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.

Behavioral Advertising Mostly OK

Most US adults are uncomfortable that some websites use information about one’s online activity to customize website content or ads - but, if site privacy and security policies were improved, most would be comfortable with the practice, according to a new study.

Specifically, the Harris Interactive survey found as follows:

• Six in ten (59%) are not comfortable when sites like Google, Yahoo and Microsoft (MSN) use information about a person’s online activity to tailor advertisements or content based on a person’s hobbies or interests: 25% are not at all comfortable, 34% are not very comfortable.

• The remaining 41% who say they are comfortable with websites’ tailoring content is split between 7% who are very comfortable and 34% who are somewhat comfortable.

To study also sought to determine whether US adults would alter their views if various policy and security policies were adopted, based on possible self-regulatory principles for online behavioral advertising outlined (pdf) by the Federal Trade Commission.

Among the findings:

If four privacy/security policies were introduced, most US adults would become more amenable to being served content and ads based on their online behavior:

• By a 55% to 45% majority, US adults indicate that they would be more comfortable with companies’ using information about a person’s online activities to provide customized advertising or content.
• Interestingly, once the privacy/security policies were presented, the percentages of those who are very comfortable increases only slightly to 9%, from 7%. The percentage who are somewhat comfortable given the privacy/security policies increases more significantly, to 46% from 34%.
• Similarly, the proportion of those who are not at all comfortable declines to 19% from 25%, and of those who are not very comfortable declines to 26% from 34%.

Analysis of the by age indicates a difference of views among generations. Those who are younger Echo Boomers (age 18-31) and Gen Xers (age 32-43) are initially more comfortable with the notion of websites’ customizing content than older Baby Boomers (age 44-62) and Matures (age 63 or older).

After being presented with the privacy/security policies, all generations’ level of comfort increases:

• Echo Boomers’ increases to 62% from 49%. Gen Xers’ increases to 56% from 45%. Baby Boomers’ comfort increases to a majority (52%) from 34%.
• Only Matures remain uncomfortable with the websites’ customizing advertising and content, though the level of support rises to 46% from 31%.

The nationwide survey was designed in collaboration with Dr. Alan F. Westin, Professor of Public Law and Government Emeritus at Columbia University.

Dr. Westin commented: “The failure of a larger percentage of respondents to express comfort after four privacy policies were specified may have two bases - concerns that web companies would actually follow voluntary guidelines, even if they espoused them, and the absence of any regulatory or enforcement mechanism in the privacy policy steps outlined in the question.”

About the study: The Harris Poll was conducted online within the United States March 11-18, 2008, among 2,513 adults (age 18 and over). Figures for age, sex, race/ethnicity, education, region and household income were weighted where necessary to bring them into line with their actual proportions in the online population. Respondents were selected from among those who have agreed to participate in Harris Interactive surveys. The data have been weighted to reflect the composition of the adult population.

http://www.marketingcharts.com/interactive/behavioral-advertising-mostly-ok-if-privacy-security-safeguards-instituted-4197/?camp=newsletter&src=mc&type=textlink

Consumers Like Relevant Advertising, Dislike Data Mining

A study from TNS Global finds most people aren't comfortable with having their online behavior tracked for ad delivery purposes, reports ClickZ.

The research reflected broad awareness among consumers that third parties collect information about their online activities: 71 percent said they knew they were being virtually watched, though only 40 percent were familiar with the term "behavioral targeting."

57 percent were uncomfortable with having their browser cookies analyzed for ad delivery. This held true even if respondents believed their personal information was protected from fraud or other forms of identity abuse.

(For more findings, including tables, from the study, see coverage by MarketingCharts.)

Proponents of behavioral advertising argue that data-mining practices help the consumer, which as a result sees less, and more relevant, advertising in exchange for free content.

Oddly, most consumers surveyed did express a desire for highly targeted, relevant ads; 55 percent said they would be willing to fill out an anonymous survey to get them.

TRUSTe's VP of communications Carolyn Hodge says education on behavioral targeting can help overcome the qualms people have about it. She cited Amazon, which gathers data to share relevant products with users, as one example where behavioral consumer profiles make everyone a winner.

A recent survey by MarketingSherpa found that among marketers, behavioral advertising was among the best ROI deliverers online. To balance practitioner enthusiasm, the FTC released some behavioral ad targeting guidelines late last year.

http://www.marketingvox.com/consumers-like-relevant-advertising-dislike-data-mining-037717/?camp=newsletter&src=mv&type=textlink

Newspaper Online Advertising Spending Jumps 19%, Print Ads Down 9%

Advertising expenditures for newspaper websites in 2007 increased 18.8%, to $3.2 billion - accounting for 7.5% of all newspaper ad spending last year (up from 5.7% in 2006), according to preliminary estimates from the Newspaper Association of America.

Print ad exenditures were down 9.4% in the same period, however, and total (combined print and online) newspaper ad expenditures were down 7.9% for the year.

