting another piece of bad news: the growth in online advertising they saw as their salvation has slowed to a crawl.

USAToday.com uses ad networks to fill unsold spots for ads.

In the last few years, newspaper companies have been rapidly expanding their Web presence — adding blogs, photo slide shows and podcasts — in the belief that more features would bring more advertisers. But now, after 17 quarters of ballooning growth, online revenue at newspaper sites is falling. In the second quarter, it was down 2.4 percent compared with last year, to $777 million, according to the Newspaper Association of America. It was the only year-over-year drop since the group began measuring online revenue in 2003.

Overall online advertising, however, is strong. Display advertising, the graphics-rich ads that newspaper sites carry, grew 7.6 percent in the second quarter, TNS Media Intelligence reported.

Newspaper executives say the new features have drawn bigger, more engaged audiences, which they hope will translate to more advertisers. Unique readers in August were 17 percent higher than a year earlier, at 69.3 million, according to a Nielsen Online analysis of newspaper sites for the newspaper association. They also point to other factors for the decline, including the economic downturn and the continued flight of classified advertisers away from papers and their sites.

But the advertising glut, particularly in display advertising, on which companies had based their optimistic projections, has shrunk. As newspapers keep adding pages, they are forced to sell ads at cut-rate prices.

Large papers like The Washington Post or The New York Times can sell premium ad space on, for example, a newspaper’s home page, for $15 to $50 for every thousand impressions. But these and other papers of all sizes have increasingly relied on middlemen — known as ad networks — to sell less desirable space, typically for around $1 for every thousand impressions. The networks usually charge advertisers double that or higher, industry insiders said.

While some publishers rely on ad networks, others are devising strategies to avoid them. With networks, “unwittingly, I think, the publishers commoditize their own inventory,” said Paul Iaffaldano, the general manager of the TWC Media Solutions Group, which sells ads for the Weather Channel and Weather.com.

A recent study from Bain & Company and the Interactive Advertising Bureau examining seven high-end publishers (their names were not disclosed) found that about 53 percent of the ad space on newspaper sites went unsold without networks last year, up from 50 percent in 2006.

Given the choice of showing an ad-free page and making no money, or using an ad network and making a few cents, many publishers choose networks. In 2007, 30 percent of the ad spaces sold on their sites came from networks, up from 5 percent in 2006, according to the Bain study.

“If we sold every scrap of inventory, we wouldn’t use ad networks, but right now it makes some sense for us,” said Jeff Webber, the publisher of USAToday.com. At Gannett, which owns USAToday.com, online revenue in the United States rose a modest 3 percent in the second quarter. Results from other chains have been grimmer. In the second quarter, online revenue dropped about 12 percent at A. H. Belo, 8 percent at E. W. Scrippsnewspapers, 4 percent at the Tribune Company, and 9 percent at Lee Enterprises, all compared with the same period last year.

Denise Warren, the chief advertising officer of The New York Times Media Group, saidNYTimes.com used ad networks despite some concerns. She said they were useful when traffic spiked; this September, for example, the financial crisis spurred lots of page views.

“We couldn’t sell that inventory because we didn’t know it was going to exist, so if we have an ad network we’re able to have all those extra C.P.M.’s,” she said, using the industry term for cost per thousand impressions.

At The New York Times Company, online revenue grew a healthy 13 percent in the second quarter. More recent figures indicate sluggishness at the company’s newspaper sites, however. At The Times’s News Media Group, which includes newspaper sites like The Boston Globe, The New York Times and regional newspapers, online revenue grew only 0.9 percent in July and 7.9 percent in August, well below the usual double-digit growth.

Ms. Warren said that the two months were anomalies, adding that growth in display advertising at NYTimes.com alone had been much higher, though she declined to specify a figure.

As for the new blogs and video, “those investments will definitely add to advertising revenue,” she said, but “those things are just getting started right now.”

Steve Stup, the vice president for sales at Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive, said he began using networks this year only because the site had unpredictable traffic because of the elections. He said some advertisers might start to see networks as an inexpensive substitute for dealing with papers directly.

“It’s still a situation where if advertisers even perceive they can reach your audience, they might be inclined to go with a network, and that’s a concern I have with networks,” he said.

This has meant a spurt in networks, which are popular with marketers looking for direct response, like eBay and E*Trade. There are now more than 300 networks, most offering custom ads, and they are popular venture-capital investments and acquisition targets. Last year, Microsoft bought the network DRIVEpm, Yahoo bought Blue Lithium, and AOLbought Tacoda.

“The ad networks have actually been using the presence of publisher inventories as part of their selling story to ad buyers,” said John Frelinghuysen, a partner in Bain’s media practice. Many publishers join only the networks that do not disclose what sites they include, but even so, savvy advertisers can guess.

In response to the downturn, some publishers are exploring a larger, counterintuitive strategy: instead of creating more ad space, they are limiting it.

“We’re going to reduce the number of ad sizes we use and the number of units,” said Christian Hendricks, the vice president for interactive media at McClatchy. “It is a case where yeah, you could probably sell another advertiser by creating another ad space,” but that could hurt the revenue over all, he said. Online revenue at McClatchy rose 12.5 percent in the second quarter; a year earlier, revenue dropped 2.2 percent.

McClatchy also tries to avoid ad networks. “We don’t want to get in the habit of filling every little space we have with remnant,” Mr. Hendricks said.

Mr. Frelinghuysen said limiting the ads on a page can be smart. “That high level of unsold inventory often creates a real challenge in terms of sustaining pricing or growing pricing,” he said. “In most media, especially in television, the traditional model has been that you drive sellout, and that gives you the ability to drive pricing over time.”

Some sites unaffiliated with newspapers have also limited inventory and banned ad networks, and many report good results.

Weather.com limits its ad spaces so it can sell out each day, and it does not use ad networks, Mr. Iaffaldano said. Prices there have increased 10 to 15 percent over last year, he said.

Forbes.com stopped using ad networks this year, as did ESPN.com and CNN and other Turner sites. (Turner and Forbes then created their own networks, which they say are different from the remnant networks because they focus on narrow subjects.)

“As more and more sites like ourselves forsake networks and are public about it, the ability for the agency to think for themselves, or even suggest to a client, that they’re going to get quality impressions, will get harder and harder,” said Jim Spanfeller, the chief executive of Forbes.com.

At CNN.com, where display advertising rose 17 percent in the second quarter, the site does not use networks and limits space.

“We want to get as much value for our product as possible, and that means not having an endless supply of inventory,” said Greg D’Alba, the executive vice president and chief operating officer of CNN Advertising Sales.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/13/business/media/13adco.html?ei=5070&emc=eta-1&pagewanted=all

New Chart: Top Tactics to Boost Online Ad Response Rates

SUMMARY: Different design tactics can boost the response rates to your online advertising. Results for the third chart in this four-part series focus on seven top design tactics.
Click for Sherpa analysis

University of Phoenix Catches 4.7 Billion Web Looks in June

According to the most recent comScore, Inc. ranking of the top online display ad publishers and advertisers, Fox Interactive Media, as the top display ad publisher got 15.9 percent of all display ads viewed, while Microsoft was the top display advertiser with 1.7 percent of total views. Experian gets the most unique visitors with 138 million.

And, Forrester projects that of the $8.2 billion, retailers will spend this year on online marketing, just over a third, $2.78 billion, will be spent on display advertising. Search engine marketing leads the way with $3.63 billion and e-mail marketing is third at $1.25 billion. Forrester projects retailer spending on online display ads will grow at an annual rate of 20% through 2012 when it will reach $4.99 billion.

Fox Interactive Media served 52.3 billion ad views, with MySpace.com accounting for 51 billion of these views. Yahoo! Sites reached 130 million unique individuals with its ads, reaching more people than any other publisher. AOL LLC ranked third, followed by Microsoft Sites, and Google.

 

Microsoft was the top display advertiser with 5.5 billion display ad views, due in large part to its promotional campaign for Windows Live Search, including ads for Windows Live Search Club games and the new Windows Live Search cashback program. The University of Phoenix, an online university, ranked second, followed by Experian which advertises for a variety of sites including LowerMyBills.com and FreeCreditReport.com.

For additional information, please visit comScore here

Top 5 Legitimate SEO Techniques That Will Help Your Business Get Found

by Mike Volpe

Published on August 19, 2008

People have not stopped buying things, so how are they researching and purchasing products since they have made themselves immune to old marketing techniques like banner ads and direct mail?

The answer is with search engines and Google. According to comScore, Americans conducted 11.5 billion searches in June 2008, and Google was used for 61.5% of those searches.

This means it is essential that you make it easy for customers to find you, and one of the most effective ways to do so is search engine optimization (SEO), which focuses on getting your Web site listed in the unpaid, organic search engine results.

Organic listings generate visitors to your site. Moreover, with SEO, you don't pay a per-click "tax" to the search engines, so it usually has a higher ROI than paid-search listings. Finally, if you do SEO right, it can be a competitive advantage, unlike paid search, because anyone can increase their keyword bid to beat you out.

How do you actually get your Web site ranked high in search engines? The answer is quite simple, but getting there can be a bit more difficult.

Search engines use two broad categories of factors to decide which site shows up first in search results:

1. On-page SEO factors are all the things that happen on your Web page. The good part is that you have complete control over these things. The bad part is they are only about 25% of the reason you will rank for a search term.
2. Off-page SEO factors are things that happen outside your direct control but are roughly 75% of the reason you rank for a given search. The most important off-Page SEO factor is the number and quality of links into your Web site. Search engines use links as a measure of how interesting your content is, since more interesting content tends to get more links. Search engines also regard links from more-established Web sites as more important than links from less-trustworthy Web sites.

With those basics in mind, here are five useful tips to help guide you through your SEO strategy.

1. Pick good page titles

The page title of each Web page is the most important on-page SEO factor. The page title is the text that appears in the top bar of your browser window and is the first thing a search engine looks at to determine what the page is about.

For instance, the page title of the MarketingProfs home page is "MarketingProfs - Marketing Resources for Marketing Professionals." It does a good job telling search engines about that page, using keywords relevant to the target audience.

The other smart thing Marketing Profs does is that the page title is different on each page of the Web site. Just as in the case of a lottery, you don't bet the same number over and over for the same drawing; you want to use each page of your Web site as a different entry into the SEO lottery, and a unique page title is how to do that.

2. Be smart about URLs

Your URL is how search engines track and manage your company's reputation online. Using a free URL that actually belongs to another company is a bad idea in the world of SEO because you can never change or forward that URL. Using URLs like yourcompany.blogspot.com make it possible for you to build SEO power for blogspot.com, but if you ever want to move or rename your Web site, you have to leave all that power back at the old Web site.

If you have your own domain, like yourcompany.com, then you can always move to a new address and forward all the SEO power you have built up.

3. Start a blog

Blogging does two great things that are a huge help with SEO.

First, if you run a blog correctly, you are updating content on a frequent basis. Search engines love fresh content on Web sites. Web pages or articles that have been published recently on an established Web site get an extra boost in the rankings. The second benefit of blogging is that blogs are a magnet for links. The people who do the most linking online are bloggers and writers. They are much more likely to link to an interesting blog article with a unique perspective on an issue than a typical corporate Web site.

If you start a blog and regularly post content that is appealing to your market, you will help your SEO efforts a lot.

4. Leverage your PR program

If you have a public relations program at your company, there are two things you need to do for SEO. First, you should optimize all of your press releases. This basically means adding links into your press releases that lead back to your Web site. Second, as you get coverage of your company in online publications, make sure that there is link within the article back to your company. You would be surprised how many journalists do not automatically link to companies they write about.

For bonus points, for your links in press releases and media coverage, use hyperlinked text with keywords relevant to your business as the link, not just the URL. The search engines key off of these keywords for added clues about the topic of your Web site. For example: you want a link like marketing resources, not http://www.marketingprofs.com.