The following table breaks down online and print newspaper ad expenditures, by quarter, for 2007 and 2006:

In the fourth quarter of 2007, advertising expenditures for newspaper websites increased to $847 million, up 13.6% compared with the same period a year earlier.

That was the thirteenth consecutive quarter of double-digit growth for online newspaper advertising since NAA started reporting online ad spending in 2004.

Advertising expenditures at newspapers and their websites, combined, totaled $12.6 billion for the fourth quarter; spending for print ads in newspapers totaled $11.7 billion.

Those figures are down from the fourth quarter of 2006, when total advertising expenditures were $14 billion, and print ad spend was $13.2 billion.

The following table breaks down newspaper print ad expenditures, by segment and quarter, for 2007 and 2006:

About the data: The NAA website has quarterly and annual ad spending numbers in their entirety.

http://www.marketingcharts.com/print/newspaper-online-advertising-spending-jumps-19-print-ads-down-9-4024/?camp=newsletter&src=mc&type=textlink

How-To: 9 Basic SEO Tips

Search Engine Optimization (SEO), one component of search engine marketing (SEM), is the process of fortifying a website so it is more likely to appear in a high position when users conduct a search with keywords related to the website's offerings.

Here are a few basic SEO tricks:

1. Find out how well you rank online. You can do this at Alexa.com, which will tell you what position your website holds against all others. The goal will be to make that number lower.

It may be helpful to download the Google Toolbar, which gives you the "PageRank" score for websites. Pages are scored on a scale of 1 to 10. The goal will be to make this number higher on your website.

You can also check the Google PageRank Checker, which provides Google PR, visitor figures and numbers on related links.

2. Submit your site to search engines. Do it personally; avoid "submission services" or software. You only need to do it once. Here is Google's submission page.

3. Place relevant keywords in the title tag so search spiders will know what your page is about. The title tag is the text that appears at the top of the browser when a webpage loads. MarketingVOX's title tag is "MarketingVOX - The voice of online marketing."

Avoid stuffing the title tag with too many keywords, or making it too long. A good rule of thumb: ensure title tag text also appears in the body of the page.

4. Use your archives. When you update your site, link back to relevant stories from the past, using equally relevant anchor text. Don't go overboard; the trick is to give users more information, not overwhelm them with hyperlinks.

Anchor text — the hyperlinked words that point to another page — are a way of telling search engines that page is about those words. The more relevant words point to a page, the more likely that page is to appear in search results when users run a query with those terms.

5. Cultivate relationships with quality websites in your industry. When well-ranked websites link to you (with hopefully relevant anchor text!), this tells spiders your page is important to users seeking information about your area of expertise.

6. Avoid relationships with link farms, people who offer to pay for links to their websites, or other sites that you don't want associated with your own. Google conducts occasional sweeps and penalizes destinations of ill repute by tanking their ranking.

7. Use alt tags on images to "tell" search engine spiders what the images are. This will help them index your pictures and better serve readers with text-only web browsers.

8. Got a big site? Build a site map. A site map can help spiders crawl pages more quickly. The fewer clicks necessary to get to a page on your website, the better. Small site? Use a nav bar.

9. Occasionally embolden useful terms on a page. Once or twice is fine; too much bold can irritate readers. Worse still, it might look to Google like keyword abuse.

10. Focus on the customer. The best sites for users, and consequently for search engines, are full of oft-updated, useful information about a given service, product, topic or discipline. Avoid cutting corners or exploring "black-hat" SEO options, which could result in lower rankings over time or even a site ban from search engines.

Updating often, making content readable and easy to find, and developing productive online relationships are enough to improve destination relevance significantly over time.

http://www.marketingvox.com/how-to-9-basic-seo-tips-037438/?camp=newsletter&src=mv&type=textlink

The Six Cs of Permission Email Marketing

by Karen Talavera

Published on February 19, 2008

Permission Marketing. Beyond buzz word, it's clearly the status quo for email and has long been debated as the future state of direct mail, too. Already legally mandated by data laws in other countries, opt-in marketing may evolve into the preferred model within the US as well.

With marketing channels of choice proliferating and messaging devices diversifying, it's not hard to imagine an opt-in vs. opt-out future where permissions are granted not only by marketing channel (email, postal mail, phone, RSS), but also by content, device, time, and place.

All the more reason to genuinely understand permission, which in the world of email marketing alone appears relegated to subjective definitions. We'll help set the record straight by exploring the first two of six dimensions of permission in this three-part series, "The Six Cs of Permission Email Marketing."

They may seem obvious, and they may sound simplistic, but you might be surprised how often the fundamentals are dismissed.

 

1. Conscious Consent

There are numerous ways individuals end up on email lists, and many of those ways are unknown even to them.

Terms like "affirmative consent," "passive consent," and "third-party consent" abound. But when it comes to genuine 100% permission marketing, the only consent that matters is conscious consent.