5. Use social media to build links

Many marketers are scared of social media. The trick is to think of it just as an online version of all the business cocktail parties you have attended over the years. And just like at a cocktail party, with social media you should never enter the conversation with a sales pitch. But social media is an excellent way to promote your interesting blog articles or other content, because other bloggers and writers might write about your company and link back to your content. Find online communities, groups, blogs, and networks where your audience hangs out, and start listening and asking questions.

 

http://www.marketingprofs.com/8/five-legitimate-seo-tactics-that-help-businesses-get-found-volpe.asp?sp=1

The Latest SEO Trends and Metrics: What's Hot, What's Not

by Stephan Spencer

Published on August 19, 2008

If you're not "living and breathing" search engine optimization, it can be easy to latch onto old SEO trends and metrics and focus obsessively on them, especially those few hot-button issues that get the most attention from the press or from your CEO.

It takes time and experience to stay on the cutting edge of SEO, and more than likely you don't have that kind of time, considering your other marketing efforts. So here's a quick update on what's hot and what's not in the world of search engine optimization.

What's hot:

• Becoming a trusted contributor on social news/content sites like Digg, Propeller, Reddit, Mixx, StumbleUpon, Wikipedia, and Knol
• Building your personal and professional network in online communities like Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, Flickr, YouTube, Bebo, MyBlogRoll, and the blogosphere in general, and then taking advantage of the residual network effect
• Link baiting—posting humorous/fascinating/contentious/controversial content that is a magnet for links
• Truly understanding and leveraging the power of "Long Tail" dynamics

What's not:

• Obsessively watching search engine indexation numbers and rankings on trophy keywords (like the one you know the CEO always checks first thing in the morning)
• Worrying yourself sick over duplicate-content penalties
• Relying on XML sitemaps to fix your indexation problems
• The old-fashioned link exchange

Speaking of what's hot, a new generation of SEO metrics exists so you can keep track of your progress once you've abandoned the old thinking and adopted more modern strategies. Gauging your success solely on your positions in the search engine results is old hat.

New SEO paradigms, such as the "Long Tail," universal search, and personalized search, call for new key performance indicators (KPIs).

In addressing "Long Tail SEO," consider the following KPIs:

Brand-to-Nonbrand Ratio

This is the percentage of your natural search traffic that comes from brand keywords versus nonbrand keywords. If the ratio is high and most of your traffic is coming from searches for your brand name, this means that your SEO efforts are fundamentally broken. The lower the ratio, the more of the long tail of natural search you are likely capturing. This metric is an excellent gauge of the success of your optimization initiatives.

Unique Pages

This is the number of unique (non-duplicate) Web pages crawled by search engine spiders such as Googlebot. Your Web site is your virtual sales force, bringing in prospects from search engines, and each unique page is one of your virtual salespeople. The more unique pages you have, the more virtual salespeople you have out there in the engines selling on your behalf.

Page Yield

This is the percentage of unique pages that yield search-delivered traffic in a given month. This ratio essentially is a key driver of the length of your Long Tail of natural search. The more pages that yield traffic from search engines, the healthier your SEO program. If you have only a small portion of your Web site delivering searchers to your door, then most of your pages—your virtual salespeople—are standing around the water cooler instead of working hard for you.

Keyword Yield

This is the average number of keywords each page (minus the ones that don't get you any traffic) yields in a given month. Put another way, it's the ratio of keywords to pages yielding search traffic. The higher your keyword yield, the greater the part of the Long Tail of natural search your site will capture.

In other words, the more keywords each yielding page attracts or targets, the longer your tail. So an average of eight search terms per page indicates pages with much broader appeal to the engines than, say, three search terms per page.

In a research study done by my company (Netconcepts) called Chasing the Long Tail of Natural Search, the average merchant had a keyword yield of 2.4 keywords per page.

Visitors per Keyword

This is the ratio of search engine-delivered visitors to search terms. This metric indicates how much traffic each keyword drives and is a function of your rankings in the search engine result pages. Put another way, this metric determines the height or thickness of your Long Tail. The average merchant in the aforementioned study obtained 1.9 visitors per keyword.

Index-to-Crawl Ratio

This is the ratio of pages indexed to unique crawled pages. If a page gets crawled by Googlebot, that doesn't guarantee it will show up in Google's index. A low ratio can mean your site doesn't carry much weight in Google's eyes.

Engine Yield

Calculated for each search engine separately, this is how much traffic the engine delivers for every page it crawls. Each search engine has a different audience size. This metric helps you fairly compare the referral traffic you get from each engine. The Netconcepts study found that Live Search and Yahoo tended to crawl significantly more pages, but the yield per crawled page from Google was typically higher by a significant margin.

Summary

Hopefully you're now more up-to-date on your SEO tactics, but keep in mind that any of these trends can change at the drop of a hat. Search engine optimization is a process, not a project, so as you optimize your site through multiple iterations, watch the above-mentioned KPIs to ensure you're heading in the right direction. Marketers who are not privy to these metrics will have a much harder time reaching qualified prospects.

If you'd like to hear more about these search trends and metrics, attend the Marketing Profs Digital Mixer, a multi-channel online marketing conference coming up in October. Stephan is program chair for the search marketing track. Check out the full program.

 

http://www.marketingprofs.com/8/latest-seo-trends-tactics-spencer.asp?sp=1

Online Behavior of Older Americans Mirroring Younger Users’, Even Teens’

Some 76% of Americans over age 50 say the internet is an important source of information for them - up from just 51% five years earlier - according to findings from AARP and the Center for the Digital Future at the USC Annenberg School for Communication.

The research, which is part of the larger Digital Future Project, also finds that Older Americans have embraced Web 2.0 and often use the web and several forms of social media as much or more than their younger, more tech-savvy counterparts.

Though instant messaging and video downloading still remain more popular with a younger crowd, older Americans check the internet for news more frequently than younger users and are logging onto online communities, researching purchases becoming socially active and playing games in increasing numbers.

Key findings:

• Users 50+ go online more frequently to check for news than those under 20. Some 42% of consumers over 50 check the web for news daily or several times a day, compared with just 18% of users under 20:

• Among internet users 50+ who are members of online communities, 58% log in to their online community daily or several times a day, compared with 47% of members under 20:

• 36% of members 50 and older say their social activism has increased since they began participating in online communities for social causes, compared with 29% of members under 20.
• 18% of users 50+ say they go online daily or several times a day to play games, compared with 22 % of users under 50:

• 68% of users 50+ say they sometimes or often browse in retail stores and then buy online, compared with 72% of users under 50. Users in both the 50+ and the under-50 groups have similar online shopping habits:

• 46% of users under 50 say the internet is important or very important in maintaining their social relationships - identical to the percentage for those over 70 (though that’s not the case for cell phones):

• More users under 20 than those over 50 (85% vs. 76%) say the internet is an important or very important source of information. However, the percentage of those over 50 who say so has grown substantially from 2002 to 2007 - up from slightly more than half (51%).
• Only 9% of users 50+ said instant messaging was important or very important, compared with 48% of users under 20.

“The perception is that Americans over 50 only dabble on the internet, but we are finding that they are increasingly spending time online becoming involved in robust internet activities, such as online communities,” said Jeffrey I. Cole, director of the Center for the Digital Future at the USC Annenberg School for Communication. “In specific areas, there is often little difference in use of online technology between older users and some of the youngest users.”

About the research: The Center for the Digital Future at the USC Annenberg School for Communication created and manages the World Internet Project, including the Digital Future Project, which produces a broad year-to-year exploration of the influence of the internet and online technology on Americans. Since 2000, the project has examined and compared the behavior and views of internet users and non-users.

http://www.marketingcharts.com/interactive/online-behavior-of-older-americans-mirroring-younger-users-even-teens-5175/?camp=newsletter&src=mc&type=textlink

Lazy Eyes - How we read online.

By Michael Agger
Posted Friday, June 13, 2008, at 1:00 PM ET

 

You're probably going to read this.

It's a short paragraph at the top of the page. It's surrounded by white space. It's in small type.

To really get your attention, I should write like this:

• Bulleted list
• Occasional use of bold to prevent skimming
• Short sentence fragments
• Explanatory subheads
• No puns
• Did I mention lists?

What Is This Article About?
For the past month, I've been away from the computer screen. Now I'm back reading on it many hours a day. Which got me thinking: How do we read online?

It's a Jungle Out There
That's Jakob Nielsen's theory. He's a usability expert who writes an influential biweekly column on such topics as eye-tracking research, Web design errors, and banner blindness. (Links, btw, give a text more authority, making you more likely to stick around.)

Nielsen champions the idea of information foraging. Humans are informavores. On the Internet, we hunt for facts. In earlier days, when switching between sites was time-consuming, we tended to stay in one place and dig. Now we assess a site quickly, looking for an "information scent." We move on if there doesn't seem to be any food around.

Sorry about the long paragraph. (Eye-tracking studies show that online readers tend to skip large blocks of text.)

Also, I'm probably forcing you to scroll at this point. Losing some incredible percentage of readers. Bye. Have fun on Facebook.

Screens vs. Paper
What about the physical process of reading on a screen? How does that compare to paper?

When you look at early research, it's fascinating to see that even in the days of green phosphorus monitors, studies found that there wasn't a huge difference in speed and comprehension between reading on-screen and reading on paper. Paper was the clear winner only when test subjects were asked to skim the text.

The studies are not definitive, however, given all the factors that can affect online reading, such as scrolling, font size, user expertise, etc. Nielsen holds that on-screen reading is 25 percent slower than reading on paper. Even so, experts agree on what you can do to make screen reading more comfortable:

• Choose a default font designed for screen reading; e.g., Verdana, Trebuchet, Georgia.
• Rest your eyes for 10 minutes every 30 minutes.
• Get a good monitor. Don't make it too bright or have it too close to your eyes.
• Minimize reflections.
• Skip long lines of text, which promote fatigue.
• Avoid MySpace.

Back to the Jungle
Nielsen's apt description of the online reader: "[U]sers are selfish, lazy, and ruthless." You, my dear user, pluck the low-hanging fruit. When you arrive on a page, you don't actually deign to read it. You scan. If you don't see what you need, you're gone.

And it's not you who has to change. It's me, the writer:

• One idea per paragraph
• Half the word count of "conventional writing"! (Ouch!)
• Other stuff along these lines

Nielsen often sounds like a cross between E.B. White and the Terminator. Here's his advice in a column titled "Long vs. Short Articles as Content Strategy": "A good editor should be able to cut 40 percent of the word count while removing only 30 percent of an article's value. After all, the cuts should target the least valuable information."

[Ed. Note: Fascinating asides about the writer's voice, idiosyncrasies, and fragile ego were cut here.]

He's Right
I kid about Nielsen, but he's very sensible. We're active participants on the Web, looking for information and diversion. It's natural that people prefer short articles. As Nielsen states, motivated readers who want to know everything about a subject (i.e., parents trying to get their kid into a New York preschool) will read long treatises with semicolons, but the rest of us are snacking. His advice: Embrace hypertext. Keep things short for the masses, but offer links for the Type A's.

No Blogs, Though
Nielsen may be ruthless about brevity, but he doesn't advocate blogging. Here's his logic: "Such postings are good for generating controversy and short-term traffic, and they're definitely easier to write. But they don't build sustainable value."

That's a debatable point. My experience has been that a thoughtful blogger who tags his posts can cover a subject well. But Nielsen's idea is that people will read (and maybe even pay) for expertise that they can't find anywhere else. If you want to beat the Internet, you're not going to do it by blogging (since even OK thinkers occasionally write a great blog post) but by offering a comprehensive take on a subject (thus saving the reader time from searching many sites) and supplying original thinking (offering trusted insight that cannot be easily duplicated by the nonexpert).