Are your join and subscribe invitations structured in such a way that list members must voluntarily take action to receive your messages, and do they realize the action they are taking will result in email from your company, partners, or affiliates? If you can't answer "yes" to these questions, your methods are not garnering conscious consent.

Sure, people are bombarded with messages and advertising impressions from a growing array of channels; and, yes, they forget what they've signed-up for. However, conscious consent ensures that an opt-in process is clear and non-deceitful.

Without a self-initiated action on the part of your list members, it is virtually impossible for them to join. Requiring such self-initiated, voluntary measures requires conscious action on the part of your recipients and increases the likelihood that they remember having taken such action.

On the other hand, unconscious or passive consent assumes rather than requests permission. It takes true voluntary choice out of the equation by pre-checking boxes, using data gathered from publicly available sources, or gathering information via some other opt-out collection model.

While those methods are certainly not illegal and are often justifiable, they don't constitute conscious consent. If 100% permission marketing is what you aim for, nothing less than voluntary consent will do.

2. Choice

Choice and conscious consent go hand in hand, since conscious consent assumes individual choice. Yet beyond the choice to join/subscribe in the first place, you should make available options that offer control (one of our upcoming C's).

Which options will you—can you—offer in a permission marketing environment? These are just a few:

• Communication type (news, promotional, legal, transactional)
• Content type (product information, reminders, sales offers)
• Preferred communication channel (email, postal mail, phone, fax)
• Frequency preferences
• Device-specific message formatting (mobile vs. desktop)
• Temporary suspension of messages
• Unsubscribe

For an expert example of how it's done, see United Airlines customer preferences at www.united.com. If you're a United Mileage Plus program member, just log-in and select "My Profile." You'll be able to edit email preferences, flight notification preferences, and other options. Another excellent example can be found at Hallmark. Create an account there if you don't already have one to see what we mean.

When offering permission and communications choices, you offer preferences; so, present only the options that you can successfully fulfill. And don't forget to note when certain types of content or communication are available only through a particular channel and not others.

It's fine to restrict choices solely to what you can realistically manage; aim your sights on under-promising and over-delivering—and your customers will reward your efforts.

Next: The next two Cs of Permission Email: Clarity and Confidence.

http://www.marketingprofs.com/8/six-cs-permission-email-marketing-part-1-talavera.asp?sp=1

New Study Shows that Heavy Clickers Distort Reality of Display Advertising Click-Through Metrics

New Study Shows that Heavy Clickers Distort Reality of Display Advertising Click-Through Metrics

CHICAGO – Media agency Starcom USA, behavioral targeting network Tacoda, and digital consumer insight company comScore collaborated on a research study whose results call into question click-through rates as a primary source of accountability for Internet display advertising aimed at brand-building. Called “Natural Born Clickers,” the study reveals that a very small group of consumers who are not representative of the total U.S. online population is accountable for the vast majority of display ad click-through behavior.
Full findings of the study, its methodology and results are being presented this afternoon at the iMedia Brand Summit in Coconut Point, Florida.
The study illustrates that heavy clickers represent just 6% of the online population yet account for 50% of all display ad clicks. While many online media companies use click-through rate as an ad negotiation currency, the study shows that heavy clickers are not representative of the general public. In fact, heavy clickers skew towards Internet users between the ages of 25-44 and households with an income under $40,000. Heavy clickers behave very differently online than the typical Internet user, and while they spend four times more time online than non-clickers, their spending does not proportionately reflect this very heavy Internet usage. Heavy clickers are also relatively more likely to visit auctions, gambling, and career services sites – a markedly different surfing pattern than non-clickers.
Further preliminary Starcom data suggests no correlation between display ad clicks and brand metrics, and show no connection between measured attitude towards a brand and the number of times an ad for that brand was clicked. The research presentation suggests that when digital campaigns have a branding objective, optimizing for high click rates does not necessarily improve campaign performance.
“There is more and more emphasis by advertisers for greater return-on-objectives in campaigns, particularly in the digital space where the accountability data is so readily available,“ says Starcom USA Director of Connections Research and Analytics Grant Prentice. “Natural Born Clickers shows us that we can’t count on click-through rate as our primary success metric for display ads; Starcom is more reliant on shifts in brand attitude metrics and analytics tying on-line exposure to sales as the true measures of online advertising efficacy.”
“While the click can continue to be a relevant metric for direct response advertising campaigns, this study demonstrates that click performance is the wrong measure for the effectiveness of brand-building campaigns,” said Erin Hunter, executive vice president at comScore. “For many campaigns, the branding effect of the ads is what’s really important and generating clicks is more of an ancillary benefit. Ultimately, judging a campaign’s effectiveness by clicks can be detrimental because it overlooks the importance of branding while simultaneously drawing conclusions from a sub-set of people who may not be representative of the target audience.”
“One of the underlying values of looking at people and not just pages in our business is that we are able to help uncover behavior that is counterintuitive to what much of the media world assumes about online audiences,” says Daniel Jaye, CEO of TACODA.

http://www.smvgroup.com/news_popup_flash.asp?pr=1643