Like a lot of what Nielsen says, this is both obvious and thoughtful.

Ludic Reading
Nielsen focuses on how to hold people's attention to convey information. He's not overly concerned with pleasure reading.

Pleasure reading is also known as "ludic reading." Victor Nell has studied pleasure reading (PDF). Two fascinating notions:

• When we like a text, we read more slowly.
• When we're really engaged in a text, it's like being in an effortless trance.

Ludic reading can be achieved on the Web, but the environment works against you. Read a nice sentence, get dinged by IM, never return to the story again.

I suppose ludic readers would be the little sloths hiding in the jungle while everyone else is out rampaging around for fresh meat.

Final Unnecessary Thought
We'll do more and more reading on screens, but they won't replace paper—never mind what your friend with a Kindle tells you. Rather, paper seems to be the new Prozac. A balm for the distracted mind. It's contained, offline, tactile. William Powers writes about this elegantly in his essay "Hamlet's BlackBerry: Why Paper Is Eternal." He describes the white stuff as "a still point, an anchor for the consciousness."

Source: Slate.com

Embedded Video Lifts Conversion Rate 50%: 5 Steps to Test Deliverability & Subject Line

SUMMARY: Videos embedded in email can grab attention or cause deliverability problems and rendering nightmares. Most marketers believe the latter, but a few say their data speak otherwise.
See how a marketer increased conversions more than 50% by embedding video in emails. Includes deliverability and subject line test data. Plus, what’s the best video length to use.

 

CHALLENGE
Conversion rates on email campaigns for a UK entertainment brand hit a plateau late last year. Carolyn Jacquest, Online Marketing Executive, Haven Holidays, and her team didn’t take the news lightly.
“We wanted something new and exciting that would bring the Haven experience to life,” Jacquest says of the amusement park and family resort. “We wanted to show what we had to offer visually.”
They particularly wanted to shake things up before the all-important summer season began. Enter the idea of stimulating conversion rates with videos embedded in the email message body – considered a no-no by some email experts.
CAMPAIGN
Jacquest and her team’s concept was emboldened by data found in MarketingSherpa’s Email Benchmark Guide 2008. It indicates that online consumers react positively to video, with in-stream video ads getting clickthrough rates nearly twice those of static images.
Haven’s email service provider also convinced Jacquest that, with the right preparation, an embedded video can be delivered successfully and catch people’s attention. Here are the five steps they took:
-> Step #1. Improve reputation
The first thing Jacquest and her team did was work to improve their sender reputation. Indeed, the idea of sending videos in emails almost begins and ends with deliverability concerns.
This boiled down to *regularly* observing one best practice – routinely scrubbing their list to get rid of addresses that were bouncing in the months leading up to the test.
-> Step #2. Produce video
The creative process began with Jacquest and her team deciding to produce a 5-minute video that could be edited down to the most appropriate size for an email. Then, they focused on the content, which revolved around the parks’ amenities.
“We focused on entertainment and the varied activities that can be experienced. Things like our indoor and outdoor pools, our live bands, pantomimes for the children, etc.”
-> Step #3. Test video clip size
Working with the promo video, Jacquest and her team tested the length to eliminate two problems:
o File size that email systems wouldn’t bounce
o Download that wouldn’t take forever for recipients to receive
To discover the optimal length, they sent clip sizes to the in-house accounts for their UK-based audience’s 10 most-popular Web mail providers or receivers. “We did weeks of testing before sending the campaign.”
The receivers they tested:
- Outlook 2003
- Outlook 2000
- Outlook Explorer
- Hotmail
- Yahoo!
- AOL Webmail
- Virgin
- NTL World
- Tiscali
- Gmail
From the test results, they learned that clips at 20 seconds were optimal for deliverability. That also gave their audience something to chew on. The 5-minute clip was edited to 20 seconds – or 1 megabyte in file size.
“The length had to do with how much the email could hold. A longer clip would have affected deliverability. Additionally, we wanted to be informative and snappy in the marketing message.”
-> Step #4. Create test design
They picked an Easter holiday email for the test. At the top of the HTML design appeared the copy in blue type: “Fun Filled Easter at Haven!” Just below this was a four-buttoned navigation bar. The copy, “Come and enjoy the Best Easter Holiday ever,” appeared in a white font.
A 320x180-pixel video box appeared when the video automatically started rolling inside the preview pane when the message was opened.
They knew that the video was going to go unseen for some users no matter what they did in testing. For instance, Gmail users who didn’t have HTML images turned on simply did not see the video automatically roll in the message.
Jacquest accounted for those types of situations by including a link to a microsite where a 60-second version of the clip could be seen. The email copy for the link read: “If you can’t see our video … Click here.”
-> Step #5. A/B test subject lines
Jacquest and her team also tested the word “video” in the subject line – even if the copy got a bit long. “I normally try to keep subject lines’ characters under 45,” she says.
Here are the two subject lines they tested:
#1. “Picture yourself at Haven this Easter, watch our video now” (58 characters with spaces)
#2. “Come and enjoy the Best Easter Holiday ever!” (45 characters with spaces)

RESULTS
Plain and simple – embedding a video in emails worked. The Easter campaign become a smash hit with a 3.38% conversion rate – 50.2% higher than previous non-video campaigns. “Our average conversion rates were ranging between 2% to 2.5%,” Jacquest says. “So, the 3.38% was great, exceeded our expectations and was an ROI winner.”
Although Jacquest and her team weren’t able to track how many of those ticket buyers viewed the email in the body vs. on the microsite, they were thrilled to see conversions rise significantly.
Another point of great importance was the fact that the 20-second clip got through to inboxes with a deliverability rate of 96%. It showed that, if done correctly with attention placed upon sender reputation and thorough testing, video can work in the body of the message. Clickthroughs also were a healthy 27%.
Jacquest’s hunch on subject lines was dead-on as well. Including the word “video” had a big impact – a 14.6% boost for opens. “I think people are interested in video, and it’s not something you see very often in an email. It’s become more common at websites, but to have it open within your email message can have a strong impact on the recipient.”
In the subject line test, the word video didn’t trip email filters. Both subject lines produced the same deliverability rate: 96%.
Another key lesson learned from their test: Even if the video doesn’t roll in the email body, it appears to create enough intrigue to induce clickthroughs to the clip.

Useful links related to this article
Creative samples from Haven Holiday’s email campaign:
http://www.marketingsherpa.com/cs/havenholidays/study.h
ml
Red Eye International - Haven Holiday’s ESP and video technology provider:
http://redeye.com/
Haven Holidays:
http://www.havenholidays.com/

http://www.marketingsherpa.com/article.php?ident=30655&pop=no#

Five Ways to Make SEO Work for You

How much attention do you pay to search engine optimization? Many marketers give it short shrift, not understanding that it can be the difference between success and failure.

Here are five tips that will help you put SEO to work for you.

1. Develop good, high-quality content. Before you pull visitors into your site through SEO, you should first have a foundation of first-rate content that has relevant benefit to your visitors. Implementing SEO practices before making your site a useful stop for consumers means they will likely leave just as quickly as they came.

2. Use searchable, rational keywords. Now that the foundation is laid, you need to have the right amount of keyword density. First of all, remember to not put too many keywords onto your Web pages, as some search engines will label your site as spam for having too many. Five% or less keyword density is a good amount.

To build up your keyword density, replace generic terms with keywords specific to your industry. For example, Avidian’s homepage contains the header “Compare CRM Software” rather than a more generic phrase such as “Compare Competitors.” This helps get the right message to customers and search engines alike.

3. Build relevant external links. Getting other influential Web sites to link back to you can equate to as much as 70% of your SEO efforts.

Here are a few current best practices when building external links:

· Relevant content: Develop articles and other content that others will want to display and link to on their sites.

· Pay for it: Serve as a sponsor on an applicable site.

· Say please: Ask nicely and hopefully they will link to your site because they want to support you.

4. Build relevant internal links. Building relevant internal links is a much easier process yet it is still important. Including numerous internal links on all of your Web pages to other places on your site is essentially giving search engines suggestions of the most important pages on your site.

When building internal links you should keep these tips in mind:

· Use HTML for inbound links: Search engines don’t like Flash and Java, stick with HTML links.

· Link from your most important pages: Search engines give more credence to links on home pages.

· Link to pages using relevant keywords: Consider what you are using for your anchor text. For example, rather than saying, “For more information, click here,” place the link within a sentence containing the name of the product.

5. Track and review your data to continuously improve. In order to continually improve your SEO processes, you need to understand the consumer behavior on your site. At Avidian, we’re constantly looking at what keywords are bringing people to us, where the traffic is coming from, what pages they are visiting and what actions they are taking. This helps us determine how we can further improve our SEO efforts.

http://chiefmarketer.com/online_marketing/search/seo_0617/

Search Engine Optimizing a crap-filled site just makes it a little less crappy

People often ask me about search engine optimization. In particular, many ask what search engine marketing techniques they can use on their site to "get high rankings."

Inevitably with most of these requests, I find that the site that they want optimized sucks. It's poorly written. It goes on and on in an egotistical way about what the company's products do. It's filled with gobbledygook.

I tell these people that they need to understand buyers and create some great content that people want to consume. That way, they will get high rankings as the search engine algorithms reward the great content.

Usually I get pushback. People say they just want to an agency to "tweak our existing Web pages."

"Sorry," I say. "Search Engine Optimizing a crap-filled site just makes it less crappy." And I go on to give examples of how valuable Web content drives high rankings.

I’m amazed by how some interesting content (a blog post, an ebook, or a web page) can generate high rankings for a tiny company, way above the big famous organizations.

Consider these examples from my own efforts:

A few months ago, I did a blog post about my participation at the Milken institute global conference. This is a big event (over 3,000 people attend), it has been going on for more than a decade, is covered by the business TV networks like FOX Business and Bloomberg as well as dozens of magazines and newspapers, and speakers include Nobel prize winners. This year Arnold Schwarzenegger and Google CEO Eric Schmidt were some of the speakers. Yet my little blog post is on the top page of the search results for the phrase Milken institute global conference.

Early this year I published The New Rules of Viral Marketing ebook. Prior to putting out the ebook, my site and blog were ranked way down in the results for the phrase viral marketing. Now, because of an ebook that has been downloaded 150,000 times, my site and my blog are ranked numbers 11 & 13 out of 4.8 million hits.

http://www.webinknow.com/2008/06/search-engine-o.html

Newspaper Ads Help Drive Consumers to the Web

Some 44% of people who saw a product or service advertised in a newspaper in the past month researched it - and two-thirds (67%) of that group went online to find more information, according to a Google-commissioned survey from Clark, Martire & Bartolomeo.

The survey of 1,003 search-engine-using adults who also read newspapers (an estimated 82 million people in the US) finds that among those who go online to research a product, nearly half (47%) go directly to a product URL, 31% go to a search engine, and 22% go to another site:

Some additional findings from the study, below.

Effect on Purchasing

Some 42% of respondents reported that in the last month they purchased at least one product they had seen in the newspaper.

Most of them (83%) purchased at least one thing from a store or dealer; the second most common purchase venue was online (38%):

Among those who go online after seeing ads in newspapers, nearly 70% make purchases following their additional research.

Multi-channel Ads Increase Trust/Likelihood to Buy

Seeing products and services advertised in multiple channels increased both consumer trust in them and likelihood to buy.

Nearly half of respondents (48%) said seeing a product in the newspaper after seeing it online would make them trust the product more. More than half that group (52%) said they would be more likely to purchase the product if they saw a newspaper ad for a product they already knew about from the internet.

When rating which media are better for different functions, respondents considered the newspaper more useful for learning about promotions (68% - vs. 42% for the internet) and deciding where (54% v. 45%) and when (43% v. 30%) to buy:

http://www.marketingcharts.com/direct/newspaper-ads-help-drive-consumers-to-the-web-4931/?camp=newsletter&src=mc&type=textlink

How-To: 7 Tactics for Getting Online Readers to Stick

This article was written by CEO Nate Whitehill of Unique Blog Designs. It works best for those seeking to build brands through blogging, but is also adaptable to companies wishing to maximize their online content development.

Here are seven tried and tested methods to get visitors to become regular readers, be it through RSS subscriptions or simply by reading a good amount of posts. All of these methods, used in conjunction, tripled my RSS subscriber count in April.

A note on traffic.

"Steroid traffic" is a term I coined to mean quick surges of traffic that don’t necessarily average more than 1.1 pageviews per visitor. It has short-term benefits and the visitors rarely stick around.

In contrast, natural traffic — traffic from search engines or referrals — averages well over 2.0 pageviews per visitor and generally become repeat visitors. This piece focuses on generating natural traffic.

1. Use a highly visible Feed Button. Make sure you have a BIG RSS button near the top of your site and also in your sidebar. If you need Feed Icons, check out FeedIcons.com, which has a downloadable package of customizable ones.

2. Include this magic sentence after each post. As soon as I modified my template to include the following sentence after each post, I saw RSS subscribers go up significantly. The magic line is, "If you enjoyed this post, then make sure you subscribe to my RSS Feed." You can use a derivative of that, but anytime someone finishes reading a post you wrote, that option will be presented directly in front of them.

3. Install this plugin. Anytime someone finishes reading an article, what do they do? They either leave a comment, leave your site, or read another article. How do you get them to read another article? Install the Related Posts plugin. I have it set to display 7 other related posts readers might be interested in. As soon as I installed that plugin, I saw my P/V ratio (pageviews per visitor) go way up.

4. Ask questions.install a poll and ask a question which will benefit you, such as, “what do you want to see more of on this blog?” I used the answers to that question to help further define the focus of my blog.

5. Offer a full feed RSS. RSS, also known as Really Simple Syndication, is a popular way to read blogs and stay up to stay on multiple news sources. If you offer a full feed RSS and do not cut off your posts (in your RSS feeds), you will definitely see readership increase. You may have to sacrifice readers visiting your site to read an article, but the goal is to build readership for the long term. If they want to leave a comment, they will have to visit your blog anyway.

6. Be highly reachable. I use a plugin called Comment Relish to send an email to every new visitor who leaves a comment. In this email, I include all my instant messenger (skype, aim, msn gtalk) usernames and encourage them to contact me about anything.

7. Host a contest. Contests are a great way to give back to readers and encourage community participation. I just finished hosting my first contest and it was a great success. I saw a ton of new visitors and a met some new people. Try to make the contests somewhat interesting and encourage people to talk about it.

Those methods have helped my blog increase its traffic, RSS subscribers, and overall reader interaction significantly over the past few months. You can see the percentage of repeat visitors by monitoring the repeat visitor rate in your stats software. (Generally, anything over 50% of considered a good repeat visitor rate.)

What other methods have you used to get visitors to stick around on your blog?

If you're a personal blogger, it can be beneficial to have a home affiliate business; banner advertising on its own can generate money for the webmaster. But it is essential that one know how to operate this business. To do so there are training programs which can help you learn new skills, such as Microsoft training.

Besides that, SEO techniques should be implemented to increase site traffic. Constant changes need to be made to keep users up-to-date; use a broadband connection for fast updating. The domain name itself should specify what the site is about. Finally, it's smart to go for hosting services which provide free site hosting to save money.

http://www.marketingvox.com/how-to-7-tactics-for-getting-online-readers-to-stick-039155/?camp=newsletter&src=mv&type=textlink

How School Doubled Enrollment With Multichannel & Lead Nurturing Program

SUMMARY: Prospects for your products and services can come from anywhere and show up at almost any time. But how do you get those leads in the first place and keep them “warm” once they’re in the pipeline?
See how a school’s marketing team doubled enrollment with a nurturing campaign that included targeted online advertising, search, telemarketing and email.

CHALLENGE
Adult distance learners are a difficult demographic for colleges to attract. It’s not like targeting high school students within a certain radius and knowing that many of them will be interested in you simply because of your location.
Ronald Kennedy faced this dilemma when he became Executive Director, Distance Learning and Graduate Studies, Liberty University, about 2 1/2 years ago. He was charged with increasing the college’s distance learner enrollment, which was about 12,000 students when he took over. At Liberty, adult and distance learners are almost one and the same -- 60% to 70% are 30 to 45 years old.
Adult distance learners also can enroll at almost any time, unlike traditional college students who typically start in the fall. And there’s plenty of competition from colleges like The University of Phoenix, which offers courses to working adults online and in local learning centers nationwide.
“It’s a very competitive field out there going after the adult learner,” says Kennedy.
CAMPAIGN
Kennedy and his team devised a strategy that focused heavily on online ads, interactive lead generation and Liberty’s brand identity to attract adult distance learners and keep them interested as prospects.
Here are the seven steps they followed:
-> Step #1. Analyze demographics of each degree program
Kennedy and his team first conducted a detailed demographic analysis of each of the college’s more than 35 distance learning degree programs.
They compiled this data by:
o Extracting the student profiles of each degree program
o Breaking down profiles by gender, age, household income, etc.
o Matching the demographics to websites for targeted advertising
“We get a lot of traffic that we can’t effectively source back to any particular channel,” Kennedy says. “That relates directly to our strong brand identity.”
-> Step #2. Leverage existing brand
Next, they took advantage of the school’s reputation for having one of the oldest distance learning programs. The team also leveraged the college’s conservative faith-based approach to education in their messages to stand out from secular schools offering online courses.
-> Step #3. Target online ads to matched websites
Kennedy and his team ran banner ads primarily on two types of sites:
o Ones that appealed to the demographics of Liberty’s online degree programs
o Ones that affiliated with education, specifically online education
“We’re targeting a student who is potentially going to take classes online, so there’s already an affinity that they live online.”
An example of matching demographics to degree: They advertised the school’s seminary degree program -- with a 95% male demographic -- on sites that appealed to Christian men.
-> Step #4. Qualify the leads
Prospects who clicked on the banner ads were directed to a landing page with a form containing qualifying questions to weed out those who weren’t a good fit. “On the back end, we do append some information to the lead to try to tell us internally who’s most likely to convert more than others, and we’ll gear our strategy in-house to that,” Kennedy says.
Qualifying these potential students was very important because adult learners are expensive leads to generate and nurture. Adult learners often won’t enroll in an online degree program for up to a year after giving their information to Liberty. This means the team has to spend more money to keep the brand name in front of the lead for extended periods of time and they didn’t want to waste money and internal resources on leads that weren’t going to convert.
-> Step #5. Invest in matching services
Kennedy and his team also spent some of their marketing budget on a service that matched programs with students to develop more qualified leads. Here’s how that worked:
- The service provider used search engine marketing and an extensive keyword campaign to drive traffic to Liberty’s website.
- Then, they collected the demographic and contact information from the leads and matched them with the most compatible degree program at the university.
“We liked the strategic analysis they were willing to provide on the leads we were getting to help optimize and bring in better quality, as well as analysis they did with SEO and purchasing,” Kennedy says.
-> Step #6. Create landing page
Higher quality leads were directed to the landing page, which included a description of the university and information about it being ranked No. 3 on the Online Education Database’s 2008 list of online universities in the United States.
The landing page asked visitors to enter:
o Name
o Address
o Email
o Phone number
o Good time to call
o Degree program of interest
“The easier you make that form, the more leads you’re going to get,” Kennedy says.
As soon as visitors submitted their information, they received an immediate reply email. They also received a telephone call within 15 minutes. This was an extremely important part of the nurturing strategy because “in this business speed wins,” Kennedy says.
That nurturing strategy consisted of three parts:
Part 1. Phone call
Telemarketing calls were the No. 1 method Kennedy and his team used to follow up with qualified leads.
Part 2. Email
Email was second -- and the longest lasting of the three strategies because it was the cheapest.
The emails contained:
o A link back to the school’s distance learning website
o “Real life” situations in the messaging
o Emphasis on the ultimate goal
o Call to action
Instead of just telling adult learners how convenient online classes were, the team described how inconvenient it was to find a baby sitter after work or to fight traffic to take classes on a campus. They juxtaposed that scenario with coming home, making dinner and then working on the computer for a couple of hours to take classes.
The team also invited leads to call or email the university for more information or to chat live with an admissions counselor or academic adviser online from the school’s distance learning site.
Part 3. Direct mail
Direct mail was No. 3. “We try to hit them with all the different communication styles that are available to keep our name and brand in front of them vs. our competitors,” says Kennedy.
-> Step #7. Test, test, test
The team analyzed traffic patterns and continually looked for more effective keywords. They also conducted split tests on creative, including the online ads and landing pages.
Testing was especially important when determining how many qualifying questions they should ask a lead, Kennedy says. The team did split tests between longer, more detailed forms vs. shorter forms.

RESULTS
Enrollment in Liberty’s distance learning program shows the campaign’s overall impact: in 2 1/2 years, Kennedy and his team have seen a 108% increase to more than 25,000 students.
Other results:
o 3% to 5% clickthrough rate on banner ads with targeted audiences
o 0.5% to 1% clickthrough rate on paid search ads
o 2% to 5% clickthrough rate on trade name search
o Higher clickthrough rates on Christian sites vs. secular sites
“I think through doing more target marketing, more demographic type research it’s really paid off in terms of what we’re seeing at the back end as far as enrollments,” Kennedy says.
As for how many questions they should ask a lead, the shorter forms proved to be more successful, Kennedy says. But it was a balancing act. “We’re constantly honing out how many questions we’re asking vs. how many we’re going to have to qualify.”

http://www.marketingsherpa.com/article.php?ident=30632

The long and short of e-mail subject lines

Findings suggest that e-mail open rates rise with subject lines that are between 50 and 80 characters, according to Dela Quist, CEO of Alchemy Worx, London. However, open rates drop to mid-range when the length is 60 or 70 characters, suggesting the subject line either provides too much information or not enough, Quist said in a recent keynote address. MediaPost Communications (5/27) Article below:

Email Analytics Reveal Sweet Spots In Subject-Line Length

by David Goetzl, Tuesday, May 27, 2008 7:00 AM ET

CAPTIVA ISLAND, Fla. -- Email marketing analytics have led Dela Quist, CEO of London shop Alchemy Worx, to discover a sweet spot for how long subject lines should be.

He says open rates climb when the subject lines are in the 50-character range or 80-character range. But, perhaps counterintuitively, they fall in the middle when the length is 60 or 70.

The magnetic Quist gave the keynote address Saturday at MediaPost's Email Insiders Summit conference: "Emailing People Not Lists: Using Customer Based Metrics to Drive Performance Improvement."

Research culled from 250 million messages sent over the past two years, with 660 different subject lines, has led him to believe that a 50-character subject line touting a "powerful" offer is appealing (30% off Spring Getaway flights to Florida on Delta).

And a longer 80-character-plus line describing a newsletter in enticing fashion works (Find out Secrets to Spice up your Barbecue this weekend and all Summer Long and enter to win a New Weber Grill.)

Somehow, in the 60- to-70-character middle, he says, the subject line is either too long or not long enough.

Quist has various theories, but one is that the longer the subject line, the better chance a marketer has of presenting different concepts that may appeal to different consumers and boosting open rates. So in the above example, some may be interested in the ways to improve their grilling, while others would seek the new grill, leading to higher open rates.

Quist's research--his clients include PayPal and Intercontinental Hotels in the U.S.--showing that "long subject lines work better" goes against conventional wisdom, he said.

"Our experience tended towards the belief that long subject lines work better," he said. (The longer the better goes against conventional wisdom.) A more descriptive subject line can also build goodwill with consumers, since it can provide enough info to easily either turn them on or turn them off.